Submission

  SUBMISSION

  HARRISON YOUNG

  Submission

  by Harrison Young

  Published in 2014 by Jane Curry Publishing

  [Wentworth Concepts Pty Ltd]

  PO Box 780 Edgecliff NSW 2027 Australia

  www.janecurrypublishing.com.au

  Copyright © Harrison Young, 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any other information storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Author: Young, Harrison

  Title: Submission

  Print 978-1-922190-87-1

  Epdf 978-1-925183-07-8

  Epub 978-1-925183-09-2

  Front cover photographs: Shutterstock

  Back cover photograph: Shutterstock

  Internal design and cover design: Working Type

  Editorial: Catherine McCredie

  Production: Jasmine Standfield

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  In memory of Dick Pershing, who showed me how to be a soldier, and have fun at it, when we were both privates, and who was killed in action a year later in Vietnam as a second lieutenant in the 101st Airborne Division, going back for one of his men.

  SITUATION

  1

  Philip Cooper was suddenly dispatched to a country no one had heard of, on a mission he didn’t understand. So he went for a run. Having survived both Vietnam and law school, he understood the solace of exhaustion.

  It was Friday, the Moslem weekend, part way through 1980 and shortly before sunrise. So far from home, Philip’s body had refused to sleep. He stood outside the Hilton, doing stretching exercises. A soft breeze blew in from the Arabian Gulf. It was a welcome change from the hotel’s soulless air-conditioning.

  The minaret of the mosque across the street resembled a lighthouse: large alternating squares of black and white, with a little walkway around the top. Viewed from the parking lot, the Hilton resembled a spaceship that had landed in the wrong millennium: chrome and glass and absurd angles, surrounded by date palms and mud houses. There was a savage beauty about it, if you could resist the impulse to laugh.

  The lighthouse spoke. Actually it was a loudspeaker. Based on the small amount of reading he had managed to do, Philip assumed this was the call to prayer. He liked the plaintive, sweeping sound of it. He liked the idea of a religion where you have to get up early. It reminded him of the army. When the sound stopped, he started down the street. Instinct led him out of town and into the desert.

  Philip had enlisted after a year of college. The money had sort of run out. The army had been hungry for lieutenants at the time, and in less than a year they turned him into one. A pretty good lieutenant, actually.

  The army was a way of life, and Philip had needed one. It licenced violence. It joked about sex. There were words for everything there needed to be words for. You always knew where you stood. It was sometimes hard to explain why he hadn’t stayed in. The answer was ambition, but that didn’t stop him being nostalgic.

  The best thing about the army was the sergeants. They issued you one as soon as you got off the bus.

  As Philip gave himself to his running and Arabia swallowed him up, he remembered what one of the best had taught him:

  I know a girl named Barbara Sue.

  Do you know what she can do?

  He had learned to chant in basic training. There were many verses.

  I don’t know, but I hear tell

  That she does it very well.

  One ran along in a “column of fours,” sixty moderately terrified trainees in T-shirts, baggy pants and boots, shivering at first in the morning mist, and Sergeant Webster would begin. He would sing a line and then the whole platoon would repeat it:

  I don’t know, but I would guess

  I don’t know, but I would guess

  Mary Jane does more with less.

  Mary Jane does more with less.

  This should have the effect, Sergeant Webster explained, “of assisting you mens in maintaining a proper cadence.” That it did.

  Sergeant Webster was an old-fashioned mixture of practicality and earnestness. He believed in push-ups. He did not believe in “using nasty language to address trainees.” He had a wealth of knowledge to impart. “A lot of people has asked me, is there snakes in the ’Nam? Mens, there definitely is snakes in the ’Nam.”

  But Philip wasn’t in the army anymore. He had been sent to the country no one had heard of on “secondment” from his firm.

  “They’ve suddenly got a lot of money,” the partner whose turn it was to “do personnel” had told him. “They can negotiate with the best, but they don’t know how to agree. They need a legal adviser. The prime minister needs one, which should give you an indication. You seemed a natural choice.”

  “Because I’m single?” Philip said.

  “Why, because we think you’ll do a very good job,” the man said, who wasn’t a partner for nothing. “Arthur in particular thinks so. But think about it for a few days, if you like.”

  “I’ll go,” Philip had said.

  C-130 comin’ down the strip.

  Airborne daddy’s gunna take a trip.

  Because Sergeant Webster was “airborne,” quite a few of the verses the Third Platoon sang had to do with jumping out of airplanes, an activity whose charms Philip came to appreciate later. Sergeant Webster explained that “a C-130 is what gets you to the drop zone. The air force is in charge of the flying and we is in charge of the jumping.”

  Fact was, Sergeant Webster was just about a human explaining machine. “Part of my mission is to help you mens appreciate the army.” He generally did this while running backwards beside the platoon. There would be a bit of monologue, then reflective silence filled with the sound of boots, and then another verse.

