The Baghdad Railway Club (6 page)

On the first landing, he pointed to double doors, saying, ‘Officers’ mess, sir, for your glass of something cool in a little while. They’ve got the local chaps taking ice up there on the hour every hour.’

We pressed on up to the second floor, and Jarvis threw open a door . . . A smell of dusty carpet, a wide, low bed; wooden sun shutters, closed, with mosque-like shapes cut into them, through which the green evening light oozed.

‘It’s a bit better than the Western Front,’ I said.

‘To say the least, sir,’ said Jarvis. ‘To say the least.’

At a nod from Jarvis, the porter departed; Jarvis now began unpacking my pack, and laying the things out on my bed. He held my second tunic and trousers: ‘Take these away for pressing,’ he said, which meant he was going to go. ‘Will that be all, sir?’ he said. ‘You’ll find me two doors along if you need me in the night. I’ll be here in the morning with coffee at eight o’clock, sir.’

I looked at my watch. It had stopped.

‘What’s the time?’ I said.

‘Nearly nine, sir.’

‘Will it start to get cool soon?’

‘About October sort of time. Even the Indian lads find it a bit . . . I don’t mind telling you, I thought I was going off me dot at first. Thing is, sir, you must wear clothes to keep it off. I’ll fix you up with a keffiyah – that’s a sort of headscarf.’

‘I’m going out tonight,’ I said.

‘You crossing the river‚ sir?’

I eyed him.

‘Why do you ask?’

‘It’s not patrolled‚ sir, or not so much as over here. Patrols are to be stepped up over the next few days. But you’ll be carrying your piece, I take it, sir?’ He nodded towards the holster of my Sam Browne belt, together with the Webley .455 that it held. I nodded back; I would be carrying the Webley.

‘What’s over there?’ I said.

‘You’ve got the ranges – the artillery spend a good deal of time over there in the daylight hours.’

‘
Machine-gun
ranges?’

‘Some, I think. And you’ve got the railway station – and the south gate of the wall.’

‘How’s the feeling in the town – towards the British, I mean?’

‘They prefer us to the Germans and the Turks, sir.’

‘Good.’

‘But that’s not saying much. See, they’re trying to figure us out. It’s all in the balance between us and them. That’s why I’ve taken a bit of trouble to learn a few words of the language, sir. That’s why I go in the water place – hoping to build a few bridges, so to speak.’

I noticed that he’d stopped calling it
fresh
water. How did I feel? All right, considering, but when Jarvis offered to fetch me a glass of cold beer before departing, I turned him down. I couldn’t face beer.

‘I’ll just take a sluice-down,’ I said, which was Jarvis’s cue to quit the room.

Ten minutes later, feeling better in some ways but worse in others, I looked into the officers’ mess on my way out of the Hotel.

It was a luxurious room of many sofas and many carpets, but not enough electrical fans – only two of them doing their strange bowing dance. All the men in there were staff officers or political officers. The individual battalions and regiments that made up the corps would have their own quarters and their own messes around Baghdad. I couldn’t see Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd in the room. I heard one man saying, ‘Ought we to retribute?’ as though he wasn’t much bothered either way. Another was saying, ‘Well, it’s a kind of an opera.’ I knew I was out of my league, and was about to quit the room when a man came up and introduced himself.

I told him I had come out to work for the Political Officer (Railways). ‘That’s Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd,’ I added, and the fellow looked blank for a minute before leading me over to a notice-board, where he indicated, next to something about a smoking concert, and beneath something about a cricket match, a paper headed: TALKS ON RAILWAY TOPICS.

The fellow returned to the conversation from which he’d broken off a minute before, leaving me to read:

As I quit the mess, I heard a voice saying, ‘We have more railway people than would seem to be justified.’

I went down to the river by a different crowded lane. A new boat was on the quay where the
Mantis
had lately been: a cranky-looking old packet, laden with boxes marked ‘Bully Beef’, and quite unattended. It bumped and scraped against the quay, and I saw a man in a much smaller boat – a blue wooden canoe of sorts, but with decorative mouldings – who floated just beyond the stern of the bigger one, bumping and swaying in rhythm with it, occasionally extending an arm to keep himself from clashing against it. He was grinning up at me.

