The View from Mount Dog (3 page)

Another year passed in which the pseudo-Sultan took over almost all executive power and had grown so familiar with the role he was playing that for days on end he could forget it was a role. To all intents and purposes he
was
the Sultan, and the irony pleased him. So did his new life-style, which was a great improvement on what he had been used to in South Yemen. He liked the perks and trappings, the sumptuous robes, the arcane
protocols, the guards with scimitars in their belts and Berettas under their embroidered tunics. He enjoyed the parades with camels wearing kettledrums slung from their humps, he liked bugles and jet aircraft in formation overhead. He liked banquets a lot and he loved concubines very much indeed. In the early days he was even quite amused by playing monarch with the jet-set businessmen and politicians. Many of his decisions were fairly arbitrary; several were positively quirky. He unexpectedly welcomed a delegation of Jehovah’s Witnesses, gave them full permission to build a large and costly Kingdom Hall in Jibnah and, when it was finished, confiscated it without compensation. He gave the Witnesses a day to leave the Sultanate and converted their Hall into a braille school for blind Imams. People openly thanked God that the Sultan had regained his old spiritedness.

But abuses of power may herald a growing disenchantment with it as much as a craving for more of it, and so it was in the case of the pseudo-Sultan. After making sure that nobody in his own family could ever conceivably lack for the odd ten million dollars and after indulging himself royally at – apparently – nobody’s expense he, too, began to grow restless. The real trouble was that life in Jibnah was dull. Whatever he wanted,
almost
whatever he wanted, would instantly be brought him; but that was not the same as being able to wander around the world looking for nothing in particular but indulging his fancies with somebody else’s platinum American Express card. Jibnah was the conservative and provincial little capital of a conservative and provincial little sultanate, and the pseudo-Sultan felt himself inhibited from asking for certain things he quite wished to toy with. For example, he dearly wanted to try cocaine ever since talking to the American ambassador’s son, but he was far too embarrassed to ask. He also longed to learn how to waterski, but the idea of having to flounder about in front of lickspittle aides pretending to be overwhelmed by His Most Serene Highness’s God-given skill was enough to deter him. Why could he not practise in private with just a single motor-boat driver who could instantly be rendered headless at the slightest suspicion of a snigger? But he couldn’t: security was obsessive and Court protocols inflexible. Besides, vague memories came to him of
Paris
Match
pictures from the fifties, grainy black-and-white photos of playboy monarchs such as King Faroukh being towed around behind boats in places like Monaco wearing dark
glasses and looking like portly beetles. That was not the figure the pseudo-Sultan wished to cut for himself.

After sunset he would often stand on the Palace balcony as the Sultan had before him, made introspective by the evening breeze, which seemed nightly to contain less mimosa and more exhaust-fumes. The city, until so recently a shady little oasis scattered with flocks and tents and houses like whitewashed cubes, had grown so that one of the shopping malls now ended abruptly at the airport’s perimeter. Bad planning there, he thought and wondered if the odd head shouldn’t roll, but then his attention was redistracted by the sight of listless knots of European
Gastarbeiter
making their way slowly up the boulevards in front of the Palace, sweeping the drifts of crumpled petrodollars into little piles and setting fire to them. A great sense of unease and thwart came upon him.

It was inevitable, of course, that he should have hit on the same solution and that it should then have seemed so obvious. No need to tell the Sultan; much better not, in fact, since he was by all accounts becoming more and more reclusive and would now only talk with any interest about cowries and winkles. Using the same methods by which he had himself been so successfully recruited, the pseudo-Sultan quietly introduced a second pseudo-Sultan into the Palace of a Thousand and One Rooms. It might have been thought such a move would lead to complexities unimagined since the death of Feydeau. Not a bit of it. Most of the Palace staff were desert fathers who had been retainers to the Sultan’s family since birth and tended towards age and forgetfulness. A few of the more alert ones below sixty wondered at their monarch’s extraordinary energy and slight departures from habit and custom but reflected that the Masood Ammar boys always had been headstrong and gave it no more thought. The Sultana from Harrogate marvelled at the efficacy of the tablets compounded of ginseng and dried scorpion venom which her husband had begun taking. Even the Sultan, when he paid a surprise visit to the Palace to look for a scrapbook he had once made, noticed nothing on running into his second double. His original double, fortuitously out of town for an important meeting with the son of the American ambassador, heaved a sigh of relief when he heard. That was one of the really wonderful things about conservatism, he reflected: it never wanted to
know
anything. Just as long as things looked right, with the correctly dressed people coming
through the right doors at the right time of day and uttering the same prescribed formulas, things
were
right. What did it matter whether somebody were actually the person he purported to be? As long as whoever it was acted in character and looked the part there would never be any end to the motorcades and the cheering crowds. With all that dead weight of conditioned reflex working in one’s favour the only real enemy was one’s own disenchantment, the deadly tedium of the puppetry, the awareness of dwindling days.

