The game went on. After hearing my story, Simonich went to Mohammad Shah, the Persian king, and told him that the British envoy, Sir John McNeill, had only pretended to negotiate peace while in reality he urged Yar Mohammed to hold on just a wee bit longer. Mohammad Shah, enraged, passed the accusation to McNeill. On June 7, McNeill, slighted, broke relationships with Persia, packed up the mission, and left the camp. No more of the Union Jack flying over the “Little Britain” made of Persian clay and straw. Simonich had the Persian king’s ear all to himself. Ten days after McNeill’s departure, the Persians started bombing the city anew, and on June 24, the army launched an attack.
It failed. A Russian would tell you that failed logistics, idiocy, and the arrogance of mid-level command were to blame. How else could the leading contingent in the attack that almost took the largest breach spend two hours there sitting around, waiting for a new commander to be appointed, and finally retreating?
A Persian would say they did all they could but the Afghans held on like roots of the earth and fought like lions—swords against bullets.
An Afghan would add that if only the garrison had cannon, they would’ve ground the enemy to dust.
A Brit would opine that both sides lacked basic understanding of siege warfare, but still, the city would have fallen if not for one man: at the moment of the greatest peril, when the biggest breach was well-nigh taken, the defenders wavered, and even Yar Mohammed crumpled to the ground in despair—the young Eldred Pottinger yanked the despot up by the arm and appealed to his honor—three times! Thus pushed and prodded by the Angleesh, Yar Mohammed in turn pushed and prodded the fighters, who fell on the Persians if only to avoid the wuzeer’s wrath.
I did not see the battle, so I cannot add anything. I was a mile away in the camp, worrying. A week later, Count Simonich summoned me. His frustration filled the room to the ceiling. He crumpled and tossed some papers. He ranted about the barbaric backwardness, laziness, and false pride that ruined the best of plans. Then he stepped in close to me and demanded, “Who is this—this wuzeer-whisperer, this—Pottinger? Why is he still there, Mr. Szwerin, would you care to explain? Why is it that His Majesty the Persian king would not hear about a peace negotiation with Herat unless it has expulsion of a measly English lieutenant as the top demand? And why do Afghans cling to him like burrs?”
I tried to be careful with my explanation, but Simonich fixed me with a stare as heavy as fate and said, “Mr. Szwerin—I suggest you do as you have proposed. Return to the city and use whatever means to neutralize this nuisance, for Christ’s sake! You will be provided with the necessities and rewarded with more if successful. However, if any part of your business plan fails, be prepared to stand alone. You are not acting on behalf of the Russian government, remember that.”
I did not remember proposing anything of this sort. But after a quick calculation, I accepted. I had lasted another month—sleeping well and eating my full—and got a fighting chance to last a few more. There was a price to pay for this luxury. But Mr. Szwerin was on it, thinking hard. And Alexander Velitzyn—Eskandar Agha—wanted nothing more than for the siege to lift.
I received money. I received pistols—a set of two thick-barreled .44-caliber made by a British manufacturer in Calcutta. I got a new khalat robe, a new shawl for a belt, under which I tucked a fine yataghan knife. Boots of Russian leather replaced my straw slippers. I had a letter that was to serve as a pass to get me through. It was a resealed old piece written by Pottinger to McNeill. A messenger who had carried it had been caught and strangled by the Persians.
• • •
The city was moribund. Parts of it seemed dead already, others on the brink. The stench—refuse and corpse. At eleven o’clock on the night that I entered the city, I knocked on the door of the kala, the compound that housed the Angleesh. Two Afghan sentinels let me in—the letter worked its magic. God, they didn’t even try to frisk me!
Pottinger was up, seated at a small field desk. He had been writing. A pistol was on the desk before him, and he put his hand over it when I made my entry. I said, “Good evening, Mr. Pottinger,” which greeting he met with an expression of pained surprise on his face, as if he expected all news to be bad news. He was skinnier than I remembered. I noted he did not wear his boots inside, Mussulman-style, so I too pulled off my boots. This made him take his hand off his weapon.
