Zadie Smith - White Teeth

‘My friend, what is it you find so darned mysterious about me that it has you in such constant revelries?’

‘You what?’ said Archie, flustered, for he was not one to have private conversations on army time. ‘Nobody, I mean, nothing – I mean, well, what do you mean?’

They both spoke under their breath, for the conversation was not private in the other sense, there being two other privates and a captain in their five-man Churchill rolling through Athens on its way to Thessaloníki. It was 1 April 1945. Archie Jones was the driver of the tank, Samad was the wireless operator, Roy Mackintosh was the co-driver, Will Johnson was crunched on a bin as the gunner, and Thomas Dickinson-Smith was sitting on the slightly elevated chair, which, even though it squashed his head against the ceiling, his newly granted captaincy would not permit his pride to relinquish. None of them had seen anyone else but each other for three weeks.

‘I mean merely that it is likely we have another two years stuck in this thing.’

A voice crackled through the wireless, and Samad, not wishing to be seen neglecting his duties, answered it speedily and efficiently.

‘And?’ asked Archie, after Samad had given their coordinates.

‘And there is only so much of that eyeballing that a man can countenance. Is it that you are doing some research into wireless operators or are you just in a passion over my arse?’

Their captain, Dickinson-Smith, who was in a passion over Samad’s arse (but not only that; also his mind; also two slender muscular arms that could only make sense wrapped around a lover; also those luscious light green/brown eyes) silenced the conversation immediately.

‘Ick-Ball! Jones! Get on with it. Do you see anyone else here chewing the fat?’

‘I was just making an objection, sir. It is hard, sir, for a man to concentrate on his Foxtrot F’s and his Zebra Z’s and then his dots and his dashes when he has a pug-dog fellow who follows his every move with his pug-dog eyes, sir. In Bengal one would assume such eyes belonged to a man filled with-’

‘Shut it, Sultan, you poof,’ said Roy, who hated Samad and his poncey-radio-operator-ways.

‘ Mackintosh ,’ said Dickinson-Smith, ‘come now, let’s not stop the Sultan. Continue, Sultan.’

To avoid the possible suggestion that he was partial to Samad, Captain Dickinson-Smith made a practice of picking on him and encouraging his hateful Sultan nickname, but he never did it in the right way; it was always too soft, too similar to Samad’s own luxurious language and only resulted in Roy and the other eighty Roys under his direct command hating Dickinson-Smith, ridiculing him, openly displaying their disrespect; by April 1945 they were utterly filled with contempt for him and sickened by his poncey-commander-queer-boy-ways. Archie, new to the First Assault Regiment R. E., was just learning this.

‘I just told him to shut it, and he’ll shut it if he knows what’s good for him, the Indian Sultan bastard. No disrespect to you, sir, ’course,’ added Roy, as a polite gesture.

Dickinson-Smith knew in other regiments, in other tanks, it simply was not the case that people spoke back to their superiors or even spoke at all. Even Roy’s Polite Gesture was a sign of Dickinson-Smith’s failure. In those other tanks, in the Shermans, Churchills and Matildas dotted over the waste of Europe like resilient cockroaches, there was no question of respect or disrespect. Only Obey, Disobey, Punish.

‘Sultan… Sultan…’ Samad mused. ‘Do you know, I wouldn’t mind the epithet, Mr Mackintosh, if it were at least accurate . It’s not historically accurate , you know. It is not, even geographically speaking, accurate. I am sure I have explained to you that I am from Bengal . The word “Sultan” refers to certain men of the Arab lands – many hundreds of miles west of Bengal. To call me Sultan is about as accurate, in terms of the mileage, you understand, as if I referred to you as a Jerry-Hun fat bastard.’

‘I called you Sultan and I’m calling you it again, all right?’

‘Oh, Mr Mackintosh . Is it so complex, is it so impossible, that you and I, stuck in this British machine, could find it in ourselves to fight together as British subjects?’

Will Johnson, who was a bit simple, took off his cap as he always did when someone said ‘British’.

‘What’s the poof on about?’ asked Mackintosh, adjusting his beer-gut.

‘Nothing,’ said Samad. ‘I’m afraid I was not “on” about anything; I was just talking, talking, just trying the shooting of the breeze as they say, and trying to get Sapper Jones here to stop his staring business, his goggly eyes, just this and only this… and I have failed on both counts, it seems.’

He seemed genuinely wounded, and Archie felt the sudden unsoldier-like desire to remove pain. But it was not the place and not the time.

‘All right. Enough, all of you. Jones, check the map,’ said Dickinson-Smith.

Archie checked the map.

Their journey was a long tiresome one, rarely punctuated by any action. Archie’s tank was a bridge-builder, one of the specialist divisions not tied to English county allegiances or to a type of weaponry, but providing service across the army and from country to country, recovering damaged equipment, laying bridges, creating passages for battle, creating routes where routes had been destroyed. Their job was not so much to fight the war as to make sure it ran smoothly. By the time Archie joined the conflict, it was clear that the cruel, bloody decisions would be made by air, not in the 30-centimetre difference between the width of a German armour piercing shell and an English one. The real war, the one where cities were brought to their knees, the war with the deathly calculations of size, detonation, population, went on many miles above Archie’s head. Meanwhile, on the ground, their heavy, armour-plated scout-tank had a simpler task: to avoid the civil war in the mountains – a war within a war – between the EAM and the ELAS; to pick their way through the glazed eyes of dead statistics and the ‘wasted youth’; to make sure the roads of communication stretching from one end of hell to the other were fully communicable.

‘The bombed ammunition factory is twenty miles south-west, sir. We are to collect what we can, sir. Private Ick-Ball has passed to me at 16.47 hours a radio message that informs me that the area, as far as can be seen from the air, sir, is unoccupied, sir,’ said Archie.

‘This is not war,’ Samad had said quietly.

Two weeks later, as Archie checked their route to Sofia, to no one in particular Samad said, ‘I should not be here.’

As usual he was ignored; most fiercely and resolutely by Archie, who wanted somehow to listen.

‘I mean, I am educated. I am trained. I should be soaring with the Royal Airborne Force, shelling from on high! I am an officer! Not some mullah, some sepoy, wearing out my chappals in hard service. My great-grandfather Mangal Pande’ – he looked around for the recognition the name deserved but, being met only with blank pancake English faces, he continued – ‘was the great hero of the Indian Mutiny!’

Silence.

‘Of 1857! It was he who shot the first hateful pigfat-smeared bullet and sent it spinning off into oblivion!’

A longer, denser silence.

‘If it wasn’t for this buggery hand’ – Samad, inwardly cursing the English goldfish-memory for history, lifted five dead, tightly curled fingers from their usual resting place on his chest – ‘this shitty hand that the useless Indian army gave me for my troubles, I would have matched his achievements. And why am I crippled? Because the Indian army knows more about the kissing of arses than it does about the heat and sweat of battle! Never go to India, Sapper Jones, my dear friend, it is a place for fools and worse than fools. Fools, Hindus, Sikhs and Punjabis. And now there is all this murmuring about independence – give Bengal independence, Archie, is what I say – leave India in bed with the British, if that’s what she likes.’