The Age of Ice: A Novel (50 page)

“Woe, woe,” Iqbal cried, “what am I to do? Why are you laughing? You brought it upon me, Agha, and now you lost your mind!”

I said, “My mind may be slow, but I only brought
this
about”—I pointed at my charred ear in the firepit, then around me, at the aftermath of the raid—“not
this
. Why would your exalted client buy what he can take by force?”

Iqbal could not deny the logic of the argument. Still, when I hid my ear under a lopsided turban and told him I was leaving, he began to look less miserable.

It sickened me to think they would keep coming to Khwaja Iqbal Ali. What would happen to him when he ceased to be helpful? “Khwaja, I am sorry for your misfortune. I am going to the Angleesh. Remember to say that to anyone who asks, and hashish will be your only trouble.”

• • •

When I arrived, Pottinger’s
kala
was up in arms. Lanterns burned everywhere. His Hindu domestics and Afghan hosts were guarding the grounds: two on the roof, two at the gate. They led me in at gunpoint. In
he courtyard, Pottinger and a couple of Afghans were crouching over a teenage boy who lay on a blood-soaked rug, moaning. What I could see of the boy’s skin was sliced up. “Pottinger Sahib, he says you know him,” the Hindu said. Pottinger looked at me with a familiar expression of pained surprise. His bloodied hands hung between his knees. “To what do we owe the honor?”

I said, “I am sorry—my timing is perfectly bad.”

Pottinger said, “We need to get him indoors. Khalo, we will try to lift you again now.”

Khalo.
So
this
was the bright boy Pottinger had spoken so fondly of !

I tried to be helpful. Once we dragged Khalo inside, and Pottinger broke open his medical kit, I helped him wash, suture, bandage. My missing ear was a scratch compared to the carving done on the boy’s face, chest, back. I pulled a bit of charras from my satchel and had the men start a kallion for him.

When the boy was soothed, I asked Pottinger what had happened. We’d switched to English, and a small clutch of his Afghan associates who’d stuck around observed us keenly but cluelessly. The air in the chamber was thick with body heat and smelled of Khalo’s blood. It was past midnight, but the emergency held the household sleepless, as if before an imminent attack. Pottinger said, “Khalo was running an errand. Someone did this to the poor fellow and dropped him by the gate.”

I said it meant a death threat to him and he heaved a sigh. “I know.”

Then I asked him for asylum.

Why,
he asked uncomfortably. I was not going to divulge that Russians—or their agents—wanted me to assassinate him. I said only that I had been
approached
by Goutte, who was still here, in Herat. I did not want to work for the Russians, I said. My ear hurt, my jaw felt fatigued and shaky.

“Our last meeting ended
irregularly,
” said he.

“I left too abruptly.”

“You’d come to exercise force.”

“No. I’d come to talk.”

“I should like to avoid any
talk
of that sort.”

It occurred to me: even if he ever doubted that I’d come to kill him that night months ago, he’d still hate the memory of the encounter, because it had glanced on something personal. Private. There had been a moment of weakness. The steel man in him was repelled by it now. Part of me
sneered,
Go away, old fool, you are not going to win him over
. I held on. “I do not want to be
compelled
to work for the Russians.”

There was a pregnant pause. “What are you to them?”

“I told you. A man on the way to India. I am Russian and I know local languages, that’s all. That’s why they want me.”

Pottinger wiped his forehead and stood. He looked exhausted. “Mr.—
Veltzen,
is it? I find myself at a difficulty trusting you. I do not relish saying it, but—you should leave, I am afraid.”

“
Velitzyn.
Not Veltzen.” I rose to my feet. I went to the doorway and bent to pull my boots on, a head rush making my pain swell tenfold. I held onto the wall for balance.
I’ll be dead in a matter of days
. “Mr. Pottinger, have pity,” I muttered. He may not have heard me. He was staring at Khalo.

One of the Afghans rose briskly and spoke to the Angleesh, pointing at me. The words were in a dialect I did not understand. The Angleesh replied and the Afghan objected. I watched them argue. The Afghan turned my way and said, now in Farsi, “You stay. You help my nephew.”

“Apparently, everyone here thinks
you
are a medicine man,” Pottinger commented with sarcasm. “I have to let him keep you. It’s
his
house.”

