Philip Hensher - The Mulberry Empire

Khushhal gave him a sideways glance. ‘The Amir knows you, it seems. Or he has seen you, at least.’

‘I don’t know when that can have been,’ Hasan said reflectively, ‘for it’s not to be expected that the Amir’s life and mine take similar paths. He is not as I thought he would be.’

‘It is not for you to think how the Amir will appear, or consider what so great a man as he should be like,’ Khushhal said. Then he relented, as, with Hasan, he usually did relent, and said, ‘Of course, no one could expect you not to wonder what Akbar’s father would be like. They talk – at least the Amir talks – of sending Akbar as ambassador to the English in London.’

‘What for, father?’

‘I don’t know. I really don’t know. Perhaps the Amir has a lot to discuss with the English, and after all, they paid him the compliment of coming to visit him, so it would only be polite to send an ambassador to them with gifts, in return.’

Hasan’s attention had been drawn by a merchant of cloth, bringing materials into the fortress of the Bala Hissar. By now, they had passed beyond the state rooms and were in the outer shell of the palace, which resembled a market as much as anything, as the tradesmen of the city came to service and supply the court and the palace guard. An oddly silent market; when a baker, now, laden with the bread for the household, collided with a butcher with a bound calf over his shoulder, neither made the smallest protest as they surely would have outside, but walked away briskly, humbled and silenced by the sudden importance of their roles, the gravity of the shady palace. The cloth merchant was a little man, and waddled before three apprentices, meandering helplessly as they half-ran behind him, arms stretched out under the weight of brilliant bolts of rough silk, red and blue and gold. Hasan’s attention was taken like a child’s with a cloud of hummingbirds. Then he shut his mouth and said, ‘Where is London?’

‘Where the English live, who rule India,’ Khushhal said, despairing a little. ‘Though England is far away in one direction and India far in the other direction, beyond the great mountains beyond the empire of the Amir. Do you remember the English, when they came last year, when they lived with the Newab Jubbur Khan for a month, and brought the marvellous clock, the clock of gold and crystal?’

‘I remember,’ Hasan said, dimly. ‘Those English, they looked nothing like the merchants from India, the ones who come in the spring.’ Then he brightened, as if sunlight had fallen on his face, and said, ‘There is another English in the city, though he is dressed strangely, and talks strangely, the women say. Is he perhaps a Russian, that Englishman?’

‘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.

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.