The Mulberry Empire

by Philip Hensher

  ‘I think he was rather disappointed,’ Mohan Lal said. ‘He was probably hoping for more guns or a thrilling sort of dagger, I expect. They are said in my country to be frightfully fond of weaponry, these Afghan fellows.’

  Gerard gave a snort, with which Burnes silently concurred. Mohan Lal had long ago started to seem a tedious companion, with his incessant calm explanations of why things had gone wrong.

  They had been led to a house. The owner of the house had welcomed them as if they were guests, effusively, ordered them to be given food and drink, and showed them their beds. Were they prisoners? Were they guests? The interminable attentions of the Newab Jubbur Khan, the owner of the house, and of the series of small boys who sat in the corner of the room with muskets seemed to point to different conclusions. They had arrived ten days ago, and seemed no nearer achieving what they were here to do.

  What they were was quite a simple matter: two British officers and a native guide. What they were doing there, not even Burnes would, for this moment, quite bring into his mind. If the knowledge was not at the front of his thoughts, even the calmly interrogative brown gaze of his guards would not bring it out. What Kabul was – what Afghanistan was, here at this moment, far from India, further from England in some sense other than yards and feet than even an explorer like Burnes could quite comprehend – was a matter which could not be thought of as simple. There was, too, the question of what an Englishman was doing in Asia. That had been a question which, in this sort of situation, Burnes had had ample time to contemplate, and never managed any kind of answer. He began to be nervous, sitting here; any Englishman grows atavistically restless if he finds himself more than a hundred miles from the nearest sea, and Burnes was somehow aware all the time that this high brown stinking city was a great deal more than a hundred miles from any imaginable sea.

  3.

  ‘Now, the Lord,’ Burnes went on. ‘No, sorry, vocative, O Lord of the Wind of a Hundred and Twenty Days. I always forget Persian numbers over fifty or so.’

  ‘It is not particularly complicated,’ Mohan Lal said, smiling in his infuriating way. ‘Numbers in Arabic are far more complex a proposition. And we may find we have plenty of time to perfect the address to the Amir.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ Gerard said. ‘Years, probably. Hi, you, sir.’

  The guard in the corner of the room moved, minimally.

  ‘Are we to see the Amir today?’ Gerard said, as he had asked ten times a day since they had arrived.

  The guard made a head-tipping gesture; whether it meant something, or whether it was just the weight of the boy’s enormous, mushroom-coloured turban, was not clear.

  ‘In any case,’ Gerard said, ‘he knows we are here. Probably.’

  The boy guard, his loaded jezail like a bayonet between his thin dirty hands, considered this, deeply, and then made the same head-tipping gesture. ‘Rus?’ he said in the end, nodding three times at the three Europeans. They appeared to know very well what Mohan Lal was.

  ‘No,’ Burnes said patiently, not for the first time. ‘No, we are not Russians. We are from England, from Engelstan.’

  ‘Yes,’ Gerard cut in. ‘Tell the Newab Jubbur Khan to tell the Amir. Go on, go and tell your commanding officer. He will see us then, when he knows where we come from.’

  The boy looked, as if deeply wounded, appealing to Burnes. ‘Rus,’ he said once more, and then, for no reason on earth, started to laugh uproariously. He did not get up.

  ‘I wish they wouldn’t do that,’ Gerard said irritably. ‘Laugh like that, I mean. It makes me think they know something we don’t know. And why do they keep calling us Russians?’

  ‘Rus,’ the boy said again, murmuring as if entranced, understanding a word in what Gerard said.

  ‘No, no, not Rus,’ Gerard said. ‘And when do we hear from the damned Emperor of the damned Afghans? Oh, God – oh, God – that damned mutton at breakfast. Gentlemen, excuse me—’

