Dust on the Paw

by Robin Jenkins

  ‘No.’

  ‘You mean, you have never had a child? Perhaps then being without one is a great sorrow to your husband. It would be a great sorrow to me.’

  A voice spoke in the doorway, polite but sulky: ‘How are you, Wahab?’

  He recognized the Prince. ‘Thank you, Your Highness. In a minute or so I shall be as good as new again, thanks to Mrs Moffatt’s kind attentions.’

  ‘If I may say so, her husband’s weren’t very kind. Why did he do it?’

  ‘A foolish impulse, shall we say?’

  ‘That’s not what he says.’

  ‘Mr Moffatt?’

  ‘Yes, yes. He said that he did it because you insulted Miss Larsen.’

  Wahab opened eyes and mouth in astonishment; he quickly shut the former again; they were still fiery. ‘Miss Larsen?’

  ‘Yes, yes. Please do not say you do not know who she is. You were talking to her.’

  ‘Is she—’ he almost said ‘the woman with the plump buttocks,’ but changed it in time to ‘the woman with the fair hair?’

  ‘Yes. Now why did you insult her? Was it because you had drunk too much whisky? For you had, you know.’

  ‘I do not think I insulted her.’

  ‘Surely in such a matter you can be sure? Your eyes may be closed, Wahab, but your memory, I suppose, is still open.’

  Wahab tried to remember. Of course he had admired her buttocks and breasts, and perhaps in his imagination he had fondled them; but he had reason to believe that was a normal and permitted degree of lasciviousness. Still, it was true he had drunk too much whisky. Had he dared to speak his admiration?

  ‘You see, Wahab, you are not sure. He’s gone to spread it all over Kabul, and everyone will believe him.’

  ‘It is not true, Naim,’ said Mrs Moffatt, ‘and I shall tell everyone it is not true.’

  ‘They will say you are only doing it to protect this foolish fellow.’

  Wahab nodded and sighed. He could not deny that he was foolish.

  ‘I think they will know that Miss Larsen is not the kind of woman to be insulted.’

  ‘Ah, but you forget, Lan, that she is Western, and poor Wahab here, and myself, are ignorant dark-skinned natives from the East. It just isn’t good enough, you know. Even if Wahab did say something he shouldn’t have, because of the whisky, Harold had no right to do what he did. What’s wrong with him? Is he ill? Has he gone mad? Do you think it’s time he went home? I must look upon this from a selfish point of view. Consider my position. It will be said I brought Wahab here. I didn’t, of course; I merely met him at the gate. But it will be all over Kabul by tomorrow that I brought him here, he got drunk, he insulted this woman, and Harold threw whisky in his face. My mother will hear about it; my father; the Prime Minister; Mojedaji. If it had been tea, even scalding tea, it might not have been so bad; but you know the absurd prejudice they have against whisky. I’m afraid, Wahab my dear fellow, your goose has been cooked. I’ve been trying to use my influence on your behalf, but after this I’ll have none left.’

  ‘It wasn’t in any way Mr Wahab’s fault,’ said Mrs Moffatt.

  ‘He drank the whisky, didn’t he? I warned him, and you warned him. Yet he drank it as if it was water.’

  Wahab was suddenly sick. Mouth full of sour vomit, and eyes still tightly closed, he tried to mumble apologies.

  ‘It’s a bit late now for repentance. Lan, I must push off now. I may say the house is empty. Discretion has swept the last of your guests away. The servants have gone too. Harold took them with him in his car.’

  ‘Yes. We had promised to lend them to the Club.’

  ‘There’s nothing I can do to help? You’re not blind, Wahab, are you?’

  Bravely Wahab opened his eyes long enough to see how peeved the Prince was. ‘I am not blind,’ he muttered.

  ‘For heaven’s sake!’ cried Naim. ‘I did not ask to be a prince. I would have been happier as a simple gardener. But I must go and consider what my line of action should be. I would advise you, Lan, to get along to the Club as quickly as possible; for reasons that ought to be obvious. Good night.’

  ‘Good night, Naim.’

