The Age of Ice: A Novel (46 page)

By the end of 1816, we were in Tabriz at the court of Abbas Mirza, the heir apparent. At least ten English officers were there, training Mirza’s infantry and artillery in the modernized, Western ways of warfare. Najar took me to the firing range, to the drill grounds. All I had to do was listen. Once or twice I translated some letters. In 1817, Asker Khan and his nephew were appointed to meet the three hundred strong Russian diplomatic mission at the border and attend to their passage and well-being—it was called being a
mehmandar
to them. (The relationship between Russia and Persia was strained. Persia was waning, Russia waxing; in 1805 Russia went to war and bit a chunk off Persia, redrawing the border south of the Caucasus. No wonder Abbas Mirza was concerned about the readiness of his army for a standoff with a European power.) Najar ran his feet off to arrange the Russians’ lodging and meals in such a way as to both appease them and fulfill his duties of intelligence gathering. I tailed Najar everywhere. He had me serving meals to the Russians. He would pester me: What does this mean?—about this or that expression of their body language. Why didn’t the
feringhee
touch food? Do they not like the music? What was that look on their faces?

I explained as best I could, kept nothing to myself. I never thought of my services as spying.

• • •

To Najar’s befuddlement, the officers of the Russian mission, while in Tabriz, struck up quite a friendship with the resident Englishmen officers—Abbas Mirza’s military advisers. We watched them one day, and the poor mehmandar got so vexed: what are they talking about? They should be suspicious of each other! Why is it that they spend the nights drinking together? Are they conspiring?

I said, “No, they are talking about India. How it is so terribly hot there, hotter than here in summer.”

“India?”

“Many of these
Inglese feringhee
are from there. They worked for the East India Company.”

“Not this one.” Najar pointed out to me an English captain. “This one was here all along and saw his friend killed by Russians. The friend’s name was Captain Christie. He fell during a Russian attack, but he was wounded, not dead. He lay where he fell for a night and a day. Killed six more Russians before a Cossack shot him like a dog. So why is Captain Christie’s friend laughing with Russians now?”

I did my best to explain.
Haven’t you been to Paris, Najar Alibek? Aren’t you worldly enough to understand why?
Life goes on, for one. Besides, these people are just homesick. Najar objected: That does not explain it at all!
Homesick, as in Europe-sick,
I explained. He studied me hawkishly:
You too want to go to them, you
kafir,
infidel, you want to serve them, don’t you, Eskandar?

Are you Europe-sick?

Sitting around their table, the officers reminded me of myself many years ago, of Sawyer and company, of our feasts. But I felt no emotion toward these people, nor longed to join them. I did not even turn cold. It felt appropriate that I, a docile slave, was able to face my own distant memories only through a tiny, secret peephole. I could be, under the circumstances, easily mistaken for a ghost.

“No,” I said.

“You are stupider than I thought, then,” Najar said. “You don’t know these people, they never do a thing for nothing!”

Those interludes aside, Najar treated me well. He fed me royally and never ordered me hurt.

Oh, and the heat . . .

• • •

Eight years later, the Persian shah went to war with Russia again and was soundly defeated. He asked for British help as entitled by the treaty of 1810, and received none. Najar Alibek claimed to have foreseen it. “Europe-sick” had become his word of choice to denote an unbridgeable chasm between the interests of Persia and those of the Christian powers.

Meanwhile, Abbas Mirza died, his modernized army fell into disrepair, his British officers out of favor. Russian influence in Persia kept waxing despite a setback in early 1829, when a mob stormed the Russian embassy in Tehran and tore the ambassador to pieces. By then, Najar’s memories of Paris had become glimpses of something pleasant but naïve, a touch embarrassing, and mostly irrelevant. Najar’d lost his French, I’d gained his Farsi. He only regretted that he hadn’t brought with him a Frenchwoman for a wife.

