The sergeant, p.7
The Sergeant, page 7
Since serfs were defined by their ancestral connection to the land, people who lacked such a connection could not be held in bondage, not even foreigners who had been purchased as slaves abroad. And that is how freedom came to Mohammed Ali ben Said: “Having never been ‘attached’ to Russian soil, I could not be a serf under the ‘free’ laws of that empire…. I was free, and at liberty to go whithersoever I chose.”
But there was a catch. Even though Said had full rights to return to Borno, he had neither the money nor means to get there. Instead, he was marooned more than 5,000 miles from home, in a country whose language he barely spoke, with the vastness of Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Sahara lying in between. It was a hopeless situation, but the Russians offered a way out. If he would just agree to stay with Menshikov’s household studying the Russian language and culture, when he turned twenty-five (roughly seven or eight years in the future), he would be given enough money to go back to Africa. Said immediately accepted, taking a room in Menshikov’s mansion and devoting himself to his studies.
Said would later complain about the difficulties of learning Russian, with its “peculiar alphabet of 36 letters [since trimmed to 33], its numerous and irregular flexions, and singular pronunciation.” But he was a magnet for foreign languages, and was soon not only speaking but reading Russian. For his reading material, he was given works of logic, science, and mathematics, appropriate for someone being groomed to be a new Gannibal, as well as more creative fare, including the poetry of Gannibal’s famed descendant, Alexander Pushkin.
Of course, Menshikov would never have bought Said if he thought he would scamper back home after seven years. The assumption was that by the time Said turned twenty-five, he would feel so acclimatized he would stay in Russia, whether as a new Gannibal or as a servant to the nobility. Since the days of Peter the Great, it had been fashionable in Russia—and many other European countries—for the elite to add an exotic flair to their households by employing a small number of Africans as highly paid indentured servants, who almost always decided to stay once their terms of indenture were over. In Russia, the most notable of these servants were the so-called Abyssinian Guards who worked in the royal palace, armed with sabers, dressed in uniforms of red velvet and gold lace, and answerable only to the tsars. But there were also African footmen, stable hands, housemaids, musicians, and pipe bearers, modeled after Turkish chiboukjis and often dressed in the same Turkish-style outfits that Said wore.
Most of these workers came from the slave markets of Istanbul or Abyssinia, whose Ethiopian Orthodox king periodically gave slaves as gifts to the Russian ambassador. Some, however, came as freemen. In the 1810s, for instance, Tsar Alexander I—Tsar Nicholas’s father—hired at least three American freemen, including a servant of Ambassador John Quincy Adams as well as two sailors: Claude Gabriel and Nero Prince.
Claude Gabriel, on shore leave from the navy frigate USS John Adams, was watching a royal procession when Alexander halted his carriage, strode into the crowd, heartily shook his hand, and offered to hire him as a guard. Gabriel was so pleased with his new position that when he returned home to retrieve his wife and children, he wore the gold-embellished uniform and saber Alexander had given him. Unfortunately, Boston wasn’t ready for such a sight. He was mocked and pummeled by so many strangers that he set the uniform aside and didn’t wear it again until he was back in Russia.
Nero Prince was on shore leave when a Russian princess offered him a high-paid position among her servants, where Alexander spotted him and hired him as a guard. Nero’s wife Nancy was pleased to find “there was no prejudice against color” in the royal palace. Shortly after her arrival from Massachusetts, Nancy was greeted personally by the tsar, who “stepped forward with great politeness and condescension, and welcomed me, and asked several questions… [and] presented me with a watch.” (Back then, “condescension” meant “deference” instead of “disdain.”) The Princes remained in the palace after Alexander’s death, when Nicholas assumed the throne, and when Nancy later opened a seamstress shop in Saint Petersburg, Nicholas’s wife Alexandra personally shopped there, encouraging other noblewomen to do the same. Nancy wrote that Nicholas and Alexandra were both always “courteous and affable” to her.
A quarter of a century later, Nicholas was still on the throne, and it did not take long for him to notice Mohammed Ali ben Said, if only through happenstance. One day, as Nicholas was strolling along the waterfront, he spotted Said dressed in the same flowing outfits and Turkish fez he’d worn in Constantinople. Said noticed the tsar as well but had no idea who he was, thinking he was merely “a distinguished-looking individual in full Russian uniform.” Everyone on the promenade took off their hats as the tsar passed, and many dropped to their knees. Said still did not recognize him, but doffed his fez and stood at attention, giving a military-style salute. “Molodyetz!” Nicholas exclaimed, clapping his hand on Said’s shoulder. “Well done!” The next day, after finding out where Said was living, the tsar sent him a gift of fifty rubles.
The servants at Menshikov’s mansion, however, had a different opinion about their African guest. At least thirty workers staffed the mansion, but only two were freemen: a German pianist and the Swiss tutor of Menshikov’s grandchildren. The rest were serfs. Their families had worked loyally for the Menshikovs for more than a century, but despite generations of hard work, they remained in servitude. Yet here was a teenaged African who dressed like a Turk, prayed as a Muslim, wore tattoos like a pagan, and had scarcely stepped foot in Russia or learned its language before being granted more freedom than they ever hoped to possess. And they had to cook his food, wash his clothes, make his bed, and empty his chamber pots as if he were their master, while he lounged in the library, thumbing through books they were too illiterate to read.
