Dust on the Paw

by Robin Jenkins

  Could that be it? he wondered. Was it possible after all these years that Richardson should come to haunt him here by this quiet river because of that blood and the baby in his wife’s arms, a baby that would now be a boy or girl of fourteen unless it too had died? And what stresses in Moffatt’s own mind could cause so strange a ghost to haunt? Supposing he were ashamed of his betrayal of Wahab, why should shame take this form?

  But he had not yet admitted to himself that he was ashamed. What he had done had been to protect Miss Johnstone, and if Wahab were to suffer as a consequence then it was a pity, but no man who had approved of Hiroshima at the time, as Moffatt and his fellow soldiers had done, most profanely, could be expected to be too squeamish about the means taken to achieve a necessary end, particularly when the issue was so infinitely much smaller. Even if Wahab was as honest as Lan too readily gave him credit for being, he must still be sacrificed; and it was more than likely that, being an Afghan on the make, he was selfish, cynical, and mercenary.

  Lan of course would have to be told, but there seemed no reason why she should not be convinced that the betrayal, if it could be called such, had been justified. After all, whenever anyone in her presence, such as Josh Bolton, condemned the idealistic excesses of Communist China which had resulted in hundreds of thousands of innocent peasants being slaughtered or starved to death, did she not always keep silent and hide behind a smile of such faith and beauty that it was almost, but not quite, an answer? And in private whenever Moffatt had discussed the question with her, she had always shown such agitation and sorrow that he had been only too willing to change the subject. All the same, she ought to show the same consideration for him in this matter of Wahab.

  Ten

  WAHAB, hat on head, was so engrossed in squinting through the lens of the microscope and in crying out a description of what he saw to the boys crowding round him, that he didn’t hear the rattling at the door.

  A boy had to touch him on the shoulder. ‘Sir, there is someone at the door.’

  Wahab straightened up, blinking. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘We think it is the Principal.’

  ‘The Principal!’

  ‘Do not be frightened of him, sir,’ said another boy. ‘Everyone knows he is not important.’

  Wahab licked his lips nervously and tried to smile. ‘Do not be disrespectful, Aziz.’ Then suddenly he rushed to his desk where he usually kept his hat and searched for it to put it on. The Principal was very orthodox; he liked his teachers to show an example to the boys by wearing their hats in the classrooms.

  ‘It is on your head, sir,’ said a boy.

  Most of them were not really boys, but young men; two or three had moustaches. Few wore hats. Most were rebels against the imprisoning traditions of their country. Now they stared at Wahab in sympathy that had a sneer of contempt in it.

  The door rattled again and the Principal’s shrill, plaintive voice was heard: ‘Wahab, are you there? It is important that I speak to you.’

  ‘Stand back from the microscope,’ whispered Wahab. ‘Go to your desks. Write in your notebooks.’

  ‘What does it matter, sir?’ asked one. ‘He will never know what we were looking at.’

  ‘He is not interested,’ said another.

  ‘All the same, return to your desks.’

  They obeyed, their shoulders hunched in disappointment at what they so plainly considered his timidity. Chewing at his knuckle, he could have wept: those boys should be his allies in his fight against the ignorance and prejudice which were holding his country back; yet here he was once again betraying both them and himself.

  ‘The time’s not ripe, do you not see?’ he muttered. ‘We must go forward carefully.’

  The Principal was kicking the door. ‘I hear you, Wahab,’ he cried.

  Wahab hurried over and unlocked the door.

  The Principal, Abdul Mussein, fidgeted outside, one hand in his pocket, the other clutching the knot of his tie as large as a goitre. His suit was threadbare, and the collar of his shirt badly frayed. ‘Why do you keep the door locked?’ he asked.

  ‘It is the regulation.’

  ‘Sadruddin’s?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Sadruddin was the Custodian. His salary was lower than any teacher’s and he wore native clothes. Nevertheless, in his zeal to protect all the property in his charge he would defy the Minister of Education himself and be respected for it.

  ‘But surely it is only necessary,’ suggested the Principal, as he entered cautiously, his hand nervous in his pocket as if it held a gun there, ‘when the room is unoccupied?’

  ‘No, when it is occupied too. Even when I am present.’

  The Principal stretched out his long neck to look at the equipment. ‘This is valuable, of course,’ he muttered. ‘We dare not have it stolen.’

  ‘I agree.’ In the first place what was stolen would never be replaced; and in the second place every teacher’s salary would have deducted from it an amount that, in aggregate, would be worth more than double the value of the stolen article. Wahab like all the others dreaded such deductions. ‘Nevertheless,’ he added bravely, ‘these boys can be trusted.’

  The Principal shook his head, meaning there wasn’t an Afghan in the whole country, including himself, who could be trusted.

  ‘Yes. They respect this equipment; they know its purpose is to bring to them the secrets of science.’

  The Principal sighed. ‘Perhaps it is too expensive. Perhaps it would be safer to keep the room empty and the door locked.’

