Let Our Fame Be Great (46 page)

Runovsky then promised not only to love him, but to respect him too, but Shamil had not finished. The imam said he had watched Runovsky closely ever since they had first met, and was sure that they would have a close relationship.

‘The old man Shamil has never made a mistake about a person he has observed for a long time, and I know I have not made a mistake this time.'

Shamil regularly retreated into his own quarters – the top floor of the house, which the younger men later nicknamed Akhulgo, after the fortress where Jamal-Edin was taken by the Russians – but he still appeared for tea and chats with Runovsky, sometimes one suggesting the topic of conversation, and sometimes the other.

The regular diary entries written by the Russian officer progressively build up a picture of Shamil that is surprising and rather lovely. In place of the fierce chieftain the Russians might have expected, they had a gentle and thoughtful old man who contemplated before speaking or acting, and lived by a moral code as unshakeable as it was peculiar.

One day, Shamil and Runovsky sat and ate lunch together. The officer did not record what the food was, merely that it was very bad. He pushed his plate away, saying he would complain to the cook. Shamil was shocked, and told him he must not do so.

‘It is a great sin,' the imam told him.

‘But is it not a sin for the cook to feed us with dreadful food?' replied Runovsky, perhaps in jest.

‘Yes, it is a sin, but God will punish the cook for it himself,' said Shamil, with great simplicity. His answer did not satisfy Runovsky, who clearly preferred his rewards from God to be more immediate, and ideally to arrive before the next meal was scheduled.

‘But if I do not tell the cook that he has cooked dreadful food then he, not knowing this, will always cook it the same way, thinking that maybe he is supposed to do it that way. It must be right to tell him that there is too much salt or that he has somehow spoiled the food,' the officer said.

Runovsky clearly felt he had won the day with this speech, but Shamil did not budge, so Runovsky went on the offensive once more.

‘So is it also a sin to tell a person that he is ruining a valuable thing, that he interferes with your affairs, that he wants to change your customs, or that he harms your condition of life and forces you from happiness into unhappiness and need?'

Shamil was ready for this reply, however, and perhaps this was an argument he had been through in his own head. What followed was as complete a discourse on his own philosophy as anything Runovsky ever recorded. It is complete in itself, logically coherent, yet somehow alien and peculiar.

‘A man must never express his dissatisfaction with anything at all. If someone gives me food that is not tasty or is over-salted, then I must not judge him. I must keep my silence, in the same way that I must if it is very good food. Above all I must not criticize a servant if he is to blame for something. If I start to scold him, then it is a great sin, that is what it says in the books. Therefore I am always content, content with everything, and I have no needs, and I must observe my customs when it is necessary for other people. If I do not do this it will be a great sin, it says so in the books.'

As Runovsky's acquaintance with Shamil and his family went on, he discovered that this philosophy informed much of their attitude to the outside world. The shoes they had bought in St Petersburg, for example, did not fit and were very uncomfortable. The imam did not mention it, however, since that would have been a sin, until it was too late to replace them. It was a pattern regularly repeated.

Runovsky became very frustrated by Shamil's insistence that what was ‘written in books' was the only truth, but he failed to shift the imam from his beliefs, which admitted no hypocrisy or double standards. For example, Shamil would give out charity to all poor people as he walked through Kaluga, and would often force it upon people who had not even asked for it. Once, indeed, he apologized to a young child for not being able to give him anything. The child's reaction was not recorded.

Shamil did not himself carry the money, leaving it to his follower Hajio – the same man who was tormented by the captive princesses
during their enforced stay in the mountains – to do so for him. Hajio was regularly instructed to distribute large sums, which were far greater than the household could afford. On one occasion he gave out 10 roubles – a huge amount by the standards of the time. Runovsky eventually took Shamil aside and warned him off the practice. He said most of the beggars did not deserve the money, and would spend it undesirably.

Shamil was having none of it. ‘But it is no business of mine where the poor person takes his money,' he said.

‘But you can't give out so much,' the ever-sensible Runovsky insisted.

‘Well, how much can I give out?'