That was how Mr. Velitzyn ran over to the British lion. Some blood, some pain, and a necessity to compromise, which Eldred Pottinger,
our
political agent in Herat, was wise to accept.

• • •

Khalo’s uncle, the Afghan who let me stay, may have meant simply that I would ease Khalo’s passage with charras. But I fought for the boy’s life: it kept me from being kicked out. No, more: my own sense of worth depended on it. And I began to like the boy. I stayed at his side day or night. I pushed morsels of rice into a slit in his bandages, past his teeth.
You need to eat. Good. And now a raisin.
I held him when he thrashed and helped him when he needed to sit up. I told him my stories to distract him from pain and misery: tales of Orenburg, the Arctic, the year 1812. As these ran out, I went on to Ferdowsi, the
Shahnameh
: “Rostam was a great warrior . . .”

When he knew he’d live, Khalo began to contemplate his future as a disfigured man. He had been born a peasant. He had learned some English from Pottinger, and had wanted to speak it fluently. He’d wanted to learn how the British make cannons, and watches, and compasses. “Now I can barely speak in my own tongue.” The options he considered now were few: a mendicant or an assassin. I said he could still be a scholar.

The Angleesh would come and check on Khalo, then tarry, listening. One time I was telling Khalo, “Do you know that the British ‘God Save the King’ and the Russian ‘God Save the Czar’ are really one and the same tune, only one is played faster?” Khalo did not believe me, so I sang both to him. “Hear it?”

Khalo grinned around his crippled lips.

I said, “There are more things in common between enemies than one thinks.”

Pottinger, still in the doorway, shook his head.

Another time, he came and sat with us. I was telling Khalo that Russians too had Rostam the Warrior tales. “Only they call Rostam—
Ruslan
.”

Khalo blew out a scornful sound. “Ours came first!”

“I’m sure you’re right,” I said. “We must have heard your tales. When Tatars overran Russia six hundred years ago, not all warriors were ruthless all the time. Some stopped to tell stories to Russian children.”

Khalo looked at me as if I was joking. Pottinger remarked that I was
quite a storyteller
. I shrugged. “Keeps one’s mind off other things.” Pottinger picked at his beard. “The other time . . . it was Paris in 1814 you were talking about, weren’t you? A British hussar lieutenant bought you a pastry?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“Almost thirty years ago, what? You must have been a young lad back then—an ensign, I suppose?”

“Eskandar Agha is a hundred years old,” Khalo intervened, speaking in Farsi with specks of English. “He can turn into a ruthless warrior, like Rostam. He wields a sword of ice! Thirty years ago he made Napoléon’s whole army freeze in Russia.”

Pottinger looked as if he’d misheard. “Perhaps we could hear more about Paris sometime, Mr. Velitzyn? I haven’t ever been to Paris.”

“Anytime,” I said, while Khalo persisted, laboring on enunciation so hard, it hurt me to watch him. “And now, like Rostam, he’s withdrawn into the desert, haunted by the ghosts of his past.”

“Quite.” Pottinger glanced at me with reproach.
Really, this is embarrassing of you, Mr. Velitzyn, to feed the youth such tales,
his face said. I protested, “That’s not what I told him.”

He never resumed teaching Khalo. Perhaps he was arrested by guilt: the boy had suffered because of him. Or perhaps because he now perceived it to be a competition with me.

• • •

Yet I do believe he was warming up to me. Even if I never told Pottinger how I’d lost my ear, I told him tales of Paris. And he told me tales of India, even if he never told me about something that had been already decided by then, with his input: come spring, Britain was to invade Afghanistan.

While Herat was still besieged, the British, the exiled Afghan Shah Shujah, and Ranjit Singh, the ruler of the Sikh kingdom, signed an agreement to replace the sovereign of Kabul, Dost Mohammed, who had just leaned toward the Russians, with the pro-British and more tame Shujah. The victory of the British interests at Herat only made the hawks more confident—British prospects were all
en couleur de rose
(as the British envoy to Kabul, Sir Macnaghten, would be saying, up until the day he was dismembered). In the spring of 1839, an army crossed through the Bola-n Pass into Afghanistan. This opened the saddest chapter of the Great Game.

