The Mulberry Empire

‘Perhaps so,’ Khushhal said. They were in one of the little courtyard gardens which appeared from time to time in the great rude mass of the Bala Hissar. A pool of clean water at the centre, dripping with a delicious cooling sound into a trough; a plum tree, casting shade in the blunt-bright heat of the afternoon. The cool smell of water on marble, of the shade of a fruit tree; here was luxury, here in the silent quarter of the palace, and Khushhal and Hasan hitched their robes up to their knees and squatted in the cool shade.

‘The Amir has very bad teeth,’ murmured Hasan, as if he were thinking of something else. ‘I saw as he passed. He started to smile, as he may, and then he seemed not to want to smile, because his teeth are bad, perhaps.’

‘That is enough, boy,’ Khushhal said. ‘Remember you are in the house of the Amir before you insult him so childishly.’

‘I’m sorry, papa,’ Hasan said. ‘I was only making an observation.’

‘That’s all right,’ Khushhal said. They fell silent for a moment; somewhere, nearby, there was the rush of women’s voices, somewhere walled, enclosed and veiled, and they both listened to the lovely liquid sound. ‘The Amir, you must know, has a task for you. To do with the Englishman – it’s good that you know of him, since it concerns him.’

‘A task for me?’ Hasan said. ‘But how can it be that the Amir should need me to do anything for him? Why has he chosen me?’

Khushhal looked at his slow-lidded son. It was almost worrying, the boy’s lack of consciousness of his beauty. In his shy moods, he seemed to be shrinking back from his own face, disowning it, wanting to hide, preferring not to be looked at, not understanding why he was looked at. But it was wilfulness to question the decision of the Amir. Hasan’s strangely hot blue eyes – like Khushhal’s own, a sign of a direct and pure descent from the Jews, the founders of the Afghan nation – his high smooth brow and small beardless chin, his fine strong hair and teeth, his soft skin. It must have been obvious to Hasan, without too much concentration, what use he could be in the present case.

Khushhal explained slowly what was wanted. Hasan said nothing, merely listened, occasionally nodding. When Khushhal had come to the end of his explanation, Hasan sighed and salaamed to his honourable father. There had not been so much to explain, after all, and it was clear even to Hasan, who was always the last to shut his mouth and understand the point of a story or a joke, that his father did not quite know what Hasan was supposed to do. The Englishman, down there, in his disguise! Wasn’t that enough to have found out?

‘When shall I go there, papa?’ Hasan asked. He concentrated on working out some dirt from under his toenails with the point of his dagger.

Khushhal clapped him on the back, almost making him drive the knife deep into the ball of his toe. ‘As soon as you may choose,’ he said. ‘The Amir will send for you in seven nights.’

‘Now, then?’ Hasan said. He could not see why not, and his father nodded, dismissing him.

6.

Hasan flexibly raised himself like a deer from where he squatted, and, salaaming, left his father chewing thoughtfully on a twig in the inner courtyard of the Bala Hissar’s inner fortress, waiting on the pleasure of the Amir. He set off towards the Englishman’s house. The sentries braced themselves in half-salute as he left the palace by the main gates. He liked that. Hasan knew perfectly well where the Englishman was living. All Kabul knew where he was, knew all about his habits, his interests, the hours he kept and the people he saw. You could, they said in the bazaar, take him anything you found, anything you had. A broken old lamp, a worthless old coin you found in the earth, anything you happened upon, and he would give you money for it with cries of delight like a monkey’s howl, and then spend long minutes staring at it before opening his book and scribbling down in it. The boys in the bazaar abandoned themselves in merriment, the soles of their feet to the sky, at this last incredible detail. But he did not seem like a holy man, since he drank a good deal, a shocking amount, and the whole of Kabul, from the storytelling beggars crouched outside the limits of the bazaar to the gossiping nobles in the august silent halls of the Bala Hissar itself, knew precisely what he liked to do after nightfall with whatever boys presented themselves smiling at the gate of his secluded little house. Everyone knew about him. It was true that few had seen him, since he stayed inside like a woman, sending out for his needs; but everyone knew about him. There was an incredible party trick half a dozen boys could now perform, an incredulous account of his gabbling fantastic Persian, complete with the wildest gestures. Hasan was a slow serious boy, not given to laughter, always sitting wide-eyed and solemn while his companions retailed one hilarity after another. But he had laughed at the gulping mania of the impersonation, and hoped that now, brought up against the original of what was currently the city’s favourite joke, he could keep himself from hilarity.

