‘We have perhaps a friend in common.’
I took out the envelope. The consul opened it carefully; he had taken his gold-rimmed glasses from his desk and was reading when I suddenly noticed that his fingers were trembling. He stood up, went over to lock the door to the room, placed his lips to the paper and remained so for a few seconds as if in contemplation. Then he came over to me and held me as if I were a brother who had survived a shipwreck.
As soon as he had managed to recompose his expression, he called his servants and ordered them to fetch my trunk, to show me to the best room and prepare a feast for the evening. He kept me there for two days, neglecting all his work in order to stay with me and question me ceaselessly about the Master, his health, his mood and particularly what he was saying about the situation in Persia. When it was time for me to leave, he rented a cabin for me on a steamer of the Russian Caucaset-Mercure Line. Then he entrusted me with his coachman to whom he gave the task of accompanying me to Kazvin and to stay at my side as long as I had need of his services.
The coachman immediately proved to be extremely resourceful, and often even irreplaceable. It was not I who would have know to slip some coins into the hand of that proudly moustached customs officer so that he would deign to leave his kalyan pipe for a moment to come and inspect my huge Wolseley. It was the coachman again who negotiated with the Roads Administration for the immediate provision of a four-horse carriage, although the official was imperiously inviting us to come back the next day and a seedy innkeeper, who was most apparently his accomplice, was offering us his services.
I consoled myself for all these difficulties of the route by thinking of the suffering of the travellers who had preceded me. Thirteen years earlier, the only way to Persia had been the old caravan route which started at Trebizond and led toward Tabriz through Erzerum, with its forty staging points taking six exhausting and expensive weeks and which was sometimes truly dangerous owing to the incessant tribal warfare. The Transcaucasian had revolutionized matters. It had opened Persia to the world and one could reach that empire with neither risk nor major discomfort by taking a steamer from Baku to the port of Enzeli, then it only took one more a week, on a road suitable for motor vehicles, to reach Teheran.
In the West, the cannon is an instrument for war or ceremonial occasions; in Persia it is also an instrument of torture. If I speak of it, it is because I was confronted by the spectacle of a cannon which served the most horrific purpose as I reached the town limits of Teheran — a man, who was tied and whose head was the only part of him visible, had been placed in the large barrel. He had to stay there, under the sun and without food or water until death came to him; even then, I was told, the custom was to leave his body exposed for a long time in order to make the punishment an example, to inspire silence and dread in all those who passed through the city gates.
Was it because of this first image that the capital of Persia exerted such little magic on me? In the cities of the Orient, one always looks for the colours of the present and the shades of the past. In Teheran I came up against none of that. What did I see there? Thoroughfares which were too wide, linking the rich of the northern districts to the poor of the southern districts, a bazaar absolutely swarming with camels, mules and gaudy materials, but which could hardly bear comparison with the souks of Cairo, Constantinople, Isfahan or Tabriz. And wherever one’s gaze alighted there were innumerable grey buildings.
It was too new. Teheran had too short a history! For a long time it had only been an obscure dependency of Rayy, the prestigious city of the scholars which was demolished at the time of the Mongols. It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that a Turkoman tribe, the Qajars, took possession of the area. Having succeeded in subduing the whole of Persia by the sword, the dynasty elevated its modest abode to the rank of capital. Until then, the political centre of the country had been in the south, at Isfahan, Kirman or Shiraz. That is to say that the inhabitants of these cities had nothing good to say about the ‘brutish northerners’ who governed them and whose lack of knowledge included even that of their language. The reigning Shah, upon his accession to power, needed an interpreter to address his subjects. Anyway, it seems that after that he acquired a better knowledge of Persian.
It must be pointed out that he had plenty of time to do so. When I arrived in Teheran, in April 1896, the monarch was preparing to celebrate his jubilee, his fiftieth year in power. In honour of this the city was decked with the national emblem bearing the sign of the lion and the sun. Notables had come from all the provinces, numerous foreign delegations had turned up, and even though most of the official guests were lodged in villas, the two hotels for Europeans, the Albert and the Prévost, were unusually full. It was in the latter-named hotel that I finally found a room.
I had thought of going straight to Fazel, to deliver the letter to him and ask him how I could find Mirza Reza, but I was able to overcome my impatience. Not being unaware of the customs of Orientals, I knew that Jamaladin’s disciple would invite me to stay with him; I did not want to offend him by refusing but nor did I want to take the risk of being caught up in his political activity, and still less in that of his Master.
I therefore checked into the hotel Prévost, which was run by a Swiss man from Geneva. In the morning I rented an old mare so I could go to the American legation — a practical act of courtesy — on the boulevard des Ambassadeurs. Then I went to see Jamaladin’s favourite disciple. With his slender moustache, his long white tunic, the majestic way he held his head and a hint of coldness, Fazel corresponded on the whole to the image which the exile in Constantinople had drawn for me.
We were going to become best friends in the world, but the contact was distant and his direct language disturbed and upset me. Such as when we spoke of Mirza Reza:
‘I will do what I can to help you, but I do not wish to have anything to do with that madman. The Master told me that he is a living martyr. I replied: then it would be better if he were to die! Do not look at me like that, I am not a monster, but that man has suffered so much that his spirit is completely deformed; every time he opens his mouth he harms our cause.’
‘Where is he today?’
‘For weeks he has been living in the mausoleum of Shah Abdul-Azim, prowling around the gardens or in the corridors, between the buildings, speaking to people about Jamaladin’s arrest and entreating them to turn against the monarch, telling them of his own suffering, shouting and gesticulating. He never stops avowing that Sayyid Jamaladin is the Mahdi, even though he himself has forbidden him to mouth such crazed utterings. I really have no wish to be seen in his company.’
‘He is the only person who can give me information about the manuscript.’
‘I know. I shall take you to him, but I shall not stay with the two of you for a second.’
That evening a dinner was held in my honour by Fazel’s father, one of the richest men in Teheran. He was a close friend of Jamaladin and even though he kept out of any political activity he was keen to honour the Master through me; he had invited almost a hundred people. The conversation centred on Khayyam. Everyone was spouting forth quatrains and anecdotes, and there were animated discussions which sometimes veered off into politics; everyone seemed perfectly at ease in Persian, Arabic and French, and most of them could speak some Turkish, Russian and English. I felt all the more ignorant as they all considered me a great orientalist and specialist in the Rubaiyaat, which was a very great, or, I would even say, an extreme overstatement, but I had to stop contradicting it since my protests were taken as a sign of humility, which as everyone knows, is the mark of a true intellectual.