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CHAPTER 48
Cherbourg. 10 April, 1912
The English Channel stretched as far as the eye could see, its surface flecked
with silver. By my side was Shireen. We had the
Manuscript
in our luggage. We
were surrounded by an unlikely crowd, completely oriental.
So much has been said of the shining celebrities who set sail on the
Titanic
that we have almost forgotten those for whom these sea giants were built: the
migrants, those millions of men, women and children no country would agree to
feed any more and who dreamt of America. The steamboat had to make a lot of
pick-ups: the English and Scandinavians from Southampton, the Irish from
Queenstown and at Cherbourg those who came from further away, Greeks,
Syrians, Armenians from Anatolia, Jews from Salonika or Bessarabia, Croats,
Serbs and Persians. It was these Orientals that I was able to watch at the harbour
station, clustered around their pathetic luggage, in a hurry to be somewhere else
and in a state of anguish from time to time, suddenly looking for a lost form, a
child who was too agile, or an unmanageable bundle which had rolled under a
bench. On everyone’s face there was written adventure, bitterness or defiance.
They all felt that it was a privilege, the moment they arrived in the West, to be
taking part in the maiden voyage of the most powerful, the most modern and
most dependable steamboat ever dreamed up by man.
My own feelings were hardly different. Having been married three weeks
earlier in Paris, I put back my departure with the sole aim of offering my
companion a wedding trip worthy of the oriental splendour in which she had
lived. It was not a vain whim. For a long time, Shireen had seemed reticent about
the idea of living in the United States and, had it not been for the fact that she
was so disheartened by Persia’s failed reawakening, she would never have
agreed to follow me. My ambition was to build up around her a world which was
yet more magical than the one she had had to leave.
The Titanic served my purposes marvellously. It seemed to have been
conceived by men who were eager to enjoy, in this floating palace, the most
sumptuous pleasures of terra firma as well as some of the joys of the Orient: a
Turkish bath just as indolent as those of Constantinople or Cairo; verandahs
dotted with palm-trees; and in the gymnasium, between the bar and the pommel
horse there was an electric camel, which, when you pressed the magic button,
instilled in the rider the feeling of a jumpy ride in the desert.
However, as we explored the
Titanic
, we were not just trying to search out
the exotic. We also managed to give ourselves over to wholly European
pleasures, such as eating oysters, followed by a
sauté de poulet à la lyonnaise
,
the speciality of Monsieur Proctor the chef, washed down by a Cos-d’Estournel
1887, as we listened to the orchestra dressed in blue tuxedos playing the Tales of
Hoffman, the Geisha or the Grand Moghul by Luder.
Those moments were even more precious to Shireen and me since we had
had to keep up pretences throughout our long romance in Persia. Ample and
promising as my Princess’s apartments had been at Tabriz, Zarganda or Teheran,
I suffered constantly from the feeling that our love was restricted within their
walls, with its only witness engraved mirrors and servants with fleeting glances.
Now we could take simple pleasure in being seen together, a man and a woman
arm in arm, taken in by the same strange looks. We avoided going back to our
cabin until late at night, even though I had chosen one of the most spacious on
board.
Our final delight was the evening promenade. When we finished dinner, we
would go and find an officer, always the same one, who would lead us to a safe
from which we would take out the manuscript and carry it carefully on a tour
across bridges and down corridors. Seated in rattan armchairs in the Parisian
Cafe we would read some quatrains at random, then, taking the lift, we would go
up to the walkway where, without having to worry too much as to whether we
could be seen, we would exchange a passionate kiss in the open air. Late in the
night we would take the manuscript to our room where it spent the night before
being placed back in the safe, in the morning, with the help of the same officer.
It was a ritual which enchanted Shireen. So much so that I made it a duty for
myself to retain every detail in order to reproduce it exactly the next day.
That is how, on the fourth evening, I had opened the manuscript at the page
where Khayyam in his day had written:
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
