Oz passed me the peanut butter. He put more bread in the toaster. ‘Do you have family in Khartoum?’
‘My father is still there. He remarried and has a son. My father,’ I expanded, knowing Oz would be interested, ‘is Muslim in name only, unless he’s lately changed. He didn’t care about religion. He was a member of the Communist party and they gave him a scholarship to Russia where he met my mother and faith was not an issue for them. So I wasn’t brought up Muslim even though we lived in a Muslim country. But I was aware of Islam around me. You can’t miss it in Sudan. My grandmother prayed. When she came to stay with us, I would taunt her and push her as she prayed just because I knew she wouldn’t leave her prayers and punish me. She used to swipe at me, though, while she was praying.’ I mimicked my skinny grandmother flailing her arms.
Oz laughed. ‘That’s so mean.’ He sounded like a schoolboy.
‘During Ramadan,’ I said, now that I was on a roll with memories, ‘none of us used to fast, not even my father, but instead of eating lunch at the usual time before siesta we would eat around sunset. My father insisted on it. He liked the special drinks and foods of Ramadan. You’ve never lived in a Muslim country, have you? Culture and religion are so entwined that sometimes people can’t tell the difference. At sunset, the special Ramadan cannon would go off. It was a relic of Turco-Egyptian rule. I would hear that one bang as I was playing in the street. The other children were fasting and we would each go to our own homes. Sometimes I fasted like them just so as not to be different, but it annoyed my mother.’ Those were the years when I had hope of fitting in. Then awkwardness became my home.
‘Do you think if you stayed with us here, you would change?’ He stirred more sugar into his coffee, splashed a drop of milk on the table.
‘What do you mean?’
‘If, just to say, the snow lasted for days and days. If you couldn’t leave, would you come closer to faith, just by being with the two of us?’
I knew that I should resent his suggestion. Its echoes of compulsion and submission. ‘No matter how long the snow lasts, it will melt and I will leave. Then I will go back to my own life and this will be a memory. Do
you
find yourself easily changing? Do you match the company you keep?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I guess I do or at least did. I would like to be braver. I would like, just as an example, to be assertive enough not to mind my name or not to care what others think about my mother’s job.’
‘What’s wrong with her job?’
He sat up straight and didn’t reply. I could hear Malak in the next room close. At last he said, ‘It is not others that are the problem. Their thoughts become my thoughts.’
‘You’re young,’ I said and that was not the right thing to say. He felt somewhat rebuked.
Malak came into the kitchen, her face shining with sweat. She refilled her water bottle from the tap. ‘Ossie, show Natasha the flag that was sent to Shamil from England,’ she said as she walked out again.
In the living room, he moved a tartan rug from the top of a trunk and knelt down to open it. I sat next to him on the floor and it had been years since I had done that. My knees creaked and I shifted my heaviness on the carpet. He showed me portraits of Shamil; sketches and paintings made by Russian journalists and artists who accompanied the troops. They were orientalist in ethos: one of him standing alone in prayer while behind him his men were on horseback, swords drawn, ready to charge. In others, he was
a hawk-like figure, with brooding dark eyes. In a family album, someone had collected fragments of the comments written in the West about Shamil. Oz read them out loud and when Malak joined us, she supplied the appropriate accent and I was soon laughing.
A French accent for Alexander Dumas: ‘Shamil, the Titan, who struggles from his lair against the tsar.’
The MP in the House of Commons lauding Shamil’s stand as a check to tsarist designs in India: ‘… a really splendid type who stood up to tyrants … and deeply religious even if he did have several wives …’ The Caucasus blocked the route to Delhi and Shamil was their man.
‘Look,’ Malak said and took out a scrap of material preserved in a sealed glass case. Three scarlet stars stitched on a dull beige background that must have been white at the time. ‘This was part of a banner that was sent to Shamil as a token of support. Imagine a group of English ladies, a sewing circle, stitching away in a parlour. Wasn’t it good of them, Natasha?’
