Dust on the Paw

by Robin Jenkins

  The Head of Chancery tried, but could not swallow that disloyalty to his chief; it stayed in his mouth, Howard Winfield noticed with a grin, like a beetle found in H.E.’s soup.

  Suddenly Paula became excited, so much so that, though she thought her husband was building up a suspense, at the height of which he would disclose Mrs Habbibullah’s important purpose, she could not resist interrupting, thus shattering the suspense, and, she saw with affection and annoyance, making his face ludicrous with the fragments.

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘for heaven’s sake. Look who’s being presented to her.’

  They looked, even Alan, and they were all astounded. Being presented by Dr Habbibullah to his wife were Miss Laura Johnstone and the odd little Afghan, Wahab, whom she was going to marry. Last night at the Gillies’ cocktail party she had amused some, insulted many, and saddened a few, by, in spite of her obviously plebeian origins, putting on what could only be called a queenlike air, because she had not yielded even to the Ambassador himself. He had spoken to her, nicely enough, and had been told, quite gratuitously, that after her marriage she would no longer regard herself as British and would work for her new country, not for the international community. She had spoken of her plans to him as if she expected him to be interested.

  Now here she was again, queenlike, in wide-brimmed hat and long white gloves, being introduced to the mysterious woman at the centre of the scene. Wahab was there too, unlike her, uneasy in the limelight.

  ‘I know he’s said to be one of Habbibullah’s boys,’ said John Langford, ‘but I must say I didn’t think he was the type when I spoke to him last night.’

  ‘Oh, John,’ cried Paula, in surprise. ‘He is the type, surely. Habbibullah would kick a rival out of the way without a flicker of compunction. Laura’s little friend would find you any number of pious and moral reasons why it was necessary.’

  ‘You’re making him sound damn like a human being,’ said Gillie.

  ‘Among his reasons,’ said Alan, ‘foremost among them, would be patriotic necessity. I had quite a searching chat with him last night. I got the impression I wasn’t speaking to a human being at all, but rather a lump of conceit, ambition, and hypocrisy.’

  ‘To be a lump of conceit, ambition, and hypocrisy does not disqualify from being a human being,’ said Gillie. ‘On the contrary. Besides, he’s got two ears, though they are somewhat darker in shade than ours.’

  Alan frowned. He appealed to Winfield who grinned, to Langford who also grinned, and to Rodgers who didn’t understand.

  ‘And a nose,’ added the Consul, ‘and a heart, and a couple of legs.’

  ‘I don’t understand the point of this catalogue, Bob,’ said Paula, roused to Alan’s defence, ‘and I’m sure no one else does, but while you’re at it, please include that member for which, I’m told, there are more names than there are for God. To conceit, ambition, and hypocrisy, add lust.’

  ‘I accept the addition,’ said Gillie. ‘Don’t tell me, any of you, you are free from those: conceit, ambition, hypocrisy, lust. The trouble with Wahab is that he’s too human. It’s the trouble with Habbibullah, too. And with Voroshilov, for that matter. Brace’s toy soldiers aren’t human, I’ll grant you that.’

  ‘What about my soldiers, Bold old man? I don’t quite get your meaning.’

  ‘I’m trying to say I like Wahab, that’s all. I’m not so sure about her, but he’s all right. He deserves success, but I can’t say I’m confident he’ll find it with her.’

  ‘All the same, old man,’ said the Colonel, ‘I’m afraid I don’t see what my soldiers have got to do with it. As for Wahab, well, I had a chat with him last night, too. Shifty, I thought; clever, one of these intellectual wrigglers; wouldn’t trust him an inch. Still, he’s an Afghan, impossible for us to fathom. Ask any Afghan general. Know what he will tell you? That treachery’s as legitimate a tactic as surprise. They’ve always believed that, of course. In the past they’ve slaughtered thousands of our chaps on the strength of it. But to get back to the hooded lady. What is her purpose, Alan?’

  But before Alan could answer the King and Voroshilov arrived together. Everybody stood and applauded. It was really impossible, though some Americans tried it, to indicate that their handclasps were for the King only. He saluted affably and the white-haired President waved his soft hat. They climbed side by side up the stairs into the King’s box. Behind them came the Prime Minister, the King’s sons, including Naim, and the Soviet Ambassador. The latter’s wife, Sarah Rodgers noticed with amazement, was wearing a dress that looked as if it had come from Paris.