  “There is three reasons why the army has you sing while you is running. The first is for cadence, like I said, and the second is for breathing. With the exception of the physical training test, which you mens will take next week, the army do not ask a man to run fast. If you is in any kind of shape at all, it is possible to complete a run without even breathing hard. This actually makes running more difficult. The third reason is the most important, and that is motivation.”

  If I die on the old drop zone,

  Wrap me up and ship me home.

  Pin my wings upon my chest.

  Tell my girl I done my best.

  Philip’s “best” did not seem to have been enough. He assumed “secondment” was a euphemism for “goodbye.” As far as he had ever been able to figure out, Arthur Allison didn’t even like him.

  “Philip has a gleam about him,” he had written in an early year-end review, “suggesting physical fitness and a species of enthusiasm we cannot always use.”

  Arthur was the firm’s one genuinely famous partner, a rotund man who had once been a very young Assistant Secretary of State, and who now let cigarette ashes fall on his chest in order to appear absentminded. Philip had nearly quit. Only the challenge implicit in the remark, and a younger partner’s argument that “Arthur is beastly to everyone,” had dissuaded him. In the ensuing five years, he had never been able to decide if that was a mistake.

  He had acquired a profession, which was useful, and at a demanding firm. That was probably smart. He had been a bachelor in New York, which was pleasant: dating women who dressed well enough to be somebody’s mistress, running in Central Park at dawn, buying the Sunday Times on Saturday night. He enjoyed the burdens of the law: the late nights and cancelled vacations, the obligati
on to read nothing carelessly, the tireless manufacture of elaborate sentences full of semicolons. But the shadow of Arthur’s scepticism clung to him.

  At some level, Philip could never believe in himself as a lawyer – or not at the absurdly prestigious Manhattan firm that had recruited him. He could not imagine himself as someone who lived in a big house in Westchester County, needed a haircut, spoke in paragraphs, missed trains, had a slim, impatient, still quite lovely wife, had clients, had partners. Someone who could turn to a chief executive and say, “I think I’m going to ask you to let my partner, Arthur Allison, look at this,” and have the chief executive in question try to look nonchalant. Philip would never get to use that magical phrase. No one would ever say, “my partner, Philip Cooper,” no matter how badly Philip wished for it. The law was something he was doing while he waited for his life to begin. So this strange assignment, which had an air of abandonment about it, was also a release.

  Soldier, soldier, don’t feel blue.

  Uncle Sam has work for you.

  Just before Philip left for JFK airport, Arthur summoned him to his cluttered office. Door shut, desk between them. A curious shyness.

  “I think you’ll like the place, Philip. That makes a difference, you know. Going out to the Gulf could be all you need.”

  “You sound like I’ll come back a changed man.”

  “Not entirely changed, I hope,” said Arthur.

  “That’s kind of you to say, sir.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “I thought you found me…insufficiently detached.”

  “You didn’t seem comfortable here, that first year.”

  “And now?”

  “I think I’ve already answered that question. Besides,” – the older man’s tone changed – “we had to send someone. Their prime minister had been after me about it. You’ll do.”

  “You have an unusual leadership technique, sir.”

  “You don’t require tea and sympathy, Philip.”

  “What do I require?”

  “I can’t say. All I can do is see that you go out there without illusions. This is an opportunity for you. We don’t owe you anything for going. Keep your eyes open. I have an idea you can do very well, if you avoid making the wrong friends.”

  “Have I made the wrong friends at the firm?”

  “Not at all, Philip. Everyone likes you here. But forget about the firm for a while. The point is that Alidar is a third world country. The political situation is fluid. We don’t actually know very much about the place. There’s an insurgency next door, which you are not supposed to talk about, by the way. Some people say there will be a war eventually. Your prior experience is not irrelevant. The Arabs are a warlike people. Some of them are a little crazy, but the best have remarkable dignity. Win their respect, and when you come back you will have yourself a valuable client.”

  “A valuable client for the firm, you mean.”

  “Arabs tend to personalise relationships.” Pause. “So be careful.”

  The conversation had left Philip puzzled and agitated. Arthur, for some reason, cared how he did. Whether that was good news or bad news remained to be seen.

  Twenty minutes into actual desert, with the temperature rising rapidly, it occurred to Philip that he ought to turn around. That put the sun in his face. Now for the character building part, he said to himself.

  Airborne, airborne, where you been?

  Round the world and back again…

  2

  If you live in a cold climate, warmth is a drug. So being sick of life, I went to Arabia. It was possible for a woman to do that then.

  Begin with the heat. It is as if you are being fired. The celestial potter has put you in his kiln, and you are about to assume the shape by which eternity will know you. Thought ceases. Immobility is worship. It is no accident the Arabs invented zero.

  When the wind is from the south, the desert possesses you. Grit accumulates in your silverware drawer, in your underwear drawer, between your teeth. It is forty-five degrees Celsius and men walk the street wrapped up like Arctic explorers, trying to escape the sand. I would never have guessed at its relentlessness.

