The Veiled One
BY AATIF RASHID
In the summer of 1993, two years after I was granted tenure by my university and a little over a year before I was to get married to the love of my life, I discovered a manuscript in a wooden cupboard of my mother’s basement that purported to be the memoirs of an eighth-century prophet from Central Asia. It was, to say the least, a very startling discovery—a manuscript older than Charlemagne sitting in a dusty drawer in the American Midwest underneath a few old textbooks on Islamic history, about forty handwritten pages bound in leather and covered in faded Arabic handwriting. My mother had died the previous month, and I had come to her house in this suburb of St. Louis to help my sister Grace sort out her possessions. In a bout of melancholy, while Grace sat weeping over a photo album of our parents’ wedding, I’d come down to the basement, knowing that this was where our mother kept what she referred to as her “Moslem things”—the few objects inherited from her first husband Roger Darcy (not our father), who’d worked as a diplomat in the Arab world in the ‘60s and ’70s. I hadn’t expected to find anything of value, but I was a scholar of Arabic history, specifically eighth and ninth century Abbasid Khorasan, and so perhaps I noticed all the things my mother hadn’t when she’d tossed this manuscript carelessly in this drawer—the fact that the pages, for example, were so much older and more weathered than even the nineteenth century books her third husband (also not our father) liked to collect, or the fact that the Arabic was handwritten, which meant it was likely at least as old as the sixteenth century, before the printing press became widespread across the Islamic world. In fact, staring at the handwriting, I realized that the document was written in the Kufic script, the oldest form of Arabic calligraphy, prominent primarily between the seventh and the tenth centuries, a distinctive style made of blocky, geometric letters with sharp angles and edges and swift vertical and horizontal lines—and because I’d studied manuscripts from the period for almost a decade, seeing those letters in that style on that kind of paper immediately made me think of the eighth and ninth centuries, the world of the Abbasid Caliphate and Harun al-Rashid. And so, when I held the pages in my hand and lifted them to the dim light of the single bulb flickering on the ceiling, my heart beat wildly, because I knew instinctively that this manuscript was something special, as if it carried in its rough old pages something from those centuries oh so long ago, something that had settled in the lampblack ink that the scribe must have used when forming these beautiful letters, a spirit of ancient history that I had come to believe you could in this present century only ever experience second-hand.
I went upstairs to my old room and read the manuscript in an intensifying feverish haze, sitting at the old wooden desk where I had once typed out high school essays and doing my best to translate what I was reading, my hand eventually growing cramped and shaking from the effort, while outside the evening shadows fell upon the lawn.
About a quarter of the way through reading, I suddenly realized what the manuscript might be—but it was so extraordinary a possibility that I started to wonder whether I was mad.
I, Hashim ibn Hakim, do here record this testament, in the name of Ahura Mazda and his prophet Mazdak, to preserve for posterity the evidence of our movement and so none will forget the devastation inflicted upon our land by the invaders. May Ahura Mazda spill the blood of those who have spilled ours.
Hashim ibn Hakim had been the leader of a revolt against the Abbasid Caliphate during the eighth century. In graduate school I had attempted to write an article about him, though I’d ultimately abandoned it for lack of historical evidence. The little we knew about Hashim ibn Hakim had already been analyzed extensively—how he’d claimed to be a prophet and preached a revived form of Zoroastrianism, how his rebellion had ultimately failed and how he and his followers had all committed suicide, and most famously of all, how he’d become a popular symbol in the West centuries later, perhaps because of the origin of his fabled sobriquet “al-Muqanna,” a name which in Arabic meant “the veiled one”: according to legend, his face had been burned in a chemical accident, and as a result he had to wear a veil, which gave him a gothic mystique for future generations. It was a stirring image, after all, a veiled rebel with a burned face guided by prophecy.
The most well-known work of literature about al-Muqanna was probably Thomas Moore’s 1817 Orientalist verse romance Lalla Rookh, but there were others who’d also drawn inspiration from the doomed rebel—Napoleon wrote a short story about him, as did Borges a century and a half later. But Al-Muqanna’s most bizarre legacy, and the one closer to my own life, was that in 1878, a group of St. Louis businessmen created a secret society based on Moore’s poem and chose from among themselves a Veiled Prophet to act as a kind of leader. Every year, even up to this day, they would hold a parade and a debutante ball, and the Prophet would choose a woman to be his queen. It was a strange, pseudo-Masonic symbolic ritual, but from an anthropological perspective the purpose was clearly to reify the community of elites in the city—in early images, in fact, the Veiled Prophet looked eerily like a Ku Klux Klansman, complete with a white cloak and pointed hood, and in my research I’d discovered that this association might not have been accidental, as the businessmen of St. Louis saw the ball and the parade as a chance to reassert their power against the state’s newly freed population of African Americans (Missouri, after all, had been a slave state, although as my mother would often insist, “You must remember dear, we never did join the Confederacy.”).
