‘What foreign coins are used in Persia?’
‘Russian Imperials, Dutch carbovans and ducats, English and French coins are very rare.’
‘What is the current king called?’
‘Nasser ed-din Shah.’
‘It is said that he is an excellent king.’
‘Yes. He is extremely benevolent to foreigners and extremely generous. He is highly educated, with a knowledge of history, geography and drawing; he speaks French and is fluent in the oriental languages – Arabic, Turkish and Persian.’
Once at Trebizond I took a room in the Hotel d’ltalie, the only hotel in town, which was comfortable if one could but forget the swarms of flies which transformed every meal into an uninterrupted and exasperating gesticulation. I resigned myself to imitating the other visitors by employing for a few meagre coins a young adolescent whose job was to fan me and keep the insects away. The most difficult thing was convincing him to get them away from my table without squashing them before my eyes, in between the dolmas and the kebabs. He obeyed me for some time, but as soon as he saw a fly within reach of his fearsome instrument, the temptation was too great and he would swat.
On the fourth day I found a place on board a freight steamer running the Marseille-Constantinople-Trebizond line. It look me as far as Batum, the Russian port on the east of the Black Sea, where I took the Transcaucasian Railway to Baku on the Caspian Sea. The Persian consul there received me so warmly that I hesitated to show him Jamaladin’s letter. Would it not be better to remain an anonymous traveller and not arouse any suspicions? However, I was beset by some scruples. Perhaps the letter contained a message concerning something other than myself and I therefore did not have the right to keep it to myself. Abruptly I thus resolved to say, in any enigmatic way:
‘We have perhaps a friend in common.’
I took out the envelope. The consul opened it carefully; he had taken his gold-rimmed glasses from his desk and was reading when I suddenly noticed that his fingers were trembling. He stood up, went over to lock the door to the room, placed his lips to the paper and remained so for a few seconds as if in contemplation. Then he came over to me and held me as if I were a brother who had survived a shipwreck.
As soon as he had managed to recompose his expression, he called his servants and ordered them to fetch my trunk, to show me to the best room and prepare a feast for the evening. He kept me there for two days, neglecting all his work in order to stay with me and question me ceaselessly about the Master, his health, his mood and particularly what he was saying about the situation in Persia. When it was time for me to leave, he rented a cabin for me on a steamer of the Russian Caucaset-Mercure Line. Then he entrusted me with his coachman to whom he gave the task of accompanying me to Kazvin and to stay at my side as long as I had need of his services.
The coachman immediately proved to be extremely resourceful, and often even irreplaceable. It was not I who would have know to slip some coins into the hand of that proudly moustached customs officer so that he would deign to leave his kalyan pipe for a moment to come and inspect my huge Wolseley. It was the coachman again who negotiated with the Roads Administration for the immediate provision of a four-horse carriage, although the official was imperiously inviting us to come back the next day and a seedy innkeeper, who was most apparently his accomplice, was offering us his services.
I consoled myself for all these difficulties of the route by thinking of the suffering of the travellers who had preceded me. Thirteen years earlier, the only way to Persia had been the old caravan route which started at Trebizond and led toward Tabriz through Erzerum, with its forty staging points taking six exhausting and expensive weeks and which was sometimes truly dangerous owing to the incessant tribal warfare. The Transcaucasian had revolutionized matters. It had opened Persia to the world and one could reach that empire with neither risk nor major discomfort by taking a steamer from Baku to the port of Enzeli, then it only took one more a week, on a road suitable for motor vehicles, to reach Teheran.
In the West, the cannon is an instrument for war or ceremonial occasions; in Persia it is also an instrument of torture. If I speak of it, it is because I was confronted by the spectacle of a cannon which served the most horrific purpose as I reached the town limits of Teheran – a man, who was tied and whose head was the only part of him visible, had been placed in the large barrel. He had to stay there, under the sun and without food or water until death came to him; even then, I was told, the custom was to leave his body exposed for a long time in order to make the punishment an example, to inspire silence and dread in all those who passed through the city gates.