  ‘I am deserting, I know it; but who will be surprised? Wahab, have you learned this: no one is to be trusted, not even your Laura?’

  Wahab heard the footsteps receding along the tiled corridor, and a minute later heard the car move away. For a moment he wondered what it was to be a prince. Then he opened his eyes, determined to keep them open. They smarted painfully, and streamed tears; but they functioned well enough to let him see that Mrs Moffatt standing beside him, with a wad of cotton wool in her hand, was weeping too. Her tears were new and rare. Only he was seeing them; not even the Prince had been privileged.

  He put out his hand and touched hers. ‘Please do not weep on my behalf.’

  She tried to smile.

  ‘You are a brave woman. I am not a brave man. I am little better than a coward. Like the Prince too I will desert; nothing is surer. They will send for me. Mojedaji will be there. “Wahab,” they will say, “no more syphilis microbes, no more Laura.” And I will reply: “Yes, masters, I promise.” ’

  ‘No, you will not!’

  He was startled by the fierceness with which she cried that. Yes, small and dainty though she was, she could also be fierce.

  ‘You will not let them insult you, persecute you, and defeat you.’

  ‘Mrs Moffatt, do not distress yourself for my sake. I assure you I am a weakling. I have been deceiving myself even about Laura; and I have been deceiving her too. Never once have I really been convinced she would come here and marry me. She was to come and marry a man proud of being an Afghan, devoted to advancing his country, unafraid of the reactionary forces now in power, prepared to face insult, prison, torture, even death. But who was that man? Not Mohammed Abdul Wahab, not me. He was a dream. She cannot come and marry a dream.’

  ‘You can make the dream come true. You must. How are your eyes now?’

  Fearfully he examined them in the mirror; bloodshot, tender, wet, they were recognizable as his own; he saw and hated their brown furtiveness, their servile meltings. Mrs Moffatt might as well ask him to pluck them out of his head as to expect him to become the hero he had dreamed himself to be.

  In the mirror he noticed the lavatory pan. The sight terrified him. He ought not to be there with this Chinese woman.

  ‘You and I will go to the Club together,’ she said.

  He let out a squeal of alarm. ‘No, no. I am going to find my bicycle and go home.’

  ‘If you do that, you will have lost Laura.’

  ‘I tell you, I have already lost her. For weeks I have been carrying a letter in my pocket, stamped, ready to send. Do you know what it says? It says that she must not come, that I never was in earnest, and that she must be a conceited English fool to think that I, an Afghan, would ever condescend to marry her, a skinny cripple! Yes, it is addressed to Laura. Look, here it is.’

  He took it out and showed it to her; but it was at his face she stared.

  ‘She is a cripple?’

  ‘Yes. I have told no one. I have tried to hide it from myself. It is shameful. Only one foot, of course; her left. When she was a baby she had some illness; her leg too is very thin. But she can walk; she can climb hills. She is very courageous about it, not bitter as I would be. I have a relative – you see, there are no princes in my family – who has a small shop. He too is a cripple, and he has eleven children. You see, Mrs Moffatt, how ridiculous my dream has been.’

  ‘You love her.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I love her. I weep for her in the darkness. Would I have written this letter if I did not love her?’

  ‘And she loves you.’

  His face grew radiant. ‘Yes, it is wonderful, impossible, but she does. I am sure of it. Why should I care if they cut out my eyes with knives? Laura loves me.’ It was true he had desired Miss Larsen, but only in thought. All men had such thoughts. Women should not feel insul
ted.

  ‘I think Laura will come here and you will get married.’

  ‘Why not?’ he cried. ‘I am a coward, but I should not be afraid to die for her sake.’

  ‘We will go to the Club together.’

  ‘They think I insulted Miss Larsen.’

  ‘You and I know that is a lie.’

  But he did not know that at all. ‘They will hate me. Perhaps they will not allow me in. Mojedaji will be there. But you are right,’ he went on shrilly. ‘I must not let them defeat me. I will go and perhaps I will dance too. You will not think it possible, but twice Laura and I went dancing in Manchester. She can dance well enough, if one is slow and gentle. Yes, if they laugh, I shall think of her. If they hate me, I shall remember that she loves me. Even if she does not come to Kabul, have I not known her, and shall I not remember her all my life? No one will be able to hurt me; at least not very much.’

