Dust on the Paw

by Robin Jenkins

  But today, thought Wahab, and all days previously, the police had been instructed to arrest any woman daring to lift even a part of the veil. So, by signatures on paper, did a nation advance to enlightenment. After tomorrow then, the streets would be bright with the faces of laughing, beautiful Afghan girls. Among them he would walk with Laura. No need to panic, though. No need to think now about her limp or shrunken salary. The situation would be young and revolutionary. Opportunities and inspirations would bloom like flowers.

  ‘What I’m going to say now, Wahab,’ said the Minister, with a glance at his huge wrist watch, ‘is merely preliminary. It’s not just talk, however; it’s been mentioned at the highest level. We’ve been looking at your record again. I didn’t realize you had been such an outstanding scholar.’

  ‘By our standards, sir,’ murmured Wahab daringly.

  ‘By English standards, too. At Manchester University you gained a degree of Bachelor of Science. According to the professor’s report you would have made an excellent research scholar.’

  Yes, and how he had frantically tried to get the professor and the University authorities to find some way of financing a prolongation of his stay in England. Another two years, a doctorate, and he would have been there for good. Who was it that had advised resolutely against his trying to stay? The Afghan Embassy, yes, but Laura too. He heard again her calm, clear, dutiful voice. ‘Afghanistan is your country, Abdul; your duty is to it. In any case, here there are thousands of men with science degrees. How many are there in Afghanistan?’

  Now, smiling at the Minister, he could have wept with pity at himself so falsely advised.

  ‘I had no right,’ he murmured, ‘to expect more public money to be spent on me. Besides, I felt I had been away from home long enough.’

  ‘And of course you now speak excellent English.’

  ‘I may say I was top of the English class at the University. You see, Excellency, I had to learn the language because most of the science books were written in it.’

  ‘You have brains and ambition, Wahab.’

  ‘I want to be in a position where I can help to the best of my ability.’

  The Minister grinned appreciatively. ‘At the moment there are two possibilities being considered. For obvious reasons, Prince Naim is being urged to resume his duties as Minister of Education; for the time being. He will need an assistant, who will really be an adviser. The other possibility is that a college solely for the teaching of science is going to be set up. The Russians have promised to equip it. We shall recruit teachers from abroad, but the principal must be an Afghan.’

  So, instead of being dismissed, I am being pushed up so fast I feel giddy and breathless. Or is it shame that’s stuck in my throat? The trouble seems to be that I have in me too many different kinds of sincerity. In this am I unlike all other men, or is it not that I am too human, too clever first at seeing what’s for my own good, and then at devising unassailable reasons for pursuing it?

  Into his mind then flashed memories; some were expected, but others took him by surprise: himself approaching with such careful modesty and demeaning terrors the group of people waiting for him on the International School veranda; his father’s bare feet; Laura’s naked bosom; Mussein boasting about dancing in private with his wife; Moffatt’s hand with the emptied whisky glass held up as if some kind of toast had just been drunk; the flowers in the taxi; Mrs Mossaour at the airport, with her sex purposely displayed like a peacock’s tail; and Rasouf leading the boys in the silly act of rubbing their hands in the sterile dust.

  I am not sure, he thought; no man can be sure; but what does appear to emerge is the necessity of looking after oneself; that assured, there may be opportunities for looking after others.

  The Minister too had been remembering. ‘What about that fellow, Moffatt?’ he asked. ‘What have you decided to do about him? By God, if he’d flung whisky in my face, I wouldn’t rest till I’d seen him booted out of the country. There are some things that just can’t be forgotten.’

  ‘I have not forgotten, Excellency.’ And when he touched that secret spot in his pride he found it as raw as ever. ‘But if he is expelled, how can I watch his humiliation?’

  ‘What humiliation?’

  ‘His wife is Chinese.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘She is pregnant.’ Had not Laura seen it, with envy’s or intuition’s eyes?

  Dr Habbibullah laughed. ‘What mystery is there in that? Aren’t there six hundred million Chinese?’

