Alexandra Lapierre - Between Love and Honor

What he felt was so new. Floating in the antechamber, he saw the sweet face of his mother, whom he had feared was dead. Just as he had feared Mohammed Ghazi was dead. During the long journey, he had misunderstood what the giaours had said when they spoke of the massacre of Jawarat and of Saïd. Of so many others.

He pitied his own, but he could no longer feel as sad.

Fatima looked at him with the same faint smile full of love and courage she had shown on the boulder of Akulgo as she had dressed him in white and pulled tight the strap that would hold his kinjal. Shamil had saved her. His father, invulnerable, watched over her, watched over him, watched over all of them. His happiness and his sense of peace were boundless. The Great White Czar had given him back not only his honor, but his hope.

Such was not the case for Milyutin, on the other side of the door.

He had scarcely shut it behind him before he received the first unexpected warning shot across the bow.

“What is that outfit?”

The czar no longer seemed merely irritated. He was furious.

“Where did that costume come from?”

Milyutin glanced down at his uniform in dismay. A missing button or poorly shined boots could send him to Siberia.

“This is the last time I want to see that boy in a Montagnard getup. I never want to see him again in a cherkeska! You will transmit my wishes to the director of the Alexandrovsky institution: this very evening, I want the rebel’s son to put on the tunic of the youngest cadets. In no way will he be distinguishable from the others. He may be brought up with all the superstitions of Islam—fine. I am tolerant when it comes to religion. It may actually be of service to us for him to retain his mother tongue and remain the spiritual heir of his father. If trouble arises in the Caucasus again—God help us!—we will make this Muslim our spokesman. The most precious of our intermediaries. And ultimately, who knows, the legitimate successor of the imam? In any case, if, eventually, perhaps one day, we choose to send him back to the mountains, he should return like all his classmates in the corps, like you, like me, like all of us, in the service of Russia. I want him to become the best Russian possible, Russian in body and soul,” the czar insisted, “above all, a Russian. Keep me informed as to further developments.

“And the boy must give his dagger back to you. He’s just a child, unhappy and lost. I wanted to calm him down, give him a little peace of mind. He will have had time to play with his knife in the antechamber, under the watchful eye of the guards. That will do. In Russia, a child as young as that does not possess a weapon, especially a child like this one, who is scarcely reliable and who has already killed others. Imagine, if he gets into fights with his companions, the risk we’d be taking with the others! Do you understand me? Take back this kinjal immediately.

“You are dismissed.”

The tumultuous sounds he heard as he was leaving the Cadet Corps of Tsarskoye Sielo, where he had handed Jamal Eddin over to the teachers, would ring in Milyutin’s ears long afterward. The boarding school, which accepted only young children, was run by women: nursemaids, supervisors, and schoolmistresses. The lieutenant had given them his instructions, and then he had fled.

At the foot of the steps, in the snow, he listened to the shouts of the women struggling with the little boy and Jamal Eddin’s cries as he tried to explain, in Avar, “The czar gave it back to me! You must not, you have no right, the czar is the one who gave it to me. The czar gave me permission! It’s the czar!”

The young officer felt guilty. But what choice did he have? What other order should he have obeyed? Honor commanded him to obey orders.

Obey? He had seen too much at Akulgo. But what could he do? Leave the army? Travel?

Lost in his troubled thoughts, Milyutin picked up the reins of the sleigh.

He sat there, incapable of making the horses move, listening to the protests of Shamil’s son. What did honor dictate that Jamal Eddin do? That he give up his kinjal without a fight, as he had promised? Or that he use it to defend himself, as he was trying to do? What laws should he respect from now on?

Once again robbed of what was essential to him, abandoned in a world he did not understand, the child sputtered his first words in Russian and hung on to the only person who had spoken his language.

“It’s the czar.” He repeated those three words, incontestable proof of what he was trying to explain, three words whose power, on that morning, he could not imagine.

And he was crying, as he had never cried before in his entire life.

Tsarskoye Sielo The Alexandrovsky Cadet Corps The Cemetery and Hospice for Horses at Alexander Park, a year and a half later June 1841

It was the hour of the nighttime prayer, the last prayer of the day. The child stood at the dormitory window, his face lifted toward the sky. He was looking for the stars that would indicate the direction of Mecca. But there weren’t any stars here, just the moon. How could one glorify God in the shadows, as the Book said? Here, the shadows were white. How could he say the name of the Almighty at dawn or prostrate himself before Him at twilight? Here, the sun never set. And how could he sneak out, under cover of darkness? You could see everything as though it were daylight! This was, indeed, an inconvenience, but it didn’t prevent him from escaping, as he did every night.

All the same, there was one advantage to the summer. The heat forced the supervisors to leave open all the windows of the huge wooden building that housed the school. Most of the supervisors were old and deaf and snored in their sleep. He would have no trouble creeping along the eaves, slipping through the hole in the fence, and scampering as fast as his legs could carry him across the silvery plain.

In his full uniform shirt, buttoned at the side Russian-style, he ran barefoot through the pastures. The fog floating over the river in the distance formed white ribbons that reminded him of the mountain streams back home and of the torrents that escaped from the gorges like metallic serpents.

The scent of the prairies was intoxicating, the air full of the perfume of the earth and the heat of the animals. The foliage smelled like the Chechen forests. He knew the way. He kept his eye on the high brick tower he could see over the treetops and headed straight for it. In the midst of the green mass of branches, the red tower shone like fire. He knew it rested on top of another building.

Soon he had reached the corner of the crenellated roof.

The outline of the building’s crenel-tiled border against the pearl-colored sky made him think of the terrace of his father’s house at Akulgo. A fleeting thought, it was quickly overtaken by another, for here were the stables. These were not the magnificent imperial stables of the Catherine Palace, but a retirement home for old horses, built by the czar just north of his summer residence at the Alexander Palace. The courtiers staying at Tsarskoye Sielo had baptized this new establishment “Les Invalides.”

“After the orphanage, the hospice,” joked those less fortunate, who rented dachas in the meadows between the Alexandrovsky Cadet Corps school and Les Invalides of Alexander Park.

Jamal Eddin could not remember which of his classmates had first mentioned the presence of this haven for noble horses less than a verst from the dormitory. On these June nights, Czar Nicholas’s Orlovs, the stallions and mares and geldings that had been sent to end their days here, enjoyed the air literally in his own backyard. All these horses that had carried members of the royal family roamed about freely in the vast fields, which His Majesty had had planted with rich grass and clover.

He never tried to enter the building; there was no point. He had peeked through the window and seen that the stalls were empty. But over the stalls lived the caretaker and the grooms. Unlike the teachers at school, they were all young and less inclined to sleep. They had already chased him, and one night, they had nearly caught him.

In the opalescent light, twenty animals crossed the meadow at a leisurely pace, one behind the other. Jamal Eddin watched their dark silhouettes, which cast no shadow on the plain, and was struck once again by their power and beauty. He had never seen anything like them. With their round hindquarters, which shone in the moonlight, their broad breasts, their long necks, and their thick manes, they appeared gigantic.