The Mulberry Empire. Philip Hensher

he a sensible boy, cousin? Is he worthy?’

      ‘He is the finest steed in my stable, Amir, and I give him to any task of his lord’s willingly, knowing that he will succeed where many others, where many others—’ Khushhal was losing his way in the stately sentence, ‘—might to their Amir have brought failure and sorrow.’

      Dost Mohammed seemed content. ‘Very well, excellent. Make him understand that he may have to do something beyond talking to the English about the Sikhs. Don’t tell him what to do, cousin – it wouldn’t do to shock the English out of countenance. Or out of bed, I mean, Khushhal?’ Everyone laughed at the Amir’s heavy joke, covering their mouths genteelly. ‘You’re certain he likes boys, the English spy?’

      ‘Yes, Pearl of the Age, quite sure.’

      ‘Well, let us see. Is it Friday?’

      ‘Friday, Amir,’ Khushhal said, overstepping himself. The Vizier had been trembling at the Amir’s coat-sleeves to make this announcement.

      ‘Have the people come to see Us?’

      ‘Naturally, Imperial One,’ the Vizier leapt in, urgent with his own grandeur.

      ‘Well, show them in. No, no, no more food.’

      3.

      Friday was, by decision of the Amir, set aside for any citizen of Kabul with a grievance to come and set it before the court. It was Dost Mohammed’s invention. None of his predecessors had carried out such a practice, as the scandalized nobility had muttered among themselves when it had become apparent that the young Sirdar – as he then was – was perfectly serious in proposing that any man at all might come and wear the court’s patience into rags with his trivial complaints. Only the Mir Wa’iz, however, had the nerve, as a licensed idiot whom Dost Mohammed liked to contradict, to say bluntly, ‘But no Amir before you, Lord of the Wind, has ever suggested such a thing.’

      Dost Mohammed was ready for that, and reminded the court, and, particularly, the Mir Wa’iz (taking his sleeve firmly between thumb and forefinger and drawing the mullah’s face terrifyingly close to his own) that, although none of his predecessors had found it necessary to hold a weekly plebeian durbar, every single one of them had met a violent end. An end (beheading, hanging, dismemberment, crushing, and blowing into bits with gunpowder) which, the court would do well to remember, had invariably been meted out to the intimates of the Amir concerned at the same time. The court had swallowed, as one. All at once, precedent and the habitual practice of the court had seemed a much less important thing.

      ‘Remember,’ Dost Mohammed had said, exercising his imperial prerogative of a broad open unshielded smile, ‘it is only five hours, every Friday, a short afternoon of boredom for you, and my chance to speak to anyone who wishes to speak to me. And, in return, you probably won’t be murdered in the bazaar. Who knows? You might even come to be loved as much as Us.’

      The court had swallowed again. Five hours! At most, they had envisaged one carefully selected and clean old man, allowed to sit at the far end of the throne room and abase himself for – surely ten minutes would be enough?

      But the Amir had been in deadly earnest, and no one found it much consolation to go on thinking of the grim fates of various long-gone Amirs. Frankly, Khushhal for one sometimes thought, after an hour or two standing stiffly behind the mildly nodding Amir while an old man went on and on about his problems, a quick and merciful death might not be such a bad thing. Nor was it the smallest consolation that the Amir himself hardly seemed to look forward to these occasions with enthusiasm. Certainly, the court had suffered enough, and none of them would venture the slightest expression of sympathy at what had now become an official duty.

      ‘Well, well, show them in,’ the Amir said. ‘Quick, Jubbur, the grass – quickly now.’

      The Newab came from the back of the crowd with his appointed task. The Amir settled himself on the upper step of the throne room, while the others drew back. He took a deep breath, and shut his eyes. Jubbur Khan now, concentrating, placed the three blades of grass he had been holding in the second fold of the Amir’s turban, five inches above his left ear. He examined his handiwork, then stepped away, feeling for the step with his heel as he walked backwards to his appointed place.

      ‘How many?’ Dost Mohammed asked, opening his eyes, rejuvenated.

      ‘Twenty, sir,’ the Vizier said, straight-faced. The Amir nodded, and in they came. There was a particular approach of the common people on these occasions: they walked in like sheep, driven in by the attendants’ impatient shovelling gestures. They could not look at the Amir, of course, and stared instead furiously at the floor. But their movements were sheeplike; they moved in odd little scurries and shuffling panics, all at once in one direction. Some preferred, it seemed, to cling to the wall like blind men, as if the mere open spaces of the throne room terrified them. They moved forward, haphazardly, loosely, their fear palpable. They made no sound but an occasional small mew of alarm. The court watched the progress, unamused. It was like watching a lot of inflated bladders being pushed along a floor. Finally, they were in place in a rough square. At the attendants’ double clap, they all fell on their faces, exactly as if praying.

      ‘First,’ Dost Mohammed said after the terrific ten-minute preliminaries had been got through.

      First was a vile old man, as ever. The court rustled, not entirely certain, in fact, whether this particular vile old man hadn’t been here a month or two ago. He began to recite his troubles, in a long-drawn-out cracked singing voice, an old bell being beaten again and again; worse, like a bell being beaten by a deaf man, to whom the noise would mean nothing.

      ‘My son is the light of my old age, Amir, the staff on which I lean. Once I was the tree in whose shade he lisped and played, which protected his helpless infancy. And as the lives of men and women teach us, a reversal must come upon us, so that those we once protected with our superior strength must, as the years pass, grow to be stronger than us, and as we grow frail, we may rely on the strength of their arms and the love in their hearts, as they once relied upon ours. Such is the way of human life, lived as it is in a short spell between birth and death.’

      The man made a small but rhetorically rather effective gesture at his shirt, as if preparing to rend it in his grief. You could see the man had been an admirable and successful storyteller, in his day, though now his voice quavered and he lost his place too easily. He gathered himself, and went on in his amazingly annoying voice.

      ‘Hear then, O Amir, how wrongly I have been treated, how contrary to all human dignity and proper family life! Can such ill-treatment ever have been borne by one poor, neglected old man? Can such suffering ever have been so wilfully, so cruelly inflicted by a son on his helpless father, since the annals of time were started? Can the ears of the great Amir ever have been soiled by the sorrowful retelling of a tale so shocking, of maltreatment so blatant? You see, Amir,’ the vile old man went on, dropping disconcertingly into prose after his formal encomium, ‘my son is an ironmonger, with his own shop, in the bazaar. And I was an ironmonger before him, and the shop was mine originally. So two years ago Ahmed, that’s my boy’s name, he said to me, one day as we were sitting peacefully over a pipe one evening, I think I want to get married. So I said to him, what do you want to do that for? Because, straight away, I could see trouble coming. So he said …’

      The interminable story wound on, as the daughter-in-law said, so I said to her, and then he said, well; and the court stood stiff as pillars, and wondered at the fantastic patience of the Amir. When it had finally come to an end, the old man looked up, blinking, bewildered, hardly knowing any longer where he was. He had been entirely absorbed by the immense tale of woe and wrong, his eyes fixed on the carpet. Dost Mohammed gave a great cough and a nod, as if commanding a swordsman to scythe through the incredible knots of wrongs and misunderstandings which constituted this unremarkably dull life.

      ‘You have complained that your son wishes you to leave his house, which once was yours,’ the Amir said. ‘You say that the wish comes from your son’s wife, though her wishes can mean nothing