My mother, in fact, had attended one of these Veiled Prophet Balls in the 1950s, and I remember her telling rapturous stories about it when I was little, a ballroom with a glittering chandelier and a gathering of women in ball gowns and old men in tuxedos, champagne sparkling, a lively band and orchestra, and, as my mother put it in that striking Southern accent of hers, whose lilting melody I can never even to this day get out of my head, “the most astounding people you’ve ever seen, the ones who practically ran the city, all gathered there in that little room—why, it was like being at the center of the world.”
When I was finished reading the manuscript, it was dark outside the window. My stomach grumbled, and I realized I hadn’t eaten anything practically all day. But instead of rising from the desk to stretch my legs, I lit another cigarette and flipped back to the opening pages, to the passage which had confirmed to me that this manuscript was indeed the memoir of al-Muqanna himself.
In my arrogance, I had sought to understand the true nature of fire and its properties. But calamity befell me, and now I must hide my face. I see my misfortune, however, as the will of the divine, for without such an affliction, I would never have been blessed with prophecy. Now, I reveal to my followers the mysteries of creation. I have become to them a figure with one foot in this world and one foot in the beyond. I am blessed with foreknowledge. And from behind this veil, I have been granted visions of what has not yet come to pass.
Still, I did try and retain my historian’s skepticism. It seemed too perfect a document—a twelve-hundred-year-old manuscript preserved almost in its entirety, somehow making its way from Central Asia, where al-Muqanna had lived and died, to my mother’s basement in a suburb of St. Louis, where I, a scholar of Arabic history, just happened to lay my eyes upon it and recognize it for what it was. It could be a very elaborate forgery. I would have to get the pages carbon-dated to verify the document’s authenticity, and until then, it was best to treat the discovery with a rational detachment.
And yet, I felt drawn to the manuscript for reasons that went beyond historical interest. In graduate school, my fascination with al-Muqanna had been heightened by the connections to the Veiled Prophet Ball of St. Louis and to the image of my mother in a golden ballroom, a martini glass in her hand and cloaked figures gathered around her while trumpets blared—and when I’d failed to find new evidence, I felt the crushing disappointment all historians feel when their research leads to a dead end, but magnified by a sense of personal failure. Now, with this manuscript, I felt like I’d been given another chance. If I could understand whether it was real and how it had come into my mother’s possession, then maybe I would understand something about her—that glamorous, enigmatic personality whom I had looked up to all my life but who had always possessed a fundamental ephemerality, like a figure from history just beyond my reach. Grace (a therapist) had put it more bluntly, describing our mother as “someone who never let herself into other people’s lives.” After the funeral, we’d returned to the house and stood for a moment before a photo of her hanging in the hallway downstairs, a snapshot that must have been taken by her third husband, our mother in a black dress backlit by the lights of Manhattan, holding her purse under her arm—and even in this photo, even though our mother had been caught mid-laughter, a vivacious, spirited look in her eyes, her body was already turning away from the camera and disappearing into the shadows of the night, and all we could really see with clarity was the left side of her face. The rest of her was already vanishing, already dissolving into the shimmer behind her.
#
Geneva was colder than I’d expected, even in the late summer, and after dropping my bags off at my hotel, I walked around the lake for a while, staring at the water and shivering in the wind that bounced off its polished and gleaming surface.
I was here to speak to Stephanie Vermandois, the daughter of my mother’s first husband Roger Darcy. After returning to Dartmouth and depositing the manuscript with the university’s radiocarbon laboratory, I had decided that Roger was the most obvious lead if I was to determine where the manuscript had come from—it seemed most likely that he had discovered it somewhere in the Middle East during his years of diplomatic service. After some research at the library, I’d found his obituary, dated 1989 and published in The New York Times, which described him as “a scholar, a diplomat, and, if rumor can be believed, a spy” as well as “the last in a line of British gentlemen adventurers in the vein T.E. Lawrence and Richard Burton.” I hadn’t been aware about the rumors that he’d been a spy, but the more I considered it, the more obvious it seemed. I began to wonder if my mother had known.
