Some Kind of Grace Read online

  SOME KIND OF GRACE

  Robin Jenkins has been hailed as the ‘greatest living fiction-writer in Scotland’ (The Scotsman, 2000). Born in 1912, he studied at Glasgow University and has worked for the Forestry Commission and in the teaching profession. He has 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.

  ROBIN JENKINS

  Some Kind

  of Grace

  Introduced by

  James Meek

  This eBook edition published in 2011 by

  Birlinn Limited

  West Newington House

  Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.birlinn.co.uk

  First published in 1960 by MacDonald & Co, London

  This edition first published in 2010 by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd.

  Copyright © Robin Jenkins, 1960

  Introduction copyright © James Meek, 2004

  The moral right of Robin Jenkins to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  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: 978-0-85790-105-7

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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

  Introduction

  Among the foreigners drawn into Afghanistan in the late autumn of 2001 by the hijacked airliner attacks on America’s eastern seaboard were many, like myself, who were seeing the country for the first time. As Robin Jenkins had more than four decades earlier, we saw beauty, desolation and ruin. His ruin had a different character to ours. Depending on the country we entered Afghanistan from, we saw how powerful empires had been unable to treat, with their rough medicine, this hard crust at the rim of their dominions. They had not been able to offer it their treatment, but nor had they been able to leave it alone, so they and their successors had scratched and poked at it instead, infecting it with warlords and weapons and broken industrial showpieces. If you came in from the south, the scab-pickers were Britain, the US and Pakistan. If you came from the north, it was Russia and Iran.

  In 2001, we were walking among the ruins of the end of the Cold War; Osama Bin Laden as Islamist irregular general was a creation of the CIA, made to break the Soviets. The Afghanistan which Jenkins recreates lies in the Cold War’s early years, when the US and the USSR competed not only through arms shipments, ideology and nuclear posturing but through gifts of roads, schools and clinics. The strategists in Moscow and Washington may have been cynical, but the engineers, teachers and doctors from the superpowers weren’t, not always. The Russians and the Americans shared a belief in progress and human mastery over nature. Without realising it, both wanted to see a world of pretty nuclear families – their women unveiled – driving cars and having barbecues at the weekend. One of the things which strikes the later visitor to Afghanistan about Jenkins’ novel is that he shows how in this time of hope, the late 1950s, there were ruins already there. His is very far from a hopeless vision. But whatever our illusions about an idyll before the long, cruel Afghan war – which we tend to date from 1979, the year of the Soviet invasion – Jenkins removes them. He shows poverty, dirt, disease and despair generations old. He shows feudalism and backwardness, suspicion and bigotry, if tempered by generosity and piety. He portrays a local elite exposed to just enough of European and American ways to be attracted to them, without the ability to use them to change their country, and thus made more cynical themselves. In this book Afghan men are often said to look like Christ, but these Christs are not bringers of any good word; rather, harrowed peasants who wouldn’t be surprised to be crucified, because crucifixion is the kind of thing that has been happening to men like them for thousands of years. When Jenkins describes the great stone Buddhas of Bamian, whose destruction by the Taliban was so mourned around the world, it is to mock the pomposity of the vanished conquerors who put them there before Britain, Russia or America existed. Looking at the Buddhas, the hero of Jenkins’ novel, John McLeod, is reminded ‘of the attempts by Renaissance artists to portray the infant Christ. Instead of divine innocence a crafty senility seemed to be achieved.’

  How much is familiar in Jenkins’ Afghanistan, and how much finds an echo now, down to the hero’s decision at one point to pretend to be French in order to avoid death at the hands of British-hating locals whose religion and tribal pride have merged into one. The dust so fine that it is liquid, the ubiquity of weapons and the feudal levy of warriors by village, the isolation of women from outsiders, the ease with which well-paid, well-supplied foreigners make themselves comfortable at their compound dinner parties (although today they would be unlikely to wear black tie). Some things have changed. The everyday weaponry is more deadly. The poplars Jenkins writes of have largely disappeared into cooking fires; northern Afghanistan is bleakly deforested. Only the mulberry groves remain. And the outside world, for better and for worse, intrudes ever more deeply, usually to market rather than to teach. This is as true of global Islam – the Saudi brand, Wahhabism – as it is of satellite TV or Pepsi.

  It takes a bad book to remind us how hard it is to write a good one. Because this is not a bad book, let me make the reminder of how narrow a space there is between avoiding sentimentality, on one side, and making your characters expressions of pure cynicism, on the other. Jenkins finds this space. He finds another rare spot, that place of honesty where multiple contradictory truths reside, where men and women can be both wicked and brave, vengeful and remorseful, bigoted and generous; where, when they go looking for absolute truths, they fail to find them.

  ‘Tell me,’ murmured McLeod, ‘is it true, according to the Koran, that any faithful follower of Islam can make sure of his place in paradise by exterminating an infidel?’

  The Commandant chuckled, rather sourly. ‘Yes, I believe you could find that somewhere in the Koran,’ he said. ‘It is like your own Bible. Everything is in it that suits you. If you wish to kill your enemy, search through the pages, and you will find sanction. If you wish to forgive him and love him like a brother you will find sanction for that, too. A man takes his choice of what God advises.’

