At nightfall fireworks lit up the city. Seating had been erected in the gardens of the Baharistan. The diplomatic corps sat on the grandstand together with members of the new government, deputies, religious dignitaries and the bazaar guilds. As a friend of Baskerville I was entitled to sit near the front and my chair was just behind Fazel’s. There was a stream of explosions and bangs, the sky was lit up at times and people turned their heads and leaned to and fro smiling like overjoyed children. Outside, sons of Adam tirelessly chanted the same slogans for hours.
I do not know what noise or shout brought Howard back into my thoughts. He so deserved to be at the celebration! At that very moment, Fazel turned to me:
‘You seem sad.’
‘Sad. Certainly not! I have always wanted to hear the word ‘freedom’ ringing out on the soil of the Orient, but some memories are bothering me.’
‘Cast them aside. Smile and rejoice. Make the most of the last moments of exhilaration.’
Worrying words which divested me of any wish to celebrate that evening. Was Fazel, after an interval of seven months, about to take up the difficult discussion which set us against each other in Tabriz? Did he have new cause for worry? I made up my mind to go and see him the following day for an explanation, but in the end I decided against it. I avoided seeing him for a whole year.
What were the reasons? I believe that after the arduous adventure I had just been through, I had some nagging doubts about the wisdom of the role I had played in Tabriz. I had come to the Orient in search of a manuscript and had it been right for me to become so involved in a struggle which was not mine? To begin with, by what right had I advised Howard to come to Persia?
In the language of Fazel and his friends, Baskerville was a martyr; in my eyes he was a dead friend, a friend who had died in a foreign country for a foreign cause, a friend whose parents would one day write to me to ask me in the most poignantly polite of terms why I had led their son astray.
Was it remorse I was feeling over Howard? It was, to be more correct, a certain feeling of decency. I do not know if that is the right word, but I am trying to say that after my friends’ victory I had no desire to strut around Teheran listening to people laud my supposed exploits during the siege of Tabriz. I had played a minimal and quite fortuitous role. Above all I had had a friend who was a heroic compatriot and I had no intention of exploiting his memory to obtain privileges and respect for myself.
To tell the whole truth, I felt a great need to disappear from view, to be forgotten and not to visit politicians, anjuman-members and diplomats. The only person that I saw every day, and with a pleasure that never diminished, was Shireen. I had talked her into going to live in one of the numerous residences belonging to her family in the heights of Zarganda, a holiday resort outside the capital. I myself had rented a small house in the neighbourhood, but that was for the sake of appearances and I spent my days and nights at Shireen’s, with the collusion of her servants.
That winter we managed to spend whole weeks without leaving her huge bedroom. We were warmed by a magnificent copper brazier, we read the manuscript and some other books, lazed around for hours smoking the kalyan, drinking Shiraz wine and sometimes even champagne, munching Kirmani pistachios and Isfahani nougat; my Princess could be a great lady or a little girl at one and the same time and we felt great tenderness for each other the whole time.
With the onset of the first warm days, Zarganda started to liven up. Foreigners and the richest Persians had sumptuous houses there and would move in for long months of idleness surrounded by luxuriant vegetation. It is a matter beyond dispute that only the proximity of this paradise made the grey dullness of Teheran bearable for innumerable diplomats. However Zarganda became a ghost-town in the winter, with only the gardeners, some caretakers and the rare survivors of its indigenous population staying behind. Shireen and I were badly in need of just such a desert.
However from April on, alas, the visitors took up their summer lodgings. There were people strolling in front to all the entrance-gates and people walking down all the paths. After every night and every siesta, Shireen offered tea to female visitors with roving eyes. I was always having to hide or flee down the corridors. The gentle months of hibernation had been used up, and it was time for me to leave.
When I informed her, my princess was sad but resigned.
‘I thought you were happy.’
‘I have experienced a rare moment of happiness. I want to put it in suspended animation so that it will still be intact when I come back to it. I never tire of watching you, with both astonishment and love. I do not want the invading crowd to change the way I see you. I am going away in the summer so that I may find you again in the winter.’
‘Summer, winter. You go away, you come back. You think that you can dispose of the seasons, the years, your life and mine with impunity. Have you learnt nothing from Khayyam?
“Suddenly Heaven robs you of even the moment you need to moisten your lips.”’
She looked deep into my eyes, as if she were reading an open book. She had understood everything and sighed.
‘Where are you thinking of going?’
I did not know yet. I had come to Persia twice and twice I had led a besieged existence. I still had the whole of the Orient to discover, from the Bosphorous to the China Sea — Turkey which has just risen up at the same time as Persia, which deposed its Sultan-Caliph and which now prides itself upon its deputies, senators, clubs and opposition newspapers; proud Afghanistan which the British managed to subdue, but at what cost! And of course there was all of Persia to explore. I knew only Tabriz and Teheran. But what of Isfahan, Shiraz, Kashan and Kirman? Nishapur and Khayyam’s tomb, a grey stone watched over for centuries by untiring generations of petals.
Out of all the roads which lay before me, which should I take? It was the manuscript which chose for me. I took the train to Krasnovodsk, crossed Ashkabad and old Merv and hence to Bukhara.
Most importantly, I went to Samarkand.
CHAPTER 43
I was curious to see what was left of the city where Khayyam spent the flower of his youth.
What had become of the district of Asfizar and of that belevedere in the garden where Omar had loved Jahan? Was there still some trace of the suburb of Maturid, where in the eleventh century that Jewish paper-maker was still turning white mulberry branches into pulp according to an old Chinese recipe. For weeks I went about on foot, and then on a mule; I questioned the merchants, the passers-by and the imams of the mosques, but they only replied with blank unknowing looks, amused smiles and generous invitations for me to squat on their sky-blue divans and take tea with them.
It was my luck to be in the Registan Square one morning. A caravan was passing. It was a short caravan, consisting of just six or seven thick-haired and heavy-hoofed Bactrian camels. The old camel-driver had stopped not far from me in front of a potter’s stall, holding a new-born lamb to his chest; he proposed a barter and the craftsman discussed it; without taking his hands off the jar or the wheel, he pointed with his chin toward a pile of varnished vessels. I watched the two men with their black-bordered woollen hats, their striped robes, reddish beards and their ancient gestures. Was there any detail of this scene which had not come down unchanged from the time of Khayyam?
There was a slight breeze and the sand started to swirl, their clothing billowed and the whole square was covered with an unreal haze. I cast my eyes around. At the edge of the square rose three monuments, three gigantic complexes of towers, domes, gateways and high walls completely covered with minute mosaics, arabesques studded with gold, amethyst and turquoise, and intricate calligraphy. It all retained its majesty, but the towers were leaning, the domes had gaping holes, the facades were crumbling, ravaged by time, wind and centuries of neglect; people no longer looked at these monuments, these haughty, proud and forgotten giants which provided an imposing backdrop for a derisory play.