by Amin Maalouf
After a few moments he left me, muttering that he was going to give orders for us to change course to throw off our pursuers.
Good God, where is he taking us?
I’ve decided not to tell anyone about this, at least for the time being. Anyhow, who would I confide in, and what should I say? And with what object? Did I want to stir up a mutiny? Fill the ship with fear, suspicion and revolt, and be responsible for the bloodshed that might ensue? Too dangerous. Keeping quiet might not be the most courageous solution, but I really think the best thing to do is just watch and wait and be on the alert.
It’s a good thing I can tell this journal what I can’t tell anyone else.
8 May
This morning I had a conversation with my Venetian fellow-passenger, Girolamo Durrazzi. Our talk was brief, but courteous. If my late lamented father could read these lines I’d have said “courteous, but brief”.
Another passenger is a Persian whom the crew refer to under their breath as “the prince”. I don’t know if he really is a prince, but he carries himself like one, and two sturdy fellows follow him closely everywhere looking around in all directions as if they feared for his life. He has a short beard and wears a turban that’s so narrow it looks almost like a band of black silk. He never speaks to anyone, even his two guards; he just looks straight in front of him as he walks along, stopping now and then to gaze at the horizon or the sky.
Sunday, 9 May 1666
We’ve dropped anchor at last. Not in Barcelona or Valencia, though: we’re at the island of Minorca in the Balearics, more precisely in the port of Mahon. Re-reading my last few pages, I see it’s one of the many places rumoured to be our destination. Rather as if the name were written on the face of the dice thrown for us by Providence.
Instead of trying to find a last vestige of sanity in the heart of madness, why don’t I leave this crazy ship? In other words, let them all go to perdition without me — the captain, the surgeon, the Venetian, the Persian “prince” and all! But I shan’t go. I shan’t run away. Do I still care what happens to these strangers? Or is it that I no longer care about my own survival? Am I acting out of supreme courage or supreme resignation? I don’t know. But I’m staying.
At the last moment, seeing how many people were flocking round the boats, I even decided not to go ashore, but to call the young sailor with fair hair and get him to buy some things for me. His name’s Maurizio, and he feels he owes me something because of the trick he played on me. To tell the truth, I don’t hold it against him at all: I find the sight of his yellow locks rather a comfort — but it’s better he shouldn’t know that.
I wrote him a list of the things I need, but I could see from his embarrassment that he’d never been taught to read. So I made him memorise the shopping list, and gave him more than enough money to cover the cost. When he got back I let him keep the change, and he seemed overjoyed. I expect he’ll come and ask me every day if there’s anything he can do for me. He can’t take Hatem’s place, but like him he looks bright and honest. And what more can one ask of an employee?
One day I shall get Maurizio to tell me who it was that sent him to find me at The Maltese Cross. But is there any point? I know exactly what he’ll say. Yes, on reflection, there is a point — I want to hear with my own ears that Gregorio Mangiavacca paid him to come to fetch me that day and make me run to catch the ship now carrying me to England! To England, or God knows where …
But I’m not in any hurry. We’ll both still be on this ship for weeks, and if I’m patient and ingenious the lad will tell all in the end.
11 May
Well, I’d never have thought I’d be friends with a Venetian!
It’s true that when two merchants meet on a long sea voyage they’re bound to get into conversation. But it went beyond that. We found we had so many interests in common that I soon forgot all the prejudices instilled in me by my father.
No doubt it helped that Durrazzi, though born in Venice, had lived since he was a child in various places in the East. In Candia to begin with, then in Tsaritsin on the River Volga. He recently settled in Moscow itself, where he seems to enjoy a distinguished reputation. He lives in the Foreign Quarter, which he tells me is becoming a city within a city. It contains French caterers, Viennese pastry-cooks, Italian and Polish painters, Danish and Scottish soldiers, and of course dealers and adventurers from all over the place. Some of them have even set up a pitch outside the city where they play a sort of English game that involves kicking a ball. The Earl of Carlisle, King Charles’s ambassador, sometimes goes to watch.
