Samarkand (19 page)

Omar shrugged.

‘If I did not believe that God existed, I would not address Him!’

‘But you would address him in that tone?’ sniggered the
qadi
.

‘It is to sultans and
qadis
that one must speak with circumlocution – not to the Creator. God is great, he has nothing to do with our airs and graces.
He made me a thinker and so I think, and I give over to him the undiluted fruits of my thought.’

To murmurs of approval from those present, the
qadi
withdrew, uttering dire threats. When he had stopped laughing, the sovereign was beset with worry, fearing the consequences
in certain quarters. As his expression became gloomy his visitors hurried to take their leave.

As he returned home accompanied by Vartan, Omar inveighed against court life with its snares and time-wasting, promising himself
that he would leave Merv as soon as possible; his disciple was not too concerned as it was the seventh time that his master
had threatened to leave; as a rule, he was much calmer the next day having taken up his research again, and that was the appropriate
time to console him.

That evening, back in his room, Omar wrote in his book a vexed quatrain which ended as follows:

Swap your turban for some wine

And without regrets, put on a woollen hat!

Then he slipped the manuscript into its usual hiding place,
between the bed and the wall. When he woke up, he wanted to re-read his
rubai
since one word seemed to him out of place. He groped about and grasped the book. It was as he opened it that he discovered
the letter from Hassan Sabbah which had been slipped between the two pages as he slept.

In an instant Omar recognized the writing and the nomenclature agreed upon between them forty years earlier: The friend from
the caravansary at Kashan.’ As he read it he could not help bursting out laughing. Vartan, who was just waking up in his adjoining
room came in to see what was amusing his master so much after his ill feelings of the night before.

‘We have just received a generous invitation. We can be lodged, protected and have all our expenses looked after until the
end of our lives.’

‘By which great prince?’

‘The prince of Alamut.’

Vartan jumped. He felt guilty.

‘How could the letter have got here? I checked all the doors and windows before I went to lie down!’

‘Do not try to find out. Sultans and Caliphs themselves have given up protecting themselves. When Hassan decides to send you
a message or a dagger’s blade, you can be certain of receiving it whether your doors are wide open or padlocked.’

The disciple held the letter to his moustache, sniffed it noisily and then read and re-read it.

‘That demon may well have a point,’ he concluded. ‘It is indeed at Alamut that your safety would be best assured. After all,
Hassan is your oldest friend.’

‘For the moment, my oldest friend is the new wine of Merv!’

With childish glee, Omar set to tearing up the sheet of paper into a multitude of little pieces which he threw up in the air.
As he watched them flutter down, he started to speak again:

‘What do we have in common, this man and I? I worship life and he worships death. I write: “If you cannot love, what use is
the rising and the setting of the sun?” Hassan demands his men to give
no heed to love, music, poetry, wine or the sun. He despises the most beautiful things in all creation, yet he dares pronounce
the name of the Creator – and to promise people paradise! Believe you me, if his fortress were the gateway of paradise, I
would renounce paradise! I shall never set foot in that den of pious shams.’

Vartan sat down and had a good scratch of his neck before saying, in the most exhausted of voices:

‘If that is your response then the time has come for me to reveal to you a secret which has been kept too long. Have you never
wondered why the soldiers let us pass through so easily when we fled from Isfahan?’

‘It has always intrigued me, but since I have seen nothing but loyalty, devotion and filial affection from you for years,
I have not wished to stir up the past.’

‘That day, the officers of the Nizamiya knew that I was going to save you and leave with you. That was part of a strategy
which I had drawn up.’

Before carrying on, he served his master, and himself, a useful glass of grenadine wine.

‘You do know that the list of outlaws set up by Nizam al-Mulk contained the name of one man whom we had never managed to reach
– Hassan Sabbah. Was he not the man principally responsible for the assassination? My plan was simple: to leave with you in
the hope that you would take refuge in Alamut. I would have accompanied you, asking you not to reveal my identity and I would
have found an occasion to rid the Muslims and the entire world of that demon. However, you have stubbornly refused to set
foot in the dark fortress.’

