Some Kind of Grace, page 10
Then the headmaster led the way to the classroom. It was, no doubt, the best in the school. Certainly there was glass in some of the windows, and the desks were solid lumps of wood fresh from the saw. And it was, surely, the brightest class. McLeod did not have to be told that only the smartest were allowed to study English, or at any rate to parade their knowledge of it before the inquisitor. As soon as he entered forty pairs of the keenest, brownest, slyest eyes he had ever seen glittered at him, as if he was about to be overwhelmed in a booby trap, or else his fly buttons were undone. With such mischievous hope might a puppy wait for a frog to hop. At a signal from the teacher they sprang up to greet the visitors, and yelled what at first McLeod thought must be a local salutation, but a moment later realised was: ‘Hi!’ Glancing towards Farouk, he learned that this form of address was not irrepressible youthful impertinence, quaint when uttered by urchins with shaven heads and spotted pyjamas, but rather well-rehearsed idiomatic English, according to the book. He half-expected Farouk then to tell them to sit by asking them to park their fannies.
A bench was reserved at the front for the headmaster and the secretary. Smirking with duplicity, McLeod stood by the teacher’s desk near the blackboard; he took care not to lean on it, for it had only three legs. Book in hand, with his eyes closed oftener than open, Farouk faced the class. They would now, he told them in Persian, demonstrate the vowel sounds of the English language, as explained in the book.
Each pupil had a copy, covered with the outside of an old Time magazine. There on those desks that smelled like a sawmill were the faces of Dulles, Eisenhower, Chiang Kaishek, Adenauer, and other famous friends of America. The boys were all quiet, but when told to open their books and begin enunciating hounds in fall cry after a fox couldn’t have shown a noisier more competitive zest.
‘Bee, bee, bee!’ they yelled, with glee, as if they knew what the letter frequently stood for. Such an instinctive grasp of the language reflected much credit on the teacher, thought McLeod. A moment later they were shrieking, in onomatopoetic spurts: ‘Pee, pee, pee!’ Then it seemed to him they must have got out of control, or else were using some language he had never heard of: ‘Boob, doob, pood; nem, meem, meed; nob, neen, deen; tot, toot, teet; gook, goom, geem; zoop, zop, zood; gosh, joosh, posh; fop, fooch, goof; yot, yoot, yooz.’ And the climax, with the hounds racing one another for the kill, was: ‘Box, fox, pox.’ Then, exhausted, with their faces pink, sweat on their brows, and spit on their lips, they waited for the next pursuit.
When the teacher slowly turned and wistfully looked at McLeod, he could only smile and nod. Obviously it was all in the book; Farouk never could have invented it. The real Shoopbaum would have the key.
Encouraged a little, the teacher turned to another page, and called upon the class to turn to it, too. This they did, bouncing in their seats with anticipation; the next lesson was evidently one they had rehearsed well and thought they were good at. Like an orchestral conductor the teacher pointed to the boys in the row nearest the windows. At once they piped softly, three times: ‘A teacher, a teacher, a teacher.’ Then his finger pointed to the middle row; with rather bolder conviction these cried: ‘A good teacher, a good teacher, a good teacher.’ The last row was ready. ‘He’s a very good teacher,’ they shrieked, three times. Finally, with a frantic sweep of his arm, he had the whole class on their feet, bawling: ‘We think he’s a very good teacher, we think he’s a very good teacher. WE THINK HE’S A VERY GOOD TEACHER.’
McLeod was convinced, but the teacher was taking no chances. Six times he had the class go through the performance, and the sixth time was the loudest. Only then would he turn to see if Shoopbaum had approved. The real Shoopbaum would have certainly, and perhaps have shown it by taking off his cap with the scarlet peak; but the impostor had a hard job keeping his face straight, especially as the secretary had, in so well-bred a fashion, one finger permanently in one ear, and another finger of the other hand wandering near enough the rim of the other ear to run in and close it whenever necessary.
