‘Vitkevich, you cannot go, and you will not delay, and you will not send another man in your place,’ Stanchinsky said. ‘Come now, something must be done.’
‘Leave me in peace,’ Vitkevich said, and wretchedly inserted the handkerchief back into the horrible orifice. ‘Good evening, sir,’ he attempted, in Persian, as the Newab Jubbur Khan entered the room.
The Newab bowed, delightedly, all about. ‘But that can be cured,’ he said, when his inquiries about everyone’s health had been answered by an account of Vitkevich’s present misery. ‘There is nothing easier. I shall arrange it immediately.’
That, in fact, had been Vitkevich’s fear – he could, after all, have arranged it himself, were it not that the details of Kabul dental treatment were as vividly present to his mind as any pain could be. He attempted to object as best he could.
‘Do not try to speak, my dear sir,’ the Newab said, cutting through Vitkevich’s farffing. No one else attempted to help him out; indeed, they were grinning insanely at the prospect of this coming entertainment. ‘It only aggravates the pain, constantly to be speaking.’
Everything else seemed to be handled in the most infuriatingly leisurely way, but it could only have been five minutes when the Newab returned, smiling benevolently, with a servant of dangerously insane appearance. In the man’s hand there was a blackened tool, surely too big to insert into anyone’s mouth. He hung back, staring wildly around the room as if searching for a victim.
‘There is nothing easier,’ the Newab said kindly. ‘I am so sorry you did not bring this to my attention earlier. My dear sir, please, it will be over in a moment – if you could just indicate to my farrier the tooth which is causing you such pain …’
‘Your farrier?’ Vitkevich said, or tried to say, retreating back into his pile of blankets.
The Newab turned to his farrier, and gestured at Vitkevich, still smiling benevolently. The other Russians all shut their eyes, clapping their hands over their faces as one. The farrier advanced, his blacksmith’s black implement in hand, and Vitkevich swallowed, hard.
‘The wise man learns from pain,’ the Newab said sententiously, ‘and then plucks out what pains him.’
‘Well, tell him to chop my head off,’ Vitkevich said, but no one understood him through his gag. The farrier thrust a filthy hand into Vitkevich’s mouth, pulling out the handkerchief. Vitkevich told himself that he was a brave man – he was – and indicated, silently, the rotting tooth.
Half an hour later, Vitkevich was wondering how his head could possibly have contained so much blood, and now be so empty. Two teeth had been pulled – a good one, by mistake, and then the rotten one. The farrier had gone, jingling the teeth in his dirty fist like dice, and the handkerchief, the blanket, Vitkevich’s robes, were sodden with blood. The others were staring at him in awe.
‘Gentlemen,’ Vitkevich said, wretchedly approaching an appearance of insouciance. ‘I am happy to say that I am quite fit to pay a visit on the English tomorrow.’ But he spoke through a pond of blood, and nobody understood what on earth he was trying to say.
3.
Burnes had made a great effort, conquered his dislike, and returned, the morning of his Christmas dinner, to see Masson in penitent and apologetic mood. It had to be done; there was no reason, after all, to be rude to the poor man, and, almost as soon as he had stalked off and left him in the marketplace, Burnes had been taken with a feeling of guilt. He must be lonely, and be pleased, underneath his touchy surface, that there were compatriots of his here to keep him company. In any case – as Mohan Lal pointed out – the man was well informed, and deserved to be trusted a little. For all these reasons, Burnes did not wait long before going back to Masson’s house to apologize.
He would rather, however, not have had to bring him what must seem like bad news. In the interim, Burnes had been subjected to another gigantic audience with the Amir. He had made what he now suspected was a mistake. He had gone into the hall and, waiting for the Amir to arrive, assessed the hand he held. Burnes had two trump cards. The first was the firm information that the Russians were aiding the Persians in the siege of Herat. They were besieging the capital of the Amir’s cousin. The second was something he could say; something he knew to be false; that the Russians in Kabul were, in fact, no emissaries from the Emperor of Russia, but merely adventurers, bearing a false letter, drawn up by themselves and sealed with something from a bag of sugar. He could say both these things, and the Amir would believe them both. What consequences would follow if he lied, he could not imagine; but he could not imagine what consequences would follow if he told what he knew to be the truth.
