Dust on the Paw Read online

  DUST ON THE PAW

  Robin Jenkins (1912–2005) studied at Glasgow University and worked for the Forestry Commission and in the teaching profession. He travelled widely and worked in Spain, Afghanistan and Borneo before finally settling in his beloved Argyll. His first novel, So Gaily Sings the Lark, was published in 1951 and its publication was followed by more than thirty works of fiction, including the acclaimed The Cone-gatherers (1955), Fergus Lamont (1979) and Childish Things (2001). In 2002 he received the Saltire Society’s prestigious Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun Award for his outstanding contribution to Scottish life.

  To Helen and Bryan

  First published by Macdonald & Co. (Publishers) Ltd in 1961

  This edition published in Great Britian in 2006 by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

  This ebook edition published in 2012 by

  Birlinn Limited

  West Newington House

  Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.birlinn.co.uk

  Copyright © the estate of Robin Jenkins, 1961

  Introduction copyright © David Pratt, 2006

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-153-8

  Print ISBN: 978-1-904598-84-8

  Version 1.0

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  According to the eleventh-century Persian poet, Firdausi, the powerful ones of the earth were the lion’s paw, and the humble the dust on it. In some places it is no different today.

  Contents

  Introduction

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Introduction

  AFGHANISTAN has always been a harsh land. It is more than 20 years since I first came to this remote country, crossing on foot from neighbouring Pakistan to report on the conflict taking place between the Afghan guerrillas and the occupying Soviet army.

  Since then I have returned many times, a witness to Afghanistan’s tortured journey through war and natural disaster – a journey that would leave any nation exhausted. First it was the Soviet withdrawal and the country’s descent into bitter factional fighting, then the rise to power of the Taliban, probably the world’s most extreme Islamic fundamentalist group. These days the nation is wracked by the war prosecuted by the West to root out this lingering Islamic militant group and the remnants of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda.

  Somewhere in between all this, two hugely destructive earthquakes added 10,000 to the death toll of over one million Afghans killed by bombs, bullets, shells and mines over the last two decades.

  Throughout all this suffering, I have rarely seen an Afghan cry. A truly extraordinary people, they are among the toughest and most resourceful on earth. Fiercely proud, Afghans smile when most others would throw up their hands in despair. They are also a generous people whose hospitality at times can be so overwhelming that the visitor often feels embarrassed.

  Perhaps it’s not surprising then that the Afghan character, like the rugged uncompromising landscape out of which it is moulded, has always fascinated writers, from novelists and poets like Rudyard Kipling to chroniclers of travel, adventure and political intrigue like Robert Byron and Peter Hopkirk. Afghanistan has provided a marvellous setting and wealth of human characters for literary exploits; it is a place that really is larger than life.

  Yet, in part due to the stereotypes created by a colonial mindset, Afghans themselves have too often been portrayed as little more than a band of devious, violent and unscrupulous brigands. ‘Trust a Brahmin before a snake, and a snake before an harlot, and an harlot before a Pathan,’ Kimball O’Hara tells Colonel Creighton in Rudyard Kipling’s famous novel of life on the North West Frontier, Kim, published in 1901.

  The Pathans to which ‘Kim’ refers are the largest of the tribal groups that make up Afghanistan’s rich ethnic mix. Others include Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras, each a product of the country’s unique position at the crossroads of Asia, which itself has accounted for much of the political instability and given rise to the Afghans’ warlike reputation.

  Given this literary predilection to portray Afghanistan and its people in such a cardboard cut-out way, it was with some apprehension that I picked up Robin Jenkins’ novel, Dust on the Paw. It seemed to me unlikely that a writer from a Scottish background could do real justice to the exotic richness and vitality of the Afghan culture and way of life.

  It was in 1957 that Jenkins – a Lanarkshire boy, like myself – took a British Council teaching post in Kabul. ‘Snow came in through the roof and I taught wearing my overcoat, scarf and bunnet. It was pretty primitive,’ Jenkins recalled. Out of his experiences in this city, surrounded by the Hindu Kush mountains, came his tale of Abdul Wahab, an Afghan science teacher, who eagerly awaits the arrival of his British fiancée, Laura Johnstone, whom he met while when he was a student at Manchester University.

  Within a short time the couple find themselves the talk of the ex-patriot community as Miss Johnstone’s arrival stirs the attention of the Afghan Royal household and one Prince Naim, who sees her as the seal of approval on an East–West union.

  In this almost claustrophobic community, characterised by diplomatic double-dealing, and memsahibs in opera gloves, a story of interracial love set against the backdrop of 1950s Kabul unfolds. With its cross-cultural gossip, scandal, hearsay, and emotional manoeuvring, it’s a story worthy of those recounted in the crammed chaikhanas, teahouses, of the North West Frontier’s ‘storytellers’ bazaar’ where, over endless glasses of sweet green and black tea, Afghan business is done, and the vagaries of life talked about and mulled over.

  Somewhere in the background to Jenkins’ tale lurks a Cold War prelude to the years ahead, when Russia would ultimately flex its military and political muscle and invade Afghanistan.

