The Boy in the Green Suit

by Robert Hillman

  Randall was impressed when I gave him the news. Jo wanted me to recall every detail of this Captain Mahsood Zamamzadeh’s appearance and behaviour. She feared that he would rape her. In the end, for the sake of the savings, she agreed to go. Mahsood met us at the apartment and showed us inside. It was completely bare, although clean and obviously expensive.

  ‘Blanket,’ said Mahsood, waving a hand at the floor. Then he said, ‘In kitchen, food.’ He shook hands with each of us and promised to return in the morning. He locked the door when he left, and was gone before we could protest.

  We found a white paper bag half-full of sugar in the kitchen, but nothing more. Jo believed that Masood was going to bring back a dozen of his friends to rape her.

  ‘Why a dozen?’ Randall asked her, irritated. ‘Why not one, or two, or five? Why a dozen?’

  ‘I just know,’ said Jo. She made us sleep snugly wedged against her, she and Randall in sleeping bags, me in my blue cabin blankets.

  Captain Masood did not come back with a dozen friends, but he did come back alone. ‘Food,’ he said, and with a big white smile handed over a crumpled brown paper bag that contained perhaps a dozen raisins. He had also brought a guitar. He sat down cross-legged on the floor and sang ‘Love Me Do’, accompanying himself, poorly, on the guitar. ‘You now,’ he said, and handed the guitar to Randall, the only one of us who could play it. He sat tuning it for five minutes, then sang ‘The Streets of Laredo’ in a beautiful, piping tenor. It was my turn. I sang ‘From a Jack to a King’, with Randall on guitar. Mahsood was delighted and sat smiling like a lunatic. Jo refused to sing anything, and instead demanded to know why he had locked us in. ‘Safe for you,’ he said.

  We were free to wander about during the day, but were instructed by Mahsood to return at six in the evening. We did so, that evening and the next three evenings. The apartment had no electric power, so we sat around my candles reading, chatting, speculating on Masood’s motive. Between Jo and me, an unspoken rivalry had developed. Each of us hoped that Masood would make a pass. Neither of us wanted to satisfy him, but each wished to be the one to say, ‘Certainly not.’ Jo had ceased to believe that she was likely to be raped, and was prepared to say one or two nice things about Masood’s appearance.

  The high point of my relationship with Captain Mahsood came when he turned up one morning with some flour for us. It was part of a packet of O-So-Lite flour from my native land, but with Farsi script on the bag. It made me cry. The high point of Jo’s relationship with the captain was reached when he violated her in the kitchen. She emerged in a rage, her face its characteristic crisis crimson. ‘We’re leaving!’ she said. Mahsood stood in the kitchen doorway with his head bowed and his peaked cap in his hands. ‘Sorry please!’ he said. It was later revealed that he had kissed Jo on the top of her head.

  We lost our free lodging, but at least Jo was in a good mood for the remaining days in Tehran. She heaped curses on Captain Mahsood, deplored the conduct of all the people of the world who had not been brought up in the British Isles, and generally radiated goodwill. She allowed Randall and me to buy cigarettes for the first time in two weeks. We loved the captain.

  Bus journeys in Iran imitate, in sluggishness and discomfort, progress by camel or donkey. It is by preference, I think. Drivers relish the sudden, unanticipated thud into a dip. As the passengers rise towards the ceiling, a communal shout of merriment is followed by guffaws of rough delight. I guessed that they were recalling famous lurches and dips of the past. All the passengers were poor. If you had money, you found some other, sissier means of travel.

  I was still brooding in an off-hand way on the fate of the little haulier in Istanbul. Being surrounded by poor folk on the buses was, I thought, good for me, good for my soul, and maybe even good for the world, since I was using my time to brainstorm. Desalination, for example. Huge desalination plants on the coasts of poor countries, piping limitless clean water to desert regions such as those outside the bus. Biscuit factories turning out a super high-protein, super low-cost snack. My compassion lacked the vital complement of disinterest. I wanted the poor to benefit in order that I should benefit. The Nobel Peace Prize gold cup gleamed in the crystal cabinet of my imagination with all the lustre of the Nobel Prize for Literature gold cup.

