Samarkand (32 page)

‘You see!’ he told us with an imperceptibly triumphant tone of voice. ‘Everything which Panoff stated was true. Colonel Liakhov
has carried out his coup d’état. He has declared himself military governor of Teheran and has imposed a curfew there. Since
this morning supporters of the constitution have become fair game in the capital and all other cities, starting with Tabriz.’

‘It has all happened so quickly!’ Howard marvelled.

‘It was the Russian consul who was notified of the launch of the coup by telegram and he then informed the religious chiefs
of Tabriz this morning. They in turn summoned their supporters to assemble at mid-day in the Deveshi, the Quarter of the Camel-drivers,
whence they spread out through the city, first heading for the home of one of my journalist friends, Ali Meshedi. They dragged
him out of his house accompanied by the screams of his wife and mother, cut his throat and severed his right hand and then
left him in a pool of blood. But have no fear – Ali will be avenged before nightfall.’

His voice betrayed him. He managed a respite of a second and drew a deep breath before continuing:

‘If I have come to Tabriz, it is because I know this city will resist. The ground we are standing on is still ruled by the
constitution. This is now the seat of parliament, the seat of the legitimate government. It will be a fine battle but we will
end up winning. Follow me!’

We followed him, along with half a dozen of his supporters. He led us toward the garden, and walked around the house to a
wooden staircase whose extremities disappeared in thick foliage. We went up to the roof, through a passageway, up a few more
steps and then came to a room with thick walls and small yet potentially deadly
windows. Fazel invited us to take a look: we were overhanging the most vulnerable entrance to the quarter which at present
was blocked by a barricade. Behind it there were about twenty men, kneeling to the ground with their rifles aimed.

‘There are others,’ Fazel explained. Just as determined. They are blocking all the entrances to the quarter. If the pack comes,
they will be given the welcome they deserve.’

The pack, as he called them, was not far off. They must have stopped on the way to set fire to two or three houses belonging
to sons of Adam, but they were relentless and the noise and shots grew closer.

Suddenly we were seized by a kind of shudder. However much we expected them and were sheltered by a wall, the spectacle of
a wild crowd calling out death and coming straight at one is probably the most frightening experience one can have.

Instinctively I whispered:

‘How many are they?’

‘A thousand, a thousand five hundred at the most,’ Fazel replied in a loud voice which was clear and reassuring.

Then he added, like an order:

‘Now it is up to us to frighten them.’

He asked his aides to give us rifles. Howard and I exchanged a quasi-amused glance. We felt the weight of those cold objects
with both fascination and distaste.

‘Position yourselves at the windows,’ Fazel yelled. ‘And shoot at anyone who approaches. I have to leave you. I have a surprise
up my sleeve for these barbarians.’

He had hardly gone out before the battle started although to speak of it as such is most probably an exaggeration. The rioters
arrived. They were a vociferous and bird-brained mob and their forward ranks threw themselves against the barricade as if
it were an obstacle course. The sons of Adam fired one salvo and then another. A dozen of the assailants were downed and the
rest fell back. Only one managed to scale the barricade, but that was only to be run through by a bayonet. He gave out a horrible
cry of agony and I turned my eyes away.

Most of the demonstrators wisely stayed back, making do with
shouting out hoarsely the same slogan: ‘Death!’. Then a squad was thrown anew into an assault on the barricade – this time
with a little more method, that is to say that they were firing on the defenders and the windows from which the shots had
come. A son of Adam hit on the forehead was the only loss in his camp. His companion’s salvoes were already starting to mow
down the first lines of the assailants.

The offensive tailed off, they fell back and discussed a new strategy noisily. They were regrouping for a new attempt when
a rumbling sound shook the quarter. A shell had just landed in the middle of the rioters, causing carnage followed by headlong
flight. The defenders then raised their rifles and shouted:
‘Mashrouteh! Mashrouthe!’ –
Constitution! From the other side of the barricade we could make out dozens of corpses stretched out on the ground. Howard
whispered:

‘My weapon is still cold. I have not fired a single cartridge. What about you?’