The headmaster kept bending his nose, and so producing grimaces which indicated that in his private opinion this was a lunatic method of teaching anything, but since it was the method of the book he would listen to it, and applaud it, even though half of those thousand lions were to come growling at the windows.
The teacher pressed on with the demonstration. For the next exercise the class was divided into groups; each group had its own particular sentence to shout out in its turn. Inspired irrelevance had selected those sentences: ‘I feel fine. Fill the tank. He sells bikes. He was ill last week. The farmer sells his sheep. Let me see the list.’ And so they continued, chanting, bleating, yelping, singing, hooting those absurdities, until the secretary’s fingers were permanently in both ear-holes, and the headmaster’s nose was bent so far he had to breath, or rather gasp, through his mouth.
At once followed a performance by individuals, the stars of the class. Up sprang the first, slant-eyed, red-pyjama’d, and shrieked: ‘I hear with my ear.’ Hardly was he seated than, in another part of the room, shot up another, hooknosed, Semitic, glossy-headed, hooting: ‘He has a hat as old as his shirt.’ Then a third, Orientally plump, softly chanting: ‘This is his home.’ The fourth, with the whites of his eyes immense, intoned the finishing touch: ‘Harry hit it with a hammer.’ Next time round each had a different sentence to say. No sooner was the fourth round finished than the whole class was shouting, crescendo: ‘The beauty of the view. Cute twin mules. The puny dwarf was thwarted. I like humour and music and beauty.’
Then there was silence.
Soon the secretary’s fingers crept out of his ears for a moment, were reassured sufficiently by the continuing silence, and so went dancing down the front of his robe on to the desk. The headmaster softly clapped his hands, and beamed at McLeod to be as charitable.
Farouk’s mild eyes begged a verdict.
‘Do you like teaching in that way?’ asked McLeod.
‘But, Mr. Shoopbaum, it is in the book.’
‘Yes, I’m sure it is. Do you think it’s a good book? Does it really help you?’
Eyes huge with necessary mendacity, Farouk said it was a wonderful book; he was grateful to the clever men who had written it to make his task of teaching English so much easier. If his pupils weren’t as good at English as they ought to be, it was his fault as a teacher, because his own English wasn’t good enough. It was also because most of them came from very poor homes, where they had no peace to study. It was because, moreover, education was new in his country, especially in that province so far from the capital. And it was, furthermore, because all winter the land and houses were under snow and ice, so that the intelligence of the pupils was frozen. Though by this time running out of excuses, he was prepared to find more of them for his pupils’ shortcomings. Among those excuses, though, was certainly not going to be the fatuousness of the book.
McLeod suggested that excuse. Farouk jumped from it as a mouse might from a trap gone off prematurely. No, no, the book must be very good because it had been written according to the latest scientific principles. It was, everybody knew, the best possible book, no book could be better. How wise the Ministry of Education was in ordering copies for all the schools in the country, especially as, owing to American benevolence, it was being supplied free.
‘Cute twin mules!’ said McLeod. As an expression of incredulity it was as eloquent as any he had ever heard.
Farouk almost grinned; swift as a mouse, though, the grin vanished back into his face.
McLeod wished he could end the imposture and whisper that he wasn’t Shoopbaum; but, inured to irrelevance as the teacher had to be, he would never have understood. No combination of words in English could ever surprise him, or indeed have any meaning for him. He could, with equanimity, have read hundreds of pages of Gertrude Stein at a sitting.
He came close to McLeod and whispered: ‘The salary is not much, Mr. Shoopbaum, but I need it.’
A sentence, McLeod thought, so pregnant with sense and relevance, he ought to have had his whole class reciting it, and it only, with a hundred different intonations.
Then into the playground, to halt beside McLeod’s Land-Rover, roared in a swirl of dust an American jeep, with that emblem of the clasped hands prominently painted on its side. Beside the native driver sat, indisputably, the real Shoopbaum. In one particular only had McLeod been wrong; this keenfaced educationist’s cap did not have a scarlet peak, it had a sky-blue one, which went rather better with his blue-checked lumberman’s shirt and blue jeans.
