Dust on the Paw

by Robin Jenkins

  ‘Her foot, Mr Powrie,’ said Harold. ‘She’s a cripple.’

  Shocked, the minister blamed first the whisky, and then Moffatt’s too worldly sense of humour; what he was careful to avoid blaming was the callousness and malice of the remark. All this was evident in the smile that kept desperately shining on his face. For an instant he closed his eyes. That indicated a flash of prayer, of consultation, but for whose soul’s sake Moffatt could not be sure; his, he supposed.

  Lan’s reaction, he noticed, was almost as complicated, and for the same reason: whoever was to be blamed, he wasn’t. She had made that resolution and knew that if she were to break it once only she might swing to the opposite extreme and blame him for everything. She frowned at the minister, as if she too thought his gush of kindliness provocative.

  ‘I didn’t know that!’ cried Powrie. ‘I had no idea. Mrs Gillie didn’t mention it.’

  ‘She doesn’t know it. Only Lan, myself, and Wahab, the man she’s going to marry, know about it here; and now you, of course.’

  Powrie held out his hands carefully cupped, as if the knowledge lay in them like water that kept trickling through. What was the Lord’s purpose in inflicting lameness upon Miss Johnstone? The question was as bright on his forehead as the Kabul slaughterhouse sign, neon lit, was above the building.

  ‘How did it happen?’ he asked gently. ‘Was she born that way?’

  ‘No. Poliomyelitis in childhood.’

  ‘I see.’ And it was obvious he did see, with far more perplexed sympathy than Moffatt, how unkind fate had been to Miss Johnstone; only in his case fate had to be called God. ‘And does it affect her, the poor woman?’

  ‘It appears she can dance. Gentle waltzes. Not square dancing.’

  ‘No. It’s very brave of her coming out here with such a handicap. I must say too I’m a little surprised. I mean, you know the attitude most of these Afghans have towards their womenfolk. He must surely love her very much.’

  ‘I don’t think it follows. She’ll cost him nothing, she’ll have a fair amount of money saved up, she’ll get a job here and earn six times what he does.’

  ‘Dear me! Is he that kind of person? Mrs Gillie did mention that she had met him. She said he seemed to her nice enough, but a little on the simple side.’

  ‘She thinks all Afghans, from the King down, are a little on the simple side. Whatever Wahab is, he’s not simple.’

  ‘What does he do?’

  ‘Teaches science at Isban College. But I hear he’s been promoted Principal.’

  ‘So he does have influential connections?’

  ‘At the moment.’

  ‘I gather from your general attitude, Harold – if you’ll pardon my saying so – that you do not think Miss Johnstone is acting in her own best interests by coming here to marry this man?’

  ‘That’s it. What do you think yourself? Aren’t you opposed to these mixed marriages?’

  Again the hands were cupped; in them this time, trickling through also, was the responsibility of guessing what God thought was best. ‘In principle, yes, Harold, I am. Christians should marry Christians.’

  Moffatt grinned. Christians like the Langfords, he supposed. And what did the minister secretly think of marriage between Buddhists and agnostics? There was no doubt that Powrie had come with another purpose: to place his hand in Lan’s; and not just metaphorically, either.

  Shyly Powrie turned to Lan. ‘I take it you agree with Harold, Mrs Moffatt?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I understand. If I may say so, it makes it all the more praiseworthy that you should be willing to offer her hospitality.’

  ‘We hope to be able to dissuade her from marrying him,’ said Harold. ‘If you can help, we’d appreciate it.’

  ‘I’ll certainly do everything I can to help. Do you have any idea when she expects to arrive?’

  ‘In three weeks.’

  ‘So soon as that! My, we’ll have to be getting our welcome ready.’

  ‘The authorities will do that for us.’

  The minister did not understand, but smiled, still confident that not only would there be relevance in the remark but wisdom and kindness also.

  ‘I mean, just about that time they’ll be putting up the arches for Voroshilov.’

