The King

39. Malijak

The country seemed unruffled, but just the opposite was true. The vizier’s opponents said his death and the arrest of his supporters had saved the country from misfortune. But they had no idea what the vizier’s death had unleashed. A wave of resistance slowly spread across the land.

It was at this time that Sharmin went missing. The shah looked everywhere for her, but she seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth. He suspected that the women had stolen his cat to avenge the death of the vizier, so he asked the overseer of the harem to search all the rooms. But not a trace of Sharmin was found. Could Sharmin have left the palace herself? Had she not felt safe? Had she been afraid of the women of the harem, or was she afraid of the shah? Perhaps Sharmin had joined the wild cats.

The shah had a feeling she would never come back. It caused him pain, but there was nothing he could do.

A few months had passed since the death of the vizier. The shah often thought of him, but he threw himself into his poetry as a distraction. It didn’t work. His latest poems were all about the vizier.

Take up a pickaxe, break down the wall

and flee this prison.

Escape, and surrender to the light.

Just like those who are gone

And are never coming back.

No matter what he did, the remorse he felt at doing away with the vizier grew stronger and stronger. No one had been permitted to mourn his disappearance, but the shah mourned him in silence. He consoled himself with the thought that other kings in his position had done the same thing. Someone had to hold the country together. Now that the vizier was no longer there he would have to go out into the country and show his face.

He asked Sheikh Aqasi to arrange a journey for him to the city of Sultanabad. The road to Sultanabad ran through the holy city of Qom, where the holy Masuma, a second cousin of the Prophet Muhammad, lay buried. Her tomb was one of the most important religious sites in the country.

Sheikh Aqasi advised the shah to spend a few days in Qom and to pay a visit to the shrine as a way of strengthening his ties with the great clerics of the city. The journey would take almost two weeks, and the shah and his wives would stay in the homes of the city’s richest merchants.

Qom was a passionately religious city on the edge of the desert. Its inhabitants were mainly clerics and their relatives. The country’s most important ayatollahs lived in Qom. The status of ayatollah was the highest that an ordinary imam could achieve. Those who held that position were usually of advanced years. The ayatollahs were powerful. They had thousands of followers. They lived simple lives among the people and their words were widely heeded. The mosque was the centre of their power. There were hundreds of imams throughout the country who kept them informed about what was going on at the grass roots. The shah hated that city, but he had to maintain good relations with the ayatollahs.

The shah spent his days in Qom in a castle just outside the city in a very special place among the old date palms, where it was pleasantly warm during the day and pleasantly cool at night. The shah was not really interested in visiting the holy tomb, but he had to let the ayatollahs see that he was the one with a firm grip on the reins of power.

Accompanied by a group of leading clerics the shah paid a visit to the holy Masuma and kissed the golden bars of the grave, as required by tradition. From there he visited a madrassah where students were training to become imams, and then withdrew to the castle so he would no longer have to have anything to do with saints, turbans and beards.

The next morning he rose early and continued his journey to Sultanabad. After a day of riding he and his retinue spent the night at a caravanserai, where a tent was set up for the shah. The thirty women accompanying him were put up in the travellers’ lodgings.

Sultanabad was a provincial town and of little consequence in and of itself. The Farahan district, however, which contained a few hundred small villages, was a different matter. It was the native region of the murdered vizier, and for centuries the descendants of the vizier’s family had lived there. The inhabitants of the region were proud of the family and were especially proud of the murdered vizier.

When the shah rode into the city the next day as evening fell, all the men he saw looked like the vizier. He may have been mistaken, but they all seemed to be wearing the same beards and the same hats. Tears sprang to his eyes.

The shah wanted to go to the city’s old bazaar. The vizier had loved shoes, especially tall leather boots, and every time he went travelling he came back with a new pair. Once the shah had remarked on this practice: ‘I see you had enough time to purchase a pair of boots.’

And the vizier had answered, ‘No matter what I buy it never gives me as much pleasure as when my father bought me my first pair of boots at the Sultanabad bazaar.’

