by Harold Lamb
"It has been asked before. The answer is, yes."
Michal Thorne considered him, as, coatless, he drank his brandy. He had hooked his cane over the arm of his chair. The silence between them was like time being marked off, when enemies face each other. After a moment Jacob noticed his bag by the door, pulled it over with his cane, and, opening it, extracted a box. "If you need quinine," he said, "here's some."
For an instant her eyes closed, as if, greatly stirred, she wished to hide her feeling from him. The quinine, which had almost
38 ceased to exist even in military supplies three years before, must have meant a great deal to her. Jacob had kept this handful of capsules from the time of his enlistment. Although the girl looked pale in the half-light of the veranda she did not appear to be sick.
"They're for someone else," she said quickly. Her eyes, masked of feeling, met his. The unspoken enmity that lay between them she accepted indifferently. "Can you spare a few, Mr. Ide?"
"I can spare them all. I don't use them."
44You might. Quinine's worth its weight in diamonds, isn't it?" There had been no malaria in Cairo or the large cities which had formed Jacob's orbit. "At this altitude," he pointed out, "we're above the malaria belt."
"Perhaps. But I don't think anyone's safe near water. Listen." Jacob had heard it before now—the steady rush of the stream below them and the thud of a waterfall on a millwheel. And again Michal read his mind. "It's all Mr. Parabat's doing, the irrigation for his herbaceous garden and the power for the wheel. He says mechanical power doesn't press juices properly—that only the fall of water can turn flowers into essence. But of course there's no electricity within a hundred miles. He's a dear, and a Zoroastrian with all kinds of inhibitions, and probably money enough to buy half of Baghdad including the Alawiah Club if he wanted to."
With a twinge Jacob thought: I took his car, and crashed his gate, and he did not ask for any explanations. I suppose being an American explains a little thing like blundering into another man's house.
"But he doesn't want to," Michal rambled on. "He loves having guests; at least he pretends to. He says he came to Riyat because obscure kinds of ferns and moss grow here, and Zarathushtra—Zoroaster—meditated in the hills above us. He likes to argue—I mean Mr. Parabat now—about Spengler's Decline of the West. I can't read it. When I skipped to the end about the survival of the most warlike men in a kind of modern Gotterdammerung, it gave me nightmares. But I'm perfectly willing to argue that our West is declining, while Mr. Parabat believes we are only going through birth pangs and the ordeal of the machine age. Perhaps because he was educated at Oxford, he still believes in us when we no longer believe in ourselves."
She glanced across the garden. Framed against the afterglow of sunset, Mr. Parabat's stocky figure in white linen dinner clothes bent over two small animals, a white sheep and black goat, tied up at a safe distance from the flower beds. He seemed to be feeding them.
"I'm late at the rendezvous," said Michal Thorne. "Thank you for the quinine, Mr. Ide."
For a while Jacob watched the two figures moving along the garden walks, the young woman bending a little to keep her head near the small man who paced impassively the length of the garden that had been his shelter and his profit during a world war. The stars were out when Michal Thorne hurried back to the veranda, to disappear into the bedroom and emerge in ten minutes clad in white organdie, pulling a scarf around her. Snatching up her handbag and the precious quinine, she ran down the steps, pausing abruptly to call back, "Please don't wait anything for me."
No sooner had she gone than the servant Jemail appeared with a towel and a cake of homemade soap to announce that there was warm water in the shower bath below the veranda and to ask at what hour the sahib desired dinner.
"Nine o'clock," said the sahib.
Although places were set for two and a whole chicken appeared in due course on the table, Michal Thorne did not show up. When Jemail removed the tablecloth, he brought in a floor mattress and embroidered quilts, making up a bed on the sitting-room floor. His knowledge of English seemed to extend only to his performance as butler, because when Jacob questioned him about Riyat he took refuge in silence.
Jacob gathered that only one Englishman was posted nearer than Rowanduz on the main highway below, and that in Riyat the people were tribal, speaking only Kurdish, while the Indian servants understood also Hindi and Pashtu—all three unknown tongues so far as Jacob was concerned. The bungalow was nothing unusual, he knew, since the hospitality of the hills made much of any guest.
