The Wind Cannot Read

by Richard Mason

  “Perhaps,” I said.

  We went upstairs and there were no single rooms, at least the rooms had had two single beds put in to accommodate us. Peter and I took one, and Mario went in with Mervyn.

  “You’re coming in here,” Miss Jackson said to Fenwick. Her tone was commanding. She swept forward and led him into a room in which there was already an officer who had arrived on another train from Karachi. “Now are you all right, boys?”

  “Where is the bath?” Mario asked.

  “At the end of the corridor.”

  “What time do we eat?”

  “You eat at eight o’clock. On other days you may eat earlier by request.”

  “I hope your food is well cooked.”

  “We are used to catering for officers.”

  “That means nothing,” Mario said. “We’re very particular.”

  “I am particular, too,” Miss Jackson said. “I am very particular about whom I have in my hotel. I hope you are all nice boys.”

  “We will pay for what we have,” Mario said. “We’re as nice as that.”

  “I think we shall understand each other.”

  Fenwick stood in the passage. He was still annoyed by the way he had been ordered into the room; he had also heard Mario talking to the proprietress and was jealous of this independence. He thought it was time to display his seniority.

  “How do you think I can wash my hands in the basin when the tap doesn’t run?” he said.

  “There is a tap on the pipe.”

  “Oh,” he said with forced jocularity. “That’s different. Why didn’t you say so before?”

  Bahadur began to unpack my clothes. He laid them neatly according to his invariable pattern, with my blue shirts and my khaki shirts in different piles, and pants and vests laid alternately ready to take out in pairs. In one of my socks he found a hole over which he shook his head sadly. Then he went into the bath: room to place my towel and soap by the bath. He would not go down to the bazaar to find himself a place to sleep until I was dressed for dinner. This was because he was afraid that when his back was turned I should put on the same bush-shirt that I had been wearing all day. He made it clear that in this respect he did not trust me farther than he could see.

  (2)

  On the following day we went to the school for an interview. Two flats had been taken over for our purpose in a large modern block; and the big, cool rooms overlooked the harbour, with its liners and naval vessels and graceful fishing-boats. When a new troopship came in from England, we could see it from the windows.

  Often, later on, we looked out of the windows at these things instead of thinking about Japanese.

  The chief instructor was a retired Brigadier, a fine, cultured man, small of stature and well-preserved. He had spent many of his sixty-five years in Japan, and we were to find a refreshing lack of prejudice in the way he spoke of the qualities and the shortcomings of the Japanese people.

  We sat down at the desks in the classroom.

  “Tell me how much Japanese you know,’ he said.

  “Sayonara,” said Mario.

  “Hara-kiri.”

  “Kimono.”

  “Good,” he said. “You don’t know much Japanese. We can start from the beginning. First I’m going to give you a test.”

  He turned the blackboard round. On the back there were a dozen ideographs. We studied them intently for two or three minutes. After that he rubbed them out and drew twelve more. He numbered them. On a piece of paper we wrote down the numbers of those that we thought had appeared before.

  “That is to test your visual memory,” he said.

  Then he wrote on the blackboard some word-by-word translations of Japanese sentences. Man as-for comes time at me to informing condescend. We tried to make sense of them.

  “There is not time enough in one year to learn both the spoken and the written languages,” the Brigadier said. “I shall divide you into two sets.”

  He came and sat down by each of us in turn and examined our papers. I was the first in the front row.

  “You haven’t got all the characters right,” he said.

  “I haven’t got a good visual memory.”

  “You can pick up words well by ear?”

  “I learn best that way.”

  “Very well,” he said. “You can do the colloquial.”

  He went on to Fenwick.

  “You would also be better at the spoken language?”

  “I got hold of French and German without difficulty.”

  “That is settled, then.”

  I thought that was a pity. I should have to work with Fenwick. But there would be Peter, too, and the other officer called Lamb who had been at the hotel, and a number of Army officers also. Mervyn and Mario elected to learn the ideographs.

  “I will introduce you to your instructors now,” said the Brigadier, and led the way from the room. We followed him across the passage into the Common Room. Four Japanese sat there reading newspapers. They stood up and bowed as we entered, and when they had finished bowing they inclined their heads several times more and sucked in their breath noisily. They were all small of stature, and two of them wore thick-lensed glasses. They had all been in India when the war broke out; now in pedagogy they had been offered an alternative to internment.

  We shook hands.

  “How do you do?” one said meticulously. “How do you do?”

  “There is another instructor on the way out from England,” the Brigadier said. “Meanwhile we’re lucky to have these gentlemen.”

  “Yes, indeed,” we murmured, and the Japanese inclined again.

  “Very well,” said the Brigadier. “Will you please be here on Monday morning. I hope half-past nine is not too early?”

  (3)

  Although I did not expect to find Mr. Headley in his office on Sunday, I called on the off chance at No. 211 Cornwallis Road. I had been given his name and address before leaving England and for some reason it had remained in my mind long after my address­book had been lost in Burma.