  Burnes shrugged, as Gerard rushed from the room, clutching his stomach chaotically like an unfastened valise. He prided himself on the value of patience in these dealings. That was the great thing in the East; patience, because nothing ever happened when it should, nothing ever happened on schedule. Everything, in dealing with the great rulers of the East, was whim and delay. Ten days was nothing; because, in response to whim and delay, there was no sensible behaviour to adopt but a complete, more-than-Oriental patience. That was what everyone said, and Burnes was pleased with himself for having exercised a great deal of patience with every potentate he had ever come across, and usually attained, if not the desired end, then, at least, some interesting conclusion. What no one had ever warned him about was the necessity to exercise some patience with one’s fellow travellers; with a supercilious ass like Mohan Lal, forever making superior suggestions about one’s Persian or giving one ridiculous and probably entirely false information about the curious customs of the country, or a bigger ass like Gerard, complaining about the slightest inconvenience to his blessed dignity, arguing for two entire days about the necessity of shaving his head and dying his beard black before crossing the Indus, always wanting to tell some outraged and heavily-armed nabob about the greatness of the Empire, or even, once, telling an imam in response to the invariable question about the European diet that, yes, he ate bacon daily and very delicious it was too. Unfairly, Burnes blamed Gerard even for his disastrous digestion, the steady torrential cataract from his bowels, blamed in turn on the damned mutton at breakfast, the damned beans at dinner, or the damned melon which the rest of the company had eaten at Jalalabad with no ill effects. Yes, the exercise of patience with one’s damned fellow travellers was the most taxing thing; compared to that, waiting ten days to see the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan presented him with no difficulty whatever.

  4.

  Out on the street, debate about the Europeans who rode so badly was furious and incessant, like the noise of a cloud of swallows.

  ‘The Amir will not see them.’

  ‘The Amir will see them tomorrow, fool. He has seen them yesterday, and knows everything about them.’

  ‘How can the Amir have seen them when they have not seen the Amir?’

  At the edges of the market, the old men jogged up and down on their heels, agitated by debate, and punched at the air, quick as clockwork. They bothered no one.

  ‘The Amir sent Akbar the son of the Amir, and the Amir saw them with the eyes of Akbar.’

  ‘Did they not know the son of the Amir when Akbar was announced?’

  ‘Many are the ways of the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan, and wise they are.’

  Futteh the singer, plump and pale as a dove, his saucy eyes wandering to make sure of his audience, finished sucking on his plum, pondered, spat. He began a story.

  ‘You recall the tale of the Vizier’s daughter and the son of the King,’ he started. ‘And the King did not know how he should know if the daughter of the Vizier was true and good as she was thought to be. Now, this was many, many years ago, in China. And the Vizier had the most marvellous garden of roses in all of China, and he was in the habit of taking a walk in the garden, each morning. And one morning, he was accompanied in his walk by his daughter, who was as beautiful as the first light of the dawn over the mountains. He was glad to walk in the rose garden with his daughter, and, after they had walked together for an hour, the Vizier said to his daughter: My daughter, is it true that …’

  The story unravelled. Futteh was a good storyteller, and, even in the cold of the early evening, he could hold half a dozen old men with his seamless voice. Their eyes fixed on his, six pairs of eyes, whether crafty, knowing, cynical, for the moment subdued into the quiet trust of the audience. Their knees hunched, their backs against the wall, they listened to the comforting tale they had heard hundreds of times before. Occasionally they interrupted with marginal, concerned comments – ‘He does not know that the ring has been swallowed by the fish on the King’s table,’ or, ‘The girl, does she not understand that the man she
is marrying is her own brother?’ or, as narrative catastrophe threatened, ‘Allah is great and merciful.’ But for the most part, they let Futteh tell the story in his own leisurely manner.

  When it was over, an hour or two had passed, and the audience sighed, as if wanting more of their own satisfaction.

  ‘The son of the King in the story disguised himself, and went into the marketplace to hear what the common people were saying,’ one of the audience said.

  ‘Yes, and that is what Akbar, son of the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan, that is what he has done, with the Russians.’

  ‘They are not Russians,’ another man said, passing. ‘Engelstan.’

  ‘Akbar put on a tribesman’s clothes, and took a jezail,’ Futteh said, waving his hand in the air impatiently, dismissing either the objection or the flies. ‘And he went to the house where the English are, and sat with them for two hours, and talked with them. But all the time, they did not know who they were speaking with.’

  ‘Great is the mind of the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan, and wise is he in the ways of the world,’ someone murmured.

  ‘And they ride so badly,’ Futteh added, with great finality.

  ‘Like the sack of rice on the back of an old donkey,’ his listeners chorused sagely.

  5.

