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 if they are different from your son’s. You say, truly, that you 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