‘One kopeck, two, three, maybe five,' was Runovsky's reply. But if the officer thought he had controlled this drain on Shamil's resources, he was wrong. The imam asked for an explanation, asked how many kopecks there were in a rouble, and asked how many someone would need to survive. Runovsky explained the cost of food, drink and accommodation, but failed to satisfy the old man.

‘Well, what help is it to give one kopeck?' asked the baffled imam, having learned that a beggar could not live on such a small sum.

‘You give, I give, a third person gives, thus the poor person gathers enough for his daily existence,' said Runovsky, giving a little summary of the principles of Western charity. But that, inevitably, did not satisfy Shamil.

‘What need have I for others? If a poor person asks help of me then I must help him. If I give him too little, that means I am mocking him. And in books it says poor people must be helped and not mocked for their situation. Does it not say the same in your books?'

Even Runovsky had to recognize the logic in Shamil's position, and was forced to give in. Eventually, however, he had his way, by persuading Hajio that most of the supplicants went and spent the money on vodka, which was not good for them.

It is not surprising that this gentle and thoughtful old man was a giant success in Kaluga society. Shamil was perhaps the second most famous celebrity – behind only the tsar – in the empire, and having him in their midst was a huge coup. The imam was regularly invited to parties and balls, or to drink tea.

One woman, Maria Chichagova, saw the imam regularly, since her husband was in charge of his well-being for a while. She had the disarming habit of referring to the imam as the ‘former terror of Dagestan and Chechnya' and said he liked nothing more than to play with children.

‘Shamil very much loved children, and such a person cannot be evil,' she wrote, in her own – disappointingly uninformative – memoirs. ‘On Shamil's departure, I realized that I had not once remembered his Caucasus cruelties. Nothing made him appear a soul-less, cruel, severe person. On the contrary, from first acquaintance, Shamil inspired sympathy in me. As a consequence I discovered that in this highlander's wild nature was hidden a divine spark of love for his neighbour.'

But, for these early months in Kaluga, Shamil was not happy. He hid it well, but he desperately missed his family. He worried that Shuanat, now she was back among her own people, might return to Christianity and be torn away from him. He should have trusted his beloved wife, who would have stayed with him through more than a few months' forced separation, but it worried away at him. Other perceived slights from his past now rose up and concerned him too.

He had a particular dislike for the Turks, since the sultan never wrote him a letter to ask how he was, and he expressed hatred for Daniel-Sultan, one of his former allies who had deserted him.

But in mid-January 1860 his depression vanished.

A rumbling from outside the window showed that a wagon was arriving. A messenger entered the receiving room, asking the imam what he would like done with his books. Most of his library, which he had lost in the last humiliating retreat to Gunib, had been recovered and here it was, ready for him to read again. The imam was delighted, and then overjoyed when he heard that his family was close behind. He clearly struggled to follow his own rule of hiding his feelings, and trembled with impatience before mastering himself. He also failed to stop himself criticizing a servant and swore at Hajio for only giving a 30-kopeck tip to the messenger. The bringer of such news deserved gold, Shamil said.

First up the stairs came Muhammad-Sheffi, Shamil's youngest
son. The imam walked to the head of the stairs to meet him, then reconsidered and went back to sit at the table, adopting an expression of indifference. His son, on entering the room, also looked like he wished to embrace his father, but instead calmly walked up and kissed his hand.

They prayed together while the remaining carriages arrived.

In quick succession entered Gazi-Muhammad, Shamil's oldest son, followed by the imam's oldest son-in-law (also, as it happened, the brother of his senior wife, the brother of Shamil's other son-in-law, and the son of the imam's spiritual leader). Then the women arrived, and stepped out of their carriages into the snow. The family went upstairs, kissed the imam's hand and prayed, before retreating upstairs for a week.

Shamil was no doubt relieved that his favourite wife, Shuanat, had come back to him, but the rest of the family were less pleased that the senior wife, Zeidat, had done so. Hajio had already, rather disloyally, suggested that it would not be a bad idea if someone thought of converting Zeidat to Christianity and leaving her in the Caucasus.

