‘David Chavchavadze came to see me,’ Nicholas said. ‘He is mortgaging his estate to pay for the ransom. But the ransom is not enough. Shamil wants you. I told David I cannot order you to make such a sacrifice. It is too much.’
Jamaleldin said, ‘I was not given a choice when I came here. I do not have a choice now.’
Nicholas’s fingers grabbed at the sheets. He tossed his head impatiently from side to side and moaned. ‘Show more gratitude. It took David a long time to approach me. He knows how dear you are to me. He did try to rescue his family but failed.’
Jamaleldin felt conscious of his well-shined boots, his leather gloves that lay across his knees. The distance between him and Nicholas was growing. There was a time when it had all been much simpler. He rescued from the wild, Nicholas the benevolent godfather. He the pet, Nicholas the mighty. He the puppet, Nicholas the conductor, the thrower of crumbs, the arranger of roles, the changer of destinies. Jamaleldin the chess piece, and now Shamil had changed the rules of the game.
‘Sire,’ Jamaleldin said, wanting more than anything to stretch his legs, to run down the stairs. ‘I will not shy away from my duty.’
The tsar raised his hand. ‘You do not have to give me your decision now. Go away and reflect on the sacrifice that is asked of you. I will give you two days.’
To reflect – was that to realise that he would not be entering the military academy, that he would never serve on the staff, that in terms of his career in the Russian army this was the end? Or to reflect that if he did not buy an atlas and take it with him, he would never see one again? Or to attend the ballet one last time, really the very last time? Or alternatively to think “I will see Ghazi again” and laugh out loud in a rush of elation? Or to reflect that if he fell ill in Dargo, there would be nothing but herbal concoctions and superstition? But these recent pangs of hunger to hug his little
brother again – how else could they be subdued? No, he did not want two days to reflect. He could not visit this sick bed again.
Jamaleldin fell to his knees. ‘There is only one right thing to do. I will use the two days to prepare for the journey and say my goodbyes.’
The tsar blessed him and gave him a parting gift, words to keep hearing in the mountains. ‘Never forget that I made you a civilised man.’
He walked down the stairway, of course, he did not run. The palace was gloomy; for some time now there had been no balls, no receptions, just echoes of better days. Near the archway, Jamaleldin had a sudden memory of Anna. Ever since he had heard the news, he had searched his mind for a recollection of her, sure that he must have met her at one point. Now her face and figure slotted into place under this particular chandelier. Slightly older than him, too beautiful to be considered dowdy, but still the provincial had cast a pall over her. He had danced the mazurka with her once and found her distracted, a little awkward, not Russian enough. She did not fit in and this had lowered her instinctively in his estimation. Perhaps she reminded him of himself, perhaps in his competitive desire for court approval he surmised that her acquaintance could not be an asset. And now, exponentially, she would be his downfall. But blaming her was hardly chivalrous, let alone logical. His father. This was all about his father. His father’s love had done all this. But what took you so long? Why not after six months or a year or even two, when I stayed up at night listening out for your men’s footsteps then cried myself to sleep. Before I forgot your language.
Once in his first week at the
Kadetsky Corpus,
on a particularly windy night, the branches of the tree kept tapping on the dorm window. Jamaleldin had imagined it as a code. He crept out of bed and crouched by the window. ‘Younis,’ he had whispered and then in the Avar language, ‘Is it you?’ until the cold sense of his foolishness sent him back between the sheets to dream of the last highlander he had seen, the teacher who gingerly made his way
down the mountains, passed the Russian lines and visited him in the garrison at Akhulgo, to lead him in prayer and continue with the Qur’an lessons. Younis, who left one day saying, ‘We will continue tomorrow insh’Allah’, but by tomorrow Jamaleldin was on his way to Moscow, without ever saying a proper goodbye. At cadet school the following day, hardened and grateful that no one had seen or heard him talking to a window, he plunged into the race to prove himself. No time to be homesick, no time for memories. So why now, after all these years? Because Anna Chavchavadze had not heeded the military governor’s warning and stayed in Tiflis. Or because, when the raiders came, she didn’t escape to the woods in time. Or because, as his father would no doubt say, it was Allah’s will and nothing could be done to change it.