The obituary indicated that he was survived by his daughter Stephanie, and on a hunch, I telephoned both Oxford and Cambridge and asked the registrar for a record of any “Stephanie Darcy,” assuming that a man like Roger would not have wanted his daughter educated anywhere else. Sure enough, I was told that she had matriculated at St. Hugh’s in Oxford in 1981. I then called the St. Hugh’s alumni network and learned that she was now working in Geneva for the United Nations, and after telling them that I was a researcher working on a biography of her father (“The famous Roger Darcy, you know.”) the woman in the office gave me the phone number they had on file.
I called Stephanie from Dartmouth and told her I was writing a biography of her father and asked if she had any papers from his days as a diplomat. I decided not to reveal that my mother had been her father’s first wife—the personal dimension, I felt, would unnecessarily complicate things. Better for her to think that I was just an objective researcher.
“There are some boxes I inherited after he died,” she said. “We weren’t very close, you know, especially toward the end of his life. I don’t think his fourth wife liked me very much.”
Stephanie and I arranged to meet at a bar in Geneva not far from the cathedral, amidst the narrow streets of the old town. On the way, I passed by the monument to John Calvin and the city’s other Protestant reformers, each of them robed and bearded and looking as grim as executioners. Something about their faces made me think of al-Muqanna, and I imagined them all with veils across their features.
The place Stephanie chose was old and charming, with wooden tables that looked like they’d been there since the fourteenth century and the pleasant smell of old casks of ale. Stephanie herself was waiting for me when I arrived, and when she saw me, she waved tentatively.
“You must be Nasir,” she said.
“How could you tell?”
“The cut of your jacket. It’s very American.”
I got us beers and then joined her at one of the tables. She was tall and thin, with blonde hair in a loose ponytail and a tailored blue blazer that made her look at once elegant and assertive. Her eyes in particular had a striking, seductive charm, and I imagined Roger Darcy’s gaze must have possessed that same magnetism. I began to understand why my mother had found him so appealing.
“So you’re writing an article about my father?” Stephanie asked.
“An article, yes,” I said. “Perhaps even a book.”
“Does he really deserve a whole bloody book about him?”
“Well, I’m not sure what kind of father he was to you, but as a diplomat he was at the center of many of the key events of this past half-century—Cairo during the era of Nasser, Damascus just as Hafez al-Assad was rising to power, Kabul during the coup that ended the monarchy. I’m a scholar of the Middle East and Central Asia, you see—the Islamic world if you will—and to me Roger Darcy is like a secret cipher standing in the middle of all these key events, a modern T.E. Lawrence one might even say.”
I had opted for effusive praise, hoping she would respond well to such a panegyric—but instead she only curled her lip. Perhaps her relationship with her father had been worse than I’d thought.
“You know, I’m confident he was a spy,” Stephanie said. “He never said, but I gathered as much from the way he spoke of his work. He may even have had a hand in some of those events you mentioned.”
“I know. I suspect so too. That’s why I’m so eager to see his papers.”
Stephanie told me she had the boxes in her flat, and so once we’d finished our beers, I followed her back to her place. It had grown dark now, and the streets were lit in a somber, yellow gloom. Stephanie’s heels made crisp, clipping sounds on the pavement, and I had to walk fast to keep pace with her rapid strides.
Stephanie’s flat was a charming townhouse just south of the city center and not far from the university, with old wooden floors and elaborate crown moulding and French doors that opened onto a large balcony and gave the place an old-world charm.
“My husband is away on business,” she said, taking my coat and hanging it with hers on the rack. “Would you like wine?”
“I’d love some.”
Stephanie poured us some, and then we sat together on her sofa and leafed through a box of her father’s documents, which she brought in from the other room.
“There are several others like this,” she said. “Is there anything in particular you’re hoping to find?”
I considered where Roger Darcy might have found the manuscript of al-Muqanna. The region of Khorasan where the Veiled Prophet had been from was today part of Uzbekistan and northern Afghanistan.
“Well, the chapter I’m currently writing is on the coup in Afghanistan,” I said. “Your father was in Kabul in the 1970s, correct?”