He went directly down the hill from the fortress, ignoring the calls which came his way, and out through the great bazaar. He had lived here all his life, and could burrow through the deep entangled streets as well as any ragged urchin. They called out to him, knowing who he was, wondering at this boy in dazzling imperial white, this boy with the lovely cross face. They knew who he was – his dress proclaimed him – but there was already something in him, despite his blank simplicity, his effortless blank visage, which made the street hang back. They called out to him, but, awed, cast their eyes down before he could respond. They did not want to be the sort of people who called out to Hasan, son of Khushhal, the famous angel of the princely house, and they cast their eyes to the floor, dazzled, in modesty, before he could speak back to them. But he did not respond to their calls, and never had. Even those who called out to him knew this, before they made a sound. He was untouchable, virtuous, noble; the sun shone between the road and the soft pale soles of his feet. He was too good, they said, to walk the earth, and yet he walked the earth, which knew his virtue.

Hasan passed on through the parting crowds. The long twisting call of the muezzin was just beginning, like a great bird singing its inscrutable vowels, and, soon, Kabul would turn with regret from Hasan and, summoned, go to wash, and pray for its own sins. Hasan walked on, into the street of the shoemakers. Here it was that the Englishman had his house. He had taken it from the widow Khadija. The main artery of the quarter, now quickly emptying, was broad and fine, shaded with limes. Every thirty paces or so, a small half-street, blind-ended, like a three-sided courtyard, where the houses were. In the fourth of these was the widow Khadija’s house. The houses in this quarter of the city barely had windows or doors onto the street; they were built for the summer’s heat, the winter’s cold, to withstand a siege. They were solid houses, but not large. Behind the thick walls there was only a small garden and a few square rooms, Hasan knew; his old fencing master had lived in one. But as he stood there, he felt that behind the heavy coarse wall and deep-set tiny door, there could lie anything at all. He stood in front of the Englishman’s door. Silly! It was like any other! He felt no nerves. Nervousness was not part of him, but as he stood there, with his innocent cross face, he surely felt something, the barefoot emissary of the Amir with a dagger in his belt, the lovely ambassador between empires. He served an unknowing purpose, a purpose opaque to everyone. He served the implacable veiled purpose of the Emperor’s marvellous mind. There was a chatter, from within, like the chatter of birds, of monkeys, of women. But it was not the noise of birds. Hasan raised his soft princely hand to his soft pale face, just once. He pushed at the door. It gave; and, making no noise, he entered the house of the Englishman.

SIX

1.

THIS IS THE WAY THAT Charles Masson came to be in Kabul and how he came to talk the way that he talked, which was the first thing anyone noticed about him.

Five years before, in an army camp in Calcutta.

The parade ground was a desert of musket parts. The company sat, cross-legged, red and sweating, each surrounded by his own little puzzle of greased iron to put back together.

‘Now this,’ Suggs, the Sergeant-Major, was saying through his horrible grin, ‘is the locking bolt. The locking bolt.’ He was holding up a small iron object between thumb and forefinger.

The Company, together, grunted a four-syllable noise with their heads to the ground, a masculine grunt which satisfied Suggs. He seemed to think they had replied with what he had said; they could, in fact, have said anything at all.

At the back of the platoon, his gun now in forty pieces scattered, a hopeless archipelago, on a greasy blue cotton tablecloth, sat Charles Masson. He scratched his head. Sweating profusely in his shirt and breeches, contemplating the nightmare iron picnic in front of him, he wondered merely what delicacy to go for next.

‘And this,’ the Sergeant-Major said, grinning sadistically at this further element of bafflement, ‘is the barrel-loader. The barrel-loader.’

There again, that grunting noise, five syllables this time, a downward scale, like a bouncing ball. Masson said nothing, not seeing the need to say an object’s name to commit it to memory. In his case, he was as likely to forget the horrid little object after saying its name as before. And he had decided that this was not the sort of information he wanted cluttering up his brain.

