Khayyam gave his disciple a long hug.
‘I am happy that my doubts about you have been dispelled. I am old now and need to know that I have a trusty man at my side – because of the manuscript. That it is the most precious thing I possess. In order to take on the world Hassan Sabbah has built Alamut, whereas I have only constructed this minuscule paper castle, but I choose to believe that it will outlive Alamut. Nothing frightens me more than to think that upon my death my manuscript could fall into careless or malevolent hands.’
In an almost offhand manner he held the secret book out to Vartan:
‘You may open it, since you will be its guardian.’
The disciple was moved.
‘Would anyone else have had this privilege before me?’
‘Two people. Jahan, after a quarrel in Samarkand, and Hassan when we were living in the same room upon our arrival in Isfahan.
‘You trusted him to that extent?’
‘To tell you the truth, I did not. However, I often wanted to write and he ended up noticing the manuscript. I preferred to show it to him myself since, anyhow, he could have read it behind my back. Moreover, I deemed him capable of keeping a secret.’
‘He really does know how to keep a secret – the better to use it against you.’
Henceforth the manuscript would spend its night in Vartan’s room. At the slightest noise the former officer would be bolt upright, brandishing his sword, his ears pricked up; he would check every room in the house and then go out to make a round of the garden. Upon his return he would not always be able to fall asleep again and so would light a lamp on his table, read a quatrain which he would memorize and then indefatigably go over it in his head to draw out its most profound meanings and to try and guess under what circumstances his master had been able to write it.
At the end of a string of disturbed nights, an idea took shape in his thoughts which received Omar’s hearty approval: to write the manuscript’s history in the margins of the Rubaiyaat and through this device the history of Khayyam himself, his childhood in Nishapur, his youth in Samarkand, his fame in Isfahan, his meetings with Abu Taher, Jahan, Hassan, Nizam and many others. Thus it was, under Khayyam’s supervision, and sometimes with him dictating the words, that the first pages of the chronicle were written. Vartan threw himself into it, writing each phrase down ten or fifteen times on a loose sheet before transcribing it, in a thin, angular and laborious hand – which, one day, was brutally interrupted in the middle of a phrase.
Omar had woken up early that morning. He called Vartan who did not reply. Another night spent writing, Khayyam said to himself in a fatherly way. He let him rest a while longer, poured himself a morning drink, just a drop at the bottom of the glass which he swallowed in one gulp followed by a whole glassful which he carried with him as he went for a walk in the garden. He walked around it, diverting himself by blowing on the dew which was still on the flowers, then he went off to gather some juicy white mulberries which he placed on his tongue and squashed against his palate with every sip of wine.
He was enjoying himself so much that a good hour had passed before he decided to go back in. It was time for Vartan to get up. He did not call him again, but went straight into his room to find him stretched out on the ground, his throat black with blood, his mouth and eyes open and set rigid as if in a last suffocated cry.
On his table between the lamp and the writing desk was the dagger with which the crime had been committed. It was planted in a curled up sheet of paper which Omar unrolled to read:
‘Your manuscript has gone on ahead of you to Alamut.’
CHAPTER 24
Omar Khayyam mourned his disciple with the same dignity, the same resignation and the same discreet agony as he had mourned other friends. ‘We were drinking the same wine, but they got drunk two or three rounds before me.’ Anyway, how could he deny that it was the loss of the manuscript which affected him most grievously? He was certainly able to reproduce it; he remembered its every letter but apparently he did not want to, for there is no trace of a rewritten version. It seems that Khayyam learnt a wise lesson from the theft of his manuscript; he would never more try to have control over either his future or that of his poems.
He soon left Merv, not for Alamut – not once did he envisage going there! – but for his home town. ‘It is time,’ he told himself, ‘to put an end to my peregrinations. Nishapur was the first port of call in my life. Is it not within the order of things that it should also be the last?’ It is there that he was going to live, surrounded by relatives, a younger sister, a considerate brother-in-law, nephews, and above all a niece who was to be the recipient of most of the tenderness of his autumn years. He was also surrounded by his books. He did not write any more, but untiringly re-read the works of his masters.