Was it because of this first image that the capital of Persia exerted such little magic on me? In the cities of the Orient, one always looks for the colours of the present and the shades of the past. In Teheran I came up against none of that. What did I see there? Thoroughfares which were too wide, linking the rich of the northern districts to the poor of the southern districts, a bazaar absolutely swarming with camels, mules and gaudy materials, but which could hardly bear comparison with the souks of Cairo, Constantinople, Isfahan or Tabriz. And wherever one’s gaze alighted there were innumerable grey buildings.
It was too new. Teheran had too short a history! For a long time it had only been an obscure dependency of Rayy, the prestigious city of the scholars which was demolished at the time of the Mongols. It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that a Turkoman tribe, the Qajars, took possession of the area. Having succeeded in subduing the whole of Persia by the sword, the dynasty elevated its modest abode to the rank of capital. Until then, the political centre of the country had been in the south, at Isfahan, Kirman or Shiraz. That is to say that the inhabitants of these cities had nothing good to say about the ‘brutish northerners’ who governed them and whose lack of knowledge included even that of their language. The reigning Shah, upon his accession to power, needed an interpreter to address his subjects. Anyway, it seems that after that he acquired a better knowledge of Persian.
It must be pointed out that he had plenty of time to do so. When I arrived in Teheran, in April 1896, the monarch was preparing to celebrate his jubilee, his fiftieth year in power. In honour of this the city was decked with the national emblem bearing the sign of the lion and the sun. Notables had come from all the provinces, numerous foreign delegations had turned up, and even though most of the official guests were lodged in villas, the two hotels for Europeans, the Albert and the Prévost, were unusually full. It was in the latter-named hotel that I finally found a room.
I had thought of going straight to Fazel, to deliver the letter to him and ask him how I could find Mirza Reza, but I was able to overcome my impatience. Not being unaware of the customs of Orientals, I knew that Jamaladin’s disciple would invite me to stay with him; I did not want to offend him by refusing but nor did I want to take the risk of being caught up in his political activity, and still less in that of his Master.
I therefore checked into the hotel Prévost, which was run by a Swiss man from Geneva. In the morning I rented an old mare so I could go to the American legation – a practical act of courtesy – on the boulevard des Ambassadeurs. Then I went to see Jamaladin’s favourite disciple. With his slender moustache, his long white tunic, the majestic way he held his head and a hint of coldness, Fazel corresponded on the whole to the image which the exile in Constantinople had drawn for me.
We were going to become best friends in the world, but the contact was distant and his direct language disturbed and upset me. Such as when we spoke of Mirza Reza:
‘I will do what I can to help you, but I do not wish to have anything to do with that madman. The Master told me that he is a living martyr. I replied: then it would be better if he were to die! Do not look at me like that, I am not a monster, but that man has suffered so much that his spirit is completely deformed; every time he opens his mouth he harms our cause.’
‘Where is he today?’
‘For weeks he has
been living in the mausoleum of Shah Abdul-Azim, prowling around the gardens or in the corridors, between the buildings, speaking to people about Jamaladin’s arrest and entreating them to turn against the monarch, telling them of his own suffering, shouting and gesticulating. He never stops avowing that Sayyid Jamaladin is the Mahdi, even though he himself has forbidden him to mouth such crazed utterings. I really have no wish to be seen in his company.’
‘He is the only person who can give me information about the manuscript.’
‘I know. I shall take you to him, but I shall not stay with the two of you for a second.’
That evening a dinner was held in my honour by Fazel’s father, one of the richest men in Teheran. He was a close friend of Jamaladin and even though he kept out of any political activity he was keen to honour the Master through me; he had invited almost a hundred people. The conversation centred on Khayyam. Everyone was spouting forth quatrains and anecdotes, and there were animated discussions which sometimes veered off into politics; everyone seemed perfectly at ease in Persian, Arabic and French, and most of them could speak some Turkish, Russian and English. I felt all the more ignorant as they all considered me a great orientalist and specialist in the Rubaiyaat, which was a very great, or, I would even say, an extreme overstatement, but I had to stop contradicting it since my protests were taken as a sign of humility, which as everyone knows, is the mark of a true intellectual.