  ‘Yes.’ For some reason that immensity depressed Wahab. Perhaps it was because this spite, selfishness, and treachery which he was displaying were bearable only if he felt that they were restricted to himself; to be reminded that they were probably in every man, and therefore were throughout the world in colossal abundance was terrifying and intolerable. Another memory came into his mind. Once, visiting a small town near Kabul, he had needed to relieve himself. There was no such place as a public lavatory. Asking a bus driver, he was directed to a gap in a wall, itself the colour of dried excrement. When he had hurried there he had halted in the gap, appalled. Within was an enclosure as big as a football field, but he had not seen it as such. It had looked to him like a battlefield; the dead men, thousands of them, in every part, were the individual heaps of shit, in various stages of desiccation in the hot sunshine. It had been like a vision of the end of the world. Shocked and nauseated, he had nevertheless to venture in and, holding his breath, add to the dead. Now his soul was like that place, only in it the sad filth was moral.

  ‘Moffatt is a very proud man, Excellency,’ he said, with a smile. ‘All his friends know this. He is a poet and an idealist. He dreams of perfection. Therefore it is disgusting to him that his children should be impure.’

  ‘Impure?’

  ‘Half-caste.’

  ‘His wife is a beautiful little woman.’

  ‘So might his children be beautiful, Excellency, in your eyes and mine; but not in the eyes of his Western friends; therefore not in his.’

  ‘I see.’ The Minister grinned. ‘And you think you should keep him here until the child’s born?’

  Though Wahab nodded and smiled, he not only hated but was afraid of himself. If he was capable of such evil, all those many millions were also.

  ‘Did you know, Wahab, that some people have expressed the opinion that you are too squeamish, too afraid of hurting people?’

  ‘They cannot know me, Excellency.’ How could they, when he was just learning to know himself?

  ‘No, they can’t,’ agreed the Minister, laughing. ‘Very well. You can have Mr Moffatt. But here’s something that’s more important. I thought you’d raise objections about this, but now I’m not so sure. I’m referring to this Englishwoman you’re supposed to be going to marry. I believe she’s arrived in Kabul. Do you still intend to marry her?’

  ‘Excellency, this is a sudden question after more than two years of promise.’

  ‘Yes, yes. But we’re Afghans, Wahab. We may love our wives as much as other men do, but we are a bit more realistic about marrying them.’

  ‘Indeed.’ Yet, as Wahab smiled he remembered what he had heard said several times, that Habbibullah’s wife was much younger than he and very beautiful. The Minister was said to love her almost as much as he loved ambition.

  ‘You’re a young man, Wahab. After tomorrow, the situation here will become wonderfully exciting for a young single man with good prospects; such as yourself. What a choice before you! On the other hand, this Englishwoman’s older than you, she’s gray-haired, and she appears to be lame.’

  So the dogs have been set after us. Were their filthy noses snuffling outside the bedroom window? Well, whose filthy nose had snuffled outside Moffatt’s, that moonlit night?

  ‘I’m offering no advice, Wahab; just making sure you understand the situation. It’s up to you. Probably this woman has remarkable qualities.’

  ‘She is a Bachelor of Economics.’

  The
Minister seemed unable to keep from laughing. ‘You’re an extraordinary fellow, Wahab,’ he said. ‘I should have known this woman would turn out to be remarkably efficient.’

  But not at making love. Then, as his soul was about to crawl toward that disappointment, as nervous as a homeless dog sniffing at some house’s refuse, suddenly it was transfigured, became so grand and bright as to be almost terrifying, and everything seen in its light, even the gray hairs growing out of the Minister’s ears, shared in the transfiguration. Then into the terror flowed a great tenderness. He knew what had happened, what was still happening, and what would keep happening for the rest of his life. His love for Laura had at last thrown off all its ignoble disguises, was no longer a cringing cur, a furtive monkey, a gluttonous wolf, a worm, a rabbit forever bolting into its hole, but was for the first time its own self, and he was astounded by its glory, especially as all its ingredients, recalled with miraculous simultaneity, were as ordinary and human as those hairs, and among them even were what others would call faults. No flower in the world, not even one held in his first child’s hand, would be as beautiful as this small dark-red rose on his jacket. Its fragrance, faint but distinctive, would come about him and invade every cranny of his soul whenever he even thought of her.