  ‘Yes indeed, so they will. True, true. Well, let us claim the arches for ourselves. Our own little welcome will, I am sure, be much more sincere.’ He rose. ‘I’ll not take up any more of your valuable time. But I would sure be pleased if you would let me know in good time when Miss Johnstone’s plane is due.’

  Moffatt accompanied him out to the gate. ‘Really we know very little about Miss Johnstone,’ he said.

  ‘Does that matter, Harold?’

  ‘I meant, she may not want to be married according to Christian practice. From what I know of her, she’s the kind likely to go the whole way and become a Moslem.’

  ‘I would consider it my duty to prevent that happening, if I could. We are all God’s children, Christians, Moslems, Buddhists, agnostics, atheists; but He loved Christ best of all.’

  While Moffatt was trying to make sense of that, he saw a family of kuchis, or nomads, on the main road. The dark-faced men and women, and the shy children, seemed as remote from humanity as their donkeys and camels.

  ‘What about those?’ he asked.

  ‘I see our Lord walking with them, Harold. His feet too are bare. These people are His true contemporaries.’

  All right, thought Moffatt, I’ll accept that. It’s phony, but I’ll accept it. But what about the ex-Minister of Finance, with his face kicked to pulp? Is he a child of God? Was your Lord watching the kicking? Had He His feet bare then, or did He, like the soldiers, wear hobnail boots?

  The minister held out his hand. ‘If the spirit ever takes you along to our little church, Harold, we’ll all rejoice to see you; and that of course includes your beautiful and charming wife.’

  ‘Lan isn’t a Christian.’

  ‘Is she Buddhist?’

  ‘She was brought up one.’

  The minister lifted his hand to the blue sky. ‘Do you know, Harold, when I think of the wonderful variety of God’s children, I feel rich in my soul.’

  He walked over to the little Austin car that his congregation had bought for him. After Josh Bolton he was said to be the poorest American in Kabul, and it was rumoured that those of his flock who contributed most to his stipend were the most bigoted and forbade his taking part in the square dancing at the U.S.I.S., although he and his wife were thought to be keen and expert. Nevertheless, it was miraculously true enough that he was rich in soul and proved it daily.

  Harold watched the car go dustily down the road and then went back slowly into the house.

  Lan had the letter in her hand.

  He drank some whisky with a gulp, as if he’d needed it. ‘Now, let’s hear what she’s got to say,’ he said. ‘I feel my soul is fortified enough.’

  To his surprise she jumped up, pale and tense. ‘I’m not going to read it to you, Harold. If you want to read it, there it is.’ She dropped it on a table, and ran out.

  He heard the bedroom door close behind her. No doubt she had heard those last words. What was she doing now? Not, as Helen Langford once had done, doodling all over her face with lipstick. And not, as Paula Wint would, after a tiff with Alan, lying upon the bed and waiting for him to come with his packet of love. Lan would sit on the stool in front of the mirror, as still as an idol; and without so much as a tear she would suffer, so privately and mysteriously that, unable to share any of it in his imagination, he could not keep his love and sympathy from being strangled by resentment and a feeling of loss. She had gone again to kneel by her dead sister.

  Picking up the letter and his glass of whisky, he went out and sat on the terrace. The poem that had been rejected had been inspired by some remarks of Howard Winfield’s, to the effect that almost any action when analysed, whether it were a king’s or prime minister’s or general’s or ambass
ador’s, was found to have in it a high proportion of childishness. There could be no doubt that the human race was still in its long infancy. ‘I challenge you, Harold,’ the young Oriental Secretary had said, ‘to name any action, public or private, contemporary or historical, by potentate or menial, which is or was completely and unassailably adult.’ Moffatt had not tried, but he had written the poem and now, with this letter still unread in his hand, he thought that the present trouble between him and Lan was not unlike the quarrels of childhood. But by admitting that he was by no means belittling it. He believed that the emotions of childhood were so intense and complicated as to affect the minds for the rest of life.

