by Amin Maalouf
We beseech God to guide the representatives of the nation and to assure honour, independence and happiness for Persia.
Teheran was jubilant that day. Everyone was out in the street, singing at the crossroads, reciting improvised poems whose words all either rhymed or were made to rhyme with ‘Constitution’, ‘Democracy,’ or ‘Liberty’. Merchants offered the passer-by drinks and sweetmeats, and dozens of newspapers which had been silenced after the coup d’état brought out special editions announcing their resurrection.
At nightfall fireworks lit up the city. Seating had been erected in the gardens of the Baharistan. The diplomatic corps sat on the grandstand together with members of the new government, deputies, religious dignitaries and the bazaar guilds. As a friend of Baskerville I was entitled to sit near the front and my chair was just behind Fazel’s. There was a stream of explosions and bangs, the sky was lit up at times and people turned their heads and leaned to and fro smiling like overjoyed children. Outside, sons of Adam tirelessly chanted the same slogans for hours.
I do not know what noise or shout brought Howard back into my thoughts. He so deserved to be at the celebration! At that very moment, Fazel turned to me:
‘You seem sad.’
‘Sad. Certainly not! I have always wanted to hear the word ‘freedom’ ringing out on the soil of the Orient, but some memories are bothering me.’
‘Cast them aside. Smile and rejoice. Make the most of the last moments of exhilaration.’
Worrying words which divested me of any wish to celebrate that evening. Was Fazel, after an interval of seven months, about to take up the difficult discussion which set us against each other in Tabriz? Did he have new cause for worry? I made up my mind to go and see him the following day for an explanation, but in the end I decided against it. I avoided seeing him for a whole year.
What were the reasons? I believe that after the arduous adventure I had just been through, I had some nagging doubts about the wisdom of the role I had played in Tabriz. I had come to the Orient in search of a manuscript and had it been right for me to become so involved in a struggle which was not mine? To begin with, by what right had I advised Howard to come to Persia?
In the language of Fazel and his friends, Baskerville was a martyr; in my eyes he was a dead friend, a friend who had died in a foreign country for a foreign cause, a friend whose parents would one day write to me to ask me in the most poignantly polite of terms why I had led their son astray.
Was it remorse I was feeling over Howard? It was, to be more correct, a certain feeling of decency. I do not know if that is the right word, but I am trying to say that after my friends’ victory I had no desire to strut around Teheran listening to people laud my supposed exploits during the siege of Tabriz. I had played a minimal and quite fortuitous role. Above all I had had a friend who was a heroic compatriot and I had no intention of exploiting his memory to obtain privileges and respect for myself.
To tell the whole truth, I felt a great need to disappear from view, to be forgotten and not to visit politicians, anjuman-members and diplomats. The only person that I saw every day, and with a pleasure that never diminished, was Shireen. I had talked her into going to live in one of the numerous residences belonging to her family in the heights of Zarganda, a holiday resort outside the capital. I myself had rented a small house in the neighbourhood, but that was for the sake of appearances and I spent my days and nights at Shireen’s, with the collusion of her servants.
That winter we managed to spend whole weeks without leaving her huge bedroom. We were warmed by a magnificent copper brazier, we read the manuscript and some other books, lazed around for hours smoking the kalyan, drinking Shiraz wine and sometimes even champagne, munching Kirmani pistachios and Isfahani nougat; my Princess could be a great lady or a little girl at one and the same time and we felt great tenderness for each other the whole time.
With the onset of the first warm days, Zarganda started to liven up. Foreigners and the richest Persians had sumptuous houses there and would move in for long months of idleness surrounded by luxuriant vegetation. It is a matter beyond dispute that only the proximity of this paradise made the grey dullness of Teheran bearable for innumerable diplomats. However Zarganda became a ghost-town in the winter, with only the gardeners, some caretakers and the rare survivors of its indigenous population staying behind. Shireen and I were badly in need of just such a desert.
