He looked to be one of those quiet men with a hidden core of steel, I thought: little charisma but plenty of gravitas. Likely he had no sense of humor. Possibly he was dogmatic. Or—idealistic? What was his game?
It may have been jealousy that I felt.
I would urge myself to stop staring and carry on, with my precious kettle of clean water or handful of rice, hurry on to sneak into my corner in a caravanserai so I could have my little feast and spend the night peacefully tucked in. I was just a small man who had only a tent, a mat, a bunch of old glass vials, and a mule (later taken for food). A small man who just wanted to last long enough until this calamity blew over, so that he could make his way to the hot, coveted India.
• • •
One day at the bazaar a Herat doctor, Khwaja Iqbal Ali, came to see me. I had remembered him from before the siege as someone who would saunter past, eyeing me and my vials. I was a competitor, after all. Now he bowed, sat down, introduced himself. He was youngish, with quick, smiling eyes. He pulled out a small bundle, unwrapped it. Inside was a chunk of fresh flatbread, wrinkled like baby skin, soft, probably just baked. The bread was generously sprinkled with small black seeds. He pushed it toward me on a rug. “Eat.”
I was hesitant to take the bait but I couldn’t help reaching for the bread, just to feel its warmth.
“What are these seeds?” Iqbal said.
I picked off one seed and crushed it between my front teeth. I said, “Siyah daneh. Arabs call it Tibb al-nabvi. Prophet’s medicine.”
He nodded and slid his palms up and down his folded knees, with satisfaction, perhaps. “You have kalpooreh?” He referred to another medicinal plant.
“No.”
“Does it grow here?”
“Yes. Leafless, now.”
“You’re a doctor.” Not a question, a statement.
I said, “Just know some herbs.”
He pulled one of my own vials of snowflakes out of his sleeve. “How do you do that?”
“I don’t,” I said. “I’d bought those a year ago from a Baluchi.”
Grinning, he shook the vial, as if this could shake more information out of me.
“A Baluchi. Eat, eat.” He pocketed the vial. “They say you came from Persia. But I see you are feringhee, European.”
Luckily I did not have a chunk of bread in my mouth yet, for I would have choked on it. Doctor Iqbal proceeded to tell me that he could pick out a European because he had known one. That he was so good at it, he was the first to spot the Angleesh Pottinger. And that it was possible that we inherently possessed medical skills, but if you asked his opinion, none of us was ever what we seemed, or claimed. Take that first feringhee he’d known—that one had posed as a horse trader from Bokhara, then a pilgrim, but was neither. So, who was I?
I shook my head. “I’m just a poor Armenian, on his way to India.”
“Angleesh Pottinger does not know you. He came from India. Why did you not go talk to the Angleesh? Because you’re not from his country. Kamran Shah has a feringhee for a doctor, Euler. Why did you not go to Euler? You’re not from Euler’s country either. Where are you from?”
“Wherever I’m from, doors of big houses are not open for me. I am a small man.”
But Iqbal was undeterred. “They say there is an Ouruss general at the Persian camp. And a whole army. Why are they here?”
A Russian general? An army? My face must have shown more than surprise, but I said stubbornly, “I am not the one to ask.”
Iqbal got on his feet, looked down on me, shook his head. “I need wounds’ herbs, kalpooreh, ramilak, hashish. Find me some.” Then, “Eat, eat, it’s yours.”
• • •
I did not want to take sides.
For two and a half decades I had been a nobody—not Russian, not British, not Persian or Afghan, not Christian, not Muslim. I merely went through the motions of living, and I needed to remain that way—lest I’d have to face myself in earnest. If only I could ever reach India, I thought, then maybe—given enough time, and heat, and peace, I would rebuild myself to being somebody again—or melt and die, like an ice maiden who got too close to fire in that old Russian fairy tale.
If only I could.
In March I got kicked out of the caravanserai and had to move into a bombed-out Jewish synagogue along with some displaced Afghan peasants. In two weeks they concluded I was a Persian and hence a Shiite infidel, and expelled me. The next night I was robbed of my remaining money at knifepoint. The day after, I went to the Persian neighborhood, knocking on doors and begging denizens to let me in for the night. I said I was Persian. I asked if they had anybody sick, promised cures. Even—the last resort—said I was the kind of scribe who could write down their complaints and deliver them to Angleesh Pottinger and translate them so their voices would be heard and the injustices done to them—remedied.
