The Mulberry Empire

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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 (#ulink_8d88a65d-ae8f-5628-8798-88d4d164cef3)

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.

The blade was curved, whether for grace or use. Though the handle was encrusted and filthy, the quarter-inch at the blade’s edge shone. This knife had been used regularly, and recently. Masson had heard of oriental knives that cut flesh as easily as butter, and placed the tip of his forefinger on the edge of the blade. It rested there, the blade trembling slightly in Masson’s hand.

‘You are left-handed, I perceive,’ Das said.

‘I use both equally well,’ Masson said, fixed on the thin contact between finger and blade, insubstantial as a point in geometry.

‘That is bad luck, very bad luck,’ Das said, drawing back from Masson with his shock of red hair and his divided soul. He made a warding-off hiss, like the noise of hot metal in water.

Masson smiled his wide open devouring smile. ‘On the contrary,’ he said. ‘It’s a piece of very good luck.’ And he moved the knife, a small movement, half an inch, putting no pressure on the handle. There was a sudden heat in the finger, and underneath the blade, the colour had fled the dirty finger, a little field of tripe-white as the blood drew back under the blade. Masson made his pain-noise, the same hissing Das had made, the same sound of hot metal in water. The blood returned and welled up, wine-dark, in the little flap of severed flesh the knife had made. White, translucent, an onion’s slice. Masson put down the magnificent knife, and sucked his salty finger for a minute. When he took it out, the finger was clean, and white in his dirty hand.

‘A good knife,’ he said, picking it up again.

‘Whence does it originate, in your opinion?’ Das asked.

Masson turned the knife over again. The handle was so encrusted with rust and dirt that it was hard to see if it were decorated. He ran the nail of his forefinger over the surface, and there was some raised pattern – he followed the line – some arabesque – some writing, surely. By the whiplash feel of it, he supposed it to be Arabic, some belligerent verse of the Koran. Not Indian; he somehow knew this, without knowing how he knew. He guessed at Persian. It felt like damascene work, anyway.

He said this to Das as he was feeling the knife. Das clapped his hands with pleasure. ‘Indeed, indeed, excellent, quite on the nail, as you would say,’ he said. ‘I had an interesting visitor this week, a traveller, who had acquired some curiosities. I cannot account for it, but he was eager to disembarrass himself of some old Persian treasures. That, I think, is the finest of his hoard, alas, and sadly in want of care, but the other objects I acquired from him have their own interest and even, I dare say, some measure of value. Would you, by any chance, care to …’

‘In a furious hurry, was he, your friend?’ Masson said. ‘And I have no doubt that you found yourself in possession of a large quantity of Persian antiquities without requiring too much of the gentleman?’ Das looked outraged at the suggestion that he might be in the habit of consorting with thieves. It took a moment to make him realize that Masson was only casting the first shot in the exchanges over the final price, and for a while he seemed unwilling to show his newly acquired objects at all.

But in the end, he yielded to the undeniable argument of lucre, and Masson was soon looking, with hungry eyes, at an array of metalwork spread out on Das’s table. For a moment he was incongruously reminded of this morning’s exercise with the dismantled musket, as he pored over the miscellaneous array of mostly Persian, mostly indifferent antique objects. In the end – it took an hour – he settled, besides the knife, for a little silver dish and three unfamiliar coins, interesting in appearance, unaccountably so. As was customary these days, he paid Mr Das with a combination of his army pay and the restitution of one of Masson’s own early purchases, before he had developed a proper eye. This process of secondary haggling occupied another half an hour, as Masson attempted to return to Das some of the worthless trash he had originally passed off on Masson at any price. Das, indignant at being insulted in such a manner that it should be suggested that his shop should ever be soiled with such bazaar trinkets, and denying furiously that he was the first source of the trash, attempted to inveigle out of Masson the beautiful little silver medal he had sold him no more than three weeks before, presumably having realized its worth in the interim. At length an agreement was reached, leaving both Masson and Das sore and suspicious, and they settled down to talk, undisturbed by customers, the army, Suggs or Sale.

‘Mr Das,’ Masson began. ‘Speaking of your visitor last week, if you were to travel and were obliged to live on the proceeds of what you could sell on your travels, what goods would you take?’

‘I do not understand your question, Mr Masson,’ Das said. He picked his nose meditatively and examined the contents before flicking it at the floor. ‘I have no need or desire to travel, as you well know, I am sure.’

‘Indeed, indeed,’ Masson said. He persevered. ‘In a hypothetical situation, however, if you were obliged to travel, and the only means of support you had was the sale of what goods you could carry, what would you take with you to sell?’

‘Ah,’ Das said, now having got the point. ‘Like my friend, earlier this week, in flight from his own shadow and selling his worldly goods at a highly disadvantageous rate, I can assure you.’

‘Disadvantageous to him, Mr Das.’

‘Indeed, indeed,’ Das said. He had a disconcerting habit of taking up Masson’s expressions and repeating them, a minute or two later. You could see the quick boy he must have been. ‘Well, I am sure you are aware that this is a simple matter of working out the relationship between value and bulk.’

The conversation ran its course; they agreed on silver, as being most easily disguised and most universally valued. ‘But why,’ said Das, ‘why, my friend, this sudden interest?’

It was time for Masson to go. He consigned the Persian dish to the cupboard where he stored his things, saying a silent goodbye to it, and thanked Das for the chai. He left the knife with Das. The heat and damp were insufferable, and, returning to the barracks, Masson lengthened his journey by remaining in the shade. Anyone watching him might have thought there was some superstition which directed his route, like a child leaping the cracks in the pavement. Certainly he drew the attention of the Calcutta streets; the red-toothed men squatting on their haunches chewing paan and spitting consumptively followed him with their incurious eyes. They wondered at this peeled-raw man, ugly and gawky, shrinking into the darker side of the street, hugging the wall like a conspirator, looking down, hiding something.

4.

Masson was hiding something, as it happened. It was his plan for escape. It had seemed audacious, impossible, but now Das, with his idle conversation, had found something for him. Until now, Masson had seen no way to be in the East, where he wanted to be, other than by the way he had chosen. The surety that he could only find the East he had dreamt of by remaining where he was, serving the Company at the Company’s request, all at once left him.