Samarkand

CHAPTER 25

Until now I have spoken little of myself. I have been trying to expose, as faithfully as possible, what the Samarkand Manuscript reveals of Khayyam and of those he knew and some of the events he witnessed. It remains to be told just how this work, spared at the time of the Mongols, has come down to our time, and through what adventures I managed to gain possession of it, and to start with — through what stroke of luck I learnt of its existence.

I have already mentioned my name, Benjamin O. Lesage. In spite of its French sound, the heritage of a Huguenot forebear who emigrated in Louis XIV’s century, I am an American citizen and a native of Annapolis in Maryland on the Chesapeake Bay, a modest inlet of the Atlantic. My connection with France is not limited, however, to that distant forefather and my father applied himself to renewing the link. He had always had an obsession about his origins — even noting in his school book: ‘Was my genealogical tree felled in order to construct a get-away boat!’, and he set about learning French. Then, with pomp and circumstance, he crossed the Atlantic in the opposite direction to the hands of time.

His year of pilgrimage was either extremely badly or well chosen. He left New York on 9 July 1870, on board the Scotia; he reached Cherbourg on the 18th and was in Paris on the evening of the 19th with war having been declared at mid-day. There followed retreat, calamity, invasion, famine, the Commune and massacres. My father was never to live a more intense year. It would remain his finest memory, why should it be denied? There is a perverse joy in finding oneself in a besieged city where barricades fall as others arise and men and women rediscover the joys of primitive bonding. How many times in Annapolis, around the inevitable holiday turkey, would father and mother recall with emotion the piece of elephant trunk they had shared on New Year’s eve in Paris and which they had bought for forty francs a pound at Roos’, the English butcher on Boulevard Haussmann!

They had just become engaged, they were to be married a year later, and the war christened their happiness. ‘Upon my arrival in Paris,’ my father would recall, ‘I took up the habit of going to Cafe Riche in the morning, on the Boulevard des Italiens. With a pile of newspapers, le Temps, le Gaulois, le Figaro, la Presse, I would settle down at a table, reading every line and listing discreetly in a notebook the words I could not understand — words such as “gaiter” or “moblot” — so that I would be able, upon my return to my hotel, to ask the erudite concierge.

‘The third day a man with a grey moustache came and sat at the next table. He had his own stack of newspapers, but he abandoned them soon in order to observe me; he had a question on the tip of his tongue. Unable to restrain himself any longer, he spoke out with his hoarse voice, keeping one hand on the handle of his cane while the other tapped nervously on the wet marble. He wanted to be certain that this young man, apparently in sound health, had good reasons for not being at the front in order to defend the fatherland. His tone was polite, although very suspicious, and accompanied by sidelong glances at the notebook in which he had seen me hurriedly scribbling. I had no need to argue as my accent proved to be an eloquent defence. The man gallantly apologized, invited me to his table, and mentioned La Fayette, Benjamin Franklin, Tocqueville and Pierre L’Enfant before explaining in detail what I had just read in the press — how this war would be “just an excursion to Berlin for our troops”.’

My father wanted to contradict him. Although he knew nothing of the comparable strengths of the French and the Prussians, he had just taken part in the Civil War and had been wounded in the siege of Atlanta. ‘I could testify that no war was a picnic,’ he told us. ‘But nations are so forgetful and gunpowder so intoxicating that I held back from being drawn into an argument. It was not the time for discussions and the man did not ask my opinion. From time to time he would utter a “Don’t you think so?” which hardly required an answer; I replied with a knowing nod.

‘He was friendly. Besides, we met every morning after that. I still spoke very little and he stated that he was happy that an American could share his views so thoroughly. At the end of his fourth monologue, which was just as spirited, this august gentleman invited me to dine with him at his home; he was so certain of obtaining my agreement yet again that he hailed a coach before I could even formulate a reply. I must admit that I have never regretted it. He was called Charles-Hubert de Luçay and lived in a mansion on Boulevard Poissonière. He was a widower. His two sons were in the army and his daughter was going to become your mother.’

She was eighteen and my father was ten years older. They observed each other in silence throughout long patriotic harangues. From 7 August, when it became clear, after three defeats in a row, that the war was lost and that the national territory was under threat, my grandfather became less verbose. As his daughter and future son-in-law busied themselves trying to temper his melancholy a complicity sprang up between them. From then on, a glance was enough to decide which of them was going to intervene and with the medicine of which argument.

‘The first time we were alone, she and I in the huge salon, there was a deathly silence — followed by a burst of laughter. We had just discovered that, after numerous meals taken together, we had never addressed a word to each other directly. It was sweet, knowing and uncontrolled laughter, but it would have been unbecoming to prolong it. I was supposed to speak first. Your mother was clutching a book to her blouse, and I asked her what she was reading.’

At that very moment, Omar Khayyam entered into my life. I should almost say that it gave birth to me. My mother had just acquired Les Quatrains de Khéyam, translated from the Persian by J.B. Nicolas, formerly chief dragoman of the French Embassy to Persia, published in 1867 by the Imperial Press. My father had in his luggage the 1868 edition of Edward FitzGerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.

‘Your mother’s rapture was no better hidden than mine. We were both sure that our life lines were going to join. At no moment did we think that it could just be a simple coincidence that we were reading the same book. Omar appeared to us instantly like fate’s password — to ignore it would have been almost sacrilegious. Naturally, we had said nothing of what was going on inside us, the conversation centred on the poems. She informed me that Napoleon III in person had ordered the publication of the work.’

At that time, Europe had just discovered Omar. Some specialists, in truth, had spoken of him earlier in the century, his algebra had been published in Paris in 1851 and articles had appeared in specialized reviews. But the western public was still unaware of him, and, in the east itself, what was left of Khayyam? A name, two or three legends, some quatrains of indefinite authorship and a hazy reputation as an astrologer.

When an obscure British poet, FitzGerald, decided to publish a translation of seventy-five quatrains in 1859 there was indifference. The book was published in an edition of two hundred and fifty copies; the author offered some to his friends and the rest were selling very slowly at the book-shop of Bernard Quaritch. ‘Poor old Omar, he apparently was of interest to no one,’ so FitzGerald wrote to his Persian teacher. After two years the publisher decided to sell off the stock: from an initial price of five shillings, the Rubaiyaat went down to a penny, sixty times less. Even at this price, few were sold until the moment when two literary critics discovered it. They read it and were amazed by it. They came back the next day and bought up six copies to give out. Feeling that some interest was about to be aroused, the editor raised the price to two pence.

And to think that on my last trip to England I had to pay the same Quaritch, now finely established in Piccadilly, four hundred pounds sterling for a copy which he had kept from that first edition!

However, success was not immediate in London. It had to come from Paris where M. Nicolas published his translation, where Théophile Gautier had to write, in the pages of the Moniteur Universel a resounding ‘Have you read the Quatrains of Kéyam?’ And welcome ‘this absolute freedom of spirit which the boldest modern thinkers can hardly equal’, and Ernest Renan had to add: ‘Khayyam is perhaps the most curious man to study in order to understand what the unfettered genius of Persia managed to become within the bounds of Muslim dogmatism’ — in order for Fitzgerald and his ‘poor old Omar’ to come out of their anonymity. The awakening was thunderous. Overnight all the images of the orient were assembled around the sole name of Khayyam. Translation followed translation, editions of the work multiplied in England and then in several American cities ‘Omar’ societies were formed.

To reiterate, in 1870 the Khayyam vogue was just starting. The circle of fans of Omar was growing every day, without yet having transcended the circle of intellectuals. After this shared reading matter brought my father and mother together, they started to recite the quatrains of Omar and to discuss their meaning: were wine and the tavern, in Omar’s pen, purely mystical symbols, as Nicolas stated? Or were they, on the other hand, the expression of a life of pleasure, indeed of debauchery, as FitzGerald and Renan claimed? These debates took on a new taste in their mouths. When my father evoked Omar, as he caressed the perfumed hair of his beautiful girl, my mother blushed. It was between two amorous quatrain that they exchanged their first kiss. The day they spoke of marriage, they made a vow to call their first son Omar.

During the 1890s, hundreds of little Americans were also given that name: when I was born on 1 March 1873 it was not yet common. Not wishing to encumber me too much with this exotic first name, my parents relegated it to second place, in order that I might, if I so desired, replace it with a discrete O; my school friends supposed that it stood for Oliver, Oswald, Osborne or Orville and I did not disabuse anyone.

The inheritance which was thus handed down to me could not fail to arouse my curiosity about this remote godfather. At fifteen I started to read everything about him. I had made a plan to study the language and literature of Persia and to make a long visit there. However, after a bout of enthusiasm I cooled down. Indeed, in the opinion of all the critics, FitzGerald’s verses constituted a masterpiece of English poetry, but they had only a remote connection with what Khayyam could have composed. When it came to the quatrains themselves, some authors quoted almost a thousand, Nicolas had translated more than four hundred, while some thorough specialists only recognized a hundred of them as being ‘probably authentic’. Eminent orientalists went as far as to deny that a single one could be attributed to Omar with certainty.

It was believed that there could have existed an original book which once and for all would have allowed the real to be distinguished from the false, but there was nothing to lead one to believe that such a manuscript could be found.

Finally I turned away from the person, as I did from the work. I came to see my middle initial O as the permanent residue of parental childishness — until a meeting took me back to my first love and directed my life resolutely in the footsteps of Khayyam.

CHAPTER 26

It was at the end of the summer of 1895 that I embarked for the old world. My grandfather had just celebrated his seventy-sixth birthday and had written tearful letters to me and my mother. He was eager to see me, even if it were only once, before his death. Having finished my studies I rushed off and on the ship I readied myself for the role I would have to play — to kneel down at his bedside, to hold his frozen hand bravely while listening to him murmur his last orders.