  The orchard city fell into shade as the afternoon wore on; pale peaches, espaliered against the wall, plums, apricots, pears; beneath the window of the Newab Jubbur Khan where they sat all day, a fine apple tree, just like the trees of Burnes’s childhood. He shut his eyes, and sniffed, and sometimes, through all the smell and noise and clear strange mountain air, there was all his childhood, in the sheltered Montrose garden. Walnuts, cherries, vines, and more wonderful things, pomegranates growing in the streets, and, everywhere, mulberry trees; their fruit piled up in market stalls, lying in the street, and the whole city sucking ceaselessly on fruit. At the door of their wing in the courtyard, a small boy, padded up with scraps of cloth, his legs wrapped up puttee-fashion, his dirty feet bare and hardened in sandals, was sucking on a handful of cherries and mulberries, cracking walnuts between his hard teeth, and every so often running his tongue round his mouth to clean off what juice was staining his face, leaving a fat white clown-smile in a fruit-smeared face. And everywhere the birds; bright chattering magpies, the fat burble of doves, edging at each other in their nervous fighting. Burnes watched them for hours from the window. And the nightingale; he had never known, quite, what the Persians meant when they wrote about the nightingale, but here, it was a sharp lemon tang, cutting through the rich sweetness of the dungy perfumed city, a line of pure song, returning on itself, multiplying, varying, twisting, but always, always, itself. He sat in the evening light, and listened, and found no way to ask the others to be quiet too.

  The day wore on, and at some point towards the end of the afternoon, a procession of dishes began to be carried into the room. The two women of the house, veiled in brick-red cloaks, carried them in. Their veils were raw squares of cloth, dropped over their heads. A coarse lattice was cut in to allow them to see. Burnes seemed to catch the glint of an eye through the loose weave of the eye-slit, and, before he lowered his eyes, wondered for a moment if that meant the woman was looking at him. From their gait, they were both young, and the contours of their bodies were revealed by the rippling red cloth.

  A third woman stood at the door and watched, holding a baby; she too was veiled; even the baby was veiled. She seemed to be supervising the other women. Perhaps a favoured wife. The dishes were set down on the floor without explanation, and, when the entire room was filled with clay dishes, the three women retreated to the door, looked once at the food, and not at the men, and quickly left. And then the Newab Jubbur Khan came in.

  The Newab, whose house this was, seemed to regard them with an almost affectionate air. He made a point of eating with them; he also made a point of coming in after the food, and leaving without excusing himself. The three of them scrambled to their feet.

  ‘You have passed an agreeable day, I hope?’ the Newab said kindly. He was a slight man, his nose a huge beak in his little face; when he walked, it was with an evident consciousness of grandeur which his appearance did not entitle him to. He walked like a man who has once been fat. ‘If you do not object, I would like to eat with you.’

  ‘We would be honoured,’ Burnes said.

  ‘Honoured indeed,’ Gerard said, looking warily at the food. ‘Thrice honoured.’

  The Newab nodded agreeably at Gerard’s meaningless formulation. ‘Sit, sit,’ he said. He rattled off the habitual prayer, lazily looking round, and without taking a breath, fell back from Arabic into Persian. ‘The lamb is particularly fine, from my own flock.’ He gestured at a greasy-looking dish, grey and shining in the sun. Burnes leant forward and scooped up some of the cold stew, knowing perfectly well that the Newab was lying politely, since all the food here had to be ordered up from the bazaar. Gerard just looked green.

  ‘Tell me,’ the Newab asked, after each of the dishes had been commended and accepted, and they were embarked on the task of struggling unsuccessfully with what could be eaten of the Newab’s food. ‘How large a city is London, or Calcutta?’

  ‘They are different cities, Newab, and both large and beautiful,’ Mohan Lal said.

  ‘I see,’ the Newab said. He seemed, still, to be under the impression that Calcutta and London were more or less the same place, or perhaps different names for the same city; an impression they had been trying to correct for some time now. ‘But how big? Is it, for instance, as large as our city?’

  ‘I think it might be even a little larger,’ Burnes said tactfully. ‘How many people, for instance, live in Kabul?’

  The Newab sucked on his teeth, and gazed at the wall, as if calculating. ‘Many, many people, and their numbers grow every day, thanks to the wisdom and kindness of the Amir who rules over them.’