  McLeod and the man and the woman he is seeking in Afghanistan are from Scotland. In the hands of another writer this might be a barely relevant detail. They’re all Brits, Europeans, westerners, abroad. Jenkins makes it otherwise. The hero’s origins are expressed in the comparisons he makes and the language he uses. An Afghan headman is described through the eyes of McLeod – a senior British diplomat – as ‘glaikit’. The hero is reminded at one point of Edinburgh Castle; he contrasts Afghan mountains with those of his native Wester Ross. Elsewhere the transference is more loaded, and points to a purpose. In the remotest, most serene Afghan valley McLeod visits, he hears someone call to him in Gaelic. McLeod recalls visiting the religious parents of the missing woman in Scotland who in the gentle voices of good churchgoers invoke eternal damnation for her partner in the bad fire. In his meetings with Afghans McLeod veers from contempt through an unpleasant disgust to admiration, almost an implied envy. They are the same emotions expressed by English and Lowland visitors to the remote glens and islands of Scotland hundreds of years ago, where En
glish speakers were scarce. James Boswell, accompanying Samuel Johnson in Skye on a walk not much more than a generation after Culloden, talks of being accompanied by a local servant ‘quite like a savage ... the usual figure of a Skye-boy, is a lown with bare legs and feet, a dirty kilt, ragged coat and waistcoat, a bare head, and a stick in his hand, which, I suppose, is partly to help the lazy rogue to walk . . .’ Later visitors saw the Gaels more romantically. Besides being an atheist among believers and a wealthy foreigner among the poor, McLeod, in the glens of Afghanistan, is a Highlander among highlanders, seeing the squalor and the dignity both as an outsider and, through history, from within. He understands the destructiveness of progress, destroying worldly innocence and worldly ignorance together, but he is aware, too, of the dark side of that apparent innocence. It is not just governments which can make trouble for these archaic, unmodernised clans, but individual adventurers from big cities overseas, concealing their selfishness under a banner of romantic ideals – Lawrence of Arabia, Osama bin Laden, in a smaller way, some of the characters in Jenkins’ novel and, perhaps, in a sense, even Bonnie Prince Charlie – exploiting and provoking the un-worldliness of the glens into actions whose terrible consequences they cannot foresee.

  James Meek

  June 2004

  One

  Tugging back the curtains, McLeod noticed that round the tawny hornet he’d killed the night before were swarming dozens of tiny black ants, devotedly dismembering it and carrying the fragments down a crack in the window ledge. For a minute he watched them, while from a wireless set in the bazaar across the street a love-song shrilled out, full of long, repetitive nasal passages, like a parody of bagpipes. It cheerfully told the story of a young man who after wooing a girl for years went off, just as she was about to admit his merits, and married another, for spite and peace of mind.

  Into McLeod’s contemplation another pair of unlucky lovers entered: Kemp and Margaret Duncan, as dead, so authority sadly but sharply insisted, as this hornet. Yet here to be seen, to be touched even, was the insect’s corpse, though growing less minute by minute. Of Kemp’s and Margaret’s not so much as a red or yellow hair had been found. In their case who had been the scavengers? Wolves, the police had said; but did wolves, like domestic dogs, really carry bones off to bury them in the forest? And above all, in this land of public prayer, where the beggar in rags went down so punctiliously on his knees, would not a man so dynamic with the certainty of God, as Kemp latterly had been from all accounts, and so contemptuously destitute of the world’s goods, be immune from the attacks of superstitious robbers?

  Relaxing, turning from speculations that had troubled him for months, McLeod gazed out of the window. Already at eight in the morning the sky was blue, the sun hot, and the street busy. Last time he had seen this main street, five years ago, it had been made of earth like all the other roads in the country, but now, thanks to the astute benevolence of the Russians, it was tarmacadamed, though here and there the usual subsidences were marked off by large stones. One of the buses presented by the Russians to commemorate the recent visit of Krushchev came along, crammed to the doors; the postillion, in his brocaded skull-cap and cotton pantaloons, clung to the steps with toes and fingers, yet he would be, McLeod knew, grinning and marvellously good-tempered. Less carefree, with the burdens of their country’s backwardness and neutrality to carry, came business men, government clerks, teachers and students, in lounge suits and woolly caps, cycling past with brief-cases fastened to the bars of their bicycles. Most of the private cars were tinny and Russian, with rancorous horns; but one, fitter for a Hollywood boulevard than for this mud-built, sun-lucky city on the roof of the world, glided by, long, gleaming, cream and crimson, with white-turbaned driver, and three women shrouded in silken shaddries as passengers.