“I am Alexander Velitzyn,” I said. “I have been in this city since the onset of the siege. Two months ago I almost called on you. But Afghans put me in jail. You may of course know that already.”
“I do not,” he said. “I had no part in it. I am sorry to hear you’ve suffered.” He stood up. “How do you do, Mr. Velitzyn? It’s a surprise visit, I must admit. I suppose I should offer you to stay the night.”
“I’d like to speak with you. Now, if I may.”
“Well . . . all right. I see you carry a letter.”
“It’s one of your own. It’s been taken from your messenger, a while ago. I used it to get here.”
He took the letter from my hand. He stared at the new seal, not his, broke it, and briefly examined the contents; one corner of his mouth twitched. “Did Count Simonich send you?”
“No one sent me. Let’s say I stole it. I am returning to you what’s yours.”
“What do you want?”
“I want this siege to end.”
“On what terms?”
“It’s over. The British mission has left. You are alone. Why do you want this city to stand?”
“Why do you want it to fall?”
“I did not say that. I said, end the siege. Make peace.”
Still standing, he folded his arms and picked at the beard on his chin. “Mr. Velitzyn, you can tell Count Simonich or any other Russian agent you are connected with that a fair peace settlement is everybody’s goal. If you intend to add your voice to the choir, I can help you get the attention of the wuzeer, and I suggest you start there.”
“I told you I do not represent Russians. And I am here not to do diplomacy but to name things for what they are. You have the wuzeer’s ear. Tell him to make peace. ”
Pottinger made a wince of a smile. “Within my means—which are limited—I am doing just that, I can assure you.”
“No, you are not. You help the defenses to hold. The Persian shah thinks you are the only obstacle between him and Herat. My jailers thought so too, and so did the city’s Persians, who had tried—and failed—to tell you about the abuses they suffered from Yar Mohammed. You are aiding and enabling a despot, Mr. Pottinger, a despot and a torturer.”
“Against another one just like him.”
“Then why are you doing it? For glory? Thrill? So that British broadcloth is sold in the Afghani bazaars instead of Russian broadcloth? Or is it a mission to bring this corner of the world into the enlightenment of civilization as exemplified by the British Empire? Or maybe you are merely following orders, is that it?”
“This is quite beyond anything I may consider reasonable to discuss with you, given that I don’t have the privilege of knowing who you are, nor am I answerable to you.”
“You are answerable to your conscience!”
He clenched the edge of his desk and glared at me. “Nor are you my conscience.”
“May I?” I sat down on his rug even as he said, “I’m afraid not.” He remained standing.
“My name is indeed Russian. But I haven’t been to Russia in decades. My wife and son are dead. Do you know who taught me English? A great friend of mine by the name Martin Sawyer, who lived most of his life in Russia but had to leave because of the Blocus. Once upon a time, he and I had spent a winter in Siberia cooped up in a tiny hut with two other companions—a Royal Navy surgeon and a German doctor. Mr. Robeck, the surgeon, told us about India. We dreamed of the heat. That is what I’ve been doing here: I’ve been trying to get to India.
“In my day, I’ve done very bad things to the retreating French. So when a Parisian man gave me shelter, only
to trick me into bondage in Persia, I did not mind, I deserved every bit of it. And I wanted to run away from Europe and her wars. The Persian who owned me was a man of some importance at court. When Russians found me out and wanted me to work for them, I ran again. I do not represent any country or government, Mr. Pottinger.”
He looked at me, puzzled. He was probably calculating my age, subtracting 1812 from 1838. He shook his head, as if dismissing the result. “A man can run from war but not a nation. A nation has nowhere to run. I suppose if you were serving a country, you’d appreciate it more than you do.”
“Mr. Pottinger, your nation is far from having to run anywhere. You are sitting considerably west of the Indus, and it is Persia and Afghanistan we are talking about, not Yorkshire—not even Calcutta. Certainly, with so much room to spare between you and your home, there is more than one way to carry out a mission. You’ve made promises to the Afghans—take them back. You’ve assured them of British help—tell them it is uncertain. You may attach great importance to your rectitude now, but in several years, when you have started a family—trust me—you will find yourself wishing you were less willing to let women and children starve for your political agenda. Don’t you see—the disease that is happening here would never have been so hideously protracted if the patient hadn’t been kept alive by the artifice of British and Russian surgeons. Our meddling makes it that much worse. Don’t you understand that?”