The quickest way out for McLeod was by way of the window nearest him.
‘Here is a colleague of mine,’ he said, and had clambered out before anyone could reply.
He ran across the playground. Shoopbaum, carrying a fat brief-case, stopped to gape at him. There was no point, McLeod decided, in waiting to explain. Already Mr. Shoopbaum looked dumbfounded; to tell him about the imposture would be worse than having his own cute twin mules kick him.
‘Good morning,’ called McLeod, as he climbed into the Land-Rover.
Shoopbaum took a step nearer. ‘Hi!’ he said, not too cordially.
‘Sorry I can’t wait,’ cried McLeod. ‘Mr. Farouk will tell you all about it.’
All the same, he thought, as he drove fast out of the playground, it would have been worth seeing and hearing Shoopbaum, not to mention teacher, headmaster, and secretary, when the explanations began. One thing at least was certain: as the book proclaimed, they would all hear with their ears.
Ten
McLeod felt much lighter in heart as he left Kalak and its giant Buddhas. Thanks to that whisper of the teacher’s: ‘The salary is not much, but I need it,’ he was able to see life again, and especially his own present part in it, from a man’s height. Even if he were to have it confirmed that Donald and Margaret had been treacherously murdered, there were still compensations. He remembered these with gratitude: the merry old man with the cancerous throat; the young wife and her dead baby; the Colonel at Mazarat; the old fellow who kept the dust down in the school; and even Shoopbaum, bewildered under his blue-peaked cap. All those were as much part of his search as would be the two bodies in the bloodstained snow.
Not far along the road too, after leaving Kalak, he was to meet another.
The road, now only a churned track in the thick dust, climbed by a very steep, spiralling pass up into a wide plateau at the far end of which were the snow-capped mountains, his destination. At the foot of the pass were a chai-khana or tea-shop and a wayside shrine: refreshment for both body and mind before tackling the long, dangerous ascent. Waiting by the tea-shop was a heavily laden lorry, leaning far to one side like a lame camel; it would need the help of God to get up. Its driver, a small, humorous man in a dirty turban and an old American army tunic, sat cross-legged, drinking cup after cup of sweet, weak tea. Over the rim of the cup he kept squinting in amusement at his young assistant who, with his large mallet-like implement beside him, was on his knees at the heap of holy stones and rags. In the tea-shop were the crews and passengers of two other lorries that had just safely descended; these were loud and cheerful with relief, and laughed at the driver’s sly remarks about his colleague’s piety. The latter, a youth of about seventeen, must have heard the jokes and the laughter, but did not allow them to disturb or spoil his prayers. When he got up, lifted his club of office, and walked to get his own tea, he, too, was laughing, as if better than they he saw the joke. His round, happy face under its skull-cap was coated with dust, and his eyes were bloodshot. Although his job, that of leaping off the lorry to stop it from running backwards to destruction, required the nimbleness of a goat, he wore broken sandals with long, upturned toes. McLeod could not have shuffled in them, never mind leapt.
Sitting placidly on the ground, drinking tea, with his club beside him, the boy grinned at the jesters; and half an hour later, all the way up that dizzy hillside, he kept on grinning, although he had to run most of the way, and at each of the four hair-pin bends had to scurry about thrusting his mallet under the back wheels, just in time to save the lorry from slipping over the edge and bouncing to the foot hundreds of feet below. Driver and brakes shrieked, the driving-wheel was spun round like mad, the lorry lurched, disaster looked certain, but always that mallet was pushed in time behind the wheels. Now squatting, now kneeling, now flat on his stomach, now rushing to one side to direct the driver and now to the other, always in a smother of dust, he stuck to his task and ignored his own danger. McLeod kept as close behind as was safe, intending to offer help if it was needed and could be given in time. In the midst of his exertions the boy had time and spirit available, as he dashed in and out of the lorry’s dust storm, to grin back at McLeod, as one motorist to another.
