Arslan

words had cured me. My heart sprang; my lungs drew one delicious breath of pure freedom, like pure oxygen, before everything shifted, like one of those optical illusions in which high is suddenly low and low high, and I felt myself abandoned in a world to which I had been made a traitor. Christ had volunteered; but the scapegoat was a conscript.

“I want you with me,” he said.

So it was back into the frying pan, and nothing had been given me but the prospect of old tortures with new instruments. And falling back into the crumpled husk of myself, I felt tears under my eyelids. I closed them. “And if I say no, I suppose you’ll consider that I said yes?”

He was silent, until I had to open my eyes and look at him. At once he smiled and spoke. “I am not asking you to choose, Hunt. You come with me. When I ask, I do not dictate the answer.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Okay.” I closed my eyes again, going down for the third time. And this time (elementary tactics, invite a relaxation of vigilance and then strike) his hands shut like steel on my upper arms and I felt his breath on my ear as he said softly, “Remember.”

Chapter 18

And I remembered. Through the four terrific years, the fast years, the years of my true initiation (for what happened in Kraftsville had been only the test, the preliminary ordeal, which I had passed, because I had survived), I remembered that he did not accept my hate; he returned it to me, so to speak, unopened. I remembered that he chose not to endow me with free will. I remembered, seeing her for the first time the day he brought her to the palace, that my mouth was incompetent to speak her name. Seeing him look at her, I remembered the taste of his tongue. Seeing him rock with laughter, hearing her passionate shouts of anger and of joy, I felt again the little tap that had clapped my jaws together; and I thought—small, sour, spiteful, old-man’s thought—Well, I was right. Rusudan did not exist in a condition of strain.

She was not beautiful, no. She was garish, she was cheap, she was third-rate Technicolor—not even nouveau riche, as Arslan so patently was, but overpriced toy of nouveau riche. Yet she was whole; she was integral. And I, a disarticulate collection of fragments, awash in the bile of envy, watched. She was the only person with whom I had ever seen him quarrel. With the rest of the world his arguments were rational, his angers dictatorial. But with her he struggled and raged. With her he was unjust, brutal, indignant.

I thought I understood. She was, in some way, his unique equal—the one living being with whom it was unnecessary for him to condescend, to explain or domineer. Not even Nizam the Ineluctable Shadow merited abuse or importunity—how much less I. I watched at first with bewilderment and shame, but later with admiration. No, it would not occur to him to muffle his noisy struggles; there was no danger of rousing revolt or contempt, for it was inconceivable that any other could dare stand against the flashing force of his confidence. All the openness of his furies, his frustrations, his delights, said to the world, My weakness is stronger than your strength.

Bukhara was a trap. In those bleak halls, under that blank sky, Arslan’s retinue drew into itself, re-formed, transmogrified, and spread netlike around him, a fullfledged court. In the exercise yard he wrestled with soldiers from the garrison, challenging one after another, embracing every man who gave him a fall. Cigarettes drooping, eyes askance, the jealous majors stirred and shifted. They were aligned in only two things, distrust of Rusudan and devotion to Arslan. The world was divided and distributed every day in the casino, while Arslan, sweating and tousled, dictated endless orders in the radio room, scribbled his maps with ever-spreading lines like crackling glaze, shoved away his lukewarm coffee and called violently for hot.

He was happy. This was his home. He had his woman, the chosen vessel. Never yet have I found the woman by whom I should like to have children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love thee, O Eternity! She was eternal, at least, in her pestiferousness. She mocked, interrupted, scolded, demanded. It was unnecessary to understand the language of her complaints. So-and-so had insulted her. She wanted new clothes, more jewels. The cook must be replaced. Arslan shouldn’t drink so much.

He drank more. He began with coffee and raki at lunch. The steel schedule of Kraftsville—a long day’s driving work, an evening’s intense debauch, a short night’s childlike sleep—crumbled and vapored away. More coffee, to be gulped or forgotten. More raki, until light-foot Arslan slipped and scrambled on the treacherous marble floors.

