Zadie Smith - White Teeth

Samad released his hand and rummaged in his pocket, dabbing his finger into a repository of white dust he kept in there, slipping it discreetly into his mouth. He leant against the wall and drew his fingertips along the stone. It was a tiny missionary church, converted into a hospital and then abandoned after two months when the sound of shells began to shake the windowsills. Samad and Archie had taken to sleeping there because of the thin mattresses and the large airy windows. Samad had taken an interest too (due to loneliness, he told himself; due to melancholy) in the powdered morphine to be found in stray storage cabinets throughout the building; hidden eggs on an addictive Easter trail. Whenever Archie went to piss or to try the radio once more, Samad roved up and down his little church, looting cabinet after cabinet, like a sinner moving from confessional to confessional. Then, having found his little bottle of sin, he would take the opportunity to rub a little into his gums or smoke a little in his pipe, and then lay back on the cool terracotta floor, looking up into the exquisite curve of the church dome. It was covered in words, this church. Words left three hundred years earlier by dissenters, unwilling to pay a burial tax during a cholera epidemic, locked in the church by a corrupt landlord and left to die in there – but not before they covered every wall with letters to family, poems, statements of eternal disobedience. Samad liked the story well enough when he first heard it, but it only truly struck him when the morphine hit. Then every nerve in his body would be alive, and the information, all the information contained in the universe, all the information on walls, would pop its cork and flow through him like electricity through a ground wire. Then his head would open out like a deckchair. And he would sit in it a while and watch his world go by. Tonight, after just more than enough, Samad felt particularly lucid. Like his tongue was buttered and like the world was a polished marble egg. And he felt a kinship with the dead dissenters, they were Pande’s brothers – every rebel, it seemed to Samad tonight, was his brother – he wished he could speak with them about the mark they made on the world. Had it been enough? When death came, was it really enough? Were they satisfied with the thousand words they left behind?

‘I’ll tell you something for nothing,’ said Archie, following Samad’s eyes and catching the church dome’s reflection in them. ‘If I’d only had a few hours left, I wouldn’t have spent it painting pictures on the ceiling.’

‘Tell me,’ inquired Samad, irritated to have been dragged from his pleasant contemplation, ‘what great challenge would you undertake in the hours before your death? Unravel Fermat’s Theorem, perhaps? Master Aristotelian philosophy?’

‘What? Who? No… I’d – you know… make love – to a lady ,’ said Archie, whose inexperience made him prudish. ‘You know… for the last time .’

Samad broke into a laugh. ‘For the first time, is more likely.’

‘Oh, go on, I’m serious .’

‘All right. And if there were no “ladies” in the vicinity?’

‘Well, you can always,’ and here Archie went a pillar-box red, this being his own version of cementing a friendship, ‘slap the salami, as the GIs say!’

‘ Slap ,’ repeated Samad contemptuously, ‘ the salami … and that is it, is it? The last thing you would wish to do before you shuffled off this mortal coil is “slap your salami”. Achieve orgasm.’

Archie, who came from Brighton, where nobody ever, ever said words like orgasm, began to convulse with hysterical embarrassment.

‘Who is funny? Something is funny?’ asked Samad, lighting a fag distractedly despite the heat, his mind carried elsewhere by the morphine.

‘Nobody,’ began Archie haltingly, ‘nothing.’

‘Can’t you see it, Jones? Can’t you see…’ Samad lay half in, half out of the doorway, his arms stretched up to the ceiling, ‘… the intention ? They weren’t slapping their salamis – spreading the white stuff – they were looking for something a little more permanent .’

‘I can’t see the difference, frankly,’ said Archie. ‘When you’re dead, you’re dead.’

‘Oh no , Archibald, no ,’ whispered Samad, melancholic. ‘You don’t believe that. You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain . We are creatures of consequence, Archibald,’ he said, gesturing to the church walls. ‘They knew it. My great-grandfather knew it. Some day our children will know it.’

‘Our children!’ sniggered Archie, simply amused. The possibility of offspring seemed so distant.

‘Our children will be born of our actions. Our accidents will become their destinies . Oh, the actions will remain. It is a simple matter of what you will do when the chips are down, my friend. When the fat lady is singing. When the walls are falling in, and the sky is dark, and the ground is rumbling. In that moment our actions will define us. And it makes no difference whether you are being watched by Allah, Jesus, Buddha, or whether you are not. On cold days a man can see his breath, on a hot day he can’t. On both occasions, the man breathes .’

‘Do you know,’ said Archie, after a pause, ‘just before I left from Felixstowe I saw this new drill they have now which breaks in two and you can put different things on the end – spanner, hammer, even a bottle-opener. Very useful in a tight spot, I’d imagine. I tell you, I’d bloody love one of those.’

Samad looked at Archie for a moment and then shook his head. ‘Come on, let’s get inside. This Bulgarian food. Turns my stomach over. I need a bit of sleep.’

‘You look pale,’ said Archie, helping him up.

‘It’s for my sins, Jones, for my sins and yet I am more sinned against than sinning.’ Samad giggled to himself.

‘You what?’

Archie bore the weight of Samad on one side as they walked inside.

‘I have eaten something,’ said Samad, putting on a cut-glass English accent, ‘that is about to disagree with me.’

Archie knew very well that Samad sneaked morphine from the cabinets, but he could see Samad wanted him not to know, so ‘Let’s get you into bed,’ was all he said, bringing Samad over to a mattress.

‘When this is over, we will meet again in England, OK?’ said Samad, lunging towards his mattress.

‘Yes,’ said Archie, trying to imagine walking along Brighton pier with Samad.

‘Because you are a rare Englishman, Sapper Jones. I consider you my friend.’

Archie was not sure what he considered Samad, but he smiled gently in recognition of the sentiment.

‘You will have dinner with my wife and I in the year 1975. When we are big-bellied men sitting on our money-mountains. Somehow we will meet.’

Archie, dubious of foreign food, smiled weakly.

‘We will know each other throughout our lives!’

Archie laid Samad down, got himself a mattress and manoeuvred himself into a position for sleep.

‘Goodnight, friend,’ said Samad, pure contentment in his voice.

In the morning, the circus came to town. Woken by shouts and whooping laughter, Samad struggled into uniform and wrapped one hand around his gun. He stepped into the sun-drenched courtyard to find Russian soldiers in their dun-coloured uniforms leapfrogging over each other, shooting tin cans off each other’s heads and throwing knives at potatoes stuck on sticks, each potato sporting a short black twig moustache. With all the exhaustion of revelation, Samad collapsed on to the front steps, sighed, and sat with his hands on his knees, his face turned up towards the heat. A moment later Archie tripped out, trousers half-mast, waving his gun, looking for the enemy, and shot a frightened bullet in the air. The circus continued, without noticing. Samad pulled Archie wearily by the trouser leg and gestured for him to sit down.