  Perfection is tangible. Women are invisible. Five times a day a man shouts from a tower that God is great. “Allahu akbar,” he says. One comes in the end to agree.

  Alidar is a small country, almost a visitor upon the landscape. They have a king, so it is a kingdom. They have no parliament, so it matters who is king. The king knows this. For an English-woman with any sort of education, it is like being transported back to Tudor times. There are only so many capable Alidi. The character of individuals one is personally acquainted with affects the country’s future. One encounters individuals about whose character one must speculate. Destiny permeates intercourse. Like the sand.

  There are automobiles and air-conditioners, of course, and gossip and daydreams. If you live by pleasing men, as I have, you are either an extreme realist or a fool. I have put on black silk and walked the souk, as the local women do, studying the world through the porous cloth, buying rice and jewellery, watching the shopkeepers notice the condition of my hands. The Alidi have a civilisation. But primarily there is the heat and the port and the presence of the desert. I would not want to live in Alidar without means.

  The port is why there is an Alidar. It is as if someone had taken up the Arabian Peninsula like a piece of cloth, and made a little rip in it. The rip attracts commerce as a flaw attracts the eye. For the past two centuries it has been the capital of the Gulf. Indians and Persians settled here. Saudis party here. Every form of contraband is available. Asylum is available. Like Britain, it has a tradition of tolerance, punctuated by slaughter.

  All this I had learned in the first few months. Then winter approached, and the celestial potter decided to give me a final glaze. I became bored, and found a job – as a secretary. I have done that sort of work before, actually. It fills the day. I wasn’t ready for more than that. Or so I thought.

  3

  Philip was half a mile from the crest that would bring him in sight of the city again when he saw the black Arab. The man was enormous. He stood in the middle of the highway, robe billowing in the wind, left hand on his hip, right hand grasping a sword, which he held motionless and erect. Because of the sun, Philip had been watching the few yards of asphalt in front of his own feet, so he did not see him until he was quite near. For an intoxicating second, he had an impulse to rush the man, who clearly wasn’t poised to fight. But reason and exhaustion asserted themselves, and he stumbled to a halt.

  As he did so, he noticed that an ancient, cream-coloured Bentley was parked a few yards off the road. A second man in Arab robes was sitting on the car’s running board.

  “It is important to know when to stop,” he said.

  “I could have made it,” said Philip.

  “Do not underestimate the desert. Come out of the sun and have some water.”

  Philip sat down beside his host, who looked to be about fifty years old. The black Arab produced a cup and Philip drank.

  “You are the most tenacious person I have met since Mrs. Campbell. She, I believe, might even have refused the water, though I doubt she ever went joggeling in the desert.”

  After a brief silence, during which Philip pondered the merits of his host’s mispronunciation, it occurred to him to indicate that he was all right. “Thank you for the water,” he said. “Who is Mrs. Campbell?”

  “She was the wife of the manager of the Chartered Bank here in the late nineteen-forties. She taught me English.”

  “Did she speak Arabic?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  “That must have made it hard.”

  “I had curiosity and she had patience. She began by pointing at objects and naming them in English – or what I have subsequently come to understand passes for that language in the Highlands of Scotland.”

  “I was trying to place the accent.”

  “Many people find
it astonishing. It has faded, of course.”

  “How long did you study with Mrs. Campbell?”

  “Five years. I also had patience.”

  “And did she in the process learn any Arabic?”

  “She did not. I believe she felt it would put her soul in jeopardy.”

  “That seems a rather old-fashioned idea.”

  “Tradition often harbours truth. The language of the Holy Koran is very beautiful. She might have been converted. Then she and Mr. Campbell would have had to go to separate heavens.”

  The man went on to ask about Philip. Where had he grown up? How long did he plan to stay in Alidar? Why did he run?

  “I guess it’s a habit I picked up in the army,” Philip said.

  “My son would like to be a soldier. He will want to meet you.”

  “Do you have an army?” Philip asked – and immediately wished he hadn’t put it that way.

  “A wee one. But it lacks experience, thank God. Do you have children?”

  “No.”

  “They are an adventure. Other family?”

  “No.”

  “You travel light.”

  “We all have baggage. And you?”

  “I don’t travel.”

  Philip declined the man’s offer of a ride into town. People were appearing on the streets when he got there, most of them dressed in long robes, as if for a Sunday School pageant. The lobby of the Hilton was full of young women speaking German. There was a sign outside the dining room advertising an “asparagus promotion.” What can an asparagus aspire to, Philip wondered. Can it become a Brussels sprout?

  Something about Alidar was making him happy. Not a good sign, he knew. Happiness meant confidence, which made you sloppy. He’d asked the Arab with the Bentley about the prime minister, for Christ’s sake. Not a big country. Everyone would know everyone. Still, the answer was interesting: “He is easy to underestimate.”