A curry was served at the end of the zikr, followed by tea. Malak moved closer to me. Paper cups, mint leaves in the boiling water. Moroccan tea, someone said.
I couldn’t help with picking up the empty plates, scrunching up the plastic sheet that had served as a tablecloth. I stood apart, waiting and watching. Malak looked as if a load had been lifted from her shoulders. The darkness under her eyes was gone. I was the one sluggish, drugged.
She was smiling when she led me out of the room. My legs were sore and stiff, I almost stumbled down the stairs. She held my arm and spoke to me gently. ‘We’ll take a taxi. I’ll drop you off. Your hotel is on my way.’ She was staying with friends in Hampstead.
I dozed in the taxi. The streets were wet with rain, the taxi sped through the night. Malak was humming a refrain from the zikr, something that had a tune, words I couldn’t understand. She was petite but she was spiritually strong.
The feeling of heaviness and enlargement followed me to the hotel. I fell into the darkest layers of sleep. It must be because I had inhaled too deeply from the opium of the people. When I woke up in the morning for a split second I did not know where I was. My mobile was ringing. It was Grusha from Sudan, but instead of news about my visa which she had promised to expedite, she spoke softly. ‘I am at the hospital with your father. Here, he wants to speak to you.’
I sat up in bed. ‘Papa,’ I said, ‘I will be with you in a few days’ time.’ I had not spoken to him for nine years. ‘How are you feeling now?’ I stood up and pulled open the curtains. A remnant of yesterday’s heaviness was still in my arms.
‘Natasha,’ he grunted and then a couple of sentences in Arabic.
‘In Russian,’ I said. ‘I’ve forgotten my Arabic.’
He needed time to make the adjustment. I could hear Grusha in the background helping him. He spoke slowly. ‘You have no business staying on in Britain without your mother. Leave that foreign man and come home.’
I was amused at Tony being the ‘foreign man’ and my father forgetting that I had grown up.
‘Papa, I don’t live with Tony. I have my own flat. I have a full-time job and two cars. I’m thirty-five years old.’
‘I made a mistake,’ he said, as if I hadn’t been listening. ‘I should not have let you go. I should have kept you here with me. And now I want to set it right. I want my daughter back with me where she belongs. Come over here and I will look after you.’ He was upset. Ill, in pain and getting himself more upset. ‘People make mistakes. I made a mistake. You don’t know how I felt. Your mother blackened my name, she turned me into a laughing stock. That’s why I let you go. It was wrong and that’s why we need to set this right.’
I felt sorry for him. I said, ‘I will come to Khartoum and spend time with you. I am hoping to come in the next few days. But I will have to return. My work is here.’
‘Resign. There are jobs here.’
‘I can’t do that. I’m settled here.’
This made him more agitated. His voice was louder. ‘I’m telling you it’s a mistake. The biggest mistake. You see because you were her daughter. I couldn’t stand even looking at you. That was when I made the wrong decision. Take her, I said. She can go to hell, I said. That is the mistake that needs to be put right. Don’t tell me you have to go back. I am your father and I am ordering you …’
Anger surged through me. I did not trust myself to speak. Instead, I threw the telephone across the room. It skidded onto the carpet and the back broke off. All that hard work, all that sucking up, jumping through hoops then proving myself again, all that I had achieved and he called it a mistake.
I picked up my mum’s laptop and opened it onto my Staff Profile page at the university. The best photo of myself and next to it who I was. Dr Natasha Wilson, lecturer in history. Next to the photo was my office phone number and my email address. Click to see my profile, click to see my research interests and the research grants I had been awarded. Click to see the modules I taught and a list of my publications.
My body was buzzing. Patches of red floated before my eyes. To calm myself, I should work on the revisions to my paper now. Never mind breakfast, never mind that I could hear Housekeeping up and down the corridor and they would be wanting to clean my room next. I opened the document and began to write.