That was all absolutely wasted. Grandfather was waiting for me at Cherbourg. I can still see him, on the quai de Caligny, straighter than his cane with his perfumed moustache, his lively gait and his top hat tipping automatically when a lady passed by. When we were seated in the Admiralty restaurant, he took me firmly by the arm. ‘My friend,’ he said, deliberately theatrical, ‘a young man has just been reborn in me, and he needs a companion.’

I was wrong to take his words lightly. Our time there was a whirl. We would hardly have finished eating at the Brébant, at Foyot or at Chez le Père Lathuile before we would have to run to the Cigale where Eugénie Buffet was appearing, to the Mirliton where Aristide Bruant reigned or to the Scala where Yvette Guilbert would sing les Vierges, le Foetus and le Fiacre. We were two brothers, one with a white moustache, the other with a brown one. We had the same gait, the same hat and he was the one the women looked at first. With every champagne cork that popped I studied his gestures and his behaviour, and I could not even once find fault with them. He arose with a bound, walked as quickly as I did, his cane being hardly more than an ornament. He wanted to gather every rose of this late spring. I am happy to say that he would live to be ninety-three — another seventeen years, a whole new youth.

One evening he took me to dine at Durand in the place de la Madeleine. In an aisle of the restaurant, around several tables which had been placed together, there was a group of actors, actresses, journalists and politicians whose names grandfather audibly reeled off for me one by one. In the middle of these celebrities there was an empty chair, but soon a man arrived and I realised that the place had been saved for him. He was immediately surrounded and adulated. Every last word of his gave rise to exclamations and laughs. My grandfather stood up and made a sign to me to follow him.

‘Come on, I must present you to my cousin Henri!’

As he said that, he dragged me over to him.

The two cousins greeted each other before returning to me.

‘My American grandson. He wanted to meet you so much!’

I did not hide my surprise too well, and the man looked at me with some scepticism before stating:

‘Let him come and see me tomorrow morning, after I have had my tricycle ride.’

It was only upon sitting back at my table that I realised to whom I had been presented. My grandfather was very eager for me to know him, and had spoken of him often with an irritating pride of clan.

It is true that the aforementioned cousin, who was little known on my side of the Atlantic, was more famous in France than Sarah Bernhardt, as he was Victor-Henri de Rochefort-Luçay, now known in democratic France as Henri Rochefort, a marquis and a communard, former deputy, minister and convict. He had been deported to New Caledonia by the regular troops. In 1874 he effected a swashbuckling escape which inflamed his contemporaries’ imagination, and which Eduard Manet depicted in his painting The Flight of Rochefort. However, in 1889 he was sent off into exile again for having plotted against the Republic with General Boulanger, and it was from London that he managed his influential newspaper l’Intransigeant. Returning in 1895 thanks to an amnesty, he had been welcomed back by two hundred thousand delirious Parisians — both Blanquistes and Boulangistes, revolutionaries of the left and the right, idealists and demagogues. He had been made the spokesman of a hundred different and contradictory causes. I knew all of that, but I was unaware of the most important thing.

On the appointed day I went off to his residence on rue Pergolèse, incapable of imagining at the time that this visit to my grandfather’s favourite cousin would be the first step of my never-ending trip in the universe of the Orient.

‘So,’ he said accosting me, ‘you are sweet Geneviève’s son. Are you not the one to whom she gave the name of Omar?’

‘Yes. Benjamin Omar.’

‘Do you know that I have held you in my arms?’

As this was the case, he was now obliged to address me familiarly. The same, however, did not apply to me when addressing him.

‘My mother has actually told me that after your escape you landed at San Francisco and took the train for the East coast. We went to New York to meet you at the station. I was two.’

‘I remember perfectly. We spoke of you, of Khayyam and of Persia and I even predicted that you would be a great orientalist.’

I shammed a little embarrassment in admitting to him that I had side-stepped his vision and that my interests were elsewhere — I was more oriented toward financial studies, foreseeing myself one day taking over the maritime construction business started by my father. Appearing to be sincerely disappointed by my choice, Rochefort set off on a lengthy plea, intermixed with the Persian Letters of Montesquieu and his famous ‘How can one be Persian?’, the adventure of the gambling-addict Marie Petit who had been received by the Shah of Persia by passing herself off as Louis XIV’s ambassador, and the story of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s cousin who ended his days as a watchmaker in Isfahan. I was only listening to the half of it. Above all I was watching him, with his voluminous and immoderate head, his protruding forehead topped by a tuft of thick wavy hair. He spoke with passion, but without emphasis and without the gesticulations which one might have expected from him having read his intense writings.

‘I am mad about Persia, although I have never set foot there,’ Rochefort declared. ‘I do not have the soul of a traveller. Had I not been banished or deported those few times I should never have left France. But times change, and the events which are taking place at the other end of the planet are affecting our lives. If I were twenty today, instead of being sixty, I should have been very tempted by an adventure in the Orient — particularly if I were called Omar!’

I felt constraint to justify my lack of interest in Khayyam. In order to do so, I had to mention the dubious nature of the Rubaiyaat, the absence of a copy which could prove their authenticity once and for all. For all that, as I was speaking, an intense glimmer came into his eyes, an exuberance which I failed to understand. Nothing in my words was supposed to provoke such excitement. Intrigued and irritated, I ended up compressing what I had to say and then falling silent quite abruptly. Rochefort questioned me enthusiastically:

‘If you were certain that such a manuscript existed, would your interest in Omar Khayyam be reborn?’

‘Naturally,’ I admitted.

‘And if I were to tell you that I have seen this manuscript of Khayyam with my own eyes, in Paris what’s more, and that I have leafed through it?’

CHAPTER 27

To say that this revelation immediately turned my life upside down would be inexact. I do not believe that I reacted the way Rochefort had presumed I would. I was both abundantly surprised and intrigued, but I was still sceptical. The man did not inspire me with unlimited confidence. How could he know that the manuscript he had leafed through was the authentic work of Khayyam? He did not know Persian and the wool might have been pulled over his eyes. For what incongruous reason would this book have been in Paris without a single orientalist reporting the fact? I did no more than utter a polite but sincere ‘Incredible!’, since it showed both the enthusiasm of the man I was speaking to and my own doubts for I was not yet ready to believe in it.

Rochefort went on:

‘I had the chance to meet an extraordinary personality, one of those beings who cross History determined to leave their imprint on the generations to come. The Sultan of Turkey fears and courts him, the Shah of Persia trembles at the mere mention of his name. He is a descendant of Muhammad, but was nonetheless chased out of Constantinople for having said, at a public conference in the presence of the greatest religious dignitaries, that the profession of the philosopher was as indispensable to humanity as that of the prophet. He is called Jamaladin. Have you heard of him?’

I could only confess my total ignorance.

‘When Egypt rose up against the English,’ Rochefort continued, ‘it was at this man’s call. All the intellectuals of the Nile Valley take their inspiration from him. They call him ‘Master’ and revere his name. However, he is not an Egyptian and has only made a short stay in that country. He was exiled to India where he managed to arouse a considerable movement of opinion. Under his influence newspapers were established and associations were formed. The Viceroy became alarmed and had Jamaladin expelled, whence he decided to settle down in Europe and he continued his incredible activity in London and then in France.’

‘He worked regularly on l’Intransigeant and we used to meet often. He presented his disciples to me — Muslims from India, Jews from Egypt and Maronites from Syria. I believe that I was his closest French friend, but certainly not the only one. Ernest Renan and Georges Clemenceau knew him well, and in England his friends were people like Lord Salisbury, Randolph Churchill or Wilfrid Blunt. A little before his death, Victor Hugo met him too.’

‘This very morning, I was in the middle of going over some notes about him which I am thinking of inserting in my memoirs.’

Rochefort took some sheets covered in minuscule writing out of a drawer and read: ‘I was introduced to an outlaw, a man famous throughout all of Islam as a reformer and a revolutionary — Sheikh Jamaladin, a man with the head of a saint. His beautiful black eyes, so gentle and yet fiery and his deep tawny beard which reached his chest gave him a particularly majestic air. He looked like a born leader. He understood French more or less although he could hardly speak it, but his ever alert intelligence easily made up for what he lacked of our language. Behind his calm and serene appearance his activity was frenetic. We soon became good friends for my spirit is instinctively that of a revolutionary and I am attracted to all freedom-fighters …’

He quickly put the sheets of paper away and then continued:

‘Jamaladin had rented a small room on the top floor of a hotel in Rue de Sèze near the Madeleine. That modest space was enough for him to edit a newspaper which went off by the bundle to India and Arabia. I only managed to wheedle my way into his den once, being curious to see what it could look like. I had invited Jamaladin to dine chez Durand and promised to go by and pick him up. I went straight up to his room. It was difficult to move around in it because of all the newspapers and books piled up to the ceiling there, some of them even covering the bed. There was a suffocating smell of cigar smoke.’

In spite of his admiration for him, he had pronounced this last phrase with a hint of distaste, which induced me to extinguish on the spot my own cigar which was an elegant Havana I had just lit. Rochefort thanked me for that with a smile and carried on:

‘After apologizing for the mess in which he was receiving me, and which, he said, was unbefitting for someone of my rank, Jamaladin showed me that day some books he was fond of — particularly that of Khayyam which was full of exquisite miniatures. He explained to me that this work was called the Samarkand Manuscript, and that it contained the quatrains which had been written in the poet’s own hand, together with a chronicle running in the margins. Above all he told me through what tortuous route the Manuscript had reached him.’

‘Good Lord!’