“As far as I know. In fact, he might have been there earlier too. I remember him telling a story once about sneaking over the border into Uzbekistan, which was then part of the Soviet Union, to see Samarkand and the mausoleum of Tamerlane. Architecture was an obsession of his, you know. I think he loved old buildings more than people.”
“When was this? Sneaking into Uzbekistan I mean. Was that when he was stationed in Kabul?”
“No, no, much earlier I think. He said he was still in his thirties, so it must have been in the fifties. He talked about going there with his first wife, I think.”
My heart began to beat quickly. His first wife. That was my mother. But my mother had never mentioned traveling to Afghanistan with him and certainly never described sneaking into Soviet Uzbekistan to see old Islamic architecture.
“Do you think he was already working for MI6 at that point?” I asked. “Many people were recruited straight out of college.”
“It’s possible. He was at Cambridge during the war, and perhaps he was working for the government even then.” Stephanie pulled out a stack of papers from the box. “Here. This is chronological I think, and these are from the mid ‘50s. He started working for the Foreign Office around this time, I think—oh look!”
As she was flipping through the papers, she’d come upon a black and white photograph of two men and a woman standing before a tiled archway with the dome of a mosque rising behind it. Both men wore suits with open-collared white shirts, while the woman wore a dress with a shawl wrapped around her shoulders and a loose hijab framing her face. Despite her attire, it was clear she was white, just like the men.
“That’s him,” she said, pointing to the man on the right. “That’s my father.”
He was taller than the others, with windswept hair that fell over his forehead and the expression of someone who lived by action and will, confidence projected from the eyes, an easygoing charm in the way he stood with his arms crossed over his chest. But it was the woman who drew my gaze more than the men: she was young, no older than her mid-twenties it seemed, and though her hair was covered with her hijab, I recognized those fashionable curls, as well as that smile that played across her lips, and I could almost hear her accent, could imagine her turn to Roger and say “Oh darling, what a lovely place this is!”
“Where was this taken?” I asked, my voice trembling.
Stephanie turned the photo over and scrutinized the handwritten inscription.
“It says Balkh, 1955.” She looked up at me. “Where is Balkh?”
“It’s in northern Afghanistan. Near the border with Uzbekistan.”
“So perhaps this was around when he crossed over. I wonder who the other two are…”
Stephanie stared at the photograph, clearly captivated by this image of a younger version of her father, an image which perhaps changed her impressions of him. I was too overcome, though, to pay her much attention anymore. I put my glass of wine on the table and leaned back against the sofa, my head spinning. Balkh was also the birthplace of Hashim ibn Hakim—the birthplace of the Veiled Prophet. And my mother had been there. Suddenly, I realized that maybe it wasn’t Roger Darcy who’d brought the manuscript to St. Louis but my mother. She’d told me she’d married Roger in 1959 in London, just before he’d been given a job by the Foreign Service in Cairo—but I’d never guessed that she’d known him years before, that they’d traveled the Middle East together, that they’d traveled to Afghanistan together. I calculated the dates in my head: if the photograph had been taken in 1955, that meant my mother would have been twenty two. This would have been eight years before I was born, and about six before she met my father, a Pakistani-American businessman, at that party in Damascus. For whatever reason, I had always imagined her as a traditional diplomat’s wife, drinking at embassy receptions, flirting with other women’s husbands, resentful of being cooped up while Roger did his important work. But here she was in this photograph, in an obscure city in northern Afghanistan, standing with Roger like she was Gertrude Bell or Mary Kingsley, one of those women adventurers of the twentieth century who didn’t give a damn what other people thought.
I reached out and took the photograph from Stephanie one more time. She’d moved on to combing through the rest of the box—I could tell from her expression that she was experiencing a wave of nostalgia almost as powerful as I was.
I stayed in Geneva for almost a week—Stephanie gave me her spare key, and while she was at work, I spent the day looking through her father’s papers, taking notes and reading everything I could. When she came home, we drank a bottle of red wine, and I listened to her tell me about Roger.
“He hated England actually,” Stephanie said. “I know that sounds strange to say given what he did, but he always complained about how small it was, how remote from everything. Meanwhile, he would get this gleam in his eyes whenever he talked about the Middle East.”
“Did he ever go back?”
