White Teeth (11 page)

‘Are you all right, ladies?’

It is Sol Jozefowicz, the old guy who back then took it upon himself to police the park (though his job as park keeper had long since been swept away in council cuts), Sol Jozefowicz stands in front of them, ready as always to be of aid.

‘We are all going to burn in hell, Mr Jozefowicz, if you call that being all right,’ explains Alsana, pulling herself together.

Niece-of-Shame rolls her eyes. ‘Speak for yourself.’

But Alsana is faster than any sniper when it comes to firing back. ‘I do, I do — thankfully Allah has arranged it that way.’

‘Good afternoon, Neena, good afternoon, Mrs Jones,’ says Sol, offering a neat bow to each. ‘Are you sure you are all right? Mrs Jones?’

Clara cannot stop the tears from squeezing out of the corners of her eyes. She cannot work out, at this moment, whether it is crying or laughing.

‘I’m fine . . . fine, sorry to have worried you, Mr Jozefowicz . . . really, I’m fine.’

‘I do not see what’s so very funny-funny,’ mutters Alsana. ‘The murder of innocents — is this funny?’

‘Not in my experience, Mrs Iqbal, no,’ says Sol Jozefowicz, in the collected manner in which he said everything, passing his handkerchief to Clara. It strikes all three women — the way history will, embarrassingly, without warning, like a blush — what the ex-park keeper’s experience might have been. They fall silent.

‘Well, as long as you ladies are fine, I’ll be getting on,’ says Sol, motioning that Clara can keep the handkerchief and replacing the hat he had removed in the old fashion. He bows his neat little bow once more, and sets off slowly, anti-clockwise round the park.

Once Sol is out of earshot: ‘OK, Auntie Alsi, I apologize, I apologize . . . For fuck’s sake, what more do you want?’

‘Oh, every-bloody-thing,’ says Alsana, her voice losing the fight, becoming vulnerable. ‘The whole bloody universe made clear — in a little nutshell. I cannot understand a thing any more, and I am just beginning. You understand?’

She sighs, not waiting for an answer, not looking at Neena, but across the way at the hunched, disappearing figure of Sol winding in and out of the yew trees. ‘You may be right about Samad . . . about many things. Maybe there are no good men, not even the two I might have in this belly . . . and maybe I do not talk enough with mine, maybe I have married a stranger. You might see the truth better than I. What do I know . . . barefoot country girl . . . never went to the universities.’

‘Oh, Alsi,’ Neena is saying, weaving in and out of Alsana’s words like tapestry; feeling bad. ‘You know I didn’t mean it like that.’

‘But I cannot be worrying-worrying all the time about the
truth
. I have to worry about the truth that can be
lived with
. And that is the difference between losing your marbles drinking the salty sea, or swallowing the stuff from the streams. My Niece-of-Shame believes in the talking cure, eh?’ says Alsana, with something of a grin. ‘Talk, talk, talk and it will be better. Be honest, slice open your heart and spread the red stuff around. But the past is made of more than words, dearie. We married old men, you see? These bumps’ — Alsana pats them both — ‘they will always have daddy-long-legs for fathers. One leg in the present, one in the past. No talking will change this. Their roots will always be tangled. And roots get dug up. Just look in my garden — birds at the coriander every bloody day . . .’

Just as he reaches the far gate, Sol Jozefowicz turns round to wave, and three women wave back. Clara feels a little theatrical, flying his cream handkerchief above her head. Like she is seeing someone off for a train journey crossing the border of two countries.

‘How did they meet?’ asks Neena, trying to lift the cloud that has somehow descended on their picnic. ‘I mean Mr Jones and Samad Miah.’

Alsana throws her head back, a dismissive gesture. ‘Oh, in the war. Off killing some poor bastards who didn’t deserve it, no doubt. And what did they get for their trouble? A broken hand for Samad Miah and for the other one a funny leg. Some use, some use, all this.’

‘Archie’s
right
leg,’ says Clara quietly, pointing to a place in her own thigh. ‘A piece of metal, I tink. But he don’ really tell me nuttin’.’

‘Oh, who cares!’ Alsana bursts out. ‘I’d trust Vishnu the many-handed pick-pocket before I believed a word those men say.’