  Wahab pouted scornfully. That had been the situation when he had come to the school after his return from England. This science laboratory had been kept permanently locked; the microscopes had not even been taken out of their boxes. It had been opened and furnished with students only when some foreign official, such as the Egyptian Minister of Education or the Russian Cultural Attaché, was paying a visit. After a long exhausting struggle with Sadruddin, Wahab had been allowed to teach pupils there. At first the condition had been that the Custodian should always be present, but though a special chair had been installed for him at the end of the teacher’s dais, he had soon given up the arrangement as tedious and had substituted this other of keeping the door locked. Wahab had had to agree. Sadruddin was such a power in the school that if he were absent, either ill or on leave, nothing could be issued from his store, books or chalk or stationery, until he returned. Not even the Principal could afford to offend so officious an underling. Wahab’s resistance had not been forgiven by Sadruddin, who maligned him every day at the Ministry, where he reported like a spy.

  The Principal glared sadly at the students. He did not like or trust them, but he could not have said why. They, on the other hand, knew very clearly why they didn’t approve of him: he was too scared of authority above him to have any fresh ideas himself or any tolerance of them in others; his only concern was to keep his position, which he had got by nepotism. It was impossible for them not to sympathize with him, for they knew the abyss into which a man who had lost favour could fall; but that very sympathy made them all the more bitter. Wahab, who had returned from England bold and enthusiastic, they had at first idolized. He had seemed to them not only a clever but also a brave man, daring to oppose forces that had dominated their country to its detriment for centuries. Frequently, however, under their eyes made sharp by admiration, his courage had faltered or even completely collapsed. He was for instance, like all his colleagues, terrified of the mullah Mojedaji. He had tried to explain to them in confidence that as he had given up most of the religious beliefs instilled into him when a child he was more vulnerable to the mullah’s spite than the other teachers were, who were afraid only out of habit. But most of the boys were themselves much more critical and outspoken than he, and so refused to take his excuses. As an unmarried man he should have been able to show more independence. What they were looking for, they had told him, were heroes, not the same kind as of old when invaders such as the British had to b
e repelled, but a new kind whose weapons were ideas. In tears, he had agreed.

  With a kind of indignant loyalty they protected him against his superiors. Now, for instance, when they heard him stammer to the Principal that they had been looking at some microbes on a slide, they did not add that the microbes were those that caused syphilis, a disease rife in all the country villages as well as in the city itself. Nor did they mention that in the drawer of Wahab’s desk were real photographs showing syphilitic sores on men, women, and children in some of those villages. They knew that the Principal would be shocked and terrified, not so much by the sight of the chancres as by his subordinate’s rashness in giving such a lesson.

  Wahab, well aware that he was at their mercy, gave them little comradely smiles that kept dying on his lips.

  ‘No one can say that we are not advancing,’ said the Principal as he gazed round. ‘Every year the Ministry spends hundreds of thousands of afghanis on school equipment.’

  ‘True, but don’t let us forget that compared with school laboratories in England, this room is nothing.’

  ‘Compared with Saudi Arabia?’

  ‘Yes, indeed, and the aborigines of Africa. We used to be a civilized people.’

  ‘Are we not still civilized, Wahab?’

  ‘In many ways we are not.’ Wahab’s teeth chattered as he spoke; here he was again blurting out truths that could destroy him.

  The Principal gaped at him and suddenly remembered why he had come downstairs. There were two reasons – to relieve himself, and to tell Wahab that someone wished to speak to him on the telephone.

  There should be, no doubt, in a civilized school a W.C. for the principal alone, or at least for him and the senior teachers. But there was none, and to relieve himself he would have to slink outside, round the back of the building, and find a corner which others would have found before him; or else he would have to set off across the playground for two hundred yards or so to the latrines which were indeed only aboriginal holes in the ground and smelled atrociously.

  ‘You are wanted on the telephone, Wahab,’ he said.

  Wahab looked worried. ‘Is it the Chinese woman again?’

  ‘No.’ The Principal realized he ought to have been smiling with excessive friendliness. ‘It is the secretary of His Highness Prince Naim.’

  ‘Prince Naim!’

  ‘Yes. I did not know you knew the Prince.’

  ‘But I do not know him.’

  The Principal was not surprised at thus being excluded from Wahab’s sphere of influence; but he was also by no means discouraged. ‘It is his secretary of course, but I think it is the Prince himself who wishes to speak to you.’

  ‘There must be some mistake.’

  ‘I thought so, too; but the secretary gave your name and described you as a teacher of science at this school. Prince Naim is, I understand, interested in education. He is also, I am told, a friend of the Prime Minister.’

  ‘I do not know who is a friend of whom.’

  The Principal grinned sadly. ‘It is wiser to say so,’ he whispered.

  ‘Perhaps, if the Prince is waiting, I should go at once?’

  ‘Yes, of course. You must hurry.’

  ‘What about my students? Will you stay with them until I return?’

