Kader Abdolah - The King

‘Thank you, Mother. Please don’t leave us alone.’

‘I am not about to die, my son,’ she said. ‘I will keep on living until the shah says, Mother, you may go now.’

‘You’re going to outlive us?’ asked the shah with a laugh.

‘I’m not going to outlive you. I’m going to stand by you as long as necessary.’

‘That’s a beautiful promise, Mother,’ said the shah.

‘Help me, boy. I can no longer climb the stairs by myself.’

He picked her up off the ground and carried her up the stairs in his arms.

‘Put me back on the ground,’ she laughed, threatening him with her walking stick.

The shah put her down gently and planted a kiss on her crown.

The years had left their mark on the face of the shah. Whenever he looked in the mirror he no longer dared take off his hat, he had become so grey and bald. Malijak too had visibly changed with the passing of time.

Long ago the shah had talked to his cat to lighten his heart and share his loneliness, but after Sharmin had mysteriously disappeared Malijak took over the cat’s job. The shah found him very amusing when he was still small. He never saw the need to teach Malijak to read or write, but he did impart to him the fundamentals of chess. The shah enjoyed Malijak’s foolish chessboard moves. As the boy grew older, however, the shah took less pleasure in his company. Malijak still hated to be washed, and he stank. When Malijak was a child the shah himself bathed him, cut his hair and dressed him in clean clothes. But those days were long gone.

The seasons came and went, night followed day, and the shah’s travels to Europe now seemed like something that had happened in a dream.

In retrospect he realised that the journey had not brought him happiness but had made him even less happy. His plan to intervene directly and help his subjects with their problems had been more than he could handle, and political unrest was rearing its head once again. As his ambassador in Moscow had written to him in a letter:

What the shah is suffering through in our homeland is actually a variation of the problems that the Russian tsar is struggling with.

There are several groups that want to subvert the power of the tsar. It is their belief that the elite are controlling the state and oppressing the population. These groups are trying to establish a society in which the people govern the state through their elected representatives.

It is a worrying development. They emphasise the rights of the common man, that is, the rights of the man in the street. We believe that the unrest in Russia is going to surface in our country as well, but much more strongly than before. The leaders of the Russian insurgents have spoken with the leaders of the Persian insurgents in Baku. One of them is Aga Jamal.

That evening the shah wrote this in his diary: ‘What is happening at the present time is not only our problem. The tsar is having the same difficulties. In Turkey too the sultan realises his power is being compromised. What people in Russia or Turkey do is their business. We will continue to rule in our own way. We are probably destined to go down in history as the last old-fashioned king. If that is the case, we must try to take more pleasure in life.’

Locked up in Tehran’s dreadful prison Mirza Reza spent every day applying his mental powers to keep from going mad. He was in with the violent criminals. Most prisoners lost their minds due to lack of light.

The director had been ordered by Eyn ed-Dowleh to subject Mirza Reza to a special punishment. When the guards came to bring him his food they beat him with a copy of his own statute book. At breakfast they beat him once, at around noon they beat him twice, and during dinner they beat him three times.

Mirza Reza knew he must concentrate on his great objective to keep from collapsing in such degrading circumstances. He had a big secret safely tucked away in his heart. It was a secret that burned like an oven, and he turned to it every day to warm himself.

Jamal Khan made several trips to Baku and Istanbul to meet with kindred spirits from Turkey, Iraq, India, Egypt and Russia. He provided his foreign comrades with detailed descriptions of developments in his homeland and exchanged experiences and ideas with them. Slowly he built up a strong network in his own country. Now it was just a matter of waiting for the right opportunity to strike.

Among all the contracts that the shah had signed with commercial firms, businessmen and entrepreneurs during his journey, there was one agreement that proved truly disastrous.

Over a period of twenty years the British had vastly expanded the size of their embassy. They had purchased a large parcel of land behind the embassy building where they constructed a number of houses to accommodate their British guests.

The Russians still lived in their old residence, which dated from the previous century. When the shah was in Moscow this subject came up during a dinner in the Kremlin. The shah, who had already downed two stiff Russian drinks, generously promised a sizeable piece of land to the Russians at no expense whatsoever and sealed the promise with his signet ring.

Nothing else happened. The shah forgot about the contract — until the Russians put up an enormous wooden fence round the promised property. The work was done by a group of local carpenters, and it occurred to no one that the Russians were planning on building a new embassy there. Neither the shah nor the Russians were aware that this was the site of a forgotten burial ground from the previous century.

Jamal Khan was notified of the Russian building plans by his contacts. He went to have a look and was shocked by what he saw. In preparation for the laying of the foundations at the building site all the graves had been desecrated and the bones piled up in a heap. Russian liquor bottles and other rubbish were scattered everywhere.

That evening Jamal Khan took Ayatollah Tabatabai to the cemetery, forced open a length of fence, led the ayatollah inside and cast the light from his lantern over the empty graves, the bones and the thrown-away bottles.

The ayatollah shook with rage as he said, ‘Allah, Allah, this is unacceptable. I take refuge in You.’

The shah had made a serious mistake, but what was the ayatollah to do? He had the power to send thousands of people to the Russian embassy to punish both the Russians and the shah. But the ayatollah feared that lives would be lost. So he decided to send a courteous letter to the shah containing the following words: ‘We expect the graves to be restored as soon as possible. Allah forgives and Allah punishes without mercy. Wassalam. Tabatabai.’

The shah was livid, but when it came to ayatollahs you couldn’t be careful enough. He consulted his vizier. ‘It is definitely a serious case,’ said Mostovi Almamalek, ‘and we must do something about it.’

‘It’s an old, forgotten burial ground from a hundred years ago.’

‘That argument won’t hold water. They want the Russians out of there. I’m afraid we’ll have to go along with the ayatollah’s demand. We have to ask the Russians to abandon their plans for the time being.’

‘Out of the question. They’ll see us as a weak king. Find another solution.’

‘I see no other solution, Your Majesty.’

‘Talk to the ayatollah.’

‘Talking won’t help. There can be no Russian embassy on that site.’

‘How do you know that?’ answered the shah, who was beginning to wonder whose side his vizier was on.

‘Everyone knows that, Your Majesty,’ said Mostovi Almamalek. ‘And so do you.’

The shah could not put the ayatollah in his place, the vizier knew that a compromise was impossible, and the ayatollah in turn was wrestling with whether he ought to inform the people during a sermon.