The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar

by Yury Tynyanov

  “See Alaiar-Khan today. Remind him from me about the girah. He knows what I mean. They are holding it back. When you are done, come and have dinner with us. The girls keep asking why you have stopped calling.”

  And the ensign in the conical hat with the tassel—the little boys were afraid of them and called them “donkey tails”—stood at attention before the khan’s gown.

  Samson tapped the pipe out and hung his head. He had not told Skryplev the whole truth. Abbas Mirza’s firman, which he had received the previous night, did indeed grant land in Azerbaijan to the Russian bahaderans. But part of Abu’l-Qasim-Khan’s report also mentioned that Vazir-Mukhtar had secret orders to extradite all Russians from Persia, including Samson himself. He sat there silently, looking at his feet.

  “It’s that fool Nazar who had spilled the beans. I’ll hang him for his old woman’s tongue. Kharab.”

  Kharab has many meanings—“a poor road”; “a desolate, ruined town”; and “a stupid or sick man.”

  “Kharab,” murmured Samson, and he suddenly remembered Griboedov’s nose and mouth. And his spectacles. The mouth was thin, pursed.

  Samson grimaced and cursed under his breath.

  Then he spat and went unhurriedly into the anderun.

  9

  Alaiar-Khan, to whom Samson had sent Skryplev, had the title of Asaf-ud-Daula.

  This title deserves particular attention.

  In 1826, in a report to Nesselrode, Prince Menshikov conjectured that Alaiar-Khan called himself “Asaf” mainly because that was the title of one of the ministers of Solomon, king of Israel.

  A traveler in the 1820s translated the title erroneously as “the state Solomon.” What is the remit of the “state Solomon”? This title is as dubious as that of vice chancellor, chancellor, or minister without portfolio. The absence of a ministerial portfolio is always an ominous sign.

  All officials are attached to a certain branch of government, finance or some other, and only one person is empty-handed. The hands of such a “state Solomon” are not only empty, they are untied.

  He meddles in the finances and whatnot. He can resolve the question of the girah, the horses’ feed, and leave some people extremely disgruntled.

  Alaiar-Khan was Fat’h-Ali-shah’s first minister, and a minister without portfolio. Additionally, he was a sadrasam, and, on top of all that, for some reason, he was subordinate to the eunuch Manouchehr-Khan.

  Alaiar-Khan wasn’t a Qajar. His immobile black eyes were like those of a man deep in thought.

  He despised Fat’h-Ali-shah and obeyed him silently and reluctantly. He had the fate of the dynasty on his mind. He had never forgotten how, upon conquering Tabriz, the shah had ordered his heels to be caned, intending not just to punish him and not so much to shame him—caning was not considered a disgrace—as to point the finger of blame. It was he who had stood behind the curtain in Abbas’s tent when the latter negotiated the peace treaty with the kafir in spectacles. Alaiar-Khan stood behind the curtain listening, and tears as large as hailstones fell onto his beard. Now he stood behind the curtain again, stood and thought behind the curtain of his anderun.

  Who was to blame?

  In the Eastern countries, when the head of the family dies, the question at issue is: who is to blame? And the person to blame turns out to be either the doctor or the daughter-in-law who had failed to bring him a drink at the right moment, not the stomach ulcer from which the sick man died.

  Persia was dying from an ulcer. The bazaars had been growing poorer; taxes had been increasing. Crowds of beggars wandered about Tehran, scrounging. Loose women and thieves, lots, had proliferated to such a degree that the outskirts were lively at night. So far, they were merely wandering aimlessly. They hadn’t yet begun to think. But Alaiar-Khan had already had a good think.

  The Qajars were to blame.

  Alaiar-Khan, who had spoken in favor of the war, and who had built a new palace in its aftermath, was not to blame.

  Abbas Mirza was to blame, and he had to be dethroned. If he were deposed, Alaiar-Khan would pick up his old Persian knife. And the Qajars’ throne would be passed on to a Persian.

  So far, they were harmless wanderers, the lots and destitute kebabchi, the cobblers who had abandoned their hammers, the joiners who had sold their axes. The shah was oblivious to them. But Alaiar-Khan was not.