My pious English interjection draw a triumphal laugh out of cousin Henri. It was the proof that my cold scepticism had been swept away and that I would henceforth hang on to his every word and he lost no time in taking advantage of this.

‘Of course, I do not remember everything that Jamaladin must have said to me,’ he added cruelly. That evening we spoke mainly of the Sudan. After that I never saw the Manuscript again but I can testify that it existed, but I am truly afraid that by now it has been lost. Everything my friend possessed was burned, destroyed or scattered around.’

‘Even the Khayyam Manuscript?’

By way of reply, Rochefort made a discouraging pout, before throwing himself into an impassioned explanation during which he made close reference to his notes:

‘When the Shah came to Europe to go to the World Fair in 1889, he suggested to Jamaladin that he returned to Persia “instead of passing the rest of his life in the midst of infidels”, giving him to understand that he would install him in high office. The exile set some conditions: that a constitution be promulgated, that elections be organized, that equality be recognized by law ‘as in civilized countries’ and that the hugh concessions granted to the foreign powers be abolished. It must be stated that in this area the situation of Persia had for years been the butt of our cartoonist: the Russians, who already had a monopoly on road-building, had just taken over military training. He had formed a brigade of Cossacks, the best equipped in the Persian army, which was directly commanded by officers of the Tsar; by way of compensation, the English had obtained, for a song, the right to exploit all the country’s mineral and forest resources as well as to manage the banking system; as for the Austrians — they had control of the postal services. In demanding that the monarch put an end to royal absolutism and to the foreign concessions, Jamaladin was convinced that he would receive a rebuff. However, to his great surprise, the Shah accepted all his conditions and promised to open up the country to modernisation.

‘Jamaladin thus went and settled in Persia, as part of the sovereign’s entourage. The sovereign, at the start, showed him all due respect and went as far as to introduce him with great ceremony to the women of his harem. However, the reforms were put off. As for a constitution, the religious chiefs persuaded that Shah that it would be against the Law of God, and courtiers foresaw that elections would allow their absolute authority to be challenged and that they would end up like Louis XVI. The foreign concessions? Far from abolishing those which existed, the monarch, ever short of money, was to contract new ones: for the modest sum of fifteen thousand pounds sterling he granted an English company the monopoly of Persian tobacco — not only its export but also domestic consumption. In a country where every man, every woman and a good number of children were addicted to the pleasures of the cigarette or the pipe, this was a most profitable business.

‘Before news of this last renunciation of Persian rights was announced in Teheran, pamphlets were distributed in secret advising the Shah to rescind his decision. A copy was even placed in the monarch’s bedroom, and he suspected Jamaladin of being the author. The reformer, who was by now worried, decided to go into a state of passive rebellion. This is a custom practised in Persia: when a person fears for his liberty or his life, he withdraws to an old sanctuary near Teheran, locks himself in there and receives visitors to whom he lists his grievances. No one is allowed to cross through the doorway to lay hold of him. That is what Jamaladin did and thereby provoked a surge of people. Thousands of men streaming from all corners of Persia to hear him.

‘In a state of vexation the Shah gave orders for him to be dislodged. It was reported that he hesitated a long time before committing this felony, but his vizir, who was educated in Europe moreover, convinced him that Jamaladin had no right to claim sanctuary since he was only a philosopher and a notorious infidel. Armed soldiers broke into the holy place, cleared a passage through the numerous visitors and seized Jamaladin, whom they stripped of everything he possessed before dragging him half-naked to the border.

‘That day, in the sanctuary, the Samarkand Manuscript was lost under the boots of the Shah’s soldiers.’

Without breaking his flow, Rochefort stood up, leant against the wall and crossed his arms in his favourite pose.

‘Jamaladin was alive but he was ill and above all shocked that so many visitors, who had been listening to him enthusiastically, could have stood meekly by while he was publicly humiliated. He drew some curious conclusions from this — the man who had spent his life denouncing the obscurantism of certain clerics, who had been a regular visitor at the masonic lodges of Egypt, France and Turkey — he made up his mind to exploit the last weapon he had to make the Shah bend no matter what the consequences.

‘So he wrote a long letter to the chief of the Persian clerics, asking him to use his authority to prevent the monarch from selling off the property of the Muslims to the infidels. What happened then, you know from the newspapers.’

I remember that the American press indeed reported that the great pontiff of the Shiites had circulated an astounding proclamation: ‘Any person who consumes tobacco places himself thereby in a state of rebellion against the Mahdi, may God speed his arrival.’ Overnight no Persian lit a single cigarette. The pipes, the famous kalyans were shelved or smashed and tobacco merchants closed up shop. Amongst the wives of the Shah the ban was strictly observed. The monarch panicked, and wrote a letter to the religious chief accusing him of irresponsibility ‘since he was not concerned with the grave consequences which being deprived of tobacco could have on the health of Muslims’. However, the boycott lasted and was accompanied by stormy demonstrations in Teheran, Tabriz and Isfahan. The concession had to be annulled.

‘Meanwhile,’ Rochefort carried on, ‘Jamaladin had left for England. I met him there and had long talks with him; he seemed to be distraught and could only say, time and again: “We must bring the Shah down”. He was a wounded and humiliated man who could think of nothing but avenging himself — all the more so since the monarch, the target of his hatred, had written an angry letter to Lord Salisbury: “We expelled this man because he was working against the interests of England, and where should he take refuge? In London.” Officially the Shah was informed that Great Britain was a free country and that no law could be invoked to suppress a person’s freedom of expression. In private, the Shah was promised that they would seek legal means of restraining Jamaladin’s activity and he found himself being asked to cut short his stay — which made him decide to leave for Constantinople, but with death in his heart.’

‘Is that where he is now?’

‘Yes. I am told that he is deeply dejected. The Sultan has allotted him fine quarters where he can receive friends and disciples, but he is forbidden to leave the country and lives under constant and tight surveillance.’

CHAPTER 28

It was a sumptuous prison with wide-open doors: a palace of wood and marble on the hill of Yildiz, near the residence of the grand vizir; hot meals were delivered straight from the Sultan’s kitchens; visitors came one after another, crossing through a metal gate and walking down an alley before leaving their shoes outside the door. The Master’s voice boomed from above with its grating syllables and closed vowels, he could be heard castigating Persia and the Shah and announcing the evils which would come to pass.

I tried to make myself unobtrusive, being the foreigner — an American with a small foreign hat, small foreign footsteps and my foreign concerns who made the trip from Paris to Constantinople, a trip of seventy hours by train across three empires, in order to ask after a manuscript, an old poetry book, a pathetic bundle of papers in a tumultuous Orient.

A servant came up to me. He made an Ottoman bow, spoke a few words of greeting in French but asked not the slight question. Everyone came here for the same reason, to meet the Master, to hear the Master or to spy on the Master. I was invited to wait in the huge sitting room.

As I entered, I notice the silhouette of a woman. This induced me to lower my eyes; I had been told too much about the country’s customs to walk forward beaming and cheery with my hand outstretched. I simply mumbled a few words and touched my hat. I had already repaired to the other side of the room from where she was sitting to settle myself into an English-style armchair. I looked along the carpet and my glance came up against the visitors shoes, then travelled up her blue and gold dress to her knees, her bust, her neck and her veil. Strangely however, it was not the barrier of a veil that I came across but that of an unveiled face, of eyes which met mine, and a smile. I looked quickly down at the ground, over the carpet again, swept over the edge of the tiling and then went over inexorably towards her again, like a cork coming up to the surface of the water. Over her hair she wore a fine silk kerchief which could be pulled down over her face should a stranger appear. However, the stranger was there and her veil was still drawn back.

This time she was looking into the distance, offering me her profile to contemplate and her skin of such pure complexion. If sweetness had a colour, it would be hers. My temples were throbbing with happiness. My cheeks were damp and my hands cold. God, she was beautiful — my first image of the Orient — a woman such as only the desert poet knew how to praise: her face was the sun, they would have said, her hair the protecting shadow, her eyes fountains of cool water, her body the most slender of palm-trees and her smile a mirage.

Could I speak to her? In what way? Could I cup my hands to my mouth so that she would hear me on the other side of the room? Should I stand up and walk over to her? Sit down in an armchair which was closer to her and risk seeing her smile evaporate and her veil drop like a blade? Our eyes met again, and then parted as if in jest when the servant came and interrupted us — which he did a first time to offer me tea and cigarettes. A moment later he bowed to the ground to speak to her in Turkish. I watched her stand up, veil herself and give him a small leather bag to carry. He went quickly towards the exit and she followed him.

However, as she reached the door of the sitting room she slowed down leaving the man to distance himself from her. Then she turned towards me and stated, in a loud voice and in a French purer than mine:

‘You never know, our paths might meet!’

Whether it was said in politeness or as a promise, her words were accompanied by a mischievous smile which I saw as much as defiance as sweet reproach. Then, as I was getting up out of my seat with the utmost awkwardness, and while I was stumbling about trying to regain both my balance and my composure, she remained immobile, her look enveloping me with amused benevolence. I could not manage to utter a single word. She disappeared.

I was still standing by the window, trying to make out amongst the trees the coach carrying her off when a voice brought me back to reality.

‘Forgive me for having kept you waiting.’

It was Jamaladin. His left hand held an extinguished cigar; he held out his right hand and shook mine with warmth and friendship.

‘My name is Benjamin Lesage. I have come on the recommendation of Henri Rochefort.’

I handed him my letter of introduction, but he slipped it into his pocket without looking at it. He opened his arms, gave me a hug and a kiss on the forehead.

‘Rochefort’s friends are my friends. I speak to them with an open heart.’