No one was crazy enough to let me in.
So the next night I was forced to do Iqbal’s bidding. He walked me to the southeastern gate, told the soldiers to let me through. My task was an impossibility, of course. Whatever I’d seen of the plants he wanted were along the roads leading into Herat from the West—where the Persian army stood. I headed into foothills northeast of the city. Ramilak, a sizable bush, or, if I climbed some way up, an old stalk of hashish were my best hope. Slavers, skirmishers, jackals, mountain lions, snakes, tarantulas—were my fears. But the moonlit night was beautiful nonetheless. The thought of never coming back loomed in my mind . . . No. I’ve done it before. Cold and with nothing to eat, I’ll just turn into Old Man Frost, again.
I was terrified of that possibility. If I were Old Man Frost, I’d wish a wild animal disposed of me before a slaver caught and sold me somewhere north, to Bakht or Samarkand.
I stood on my knees, pinching one leaf after another from a newly sprouted perennial, chewing on it. I could not tell whether it was what I was looking for or another one of a thousand perennials that grew as a rosette of shoots out of a common stem close to the ground. But perhaps if I just kept eating it . . . I’d at least decide what to do next.
What if I climbed all the way to the snowy mountaintops? Would it not be cold enough there to make me into a meditative plant made of ice, its foot thrust deep into the ground? I did not know.
I found a young fern in the crack of a rock, still curled up like an untold tale. Used against infertility, this one, because eight hundred years ago Avicenna and before him Pliny may have thought these leaves looked like an embryo . . . None of it made any sense. What if my last three decades were just a dream, and all this time I had been lying frozen somewhere in a forest in Russia? Maybe. But there was no waking up from it either.
I slogged back to Herat.
In the nights that followed, I went out and came back. I brought in remedials against diarrhea, liver trouble, impotence. Against life’s sorrows and against life itself. In exchange, Iqbal gave me food. He kept saying that I would not survive on my own. During the days, I hung around the bazaar, among people—safer that way, even to sleep.
• • •
In early April, all rumors proved to be true—the British ambassador to Persia, the important elchee, truly had come all the way from Tehran to the walls of Herat, and was expected to enter the city any day now. There was talk of British mediation, and much excitement, though not all happy—the city’s Persians did not know whether it bode well or ill for them. A man approached me then, and reminded me of the services I had promised when I had been knocking on doors in fear of having to spend another night in the streets. Could I explain the plight of the Persian townsfolk to the Angleesh, he asked.
I said, I speak his native tongue.
The man led me to a crumbling house where four weary elders sat around a kallion. They told me about their sufferings under Yar Mohammed. I sat between a man whose mangled feet had healed as two shriveled clumps useless to stand or walk on, and a man who had watched his brother’s tongue cut off and mouth bound so he had died by dr
owning in his own blood.
The men questioned me. Did I not know that khans kept the access to the Angleesh restricted? Could I prove I knew his language? I said I’d get as close as I could and shout, “Lieutenant Pottinger! May I have a word with you?”
I said these words in English and they listened hard and looked at each other. Likely, none of them knew how English should sound, but what choice did they have other than to put the fear of God in me? Best of all, they did not believe me enough to let me go, so I got to spend a blissful night indoors.
I set out on my mission on the eighteenth of April, in the company of the old men’s sons. The Angleesh’s movements were always known to the whole town—watched as he was by the town’s boys. We went to the western wall.
What happened there was unfortunate though not unexpected. I should have known that in this land, negotiation had to be preceded by military action on the part of the side that planned to send out a negotiator. So, shortly before noon, Persians started a vigorous bombing of our earthworks, then an attack that almost carried a gallery on the wall. The Angleesh was there, at the biggest breach, and so were Yar Mohammed and a dozen khans. “Lieutenant Pottinger!” I shouted, but he could not possibly have heard me over booming cannon, and avalanches of earth and brickwork, over the screaming of dozens of people. “Mr. Pottinger!” I saw him turn around with the expression akin to being startled out of sleep. He searched with his eyes but did not see me.
