Ollie's Cloud (10 page)

Chapter 5

The man is smaller than he had expected. The long caravan journey to Karbala had magnified Kujiri’s imagined picture of the Shaykhi leader into a shimmering, larger-than-life mirage, and now the human scale of Shaykh Ahmad seems to belie the man’s station.
How can so much wisdom and knowledge be captured in such a small frame?
Can this frail person truly be the legendary Shaykh Ahmad?

Kujiri had arrived in Karbala three days earlier. After burying his wife and the others in a sprawling cemetery near the Tomb of Imam Husayn, he had inquired about the Shaykhi school. For many years it had been his fondest dream to meet Shaykh Ahmad and beseech him for enlightenment on various topics. Eventually, Kujiri had met a man named Siyyid Kazim, a disciple of Shaykh Ahmad, and was invited by him to attend a gathering of students. At that time he was not told the Shaykhi leader also would be present at the gathering or he may not have survived the excruciating anticipation of meeting face-to-face the object of his arduous quest.

The simple stone building had given Kujiri no hint of the personage—so venerated and reviled—hidden within its crumbling walls. Kujiri had entered with no sense of the moment except historical—that here, at some time in the past, the great man himself had been present. Siyyid Kazim had ushered him quietly into a large room that now echoes with the voices of at least twenty students, all sitting on the floor and facing a small, aged man seated on cushions.

“Who is the teacher?” Kujiri had asked Siyyid Kazim.

“He is the man you have come all this way to meet—Shaykh Ahmad.”

And now the enormity of the occasion overwhelms Kujírí. He sits down for fear that he may otherwise collapse. This man, this small and unimposing creation of flesh and bone, is the holy man that Kujiri has traveled hundreds of miles to meet. The man whose ideas had almost cost Kujiri’s life at the caravanserai. The man whose teachings had polarized Muslims and provoked charges of heresy.

Jalal is homesick. The long journey with his father from Bushruyih to the madrisih in Mashhad had been an adventure, but now the boy finds it difficult to think of anything but his family and friends. Especially one friend—Ali Qasim. The friend who had vanished.

He remembers the night that ‘Abdu’llah, Jalal’s father, had given him the precious sword. Jalal remembers how anxious he had been for morning to come so that he could carry this treasure to the kelauntar’s compound and show it to his best friend. He had barely slept that evening. At dawn, after prayers, he had grabbed the sword, in its rich velvet wrap, and had been ready to race from the house with it when his mother had stopped him, smiling as she always did, understanding his excitement but insistent on performing her motherly duties. “Not without breakfast!” she had said. And so he had set down the sword to eat with his family.

After breakfast he had walked (so difficult not to
run
) to the main gate. As he had approached it, the massive gate had been flung open and at least twenty men, all of them nervous and staring straight ahead, had marched hurriedly from the compound, muskets raised and swords clattering at their sides, followed by an ashen-faced kelauntar.

“Jalal! Come here!” the kelauntar had ordered. And Jalal had run to the side of Ali’s father, who seized his arm painfully with an expression of—what? Panic, perhaps. Fear. Anxiety. “You must tell me the truth or I will have your father tortured and exiled. Do you understand?”

“Did Ali tell you that he was planning to leave Bushruyih?”

“What? No! Never!”

“Tell me the truth! What did Ali say to you in the past several days about his mother and the missionary? Be honest, now! Were they all planning to leave Bushruyih together?”

“No. He never said anything about them. Why? Is Ali all right?”

The kelauntar had sighed deeply. For a moment Ali had thought that this pear-shaped man might deflate into an empty bag and blow away, but at last the sigh ended and a fierce, angry expression swept over the kelauntar.

“Ali and his mother have been kidnapped by the English missionary,” the kelauntar had explained unconvincingly.
If this were true, why had he asked about Ali’s plans, or his mother’s?
“Come with me!”

The kelauntar had marched Jalal, accompanied by the angry musketeers, to the mosque where a terrible sight confronted the boy. In the courtyard, lying on his back, was Omar, the caravanserai gatekeeper. Two men had removed Omar’s shoes and begun to lift Omar’s legs, passing his feet through leather loops hanging from a long pole. Two others had then rotated the pole by its handles, and this action had turned Omar’s soles upward, tightening the ankle loops so Omar could not writhe out of them. Jalal had heard about this torture, the
bastinado
, but his father had never permitted him to witness it.