  The poor of Iran flattered my sense of humanity (one of the time-honoured functions of the poor), but I missed the sight of girls—their bare arms, the swell of their breasts, the definition of their lips, the swing of their hair. The strictures of Islam had been successful in smothering the beauty of the Iranian female form under a noggin-to-ankle vestment. T. E Lawrence believed that the war against the sensual was Islam’s way of countering sexual incontinence. In my homeland we studied America as closely as any country on earth, and so knew that sexual incontinence is practically a citizen’s obligation. I had grown up besotted by the beauty of the female form—what could be more natural?—and was encouraged in my delirium by the spells and incantations of almost every hawker in the land. My heaven was populated entirely by women so emphatically mammalian that you could not open your mouth but that a nipple thrust its way in.

  All of this, Islam denied me. I was travelling in a part of the world where I was least likely to see a naked breast, least likely to cover a kissable mouth with my own. The women I saw—on buses, or walking about towns—were busy being mums, or busy being girls who would pretty soon be busy being mums. And they were excellent mums, endlessly enduring, endlessly affectionate mums, but they were not the stuff of my dreams. In any case, they had no interest in me.

  The chaps—that was a different story. I was having enormous success with the chaps. Just as Randall had promised, my arse was exercising a fabulous allure. I was felt up on crowded streets, in queues, in shops. On buses, the hand of my neighbour might creep towards me by slow degrees, then fall, seemingly by gravity, onto my thigh. The jolting of the bus might bounce this hand onto the pudding of my groin. The surprised hand might find within its grip the fly fabric of my green suit pants. I would remove the hand, gently returning it to its owner, who might give an embarrassed smile.

  More difficult to deal with diplomatically were the frotteurs. Hemmed in left, right, front and back in a crowded shop, I would become aware that the gent behind me was quietly attempting to winkle his betrousered dick into the crack of my bum. I might move a little to the left, and so might he. Or I might turn side-on, only to find myself claimed by a new neighbour. I might turn and scowl, and meet a blank face, ignorant of my intended complaint. Or I might mutter, ‘Oh for God’s sake!’ and storm out of the shop. Or I might simply sigh and roll my eyes and murmur to myself, ‘Okay, make it quick!’—and shoot him a venomous look when I finally claimed my bread and cheese and hustled back to the bus. One morning in Isfahan, I thought ‘Enough is enough!’ I swung around, and stared down at an ancient dwarf bollocking away furiously at the back of my knees.

  Randall sympathised with me, consoled me, but his essential interest was scholarly. ‘To these guys,’ he said, ‘you’re a slut. You’re from the West, you wear tight pants. As far as they’re concerned, you’re begging for it. If you were from here and you dressed like that, you’d get whipped, probably. They think you don’t know any better because you’re a Christian. You’re no loss even if they fuck you to death.’

  ‘I’m not a Christian,’ I said. ‘I’m an atheist.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. All that matters is you’re fuckable. You can’t fuck your girlfriend here until you marry her. You’re next best. Get used to it.’

  Jo, disgusted with men, with Iran, at first held herself aloof and wouldn’t listen to my tales of woe. But then she became interested.

  ‘Do you let men put their thingies in your bottom?’

  ‘No! Jesus, Jo!’

  She didn’t believe me. She thought I protested too much. She went about with a smug, knowing air, very like my stepmother Gwen when she accused me of bei
ng ‘sly’.

  When I was left in peace, I tunnelled into my books as into a cave of buried treasure, forgot the world and spent hours marvelling over jewelled goblets and fat golden coins. Returning to the local at intervals, I gazed from the window of the bus at the baked desert, at canyons of clay and treeless valleys, at towering formations of rock as bright as the flesh of carrots. Within the swelter of the bus, children slept across the laps of their mothers, their heads lolling, bubbles of spittle forming at the corners of their mouths. Men drowsed in their seats or fingered prayer beads, their chins raised and their eyes fixed on paradise. A woman who had let her shawl fall onto her shoulders quickly and expertly wrapped her head again after catching my gaze. Raw onions were passed between the members of a family, the skin tossed to the floor. Always a few old men of great piety stared out the window as they recited the endless cantos of a poem of praise to the Almighty, pausing at intervals to wipe tears from their eyes. A child might suddenly appear before me, balanced in the aisle of the swaying bus, black eyes of stunning beauty scanning my face, pondering the mystery of a boy dressed in this way with Lolita resting in his lap.

