The Age of Ice: A Novel (49 page)

“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 reason 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.

Also Kinnub in Arabic, also Ganja in Hindu. It is bhang when big
leaves are dried and sukho if it is small leaves, husks, and seeds. Made in milk it is an aphrodisiac, but take too much and in come delirium, impotence, catalepsy.
Charras
—sap—is the most precious. It will take your pain away and make you lose your mind. But,
Erlaubt ist, was gefällt,
as Euler Sahib would say—all is permitted that pleases. Collect enough hashish, Eskandar, and you can pay for a caravan of your own, go anywhere you please and by any route, instead of having to wait for someone else’s party, butter the caravan-bashee, and learn to your dismay that the one caravan due to depart will go via Kandahar and is certain to convey Mr. Goutte, as Kandahar is Mr. Goutte’s base of operations in the first place.

So it happened that when the Persian army and the Russian mission started to march west on September 9, the greedy Meerza Eskandar did not leave Herat for India the very next day. Why, he felt safe now!

Pottinger didn’t leave either, surprising me yet again. He took to humanitarian projects instead, trying to effect the city’s revival. Winter set in, and now I was getting worried: did the Angleesh not realize that he was about to overstay Yar Mohammed’s hospitality?

• • •

To my credit, I told Iqbal that I knew German and could understand what Euler Sahib had a habit of muttering; that when it wasn’t a self-justifying proverb it was an expression of Euler’s disregard for Iqbal in particular and Afghans in general. But Iqbal only laughed. “Men of power have their ways.”

The worst thing about Dr. Euler, however, wasn’t that he had been partaking in his royal patient’s pleasures, but that his mind worked where it mattered even if most of the time he was just a lazy-eyed addict. As he would say,
die Katze läßt das Mausen nicht,
which means, more or less, a cat never stops being a mouser.

“We Europeans take after dogs,” he told me one day, on the way out with his latest purchases, “or wolves, to be precise. Strong loyalty to the pack, discipline. Cooperation. Servitude. A bitch can be a leader. Take our British friend here, for example—what a purebred dog that man is! No wonder he is not liked around here. Because, you see, Asiatics—they’ve taken after cats. It is in fact quite obvious, isn’t it? As for myself, I have a cat and a dog fighting inside me every single day. You better believe it, Mr. Szwerin.”

He was not supposed to know that name, the name of my lie! I was
still standing speechless when a pack of jezailchees broke in. One pinned Iqbal to the wall with a rifle’s muzzle. Two went on to pillage Iqbal’s stores. Three more pounced on me, fought me, held me down. One slashed half of my ear off and dangled it, dripping, like bait in front of my nose, then shoved it against my clenched teeth. Said, if I did not want to have to eat it up together with my own balls, I’d better go do as I had
boasted
and kill the Angleesh Pottinger.

• • •

Woe, woe to the wretched Mr. Velitzyn!
My evil twin—the scheming double agent Mr. Szwerin—had caught up with me! What terrified me most was the thought that I had been outwitted because I was an old man, feeble in mind if not in body and falling further and further behind the game. I’d lost trust in myself. I had to seek protection, or else I’d lead my own self to a grisly end.

Iqbal’s old mother wailed amidst broken earthenware, while Iqbal switched between lamenting the theft of his whole harvest, accusing me of not foreseeing it, and forcing wounds’ herbs and clean cloth upon me. I threw the scrap of my ear in the fire and watched it sizzle. But—lo and behold—the sleeve of my shirt that I’d held to the wound had seized not just with dry blood—with frost. I was freezing cold again, as cold as I’d never been in the last—decade, or more. I laughed till I wept.