‘It means a country lady should learn to look after herself.’
‘I will. I will look after myself and our home and our future.’
He looked at her as if he was sorry for her. Then with a gesture of impatience he picked up an ashtray. ‘My future and my children’s future is Russia.’
‘Why are you differentiating yourself from me? We are the same – we’re Georgians, not Russians.’
He shook his head. ‘Your own grandfather, a wise king and a man of peace, ceded Georgia to Russia. He spared us bloodshed. Look at these Chechens, hard-headed as the mountains that bred them, fighting years on end, and every day I lose one lad after the other. Every day my clerk writes a letter to the family of a Seregin or a Panov, telling them that their son has been killed defending tsar, fatherland and the Orthodox faith. Why all this waste, why does Shamil continue when common sense says that we will win, when common sense says that they are resisting all that would be good for them?’
‘What good?’ She was sullen now, the arguments narrowing around her.
‘What good?’ he snorted. ‘Peace for one, prosperity too. Modern roads, sanitation, education, enlightened thinking. Everything that is uncouth and reprehensible to be replaced by what is civilised and rational. No one in his right mind, given a choice, would choose primitiveness over advancement. You can’t live in the past, Anna, you can’t be like them.’
Tears came into her eyes and as if in sympathy her breasts, though not full, started to leak. Lydia’s milk. She would like to feed her now, to douse the baby’s thirst and her own anger. Instead it was her nightdress that was becoming wet. Not every Georgian was glad to submit to Russia. But David deliberately shunned those objecting members of the family who had had their lands confiscated and were held in Moscow against the threat of political intrigue. It irked Anna that her grandmother, the dethroned Queen Maria, was commanded at times to attend court for certain functions, then ridiculed for her clothes and tanned skin. Why did these humiliations not touch David too? In Petersburg society, hangers-on went around describing themselves as ‘Georgian princesses’ as if the phrase had no protection or use. In Anna’s case, the title was a right – she was granddaughter of George XII, the last king. David would accuse her of being proud if she mentioned this. In turn she would defend herself by saying that she wanted simplicity and closeness to the peasants, that she worked hard and did not indulge herself in luxuries. Then they would argue even more.
She looked at him now, holding his cigar in one hand, the mother-of-pearl ashtray in the other, and saw what she had not wanted to acknowledge. This was not the bridegroom she had exchanged vows with in church, the husband who brought her to Tsinondali, the lover who swam with her in the river. It was not only that he was older, the lustre lost from his hair, the boyish look in his eyes replaced with the keen desire to advance. His beard was gone; his clothes, his concerns, his watch with the double chain and seal, his manner of speaking, were more Russian than she could ever be.
3. PETERSBURG, JUNE 1854
Jamaleldin, granted an audience with the tsar, waited in the reception room on the upper floor of the Winter Palace. His uniform was that of a young officer in the Imperial Escort. He had even volunteered to fight in the Caucasus and was awaiting the tsar’s consent. All this would pave the way to his marriage to Daria Semyonovich. It would subdue her parents’ doubts, manifested in the cool reception he often received from Daria’s mother, the veiled comments about his slanting eyes. To fight the highlanders would seal his loyalty; it would, he believed, dispel the memory that he was Shamil’s flesh and blood. Let everyone know him only as the tsar’s godson. Let them remember his outstanding performance in his military examinations, his accomplishments that included astronomy, painting, a fluency in English and French, and not least his horsemanship. When he was with Daria they spoke of their love and not his past, they dreamt of the future, and unlike other girls he had known, she did not pry with questions about his family or where he was born. Daria was content to listen to him praising her eyes and her lips, her little hands and the curls that fell naturally on her wide, smooth forehead. She lapped up his devotion with a serenity that was part of her nature; a silence that hinted at either emptiness or pliancy.