Two floggers had approached Omar’s feet with glances at the kelauntar, who had nodded his consent to begin. Hundreds of willow wands, each of them soaked in water to keep them from breaking too early, were piled next to the floggers. Plucking a wand from the pile, each flogger had begun to thrash the tender white soles of Omar’s feet. Cries and curses had filled the courtyard.

After both wands had been broken on the bleeding feet, the kelauntar approached Omar saying, “We know you helped them. If you tell us where they are going, we will stop the bastinado.”

“I don’t know.” These had been Omar’s only words, at least as far as Jalal can remember.

The floggers had begun again with fresh sticks. More questions had been asked, more curses and screams had tortured Jalal's ears. Over a hundred wands had been broken before the kelauntar had mercifully ended the torment. By this time Omar had passed out. The deep and throbbing pain, temporarily relieved by unconsciousness, would return as he awakened. His feet would swell until the skin burst; infection would spread. For weeks the slightest movement or touch would send bolts of fiery pain throughout his body.

As Omar’s feet were being freed from the restraints, the kelauntar had grabbed Jalal by the shoulders and issued another threat. “I’m warning you, if you do not tell me the truth your father will suffer the same fate as Omar! Confess what Ali told you. I know you boys—you share everything. Tell me now!”

He had shaken the boy so hard that Husayn had dropped his sword. The dazzling blade had glimmered in the sunshine, scattering particles of light in every direction.

The sword had seemed to mesmerize the kelauntar, calm him, speak to him in some mystical way. “I believe you,” he finally had said, and then he had placed the sword gently into Jalal’s hands. “Ali would have loved it.” The anger seemed to have been replaced with melancholy, but only for a moment.

“What’s this I hear about Anisa?” A loud voice, coming from the fat-jowled vizier, had startled them. Followed by his showy attendants, the vizier had strutted to the kelauntar. “I’m told that you have allowed my future wife to leave Bushruyih. If this is true, I would not place bets on your future!”

“It’s untrue that I
allowed
her to leave. The truth is that she has been kidnapped. But I’ve now obtained information about where to find her.” The kelauntar had gestured to the limp body of Omar and the vizier noted the dalandar’s shredded, bleeding feet.

This is where Jalal had grown confused, the part that he now tries so hard to understand. Had the kelauntar given Ali’s mother to the vizier to marry? And since Omar had not provided any information under torture, how could the kelauntar have known the location of Ali and Anisa? If the kelauntar had believed that Anisa planned to leave willingly, why did he tell the vizier that she was kidnapped? And if this was a lie, would it not lead him into further trouble with the vizier, who clearly had struck some kind of bargain with the kelauntar?

“They have only been gone for a short time,” the kelauntar had said to the vizier. “I suggest that you and your attendants accompany us as we go to find them. Twenty men are ready to leave as we speak. You may want to be there when we mete out justice to the English missionary.”

The vizier clearly had relished the thought of torturing and killing this arrogant foreigner who had intruded on his happiness. “Yes,” he had said, “we will accompany you.”

“Good. They will not have traveled far. But we must leave immediately if we want to make it back by evening.”

Yes, Jalal is very homesick, but not for the kelauntar and his strange behavior. He misses his family and Ali, of whom only a mystery remains, for as the kelauntar and his twenty men had returned to Bushruyih on the evening of Ali’s disappearance, neither the boy nor Anisa were among them. The vizier and his attendants had also vanished. In the days that followed, before Jalal had left for Mashhad, rumors had circulated throughout the hamlet. It had been said that the kelauntar had caught up with the English missionary and killed him. That the vizier had taken Anisa with him and returned to Tabbas for their marriage. It had also been said that Ali had chosen to stay with his mother. For Jalal, the true story of his best friend’s disappearance remains a mystery and he prays that one day he and Ali will meet again.

His eyelids sag with fatigue. While he has been indulging himself with memories, a half-hour has past. Precious time! There is so much studying to do. The pressures of the madrisih are intense and the students compete fiercely for the attention and praise of the instructors. Jalal glances across the dim room. On another mat, lit by candles, is a manuscript that holds the rapt attention of an older boy, Taqi, Jalal’s fourteen-year-old roommate.