12 May
My Venetian friend asked me to sup with him in his quarters yesterday. (I still hesitate and feel embarrassed when I call him that: I suppose one day I’ll get used to it.) He’s brought a cook with him, as well as a valet and one other servant. I ought to have done the same, instead of coming on board alone like a vagabond or an exile!
In the course of the meal my friend told me why he is going to London. His object is to recruit some English artisans to go and ply their trades in Moscow. He hasn’t actually been commissioned to do so by the Tsar Alexis, but he travels with the Russian ruler’s approval and under his protection. Any skilled craftsmen will be welcome, whatever their speciality, on condition that they don’t try to convert anyone to their own religion. The Tsar is a sensible man, and doesn’t want Moscow to become a den of fanatical Christian republicans. It’s said that England is full of them, but since the return of King Charles six years ago many of them have gone into hiding or exile.
Girolamo tried to persuade me to go and live in Moscow. He treated me to another pleasing description of life in the Foreign Quarter there. Out of politeness and to encourage him to go on, I said “perhaps”, but I’m not tempted. I’m forty now, and too old to start a new life in a country where I know neither the language nor the customs. I have two homelands already, Genoa and Gibelet, and if I had to leave one it would be to go to the other.
Moreover, I’m used to being able to see the sea, and I’d miss it if I had to be away from it. Admittedly, I don’t feel comfortable aboard ship; I prefer to have both feet on dry land. But it has to be near the sea! I need to smell the ozone! I need to hear the waves dying and being reborn and dying again! I need to be able to lose myself gazing at its vastness!
Some people might be able to make do with the vastness of the desert or of snow-covered plains. But not someone born where I was born, and with Genoese blood in his veins.
That said, I can easily understand people who leave their home and their loved ones, and even change their name, to go and start a new life in another country without any boundaries. The Americas or Russia. Didn’t my ancestors do the same thing? And not only my ancestors, but everyone’s ancestors. All the towns in the world, and all the villages too, were founded and populated by people from elsewhere. The whole earth has been filled by migration after migration. If I were still light-hearted and fleet of foot, I might let myself be drawn away from my native Mediterranean and go and live in that Foreign Quarter whose very name I find tempting.
13 May
Is it true that the King of France intends to invade the lands of the Ottoman Sultan, and has even ordered his ministers to draw a detailed plan of attack? Girolamo says so, and backs up his assertion with various pieces of evidence that I have no reason to doubt. He even maintains that the French king has sounded the Sophy of Persia about the possibility that the latter, a great enemy of the Sultan, might at a given moment stir up trouble and lure the Turkish armies to Georgia, Armenia and Atropatene. Meanwhile, with the help of the Venetians, King Louis would seize Candia, the Aegean Islands, the Bosphorus Straits and perhaps even the Holy Land.
Although this doesn’t strike me as at all impossible, I’m surprised that my Venetian should speak of it so openly to someone he’s only just met. He’s certainly rather talkative, but I can hardly blame him when I learn so much from him, and when his indiscretion is due solely to our friendship and the fact
that he trusts me.
I spent all night mulling over the King of France’s plans, and I can’t say I like the sound of them. Of course, if things went his way and he could get a lasting grip on the islands, the Straits and the Levant as a whole, I wouldn’t complain. But if he and the Venetians embarked on some rash enterprise that came to nothing, the vengeance of the Sultan would fall on me and my colleagues — yes, on all the European merchants living and working in the Ports of the Levant. The more I think about it the more I’m convinced that such a war would from the very outset be a disaster for me and mine. Heaven grant that it never happens!