In the event, he had told the Amir that the Russians were quite genuine, in his opinion; and followed it up quickly with the information about the siege of Herat. Dost Mohammed had greeted these pieces of information impassively. He nodded, and then returned to his favourite subject, the necessity of the British lending him troops to invade the Punjab and regain Peshawar for the empire. Burnes wondered afterwards whether he would have done better to have kept his two pieces of information to himself. That was certainly the view of Masson, when he described the conversation to him. But by now Masson clearly felt that he had done what he could, and merely shrugged, as if to say ‘of course, of course’. Burnes left Masson’s little house, casually wishing him a merry Christmas on his way out (Masson had looked surprised, and perhaps he had little idea of the date in this remote and un-Christian place). He did not mention why he left so soon; that Vitkevich was expected at the Bala Hissar.
He returned, as it proved, not a minute too soon. The guards at the gate of the Bala Hissar were clustering like jackals circling a corpse. They were not waiting for him. They wanted to see the Russian admitted; the Russian who, every day for weeks, had been sending letters to the Amir. Burnes’s return caused a little flurry of excitement – could they really have such difficulty telling one European from another? – but when that had subsided, the youngest of the soldiers sulkily slung his jezail over his shoulders, and led Burnes back to his quarters.
His rooms had been prepared for the feast, and his companions had removed themselves. About the room, the tallow candles were blackening the walls, although it was not yet dark; a splendid carpet had been laid on the floor, and about it, piles of Chinese cushions. There was no one there; it was a banqueting hall, prepared by the afrit of the Arabian Nights, and now only one demon remained: Burnes. He stood in the fiery splendid room, and listened to the noise of his guest approaching through the distant corridors of the great palace. He wondered, standing there, how he would ever recognize him, and the thought filled him with nervousness; he had met him twice only, deep in the desert, and now, he wondered how he would ever know what he looked like. Faces were all the same in their essentials, and, unable to summon up Vitkevich’s face, Burnes recalled the story of the family of Darius before Alexander, and feared that he would destroy everything by greeting the wrong man. But then, all at once, there he was, before a small crowd of torch-bearing Afghans, and of course, of course, it was Vitkevich.
Burnes bowed deeply, putting all the warmth he could into it, and Vitkevich bowed back. The soldiers retreated into the anteroom, and stood there, gawping. Burnes decided to ignore them entirely, and they might very well stay there for several hours.
‘Do you have any books?’ Vitkevich said.
‘Books?’ Burnes said, surprised at this opening gambit.
‘Novels, of any description,’ Vitkevich said, sitting down without being invited. ‘My dear sir, I confess, I am appallingly bored.’
‘A great problem,’ Burnes said. ‘Yes, you are quite right.’
‘Well, we travelled with everything we could need, I thought,’ Vitkevich said. He had something of a lisp, Burnes noted; not an unattractive trait, but something which contributed to his alert, energetic manner. ‘Or so I thought, but I was the only one of the party to think of stowing any reading matter, apart from the essentials, and the ten novels I
chose, I have long ago read, and much as I love Balzac – I adore Balzac, sir – I rather hunger for some other entertainment. Of course, I would happily exchange our small library for yours …’
‘We play cards,’ Burnes said, smiling. ‘I believe we have novels, all much read, by now, but in English, I fear. Save the French novel I already offered you, of course, which I perceive you are too familiar with already. Do you speak English, monsieur?’
Vitkevich shrugged. ‘I am prepared to try,’ he said. ‘I am desperate to try. Perhaps cards would be a better entertainment, but – well, sir, I am not a rich man, and we may have days ahead of us, weeks. In that time I could lose whole estates to my subordinates, if I had estates to lose, of course.’
‘That is precisely my problem,’ Burnes said. ‘I am in debt by a considerable sum now to my guide – I had not thought that whist – what is whist in French? – no matter – would be so very dangerous a game, or that it would present the greatest of the perils we would have to deal with on our travels. I think you are wise – perhaps we, too, will turn to the quiet reading of novels in the long evenings. Balzac, I fear, I make no headway with.’