It might be a long wait. The minister of war was inside, briefing the tsar, and Jamaleldin did not know how long it had been since their meeting began. He could ask the duty officer, a newly appointed aide-de-camp, whom he had never met before, but he preferred not to. The sound of murmured voices and the scratch of the officer’s pen, while inside fates were being decided. Troops deployed, peasants made to run the gauntlet, promotions and demotions. The atmosphere was solemn and strangely foggy. Jamaleldin stared at the portrait of Emperor Alexander I, his reddish sideburns and an enigmatic smile on his lips. May Allah have mercy on his soul. The phrase, learnt in Arabic as a child, bobbed up unbidden. It was a natural, internal reflex. The sort of response he must not say out loud. He worried, sometimes, that these words would slip out of him on their own accord. It was for this reason that he never allowed himself to get drunk. There were limits to how much he could reveal, restraints that he imposed on himself in order to continue to succeed.
During his long journey away from Akhulgo, he had expected his father to rescue him. Spending the night at a military garrison near Moscow, he boasted of this and they took away his kinjal. He lashed out at his minders, biting, kicking and screaming. They locked him up and punished him with hunger and a darkness in which evil spirits thickened and floated because there was no lamplight to drive them off. Surely Shamil would not allow this injustice to continue. Surely he would save him. Jamaleldin waited, strained for the sounds of horses, prepared himself for a raid in which he would be carried off back to safety.
This episode of harsh discipline turned out to be a solitary one, condemned by the tsar, and never repeated. When Jamaleldin finally reached Petersburg, it was decided that military quarters were no longer suitable and that a family would foster him. A town house for him to live in, children who grudgingly shared their toys and clothes, parents who were not his parents. Better the kind nanny with the kerchief tied around her wide face. She reminded him of the peasants of the lowlands; she knew how to talk to him – not in the Avar language, but words didn’t matter – he understood the tone of her voice, the clucks and music in her sentences. She held him on her lap and sang him lullabies as if he were still a baby, as if he were a newborn. He was exhausted. Exhausted from the assault of newness; of space, sounds and smells betraying him, food not being food and speech not being speech. All this strangeness demanded his attention, all these new people in his life drew him out, pushed or goaded or cajoled him. His mother had told him not to cry, he was an Avar, he mustn’t cry. All that Jamaleldin had to do, he told himself, was wait, watch out and wait, be alert, be ready.
An invisible leash kept him tethered to his enemies, kept him cowed and conscious of his weakness in comparison to their strength, of his smallness and what he quickly realised was his ignorance. He must learn, they kept telling him, not only the Russians but the Caucasian chiefs who had allied themselves with the tsar and were now brought to meet him, those Asiatic princes who looked like him but had betrayed his father. You must learn to speak Russian, they all said. You must learn these modern ways so that one day, when peace comes, you will go back to your people and help them.
During the day, he became too busy to watch out for his father’s rescue. Night became his time to wander free. He could lie very still and strain his ears for the soft leather steps of a highlander, anticipate a midnight raid. Which of his father’s men would come for him? He went through them, exercising his memory: Zachariah who was the bravest, Abdullah who was more reliable, Imran who could speak Russian and come in disguise. Or it could be Younis, who used to visit him in the Russian general’s tent in Akhulgo, following an arrangement made by his father. Younis taught him more of the Qur’an and made sure that he was keeping up wit
h his prayers. This, perhaps, was why Younis’s face and voice remained longer in Jamaleldin’s memory. For slowly, as week followed week, he forgot to expect the relief expedition, although there still lingered a faint hope for it to surprise him, to take him unaware; as if he had just been momentarily distracted and everything would go back to how it had been before.
Later, when he was eleven and sent to the Cadet Corps, he toyed with plans of escape. The urge to flee would only come when he was reprimanded by a teacher or set upon by a bully. Humiliated, he would plot to steal a horse, wrap food in a rag and set off back to the Caucasus. But he was an able student, an amiable schoolmate and soon puberty brought with it a self-absorption that calmed him down. What felt like an alien challenging prison became a home with known boundaries, tightly filled with much to keep him exercised and amused.
