1899, Part 2
Olympia:
Prime Minister Dimitrakis stood in the shade of an olive tree, watching the diggers at work on the site of the ancient stadium. The work was going well, and with any luck, it would be finished in time for the first race of the Olympic Games to be run on the ancient track.
That was a good idea of Verne’s – something to open the century in a spirit of peace. It’s a shame about the civil war, but the games were never going to be in Paris anyway, and now that things are almost over, they’ll at least be able to send a team. The poor bastards in Hungary will have to sit it out, but nearly everyone else has said they’ll be here.
For a moment, he saw Olympia as it would be next year, with all the nations gathered for the opening ceremonies: teams from Europe and the Americas, China and Japan, India and even Africa. And all of them would go home with stories of the Greeks. It would be good for the world to be interested in Greece for something other than its neutrality – it was good already, with the great powers helping to pay for the new stadium in Athens and the diggings here.
Not that that doesn’t have its own problems – such as keeping control of the work. Dimitrakis still remembered that archaeologist Evans’ ghastly plan to reconstruct Olympia as it had looked in ancient times. He’d wanted to hold the entire games here, and to rechristen Olympia as an ‘athletic city of the world.’ They’d fought over it for months before the prime minister had finally prevailed; the stadium would be excavated but not reconstructed, and only a few events would be held on this site, with the others in Athens and Corinth.
Now there were different people fighting, and over a different subject: what modern sports would take their place beside the ancient ones? The prime minister had insisted that every event run at the classical Olympics would be run at the new one, and the nation was getting into the spirit of things: there were discus and javelin teams in every Greek village, and the off-duty diggers at Olympia had got up an impromptu wrestling match. But every country had its own favorite sports and was insisting that they be part of the games too. Was there room for cricket and rugby, or for polo – and what’s more, would enough countries send teams to make the contest interesting? More than likely, the issue would be resolved the day before the opening bell, if not the very moment it rang.
Still, the games would be a momentous occasion, a good time to reflect on what it was to be Greek and what Greece should become in the coming century.
And speaking of which, I’ll have to make sure there are some Cretan Muslims on the Greek teams. Give the mob some Greek-speaking Muslims to cheer for, let them get used to the idea that they’re Greek. Dimitrakis had no great love for Muslims or Turks, but he’d promised to treat them equally in exchange for Crete and Thessaly, and if he was nothing else, he was a man of his word. And besides, love Muslims or not, the war twenty years past had taught the premier that they were not to be despised, and that it was better to work with them than to fight them.
Yes, give them a Cretan Muslim or two to cheer for. And make sure they cheer the right way for that wrestler from Smyrna…
Bombay:
The sight of Bombay’s busy factories and bustling markets always pleased Romesh Chunder Dutt greatly. Far less pleasing were the growing slums that clustered around them. And the fact that many of those slums were occupied by veterans of the Congress regiments pleased him not at all.
The soldiers had come home and the war contracts had ended: more people who needed work, and less work for them to do. It would turn around eventually – it was starting to do so already, with the factories retooling for the domestic and East African markets – but there were many, many soldiers without jobs. And the Congress veterans seemed to have a harder time than the others – no, they didn’t
seem to have a harder time, they did. “They’re troublemakers,” a Baroda industrialist had told him in a moment of candor. “They’ll start unions and complain about everything. I can hire women for half as much, or bring in men from the country who won’t complain.”
In Baroda, at least, Dutt could do something about that. There, he was prime minister and the Congress had a parliamentary majority. He could tell the industrialists that they’d
better hire Congress veterans if they wanted to get government contracts, or arrange loans and licenses for the soldiers to start their own firms. But here…
“Mr. Tata will see you now,” said a disembodied voice above him. He looked up, and the voice acquired a body: a secretary in a well-made dhoti, who gestured for Dutt to come with him. The Congress chairman obeyed, and was ushered down paneled hallways into the great man’s office.
“Come in, Mr. Dutt!” Tata said, rising from his desk; like the secretary, he greeted Dutt in the British style. “Sit down. A cup of tea? Something for breakfast?”
“I won’t say no to the tea, sir.”
“We’re not in the army, and we’ve both made our way in the world. I’m Jamsetji to you.”
“Very well.” From all Dutt knew, Tata wasn’t given to such informality, but he had little choice but to wait and see what game the steel magnate was playing. He took a seat and looked around him at the furnishings and trophies. They were overdone for his taste – and, he suspected, for Tata’s – but an industrialist, like a maharajah, had to make a certain display to the world.