Oz shook his head. He was right to be sceptical. These tokens were not enough to save Shamil. All the newspaper articles that extolled Phoenix rising from the ashes of Akhulgo, all the calls in Parliament for an independent Dagestan, all the collections for the ‘poor, brave Caucasians’, the talk of training from Indian army officials on modern artillery methods, at the end only provided him with moral support.
‘These three stars on the flag,’ I said, ‘probably represent Georgia, Circassia and Dagestan even though Georgia had ceded to Russia.’
Oz showed me sheets of music enfolded in a romantic colourful cover of warriors with their swords and Arabian steeds. The title was
The Shamil Schottische
and Malak gave us a demonstration of the dance, a slower polka that really needed a partner, she said, but Oz would not oblige.
It was part of the magic of the day, to watch her dance and laugh, to listen to Oz teasing her. She was light on her feet, saying
‘The composer was English and to use Shamil’s name to market the tune must mean that he captured people’s imagination at the time.’ The sun shone on the sweep of her black hair, her jade earrings. The sight filled me with a sense of privilege, a gratitude I had not felt for a long time. Here we were, the three of us, fascinated by a common past – faithful to it, even. I at least to the history, they to an ancestor they were proud of. It was only in a specific period of Shamil’s career that he won British favour – the years after Akhulgo, the politics surrounding the Crimean War, up until Princess Anna Elinichna entered into the picture. It was precisely because of a Georgian princess that the British representative said, ‘Shamil is a fanatic and a barbarian with whom it would be difficult for us … to entertain any credible or satisfactory relations.’
In order to nurse the baby while sitting on her favourite armchair, Princess Anna had gone through considerable effort. Neither David nor her sisters could understand her insistence on taking this particular armchair from Tiflis all the way down to the Tsinondali estate. The chair had to be hoisted on top of an oxen-cart with the ikons and the silver samovar, covered in old sheets to protect them from the dust of the road. Even though the Chavchavadzes spent every summer in the country, this year the move had been spiked with doubts. The military governor had refused to sanction it, citing the increasing raids of the highlanders. However, Anna had insisted. It was too hot to stay in town and there was much that needed doing at Tsinondali; to give it up one summer would amount to neglect. Besides, it was only in the countryside that she felt at ease, able to wear her national costume and speak in her mother tongue, garden and supervise the estate. Luckily David had supported her. He was to be nearby throughout the summer commanding the local militia, a line of forts along the river that protected the lowlands from any invasion by the Caucasus highlanders. On a good day he could reach them by dinner, and at the slightest inkling of danger he would be
the first to know. Still, though, their summer move raised frowns. There was gossip that Anna was headstrong and manipulative of her husband. Relatives hinted that they would not visit as often as they usually did and her sisters teased her about the armchair, which she would have to abandon in case of a hasty return to town.
The chair was upholstered in a material that was gentle on the skin and easy to wipe clean in case of spills. Its design of lilacs and roses was pleasing and it was comfortable enough to sleep in on those difficult nights when Lydia was colicky and refused to settle. Anna would hold her as the baby sucked on and off, swallowing lazily because she was not really hungry, dozing into the kind of sleep that was so light that Anna knew if she even tried to move her to her cot, she would shriek into full consciousness. ‘You are spoiling her, Your Highness,’ the new governess had said. If Anna had been less confident she would have minded. But she had been a fine mother to Alexander and there was no reason to doubt her abilities with Lydia. ‘You French have your ways and we have ours,’ she answered Madame Drancy, not so much as to put her in her place, but to nip in the bud any undue harsh discipline.
Drancy had had no previous experience with children. She arrived in Georgia with the intention of opening a bookshop. French novels were much in demand, especially as the Crimean War had stopped many from travelling. But the war itself made her project fail. She was unable to import any books, the French Consulate closed and, reluctant to return to Paris as a failure, she had little option but to seek employment as a governess. French tutors and English nannies were in high demand. Anna, though, was relieved that she had been able to talk David out of the need for a nanny as well as a wet nurse. She would not give up this close contact with her children. A governess was enough for their small family and Drancy was hardy and adaptable. In Tiflis, when their move to the countryside had been debated, a staff officer presented Madame Drancy with a dagger and recommended that she learnt to use it before venturing out to danger. To her credit, Drancy had airily
remarked that the dagger would make a useful letter-opener. And ever since they’d arrived at Tsinondali, she had not stopped admiring the gardens and the fruit trees, the vineyards and the jasmines.