  As always, too, he sought the same refuge as a child: he forgot himself and remembered the world about him. The afternoon was warm and sunny. In the garden the roses were in full fragrance, and the grapes on the trellis against the wall were already forming. Among the cool vines a bird crooned. A cat slept on the wall, disturbed a little by the crooning; it seemed to think it ought to make a little effort to keep up the traditional enmity between its kind and the bird’s, but, fed and warm and sleepy, it preferred this truce. In the servants’ quarters out of sight around the corner Sofi sang somnolently a song about hunting leopards. In the park boys were playing football; they kept shrieking all the time, like a horde of birds. He could not see them but knew all of them would be dressed in striped pyjamas and most would be kicking the ball with their bare feet.

  He glanced at the letter. The handwriting was small, but, in a way that moved him, it wasn’t very neat; in fact, it had the rebellious carelessness he would have expected in a schoolgirl, her tongue out, doing a punishment exercise.

  He looked away again. The cat had given up trying; it slept soundly. The bird crooned more happily than ever. Bees buzzed among the roses. Sofi sang now about a river in the north. The boys continued to shriek.

  DEAR MRS MOFFATT,

  I find it difficult to express my gratitude to you. I have read your wise and generous letter a hundred times.

  Hitherto, ever since I made the decision to go to Afghanistan to marry my fiancé, Mr Abdul Wahab, I have been made to feel that no one, not one single person, thinks I have done right. People who do not know me at all have gone out of their way to advise me to reconsider. Friends have urged this from the beginning. That it has all been done out of genuine sympathy and interest, I cannot believe; that it has been provoked by ill will and envy is, I suppose, even more unlikely. I can only conclude that part of the reason at least must simply be racial prejudice. I myself have not always been free of that, and perhaps, in spite of my too conscious efforts to eradicate it, it still exists in me. Nevertheless, I love Abdul Wahab and I am sure he loves me. At any rate no one has ever treated me with greater tenderness and more unselfish consideration. As you may expect, it has been suggested to me that his attitude is not sincere. Some of those who think this have been at pains to impress on me that a man from the East, especially from a country like Afghanistan where women are still kept in purdah, would scarcely agree to marry one, like myself, with a physical incapacity – I have been lame in the left foot since childhood, as a consequence of an attack of poliomyelitis – unless he had some dishonourable ulterior motive. This is to show a degree of cynicism that I find disgusting. I know Abdul Wahab’s faults, as I hope he knows mine; and I certainly do not expect to find his country perfect.

  I should be very pleased and grateful to be your guest for a little while, until I have settled in; but my acceptance, of course, must depend upon your husband’s willingness to receive me.

  I expect to be in Kabul in about four weeks from now. I look forward to meeting you and expressing my gratitude in person. Alas, I am not very good at this, perhaps because of my Scotch ancestors. But I will certainly try. I have always had a high opinion of your countrymen, the Chinese, and you have proved how justified it has been.

  LAURA JOHNSTONE

  Moved in spite of himself, he read phrase after phrase over and over again, trying to build up a picture of the writer. In the end his impression was of someone sensitive and intelligent, sheltering in a shell constructed after years of lonely and resolute thought. Many attempts had failed to pierce it. Yet how easily Wahab had got in.

  She lacks humour, he thought; and then, looking at the letter again, he wasn’t sure. If one watched carefully one might catch an ironic smile.

  Feeling a hand resting lightly on his shoulder he turned and saw Lan. She was listening to the bird crooning. It struck him afresh that she too lived in a shell, more beautifully and subtly fashioned than the dour Miss Johnstone’s, but just as strong. He, whose motives were hardly any more or less honourable than Wahab’s, had got in just as easily.

  As he placed his hand on hers, he remembered Manson Powrie’s pious cry about the wonderful variety of the Lord’s children. Not so various, he thought, not so bloody various.