It was the traitor’s hour. In this palace, the bloody powers of Bukhara—emirs and viziers, and all the Turkish generals who had anticipated Arslan by half a millennium—had succeeded each other upon waves of treason. Generations of his forefathers’ betters had caroused here to their own undoing. But there were no traitors among Arslan’s men. The schemers were faithful. They came and went, dispatched to this sector or that, still plotting. The cook stayed. Rusudan was arrogantly pregnant. Arslan knocked a lieutenant down the stairs for bringing him the wrong report. But after the three-day carouse that left him immobilized for the fourth day and night, while the palace buzzed with varying tones of dismay and frenzy, he reformed by the unexpected expedient of cutting himself to three cups of coffee per day.

In the winter of Bukhara, the great wind flowed like a tide across the plain. Wild flights of snow boomed like storm birds around the minarets; sprays of coarse, dry flakes spewed through unsuspected crevices and scattered down the barren halls. (There were no comforts among the marble luxuries of Bukhara; small wonder that Arslan had settled so complacently into the meager ease of Kraftsville.) In the streets, the shivering dogs chewed the snow hopefully. Symbolic more than real, it stated winter and disappeared. But the wind rolled on, the cold sank ponderously through the blankets, the dull pink bricks of Bukhara were hazed with an arid and delicate frost.

At his orders, I gave English lessons to his officers. I, whose classification in life, for as long as I could remember, had been “pupil,” found myself elevated to full professor, an authority and source of knowledge looked up to and earnestly consulted by the commanders of regiments. All my ineptitude and confusion to the contrary, it was very steadying. Rusudan came a few times, curious and impatient—jealous, perhaps, of the alien language into which he withdrew from her—eager, most of all, to show herself off to me. Rusudan, at least, did not reject my hate.

Grotesque among the pilasters, in rooms designed for cushions and hangings but bare now as new-built prisons, stood the last emir’s gestures toward technological civilization (or was it Arslan’s father who had installed them, or even Arslan himself?): a nonfunctioning air-conditioner, a stereo console with ready-made collection of unplayed records. For the first time there came home to me, exiled in Bukhara, the banal horror of Arslan’s great work. One could not honestly grieve for the loss of future Mozarts—there would have been no more Mozarts in any case; but Arslan had destroyed forever what I, backwatered in Kraftsville, had never known: the whole ebullient and evanescent world of performance. There would be no more concerts.

In Kraftsville, Mr. Bond had left beside my bed his little record player and a stack of records in shabby jackets. Now and again, Arslan had pulled a random disc from the pile and thrust it at me—background music for the sports of the evening. Otherwise they had sat unconsidered, silent, accumulating the dust of that uncleaned room. Rigoletto, Don Giovanni, Fidelio. In Kraftsville I had not noticed. But in Bukhara I remembered and was moved. “Do you think the electricity will ever come on again, Hunt?” Mrs. Bond had inquired anxiously, at a slightly later epoch. “I know he misses those records. It’s the closest thing he’s ever had to a hobby.” Mr. Bond, the self-contained, self-satisfied, the Gibraltar on whose stolid crags my new-born soul had steadied its bruised first footsteps—had he offered me, like Arslan in the woods, drink from the very springs of his own strength? Had he once bowed, as I did now, intently over the music, searching out the rich phrase that should nourish him through another day? And pell-mell, simultaneous perhaps, regret and resentment welled up, and I burned against him, remembering with momentary hatred his lofty shoulders and rock-rough face, remembering Kraftsville with hatred, because he had not been my father.

In Bukhara, the music seemed miraculous to me, the machine no less so. Nightlong I would sit hunched beside it, touching my budding beard with small proxy caresses, while the floating tone-arm softly bobbed and gradually pivoted, spinning great ripples of sound from a flat black circle. The tremendous swag and sway of Verdi, the joyous patternings of Mozart, gave back to my memory now the odor of Arslan’s lust, now the concerned and disapproving eyes of Franklin L. Bond. In the morning there would be coffee, raucously strong; and at midday I would lie flat, spread-eagled on a blank bed, my teeth locked tight and fragments of arias furiously rotating through