Since arriving at the madrisih with high expectations, Jalal has tried to see the bright side. But his experience here has been wrinkled with disappointments, stained with unanswered questions. He had hungered for spiritual fulfillment but had been given table scraps of musty dogma. He had wanted deeper understanding but had been chastised for his questions. Islam was ceasing to be that rare and wondrous mystery that invited exploration. It was becoming a tedious recitation of trivia and empty ritual.

He longs for the appearance of the Qa’im. He now understands the tremendous need for the Promised One Who will reinvigorate the slumbering spirit of Islam, empower the righteous, and purify the world with Truth.

Jalal does not want to study this evening. Instead, he craves the one thing that all the teachers and students and lectures and debates seem to deny him. Nearness to God. Just that. The clever arguments in the manuscripts will not help him achieve it. But one thing might.

He blows out the candles, and in the darkness he talks to God.

Chapter 6

Mr. Russell is in a bad mood. It is rare when he is not. His pipe-thin body marches down the corridor with the stiffness of an octogenarian, though Russell is not yet forty. Whiskers sprout like crabgrass all the way to his jaw line, making a bushy frame for a tightly pinched face that many say has not smiled in years. His spine is straight and rigid whether he is sitting, standing or walking, and this inflexibility seems a manifestation of his unyielding and officious attitude toward the boys in his charge. As headmaster of Charterhouse, he has declared himself
supreme ruler
. No offense is unreported, no infraction unpunished. For this reason, Dr. Russell strides resolutely toward the classroom on another splendid mission of juvenile correction. He swings a four-foot bamboo cane thick as his index finger, the instrument of choice for administering discipline. He has reserved the exclusive right of caning for himself.

In the hushed classroom, Ollie sits in a creaking chair, studiously analyzing the Latin words of the catechism. There is a pattern to these odd words, but he cannot quite make it out. The other boys seem to have been educated in this language, but no one had bothered to ask Ollie if he knew Latin.

The oddly warped door to the classroom opens and all eyes turn toward the disturbance. Mr. Peele, the instructor, swiftly stands up from his desk, accompanied by a chorus of gasps. Dr. Russell enters with a scowl and begins searching faces. Like a wildfire, terror races through the room as the stern headmaster, cloaked in a tight black suit, slowly and rhythmically slaps the cane against the palm of his left hand. For many of the boys, this stiff and terrifying man has become the picture conjured by the word
Satan
.

“Mr. Peele,” Dr. Russell says, barely opening his mouth, “I understand we have a bed wetter in the room.”

“Really, sir, I had no idea,” Mr. Peele replies.

“Yes, it’s true, I’m afraid.” Dr. Russell begins pacing around the perimeter of the room. “The laundry told me just yesterday. They do not take kindly to bed wetters, and neither do I. This morning we inspected the beds of our students, and I am most happy to announce that we have discovered the identity of this undisciplined chap.” He fiercely slaps the cane against his palm. “Would you like to know who it is?”

Ollie sinks slowly into his chair, trying to grow smaller. He knows that he is the prey of this monster. Since arriving at Charterhouse three weeks ago, he has sunk into despair and hopelessness. Two weeks ago the trouble had begun. One morning Ollie had dreamed that he was on the
Prince Regent
and suddenly had fallen overboard. The sea had surrounded him, pulled him deep into its bosom, and oddly he was not frightened but found it warm and restful, even peaceful. But then he had awakened, confused at finding himself in bed but still wet from the comforting sea. Sitting up, his arms and backside drenched, he finally determined the trouble.
How could this be? It had never happened before!
Yet the more he had tried to avoid the trouble, the worse it had gotten. He was always careful to cover his sheets in the morning. He had smuggled towels into bed to soak up the trouble. On laundry day he had bundled his sheets with many others so that no one could trace them back to his bed. But now he had been caught.

Worse than the pain of caning is the prospect of public humiliation.
Oliver the bed wetter.
Everyone will know.

“Can there be anything as repulsive as fouling one’s own bed?” Dr. Russell asks, taking a step closer to Ollie. “I can imagine that such a boy has little self-respect, for he is soiling himself as well, and in the process, sullying the reputation of the Charterhouse. Don’t you agree, Oliver Chadwick?” Dr. Russell is standing directly in front of Ollie, who trembles frightfully. The headmaster had seemed to dislike Ollie from the day he had arrived.