He was now overburdened by a harem, with the ensuing duties of disbursing allowances, pacifying or inducing factions, bribing and being bribed for favors. His idea of an enlightened pastime became to summon me at night and tell me—while sipping the rare and frowned-upon wine from Shiraz—anecdotes about his wives; he had nicknamed the two most scheming of them Russia and Britain. As in: “I am expecting Lady Britain to pay me a handsome subsidy. Now that she knows I consorted with Lady Russia.” (In this he showed his worldly enlightenment, because no Persian would think of comparing a country to a woman.) He was fond of lecturing and taunting me—but I could tell he liked my company. We would talk sciences: he’d tell me about the great mathematician and astronomer of a thousand years ago, al-Khwārizmī. I’d tell him about my astronomer, Ivan Kuznetzov. I’d be lying if I said we’d never had a good time, Najar and I.

“How old are you, Eskandar?” Najar would squint at me.

I would answer quite truthfully, “I am ninety years old.” He never believed me. “You feringhee always say all kinds of strange things,” he’d say. I was no longer just his slave, I was his
meerza,
scribe, or dare I say, his
moonshee,
secretary, by then. He had started paying me a salary—smaller than it could have been, because he levied a tax on me for not converting into Mohammedan faith, but larger than it could have been had he levied me for being a Christian.

He didn’t think I was a Christian. He called me a pagan, an
ice-worshipper
. He had a reason for this.

• • •

The trouble was, it froze and it snowed in Tehran. If only it was always hot, if no one ever saw any ice, everything would have been all right. But there was ice, and it was a temptation to which I eventually surrendered, not least because by then I could see plainly that I was not aging—in fact not changing at all. Like an addict, a mourner, a wayward son—and yes, a worshipper—I would sneak out at nightfall for a trip to a yakshal. I would ride a horse, while a
ferash,
a foot servant, would walk ahead lighting the way with a paper lantern on a pole, another carry kindling coals, while a couple more, armed with clubs, would be ready to beat back beggars or stray dogs—I traveled like a man of means, almost! Down the winding streets we would convey ourselves, beyond the city proper, to Najar’s suburban estate and the yakshal therein. The ferashes would guard the entrance while I’d go down to the yakshal’s cellar and sit next to the mound of ice. I would talk.
I rarely turn cold now,
I’d tell ice.
Perhaps I no longer notice. I touch no one, and no one touches me
.
But if I don’t turn cold, then why do I endure? Am I reborn, or dead? Is it just my body, or is my mind too defying age? Did you grant me a second life because I’d helped you feed on Napoléon’s army? Are you what keeps me alive now? What am I?

No answer.

One night, when I came up from the cellar, a man was waiting for me on the ground floor of the yakshal. I don’t know how he’d sneaked past the ferashes. He introduced himself as Mr. Goutte but he spoke accentless Russian. He said, “I know who you are.” He said it was time for me to win back my honor by working to protect Russia’s interests against the encroaching paw of the British lion. The British had India, he said, now they were reaching for Afghanistan and China. The Russian Empire needed to check the British appetite for expansion.

Panicked, I barely listened. I felt exposed. For all I knew he’d eavesdropped on my innermost entreaties to ice, and all I wanted was to run. “I do not understand your talk,” I stammered in Turkish and skirred out even as Mr. Goutte pointed out that denial would serve me no good and that he had means to
compel
me to do his bidding.

I next spent two hellish weeks guessing what means of compelling me Mr. Goutte possessed, and debating whether I should tell Najar. If so, my companion ferashes would lose their ears or eyes, at the very least. Maybe I would lose mine too. Or maybe Najar Alibek would make me play with the Russian spymaster? At the end of the two weeks I was ready to confess,
particularly after I had to go out with Najar and convinced myself that I saw Russian spies all over the bazaar.

• • •

But the confession did not happen. Najar Alibek died. The story was—one of his scheming wifes, his “Russia” or “Britain,” had given him
kahveh e kajaree,
the kajar’s coffee, called thus because poisoning one’s drink had been a frequent recourse of the reigning dynasty. A wife, whether the real offender or a scapegoat, was soon thrown off a tower, as Najar’s family, brothers, and uncles moved in to dispense punishment. I could not help but suspect that none of the wives was to blame, that it was one of the ferashes, set on to the crime by Goutte the spymaster. Either way, the Russian could now try to leverage my life against my cooperation by threatening to make the finger of accusation point at me. I did not want to die like Griboedov, that unlucky Russian ambassador just a few years ago, torn up by the mob.