And he was special, after all – he was the tsar’s ward, he had a place in court. A palace he had only encountered in the descriptions of Paradise. Gliding staircase, glittering chandeliers, beautiful women, their breasts cradling jewels, dressed in rustling silks, who caressed his hair and cooed in their own language. The military parades, the steeplechases, the labyrinthine, teeming streets, of the city; magicians and clowns, a trip to the theatre, sledges, and girls peering at him over their sable muffs. Slowly, the present, the here and now, asserted itself and shoved all else to the back of his mind. Jamaleldin began to enjoy the fact that he was an intriguing figure at court, that others were drawn to his difference. Soft-spoken and even-handed in his dealings, he got along well with young men his age. He possessed, too, the keen ability to ferret out the best in others. It suited his patrons/captors to think that he had forgotten his past and it suited him to maintain this impression.
But his memories of Akhulgo were vivid and when alone with his thoughts he could smile at his brother Ghazi, he could smell his father’s beard and breathe the cloudy air of the highest peaks. The images he recalled were tied to the past. He could not speculate on how Ghazi looked now as an adult or how much Shamil’s new home in Dargo resembled Akhulgo. Jamaleldin was not interested in his family’s present, a present he could not access. Nor would he bite the hand that fed him. His captors’ values must be his values, their rules obeyed, their aspirations supported. This was why he offered to serve in the Caucasus. He would be a link between the two sides, he would carry peace and modernity to the highlands. Greater Russia’s goal, the subjugation of the mountain tribes, had become, for him, an abstract attainment. He did not have the tools to question it or doubt it. It was too much a part of the larger scheme of life.
The Emperor Nicholas was seated behind his writing table, dressed in a black frock coat. The long pale face Jamaleldin had grown to resent and revere, to fear and to serve, the familiar moustache curled at the ends, the fresh scent of eau de cologne and sense of physical wellbeing. The tsar’s hair was combed forward to one side in an attempt to hide his bald patch.
A voice in Jamaleldin’s head said in the Avar language, ‘Praise be to Allah. Observe how a mighty king with endless riches and power over people’s lives is helpless before the ravages of Time.’ The humorous tone was familiar. It was an elderly man’s voice Jamaleldin was hearing and not for the first time; a man with a turban and a long white beard who was not necessarily addressing Jamaleldin specifically. He was addressing a whole group; he exerted no pressure on Jamaleldin to listen nor needed a reply. Sometimes Jamaleldin absorbed every word, often he pushed the voice away; but he was unable to silence it. These observations, sometimes exhortations, he knew, were ghosts of his previous life. They disturbed him because, unlike the phrases he had learnt as a child, these observations were fresh and relevant to the moment. Perhaps it was the voice of his father’s teacher Jamal el-Din, the Sufi sheikh he had been named after. Perhaps he had been endowed with the gift of communicating with souls across time and space. But that was far-fetched. Rationally, the composer of these phrases must be Jamaleldin himself and yet why would he have such strange, unbecoming thoughts? He must never speak of them. They were like a squirrel hidden in the breast pocket of his jacket, threatening to wriggle out, not particularly to escape but to cause the greatest of social embarrassments.
Nicholas gestured for Jamaleldin to sit down. He looked fatigued and Jamaleldin wondered if this was perhaps not the best of days to approach him. Nicholas pushed aside the papers he had been working on and said, ‘I am sending you tomorrow to Warsaw. You will be with the Vladimirski Lancers.’
The disappointment caused Jamaleldin to lose his natural reserve. ‘But Your Majesty, I had hoped to serve you in the Caucasus.’
‘You will, but not now. It is not the right time.’ Nicholas folded his plump hands together. ‘I do not doubt your loyalty but I have other plans for you. When we subdue the Caucasus you will play your part. It will not be long now. We destroyed their supplies and laid waste to the forests. Our strategy has worked! And we will continue to harass them. We will tighten the cordon around them and only then, Jamaleldin, will I send you there.’
‘I hear and obey.’ It was the right thing to say, the only choice.
Nicholas’s curled moustache twitched. ‘You will rule Dagestan and Chechnya on my behalf. No one will be able to win the tribes’ loyalty and trust more than Shamil’s son.’