“I know you’re not one to waste time,” Tata said, settling into his own seat and leaning forward. “So tell me, while we wait for the tea. We can talk about our children and our country houses afterward.”
Dutt didn’t have a country house, but he agreed with the sentiment. “I’m looking for jobs, Jamsetji, for men who’ve served their country bravely. There are millions of Indian soldiers coming home from the war, and many of them are living on the street. Men from my regiments are starving. You’re a Baroda man and a patriot, and I was hoping…”
“You don’t have to convince me, Romesh.” Dutt started a little at the use of his first name, as he expected he was meant to. “Send them to me, and I’ll give them jobs where there are jobs to give. But there aren’t as many as I’d like.”
“Things are turning around, though…”
“Not as much as I’d like. I’ve been running into all kinds of licensing delays and material shortages – too many to be coincidence. What I’ve heard is that the Raj doesn’t want us retooling for the domestic market. We’re supposed to buy our housewares from British manufacturers, not to make them ourselves. We served our purpose during the war, and now we’re supposed to close up shop and go home.”
Dutt had heard rumors himself, but this was the first time the situation had been put to him quite so bluntly. The Congress held the industry portfolio in the Government of India – surely things couldn’t be that bad.
Unless there were things the civil service was doing that the minister wasn’t being told about…
“Partnership raj,” he muttered.
“Just because Calcutta calls it that doesn’t mean everyone believes it. And there are plenty of people who think we’ve already been given far too much, and that it’s time to clamp down.”
“Are you in danger, then?”
“Not me, no. I’ve got the money to wait them out, and I’ve got enough friends in Calcutta and London to make sure I get the licenses eventually. But some of the others might not last.”
“Don’t they realize they’ll only lose those industries to the princely states?”
“Except for Baroda and Travancore, they’re all far behind. And for your state… don’t be surprised if someone starts proposing one-way tariffs.”
“That would never be…”
“I’m not saying it’ll happen, just that someone will propose it, and that you need to be ready to fight.”
“I need to be ready for more than that.” If this was the way the wind was blowing, the Minister of Industry had better start investigating, and some civil servants needed to get the sack.
Partnership raj, yes. However many heads we have to break to make it that way.
“Excellent. We can both do much for each other, I think.” Tata clapped his hands together once. “And here’s the tea. Tell me, Romesh, is Baroda going to field a cricket team for the Olympics?”
Cape Town:
“You’ve got to run next year, Jannie!” Hendrik Steyn was saying. “Try to stay out and we’ll drag you in!”
Jan Pieter Smuts, bemused, sipped his peach
mampoer and listened. When he’d gone off to war, he’d been a farmer’s son not long out of school – a substantial citizen, certainly, but not a person of whom others took account. But he’d gone away a captain and come back a colonel, and somewhere along the way, he must have picked up the aura of a leader.
“The hell you say,” he temporized. Smuts was flush with dancing and liquor and felt very satisfied with himself, and the last thing he wanted to talk about at his cousin’s wedding was politics.
Steyn didn’t get the hint. “No, you have to run! With your war record, the British as well as the Afrikaners would vote for you – you’d win for the Bond in any seat you pick. And with a little seasoning, you’d be a prime minister everyone could agree on.”
“Prime minister?” Now Smuts was genuinely surprised. “I’m not yet thirty and I’ve never been elected to anything, and you’re talking me up for prime minister?”
“The Bond will need its own man for prime minister eventually, rather than just picking the best Englishman. The only way the Transvaal will ever come into this federation of Merriman’s is if it sees that one of ours has a chance to run it.”
“I thought you were against all that.”
“I was, and I am. But I’ve got eyes. The war pushed everything together down here, and there’s no way we’re going back. The federation’s going to happen sooner or later, and we have to look to our place in it. If the Free State and the Transvaal are members, and the Griquas too, then our place will be a damned strong one.”
Time was when Smuts would have blinked at the mention of the Griquas, but now he didn’t notice. The
bobotie indaba was eight years past now, and he took for granted that the Griquas, the Coloureds and the Cape Malays would be the Boers’ political allies. Some would never accept it – the ones who’d walked out of the Bond in ’91 had their own party now, and were as bitter toward their old comrades as any splitters would be – but it was amazing how quickly the new order had become natural. If Councilman Baitullah’s presence at the wedding didn’t prove that…
“… And whoever it is will have to be someone who knows the British, and who they trust. It could never be me or one of the other old fighters, Jannie – it’ll have to be someone who’s always been with them, and who’s fought on their side.”
