by Amin Maalouf
I decided to carry on my way without hurrying, as if I had heard nothing. However there was a new commotion, the sound of rifles being loaded and footsteps. I did not give it a second thought but ran through the alleys without looking back and threw myself into the narrowest and darkest passageways. The sun had already set and in half an hour it would be pitch dark.
I was searching my memory for a prayer to recite, but could only manage to repeat: ‘God! God! God!’ in an insistent pleading, as if I had already died and was drumming on the gate of Paradise.
And the gate opened. The gate of Paradise. A little hidden gate in the mud-stained wall at the corner of the street. It opened. A hand touched mine and I grasped on to it. It pulled me towards it and shut the gate behind me. I kept my eyes shut out of fear. I was breathless with disbelief and happiness. Outside the procession went on and on.
Three pairs of laughing eyes were watching me – three women whose hair was covered but whose faces were unveiled and who were looking at me lovingly, as if I were a newborn babe. The oldest, in her forties, gave me a sign to follow her. At the end of the garden I had landed up in there was a small cabin where she seated me on a wicker chair, assuring me with a gesture that she would come to rescue me. She reassured me with a pout and with the magic word: andaroun, ‘inner house’. The soldier would not come to search where the women lived!
In fact the noise of the soldiers had come closer only to get more distant again, before fading away altogether. How could they have known into which of the alleys I had vanished? The district was a maze, made up of dozens of passages, hundreds of houses and gardens – and it was almost night.
After an hour I was brought some black tea, cigarettes were rolled for me and a conversation struck up. In slow Persian phrases with a few French words they explained to me to whom I owed my safety. The rumour had run through the district that an accomplice of the assassin was at the foreigner’s hotel. Seeing me flee they understood that I was the guilty hero and they had wanted to protect me. What were their reasons for this? Their husband and father had been executed fifteen years earlier, unjustly accused of belonging to a dissident sect, the babis, who advocated the abolition of polygamy, complete equality between men and women and the establishment of a democratic regime. Led by the Shah and the clergy, repression had been bloody and, aside from the scores of thousands of babis, many completely innocent people had also been massacred upon a simple denunciation by a neighbour. Then, left alone with two young girls, my benefactress had been waiting for the hour of revenge. The three women said that they were honoured that the heroic avenger had landed in their humble garden.
When one is viewed as a hero by women, does one really wish to disabuse them? I persuaded myself that it would be unseemly, even foolish, to disillusion them. In my difficult battle for survival, I needed these allies, I needed their enthusiasm and courage – and their unjustified admiration. I therefore took refuge in an enigmatic silence which, for them, lifted their last doubts.
Three women, a garden and a salutary misunderstanding – I could recount forever those forty unreal days of a sweltering Persian spring. It was difficult being a foreigner; I found it doubly awkward in the world of oriental women where I did not belong at all. My benefactress was well aware of the difficulties into which she had been thrown. I am certain that the whole of the first night, while I was sleeping stretched out on all three mats laid on top of each other in the cabin at the bottom of the garden, she was the victim of the most intractable insomnia for at dawn she summoned me, had me sit cross-legged to her right, sat her two daughters to her left and gave us a carefully prepared speech.
She started by hailing my courage and restated her joy at taking me in. Then, having observed some moments of silence, she suddenly started to unhook her bodice before my startled eyes. I blushed and turned my eyes away but she pulled me towards her. Her shoulders were bare and so were her breasts. With word and gesture she invited me to suckle. The two daughters giggled under their cloaks but the mother had all the solemnity of a ritual sacrifice. I complied, placing my lips, as modestly as possible, on the tip of one breast and then on the other. Then she covered herself up, without haste, adding in the most formal tones:
‘By this act you have become my son, as if you were born of my flesh.’
Then, turning towards her daughters, who had stopped laughing, she declared that henceforth they had to treat me as if I was their own brother.