Jamaleldin packed his drawing materials, he packed books and what he reckoned he would not find in Dargo, what people carried from civilisation to the back of beyond. A clock, a globe, a music box. The tsar signed a travel order, a small group of Cossacks of the imperial escort were gathered, a troika with a bearskin rug was prepared and Jamaleldin sat in it. The journey south, via Moscow, took him along the river Don. When the Caucasus came into view, the awe he felt was mixed with oppression. The peaks were higher than he remembered, barren, stony. The troika, rendered fragile by the landscape, was exchanged for a tarantass. On and on, he travelled. It took a month to reach Vladikavkaz. There David Chavchavadze was waiting to meet him and say, ‘I cannot thank you enough.’
Jamaleldin noticed the anxiety and pain on the prince’s face. He was tall and rangy, too direct to be clumsy and too socially aware to be deep. Ironically he had recently been awarded the Order of St Anna and raised to the rank of colonel for his heroic defence of the river forts against Shamil’s invading army. That very same invasion which had carried off his family and killed his daughter. Entering David’s solicitous care and companionship, Jamaleldin could not help but think that it was only these peculiar circumstances that had
thrown them together. Ordinarily he would not merit the prince’s attention or presume upon his time.
During a walk by the Terek river, David updated him on the negotiation process. He said, ‘Your father has been informed that you are on the way.’ Six months since the princess was kidnapped, one month on the journey and five in Dargo. ‘She is suffering,’ David said and Jamaleldin did not want to hear the details, did not want to dwell on the spot she would be giving up for him.
In the evening a dinner at the commanding officer’s house was arranged in Jamaleldin’s honour. Thirty ladies and gentlemen, lulled by the monotony of this outpost, deprived of the pleasures of the metropolis, seized on the diversion of Jamaleldin’s arrival. They were curious too and he sensed the hush when he and David walked into the drawing room, noticed the plump red-headed woman who turned away from the window. Soft introductions and then time to walk into dinner where instead of sitting on the far end of the table with the other young aides-de-camp and officials, he was seated in the middle of the long side. Prince David was across from him. Next to David was the wife of a general, a tall, heavily bejewelled woman. Jamaleldin took note of all that was to pass away: the footmen in their livery, the silver tureen and the shifting breasts of the red-headed woman inches away from his left elbow.
The conversation looped reluctantly around the tsar’s health, the further bad news from the Crimea, until the general launched into a first-hand description of Hadji Murat’s defection in 1851, lauding the highlander’s courage and humanity. It must have been a story he had told often before or it was familiar enough to his audience, because no one paid much attention. It was only when Jamaleldin spoke out that everyone turned and gave him their full attention.
‘After failing in a mission, Hadji Murat was removed from office by my father, who also publicly forgave him. Instead of accepting this decree, however, Hadji Murat defected. This show of ingratitude brought down on him the charge of apostasy.’
‘An unfair charge,’ said the general, moustache bristling. ‘Everyone who was with him could see that Hadji Murat was fastidious in performing his prayers. He did not give up his religion.’
‘A pragmatic man then,’ said Prince David. ‘An opportunist who shifted his alliances when necessary.’
The general launched into an account of Hadji Murat’s unfortunate demise and Jamaleldin wished he hadn’t spoken out. He was able to give them extra information, the view from Shamil’s side, but they preferred their own speculations and opinions. They knew best. Jamaleldin turned to the lovely lady next to him and whispered, ‘I am a condemned man. But it is worth it for the pleasure of sitting next to you.’
She smiled and put down her knife and fork, turned to him with shining eyes. ‘I have never met anyone as self-sacrificing as you. Never.’
He decided to push further. ‘To spend my last days of liberty in company such as yours will help me bear more stoically my impending return to the wilds. Would you deny a dying man a drink of water?’
She was visibly moved but prevented from answering by Prince David, who stood up to propose a toast. He cleared his throat and said, ‘My joy at the prospect of regaining my family is only matched by the anguish I feel on behalf of my deliverer, our guest tonight. I have only known him a very short time but I can confirm to you all that I have never seen a Muslim with so little of the Tartar about him. A young man whose opinions and manners are completely and truly Russian!’