‘You sail!’ he said.

I was looking along to my right – towards the pontoon bridge at about a quarter of a mile’s distance. I counted the number of black barges that made it up: twenty exactly.

‘Ingilhiz!’ he shouted, and it wasn’t a question. ‘Ingilhiz, go over. Cross river. You sail.’

He was paddling towards an iron ladder that went down into the water amid floating rubbish. I climbed down the ladder, and into his boat. It was like one of the swinging boats of a fairground detached from its chains.

‘What’s on the other side?’ I said, just for something to say.

‘Same town,’ he said, smiling but paddling hard against the current.

A white launch was bearing down on us, a group of uniformed and un-uniformed white men standing on the prow.

As it went by, and we bounced on its backwash, my companion nodded at me, saying, ‘Kokus,’ and then, trying again, ‘. . . Coxus.’

I frowned at him.

‘Coxus,’ he repeated, grinning. ‘Your friend! Coxus!’

It broke in on me that he was referring to the Chief Political Officer.

‘You mean
Cox
?’ I said. ‘Sir Percy Cox?’

He nodded briefly, having already lost interest in the matter. He was fighting the current, the sound of which was now loud in my ears. Gas lights of a pale blue glimmered on the bank we’d left behind, whereas the bank we were making towards was half enclosed in darkness. I could not tell whether its buildings were newly made and barely finished, or so old that they were crumbling away. Having passed the middle of the river, my pilot was now resting, letting the current carry us, and smiling as it did so. But a minute later, he was all action again, using his oar to steer as we ran up fast on to the opposite bank. We were on a narrow beach, lying beyond the main run of buildings. There were palm trees, two long wicker benches with shades built over.

‘Baksheesh,’ said my pilot.

I had dreaded this moment. I fished in my pocket and handed over a single rupee, which my pilot began examining closely. Say it was worth 9d. That would be a decent, if irregular, sum to tip a station porter in London or York. But this fellow was not a station porter, and we were not in London or York. On the contrary, I was on a ghostly river-beach of black and orange sand, in rapidly fading light but with the heat still like a weight upon me. My companion was now looking at me slightly sidelong. He had found the coin acceptable, and secreted it somewhere in his robe. I was free to go.

I put my boot into two inches of brown water, as the fellow began again his struggle with the current of the Tigris.

. . . Low buildings, including some low domes with green and gold-coloured tiles that would have been beautiful were it not for the dirt . . . One shuttered place had a wooden board across the front: an Arabic word and ‘Koffe’. Was this the place Boyd was supposed to recommend to me, the
Salon de Thé
of Baghdad station being closed? A man sat smoking in front of it. He was surrounded by a sort of display of the circular boats. He had passed the long, hot day in putting pitch on them judging by the black spatterings on his long shirt. I nodded at him, and he tipped his head back, blowing smoke rather haughtily in my direction. The broken buildings extended back not more than three or four streets, and there was very little life in them. At one junction of alleyways, I saw a knife-grinder, his grindstone on a barrow. He pedalled the stone, sharpening a long blade, and a kid sat on the broken pavement at his feet. He might have been a customer, the owner of the blade. But he looked more like the knife-grinder’s disciple.

‘Salaam alaikum!’ I called to the pair, and they looked at me as if I was mad.

I was now at the limit of the buildings, and had begun walking over a waste of dust and rubble littered with old bricks and tiles. I made out a low sign in the fading light: ‘Ranges’. I contemplated it for a while, hearing still the creak of the knife-grinder’s wheel.

Instead of a shooting range, the sign
seemed
to indicate a sort of warehouse that had partly exploded, for there were piles of its own bricks all around it: one of the buildings blown up by the Turks before they quit town, perhaps. I’d been told there were plenty of those. Beyond the roadway was a plantation. I walked under the trees. The dates had not been picked. Presently the trees thinned out, and I saw a railway line.