When the lorry reached the top, therefore, and the youth had clambered up on top of its bulky cargo, with his mallet flung up before him, it wasn’t just the sudden nearness of the blue sky or the spaciousness that exhilarated McLeod with hope. No, it was also the sight of the boy crouching on the sacks, not even rubbing his bruises, with his head bobbing against the sky. Thus every day he earned his wage of less than ten shillings a week.
All day afterwards McLeod drove across the wide plain, seeing occasionally herds of fat-tailed sheep and goats attended by their lonely shepherds, and sometimes an encampment of nomads with their black, many-steepled tents, aggressive dogs, inquisitive children, and aloof camels. Villages were rare now, and were built far apart from the road on heights as mud-coloured as the houses. To see someone moving there was really to feel that mortality had been overcome; those movements were inscriptions written upon time itself.
Towards evening he had reached the foothills, and camped by a river whose clear water and smooth clean pebbles reminded him of the rivers of the Scottish Highlands. Here, though, instead of birches and rowans, were wild apricots and glades of poplars in which wolves and bears and even leopards might lurk. What caused him most apprehension, however, was the knowledge that the chief who held sway over that district, defying the authorities who were too distant and indolent to curb him and his wild hill-men, was an old ruffian famous throughout the country for his life-long hatred of the British. In the war against the latter, about forty years before, his father had been killed and he himself had lost his right hand. Years ago a friend of McLeod’s, travelling with a party of Germans, had had to pretend he was a German, too, so ferocious and apparently genuine were the old chief’s imprecations and one-fisted gestures against the British. If Donald Kemp and Margaret Duncan had fallen into his clutches, either they were still there as prisoners or had been ceremonially slaughtered. McLeod did not wish to have to investigate, and so as discreetly as possible he made his camp in a place by the river almost surrounded by trees.
He had just finished eating and was lying in his tent when he heard first a drumming of hooves and then splashes. Looking out, he saw coming across the river about a dozen horsemen, led by a huge man with a black beard. Their silence alarmed him as much as their guns and knives. If they had been calling in a friendly way some of them at least would have been yelling like cowboys at a rodeo; but all rode in silent ferocity. Their horses were small but powerful. Anxious though he was, McLeod couldn’t help but admire their horsemanship. Few in the world were their superiors. The favourite sport of these wild horsemen of the north was a game called buz-kashi. He had seen it played several times; it was like American football played on horseback, with a dead goat for a ball.
He decided to call himself a Frenchman, on his way to join his compatriots at an archaeological site about fifty miles away. Therefore, as the two leaders, Blackbeard and a man with a moon-like, sadistic face, came crashing through the trees right up to the tent, McLeod was waiting to greet them in French. The fat man suddenly drew a long sword and held it high.
They came right up, pushing their horses’ breasts against him. From that conquistadorial height they scowled down. The fat man, for practice it seemed, took a slash at the tent and made a great slit in it. The sight provoked him to an imbecilic joy, and he would have slashed the tent to pieces, and McLeod, too, if Blackbeard hadn’t growled to him.
‘Who are you?’ asked Blackbeard, of McLeod.
‘A Frenchman, on a journey,’ he replied.
‘What journey?’ yelled the fat man, slavering with anger. ‘Who gave you permission? Don’t you know this is our country?’
McLeod explained he was going to join his colleagues who were digging up the ground looking for relics of the past.
All the riders frowned with contempt. Digging was women’s work. But only the fat man laughed. It was peculiarly shrill laughter. McLeod had already noticed he was the only one without a beard; indeed, his great chubby cheeks and several chins were totally hairless. Nevertheless, he seemed to have more authority than Blackbeard. The latter would have no compunction about killing, but he would do it with a thrust of his dagger or a bullet. This fat madman, though, would take pleasure in first slicing off ears, nose, hands, and that other member which, it seemed, had been sliced off him.