I’ve just re-read the last few lines, and those before them, and I suddenly wonder if it isn’t dangerous to write such things and express such wishes. Naturally, I set everything down in my usual gibberish, which nobody but myself can decipher. But that applies only to personal matters, which I want to conceal from my family and possible snoopers. But if the authorities were ever to take an interest in my papers, if some Ottoman official, some wall or pasha or cadi were to take it into his head to look into them, and threatened me with impalement or torture to make me hand over the key to the code, how could I hold out? I’d reveal the secret, and then they’d see that I’d be pleased to see the King of France lay hold of the Levant.
Perhaps I should tear this page up and throw it away when I go back east. And even avoid mentioning such things in future. I’m probably being over-cautious — no wali or pasha is really going to come and pry among my notes. But for anyone in my position, whose family has lived abroad for generations and who’s at the mercy of every kind of snub and denunciation, prudence is not just an attitude. It’s absolutely essential to survival.
14 May
Today I exchanged a few words with the Persian nicknamed “the prince”. I still don’t know if he’s a prince or a merchant. He hasn’t said.
He came across me when he was taking his usual walk round the deck. He smiled, and I took this as an invitation to join him. As soon as I moved towards him his guards took fright, but he signed to them to do nothing, then made me a slight bow. I greeted him in Arabic, and he made a suitable reply.
Apart from the usual courtesies that all Muslims know, he has difficulty speaking Arabic. But we succeeded in introducing ourselves, and I think we could manage a conversation if the occasion arose. He said his name was Ali Esfahani, and he was travelling on business. I doubt if that’s his real name. Ali is the commonest name among his people, and Isfahan is their capital. In fact, the “prince” told me very little about himself. But at least we’re acquainted now, and we’ll be talking again.
As for Girolamo, my Venetian friend, he keeps singing the praises of Moscow and the Tsar Alexis, whom he seems to admire very much. He says he’s very concerned about the good of his subjects and anxious to attract merchants, artisans and educated men to Muscovy. But not everyone there is so well-disposed towards foreigners. While the Tsar himself seems delighted with what’s happening in his capital, which hitherto was only a huge dreary village, and though he poses for painters, keeps up with the latest novelties, and wants to have his own company of actors, there are thousands of cantankerous priests who see all these newfangled notions as the mark of the Antichrist. They regard what goes on in the Foreign Quarter as debauchery, corruption, impiety and blasphemy, harbingers of the imminent reign of the Beast.
Girolamo told me of a significant incident in this connection. Last summer a troupe of Neapolitans went and performed in Moscow at the invitation of one of the Tsar’s cousins. Their number included actors, musicians, jugglers, ventriloquists and so on. At one point a man called Percivale Grasso presented a very striking show in which a marionette with the head of a wolf, which had been lying on the ground, stood up and began talking and singing, then strutted about and started dancing — and all the time it was impossible to detect that the puppet was being manipulated by a man standing on a ladder behind a curtain. The whole audience was captivated. Then suddenly a priest got up and shouted that what they were all staring at was the Devil himself. He quoted the Apocalypse: “And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should speak.” Then he took a stone out of his pocket and threw it at the stage, and some of the people with him did the same. Then they all started cursing the Neapolitans and foreigners in general, and everyone involved in any way with what they considered profanities and the works of Satan. They declared that the end of the world and the Day of Judgement were at hand. The audience began to trickle away. Even the Tsar’s cousin dared not oppose such fanatics. And the troupe of entertainers had to leave Moscow at dawn the next day.
While my friend was telling me all this, I remembered the visitor who’d come to see me in Gibelet a few years before with a book prophesying that the world would end in 1666. This year. His name was Evdokim. I told Girolamo about him. The name means nothing to him, but he’s familiar with The Book of the One True Orthodox Faith, and every day has to listen to someone referring to the prediction. He himself refuses to take it seriously, I was relieved to hear, and puts it down to sheer stupidity, ignorance and superstition. But in Muscovy, he says, most people really believe in it. Some even claim to know the exact date: according to some calculation or other, the world won’t last beyond St Simeon’s Day, September 1, which they regard as the beginning of the New Year.