“The men I fought with weren’t exactly British.” The image of Usman seemed to hover over the field for a moment, and Smuts remembered commando raids behind French lines in West Africa and cavalry charges in the Balkans.
There’s another reason it seems so natural that the Coloureds and the Malays are on our side, and we on theirs…
“Doesn’t matter, Jannie. You were in their army and you were a hero. They’ll vote for you and they’ll trust you.”
Smuts stood a moment in thought and realized Steyn was right.
“Ask me tomorrow when I’m sober.”
Paris:
It was almost midnight, and the
dibiterie was finally clean, ready for the next day’s customers. The employees who weren’t family had gone home, Chiara and the girls were in bed, and Souleymane and Omar sat across from each other at the last open table. They sipped
café au lait together, the hot drink and the fire sheltering them from the late November cold outside, and let the silence lengthen, each content to be in the other’s presence.
I wish it could always be like this, Omar thought, not knowing that his father was thinking much the same thing.
Omar didn’t want to break the silence.
One more night, he told himself, like he had the night before and the one before that.
Let him go to bed and think that everything can be like before. But he couldn’t, not tonight – it
couldn’t always be like this, and this time, he couldn’t keep the words that had been building inside him from being spoken.
“I think I need to go away for a while.”
Souleymane looked back at him, not a bit surprised. “I know,” he said. “This has been coming for a long time.”
“You did?” Omar had braced for a fight, and now he wasn’t sure what to say. But there were some things he and his father could only talk about with each other, so he sat and waited.
“I was a soldier before you were ever born, son. It happened this way in the
tirailleurs sometimes – a soldier would take his bonus and leave the regiment, and six months later he’d be back. That would have been me, probably, if I hadn’t lost a leg. It isn’t easy to settle down.”
“I’m not going back to the army. Two wounds in the big war and one in the last one – I think I’ve pushed my luck enough, and I’ve had enough fighting to last forever. Any more, and I’ll end up like that crazy
poilu who almost killed the emperor.”
“Crazy? I thought he was from the Ligue.”
“No, and he wasn’t a communist or an anarchist either. Colonel Dreyfus said he was just a poor bastard driven mad by the war. But I’m not going back.”
“Good,” Souleymane answered, and that one word said a great deal. A moment passed. “So where are you going?”
“Dakar, at first.”
“You have family a hundred kilometers inland, and I’m sure they’ll welcome you.” Suddenly Souleymane shook his head and laughed. “But I can’t imagine you staying too long. If you do, you’ll realize why I joined the
tirailleurs in the first place.”
“I thought you joined to become a citizen.”
“That too – that and the money. Spend some time with the herds, though, and you’ll see those weren’t the only reasons.”
“Maybe I’ll go for a visit. I’m not staying, though. A navy lieutenant I met in Marseilles – he’s buying a surplus transport there, along with a British officer he met in the war.” Omar raised a hand at his father’s questioning look. “It’s a long story. But they’re refitting it to trade with Hawaii and Japan, and he said that since I knew some field medicine, I could come on as assistant to the ship’s doctor. I’ll have to do regular labor too, but it’ll count as a medical apprenticeship…”
“Will it?” The new law said that anyone who took a three-year apprenticeship with a doctor could enter medical school even without a lycée diploma, and could finish it in two years rather than three. “Can you do that, after being an officer?”
“I think so. I don’t really know what I’m doing at sea, so I won’t mind listening to people who do.”
“And if you go to school after, do you think you can finish?”
“I don’t know.” That was the heart of the matter after all; since Omar had come home, he just hadn’t been able to stay in one place very long. But he remembered the days in the field hospital with Dr. Carrillon –
no, she’d told him to call her Marie-Claire – and remembered how, even with the sick and wounded all around, those had been the only days of the war when he’d felt at peace. Surely he at least had to try.
“The doctor will give me some medical textbooks to read on my own. That’ll help, I think.”
“It seems you have a plan,” Souleymane said slowly. “That’s all I can ask for.”
“Then it’s all right?”
“Your mother will miss you.”
So will I, said Souleymane’s face, and Omar suddenly realized how much gray there was in his father’s sparse hair.
“She has Gabrielle’s baby to keep her busy.”
“She’s your mother.”
“I’ll stay a few more days. Until you find someone to take my place.”
“I’ve always found someone before. Stay and be welcome, but don’t take too long, or you’ll never leave.” The briefest of silences. “I went a long way; it seems you’ll have to go a longer one."
“I’ll come back.”
“Go with God, and come home safe.” Souleymane looked down into his cup, not trusting himself to say more.
They drank their coffee together in silence, and the late November wind scattered the leaves outside.
