Читать книгу The Mulberry Empire - Philip Hensher - Страница 10

‘Now, the Lord,’ Burnes went on. ‘No, sorry, vocative, O Lord of the Wind of a Hundred and Twenty Days. I always forget Persian numbers over fifty or so.’

‘It is not particularly complicated,’ Mohan Lal said, smiling in his infuriating way. ‘Numbers in Arabic are far more complex a proposition. And we may find we have plenty of time to perfect the address to the Amir.’

‘I’m sure,’ Gerard said. ‘Years, probably. Hi, you, sir.’

The guard in the corner of the room moved, minimally.

‘Are we to see the Amir today?’ Gerard said, as he had asked ten times a day since they had arrived.

The guard made a head-tipping gesture; whether it meant something, or whether it was just the weight of the boy’s enormous, mushroom-coloured turban, was not clear.

‘In any case,’ Gerard said, ‘he knows we are here. Probably.’

The boy guard, his loaded jezail like a bayonet between his thin dirty hands, considered this, deeply, and then made the same head-tipping gesture. ‘Rus?’ he said in the end, nodding three times at the three Europeans. They appeared to know very well what Mohan Lal was.

‘No,’ Burnes said patiently, not for the first time. ‘No, we are not Russians. We are from England, from Engelstan.’

‘Yes,’ Gerard cut in. ‘Tell the Newab Jubbur Khan to tell the Amir. Go on, go and tell your commanding officer. He will see us then, when he knows where we come from.’

The boy looked, as if deeply wounded, appealing to Burnes. ‘Rus,’ he said once more, and then, for no reason on earth, started to laugh uproariously. He did not get up.

‘I wish they wouldn’t do that,’ Gerard said irritably. ‘Laugh like that, I mean. It makes me think they know something we don’t know. And why do they keep calling us Russians?’

‘Rus,’ the boy said again, murmuring as if entranced, understanding a word in what Gerard said.

‘No, no, not Rus,’ Gerard said. ‘And when do we hear from the damned Emperor of the damned Afghans? Oh, God – oh, God – that damned mutton at breakfast. Gentlemen, excuse me—’

Burnes shrugged, as Gerard rushed from the room, clutching his stomach chaotically like an unfastened valise. He prided himself on the value of patience in these dealings. That was the great thing in the East; patience, because nothing ever happened when it should, nothing ever happened on schedule. Everything, in dealing with the great rulers of the East, was whim and delay. Ten days was nothing; because, in response to whim and delay, there was no sensible behaviour to adopt but a complete, more-than-Oriental patience. That was what everyone said, and Burnes was pleased with himself for having exercised a great deal of patience with every potentate he had ever come across, and usually attained, if not the desired end, then, at least, some interesting conclusion. What no one had ever warned him about was the necessity to exercise some patience with one’s fellow travellers; with a supercilious ass like Mohan Lal, forever making superior suggestions about one’s Persian or giving one ridiculous and probably entirely false information about the curious customs of the country, or a bigger ass like Gerard, complaining about the slightest inconvenience to his blessed dignity, arguing for two entire days about the necessity of shaving his head and dying his beard black before crossing the Indus, always wanting to tell some outraged and heavily-armed nabob about the greatness of the Empire, or even, once, telling an imam in response to the invariable question about the European diet that, yes, he ate bacon daily and very delicious it was too. Unfairly, Burnes blamed Gerard even for his disastrous digestion, the steady torrential cataract from his bowels, blamed in turn on the damned mutton at breakfast, the damned beans at dinner, or the damned melon which the rest of the company had eaten at Jalalabad with no ill effects. Yes, the exercise of patience with one’s damned fellow travellers was the most taxing thing; compared to that, waiting ten days to see the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan presented him with no difficulty whatever.