Putting his arm around my shoulder, he escorted me towards a wooden staircase which led upstairs.

‘I hope that my friend Henri is keeping well. I heard that his return from exile was a real triumph. With all those Parisians lining the streets and shouting his name, he must have felt great happiness! I read the account in l’Intransigeant. He sends it to me regularly although it reaches me late. Reading it brings back to my ears the sounds of Paris.’

Jamaladin spoke laboured but correct French. Sometimes I prompted the word he seemed to be looking for. When I was right, he thanked me and if not, he continued to rack his brains, contorting his lips and chin slightly. He carried on:

‘I lived in Paris in a room which was dark but which opened up on to a vast world. It was a hundred times smaller than this house but I was less cramped there. I was thousands of kilometres from my people but I worked for their advancement more efficiently than I can do here or in Persia. My voice was heard from Algiers to Kabul. Today only those who honour me with their visits can hear me. Of course they are always welcome, particularly if they come from Paris.’

‘I do not actually live in Paris. My mother is French and my name sounds French, but I am an American. I live in Maryland.’

This seemed to amuse him.

‘When I was expelled from India in 1882 I stopped off in the United States. Can you imagine that I even envisaged asking for American citizenship. You are smiling! Many of my fellow Muslims would be scandalised. The Sayyid Jamaladin, apostle of the Islamic renaissance, descendant of the Prophet, taking the citizenship of a Christian country? However, I was not ashamed of it and moreover I have told this story to my friend Wilfrid Blunt and authorized him to quote it in his memoirs. My justification is quite simple: there is no single corner of the whole of the Muslim world where I can live free from tyranny. In Persia I tried to take refuge in a sanctuary which traditionally benefits from full immunity, but the monarch’s soldiers came in and dragged me away from the hundreds of visitors who were listening to me, and with one unfortunate exception, almost no one moved or dared to protest. There is no religious site, university or shed where one can be protected from the reign of the arbitrary!‘

He feverishly stroked a painted wooden globe which rested on a low table before adding:

‘It is worse in Turkey. Am I not an official guest of Abdul-Hamid, the Sultan and Caliph? Did he not send me letter after letter, reproaching me, as the Shah did, for spending my life amongst infidels? I should have just replied: if you had not transformed our beautiful countries into prisons, we would have no need to find refuge with the Europeans! But I weakened and let myself be tricked. I came to Constantinople and you can see the result. In spite of the rules of hospitality, that half-mad man holds me prisoner. Lately I sent a message to him, saying “If I am your guest, give me permission to depart! If I am your prisoner, put shackles on my feet and throw me into a dungeon!” However, he did not deign to respond. If I had the citizenship of the United States, France or Austria-Hungary, never-mind that of Russia or England, my consul would have marched straight into the grand vizir’s office without knocking and he would have obtained my freedom within a half-hour. I tell you, we, the Muslims of this century, are orphans.’

He was breathless but made an effort to add:

‘You may write up everything that I have just said except that I called Sultan Abdul-Hamid half-mad. I do not wish to lose every last chance of flying out of this cage one day. Besides, it would be a lie since that man is almost completely mad, a dangerous criminal, pathologically suspicious and completely under the sway of his Aleppine astronomer.’

‘Have no fear, I shall write nothing of all this.’

I took advantage of his request to clear up a misunderstanding.

‘I must tell you that I am not a journalist. Monsieur Rochefort, who is my grandfather’s cousin, recommended that I come and see you, but the aim of my visit is not to write an article about Persia nor about yourself.’

I revealed to him my interest in the Khayyam manuscript and my intense desire to be able to leaf through it one day and to study its contents closely. He listened to me with unflagging attention and evident joy.

‘I am obliged to you for snatching me away from my woes for some moments. The subject that you mention has always gripped me. Have you read in Monsieur Nicholas’ introduction to the Rubaiyaat, the story of the three friends, Nizam al-Mulk, Hassan Sabbah and Omar Khayyam? They were radically different men, each of whom represented an eternal aspect of the Persian soul. Sometimes I have the impression that I am all three of them at the same time. Like Nizam al-Mulk I dream of establishing a great Muslim state, even if it were led by an unbearable Turkish sultan. Like Hassan Sabbah, I sow subversion over all the lands of Islam, I have disciples who would follow me to the death …’

He broke off, worried, then pulled himself together, smiled and carried on:

‘Like Khayyam, I am on the look-out for the rare joys of the present moment and I compose verses about wine, the cupbearer, the tavern and the beloved; like him, I mistrust false zealots. When, in certain quatrains, Omar speaks about himself, I sometimes believe that he is depicting me: “On our gaudy Earth there walks a man, neither rich nor poor, neither believer nor infidel, he courts no truth, venerates no law … On our gaudy Earth, who is this brave and sad man?”’

Having said that, he relit his cigar and became pensive. A small piece of glowing ash landed on his beard. He brushed if off with a practised gesture, and started speaking again:

‘Since my childhood I have had an immense admiration for Khayyam the poet, but above all the philosopher, the free-thinker. I am amazed that it took him so long to conquer Europe and America. You can imagine how happy I was to have in my possession the original book of the Rubaiyaat written in Khayyam’s own hand.’

‘When did you have it?’

‘It was offered to me fourteen years ago in India by a young Persian who had made the trip with the sole aim of meeting me. He introduced himself to me with the following words: “Mirza Reza, a native of Kirman, formerly a merchant in the Teheran Bazaar. Your obedient servant.” I smiled and asked him what he meant by saying “formerly a merchant”, and that is what led him to tell me his story. He had just opened a used clothing business when one of the Shah’s sons came to buy some merchandise, shawls and furs, to the value of eleven hundred toumans — about one thousand dollars. However, when Mirza Reza presented himself the next day to the Prince’s to be paid, he was insulted, beaten and even threatened with death if he took it into his head to collect what he was owed. It was then that he decided to come and see me. I was teaching in Calcutta. “I have just understood,” he told me, “that in a country run in an arbitrary fashion one cannot earn an honest living. Was it not you who wrote that Persia needs a Constitution and a Parliament? Consider me, from this day on, your most devoted disciple. I have shut my business and left my wife in order to follow you. Order and I shall obey!”’

In mentioning this man Jamaladin seemed to be suffering.

‘I was moved but embarrassed. I am a roving philosopher, I have neither house nor homeland and have avoided marrying in order that I would have no one in my charge. I did not want this man to follow me as if I were the Messiah or the Redeemer, the Mahdi. To dissuade him I said: “Is it really worth leaving everything, your business and your family, over a wretched question of money?” His face closed up, he did not respond, but went out.’

‘He returned only six months later. From an inside pocket he took out a small golden box, inlaid with precious stones, which he held out to me, open.’

‘Look at this manuscript. How much do you think it could be worth?’

‘I leafed through it, then discovered its contents as I trembled with emotion.’

‘The authentic text of Khayyam; those pictures, the embellishment! It is priceless!’

‘More than eleven hundred tomans?’

‘Infinitely more!’

‘I give it to you. Keep it. It was to remind you that Mirza Reza did not come to you to recover his money, but to regain his pride.’

‘That was how,’ Jamaladin continues, ‘the manuscript fell into my possession and that I could not be separated from it. It came with me to the United States, England, France, Germany, Russian and then to Persia. I had it with me when I withdrew into the sanctuary of Shah Abdul-Azim. That is where I lost it.’

‘Do you know where it could be at this moment?’

‘I told you, when I was apprehended only one man dared to stand up to the Shah’s soldiers and that was Mirza Reza. He stood up, shouted, cried and called the soldiers and all present cowards. He was arrested and tortured and spent more than four years in the dungeons. When he was released he came to see me in Constantinople. He was so ill that I made him go the French hospital in town where he stayed until last November. I tried to keep him longer, lest he be detained again on his return, but he refused. He said he wanted to retrieve the Khayyam Manuscript and that nothing else interested him. There are some people who drift from one obsession to the next.’

‘What is your feeling? Does the Manuscript still exist?’

‘Only Mirza Reza can give you that information. He believes he can find that soldier who spirited it away when I was arrested. He hoped to take it back from him. In any case, he was determined to go and see him and spoke of buying it back with God knows what money.’

‘If it is a question of retrieving the Manuscript, money is no problem!’

I had spoken with fervour. Jamaladin stared at me and frowned. He leant toward me as if he were about to listen to my heart.

‘I have the impression that you are no less fixated on this Manuscript than the unfortunate Mirza. In that case, there is only one path for you to follow. Go to Teheran! I cannot guarantee that you will uncover the book there, but, if you know how to look, perhaps you will find other traces of Khayyam.’

My spontaneous response seemed to confirm his diagnosis:

‘If I obtain a visa, I’ll be ready to go tomorrow.’

‘That is not an obstacle. I shall give you a note for the Persian consul in Baku. He will look after all the necessary formalities and even provide you with transport as far as Enzeli.’

My expression must have betrayed some worry. Jamaladin was amused by that.

‘Doubtless you are wondering: How can I give a recommendation from an outlaw to a representative of the Persian government? You should know that I have disciples everywhere, in every town, in all circles, even in the monarch’s close entourage. Four years ago, when I was in London, I and an American friend published a newspaper which was sent off to Persia in discreet little bundles. The Shah was alarmed by that. He summoned the Minister of Post and ordered him to put an end to this newspaper’s circulation, no matter what it took. The minister ordered the customs officers to intercept all the subversive packages at the frontier and send them on to his house.

He drew on his cigar and the smoke was scattered by a burst of laughter.

‘What the Shah did not know,’ Jamaladin continued, ‘was that his Minister of Post was one of my most faithful disciples and that I had entrusted him with distributing the newspaper as best he could.’