At the time the ceremony seemed both moving and grotesque to me. Thinking back over it, however, I can see in it all the subtlety of the Orient. In fact my situation was embarrassing for that woman. She had not hesitated to hold out a helping hand to me at great peril to herself, and she had offered me the most unconditional hospitality. At the same time, the presence of a stranger, a young man, near her daughters night and day, could only lead to some incident at some point in the future. How better to diffuse the difficulty than by this ritual gesture of symbolic adoption. Then I could move around the house as I pleased, sleep in the same room, place a kiss on my ‘sisters’ ’ foreheads and we were all protected and kept strictly in check by the fiction of adoption.
People other than me would have felt trapped by this performance. I, on the contrary, was comforted by it. Having landed up on a women’s planet and then to form a hasty attachment, through idleness or lack of privacy, with one of the three hostesses; to try bit by bit to edge away from the other two, to outwit and exclude them; to bring upon myself their inevitable hostility and to find myself excluded – sheepish and contrite at having embarrassed, saddened or disappointed the women who had been nothing less than providential – that would have been a turn of affairs which would not have suited my nature at all. Having said that, I, being a Westerner, would never have been able to come up with the solution which that woman found in the never-ending arsenal of her religious commandments.
As if by a miracle, everything became simple, clear and pure. To say that desire was dead would be telling a lie, everything about our relationships was eminently carnal yet, I reiterate, eminently pure. Thus I experienced moments of carefree peace in the intimacy of these women who were neither veiled nor excessively modest, in the middle of a city where I was probably the most wanted man.
With the passage of time, I see my stay with those women as a moment of privilege without which my attachment to the Orient would have remained short-lived or superficial. It is to them I owe the immense steps I made in understanding and speaking idiomatic Persian. Although my hostesses had made the praiseworthy effort to put together some words in French on the first day, all our conversations were henceforth carried on in the country’s vernacular. Our conversations might be animated or casual, subtle or crude, often even flirtatious, since in my capacity as elder brother anything was allowed as long as I stayed beyond the bounds of incest. Anything that was playful was permitted, including the most theatrical shows of affection.
Would the experience have kept its allure had it gone on for longer? I shall never know. I do not wish to know. An event which was unfortunately only too foreseeable put an end to all that. It was a visit, a routine visit, by the grandparents.
Ordinarily I stayed far away from the entrance gates, the birouni gate, which led to the men’s abode and was the main doorway, and the garden gate through which I had entered. At the first sound I would slip away. This time through recklessness or over-confidence, I did not hear the old couple arrive. I was sitting cross-legged in the women’s room and for the last two hours had been peacefully smoking a kalyan pipe prepared by my ‘sisters’ and had fallen asleep there with the pipe still in my mouth and my head leaning against the wall, when a man’s cough woke me up with a start.
CHAPTER 31
For my adoptive mother, who arrived a few seconds too late, the presence of a European male in the interior of her apartments had to be promptly explained. Rather than tarnish her reputation or that of her daughters, she chose to tell the truth in the most patriotic
and triumphant way she could. Who was this stranger? None less than the farangi the police were looking for, the accomplice of the man who had cut down the tyrant and avenged her martyred husband!
There was a moment of indecision and then the verdict came. They congratulated me and praised my courage as well as that of my protectress. It is true that confronted with such an incongruous situation her explanation was the only plausible one. Even though the fact that I had been slumped out right in the middle of the andaroun was somewhat compromising, she could easily have explained it away by speaking of the necessity of shielding me from sight.
Honour had been safeguarded, but it was now clear that I had to leave. There were two paths open to me. The most obvious was to leave disguised as a woman and to walk over to the American legation; in short, to complete the interrupted walk of a few weeks earlier. However, my ‘mother’ dissuaded me. Having carried out a scouting expedition she had discerned that all the alleys leading to the legation were being watched. Moreover, being rather tall at just over six feet, my disguise as a Persian woman would not fool even the most unobservant soldier.
