Alexandra Lapierre - Between Love and Honor

“With the help of God, I will bring you out of the camp,” Shamil had continued, as overcome with emotion as his son. “You will not stay long with the infidels. I swear to you,” he had added solemnly, “never will I abandon you.”

Shamil made no further gesture toward the small boy who looked up at him. But his father followed him with his eyes and accompanied him in his soul.

Was he already regretting having listened to the advice of his men?

Beneath his father’s unflinching gaze, a look at once hard and full of tenderness, Jamal Eddin straightened up.

Swallowing his tears, he sat up in the saddle and kicked his pony lightly, guiding Koura slowly forward between the tents.

He plunged on among the horses, the cannons, and the soldiers. For an instant he seemed to float above the swarm of giaours.

Then suddenly, as though swallowed up by the multitude, he disappeared.

Saint Petersburg, four months later December 1839

“Pretty name, your Akulgo. A victory that has a nice ring to it. Akulgo, like Borodino and Waterloo.”

The kibitka flew over the snow. The sound of the runners gliding over the ice-covered ground, the harness bells, even the horses’ heavy breathing as they galloped in rhythm was muted in the winter air. Only the officers’ voices broke the stillness as they crossed the vast hollow that led from Tsarskoye Sielo, “the czar’s village,” to Saint Petersburg. Thirty versts in a straight line. At this rapid speed, the sleigh would be there in a few hours. Thirty versts, in addition to the three thousand that one of the two passengers had just traveled.

He was coming from the Caucasus. It had taken four months to travel across the empire, four months of unbridled racing, from the famous Akulgo that his companion had just mentioned to the Alexandrovsky orphanage at the edge of the imperial domain.

The circumstances of the war had made this twenty-three-year-old lieutenant the abductor and jailer of a child he had been forced to snatch from his mountain home and bring here, to this institution reserved for wards of the state.

Mission accomplished.

The child was alone now, without bearings whatsoever, at the other end of the earth. Far, so far away from his own world.

The lieutenant had just handed him over to the doctors and teachers who, at this very moment, were trying to get the boy to undress so that they could examine him and judge his physical state and his reflexes. A Muslim boy, stark naked in front of women? A Muslim boy, poked and palpated by the hands of giaours? How would he survive such humiliation? How could he possibly survive in such an alien world?

The lieutenant imagined so well the helplessness and confusion of the child that he could not bear to think of it. Any more than he wanted to remember the series of degrading acts his superiors had forced him to commit.

Jamal Eddin had been taken from his people and concealed from his father in an act of betrayal—and on the explicit orders of General Grabbe, commander of the armies of the Caucasus.

By order of the czar.

Abducted with complete disregard for all custom, for their word, and for their code of honor.

With scorn for the glory and grandeur of Holy Russia.

Strapped tightly in their parade uniforms, the two officers sat next to each other, stiff and straight, behind the coachman. Their conversation was reduced to an occasional word, cut short by the biting cold. They shivered under the sable blanket they shared, cocked hats pulled down tightly on their heads against the cold, their sabers clutched between their knees. The wind blew through the white plumes on their hats, the lustrous hair of their furs, and the gold braid at their collars and cuffs, which sparkled in the pale light of winter.

The older of the two was Count Pavel Dmitrievitch Kiselyev. Nearly fifty, he had a receding hairline and his once-abundant locks were turning gray. But the hairstyle made popular by the czar, with short curls combed forward at forehead and temples, neatly trimmed sideburns, and a full, waxed moustache, emphasized the oval shape of his face in a becoming fashion. Tall and broad-shouldered, with a neat waist, Count Kiselyev was still considered one of the handsomest men in Russia. Hero of the Napoleonic wars, veteran of the Congress of Vienna, former governor of the provinces of the Danube, Wallachia, and Moldavia, today he was a member of the Council of State. Among Nicholas I’s favorites, he was the incarnation of the court’s ideal of intelligence, integrity, and power. An exception. A miracle. For beneath the arrogant exterior was a vivacious personality, full of warmth.

The other man was somewhat less imbued with the honor of his class. He lacked neither distinction nor looks, but the worn traits that marked his otherwise youthful face betrayed his extreme fatigue. Pale and thin from a long journey, on this January afternoon he had the look of an adolescent who had grown up too quickly. Nothing about him was gauche or careless, but it was evident that he had dressed hastily, shaved and combed his hair in a hurry. His hair, parted on the side, fell in unruly ash-blond waves to the nape of his neck. The sideburns that framed his weary face were bushy and undisciplined; he could not remember when they had last been trimmed. His listless exhaustion had emptied his heart of emotion and his head of thoughts. Normally energetic, he found his inability to overcome this malaise distressing and humiliating. His name was Dmitri Alexeyevitch Milyutin, and he was the count’s nephew.

Both of them were career officers in the military, officers by chance or necessity rather than vocation. The army was the czar’s great passion. He was mistrustful of civilians, people who did not know the meaning of the word “obedience.” His capital of Saint Petersburg was like an immense barracks, a garrison town, inhabited solely by uniforms. A military career was the sole possibility, the only future for a self-respecting Russian from a good family. But from that to requesting a transfer to Dagestan and Chechnya, as Dmitri Alexeyevitch had done last spring—whatever could have possessed him to behave so uncharacteristically and so impulsively?

Was it a reaction to his immense sorrow at his mother’s death last February? Boredom with his studies at the military academy? A youthful desire for risk? Or glory? Whatever it was, it was an absurd gesture for a young man who had nothing to atone for. The Caucasus was known as a land of exile, a place where one was sent as punishment, “our sweet Siberia,” as the emperor called it. It was there that he sent the undesirables, the agitators, and Pushkin and Lermontoff, the poets in disgrace.

The “wars of pacification” gave demoted lieutenants and disgraced generals a chance to redeem themselves. They could win back their stripes and return as heroes. If others observed them closely, the eyes of those who were lucky enough to come back betrayed something both wild and somber. It was the shadow of “the mark of the mountains,” a nostalgia for the grandeur of nature, for their adventures among the rebels, and for the freedom from the empire that they had enjoyed even within the empire. They became arrogant and contentious and adopted the affectation of wearing only the cherkeska, the papakha, and the sacrosanct kinjal when in civilian dress.

These veterans were known as “the Caucasians.”

Though his nephew appeared to be immune to this kind of behavior, the count was nonetheless surprised to find him remote and sullen, their reunion scarcely up to his expectations. After all, the uncle had taken the trouble to go fetch him personally, south of Petersburg, at the very place where he was to report for his mission, this much-talked-of mission that had required Lieutenant Dmitri Alexeyevitch Milyutin’s return to Russia.

Once through the initial greetings, Dmitri barely thanked him. His mind seemed to be elsewhere; he spoke little and asked no questions, not even regarding the honor he was about to receive. It was an honor of some magnitude: on this December afternoon, the count would escort his nephew to the Winter Palace. He had succeeded in having his nephew invited to dinner with the imperial family in their private apartments. This was no ordinary feat, since only the czar’s most intimate friends were invited to the legendary four o’clock dinner. Of course, Dmitri had already been presented to the czar, along with hundreds of other officers, during official ceremonies at court, but never as part of a select group at a small get-together. The count had high expectations for this meeting.