While the toast was being drunk, Jamaleldin felt queasy at the praise that was not praise, the compliments that were intended as compliments but settled inside him like stones. What a freak he was! Better to focus on the luscious lady whose hair was the colour of autumn and whose loneliness, her lieutenant husband being away on duty, was a distracting temptation. Coffee in the drawing room, a seat at the card table. Jamaleldin added a pack of cards to his list
of things that must accompany him to Dargo. He sucked on a cigar, knowing his father had outlawed smoking in all of his territories.
There were more of such dinners as he continued on his journey south accompanied by David. The garrisons on the Georgian Military Highway all the way to Tiflis threw parties in his honour. It was as if every officer stationed in the Caucasus wanted to meet him, every young woman wanted to dance with him, and every matron wanted to indulge in sentimental tears over his ‘sacrifice’. Jamaleldin, the deliverer, the hero, worthy of toasts and curiosity. And always by his side the watchful and grateful David Chavchavadze, too cautious to indulge in premature celebration, patiently tolerating and certainly not impeding what had turned into a spectacle, the procession of a champion, the last free frolics of the sacrificial lamb.
In Khasavyurt, at the frontier of Shamil’s territory, a ball was held in Jamaleldin’s honour. The opportunity to show off his dancing skills, his manly elegance and his natural handsomeness inherited from ‘he who must not be named’. By that time he had perfected his lines with young debutantes and bored army wives, with blondes and dark-haired Georgians, with seasoned beauties and those hovering on the edges of style. ‘Would you deny a condemned man a drink of water?’ He spun around the room with a Marta or a Maia or was she a Vardo? Marta, Maia or Vardo had full rosy cheeks, so large and firm that he wondered if they obscured her vision. Another turn and he noticed a movement in the window, the sway of the bushes and what could be a flash of cloth.
At the end of the dance, he excused himself and went to investigate. In the cold moonlit February evening, the sound of music and conversation followed him. He felt heady with a sense that he had done this before, he had seen something through a window, someone who beckoned to him, someone who wanted him. He moved around the building, approached the same twitching bushes he had seen from inside, wished that his progress was not so noisy. Spurs on the path, the swish sound made by moving his arm, the thud of his boots. A movement ahead of him. There was definitely
someone there. In the splash of moonlight he could see that there were even two. They speeded up and he surged forward in pursuit, circling them so that instead of the forest, they were forced to head to the garrison wall.
No sounds from them, not a whisper. Their soft, soft steps in the leather slip-ons. He could see them clearly now and his heart skipped a beat. The two men of his dreams, their turbans, the folds of their cherkesskas, their sabres hung in a halter-neck. Before they reached the wall, before, as he knew, they would deftly climb up and over it, he called out. ‘Younis!’ The word was heavy in his mouth. He had said this before and now it was time to say it louder again, summon the old language and give painful birth to it. ‘Younis. Is it you?’
The older of the men stopped and turned around. The other one stayed by the wall. The older man came forward. His breath was heaving, beads of sweat between the bushy eyebrows, eyes scanning the background to check that there was no one else. ‘Jamaleldin?’
They had come for him at last. His father had sent them and here they were. A flood of Avar but he could understand this hug from Younis, this kissing of his shoulder. Embraces that pressed his body and hurt as if he were fragile. The other man, a youth, approached open-mouthed, then kept his distance.
‘Your father sent us to check that it was really you. That the Russians weren’t tricking us.’ Younis had hardly changed over the years. Only more white in his beard, more fatigue in the lines of his face, a thickness in his bearing, but the same voice, the same manners. More kisses. ‘Oh, he would be happy. Oh, I would say that I touched you too!’ He was talking to himself, ‘It’s him, it’s him. Subhan Allah. I was sure of it as soon as I saw him.’ More squeezing of his arms, tugging of his hair, pinching of his cheeks. ‘Look at you! Look at you all grown up. Praise be to the Almighty. Subhan Allah.’
Jamaleldin was floating, he felt drunk. With wine, yes, but also with this apparition, this dream come true. Was he speaking Avar
or just understanding or both? Or laughing like a simpleton? The youth, Younis explained, was his nephew Mikail. ‘I taught him the Qur’an like I taught you.’ He gestured for Mikail to come forward. The youth obeyed but his expression was sullen. He was held back by the Russian uniform, repulsed by the imam’s son they had just seen dancing with a woman in his arms. He did not utter a single word of greeting.