  Mr. Headley was a social worker; a man who—so I had heard—had the attributes of a saint. I thought he would give me the best introduction to Bombay.

  His office was like a musty bookshop; I had seen nothing like it before amongst the well-ordered homes and places of business of other Englishmen in the Orient. There were dusty books everywhere, in the chairs and on the floor and stacked along the corridor. On the walls there were old calendars, curling at the corners and out of date; and on the desk, a chaos of papers and junk.

  But Mr. Headley himself was not there. In his place was an Indian youth who beamed at me in a fashion that was recognisably Christian.

  “Mr. Headley is out?” I asked.

  “He very soon return.”

  “What time?”

  “At twelve he must return. He has not taken with him his instrument, and therefore he must return. At twelve he must be with his instrument.”

  “I will come at twelve,” I said, though I did not understand what he meant about the instrument, and I went off to do some shopping.

  I went past the big European stores, which were closed because it was Sunday, and into the bazaars of the side streets. I felt like the stranger I was—with no comprehension of the life seething round me, not even of the simple processes, the mixing of potions, the side-stepping from the holy cow that sniffed at a cart of vegetables, the smoking of hookahs or the eating of chapattis—I didn’t understand the language or the feelings, how these brown-skinned people made love or worshipped, what they enjoyed and what they hated. The streets were full of filth and noise; children played naked in the gutter, and deformed beggars in stinking rags called out for alms in husky whispers. I thought how easy it was to lose your pity and grow contemptuous, how easy to despise what you didn’t understand. The syphiliti
c mendicant was too low for sympathy, too remote from your own experience, too animal. You needed a genius for sympathy if you were to comprehend. I turned away and went back to Mr. Headley’s office, and all the dusty chaos had a friendly and familiar English look.

  Mr. Headley, from behind his desk, called me in as though I was a regular visitor.

  “Come in, come in,” he said. “Don’t you look hot!”

  “It’s very hot outside,” I said.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “I’m one of those stupid people who must jab themselves to the clock.”

  I saw that his hand held a syringe. He was pushing the needle through the rubber cap of a small bottle.

  “Marvellous stuff, insulin,” he said. “Kept me alive for twenty-two years. How old would you say I am?”

  “That’s difficult to guess,” I said. “Fifty, or fifty-five, perhaps.”

  “Sixty. No illness—nothing. That’s insulin.”

  “Splendid,’’ I said.

  “Look at this.”

  He unbuttoned his shirt and squeezed a roll of flesh between his fingers. He was a small, wiry man with thick hair.

  “Look,” he said, and pulled up one of the legs of his short khaki trousers. I looked at his thigh.

  “Not a mark!” he said. “I’ve punctured myself twice a day for twenty-two years, and not a mark. A different place every day—that’s the trick. Do you know how long it takes me to get round my body?’’

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “Eight months. Take a look.”

  He inserted the needle into the flesh of his leg and began to squeeze in the liquid.

  “You won’t see this puncture. Haven’t used this spot since last February. Now I shan’t use it again until next June. Now,” he said, still squeezing, “sit down. Tell me who you are.”

  “My name’s Michael Quinn,” I said.

  “Quinn?” he repeated. “Never met anyone called that before. What are you? I don’t understand uniforms.’’

  “Air Force, as a matter of fact,” I said.

  “Good,” he said. “Stay to lunch, if you don’t mind taking pot-luck. It’ll be along in ten minutes. Have to eat to the clock, you know, because I’m a diabetic. How did you get here?”

  “Mrs. Bostock gave me your address—she used to know you in Birmingham.”

  “Mrs. Bostock? Can’t recall the name at all . . .”

  “Her maiden name was Beresford.”

  “Ah, I’ve got it, Lucie Beresford. A perfectly charming lady with no morals whatsoever—used to be an old flame of mine. Does she still eat cold sausages off sticks? Never met a woman with such a passion for ’em.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “She’s a friend of my fathers.”

  “Of course. I still think of her as twenty-five, but she must be fifty now—no chicken. Is your father an old flame, too?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Expect so. Who’s Bostock, anyway—the circus fellow?”

  “I think he manufactures bicycles.”

  “Fool!” Mr. Headley said. “What’s your father?”

  “He was in advertising.”

  “Doing all right out of it, I expect.”

  “He makes both ends meet,” I said.

  “Of course. Gives you plenty, I suppose?”

  “If I need it, he gives me some.”

  “See that he does—you need it when you’re young. When you’re my age, no need. Live quietly. Did you meet my boy?”

  “The chap who was here when I came first?”

  “That’s him—Jack. An untouchable—but you don’t call them Untouchables. Depressed Class—Scheduled Class. They’re on the upgrade now. Jack’ll show you round, he’s doing social work with me. Now here’s our lunch. Don’t mind eating in the office, do you? It’s easier. Must eat special food when you’re a diabetic.”

  After lunch I walked with him down the Mahatma Gandhi Road towards the Taj Mahal Hotel.

  “Tell me something about India,” I said.

  “India? Certainly. Size, one and a half million square miles. Population, approximately four hundred million. About five hundred thousand villages and eighty-three important towns.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t mean statistics.”