  Thirteen

  ON THEIR way down to the main road where they hoped to find a ghoddy to take them to the Club, they passed one of the policemen whose duty it was after dark to patrol – some said, to spy on – that street where all the houses were rented by foreigners. Light from a distant lamp glimmered on his broad, sullen face.

  Lan wished him good evening. In reply, he made a harsh noise in his throat, like an animal, and crashed the club he carried against his leather leggings.

  ‘In his native village,’ said Wahab, ‘you would see him play with his children. He would give you his best carpet to sit on, and his best mutton to eat. Here in Kabul it is different.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He is afraid. He has seen you are foreign and I am Afghan. He has been taught to consider that unnatural. He feels his superiors would have liked him to stop us.’

  ‘I think he was much happier in his native village.’

  ‘Oh yes. Much, much happier.’ He sighed. ‘Sometimes I wish I had been born a simple villager, with a river beside my house and trees behind it.’

  ‘He would be conscripted?’

  ‘Yes. His pay is the equivalent of one English penny a day.’

  ‘Listen. I think he is following us.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It is simple. He is lonely and far from his people. We are human beings.’

  ‘Yet he would not speak to me.’

  The soldier had stopped again.

  ‘What was there for him to say? Nothing, I am afraid. Perhaps he does not understand Persian very well. They have their own dialects in the north.’

  She felt a desire to go running back and stand in front of the soldier until at last he said something, no matter what. It seemed very important that he should speak to her. If necessary she would wait for hours; and so demonstrate still once again, she told herself as she moved on, that patience and imperturbability which characterized her in Kabul just as unshaven Josh Bolton’s credulity characterized him. Lan Moffatt, they said, has the secret of time. She never has too much of it or too little, and so none is ever left over for regret or heartbreak. Therefore her life is so tidy and well-arranged. Perhaps, though, that legend of imperturbability had ended that evening. Surely those with sympathy must have seen through her mask.

  They passed a man, shrouded in a blanket, crouching to make his water against the wall.

  ‘Barbarian,’ muttered Wahab.

  But she shook her head. Tears were again running down her cheeks. She remembered her childhood in Djakarta, where in the canals in the middle of the street folk side by side washed teeth or urinated. Even then she had been learning to assemble, as if it were a work of art, this thin, delicate shell of dignity, but within, no one’s heart had remained more sensitive and easily bruised. During the Revolution, when soldiers hung with grenades were swarming about the city, burning buildings and firing their rifles even at the birds in the air, her young sister Ling had been found dead under a tree with many bullet wounds. She had wept then, quietly and often, but her grief had seemed to the rest of her family incomplete, for there had been no hatred in it or desire for revenge. Kneeling beside Ling’s body, touching it, she had not been able to see the necessity for hatred. Sometimes she had wondered if she would be incapable of love also. Harold’s coming had proved that wrong.

  ‘Here, at last, is a ghoddy,’ said Wahab.

  She awoke from her memories. In front was the mosque, its dome gleaming in the moonlight, but it was thousands of miles from that other temple in the jungle where Harold had first asked her to marry him. She had said no.

  ‘As you would expect, it is filthy; but if we wait for another we may have to wait for an hour, and in any case it will be just as filthy.’

  As she took his hand to step up on to the soiled cushions, she found his shy, timid face under the gray karakul hat as terrifying as a creature’s out of the jungle.

  ‘It will be all right,’ he assured her, as he sat down beside her. ‘At least the horse is docile. It is too tired and hungry to be otherwise.’

  She had been terrified because he had been helping her up, not into this Afghan ghoddy which would rattle and bump along the bleak earth roads of Kabul, but rather on to the ancient, high, brassy American car that would take them back to Djakarta along the jungle track; and his face had been Harold’s, huffed and angry at her refusal.

  She had a vision of life without him.