But Clara holds dear the image of the young soldier Archie, particularly when the old, flabby Direct Mail Archie is on top of her. ‘Oh, come now . . . we don’ know what—’

Alsana spits quite frankly on the grass. ‘Shitty lies! If they are heroes, where are their hero things? Where are the hero bits and bobs? Heroes — they have things. They have hero stuff. You can spot them ten miles away. I’ve never seen a medal . . . and not so much as a photograph.’ Alsana makes an unpleasant noise at the back of her throat, her signal for disbelief. ‘So look at it — no, dearie, it must be done — look at it
close up
. Look at what is left. Samad has one hand; says he wants to find God but the fact is God’s given him the slip; and he has been in that curry house for two years already, serving up stringy goat to the whiteys who don’t know any better, and Archibald — well, look at the thing close up . . .’

Alsana stops to check with Clara if she could speak her mind further without causing offence or unnecessary pain, but Clara’s eyes are closed and she is already looking at the thing close up; a young girl looking at an old man close up; finishing Alsana’s sentence with the beginning of a smile spreading across her face,

‘. . . folds paper for a living, dear
Jesus
.’

A propos: it’s all very well, this instruction of Alsana’s to look at the thing close up; to look at it dead-straight between the eyes; an unflinching and honest stare, a meticulous inspection that would go beyond the heart of the matter to its marrow, beyond the marrow to the root — but the question is how far back do you want? How far will
do
? The old American question: what do you want —
blood
? Most probably more than blood is required: whispered asides; lost conversations; medals and photographs; lists and certificates, yellowing paper bearing the faint imprint of brown dates. Back, back,
back
. Well, all right, then. Back to Archie spit-clean, pink-faced and polished, looking just old enough at seventeen to fool the men from the medical board with their pencils and their measuring tape. Back to Samad, two years older and the warm colour of baked bread. Back to the day when they were first assigned to each other, Samad Miah Iqbal (row 2, Over here now, soldier!) and Alfred Archibald Jones (Move it, move it, move it), the day Archie involuntarily forgot that most fundamental principle of English manners. He stared. They were standing side by side on a stretch of black dirt-track Russian ground, dressed identically in little triangular caps perched on their heads like paper sailing-boats, wearing the same itchy standard uniform, their ice-pinched toes resting in the same black boots scattered with the same dust. But Archie couldn’t help but stare. And Samad put up with it, waited and waited for it to pass, until after a week of being cramped in their tank, hot and suffocated by the airless machine and subjected to Archie’s relentless gaze, he had putted-up-with as much as his hot-head ever could put up with anything.

‘My friend, what is it you find so darned mysterious about me that it has you in such constant revelries?’

‘You what?’ said Archie, flustered, for he was not one to have private conversations on army time. ‘Nobody, I mean, nothing — I mean, well, what do
you
mean?’

They both spoke under their breath, for the conversation was not private in the other sense, there being two other privates and a captain in their five-man Churchill rolling through Athens on its way to Thessaloníki. It was 1 April 1945. Archie Jones was the driver of the tank, Samad was the wireless operator, Roy Mackintosh was the co-driver, Will Johnson was crunched on a bin as the gunner, and Thomas Dickinson-Smith was sitting on the slightly elevated chair, which, even though it squashed his head against the ceiling, his newly granted captaincy would not permit his pride to relinquish. None of them had seen anyone else but each other for three weeks.

‘I mean merely that it is likely we have another two years stuck in this thing.’

A voice crackled through the wireless, and Samad, not wishing to be seen neglecting his duties, answered it speedily and efficiently.

‘And?’ asked Archie, after Samad had given their coordinates.

‘And there is only so much of that eyeballing that a man can countenance. Is it that you are doing some research into wireless operators or are you just in a passion over my arse?’

Their captain, Dickinson-Smith, who
was
in a passion over Samad’s arse (but not only that; also his mind; also two slender muscular arms that could only make sense wrapped around a lover; also those luscious light green/brown eyes) silenced the conversation immediately.

‘Ick-Ball! Jones! Get on with it. Do you see anyone else here chewing the fat?’

‘I was just making an objection, sir. It is hard, sir, for a man to concentrate on his Foxtrot F’s and his Zebra Z’s and then his dots and his dashes when he has a pug-dog fellow who follows his every move with his pug-dog eyes, sir. In Bengal one would assume such eyes belonged to a man filled with—’

‘Shut it, Sultan, you poof,’ said Roy, who hated Samad and his poncey-radio-operator-ways.