However from April on, alas, the visitors took up their summer lodgings. There were people strolling in front to all the entrance-gates and people walking down all the paths. After every night and every siesta, Shireen offered tea to female visitors with roving eyes. I was always having to hide or flee down the corridors. The gentle months of hibernation had been used up, and it was time for me to leave.
When I informed her, my princess was sad but resigned.
‘I thought you were happy.’
‘I have experienced a rare moment of happiness. I want to put it in suspended animation so that it will still be intact when I come back to it. I never tire of watching you, with both astonishment and love. I do not want the invading crowd to change the way I see you. I am going away in the summer so that I may find you again in the winter.’
‘Summer, winter. You go away, you come back. You think that you can dispose of the seasons, the years, your life and mine with impunity. Have you learnt nothing from Khayyam?
“Suddenly Heaven robs you of even the moment you need to moisten your lips.”’
She looked deep into my eyes, as if she were reading an open book. She had understood everything and sighed.
‘Where are you thinking of going?’
I did not know yet. I had come to Persia twice and twice I had led a besieged existence. I still had the whole of the Orient to discover, from the Bosphorous to the China Sea – Turkey which has just risen up at the same time as Persia, which deposed its Sultan-Caliph and which now prides itself upon its deputies, senators, clubs and opposition newspapers; proud Afghanistan which the British managed to subdue, but at what cost! And of course there was all of Persia to explore. I knew only Tabriz and Teheran. But what of Isfahan, Shiraz, Kashan and Kirman? Nishapur and Khayyam’s tomb, a grey stone watched over for centuries by untiring generations of petals.
Out of all the roads which lay before me, which should I take? It was the manuscript which chose for me. I took the train to Krasnovodsk, crossed Ashkabad and old Merv and hence to Bukhara.
Most importantly, I went to Samarkand.
CHAPTER 43
I was curious to see what was left of the city where Khayyam spent the flower of his youth.
What had become of the district of Asfizar and of that belevedere in the garden where Omar had loved Jahan? Was there still some trace of the suburb of Maturid, where in the eleventh century that Jewish paper-maker was still turning white mulberry branches into pulp according to an old Chinese recipe. For weeks I went about on foot, and then on a mule; I questioned the merchants, the passers-by and the imams of the mosques, but they only replied with blank unknowing looks, amused smiles and generous invitations for me to squat on their sky-blue divans and take tea with them.
It was my luck to be in the Registan Square one morning. A caravan was passing. It was a short caravan, consisting of just six or seven thick-haired and heavy-hoofed Bactrian camels. The old camel-driver had stopped not far from me in front of a potter’s stall, holding a new-born lamb to his chest; he proposed a barter and the craftsman discussed it; without taking his hands off the jar or the wheel, he pointed with his chin toward a pile of varnished vessels. I watched the two men with their black-bordered woollen hats, their striped robes, reddish beards and their ancient gestures. Was there any detail of this scene which had not come down unchanged from the time of Khayyam?
There was a slight breeze and the sand started to swirl, their clothing billowed and the whole square was covered with an unreal haze. I cast my eyes around. At the edge of the square rose three monuments, thr
ee gigantic complexes of towers, domes, gateways and high walls completely covered with minute mosaics, arabesques studded with gold, amethyst and turquoise, and intricate calligraphy. It all retained its majesty, but the towers were leaning, the domes had gaping holes, the facades were crumbling, ravaged by time, wind and centuries of neglect; people no longer looked at these monuments, these haughty, proud and forgotten giants which provided an imposing backdrop for a derisory play.
I was retreating backwards and stepped on someone’s foot. When I turned round to apologize I was face to face with a man dressed like me in European clothing, a man who had set sail from the same distant planet. We struck up a conversation. He was Russian, an archaeologist. He also had come with a thousand questions, but he already had some answers.