The other solution was, following Jamaladin’s advice, to send a distress message to Princess Shireen. I spoke of her to my ‘mother’ who gave her approval; she had heard of the assassinated Shah’s grand-daughter who was said to be sensitive to the suffering of the poor and she offered to carry a letter to her. The problem was finding the words with which to address her – words which, while being sufficiently explicit, would not give me away were they to fall into other hands. I could not mention my name, nor that of the Master. I made do with writing on a sheet of paper the only phrase she had ever said to me: ‘You never know, our paths might meet!’
My ‘mother’ had decided to go up to the princess at the ceremonies on the fortieth day of the death of the old Shah, the last stage of the funeral ceremonies. In the inevitable general confusion of the onlookers and the professional weepers smeared with soot, she had no difficulty in slipping the paper from her hand into the princess’s, who then read it and with dread looked about her for the man who had written it. The messenger whispered to her: ‘He is at my house!’ Immediately Shireen left the ceremony, summoned her coachman and placed my ‘mother’ at her side. In order not to attract any suspicion, the coach with the royal insignia stopped in front of the hotel Prévost from which spot the two heavily veiled and anonymous women continued their route on foot.
Our second meeting was hardly more wordy than our first. The princess looked me up and down with a smile on the corner her lips. Suddenly she gave an order:
‘Tomorrow at dawn my coachman will come to fetch you. Be ready. Wear a veil and walk with your head down!’
‘I was convinced that she was going to drive me to my legation. It was at the moment when her carriage went out through the city gate that I realised my mistake. She explained:
‘I could easily have taken you to the American minister’s. You would have been safe, but no one would have had any trouble guessing how you got there. Even if I do have some influence, being a member of the Qajar family, I cannot use it to protect the apparent accomplice to the assassination of the Shah. I would have been placed in an awkward predicament and then they would have found the brave women who looked after you. Your legation, moreover, would not have been too delighted to have to protect a man accused of such a crime. Believe me, it is better for everyone if you leave Persia. I will take you to one of my maternal uncles, one of the Bakhtiari chiefs. He has come down with his tribe’s warriors for the fortieth day ceremonies. I have told him who you are and stated your innocence, but his men know nothing. He has undertaken to escort you to the Ottoman frontier by routes unknown to the caravans. He is waiting for us in Shah Abdul-Azim’s village. Do you have any money?’
‘Yes. I gave two hundred tomans to the women who saved me, but I still have almost four hundred.’
‘That is not enough. You must distribute half of what you have to the men accompanying you and keep a decent amount behind for the rest of the trip. Here are some Turkish coins, they will not be too much. Here also is a text which I would like the Master to have. You will be passing through Constantinople?’
It was difficult to say no. She continued, as she slipped some folded papers into the slit of my cloak:
‘They contain a transcript of Mirza Reza’s first cross-examination. I spent the night writing it out. You can read it, in fact you should read it. You will learn a lot. Besides, it will keep you busy during the long trip. But do not let anyone else see it.’
We were already on the outskirts of the village. The police were everywhere and searching everything down to the packs on the mules, but who would have dared hold up a royal convoy? We followed our route as far as the courtyard of a hugh saffron-coloured building. In its centre was an immense and ancient oak-tree around which warriors, with two bandoliers crossed across their chests, were bustling. The Princess could only look with disdain upon these virile ornaments which complemented their thick moustaches.
‘I am leaving you in good hands, as you see; they will protect you better than the weak women who have looked after you so far.’
‘I doubt it.’
My eyes worriedly followed the rifle barrels which were pointing in all directions.
‘I doubt it too,’ she laughed. ‘But all the same they will take you over to Turkey.’
As the moment came to say goodbye, I decided not to:
‘I know that the time is hardly right to speak about it, but perhaps you know by some chance if an old manuscript was found in Mirza Reza’s luggage.’
Her eyes avoided mine and her voice took on a grating tone.
‘The time is indeed badly chosen. Do not utter that madman’s name again until you get to Constantinople!’