‘Nor have I.’

‘To have someone’s head in my sights, and to press the trigger to kill him …’

Fazel arrived a few moments later in jovial mood.

‘What did you think of my surprise? It was an old French cannon, a de Bange, which was sold to us by an officer in the imperial
army. It is on the roof, come and take a look at it! One day soon we shall place it in the middle of the largest square in
Tabriz and write underneath it: “This cannon saved the constitution!”’

I found his words too optimistic even though I could not contest the fact that he had won a significant victory in a few minutes.
His objective was clear – to maintain a zone where the last Constitutionalists could assemble and find protection, but above
all where they could all plan out the steps they were to take.

If someone had told us on that troubled June day that from just a few tangled alleys in the Tabriz bazaar and with our two
loads of Lebel rifles and our single de Bange cannon we were going to win back for Persia its stolen freedom, who would have
believed it?

Yet that is what happened, but not without the purest of us paying for it with his life.

They were dark days on the history of Khayyam’s country. Was this the promised dawn of the Orient? From Isfahan to Kazvin,
from Shiraz to Hamand, the same shouts issued blindly from thousand upon thousand of people: ‘Death! Death!’ Now one had to
go into hiding in order to say the words liberty, democracy and justice. The future was no more than a forbidden dream and
the Constitutionalists were hunted down on the streets, the meeting rooms of the sons of Adam were laid to waste and their
books were thrown into a pile and burnt. Nowhere, throughout the whole of Persia, could the odious spread of violence be checked.

Nowhere apart from Tabriz. And when the interminable day of the coup came to an end, out of the thirty main quarters of the
heroic city only one was holding out – the district called Amir-Khiz at the extreme north-west of the bazaar. That night a
few dozen young partisans took turns to guard the approaches, while Fazel was sketching ambitious arrows on a crumpled map
in the
anjuman
building in the general quarter.

There were about a dozen of us fervently following the smallest mark of his pencil which the swinging storm lamps accentuated.
The deputy stood up straight.

‘The enemy is still suffering the shock of the losses which we inflicted on them. They think that we are stronger than we
actually
are. They have no cannons and do not know how many we have. We must profit from this without delay to extend our territory.
It will not take the Shah long to send troops and they will be in Tabriz within a few weeks. By then we must have liberated
the whole city. Tonight we shall attack.’

He bent over and every head – bare or turbaned – bent over too.

‘We cross the river by surprise,’ he explained. ‘We charge in the direction of the citadel and attack it from two sides, the
bazaar and from the cemetery. It will be ours before evening.’

The citadel was not taken for ten days. Lethal battles raged in every street but the resisters advanced and all the clashes
turned to their advantage. Some ‘sons of Adam’ occupied the bureau of the Indo-European Telegraph on the Saturday, thanks
to which they were able to keep in contact with Teheran as well as with London and Bombay. The same day a police barracks
went over to their side, bringing with it as a dowry a Maxim machine gun and thirty cases of ammunition. These successes gave
the population its confidence back. Young and old became emboldened and flocked to the liberated quarters in their hundreds,
sometimes with their weapons. Within a few weeks the enemy had been pushed back to the outskirts. It was only holding on to
a thinly populated area in the north-east of the city stretching from the Quarter of the Camel-drivers to the camp of Sahib-Divan.

Toward mid-July an army of irregulars was formed, as well as a provisional administration in which Howard found himself made
quartermaster. He now passed most of his time scouring the bazaar and compiling a list of food stocks. The merchants showed
themselves more than willing to cooperate. He himself found his way perfectly through the Persian system of weights and measures.

‘You have to forget litres, kilos, ounces and pints,’ he told me. ‘Here they speak of
jaw, miskal, syr
and
kharvar
, which is the load of an ass.’

He tried to teach me.

‘The basic unit is the
jaw
, which is a medium sized grain of barley which still has its husk but which has had the little tuft of hair at each end cut
off.’