  The crowds were beginning to think but still hadn’t thought it all through.

  “Who is to blame?”

  Abbas Mirza was to blame.

  Alaiar-Khan was expecting Dr. McNeill and that lanky, narrow-boned kafir, the “infidel”, who had mocked him during the negotiations.

  He did not cheer up even when two new captive women were brought into his harem-hane, a German and an Armenian. He was replete. He told his eunuch to treat them well and forgot about them.

  07

  1

  Griboedov entered the city of Tabriz on October 7. He was traveling on horseback. He took off his spectacles, which were inappropriate for this occasion, and Tabriz struck him as a motley mass of swaying, weathered clay.

  A heavily loaded caravan followed him.

  A hundred horses, hinnies, and mules carried Nino, Maltsov, Adelung, Sashka, some Armenians, Georgians, Cossacks, and the luggage. He rode perfectly straight, as if his horse couldn’t see well and was afraid to go astray.

  The French pistols fired their shots, the sarbazes’ muskets cracked, some yellow-looking Persian rabble clamored along the way, and the black-bearded, smiling, effeminate Abbas Mirza—a white-and-blue stain—rode slowly toward him, on a prancing mare. Something stirred behind Abbas: elephants, like gray moving tents, followed the retinue, the regiments. The thunder of the drums met the victor—steady, muffled, measured.

  The gates of Tabriz shut behind them.

  The drive up to the English legation had been swept thoroughly, like the vestibule of a house.

  The stallions snorted and shoved the rabble aside.

  The drums rolled.

  2

  The laughter was coming from downstairs: Nino, Lady Macdonald, and young Burgess from the British legation were playing a game they had just learned. He heard the distinct thud of clicking billiard balls, followed by the rustling of dresses and laughter.

  The study was well furnished and decorated in sedate colors, without dear mama’s little tricks, and not like Paskevich’s bare headquarters. It had leather furniture and deep English armchairs that were conducive to smoking and dispelling gloom.

  They had traveled for a long time, for almost a month. The road, the fever, Nino’s face.

  The tombstones, the milestones, the gowns of the locals, all lay behind them.

  Also behind them was the rock at Amamlo, on the grave of Montrezor. He was a Russian major who had been sent by General Tsitsianov for provisions, had been attacked, and, realizing that he was out of cannonballs, threw himself on the cannon, clasped his arms about it, and was hacked to death like that—hence “Montrezor’s stone.”

  Gowns, hundreds of khans’ gowns at Erevan—of all these Mahmed-Khans, Ahmed-Khans, Pasha-Khans, and Jaffar-Khans, to whom, from that time on, Nino had been referring generally as chaparkhans. And the speech of the aide-de-camp of the Erivan commandant: “The Erevan khannery is honored to …” And the multicolored mantles, the golden Armenian banners at the bridge across the Zanga River, which met him as if he were King Baldwin and marching to Jerusalem.

  And dinners of thirty courses and the deputations from the Kurds in multicolored turbans, in wide trousers that resembled skirts, with ancient shields that looked like ladies’ straw hats, and with lances on which horsehair tassels fluttered like the heads of enemies.

  Everything had faded into the background.

  He was on his own in his study, smoking and smiling, when he made out Nino’s voice downstairs. He was waiting for his “harem hour,” and rested and smoked while he waited. His illness had aged him considerably. The new state had become lost somehow among Nessel
rode’s files and Rodofinikin’s receipts. He had stopped thinking about it following his conversation with Burtsov.

  Song, now it was song.

  It had been surging through his mind, throbbing, aching, fermenting, sweeping again, and dying out. He was not thinking about the new state; he laid himself out not for its sake, but for the sake of the old-style Russian song that would replace the soppy romances favored by Sashka and the editors of the miscellanies. He understood this now, now that he had grown old and his youth had been torn from him like a set of pinching, old clothes. Not the theater of war, and not the Bolshoi Theater, not the Ministry of External and Extremely Strange Affairs, not the journals for the shopkeepers and clerks—no, he wanted to compose a forthright, old-style song, truly Russian, not a Petersburg song, but an epic northern song of fresh military glory.