  Howard Winfield found himself not interested in those potentates. He looked for Wahab and Laura Johnstone, and caught sight of them in a corner of the Ministers’ box. She was the only woman there, but for Mrs Habbibullah. Her white-gloved hands were clapping far more enthusiastically than Wahab’s. On her face, as far as Winfield could make out, was again that expression of aggressive dedication which had been her disguise last night and probably would be for the next year or two. He himself had spoken to her at Gillie’s party, but his sympathetic curiosity had been rebuffed as coldly as H.E.’s condescension and Wint’s dutiful jolliness. He felt sure that even if Mrs Habbibullah at the end of the parade was going to inaugurate the shaddry’s removal, Laura Johnstone was bound to be as unhappy in Afghanistan as Mrs Mohebzada had been, but of course for different reasons. In that dusty suffocating atmosphere of corruption, inertia, and inefficiency, her idealism would turn even sourer than it was now, or would, as her husband’s was sure to, degenerate pardonably into self-enhancement. But perhaps he was being too pessimistic; he hoped so, not only for their own sakes.

  With the King’s arrival the parade could begin. It was headed by a very tall, thin, white-bearded old man, wearing a red turban and a Western overcoat down to his naked ankles; he carried a banner with an inscription on it in Persian. Behind him came, or rather shuffled, for they were quite unmilitary in gait and appearance, about a dozen similar patriarchs. They looked, as Alan Wint murmured, like the inmates of a home for the aged poor. Yet they were greeted with howls of homage by the mob, salutes of deference from the policemen lining the road, frenzied clapping by Ministers and officials, and an ostentatious salute of honour from the King. For these were the representatives of that barren, border area which, now included in the territory of a neighbouring country, was claimed by Afghans as rightly theirs. The ambassador of that neighbour, too dusky to blush, smiled politely, as if, Roger remarked, he had just thrown his handful of silver down among these decrepit paupers and was waiting until their keepers saw them safely back into their dingy cubicles.

  ‘How could it come to a war?’ asked Colonel Rodgers, scoffingly. ‘The Afghans wouldn’t last a week. They’ve got seventeen jets, the other chaps have got over three hundred.’

  ‘But what if the Russians helped them?’ asked Sarah.

  ‘Well, damn it, my dear, the Americans would help the others.’

  ‘With hydrogen bombs?’ She mentioned them as if they were too gaudy roses on some other Military Attaché’s wife’s hat.

  ‘If necessary. Why not?’

  ‘So those old fools could cause the world to blow up?’

  Again her interest was slight, but her husband was stricken by a feeling her words might hide an importance; often for this reason he consulted her when writing his reports. Now he peered into the sunshine to the spot where the old men, having done their stint, were being led aside past the flags of the nations on to a piece of grass where, he supposed, someone would attend to them. Beyond, he saw the great mountains where their miserable homes in the disputed territory lay, and unawares a compassion for them so cynically used invaded his mind. He had often said to Sarah that the wars of Genghis Khan might have been puny in scale, but a sabre in a warrior’s fist was altogether nobler than a scientist’s thumb on a button.

  ‘Here it comes, Bruce,’ chuckled Howard Winfield. ‘Your fraudulent ironmongery.’

  The Col
onel had already heard it rumbling along the tarmac, and the clattering of the hoofs of the mules pulling it. Howard called it his, because he had sent to the War Office a ten-thousand-word memorandum in which he had sought to prove that these guns were really of German origin. He had enclosed photographs which had required pluck and ingenuity to take. He had got a reply, very obscure, which had seemed to imply that in the war of 1920 it wasn’t out of the question that the British might have been using German guns. That had suggested another field of research which, however, he had found too vague and vast.

  Then he brightened, for after the guns came tribesmen on horses. They were to him the most handsome sight of the year. These were descendants of the great Khan’s soldiers. Stern, aloof, black-bearded or thinly moustached, splendid in scarlet or golden or green or orange tunics, billowing silken trousers, and calf-length high-heeled boots, they had felt their enemies’ blood spurting over their hands and faces, and, in tents of silk, on cushions of swans’ down, had raped mysterious princesses.

  He almost cried out, for one of those violated noblewomen had, in his dream, produced a knife and thrust it between his ribs. It was Sarah, prodding him excitedly and pointing to a scene at which all the others were also looking.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Harold Moffatt. A policeman’s taken his camera from him and ripped out the spool.’

  ‘By Jove, that’s a bit steep.’