For now that Shamil's bossy senior wife was in Kaluga, life would be anything but relaxing. Politics, personal dislike and petty viciousness would transform the three-storey brick-and-stucco mansion into a little nest of problems.

Zeidat carried a host of political issues with her. No one had much of a good word to say for her, but that may well be because Runovsky's informants – Gazi-Muhammad, Hajio, Muhammad-Sheffi – were all in the opposing faction. They felt that Zeidat exploited her position as senior wife to make Shuanat's position hell, and to squeeze the rest of them out of any position of responsibility.

The third wife, Aminat, who had so loved the Georgian princesses, had been divorced and was nowhere to be seen. Most accounts hold that she was divorced for being infertile, but Hajio said she had been sent away because she was too mischievous. Her habit of making jokes against her older rival had backfired, and Zeidat had forced Shamil to dispense with her.

Shamil's sons' main ground of complaint against Zeidat was that, though their sisters – the children of Fatimat, a now dead wife – had been due to marry two of the imam's chief lieutenants in solid and
sensible dynastic marriages, Zeidat, keen to increase her own influence, had forced the imam to marry the two girls to her own brothers. These brothers were hated by Shamil's sons, who were jealous of the weight they carried as the sons of Shamil's spiritual adviser.

By this stage, the three-storey building contained, besides Shamil, his two wives, his two sons, his five daughters, one granddaughter, his two sons-in-law, one daughter-in-law, a nanny, the nanny's son, a translator, a servant, two companions for his sons, a seventeen-year-old captured Ingush girl whose position was uncertain and a random Afghan dervish who seems to have adopted Shamil but to have served no discernible purpose.

The Afghan, who was an ally of Zeidat's, was engaged in lengthy and unsuccessful attempts to persuade Runovsky to give him a pension for unspecified services to Russia, related to the time of Shamil's surrender.

With so many people in such close proximity, it is unsurprising that conditions were insanitary. By June 1860, Abdurakhman – Shamil's son-in-law, one of Zeidat's brothers – had contracted a painful and irritating rash and Runovsky called in a doctor to treat him. The doctor advised him to wash more, and to change his underclothes more frequently, but Abdurakhman refused to, saying such things were unnecessary.

Runovsky, scared of contagion and angry that the young man risked infecting the whole household with his refusal to treat his rash, then declined to shake his hand. Abdurakhman exploited his connections, via his sister, and Shamil stopped speaking to Runovsky for a while.

It was a difficult game for Runovsky to play, since he was ever mindful of his order not to interfere with Shamil's family life.

Gazi-Muhammad returned to fetch his wife in the summer of 1860, leaving Abdurakhman in charge of the household. As a result, Shuanat and Muhammad-Sheffi did not receive money for food or medicine, and Runovsky was forced to subsidize them from his own pocket. Shamil, under the influence of his wife's family, demanded an oven be installed on the top floor and even rejected food cooked by Christians.

The situation looked like it could not get much worse, but in fact more trouble was around the corner.

Gazi-Muhammad's wife Keremet was the daughter of Daniel-Sultan, a lieutenant of Shamil's who the family believed had betrayed the cause. Shamil also – despite Runovsky's insistence that it was not the case – believed that Keremet had sent spies to help the Russians.

Shamil refused to live in one place with his daughter-in-law, while Keremet herself refused to live in the same house as Zeidat. A new house had to be found.

The tensions were surely heightened by the extreme boredom of their existence. They had nothing to do but scheme and walk, and – in winter – they could not even sit on the banks of the Oka and watch the river flow. The men of the family, used to ruling a country and waging war, suddenly had nothing to do, while the women were unable to go outside, fearful of being seen by infidels.

From Runovsky's account, it is clear that time passed almost imperceptibly, with feuds simmering for months and years. Abdurakhman also wrote an account of their life and completely blocked out their time in Kaluga, except for mentioning two visits that Runovsky organized to local factories. In his account, you get the impression the visits came on consecutive days, whereas from the diary it is clear they were seven months apart. It is terrible to think of these energetic and resourceful people reduced to squabbling and visiting sugar plants.