That was about two weeks away. Or a hundred and thirty-two years ago. He checked his diary, and realized that today was Christmas Day. All over the city, the hippies would be celebrating in their own way – probably abandoning themselves to opium, rather than turkey, he thought wryly. He had probably better write to Catherine, a long amusing letter. These days, he was away for too long at a time, and he felt it; whenever he returned, London had always changed in some small, unarguable way. A building demolished, a new shop, a new book or film everyone had read or seen months ago; sometimes even a new phrase of slang (Sloane Ranger!) on everyone’s lips. Sometimes it was years before he discovered that some old actress had died and everyone else knew it. Yes, it was a good idea he had had, this retracing of the famous journey. Not very helpful with regard to matrilinearity, rather out of his usual line, but interesting all the same. And there might be an article in it, he supposed. Yes, 6 January. He hoped the weather would not be too bad, then reminded himself that if it were, that, indeed, would be rather the point. His life was grey, and orderly as a filing cabinet. This would be a pleasant change.
3.
Begramee, to his slight surprise, was now a golf course. The greens were covered with snow, but he discovered the reason for the strange smoothness of the terrain when he stumbled into a pit, and found himself sliding through an unnatural melange of snow and sand. This had been the first night’s resting place. He stood up, pulling his knapsack back on, and brushed himself down. He had walked only five minutes further when, almost from nowhere, a group of women appeared, running towards him. Kipling’s advice came horribly to mind:
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains
An’ the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle an’ blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier …
But Kipling had had nothing to say about golf courses, and he suppressed the thought. The women ran up, their golden grins shining bright, and, of course, they had no knives. They gestured at him, grinning, and of course they would assume he could not speak to them in their own language.
He greeted them as elaborately as he could, but they did not reply; perhaps a foreigner’s Persian did not count in some way. He sighed, and followed them. At the end of the golf course – perhaps on the golf course, it was not implausible – there was a little group of huts, a fire burning in the open, and he followed them into the largest of them.
Inside, there was a circle of men. They paid no attention to his entrance, and he squatted down and joined the group with a general salaam. They seemed to be talking about hunting – no, he concentrated – about the cousin of one of them, gone to America to be rich. Goodness, his Pushto was poor. The story wound its way to a leisurely pause; every time one of them said something which must be meant for Connecticut, he turned and nodded at their guest, amiably. When it seemed to have come to an end, he spoke – he trusted his Persian more – explaining his journey. Only slight embellishment was needed; as always, it was sensible to bring a blood relation into it. In Kabul, he routinely refused the request for the gift of a specific possession – a ring, a cheap watch – with the sad assurance that it was given to him by his father as he lay dying. In the same way, now, he told them with a straight face that he was following the route taken by his grandfather’s grandfather, a great English warrior, and hoped to find his bones.
‘Engelstan,’ the oldest man said, nodding. ‘They came with tanks, with aeroplanes, to fight Dost Mohammed. My father told me, and his father told him.’
‘Dost Mohammed was a worthy adversary,’ the anthropologist put in, scrupulously.
‘And Macnaghten,’ he went on. ‘Macnaghten, the Prince. And when they came to the English, and told them that Macnaghten was dead, dead by his own hand, the English cried out and said, “How is it possible? How can he be dead, and the sky be as it was before?”’
‘Macnaghten,’ another said, trying the name, remembering the tale.
The anthropologist made a mental note. He would not claim Macnaghten for his grandfather.
4.
The food was good at Begramee, though heavy; the fatty stew of lamb and roots incongruously called Lancashire hotpot to mind. He fell asleep almost immediately, and woke sore and aching from the lumpy thin mattress and the hard earth. The day was clear, and the sun on the snow dazzling. He set off after a solid breakfast of thick bread and bitter, burnt tea; the sun was low in the sky still. He had forgotten to wind his watch, and had no real idea of the time. It must have been an hour before he realized he had company. A boy, about fifteen, was following him, twenty or so paces behind; a strange sort of intimacy in the white empty landscape.
