Ali & Nino

187 Pages·2011·0.89 MB·English

by  Said Kurban

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 that 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;
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
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’.