did not understand anything there.
“Shoes?” said the clerk after a moment. “You see the shoes?” as if nothing on earth could be more puzzling.
“Why shoes on?” said the captain, sounding stupid. What was spoiling there spoiled for one moment more, shrunk together in all that rottenness, and then must have hit bottom.
The box shook with the scramble inside, with the cramp muscled pain, with the white sun like steel hitting into the eyes there so they screwed up like sphincters, and then the man inside screamed himself out of his box.
He leaped up blind, hands out or claws out, he leaped up in a foam of stink and screams, no matter what next but up It happened he touched the clerk first. The clerk was slow with disinterest. And when the man touched he found a great deal of final strength and with his hands clamped around the clerk’s neck got dragged out of the box because the clerk was dragging and the captain tried to help drag the clerk free. Before this man from the box let go they had to hit him twice on the back of the head with the wooden axe handle.
“I need a bath,” said the clerk.
“Do you have any gin at home?” asked the captain. “I thought perhaps if you had any gin at home…”
“Yes, yes,” said the clerk, “come along. You have the gin while I have the bath.” They walked down the main street of Okar which was simply called la rue, because the official Arab name was impossible for most of the Europeans and the European names of the street had changed much too often.
“That isn’t much of a hospital you have there,” said the captain.
“The Italians built it. For the ministry of colonial archives.”
“They were hardly here long enough.”
“Look at the hotel,” said the clerk.
They looked at the hotel while they kept walking along the middle of the main street. They could not use the sidewalk which was sometimes no more than a curb. When it was not just a curb there would be chairs and tables which belonged to a coffee house, or stalls with fly-black meat where the butcher was, or perhaps lumber because a carpenter worked on the ground floor. It was that kind of a main street, not very long, and the hotel was the biggest building and even had thin little trees in front.
“It reminds me of Greece,” said the captain. “I don’t mean really Greek, but I can’t think of anything closer.”
“The Germans built it, and they were here less time than the Italians.”
“In America,” said the captain, “it would be a bank.”
“It was a Kaserne. You know, garrison quarters, or something like that.”
They talked like that until they came to Whitfield’s house, because they did not quite know what to say about the other matter. The clerk showed the way up a side street, through an arch in a house where a breeze was blowing, across the courtyard in back, and to the house behind that.
“The French built it,” he said. “They were here the longest.”
“The Arabs didn’t build anything?”
“There are native quarters,” said Whitfield, with his tone just a little bit as if these were still Empire days.
His two rooms were on the second floor and there was even a balcony. The captain looked at the balcony while the clerk yelled down the stairs for his Arab to bring two buckets of water and some lemon juice. There was no view, the captain saw, just rooftops and heat waves above that. And the balcony was not usable because it was full of cartons.
“You do have gin,” said the captain.
“Those are empty.”
The clerk turned the ceiling fans on, one in each room, and then went to the landing again to yell for the Arab. He came back, taking off his clothes.
“I don’t think he’ll come,” he said and threw his jacket on a horsehair couch. The couch was not usable because it was full of books.
“Who, the mayor?”
“No, Remal will come. He said so in the hospital.”
“I don’t understand why he wanted to see you and me.”
“That’s because he didn’t say.”
The clerk kept walking all this time and dropping his clothes. When he got to the second room he was quite naked.
There was a brass bed in this room, a dresser, and a tin tub with handles.
“I’ll just have to use the same water again,” said the clerk, and stepped into his tub.
“Did you say you had gin, Whitfield?”
The clerk sighed when he sat down in the water, reached down to the bottom of the tub, and brought up a bottle. The label was floating off.
“This way it keeps a degree of coolness,” he said. “There is ice only at the hotel. You see the glasses?”
The captain saw the glasses on the dresser and then was told to fetch also the clay jug from the window sill. The gray earthenware was sweating small, shiny water pearls which trembled, rolled over the belly of the jug and became stains shaped like amoebae.
“It’s a sour wine,” said the clerk. “Very safe,” and he uncorked the gin bottle.
They mixed gin and sour wine and the glasses felt fairly cool in their hands.
“ Min skoal din skoal,” said the clerk for politeness.
The captain didn’t recognize the pronunciation and said nothing. He made himself another glass while the clerk watched from the bathtub. There was a deep cushiony valley where the captain sat on the bed and the clerk thought, He looks like an egg sitting up, beard notwithstanding. I am drinking too fast “What a sight,” said the captain. “That creature we found there.”
The clerk stretched one leg out and put it on the rim of the tub. He looked at his toe, at the big one in particular, and thought how anonymous the toe looks. No face at all.
“I can’t remember what he looked like, do you know that?” said the captain. “All that hair and filth.”
“When he came to,” said the clerk, “the way he kept curling up.” He said it low, and to nobody, and when he thought of the man on the hospital bed he did with his toes what he had seen on the hospital bed. “God,” he mumbled, “the way he kept curling up-”
They said little else until the mayor came and they did not hear him because of the soft, native shoes he was wearing. Or because of the way he walked. Remal came straight into the bedroom, a very big man but walking as if he were small and light. Small steps which did not make him bounce or dip, but they gave an impression as if Remal could float.
“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” he said in English, and this also confused the impression he made. Remal looked as native as a tourist might wish. He had an immobile terra cotta face, with black female eyes and a thin male mouth. He wore a stitched skullcap which the clerk had once called a yamulke, to which Remal had answered, “Please don’t use the Jewish name for it again. Or I’ll kill you.” This politely, with a smile, but the clerk had felt sure that Remal meant it.
“I’ll fix you one of these,” said the captain, and looked around for another glass.
“Don’t,” said the clerk. He put his leg back into the tub and curled up in the water. “He’s Mohammedan, you know, but he won’t kill you because he’s also polite.”
“Please,” said Remal. He made a very French gesture of self-deprecation and smiled. “I’ll have something else. Where is your man?”
“Couldn’t find him. Disappeared. Captain, you might fix me a Christian-type cocktail.”
Remal left the room and went out to the landing and then the two men in the bedroom could hear him roar. “What was that?” and the captain stopped mixing.
“It’s a kind of Arabic which a European can never learn,” said the clerk.
When Remal came back he brought a chair along from the other room, flounced the long skirt of the shirt-like thing he was wearing, doing this in the only way a long, shirt-like thing can be handled, and sat down.
“Ah, Whitfield,” he said. “How relaxing to see you.”
“Stop flattering me. I will not give you the bathtub.”