‘That’s quite tortuous,’ I guffawed.

My teacher threw his student a look of rebuke. To make amends I thought I had better prove that I had been taking it in.

‘So the
jaw
is the smallest unit of measure.’

‘Not at all.’ said Howard indignantly.

Unruffled, he referred to his notes:

‘The weight of a grain of barley equals that of seventy grains of
seneveh
, or if you like, six hairs of a mule’s tail.’

In comparison, my own mission was light! Given my complete ignorance of the local dialect, my only job was to keep in contact
with the foreign nationals in order to reassure them of Fazel’s intentions and to watch over their safety.

It should be mentioned that Tabriz, until the construction of the Trans-Caucasian Railway twenty years earlier, had been the
gateway to Persia, the entrance point for all travellers, goods and ideas. Several European establishments had branches there,
such as the German company of MMO Mossig and Schünemann, or the Eastern Trading Company, an important Austrian firm. There
were also consulates, the American Presbyterian Mission and various other institutions, and I am happy to say that at no moment
during the long and difficult months of the siege did the foreign nationals become targets.

Not only were they in no danger, but there was some moving fraternization. I do not wish to speak of Baskerville, myself nor
of Panoff, who quickly joined the movement, but I wish to salute other people, such as Mr Moore, the correspondent of the
Manchester Guardian
, who, not hesitating to take up arms at the side of Fazel, was wounded in combat, or Captain Anginieur, who helped us to resolve
numerous logistical problems and who, through his articles in
l’Asie française
, helped produce the surge of solidarity in Paris and throughout the world, which saved Tabriz from the dreadful fate threatening
it. For some of the city’s clergy, the active presence of the foreigners was, I quote, ‘a motley crowd of Europeans, Armenians,
Babis and infidels of all sorts’. However the population remained impervious to this propaganda and showered
us with grateful affection. Every man was a brother for us and every woman a sister or a mother.

I hardly need to point out that it was the Persians themselves who gave the Resistance the most spontaneous and enormous help
from the first day. First the free inhabitants of Tabriz and then the refugees who had had to flee their towns and villages
for their beliefs and seek protection in the last bastion of the constitution. This was the case with hundreds of sons of
Adam who had rushed from all corners of the Empire and who asked nothing more than that they be allowed to bear arms. This
was also the case with several deputies, ministers and journalists from Teheran who had managed to escape the dragnet ordered
by Colonel Liakhov and who often arrived in small groups, exhausted, haggard and distraught.

However the most precious recruit beyond a shadow of a doubt was Shireen who had defied the curfew to leave the capital by
car without the Cossacks daring to impede her. Her landaulet was greeted enthusiastically by the populace, the more so as
her chauffeur came from Tabriz and was one of the rare Persians to drive such a vehicle.

The Princess set up home in an abandoned palace which had been built by her grandfather, the old Shah who had been assassinated.
He had envisaged spending a month there every year, but after the first night, as legend goes, he felt faint and his astrologers
advised him never to set foot again in a place of such ill omen. For thirty years no one had lived there. It was referred
to, not without a little fear, as the Empty Palace.

Shireen did not hesitate to defy bad luck and her residence became the heart of the city. Resistance leaders liked to meet
in her vast gardens, which were a cool oasis during those summer nights and I was often in their company.

The Princess always seemed happy to see me. Our correspondence had caused a bond to spring up between us to which no one could
become privy. Of course we were never alone, there being dozens of other people present whenever we met or dined. We debated
indefatigably and sometimes we just joked but not excessively. Familiarity is never tolerated in Persia and one must be punctilious
and flamboyant about being polite. In Persian there is
often the tendency to say ‘I am the slave of the shadow of the greatness’ of the individual to whom one is talking and when
it is a matter of mainly female highnesses, one starts if not actually kissing the ground at least doing so in the import
of the most grandiose phrases.

Then came that disturbing Thursday evening. 17 September to be exact. How could I ever forget it.