Everyone was surprised by the shah’s visit. The shopkeepers didn’t know how to react, for they had heard of the role the shah had played in the disappearance of the vizier. The chief of police cried, ‘Javid shah!’ and the officers responded, ‘Javid shah!’

At the spice stands the shah stopped and inhaled the spicy fragrances. At a carpet shop he pointed to one carpet and asked, ‘Where was that carpet woven?’ And without waiting for the answer he walked on. He passed a number of jewellers and went into a shoe shop. He picked up a light brown boot, smelled the leather and put it back. After inspecting the other boots he walked out and left the bazaar by way of a side street. His guards never lost sight of him.

The shah wanted to visit the large carpet workshop just behind the bazaar. One of the vizier’s big plans had been to promote the export of Persian carpets, and a proposal had been made to build a large number of carpet factories in various cities. The factory in Sultanabad had been erected as a pilot.

Much to the shock and joy of the carpet weavers the shah entered the factory with a train of guards and attendants. The shah was moved. Here he was, in one of the vizier’s own dreams. An operation like this was unprecedented in Persia. There was a beautiful gate leading to a classical enclosed garden with several ponds, around which were rooms where the workers wove carpets.

The shah stopped at the entrance to one of the workrooms. He couldn’t believe his eyes. Inside were hundreds of girls and young women, sitting side by side, knotting carpets on looms. Up until then the carpets had been made by women in their own homes out in the villages, but it had never occurred to anyone to gather the women together. The shah had the urge to reach into his pocket and toss out a handful of coins, but he realised this custom would be out of place here.

At first the women didn’t know he was the shah, but even so, having a strange man among them was quite unusual. And he must be a very important man to have such a retinue. Suddenly someone whispered his name. A tense silence fell. The women didn’t dare look up. They remained seated and stared at the carpets in front of them. The shah walked past the unfinished carpets and glanced at the women. A lump rose in this throat and his eyes began to burn. Then suddenly he turned and went outside.

The next day the shah decided to go deer hunting in the mountains with his guards. The mountains of Farahan were the habitat of mighty wild stags who were no easy prey. Their colouration was the same as the stones’, and they hid behind the rocks as soon as they heard a strange sound.

The hunters had spent half the day climbing around Mount Marzejaran and hadn’t encountered a single stag. They’d probably have to content themselves with a couple of pheasants and a few wild ducks. The shah was a good shot. He brought down two large pheasants, which increased his desire to climb further and to reach the top of the mountain. After seven pheasants and nine wild ducks the group returned, fully satisfied, to enjoy a delicious kebab of fresh meat.

On the way back they spied a solitary stag. The shah motioned to his guards not to stir. He kept a close eye on the animal with his binoculars. Moving cautiously he picked up his gun and took aim. The stag stood with his ears cocked in the direction of the hunting party as the shah pulled the trigger. The stag started and momentarily lost his balance, so it looked as if he had been hit. But he recovered immediately, turned and bounded away. The shah released two more shots at the stag and set out in pursuit. The stag changed direction and ran into the woods.

The shah galloped to the spot where he had seen the stag disappear, and his fellow hunters heard one last shot. The shah could go no further on horseback. He dismounted and ran among the trees, the horse’s reins in his hand. There was the stag, a short distance away, looking to see if the shah was still coming after him. Impatiently the shah shot, but he missed again. Refusing to let himself be beaten by such a beast, he jumped on his horse and rode to the rocks in order to head him off. Sweating and out of breath he reached the foot of the mountain, but there was no trace of the stag.

The shah was superstitious, and he was convinced that he had not crossed paths with this stag by accident. He had shot and missed five times, which seldom happened. In the old Persian tales, deer, stags and gazelles led the kings on mysterious adventures, but this stag was serving a higher purpose.

Because he was covered in sweat he wanted to keep moving. He was thirsty, and in the distance he saw a village. As he rode past the trees he heard a child crying in the bushes. He brought his horse to a halt and peered in. There he saw a dirty little boy, about seven years of age, standing in the bushes with bare feet.