I had been right about a core of steel in him. He measured me and said, “Russia has been spreading in all directions for a good hundred years, and it will continue doing so unless somebody erects a bulwark across her path. Britain is the only one capable of doing it—not because she wants to, because she has to. Because no one else is strong enough to do it, yet it has to be done.”
“Has Britain not been spreading across half the world?”
“She has. There needs to be a balance in the world, and I don’t mean to say a balance of right and wrong, just a balance of power. Without it, even a mere discussion of what’s right and what’s wrong is impossible. Today, the balance line is contested here, in Herat.”
“By piling Persian and Afghan bodies one upon another.”
“If you must say so.”
“I see. You are an agent of history. The British lion and the Russian bear have been stalking each other—no surprise that the ground between them gets all trampled. The lion, the bear, and all the smaller animals in this godforsaken pen are really no different in their purposes, but you are a lion’s cub, so you will serve the lion. Where do you get your meals, by the way, at Yar Mohammed’s?”
“It is NOT! THAT! SIMPLE!” His hands jerked and he spilled some ink. He glanced down, “Oh, for crying out loud!”
“It is simple, Mr. Pottinger.”
He looked past me, cringed at something, and said, “This is preposterous. But very well, if you insist, consider this: they have a Financial Committee now. It was my proposal. I thought it would be fairer this way. Only, the wuzeer made it into a means of separating the less favored chiefs from their money—they are going after their own now. So tell me now, Mr. Velitzyn, what would you do? If you’d seen the abuse—would you not try to mitigate it by asking people to contribute voluntarily in expectation of reimbursement from the British Empire? Knowing full well that half of it will be sure to settle in the wuzeer’s coffers?”
“That’s why you ought not to take part in it. Tell them you no longer have the mandate.”
“I did just that when Sir McNeill left. I did it again—I offered to leave the city when my removal became a prerequisite for peace negotiations. The wuzeer was against it. If you must know, he has been corresponding with the Persian king all along. The man is shifty, has nothing to lose of his personal comfort by continuing the stand and everything to gain by pitching Shiite and Sunni sides against one another. I do not decide between war and peace. I can only maintain the line of balance, so that neither side overruns the other. That’s all.”
“Leave the city.”
“I can’t.” He sat down.
I still sat cross-legged on his rug, and the fat barrels of my British pistols, tucked at my waist under the robe, had been pressing into my stomach. Now I felt them anew: rigid, uncompromising. Insistent. I rose to my feet and came closer. “You are held hostage.”
“No.” Forlornly, he glanced at his pistol—still on his desk.
“Why, then?”
His eyes now fixed on my arm, not my face. I realized that I had slid my right hand under the flap of my robe. I had adjusted the pistol there, now I was fingering it. The solid walnut of the grip. The engraved frame. A fine British boxlock—easy to load, easier yet to fire . . . Perhaps I could threaten Pottinger, force him to leave with me? That’s what I’d been thinking, when he said, “I suppose they call it a sense of duty only because calling it for what it is could be so confounding. This state of affairs, here, now—couldn’t get any worse, could it? But I can’t just go away. I am sorry, but you will have to shoot me to retire me.”
This was a jolt. My fingers recoiled. At this moment, he could have grabbed his pistol, called in his sentinels, overturned his writing desk into me. Instead he closed his eyes. He left me standing over him. His ink-stained fingers clenched, then, deliberately, spread out on the desktop. Keeping his eyes shut, he said, “There is a boy here, Khalo. Runs errands for me. Very bright lad. Wants to learn English. And mathematics.” He smiled, his voice trailing off, “There’s hope in that, isn’t there?”