  Among the many pedestrians, walking by the open ditch, was a group of tough, black-bearded men newly down from the hills, carrying bundles wrapped in brightly striped rugs and looking at all these signs of modernity with reluctant amazement and limited admiration. Some had rifles slung round their shoulders, and all had killing knives at their belts. These would strike as instinctively as snakes. A gesture, not intended to be hostile, might well be interpreted by them or their like as such, with swift, snake-like suspiciousness. In their remote villages the gun and the knife and the bold hand were still law, as they had been for hundreds of years. If Kemp had angered the likes of these, as he could have in any one of a dozen characteristic ways, they would not have troubled to wait for darkness before despatching him, and with him the girl so unaccountably his companion.

  In the middle of the street the traffic policeman stood on his circular dais of stone and made gestures that were more like vague threats than directions. Motorists regarded him as the chief of the many hazards. The drivers of ghoddies or horse-carriages were careful not to use their whips as they passed him; these were forbidden in a country where it was not unusual for a prisoner to hobble shackled along the street, guarded by soldiers with bayonets, without anybody being shocked and with few being curious. Here, what would have caused gasps of horror in the West, was merrily laughed at. Dogs were handed lumps of poisoned liver and their agonies were found amusing. Yet fathers were publicly devoted to their children, and carried them about in their arms, with many caresses. Donald Kemp and Margaret Duncan might well have been murdered by such a father, who needed only to wash his hands before fondling his children again.

  Raising his eyes, McLeod gazed over the many flat roofs at the far-off peaks, forever topped with snow. Among them, if his notion was right, Donald and Margaret might well be still surviving, in body at least; but from what he had already heard it could be that if he did succeed in finding them he and they would for the rest of their lives wish he had not.

  Picking up his towel, McLeod went along to try his luck at the bathroom again. The corridor was wide and pillared; in a spacious alcove were basket chairs and settees. Magnificence had been diffidently attempted, shabbiness inevitably achieved; the effect was as everywhere in this country, a mixture of pathos and sinisterness. The pillars were sloughing; the coverings of the chairs were faded and stained; and dust lay everywhere as thick as pollen, obscuring the beauty of the native carpets.

  McLeod knocked on the bathroom door, though all he needed to do to open it was to give it a push. There were a key and a lock, but the one didn’t fit the other. The lavatory, which was meant to flush but didn’t, stood in a corner and the door was out of reach of the longest, most anxious arm.

  ‘Come in, if you got pants on,’ drawled an American voice. ‘Not that I could stop you, if I wanted to.’

  McLeod hesitated, and then entered. Seated on the lavatory was a tall, thin man with grey hair, ascetic face, and gold-rimmed spectacles. Despite his posture he looked like a professor of semantics; such were numerous and prominent among America’s contribution toward this country’s progress. The trousers at his feet were of cream linen, dapper and freshly pressed. He stretched out his hand to indicate how, despite its gold amulet ring, it could not possibly reach to the door.

  ‘Goddamn key’s gone,’ he said. ‘Not, I grant you, that it was any use when it was here. Say, if it’s ever found, d’you think it’d be a good idea using it to turn the lock on this shit-house of a country, giving me personally plenty time to get the hell out of it?’

  McLeod did not smile. He knew that in return for his few esoteric duties the other would be getting a salary thirty times that of a Cabinet Minister; his long-tailed, two-toned Chevrolet would be waiting outside; his bank account in the States would be growing fat.

  ‘Don’t you like it here?’ asked McLeod.

  ‘Are you kidding? Nobody could like it here that’s seen better. D’you know the height of the walls round the king’s palace? Thirty feet. Now if you live in a place you love you just don’t shut yourself up behind thirty-foot walls. No, sir. By the way, friend, if you want to shave, go right ahead. That tap’s a liar, of course; there’s no hot wa
ter. I got a bacha to fetch me some, in that blue mug there right under your eyes. Take a peek at it. I think I’m gonna keep it as a souvenir. There’s a museum in my home town would sure give it pride of place. Genghis Khan passed this way; well, that was his true original shaving mug, water and all.’

  The mug was handleless with chips round its rim. Inside was the grime, hardly of centuries, but certainly of weeks; about an inch of scummy water lay in it. McLeod could easily picture the sad, hopeless smile of the boy who had brought it; he would know it was dirty, he would wish it could be cleaner, but he would also feel that to make it clean to the point of acceptance by an American was beyond him.

  The American was pulling the chain patiently but without hope.

  ‘You English?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Gee, if you’ll pardon me saying it, friend, you sure look English, and you talk like it.’

  ‘Scottish,’ said McLeod.

  The American laughed the distinction to foolishness. ‘Same thing,’ he said. ‘Say, I feel like a bell-man doing this; no pealing cascades of water, though. Scotch, eh? Now there’s the difference, see. Just before you came knocking at the door, there was a big Russian. When I hollered “Come in”, he took one peek, saw me on the can, and vamoosed, shocked to hell. You never turned a hair. I guess we must be natural allies, after all.’

  He turned at the door. ‘Just arrived?’ he asked.

  ‘A couple of days ago.’

  ‘Heartiest commiserations. Work at the Embassy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘With the U.N.?’

  McLeod shook his head.

  ‘O.K. I pass. Mom says: “Wilbur, ask twice. If the man still says no, then he doesn’t want to tell you. That’s the time for you to shut your big mouth and go.” Be seeing you, friend.’