The Mulberry Empire. Philip Hensher

yourself freely and without condition gave the house to your son, before he married, and the law is unable to help you. I have heard your story with great interest, and say this to you, old man. Know that the life of man is brief upon this earth, and the happinesses which man may attain are few, and the travails many. Therefore do not complain beneath your load like a bleating ass, but accept joyfully the will of your family as you would the will of God. Go back to your son and say humbly that you deserve nothing, since you gave your love to him freely, and without hope of recompense. Say this to him humbly, in Our name, and if he should remain obdurate, you must accept what he has said, and throw yourself on the mercies of the bountiful world. That is all.’

      The old man lurched backwards onto his feet, his knees cracking hugely, and, his eyes still cast clumsily downwards in his inexpressive walnut-face, shuffled back to the last row of the company of hapless supplicants. The Vizier called out the name of the second visitor.

      Dost Mohammed relaxed, now, giving the supplicants a fine open smile. Around him, the court hardened, fingering their robes. He guessed most of them would prefer never to have to listen to such lowly men at such length. The Amir didn’t much care about that. He meant them, a little, to be bored, but, in the main, he wanted them to be insulted. If the Amir was happy to listen to the common people, dressed in their heavy brown robes, to listen to them talking at whatever length they chose, what was the point of serving in the court? What honour could possibly reside in being the noble designed by ancient custom to hand the Amir his rice, if any Kabul ironmonger could just as easily whisper in the Amir’s ear, simply by turning up on a Friday morning? Dost Mohammed understood very well that, unlike all those Amirs who had ended so badly, he had no friends, and could not; between the family of the Amir and the rest of Kabul, there was an absolute gulf. What had happened to the kings who hadn’t understood this? Shah Shujah, the fool, had immured himself and his court up, and delighted the court with his enclosed fantasies, his entertainments; flattered them with excess. And he was long gone, that old Amir, with his court, long chased out; and now Dost Mohammed was the Amir, and Shah Shujah was, no doubt, in a palace on some Kashmiri lake, disconsolately torturing some small boy to death for the sake of an afternoon’s entertainment. Dost Mohammed would not flatter his court with ideas of aristocratic and regal equality; he would insult them by making them see that, in his eyes, the greatest prince and the merest citizen of Kabul were as one. That was the point of the Amir’s Fridays. Not to right wrongs, as if the life of great princes were a tale to keep children quiet, but to remind the court, to their helpless indignation, that he, Dost Mohammed, was Amir, with three blades of grass in his turban, and they, the great princes of the court, they might as well be grovelling down there on the carpet, waiting with aching knees to be summoned at their Emperor’s whim.

      Four hours later, the court was stiff with outrage as a fistful of knives. Dost Mohammed was serene as ever. The pack of mendicants, unanswered and yet somehow satisfied, made their sheeplike progress, backwards, shepherded by the court attendants, out through the double door. As they receded from the awe-struck anteroom into the more distant of the outer chambers, their chatter could be heard to break out again by degrees, merging into the irreverent cackle of starlings in the trees in the courtyard. In a moment, the room was again quiet. Dost Mohammed was thinking, and when he spoke, it was clear that nothing in the previous four hours had occupied much of his mind.

      ‘Send down the boy, Khushhal,’ he said briefly. ‘Today or tomorrow. He should stay there a week, and come and tell Us everything next Saturday. You know the particular boy? Good.’

      ‘Does the Amir wish to speak with my son before—’

      The Amir shook his hands almost irritably at this absurd suggestion. Khushhal had taken the precaution of passing a note to an attendant summoning the boy, and he was at this moment standing in his best and simplest clothes two rooms away, trembling with nerves, no doubt. Still, it did no harm, that sort of thing. Had the Amir suddenly decided to inspect the boy’s teeth – the Amir’s own being so bad – it would not have done to ask him to wait on the pleasure of a seventeen-year-old boy.

      4.