  Moffatt, in the tent reserved for such lowly officials as University teachers, had been taking photographs, as indeed were dozens of Europeans. The policeman had chosen him at random. Someone, who looked like Bill Lawson, was holding Moffatt back. Lan was there too, and Jean Lawson; the former especially, Mrs Rodgers noted, was beautifully dressed.

  Alan Wint was worried. ‘Of course it’s damnable the police should be allowed to do such things, but what really is the use of protesting?’

  John Langford grinned. He had come without Helen; at that moment, indeed, she was practising putting on a shady part of the lawn.

  ‘Harold will insist on a protest being made,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ replied Alan. ‘Yet he can’t have it both ways. He professes we’re useless, and yet when there’s any trouble he looks to us to get him out of it.’

  ‘I doubt,’ interposed Gillie, ‘if anything we can do will convince him he ought to change his opinion about our usefulness.’

  Muriel nudged him, and whispered.

  ‘Well, what will we do?’ he asked, louder than ever. ‘Send a polite snivelling little note to their Protocol Department, pointing out that, in the confusion, and so forth – And what will they do? Send back an equally polite sniggering little note, saying how regrettable it was that, in the confusion, and so forth – It’s too bloody hot, though. I doubt if I’ll be able to stand it.’

  ‘That’s hardly an excuse, Bob,’ said Alan coldly, ‘for being so damned surly.’

  Paula laughed. ‘I don’t think he’s worth quarrelling about. After all, to whom did he go when he was in that trouble over Lan? You remember, when he got drunk and insulted her so vilely? To whom did he go then for help?’

  ‘Lan,’ said Langford.

  She glared at him; she too was feeling the heat. ‘Eventually, no doubt. But at the time? Helga Larsen.’

  ‘I fancy,’ said Gillie, ‘he’d find it just as profitable going to her this time, too.’

  A company of tribesmen, rifles held above their heads, went past, doing a war dance that sent their long, black hair leaping.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ whispered Alan to Paula, forgetting that that front row of the diplomats’ stand, with the Chinese behind them, was hardly their bed where confidences such as he was now about to utter were usually exchanged, ‘something will have to be done about Bob.’

  ‘Or about Muriel.’

  ‘What d’you mean, dear?’ For Muriel, amiable little woman, always gave the Head of Chancery the respect he deserved; indeed, an instant’s reflection revealed she was the only one who did. ‘Muriel’s all right.’

  ‘Darling, she’s at a certain stage.’

  ‘Eh?’

  A dimpled elbow in his side replied.

  ‘God, can that be it?’

  ‘Darling, that is it.’

  Of course; she was just at the age. A discreet glance at Bob’s big red, sweating, scowling brow revealed so many repressions coiling there like snakes that Alan was amazed he hadn’t noticed them before. His rather surprising reaction was to feel indignant: what a poor show for the Embassy really, the Commercial Attaché and the Consul both sexually ill-adjusted. It was just as well that he, Head of Chancery, and H.E., had sweet, willing, and able wives. In diplomacy a clear brain was necessary.

  ‘Now this, I’m sure you’ll all agree, is deucedly unsoldier-like.’

  It was the Colonel, commenting on the performance of the first contingent of foreign troops. These were Turks, and though every man at rest would have looked bellicose enough, in motion he advanced with little gallous skips that gave to the whole troop, doing it in near unison, a look of jocular effeminacy.

  ‘Yet, as you all know,’ added the Colonel, ‘it’s the Turks who’ve been training the Afghans.’

  That was so, and Wint, his brain clear, wondered if any diplomatic secret was to be dug out of this odd situation where the Turks trained the Afghans in manoeuvres, and the Russians supplied them with weapons and uniforms. Was there possibly some secret agreement between the Turks and the Russians that N.A.T.O. did not know about? The supposition was not as risible as Bob Gillie, for one, would too readily conclude.

  ‘What’s odd about that?’ asked Gillie, true enough. ‘In every other way the Afghans are sitting on the fence. Why not in this way, too? And if you ask me that’s a bloody sensible perch for them, receiving gifts from both sides. Good luck to Wahab, and the rest of them; that’s what I say.’

  For revenge Paula studied Muriel closely; she found it in the restless fingers, the twitching left nostril, the talcumed pouches under the eyes, and the mouth turned virginal again after thirty years of marriage. Her childlessness was in her eyes like a plea. Paula felt sorry for her.

  Then from further along the route where the ordinary Afghans were came tremendous cheering and clapping.

  ‘The Russians,’ muttered the Colonel.

  He was right. Along they strutted, massive in their gray-blue, red-braided uniforms.