  He would spend a month, or at most a year, with these chaparkhans; he would be an honest officer to the tsar, would obey Paskevich, and would reap his reward. And he would use the money to retire and live in retreat at Nino’s Tsinandali. The place of his labors would be there. He felt no need for people. If necessary, he’d be either intimidating with the chaparkhans, or gracious. It was easy to deal with them in this way. And since he knew people and was sick of them, he would succeed at this senseless business—of representing and dealing with so many forces on the political scene.

  It did not matter that he was still unwell and exhausted, that he felt as if he were climbing the stairs to the sixth floor and on the fourth realized that the remaining two flights were superfluous. He had his head screwed tight on his shoulders. Nino was laughing downstairs.

  He smoked, looking through the latest English magazines. He leafed through them, listening to the clicking of the balls and a good-natured argument downstairs, and suddenly stopped listening.

  He was reading:

  “The famous actor Edmund Kean has finally come back to London. He had left the capital after being catcalled by the London audiences at the Coburg Theater. The infamous affair ended in Mr. Kean approaching the footlights and informing the spectators with his usual composure: ‘I’ve performed in most educated countries, where English is spoken, but I have never seen such crude brutes as yourselves.’”

  Griboedov bent over the slim issue of the Review.

  “Soon after that incident, Mr. Kean said his farewell to England and set sail to America. But being vain by nature, Mr. Kean was not so much flattered by his success as an artiste as by the fact that some Indian tribe with which he had lived for a while chose him as one of its chiefs. This is what Kean’s friend, a respectable man and a famous journalist, G. F., has to say about it: ‘I was told that I had been invited to visit an Indian chief called Alanienouidet. The visiting card left by the chief read “Edmund Kean.” When I arrived at the hotel, a servant showed me his lodgings. I entered the dimly lit room: only a sort of platform at the far side was brightly lit—there was a kind of a throne on it, on which the chief was seated. I approached and couldn’t help an involuntary shudder …’”

  The young Burgess was laughing below, and Nino too laughed briefly. Griboedov winced: the laughter was too clear, almost crude, as if they were laughing in his room. He covered his ears with both hands.

  “… the shoulders of the strange figure that presented itself before my eyes were draped with a bearskin. His footwear, something between a pair of boots and sandals, was studded with porcupine needles. His head was adorned with eagle feathers and a black horse’s mane hung down behind. There were gold rings in his nose and ears. A tomahawk was sticking from behind his wide belt. His hands, adorned with bracelets, stretched out spasmodically from time to time as if wishing to get hold of something. He descended his throne and swept toward me. His eyes glared wildly.

  The figure exclaimed in a husky voice:

  “Alanienouidet!” …”

  “Clown,” said Griboedov, shrugging his shoulders, and suddenly frowned.

  “I recognized Edmund Kean at once by his voice. The Huron people accepted him into their tribe and chose him as chief under the name of Son of the Woods, the title which he now attaches to his name. Rumor has it that when he went back to Drury Lane, he claimed that he had never felt so happy as among the Huron peoples when they bestowed on him the title of chief.”

  Griboedov hurled the magazine away from him.

  This unlucky actor, booed at, forced to flee England as he himself had fled Petersburg eight years ago—why didn’t he stay with the Huron people? Why was he clowning in front of the journalist, disgracing the traditions of the people among whom he had lived, and his own title to boot? Or is the love of theatrical rags greater than any other, and in the same way that a drunk is drawn toward the sawdust-strewn floor of the tavern, so at a certain hour after dinner, some worm will hurt the pride of an actor or a dramatist and he will abandon any person or place? He realized that he too was going to build his home theater in Tsinandali and wondered: who was going to perform in it? He suddenly understood that he would find it hard to live without seeing his Woe on a Petersburg stage.

  He picked up the magazine again.

  “On his return, Mr. Kean had no success in the part of Shylock.”

  He closed it.

  Journalists, the scum of the world, feeding off steaming entrails. Mr. F …

  Nino was standing in the doorway.

  And he gladly stretched his arms toward her.

  3

  There was clamoring in the courtyard.

