‘Would my Lord be so kind as to excuse me. I am in a period of fasting and can put nothing in my mouth.’
‘But the month of fasting finished three weeks ago, if I am not mistaken!’
‘During Ramadan I was travelling from Nishapur to Samarkand. I had to break my fast with the vow that I would complete it later.’
The qadi took fright and all those assembled fidgeted, but the sovereign’s face was blank. He chose to question Abu Taher.
‘Can you tell me, you who have knowledge of all the minutiae of the faith, can you tell me if putting gold coins in his mouth and taking them out quickly thereafter constitutes breaking the fast for Khawaja Omar?’
The qadi adopted his most neutral tone;
‘Strictly speaking, anything that goes into the mouth can constitute breaking the fast. It has happened that a coin was swallowed by accident.’
Nasr accepted the argument, but he was not satisfied. He questioned Omar:
‘Have you told me the real reason for your refusal?’
Khayyam hesitated for a moment and then said:
‘That is not the only reason.’
‘Speak,’ said the Khan. ‘You have nothing to fear from me.’
Then Omar pronounced these verses:
It was not poverty that drove me to you
I am not poor for my desires are simple.
The only thing I seek from you is honour
The honour of a free and steadfast man.
‘May God darken your days, Khayyam!’ murmured Abu Taher, as if to himself.
He did not know what to think, but his fear was tangible. There still rang in his ears the echo of an all too recent anger and he was not sure if he would again be able to tame the beast. The Khan remained silent and still, as if frozen in unfathomable deliberation. Those close to the Khan were awaiting his first word as if it were a verdict and some courtiers chose to leave before the storm.
Omar profited from the general disarray to seek out Jahan’s eyes. She was leaning with her back against a pillar with her face buried in her hands. Could it be for him that she was trembling?
Finally the Khan arose. He marched resolutely toward Omar, gave him a vigorous hug, took him by the hand and led him off.
‘The master of Transoxania,’ the chroniclers report, ‘developed such an esteem for Omar Khayyam that he invited him to sit next to him on the throne.’
‘So now you are the Khan’s friend,’ Abu Taher called out to Khayyam when they had left the palace.
His joviality was as great as the anguish which had gripped his throat, but Khayyam replied coolly:
‘Could you have forgotten the proverb which says, “The sea knows no neighbours, the prince knows no friends”?’
‘Do not scorn the open door. It seems to me that your career is marked out at court!’
‘Court life is not for me; my only ambition is that one day I will have an observatory with a rose garden and that I will be able to throw myself into contemplating the sky, a goblet in my hand and a beautiful woman at my side.’
‘As beautiful as that poetess?’ chuckled Abu Taher.
Omar could think of nothing but her, but he did not reply. He was afraid that the smallest word uttered carelessly might betray him. Feeling a little light-hearted, the qadi changed both his tone and the subject:
‘I have a favour to ask of you!’
‘It is you who has showered me with your favours.’
Abu Taher quickly conceded that point. ‘Let us say that I would like something in exchange.’
They had arrived at the gateway of his residence. He invited Khayyam to continue their conversation around a table laden with food.
‘I have thought up a project for you, a book project. Let us forget your Rubaiyaat for a moment. As far as I am concerned they are just the inevitable whims of genius. The real domains in which you excel are medicine, astrology, mathematics, physics and metaphysics. Am I mistaken when I say that since Ibn Sina’s death there is none who knows them better than you?’
Khayyam said nothing. Abu Taher continued:
‘It is in those areas of knowledge that I expect you to write the definitive book, and I want you to dedicate that book to me.’
‘I don’t think that there can be a definitive book in those disciplines, and that is exactly why I have been content to read and to learn without writing anything myself.’
‘Explain yourself!’
‘Let us consider the Ancients — the Greeks, the Indians and the Muslims who have come before me. They wrote abundantly in all those disciplines. If I repeat what they have said, then my work is redundant; if I contradict them, as I am constantly tempted, others will come after me to contradict me. What will there remain tomorrow of the writings of the intellectuals? Only the bad that they have said about those who came before them. People will remember what they have destroyed of others’ theories, but the theories they construct themselves will inevitably be destroyed and even ridiculed by those who come after. That is the law of science. Poetry does not have a similar law. It never negates what has come before it and is never negated by what follows. Poetry lives in complete calm through the centuries. That is why I wrote my Rubaiyaat. Do you know what fascinates me about science? It is that I have found the supreme poetry: the intoxicating giddiness of numbers in mathematics and the mysterious murmur of the universe in astronomy. But, by your leave, please do not speak to me of Truth.’
He was silent for a moment and then continued:
‘It happened that I was taking a walk round about Samarkand and I saw ruins with inscriptions that people could no longer decipher, and I wondered, “What is left of the city which used to exist here?” Let us not speak about people, for they are the most ephemeral of creatures, but what is left of their civilisation? What kingdom, science, law and truth existed here? Nothing, I searched around those ruins in vain and all I found was a face engraved on a potsherd and a fragment of a frieze. That is what my poems will be in a thousand years — shards, fragments, the detritus of a world buried for all eternity. What remains of a city is the detached gaze with which a half-drunk poet looked at it.’
‘I understand your words,’ stuttered Abu Taher, rather at sea. ‘However you would not dedicate to a qadi of the Shafi ritual poems which smack of wine!’
In fact, Omar would be able to appear conciliatory and grateful. He would water down his wine, so to speak. During the following months, he undertook to compile a very serious work on cubic equations. To represent the unknown in this treatise on algebra, Khayyam used the Arabic term shay, which means thing. This word, spelled xay in Spanish scientific works, was gradually replaced by its first letter, x, which became the universal symbol for the unknown.
This work of Khayyam’s was completed at Samarkand and dedicated to his protector: ‘We are the victims of an age in which men of science are discredited and very few of them have the possibility of committing themselves to real research. The little knowledge that today’s intellectuals have is devoted to the pursuit of material aims. I had thus despaired of finding in this world a man as interested in the scientific as the mundane, a man preoccupied by the fate of mankind, until God accorded me the favour of meeting the great qadi, the Imam Abu Taher. His favours permitted me to devote myself to these works.’
That night, when he went back toward the belvedere which was serving him as a house, Khayyam did not take a lamp with him, telling himself that it was too late to read or write. However, his path was only faintly illuminated by the moon, a frail crescent at the end of the month of shawwal. As he walked further from the qadi’s villa, he had to grope his way along. He tripped more than once, held on to the bushes and took the grim caress of a weeping willow full in the face.