  ‘Our own Guards could put up as good a show,’ he added. As good, yes; but not better. He had to admit that these huge fellows, chosen from a nation of over two hundred million, did everything, the salute especially as they passed the King and President, with an efficiency that surpassed the human element in men.

  ‘I understand they and the Americans were to toss for priority. Too bad they seem to have won. I mean, it won’t be easy beating that, especially for Americans. Their standards are different, you know.’

  ‘The time’s coming,’ said Gillie sourly, ‘when the fate of the world’s going to depend on the toss of a coin.’

  A man’s crassness, reflected Alan Wint, is bound to damage him, particularly in a service where subtlety is essential. Of course, if a man judiciously held his tongue, he could be damned near an ambassadorship before his stupidity was discovered. He remembered the curious episode of the cigarette pack, and others just as trivial; and tightened his own lips.

  Indians marched past, Pakistanis, and Persians. Then, rousing only moderate cheers, and causing gapes of disappointment on faces from Salt Lake City and Boston, came the Americans, those picked Marines from Berlin. Some were chewing gum, some slouched, some grinned, and all went past, as Gillie said, like men.

  ‘Mr Ambassador’s furious,’ reported Wint, after a long stare into the ambassadors’ box.

  ‘Why should he be?’ demanded Gillie. ‘He should be grateful like the rest of us.’

  ‘Grateful, Bob?’ The Colonel really did not understand.

  ‘Yes. For reassuring us that soldiers are human
beings.’

  ‘Was there ever any doubt about that, old man?’

  ‘When those Russians goose-stepped past, there certainly was.’

  The trouble with Bob, thought the Colonel, was simply that, like Howard and Harold Moffatt, he was an intellectual. No doubt he didn’t read poetry as they did, but still, all his life he’d worked at a desk.

  ‘If I were giving a party tonight,’ said the Consul, ‘I wouldn’t mind inviting those Americans; but I’m damned if I would the Russians.’

  Curious, reflected Wint, how a stupid man like Bob, even when making so acceptable a remark as this, was capable of rousing strange suspicions of fundamental disloyalty.

  Then, as Howard Winfield put it, everyone had to settle down to watch the whole Afghan army march past, like one long fashion parade of not quite up-to-date Russian guns, trucks, armoured cars, and tanks. These last worried Muriel Gillie; their caterpillar treads tore up the soft tar of the road. She protested at least three times. Her husband patted her hand and told her not to worry, she wouldn’t be asked to do the repairs. No one would do them, that was the trouble, she said. Nevertheless, not to worry, he repeated with a grin. Paula, who had recently been discussing Freudian ideas with Alan, knew there was a connection between this anxiety about the ravaged road and the onset of perpetual infertility.

  Occasionally a jet aeroplane roared low overhead. There was speculation as to whether its pilot was Afghan or Russian.

  ‘D’you think,’ asked Gillie, ‘the King and all these bigwigs would allow an Afghan to fly as low as that over them? No damned fear. And we should all be grateful.’

  Yet you do not look like a man grateful for anything, thought Wint.

  The Colonel had to agree Bob was probably right. It was his turn to worry; it seemed to him to savour of treachery to have to owe his life to the skill of a Russian.

  For two hours the army marched and clanked past in the dust and heat. The King, President, Ministers, Ambassadors, and Diplomats had all to sit and at least appear attentive. It was not so easy for the last-named, as their grandstand had no awning to protect them from the sun. The groundlings, on the other hand, among whom were included the Moffatts, Lawsons, and Mossaours, were luckier. They were able, whenever they chose, to stop watching and go off for a stroll in the grassy park behind their tents. What they could not do, though, any more than their trapped superiors in the grandstands was relieve themselves. In what other country in the world, asked Maud Mossaour, did the authorities cause to congregate a crowd of at least fifty thousand without providing one single convenience? Did not this prove that their claim to be civilized was fatuous, in spite of their jets and tanks? When it was pointed out to her, quite unnecessarily, that the Afghans themselves all around her were showing the utmost promptness and nonchalance in pissing, she refused to withdraw her opinion, and rejected Harold Moffatt’s suggestion that this disregard for absurd convention and idiotic modesty indicated that they were in advance of civilization rather than behind it. She would have asked Pierre to take her home but for two things: their car was at the heart of the crowded, chaotic parking space, and she wanted to be there at the finish to see what Dr Habbibullah’s wife intended to do. She herself thought nothing out of the usual would be done, but the Moffatts thought otherwise.