“Not in any official capacity. By the time I was born, the government had given him some emeritus position in the Foreign Office—the kind where they pay you to hang around and have lunch with people. He dragged us a few times to Cairo and Beirut, but we mostly stayed in fancy hotels and did the touristy things. He would tell lots of stories, though, about the old trips he used to take.”
“The trips with his first wife?”
“Yes. With Claire. Sometimes I got the sense that he wished they were still together.”
In the silence that followed, I felt a heavy stillness in the room. If they had stayed together, I thought, neither Stephanie or I would be here.
“Were your parents ever like that?” she asked. “Distant, I mean?”
“My mother was,” I said. “She also had a first husband before she married my father. But she never talked about him that much. It was like she wanted to leave that part of her life behind.”
“Do you wish she had told you more?”
“Of course. I feel like I never really knew her. I mean, I knew her as a mother, but I wanted to know her as a person too. I wanted to hear about her life when she was young, the things she’d dreamed of, the deep feelings she’d had. But she never opened up about any of that.”
“She was very introverted?”
“No, not at all. She was very outgoing, very gregarious, the life of every party. But she knew how to charm people without revealing too much about herself. My sister called her a ‘woman of surfaces.’”
Stephanie laughed. “She sounds like my father. He knew how to talk, but it was all an outward show. If I wanted to know how he really felt, I would have to read between the lines.”
I didn’t reply. In my mind, I was imagining Roger Darcy and my mother, meeting for the first time. Stephanie smiled wistfully and then poured us the rest of the bottle.
#
Instead of returning to Dartmouth, I decided to book a flight from Geneva to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, with a layover in Istanbul. My plan was to make my way down through Uzbekistan to the Afghan border and then across to Balkh. The radiocarbon analysis of the manuscript would still take months to return a definitive answer, and meanwhile Roger’s papers had left me with an itch. It seemed too much of a coincidence that he and my mother had been in Balkh, the birthplace of the Veiled Prophet himself. I felt that if there were any link between the two, any evidence of where Roger had found the manuscript, it had to be there, in that ancient and holy city.
I had taken almost a whole notebook’s worth of notes on Roger’s papers, largely from those early years of his travels, but also any other references I could find to my mother. These were mostly just offhand scribblings in his diaries, such as Claire and I went to bazaar today, bought a shawl she liked or Claire sick today—bought baklava from her favorite vendor to cheer her up. Still, even these little references touched something in my heart, and I felt like each one I transcribed brought me just a little closer to my mother, revived her briefly for one more moment.
Among Roger’s notes, I had found only one that made reference to Balkh, to a hotel called the “Ahmed Shah,” where he’d had stayed with his friend Paul and someone he referred to as “C.” There was no question in my mind that “C.” was Claire, my mother, and that Paul was the other man in the photo. C liked the place Roger had written in his dashing scrawl. Musty air, old carpets, a view of the mosque from the arched window. She said it felt like something out of an old romance.
Tashkent was a city of concrete, full of geometric buildings, wide, tree-lined streets, and the persistent drone of traffic, which made it hard for me to think. Since the fall of the Soviet Union two years before, Uzbekistan had begun a pivot towards a capitalist market economy, but despite the construction cranes and building sites visible throughout the city, I still felt a sense of decline about the place, the old communist structures with their innovative sense of design, the plazas where statues had clearly been pulled down, the huge apartment blocks that had once symbolized progress but now felt like relics of a bygone century. History could be so cruel, I thought—so relentless.
From Tashkent, I took the train down to Samarkand—beautiful, ancient, evocative, symbolic Samarkand. Roger had lots to say about this magisterial city, and his normally terse and slapdash style took on a surprising lyricism as he described “the blue domes and the soaring iwans and the arabesque patterns on the tiles.”
It is I think the most enchanting city I have ever seen. At evening, the light falls in such a way that, standing in the center of the Registan square, one feels as if one has departed this strained, claustrophobic century. From Tamerlane’s tomb, I turn and gaze at the horizon and almost imagine I can see the great conqueror’s funerary procession, the attendants in silk robes, the musicians beating drums, the horses and camels kicking up dust as they bear the conqueror’s body to this timeless resting place. C says she wouldn’t mind being buried in such a place.
