Ali and Nino

  Copyright

  This edition first published in the United States in 1996 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected]

  Copyright © 1970 by Lucy Tal

  First published in German by Tal Verlag, Vienna in 1937

  Translation copyright © 1970 Jenia Graman

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

  or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval

  system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the

  publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection

  with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN: 978-1-59020-978-3

  Contents

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Introduction

  This remarkable book has a strange and cloudy history behind it. When I was first given the typescript to read, I had never heard of the author, which is hardly surprising, since ‘Kurban Said’ is a pen-name and no one seems to know for certain the real name of the man who chose it. This is his only book, and the man is as shadowy as the book is vivid. The little that can be gathered about him is as follows. He was by nationality a Tartar. When his country came under the rule of the newly-formed Soviet Union, he decided to leave. He went to Vienna, which must at that time have seemed an agreeable and civilised milieu in which an imaginative writer could hope to breathe the air of freedom. There, Ali and Nino was written—in German, naturally—and published in 1937.

  By that year, however, central Europe was in the fateful grip of Hitler and his Nazis. To a lover of freedom such as the author of this book must clearly have been, the atmosphere of Nazism was no more tolerable than the atmosphere of Soviet Communism would have been. He fled again, this time to Italy, which cannot at that time have been much better than what he was leaving. And there, he died; where, and under what circumstances, I do not know and I do not think anyone knows.

  Intensive research, no doubt, could unearth more facts about ‘Kurban Said’. But until someone writes a book about him on the lines of The Quest for Corvo, we are unlikely to know more than the scant facts I have just given. In a sense, this does not matter. We have his book, ‘the precious life-blood of a master spirit’. From it, we can tell what kind of man he must have been. One thing is certain: he had genius. It was a genius strong enough to jump off the page and compel the attention of Jenia Graman, an artist who was living at that time in Berlin. She came across a copy of the half-forgotten Viennese edition of the book and at once saw that it must be translated and given its chance with the English-speaking public. To her initiative, we owe much.

  * * * * *

  Ali and Nino would be well worth reading even if it were not the brilliantly achieved novel that it is. It takes us, as Western readers, into a world in which it is very good for us to be. It allows us, for a few hours, to see life through the eyes of a Mohammedan. This, by itself, would be a reason for reading the book, since Mohammedan beliefs and attitudes are usually opaque to the Westerner, and this story helps us to see how natural and right they seem in their own setting.

  Ali Khan Shirvanshir, youngest son of a proud house, is a native of the desert. As the wise greybeard Dadiani says to him:

  You have the soul of a desert man. Maybe that is the one real division between men: men of the woods and men of the desert. The Orient’s dry intoxication comes from the desert, where hot wind and dry sand make men drunk, where the world is simple and without problems.… The desert man—I can see him—has but one face, and knows but one truth, and that truth fulfils him.

  Ali Khan assents to this. He formulates it in his own way. When, in that same scene, the sophisticated Armenian Nachararyan asks him, ‘Eagles come from the mountains, tigers come from the jungle. What comes from the desert?’, he answers, ‘Lions and Warriors’. This is true, and also character-revealing, for a lion and a warrior are the same thing.

  Ali Khan’s virtues are those of the desert man: courage, directness, and an unswerving loyalty to those customs and beliefs which are natural to him, and which he has accepted not only with his mind but with his blood and marrow. He is not a fanatic, but fanaticism does not repel him. He respects his friend Seyd Mustafa, who is undoubtedly what Westerners would call a fanatic, because of the single-minded purity of his beliefs. At the same time, he has the intelligence, and the cosmopolitan education, to realise that the world represented by Seyd Mustafa is being shredded apart at an ever more rapid rate. Seyd is outraged because some men of his town, devout Shiite Muslims, have slipped away to join the army of the Turks. From a political point of view, Ali Khan sees the rightness of this, since the Turks are fighting against the Czar’s Russia, the powerful neighbour who oppresses and exploits, making ceaseless inroads on the life of Azerbeidshan, showing hostility to its Asiatic traditions, sending teachers down to indoctrinate the inhabitants with European notions such as the desirability of motor-cars(!), and generally swamping a settled world with unacceptable ideas founded on material greed. It would be an excellent thing for Baku—not the Czar’s Baku, but Ali Khan’s Baku—if the Turks did succeed in thrashing the Russians. But the idea of becoming identified with the Turks is abhorrent to Seyd Mustafa; the Turks are heretics, who have deserted the True Faith, and it is better to keep one’s faith unbroken than to win victories in terms of this world. When Ali Khan asks him, ‘Should we in Mohammed’s name defend the Czar’s cross against the Khalif’s half-moon?’, Seyd is silent for lack of an answer, and his face is ‘shrouded in a terrible sadness’. But—and here we come to the heart of the story—Ali Khan does not abandon Seyd Mustafa because of his insoluble predicament. It never occurs to him to think of his friend as an obsolete being, possessed by unworkable ideas, and fit only to be left alone in his obstinacy. On the contrary, he loves and admires him:

  He would not give away an inch of the True Faith, even though by doing so he could make Persia great and mighty again. Better to go under than find the will-o’-the-wisp of the earthly splendour by passing through the morass of sin. And so he was silent and did not know what to do. And so I love him, the lonely guard on the threshold of our True Faith.