*

At the last count there were eleven Sultans. This figure happens to beat by three the present number of Queens of England but is one fewer than the Presidents of the United States. They are easily outnumbered by the twenty-seven current Popes. All the Popes are interchangeable, as are the Presidents and the Queens; but one of the Sultans loves driving trains.

Nobody could remember how it had started – least of all Anding whose leg it was – since it had been with him so long. It had been named over the years: ‘varicose ulcer’ or ‘that time the chip of wood flew off and stuck in when Clody was chopping’. The health worker called it ‘a chronic sore’, but by none of these terms could Anding recognise an old friend. When he thought about it with the near-affection due to the utterly familiar he could imagine he had been born with it. Not exactly as it was at this moment, of course, since its appearance changed from time to time. Its phases were varied: sometimes it wept, sometimes it bled, sometimes it shrank to a dry pucker surrounding a black borehole, and now and again it rotted a bit and smelt as at present. Essentially, though, it was resident as this hole on the outside of his right leg about three inches below the knee. In so far as it had to be allowed for at all times, but chiefly when negotiating public transport or the bamboo settles at home, Anding thought of it as he would any of his limbs: somewhere between an appendage and an inhabitant, something whose absence in other people he had begun to notice.

‘I can’t sleep with that smell in the house,’ his wife told him. ‘It’s disgusting. It attracts flies and keeps people away. Haven’t you noticed how few of our friends actually come into the house nowadays? They hang around the doors but they won’t come inside because of the stink. That leg of yours has taken over my whole house.’

‘I can’t smell anything,’ said Anding truthfully, ‘although he certainly looks as though he’s coming up for one of his wormy times.’

At fairly long intervals there would recur a period lasting anything up to a month when the presence of small creamy maggots could be noticed as they burrowed around in the necrotic hole. Tatang Petring up the track, who was by far the best barefoot doctor in the area, had told him this was an excellent sign since it meant all the green stuff was being eaten up and only clean uninfected tissue would be left whereupon the wound would quickly become smaller. And it was true the maggots came and went beneath the papaya poultices which Tatang Petring applied, but so, too, did callers at the house come and go. Anding was a fair man and came to think his wife was probably right. Certainly there were a lot of flies about.

What did not go was the wound itself, undoubtedly a black miracle, a medical mystery. Although often enlarging and deepening to the point where the bone could actually be seen by anybody interested enough to look (mainly small children and Tatang Petring himself), the wound appeared to be self-limiting in some way. The maggots did their bit, the wound grew huge and deep but quite neat: a light pinkish-grey smooth wet crater with bone at the bottom and with a slightly raised crusty rim – and anyone who knew anything about Western-style medicine or Eastern-style ways of death predicted that Anding would soon run a tremendous fever and his leg swell up and go glossy black, and at that point unless it were cut off entirely he would be done for. Yet this never happened. The health worker would procure some unmarked capsules in a twist of paper, and Tatang Petring would leave off the papaya poultices and instead apply grated palm-heart tinctured with ordinary kerosene, and within a week the wound would be half its previous size, the skin around it a glowing healthy brown.

At this point Anding used to worry about its disappearing entirely and would stop taking the capsules. It would be like murder, doing away with a companion as constant yet as varied as this one. His friend did not in the least incapacitate him but merely made him courteous when dealing with furniture or dogs (which were fascinated by the smell) or those small children always apt to bang into legs. Little boys particularly were wont to dash off suddenly in pursuit of their chafers, which instead of droning in tight circles above their heads at the
end of lengths of thread would somehow escape and blunder away, trailing their moorings. Only the other day a child had smacked into the leg, bounced off and plunged away through the goats rooting among the banana plants at the side of the track.

‘You smegma!’ Anding shouted half-heartedly after him and wondered if he hadn’t heard a faint ‘sorry, sir’ amid the crashing of sticks and goat-bleats. For it was on behalf of his friend that Anding felt annoyance: it was no way to treat a companion. The question of pain never entered into it.

And that was one more extraordinary thing. Almost regardless of which phase it was in or what was done to it Anding scarcely ever experienced his wound as painful. Occasionally his whole leg would ache but, then, so did everyone else’s after about forty; it was called arthritis and was an unbidden but not unexpected guest who would come one day and take up residence in someone’s body and not leave until that person was dead. That was the thing about wounds and diseases: they, too, had lives of their own which they had to live, and it was in their nature to have to depend on the bodies of people and animals in order to do so. Tatang Petring had told him that years ago, and Anding had long since had enough experience to confirm its truth. Sometimes one of these visitors might be accompanied by a companion of its own – it might be fever or pain. Such happened not to be the case with his own wound, which had turned up all by itself (perhaps on that wood-chopping day, perhaps not) and required a home. True, it had had certain consequences: discomfort when lying on the floor at night, inconvenience in that he always had to be on the lookout for stuff that would serve as bandaging to hold Tatang Petring’s treatments in place and, if Lerma were to be believed, a disgusting smell at the wormy periods which messed up their social life. But never actual pain.

‘He’s not going to go away, is he?’ Anding asked Tatang Petring one day.