‘What’s wrong? Why are you crying?’

The scantily clad boy couldn’t see very well, or so it seemed. His eyes were oddly placed, too close together. His ears were larger than normal, and he was clutching a little bird to his chest with both hands.

The shah smiled and got off his horse. The little boy stopped crying and looked over the shah’s head with his strange eyes.

‘What are you doing here? Do you live in that house?’ asked the shah, nodding towards a simple mud hut further down the road.

The boy didn’t answer.

‘What’s your name?’

He didn’t respond to this question either. Did he not understand the shah’s language, or was he deaf?

‘That’s a lovely little bird you have there. What’s his name?’

‘Malijek,’ said the boy.

‘What did you say?’

‘Malijek,’ he said again.

The shah laughed heartily, for the boy had taken the dialect word for wild sparrow — ‘malij’ — and turned it into a diminutive: ‘Malijek’.

‘Splendid! You’ve come up with a delightful new word. We’ll have to include it in one of our poems. Malijek, lovely, very good.’

He took a sugar cube from his trouser pocket and put it in the boy’s mouth. Sucking on the sweet the boy grabbed the shah by the hand. It moved the shah, evoking a familiar feeling within him, and he gently stroked the boy’s hair. The boy pressed his head against his leg, as Sharmin had always done.

‘You’re a sweet little boy,’ said the shah. ‘It’s going to be dark soon. You have to go home, and we have to leave as well.’

As he began walking back to his horse the boy followed him. ‘No, Malijek, don’t follow me. Go home.’

But the boy said, ‘Malijek, Malijek, Malijek!’

The shah looked at him and smiled. ‘We like you. Come, we’ll take you home with us.’ He picked the boy up and put him on his saddle.

At that moment a girl’s voice cried out, ‘Give me my brother back!’

The bushes moved and out stepped a young woman with large, wild, black eyes and tangled hair. The shah took a step towards her, but she turned and ran away.

‘Girl! Come here, and take your brother with you!’

Her long green skirt covered with red flowers, her bare feet in the wild grass, the fear in her eyes and her undaunted voice: all this intrigued the shah. He put the boy down in front of the mud hut. ‘Go inside and ask your sister to bring us a bowl of water.’ But the boy wouldn’t move.

The shah mounted his horse resolutely. The hunting party had found him by this time and were riding towards him. The little boy began to cry. An older man came out of the hut. Seeing the horsemen at the door, he suspected that this was an important person. He bowed subserviently and pulled the boy away.

The girl walked up to the shah with a bowl of water. He took the water and looked into the bowl with surprise. ‘What is this? Why is the water so filthy?’

‘It’s not filthy. I put broken sugar cane in it.’

‘Why didn’t you take the cane out?’

‘You’re all sweaty and the water is cold. You’re thirsty. If you drink the water all at once you’ll get sick. You must drink slowly.’

The shah drank the sweetened water, looking at the girl as he did so. Then he slid a gold coin into the bowl.

‘Let’s go!’ he said, and he set the horse in motion. The little boy came running after him, screaming. The shah stopped and the boy grabbed his boot and clung to it. Then it occurred to him: he was in Farahan, the region of the vizier. A stag had led him here, to this mud hut. All this had meaning. He called for one of his guards to come and stand beside him. ‘We’re taking this boy with us. The girl, too.’

The guard rode back to the house, dismounted, talked with the peasant, pressed a sack of gold coins into his hands and was given permission to take his daughter and son back to the palace. The peasant spoke quietly with his wife, who looked at the shah with astonishment and bowed. She walked up to her daughter, talked to her, and kissed her on the forehead and on the eyes. A mule was fetched from the stable for the girl and her brother to ride on as part of the shah’s retinue.

Five days later, back in the palace, the shah sent the girl to the harem. He replaced the ‘e’ in Malijek with an ‘a’ so the name would sound better. Then the shah instructed the chamberlain to give the boy a bath.

‘He’s filling the empty place left by Sharmin, and his name is Malijak.’