‘
Mackintosh
,’ said Dickinson-Smith, ‘come now, let’s not stop the Sultan. Continue, Sultan.’

To avoid the possible suggestion that he was partial to Samad, Captain Dickinson-Smith made a practice of picking on him and encouraging his hateful Sultan nickname, but he never did it in the right way; it was always too soft, too similar to Samad’s own luxurious language and only resulted in Roy and the other eighty Roys under his direct command hating Dickinson-Smith, ridiculing him, openly displaying their disrespect; by April 1945 they were utterly filled with contempt for him and sickened by his poncey-commander-queer-boy-ways. Archie, new to the First Assault Regiment R. E., was just learning this.

‘I just told him to shut it, and he’ll shut it if he knows what’s good for him, the Indian Sultan bastard. No disrespect to you, sir, ’course,’ added Roy, as a polite gesture.

Dickinson-Smith knew in other regiments, in other tanks, it simply was not the case that people spoke back to their superiors or even spoke at all. Even Roy’s Polite Gesture was a sign of Dickinson-Smith’s failure. In those other tanks, in the Shermans, Churchills and Matildas dotted over the waste of Europe like resilient cockroaches, there was no question of respect or disrespect. Only Obey, Disobey, Punish.

‘Sultan . . . Sultan . . .’ Samad mused. ‘Do you know, I wouldn’t mind the epithet, Mr Mackintosh, if it were at least
accurate
. It’s not historically
accurate
, you know. It is not, even
geographically
speaking, accurate. I am sure I have explained to you that I am from
Bengal
. The word “Sultan” refers to certain men of the
Arab
lands — many hundreds of miles west of Bengal. To call me Sultan is about as accurate, in terms of the mileage, you understand, as if I referred to you as a Jerry-Hun fat bastard.’

‘I called you Sultan and I’m calling you it again, all right?’

‘Oh, Mr
Mackintosh
. Is it so complex, is it so impossible, that you and I, stuck in this British machine, could find it in ourselves to fight together as British subjects?’

Will Johnson, who was a bit simple, took off his cap as he always did when someone said ‘British’.

‘What’s the poof on about?’ asked Mackintosh, adjusting his beer-gut.

‘Nothing,’ said Samad. ‘I’m afraid I was not “on” about anything; I was just talking, talking, just trying the shooting of the breeze as they say, and trying to get Sapper Jones here to stop his staring business, his goggly eyes, just this and only this . . . and I have failed on both counts, it seems.’

He seemed genuinely wounded, and Archie felt the sudden unsoldier-like desire to remove pain. But it was not the place and not the time.

‘All right. Enough, all of you. Jones, check the map,’ said Dickinson-Smith.

Archie checked the map.

Their journey was a long tiresome one, rarely punctuated by any action. Archie’s tank was a bridge-builder, one of the specialist divisions not tied to English county allegiances or to a type of weaponry, but providing service across the army and from country to country, recovering damaged equipment, laying bridges, creating passages for battle, creating routes where routes had been destroyed. Their job was not so much to fight the war as to make sure it ran smoothly. By the time Archie joined the conflict, it was clear that the cruel, bloody decisions would be made by air, not in the 30-centimetre difference between the width of a German armour piercing shell and an English one. The real war, the one where cities were brought to their knees, the war with the deathly calculations of size, detonation, population, went on many miles above Archie’s head. Meanwhile, on the ground, their heavy, armour-plated scout-tank had a simpler task: to avoid the civil war in the mountains — a war within a war — between the EAM and the ELAS; to pick their way through the glazed eyes of dead statistics and the ‘wasted youth’; to make sure the roads of communication stretching from one end of hell to the other were fully communicable.

‘The bombed ammunition factory is twenty miles south-west, sir. We are to collect what we can, sir. Private Ick-Ball has passed to me at 16.47 hours a radio message that informs me that the area, as far as can be seen from the air, sir, is unoccupied, sir,’ said Archie.

‘This is not war,’ Samad had said quietly.

Two weeks later, as Archie checked their route to Sofia, to no one in particular Samad said, ‘I should not be here.’

As usual he was ignored; most fiercely and resolutely by Archie, who wanted somehow to listen.