  Ali Khan loves Seyd Mustafa because of his inflexibility. But he himself does not covet this inflexibility. On the contrary, he sees himself as a modern Muslim, able to make concessions and adapt his faith to changing circumstances, provided only that its essence remains undiluted. When he marries Nino, the Georgian Christian girl whom he loves, he does not try to make her into a Mohammedan. He is glad when Seyd Mustafa, from the profundity of his orthodox belief, counsels him to go ahead and marry whom he likes, on the grounds tha
t a woman has no immortal soul in any case, so that her religious beliefs do not matter. This attitude seems to him a victory of common sense and tolerance over the narrowness of those Muslim fanatics who would certainly object to the marriage. He is aware that Seyd takes it for granted that any sons of the marriage will be brought up as orthodox Shiites, and is also aware the Nino will never be able to see the logic of this. But the problem is postponed by the fact that their first-born is a girl, and Ali Khan is content for it to be postponed; he is young and in love.

  In the end, the inexorable force that treads down Ali Khan and his Nino is nothing to do with their personal situation as Muslim and Christian. It is the blind historical force of European expansionism. The Czar has been dethroned, but Russia is still there and is still a Western power, hungry for progress and power. Cold, greedy eyes are fixed on a territory which represents natural resources and man-power. Where the Czars scourged the Transcaucasians with whips, the Soviets scourge them with scorpions. There is just time, as the infant U.S.S.R. draws its breath, for the brief tragi-comedy of the Independent Republic of Azerbeidshan, in which Nino puts on Western dress, furnishes her house in the Western manner, and receives British officers and their wives at a mock-up of a London dinner-party. But already the target is marked out. ‘The Russian delegates came, their faces bored and cunning. Quickly and indifferently they signed the endless treaty, consisting of paragraphs, columns and footnotes.’ Before the ink is well dried, the Red Army arrives.

  Ali Khan is a patrician, and he has grown up in full acceptance of the tradition that one of the chief marks of a patrician is his willingness to die in battle when the time comes. ‘Most of your ancestors died on the battlefield,’ his father has told him. ‘It is the natural death for our family.’ Hence the resistance on the bridge, the lonely stuttering machine-gun, the body falling into the dried-up river bed.

  * * * * *

  Because of the immense distance that separates us from the scene of these events, and the ever-widening gulf of time, we in the West do not often find ourselves thinking of the fate of the Transcaucasians and the long process of annexation and forced exploitation that turned this fascinating part of the world into the province of an eastern European power. But it is as well that we should turn our attention to it from time to time, not only because all human history concerns the thoughtful observer, but because it is, in its unhesitating destruction of cultures and its savage simplification of a complex society, the diagram of so much that has happened in the world in our time, and is still happening every day. (Is there a Kurban Said watching events in Tibet, I wonder? Or in Nigeria?) For this reason, as I have suggested, Ali and Nino has a claim on us. But it also has another and more general claim. It is a wonderful novel, delicately and fully imagined.

  Ali Khan is a solid, credible creation. His behaviour is completely consistent with what we know of his character, without ever becoming merely predictable. The same is true of all the principal figures in the book: Ali Khan’s father, his friends Seyd Mustafa and Iljas Beg and Mehmed Haidar, the cynic Nachararyan, and of course Nino herself. (The whole story would crumble if we were not made to see, so convincingly, why Nino is irresistibly attractive to Ali Khan.) But to create memorable and convincing characters is only the beginning of a novelist’s task. He must also tell a story which develops logically out of its predicated situations; and this story must embody in dramatic form the things the author is trying to say—the perceptions about human life that he is trying to hand on to the reader. And all this without ever suggesting the aridities of a thesis-novel. The secret lies in the ability, which in the true novelist seems to be instinctive, to build up episodes that fit naturally into the story and yet have a symbolic power. Kurban Said has a remarkable gift for these episodes. At every climax of the story we feel that the action is loaded with symbolism, yet it is always spontaneous, never contrived or top-heavy. When Nachararyan elopes with Nino, for instance, Ali Khan gives chase, the two young men fight and Nachararyan is killed. That is the bare outline of the episode. But Kurban Said fills in that outline with detail which dramatises and brings home to our imagination the impassable gulf between the two men and their worlds, between which it is Nino’s fate to be so pitiably torn. Nachararyan abducts her in a motor-car, a large and expensive English car like a lacquered box. Ali Khan pursues them, naturally, on a horse; not just any horse, but the legendary golden horse belonging to the Commander, Melikov, one of the twelve golden horses in the world, an animal almost sacred about whom Melikov has declared solemnly, ‘Only when the Czar calls to war do I mount this horse.’ The golden animal against the lacquered machine: the splendour that comes from within, versus the splendour that is painted on from without! When Ali Khan finally meets his adversary in a death-struggle, he sinks his teeth into him like a wolf. He has a revolver, with which he halts the car by shooting at the tyres, and also a dagger with which he gives the fatal thrust, but during their grapple he uses his teeth as befits a proud and savage creature of the desert, fighting for his mate.