A distant door opened and shut. Shimmering a little in the late-morning heat came the figure of Florentia Sale, the commanding officer’s wife, her jutting jaw and purposeful stride in no way modified by the pink and white parasol, her virginal dress. As she approached, the men who had seen her started to struggle to their feet. Not Masson.

‘Don’t get up, I pray you,’ called Florentia, dragging her panting little dog after her. ‘Ignore me, ignore me. I should not be here, merely the shortest route, tiffin, you know.’

She flashed a steely smile at the men, and strode onwards. Masson silently wished rabies on her dog and – a moment’s contemplation after – on her as well. The Sergeant-Major said nothing, and it remained a half-hearted tribute, as the men who had risen got no further than a bent-knee stance before sinking down again to their morning task. Too absorbed in their task; not very interested, either, in Florentia Sale, their commanding officer’s commanding wife, a greedy old woman who was more accustomed to tell people not to trouble than she was to receive unsolicited tribute. She passed on, anyway.

‘This,’ Suggs went on, projecting to the far corners of the empty parade ground, ‘is the musket’s thumb-grip. A great help when you come to fire the bleeding thing.’ He too must be suffering; his great red face twitching and glistening in the heat, his eyes rolling and yellow with the long hours in this steamy blaze, in a uniform suited only to a damp European climate. But he seemed to gain energy from the furious heat, and not to be exhausted by it; his instructions, his striding energy, actually increased as the day went on. ‘What is it?’ he demanded.

‘A thumb-grip, Sergeant-Major,’ they chorused dully, the small diversion of Mrs Sale’s stately passage now dissipated.

Something had led Masson to this point, sitting on a parade ground, sweating into his Company-issue underwear, staring at wing-nuts. A long sickly childhood in a Devon farmhouse, and tales of an uncle who went to sea, bringing back incredible tales of the East. Told and told again. That had been it, surely. There was no desire for money in Masson; he had no wish to go back with his thousands to acquire a country house and respectability. He had no wish to go home.

That was odd, because the urge that had led him here was as hungry and unfilled in Calcutta as it had been in the grey square unwindowed farmhouse ten miles from Porlock. There, it had been his three young brothers standing between him and what he wanted; here, it was the Company, and his duties, and the wing-nuts. Masson had come to the East in the only way he could. It was not long before the means of his coming were standing between him and what he could see every day. Moments – small unremarked street-moments, unhistoric, unforgettable – where the India he had dreamt of in the long confinement of his childhood and the India all around him combined in a sonorous unison. Moments where no Company intruded, where no instructions were shouted, except the single one, inside him. He was reassured, as he heard that sounding double call, that what he had dreamt of was there after all. Saved, he was, in these moments from a deeper worry, that the fulfilment of the East he had dreamt of was one without his presence, his falsifying gaze. What he wanted was an East which was no longer exotic, but purely familiar, and he feared that, like a practising pianist, it could only achieve that when he was not looking at it. An India he wanted only to the degree that it could not include him; that was his fear, dispelled in those absorbed moments when he passed down a Calcutta street, unnoticed, or at least unremarked, or a curious unfearing boy met his expression with an equal gaze, and held it. Unmoving.

That was what Masson was here for; those sudden clicks of identity when, like a hot blush, he was sure that there was something there, just there for him. It was what he had always dreamt of, in the kitchen of the Porlock farmhouse, hunched over the Vicar’s Arabian Nights. He was sure now, after a year, that it was only Suggs and Sale that stood in the way of his finding it. Suggs and Sale; they had turned into an emporium, selling only frustration to Masson, representing everything that stood in his way. Suggs and Sale; he could have started a religion, to declare the pair of them unclean.

2.

The long morning came to an end, and the platoon limped off into the guardroom, soggy with their combined concentration. McVitie, the hero of the platoon, was, for once, beyond a quip. He satisfied himself with bending down and rubbing his head with both hands, furiously back and forth, as if his head were unconnected to him, like a man affectionately scrubbing at his dog after a run in the rain. A shower of sweat fountained from McVitie’s head, and, stripping himself of his shirt, he sank down limply on the rude benches which ran round the room.