For some reason, he did not feel threatened or concerned. He let the boy pace behind him steadily for an hour or so, and then paused, turned back, smiling. The boy did not seem surprised; he continued his steady pace until he had come right up, as if he had been waiting for the anthropologist to notice him before approaching.
‘Hello,’ he said.
‘Hello,’ the boy said. Then, in English, he said, ‘Hello!’ and grinned, hugely.
‘Where are you going?’ the anthropologist said, as they started to walk once more, side by side.
‘I come from Kabul!’ the boy said, with huge enjoyment.
‘A beautiful city,’ the man said gravely.
‘What is your name?’ the boy said.
‘My name is Conrad,’ the anthropologist said.
The boy nodded, and fell back into his companionable stride without offering his own. ‘Many Americans come to Afghanistan,’ he said. ‘I like America!’
‘Would you like to travel there?’ Conrad said.
The boy laughed uproariously, although there was nothing comic in what Conrad said. He shook his head, over and over.
‘I am from England,’ Conrad said. ‘Not America. Engelstan.’
The boy seemed to agree with this. ‘Will you be my friend?’ he asked after a few minutes.
‘Of course,’ Conrad said. It was important to appear relaxed.
‘Can you give me your watch?’ the boy said.
Conrad shook his head, and explained that it had been the last gift of his grandfather, on his deathbed; an explanation the boy seemed to accept placidly.
‘Once,’ the boy said, out of nowhere, ‘the English came here, and fought with us. But now they are our friends!’
‘I hope so,’ Conrad said. ‘Do you—’
‘The English,’ the boy said. ‘They fought Dost Mohammed. And Macnaghten. The only man to reach Jalalabad was Macnaghten, and when he reachd there he said Sah makeh. Do you speak Urdu? Sah Makeh. Everything over. But now we are all friends. Do you know Jalalabad? Very very beautiful city.’
‘I am going there,’ Conrad said. ‘I have heard much of its beauties.’
‘Look,’ the boy suddenly said. ‘There is my brother!’ And he left Conrad’s side, and off he went, running heavily through the heavy snow. Conrad could see no one, and he watched the boy running off with a slight sadness. He had been nice. Yes, everyone was friends now, and Afghanistan would be peaceful for evermore.
5.
It was on the fourth day that he found the bones. By then he had invented the rules of his journey – the rules of the game, if you liked. To everyone he met, he would quite simply say that the grandfather of his grandfather, a great English warrior, had travelled this way many years before, and he was walking the same way to pay his respects to his ancestor, and perhaps to find his honoured unburied bones. He would say this, and then simply listen to what they had to say in return.
What he never expected was that the bones would be there. That broke all the rules of his game.
The night of the third day, he was listening to the family memories of an old Afghani, sitting in his shelter. Macnaghten had come with tanks; the shepherd in the next village, his grandfather’s mother had been English, who had run away to safety and fallen i
n love with a great warrior, no, another shepherd. Conrad listened, his hands biting with the cold of the January night. The old man finished what he had to say, and paused, his eyes bright.
‘The bones are there,’ he said. ‘Your ancestor’s bones.’
‘Where?’ Conrad said.
‘Over the next hill,’ the man said. ‘You do your ancestor honour by your journey.’
Conrad nodded graciously, supping from the bowl of thick soup; some of the viscous fat adhered to his beard.
‘My son will take you there,’ the old man said. He clapped his hands and a youth in the dark recesses of the hut stood up. He turned his head and rattled out a short, metallic burst of tribal Pushto. The boy sulkily came forward.
‘Tomorrow will be early enough,’ Conrad said, alarmed, but the man seemed set on the idea.
‘It is very close,’ he said. ‘And today is early enough, to do honour to your ancestor. It is very close, and quite safe.’