I had to get closer, and I tried to. Ever so unfortunate that I did not make it: some guards came up from behind, wrestled me down, threw me into jail.
• • •
The next day the British negotiator entered the city. Two days later, the official Russian envoy and his detachment arrived at the Persian camp. Each side wanted to broker peace, naturally, but on its own terms.
Rumor had it, each embassy built its own little fort and flew their respective flags in the other’s face. Prison guards told tales that the Angleesh and the Ouruss hashed it out in a fistfight in front of the Persian shah. And that each had an orchestra, which played till one or the other dropped of exhaustion. How fantastic is that. I had a dream where stiff redcoats and hairy Cossacks played a blaring counterpoint of “God Save the King” versus “God Save the Czar” on ear-piercing Middle Eastern pipes and lambskin tambours in front of a bug-eyed tyrant with painted nails.
I was in a cell with a dozen other orphans—men who had no one on the outside. No one to bring us food or water, no one to bribe the guards. No hidden riches to beat out of our heels. The people who had riches were transients in this jail: they were shipped to Yar Mohammed’s citadel and if they ever returned, it was without their feet, tongues, eyes.
We, on the contrary, were nobodies, here till the next slave caravan. (Turkoman slavers were always on hand, always moved freely, always had cash, and snatched anybody Yar Mohammed held out for sale.) But in the meantime the guards were just as eager to gossip or debate with us as to beat us up. Cruelty did not preclude amicability. If we had to shit or if we were starving, we wailed and banged on the door; we’d get knocked around but they’d let us out to the pit or would empty a bucket of mash onto the ground of the cell. Edible. If you died, you died. But before that you could be treated to a comprehensive description of the outfit the negotiator had worn—the first ever exposure of the city of Herat to the full British regimentals. By telling a story or listening to it, you remained human.
I told good stories.
• • •
No one ever interrogated me. In hindsight, I think that whoever put me in jail was saving me up. Perhaps Iqbal had dropped a word that I was an Ouruss, just in time, when the Persian shah had revoked the British authority to broker peace.
I was assuming that Russians propped the Persian side, and Britons the Afghan side. But nothing was that simple here, and the story was changing daily. Now the British—our good friends!—were sending a force to rescue the city. Now they weren’t, treacherous snakes. Now we ought to put our fate in Russian hands and surrender ourselves to the czar. Both Kabul and Kandahar already swayed to the Russian side. What held us up? Russian silver rubles were flooding the Persian camp, Russian officers advised on placement of new artillery batteries around the city. What stopped Yar Mohammed from surrendering? Not that stubborn madman, that Angleesh Pottinger! Kick him out then! Why, kill him! Kamran Shah was all for the Russians . . .
All the while, famine was squeezing the city. One day Yar Mohammed decided to relieve Herat of hundreds of Persians: the starved, frail, and crippled rabble of those, I assume, who were no good either as hostages or as slaves. When the throng of refugees streamed out of the gate, we, the nobodies, were made to follow it. We were strung by the necks to a single rope and surrounded by a convoy, and as the refugees took everyone’s attention, we were directed to head north. To a slave market. We were on our way when a rider galloped in from the city gate, just when sarbazes in the trenches—misguidedly—fired at the refugees. The garrison on the walls responded; the refugees started darting around, caught in crossfire. The rider overtook us and pointed at me, barked something to the convoy’s leader, rode up and cut my noose off. Then he pushed me in the back with his foot, “Go! Go to Persians! Tell their Ouruss general that Kamran Shah saved you. Tell he is a friend! Euler Agha is a friend!”
Ahead of me, muskets fired and people dashed about, wailing, but I started running. I ran headlong over the trench-ridden field, with the rest of the refugees who had no choice but to cross it, and screamed, as the rest did, “Don’t shoot!”
• • •
To go or not to go to the Russians? There I was, sitting in the main square of the Persian camp—one of the refugee crowd. The wretches drew to the pits where flatbread baked just as the French soldiers had drawn to the warm huts back in 1812. Before long, sarbazes were clubbing them with sticks to impress order on them, but the delirium of deliverance ran its course. Besiegers and besieged cussed, laughed, wailed, hugged, bandaged each other, bartered their belongings, gathered in groups to hear and tell tales. On the perimeter of it, Afghani heads ripe with decay listened in, leaning this way and that on their poles.