“Yes, sir.” Ollie chokes out a croaking affirmation, knowing that he has agreed to the rightness of his coming punishment.
It must be God’s will!
He lowers his head, submitting himself to the purifying cane.
Jesus, forgive me for my weakness. Muhammad, give me strength.

Suddenly, Dr. Russell swivels and bends, grabbing another boy by the nape of the neck. The small boy yelps! Ollie raises his head and watches as tiny Edmund Phipps, his twelve-year-old roommate, is marched to the teacher’s desk.

“Here is your bed wetter!” Dr. Russell announces to the room. “Wee Edmund Phipps wants to be a proper English gentleman. But before he can earn our respect, he must learn to respect himself by casting off this repulsive and repetitive act of self-loathing. Mr. Phipps, perhaps a caning will help you remember the lesson of this day. Drop your trousers!”

Little Edmund Phipps begins to howl in fear. His face puckers into a tight fist that squeezes out tears as he says, “I didn’t do it… I didn’t!” Dr. Russell turns the boy around to face the teacher’s desk, and Edmund slowly, with shaking hands, unbuckles his belt and begins to lower his pants.

The other boys are now laughing, partly out of relief. They start to taunt Edmund Phipps with name-calling: “Bed wetter!” and “Wee Wee Edmund!” Ollie watches in horror.
What is happening?
Could it be that Edmund Phipps is also guilty? Or that just this morning he wet his bed, perhaps for the first time, and had the misfortune of getting caught? Maybe they had found Edmund’s soiled bed and had stopped searching before finding Ollie’s wet sheets.

Ollie watches as Edmund exposes his white buttocks and bends over the desk, sobbing and gurgling. He watches Dr. Russell raise the stiff cane and smack the boy with a startling crack. Edmund screams in pain, and for a moment this halts the laughter. A fiery welt blooms where the cane struck.

Ollie stares in horror. Watching this torture is worse than preparing for his own punishment. He is certain now that a terrible mistake has been made, that Edmund is innocent and he is guilty.

Dr. Russell raises the cane, but before he can strike Edmund again, Ollie cries out, “No!” The headmaster lowers the cane and turns to see Ollie standing.

“What is it, young man?” Dr. Russell says.

“It was not Edmund, sir. It was me. I am the bed wetter.”

“I see. And you are not just trying to save your friend? We do not honor that kind of misguided deceit in this school.”

“No, sir. I am certain the bed they found was mine, sir.”

The headmaster turns to Edmund and says, “Well then, young man, you are off the hook, so to speak. Your roommate has just confessed to the crime.”

Edmund, sniffling, raises himself from the desk and pulls up his trousers.

“Oliver Chadwick, if you would be so good as to step to the front of the room, please,” Dr. Russell says. Ollie complies. As he reaches Mr. Peele’s desk, he looks at Dr. Russell. Up close, the man does not look like Satan at all. He is just a man. And the cane is just a piece of bamboo. Let him whack away! Nothing he can do will be as painful as Ollie’s forced separation from his loved ones. The image of Jalal comes into his mind, and the image calms him. It is almost as if his friend is communicating to him, telling him to be brave, to be proud for having done the right thing. He knows that is what Jalal would have told him.

Without being asked, Ollie unbuckles his belt, lowers his trousers and bends over the desk. The air is cool on his bare buttocks. He thinks of Bushruyih, the wind and the sand, the courtyard garden. He thinks of Mum’s loving smile—she has not forgotten him, he is sure of it. He thinks of…

Smack!
The searing pain blisters his consciousness. Unbelievable pain! But he does not make a sound.

“I would have given Edmund four,” the headmaster explains. “But for failing to speak up before your innocent friend was caned, I will give you eight.”

Whack!
Eight, yes, eight will be fine. Eight will take Ollie back to the painful Bushruyih sunburn, the scorpion sting on his thigh, the fall onto sharp rocks.
Smack!
Eight will take Ollie back to the heartache of abandoning his father, the anguish of seeing the gloomy hellhole of London for the first time.

Crack!