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‘Yet you stayed by my side all this time.’

‘At the beginning I thought I would just have to be patient and that when you had been chased out of fifteen cities in succession you would resign yourself to taking the road to Alamut. Then, as the years passed, I grew attached to you, my companions have been dispersed to the four corners of the empire and my determination has wavered. See now how Omar Khayyam has saved Hassan Sabbah’s life a second time.’

‘Do not bewail it — it may well be your life that I have saved.’

‘In truth he must be very well protected in his hideout.’

Vartan could not suppress all traces of bitterness, which amused Khayyam.

‘Having said that, if you had revealed your plan to me, doubtless I would have led you to Alamut.’

The disciple jumped out of his seat.

‘Is that the truth?’

‘No. Sit yourself down! I only said that to give you cause for regret! In spite of all the evil Hassan has managed to commit, if I were to see him drowning in the River Murghab I would offer him my hand in help.’

‘Well I would shove his head down under the water! However, your attitude gives me some comfort, and it is just because you are capable of such words and acts that I chose to stay in your company. And I do not regret that.’

Khayyam gave his disciple a long hug.

‘I am happy that my doubts about you have been dispelled. I am old now and need to know that I have a trusty man at my side — because of the manuscript. That it is the most precious thing I possess. In order to take on the world Hassan Sabbah has built Alamut, whereas I have only constructed this minuscule paper castle, but I choose to believe that it will outlive Alamut. Nothing frightens me more than to think that upon my death my manuscript could fall into careless or malevolent hands.’

In an almost offhand manner he held the secret book out to Vartan:

‘You may open it, since you will be its guardian.’

The disciple was moved.

‘Would anyone else have had this privilege before me?’

‘Two people. Jahan, after a quarrel in Samarkand, and Hassan when we were living in the same room upon our arrival in Isfahan.

‘You trusted him to that extent?’

‘To tell you the truth, I did not. However, I often wanted to write and he ended up noticing the manuscript. I preferred to show it to him myself since, anyhow, he could have read it behind my back. Moreover, I deemed him capable of keeping a secret.’

‘He really does know how to keep a secret — the better to use it against you.’

Henceforth the manuscript would spend its night in Vartan’s room. At the slightest noise the former officer would be bolt upright, brandishing his sword, his ears pricked up; he would check every room in the house and then go out to make a round of the garden. Upon his return he would not always be able to fall asleep again and so would light a lamp on his table, read a quatrain which he would memorize and then indefatigably go over it in his head to draw out its most profound meanings and to try and guess under what circumstances his master had been able to write it.

At the end of a string of disturbed nights, an idea took shape in his thoughts which received Omar’s hearty approvaclass="underline" to write the manuscript’s history in the margins of the Rubaiyaat and through this device the history of Khayyam himself, his childhood in Nishapur, his youth in Samarkand, his fame in Isfahan, his meetings with Abu Taher, Jahan, Hassan, Nizam and many others. Thus it was, under Khayyam’s supervision, and sometimes with him dictating the words, that the first pages of the chronicle were written. Vartan threw himself into it, writing each phrase down ten or fifteen times on a loose sheet before transcribing it, in a thin, angular and laborious hand — which, one day, was brutally interrupted in the middle of a phrase.

Omar had woken up early that morning. He called Vartan who did not reply. Another night spent writing, Khayyam said to himself in a fatherly way. He let him rest a while longer, poured himself a morning drink, just a drop at the bottom of the glass which he swallowed in one gulp followed by a whole glassful which he carried with him as he went for a walk in the garden. He walked around it, diverting himself by blowing on the dew which was still on the flowers, then he went off to gather some juicy white mulberries which he placed on his tongue and squashed against his palate with every sip of wine.

He was enjoying himself so much that a good hour had passed before he decided to go back in. It was time for Vartan to get up. He did not call him again, but went straight into his room to find him stretched out on the ground, his throat black with blood, his mouth and eyes open and set rigid as if in a last suffocated cry.

On his table between the lamp and the writing desk was the dagger with which the crime had been committed. It was planted in a curled up sheet of paper which Omar unrolled to read:

‘Your manuscript has gone on ahead of you to Alamut.’

CHAPTER 24

Omar Khayyam mourned his disciple with the same dignity, the same resignation and the same discreet agony as he had mourned other friends. ‘We were drinking the same wine, but they got drunk two or three rounds before me.’ Anyway, how could he deny that it was the loss of the manuscript which affected him most grievously? He was certainly able to reproduce it; he remembered its every letter but apparently he did not want to, for there is no trace of a rewritten version. It seems that Khayyam learnt a wise lesson from the theft of his manuscript; he would never more try to have control over either his future or that of his poems.

He soon left Merv, not for Alamut — not once did he envisage going there! — but for his home town. ‘It is time,’ he told himself, ‘to put an end to my peregrinations. Nishapur was the first port of call in my life. Is it not within the order of things that it should also be the last?’ It is there that he was going to live, surrounded by relatives, a younger sister, a considerate brother-in-law, nephews, and above all a niece who was to be the recipient of most of the tenderness of his autumn years. He was also surrounded by his books. He did not write any more, but untiringly re-read the works of his masters.

One day, as he was seated in his room as usual with Avicenna’s Book of Healing on his knees, open at the chapter entitled The One and the Multiple’, Omar felt a dull pain start up. He placed his golden tooth-pick, which he had been holding in his hand, between the leaves to mark the page, closed the book and summoned his family in order to dictate to them his last testament. Then he uttered a prayer which finished with the words: ‘My God, You know that I have sought to perceive You as much as I could. Forgive me if my knowledge of You has been my only path towards You!’

He opened his eyes no more. It was 4 December 1131. Omar Khayyam was in his eighty-fourth year, having been born on 18 June 1048 at daybreak. The fact that the date of birth of a person from that era is known with such precision is indeed extraordinary, but Khayyam showed an astrologer’s obsession with the subject. He had most probably questioned his mother to find out his ascendant, Gemini, and to determine the position of the sun, Mercury and Jupiter at the hour of his coming into the world. Thus he drew up his birth chart and took care to pass it on to the chronicler Beihaki.

Another of his contemporaries, the writer Nizami Aruzi, recounted: ‘I met Omar Khayyam twenty years before his death in the city of Balkh. He had come to stay with one of the notables on the Slave-Traders’ Road, and, knowing of his fame, I shadowed him in order to hear every one of his words. That is how I heard him say: ‘My tomb will be in a place where the north wind scatters flowers every spring.’ His words at first seemed absurd to me; however I knew that a man like him would not speak in an unconsidered manner.’