La Potemkina had strong ties to the most influential members of the Orthodox clergy and was active in church life. She had devoted her immense fortune to the conversion of “pagans” and had financed several missions to the Caucasus and to Kamchatka. She had also founded a home for Jews whom she was preparing for baptism. But her specialty remained the conversion of Muslims. During her long career as lady catechist, she had converted over a thousand, or so she said. She organized the baptisms with great pomp in the chapel of her palace in Saint Petersburg or during her huge parties at Gostilitsy, her country home. She always invited her friend the empress Alexandra Feodorovna to the mass and the celebration that followed on such occasions. During the summer, the czarina stayed at her domain of Peterhof-Alexandria, only a few versts from Gostilitsy.
Tatiana Borissovna was widely respected by her entourage for her generosity and her religious zeal. Her husband, however, a little bald man, found her sanctimoniousness and her proselytizing exasperating and often teased her about both.
“Well, hurry up, my dear, go invite the emperor’s favorite to spend his vacation with us. By rights he’s yours, and you’d better act quickly before someone else grabs him and saves his soul.”
She shrugged her shoulders and rushed to the rotunda where Varenka had just disappeared through the rear door.
“Ah,” he said in mock horror, “if this ravishing young man is not only the czar’s ward but a Muslim, I’m done for. My wife will have him come to stay, feed him, take care of him, and practically adopt him. Poor boy, he doesn’t know what he’s in for.”
CHAPTER VII
In Search of Inner Peace 1847
As he often did after his evening prayers, Jamal Eddin retreated to his favorite spot, a refuge he had found in a little glade carved out of one of the hillocks of the park at Peterhof. He had found this open place among the summer pavilions and work sheds, far from the cottage where the imperial family had settled in. The imperial family. His family. At the far end, between two marble benches that faced each other like fireside armchairs, was the sculpted bust of a young woman. Her hair, parted in the middle and looped back on the sides in a braided chignon that exposed the nape of her neck and the perfect oval of her face—everything about this delicate little head of marble reminded him of Varenka of Georgia. The scent of the roses and lilies cascading from the four basins above the benches reinforced a feeling of almost feminine religiosity in this isolated spot. The peaceful stillness he had discovered here had been his alone since the beginning of his vacation.
Between the end of the year and August exams, he savored a mere ten days of happiness, which were too intense to be honestly deserved. The boundless joy of living in this paradise made him feel almost guilty, as though he should temper his feelings or hold himself back in some way. So every morning and every evening, he came here to talk to his father, as though Shamil were seated on the bench facing him. He imagined his father, calm and sober, sitting there in his long imam’s robe. Only at these moments could he summon the presence of the man as he remembered him. Despite all his efforts, Shamil’s face had faded with the years, and he could recall nothing more than a shadowy figure.
He resented this silence. Since the czar had allowed them to correspond, why had Shamil never answered his letters? He had stopped asking that question and so many others. His faraway guide, his cherished master, obstinately refused to show him the way, and so he asked no more. But he told him everything, describing what he saw and mulling over the events of the past few years with him. He constantly tried to convince his father that he and Czar Nicholas were very much alike. Both were charitable to the poor, both honored their ancestors’ memories, and both looked after the honor of their progeny. The czar prayed and fasted and praised his god too.
Jamal Eddin went into great detail in these ongoing monologues, explaining to his father that the much-feared czar was kind and tender to defenseless beings. Like Shamil, he played with the children for hours, letting them climb all over him. He ate frugally, drank only water, did not smoke, and detested the odor of tobacco so much that it was banned from the streets of the capital.
Jamal Eddin didn’t dare push the comparison further by suggesting that perhaps, without realizing it, the czar practiced the precepts of the Koran. That would be going too far; it would be both absurd and blasphemous.
In any case, he had reached his own conclusions about the Great White Czar. No one was so solicitous of the welfare of the poor and more merciful to those he conquered. He was incapable of corrupting anyone with whom he had daily contact.
For Jamal Eddin and his fellow cadets, knowledge of the reality of Russia was confined to their limited experience as the sons of aristocrats.
In the rarefied atmosphere of court and army society—the only one he knew—his masters, his officers, and his comrades repeated day and night that Czar Nicholas was a great and wise man, almost a saint.
He himself had experienced the czar’s imperial generosity, and so he shared their opinion and could not imagine how the same man could pass for a monster in other circles. Those circles had dubbed him “the Iron Czar” and considered him a despot as stubborn as he was cruel, who silenced the voices of those who had the courage—and the misfortune—to express an opposing point of view.
Jamal Eddin longed for his own people to comprehend his gratitude to his benefactor, to whom he had become so attached.
His own people?
He shared Shamil’s view of the Muslims he had encountered in Russia, his disgust for the renegades and hypocrites, whom he failed to differentiate from other “converts.” Jamal Eddin’s judgment concerning them remained unchanged, he told his father. He despised those parasitic Cherkesses who adopted the religion of the infidels and complied with Princess Potemkina’s insistent demands out of sheer self-interest.
His violent rejection of members of his own community explained his apprehension at the thought of the Georgian princesses’ imminent arrival at the cottage of Peterhof-Alexandria. La Potemkina would be here tomorrow. What more would she ask of him? What further pressures would she subject him to?
For the past two years, he had resisted her demands and refused to attend mass at Gostilitsy. But he had accepted the invitations to the children’s balls at her Million Street palace. She had paraded him in her salons and presented him to the mothers of “her little friends,” boasting that he was “the best equerry in all of Petersburg, a capital the finest horsemen in the world call home.” She gushed to any and all, even in front of him, that he was as handsome as a Chevalier-Garde and had the presence of an Imperial Guard, alluding to the empire’s most prestigious cavalry regiments.
He detested La Potemkina’s florid compliments concerning horses, the beasts he loved so, but what could he do? She attended all the drills at the cadets’ stables, the parades and dressage, the charges and the carousels, behaving as though his virtuoso performances before the emperor were her own personal triumphs. And he was inundated with invitations to her home. During the school year, he could beg off with protests of studies, rules, and disciplinary actions forbidding him to go out. Last winter he had intentionally sought punishment and restriction several Sundays in a row. A lot of good it did him—the princess wrangled dispensations for her protégé. It was becoming increasingly difficult for him to resist the friendly overtures of the marshal’s wife.