That evening, I walked to the Registan square and stood in the same spot Roger had described, staring at the huge arched entrances of the madrasas and the blue-tiled cupolas in the distance, a few Russian tourists taking photos next to me and pointing in awe. It was all in all one of the most impressive examples of Islamic architecture I had ever seen, more beautiful I felt than even the mosques of Istanbul, a harmony in the contrast between the teal blue and the sandy tiles, the striking geometry of the patterned columns. But instead of reveling in a historian’s bliss, all I could think about was how my mother had forty years ago stood in this very spot and gazed upon these same buildings. Why had she never told me? In all the years I’d studied Islamic history, in all the years I’d rhapsodized about buildings like this, about the wonder of studying the culture that had produced art and architecture like this, why had she never mentioned that she had once been to Samarkand, Samarkand whose name alone conjured up all the romance of the Islamic world? Did the memories remind her too much of Roger, with whom she must have had such a bitter private history? Had she decided to shut them all away, put them in the basement with her old things, like the old manuscript she’d maybe found on her trip to Balkh? She was a woman who moved from husband to husband with such easy facility, so perhaps she’d convinced herself that her journey to Khorasan was part of a past not worth excavating, that the woman who’d stood here and stared with wonder at this skyline was someone from another life.
The next morning, I took another train down to Termez, at the Afghan border. Outside the window, the landscape had altered considerably, and the forested mountains that had been visible outside Tashkent now gave way to brown and rocky hills, the arid semi-desert which I imagined the Veiled Prophet himself had once traversed, gathering his rebel forces in preparation for war. During the trip, I reread sections of Thomas Moore’s poem Lalla Rookh.
There on that throne, to which the blind belief
Of millions raised him, sat the Prophet-Chief,
The Great Mokanna. O’er his features hung
The Veil, the Silver Veil, which he had flung
In mercy there, to hide from mortal sight
His dazzling brow, till man could bear its light.
The nineteenth century rhythms of the poem fused with the motion of the train and lulled me into a half-somnolent mood, my eyes growing hazy as the sun beat down through the window and the rocky terrain flitted by like the landscape of another planet. The poem was beautiful, I had to admit, but I couldn’t understand why this particular rendition of the story became so popular that it inspired the creation of a reactionary secret society in the heart of America. In Thomas Moore’s poem, al-Muqanna’s rebellion was a romantic, revolutionary movement and the Veiled Prophet himself “a pure redeeming angel, sent to free this fettered world from every bond and stain, and bring its primal glories back again”—yet the businessmen of St. Louis had turned him into a symbol of their own lost cause, decontextualized from history and made to serve a pure aesthetic function. How much did my mother know about the truth of the prophet, I wondered? When she stood in that vast ballroom and watched the procession of hooded figures, did she know that this was some bizarre recreation of a ceremony that was over a thousand years old? Or did she understand this only later, when she was here in this part of the world with Roger, the strange connection between that childhood debutante ball and the desert where she’d journeyed?
I reached Termez feeling tired and a little delirious. The city was small, with a few concrete buildings and blue-domed mosques, and there were mountains lining the horizon that shimmered in the heat. I stayed the night in a small hotel and then early the next day took a taxi to the Afghan border.
There was a civil war ongoing in Afghanistan, one which had started the year before after the collapse of the old communist government, but the northern part of the country remained safe and stable, ruled by General Abdul Rashid Dostum, who had turned the regional city of Mazar-i-Sharif into the capital of what was essentially an autonomous state. From what I understood, the north under Dostum remained a bastion of secularism and relative liberalism, in contrast to the rest of the country, where the fundamentalist remnants of the Mujahideen sought to impose their puritanical vision of Islam on a country battered by war and occupation. Mazar-i-Sharif was (as of now at least) untouched by the war, and thus foreign investment from places like Turkey and Uzbekistan kept the city and the surrounding region prosperous. Still, I felt nervous as I stood in line at the old border station, under dingy fluorescent lights and behind a column of Uzbek and Afghan men, some in crisp broad-shouldered business suits, most in loose shalwar kameez and round hats, all of us watching with some anxiety as the Afghan soldiers seated behind the glass screens slowly looked over each passport and spoke in gruff monosyllables. When it was finally my turn, I told the border guard that I was here to do research in Balkh, and all he did was take one look at my American passport before stamping me through without any further questions.
I stayed one night in Mazar-i-Sharif, and then the next morning took a taxi to Balkh. As we left the city, taking the highway west through the sprawl of houses and buildings, the blue domes of the city’s mosque receding behind us into the daytime haze, I felt my heart beating rapidly, anxiety spreading through my body as the old car rattled its way down the gray asphalt and towards the brown horizon. The journey was less than an hour, but I grew impatient as the minutes ticked by and we passed through the same arid and monotonous landscape.