When in January 1854 Britain and France allied themselves with the Ottomans in the Crimea, Shamil’s prospects were strengthened. He had been actively rousing the Muslim minorities in Georgia and Circassia to join the jihad. An Allied advance into the Caucasus would have driven the Russians out of Georgia and the eastern Caucasus. Instead the Allies concentrated on the Black Sea and when Russia lost Sevastopol it turned to the Caucasus and concentrated all its military might on the Muslim insurgents. For only a brief period a large-scale and arguably successful Muslim-led uprising against imperial Russia was a credible possibility.
3. K
HASAVYURT, THE FRONTIER OF
S
HAMIL’S TERRITORY
, F
EBRUARY
1855
In the library of the District Commission, Jamaleldin sat flipping through an encyclopaedia. A painting of a crab held his attention. This particular crab was found in cold waters and due to its size and taste was suitable for eating. It was not an attractive animal, asymmetrical and spiky with too much resemblance to a scorpion. Crabs walked sideways and backwards. This irritated Jamaleldin. No living thing should walk backwards. It was unnatural and gloomy.
Ever since the meeting with Younis and Mikhail, he had felt himself weakening. It was not because his father’s men had repelled him – they should have after the distance he had covered, what he had learnt and become. Instead the highlanders promised to drag him down to their level. Threatened him with love and the gravity his father exerted. Without his Russian army uniform, without the tsar’s language on his tongue, was he any different from them? They would pull him in and then take him for granted. He would slip and become uncouth like them, leaping over boulders, sitting on the ground to eat, wrapping his head in a turban. He would become
wild like them and they were wild not because he remembered them as such but because Russia and Europe said they were. The mountain spirit was in him, it had always been in him but it had been latent all these years, held down by newness and duty. All it needed was a stir and it would thicken. Like a crab, he was edging backwards to them.
David Chavchavadze walked into the room holding a letter. He was ruffled, not agitated. Jamaleldin could read his face now and judge his mood from the way he walked, the twitch of his moustache and the vein on his forehead. Whether it was visible or whether it throbbed was a good barometer. Now David was moderately engaged, which meant that the news was neither good nor bad. David stood tall and began reading out loud, somewhat gratuitously Jamaleldin thought, extracts from the latest letter to arrive from Princess Anna via one of the Georgian servants who had volunteered for the journey to Dargo-Veddin. ‘“It is impossible to reason with these people. I have failed to convince them that you cannot offer a greater sum … Today, David, I no longer believe that we are destined to meet again in this life. I try, I do try to submit to this trial with Christian humility and to hold on to the hope of that better future promised to the suffering. I will undergo with gratitude whatever may be in store for me here and I will constantly pray that Alexander’s fate is better than mine. May God strengthen you in your grief and reward you.” ’
David’s voice started to tremble. ‘She does not know that you are here,’ he said to Jamaleldin and folded up the letter. ‘If she did, she would not be despairing. But they should have heard by now that you are on your way.’ He began walking back and forth hemmed in by the shelves of books. ‘Delays, delays! First they ask for the sum in gold and I get that ready. Then Shamil changes his mind.’
Jamaleldin winced at the mention of his father’s name. He always did, as if it was something intimate that should not be exposed, at least not in that tone, not with that impatience. Yet the
name was there, it had to be said. Shamil was the core of the matter. It made Jamaleldin dizzy.
‘And why does Shamil want silver instead of gold?’ David continued. ‘Because the amount would look more impressive were it in silver and presumably he must satisfy the mercenary hordes who seek to gain out of all this. They must be ignorant not to realise that there is no difference, gold or silver, it is the same sum. The trouble I went to find silver! A little bit from here, a little bit from there. It was not easy. I still have five thousand in gold. They had better accept it and not change their minds again.’
Jamaleldin wished he did not have to listen to this. He wished for a companion his age. Twenty-four hours a day he was in the company of David Chavchavadze. They even shared the same room. Was the prince afraid that he would abscond or put a pistol to his head? David certainly hid it well. He certainly conveyed a feeling of trust and gratitude. But why read Anna’s letter out to him? So that Jamaleldin would feel sorry for her plight instead of feeling sorry for himself.