Jamaladin was chuckling as three visitors sporting blood-red felt fezzes arrived. He arose, greeted and kissed them and invited them to be seated and exchanged a few words with them in Arabic. I guessed that he was explaining to them who I was, and begging their forgiveness for a few moments more. He came back toward me.

‘If you are determined to set off for Teheran, I will give you some letters of introduction. Come tomorrow, they will be ready. Above all do not be afraid. No one will think of searching an American.’

The next day three brown envelopes were waiting for me. He laid them in my hand, open. The first was for the consul in Baku and the second for Mirza Reza. As he gave me that one, he made a comment:

‘I must warn you that this man is unbalanced and obsessive. Do not spend more time with him than you must. I have much affection for him, he is more sincere, more faithful and doubtless purer than all my disciples, but he is capable of the worst blunders.’

He sighed and dug his hand into the pocket of the wide pantaloons he was wearing under his white tunic.

‘Here are ten gold pounds. Give them to him from me; he no longer has anything and perhaps he is hungry, but he is too proud to beg.’

‘Where will I find him?’

‘I have not the slightest idea. He no longer has a house or a family and he roams from place to place. That is why I am giving you this third letter addressed to another quite different young man. He is the son of the richest trader in Teheran, and although he is only twenty and burns with the same fire as we all do, he is still even-tempered and ready to debate the most revolutionary ideas with the smile of a satisfied child. I sometimes reproach him for not being very oriental. You will see, beneath his Persian clothing there is English cool, French ideas and a more anti-clerical spirit than that of Monsieur Clemenceau. His name is Fazel. It is he who will take you to Mirza Reza. I have charged Fazel with keeping an eye on him, as much as possible. I do not think that he can stop him committing his acts of folly, but he will know where to find him.’

I stood up to leave. He bad me a fond farewell and kept hold of my hand in his own.

‘Rochefort tells me in his letter that you are called Benjamin Omar. In Persia only use the name Benjamin. Never say the word Omar.’

‘But it is Khayyam’s name!’

‘Since the sixteenth century, when Persia converted to Shiism, that name has been banned. It could cause you much trouble. If you try to identify with the Orient, you could find yourself caught up in its quarrels.’

I made an expression of regret and consolation, a sign of impotence. I thanked him for his advice and made to leave, but he caught hold of me:

‘One last thing. Yesterday you met a young person here as she was getting ready to leave. Did you speak to her?’

‘No. I had no occasion to.’

‘She is the Shah’s grand-daughter, Princess Shireen. If, for whatever reason, you find all the doors shut, get a message to her and remind her that you saw her here. One word from her will be enough to overcome many obstacles.’

CHAPTER 29

On board a ship to Trebizond, the Black Sea was calm, too calm. The wind blew only lightly and for hours on end one could contemplate only the same piece of coast, the same rock or the same Anatolian copse. It would have been wrong of me to complain, I needed some peace and quiet given the arduous task that I had to accomplish: to memorise the whole book of Persian-French dialogue written by Monsieur Nicolas, Khayyam’s translator. I had resolved to speak to my hosts in their own language. I was not unaware of the fact that in Persia, as in Turkey, many of the intellectuals, the merchants and the high officials spoke French. Some even knew English. However, if one wanted to move outside the restricted circle of the palaces and the legations, and travel outside the main cities or in their seedier districts, it had to be done in Persian.

The challenge stimulated and amused me. I delighted in discovering affinities with my own language, as well as with various Romance languages. Father, mother, brother, daughter in Persian were ‘pedar’, ‘madar’ ‘baradar’ and ‘dokhtar’, and the common Indo-european roots can hardly be better illustrated. Even in naming God, the Muslims of Persia say ‘Khoda’, a term much closer to the English ‘God’ or the German ‘Gott’ than to ‘Allah’. In spite of this example, the predominate influence is that of Arabic which is exercised in a curious way: many Persian words can be replaced arbitrarily by their Arabic equivalent. It is even a form of cultural snobbery, much appreciated by intellectuals, to pepper their speech with terms, or with whole phrases, in Arabic — a practice of which Jamaladin was particularly fond.

I resolved myself to apply myself to Arabic later, but for the moment I had enough on my plate trying to understand Monsieur Nicholas’ texts, which apart from a knowledge of Persian was providing me with useful information about the country. It was full of conversations such as:

‘Which products could one export from Persia?’

‘Shawls from Kirman, fine pearls, turquoise, carpets, tobacco from Shiraz, silks from Mazanderan, leeches and cherrywood pipes.’

‘When travelling, should a cook be taken along?’

‘Yes, in Persia one cannot move without a cook, a bed, carpets and servants.’

‘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.

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 Alexandria 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.’

‘How do you know what the Sultan might have said to Jamaladin in private?’

‘Sayyid Jamaladin himself told me. He trusted me and hid nothing from me. When I was in Constantinople he treated me like his own son.’

‘If you were so well treated there why did you come back to Persia where you feared being arrested and tortured?’

‘I am one of those who believe that no leaf falls from a tree unless that has been planned and inscribed, since the beginning of time, in the Book of Destiny. It was written that I would come to Persia and would be the tool for the act which has just been carried out.’

CHAPTER 32

If those men who strolled about on Yildiz Hill, all around Jamaladin’s house, had written on their fezzes ‘Sultan’s spy’, they would not have given away any more than what the most artless of visitors took in at first glance. Perhaps, however, that was their real purpose in being there: to discourage visitors. In fact, the residence, which usually swarmed with disciples, foreign correspondents and various personages who were in town, was totally deserted on that close September day. Only the servant was there, as discreet as ever. He led me to the first floor where the Master was to be found, pensive and distant and slumped deep in a cretonne and velvet armchair.

When he saw me arrive his face lit up. He came toward me with great strides and held me to him, apologizing for the trouble he had caused and saying that he was happy that I had been able to extricate myself. I described to him my escape in the smallest detail, and how the Princess had intervened, before returning to tell him of my too brief meeting with Fazel and then with Mirza Reza. The very mention of the latter’s name irritated Jamaladin.

‘I have just been informed that he was hanged last month. May God forgive him! Naturally he knew what his fate would be and could only have been surprised by the length of time it took to execute him — more than a hundred days after the Shah’s death! Doubtless they tortured him to extract a confession.’

Jamaladin spoke slowly. He seemed to have grown weak and thin; his face which was usually so serene was beset with twitches which at times disfigured him without detracting from his magnetism. One had the impression that he was suffering, particularly when he spoke of Mirza Reza.

‘I can hardly believe it of that poor boy, whom I had looked after there in Constantinople, whose hand never stopped shaking and who seemed incapable of holding a cup of tea — that he could hold a pistol and fell the Shah with one shot. Do you not think that they might be exploiting his unbalanced mind to pin someone else’s crime on him?’

I replied by handing him the cross-examination which the Princess had copied out. He put on a slim pair of pince-nez and read and re-read it with fervour, or was it terror, or, it seemed to me from time to time, a sort of inner joy. Then he folded it up, slipped it into his pocket and proceeded to pace up and down the room. There were ten minutes of silence before he uttered this curious prayer:

‘Mirza Reza, lost child of Persia! Would that you had simply been mad, would that you had just been wise! If only you had been content to betray me or to remain faithful to me, to inspire tenderness or revulsion! How can we love or hate you? And God Himself, what will He do with you? Will He raise you up to the victims’ Paradise or relegate you to hangman’s hell?’

He came and sat down again, exhausted, with his face buried in his hands. I remained silent, and even made myself breathe more quietly. Jamaladin sat up. His voice seemed calmer and his mood more lucid.

‘The words I read are indeed Mirza Reza’s. Until now I still had my doubts, but I do not any more. He is definitely the assassin. He probably thought he was acting to avenge me. Perhaps he thought he was obeying me. However, contrary to what he believes, I never gave him an order to murder. When he came to Constantinople to tell me how he had been tortured by the Shah’s son and his cohorts his tears were flowing. Wanting to shake him out of it, I told him: “Now stop whining! People will say that you just want them to feel sorry for you, that you would even mutilate yourself so that they will feel sorry for you!” I told him an old legend: when the armies of Darius confronted those of Alexander the Great, the Greek’s counsellors brought to his attention that the troups of the Persians were much more numerous than his. Alexander kept his poise and shrugged. “My men,” he said, “fight to win. The men of Darius fight to die!”’

Jamaladin seemed to be racking his memory.

‘That is when I told Mirza Reza: “If the Shah’s son is persecuting you, destroy him, instead of destroying yourself!” Was that really a call to murder? Do you, who know Mirza Reza, really think that I could have entrusted such a mission to a madman whom a thousand people may have met here in this very house?’

I wanted to be honest.

‘You are not capable of the crime they are attributing to you, but your moral responsibility cannot be denied.’

He was touched by my frankness.

‘That I admit. Just as I admit that daily I wished that the Shah would die. But what use is it for me to defend myself. I am a condemned man.’

He went over to a small chest and took out a sheet with some fine calligraphy on it.

‘This morning I wrote my will.’

He placed the text in my hands and I read it with emotion:

‘I do not suffer from being kept prisoner. I have no fear of death being near. My only source of sorrow is having to state that I have not seen blossom the seeds I have sown. Tyranny continues to oppress the peoples of the Orient and obscurantism still stifles their freedom cry. Perhaps I would have been more successful if I had planted my seeds in the fertile soil of the people rather than in the arid soil of royal courts. And you, people of Persia, in whom I placed my greatest hopes, do not think that by eliminating a man you can win your freedom. It is the weight of secular tradition that you must dare to shake.’

