White Teeth (12 page)

‘I mean, I am educated. I am trained. I should be soaring with the Royal Airborne Force, shelling from on high! I am an officer! Not some mullah, some sepoy, wearing out my chappals in hard service. My great-grandfather Mangal Pande’ — he looked around for the recognition the name deserved but, being met only with blank pancake English faces, he continued — ‘was the great hero of the Indian Mutiny!’

Silence.

‘Of 1857! It was he who shot the first hateful pigfat-smeared bullet and sent it spinning off into oblivion!’

A longer, denser silence.

‘If it wasn’t for this buggery hand’ — Samad, inwardly cursing the English goldfish-memory for history, lifted five dead, tightly curled fingers from their usual resting place on his chest — ‘this shitty hand that the useless Indian army gave me for my troubles, I would have matched his achievements. And why am I crippled? Because the Indian army knows more about the kissing of arses than it does about the heat and sweat of battle! Never go to India, Sapper Jones, my dear friend, it is a place for fools and worse than fools. Fools, Hindus, Sikhs and Punjabis. And now there is all this murmuring about independence — give
Bengal
independence, Archie, is what I say — leave India in bed with the British, if that’s what she likes.’

His arm crashed to his side with the dead weight and rested itself like an old man after an angry fit. Samad always addressed Archie as if they were in league together against the rest of the tank. No matter how much Archie shunned him, those four days of eyeballing had created a kind of silk-thread bond between the two men that Samad tugged whenever he got the opportunity.

‘You see, Jones,’ said Samad, ‘the real mistake the viceroy made was to give the Sikhs any position of power, you see? Just because they have some limited success with the kaffir in Africa, he says Yes, Mr Man, with your sweaty fat face and your silly fake English moustache and your pagri balanced like a large shit on the top of your head, you can be an officer, we will Indianize the army; go, go and fight in Italy, Rissaldar Major Pugri, Daffadar Pugri, with my grand old English troops! Mistake! And then they take me, hero of the 9th North Bengal Mounted Rifles, hero of the Bengal flying corps, and say, “Samad Miah Iqbal, Samad, we are going to confer on you a great honour. You will fight in mainland Europe — not starve and drink your own piss in Egypt or Malaya, no — you will fight the Hun where you find him.” On his very doorstep, Sapper Jones, on his very doorstep. So! I went. Italy, I thought, well, this is where I will show the English army that the Muslim men of Bengal can fight like any Sikh. Better! Stronger! And are the best educated and are those with the good blood, we who are truly of Officer Material.’

‘Indian officers? That’ll be the bloody day,’ said Roy.

‘On my first day there,’ continued Samad, ‘I destroyed a Nazi hide-out from the air. Like a swooping eagle.’

‘Bollocks,’ said Roy.

‘On my second day, I shot from the air the enemy as he approached the Gothic Line, breaking the Argenta Gap and pushing the Allies through to the Po Valley. Lord Mountbatten himself was to have congratulated me himself in his own person. He would have shaken this hand. But this was all prevented. Do you know what occurred on my third day, Sapper Jones? Do you know how I was crippled? A young man in his prime?’

‘No,’ said Archie quietly.

‘A bastard Sikh, Sapper Jones, a bastard fool. As we stood in a trench, his gun went off and shot me through the wrist. But I wouldn’t have it amputated. Every bit of my body comes from Allah. Every bit will return to him.’

So Samad had ended up in the unfêted bridge-laying division of His Majesty’s Army with the rest of the losers; with men like Archie, with men like Dickinson-Smith (whose government file included the phrase ‘Risk: Homosexual’), with frontal lobotomy cases like Mackintosh and Johnson. The rejects of war. As Roy affectionately called it: the Buggered Battalion. Much of the problem with the outfit lay with the captain of the First Assault Regiment: Dickinson-Smith was no soldier. And certainly no commander, though commanding was in his genes. Against his will he had been dragged out of his father’s college, shaken free of his father’s gown, and made to Fight A War, as his father had. And his father before him, and his father before him, ad infinitum. Young Thomas had resigned himself to his fate and was engaged in a concerted and prolonged effort (four years now) to get his name on the ever extending list of Dickinson-Smiths carved on a long slab of death-stone in the village of Little Marlow, to be buried on top of them all in the family’s sardine-can tomb that proudly dominated the historic churchyard.