I stood on the rail, and wondered which way to follow it. To left and right it went into more date palms and low, rocky embankments. Again, I had the swooning feeling. I was still sweating like a bull, the stuff coming off me faster than it had been before if anything. I’d been a fool to drink that water. I turned left and walked the line until the trees cleared again, and I came to a railway territory. There was the station; also an engine shed, some tracks meandering between the two with blockhouses and coal bunkers at intervals, a half-smashed hand-cranked turntable, and sidings going off, most out of commission, being buckled and broken. Had they been shelled? In the silence, I stood waiting for the flare of a Very light, the shriek of a five-nine or a whizz-bang, but that was the Western Front, and I was in the East. A different sort of death awaited here.

It was ten o’clock; I was an hour early for Boyd. I contemplated the tracks.

As far as I could judge, the one I’d followed here had been the one that ran up north to Samarrah and Tikrit – up towards where the Turks were. Another drifted off south-westerly, leading, as I believed, to the town of Feluja. A third – a narrow-gauge line – looked badly broken up, but I believed it led almost due south to Babylon, where the ruins were. Each would have to cut through the city walls, parts of which I could make out in the distance.

I approached first the engine shed. Double doors stood open at front and back, revealing two tracks and one crocked engine. It was a big beast: a 2-8-0 of German manufacture, and it had a name:
Elefant
. But the thing couldn’t travel; its side rods were missing. In between the tracks, some bushes grew. What were they? Jasmine? Basil? I thought:
the smell of them is very loud
, and I considered – slowly – that ‘loud’ was the wrong word. There were also rough wooden tables, a quantity of tools and papers piled upon them. The papers were smeared with oil and written in German – they related to the engine. Beyond the shed, a hundred yards off, was a water tower made of stone with a metal tank on the top of it, and as I looked on, a giant bird of some sort came and landed on the top of this tank. I hadn’t bargained on any of this. The colour of the evening was now a dark green, and it was unnatural that such darkness could go with such heat. I turned about, and stumbled on the rocky ground, where I saw cartridge casings, left over from the fight for the city. As I began walking towards the companion building of the shed, namely the station, I thought back again to the water I’d drunk. I should not have had it. It had
not
been fresh. Had the fellow who’d given it me known that?

The station was a building of rough grey stone with pointed, church-like windows and a church-like bell hanging from a little arch at one end of the pitched roof. There were two platforms and two tracks running between them. There was not
enough
in the station: no ticket gates, no posters on the walls, not even any nameplate saying ‘Baghdad’, and certainly no people. But between the tracks stood a Janus-faced clock on an iron stand. The clock said half after ten, so it was about right. The platforms were low, and dirty booths of glass and iron ran along the left-hand one, all in a line like compartments of a carriage: waiting rooms or ticket offices, and one must be the
Salon de Thé
. I recollected that I was supposed to say, ‘It is closed.’

Well, I’d look a bloody idiot saying that. Looking again at the walls‚ I saw that the station name
was
indicated, in that the word ‘BAGHDAD’ had been written on the right-hand wall in tall, shaky letters of red paint. There was a nightmare quality to the work, the long thin letters seeming to be formed of dripping blood. I began to make out through the gloom other scrawlings on the walls, in a different shade of red. I first thought these were all in a foreign language, but I made out the word ‘Tommy’. I looked harder . . .

I heard a footfall coming from beyond the far end of the station. Through the soft, green gloom, a man approached. I believed he had stepped out of one of the blockhouses set amid the broken tracks. He wore a long black coat, and it became clear that the small hat he wore was red – a fez. I had thought all Arabs would wear a fez, but here was the first. He held a lamp, and as he came under the station roof, the swinging white light illuminated the scrawl on the walls: ‘One Tommy – 100 Askari’, I read, and ‘Tommy, where is your Lon . . .’ and then, some way off, ‘. . . don.’

I tried my ‘Salaam alaikum’ on the man as he approached. The collar of his coat was braided with gold.

‘Hello‚ my dear,’ he said, which knocked me rather. He was a thin, handsome chap with a deeply lined face – but then most of the Arabs were. His coat made him look priest-like, but I thought I knew what the braid signified.

‘Are you the station master?’ I said.

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘of course.’

‘When is the next train?’ I said, since that was the kind of thing you asked a station master.

‘Next train?’ he said. ‘Next day.’