Conrad gave up, and, wrapping himself up and taking a torch, followed the boy out of the hut. He was oddly annoyed by the assumption that he was worried about safety. The group seemed to approve of this urgency. The boy said nothing, just slouched a pace or two ahead of him, and the anthropologist was in no mood to talk. The night was astonishingly clear; the moon bit at the deep black of the sky, and beneath the feet, the hard snow crunched like gravel. They plodded onwards in the intense hard cold. When Conrad fell, the ground shifting beneath him, the boy came back a little and hoiked him up roughly without making a comment. There was no sound, no light but the brilliant moon; somewhere, beyond the hills, a dog howled faintly. It took ten minutes to reach the top of the steep hill, and then the boy made a rough sweeping gesture. There was nothing to be seen, nothing but a smooth field of untouched snow. Conrad turned to the boy, but he was hunched over a cigarette, trying to get a match to spark. The boy raised his head, and gestured again. Conrad began to walk forward, not knowing what else to do. In a moment he would turn back, assume a solemn expression, and allow himself to be led back to the tent. There might be more to see in the morning, of course. He took another step forward, and then something broke underneath his feet; something friable, empty, like a great bird’s egg. He pulled his foot up, and something came with it. He saw what it was, knowing what it would be before he knew what he felt; and it was a skull, its crushed-in roof biting at the sole of his boot, and then, helplessly, he toppled forward with one leg in the air. He fell, ludicrously, hard, and something, again, shattered underneath him; the bones, another set of bones, what remained of another man, and, nauseous, twitching, he flailed about, trying to raise himself without doing one thing, without putting his hands on the field of bones. But from here, he could see one thing: the snow was not smooth and level, as it looked when you stood; it rippled away, unevenly, like a cloth cast over the shattered remains of a broken tea set. It was all bones, heaped up and left where they lay, untouched, contemptuously unburied. He wanted to turn and go back to the boy, unfeelingly pulling on his cigarette, but, as he pulled himself up, he seemed to fall forward, and then, again, under his boots, that sickening breaking sensation, and another, and another, and another. This was what he had come to find, and now he had to go.
6.
The next day, he walked and walked and walked, and he got to Jalalabad, and no one paid him any attention as he entered the city. And the day after that he agreed a price with a taxi driver, and drove back to Kabul along the snowy roads – it took four hours – and tried never to think of any of his journey, ever again.
AKBAR
What good is a cow that neither calves nor yields milk?
What use is a son unlettered and stubborn to boot?
The Pancatantra
TWENTY-ONE
1.
THE SHEEP IN THE FIELDS FROZE for a tiny moment, and then scattered; not running as sheep run, all together, but in different, panicked directions, like a pond when a rock has been heaved into it. They must have seen this roaring monster before – must have seen it every day of their short lives, indeed – but they ran as if this new terror were quite new to them. Their grandfathers had never seen such a thing, and they ran, having no idea what was descending on them.
‘Do stop that,’ Bella said to her sister. Elizabeth had been humming ‘Hail the Conqu’ring Hero Comes’ on and off since they had left Queen’s Acre. ‘It isn’t funny.’
‘It is funny,’ Elizabeth roundly declared. ‘Very funny indeed.’
Bella looked at her balefully. She had never been in a railway carriage before, and the novelty of it had come from an unexpected direction. The speed of the travel she had heard about, and within a few minutes it had ceased to astonish her. After an hour or so, it seemed merely the appropriate velocity to go at, and Bella allowed herself to be hurtled through the English countryside as if she deserved nothing less. What disconcerted her was a more human aspect of it. She and Elizabeth were enclosed in a small compartment, alone, and there was an unnerving lack of certainty whether they were in public or safely alone, in private. In some ways, as they talked, it felt open to any stranger, like a post-coach; in others, Bella felt as if they were luxuriously alone in a mechanical landau, and she felt a slight awkwardness as they talked, as if at any moment a stranger might enter. Still, she knew what she would say, on her eventual return, when Henry or the nursemaids wanted to know all about it; she would tell them how very fast a train went, because that was what everyone always said.