‘Well, gentlemen,’ Masson said lightly. ‘I don’t know how much any of us will remember of this morning’s dose of pointless activity.’

The platoon ignored this, one of them merely giving a small moan of boredom with Masson’s comment. He was unpopular in the platoon, for no very clear reason. His unpopularity was such that his every statement was automatically greeted with a palpable turning of backs. More than that, it had reached the point where Masson himself aimed his occasional remarks squarely at the platoon’s disapproval. Not exactly enjoying their dislike, but having earned it, at least he would exult in the power of being able to evoke it most when he chose.

McVitie raised his square head a fraction from the bench, without opening his eyes. ‘We all learnt what we was learnt, Masson,’ he said. ‘It was only you. Don’t tar us with your stinking brush.’

He fell back, gormlessly, mouth open. Masson contemplated him, the platoon hero.

Elsewhere in the barracks, Florentia Sale was passing out her brisk instructions. She was in the basement of what was termed, inaccurately, the Colonel’s house; it was merely a random stretch of the building, a few interconnected rooms with a kitchen and a washing room in the basement, but the Colonel’s status required him to have a house, and a house he should have, even where there was none. In the basement kitchen, the heat was bathlike, but Florentia Sale was livid, pale, dry in this dense heat. About her, a foot below her square determined face, the kitchen servants clustered, and listened anxiously to her instructions. ‘Very important, very important dinner,’ she was crying, not looking at her listeners. ‘I want you to imagine – to imagine that you are cooking a dinner for the Governor General himself – for the King of England.’

There was a perceptible increase in worry, as the little faces creased. ‘King?’ one of them, the most senior apparently, said, his voice almost failing.

‘No, no, no,’ Florentia said. ‘I want you to imagine that the King is coming. I want you to take as much care over your work as if—’

‘King?’ the boy said again.

Florentia gave up, her face set like cooling gravy. ‘Yes, the King is coming,’ she said bluntly. ‘Remember – fry the onions well, and slowly. Curry? Curry? Understand?’ The heads below her wobbled from side to side, acknowledging and agreeing. ‘And soup. Soup? Understand? And the fish? How will you cook the fish?’ There was another general agreeable wobbling; Florentia took it, apparently, for assent. ‘How? White sauce? Parsley?’ The kitchen attendants looked from side to side, trying to establish seniority; one, in the end, stepped three inches forward and bowed superbly. He stepped back, and smiled ingratiatingly. Florentia sighed, and prepared to begin again.

After the soldiers’ tiffin, there was, unusually, three hours at leisure. Masson skipped off as soon as he inconspicuously could. He wanted to go and see Mr Das.

Mr Das had a boutique in the bazaar. Masson had been drawn in a year before, by a blue glass vase visible through the open door. Then he had wondered if it could be Roman, with the optimism of the inexperienced. Now, he knew it was Syrian, and not at all old, but Mr Das had become the nearest thing to a friend Masson had. The shop was a ruin of miniature artefacts, and old Das a fraud, apt to proffer the cheapest bazaar silverware as precious beyond an Englishman’s dreams. But he, from time to time, failed to know when a coin from his filthy chests was a thousand years old, and deeply unfamiliar. What he knew and what he did not know was apparent from the prices he set, and, after a year going through his stock, Masson felt that, all in all, he knew more than Das did.

Das didn’t trust Masson – that was clear from the way he constantly tried to rook him, as if taking the first step in an inevitable exchange of fraud. It was natural for someone in his position, with a boutique full of frail glass, to be wary of a beef-faced Englishman twice his size in a Company uniform; wary, too, when the Englishman in question, revealed as well intentioned, seemed to turn himself from a curious fool into a scholar within months, and Das looked at his surprising protégé with a habitual reproach, as if Masson had not been entirely honest with him at the first.

Nevertheless, Das had been useful to Masson. That first purchase, the Syrian blue glass vase, had worried Masson while he was paying for it. Until then, his purchases had been small and solid – coins, metalwork, durable little objects of devotion, all easily contained in Masson’s pack. Each treasure was accompanied by a set of meticulous notes on the object, based on what the coin-handler could tell him. That was not a trove to attract attention in the barracks, but this vase could not be stuffed away like that. Masson would not display it to the platoon’s mockery, and yet he wanted the little vase, wanted it badly, and would have gone on wanting it even if he had known that it was not Roman at all.