  Seventeen

  BY A coincidence Wahab was installed as Principal on the morning of the day of the Garden Party at the British Embassy. Luckily the Ministry, now under the thoughtful direction of Prince Naim, sent along with the letter of appointment a coupon which would enable him to buy on credit from the Government Monopoly Shop a new suit, new shirt, socks, and a pair of shoes; payment for these would be deducted monthly from his augmented salary. No information was given him as to when these new clothes should be worn, but he knew himself that, arrayed in them, he would be able more readily to convince all those, foremost among them Abdul Mussein, the deposed Principal, who might otherwise have been inclined to question his fitness for so swift an upward jump. Therefore the very day the coupon arrived at the school he cycled to the shop to make the purchases; but not, unfortunately, before Mussein had been able to confront him.

  By a mistake of zealousness, pardonable enough in a new Ministry, the two letters – that to Wahab elevating him, and that to Mussein degrading him – arrived on the same morning, instead of the former being sent a day or so in advance so that the dispossessor, whose role was really the more difficult to play, might be given a chance to rehearse. During the conversation with Mussein, Wahab took note several times of that efficient but nevertheless unwise simultaneity; it was the kind of blunder, he thought, that would instinctively be avoided by the inspired administrator. Prince Naim would certainly be an improvement at the Ministry, but there was no denying that had he not been the son of the King he would never have achieved so responsible a position; he was, as the English put it, merely a gifted amateur.

  This conversation between the two Principals, the one rising and the other falling, took place, at the latter’s request, outside the school building, in a quiet corner of the playground near the mud-built communal privy. It was necessary to have it there for privacy’s sake. Though the school was in session – babble from a dozen glassless windows proved this – an extraordinary number of boys were in the playground, some reading in the shade, some strolling in the sun, some lying in it, a few playing volleyball, and others kicking a football. Indeed, only that area close to the lavatories was deserted.

  Mussein had his letter in his hand. He had called Wahab away from a class to which he had been demonstrating relative densities. Wahab, whose own letter was in his pocket, had of course known why he was being beckoned and, though prepared to pity, was at the same time determined to be thoroughly Afghan in his attitude. This was well described by a traditional legend in which the characters were flies on fresh camel dung. As soon as one flew off another alighted, saying: ‘It’s my turn now.’ Thinking about it in those terms, Wahab had to make conscious efforts to prevent himself from sprouting wings and four extra feet. Mussein’s monotonous whines, and also of course the horrid stink, confused him. Nor did it help much to raise his head from the baked cracked clay to look at the distant mountains. Meditations on the grandeur of the country were not possible while these pusillanimous complaints, which sometimes verged on the treasonable, hummed in his ears. What Wahab wanted to do was to
stop his pacing, silence Mussein with a calm hand, and say to him, quietly: ‘The difference between us, my dear Mussein, is that in your youthful dream you had not the courage to let yourself die. If you remember, you not only lived but had messengers from the king coming to shower upon you riches and distinctions. I, on the contrary, died.’ But it would have been risking self-derision to say that to a man whose suit, though badly stained on the left lapel, was still as respectable as his own.

  Therefore, as Mussein sang his bitter dirge, Wahab tried not to listen to it, but instead to concentrate on his own future which might well contain more tribulations in its brilliance than Mussein’s would in eclipse. To begin with, what would the leaders of the Brotherhood say when they discovered that Laura was lame? And even if they did accept that unfortunate blemish in the wife of a man destined to save Afghanistan, was it not brutally true that Laura, in spite of her many admirable qualities, did lack a family with influence? To marry the daughter of a general or minister would surely be the next move of an Afghan manoeuvring to improve his social position. Besides, under her shaddry, that general’s daughter might be beautiful and plump. Of course it was just as possible that she might be cross-eyed and skinny. Could he, he mused, be content with such a wife, for the sake of Afghanistan? Would he in that event remain as resolute as he now was to work for the abolition of the shaddry? And if he were to find himself married, with a fine house, and comfortably off, would the poverty of so many millions of his countrymen continue to anger him? Aziz, his colleague in the bus-company office, had once spluttered cheerfully between bouts of coughing: ‘But, Wahab, how can our governors learn to eradicate the poverty of others, if they haven’t learned first how to eradicate their own?’ Wahab had chided him: hunger and disease, those terrible off-spring of poverty, were not subjects for jokes, even cynical ones on a dying man’s lips.