‘I’m sure he will be quite all right,’ Elizabeth said. Bella looked at her, surprised; she had, indeed, been thinking about Henry, left alone at Queen’s Acre for three weeks. How he had cried when she left, although when she had first explained it to him, he had nodded in a serious, adult way, accepting what his mother needed to do; how she had cried, too, once they were safely away from the gates. ‘By now, he will be in his garden, digging to his heart’s content. He will be quite happy, you know. At that age, it is one day after another.’
‘I know,’ Bella said. ‘He would love to come to London.’
‘He is as well in the country,’ Elizabeth said, briskly dismissing this impossibility. ‘And he has never been without his mamma. It does children good. I am so fond of him.’
Bella assented to this, silently. The train slowed, quite abruptly, and in a moment stopped. Somewhere ahead, the engine hissed villainously. Bella stood up and stared out of the window at the suddenly unmoving countryside.
‘A change of horses, do you think?’ Elizabeth said idly.
‘It could be highwaymen,’ Bella said. ‘Quickly, sister dear, hide your jewels. No, I think they have to stop sometimes; it is more restful to us, and our poor nerves. Do you suppose anyone will remember me, after all this time? And so changed?’
‘Not changed one ounce,’ Elizabeth said in her uncharitable way; she need not have said ounce so meaningfully, after all. ‘Of course they will remember you – you will see. It will be good for you to leave Queen’s Acre, to see some new faces and practise your curtsy and forget your country manners.’
‘No one will marry me now,’ Bella said, and the thought made her happy. Elizabeth made no comment; the point was so unarguable. ‘But you are right. Society is good for the soul; it assures one of one’s own superiority in every point to the mass of mankind.’
Elizabeth rolled her eyes; and she used, surely, to enjoy Bella’s jokes. Beneath the window of the carriage, a bright metallic ring sounded, and again. Elizabeth joined her sister at the window; beneath, a workman with a hammer was hitting one of the wheels of the carriage, testing its soundness.
‘I know nothing of these things,’ Bella said. ‘But I would feel more at ease if they had carried out their examination of the train before we began our journey. What will happen, should we lose a wheel? There are so many wheels – perhaps we will continue as if nothing has happened. Or perhaps we will be thrown into a ditch. Who can say? Not I. Henry would be too overcome with excitement to speak – I shall wr
ite to him this night, without fail. He has been pummelling me with unanswerable questions from dawn until dusk, and now I shall be able to answer every one. Or not, more probably.’
‘Dear little Henry,’ Elizabeth said. ‘If only papa—’
Bella raised one eyebrow, quizzically, and there were a number of ways in which the sentence could have gone; if only papa could still be here, to dandle his bastard grandson; if only papa had borne the news better; if only papa had had the strength of character to behave with love, or as a gentleman ought, instead of the shameful half-measure; but he was dead now, dead after years of insensate stupor, and no end would be served by completing the sentence. At the time, she could have softened the terrible blow by telling him that she had married Burnes in secret, as Elizabeth had said she must; but, for no reason that she could see, she had not. She would have been prepared to lie to her father; it was herself she was thinking of. And afterwards she had not seen him again, and no one had told her even that he was dying. How few people had come to his funeral; how sad he would have been to have seen the empty expensive spectacle, the empty carriages lined up outside, sent by all the duchesses whose intimate friendship he prided himself on, and the clergyman, by all reports, ineffectually fumbling about for his virtues. Bella had gone into mourning, quite formally, for a year precisely, her black gowns seen by nobody. A substitute for feeling. He had never chosen to see Henry – that had been his idea of how a gentleman, in these circumstances, should behave – and Bella, now, was hardened to her gratitude at the fact. Henry was so very unlike his grandfather; so unlike, she rejoiced at it.
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