One day, as he was seated in his room as usual with Avicenna’s Book of Healing on his knees, open at the chapter entitled The One and the Multiple’, Omar felt a dull pain start up. He placed his golden tooth-pick, which he had been holding in his hand, between the leaves to mark the page, closed the book and summoned his family in order to dictate to them his last testament. Then he uttered a prayer which finished with the words: ‘My God, You know that I have sought to perceive You as much as I could. Forgive me if my knowledge of You has been my only path towards You!’
He opened his eyes no more. It was 4 December 1131. Omar Khayyam was in his eighty-fourth year, having been born on 18 June 1048 at daybreak. The fact that the date of birth of a person from that era is known with such precision is indeed extraordinary, but Khayyam showed an astrologer’s obsession with the subject. He had most probably questioned his mother to find out his ascendant, Gemini, and to determine the position of the sun, Mercury and Jupiter at the hour of his coming into the world. Thus he drew up his birth chart and took care to pass it on to the chronicler Beihaki.
Another of his contemporaries, the writer Nizami Aruzi, recounted: ‘I met Omar Khayyam twenty years before his death in the city of Balkh. He had come to stay with one of the notables on the Slave-Traders’ Road, and, knowing of his fame, I shadowed him in order to hear every one of his words. That is how I heard him say: ‘My tomb will be in a place where the north wind scatters flowers every spring.’ His words at first seemed absurd to me; however I knew that a man like him would not speak in an unconsidered manner.’
The witness continued: ‘I passed through Nishapur four years after Khayyam’s death. As I venerated him as one should a master of science, I made a pilgrimage to his last home. A guide led me to the cemetery. Upon turning to the left after entering, I saw the tomb adjoining the wall of a garden. Pear and peach trees spread out their branches and had dropped so much blossom on to his sepulchre that it was hidden under a carpet of petals.’
A drop of water fell into the sea.
A speck of dust came floating down to earth.
What signifies your passage through this world?
A tiny gnat appears – and disappears.
Omar Khayyam was wrong. Far from being as transitory as he said, his existence, or at least that of his quatrains, had just begun. But, was it not for them that the poet, who dared not wish it for himself, wished immortality?
Those who had the terrifying privilege at Alamut of being allowed in to see Hassan Sabbah did not fail to notice the silhouette of a book in a hollow niche in the wall, behind a thick wire grate. No one knew what it was, nor dared to question the Supreme Preacher. It was assumed that he had his reasons for not depositing it in the great library where there were great works which contained the most unspeakable truths.
When Hassan died, at almost eighty years old, the lieutenant he had designated to succeed him did not dare install himself in the master’s den and even less did he dare open the mysterious grate. For a long time after the disappearance of the founder, the inhabitants of Alamut were terrified by the mere sight of the walls which had sheltered him; they avoided venturing toward this previously inhabited quarter lest they come
across his shade. The order was still subjected to the rules which Hassan had decreed; the community member’s permanent lot was one of the strictest asceticism. There was no deviation, no pleasure, and only more violence against the outside world, more assassinations than ever, most probably to prove that the leader’s death had in no way weakened his adherents’ resolve.
And did these adherents accept this strictness good-naturedly? Less and less. Murmurs started to be heard. Not so much amongst the veterans who had won Alamut while Hassan was alive; they still lived with the memory of the persecutions they had undergone in their countries of origin and feared lest the slightest relaxation make them more vulnerable. However, these men were becoming less numerous every day and the fortress was more and more inhabited by their sons and grandsons. From the cradle, all of them had been accorded the most rigorous indoctrination which forced them to learn and respect Hassan’s onerous directives as if they were divine revelation. But most of them were becoming more resistant. Life was staking its claim on them again.