  ‘Please hold on tight,’ advised Wahab. ‘This bit of the road is full of holes. They dig it up, you know, and use it to mud their roofs. No one prevents them. There is no regulation against it. What a ridiculous freedom!’

  She tried to remain in this world where people dug up roads to place the mud on their roofs. How could she help Harold to subdue this shame in his mind, which would destroy them both, and which she had foreseen in that temple in the jungle. Many times since then, lying beside him in the dark, she had sensed that struggle in his mind as he had tried to prevent the shame from being born. After he was asleep he had sighed and sometimes had sworn; but always in the morning he had been gentle and curiously grateful. But the shame had been born, had thriven, and now possessed him like a madness.

  It was not so simple as Josh Bolton thought: she Chinese and yellow, Harold English and white, different races, different cultures, different ideologies, conflict inevitable. ‘It’s history, Lan,’ the American had said, with his naïve impertinence that thought itself wisdom. ‘It’s history that’s between you, and I doubt if you can fight that.’ But it wasn’t as simple as that. Yes, history was against them, history represented by the sneers of people who really were shocked in their hearts by this marriage of yellow with white, slant eyes with round. That she had not been invited to the Embassy Sewing Group was no doubt an exclusion to laugh at; but after the laughter a regret persisted, and a feeling, rather than a recollection, that there were many similar exclusions, all amounting to a sentence of isolation.

  She would never forget, for instance, the scene in the restaurant in Singapore when an American at one of the tables had told his companions the joke that Harold had shouted out in the house an hour or so ago. Harold had jumped up and rushed across. He would have struck the American if the latter’s friends hadn’t prevented him. Harold had got the worst of it, and his mouth was bleeding when they were at last shooed out by the manager. But the tears in his eyes had been of shame and anger unappeased. Later he had apologized. ‘You’d have to know my story from the day I first knew the thumb in my mouth was my own. And who wants to know that?’ She had wanted to, very much; but he had never told her. All she knew was that his mother had divorced his father when he was thirteen. He had mentioned that as a kind of counterbalance when she had told him that her sister Ling had been thirteen when the soldiers had shot her.

  ‘Very jolly, very gay,’ cried Wahab, intending to be sarcastic but quite failing, for genuine appreciation was making him laugh.

  They had arrived at the Club. From the ghoddy they could see the fairy lights and Japanese lanterns in the trees. Dance music
was playing, and people were dancing on the big terrace and below it on the grass. The water in the swimming pool was of many colours, red, blue, green, yellow, from the lights surrounding it. There were two large fires burning in corners and the smell of roasted kebab was delicious. Everywhere were women in lovely dresses, Indians in saris, Japanese in kimonos, Americans and Europeans with bosoms half-revealed. Had Laura been there, wondered Wahab, would she have worn such a dress? And would he have been proud or ashamed of her? It was not really in answer to that last question that he murmured to himself that at any rate the dress, being long, would hide her foot, even if it did show off her breasts, which in any case were less conspicuous than most.

  He could not see Moffatt or Miss Larsen. They would be inside the club house, dancing or drinking or continuing their amorous play.

  He helped Mrs Moffatt to alight. She too had a small bosom, and yet her dress buttoned right up to her throat. She was, he realized then, very like Laura in other ways too: sympathetic, but demanding in the person sympathized with a degree of resistance that he himself for instance was not always capable of; able to think clearly even when shedding tears, but not shedding them often; physically frail, but in will stronger than many muscular men; and with the ability to inspire friendship, though able to do without it herself.

  For a moment or two, without knowing why, he felt a kinship with Moffatt and a timid longing to be his friend.

  Several small Afghan children stood outside the gate, not quite begging, not quite jeering, but with hands and tongues out. Wahab was about to feel ashamed of them when he suddenly wondered why he should be, and wasn’t; instead, he loved and was proud of them, despite their rags. Pakistani or Indian children would have been as pestiferous as dogs, clinging to clothes and catching hands, whining all the time, and parading what lucky deformities they might have, such as missing fingers, or blind eyes, or twisted feet.