The evening began at sunset, but my host had insisted that I arrive earlier; he wanted to show me the splendours of his garden. Even if he possessed a palace, as was the case with Fazel’s father, a Persian rarely showed people around it. He would neglect it in favour of his garden, his only subject of pride.
As they arrived, the guests picked up a goblet and went off to find a place near the streams, both natural and made-made, which wound among the poplars. According to whether they preferred to sit on a carpet or a cushion, the servants would rush to place one in the chosen spot, but some perched on a rock or sat on the bare ground; the gardens of Persia do not have lawns, which in American eyes gives them a slightly barren aspect.
That night we drank within reason. The more pious stuck to tea, and to that end a gigantic samovar was carried about by three servants, two to hold it and a third to serve the tea. Many people preferred araq, vodka or wine, but I did not observe any misbehaviour, the tipsiest being happy to hum along with the musicians who had been engaged by the master of the house – a tar player, a virtuoso on the zarb, and a flautist. Later there were dancers, who were mostly young boys. No woman was to be seen during the reception.
Dinner was served toward midnight. The whole evening we had been plied with pistachios, almonds, salted seeds and sweetmeats, the dinner being the only the final point of the ceremony. The host had the duty to delay it as long as possible, for when the main dish arrived – that evening it was a javaher pilau, a ‘jewelled rice’, the guests ate it all up in ten minutes, washed their hands and went off. Coachmen and lamp-bearers clustered around the door as we left, to collect their respective masters.
At dawn the next day, Fazel accompanied me in a coach to the gate of the sanctuary of Shah Abdul-Azim. He went in alone, to return with a man who had a disturbing appearance: he was tall but terribly thin, with a shaggy beard and his hands trembled incessantly. He was clothed in a long narrow white robe with patches on it and he was carrying a colourless and shapeless bag which contained everything he possessed in the world. In his eyes could be read all the distress of the Orient.
When he learnt that I came from Jamaladin, he fell to his knees and clutched my hand, covering it with kisses. Fazel, ill at ease, stuttered an excuse and went off.
I held out the letter from the Master to Mirza Reza. He almost snatched it from my hands, and although it comprised several pages, he read it all the way through without hurrying, forgetting completely that I was there.
I waited for him to finish before speaking to him about what interested me. But he spoke to me in a mixture of Persian and French that I had some difficulty in understanding.
‘The book is with a soldier who comes from Kirman, which is also my town. He promised to come and see me here the day after tomorrow – on Friday. I will have to give him some money. Not to buy the book back but to thank the man for returning it. Unfortunately I do not have a single coin.’
Without hesitating I took out of my pocket the gold which Jamaladin had sent for him and I added an equal sum of my own. He seemed to be satisfied by that.
‘Come back on Saturday. If God wishes, I will have the manuscript and I will hand it over to you to give to the Master in Constantinople.’
CHAPTER 30
The sounds of laziness rose from the sleepy city. The dust was hot and glistened in the sunlight. It was a wholly languorous Persian day, with a meal of chicken with apricots, a cool Shiraz wine, and a siesta flat-out on the balcony of my hotel room underneath a faded sun-shade, my face covered with a damp serviette.
However, on this 1 May 1896, someone’s life was going to be ended at dusk and another would begin thereafter.
There was some furious and repeated banging on my door. I finally heard it and stretched out and jumped up bare-foot, my hair stuck together and my moustache unwaxed, wearing a loose white shirt which I had bought in town. My limp fingers fumbled with the latch. Fazel pushed the door open, pushed me out of the way to close it again and shook me by the shoulders.
‘Wake up! In quarter of an hour you be dead man!’
What Fazel informed me in a few broken phrases was the news which the whole world would know the next day by the magic of the telegraph.