  The Minister was now on his feet. ‘Well,’ he was saying, ‘efficiency’s something we can certainly do with. Perhaps at our stage it’s more important in a woman than all those other more conventional qualities.’

  Such as loveliness of face and body, sweetness of nature, softness of voice and hand, loyalty to husband, and to her children a devotion that nothing under the sun, or beyond it, could diminish. But Laura possessed them all; others might not have noticed them, because she was not ostentatious in their display, as Mrs Wint and Mrs Mossaour were, for instance, or tantalizingly mysterious, like Mrs Moffatt; but he, who had been admitted into the intimacy of her soul, as no one else ever had, had seen them, not once or twice only, but as often as he had seen her. Yes, even during the fiasco of that first love making – but had it really been a fiasco? – had she not revealed by her patient endurance of his lust a loyalty greater than he deserved, and after it had she not flowered into a meekness with nothing ulterior in it, a surrender indeed, containing, he now saw, promises not of future submission but rather of an appreciation that, though she was in so many ways cleverer and stronger-willed than he, nevertheless as her husband he must be given his place as head of their family.

  ‘Think it over,’ the Minister advised, as he shook hands at the door. ‘It’s up to you, and her.’

  The taxi was urgently fragrant with the flowers, and he found himself, greatly agitated, murmuring over and over again as if they were a prayer those last words of the Minister: ‘It’s up to her.’ For of course it was, far more so than the Minister knew. In the next four or five minutes Laura would be given the chance either of transforming his love for her back to its previous slinking shapes, or of perpetuating it in its present astonishing glory.

  Once, outside a pharmacy where he knew there was a telephone, he asked the driver to stop, and sat for a minute considering whether or not he ought to warn her not only that he was coming but also that so much depended on the way she received him. But to warn her would surely be to begin the retransformation. Therefore he asked the driver to drive on again, very slowly, so as to give him time to think. Yet was not thinking itself a sort of relapse?

  He thought perhaps he should scribble a message and throw it over the compound wall into the garden, or hand it to the servant at the gate to be delivered to her with the flowers. ‘Darling Laura,’ it would say, ‘I am coming to you in a few minutes. You may not notice it in my eyes, and I do not believe I shall be able to say it in words, but the truth is my love for you has in the past half hour blossomed in my heart more gloriously than these flowers. It was always there, just as the beauty of the flowers was always present in the apparently barren soil of my country; but now, for reasons neither a poet nor a scientist could explain, it has blossomed into this magnificence. I am troubled at finding such a marvel in so ordinary a man as I. Laura my dear, this is the truth. As I have said, you may not believe me, for it will not be possible for me all at once to convince you. We are, after all, human beings like all the rest, and our powers of communication are so limited. But in the years to come there will be many opportunities for me to reveal this marvellous love, and for you to detect some at least of these revelations. Do not, my darling, especially if Moffatt and his wife are watching, or their servants, receive me with reproaches, however much I deserve them, or with an attempt at retaliation, justified though it would certainly be. I cannot advise you how to receive me; that, my love, is up to you.’

  But such a message would be a warning, and inexorably would start the degeneration. He would ring the bell, wait, not knowing what kind of smile to wear, the servant would open the gate, and in he would creep, carrying the flowers, to be met by her also seeking a suitable smile. Smiles, and the rest of the meeting, would be artificial. Even if they embraced amorously, what would that signify? Amorous embraces could be plotted beforehand. No, what he must do was simply carry the flowers and the glory to her as surprises; the rest must be up to her. This trepidation of his surely proved he was not confident she would rise to the occasion; ah, rise would hardly be enough, soar rather, taking him with her, like an eagle and its mate.

