He bent over and every head — bare or turbaned — bent over too.
‘We cross the river by surprise,’ he explained. ‘We charge in the direction of the citadel and attack it from two sides, the bazaar and from the cemetery. It will be ours before evening.’
The citadel was not taken for ten days. Lethal battles raged in every street but the resisters advanced and all the clashes turned to their advantage. Some ‘sons of Adam’ occupied the bureau of the Indo-European Telegraph on the Saturday, thanks to which they were able to keep in contact with Teheran as well as with London and Bombay. The same day a police barracks went over to their side, bringing with it as a dowry a Maxim machine gun and thirty cases of ammunition. These successes gave the population its confidence back. Young and old became emboldened and flocked to the liberated quarters in their hundreds, sometimes with their weapons. Within a few weeks the enemy had been pushed back to the outskirts. It was only holding on to a thinly populated area in the north-east of the city stretching from the Quarter of the Camel-drivers to the camp of Sahib-Divan.
Toward mid-July an army of irregulars was formed, as well as a provisional administration in which Howard found himself made quartermaster. He now passed most of his time scouring the bazaar and compiling a list of food stocks. The merchants showed themselves more than willing to cooperate. He himself found his way perfectly through the Persian system of weights and measures.
‘You have to forget litres, kilos, ounces and pints,’ he told me. ‘Here they speak of jaw, miskal, syr and kharvar, which is the load of an ass.’
He tried to teach me.
‘The basic unit is the jaw, which is a medium sized grain of barley which still has its husk but which has had the little tuft of hair at each end cut off.’
‘That’s quite tortuous,’ I guffawed.
My teacher threw his student a look of rebuke. To make amends I thought I had better prove that I had been taking it in.
‘So the jaw is the smallest unit of measure.’
‘Not at all.’ said Howard indignantly.
Unruffled, he referred to his notes:
‘The weight of a grain of barley equals that of seventy grains of seneveh, or if you like, six hairs of a mule’s tail.’
In comparison, my own mission was light! Given my complete ignorance of the local dialect, my only job was to keep in contact with the foreign nationals in order to reassure them of Fazel’s intentions and to watch over their safety.
It should be mentioned that Tabriz, until the construction of the Trans-Caucasian Railway twenty years earlier, had been the gateway to Persia, the entrance point for all travellers, goods and ideas. Several European establishments had branches there, such as the German company of MMO Mossig and Schünemann, or the Eastern Trading Company, an important Austrian firm. There were also consulates, the American Presbyterian Mission and various other institutions, and I am happy to say that at no moment during the long and difficult months of the siege did the foreign nationals become targets.
Not only were they in no danger, but there was some moving fraternization. I do not wish to speak of Baskerville, myself nor of Panoff, who quickly joined the movement, but I wish to salute other people, such as Mr Moore, the correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, who, not hesitating to take up arms at the side of Fazel, was wounded in combat, or Captain Anginieur, who helped us to resolve numerous logistical problems and who, through his articles in l’Asie française, helped produce the surge of solidarity in Paris and throughout the world, which saved Tabriz from the dreadful fate threatening it. For some of the city’s clergy, the active presence of the foreigners was, I quote, ‘a motley crowd of Europeans, Armenians, Babis and infidels of all sorts’. However the population remained impervious to this propaganda and showered us with grateful affection. Every man was a brother for us and every woman a sister or a mother.
I hardly need to point out that it was the Persians themselves who gave the Resistance the most spontaneous and enormous help from the first day. First the free inhabitants of Tabriz and then the refugees who had had to flee their towns and villages for their beliefs and seek protection in the last bastion of the constitution. This was the case with hundreds of sons of Adam who had rushed from all corners of the Empire and who asked nothing more than that they be allowed to bear arms. This was also the case with several deputies, ministers and journalists from Teheran who had managed to escape the dragnet ordered by Colonel Liakhov and who often arrived in small groups, exhausted, haggard and distraught.
However the most precious recruit beyond a shadow of a doubt was Shireen who had defied the curfew to leave the capital by car without the Cossacks daring to impede her. Her landaulet was greeted enthusiastically by the populace, the more so as her chauffeur came from Tabriz and was one of the rare Persians to drive such a vehicle.
The Princess set up home in an abandoned palace which had been built by her grandfather, the old Shah who had been assassinated. He had envisaged spending a month there every year, but after the first night, as legend goes, he felt faint and his astrologers advised him never to set foot again in a place of such ill omen. For thirty years no one had lived there. It was referred to, not without a little fear, as the Empty Palace.
Shireen did not hesitate to defy bad luck and her residence became the heart of the city. Resistance leaders liked to meet in her vast gardens, which were a cool oasis during those summer nights and I was often in their company.
The Princess always seemed happy to see me. Our correspondence had caused a bond to spring up between us to which no one could become privy. Of course we were never alone, there being dozens of other people present whenever we met or dined. We debated indefatigably and sometimes we just joked but not excessively. Familiarity is never tolerated in Persia and one must be punctilious and flamboyant about being polite. In Persian there is often the tendency to say ‘I am the slave of the shadow of the greatness’ of the individual to whom one is talking and when it is a matter of mainly female highnesses, one starts if not actually kissing the ground at least doing so in the import of the most grandiose phrases.
Then came that disturbing Thursday evening. 17 September to be exact. How could I ever forget it.
For a hundred different reasons our companions had all left the palace and I was among the last to leave. Just as I went through the outer gate of the property, I realized that I had left next to my chair a briefcase into which I had the habit of placing some important papers. So I retraced my steps, but not all with the intention of seeing the princess; I was under the impression that she had retired after seeing off the last of her visitors.
Not so. She was still sitting alone in the middle of twenty empty chairs. She seemed worried and distant. Never taking my gaze from her, I picked up the briefcase as slowly as I could. Shireen was still sitting with her profile toward me, motionless and deaf to my presence. I sat down in contemplative silence and watched her for a little while. Imagining that it was twelve years earlier, I could see the two of us in Jamaladin’s sitting room in Constantinople. She looked just the same then, sitting in profile, with a blue scarf crowning her hair and trailing down to the leg of the chair. How old had she been? Seventeen? Eighteen? Today at thirty she was a mature, regal and serene woman, and just as slender as on that first day. She obviously had been able to resist the temptation of women of her rank who lay around eating and lazed their lives away on an opulent divan. Had she married? Was she a divorcee or a widow? We had never spoken of it.