  For anyone who has spent time living in the closed environs of an international community in a turbulent land, it’s Jenkins’ portrayal of such a disparate group of people – albeit one in the 1950s – that gives Dust on the Paw enduring resonance.

  For more than ten years during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the frontier town of Peshawar on the Pakistan side of the Khyber Pass housed just such a community. Like Saigon in Vietnam, Peshawar became the haunt of diplomats, guerrillas, journalists, mercenaries, aid workers and spies. All were there for the war raging across Afghanistan’s mountains and plains from Kabul to Kandahar.

  Like the International Club in Jenkins’ story, Peshawar’s American Club was where most of these roaming global misfits hung out. At ‘The Club’ they would sit at bar stools, covered with dust fresh from their last trip ‘inside’ (Afghanistan) describing the battle they had been in, might have been in, or wished they had been in.

  For those who were part of such a community it was a decade of adventure, but it was also a time of hopeful anticipation for the Afghans we befriended, in an Afghanistan we thought would soon be at peace.

  In the end of course the Soviets finally went home, pulling t
he last of their troops out and crossing the Amu Darya river into neighbouring Tajikistan. As the Russian tanks rumbled into history, this international enclave quickly moved from their frontier post in Peshawar into Kabul itself. While Kabul might have been ‘liberated’ from the communists, brick by brick it would now slowly be destroyed by rival Afghan militias fighting to control its streets.

  The city then was a place far removed from the quaint civilised surroundings Jenkins describes in Dust on the Paw. The kind of place where it was possible to sleep under trees ‘undisturbed by the wailing, from Indian and Afghan love songs, which went on all day from morning till midnight’.

  I remember at that time, in the mid 1990s, during a particularly bad bout of street fighting, iIt was like the Hundred Years War fought with twentieth-century weaponry, as gunmen emerged from mud homes to blast each other with rocket launchers and machine guns. Kabul’s canyons of ruins and pancaked buildings turned it into a latter-day Dresden. According to a United Nations report it was one of the most war-damaged cities on earth – and all this was before the arrival of the Taliban.

  These days things are little better. Kabul remains a dangerous, strange and contradictory place. Gone are the Taliban’s roaming enforcers from the department for the Prevention of Vice and Protection of Virtue. Newly arrived, however, is fortress Kabul, a mushrooming US base. It’s almost as if the ancient Bala Hissar castle that sits on the capital’s outskirts had been substituted by a new high-tech version in the heart of the city. Instead of mud and stone, the walls are high concrete ramparts padded with protective anti-explosive cladding and razor wire. The watchtowers are manned by nervous US soldiers in wraparound Oakleys and carrying M16s. Alongside bullet-pocked buildings housing refugees sits a Thai restaurant run by a woman who is said to follow the UN around the world’s troublespots providing culinary boltholes for its extensive international staff.

  These people are today’s real-life heirs to Alan Wint, Howard Winfield, Harold Moffatt, Laura Johnstone and the other characters that flit across the pages of this novel.

  While this is a Kabul that Robin Jenkins could never have imagined, it is one where the sights, sounds and smells described in Dust on the Paw still linger: the houses and buildings ‘like so many mud boxes flung down higgledly-piggledy on the hillside; the holy man’s tomb, sticks festooned with rags protruding from it like flags of humility’.

  The union of East and West so sought after by Prince Naim in Robin Jenkins’ story remains elusive in today’s Afghanistan. In its contemporary mode the power brokering that seems so considered in his narrative is now a brutal struggle for dominance in this long-suffering land.

  ‘It was his passionate belief that a writer found his material everywhere and near-at-hand,’ said writer Brian Morton in a personal appreciation of Jenkins after the novelist’s death in 2005.

  Jenkins certainly found material in Afghanistan, as he did in Barcelona, Borneo and other locations in which he found himself over the years. One can only imagine what he would have made of Kabul had he been alive to visit Afghanistan today. In one sense, so much has changed, but at the same time there is something enduring and persistent about life in this wonderful country: a place where multiple divisions remain – ethnic, sectarian, rural and urban, educated and uneducated.

  Afghanistan remains a deeply conservative country. Robin Jenkins, it’s probably fair to say, was a deeply conservative writer. Perhaps for that reason he got beneath its skin as few novelists ever have.

  David Pratt, 2006

  One

  IN HIS pale-blue distempered office Alan Wint, First Secretary and Head of Chancery, sat white-shirted, smoking, and dreaming in the Asian alpine sunshine of the day when, silver-haired and knighted, he would preside as His Excellency over some great embassy, in Washington, say, or Paris, or even Bonn. He would not have called it dreaming, though he would have conceded it was not quite reality. He had a secret name for it: purposeful meditation; and he considered it as useful a preparation for diplomatic advancement as the study of Oriental languages, or the courting of Whitehall potentates. Certainly it was more delightful and dignified than those, disturbing neither head nor conscience.