From her armchair, with Lydia swallowing rich, early-morning milk, Anna gazed down at the big courtyard, the garden where David had played as a child and where Alexander now picked a pear from the tree and walked, eating it. She could see the whole estate spread out before her. Greenery on one side and the dark mountains on the other, the ravine that marked the limit of her afternoon walk. There she would lean forward to look at the running stream, a small tributary of the Alazani, the water washing the rocks, pushing away at the mountain sides. As a child David had learnt to swim in this river and years later on their honeymoon (yet another reason that Anna was fond of Tsinondali) they had spent many laughing hours in the water. Easy days when it was just the two of them, enamoured and young, before the responsibilities of children and households.
At Tsinondali they were seven miles from the nearest town and the house was self-supporting. They raised their own cattle and made their own bread and wine. There was much to supervise including the staff of head cook, under-cooks, grooms, dairy maids, farm-hands, gardeners, carpenters and scullions. Yet all this was preferable to the social rounds of St Petersburg, the predictability of court gossip, the formality of being ‘at home’ on Thursdays or Mondays. She was, it seemed, the only Georgian princess who had not enjoyed being a lady-in-waiting to the tsarina. Anna was often homesick and had no patience with the games and side-stepping needed to catch the eye of an eligible bachelor. She wanted to marry a Georgian prince and did not understand the need to go all the way to Petersburg to find him. Now gazing into baby Lydia’s eyes, she knew that she would rather be here than anywhere else. ‘Wake up, don’t doze again. I’ll change you and take you out in the sunshine.’ This was the best feed of the day when her breasts were full and she could revel in this natural, maternal generosity, this abundance that was making her daughter content and languorous, this nourishment
that would make her tiny limbs strong. When she changed Lydia’s nappy, Anna bent down and took deep breaths of the yoghurt smell that came from a baby who had not yet tasted solid food. It was as exhilarating as a perfume, a sweetness that locked them together, that sealed them as mother and child.
In the evening, after Anna had made the sign of the cross over Alexander and kissed him goodnight, she stayed up playing the piano, but Madame Drancy was restless. The governess kept getting up to walk to the window and peer out from behind the curtains. It made Anna lose her concentration. She stumbled twice on the same note and gave up. ‘What can you see out there?’
‘There is a light; it might be a Chechen campfire.’ Drancy’s fair hair was held firmly away from her face and she dressed in sombre colours as if she was always conscious of being a widow.
Anna moved over to the window. The moon was covered by clouds but she could see a cluster of orange flames up on the mountains. ‘They are on the other side of the river.’
‘They can cross it.’
‘Cross the Alazani!’ Anna pulled the curtains closer together and walked back to the piano seat. ‘It’s the deepest of rivers. Besides, with all the rain we’ve been having, it’s swollen.’
Madame Drancy followed her. ‘There is talk that Shamil and his men are descending from the mountains to take Georgia.’
Anna tidied her music sheets. ‘It’s just servants’ gossip. You mustn’t pay attention to it.’ She looked up at the clock. It seemed a little slow; it needed winding. ‘I must remember tomorrow to send for the clockmaker.’
But Madame Drancy was not to be distracted. ‘They say Shamil is a monster who eats Russian flesh.’
Anna laughed. ‘An educated woman like you believing such nonsense!’
‘But how else can one explain the uncanny way he escaped death and capture! Time and again. It must be that he has made a pact with the devil.’
‘I doubt it very much, Madame Drancy.’ Anna’s voice was deliberately calm. It would not be right to lose patience.
Madame Drancy clutched her hands together. ‘He’s a savage with insatiable needs.’
Anna sighed and started to offer more reassurances. The Chechen campfire, if it was really that, was definitely across the river. There was no need to panic and yet, she told herself, the anxiety would always be there, a risk she had taken when she insisted on coming here for the summer. The military were concentrating their efforts in the Crimea. It would be a strategic moment for Shamil to attack and yet many believed that he was in too poor a shape to do so.