‘Keep a copy of it and translate it for Henri Rochefort. L’lntransigeant is the only newspaper which still holds me innocent. The others treat me as an assassin. The whole world wants my death. Let them be reassured — I have cancer. Cancer of the jaw.’

As with every time that his resolve weakened and he complained, he tried to make up for it on the spot by giving a forced laugh of unconcern and making a learned jest.

‘Cancer, cancer, cancer,’ he repeated as if in warning. ‘In the past doctors attributed illnesses to the conjunctions of the stars, but only cancer has kept its astrological name, in all languages. The fear is still there.’

He remained pensive and melancholy for a few moments, but then hurried to carry on, in a happier vein which was blatantly affected but, for all that, more poignant.

‘I curse this cancer. Yet nothing says that it is the cancer which will kill me. The Shah is demanding my extradition: the Sultan cannot hand me over since I am still his guest, but be cannot let a regicide go unpunished. He has hated the Shah and his dynasty to no avail, plotted against him every day, but members of the brother-hood of the great of this world bolster each other against an intruder like Jamaladin. What is the solution? The Sultan will have me kill myself, and the new Shah will be comforted, since, in spite of his repeated requests for my extradition, he has no wish to stain his hands with my blood at the outset of his reign. Who will kill me? The cancer? The Shah? The Sultan? Perhaps I will never have the time to know. But you, my friend, you will know.’

He then had the gall to laugh!

In fact I never knew. The circumstances surrounding the death of the great reformer of the Orient remained a mystery. I heard the news a few months after my return to Annapolis. A notice in the 12 March 1897 edition of l’Intransigeant informed me of his death three days earlier. It was only towards the end of the summer, when the promised letter from Shireen arrived, that I heard the version of Jamaladin’s death which was current among his disciples. ‘For some months he had been suffering from raging tooth-ache,’ she wrote, ‘no doubt caused by his cancer. That day, as the pain had become unbearable, he sent his servant to the Sultan who sent over his own dentist who listened to Jamaladin’s chest, unwrapped a syringe which he had already prepared and gave him an injection in the gums while explaining that the pain would soon die down. Hardly a few seconds passed before the Master’s jaw swelled up. Seeing him suffocating, the servant ran off to bring back the dentist, who had not yet left the house, but instead of coming back the man started to run as fast as he could towards the carriage which was waiting for him. Sayyid Jamaladin died a few minutes later. In the evening, agents of the Sultan came to take away his body, which was hurriedly washed and buried.’ The princess’s account finished, without any transition, by quoting words from Khayyam which she had carefully translated: ‘Those who have amassed so much information, who have guided us towards knowledge, are they themselves not swamped by doubt? They tell a story and then go to bed.’

As to the fate of the Manuscript, which was her purpose in writing to me, Shireen informed me in rather terse terms: ‘It was in fact amongst the murderer’s belongings. It is now with me. You may consult it at your leisure when you return to Persia.’

Return to Persia, where I had aroused so many suspicions?

CHAPTER 33

I had retained from my Persian adventure nothing but cravings. It had taken me one month to get to Teheran and three months to get out. I had spent a few days, which were both brief and numb, in its streets, having hardly had the time to breathe in the smells, or to get to know or see anything. Too many images were still calling me toward the forbidden land: my proud kalyan smoker’s sluggishness, lording it over the whisps of smoke rising from the charcoal in the copper holders; my hand closing around Shireen’s, a promise; my lips on breasts chastely offered by my mother of an evening and more than anything else, the Manuscript which awaited me lying in its guardian’s arms with its pages open.

To those who may never have contracted the obsession with the Orient, I scarcely dare mention that on Saturday at dusk I took myself out for a walk on a stretch of the Annapolis beach that I knew would be deserted, wearing a pair of Turkish slippers, my Persian robe and a lambskin kulah hat. There was no one on the beach, and immersed in my daydreams on my way back I made a detour via Compromise Road which was not at all quiet. ‘Good evening Mr Lesage,’ ‘Have a nice walk. Mr Lesage.’ ‘Good evening Mrs Baymaster, Miss Highchurch,’ the greetings rang out, ‘Good evening Reverend.’ It was the pastor’s raised eyebrows which brought me back to myself. I stopped dead in order to look contritely at myself from my chest to my feet, to feel my headgear and hurry on my way. I think I even ran, draped in my aba as if to cover my nakedness. Once home I tore off my attire, rolled it up with a gesture of finality and then tossed it angrily to the back of a broom cupboard.

I was on my guard not to do the same again, but that one walk had labelled me an eccentric — a label which doubtless would be with me for life. In England eccentrics have always been viewed sympathetically or even admiringly, as long as they had the excuse of being rich. America, in those years, was hardly ready for such behaviour; the country was approaching the turn of the century with a certain prudish reticence — perhaps not in New York or San Francisco, but certainly in my town. A French mother and a Persian hat — that was far too exotic for Annapolis.

That was the dark side, but my moment of folly also had its bright moments. It won me, on the spot, an undeserved reputation as a great explorer of the Orient. The director of the local newspaper, Matthias Webb, who had got wind of my walk, suggested that I write an article about my experience in Persia.

The last time that the name of Persia had been printed on the pages of the Annapolis Gazette and Herald was back to 1856, I believe, when a transatlantic liner, which was the pride of Cunard and the first ever metal-framed paddle-boat, collided with an iceberg. Seven sailors from our county perished. The unfortunate ship was called the Persia.

Sea-faring people do not play games with the signs of destiny. I also thought it necessary to remark in the introduction to my article that the term ‘Persia’ was incorrect, and that the Persians themselves called their country ‘Iran’ which was an abbreviation of a very ancient expression ‘Aïrania Vaedja’, meaning ‘Land of the Aryans’.

I then mentioned Omar Khayyam, the only Persian that most of my readers might have heard of, quoting one of his quatrains which was imbued with a deep scepticism. ‘Paradise and Hell. Might someone have visited these unique regions?’ It provided a useful preamble before I expounded over the course of some dense paragraphs on the numerous religions which, since the dawn of time, have prospered on Persian soil, such as Zoroastrianism, Manicheism, Sunni and Shiite Islam, Hassan Sabbah’s Ismaili variant and nearer our time, the babis, the sheikhis and the bahais. I did not omit to mentioned that our word ‘paradise’ comes originally from the Persian word ‘paradaeza’ which means ‘garden’.

Matthias Webb congratulated me on my apparent erudition, but when I become encouraged by his praise and suggested making a more regular contribution he seemed embarrassed and suddenly irritated.

‘I really would like to put you to the test, if you will promise to drop this annoying habit of peppering your text with barbarian words!’

My face betrayed my surprise and incredulity. Webb had his reasons.

‘The Gazette does not have the means to take on, permanently, a Persian specialist. However, if you agree to take charge of all the foreign news, and if you think you are capable of making distant countries accessible to our compatriots, there is a place for you on this newspaper. What your articles lose in profundity they will gain in range.’

We both managed to smile again; he offered me a peace cigar before continuing:

‘Just yesterday, abroad did not exist for us. The Orient stopped at Cape Cod. Now suddenly, under the pretext of the end of one century and the start of another, our peaceful city has been laid hold of by the world’s troubles.’

I must point out that our discussion was taking place in 1899, a little after the Spanish-American war which took our troops not only to Cuba and Puerto Rico but also the Philippines. Never before had the United States exercised its authority so far from its shores. Our victory over the dilapidated Spanish empire had cost us only two thousand four hundred dead, but in Annapolis, seat of the Naval Academy, every loss could have been that of a relative, a friend or an actual or potential fiancé; the most conservative of my fellow citizens saw in President MacKinley a dangerous adventurer.

That was not Webb’s opinion at all, but he had to pander to his readers’ phobias. To get the point over to me, this serious and greying pater-familias stood up, uttered a roar, pulled a hilarious face and curled his fingers up as if they were the claws of a monster.

‘The tough world outside is striding towards Annapolis, and your mission, Benjamin Lesage, is to reassure your compatriots.’

It was a heavy responsibility, of which I acquitted myself without too much ado. My sources of information were articles in newspapers from Paris, London and of course New York, Washington and Baltimore. Out of everything I wrote about the Boer War, the 1904-5 conflict between the Tsar and the Mikado or the troubles in Russia, I am afraid that not a single line deserves to go down in history.

It was only on the subject of Persia that my career as a journalist can be mentioned. I am proud to say that the Gazette was the first American newspaper to foresee the explosion which was going to take place and news of which was going to occupy much column space in the last months of 1906 in all the world’s newspapers. For the first, and probably the last, time articles from the Annapolis Gazette and Herald were quoted, often even reproduced verbatim in more than sixty newspapers in the South and on the East Coast.

My town and newspaper owe that much to me. And I owe it to Shireen. It was in fact thanks to her, and not to my meagre experience in Persia that I was able to understand the full extent of the events which were brewing.

I had not received anything from my princess for over seven years. If she owed me a response on the matter of the Manuscript, she had supplied me with one which was frustrating but precise. I did not expect to hear anything more from her, which does not mean that I was not hoping to. With every mail delivery the idea ran through my mind and I looked over the envelopes for her handwriting, for a stamp with Persian writing, a number five which was shaped like a heart. I did not dread my daily disappointment, but experienced it as a homage to dreams which were still haunting me.

I have to say that at that time my family had just left Annapolis and settled in Baltimore where my father’s most important business was to be concentrated. He envisaged founding his own bank along with two of his young brothers. As for me, I had decided to stay in the house where I was born, with our old half-deaf cook, in a city where I had few good friends. I do not doubt that my solitude amplified the fervour of my waiting.