  The telephone on his desk rang. Instantly, with a tug to straighten his tie, he snatched it up, fearing it might be the Ambassador, reported to be irascible that morning. But no, it was the voice again, or rather the voices, for there were at least two; giggling, and gently uttering what he had been informed by Howard Winfield, the Oriental Secretary, expert in Persian, were improper proposals. Howard had supplied him with an appropriate rejoinder, and this he now spoke severely into the mouthpiece, causing the giggles to become, if anything, more seductive, so that he actually found his cheeks turning warmer.

  ‘Extraordinary,’ he murmured, as he put down the receiver, knowing it would ring again almost immediately, for the little bitches were persistent. And extraordinary it surely was, in a country said to be the third most backward in the world, as far as feminine emancipation was concerned. No woman over the age of puberty was allowed to appear in public without a long flowing gown of silk or cotton that shrouded from crown to toes, with a peephole of lace. The young men among the Afghans, who felt embittered about it, called a woman so enveloped a walking tent or a shuttlecock.

  The telephone rang again. Wint pounced on it and repeated the instruction before the giggles could even get started.

  ‘What the devil’s the matter with you, Alan? Have you gone out of your mind?’ The voice, loud, was sufficiently masculine and aggressively ambassadorial.

  Christ, breathed Wint. ‘Yes, sir?’ he said, as brightly as he could.

  ‘Did I understand you to tell me just now to go to hell?’

  ‘No, sir. Of course not, sir.’ Damn Howard’s conceit and juvenile sense of humour; and damn, too, his own so vulnerable trust. No wonder his wife Paula often warned him. A diplomat of all people, she would say, should know instinctively when to doubt. He was almost as trustful, she might add with satirical fondness, as the Reverend Manson Powrie, the minister of the American Church, who would hardly tell the devil himself to go to hell.

  The Ambassador, too, was an expert in Persian. He appeared to chuckle. ‘That, I assure you, Alan, is what the idiom means. Who’s been giving you lessons?’

  ‘I suppose Howard, sir. I thought the expression meant: go away and don’t bother me.’

  ‘It does, Alan. But isn’t it a strange one to use on the telephone?’

  ‘Perhaps not in the circumstances, sir.’

  ‘What circumstances?’

  ‘You see, sir, I thought it was those girls again.’

  ‘What girls? You don’t happen to be referring to our respected clerks, the Misses Winn and Anderson?’

  ‘Of course not, sir.’

  ‘What other girls do you keep about the office?’

  ‘I was intending to mention them to you, sir. I don’t of course keep them about the office. No, it’s like this, sir. These girls telephone the Embassy, ask for me, are put through, and then, well sir, it appears that what they say are, according to Howard, improper proposals.’

  ‘Improper proposals? Be more explicit.’

  ‘Well, sir, it appears they ask if I would like—’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Er – to put it bluntly, sir – to have certain relations with them.’

  ‘That’s hardly putting it bluntly, Alan. Are you their only victim?’

  ‘I believe so, sir.’

  ‘Why?’

  Because, darling, Paula had said, you are the only handsome man in the Embassy.

  ‘I really couldn’t say, sir. It’s a mystery to me.’

  ‘Are you sure they’re Afghans?’

  ‘Oh, I think so, sir. Very young, too; no more than schoolgirls.’

  ‘When did this start?’

  ‘Three days ago, sir.’

  ‘Any suspicions? Sounds as if it might be someone’s idea of a practical joke. Couldn’t be Americans?
It has the flavour of transatlantic humour.’

  ‘Doesn’t it, sir? But I think they really are Afghans.’ He did have suspicions, though, or rather Paula had. She thought it was the kind of puerile prank, conceived in drunkenness, that Harold Moffatt would stoop to; and he was almost the only one of the foreign community in contact with Afghan women. Besides, was he not always accusing him, Alan Wint, of having no sense of humour? Too many people believed that, thought Wint indignantly; including H.E. himself.

  ‘What does Paula say about it?’

  Wint frowned, not quite seeing why H.E. should ask that. It was extraordinary how, even in the most intelligent people, the desire to create laughter made for irrelevance.

  ‘She just laughed, sir.’ But she had also cried out, so loyally, that she’d like to smack their dusky little bottoms – her own so rosy. He smiled, almost forgetting the monocled presence at the other end of the wire.

  ‘Well, it’s your problem, Alan. But do something about it. After all, this is an Embassy, not a co-ed high school in Massachusetts.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘What I rang up about was this morning’s bulletin. I’ve just seen a copy. It can’t go out like that. Whose idea is it to spell Moslem with a small m?’

  ‘Well, sir, Tom Parry takes it down from the radio, but it’s Howard who usually edits it.’

  ‘I thought so. It’s Howard I want to talk to then. I don’t care what piece of damned philological sophistry he has to explain or excuse it, it won’t do; it’s got to be put right before the bulletin’s issued. After all, this is a Moslem country. How would we feel if the Afghans in England spelled Christian with a small c?’

  Wint smiled; it served Howard jolly well right. The smile dimmed a little as he realized that the rocket, however high-powered and explosive, would descend upon the Oriental Secretary’s premature bald spot like a puffball.

  ‘Perhaps it was just a typing error, sir?’ he suggested generously.