The doctor considered silently.

‘No. He wants to stay. He likes you. Sometimes it looks as though he’s going to take over more of you and sometimes as though he might move out altogether. But he never does either, does he?’

‘It’s strange,’ said Anding, who was still then thinking in terms of his wound’s apparent indecisiveness.

‘Not a bit,’ Tatang Petring told him. ‘Look at the moon. That comes and goes at seemingly odd intervals, all the time on the wax or on the wane, but you couldn’t say the moon was vague, could you? It’s always in exactly the right place. It’s just a question of understanding its habits. When you understand things as they properly are they almost always turn out to be regular in some way. Look at women’s periods; or better’ – Tatang Petring hurriedly skipped over one of the greater mysteries whose very irregularity accounted for a large percentage of his patients’ visits – ‘the tides.’

‘They’re both connected to the moon,’ said Anding. ‘Everyone knows that.’

‘Perhaps your leg is, too. We don’t know.’

Both men contemplated this possibility.

‘If
madness
is,’ pursued Tatang Petring, ‘why not wounds? It doesn’t matter if it’s your spirit that’s wounded or your leg. Perhaps everything’s connected with the moon in some way. Meanwhile, how is he?’ He began unwrapping the strip of old T-shirt which this week was tied about Anding’s leg. It had part of a legend printed on it in faded blue letters advertising a paint company. Underneath lay an amorphous lump of pus and poultice, and beneath that Anding’s old friend.

‘He’s going down a bit for food,’ the doctor said at length after close examination. ‘He’s growing now so he needs more nourishment.’

‘Ah.’ To study the outside of his leg Anding craned down and bobbed his knee inwards at the same time, a movement which in the early days had felt awkward and even slightly painful when prolonged but which now had become an entirely natural posture like squatting or bowing or kneeling or any of the other contortions human beings ritually adopt from place to place; there was indeed an element of obeisance in his gesture. ‘And then?’

‘Well, what do you do when you eat a lot?’

‘Fart, usually. Sleep?’

‘You
shit
a lot. Eat a lot, shit a lot; it’s natural. So he’s going to shit a lot of this greenish stuff. That’s when the worms come along to clear it away.’

‘That’s the bit Lerma says is smelly.’

‘Of course,’ said Tatang Petring. ‘Did you ever have shit that wasn’t? Though wound-shit doesn’t smell quite the same as ours.’

‘By all accounts it’s a lot worse.’

‘Depends on your point of view. Think how bad your own shit might smell to him.’

They both looked at the wound.

‘I hadn’t thought of that, certainly,’ said Anding. Then he asked: ‘So what are you – or we – actually
doing
?’

‘You mean to the wound?’

‘Exactly. If he’s living his own life in his own time, why are we treating him at all? Why all these leaves and herbs and things?’

Tatang Petring looked up at him in surprise. ‘Isn’t that obvious? I’d have thought that was obvious, myself.’

‘Not completely,’ said Anding humbly.

‘When you have guests in your house … in the
old
days when you used to have people who stayed overnight, did you ignore them and just leave them to fend for themselves?’

Anding studied the palms of his hands very closely. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I see now.’

‘Well, just as when friends stay we can never be sure we’re giving them exactly what they want most at any moment because there are codes of politeness for guests as well as for hosts, nor can I be quite certain that I’m making him’ – he indicated the wound – ‘as comfortable as I can. We can only try. I sometimes worry about the flies, though.’

‘How?’

‘Occasionally my dressings make it quite difficult for them to reach the wound. Suppose, now, that those flies are
his
house-guests.’

‘Goodness…. We’re driving away his friends just as Lerma says I’m driving away ours.’

‘I’m not saying we are. I’m just saying we might be. Medicine’s extremely difficult; there’s so much we don’t know yet.’

For a long time afterwards Anding had brooded about this conversation and had come to a barely identifiable conclusion that somewhere, in a way which he did not at all understand, there was definitely a suggestion of lightness about it all. Once you had grasped the essential correctness of things the only course which remained was learning how to live with them as they were. Viewpoints. The more viewpoints you saw things from the more sense they made … well, the less they seemed open to the slightest change.

So now when Lerma was complaining about his friend’s smell
he was patient. Quite truthfully he did not himself notice it, and when from under the edge of leaf or bandage a maggot would rumple itself aimlessly away across the brown bumpy expanse of his calf Anding would tuck it back underneath with an offhand solicitude, an abstracted courteousness which quite precisely was unable to notice the reaction of wives, houseguests, casual passers-by. Dogs, small children and Tatang Petring were, Anding did comprehend, about the only creatures yet able to see how interesting and proper the notion of a body-guest was.

‘Let them wait,’ he said of the others to himself while going to and fro about his business, chopping firewood here, feeding the pigs there and walking up the track to chat with Tatang Petring daily. ‘Sooner or later somebody will call on them.’ And spotting the piercing yellow of an oriole looping up to its nest in the crown of a coconut-tree felt a blaze of happiness which made him chuckle at a point a few inches above the head of a passing child.