Kader Abdolah - The King

‘Would we like something to drink, perhaps?’ asked the shah awkwardly, pointing to the bottles of juice on the table.

The girl walked to the table, studied the bottles, sniffed the juice and said, ‘I like white grape juice. Shall I pour you a glass as well?’

The shah was surprised by this unusual question. Up until now no woman had ever asked him so casually if he would like something to drink.

‘No, no. Well, actually, yes. Why not?’ he answered.

The girl elegantly poured a small amount of white grape juice into a glass for the shah and handed it to him. Only then did she pour half a glass for herself, drinking it down in a single draught.

‘Excuse me. I was thirsty.’

‘No, no. No need to apologise,’ said the shah.

‘It was so exciting coming here to meet you, it made my throat dry,’ said the girl.

The shah found her explanation amusing, but it was difficult to carry on a conversation with her. ‘There’s also food if you’re hungry,’ he said.

‘No, not that. Not now. Maybe later. I’ve got to catch my breath.’

Now what should he say? He couldn’t just take her to his bedroom. That idea didn’t even occur to him. He found her presence delightful, and he simply wanted to enjoy it.

‘We were recently given some photo albums as gifts,’ the shah remarked, ‘but we haven’t looked at them yet. If you like we could do that together.’

‘What kinds of photographs are they?’

‘They aren’t photographs but prints. They’re about light and other things. We’re quite curious ourselves.’

He felt more and more at ease, and the girl saw it as an opportunity to get closer to him. For a moment he wondered whether he should sit on the couch or on the floor, where he smoked his hookah. The girl knelt on a feather cushion and crept up to the shah cautiously like a cat, so he could feel her warm, soft body against his leg.

The shah picked up the Russian album and opened it. The girl bent down to look at the photographs.

‘What’s your name?’ asked the shah, who now felt like a hungry lion beside a young gazelle.

‘Anya, Anastasia, Anita, Ani, Antonia, Anisia,’ she responded.

‘So many names? Even we as king don’t have so many titles,’ said the shah teasingly.

‘I haven’t known my name since I was fifteen,’ she said. ‘The men themselves make up names for me, but I don’t mind.’ And then she asked him, ‘What’s your name?’

The shah was caught off guard by this question. No one had ever asked him his name before. He burst out laughing, and with tears in his eyes he said, ‘We no longer know our name, either.’

‘Really?’ said the girl. ‘Well, that’s all right. You’re still a sweet man.’ With these innocent little words she touched the shah’s heart. No one had ever told him he was sweet before. He took her face in both his hands and planted a kiss on her left cheek.

‘Your moustache tickles,’ she said.

The shah had to laugh again. ‘Who are you, anyway? You’re so … so … How can I put it? There’s something familiar about you that makes us feel you’re ours.’

The girl wiped the tears from the shah’s face with her hand.

‘We remember,’ said the shah. ‘Our name is Naser Muhammad Fatali Mozafar.’

‘Are they all titles?’ asked the girl.

‘They’re not titles. They’re the first names of my father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather and my great-great-grandfather.’

‘Were they all kings like you?’

‘Of course. We’ll show you. Come here. We can look at the albums later.’

He set the book aside, stood up, took the girl by the hand and led her all the way upstairs, to the big room next to the library where the kings’ personal possessions were kept. No one ever came into this mysterious room except the shah’s immediate family. The floors were covered with rare carpets, and hanging on the walls were portraits, articles of clothing and jewel-encrusted guns, swords and daggers.

The shah had a little bag of sand from Herat that he kept here in a niche. There were old closets containing the boots and leather slippers of past kings. Woollen socks and handkerchiefs were stored in handmade wooden boxes, and there were special glass caskets containing gold rings and necklaces. Displayed on the great mantelpiece were the kings’ writings, quills, scissors and combs. The girl stared in wonder at a series of thin glass tubes in which hairs from the kings’ heads and beards were preserved.

The shah pointed at a portrait on the wall and said, ‘This is our father. He died of grief.’

‘Of grief?’

‘The part of Azerbaijan that you come from used to be ours. The Russians took it from us in a war with my father. The grief of that loss was the death of him,’ explained the shah sadly.

To show her sympathy she began stroking the shah’s arm.

‘This is our grandfather, an extraordinary man. He held the country together. He restored our beloved Afghanistan to the homeland and was planning to make India part of Persia as well, but he was killed.’

‘Killed?’ asked the girl.

‘One of his Afghan guards murdered him in his sleep with a dagger. Look, his bloody coat is hanging there on the wall.’

Later that evening they lay together in bed and looked at the catalogues. In the Russian album there were incredible pictures of Russian industries, of impressive tools and of machines with gigantic wheels. How was it possible for men to make such extraordinary devices?

The shah was fascinated by one picture in particular, a photograph of the first train to run from Moscow to St Petersburg. Just before all the uproar in the country he had reached an agreement with the Russians on the building of a railway line from Tabriz to Tehran. But it was only by looking at this photograph that he understood how the combination of a locomotive and two iron rails would actually work. And when he saw a picture of passengers getting out of the carriages he became completely smitten by trains.

‘Amazing, don’t you think?’ he said. ‘That people will sit in a monster like this that rides on two iron rails.’

‘I’ve ridden in that train!’ said the girl suddenly.

‘What? You? In this train?’

‘Yes!’

‘How? — Or where, we mean?’

‘In St Petersburg on the way to Moscow,’ she responded.

‘You? To Moscow? What were you doing there?’

‘I was with those men. I went with them,’ said the girl.

Men? What men? the shah wanted to ask, but he didn’t. He thought she was lying, fantasising, but nevertheless her story had frightened him a bit. Could she be a Russian spy, someone sent to charm him with her innocence in order to rob him of his royal power?

The girl pushed the Russian album aside and picked up the French catalogue. She thumbed through it and looked at the monumental buildings of Paris, at the Assemblée nationale and at Notre Dame, and the graceful bridges over the River Seine.

‘This is something you shouldn’t miss,’ she said, and pulled the shah towards her. The candle on the bedside table fell onto the bed, and candle wax dripped on her leg.

‘Hot!’ she cried, and pulled her leg away. The shah picked up the candle, lit it again with another candle and put it back on the bedside table. The girl was disappointed that he paid no attention to her leg, which had reddened.

‘You are a king, but you still use candles,’ complained the girl. ‘Your bedroom stinks. I had expected you to have that new kind of light.’

The shah took the girl’s indignation seriously. He ran his hand gently along her bare leg and kissed her hair. He lay down beside her and looked at the picture. It was a photograph of Paris by night. A bridge elegantly connected one bank of the River Seine to the other, and there were two cast-iron telegraph poles standing at either end of the bridge like two works of art. The telegraph cables hung over the bridge like swaying black lines. Part of the photograph was covered by the branch of a tree. In this mysterious environment a young woman in a fashionable black hat was walking across the bridge in the light of an electric lamp.