Mr Das was all tact, and saw the problem even before Masson had said anything. After all, what was a common soldier doing with such a fine object, handling it so tenderly? What would he do with such a thing? Masson eagerly fell in with Das’s suggestion that he transfer all his little collection to a secure cupboard in Das’s boutique, and, as Das foresaw, afterwards made all his purchases from Das. He was a sympathetic fellow, the shopkeeper, only betraying the slightest sorrow in a little wince when he saw the appalling tinsel exoticism of Masson’s first purchases, when he had arrived in Calcutta. Das handled the semi-industrial figure of Shiva in rough, tarnished bronze with a display of reverence intended much more to spare Masson’s feelings than for the benefit of the god. And since then, he had been of great use – there was talk, even, of introducing Masson to a scholarly friend of his, who might be able to start him off on Sanskrit – and he represented, all in all, the nearest thing to a friend Masson had ever had. His face was sharp-cornered at jaw and chin, like many Bengalis; he had an almost pentagonal, queerly inquisitive appearance.

3.

Das was turning a coin over and over as Masson came into his shop. A little man even by Indian standards, half Masson’s size, he was respectably dressed according to the lights of his religion. Masson could never quite get used to holding a conversation on serious matters with a man so nearly naked. He liked to be discovered in a scholarly attitude, and Masson sat in respectful silence for a couple of minutes, until Das was ready to speak to him.

‘My dear fellow,’ he said finally. ‘I wonder what you have to say to this. My mind, I confess, is a trifle stumped.’

Masson took the coin and looked at it, wondering as usual at the way Das talked, like Tacitus after a drink or two. The coin was a Queen Anne penny, probably palmed off on Das by a Company private too sharp for his own good. Masson considered telling Das that it was a coin of the reign of the Empress Agrippina before it occurred to him that Das might be testing him in some obscure manner. He told the shopkeeper what it was.

‘That,’ Das said, smartly snapping the coin back into his fist, ‘was more or less what I had supposed it to be. Thank you, my dear sir. And how may I help you today? A cup of chai first, certainly.’

He clapped his hands and the toothless dirty old woman who was always in the boutique, fingering the goods – perhaps Das’s wife, there was no means of knowing – mumbled off into the recesses of the shop.

‘I really want nothing of you, Mr Das,’ Masson said. ‘Chai would be splendid.’

‘Perhaps a perusal of your treasures, Mr Masson?’ Das said as the chai arrived. Masson took the stinking sweet orange confection, tea and milk and sugar and water boiled together for half an hour. As always at Das’s shop, the water it had been made from was so filthy, the chai could have been strong or weak, and Masson had to rid himself of the irrational idea that Das made his tea out of the water his crone familiar washed her grubby old body in. The crone smiled and shook her head from side to side, letting go of the cup, leaving a dirty thumbprint over the clay rim. ‘Always welcome, always welcome. Or perhaps he would like to see a few minor curiosities I acquired in the course of several perambulations about this great metropolis, hmm? No obligation, my dear sir, merely an oddity or two I feel you would be interested by, and – I confess – one or two more I should be grateful to have the benefit of your undoubted and excellent wisdom regarding their history, provenance and significance. Queen Anne penny, indeed.’

The exchange of business was a necessary preliminary to their conversation, Masson had found. Das preserved some necessary dignity by reminding himself that they had begun in a business relationship, and would not, entirely, get beyond that. It might have been designed, too, to remind Masson that he would not come to know everything about Das, that whatever expertise he acquired about Das’s stock, he was always there on sufferance. Das reached across the table, stained with rings, and gestured at a small knife, curved and graceful like a miniature scimitar. Masson picked it up carefully and turned it over. A cockroach ran across the table, making Masson jump; it had been sheltering under the blade, and Masson now discreetly flicked it onto the floor with the tip of the knife. Das hated to see an insect killed, and tutted mildly, either at Masson’s squeamishness or to suggest that the thing was of no significance.