15 May 66
I think I gained the confidence of the “prince” from Isfahan today; or more probably awakened his interest.
We met, as before, when we were both taking a stroll, and as we went on together a little way I told him about all the towns I’d been to in the last few months. He nodded politely at each fresh name, but when I mentioned Smyrna his expression changed. To encourage me to continue, he said, “Izmir, Izmir”, the Turkish name for the place.
I’d spent forty days there, I said, and on two occasions had seen with my own eyes the Jew who claims to be the Messiah. The Persian then seized my arm, called me his honoured friend, and said he’d heard many contradictory stories about “Sabbataï Levi”.
“I heard the Jews call him Sabbataï Zevi or Tsevi,” I said.
He thanked me for the correction, and asked me to tell him exactly what I’d seen, so that he could distinguish the true from the false in what was being said about this character.
I told him some things, and promised him more in due course.
16 May
Yesterday I revised what I’d said about gaining the “prince’s” confidence, and said, rightly then, that it was rather that I’d aroused his curiosity. Now I really can speak of trust, for today, instead of just listening to me, he talked about himself.
He didn’t tell me any secrets — why should he? But for someone who’s a foreigner and evidently likes to keep himself to himself, the little he did communicate is a token of esteem and a mark of confidence.
He said he wasn’t really travelling on business in the usual sense, but to see the world and find out at first hand about the strange things that are happening in it. Though he didn’t say so, I’m sure he’s someone of importance, perhaps a brother or cousin of the Grand Sophy.
I’ve thought of introducing him to Girolamo, but my Venetian friend is rather garrulous and might scare him. Then, instead of opening out gradually like some shy rose, the Persian might just close up again.
So I mean to see them separately, unless they should happen to meet one another without me.
17 May
Today the prince invited me to his “palace”. The word is not excessive, relatively speaking. The sailors sleep in a barn, I sleep in a shed, Girolamo and his entourage have a house, and Ali Esfahani, who has a whole suite of rooms which he’s decorated with rugs and cushions in the Persian style, lives in the equivalent of a palace. His staff includes a butler, a translator, a cook and his scullion, a valet, and four general manservants in addition to the two guards, whom he calls “my wild animals”.
The translator is a French eccles
iastic from Toulouse who calls himself “Father Angel”. I was surprised when I first saw him with Ali, especially as they spoke to one another in Persian. I haven’t been able to find out anything more: the translator disappeared when his master said he and I could make ourselves understood to one another in Arabic.
In the course of the evening my host told me a very strange thing: it’s said that every night since the beginning of this year several stars have vanished from the sky. You have only to look up at the part of the sky where the stars are most densely concentrated to see that some of them suddenly go out, never to reappear. Ali seems to believe that as the year goes by the night sky will gradually empty, until at last it’s completely dark.
To check whether this is true I prepared to spend most of the night sitting on deck with my head flung back, watching the sky. I tried to focus on fixed points, but my eyes kept blurring. After an hour I felt so cold I gave up and went to bed without having proved anything.
18 May
I told my Venetian friend the tale about the stars, and he burst out laughing before I’d even finished. Luckily I hadn’t said where I’d heard it. And luckily I haven’t introduced the two men to one another.
Though he goes on making fun of rumours about the end of the world, Girolamo has told me some things I find disturbing. When I’m with him I feel the same as I used to with Maïmoun. On the one hand I wish I could share his serenity and his scorn for all superstition, and this makes me seem to agree with what he says. But at the same time I can’t prevent these same superstitions, even the most extravagant of them, from lodging in my mind. “What if these people were right?” “What if their prophecies came true?” “Supposing the world really was less than four months away from extinction?” Questions like these flit about in my head in spite of me. I know they’re foolish, but I can’t manage to get rid of them. This depresses me and makes me doubly ashamed: in the first place for sharing the apprehensions of the ignorant, and in the second for being so deceitful with my friend — nodding my head at what he says, and all the time disagreeing with it in my heart.
