Samarkand (26 page)

Three soldiers were posted at the entrance to my alley. Would they let me through? To the left I could make out another alley.
I thought it would be better to follow that one even if it meant having to come back later down the right alley. I walked
on, avoiding looking in the direction of the soldiers. A few more steps and I would not be able to be see them any more, nor
they me.

‘Stop!’

What should I do? Stop? With the very first question they asked me they would discover that I could hardly speak Persian,
they would ask to see my papers and arrest me. Should I run off? They would not have much difficulty catching up with me,
I would have been acting in a guilty fashion and would not even be able to plead in innocence. I had only a split second to
make a choice.

I decided to carry on my way without hurrying, as if I had heard
nothing. However there was a new commotion, the sound of rifles being loaded and footsteps. I did not give it a second thought
but ran through the alleys without looking back and threw myself into the narrowest and darkest passageways. The sun had already
set and in half an hour it would be pitch dark.

I was searching my memory for a prayer to recite, but could only manage to repeat: ‘God! God! God!’ in an insistent pleading,
as if I had already died and was drumming on the gate of Paradise.

And the gate opened. The gate of Paradise. A little hidden gate in the mud-stained wall at the corner of the street. It opened.
A hand touched mine and I grasped on to it. It pulled me towards it and shut the gate behind me. I kept my eyes shut out of
fear. I was breathless with disbelief and happiness. Outside the procession went on and on.

Three pairs of laughing eyes were watching me – three women whose hair was covered but whose faces were unveiled and who were
looking at me lovingly, as if I were a newborn babe. The oldest, in her forties, gave me a sign to follow her. At the end
of the garden I had landed up in there was a small cabin where she seated me on a wicker chair, assuring me with a gesture
that she would come to rescue me. She reassured me with a pout and with the magic word:
andaroun
, ‘inner house’. The soldier would not come to search where the women lived!

In fact the noise of the soldiers had come closer only to get more distant again, before fading away altogether. How could
they have known into which of the alleys I had vanished? The district was a maze, made up of dozens of passages, hundreds
of houses and gardens – and it was almost night.

After an hour I was brought some black tea, cigarettes were rolled for me and a conversation struck up. In slow Persian phrases
with a few French words they explained to me to whom I owed my safety. The rumour had run through the district that an accomplice
of the assassin was at the foreigner’s hotel. Seeing me flee they understood that I was the guilty hero and they had wanted
to protect me. What were their reasons for this? Their husband and father had been executed fifteen years earlier, unjustly
accused of belonging to a dissident sect, the
babis
, who advocated the abolition of polygamy,
complete equality between men and women and the establishment of a democratic regime. Led by the Shah and the clergy, repression
had been bloody and, aside from the scores of thousands of
babis
, many completely innocent people had also been massacred upon a simple denunciation by a neighbour. Then, left alone with
two young girls, my benefactress had been waiting for the hour of revenge. The three women said that they were honoured that
the heroic avenger had landed in their humble garden.

When one is viewed as a hero by women, does one really wish to disabuse them? I persuaded myself that it would be unseemly,
even foolish, to disillusion them. In my difficult battle for survival, I needed these allies, I needed their enthusiasm and
courage – and their unjustified admiration. I therefore took refuge in an enigmatic silence which, for them, lifted their
last doubts.

Three women, a garden and a salutary misunderstanding – I could recount forever those forty unreal days of a sweltering Persian
spring. It was difficult being a foreigner; I found it doubly awkward in the world of oriental women where I did not belong
at all. My benefactress was well aware of the difficulties into which she had been thrown. I am certain that the whole of
the first night, while I was sleeping stretched out on all three mats laid on top of each other in the cabin at the bottom
of the garden, she was the victim of the most intractable insomnia for at dawn she summoned me, had me sit cross-legged to
her right, sat her two daughters to her left and gave us a carefully prepared speech.

She started by hailing my courage and restated her joy at taking me in. Then, having observed some moments of silence, she
suddenly started to unhook her bodice before my startled eyes. I blushed and turned my eyes away but she pulled me towards
her. Her shoulders were bare and so were her breasts. With word and gesture she invited me to suckle. The two daughters giggled
under their cloaks but the mother had all the solemnity of a ritual sacrifice. I complied, placing my lips, as modestly as
possible, on the tip of one breast and then on the other. Then she covered herself up, without haste, adding in the most formal
tones:

‘By this act you have become my son, as if you were born of my flesh.’

Then, turning towards her daughters, who had stopped laughing, she declared that henceforth they had to treat me as if I was
their own brother.

At the time the ceremony seemed both moving and grotesque to me. Thinking back over it, however, I can see in it all the subtlety
of the Orient. In fact my situation was embarrassing for that woman. She had not hesitated to hold out a helping hand to me
at great peril to herself, and she had offered me the most unconditional hospitality. At the same time, the presence of a
stranger, a young man, near her daughters night and day, could only lead to some incident at some point in the future. How
better to diffuse the difficulty than by this ritual gesture of symbolic adoption. Then I could move around the house as I
pleased, sleep in the same room, place a kiss on my ‘sisters’ ’ foreheads and we were all protected and kept strictly in check
by the fiction of adoption.

People other than me would have felt trapped by this performance. I, on the contrary, was comforted by it. Having landed up
on a women’s planet and then to form a hasty attachment, through idleness or lack of privacy, with one of the three hostesses;
to try bit by bit to edge away from the other two, to outwit and exclude them; to bring upon myself their inevitable hostility
and to find myself excluded – sheepish and contrite at having embarrassed, saddened or disappointed the women who had been
nothing less than providential – that would have been a turn of affairs which would not have suited my nature at all. Having
said that, I, being a Westerner, would never have been able to come up with the solution which that woman found in the never-ending
arsenal of her religious commandments.