Killed by the Hun, the Wogs, the Chinks, the Kaffirs, the Frogs, the Scots, the Spics, the Zulus, the Indians (South, East and Red), and accidentally mistaken for a darting okapi by a Swede on a big-game hunt in Nairobi, traditionally the Dickinson-Smiths were insatiable in their desire to see Dickinson-Smith blood spilled on foreign soil. And on the occasions when there wasn’t a war the Dickinson-Smiths busied themselves with the Irish Situation, a kind of Dickinson-Smith holiday resort of death, which had been going since 1600 and showed no sign of letting up. But dying’s no easy trick. And though the chance to hurl themselves in front of any sort of lethal weaponry had held a magnetic attraction for the family throughout the ages, this Dickinson-Smith couldn’t seem to manage it. Poor Thomas had a different kind of lust for exotic ground. He wanted to know it, to nurture it, to learn from it, to love it. He was a simple non-starter at the war game.

The long story of how Samad went from the pinnacle of military achievement in the Bengal corps to the Buggered Battalion was told and retold to Archie, in different versions and with elaborations upon it, once a day for another two weeks, whether he listened or not. Tedious as it was, it was a highlight next to the other tales of failure that filled those long nights, and kept the men of the Buggered Battalion in their preferred state of demotivation and despair. Amongst the well-worn canon was the Tragic Death of Roy’s Fiancée, a hairdresser who slipped on a set of rollers and broke her neck on the sink; Archie’s Failure to Go to Grammar School because his mother couldn’t afford to buy the uniform; Dickinson-Smith’s many murdered relatives; as for Will Johnson, he did not speak in the day but whimpered as he slept, and his face spoke eloquently of more miserable miseries than anyone dare inquire into. The Buggered Battalion continued like this for some time, a travelling circus of discontents roaming aimlessly through Eastern Europe; freaks and fools with no audience but each other. Who performed and stared in turns. Until finally the tank rolled into a day that History has not remembered. That Memory has made no effort to retain. A sudden stone submerged. False teeth floating silently to the bottom of a glass. 6 May 1945.

At about 18.00 hours on the 6th of May 1945 something in the tank blew up. It wasn’t a bomb noise but an engineering disaster noise, and the tank slowly ground to a halt. They were in a tiny Bulgarian village bordering Greece and Turkey, which the war had got bored with and left, returning the people to almost normal routine.

‘Right,’ said Roy, having had a look at the problem. ‘The engine’s buggered and one of the tracks has broken. We’re gonna have to radio for help, and then sit tight till it arrives. Nothing we can do.’

‘We’re going to make no effort at all to repair it?’ asked Samad.

‘No,’ said Dickinson-Smith. ‘Private Mackintosh is right. There’s no way we could deal with this kind of damage with the equipment we have at hand. We’ll just have to wait here until help arrives.’

‘How long will this be?’

‘A day,’ piped up Johnson. ‘We’re way off from the rest.’

‘Are we required, Captain Smith, to remain in the vehicle for these twenty-four hours?’ asked Samad, who despaired of Roy’s personal hygiene and was loath to spend a stationary, sultry evening with him.

‘Bloody right we are — what d’ya think this is, a day off?’ growled Roy.

‘No, no . . . I don’t see why you shouldn’t wander a bit — there’s no point in us all being holed up here. You and Jones go, report back, and then Privates Mackintosh, Johnson and I will go when you come back.’

So Samad and Archie went into the village and spent three hours drinking Sambucca and listening to the café owner tell of the miniature invasion of two Nazis who turned up in the town, ate all his supplies, had sex with two loose village girls and shot a man in the head for failing to give them directions to the next town swiftly enough.

‘In everything they were impatient,’ said the old man, shaking his head. Samad settled the bill.

Walking back, Archie said, ‘Cor, they don’t need many of ’em to conquer and pillage,’ in an attempt to make conversation.

‘One strong man and one weak is a colony, Sapper Jones,’ said Samad.

When Archie and Samad reached the tank, they found Privates Mackintosh and Johnson and Captain Thomas Dickinson-Smith dead. Johnson strangled with cheese wire, Roy shot in the back. Roy’s jaw had been forced open, his silver fillings removed; a pair of pliers now sat in his mouth like an iron tongue. It appeared that Thomas Dickinson-Smith had, as his attacker moved towards him, turned from his allotted fate and shot himself in the face. The only Dickinson-Smith to die by English hands.

