White Teeth

‘Dead or fled… dead or fled,’ said the Russian, highly amused, turning a matchstick over and over between his finger and thumb. ‘Good phrase this… funny phrase. No, well, you see, I would have thought the same, but we have reliable information – from your own secret service, in fact – that there is a senior officer, at this very moment, hiding in that house. There.’ He pointed to the house on the horizon.

‘The Doctor? Some little lads told us about him. I mean, he must be shitting himself with fear if you lot are after him,’ said Archie, by way of a compliment, ‘but I’m sure they said he’s just some sick bloke; they called him Dr Sick. Oi: he ain’t English, is he? Traitor or something?’

‘Hmm? Oh no. No, no, no, no. Dr Marc-Pierre Perret. A young Frenchman. A prodigy. Very brilliant. He has worked in a scientific capacity for the Nazis since before the war. On the sterilization programme, and later the euthanasia policy. Internal German matters. He was one of the very loyal.’

‘Blimey,’ said Archie, wishing he knew what it all meant. ‘Wotchyagunnadoo?’

‘Catch him and take him to Poland, where he will be dealt with by the authorities.’

‘Authorities,’ said Archie, still impressed but not really paying attention. ‘Blimey.’

Archie’s attention span was always short, and he had become distracted by the big, amiable Russian’s strange habit of looking in two directions at once.

‘As the information we received was from your secret service and as you are the highest- ranking officer here Captain… Captain…’

A glass eye. It was a glass eye with a muscle behind it that would not behave.

‘I’m afraid I don’t know your name or rank,’ said the Russian, looking at Archie with one eye and at some ivy creeping round the church door with the other.

‘Who? Me? Jones,’ said Archie, following the eye’s revolving path: tree, potato, Archie, potato.

‘Well, Captain Jones, it would be an honour if you would lead the expedition up the hill.’

‘Captain – what? Blimey, no, you’ve got it arse-ways-up,’ said Archie, escaping the magnetic force of the eye, and refocusing on himself, dressed in Dickinson-Smith’s shiny buttoned uniform.

‘I’m not a bloody-’

‘The Lieutenant and I would be pleased to take charge,’ broke in a voice behind him. ‘We’ve been out of the action for quite a while. It is about time we got back in the thick of it, as they say.’

Samad had stepped out on to the front steps silently as a shadow, in another of Dickinson- Smith’s uniforms and with a cigarette hanging casually off his lower lip like a sophisticated sentence. He was always a good-looking boy, and dressed in the shiny buttons of authority this was only accentuated; in the sharp daylight, framed by the church door, he cut quite an awesome figure.

‘What my friend meant,’ said Samad in his most charming Anglo-Indian lilt, ‘is that he is not the bloody captain. I am the bloody captain. Captain Samad Iqbal.’

‘Comrade Nikolai – Nick – Pesotsky.’

Samad and the Russian laughed together heartily, shook hands again. Samad lit a cigarette.

‘He is my lieutenant. Archibald Jones. I must apologize if I behaved strangely earlier; the food’s been disagreeing with me. Now: we’ll set off tonight, after dark shall we? Lieutenant?’ said Samad, looking at Archie with a private encoded intensity.

‘Yes,’ blurted Archie.

‘By the way, comrade,’ said Samad, striking a match off the wall and lighting up, ‘I hope you do not mind if I ask – is that a glass eye? It is most realistic.’

‘Yes! I purchased it in St Petersburg. I was separated from my own in Berlin. It’s a quite incredible likeness, don’t you think?’

The friendly Russian popped the eye out of its socket, and laid the slimy pearl in his palm for Samad and Archie to see. When the war started, thought Archie, all us boys were crowded around a fag-card of Grable’s legs. Now the war’s ended we’re huddled round some poor bastard’s eye. Blimey.

For a moment the eye slid up and down each side of the Russian’s hand, then came to a restful halt in the centre of his longish, creased life-line. It looked up at Lieutenant Archie and Captain Samad with an unblinking stare.

That evening Lieutenant Jones got his first taste of real war. In two army jeeps, Archie, the eight Russians, Gozan the cafe owner and Gozan’s nephew were led by Samad on a mission up the hill to catch a Nazi. While the Russians swigged away at bottles of Sambucca until not a man among them could remember the first lines of their own national anthem, while Gozan sold roasted chicken pieces to the highest bidders, Samad stood atop the first jeep, high as a kite on his white dust, his arms flailing around, cutting the night into bits and pieces, screaming instructions that his battalion were too drunk to listen to and he himself was too far gone to understand.

Archie sat at the back of the second jeep, quiet, sober, frightened and in awe of his friend. Archie had never had a hero: he was five when his father went out for a proverbial pack of fags and neglected to return, and, never being much of a reader, the many awful books written to provide young men with fatuous heroes had never crossed his path – no swashbucklers, no one-eyed pirates, no fearless rapscallions for Archie. But Samad, as he stood up there with his shiny officer buttons glistening in the moonlight like coins in a wishing- well, had struck the seventeen-year-old Archie full square, an uppercut to the jaw that said: here is a man for whom no life-path is too steep. Here was a raving lunatic standing on a tank, here was a friend, here was a hero, in a form Archie had never expected. Three quarters of the way up, however, the ad hoc road the tanks had been following thinned unexpectedly, forcing the tank to brake suddenly and throwing the heroic Captain in a backward somersault over the tank, arse in the air.

‘No one comes here for long, long time,’ said Gozan’s nephew, munching on a chicken bone, philosophically. ‘This?’ He looked at Samad (who had landed next to him) and pointed to the jeep they sat in. ‘No way.’

So Samad gathered his now paralytic battalion around him and began the march up the mountain in search of a war he could one day tell his grandchildren about, as his great-grandfather’s exploits had been told to him. Their progress was hampered by large clods of earth, torn from parts of the hill by the reverberation of past bombs and left at intervals along the pathway. From many, the roots of trees shot up impotently and languished in the air; to get by, it was necessary for them to be hacked away with the bayonets of the Russian guns.

‘Look like hell!’ snorted Gozan’s nephew, drunkenly scrambling through one such set of roots. ‘Everything look like hell!’

‘Pardon him. He feel strongly because he is young. But it is the truth. It was not – how do you say – not argument of ours, Lieutenant Jones,’ said Gozan, who had been bribed two pairs of boots to keep quiet about his friends’ sudden rise in rank. ‘What do we have to do with all this?’ He wiped a tear, half inebriated, half overcome with emotion. ‘What we have to do with? We peaceful people. We don’t want be in war! This hill – once beautiful! Flowers, birds, they were singing, you understand? We are from the East. What have the battles of the West to do with us?’

Instinctively, Archie turned to Samad, expecting one of his speeches; but before Gozan had even finished, Samad had suddenly picked up his pace, and within a minute was running, pushing ahead of the intoxicated Russians, who were flailing about with their bayonets. Such was his speed that he was soon out of sight, turning a blind corner and disappearing into the swallowing night. Archie dithered for a few minutes, but then loosened himself from Gozan’s nephew’s merciless grip (he was just embarking upon the tale of a Cuban prostitute he had met in Amsterdam) and began to run to where he had last seen the flicker of a silver button, another one of the sharp turnings that the mountain path took whenever it liked.

‘Captain Ick-Ball! Wait, Captain Ick-Ball!’

He ran on, repeating the phrase, waving his torch, which did nothing but light up the undergrowth in increasingly bizarre anthropomorphisms; here a man, here a woman on her knees, here three dogs howling at the moon. He spent some time like this, stumbling about in the darkness.

‘Put your light on! Captain Ick-Ball! Captain Ick-Ball!’