The murids spread the rumor that the giaours had poisoned him before turning him over to them.
For several months, there was no news of Jamal Eddin’s condition.
Baron Nicholas’s headquarters, Prince Orbeliani, and Prince Chavchavadze hounded their spies for information about the imam’s son. None was forthcoming.
On February 15, 1858, three years after the exchange ceremony, a Montagnard bearing a white flag rode down from Dargo-Veden, the aul where Shamil lived, and presented himself at Fort Khassav-Yurt. He carried a message from the imam asking for medicine for his son, Jamal Eddin.
The commander took in the significance of such a gesture.
Shamil’s willingness to lower himself to beg for assistance from the infidels was an extraordinary indication of his love for Jamal Eddin.
This humiliating request had obviously come from the young man and spoke volumes about the imam’s distress. It was an admission before all, the Russians and his own people, that he had never ceased to love his child. It proved to Jamal Eddin the immensity of his affection.
The commander did not miss the chance to accept the hand that reached out to him. He immediately told the messenger he would do all he could.
He called in his own personal physician, who listened to the description, such as it was, of the patient’s symptoms and provided a few vials of medicine that might correspond to the illness.
The commander sent word to the imam that if his son needed medical attention, he was ready to send a doctor.
Four months later, on June 10, 1858, the same messenger returned to Khassav-Yurt. The imam asked whether the doctor the commander had mentioned in February could visit Jamal Eddin.
The commander sent Doctor Piotrovsky in exchange for an amanat.
Shamil had foreseen this possibility and had sent five of his naïbs, five murids who were waiting in the woods. They were his offering as hostages.
The commander retained three.
Doctor Piotrovsky set out from Khassav-Yurt the following morning.
Jamal Eddin lived in the small, extremely remote village of Soul-Kadi, near the source of the Andi Koysu. Even the Montagnards considered it virtually inaccessible.
The doctor’s journey took over four days and was, as he described it, a harrowing experience. He descended into chasms on trails whose stones slipped and crumbled beneath his feet and experienced nearly six hours of vertigo on precipices that, looking down, offered a sheer drop and, looking up, offered no path at all. Worse still, Shamil’s own messenger and their guide had to hide them from the local inhabitants, who would have massacred all three of them had they discovered a Russian in their mountains.
The doctor arrived in Soul-Kadi late in the night on June fourteenth. The aul appeared particularly mean and desolate to him.
The house where Jamal Eddin lived was guarded by a sentinel. The patient was living in captivity.
Sacks of grain lay everywhere, and fruit had been left to dry among heaps of clothing at the entrance.
Jamal Eddin’s room was sparsely furnished. A rifle and a saber hung on the wall.
The young man was lying on an iron bed.
He awoke at the arrival of his visitor. Deathly pale, his eyes hollow, Jamal Eddin coughed incessantly.
The doctor tried to ask him a few questions.
But Jamal Eddin realized that the man was completely spent and invited him to sleep first. A mattress had been prepared on the floor next to him. Exhausted, the Russian collapsed on it.
In the morning, the doctor noticed that Jamal Eddin had persuaded his jailers to accept some rather bizarre habits.
While he lacked everything and lived in utter poverty, he insisted that his meager meals be served with the silverware that had been stolen from the princesses, on what was left of their fine china—knives embossed with the family’s coat of arms, fine white gold-rimmed porcelain plates, all the plunder of Sinandali—the ultimate symbols of a lost past.
All signs of wealth and luxury were forbidden by Shamil, and the naïbs and partisans of his brother took Jamal Eddin’s attachment to worldly goods as further proof of his corruption.
Such whims only confirmed their contempt for him.
Although he was surrounded by spies and guarded by men the Russian doctor described as “fanatics,” the patient appeared to be adored by the women who cared for him, the inhabitants of Soul-Kadi, and everyone who came into contact with him.
But he was already so weak and ill that he could no longer walk.
The doctor understood that his pitiful state was due to despair, an acute case of depression that no medicine could cure.
He diagnosed tuberculosis as well.
He found Jamal Eddin “dignified, calm, reasonable,” and fully aware of the gravity of his condition.
The young man was letting himself die. What else could he do?
Doctor Piotrovsky stayed at his bedside for two days.
He was increasingly struck by the fact that the people’s adoration, even adulation, of Jamal Eddin was as strong as the naïbs’ hatred for him was absolute. The dignitaries maligned him incessantly, depicting him as a degenerate to anyone who would listen—especially those who did not know him.
Shamil’s naïbs were the ones who had forbidden him to read the Russian press, the newspapers of Petersburg that Shamil himself had translated for his own information. It was just one more deprivation, added to a long list of others.
Jamal Eddin explained that the imam had had no choice; he had been forced to break him and silence his voice to preserve the love and confidence of his captains.
To the doctor’s way of thinking, this forgiveness made no sense at all. Perhaps Shamil had been forced by circumstance, by public opinion, to behave this way. But the consequences of his actions were before his eyes. He had killed his son.
And local cures were finishing him off.
Jamal Eddin was fed saltpeter scraped from the rocks around the aul together with a variety of fermented plants and minerals, all of which was mixed with donkey’s milk. The concoction had disastrous effects upon the patient.
“I could not cure Jamal Eddin,” the doctor wrote in his report to the commander of the fort at Khassav-Yurt. “I could not even prevent the disease from progressing. I simply tried to assuage his suffering.
“Unfortunately, I am certain that he will not survive beyond another two or three months. At the very most.
“I should add that, instead of preparing himself for this grand and final event that is death, this sensitive young man of such fine character spends his time contemplating the jewels that were stolen from the princesses in July 1854.
“He considers the earrings in particular to be his personal property and hides them very carefully under his mattress.
“But at nightfall, he delicately takes two tiny diamond pendants from their case.
“He holds them in his hand, turning them over in his palm. He never seems to tire of admiring these little teardrops of precious stone.
“Doubtless this occupation distracts him from the specter of Death standing at the foot of his pallet.
“Ah! God, how strange and full of contradictions is the human condition. Who would have imagined that this apparently civilized being is, in the end, interested only in a pair of stolen diamonds? And that on his deathbed, he should never cease to be fascinated by all that glitters, just like all savages?”
The doctor was clearly lacking in imagination.
Perhaps a woman would have understood the secret behind this fascination.
Lisa.
When they had first met, at the relay of Torjok, hidden in the locks of hair that fell from her temples, Jamal Eddin had glimpsed the sparkle of two diamond teardrops that caught the sun.