It was all run pleasantly enough, in the best Indian Service colonial tradition, yet it seemed odd that a manufacturer like Parabat should have set up a factory, even in wartime, in such a remote frontier region.
Probably, he reasoned, Jemail's one Englishman would prove to be Leicester, who was overdue in Riyat. And Jacob, just as obviously, had less chance of getting out of Riyat than of slipping out of Kirkuk.
Moreover, he did not want to have to leave the village just then. He had been glancing through the one book on the reading table, which proved to be a copy of Spengler, unabridged. For some time he studied the inscription scrawled on the flyleaf. Mein Geleibter Freund, Ninghia Parabat.
The angular writing was the same he had seen on the card at the museum. The writer, then, was a friend of Parabat's. And someone who did not care to sign his own name except for the initial W.
Curiously he turned to the last page, and found there, underscored: "the genuine sense of a great mission (race quality, that is, and training). . .can become a center which holds together the being-stream of an entire people and enables it to outlast this time and make its landfall in the future. . . .It falls to us to live in the most trying times known to the history of a great Culture. The last race to keep its form, the last living tradition, the last leaders who have both at their back, will pass through and onward, victors."
So had Spengler, Jacob reflected, prophesied twenty years before a final conflict among civilized nations.
He wondered whether the original German owner, or Parabat, or Michal Thorne had underscored these words. Somehow he did not think Michal had done so.
Replacing the Spengler, he took up Aristotle, but found that he couldn't concentrate on the greatest of philosophers.
Going out onto the veranda, he sprawled on the steps, listening to the thudding creak of the water wheel and wondering what a woman dressed for evening could find to do in a hill village where the people all presumably slept until the dawn hour. Except for the lamp behind him, he could see no trace of a light. She couldn't be with Parabat.
She came to the steps, a white wraith, with small heels tapping the earth, and sat down by him clutching her bag, her head bent. He could feel the faint warmth of her body, and he thought that he had never met with a woman whose mind seemed so dissociated from her body, and both so restless.
"What would you do," she asked the darkness, "with a person who wants to die?"
Obliquely, she had not spoken of a man or of a woman, only of an intangible person. Jacob rubbed the hard head of his cane. "Either go away quickly or stay with him all the time, I suppose," he ventured.
He could hardly catch her voice. "What's quinine? A bark the natives gathered in Java, or was it India, made by our scientists into capsules that can keep life going but can't preserve it. Then we couldn't get the bark because of the war."
"You have quinine."
"I know. I'm only trying to think, and that is a very difficult thing for me to do, so I mutter about it."
Jacob waited, thinking that she had tension in her, drawn fine, ready to break.
"You shouldn't have waited up. I don't mind the dark here. And Badr and Jemail hold the gate for me in duty bound because I am a distinguished guest in Riyat. Badr, who drove you up, always sits with his rifle over his knees in the deep shadow by the doorstep, but I think he really sleeps, and I know Jemail does on the rug inside. But no matter how I try, I can't catch Bad
r asleep—he opens the door before I can touch him."
Abruptly she was silent, as if listening. The water wheel moaned upon its measured beat. "I don't lock my door at night," her low voice went on, "because, as you may have noticed, there are no keys and no locks, either. Not even on the front door. Mr. Parabat says he has the only doors in Kurdistan and he is quite proud of them."
She waited for Jacob to speak; now she was attentive to him. When he said nothing, she went on: "Locks don't seem to be necessary here."
Jacob nodded. "I have nothing worth stealing."
Michal smiled, turning her head. "When I was here before, a Major Cunninghame thought otherwise. He piled chairs and valises against the front door before he would go to sleep. I'm very much opposed to that, because it's like shutting me in, without a way of escape. I resented the barricade."
"And so?"
"The barricade stayed. You can't argue with a senior major. At least I can't."