‘Yet you stayed by my side all this time.’

‘At the beginning I thought I would just have to be patient and that when you had been chased out of fifteen cities in succession
you would resign yourself to taking the road to Alamut. Then, as the years passed, I grew attached to you, my companions have
been dispersed to the four corners of the empire and my determination has wavered. See now how Omar Khayyam has saved Hassan
Sabbah’s life a second time.’

‘Do not bewail it – it may well be your life that I have saved.’

‘In truth he must be very well protected in his hideout.’

Vartan could not suppress all traces of bitterness, which amused Khayyam.

‘Having said that, if you had revealed your plan to me, doubtless I would have led you to Alamut.’

The disciple jumped out of his seat.

‘Is that the truth?’

‘No. Sit yourself down! I only said that to give you cause for regret! In spite of all the evil Hassan has managed to commit,
if I were to see him drowning in the River Murghab I would offer him my hand in help.’

‘Well I would shove his head down under the water! However, your attitude gives me some comfort, and it is just because you
are capable of such words and acts that I chose to stay in your company. And I do not regret that.’

Khayyam gave his disciple a long hug.

‘I am happy that my doubts about you have been dispelled. I am old now and need to know that I have a trusty man at my side
– because of the manuscript. That it is the most precious thing I possess. In order to take on the world Hassan Sabbah has
built Alamut, whereas I have only constructed this minuscule paper castle, but I choose to believe that it will outlive Alamut.
Nothing frightens me more than to think that upon my death my manuscript could fall into careless or malevolent hands.’

In an almost offhand manner he held the secret book out to Vartan:

‘You may open it, since you will be its guardian.’

The disciple was moved.

‘Would anyone else have had this privilege before me?’

‘Two people. Jahan, after a quarrel in Samarkand, and Hassan when we were living in the same room upon our arrival in Isfahan.

‘You trusted him to that extent?’

‘To tell you the truth, I did not. However, I often wanted to write and he ended up noticing the manuscript. I preferred to
show it to him myself since, anyhow, he could have read it behind my back. Moreover, I deemed him capable of keeping a secret.’

‘He really does know how to keep a secret – the better to use it against you.’

Henceforth the manuscript would spend its night in Vartan’s room. At the slightest noise the former officer would be bolt
upright, brandishing his sword, his ears pricked up; he would check every room in the house and then go out to make a round
of the garden. Upon his return he would not always be able to fall asleep again and so would light a lamp on his table, read
a quatrain which he would memorize and then indefatigably go over it in his head to draw out its most profound meanings and
to try and guess under what circumstances his master had been able to write it.

At the end of a string of disturbed nights, an idea took shape in his thoughts which received Omar’s hearty approval: to write
the manuscript’s history in the margins of the
Rubaiyaat
and through this device the history of Khayyam himself, his childhood in Nishapur, his youth in Samarkand, his fame in Isfahan,
his meetings with Abu Taher, Jahan, Hassan, Nizam and many others. Thus it was, under Khayyam’s supervision, and sometimes
with him dictating the words, that the first pages of the chronicle were written. Vartan threw himself into it, writing each
phrase down ten or fifteen times on a loose sheet before transcribing it, in a thin, angular and laborious hand – which, one
day, was brutally interrupted in the middle of a phrase.

Omar had woken up early that morning. He called Vartan who did not reply. Another night spent writing, Khayyam said to himself
in a fatherly way. He let him rest a while longer, poured himself a morning drink, just a drop at the bottom of the glass
which he swallowed in one gulp followed by a whole glassful which he carried with him as he went for a walk in the garden.
He walked around it, diverting himself by blowing on the dew which was still on the flowers, then he went off to gather some
juicy white mulberries which he placed on his tongue and squashed against his palate with every sip of wine.