‘In Samarkand, time moves from one cataclysm to the next and from one tabula rasa to the next. When the Mongols destroyed the city in the thirteenth century, its various districts were left a mass of ruins and corpses. It had to be abandoned; the survivors went to rebuild their dwellings on another site, further to the south, with the result that the whole of the old city, the Samarkand of the Seljuks, was gradually covered by layers of sand and became a raised field. There are treasures and secrets under the ground, but the surface is a pasture. One day it will all have to be opened up, the houses and the street dug up. Once freed, Samarkand will be able to tell us its history.’
He broke off.
‘Are you an archaeologist?’
‘No. This city attracts me for other reasons.’
‘Would it be impolite of me to ask what they are?’
I told him of the manuscript, the poems, the chronicle, and the paintings which evoked the lovers of Samarkand.
‘I would love to see that book! Do you know that everything from that time has been destroyed – as if by a curse. Walls, palaces, orchards, gardens, water-pipes, religious sites, books and the principal objets d’art. The monuments which we admire today were all built later by Tamerlane and his descendants. They are less than five hundred years old. From Khayyam’s era we only have potsherds and, as you have just informed me, this manuscript which has miraculously survived. It is a privilege for you to be able to hold it in your hands and read it at your leisure. It is a privilege and also a heavy responsibility.’
‘Believe me, I am quite aware of that. For years, ever since I learnt that this book existed, I have lived for nothing else. It has led me from adventure to adventure, its world has become mine and its guardian my beloved.’
‘And have you made this trip to Samarkand to discover the places it describes?’
‘I was hoping that the townspeople would be able at least to give me some indication of where the old districts lay.’
‘I am sorry to have to disappoint you,’ the Russian continued, ‘but if you are searching for something from the period for which you have a fascination, you will only gather legends, stories of jinns and divs. This city cultivates them with delight.’
‘More than other cities in Asia?’
‘I am afraid so. I wonder if the proximity of these ruins does not naturally inflame the imagination of our miserable contemporaries. Then there is the city which is buried under the ground. Over the centuries how many children have fallen down cracks never to reappear, what strange sounds people have heard or thought that they heard, apparently coming out of the entrails of the earth! That is how Samarkand’s most famous legend was born – the legend which had a lot to do with the mystery which envelops the name of the city.’
I let him tell the story.
‘It was told that a king of Samarkand wanted to make everyone’s dream come true: to escape death. He was convinced that death came from the sky and he wanted to do something so that it could never reach him, so he built an immense underground palace of iron which he made inaccessible.
‘Being fabulously rich, he also had fashioned an artificial sun, which rose in the morning and set in the evening, to warm him and indicate the passing of days.
‘Alas, the God of Death managed to foil the monarch’s vigilance and he slipped inside the palace to accomplish his job. He had to show all humans that no creature could escape death, no matter how powerful, skilful or arrogant he was. Samarkand thus became the symbol of the inescapable meeting between man and his destiny.’
And after Samarkand, where to? For me it was the furthest extremity of the Orient, the place of all wonders and unfathomable nostalgia. The moment I left the city I decided to go back home; my desire was to be back in Annapolis and to spend some sedentary years there resting from my travels and only then to set off again.
I thus drew up the most insane plan – that of going back to Persia to fetch Shireen and the Khayyam manuscript, and then to go off and disappear in some great metropolis, such as Paris, Vienna or New York. For the two of us to live in the West but to an oriental rhythm; would that not be paradise?
On my way back, I was continually alone and distracted, preoccupied solely with the arguments that I was going to present to Shireen. ‘Leave? Leave …?’ she would say wearily. ‘Is it not enough for you to be happy?’ However, I did not despair of being able to overcome her reservations.
When the convertible which I had rented at the edge of the Caspian set me down at Zarganda in front of my closed door, there was a car there already, a Jewel-40 sporting a star-spangled banner right in the middle of its hood.