Observing all this “Middle Eastern barbarism,” a civilized ethnographer’s smug pity on their faces, were two neat, clean-shaven, freshly uniformed Russian officers.
To call or not to call to them? One word of my genuine, accent-free Russian—and I’d be whisked to a clean, secure hut with a table and chairs, perhaps even a bed; I’d be fed, given a mug of hot tea, clean clothes, a bath. I’d be marveled at, doted on. All I had to do in return was tell my story—adventures unraveling back to—what? What was my identity? An amateur explorer caught in a vise of war? A spy on a fact-finding mission? What was my name? Where was my home?
My stomach knotted, my head burned. Tell them I was a messenger from Kamran Shah, the king of Herat? Or was I? Oh, the twisting, furling identities—pick one, but you have to, you cannot walk into safety without one, it is your price for a mess of pottage; you can be any one of the fools, survivors, explorers, deserters, spies out there—but you cannot be Prince Alexander Velitzyn, a limber ninety-eight-year-old. And that’s not all: the bigger the lie you tell about yourself, the harder it’ll hit you if—when—it collapses—once they take you back to Russia.
You can only enter Russia as a man of no importance at all. As an orphan with no memory to count on other than slavery.
But I could, couldn’t I? Present myself as a slave who had been captured and sold as a child. They may not even query me too hard about my other fellow countrymen slaves—where, how many. But what next? Start another life in the same old snowy field of my country? Pay for a coach on Sundays to sneak a peek at my old mansion, my first life—and slowly go mad over it? Or settle close to the border, in the Caucasus, attach myself to some garrison and in a decade proudly earn a rank of a Feldwebel or a sergeant, provided I didn’t die on my own or by a hand of some mutinous Chechen tribesman—
Bu
t what if I stayed in the game?
Could I become an interpreter to these very people and help pull the regally slow though irreversible dredge of the Russian Empire as it dug into the bottom of one adjoining “barbaric” state after another in the name of peace, order, and security? Just as the British Empire had been doing. Just as Goutte urged me to—
I did not want to take sides.
But when the Russian officers headed away from the square I sneaked after them.
• • •
There really was an encampment, a wall of clay and straw, huts and tents with a Russian flag over them. When the officers were about to clear the guard post and enter behind the wall, I called, “Gentlemen! May I join you?” The officers whipped around. Cossack guards flung up their rifles. But the rest of the reception was just as my imagination painted it.
Oh, I told stories all right. I treated Count Simonich, the Ouruss elchee, to the full picture. The starvation and dysentery. The repressions against the city’s Persians. The fear of Russian guns. I introduced myself as Alexander Szwerin, an adventurer down on his luck, and said I knew Kamran Shah’s physician, Dr. Euler. I had thought hard about the next, and I made a choice. The city’s rulers were divided, I said. Kamran Shah would not continue this senseless standoff if not for his bloodthirsty wuzeer, Yar Mohammed, the man who’d thrown me in jail. If His Excellency the envoy allowed me—if he only supplied me with modest means of self-protection and sustenance—I’d go back, I said. I’d go back to Herat and communicate to Kamran Shah that his interest in peace was known to His Excellency the Russian envoy, and that it was time to seal the wuzeer off and dispel his air of being—unconditionally—supported and enabled by the British.
The wily count listened with great interest—but did not hurry to send me back to Herat. “Alexander Szwerin” ate, slept, and socialized, but kept his beard unshaven. He learned that there was no Russian army here, only the same old regiment of deserter Cossacks that had been at the shah’s service all along, plus the contingent of Simonich’s diplomatic mission. The general opinion of the mission’s officers about the siege was that it was a spectacle of ineptitude and barbarism; the enlightened pitied the sarbazes, and the unenlightened made fun of them. On occasion, Mr. Szwerin listened to “God Save the Czar” rolling over the Russian camp and caught echoes of “God Save the King” wafting over from the Britons. The music of both anthems sounded peculiarly similar.
The Age of Ice: A Novel Page 36