He was enjoying himself so much that a good hour had passed before he decided to go back in. It was time for Vartan to get
up.
He did not call him again, but went straight into his room to find him stretched out on the ground, his throat black with
blood, his mouth and eyes open and set rigid as if in a last suffocated cry.

On his table between the lamp and the writing desk was the dagger with which the crime had been committed. It was planted
in a curled up sheet of paper which Omar unrolled to read:

‘Your manuscript has gone on ahead of you to Alamut.’

Omar Khayyam mourned his disciple with the same dignity, the same resignation and the same discreet agony as he had mourned
other friends. ‘We were drinking the same wine, but they got drunk two or three rounds before me.’ Anyway, how could he deny
that it was the loss of the manuscript which affected him most grievously? He was certainly able to reproduce it; he remembered
its every letter but apparently he did not want to, for there is no trace of a rewritten version. It seems that Khayyam learnt
a wise lesson from the theft of his manuscript; he would never more try to have control over either his future or that of
his poems.

He soon left Merv, not for Alamut – not once did he envisage going there! – but for his home town. ‘It is time,’ he told himself,
‘to put an end to my peregrinations. Nishapur was the first port of call in my life. Is it not within the order of things
that it should also be the last?’ It is there that he was going to live, surrounded by relatives, a younger sister, a considerate
brother-in-law, nephews, and above all a niece who was to be the recipient of most of the tenderness of his autumn years.
He was also surrounded by his books. He did not write any more, but untiringly re-read the works of his masters.

One day, as he was seated in his room as usual with Avicenna’s Book of Healing on his knees, open at the chapter entitled
The
One and the Multiple’, Omar felt a dull pain start up. He placed his golden tooth-pick, which he had been holding in his hand,
between the leaves to mark the page, closed the book and summoned his family in order to dictate to them his last testament.
Then he uttered a prayer which finished with the words: ‘My God, You know that I have sought to perceive You as much as I
could. Forgive me if my knowledge of You has been my only path towards You!’

He opened his eyes no more. It was 4 December 1131. Omar Khayyam was in his eighty-fourth year, having been born on 18 June
1048 at daybreak. The fact that the date of birth of a person from that era is known with such precision is indeed extraordinary,
but Khayyam showed an astrologer’s obsession with the subject. He had most probably questioned his mother to find out his
ascendant, Gemini, and to determine the position of the sun, Mercury and Jupiter at the hour of his coming into the world.
Thus he drew up his birth chart and took care to pass it on to the chronicler Beihaki.

Another of his contemporaries, the writer Nizami Aruzi, recounted: ‘I met Omar Khayyam twenty years before his death in the
city of Balkh. He had come to stay with one of the notables on the Slave-Traders’ Road, and, knowing of his fame, I shadowed
him in order to hear every one of his words. That is how I heard him say: ‘My tomb will be in a place where the north wind
scatters flowers every spring.’ His words at first seemed absurd to me; however I knew that a man like him would not speak
in an unconsidered manner.’

The witness continued: ‘I passed through Nishapur four years after Khayyam’s death. As I venerated him as one should a master
of science, I made a pilgrimage to his last home. A guide led me to the cemetery. Upon turning to the left after entering,
I saw the tomb adjoining the wall of a garden. Pear and peach trees spread out their branches and had dropped so much blossom
on to his sepulchre that it was hidden under a carpet of petals.’

A drop of water fell into the sea
.

A speck of dust came floating down to earth
.

What signifies your passage through this world?

A tiny gnat appears – and disappears
.

Omar Khayyam was wrong. Far from being as transitory as he said, his existence, or at least that of his quatrains, had just
begun. But, was it not for them that the poet, who dared not wish it for himself, wished immortality?

Those who had the terrifying privilege at Alamut of being allowed in to see Hassan Sabbah did not fail to notice the silhouette
of a book in a hollow niche in the wall, behind a thick wire grate. No one knew what it was, nor dared to question the Supreme
Preacher. It was assumed that he had his reasons for not depositing it in the great library where there were great works which
contained the most unspeakable truths.