Some dared one day to ask why they were forced to spend their whole youth in that barracks-type convent from which all joy had been banished. They were so thoroughly repressed that henceforth they guarded against uttering the slightest discordant opinion. That is, in public, for meetings started to be held secretly indoors. The young conspirators were encouraged by all those women who had seen a son, brother or a husband depart on a secret mission from which he had not returned.
One man made himself the spokesman for this stifled and suppressed longing. No one else would allow himself to be put forward: he was the grandson of the man Hassan had designated as his successor and he himself was named to become the fourth Grand Master of the order upon the death of his father.
He had a distinct advantage over his predecessors. Having been born a little after the death of the founder, he had never had to live under his terror. He observed his home with curiosity, and naturally with a certain amount of apprehension, but without that morbid fascination which paralysed all the others.
He had even gone into the forbidden room once, at the age of seventeen, had walked around it, gone up to the magic basin and dipped his hand into the icy water then stopped in front of the niche which enclosed the manuscript. He almost opened it, but changed his mind, took a step back and then walked backwards out of the room. He did not want to go any further on his first visit.
When the heir wandered, in pensive mood, through the alleyways of Alamut, people gathered around while not getting too close and uttered curious formulae in blessing. He was also called Hassan, like Sabbah, but another name was already being whispered around him: ‘The Redeemer! The Long-Awaited!’ Only one thing was feared: that the old guard of the Assassins, who knew his feelings and who had already heard him rashly censure the prevailing atmosphere of severity, would prevent him from acceding to power. In fact his father did try to impose silence upon him, even accusing him of being an atheist and of betraying the teachings of the Founder. It was even said that he had two hundred and fifty of his partisans put to death and expelled two hundred and fifty others, forcing them to carry the corpses of their executed friends on their backs down to the foot of the mountain. However, due to a trace of paternal feeling, the Grand Master did not dare follow Hassan Sabbah’s tradition of infanticide.
When the father died, in 1162, the rebellious son succeeded him without the slightest hitch. For the first time in a long while real joy broke out in the grey alleyways of Alamut.
But was it really a question of a long-awaited Redeemer, the adherents asked themselves. Was it really this man who was to put an end to put an end to their suffering? He himself said nothing. He continued to walk around distractedly in the alleyways of Alamut or he spent long hours in the library under the protective eye of the copyist who was in charge of it, a man originally from Kirman.
One day he was seen walking decisively toward Hassan Sabbah’s former residence. He threw the door open, walked up to the niche and shook the grate with such violence that it came away from the wall letting a stream of sand and bits of stone pour on to the floor. He lifted out Khayyam’s manuscript, tapped the dust off it, and carried it away with him under his arms.
It was then said that he shut himself up to read, to read and to meditate, until the seventh day, when he gave the order that everyone in Alamut, men, women, and children, should assemble in the maydan, the only place large enough to hold them all.
It was 8 August 1164. The sun of Alamut was beating down on their heads and faces but no one thought of protecting himself. Toward the west there rose a wooden dais, decked out with a huge standard, one red, one green, one yellow and one white, at each of the four corners. It was in this direction that everyone’s gaze was directed.
Suddenly he appeared, dressed all in dazzling white, with his slight young wife behind him, her face unveiled, her eyes cast to the ground and her cheeks flushed with confusion. In the crowd it seemed that this apparition dispelled the last doubts; people were boldly murmuring: ‘It is He. It is the Redeemer!’
Solemnly he climbed the few steps to the platform, and gave his faithful a warm gesture of welcome, intended to silence the murmurings. Then he went on to pronounce one of the most astonishing speeches ever heard on our planet:
‘To all the inhabitants of the world, jinns, men and angels!’ he said. ‘The Mahdi offers you his blessing and pardons all your sins, both past and future.