‘When will this finally come to an end? Our men had to wait a whole month in Dargo because Shamil was away. Then they want to exchange other prisoners as well. That opens more doors of negotiations. Then they tell me: come to Dargo yourself for a visit. A visit! So that you could see your wife and son. And then what? I said. Come back empty-handed? I would not do that. Either they come back with me or not at all.’
Mistrust on all sides. Jamaleldin could see through them both. The Russians believed the Chechens were wily and suspicious. The Chechens believed the Russians were aggressive and treacherous. They were both right, they were both wrong. One led to the other.
‘My first offer to him was forty thousand roubles.’ David was still pacing up and down. His scalp shone through his receding hairline. ‘Would I conceal or keep back one
shaour
when my family’s liberty is at stake?’ He suddenly stopped and faced Jamaleldin, posing this disingenuous question.
For the sake of peace Jamaleldin replied, ‘You would not.’ He strained to remember what a
shaour
was. It was a Georgian coin valued at only five kopeks.
‘He has still not turned my offer down.’ David resumed his pacing. ‘Nor has he accepted it.’
A knock on the door and Jamaleldin was saved by a visit from a group of young officers who asked him to join them for a ride. He readily agreed. On a horse he felt more like himself. He could race and exert himself to the point where his muscles trembled and his heart beat louder than his thoughts. He could pretend that everything was normal. Not quite. The mountains were there, up ahead waiting for him. Their forests and snows, their steepness that this horse could not manage, though other horses could.
Why was he thinking of them all the time? Of
him
all the time? In the evenings when he knocked back schnapps and lost money playing cards, Shamil’s disapproval ruined his pleasure. He was a marked man. And yet there was the ache to thaw and he wanted more than anything to see how Ghazi looked now. With a brother one would be less lonely, one would stretch out and spar without needing to win. The prospects played out in his mind, secrets soft as dreams. He dreamt of his mother and woke up with the fresh realisation that she was dead. He would not be going back to her, he would not be going back to Akhulgo. The course of the war had altered and his father, who split a man vertically in two halves with one blow of his sword, who could out-run and out-jump friend and foe, must have aged, even if only a little.
On the following morning two highlanders came. They were the official negotiators sent by Shamil. One of them, Hassan, circled Jamaleldin asking him one question after the other. What did he remember from his childhood? What was the name of his mother, his uncle who was long-ago martyred, his father’s cook? What was the colour of his father’s horse? Jamaleldin’s answers were vague, the Avar language let him down. He needed an interpreter.
He started to feel bored. There was no point to this interrogation. Hadn’t Younis vouched for him already?
Hassan exuded ambition. His thick eyebrows almost met. His copious beard was perfectly black. He was not as old as he wanted to look. ‘My commission is to ascertain whether you are really the son of our great imam. I need positive physical evidence. Please bare your right arm.’
Jamaleldin rolled up his sleeve. Hassan grabbed his arm. His hand was rough and warm. ‘Yes, I can see the scar.’ A smile entered his voice. His grip loosened. He looked Jamaleldin straight in the eye. ‘When you were very young, you fell from a mill and wounded your arm. It was the kind of deep cut that would leave a scar.’
Jamaleldin rolled down his sleeve. He did not remember falling from a mill and hurting his arm. The scar had once or twice roused his curiosity but it was neither ugly nor big enough to embarrass him. Now he could make up a story about himself climbing inside a mill in Akhulgo and falling on the straw. Little Ghazi frightened by the sight of blood, running off to tell their mother and Jamaleldin looking at the frazzled stained flesh and willing himself to be brave.
Hassan turned to David. ‘You have delighted us with the return of Shamil Imam’s son. On my honour, I can now assure you of the return of your family very soon.’
Jamaleldin could see the relief in David’s face, the restrained excitement. The highlanders promised they would convey the news to Shamil in Dargo and return in three days’ time. I am that close, Jamaleldin thought. Days, not weeks or months.
Hassan and his companion returned as promised but not with a message from Shamil concluding the exchange. Instead the letter read, ‘I thank you for keeping your word with regards to my son’s return from Russia but do not think that this will end the negotiations between us. Besides my son, I require a million roubles and a hundred and fifty of my men whom you now hold prisoners. Do not bargain with me. I will not take less.’