Since Jamal Eddin could not dismiss him without the czar’s approval, he simply tried to stay calm and tune him out—in short, put up with him. Only once did Shibshiev manage to shake his resolve, striking a nerve that touched Jamal Eddin so profoundly that he flew into a rage.


One evening the young lieutenant returned to his quarters to find that Shibshiev had fresh news from the Caucasus, information that seemed to have dropped from the sky. He announced that Jamal’s mother had died seven years ago and that the imam had chosen the eldest daughter of Sheik Jamaluddin Al-Ghumuqi as her replacement. He had taken other wives as well, who had borne him more sons. But that was nothing compared to the next piece of news. Shibshiev coddled his revenge triumphantly. No, it was nothing.

A year ago, Shamil had named Jamal Eddin’s younger brother, Mohammed Ghazi, as his spiritual heir and successor. The eighteen-year-old had legally taken his older brother’s place in a ceremony attended by all the naïbs.

Jamal Eddin listened to all this calmly and asked only one question—in Russian.

“Where did you get this information?”

“I know it,” Shibshiev replied, in Chechen.

“How?”

“I know it,” the servant repeated smugly.

“Who told you this?” Jamal Eddin exploded.

Jamal Eddin grabbed him by the collar. Shibshiev made no move to defend himself. He was not armed and would not engage in a fistfight.

Jamal Eddin let go of him. “Get out of my sight!”

He did not have to tell Shibshiev twice. The servant took the lieutenant’s coat, saber, and kinjals and left.

Stunned and enraged, Jamal Eddin could not believe the news. What? For the past thirteen years, he had written faithfully to his father, without ever receiving so much as a word of response. Never had the imam deigned to answer even one of his letters. He was so upset that he could not even find words for the exact reason for his anger. How could he have been stripped of all his rights of primogeniture when his father knew that Jamal was alive? The fact that Shamil had chosen this savage, this accursed shadow, Shibshiev, to deliver his message only added to the disgrace.

This kind of renunciation contravened all the laws of the kanly, as well as those of the Sharia, both the laws of blood and the laws of Islam. Such a repudiation signified the dishonor of the eldest son—and his death in the heart of his father. Shibshiev had delivered his message with full knowledge of these facts.

It would be his last.

Shibshiev’s smug disclosure of the imam’s relationships with his heirs had rendered him so hateful to Jamal Eddin that he ordered his aide to swallow his tongue. There were to be no more sermons or speeches. He assured Shibshiev that if he opened his mouth to utter so much as one word of criticism, he would live to regret it. At the merest hint of an accusation or an insult, Shibshiev would pay.


Shibshiev failed to comprehend the significance of this command from an officer like Lieutenant Shamil. He was too obtuse to realize that beneath Jamal Eddin’s calm exterior lay an untapped reservoir of passionate feeling. He learned the extent of his poor judgment when he dared to begin reiterating his insults. It was to his extreme detriment. The beating he took left him panting in terror at the violence of his master.

Anyone but Shibshiev would have planned vengeance for such humiliation and stabbed the officer in his bed. And in fact, Jamal Eddin was counting on an act of attempted murder to finally send Shibshiev back to Saint Petersburg. Or, quite simply, to get rid of him for good.

But Shibshiev did not budge.

He cowered in submission, kissed the hand he could not cut off, and ceased to call the imam’s son a dog or a woman.

His master demanded nothing more of him.

If the czar’s purpose had been to familiarize his protégé with Caucasian customs, the endeavor was a rousing success. By the time the Uhlans returned to Russia in June 1851, Jamal Eddin and Shibshiev were no longer on speaking terms.

Each waited for the opportunity to pursue his hatred to its inevitable conclusion.

Each, in his own way, did all he could to destroy the evil incarnate in the other.

Russia At the Torjok garrison, in the province of Tver September 1851

The scent of ripened wheat and lucerne rose in waves from the damp earth. It was wonderful to slip into the open country at daybreak, when the air was still, before the buzz of bees and insects filled the linden trees of Torjok. Banks of mist hovered low over the prairies, creeping toward the lakes, the ponds, and the thousand streams that dotted the countryside of Tver, then formed a thick blanket above the woods.

“Not far to the forest,” Jamal Eddin thought.