  Five voices were screaming in Persian:

  “No! No! No! No money necessary. We’ve brought this goat from veliagd for Vazir-Mukhtar’s enjoyment.”

  It was seven in the morning. Griboedov listened closely.

  Rustam-bek’s fat voice rose above the Persian shrieking:

  “I’ve paid you enough, quite enough.”

  Rustam-bek was Princess Salome’s distant relative, and therefore was in charge of the household duties. Griboedov instinctively looked at the sleeping Nino, as if for an explanation.

  Unfortunately, this scene repeated itself often enough.

  Every day, they brought either some fruit in a heavy basket from Abbas’s orchard or a goat “killed by His Highness’s own hand,” or some sweets on a silver platter.

  Ghulam-pishkhedmets stood modestly as befits Kammerjunkers; they expected a decent reward for their labors and would probably have been surprised to discover that Vazir-Mukhtar referred to the payment as “a tip for vodka.”

  Through Princess Salome, God had sent Griboedov two men he had no idea what to do with: Rustam-bek and Dadash-bek.

  That was why he appointed Rustam-bek, with his dashing, curly little mustache, to be in charge of the provisions, while Dadash-bek remained at loose ends.

  Griboedov called them “the Ajaxes.”

  Money was terribly scarce. Pickled Date still hadn’t given instructions to send any. But in such situations, the Ajaxes behaved in the same way as they used to do in Tiflis when dealing with Tatar traders.

  “Take your goat and get lost—to the four corners of the world!” roared Rustam-bek all over the courtyards.

  “You call that a goat? It’s as tiny as a cat,” Dadash-bek came to his assistance.

  “No! No! No! We need none of your money. Eat to your heart’s content.”

  The ghulam-pishkhedmets bawled and squalled and did not move off their spot.

  Griboedov threw on a dressing gown and slipped through to the study.

  He sat in an armchair, and only then, slowly and lazily, came up to the window and hailed the Ajaxes.

  “Give them what I have agreed to.”

  “Take a look at this goat, Alexander Sergeyevich.” Dadash-bek was turning purple downstairs, his hands on his hips. “It’s a cat. It’s not from the veliagd. They bring their own rubbish and fleece us mercilessly. It’s a swindle.”

  “This has nothing to do with you, Dadash-bek.”

  The Ajax shrugged his broad shoulders, and the Kamerjunkers got
their money “for vodka” and left satisfied.

  Griboedov knew that a couple of days later, the scene would be repeated.

  It was time for him to go to the court to judge, and by noon, he was due to be with Abbas. He saw His Highness three times a day.

  Having pulled on the uniform, which made him uncomfortable and hot in the mornings, he went down into the inner little court.

  A few people were already waiting for him.

  The Cossacks stood at full attention and mounted guard.

  The people fell silent.

  Griboedov looked about the gathering for yet another parent. This time, it was an elderly German colonist. After Griboedov arrived, Armenian, German, and Georgian parents, whose daughters had been captured or abducted, started to appear in their bullock-drawn or ordinary little carts, ancient rattletraps, and vans.

  The parents would stay at a caravanserai, wander about the bazaars, lose themselves in the outskirts, questioning and sniffing the air, and then would bring proof of their daughter’s residence at Sayyid Mehmed-Ali’s or at Sayyid Abu’l-Qasim’s.

  Griboedov would summon the sayyid, and the sayyid would show up with a look of innocence on his face. He would try to convince him in an extensive speech that the man’s daughter was not in his harem, and it was his neighbor, a shoddy, shallow man, who had made it all up. After a long deliberation with the parents, he would peer closer into Vazir-Mukhtar’s spectacles and would agree to bring the man’s daughter, “only if it was really she.”

  The third act of the comedy of the prodigal daughter would then open. Enter the daughter.

  This was exactly what was happening now.

  The sayyid in a fur hat, mustachioed and thick-lipped, stood there with a humble and indifferent expression on his face.

  An old parent, wearing spectacles tied up with a piece of string, stood with his arms behind his back.

  The daughter was brought before him. She was as big and bulky as a pagan idol—majestic, with blond curls at her temples. Her sunburned face was covered with light freckles.