‘He announces to you that the sacred Law is abolished for the hour of the Resurrection has sounded. God imposed on you his Law to make you earn Paradise and indeed you now deserve it. From today on, Paradise is yours. You are thus free of the yoke of the Law.
‘Everything that was forbidden is permitted, and everything that was obligatory is forbidden!
‘The five daily prayers are forbidden,’ the Redeemer continued. ‘Since we are now in Paradise and in permanent contact with the Creator, we no have any need to address Him at fixed times; those who persist in making the five prayers show thereby how little they believe in the Resurrection. Prayer has become an act of unbelief.’
On the other hand, wine, considered by the Quran to be the drink of Paradise, was from now authorized; not to drink it was considered to be a manifest sign of a lack of faith.
‘When this was proclaimed,’ a Persian historian of the time related, ‘the assembly started to rejoice on the harp and the flute and to drink wine conspicuously on the very steps of the dais.’
It was an excessive reaction, in proportion to the excesses practised by Hassan Sabbah in the name of Quranic Law. Soon the successors of the redeemer would set themselves to diminishing his messianic ardour, but Alamut would never again be this reservoir of martyrs desired by the Supreme Preacher. Life would henceforth be sweet and the long series of murders which had terrorized the cities of Islam would be interrupted. The Ismailis, as radical a sect as there ever was, would change into a community of exemplary tolerance.
In fact, after having announced the good news to the people of Alamut and its surroundings, the Redeemer sent emissaries off to the other Ismaili communities of Asia and Egypt. They were provided with documents signed by his hand, and asked everyone to celebrate the day of redemption whose date they gave according to three different calenders; that of the Hijra of the Prophet, that of Alexander the Greek and that of the ‘most eminent man of both worlds, Omar Khayyam of Nishapur’.
At Alamut the Redeemer gave orders that the Samarkand Manuscript be venerated as a great book of wisdom. Artists were commissioned to ornament it with pictures, to illuminate it and to make for it a casket of chased gold encrusted with precious stones. No one had the right to copy its contents but it was placed permanently on a low cedar table in the small inner room where the librarian worked. There, under his suspicious surveyance some privileged members would come to consult it.
Until then, people knew only a few of Khayyam’s quatrains, which had been composed in his impetuous youth; now many others w
ere learnt, quoted and repeated – some with serious alterations. This period also saw one of the strangest phenomena: whenever a poet composed a quatrain which might cause trouble for him, he would attribute it to Omar; hundreds of false rubaiyaat came to be intermixed with those of Khayyam, to the extent that, in the absence of the manuscript, it was impossible to discern which were truly his.
Was it at the Redeemer’s request that the librarians of Alamut, from father to son, took up the chronicle of the manuscript at the point where Vartan left it? In any case, it is from this single source that we know Khayyam’s posthumous influence on the metamorphosis the Assassins underwent. The concise yet irreplaceable account of history was carried on in the same way for almost a century until a new brutal interruption – the Mongol invasions.
The first wave, led by Chengiz Khan, was, beyond a shadow of doubt, the most devastating scourge ever to cross the Orient. Important cities were razed and their population exterminated. Such was the case with Peking, Bukhara and Samarkand, whose inhabitants were treated like cattle with the young women handed around the officers of the victorious horde, the artisans reduced to slavery and the rest massacred with the sole exception of a minority who, regrouping around the grand qadi of the time, very quickly proclaimed their allegiance to Chengiz Khan.
In spite of this apocalypse, Samarkand appeared to be almost favoured, since it would one day be reborn from its rubble to become the capital of a world-wide empire – that of Tamerlane – in contrast to so many cities which were never to rise again, namely the three great metropolises of Khorassan where all this world’s intellectual activity had long been concentrated: Merv, Balkh and Nishapur – to which list must be added Rayy, the cradle of oriental medicine whose very name would be forgotten. The world would have to wait several centuries in order to see the rebirth, on a neighbouring site, of the city of Teheran.