  “The Hindus wear turbans, Muslims fezes, and the Parsees wear hats like a cow’s hoof. They also put their dead on the Towers of Silence. You can see them on Malabar Hill over there. Devoured by vultures in half an hour. That’s hygienic, you know.”

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  “Do you want to know about India?”

  “I have to live here,” I said.

  “You must live here for thirty years, and you’ll find out something about India. Now I’ve got a meeting—please excuse me. Go away and be young. It’s a good thing to be young, you know.”

  (4)

  I lay on my bed with a towel over my middle and looked at the fan, and did not think it was always so good to be young. Why, I was not even that, I was forgetting. Five years ago I was young, like Peter. I was always forgetting how those five years had slipped away. It was necessary to get used to this—to accept the truth that I was no longer someone who had just left school and had all his life before him. When the war was over I should be practically middle-aged; and it was no use hoping to take up life again where I had dropped it in nineteen thirty-nine. This wasn’t a slice out of life; it was part of life itself that must be lived to the full.

  I lay looking at the fan. In my chest was a hollowness—the sort of hollowness that usually came in the afternoon or early evening—a sense of utter futility. Sitting before a blazing log fire with a good book in my hand, I never experienced that hollowness. I never experienced it when I thought I was in love, nor when I was passionately interested in a thing. Nor at any time in England, for life was too full. But in India it came often; and it was necessary to study its treatment. Not a difficult study—it was merely a question of learning to drink; or if you already knew, of finding out where and with whom it was nicest to become intoxicated. It was an infallible way of filling in the hollow. It was also an admission of defeat.

  It was gravely wrong, I told myself, looking at the fan, to be on the way to middle-age and still have a hollow. When you were young, when you were Peter’s age, you could legitimately have a hollow, for it was something that you expected to be filled in as age brought you experience, philosophy, love or religion. But I had none of these things—except perhaps for experience; and what had experience done for me except to bring home to me the futility of all things? What I needed was a religion, that greatest Filler-in-of-Hollows. If you had a religion you need not bother any more about blazing log fires and women and stamp-collecting. It was a great pity not to have a religion. But I was not anywhere near having one—not unless there was a miracle and God appeared to me suddenly in the midst of my hollowness.

  The air from the fan was cool on my body. I removed the towel and lay naked, and all of me was pleasantly cool. I bunched the pillow under my head, and looking down I could see how white and clean was my body from the shower. Then I thought of four hundred million other bodies in a million and a half square miles. If only it were possible to think, “But they are brown, they are black, they are inferior. I am white. I am great!” But I could not adopt even that conviction.

  I thought, there is a war, and God knows when it will all be over.

  I am no longer young; no longer free to shape my life as I choose.

  This body is me; and this mind is me; and I can no more change these things than I can change water into fire—and I can no more escape from them than a prisoner can escape from a cage of iron.

  (5)

  When Peter came in he said:

  “Why are you depressed? You’re not often like that—you’re so interested in things. When you wal
k through the bazaars you’re perfectly happy. All I think of is what vile, ugly people. I’m glad I can’t understand the vulgar things they say to one another.”

  “You always talk like that,” I said, “until suddenly you give a brilliant discourse on the mental processes of a scavenger—full of intuitive understanding.”

  “Probably one of my ancestors was a scavenger. I shall really have to hush it up. I don’t approve of that kind of thing at all.”

  “I’ve never really found out what you do approve of.”

  “I approve of the Taj Hotel,” he said, smiling. “Inside it’s so clean and beautiful, and you don’t have to think about scavengers. Let’s go there for dinner. We’ll have a nice brandy, and you can tell me all about the women in your life, and that’ll make you feel fine.”

  Chapter Five

  (1)

  I began to like learning Japanese. Half the reason was that I liked the Brigadier. He made his classes amusing and coloured them with anecdotes of Japan.

  He knew a great deal about the culture and the social life of the country. Sometimes he would break off a class to give a demonstra­tion; clearing the top of his desk, he would climb on to it to show the sitting posture of the Japanese, or he would go the length of the room, bowing and sucking in his breath, in imitation of a Japanese meeting an acquaintance in the street. Then he would mimic the high-pitched songs of the geisha; or with curious grunts from his belly show how Japanese generals gave their military orders.

  “But Miss Wei will tell you about Japanese women,” he said. “She’s the new instructor, who ought to be here next week.”

  Our second instructor was Mr. Itsumi, or Itsumi San as we called him, for San was the Japanese equivalent of Mr. He was only twenty-nine or thirty, with an owlish student’s face. He had been studying British business methods in England, and on the way back to Japan when the war started, his ship had docked in India. He had been released from internment to teach us.

  He was strikingly yellow. I had not met many Japanese, and I did not know that they were really this colour, a deep brown-yellow. When he was angry it turned to a grey-yellow, and that happened often, for he easily took offence. I suppose it was an inferiority complex. He would misunderstand a word, and believing himself to be insulted would fall suddenly silent and nurse a grudge for days.