As if by a miracle, everything became simple, clear and pure. To say that desire was dead would be telling a lie, everything
about our relationships was eminently carnal yet, I reiterate, eminently pure. Thus I experienced moments of carefree peace
in the intimacy of these women who were neither veiled nor excessively modest, in the middle of a city where I was probably
the most wanted man.

With the passage of time, I see my stay with those women as a moment of privilege without which my attachment to the Orient
would have remained short-lived or superficial. It is to them I owe
the immense steps I made in understanding and speaking idiomatic Persian. Although my hostesses had made the praiseworthy
effort to put together some words in French on the first day, all our conversations were henceforth carried on in the country’s
vernacular. Our conversations might be animated or casual, subtle or crude, often even flirtatious, since in my capacity as
elder brother anything was allowed as long as I stayed beyond the bounds of incest. Anything that was playful was permitted,
including the most theatrical shows of affection.

Would the experience have kept its allure had it gone on for longer? I shall never know. I do not wish to know. An event which
was unfortunately only too foreseeable put an end to all that. It was a visit, a routine visit, by the grandparents.

Ordinarily I stayed far away from the entrance gates, the
birouni
gate, which led to the men’s abode and was the main doorway, and the garden gate through which I had entered. At the first
sound I would slip away. This time through recklessness or over-confidence, I did not hear the old couple arrive. I was sitting
cross-legged in the women’s room and for the last two hours had been peacefully smoking a
kalyan
pipe prepared by my ‘sisters’ and had fallen asleep there with the pipe still in my mouth and my head leaning against the
wall, when a man’s cough woke me up with a start.

For my adoptive mother, who arrived a few seconds too late, the presence of a European male in the interior of her apartments
had to be promptly explained. Rather than tarnish her reputation or that of her daughters, she chose to tell the truth in
the most patriotic and triumphant way she could. Who was this stranger? None less than the
farangi
the police were looking for, the accomplice of the man who had cut down the tyrant and avenged her martyred husband!

There was a moment of indecision and then the verdict came. They congratulated me and praised my courage as well as that of
my protectress. It is true that confronted with such an incongruous situation her explanation was the only plausible one.
Even though the fact that I had been slumped out right in the middle of the
andaroun
was somewhat compromising, she could easily have explained it away by speaking of the necessity of shielding me from sight.

Honour had been safeguarded, but it was now clear that I had to leave. There were two paths open to me. The most obvious was
to leave disguised as a woman and to walk over to the American legation; in short, to complete the interrupted walk of a few
weeks earlier. However, my ‘mother’ dissuaded me. Having carried out a scouting expedition she had discerned that all the
alleys leading to
the legation were being watched. Moreover, being rather tall at just over six feet, my disguise as a Persian woman would not
fool even the most unobservant soldier.

The other solution was, following Jamaladin’s advice, to send a distress message to Princess Shireen. I spoke of her to my
‘mother’ who gave her approval; she had heard of the assassinated Shah’s grand-daughter who was said to be sensitive to the
suffering of the poor and she offered to carry a letter to her. The problem was finding the words with which to address her
– words which, while being sufficiently explicit, would not give me away were they to fall into other hands. I could not mention
my name, nor that of the Master. I made do with writing on a sheet of paper the only phrase she had ever said to me: ‘You
never know, our paths might meet!’

My ‘mother’ had decided to go up to the princess at the ceremonies on the fortieth day of the death of the old Shah, the last
stage of the funeral ceremonies. In the inevitable general confusion of the onlookers and the professional weepers smeared
with soot, she had no difficulty in slipping the paper from her hand into the princess’s, who then read it and with dread
looked about her for the man who had written it. The messenger whispered to her: ‘He is at my house!’ Immediately Shireen
left the ceremony, summoned her coachman and placed my ‘mother’ at her side. In order not to attract any suspicion, the coach
with the royal insignia stopped in front of the hotel Prévost from which spot the two heavily veiled and anonymous women continued
their route on foot.

Our second meeting was hardly more wordy than our first. The princess looked me up and down with a smile on the corner her
lips. Suddenly she gave an order:

‘Tomorrow at dawn my coachman will come to fetch you. Be ready. Wear a veil and walk with your head down!’

‘I was convinced that she was going to drive me to my legation. It was at the moment when her carriage went out through the
city gate that I realised my mistake. She explained:

‘I could easily have taken you to the American minister’s. You would have been safe, but no one would have had any trouble
guessing how you got there. Even if I do have some influence, being a member of the Qajar family, I cannot use it to protect
the apparent
accomplice to the assassination of the Shah. I would have been placed in an awkward predicament and then they would have found
the brave women who looked after you. Your legation, moreover, would not have been too delighted to have to protect a man
accused of such a crime. Believe me, it is better for everyone if you leave Persia. I will take you to one of my maternal
uncles, one of the Bakhtiari chiefs. He has come down with his tribe’s warriors for the fortieth day ceremonies. I have told
him who you are and stated your innocence, but his men know nothing. He has undertaken to escort you to the Ottoman frontier
by routes unknown to the caravans. He is waiting for us in Shah Abdul-Azim’s village. Do you have any money?’

‘Yes. I gave two hundred
tomans
to the women who saved me, but I still have almost four hundred.’

‘That is not enough. You must distribute half of what you have to the men accompanying you and keep a decent amount behind
for the rest of the trip. Here are some Turkish coins, they will not be too much. Here also is a text which I would like the
Master to have. You will be passing through Constantinople?’

It was difficult to say no. She continued, as she slipped some folded papers into the slit of my cloak:

‘They contain a transcript of Mirza Reza’s first cross-examination. I spent the night writing it out. You can read it, in
fact you should read it. You will learn a lot. Besides, it will keep you busy during the long trip. But do not let anyone
else see it.’