The chauffeur stepped out and enquired as to my identity. I had the idiotic impression that he had been waiting for me ever since I left. He reassured me that he had only been there since the morning.
‘My master told me to stay here until you came back.’
‘I might have come back in a month, a year or perhaps never.’
My astonishment hardly upset him.
‘But you are here now!’
He handed me a note scribbled by Charles W. Russell, minister plenipotentiary of the United States.
Dear Mr Lesage,
I would be most honoured if you could come to the Legation this afternoon at four o’clock. It is a matter of great importance and urgency. I have asked my chauffeur to remain at your disposal.
CHAPTER 44
Two men were waiting for me at the legation, with the same suppressed impatience. Russel, in a grey suit, a moiré bow-tie and with a drooping moustache like Theodore Roosevelt’s but more carefully shaped; and Fazel, in his undeviating white tunic, black cape and blue turban. Naturally it was the diplomat who opened the session in hesitant but correct French.
‘The meeting taking place today is one of those that change the course of history. In our persons, two nations are meeting, defying distances and differences: the United States, which is a young nation but already an old democracy, and Persia which is an old nation, several thousand years old, but a brand-new democracy.’
He said all this with a touch of mystery, a whiff of formality and a glance toward Fazel to make sure that his words were not upsetting him. He continued:
‘Some days ago I was a guest of the Democratic Club of Teheran. I expressed to my audience the great sympathy which I feel for the Constitutional Revolution. This feeling is shared by President Taft and Mr Knox, our Secretary of State. I must add that the latter is aware of our meeting today and he is waiting for me to apprise him, by telegraph, of the conclusions which we reach.’
He left it to Fazel to explain to me:
‘Do you remember the day when you tried to convince me not to resist the Tsar’s troups?’
‘What a job that was!’
‘I have never held it against you. You did what you had to do and in one sense you were correct. However, what I feared has unfortunately not died away. The Russians still have not left Tabriz, and the populace is subjected to daily torments. The Cossacks snatch the veils off women in the street, and sons of Adam are imprisoned upon the least pretext.
‘Yet there is something more serious. More serious than the occupation of Tabriz and more serious than the fate of my com
panions. It is our democracy that is at risk of floundering. When Mr Russel said “young”, he should have added “fragile” and “under threat”. To all appearances everything is going well, the people are happier, the bazaar is is prospering and the religious appear to be conciliatory. However, it would need a miracle to stop the edifice from crumbling. Why? Because our coffers are empty, as in the past. The old régime had a very strange way of collecting taxes. It farmed each province out to some money-grubber who bled the population and kept the money for himself, deducting a small part to buy the Court’s protection. That is what has caused all our difficulties. As the Treasury was bare, they borrowed from the Russians and the English, who, in order to be reimbursed, obtained concessions and privileges. That is how the Tsar became involved in our affairs and how we sold off all our wealth. The new government finds itself with the same dilemma as the old leaders: if it cannot manage to collect taxes the way modern countries do, it will have to accept the tutelage of the Powers. Our most urgent priority is to get our finances into order. The modernization of Persia will follow on from that: such is the cost of Persia’s freedom.’
‘If the remedy is so obvious, why the delay in implementing it?’
‘There is no Persian today who is up to undertaking such a task. It is sad to say, for a nation of ten million, but the weight of ignorance should not be underestimated. Only a handful of us here have received a modern education similar to that of the top-ranking civil servants in the advanced nations. The only area in which we have numerous competent people is the field of diplomacy. As for the rest, by which I mean the army, communications and above all finance, there is nothing. If our régime can last twenty or thirty years, doubtless it will produce a generation capable of looking after all these sectors but while we wait, the best solution available to us is to call upon honest and competent foreigners for help. It is not easy to find them, I know. In the past, we have had the worst experiences with Naus, Liakhov and many others, but I do not despair. I have spoken on this subject with some of my colleagues in Parliament and the government, and we think that the United States might help.