‘I adore Balzac,’ Vitkevich said again. ‘I wonder if you have ever read – well, I forget the title, but a marvellous novel. I could read it twice, three times. Indeed, I have, and a fourth reading, it emerges, would be more than even I could stand. But you will enjoy it. An English novel? A pleasant diversion. Let me see. Squire Allworthy, Uncle Toby, I’homme de qualité and his ghastly dog Fido, Sir Grandison, Peregrine Gherkin, and there was a novel where a man was naufragé and made friends with a negro and another where a man was naufragé and his only friends were very small people and very big people and a third book which I did not trouble with and horses. Very rational. No, I fear I have read all English novels, or all that I am likely to read, and I find that every single one of them begins with a shipwreck, for some reason I cannot guess at.’
Burnes found himself laughing. ‘My dear sir, what dull old books you have suffered through. Perhaps we may offer you something more modern—’
‘But not if it is mad Belinda in a haunted house – Otranto? Udolpho? Yes, there is another one the poor dear Empress forced me to read.’
‘No, I am sure we can supply something more entertaining than Sir Charles Grandison with his men, women and Italians.’
‘Men, women and Italians,’ Vitkevich said. ‘How I adored that, and now I remember nothing else of the poor boring fellow’s adventures. I longed, I must say, to meet that dull fellow in real life and tell him the full story of the dullest periods in my own dull life, to wreak some kind of revenge. If only it were he who travelled to the kingdom of the giants, and if only one of them had had the sense to tread on him very firmly. Well, you will enjoy Balzac and I will suffer through your terrible English novels. You know, I am quite ashamed to confess to such a thing, but it was the Tsarina herself who recommended Balzac to me, and I set upon it with the heaviest heart – the poor woman, she has recommended the most unspeakable books to her whole court, and we all are obliged to read them, since any suggestion from their imperial majesties, you know, has the force of an imperial command. The poor woman – I can hear her now. “I know,” she would say, “I am quite assured, quite determined that you, my dear Vit-a-kevich” – poor woman, she is so, so vulgar – “that you, above all people, shall appreciate the many sincere, the many improving beauties of this beautiful and most Christian book, and I know, I am quite assured that you shall weep, you shall cry as I did over so very sad and improving a story.”’
‘You are intimate, I perceive, with Their Majesties?’ Burnes said.
‘Agonizingly so,’ Vitkevich said. ‘Well, the imperial literary command goes out, and a book the poor illiterate woman has spent months poring and puzzling over is delivered, and we must read it in two days and then listen to her sad ramblings. Well, unspeakable as this all is, she truly redeemed herself with her enthusiasm for Illusions Perdues, and now, sir – do you know, I will not hear a word spoken against Her Imperial Majesty’s imperial literary tastes. Poor woman. She reminds me of no one so much as our unspeakable host here, the Newab Jubbur Khan, whom I believe you know. Or so he tells us.’
‘Indeed,’ Burnes said. The fellow, all in all, was a gentleman, to Burnes’s slight and inexplicable surprise. ‘Well, I apologize in advance for our national literary effusions, and, indeed for our national Christmas dinner. I have been so bold as to attempt to instruct the Amir’s cooks in an English Christmas feast, but I dared not inquire into what they have made of my instructions. It may be a curiosity for your memoirs. I cannot promise more than that.’ Burnes clapped his hands and ordered a bearer off to the kitchens. ‘I would be most interested, sir, to hear of your travels; you must have seen quite different lands from us.’
‘Indeed,’ Vitkevich said, and, quite evidently, was immediately on his guard. ‘Indeed, many most interesting places. And we have observed most interesting customs. Do you know, sir, the inhabitants of – now, what was that place we travelled through – my poor memory, quite hopeless – well, some place between here and the Emperor’s borders – they have a custom of telling the future from the grounds of coffee, thrown onto the ground? A most curious thing. I had never seen it before.’
‘We have something similar in London,’ Burnes said briskly. ‘What route did you take to arrive at so very distant a place as this?’
‘Oh, a very commonplace and uninteresting route, I assure you,’ Vitkevich persisted. ‘I wonder if you have ever had cause to have a tooth removed in Kabul? Well, I must tell you …’
Vitkevich embarked on his long and dreadful tale of the Newab and his brutish farrier. Despite himself, Burnes was amused, and waited patiently until the end of the story.