  The names of the towns we passed through were not displayed, as they would have been in Australia. A little way out of Isfahan, I asked a little boy to tell me where we were, using the few words of Farsi I had picked up. ‘Mahyar,’ he said, then for the rest of the journey to Shiraz he trotted back up the aisle each time we came to a town, his eyes dancing in delight: ‘Shahreza … Sular … Aminabad … Shurjestan … Deh Bid …’ Sometimes he would act out what the town was known for, putting his fingers to his head and waggling them in imitation of a goat, or raising his hands high as he stood on tiptoe to indicate a famous mosque.

  He made me understand, with clever actions, that he required the name of the country I had come from. ‘Australia,’ I said, three, four, five times, changing the stress, taking care with the pronunciation. But he couldn’t get his mouth around it and obviously had not heard of it, and was happy only when Randall whispered to me to me, ‘Say America’, which the boy had heard of, of course. ‘Decks Us,’ he said, pleased with himself. And brandishing an imaginary Colt .45, ‘Argon Smock. Pow pow! Maddy Lon’. (Where would he have seen Gunsmoke in Iran?) And taking real trouble, ‘An Angry Force,’ which surfaced from my eddies of puzzlement as ‘Niagara Falls.’

  A little girl came down the aisle one evening and, instead of staring at me, held up her arms. She was asking to be lifted, held. Her mother, looking around the corner of her seat, gave a little shrug and nod of her head. I dropped my novel to the floor, hoisted the girl onto my lap, cradled her, and she fell asleep within minutes. An hour later she was still asleep. The pain of supporting her in the one position was awful, but the aching merged with a sort of daddy delight in providing comfort. Whenever she stirred in her sleep and looked up at me and smiled, happiness spread like a pleasant ache through my chest.

  Past Shiraz, heading west to the Persian Gulf, we entered a night made more intensely black by the pillars of fire roaring above the oil wells. Gas was being burnt, and its reek mingled with the suffocatingly humid air, so that it seemed the bus was penetrating deeper and deeper into a swamp on the frontier of hell. The roar of the gas thrummed through the bus, waking the children from sleep. Like me, they stared out in alarm and excitement at the radiance of the fires gilding the ridges of the barren hills. The little boy hurried up to tell me that we were coming to Abadan, and turned an imaginary steering wheel left and right, acting out the destination of petroleum. He wished to know if I would go to sleep in Abadan (hands to the side of his head, eyes closed briefly). ‘No,’ I said. ‘Kuwait.’ ‘Kuwait?’ he repeated, and wrinkled his nose. ‘Bad!’ he said.

  Like most working-class men of his generation, my father first travels beyond the shores of Australia as a soldier. In 1941 he is sent to Palestine with the 8th Battalion, AIF. He is twenty-three years old, but is thought to be much younger. He learns to drink, and finds he enjoys it. Cross-legged on the floor of a bar in Jaffa, he sings all night, urged on by his mates. He has a clear tenor voice and has picked up a little vibrato trick that kicks the cowboy songs along; he has also mastered a Jimmy Rogers Tennessee yodel. He sings ‘Mountains of Morne’, ‘Danny Boy’, ‘Galway Bay’, ‘The Rising of the Moon’, ‘Road to Mandalay’, ‘’Goodnight Irene’, ‘So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You’, ‘Farewell’ and ‘Always’. He also recites. He has ‘The Man From Snowy River’ down pat, and ‘The Face on the Bar-room Floor’, but the piece that drives his audience crazy and wins him free drinks until morning is ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’.

  His mother, whose picture he carries in his breast pocket, taught him all the songs he knows, and the poems, too. He has no picture of his father. His father is a bit of mystery, dead for some time now. He better recalls his stepfather, a true bastard’s bastard who used to tether him by one hand to a fence post and larrup the daylights out of him with a horsewhip. And for what? For nothing.

  Later in the war, he sings and recites in Trincomalee, Moresby, Milne Bay.

  After the war, he has a lot to say about the women of the islands, of course, but the people of the East have also left an impression. “You get nothing out of Bob Arab,” he tells me, “but bullshit.” All the men of the East are Arabs in his stories. “Hates the old white man, the Arab,” and “Treats his wife criminal, an Arab will.” He holds that the wartime crop of Arabs are a different breed than the Arabs of the Crusades, many of whom (but by no means all) were capable of behaving with great dignity in battle.

