White Teeth (11 page)

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. Among 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 during the day but whimpered as he slept, and his face spoke eloquently of more miserable miseries than anyone dared inquire into. The Buggered Battalion continued like this for some time, a traveling 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. May 6, 1945.

At about 1800 hours on May 6, 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 Sambuca 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.

As they walked 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 toward 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 was 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 defense. Worst: we have lost our commander. 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 that 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 pieces. Samad discreetly coughed as Archie's little finger strayed toward 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 learned 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 signaled 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 among his friends. They began chewing wildly, eyes bursting from their heads with the effort. Then, as the flavor 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 learned, placing them in any order.

“Please?”
The boy stretched out his arm in such a strenuous manner that it pushed him onto 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.

“No, mister, no, no. From him. Him.”

He stretched his free arm and pointed to a large derelict house that sat like a fat brooding hen on the horizon.

“Did someone in that house kill our men?” barked Samad.

“What you say, mister?” squeaked the boy.

“Who is there?”

“He is doctor. He is there. But sick. Can't move. Dr. Sick.”

A few remaining children excitedly confirmed the name. Dr. Sick, mister, Dr. Sick.

“What's wrong with him?”

The boy, now enjoying the attention, theatrically mimed a man crying.

“English? Like us? German? French? Bulgarian? Greek?” Samad released the boy, tired from the misplaced energy.

“He no one. He Dr. Sick, only,” said the boy dismissively. “Bubblegum?”

A few days later and still no help had arrived. The strain of having to be continually at war in such a pleasant village began to pull at Archie and Samad, and bit by bit they relaxed more and more into a kind of civilian life. Every evening they ate dinner in the old man Gozan's kitchen-café. Watery soup cost five cigarettes each. Any kind of fish cost a low-ranking bronze medal. As Archie was now wearing one of Dickinson-Smith's uniforms, his own having fallen apart, he had a few of the dead man's medals to spare and with them purchased other niceties and necessities: coffee, soap, chocolate. For some pork Archie handed over a fag-card of Dorothy Lamour that had been pressed against his arse in his back pocket ever since he joined up.

“Go on, Sam—we'll use them as tokens, like food stamps; we can buy them back when we have the means, if you like.”

“I'm a Muslim,” said Samad, pushing a plate of pork away. “And my Rita Hayworth leaves me only with my own soul.”

“Why don't you eat it?” said Archie, guzzling his two chops down like a madman. “Strange business, if you ask me.”

“I don't eat it for the same reason you as an Englishman will never truly satisfy a woman.”

“Why's that?” said Archie, pausing from his feast.

“It's in our cultures, my friend.” He thought for a minute. “Maybe deeper. Maybe in our bones.”

After dinner, they would make a pretense of scouring the village for the killers, rushing through the town, searching the same three disreputable bars and looking in the back bedrooms of pretty women's houses, but after a time this too was abandoned and they sat instead smoking cheap cigars outside the tank, enjoying the lingering crimson sunsets and chatting about their previous incarnations as newspaper boy (Archie) and biology student (Samad). They knocked around ideas that Archie did not entirely understand, and Samad offered secrets into the cool night that he had never spoken out loud. Long, comfortable silences passed between them like those between women who have known each other for years. They looked out on to stars that lit up unknown country, but neither man clung particularly to home. In short, it was precisely the kind of friendship an Englishman makes on holiday, that he can make only on holiday. A friendship that crosses class and color, a friendship that takes as its basis physical proximity and survives because the Englishman assumes the physical proximity will not continue.

A week and a half since the radio had been repaired and there was still no reply to the aid signals they sent bouncing along the airwaves in search of ears to hear them. (By now, the villagers knew the war was over, but they felt disinclined to reveal the fact to their two visitors, whose daily bartering had proved such a boost to the local economy.) In the stretches of empty time, Archie would lever up sections of the wheel track with an iron pole, while Samad investigated the problem. Across continents, both men's families presumed them dead.

“Is there a woman that you have back in Brighton City?” asked Samad, anchoring his head between the lion jaws of track and tank.

Archie was not a good-looking boy. He was dashing if you took a photo and put your thumb over his nose and mouth, but otherwise he was quite unremarkable. Girls would be attracted to his large, sad Sinatra-blue eyes, but then be put off by the Bing Crosby ears and the nose that ended in a natural onion-bulb swelling like W. C. Fields's.

“A few,” he said nonchalantly. “You know, here and there. You?”

“A young lady has already been picked out for me. A Miss Begum—daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Begum. The ‘in-laws,' as you say. Dear God, those two are so far up the rectums of the establishment in Bengal that even the lord governor sits sniveling waiting for his mullah to come in carrying a dinner invitation from them!”

Samad laughed loudly and waited for company, but Archie, not understanding a word, stayed poker-faced as usual.

“Oh, they are the best people,” continued Samad, only slightly dispirited. “The very best people. Extremely good blood . . . and as an added bonus, there is a propensity among their women—traditionally, throughout the ages, you understand—for really enormous melons.”

Samad performed the necessary mime, and then returned his attention to realigning each tooth of track with its appropriate groove.

“And?” asked Archie.