While Archie and Samad assessed this situation as best they could, Colonel-General Jodl sat in a small red schoolhouse in Reims and shook his fountain pen. Once. Twice. Then led the ink a solemn dance along the dotted line and wrote history in his name. The end of war in Europe. As the paper was whisked away by a man at his shoulder, Jodl hung his head, struck by the full realization of the deed. But it would be a full two weeks before either Archie or Samad were to hear about it.

These were strange times, strange enough for an Iqbal and a Jones to strike up a friendship. That day, while the rest of Europe celebrated, Samad and Archie stood on a Bulgarian roadside, Samad clutching a handful of wires, chipboard and metal casing in his good fist.

‘This radio is stripped to buggery,’ said Samad. ‘We’ll need to begin from the beginning. This is a very bad business, Jones. Very bad. We have lost our means of communication, transport and defence. Worst: we have lost our command. A man of war without a commander is a very bad business indeed.’

Archie turned from Samad and threw up violently in a bush. Private Mackintosh, for all his big talk, had shat himself at St Peter’s Gate, and the smell had forced itself into Archie’s lungs and dragged up his nerves, his fear and his breakfast.

As far as fixing the radio went, Samad knew
how
, he knew the
theory
, but Archie had the hands, and a certain knack when it came to wires and nails and glue. And it was a funny kind of struggle between knowledge and practical ability which went on between them as they pieced together the tiny metal strips that might save them both.

‘Pass me the three-ohm resistor, will you?’

Archie went very red, unsure which item Samad was referring to. His hand wavered across the box of wires and bits and bobs. Samad discreetly coughed as Archie’s little finger strayed towards the correct item. It was awkward, an Indian telling an Englishman what to do — but somehow the quietness of it, the manliness of it, got them over it. It was during this time that Archie learnt the true power of do-it-yourself, how it uses a hammer and nails to replace nouns and adjectives, how it allows men to communicate. A lesson he kept with him all his life.

‘Good man,’ said Samad, as Archie passed him the electrode, but then, finding one hand not enough to manipulate the wires or to pin them to the radio board, he passed the item back to Archie and signalled where it was to be put.

‘We’ll get this done in no time,’ said Archie cheerfully.

‘Bubblegum! Please, mister!’

By the fourth day, a gang of village children had begun to gather round the tank, attracted by the grisly murders, Samad’s green-eyed glamour, and Archie’s American bubblegum.

‘Mr Soldier,’ said one chestnut-hued sparrow-weight boy in careful English, ‘bubblegum please thankyou.’

Archie reached into his pocket and pulled out five thin pink strips. The boy distributed them snootily amongst his friends. They began chewing wildly, eyes bursting from their heads with the effort. Then, as the flavour subsided, they stood in silent, awed contemplation of their benefactor. After a few minutes the same scrawny boy was sent up as the People’s Representative once more.

‘Mr Soldier.’ He held out his hand. ‘Bubblegum please thankyou.’

‘No more,’ said Archie, going through an elaborate sign language. ‘I’ve got no more.’

‘Please, thankyou.
Please
?’ repeated the boy urgently.

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ snapped Samad. ‘We have to fix the radio and get this thing moving. Let’s get on with it, OK?’

‘Bubblegum, mister, Mr Soldier, bubblegum.’ It became a chant, almost; the children mixing up the few words they had learnt, placing them in any order.

‘
Please
?’ The boy stretched out his arm in such a strenuous manner that it pushed him on to the very tips of his toes.

Suddenly he opened his palm, and then smiled coquettishly, preparing to bargain. There in his open fist four green notes were screwed into a bundle like a handful of grass.

‘Dollars, mister!’

‘Where did you get this?’ asked Samad, making a snatch for it. The boy seized back his hand. He moved constantly from one foot to another — the impish dance that children learn from war. The simplest version of being on your guard.

‘First bubblegum, mister.’

‘Tell me where you got this. I warn you not to play the fool with me.’

Samad made a grab for the boy and caught him by the arm of his shirt. He tried desperately to wriggle free. The boy’s friends began to slink off, deserting their quickly sinking champion.

‘Did you kill a man for this?’

A vein in Samad’s forehead was fighting passionately to escape his skin. He wished to defend a country that wasn’t his and revenge the killing of men who would not have acknowledged him in a civilian street. Archie was amazed. It was his country; in his small, cold-blooded, average way he was one of the many essential vertebrae in its backbone, yet he could feel nothing comparable for it.