The game was to keep his horse in check until they reached the first pines, then to suddenly give him his head. Impatient to break into a gallop, Jamal Eddin turned off at one of the paths. The vast mass of trees, blue in the light of the summer dawn, stretched as far as the eye could see. He spurred his horse gently into a trot. Crushed beneath the horse’s hooves, the first pines needles released their tantalizing scent of resin. Applying firm pressure with his legs, Jamal Eddin directed his mount to bound forward. He crouched over the horse’s neck to avoid the low-hanging conifer branches, covered with gray barbs, as he took off into the cluster of tall trees. The croaking frogs on the banks of the streams fell silent. A woodcock fluttered away. The deer disappeared. But he knew that the animals were there, and the thrill of their presence made him forget Shamil, the czar, and Shibshiev. He forgot about his anger and the sense of injustice that loomed over him always. Without a doubt, that savage’s accusations had finally borne fruit.

If sometimes, in his innermost thoughts, he still spoke to his father, it was to tell him that never once had he faltered, that he had always fulfilled his religious duties, that he had always said his prayers and observed Ramadan, that he was still a Montagnard. In the midst of all the Uhlans, he had worn the national dress, the cherkess. He did not go beyond that in his silent monologues. He did not speak of his violent struggle within or of all the restraint and effort his loyalty to the Caucasus had cost him. He did not mention that his memory of the mountains was becoming increasingly vague and—worse still—that his sparse memories were painful, that the images Shibshiev evoked disturbed him. How could he have expressed the truth and admit that the problem was not that he felt different from his comrades but—on the contrary—that he felt neither different nor in any way excluded from the world around him? The difficulty lay in belonging to a lost world that was no longer relevant to his existence but to which his sense of honor demanded he remain loyal. And he was no longer even certain of that.

Oh, the hell with all these confusing thoughts. Gallop in a straight line, gallop over the immense flat stretch of Russian forest. The appeal of the endless, compelling plain defied the call of the Caucasus. Everything played out before him, rushing by thick and dense, the past, the future, all of it—life suddenly seemed simple.

He threaded his way swiftly among the black tree trunks, streaked now by the morning sun, whose light penetrated everywhere as he crossed the forest floor. He was flying, free, alive.

As he rode wildly on, he occasionally heard the echo of another set of pounding hooves. It was then that he caught a fleeting glimpse of his double, galloping through the foliage as the sunlight streamed through the trees. Far off in the distance was another horseman—no, it was a young woman, blonde, bareheaded, riding sidesaddle and dressed in a green habit. Her grace was enchanting. Now there was someone who knew how to ride. She held herself in the saddle with such natural elegance that even her mare seemed to sense it as she galloped on, limbs contained, head lowered. A magnificent beast, she reminded him of his friend from the horse cemetery, the sorrel mare from his first Russian summer, who played at charging him in the sleepless nights at Tsarskoye Sielo. In different circumstances, he would have pursued them. But this fugitive vision was so completely part of his pleasure, along with the pungent perfume of the earth, the images of the clearings, the croaking frogs, the light, the sun and the forest, and all that was Russia, that chasing them would have seemed not only futile but an utter sacrilege.


It was only in autumn, when the green-clad Amazon no longer appeared, that he realized he had been listening expectantly for the dull pound of hooves in the sand, just as he had counted on hearing them all summer. The strident cry of the black grouse mating in the branches above him now made him shiver with impatient anxiety. Somehow, in the midst of the triumphant radiance of nature, he sensed that he was waiting for something.

Something that did not come.

In his mind, he contemplated the face of Varenka and the eyes of all the women he had been attracted to at Covensk, all the women he had had to renounce. When he thought of his Polish mistresses—whom he had invariably chosen among the older and married women in order to discourage any illusions of a future or even a hint of a shared destiny—those with whom his religion forbade him to form any bonds, he felt a restlessness that cost him many sleepless nights.

A few dance steps, the whirl of a waltz—were those all he could ever share with these women? A turn around the dance floor. It all amounted to nothing. Even now, when he was known as a heartbreaker, he had no choice but to keep his own heart at a respectful distance; he could not allow himself to become attached to anyone. Could he ever marry a young woman of Torjok? Certainly not.