Eventually, we pulled off the highway and drove down a long road, passing between patches of farmland and scattered trees. After a few minutes, I saw the old city walls of Balkh appear ahead of us, a long row of old towers and crenelations crumbling so majestically that they looked like a natural part of the landscape, like some rock formation carved by the wind over centuries. I didn’t know how old they were, but they underscored for me just how ancient Balkh really was—the city where Alexander the Great had met Roxana, the supposed birthplace of Zoroaster, as old as the Vedas of the second millennium BC. Marco Polo had praised Balkh as “a great seat of learning,” and to the Arabs it was “Umm Al-Bilad”— the Mother of Cities. In contrast, the Veiled Prophet felt like modern history.
The taxi driver dropped me off in the center of the town, near the Khwaja Parsa Mosque. The building reminded me of the madrasas I’d seen in Samarkand, with the same turquoise-blue dome and a similar arched entryway, only here the structure looked more worn down by time, with cracks in the tiles and paint and the patterns faded from exposure to the wind and sun. There were a few men in shalwar kameez gathered in the main square by one of the benches, and two women in hijabs standing a few feet from one of the doors of the mosque, but otherwise the town looked empty and almost deserted. There was a slightly forlorn feeling in the sound of the wind drifting through the trees and the way the heat settled across the stones. The backdrop of mountains that made all the buildings feel very small. I had the sensation that I’d reached the edge of the known world and that beyond me lay nothing but a vast desolation.
As I circled the blue mosque and found myself facing the arched entryway at an angle, I realized that this was the same building in the background of the photo of my mother, Roger Darcy, and their friend Paul. Stephanie had refused to let me take it, but I remembered it as clearly now as if I was holding it in my hand. My mother had stood right here, in her hijab and shawl, and Roger Darcy right here with his arms across his chest. They’d been here. They’d seen this same mosque. And al-Muqanna had been here too, over a millennium before them, had called these lands home, this city his place of birth. In the manuscript, he had only mentioned Balkh once. I was born in the ancient and holy city of Balkh. But perhaps he’d come back here at some point during his rebellion, shrouded in his veil and surrounded by his white-robed followers, who’d pledged to fight the Islamic Caliphate and restore Zoroastrianism to its ancient birthplace. Now, there were almost no Zoroastrians left in the region, though there was still civil war. Was that history, I wondered? The context changed, but the pattern repeating?
I left the mosque and walked the streets until I found a small shop. Inside, I bought a bottle of water and then asked the man in a broken patchwork of Tajik, Uzbek, and English if he knew where I could find the Hotel Ahmed Shah. The man at first thought I was asking about Ahmad Shah Durrani, the King who’d ruled Afghanistan in the eighteenth century, but eventually after I mimed the shape of a building, he understood.
“Mohammad!” he called through a curtain behind him.
After a moment, a young boy of around fourteen appeared. I could tell he was the shop owner’s son—they had the same curved nose, the same large eyes. They spoke for a while in rapid Tajik before the shop owner turned back to me.
“Mohammad show you,” he said in English. “Hotel Ahmad Shah.”
Mohammad eagerly grabbed my arm and pulled me out the door, speaking rapidly in Tajik that I couldn’t understand. I followed him down a few streets, trying to keep his brown pakol hat in view. We passed rows of parked cars, concrete apartment buildings, market stalls made of tarps that flapped in the wind, but still very few people. One man gave me a strange look, and another called out to me, though I couldn’t understand what he said or what language he was speaking.
Eventually, we came upon a broad avenue and stopped before a dilapidated ruin. Mohammad gestured theatrically and smiled.
“Hotel Ahmed Shah!”
The building, if it could be still called that, was just a pile of rubble, with only the vague remnants of a foundation and what had once been the ground floor. At the far end of the ruins, a few children were playing, throwing stones at each other and laughing in high pitched, piercing voices.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Bomb,” Mohammad said, gesturing with his hands. “Many years ago now. During Russian war.”
I knelt and picked up a handful of broken stones. I hadn’t seen any other ruined buildings like this in Mazar i-Sharif or here in Balkh, and the sight of this one was a sudden reminder of the reality of war. I imagined Russian bombs raining down on this street, men and women running in fear towards open doorways. But the children’s laughter soon interrupted my thoughts.
