“If Lieutenant Shamil has said he will return to his father, he will do it, Your Imperial Majesty,” Milyutin replied heatedly. “All I know of him, everything I have seen for the past fifteen years, makes me certain that he will.”
“This boy is lovesick. Who knows what his fiancée will tell him, who knows what she’ll do to convince him not to leave her? If he doesn’t return, or if he even delays his journey, the hostages are done for. I repeat, we cannot put the princesses’ lives at such risk.”
Milyutin stared at his master. Was it possible that he felt nothing?
Or were his pride and his affections so wounded that he could not bear to face the necessity of sending Jamal Eddin back? This entire affair had forced him to bend to a will that was not his own: the law of Shamil. It reinforced the feeling of impotence that had become a constant in his life, driving him to despair.
“I do not mean that Jamal Eddin should be ill-treated, of course,” the czar added wearily. “On the contrary, I’m counting on you personally to look out for his well-being. He should be given books, maps, instruments for physics experiments, a paint box, sheet music. I’m granting him unlimited credit on my own personal treasury. Tell the war minister to set aside three hundred rubles to outfit him completely with uniforms, arms, and horses. I want him to put on a good show when he returns to the Caucasus. Once he’s back with his father, he won’t have anything. He should return like a prince, laden with gifts and accompanied by a retinue of young people his own age. If I didn’t need you so badly here, I would tell you to accompany him. Choose the most trustworthy of his companions in the regiment to escort him.”
“Does Your Majesty mean, to keep an eye on him?”
“I mean nothing but what I said, General Milyutin!”
“Will he be sent there as a prisoner,” Milyutin countered bitterly, “just as he came here?”
He recalled that terrible journey through the snowstorms of the Russian winter, with this child who had retreated into silence, whom he himself had torn from his people.
“On the contrary, I wish for Jamal Eddin to return in as comfortable circumstances as possible. I mean it, in the manner that will be the least painful for him. It is your responsibility to see to it that he is in the company of his friends. Your younger brother, for example—I understand they are very close. And one or two other Vladimirsky Lancers, according to his preferences.
“But I forbid him to see Elizaveta Petrovna Olenina! Make sure that the young woman is warned and that her parents are warned as well. That is an order. I forbid it. Have I made myself clear? To be safe, take him immediately to Stavropol. General Muravyev, whom I’ve just appointed commander of the Armies of the Caucasus and governor of the region, will join him there with his friends, the Uhlans from Poland that you will have carefully selected.”
Jamal Eddin did not wonder what the two men were discussing behind closed doors. He did not imagine that it had taken all this time just to decide what to do with him.
He contemplated this realization that the man he called his “benefactor” was not who he thought he was—not entirely, at least, not completely.
He nonetheless could not help but remain attached to the czar. Today he felt a kind of tenderness for the old man, this defeated emperor who had become a shadow of his former self and for whom the appearance of power still counted so much.
His manipulations and his duplicity didn’t matter. So what if this father, who pretended to possess the truth and thought himself morally irreproachable, who considered himself a man of honor, was perhaps only a brute and a phony. In spite of it all, he still loved him.
But their last conversation, far from reassuring him, had left him feeling totally helpless and confused. He had the feeling that a wall had grown up between himself and the czar, a wall he would never be able to scale.
He suddenly felt certain that they would never see each other again—and that they had both bungled their last encounter.
Jamal Eddin’s kibitka, escorted by two other sleighs, slid through the snow along the Sovereign’s Road, taking him south toward Moscow.
“How can I do this again, deny a world I have grown to love? How can I rebecome the spiritual heir of the imam Shamil? How can I take this long journey back to my childhood?” he wrote to Lisa on January 15, 1855.
The three hundred rubles that the war minister had supplied were spent on bribes and messengers, and he managed to correspond with Lisa. Though they exchanged a thousand letters, Jamal Eddin was never able to return to the Olenins’.
The czar had taken every precaution to make such a visit impossible.
Snow sprayed from the horses’ hooves as the sleighs slid through the silence. The quiet of the forest was broken only by the jingling of the harness bells, the coachmen’s shouts, and the gentle hiss of the runners cutting through the snow.
“Come on, my beauties,” they sang out as they cracked the whip, “courage, my darlings! We’re in a hurry, speed it up!”
“No,” thought Jamal Eddin, “keep going, but don’t ever get there.”
He differed in this respect from all the other voyagers traversing the empire just then. He would have wished for a vast and endless Russia, spaces that went on to infinity. He wished it would take all eternity to cross the country.
But between the trees, little black-and-white signposts capped with the imperial eagle at regular intervals told him how many versts they had just covered and of the distance pulling him farther and farther away from happiness.
With all the lanterns dimmed and escorted under guard by two other sleighs, his sleigh flew through the snow. They had passed the little woods at Machouk and had already plunged into the forest at Tver. The coachmen had not stopped to change horses at the relay post of Torjok.
“Without you, Lisa, I shall die in the Caucasus.”
Book Three
The Return: Keep on Going and Never Get There the Caucasus
1855–1858
CHAPTER X
The Exchange Will Not Take Place 1855
Their peaks covered in eternal snow, the mountains loomed, black and gigantic, a massive chain that blocked the sky and eclipsed the horizon. As the sun set, the glaciers changed from white to pink to violet to purple. The dull murmur of the waterfalls sounded like the beating of a heart. The air was filled with the pungent odor of wood fires, leather, saltpeter, goats, pilaf, and curdled milk, and, sharper than the rest, the stench of suint that rose from the papakhas and burkas. Jamal Eddin thought that he had forgotten the sights and smells of his past, but they surfaced again, intact. The sounds, the colors, and the odors were all still vivid. The only exception was the Caucasus themselves, which seemed infinitely more vast and powerful than anything he could remember from his childhood.
The Russian camp was located on the stony plateau.
Situated on a soil embankment, the square fort had four miradors. A hedge of bushes reinforced a high, wooden stockade that was dotted with holes to accommodate the mouths of cannons. Several entry gates were guarded by sharpshooters in watchtowers. Inside, the artillery was posted along the length of the enclosure. The cavalry was positioned in the center.