He didn’t wait for the cheering to subside. He withdrew with the leaders to the assembly hall and bade each of them farewell there. Then he and the grand dais withdrew to his chambers.
“So, now the fifth and final chapter of our tragedy is over,” he said with an almost melancholy smile. “There’s no one left over us, except for Allah and the unknown heavens. But we know incredibly little about either of them. So we might as well close the book of unsolved riddles once and for all.
“I’ve had enough of the world for the time being. While I wait in this retreat for the solution to the final riddle, I can’t think of a better way to occupy my time than by filling in the last details of the fairy tales for our faithful children. It’s fitting for an old man who knows the world to reveal it to the people in the form of tales and parables. There’s so much work still ahead of me! For the simplest believers I have to invent a thousand and one tales about the origins and beginning of the world, heaven and hell, the prophets, Mohammed, Ali and the Mahdi. The second grade, the fighting faithful, will need more than anything a clear rule book giving them all the commandments and prohibitions. I’ll have to embed the fairy tales into basic principles and provide them with a whole catechism. For the fedayeen I will have to reveal the first great Ismaili mysteries: the Koran is a complicated book and requires a special key to interpret it. Still higher up, those who advance to the level of dais will learn that even the Koran doesn’t contain the ultimate mysteries, and that those are equally distributed among all the different faiths. Those worthy enough to become regional dais will learn the awful supreme Ismaili principle: that nothing is true, and everything is permitted. But those of us who hold all the threads of this mechanism in our hands will save our ultimate thoughts for ourselves.”
“What a pity that you plan to shut yourself off from the world!” Buzurg Ummid exclaimed. “Now, of all times, when you’ve reached the zenith of your life’s path.”
“A man who fulfills a great mission only really comes to life once he’s dead. Especially a prophet. I’ve fulfilled mine and now it’s time to start thinking of myself. I’m going to die to other people so that I can come to life for myself. This way I’ll be able to see what will endure after me. Do you understand?”
They nodded.
“But if you were to ask me what the purpose of all this has been and why it’s been necessary, I wouldn’t be able to answer you,” he continued. “We just grow because there’s strength in us to do that. Like a seed that germinates in the earth and shoots up out of the ground, that blooms and bears fruit. Suddenly we’re here, and suddenly we’ll be gone.”
“Let’s go have a last look at the gardens!” he at last invited them.
They entered the lift and descended to the base of the tower. A eunuch lowered the bridge and Adi ferried them over to the central garden.
The deciduous trees were bare and the flower beds were deserted. There was no fresh greenery, no flowers. Only a cypress grove darkly withstood the winter.
“If you sent somebody to the gardens now,” Abu Ali said, “he’d have a hard time believing he was in paradise.”
“The world consists of color, light and warmth,” Hasan replied. “They are the food for our senses. A ray of light on the landscape, and it’s completely transformed in our eyes! With its transformation our feelings, thoughts and moods are also transformed. This, you see, is the eternally self-renewing miracle of all life.”
Apama joined them.
“How are the girls doing?” Hasan asked.
“They talk a lot, and they work a lot, they laugh a lot and they even cry a lot. They just don’t think very much.”
“That’s for the best. Otherwise they might realize they’re in prison. It can’t be helped. You women are used to harems and prison. A person can spend his whole life between four walls. If he doesn’t think or feel that he’s a prisoner, then he’s not a prisoner. But then there are people for whom the whole planet is a prison, who see the infinite expanse of the universe, the millions of stars and galaxies that remain forever inaccessible to them. And that awareness makes them the greatest prisoners of time and space.”
They walked silently down the deserted paths.
“Is there anything new here?”
“No, except that we’re expecting a few babies.”
“That’s fine. We’ll need them. Make sure that everything goes well.”
Then he turned to his grand dais and said, “Those will be the only creatures in the world who were conceived by their fathers in the firm belief that their mothers were heavenly maidens, unearthly beings.”
They walked around the pond.
“Spring will come again, and then summer after it,” Hasan continued. “Stay as warm as you can through the winter, so you can experience the luxury of nature renewing itself again in the gardens. And we should withdraw to our chambers too, because the sky has clouded over ominously and it might even snow tomorrow. It’s going to get colder.”
When they returned to the castle, Hasan bade his grand dais farewell with these words:
“The earth has barely made half a circuit around the sun, just half of one of the hundreds and hundreds of thousands it has made until now. And yet we can say that a fair amount has changed on its surface in that time. The empire of Iran no longer exists. Our institution has emerged from the night. What course will it take from here? We call for an answer in vain. The stars above us are silent.”
For the last time he embraced both of his friends. Then he entered the lift. They felt a strange sadness as they watched him ascend.
He locked himself inside his chambers and died to the world.
And legend enfolded him in its wings.
AFTERWORD
AGAINST IDEOLOGIES:
VLADIMIR BARTOL AND ALAMUT
Vladimir Bartol (1903–1967) wrote Alamut, which remains his only book of any significant renown, in the peaceful seclusion of a small, baroque town nestled in the foothills of the Slovenian Alps, over the course of about nine months in 1938. As he worked on an early draft, barely thirty miles to the north Austria was forcibly annexed to Nazi Germany. Fifty miles to the west, just over another border, Italy’s Fascists regularly hounded the large ethnic Slovenian minority of the Adriatic seacoast town of Trieste, and were already looking to extend their holdings into the Slovenian and Croatian regions of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. A few hundred miles to the north and east, in the Soviet Union, Stalin’s bloodiest purges had reached their high tide, claiming hundreds of thousands of victims, most of whom met their fate in dank cellars with a single bullet to the back of the head. Amidst this turmoil and menace, Slovenia and its parent country of Yugoslavia were, for the time being, an island of relative tranquility. If the book that Bartol wrote in these circumstances proved to be an escape from the mass political movements, charismatic leaders, and manipulative ideologies that were then coming to rule Europe, it was also a profound meditation on them.
Most of all, Alamut was and is simply a great read—imaginative, erudite, dynamic and humorous, a well-told tale set in an exotic time and place, yet populated by characters with universally recognizable ambitions, dreams and imperfections. Both at home and abroad, it continues to be perhaps the most popular book that Slovenia has ever produced, with recent translations of Alamut having become bestsellers in Germany, France and Spain. But despite its surface appearance as popular literature, Alamut is also a finely wrought, undiscovered minor masterpiece which offers the reader a wealth of meticulously planned and executed detail and broad potential for symbolic, intertextual and philosophical interpretation.