Philip Hensher - The Mulberry Empire

The river continued its placid brown life, unmoved by Burnes’s enthusiasm. As Burnes had talked, they had started to walk again, and they now found themselves in the shadow of the great bridge. A boatman clung on to the rope hanging on the nearest pier, the boat under his lurching feet being pushed away by the current. It swung from one side of the great pier to the other. With his left hand, he nonchalantly ate a bit of bread and an onion. The river was low, its stench so strong and heavy that it could be tasted in the mouth. A flock of coal-lighters was secured for the next few hours in the treacle-rich ooze of the river’s mud, a stuff almost valuable in itself. On the far bank, boys, almost naked, were plunging into this thick mass of mud, occasionally surfacing with cries to show that some small treasure, some penny had been found. Here surfaced a boy, black and dripping, his hand upstretched with a treasure, and trying to hail a little green tug with his shrieking gull-cry. The traffic of the river continued its furious pace uninterrupted, in the middle stream, like water-insects, handling each other out of the path with busy prodding prongs, hooks, ropes, businesslike and abrupt, not pausing for pleasantry, or apology; the purposeful dancing of a rude public ball. Long and intricate levels of wooden stairs and causeways, eroded and slippery smooth, clung to the river’s edge, and each boat, loading, unloading, mooring for a few short hours, seemed like an efficient drab bird which had alighted on one branch rather than another for no particular reason. In a moment it would set off again in a new direction, impelled by nothing more than its own furious energy. As each boat sat there, it seemed as if it cost it more energy to stay still than to move.

Bella said nothing. To her, it had always seemed the river, brown-black, crowded, noisy and stinking; it had never seemed to matter greatly where her tea came from, what produced the stuff for her linen. She could not suppose that the originators of the stuff worked explicitly to supply her with tribute, like the worshippers of a pagan god. Money and trade; filth and lucre. And yet she did feel it, she did; she felt that here, with Burnes, she was being shown a world; whether it was the great world Burnes descanted on, or the great opening mind of a man she suddenly, incomprehensibly, loved and would give herself to, she did not know.

‘It frightens you, the world?’ Burnes said suddenly. His eyes were fixed on Bella’s face; they were dark and swarming with appraisal. They wavered in their orbs as if searching for some secret that Bella’s face held.

‘Perhaps it does,’ Bella said carefully. ‘Sometimes I don’t understand what – quite what the greater part of it has to do with me. You will despise me for that.’

‘Never,’ Burnes said, his eyes fiery, fixed on hers, and in one unspoken agreement, they turned, and began to pick their way through London, to return to the place they came from.

The house, still, was empty as they entered, and in the dark hall, Burnes turned to her. She looked with bewilderment upon his face, but he was not preparing to leave her: on the contrary, he was keeping her, and in his expression was a new certainty, as if he knew all at once where to go and what to do. Still with her hand in his, she, all bewildered, submitted to be led forward a pace or two. He hesitated for a moment: it appeared that now he had forgotten what opportunity he had perceived in the course of the journey from the river to this sad empty house; forgotten why he was standing here, why he had taken Bella’s hand. But it was, after all, easier than that. She looked at him. His head was cocked like a foxhound’s. He was listening for the sound of any other person in the house.

‘Very well, then, Burnes,’ she said, and she had spoken her decision, her right hand in his. What they had understood with the burden of those so few days bearing down upon them, neither would express: she felt that. He led her, then, saying nothing, and she submitted to be led; and together, in the empty house, they walked upstairs.

ASTRANGER WAS THERE, out there, somewhere, somewhere in the haphazard piled-up overlapping streets of Kabul. No one had planned this city, and its many streets were like hundreds of thousands of individual routes. As if a pond was made of the ways that fish find through it. Down there, somewhere in the carpet-mass of pattern and direction and half-intended result, a European stranger had arrived, in an inadequate and fascinating disguise, and the town, quietly, was talking and talking and talking about the new arrival until the muted babble of discussion mounted the hill to the austere halls of the Bala Hissar, and reached – so quickly, so quickly – the ears of the Amir. And to the Amir, the arrival of the new European in town was like the dropping of a rock into the opaque pool of water which was the city, ruffling the surface immediately in ordinary and predictable ways, but disturbing the substance and mass beneath in a manner which could not be seen, or predicted. The Amir sat on the steps of the throne room, with the nobles and the clergy, and listened, noncommittally nodding his head from time to time, as if he were hearing nothing more than gossip.

‘His hair is red,’ the Newab Mohammed Zemaun Khan said. ‘Red, red as the devil’s is.’

‘And he wears the clothes of the country people,’ the Newab Jubbur Khan cut in. ‘He came from the East, from India, but he has been to many, many places. He speaks to everyone about the places he has been, and asks everyone, down to the smallest child, a thousand thousand questions.’

‘A wise man, then,’ the Amir said, pretending to reprimand the court. The Newab Jubbur Khan was a poor fellow, the Amir’s brother, and if Mohammed Zemaun would one day amount to something, for the moment he was no more than the Amir’s gawping boy-nephew.

‘A spy, Pearl of the Age,’ a mullah said. The Amir Dost Mohammed Khan turned, not recognizing the voice; it was the Mir Wa’iz, the teacher of Kabul, speaking through a mouthful of food.

‘A spy, Holiness?’ the Amir said; the Mir Wa’iz had not, quite, recovered from his display of asininity, weeks and weeks before. He had, after all, allowed the English to question holy doctrine over the question of the faithful Esquimaux, and could still be savagely teased on any subject. ‘But what enemies can I see on the most distant horizon? Do we not live in peace and plenty?’

‘A fool, then,’ Mohammed Zemaun said. ‘Or a mere scholar.’

‘He came from the East,’ the Mir Wa’iz insisted, in his best holy inscrutable manner.

‘A scholar, I expect,’ the Amir said. ‘But we shall spy on him, a little, shall we not?’

In truth, Dost Mohammed felt and knew that the arrival of the new Englishman was, in the end, going to prove to be more than gossip, but for the moment there was no reason for the clergy and nobles and wives to know such a thing, and his nodding head was intended to soothe the city into a mood of mere curiosity about the interloper …

… and down there, in the city, in a hired house, the Amir could almost see the interloper in his absurd and extravagant disguise, writing like a poor scribe, his head down to the page, his tongue almost out. When the Amir concentrated, he could see the arrival, beginning to write, concentrating, his mind on what he was doing, his sudden and uncontrolled movements betraying the angry impatient European fool as he put one word after another down. Like all Europeans, he would be writing about himself, setting down the ease and mastery with which he had come to this point, and the ease and mastery with which he had persuaded the city of what he was. His name the Amir did not need to imagine. He knew it: Masson. And down there in the city, in the far-off distant serene concentrating gaze of the Amir, Masson, the new arrival in his inadequate disguise, started to write …