      You know the one I mean, the Amir had said, querulously, as if it were absurd that anyone should think of another son. And as the court swept past the deeply bowing youth in the third anteroom, shrinking back into one of a file of attendants lining the little route between the throne room and Dost Mohammed’s suite of apartments, it was clear from the suddenly drawn eyes, the suddenly checked pace of half the court that they knew the son he meant, too. Dost Mohammed himself gave no sign of recognition in his purposeful stride, but, behind him, the nobility, normally so regulated, cannonaded each into each, tripped over each other as they caught sight of Hasan. For a moment they forgot how to walk. Khushhal himself had no idea. Well, he knew about the boy’s beauty, but he had no idea the fame of it had spread beyond the family into the city, and wasn’t entirely sure he liked the idea of his son being gazed at in the street, being the cause of lost sleep, being importuned to surrender what virtue, at seventeen, he still possessed, as if he were some bazaar-boy and not the son and grandson of princes. Still – Khushhal reflected – he himself had been famous, in his day (he relished the memory, twenty years back, of a trader at his shop abandoning a transaction and, open-mouthed, clambering up on a chair for a better view). If Hasan could be of use to the Amir, that, at any rate, was a more virtuous and useful end than, as Khushhal had, only using his God-sent gift of beauty to satisfy the lower urges with every bazaar-boy in Kabul, the heavens forgive him.

      Hasan, at seventeen, was famous. Of course Dost Mohammed could only mean one of Khushhal’s sons. He meant the one who was an angel. Hasan, alone among the sons, was an angel. He had been so beautiful as a baby, as a boy, that his mother had feared for him, knowing that beautiful children often coarsen as they grow older, become overblown like a July rose, their temperament uncertain as they grow too accustomed to the regular supply of love. And when love as it must proves no certainty, they are not resigned to the fact, but are shocked and angry at the seeming injustice. She had veiled him for a time, like a girl baby, to keep off the demons his beauty would summon. Had those demons come? For beautiful children, love occupies too central a place in their mind, pushing other thoughts, wisdom, understanding to the edge, if not altogether out of their thoughts. We are not made for love alone. Love, in the end, is the prerogative of God, the force of whose love we glimpse in shadow, and dimly, when a man loves another. It is, perhaps, only those who for the first decade of their lives have been loved universally and without conditions, on account of their beauty, who go on believing the central fact of their life remains to love and be loved. Those lucky, unlucky people, so secure only in their insecurity, remain as they once were all their lives only in one respect: they always remain children.

      The mother of Hasan said some of these things, and thought all of them, confiding the whole only in her prayers. How could this earthly angel not come to harm? But Hasan grew, and the light still shone beneath the soles of his feet as he lightly trod God’s earth. With each year, he remained beautiful; with each year, he became beautiful in a different way, since the beauty of a child is a changing thing, even when it is most constant. She never mentioned his name, never, never, in any context, for any purpose, without casting a net around his beloved skin by afterwards slipping in a ‘God willing’. It was so fragile, the radiant beauty which cushioned his steps, and nothing could touch, nothing, not even Time, could destroy it.

      Khushhal had made a quick palms-down gesture and a hiss as he passed the boy, wanting him to stay where he was until Khushhal, with the court, had accompanied the Amir to the door of his apartments. The worst of his wives, the lewd contemptuous one, had been waiting there for the Amir; not respectfully, but waiting as if to insult him.

      ‘Dosto,’ she sang out the second the doors were opened, though she could have no doubt that the court was waiting just there for their dismissal. ‘I’ve been waiting for you for the whole day.’ She had an infuriating voice, with her drawling Suddozye-princess vowels. She had been a prize at the end of one of those footlingly interminable, brutal scraps with the Suddozye pretenders, and never missed a chance to display her contempt of the whole court and the Amir himself before the entire establishment – before Kabul, before the English ambassadors, if she could. Why the Amir didn’t simply toss her down a well …