I left in secrecy, no possessions but the clothes on my back. But I was able to carry out all the money I’d saved, and the one remaining token of my past—the sachet of snowflakes that I wore on a string around my neck.

• • •

Where was I to go? The answer came with ease: to India! To the hottest ever place, the land where no ice could possibly exist. To the country whose tales I’d first heard good old Robeck tell in the earthen hut deep in Siberia, and which the British officers at Abbas Mirza’s court had spoken to their Russian fellows about. To the country where a European, while remaining fabulously, tropically hot, could still have a luxury of European living, with tables, chairs, forks, and civil liberties—thanks to the British rule.

The devil was in the details of getting there. I should have gone south and sought a sea passage to Bombay. But I turned my eyes to the East, across land, to the well-trodden road through Khorasan and on to Herat.

My journey lasted longer than my money permitted; besides, the cholera in Khorasan conspired to slow me. For my own safety, I began posing as a fakir, something in between a holy man, a beggar, and a lunatic. Then I discovered I could scratch out a living selling herbal remedies. I learned to brew infusions and spike them with my snowflakes: swirl a vial, and magic sparks would stir from the bottom.

It was 1837 when I made my way to the city of Herat, the ancient gate
to India, then in Afghan hands. Many of you may know what happened next. In came a Persian army with the new King Mohammad Shah at its head, and laid siege to it.

• • •

I could have escaped. I almost did. I was arranging to leave for India—a matter that took time and expense because the road south through the Bolan Pass, along the high desert, was full of natural and man-made dangers. A rich man could have put together his own party with guides and convoy, but a near-beggar like me had to wait to join someone else’s caravan and to ensure that I would not be abandoned if my one and only mule fell on the road. I had just made myself known to a Hindu merchant house and secured a spot in their next caravan. I was hoping one would depart before the pass closed for the winter. I was saving money for it. Then rumors of the incoming Persian army started to circulate in the bazaars and the price for a spot in the caravan doubled, then tripled. I was left behind.

• • •

So many stories have since been told about the siege of Herat. If I took sides, if I surrendered myself to the Persian point of view, or stuck with the Russian perspective, my story would have been so much simpler: I’d say the Persian army came to put an end to the slave trade in Persian folk, operated by Yar Mohammed, the wuzeer of Herat’s ruler, Kamran Shah. Or I’d say that the Russian detachment that joined the Persians, came in on a peace-loving mission to convince the Cossacks at the Shah’s service to return home to Russia, and then just . . . stayed to help because the Shah begged them to.

If I embraced the British side, I’d say that the Persian shah, a newly crowned youngster, wanted to show the British Empire (the British India included), that he was no pansy, that he could wage a war and win it.

The truth is, Herat was the Great Game at its most insidious. At the time, I did not have the knowledge to see it. All I knew was I did not want to take sides. I was too old for that, and the wars I’d been in had taught me that seeing out of only one eye is as good as blindness. The truth? Two-thirds of the Herat population died or was sold into slavery. Kamran Shah their ruler was a useless drunk, and his wuzeer Yar Mohammed—a conniving sadist who made a fortune on the siege. And—the course of history may indeed have pivoted on a single man, Lieutenant Pottinger, an errant British officer in Herat. But for what reason and to what effect?

Ah, truth. That blind poet! The truth is, I was too old to take sides but not old enough to know that in the Great Game, there is no such thing as not taking sides.

• • •

The Persian army settled in, building a shantytown a mile and a half away from the wall, complete with a bazaar. Its foot soldiers, the
sarbaz,
were peasants freshly torn from their plows, so even their trenches and foxholes immediately took the shape of a village. They bombarded us, but lazily, and when they succeeded in breaking holes in the ramparts (crumbling of old age), they failed to capitalize on the achievement. They did not even cut off our eastern approaches. Herat peasants still sneaked in and out of those gates.

For the first month or so I would still sit in my corner of the bazaar, my last snowflake potions in chipped vials out for sale in front of me on a rug, and I would think back to Orenburg, to Anna. I would say to her,
Remember how you and I exchanged glances whenever a cannonball landed closer than usual? Funny, I now recall those moments as romance, not dread
 . . .
Can you understand
that?