‘… but what the fellow was proposing to do with my two teeth, one in perfect health, I could not tell you. Perhaps they are at this very moment on sale as an exotic curiosity in the market here. I like to think so – I would be most curious to see what price two fine Russian teeth (very well, one fine, one rotten) would fetch.’
‘What very interesting experiences you must have had,’ Burnes said. ‘Tell me—’
‘Ah …’ breathed Vitkevich, and Burnes’s inquiries were cut short by the arrival of the feast, in high silver state. First, borne in magnificent splendour, was—
‘A dish of grass,’ Vitkevich said, amused. ‘That, I confess, I have never seen. Not cooked, either. Is that an English custom? To present your guests with grass? A most interesting sort of salad.’
‘No, I promise you,’ Burnes said. ‘I think that must be their own addition. There is some importance, you know, attached to grass here – you know that the Amir wears blades of grass in his turban?’
‘I did not know,’ Vitkevich said. ‘I have not, I admit, laid eyes on the Amir. Blades of grass? How odd. What can that mean? And they would wilt so. Are they replaced hourly, by minions? Still, it seems odd to begin a feast with a dish only a sheep would appreciate. Ah, things are improving. Fowl – two in one, how interesting – the small bird escaping from the larger one’s anal cavity, how charming.’
‘No, that is its neck.’
‘I find that even more charming. An English custom? I suppose not. And – ah, that is more attractive, I must say – when did I last eat mutton? – at Bokhara – have we been to Bokhara? – I forget. Well, a very long time ago. Yes, and …’
Vitkevich hungrily narrated the entire arrival of the feast. ‘I have not eaten—’ he said at one point, his eyes shining, and Burnes felt that this was the first sincere thing he had said, and might be the only sincere thing he had ever said in his life, ‘—for days. Good heavens, what is that? Some Afghan monstrosity. What a disaster they have made of a fine English dinner, but you and I, we shall enjoy it.’
‘I have to say,’ Burnes said, ‘that looks to me like a very reasonable approximation of an English plum pudding. I am surprised. Please, sir, do assuage your hunger.�
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4.
They ate, at first with cautious delicacy, offering each other this dish or the other, then with increasing speed, taking spoonfuls indiscriminately, mixing the meat with the splendid flaming pudding. Vitkevich kept up a commentary on the food, telling one funny story after another, and swerving gracefully away from any suggestion of where he had been, where he was going, who he was, and what he wanted. For a moment, Burnes had thought that he had come to the Bala Hissar with the beginnings of a conversation, and, like many great wits, would exhaust his store within a few minutes and be reduced to retelling the plots of his favourite novels. But it did not happen; as he gorged, the man grew more and more loquacious, and his conversation as fanciful as if it had been fuelled by wine.
‘Have you ever been spoken to by a camel?’ Vitkevich would suddenly say. ‘I had no idea they could be so rational. Now, this was some weeks ago – we were in some need of fresh mounts—’
‘Where was this?’
‘Ah – I forget the place, precisely – a small town, a trading town, somewhere to the north of here, or possibly to the west—’
‘In the vicinity of Herat, perhaps?’
‘Herat, Herat … no, not there. Well, it was a trading town, and we were trying to acquire fresh camels. They were wretched beasts, and the fellow was asking a tremendous, an obscene sum for them. But, as a traveller like you must know, far better than I, sometimes there is simply no alternative, and we were quite at the man’s mercy. Well, we loaded up the animals, and attempted to mount. I had reserved the one tolerable-looking beast for myself, but the miserable animal obviously thought itself too fine, and would not kneel. We whipped it and pushed it and beat at its knees, and it would go down for a moment, but whenever I approached it, the animal rose sharply and threw me into the dust without the slightest ceremony. Of course, this was supplying a great deal of merriment to the entire town, and I was growing somewhat impatient. The animal was standing there, looking appallingly contented with its success. I flung down my pack, and went to glare at it. I brought my face up against its own beastly physiognomy, and hissed at it. And it looked at me, and said, quite clearly, Va t’en. A dreadful animal.’
The Mulberry Empire Page 39
