The Last Samurai

Of course my luck changed at once. We’d been playing five hours—it took only three to win back the money, and three after that to win the chest. We both felt like death by the end—my head was throbbing, eyes as dry as stones—and he looked worse. He can’t have thought what he was about when he suggested it, you know—that he should play for a thousand quid and the right to consign a group of innocent people to perdition. God knows what it was like defending that for 11 hours. He tossed the cards down at the end—he wouldn’t look at me—said he’d see me in the morning, and went to bed. Just at the door he turned back. He said if anyone harmed a British subject he must object to the authorities in the strongest possible terms.

I went at once to the chest—there was a whole stack of passports, and some sort of official-looking stamp.

They were the old-fashioned type of passport—God knows how long he’d had them, I shouldn’t be surprised if the consulship, and the passports with them, had been passed down from father to son since the last century—with a description instead of a photo. I let myself sleep four hours. In the morning I spent a few hours filling in the descriptions, writing hair: black, eyes: black; complexion: swarthy 50 or 60 times. I left the names blank, stuffed them in a couple of saddle bags, and rode off.

Well, you should have seen the look on those soldiers’ faces when the first peasant brought out his British passport! I’d had my friend teach me enough Spanish for ‘This man is a British subject’—there I stood among the black-haired, black-eyed, swarthy-complexioned loyal subjects of the Queen trying not to laugh my head off. The marvellous thing about it was that they couldn’t prove it wasn’t so—certainly none of them had any Guatemalan papers.

It did some good. Some of the Indians actually came to Britain on those wretched passports. Some went off into the hills to join a guerrilla group.

Anyway, having pulled off a trick like that once I got a taste for it. We’re such cowards in front of a piece of paper these days—my mother was an Egyptian, and my father was from Hungary, both countries with a particularly impressive tradition of bureaucracy, and it gave me an indescribable frisson to cock a snook at the official channels. Once you’ve tried it you realise how easy it is! Half the time no one bothers to challenge you—if you say you’re the Danish consul it won’t even occur to most people to doubt it. I felt ashamed, really ashamed of all the times I hadn’t claimed to be a partipotentiary of some foreign power of other.

I said:

Did it work at all in West Papua before you were deported?

He said:

Well, the visas got some people out of the country, but getting them into Belgium was pretty sticky. Shouldn’t have picked Belgium, really, they’ve no sense of humour worth speaking of, but I was bored with being a Dane of Inuit extraction, and there’d been a picture of me in Hello! with Paola which I thought might give the story credibility, and anyway my French isn’t half bad. My mother went to a Swiss finishing school, you see—her mother was Lebanese, and frightfully cosmopolitan—and the girls were all made to study French, German and English, with Italian for bad behaviour. That was how she met my father, as a matter of fact. She got sentenced to a week of Italian for some frightful breach of school regulations, walked straight out the door and found a lift down to Monte—reasoning, you know, that if she were independently wealthy she wouldn’t have to be finished. She pawned the little gold crucifix she’d worn at the school—she was Muslim, of course, but it was more in the way of a fashion accessory—and spent the money, what there was of it, on chips. 28, that was her number. She couldn’t lose. My father had been losing all week, but he saw the way the wind was blowing and switched to 28—he knew better than to let his luck slip once it had changed and followed her out when she left. My father had reason to curse the school; my mother took an instant antipathy to Hungarian, a language the school, she said, would not have inflicted on a girl had she enacted the 120 Journées de Sodome, and refused to learn a word of it; having heard the Arabic language put through the wringer of my father’s strong Hungarian accent she declared her native tongue off-limits, and insisted that he confine his atrocities to English and to French (German he despised, though he spoke it well), in which languages my parents conversed to the exclusion of all others for the whole of their married life.

I gathered that he did not want to talk about West Papua.

I was afraid he would throw me out any minute, so I took a couple of crêpes and a croissant and I said diplomatically:

Was your father Muslim too? I saw you had an 11th-century Qur’an so I assumed you were.