‘It is a manuscript by Khayyam!’
I was right to insist. After all, it was because of that book that I had allowed myself to be dragged into this Persian adventure. However Shireen gave a sigh of impatience.
‘I know nothing of it. I will make inquiries. Leave me your address and I will write to you. However, please do not reply to me.’
As I scribbled down ‘Annapolis, Maryland’ I had the impression that I was already far away and I had started feeling sorry that my foray into Persia had been so short and that it had gone so wrong from the start. I held the paper out to the Princess. As she was about to take it, I took hold of her hand – briefly but firmly. She also squeezed my hand, digging a finger-nail into my palm, without scratching me but leaving behind its distinct outline for a few minutes. Smiles came to both our lips and we uttered the same phrase in unison:
‘You never know, our paths might meet!’
For two months I saw nothing which resembled what I was used to calling a road. Upon leaving Shah Abdul-Azim we headed southwest in the direction of the Bakhtiaris’ tribal territory. After we had skirted the salt lake of Qom we followed its eponymous river but did not go into the city itself. My guides, who brandished their rifles permanently for battle, took care to avoid built-up areas and although Shireen’s uncle often took the trouble to inform me that we were at Amouk, Vertcha or Khomein, it was only a turn of phrase by which he meant that we were on a level with those localities whose minarets we could make out in the distance and whose contours I was happy to leave to my imagination.
In the mountains of Luristan, beyond the sources of the Qom River, my guides became less vigilant – we were in Bakhtiari territory. A feast was organised in my honour. I was given an opium pipe to smoke and I fell asleep on the spot amid general hilarity. I then had to wait two days before starting off again on the route which was still long: Shuster, Ahvaz and finally the perilous swamp crossing to Basra, the city of Ottoman Iraq which lay on the Shatt al-Arab.
At last, out of Persia and safe! There was still a long month at sea to get by sail-boat from Fao to Bahrain, then I had to sail down the Pirate coast to Aden and come back up the Red Sea and the Suez Canal to Alexa
ndria in order finally to cross the Mediterranean in an old Turkish steamer to Constantinople.
Throughout this interminable escape, which was tiring but went without a hitch, the only leisure activity I had was to read and reread the ten manuscript pages of Mirza Reza’s cross-examination. Doubtless I would have tired of it had I any other distractions, but this forced meeting with a man condemned to death exercised an undeniable fascination over me, in that I could easily imagine him, with his gaunt limbs, his eyes racked with pain and his unlikely clothing of a devout. Sometimes I thought I could even hear this tortured voice:
‘What were the reasons that induced you to kill our beloved Shah?’
‘Those who have eyes to see with will have no difficulty in noticing that the Shah was struck down in the very same place where Jamaladin was abused. What had that saintly man done, that true descendant of the Prophet, to deserve to be dragged out of the sanctuary the way he was?’
‘Who induced you to kill the Shah, who are you accomplices?’
‘I swear by almighty and omnipotent God, by God who created Jamaladin and all other humans, that no one apart from me and the Sayyid knew anything of my plan to kill the Shah. The Sayyid is in Constantinople. Try and reach him!’
‘What instructions did Jamaladin give you?’
‘When I went to Constantinople, I told him of the tortures to which the Shah’s son had submitted me. The Sayyid ordered me to be silent, saying, “Stop whining as if you were leading a funeral service! Can you do nothing other than cry? If the Shah’s son tortured you, kill him!”’
‘Why kill the Shah rather than his son, since he is the one who wronged you and it is upon the son that Jamaladin advised you to take your revenge?’
‘I said to myself: “If I kill the son, the Shah with his vast power will kill thousands of people in reprisal.” Instead of cutting off a branch, I preferred to pull out the whole tree of tyranny by its roots in the hope that a different tree would spring up in its place. Besides the Sultan of Turkey said to Sayyid Jamaladin in private that in order to bring about the union of all Muslims we had to get rid of this Shah.’