‘Who wrote this?’ I said, indicating the scrawl on the walls.

‘Turk, my dear,’ he said, and he grinned; then his grin faded rather rapidly. ‘Next train, next day,’ he repeated, ‘God willing.’

This next train was getting less likely by the minute.

‘I help you?’ he said.

I shook my head. ‘No thanks,’ I said, and he turned on his heel. I watched him walk along the platform, then step down into the territory of the sidings. He was a station master at arm’s length from his station. He seemed to be heading back towards a certain blockhouse when the darkness enclosed him; perhaps he lived there; or perhaps he would walk beyond it and go to some other place entirely. I was glad he was gone, not so much because he would get in the way of my meeting Boyd as because I was about to be sick. I did not want to be sick in the station, however.

I was halfway back towards the engine shed when the stuff came out in a yellow fountain. Well, it missed my boots; and I immediately felt better, getting – for the first time since my arrival in Baghdad – a hint of coolness about me. I sat on the ground savouring the feeling for a while; I then pursued my way back into the engine shed and found a lamp there. I lit it, and turned up the wick. I looked at my watch – ten to eleven.

‘Next train, next day . . . God willing’: I revolved the words. Why
would
God will it, given that it could only be a British Army train, an organisation not over-full of Mohammedans? Or had the station master meant that God might favour the return by rail of the Turks? Was he one of the pro-Turkish Arabs? Which side, in fact, was the fellow really on?

I turned back towards the station, going by the blockhouse from which the station master seemed to have emerged. By the light of the lamp, it appeared locked and shuttered. There was no window in it. If I’d come across this sort of brick bunker in the railway lands of York, I’d have said it held lamps, lamp oil, track shoes, not a person, and certainly not a station master. The
deputy
station master at York had a chandelier in his office.

I was under the station roof again at dead on eleven, and there was unquestionably no sign of any Captain Boyd on the platforms. In the light of my lamp, the ‘B’ of ‘Baghdad’ danced as I closed on the glass and iron booths. The door of the first was ajar. I pushed, and saw a jumble of rubbish, iron chairs and tables, photographs with scenes of Baghdad on the walls. I held up my lamp and it revealed a counter bearing two kettles, assorted kitchen clutter, and the dusty remains of what might have been a spirit stove. A dead palm also lay on the counter, and the soil that had come out of the pot was scattered everywhere. There was a kind of sideboard against the wall. No – a shallow display cabinet of sorts, with broken glass doors. My lamp showed – pinned to cork board – photographs of engines near buildings that looked more like castles than stations, but which I knew to
be
stations. Above the photographs was pinned a blue tin strip with white lettering: ‘
Die grosse Berlin–Baghdad Eisenbahn
’. On a shelf lay a whistle with a green and red tassel, and two copper medallions, also with tassels. I picked one up, moved it near the lamp. On one side was an engraving of a locomotive surrounded by a circle of laurel leaves; on the other was an inscription in Arabic, perhaps Turkish Arabic. The whole display was a celebration of the Berlin–Baghdad railway, but whoever had put it up had jumped the gun, for the line, as I had discovered, was incomplete north of Baghdad.

Captain Boyd was not here.

I walked towards the counter, set my lamp down there. What I thought had been soil was not soil. I licked my finger and dabbed at it: coffee. And the kettle was not a kettle either, but a coffee pot, and there were a couple more nearby. If this was the
Salon de Thé
, then where was the
Thé
?

I walked back on to the platform, and held my lamp up the next booth along, seeing in the glass only the reflection of an ill-looking British Army captain with lamp in hand. I could do with a shave. As I pushed at the door, another dead potted palm swung into my lamp beam. The place was full of flies. I heard a sudden shuffling from low down in the corner, and I thought: snake; I am in a reptile house. While transferring the lamp to my left hand, I took the Webley from its holster. I saw white-painted wicker chairs heaped at one end, iron tables at another. Cutlery was scattered over the floor. On the counter I saw several dusty spirit burners with silver kettles sitting on them with all the spouts pointing the same way – a kettle train. I moved a little way forward on the gritty floorboards. Many parchment-coloured moths danced around my lamp. They avoided the flies, but the flies did not avoid me.