Then, one day, Shireen finally wrote to me. There was not a word about the Samarkand Manuscript and nothing personal in the long letter, except perhaps the fact that she began it with ‘Dear distant friend’. There followed a day-by-day report of the events unfolding around her. Her account abounded in painstaking details, none of which was superfluous, even when they seemed so to my vulgar eyes. I was in love with her wonderful intellect and flattered that she had chosen to direct the fruit of her thoughts to me of all men.

From that moment I lived to the rhythm of her monthly letters, which were a vibrant chronicle and which I would have published as they were if she had not demanded absolute discretion from me. She did authorize me, however, to use the information contained in them, which I did shamelessly, drawing on them and sometimes translating and using whole passages with neither italics nor quotation marks.

My way of presenting the facts to my readers, however, differed greatly from hers. For example, the princess never would have thought of writing:

‘The Persian revolution was triggered when a Belgian minister had the disastrous idea of disguising himself as a mullah.’

That, however, was not so far from the truth, although for Shireen the beginnings of the revolt were discernible at the time of the Shah’s course of treatment at Contrexéville in 1900. Wanting to go there with his retinue, the Shah needed money. His treasury was empty as usual and he had asked the Tsar for a loan and was granted 22.5 million roubles.

There was almost never such a poisoned gift. In order to make sure that their neighbour to the south, who was permanently on the brink of bankruptcy, would be able to pay back such a large sum, the St Petersburg authorities demanded and succeeded in gaining control of the Persian customs whose receipts were now to be paid directly to them. For a period of seventy-five years! Aware of the enormity of this privilege and fearing lest the other European powers take umbrage at this complete control over the foreign trade of Persia, the Tsar avoided entrusting the customs to his own subjects and preferred to have King Leopold II take charge of them on his behalf. That is how thirty or so Belgian functionaries came to the Shah’s court and their influence was to grow to dizzy heights. The most eminent of them, namely a certain Monsieur Naus, managed to haul himself up to the highest spheres of power. On the eve of the revolution, he was a member of the Supreme Council of the Kingdom, Minister of Post and Telegraph, General Treasurer of Persia, Head of the Passport Department and Director General of the Customs. Amongst other things, his job was to reorganize the whole fiscal system and it was to him that the new tax on freight carried by mule was attributed.

It goes without saying that by that time Monsieur Naus had become the most hated man in Persia, the symbol of foreign control. From time to time a voice would arise to demand his recall, a demand which seemed the more justified as he had neither a reputation for incorruptibility nor the alibi of competence. However he stayed in place, supported by the Tsar, or rather by the retrograde and fearsome camarilla who surrounded the latter and whose political objectives were now being expressed aloud in the official press of St Petersburg — the exercise of undivided tutelage over Persia and the Persian Gulf.

Monsieur Naus’s position seemed unshakeable and it remained so until the moment his protector was shaken. That happened more quickly than anyone in Persia had dreamt and it was precipitated by two major events. First, the war with Japan, which to the whole world’s surprise ended with the defeat of the Tsar and the destruction of this fleet. Then the anger of the Russians which was fuelled by the humiliation inflicted upon them because of incompetent leaders: the Potemkin rebellion, the Cronstadt mutiny, the Sebastopol uprising and the events in Moscow. I shall not discuss in detail these facts which no one has yet forgotten, but I shall content myself by emphasising the devastating effect that they had on Persia, in particularly in April 1906 when Nicolas II was forced to convene a parliament, the Duma.

It was in this atmosphere that the most banal event occurred. A masked ball was held at the residence of a Belgian functionary which Monsieur Naus decided to attend dressed up as a mullah. There were chuckles, laughs and applause; people gathered around him to congratulate him and posed for photographs with him. A few days later hundreds of copies of this picture were being distributed in the Teheran bazaar.

CHAPTER 34

Shireen had sent me a copy of this document. I still have it and sometimes I still cast a nostalgic and amused glance at it. It shows, seated on a carpet spread out amongst the trees of a garden, about forty men and women dressed in Turkish, Japanese or Austrian garb. In the centre foreground appears Monsieur Naus, so well disguised that with his white beard and salt-and-pepper moustache he could easily be taken for a pious patriarch. Shireen had written on the back of the photograph: ‘Unpunished for so many crimes, penalized for a trifle.’

It assuredly was not Monsieur Naus’s intention to mock the religious. On that occasion he could only be found guilty of naïveté, of a lack of tact and a touch of bad taste. His real mistake, since he was acting as the Tsar’s Trojan horse, was not understanding that, for a while, he should allow himself to lie low.

The distribution of the picture caused some angry gatherings and some incidents. The bazaar shut its gates. First of all Naus’s departure was demanded, then that of the whole government. Tracts were handed out demanding the institution of a parliament, as in Russia. For years secret societies had been at work amongst the population, invoking the name of Jamaladin and sometimes even that of Mirza Reza, and were now transformed by circumstances into a symbol of the struggle against absolutism.

The Cossacks surrounded the districts in the centre of the city. Certain rumours, propagated by the authorities, gave out that unprecedented repression was about to fall upon the protesters and that the bazaar would be opened by the armed forces and left for the troops to pillage — a menace which had terrified the merchants for centuries.

That is why, on 19 July 1906, a delegation of tradesman and money-changers from the bazaar went to see the British chargé d’affaires on a matter or urgency: if people in danger of being arrested were to come and take refuge in the legation, would they be afforded protection? The response was positive. The visitors retired showing expressions of gratitude and making solemn bows.

That very evening, my friend Fazel presented himself at the legation with a group of friends and was enthusiastically received. Although he was hardly thirty years old, he was, as his father’s heir, already one of the richest merchants in the bazaar. However, his rank was even more elevated by his vast culture and his influence was great amongst his peers. To a man of his status, the British diplomats had to offer one of the rooms reserved for visitors of distinction. However, he turned down the offer and, mentioning the heat, expressed his desire to install himself in the legation’s vast garden. He said that he had brought with him a tent for that purpose, along with a small carpet and a few books. Tight-lipped and frowning, his hosts watched as all these items were unpacked.

The next day thirty other merchants came in the same way to profit from the right of asylum. Three days later, on 23 July, there were eight hundred and sixty. By 26 July there were five thousand — and twelve thousand by 1 August.

This Persian town planted in an English garden was a strange sight. There were tents all around, clustered together by guild. Life there had been speedily organized with a kitchen being set up behind the guards pavilion from which enormous cauldrons were sent around to the different ‘districts’, each sitting lasting three hours.

There was no disorder and very little noise. Taking refuge, or taking bast as the Persians say, means giving oneself over to a strictly passive resistance in the shelter of a sanctuary of which there were several in the area of Teheran: the mausoleum of Shah Adbul-Azim, the royal stables, and the smallest bast of all, the wheeled cannon in Topkhane Square — if a fugitive clung to it, the forces of order no longer had any right to lay hands on him. However, Jamaladin’s experience had shown that the powers that be would not tolerate this form of protest for long. The only immunity that they recognised was that of the foreign legations.

To the English, every refugee had brought his kalyan and his dreams. From tent to tent there was a world of difference. Around Fazel was the modernist elite; they were not just a handful but hundreds of young and old men, organized into anjuman — which were more or less secret societies. Their debates raged ceaselessly around the topics of Japan, Russia and particularly France whose language they spoke and whose books and newspapers they assiduously read — the France of Saint-Simon, Robespierre, Rousseau and Waldeck-Rousseau. Fazel had carefully cut out the section of the law on the separation of church and state which had been voted on a year earlier in Paris. He had translated it and handed it out to his friends and they were now debating it heatedly albeit in hushed tones, for not far from their circle there was a gathering of mullahs.

The clergy itself was divided. One party rejected everything which came from Europe including the very idea of democracy, parliament and modernity. ‘How,’ they said, ‘could we need a constitution when we have the Quran?’ To which the modernists replied that the Book had left to men the task of governing themselves democratically since it declared, ‘Let your affairs be a matter of mutual consent.’ Cunningly they added that if, upon the death of the Prophet, the Muslims had a constitution organizing the institutions of their embryonic state, they would not have seen the bloody struggles for succession which led to the ousting of the Imam Ali.

Beyond the debate on doctrine, the majority of the mullahs nevertheless accepted the idea of a constitution to put an end to the arbitrary nature of royal rule. Having come in their hundreds to take bast, they delighted in comparing their act to the Prophet’s migration to Medina and the sufferings of the people to those of Hussein, the son of Imam Ali, whose passion is the closest Muslim equivalent to that of Christ. In the legation’s gardens, professional mourners, the rozeh-khwan, recounted to their audience the sufferings of Hussein. People cried, flagellated themselves, and grieved unrestrainedly for Hussein, for themselves and for a Persia which was astray in a hostile world and had sunk over the centuries into unending decadence.

Fazel’s friends distanced themselves from these displays. Jamaladin had taught them to feel disdain for the rozeh-khwan. They could only listen to them with worried condescension.

I was struck by a cold reflection written by Shireen in one of her letters. ‘Persia is ill,’ she wrote. ‘There are several doctors at her bedside, some modern and some traditional and each one offers his own remedies. The future belongs to him who can effect a cure. If this revolution triumphs, the mullahs will have to turn themselves into democrats; if it fails, the democrats will have to turn themselves into mullahs.’

For the moment they were all in the same trench, in the same garden. On 7 August, the legation counted sixteen thousand bastis, the streets of the city were empty and any merchant of renown had ‘emigrated’. The Shah had to give in. On 15 August, less than a month from the start of the bast, he announced that elections would be organized to elect a national consultative assembly by direct suffrage in Teheran and indirect suffrage in the provinces.