  The Principal remembered his rank. ‘I cannot. I have so much other business to attend to.’ Indeed, he had now to keep one knee pressed tight against the other.

  ‘Then they must all come out. The agreement is that they must not be left in the laboratory without someone to supervise them.’

  ‘A very necessary agreement.’

  Wahab addressed the boys and apologized for having to put them out. They dawdled, resentful at the lack of trust.

  Outside in the gloomy corridor Wahab was locking the door when around a corner, his fat thighs impeding each other, waddled Mojedaji, Koran conspicuously in hand. His little black moustache glittered with scent. It was his method of defeating the stenches of the city.

  The reaction of the boys to his approach was curious. Some smiled warily but drew back; a few bowed towards him, with hands pressed against their breasts, and two went cringing forward and kissed his negligent hand.

  Knock-kneed, the Principal smiled with affable obtuseness. Wahab held his head up and did not smile.

  ‘It is necessary, you see,’ cried the Principal, ‘for the students to come out and wait in the corridor; otherwise they might steal or break the microscopes.’

  ‘I think I should like to help them do that,’ said the mullah, with a sly grin. ‘Scientists are such dangerous people.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Wahab. ‘They want only to enrich the earth.’

  ‘Ah, but we have seen in the West that to enrich the earth means also to impoverish the soul.’

  ‘Not necessarily so. One day scientists will give everyone enough to eat, and they will also abolish disease.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Wahab. ‘They want only to enrich the earth.’

  ‘Are they Gods then?’ Mojedaji turned to the boys. ‘And with what experiment was Mr Wahab showing you how to enrich the earth this morning?’

  At first none was willing to answer.

  ‘We were looking at some things through a microscope,’ said Wahab.

  ‘What things?’ Mojedaji glared at one of the boys who had kissed his hand. ‘What things were you looking at through the microscope, Mansour?’

  Mansour, a boy with shaven head and thick lips, looked at the mud-bricked floor. ‘Microbes,’ he muttered.

  ‘What kind of microbes?’

  ‘I shall tell you,’ said Wahab, in agitation. ‘They were the microbes of syphilis.’

  ‘Syphilis!’ yelped the Principal and thought he had wet himself with the shock.

  With delicate forefinger the mullah dabbed at his perfumed moustache. ‘A strange experiment for schoolboys, surely?’

  Wahab stubbornly shook his head but kept his mouth shut. If he tried to explain he might lose control of himself and start screaming at Mojedaji that it was he and his like who kept their country imprisoned in ignorance, disease, hunger, and stupidity.

  ‘I did not know,’ wailed the Principal. ‘These microbes were dead, I hope?’

  ‘Yes, but people are alive,’ cried Wahab.

  They waited for him to explain what otherwise need hardly have been said; but he had his mouth shut again.

  Thinking of dead microbes and living people and angry Mojedaji and his own painful need, the Principal suddenly remembered that the Prince was still waiting.

  ‘It is necessary for Wahab to go up to the telephone,’ he explained to Mojedaji. ‘Prince Naim wishes to speak to him.’

  ‘Prince Naim?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. I was surprised too.’

  ‘Well then,’ said the mullah, patting Wahab on the arm, ‘you must certainly not keep the Prince waiting.’

  ‘One ought never to be discourteous,’ said Wahab, as he moved off with sad smile, ‘to prince or beggar.’

  They all watched him as he hurried along the corridor towards the stairs. The Principal noticed that in Mojedaji’s eyes surmise was taking the place of disapproval; he noticed too that the mullah’s scent was conjuring up the stink of the latrines.

  Yet when he took leave of them all he did not go out into the playground but rather followed Wahab up the stairs, although each step he took was now a danger and an agony. To go and make water, in so filthy a place, while the Prince was actually telephoning, seemed not only disrespectful, but also somehow absurd.

  Going up the stairs, Wahab had glanced out of the window and caught sight of two shaddried girls skulking along a street at the back of the school. Instantly he was reminded of Laura, and the times when, hand in hand, slowly to suit her, he and she had walked fearlessly through the widest streets in Manchester. As he remembered, the coolness of her hand came upon his, so that his heart ached with a longing that would have brought tears to his eyes if he hadn’t for her sake vowed never again to b
e so unmanly as to weep. With his other hand he stroked the fingers where he had felt hers, and thus, like a man manacled, he went up the stairs into the Principal’s room. The clerk, with bare feet and shaven head, was stretched out on the sofa that matched the chairs. He had a headache, he whispered; and indeed he looked ghastly as if he might have some fatal disease which Wahab would catch and die of, without ever seeing Laura again. ‘Do not,’ whispered the clerk, ‘talk loudly on the telephone.’

  The telephone lay on the table, upon a copy of Time magazine. As Wahab approached it, he saw out of the window which looked on the main road a caravan of camels pacing along, so far from Manchester that again the ache tortured him.

  With a sigh he picked up the telephone. ‘Hello,’ he said cautiously. ‘Abdul Wahab speaking.’