At the mention of his father, Jamaleldin felt as if he was forced to put on his best woollen coat in the height of summer. Shamil was not for him now; he was a legendary name, a lost love, as close and as far as an organ inside Jamaleldin’s own body, deadly to reach. He believed in Shamil’s eventual downfall; this belief came from the palace walls around him, from the roads he walked on, the artillery he handled, the teachers who taught him, the existence of cities such as Petersburg and Moscow, of the opera and the skating ring, the horse races and a pair of binoculars, a dance at the ball, the railway lines. Shamil’s defeat was in the trajectory of Jamaleldin’s life. Yet he flinched whenever Shamil was portrayed as an ogre. And he felt proud when he heard tales of his heroic resistance. Jamaleldin’s heart would contract and all the Arabic words, all the Avar phrases, would frolic above a whisper and it would require extra effort to control himself, to maintain his usual non-committal expression. He was too intelligent to indulge in undue insistence or exaggerated displays of his loyalty; these would only attract more attention. Instead, he trod softly, careful to hit the right notes. Unlike the Central Asian princes who wore their native dress when they came to court, Jamaleldin did not even wear a cherkesska. Every conscious thing he did reflected his conversion to the Empire.
But it was not enough. Nicholas sat back in his chair and lowered his voice, kind and firm. ‘As for the other personal matter you petitioned me on, there can be no union between you and the Princess Daria Semyonovich. You are incompatible in status and background.’
Jamaleldin flushed. It was as if Daria herself had scrunched his love like a handkerchief and thrown it in his face. He now wanted this audience to be over. He wanted to grab his dashed hopes and run away.
Nicholas chuckled. ‘So Russian women are to your taste … eh? Well, go ahead, have as many as you like, why not? But marriage, no. You must marry from your own kind. A tribal chief’s daughter, perhaps. Or an emir’s. This would further increase your acceptance among the highlanders. Think of the future,’ he concluded with a flourish. ‘You will be my mouthpiece in the Caucasus. You will bring enlightenment to your own people. For this I have fashioned you.’
4. DARGO, THE CAUCASUS, JUNE 1854
In his teacher’s home, Shamil could put the war behind him, give up the burden of command and learn again. He reached out and took over the cleaning of Sheikh Jamal el-Din’s shoes. The elderly man’s long white beard rested on his chest, his bright penetrating eyes were sources of light. Outside in the night air an owl hooted.
‘The great Shamil is cleaning my shoes!’ There was a warm jocular tone to his voice, one that listeners never forgot.
The two of them sat cross-legged o
n square cushions, a rug spread out in front of them on the earthen floor. The door of the house was open to let in the summer breeze and every once in a while it creaked on its hinges nudging shadows across the room. Shamil’s rifle and sword were hanging on a nail dug into the plastered wall. In any other house, they would have been next to the master of the house’s weapons but here there was only the washbasin and pitcher used for wudu.
‘In your presence, I am not great. I am the young boy who came to you in Yaraghl with neither knowledge in my head nor much strength in my body.’ These were sharp memories as all memories of awakenings are, that time when the swirl of unnamed desires settles into the focus of purpose. Shamil had been a moody child with a sense of loneliness so acute that it resembled arrogance. The cheerful pastimes of others his age left him baffled and disdainful. When one day the neighbourhood boys ambushed him and left him bleeding from a dagger wound, he had been too proud to seek help. Instead he had staggered to a cave in the mountainside and fastened his torn skin with the mandibles of ants, applied crushed herbs and rested until his wound healed. But instead of returning home once he recovered, he set out to seek physical and spiritual strength. He found it in the mystic teachings of the Sufi sheikhs of the Naqshbandi Tariqa.
‘I recall,’ Jamal el-Din said, ‘that you had fight in your soul. You were disciplined, too. When it was time for books, you were studious and patient. When it was time for athletics, you were energetic and sturdy.’
Shamil smiled. ‘I used to repeat the prayer you taught me. ‘Lord, make me grateful and make me patient. Make me small in my own eyes and great in the eyes of the people.’
‘And today the Ottoman sultan has nominated you as the Viceroy of Georgia.’
Shamil laughed, ‘You have heard already. No news escapes you! Advise me. Shall I accept?’
The Kindness of Enemies Page 6