"I think you could, Miss Thorne." The resentment inside Jacob hardened his words. She wouldn't be here, on familiar terms with a man such as Parabat unless she was attached to British Intelligence; nor would she talk on so guilelessly unless she wanted to find out certain things about him. So he reasoned, not quite believing it.
Michal's head didn't move, but her eyes went blank, as if she had been struck. "Were you a colonel or some such personage in this war?" she asked quietly.
Barely Jacob kept from admitting that he had been no more than a captain. "I was never a soldier," he confessed.
She still looked at him as if not seeing him. And he thought, she can't be afraid.
Lightly she touched his cane. "I only asked because this is one of the worst places on the habitable earth for an officer to go about in mufti just now. I think Diogenes with his lantern or Mr. Pickwick with his notebook could wander through these hills and be wined and dined. But it's not safe for a foreign officer——"
"I understand."
"I hope you do. I told Mr. Parabat—he asked me about you—that you were a shell-shocked American with a complex about horses, and that you didn't know what you were doing when you took his car. I did it for one reason."
Again she waited, and Jacob said nothing.
"Among many other things such as Finnish and Scottish, I'm American too," she explained, and went to her room.
When Jacob had blown out the light, he left the bungalow door carefully open and stretched out on his mattress, listening to Michal stirring in the bedroom and the beat of the water wheel, feeling the cold breath of the mountains coming into the door that was her way of escape.
The message arrived the next afternoon. Michal had not appeared by midmorning, and Jacob went to explore the village because he couldn't find Mr. Parabat, and when he looked into the rooms of the factory around the garden he beheld a few young Indian and tribal women working over tables fitted with burners, alembics, and rows of vials.
The mountain village, as he had suspected, was small. The people, all wearing rough homespun, stared at him from doorways and housetops without coming near him. No modern building other than the factory existed in Riyat, except for a small stone cabin with a screened veranda, perched among some cedars, up the slope. No one appeared to be moving about the cabin. Jacob felt like an intruder. He made up his mind to borrow a horse and start out of the village, he did not know where.
After lunch he looked for Michal, to tell her he was leaving. She seemed to be the common denominator of all the human beings here, and it was easier to tell her than Mr. Parabat.
She was snipping jonquils, wearing gloves, in the bed nearest the black goat. She told him that of course he could have a horse. Only the day before she had gone riding.
In the hot sunlight her chestnut hair shadowed her thin face, and he noticed how her eyes slanted when she tilted her head. "Did you find any bronze horses this morning?" she asked, over the flowers.
"I haven't started digging yet," he acknowledged. "I'm particular where I dig, and this doesn't seem to be a likely spot."
Casually he explained that he had no other purpose than to look for archaeological remains in the way of bronzes, of which he had heard at Baghdad. "The factor of finding them is about one in fifty," he confessed. "Not much of a chance, but it brought me here—or your driver did."
Michal laughed. "I'm here because I want to be nowhere else. This garden is a woman's paradise, if you did but know it, Mr. Ide. I think it's a pagan garden because it has only a sheep and goat for tutelary deities—they're mixed up in some obscure way with Mr. Parabat's religion, which he never discusses. All I have to do is to clap my hands and real servants come running, like jinn. I can crook my finger for all the perfume stuffs that Chanel and Lelong dream on. It suits my natural laziness, and I love it." She surveyed the handful of jonquils with satisfaction. "My day's work."
Badr the driver appeared, importantly, offering a folded paper. Michal opened it swiftly and cried out, "The devils!"
Her eyes swept down the paper again and her lips pressed together. "It's Aurel's chit. He's not coming. They've ordered him to—somewhere else. But he could have helped here; he's the only one who could have helped."
"How?"
Michal hesitated, crumpling the message. "And he says there's no quinine in Baghdad. Why"—she began to weigh her words—"it's only politics. He had been assigned to this area as liaison officer to the Kurds. They have confidence in him. It's—oh, it's devilish because someone seems to want an outbreak here, a small one. But that means lives."
"And preserves military authority."