  He remembered her saying once in Manchester: ‘It’s better to understand the kind of woman I am, Abdul. I’m just a typical, hard-headed, north-country woman, made a bit harder by my training and experience. Don’t look for any romantic abandon from me. Distrust me if you ever catch me trying on that sort of thing. But I’ll tell you this – women like me don’t give their love cheaply. If I ever love a man it will be forever. It won’t matter that appearances afterwards may indicate otherwise.’

  Yes, indeed. But there had been times, even in Manchester in the murk and the rain, when he had felt that there might come occasions when forbearance and reticence, those proud guards, must give passionate devotion its freedom. Here now was such an occasion. She must not receive him in her role as Bachelor of Economics of Manchester University, representing the level-headedness and practicality which had been the female contribution to British greatness. No, just as he had too often been a self-conscious Afghan rather than a plain, happy man, so she too long had been stiff-lipped British. In most situations that was no doubt an honourable and profitable attitude, but not in the one about to be confronted.

  There could have been no better way of banishing both his own and the taxi driver’s Afghan self-consciousness, than by voluntarily giving the latter a tip of American generosity. About to lie, haggle, appeal, and sulk, the driver instead was stricken into a cheerful human grin; and Wahab, prepared to count out the afghanis with harsh exactitude, handed them over recklessly, dismissing for once the usual bourgeois excuse – well-founded, in most cases – that his own need of the three or four afghanis extra was proportionately greater than the driver’s, who, being poor, could wear rags of any sort, eat nan, and sleep if need be in his taxi, whereas Wahab had a standard of Western imitation to keep up. That tip for a minute or two freed them both, so that the driver drove off puffing kisses at his voluptuous actress, and Wahab, boldly grasping the flowers, strode across the bridge of dried mud to the gate.

  Or at any rate made to stride across. Something in his path stopped him suddenly; for a few moments he did not know whether his mood of brave human confidence was strengthened or weakened by it. It was a scorpion. It had been asleep in the sunshine; but now, with his shadow over it, it awoke and brandished its sting like a little sword. His countrymen, seeing scorpions, shouted ‘Death!’ and looked for stones to crush them. As a scientist, he knew their stings, though painful, were not deadly, and that this hatred of them for doing what nature had ordained them to do kept the mind filled with harmful superstition. At the same time most Afghan children walked about with their feet bare, and a sco
rpion could not be expected to tell whether the foot trampling it was innocent or murderous.

  The dilemma was about to weave him into his customary web of self-doubt when the insect scurried off into the grass of the ditch. Grateful to it, he stepped forward and rang the bell.

  Little Sofi, who opened the gate, had his feet bare. When he saw who the visitor was, and what he carried, he stepped aside with a well-disposed if lubricious grin. Then he went outside into the road to have a look along it to see if any shaddried damsels were in sight. Afghans, as Wahab knew, acquired the ability to tell if the body under a shaddry was young and comely, or old and fat. Sometimes mistakes were made, and of course even the most perspicacious of lechers could not read the face. As Wahab stepped inside the gate and Sofi stepped outside it, in the former’s mind these so essentially Afghan anxieties were beginning to skulk, like surprised scorpions.

  He had not taken more than half a dozen shy steps along the path when a cry from the terrace made him halt. It was uttered by Laura, but whether in gladness or indignation he could not, in his confusion, tell. Even as she came hobbling down the steps, far faster than was safe, he was still not sure; but as she came running to meet him he knew that he had never before seen her so beautiful, although her face was still so intense that a stranger, or indeed anyone who did not know her so well as he, would not have been certain she was coming in love, not in anger.

  Her embrace, of flowers as well as of him, was fierce but loving. He at any rate was convinced, and amazed too. Before his eyes age, harshness, suspicion, and doubt all dropped from her and lay like the petals of the flowers at their feet.

  Beyond her Abdul, the other servant, watched from the guilty terrace, but visibly almost that guiltiness was vanishing. These kisses, so painful to his swollen lips and nose, absolved the whole world.