  My father’s stories of the East don’t convince me, unlike his stories of the green island. The dismissive tone of his Arab reports makes the world seem smaller; his stories of the green island are like a sea breeze that fills a sail.

  Kingdom

  Other than jet planes, the only transport to Kuwait from Abadan was the dhow, the ancient craft of the gulf traders with its lateen yard and sinewy hull. The dhows of the Tigris were mastered by tall, disdainful Arabs. They had no curiosity about us. The master of the dhow we approached refused even to look at us. He asked for a sum of money, modest enough, through another member of the crew. When we agreed he said ‘Hup!’, and snorted and gestured over his shoulder for us to come aboard. Only then did he turn his gaze on us. He shrugged in contempt and spat into the river.

  The boat’s real cargo was lettuce and artichokes in crates piled high above the gunwales. Randall, Jo and I were expected to sit on top of the crates. The crewmen, running barefoot over them, never missing their footing, swore at us and cuffed us aside when we got in the way. Jo, who seemed to relish opportunities to inform the insolent of her rights, stood cawing, ‘I say!’

  Just for a bit, out on the blue-black waters of the Gulf, sailing for a small kingdom of fabulous wealth, I forgot all about girls—didn’t worry whether their breasts would be big enough and soft enough, whether they would love me, whether (my new anxiety) I would be burly enough for them, exciting enough. I was free to be thrilled by my good fortune. I could have been sweating over a boiler full of offal in the backyard of the butcher’s shop, but instead I was scooting across the Persian Gulf with a sunrise as bright as blood staining the sky. The wind pushed the sail; the sea rushed along the hull with a soughing sound. The master of the boat stood erect at the long spar of the tiller, with a cigar as thin as a pencil bitten between his front teeth. I was suddenly aware of width—of how far life stretched to each side, rather than just ahead.

  We came to the city of Kuwait by stepping out of the dhow. In the Kingdom of Kuwait there was only Kuwait, and we were in it. A dozen tall buildings, a glistening highway between them, spruce emporia, many small shops of the roll-down-door sort, two or three gorgeous five-star hotels, a number of flop houses and a few venues of hospitality between five star and flop. It was not immediately obvious what role I might play in the commerce of this instant city. I had vaguely thought that I would beco
me an oil company executive, and would probably need to obtain a driver’s licence for the Cadillac that would go with the job. But all the Cadillacs in town were being driven by hip-looking Arabs in highly laundered white robes. There was no evidence that kids from Australia were being shown to luxurious office suites by local millionaires, and asked to sign important documents. Quite the opposite; these crisp Arabs looked at the three of us as if we were puddles of mud that might splatter their immaculate clothes.

  We found a hotel, not as cheap as in Athens or Istanbul. No air-conditioning. Randall lit a cigarette and looked out the window on to a not-very-bustling street. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is a fuck-up.’

  ‘Well, if it is or not,’ Jo shrilled, ‘you both of you get out there and find a job!’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I don’t know! On an oil rig! They have oil rigs here, don’t they?’

  We left Jo sobbing in the hotel and wandered out to find work. Randall asked a suited Kuwaiti the way to the hospital, where he intended to offer his services. The quality of the medical training he’d received in the navy had convinced him that he was in a better position to render services to the sick than any GP. Unfortunately, some Kuwaiti bigwig was receiving treatment at the hospital and the place was ringed by armed guards. Nobody at all was being admitted until the bigwig was cured. I suggested that we head back down to the dock and offer ourselves as labourers.

  ‘Jesus, Bobby! Labourers? Open your fucking eyes! Every country in the Middle East is crawling with Palestinians. You know how much they work for? About a buck a year. Labourers!’

  I didn’t know that. I didn’t know about the Palestinians. I didn’t know anything about the Middle East except the few things Dad had told me. Nevertheless, I wished to prove that I was not the drop-kick that Jo thought me. I searched assiduously for work. I wandered the streets of Kuwait looking for any ‘Help Wanted’ signs that might happen to be written in English. I didn’t find any. But I met a number of Kuwaitis who were keen to take me to bed. Their approach to boy–boy sex was different to the Iranians’, who had less money to spend than their Gulf neighbours. The Kuwaitis offered money outright, according to the capitalist ethic. When I said no, they shrugged, as if I were incapable of seeing a bargain when it was staring me in the face. I didn’t hold it against them.