I thanked Mohammad and gave him a few coins—all I had was Uzbek money, but he accepted it happily. Then I turned back to the building. My mother and Roger Darcy had been here, I thought. C liked the place. Musty air, old carpets, a view of the mosque from the arched window. But if there had been any evidence of their stay, I realized it was long gone. The world Roger and my mother had inhabited was a vanished one, disappeared with their memories into the ether beyond. I understood then that my historian’s quest was not going to bring any of it back, no matter how badly I might have wanted to. I would find no answers here for any of my questions.
The children had stopped playing and were looking at me strangely now, as if I’d interrupted a sacred ritual. I turned away and left them to their game.
I stayed in Balkh for the rest of the day, but I couldn’t find anyone who had worked at the Ahmed Shah. Muhammad’s father, the shop owner, told me a lot of people had left the city after the Soviet invasion, and that even now, everything was uncertain because of the civil war.
“Dostum Pasha, he keep everything safe,” he told me. “But who can say for how long.”
In Mazar-i-Sharif, I did some research at the library of the newly established Balkh University, but there was very little on al-Muqanna except for a few secondary sources that I’d already read, and certainly nothing about a lost confession. When I asked the librarian, he simply looked at me in utter confusion.
When I finally returned to Dartmouth, I found a letter in my mailbox from the laboratory informing me that the radiocarbon analysis was complete and that the manuscript was no older than the twentieth century. So it was a forgery, I realized—or more likely just an elaborate work of fiction. But who could have written it? It had to have been someone with an extensive knowledge of Arabic, I thought, and of the Kufic script in particular, as well as a historian’s knowledge of al-Muqanna and his rebellion. The only person who came to mind was Roger.
The more I thought about this theory, the more it made sense. Roger must have written the manuscript himself—some amusing novelistic side-project that he created during his long years living in the region, perhaps even partly inspired by stories my mother told him about the bizarre St. Louis debutante ball based on al-Muqanna’s legend. In this sense he was like Thomas Moore, Napoleon, or Borges, a man of letters moved by this strange tale from an era that to him must have looked so mystical and magical. I thought again of his diary, his evocative descriptions of Samarkand. One feels as if one has departed this strained, claustrophobic century. He certainly had a romantic side to him. It was possible he wrote this fictional memoir of the Veiled Prophet an act of the imagination, an antidote to the grim work he undertook on behalf of his country. Writing it in the Kufic script, meanwhile, must have been some kind of historical game for him—or maybe he simply found the Kufic style more beautiful than contemporary Arabic writing, the timeless, eternal feel of the straight-edged letters that reminded him of something carved out of stone. As for how the manuscript ended up in my mother’s basement, perhaps he gave it to her as a parting gift, and she kept it as a souvenir of their years together.
Of course, I would never know the real truth. My mother and Roger were gone, along with all their secrets.
I returned to my mother’s house in St. Louis later that same year. It was winter now, and the air was gripped by a frosty chill, the bare branches of the trees shaking in anticipation of the coming snow. Grace and I had decided to sell the place, but there was still lots of work to be done clearing out the rest of my mother’s things and getting everything ready for the realtors. I went back to the basement where I’d first found the manuscript. There were other items here that would be of interest to collectors and historians—old editions of books, some translated, some in Arabic, posters from museum exhibitions on Middle Eastern art, letters my mother had received from friends addressed to glamorous locales like Damascus and Beirut, postcards of old cityscapes now yellowed from time. As I rifled through the papers and objects, a photo slipped out from the pages of an old book about Islamic architecture. I bent down and picked it up from the dusty floor of the basement. It was black and white, like the photo Stephanie had shown me, only this time it was just of my mother alone, standing in a room in front of flower-patterned wallpaper, a tender and loving expression in her eyes. I’d never seen the photo before, and I was struck by just how young my mother looked—the brightness in her eyes, the smooth lines of her face. It was a very intimate photo, and something about the way she stared at the camera made me feel that Roger had been standing on the other side.
I turned the photo over and found a note on the back, written in my mother’s looping hand.
Roger, darling. Thank you for a wonderful time. I never knew the world could look so gorgeous, but you’ve shown me that there’s so much more to life than what I knew. Let’s pray this love between us never fades. — C.