Michal nodded absently. "It used to be an old story. You know—divide and rule, trouble the waters in order to fish in them, let the frontier be disturbed and keep the Ministry of Defense under your thumb. Elderly colonels with livers, and gin pahits, and dancing on the club verandas." She looked up curiously. "But how did you know?"
Jacob hesitated. At Cairo he had pored diligently through thousands of pages of British reports for four years, and had drawn his own conclusions. "At least," he said lamely, "our cousins don't make a secret of it."
Faintly Michal sighed. She hardly seemed to be paying attention. "Oh, the pukka colonel-sahibs don't. They're as honest as drawing-room whist, and I respect them for it. But if you think that the British Foreign Office has no secrets, you're much mistaken, Mr. Ide. Aurel didn't tell me that. He didn't like the colonial caste any better than I, and he worked among the Kurds to prevent just the kind of spontaneous uprising that seems to be going on now. It's all much too deep for me but I do understand that much. And now they've pulled him out, to send him a thousand miles away to inventory war-weary lorries. It won't break his heart, of course; it will only smash what he hoped for."
Gently she prodded the shears into the earth. "I'm afraid it won't be good for my garden."
Jacob thought: if it had not been for a twist of chance, Squadron Leader Aurel Leicester would be here in the garden instead of me, and the recall order might still be wandering about Kirkuk, as orders had a way of wandering.
"I'm never going to leave my garden," said Michal.
Sunlight filtered through the tracery of pepper trees, bright on Michal's head, bent over the yellow flowers, burnished gold over yellow. Jacob, watching the play of the sunlight, knew that he did not want to leave Mr. Parabat's garden that afternoon. He wanted to sit there, smoking his pipe on the porch, useless. Aurel Leicester would have been off on horseback somewhere, getting things done. And Michal, understanding the need that drew him away, would be arranging her flowers against his return, when the officer would take her in his arms and neither of them would think of barricades or escape doors. Nursing his pipe, Jacob reflected that the quiet of this garden had been disturbed, not so much by the unrest of the hills around it as by the cold calculation of a nameless official in Cairo or London.
For a moment she was silent. "I'm sorry I was cross." She considered him briefly. "I'll feel much better about it if you'll stay for tea and take
the cakes as they come—and say that after all you regret leaving the thyme and olynthus Asiaticus and Castor and Pollux." She waved her basket toward the tethered sheep and goat.
"I hope you never have to leave Castor and Pollux," said Jacob abruptly. "I don't belong here, but you do by right."
"Is that a compliment?" Michal considered. "Pm quite sure nothing sweet could ever be distilled out of me. Poor Mr. Parabat endures me because he is really sweet and kind—he lets me stay in his garden because it is all so good for me." Her eyes turned up to him with faint defiance. "Whenever you want a horse, I'll order vou a charger complete with saddlebags."
As if dismissing him, Michal began to arrange her flowers.
It was Jacob who caught the beat of the horse hoofs first. The sun had left the garden, to soften on the higher slopes, and he noticed as he sat across from Michal and the tea things that Mr. Parabat had not materialized to feed Castor and Pollux. Nor was Jemail in evidence when he heard the confused tread in the road outside—as if cavalry were passing in ranks. He reached for his stick and got up.
"What is it?" Michal asked.
"They don't drive cattle here, or hold parades. We might take a look at whatever it is."
As they crossed the garden, servants emerged to follow them to the gate, where Mr. Parabat joined them.
Then, from the gateway, beside Mr. Parabat and Badr, they saw the Mullah's army pass through Riyat.
The cascade of mounted men flowed down the ravine, pressing between the walls of the houses. Some young women rode with the tribesmen.
The horses moved as if at the end of a long march, not picking their way carefully. Purple and green and red gleamed in the headcloths of the men; sometimes silver ornaments glinted from headstall and saddle. The Kurds rode easily in the saddle, apparently paying no attention to the villagers watching from the roofs.
"Havabands and Herki, and Baradust riders," said Mr. Parabat. He whispered to Michal, who drew her scarf across her nose, like a veil. She explained afterward to Jacob that most of these riders had never seen a foreign woman before, and would think it indecent of her not to be veiled on the street.