  ‘I see,’ Burnes said, making a routine half-incline of the head at the mention of the Amir.

  ‘London has many hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, and is the richest and most beautiful city in the world,’ Gerard cut in. Burnes looked at him in irritation; what the point of boasting to the Newab about the size of London was, he had no idea. Just an unthinking, involuntary outcrop of Gerard’s personality, as frustrating and impossible to argue with as geology.

  ‘Of course, we have seen very little of Kabul,’ Burnes said. ‘But the reputation of the beauty and splendour of the city has spread far, and we have travelled from India in the hope that we may see for ourselves.’

  ‘How is it that you have seen very little of Kabul?’ the Newab abruptly asked. He seemed genuinely puzzled, proffering a dish of boiled aubergines.

  Burnes was thrown. ‘We have been resting here, at your hospitality,’ he said finally, seeing no way to point out that they were effectively prisoners. At that, as if to make his point, one of the succession of small boys with muskets wandered in. He greeted the Newab elaborately, the English more casually, and sat down in the corner of the room, promptly falling asleep, both hands on the barrel of his gun. ‘At the gracious hospitality of the Newab,’ Burnes said, pointedly. ‘We have been unable to see the famous city of Kabul.’

  ‘Great is the city of Kabul,’ the Newab Jubbur Khan echoed, absently. He took a piece of bread, tearing it in half, and dipped it in some dish of meat; before eating it, he made a vague gesture of invitation towards Gerard, who, with too evident unwillingness, followed his example. ‘Yes, the city is great, and its fame has spread far. The bazaar of the city is the greatest in the world, where the world comes to marvel at the riches and splendour of the empire. The merchants of China and Russia and Engelstan come to the great markets, laden with goods, and leave laden down with more than they brought, such are the marvels of the city. The beauty and splendour of the city is great, and the beauty of the people of the Emperor is famous throughout the world. And such, willing, it will always be. Over the city is the Bala Hissar, the palace of my broth
er, the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan, where my brother rules over his family and his wives and his wealth in wisdom and mercy and goodness, willing. And the palace of my brother is famed throughout the world, and the world comes to express its wonder at its beauty and greatness and the greatness of my brother the Amir.’

  He paused, perhaps considering whether his description of the city would, in the end, be as useful to the English as simply letting them out to look for themselves; perhaps, however, considering what there could possibly be to start praising next in the high stinking city. Not the food, at any rate, Burnes thought unkindly, refusing the offer of another greasy dish.

  ‘The Amir is your brother?’ Mohan Lal said.

  ‘The Amir is the brother, it is said, of every Afghan,’ Burnes said, helping out.

  ‘He is my brother,’ Jubbur Khan said simply. ‘The shade of the same mountain shadowed our birth, and may the same stream refresh his parched tongue.’

  ‘May friendship be forever between warriors,’ Burnes said.

  ‘And he is my brother,’ Jubbur Khan said again.

  ‘He is the brother of every Afghan,’ Gerard said, conventionally echoing what Burnes had said.

  ‘He is the brother of every Afghan,’ Jubbur Khan agreed. But then he seemed troubled, and said, once more, more emphatically, ‘The Amir is my brother.’

  ‘He is the brother of every Afghan,’ Gerard said again, idiotically.

  ‘He is your brother?’ Burnes cut in. ‘He is the son of your father?’

  ‘He is the son of my father,’ Jubbur Khan said, relieved. ‘Yes, he is the son of my father.’

  This explained a great deal. And now Jubbur Khan got up, as if he had said enough to explain who he was, and who the Amir was, and what the Europeans were. He got up, bowing on all sides, and swept out with massive graciousness, hardly waiting for his guests to raise themselves and bow graciously back, as if his good manners were such that no complementary response could possibly improve or complete them, and was out of the door and at the bottom of the stairs before Gerard succumbed to what had clearly been troubling him for some time, a colossal, harrumphing and malodorous fart, like a bough breaking under the sheer weight of fruit. The boy guard looked up, surprised and humorous. Burnes vastly bowed in his direction, the sleeves of his robe collapsing about his arms and hands. ‘And to you, O Lord of the Wind of a Hundred and Twenty Days,’ he said. ‘That, I expect, is a very good sign.’