The first parliament in the history of Persia met on 7 October. To read out the Shah’s speech, he judiciously sent a veteran opponent, Prince Malkom Khan, an Armenian from Isfahan and a companion of Jamaladin, the very same man who had put him up during his stay in London. He was a magnificent old man in the British mould who had dreamt throughout his whole life of standing in front of Parliament as he read out the speech of a constitutional sovereign to the representatives of the people.

Those who wish to examine this page of history more closely should not look for the name of Malkom Khan in documents of the time. Today, as in the time of Khayyam, Persia does not remember its leaders by their names, but by their titles, such as ‘Sun of the Kingdom’, ‘Pillar of the Religion’ or ‘Shadow of the Sultan’. To the man who had the honour of inaugurating the era of democracy the most prestigious title of all was given: Nizam al-Mulk. Disconcerting Persia, so immutable in its convulsions but how unchanged after so many metamorphoses!

CHAPTER 35

It was a privilege to be present at the awakening of the Orient. It was a moment of intense emotion, enthusiasm and doubt. What ideas, both brilliant and monstrous, had been able to sprout in its sleeping brain? What would it do as it woke up? Was it going to pounce blindly upon those who had shaken it? I was receiving letters from readers with anguished requests that I look into the future. They still remembered the Boxer Revolt in Peking in 1900, the foreign diplomats who were taken hostage, the troubles the expeditionary force came up against with the old Empress, the fearsome Daughter of Heaven, and they were afraid of Asia. Would Persia be any different? I replied with a definite ‘yes’, putting my trust in the emerging democracy. A constitution had just been promulgated in fact, as well as a charter of rights for the citizens. Clubs were coming into being every day, as well as newspapers — ninety dailies and weeklies in the space of a few months. They were entitled Civilization, Equality, Liberty, or more pompously Trumpets of the Resurrection. They were frequently quoted in the British press or the opposition Russian newspapers such as the liberal Ryesh and Sovremenny Mir which was close to the social democrats. A satirical newspaper met with overwhelming success from its very first issue. Its cartoonists’ favourite targets were the shady courtiers, agents of the Tsar and, above all, the false zealots.

Shireen was jubilant: ‘Last Friday,’ she wrote, ‘some young mullahs tried to raise a mob in the bazaar. They called the constitution a heretical innovation and tried to incite the crowd to march on Baharistan, the seat of the Parliament — but without success. They shouted themselves hoarse, but to no avail since the townspeople remained indifferent. From time to time a man would stop, listen to the end of some piece of invective and then walk off shrugging his shoulders. Finally three of the city’s most respected ulema arrived and with no further ado invited the preachers to go home by the shortest route and to keep their eyes cast below knee level. I can hardly believe it — fanaticism is dead in Persia.’

I used this last phrase as the title of my best article. I was so imbued with the Princess’s enthusiasm that what I wrote was a real act of faith. The director of the Gazette suggested that I make it more balanced, but the readers approved of my ardour, judging by the ever-increasing number of letters I was receiving.

One of them bore the signature of a certain Howard C. Baskerville, a student at Princeton University in New Jersey. He had just received his BA and wanted to go to Persia to observe the events which I was describing. One of his expressions had stopped me in my tracks: ‘I bear the deep conviction that if, at the beginning of this century, the Orient does not manage to wake up, the West soon will not be able to sleep any more.’ In my reply I encouraged him to make this trip and promised to provide him, when he had made his decision, with the names of some friends who would be able to receive him.

A few weeks later, Baskerville came to Annapolis to tell me in person that he had obtained the position of teacher in Tabriz at the Memorial Boys’ School which was run by the American Presbyterian Mission; he was to teach young boys English and science. He was leaving immediately and requested advice and letters of recommendation. I eagerly congratulated him and promised, without thinking too much about it, to stop by and see him should I be in Persia.

I was not thinking of going there so soon. It was not that I lacked the desire to do so, but I was still hesitant about making the trip because of the spurious accusations which were hanging over me. Was I not considered an accomplice to a regicide? In spite of the rapid changes which had taken place in Teheran, I feared being arrested at the border because of some dusty warrant and not being able to notify my friends or my legation.

Baskerville’s departure nevertheless prodded me into taking some steps to straighten out my position. I had promised never to write to Shireen, and not wishing to risk the loss of her letters, I wrote to Fazel whose influence I knew to be growing daily. In the National Assembly where the big decisions were made he was the most sought-after deputy.

His answer reached me three months later. It was warm and friendly and most importantly it was accompanied by an official paper bearing the seal of the Ministry of Justice and stating that I had been cleared of all suspicion of complicity in the assassination of the old Shah and accordingly I was authorized to travel freely throughout all the provinces of Persia.

Without waiting a second longer I set off for Marseille and from there to Salonika and Constantinople and then Trebizond. Riding a mule, I skirted around Mount Ararat and finally reached Tabriz.

I arrived there a on a hot June day. I settled myself into the caravansary in the Armenian quarter as the sun was level with the roof-tops. However I was eager to see Baskerville as soon as I could, and with this intention I went off to the Presbyterian Mission which was a low sprawling building freshly painted brilliant white and set amongst a forest of apricot trees. There were two discreet crosses on the gate, and on the roof above the main doorway there was a banner studded with stars.

A Persian gardener came to meet me and take me to the office of the pastor who was a large red-haired man with a beard and the looks of a sailor. He gave me a firm and welcoming handshake. Before even asking me to take a seat he offered me a bed for the duration of my stay.

‘We have rooms which we keep prepared for our countrymen who surprise us and honour us with their visits. You are not being accorded any special treatment. I am just happy to be able to follow a custom which has been practised as long as this mission has been in existence.’

I expressed my sincere regrets.

‘I have already placed my baggage at the caravansary and I am planning to move on the day after tomorrow to Teheran.’

‘Tabriz deserves more than one hurried day. How can you come this far without agreeing to spend an idle day or two in the labyrinths of the largest bazaar in the orient or without going to see the ruins of the Blue Mosque which was mentioned in the Thousand and One Nights? Travellers are in too great a rush these days, in a rush to arrive — whatever it takes. But you do not arrive only at your destination. At every stage of the journey you arrive somewhere and with every step you can discover a hidden facet of our planet. All you have to do is look, wish, believe and love.’

He seemed sincerely upset that I was such a bad traveller and I felt obliged to justify myself.

‘In fact I have some urgent work to do in Teheran. I only made a detour via Tabriz in order to see a friend of mine who is teaching at your mission, Howard Baskerville.’

At the mere mention of this name the atmosphere became heavy. There was no more joviality, animation or paternal reproach. Only an embarrassed look which I took to be evasive and utter silence. Then he spoke:

‘Are you a friend of Howard’s?’

‘In a manner of speaking, I am responsible for his coming to Persia.’

‘What a heavy responsibility!’

In vain I tried to make out a smile on his lips. He seemed suddenly old and worn. His shoulders drooped and he seemed almost to be entreating me.

‘I have been running this mission for fifteen years. Our school is the best in the city and I go so far as to believe that our work is useful and Christian. Those who take part in our activities have at heart this country’s progress, otherwise, believe you me, nothing would force them to come so far in order to take on an environment which is often hostile.’

I had no reason to doubt him, but this man’s eagerness to defend himself put me off him. I had only been in his office for a few minutes, I had not accused him of anything and had not asked him for anything. I merely nodded politely. He continued:

‘When a missionary displays indifference towards the difficulties facing the Persians or when a teacher no longer derives any joy from his students’ progress, I strongly advise him to go back to the United States. Sometimes enthusiasm sags, above all with the younger teachers. What could be more human?’

Having spoken this preamble, the reverend sat silent and his stubby hands nervously fingered his pipe. He seemed to be having difficulty in finding his words. I thought it my duty to make the task easier for him. I adopted my most detached tone:

‘Are you trying to say that Howard has become discouraged after these few months and that his love of the East has turned out to be a passing fancy?’

He jumped up.

‘Good Lord, no. Not Baskerville! I was trying to explain what happens occasionally with some of our recruits. With your friend it is the opposite and I am infinitely more worried by that. In one sense, he is the best teacher we have ever employed. His students are making wonderful progress, their parents swear by him and the mission has never received so many presents — sheep, chicken, halva — all in honour of Baskerville. The problem with him is that he refuses to behave like a foreigner. If he were just happy to dress like the people here, to live on pilau and to greet me in the vernacular of the country, I would have been happy to smile at all that. But Baskerville is not the sort of man who stops at appearances and he has thrown himself wholeheartedly into the political battle. In class he praises the constitution and encourages his students to criticize the Russians, the English and the Shah and the backward-looking mullahs. I even suspect him of being what they call here a ‘son of Adam’, that is to say a member of the secret societies.’

He sighed.

‘Yesterday morning a demonstration took place in front of our gate, led by two of the most eminent religious chiefs, demanding that Baskerville leave or, failing that, purely and simply that the mission close down. Three hours later another demonstration broke out in the same spot in support of Howard demanding that he be kept on. You must understand that if a conflict like this goes on we will not be able to stay in this city much longer.’

‘I suppose that you have already spoken of this with Howard.’

‘A hundred times, and a hundred different ways. He invariably replies that the reawakening of the Orient is more important than the Mission’s fate and that if the constitutional revolution fails we will be obliged to leave in any case. Naturally I can always end his contract, but such an act will not be understood and will only arouse hostility amongst that section of the population which has always supported us. The only solution is for Baskerville to cool his ardour. Perhaps you can reason with him?’

While not formally agreeing to the undertaking, I asked to see Howard. A glimmer of triumph suddenly lit up the reverend’s ginger beard. He jumped up from his seat.

‘Follow me,’ he said. ‘I shall show you Baskerville. I believe I know where he is. Watch him in silence — you will understand my reasons and share my feelings of helplessness.’