How did I get to this point? By what choices? My hand crept over my pistol, receded, crept back on again. I had my thumb on the hammer at one point. Kill him? There had been times in the past weeks when I thought of it. Now—I knew that a part of him wanted to die, here, this instant—so he could retire in peace to teach a boy mathematics. Does it make any sense? But if I felt anything at all, it was jealousy.
He held his breath.
I did not draw my pistol. I backed up, pulled on my boots, and left. Outside, the stench ebbed and flowed with the night’s breeze, and the tyrant’s citadel above town was crowned with watch fires that flickered this way and that like madman’s thoughts. I wondered what would happen to me when Simonich realized that I was not going to neutralize Lieutenant Pottinger. Then I wondered what Pottinger’s face looked like when he opened his eyes. I smiled. For that brief moment, I felt more like Alexander Velitzyn than ever in the past two and a half decades. Less like a Meerza Eskandar. Still less like a Mr. Szwerin.
I headed to Iqbal’s.
• • •
I banged on his door, a servant opened. Then Iqbal himself sneaked out to the courtyard.
“Khwaja, I beg for cover for the night,” I said. “I’ll make up for it.”
“Look at you—fattened and dressed like an emir.” He fingered the fabric of my khalat as if to check if it could hold whatever he was planning for it. “I am busy with a guest of importance. Sit by the hearth and keep your eyes and ears open, your face hidden.”
I did as he said. An old woman (his mother?) gave me some coffee. The fire in the pit was our only light. Peering through the gauze of smoke into the next room, I could glean that Iqbal’s guest sat cross-legged and was smoking a European-looking pipe. His fingers glittered with jewels. Iqbal was servile, offering contents of baskets and jars for his inspection. Then money changed hands and Iqbal clapped for help—at once the old woman and the servant boy rushed in to wrap and load the purchase. The strange guest stretched and yawned. Then, “Andere Länder, andere Sitten,” he rolled off his tongue in perfect, if a tad slurred, German. And when Iqbal politely asked for clarification, the guest dropped, “Ah, my friend, I am just speaking to myself, du Arschgesicht.”
That was how I finally came across the reclusive Dr. Euler, a German who served as Kamran Shah’s personal physician. However, since I happened to understand that the distinguished doctor had called Iqbal a friend and an assface in one sentence, albeit in two different languages, I saw no reas
on to trust him.
When the royal doctor’s eye finally fell upon me, I was just another one of Khwaja Iqbal Ali’s associates.
• • •
When Colonel Stoddard arrived from Tehran on August 11 and delivered an ultimatum of the British government to the shah of Persia, I was elated. Perhaps my visit to the Angleesh had not gone to waste, after all. Was it so impossible to construe Stoddard’s appearance as a consequence of a course I had induced Pottinger to take?
Britain announced her commitment to go to war if Persia did not leave the walls of Herat at once. Several British warships had already showed at the Persian island of Carrack in the Gulf. So the Persian shah stood down.
When preparations for departure were already evident but not yet incontrovertible, and contradictory rumors made everything an uncertainty, a Russian agent was said to have entered Herat to negotiate a finale that would save the Persian shah his face: a pro forma show of submission by Kamran Shah and Yar Mohammed. The rulers of Herat declined, citing Pottinger’s advice. Aggrieved, Herat’s Persians said he could have advised them otherwise—this would have saved the starved city two, three weeks of waiting. But the Angleesh stood firm, which meant I had been wrong about him. Nor had I influenced his decisions. Should I have abducted him when I had a chance?
The Russian agent, when I caught sight of him, turned out to be Mr. Goutte, the spymaster from Tehran. And this man now worked for Simonich—looking for me, perhaps! I kept off the streets.
I stayed with Iqbal. My poor medical friend had landed the powerful Dr. Euler as a regular customer. The money was good but the volume requested—quite unmanageable, given that Euler Sahib would not take no for an answer. Iqbal begged for my help and I agreed to succor him—for a share of profit. We hauled in the harvest, dried, and chopped, and soaked, and brewed, and extracted. The season was ripe and the time urgent: the moment the Persian army left, my going into the foothills would cease to be a feat, corresponding with a drop in the price of the product, the product being—hashish.
The Age of Ice: A Novel Page 37