The monarch had gone at mid-day to the Shah Abdul-Azim sanctuary for the Friday prayer. He was wearing the ceremonial suit he had had made up for his jubilee with gold threads, cornices of turquoise and emerald, and a feather cap. In the great hall of the sanctuary he chose his prayer space and a carpet was unrolled at his feet. Before kneeling down, his eyes sought out his wives and signalled them to stand behind him and he smoothed out his long tapering moustache which was white with bluish highlights, while the crowd of the faithful and the mullahs was pushing against the guards who were trying to contain them. Shouts were still coming from the outer courtyard. The royal wives came forward. A man had infiltrated amongst them, clothed in wool in the manner of a dervish. He was holding a sheet of paper in his outstretched arm. The Shah looked through his binoculars to read it. Suddenly there was a shot. A pistol had been hidden by the sheet of paper. The sovereign was hit right in the heart, but he still managed to murmur: ‘Hold me up,’ before he tottered and fell.
In the general tumult it was the grand vizir who was the first to gather his wits about him and shout: ‘It is nothing. It is a superficial wound!’ He had the hall evacuated and the Shah carried to the royal carriage. He fanned the cadaver on the back seat all the way to Teheran as if the Shah were still breathing. Meanwhile he had the crown prince summoned from Tabriz, where he was governor.
In the sanctuary the murderer was attacked by the Shah’s wives who insulted and thrashed him. The crowd ripped his clothing off him and he was about to be torn limb from limb when Colonel Kassakovsky, the commander of the Cossack brigade, intervened to save him – or rather to submit him to a first interrogation. Curiously the murder weapon had disappeared. It was said that a woman picked it up and hid it under her veil – she was never found. On the other hand, the sheet of paper which had been used to camouflage the pistol was retrieved.
Naturally Fazel spared me all those details. His account was terse:
‘That idiot Mirza Reza had killed the Shah. They found a letter from Jamaladin on him. Your name was written on it. Keep your Persian clothing, take your money and your passport. Nothing else. Run and take refuge in the American legation.’
My first thought was for the manuscript. Had Mirza Reza got it back that morning? In truth I was not yet aware of the gravity of my situation. An accomplice to the assassination of a head of state, I
– who had come to the orient of poets! Nevertheless, appearances were against me. They were deceptive, misleading and absurd, but damning. What judge or commissar would not suspect me?
Fazel was watching from the balcony; suddenly he ducked and shouted out hoarsely:
‘The Cossacks are here. They are setting up roadblocks all around the hotel!’
We hurtled down the stairs. When we reached the foyer we took up a more dignified and less suspect pace. An officer with a blonde beard had just made his entrance, his hat pulled tight down and eyes that were sweeping all the room’s nooks and crannies. Fazel just had time to whisper to me: ‘To the legation!’ Then he separated from me and went over towards the officer. I heard him say ‘Palkovnik! Colonel!’ and saw him ceremoniously shake hands and exchange a few words of condolence. Kassakovsky had often dined with my friend’s father and that awarded me a few seconds of respite. I took advantage of it by speeding up my pace towards the exit, wrapped up in my aba, and turning into the garden which the Cossacks were busy turning into a fortified camp. They did not give me any trouble. As I was coming from inside the hotel they must have assumed that their commander had let me through. I went through the gate and headed towards the little alley to my right which lead to the boulevard des Ambassadeurs and in ten minutes to my legation.
Three soldiers were posted at the entrance to my alley. Would they let me through? To the left I could make out another alley. I thought it would be better to follow that one even if it meant having to come back later down the right alley. I walked on, avoiding looking in the direction of the soldiers. A few more steps and I would not be able to be see them any more, nor they me.
‘Stop!’
What should I do? Stop? With the very first question they asked me they would discover that I could hardly speak Persian, they would ask to see my papers and arrest me. Should I run off? They would not have much difficulty catching up with me, I would have been acting in a guilty fashion and would not even be able to plead in innocence. I had only a split second to make a choice.