White Teeth

Without them noticing, the friendly Russian had ambled up behind them and was looking in horror at Samad, sucking his gun like a lollipop.

‘Cleaning it,’ stuttered Samad, clearly shaken, removing the gun from his mouth.

‘That’s how they do it,’ Archie explained, ‘in Bengal.’

The war that twelve men expected to find in the grand old house on the hill, the war that Samad wanted pickled in a jar to hand to his grandchildren as a souvenir of his youth, was not there. Dr Sick was as good as his name, sitting in an armchair in front of a wood-burning fire. Sick. Huddled in a rug. Pale. Very thin. In no uniform, just an open-neck white shirt and some dark coloured trousers. He was a young man too, not over twenty-five, and he did not flinch or make any protest when they all burst in, guns at the ready. It was as if they had just dropped in on a pleasant French farmhouse, making the faux pas of coming without invitation and bringing guns to the dinner table. The room was lit entirely by gas lamps in their tiny lady-shaped casings, and the light danced up the wall, illuminating a set of eight paintings that showed a continuous scene of Bulgarian countryside. In the fifth one Samad recognized his church, a blip of sandy paint on the horizon. The paintings were placed at intervals and wrapped round the room in a panoramic. Unframed and in a mawkish attempt at the modern style, a ninth sat a little too close to the fireplace on an easel, the paint still wet. Twelve guns were pointed at the artist. And when the Artist-Doctor turned to face them, he had what looked like blood-tinged tears rolling down his face.

Samad stepped forward. He had had a gun in his mouth and was emboldened by it. He had eaten an absurd amount of morphine, fallen through the hole morphine creates, and survived. You are never stronger, thought Samad as he approached the Doctor, than when you land on the other side of despair.

‘Are you Dr Perret?’ he demanded, making the Frenchman wince at the anglicized pronunciation, sending more bloody tears down his cheeks. Samad kept his gun pointed at him.

‘Yes, I am he.’

‘What is that? That in your eyes?’ asked Samad.

‘I have diabetic retinopathy, monsieur.’

‘What?’ asked Samad, still pointing the gun, determined not to undermine his moment of glory with an unheroic medical debate.

‘It means that when I do not receive insulin, I excrete blood, my friend. Through my eyes. It makes my hobby,’ he gestured at the paintings that surrounded him, ‘not a little difficult. There were to be ten. A 180-degree view. But it seems you have come to disturb me.’ He sighed and stood up. ‘So. Are you going to kill me, my friend?’

‘I’m not your friend.’

‘No, I do not suppose that you are. But is it your intention to kill me? Pardon me if I say you do not look old enough to squash flies.’ He looked at Samad’s uniform. ‘Mon Dieu, you are very young to have got so far in life, Captain.’ Samad shifted uncomfortably, catching Archie’s look of panic in the corner of his vision. Samad placed his feet a little further apart and stood firm.

‘I’m sorry if I seem tiresome on this point but… is it your intention, then, to kill me?’

Samad’s arm stayed perfectly still, the gun unmoving. He could kill him, he could kill him in cold blood. Samad did not need the cover of darkness or the excuse of war. He could kill him and they both knew it. The Russian, seeing the look in the Indian’s eye, stepped forward. ‘Pardon me, Captain.’

Samad remained silent, facing the Doctor, so the Russian stepped forward. ‘We do not have intentions in this matter,’ said the Russian, addressing Dr Sick. ‘We have orders to bring you to Poland.’

‘And there, will I be killed?’

‘That will be for the proper authorities to decide.’

The Doctor cocked his head at an angle and narrowed his eyes. ‘It is just… it is just a thing a man likes to be told. It is curiously significant to a man to be told. It is only polite, at the very least. To be told whether he shall die or whether he shall be spared.’

‘That will be for the proper authorities to decide,’ repeated the Russian.

Samad walked behind the Doctor and stuck the gun into the back of his head. ‘Walk,’ he said.

‘For the proper authorities to decide… Isn’t peace-time civilized?’ remarked Dr Sick, as a group of twelve men, all pointing guns at his head, led him out of the house.

Later that night, at the bottom of the hill, the battalion left Dr Sick handcuffed to the jeep and adjourned to the cafe.

‘You play poker?’ asked a very merry Nikolai, addressing Samad and Archie as they entered the room.

‘I play anything, me,’ said Archie.

‘The more pertinent question,’ said Samad, taking his seat with a wry smile, ‘is: do I play it well?’

‘And do you, Captain Iqbal?’

‘Like a master,’ said Samad, picking up the cards dealt to him and fanning them out in his one hand.

‘Well,’ said Nikolai, pouring more Sambucca for everyone, ‘since our friend Iqbal is so confident, it may be best to start relatively small. We’ll start with cigarettes and let’s see where that takes us.’

Cigarettes took them to medals, which took them to guns, which took them to radios, which took them to jeeps. By midnight, Samad had won three jeeps, seven guns, fourteen medals, the land attached to Gozan’s sister’s house, and an IOU for four horses, three chickens and a duck.

‘My friend,’ said Nikolai Pesotsky, his warm, open manner replaced by an anxious gravity. ‘You must give us a chance to win back our possessions. We cannot possibly leave things as they are.’

‘I want the Doctor,’ said Samad, refusing to catch the eye of Archibald Jones, who sat open-mouthed and drunk in his chair. ‘In exchange for the things I have won.’

‘What on earth for?’ said Nikolai, astonished, leaning back in his chair. ‘What possible use-’

‘My own reasons. I wish to take him tonight and not to be followed, and for the incident to go unreported.’

Nikolai Pesotsky looked at his hands, looked round the table, and then at his hands once more. Then he reached into his pocket and threw Samad the keys.

Once outside, Samad and Archie got into the jeep containing Dr Sick, who was asleep on the dashboard, started the engine and drove into the blackness.

Thirty miles from the village, Dr Sick woke up to a hushed argument concerning his imminent future.

‘But why?’ hissed Archie.

‘Because, from my point of view, the very problem is that we need blood on our hands, you see? As an atonement. Do you not see, Jones? We have been playing silly buggers in this war, you and I. There is a great evil that we have failed to fight and now it is too late. Except we have him, this opportunity. Let me ask you: why was this war fought?’

‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ blustered Archie, in lieu of an answer.

‘So that in the future we may be free. The question was always: What kind of a world do you want your children to grow up in? And we have done nothing. We are at a moral crossroads.’

‘Look, I don’t know what you’re on about and I don’t want to know,’ snapped Archie. ‘We’re going to dump this one’ – he motioned to the semi-conscious Sick – ‘at the first barracks we come across, then you and me are going our separate ways and that’s the only crossroads I care about.’

‘What I have realized, is that the generations,’ Samad continued as they sped through miles and miles of unchanging flatlands, ‘they speak to each other, Jones. It’s not a line, life is not a line – this is not