  The same symbolic quality is found in all the book’s set-pieces, notably when Ali Khan finds himself swept up in the religious procession and is seen with such sudden fear and loathing by Nino from the vantage-point of her European tea-party, or again in the dinner at Ali Khan’s house after his appointment as an attaché in the Department for Western Europe. But it is not only found in these set-pieces. Kurban Said can also bring off light effects with perfect timing and touch. Dealing as he is with individual lives that are rooted in complex social and historical traditions, he gives us time and time again the significant juxtaposition of small details, the light and unstrained but entirely effective illustration:

  When I came home I lay down on the divan. An Asiatic room is always cool. During the night coolness fills it like water running into a well. And during the day one comes into it out of the heat as if into a cool bath. Suddenly the telephone rang. Nino’s voice complained: ‘Ali Khan, I’m dying of heat and mathematics. Come and help me!’

  Nino’s telephonic voice, breaking into the cool silence of Ali Khan’s room and complaining of the heat (in her scientifically-ventilated Western-style home, no doubt) and the difficulty of her homework, is the voice of the world that will destroy his world. Confronted with writing like this, we know that we are in the presence, not merely of a writer able to document a poignant passage in recent history, but of a real artist, whose work must not pass into ‘the iniquity of oblivion’.

  1

  We were a very mixed lot, we forty schoolboys who were having a Geography lesson one hot afternoon in the Imperial Russian Humanistic High School of Baku, Transcaucasia: thirty Mohammedans, four Armenians, two Poles, three Sectarians, and one Russian.

  So far we had not given much thought to the extraordinary geographical position of our town, but now Professor Sanin was telling us in his flat and uninspired way: ‘The natural borders of Europe consist in the north of the North Polar Sea, in the west of the Atlantic Ocean, and in the south of the Mediterranean. The eastern border of Europe goes through the Russian Empire, along the Ural mountains, through the Caspian Sea, and through Transcaucasia. Some scholars look on the area south of the Caucasian mountains as belonging to Asia, while others, in view of Transcaucasia’s cultural evolution, believe that this country should be considered part of Europe. It can therefore be said, my children, that it is partly your responsibility as to whether our town should belong to progressive Europe or to reactionary Asia.’

  The professor had a self-satisfied smile on his lips.

  We sat silent for a little while, overwhelmed by such mountains of wisdom, and the load of responsibility so suddenly laid upon our shoulders.

  Then Mehmed Haidar, who sat on the back bench, raised his hand and said: ‘Please, sir, we should rather stay in Asia.’

  A burst of laughter. This was Mehmed Haidar’s second year in the third form. And it looked as if he might stay there for another year, if Baku kept belonging to A
sia. For a ministerial decree allows the natives of Asiatic Russia to stay in any form as long as they like.

  Professor Sanin, who was wearing the gold-embroidered uniform of a Russian High School teacher, frowned: ‘So, Mehmed Haidar, you want to remain an Asiatic? Can you give any reason for this decision?’

  Mehmed Haidar stepped forward, blushed, but said nothing. His mouth was open, his brow furrowed, his eyes vacant. And while four Armenians, two Poles, three Sectarians and one Russian were highly delighted by his stupidity, I raised my hand and said: ‘Sir, I too would rather stay in Asia.’

  ‘Ali Khan Shirvanshir! You too! All right, step forward.’

  Professor Sanin pushed his lower lip out and silently cursed the fate that had banished him to the shores of the Caspian Sea. Then he cleared his throat and said pompously: ‘You at least can give us a reason?’

  ‘Yes. I rather like Asia.’

  ‘Oh you do, do you? Well, have you ever been in really backward countries, in Teheran, for instance?’

  ‘Oh yes, last summer.’

  ‘There you are. And have you found there any of the great aquisitions of European culture, for instance motor-cars?’

  ‘Oh yes, very great ones indeed. Holding thirty and more people. They don’t go through the town, only from one place in the country to the other.’

  ‘These are called autobuses, and they are in use because there are no railways. This is reactionary. Sit down, Shirvanshir.’

  I knew the thirty Asiatics were jubilant, they showed it by the way they looked at me. Professor Sanin kept angrily silent. He was supposed to make his pupils into good Europeans. Suddenly he asked: ‘Well—have any of you been to Berlin for instance?’ It was not his day—the Sectarian Maikov raised his hand and said he had been to Berlin when he was a small boy. He remembered vividly a musty spooky Underground, a noisy railway and a ham sandwich his mother had prepared for him. We thirty Mohammedans were deeply indignant. Seyd Mustafa even asked to be allowed to leave the room, as the word ‘ham’ made him sick. And that was the end of our discussion about Baku and its geographical situation.