At the time, however, the invasion brought us instant relief. The proximity of the British force encouraged Yar Mohammed to be polite. No more ears were lost, even though the army went from Kandahar straight on to Kabul, sending no detachments toward “friendly” Herat. We got an embassy instead, with a doctor, a treasury, and more political agents. We had a mutton feast on that occasion—my first piece of meat in three years.

Yet, before we’d used up the last ounce of fat from that mutton on our rice and lentils, an unfortunate thing happened. A certain Major Todd led the embassy, another artillery officer turned diplomatist. And Mr. Todd happened to have served in Tehran as a military adviser to the shah, teaching Persians the latest advances in artillery. Mr. Todd recognized me—me,
Meerza Eskandar
—speaking English.

The change in the Angleesh was what alerted me to the reversal. Gone was the man who’d been warming up to me. Back was the one who steeled himself for a bitter confrontation. He ordered me in to the familiar room with a field desk and a folding chair and said, “I am told you used to work for the Persians.”

Woe!
I tried to explain. “I was little more than a slave. I have translated a few Russian and English documents. I’ve told you my master was a man of importance.”

“You did not tell me your master was Najar Khan, the king’s second man in foreign policy.”

“He did not discuss foreign policy with me. He discussed astronomy, and his wives, and Paris—”

“Mr. Todd tells me they suspected Persians had someone who eavesdropped on them. They just never knew who it was.
This
is what you should have told me, Mr. Velitzyn, this, not some incredible tales about Napoleonic Wars.”

Still I tried. “Mr. Pottinger, look. Mr. Todd had trained those very gunners who shot at you a year ago. But you do not accuse Mr. Todd of collaboration. Because it’s the way of life. Whatever I had translated five, ten years ago is old news. Najar is dead. Why should I have pretended to be more important than I had been?”

I tried, I failed. How could I explain to him those strange blank years after my unraveling? A sudden springtime in Paris, and then bitter guilt and silent ruins, camel dung and singing wind, the dust of bygone empires gritting on my teeth . . . Years when I stared flatly at the world and it left no trace in me, as I in it, except a handful of impressions—a vast and sullen salty lake east of Tabriz that suddenly bloomed with dozens of flamingo, a princely hunt in Khorasan that chased a stag into our caravan, and the hunters kept shooting, and took down their own people . . . Had this not been the one emotion that subsisted in my wasteland where others failed: Persia—an old man who’d lost track of time, like me?

God, what have I done wrong?

“I wish you had told me the truth,” Pottinger said. “Mr. Velitzyn, I never understood or endorsed your plea to the British government. But as of this moment, I consider it necessary to turn you in to the authorities in Calcutta. While we wait to send you off I suggest you recall the contents of all these documents that you translated.”

“To India at last,” I said.

His mouth curved with scorn. “It gives me no pleasure, though it enlightens me about your motives. Not a sage, not a voice of conscience. Not Rostam the Warrior. You’re just a Russian deserter who sold out to the Persians. For all I know, your stance for peace at any cost was fed solely by your desire to continue on your merry way to India.”

It’s not that simple,
I would have cried out, except I recalled that these were Pottinger’s exact words the night of our first conversation. “I didn’t come to harm you, that night,” I pled. He dismissed me.

In the late summer of 1839, two officers of the embassy escorted me to Bombay and then to Calcutta.

• • •

My first impression of Calcutta—impossibly familiar, reaching all the way to my youth, to St. Petersburg. I saw stately mansions of Anglo-Indians along the Garden Beach, the domed and colonnaded Government House with a statue of a spear-wielding Britannia on its top, the monolithic Fort William; kirks, courthouses, and churches—and the vast open spaces between these proud footholds of Europeanism worried my imagination, as if there was no knowing what those spaces might be filled with next, and I felt that the official city was stretched too thin over this sand and dust and palm trees. As if it put a strain on my eyes—to see in one and the same landscape dark-brown, near-naked
hamals
bearing a palanquin, and British ladies, all white frills and lace, with baby strollers and parasols held by their
chuprassee
bodyguards. But if I endeavored to boat down the river Hooghly, past the terraced steps on its banks ( 
ghats,
they were called), past moored ships and Bishop’s College—the contrasts faded, huts and shrines, bathers and cattle and funeral pyres returned, then bullfrogs, bamboo and marshes, malarial mosquitoes, crocodiles, and mangroves to the horizon, and before long everything, all grades and gradients, were evened to the sea level and released like a held breath into the great blue ocean.