As long as Menshikov’s son was around, they had to treat the guest courteously, because that was what their master desired. But in mid-July, Russian troops started the hostilities that would lead to the Crimean War, and Vladimir Menshikov left to join his father at the front lines, leaving Said largely on his own. Tensions soon flared between Menshikov’s serfs and the dark-complexioned stranger in their midst. Since Said had grown up in a household where he had been pampered by slaves, at first he may not have noticed their resentment. But soon they made their feelings clear, perhaps by refusing to serve him or putting him to work at some of their grimier chores. Soon, their actions “became so intolerable that I was forced, much to my regret, to seek a situation elsewhere,” Said wrote.
Somehow, Said found a nobleman who was willing to take over his indenture at better terms than the Menshikovs, with a promise to release him after just five years, although he’d be working full-time instead of merely studying. So Said packed his belongings—mostly robes, kaftans, fezzes, and turbans he had brought from Istanbul—and moved to the residence of his new employer, Prince Nicholas Vassilievich Trubetzkoy.
I. In his 1873 memoirs, Said says he was transferred from Fuad to Mustafa Reshid Pasha, but that account—based on twenty-year-old memories of what he saw as a teen—appears to have confused Reshid with Rifat. Reshid did not become Foreign Minister until two months later.
6 New Name, New Religion
At the age of twenty-two, Nicholas Trubetzkoy was probably only four or five years older than Mohammed Ali ben Said, but thanks to his lineage he was already a man of wealth and distinction. His ancestors once ruled Poland and Lithuania, and even though he was the youngest son of a lesser branch of their family, he enjoyed all the privileges of a princely rank. At his birth, none other than Tsar Nicholas stood in as his godfather and namesake.
With his siblings, Trubetzkoy shared ownership of huge estates near Moscow and rural Byelozersk, inherited from his deceased parents, and he also held the largely ceremonial title of provincial secretary of the Russian province of Latvia. But his primary residence was a suite of rooms he shared with his brother Andrei near Saint Petersburg’s Theater Square, a convenient place for wealthy bachelors to meet similarly situated young ladies, for marriage or other pursuits. The two brothers had a retinue of servants, likely serfs inherited from their parents, but Nicholas, who was just beginning to make his way into society, lacked a valet de chambre to serve as his personal assistant and confidant. When he heard that a multilingual African was seeking employment, he evidently decided that hiring such an exotic foreigner might help him stand out among the other young grandees competing for attention at Theater Square.
Valets de chambre were not mere servants. They were “gentlemen’s gentlemen”: personal assistants who were expected to arrange their employers’ schedules, manage their budgets, tend to their illnesses, accompany them to public events, and serve them so closely that, in the words of Napoleon Bonaparte’s valet, “I quitted [him] no more than his shadow.” Said, who had become familiar with the ways of the aristocracy in Istanbul, found it easy to fit into the role, especially under Trubetzkoy: “a nobleman in more than name, a man of the noblest and kindest impulses, and whose memory, to this day, I cannot recall without emotion.”
To accentuate Said’s exotic flair, Trubetzkoy insisted that he should keep wearing the flowing robes, curled slippers and fez that he had worn in Istanbul. But he did have two other requirements for his valet: he must speak a language appropriate for gentlemen and he must belong to the Orthodox Church, since Orthodoxy was the state religion in Russia and it would be improper for a gentleman to have an infidel as his valet.
In his late teens, Mohammed Ali ben Said still behaved like a devout Muslim: praying five times a day, refusing pork and alcohol, “and rolling my eyes in holy horror at the frequent infractions of the law of the Koran that I constantly had occasion to witness.” But he had lost faith in the religion, especially after seeing the devastation that had been wreaked by jihadists, and he was familiar with some key concepts of Christianity. As a child, he had learned the stories of Adam and Eve, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Mary, and John the Baptist—all of whom appear in the Koran—and he had been taught that Jesus was an important prophet in Islam, a miracle worker who was taken to heaven to keep him from dying on the cross. So as Trubetzkoy started telling Said about his own religious beliefs, there was at least some common ground.
But the idea that any mortal could be worshipped as a God was anathema to Muslims. Barca Gana felt anyone who believed such blasphemy would be condemned to eternal torment after they died, and even if Said didn’t share his father’s views, they were surely in the back of his mind as Trubetzkoy described Jesus’s divinity. Said later wrote that he had an “inner conviction” that Orthodoxy was not the right religion for him.
Trubetzkoy did, at least, manage to drill some church rituals into Said. When he performed his daily prayers, for instance, he had Said stand behind him, where he could memorize the words as well as the correct moments to kneel, bow, and make the sign of the cross. At first, Said amused himself by mocking Trubetzkoy’s motions behind his back, “going through all sorts of pantomimic performances when he thought I was acting in a very devotional manner,” until one day Trubetzkoy whirled around, saw what he was doing, punched him hard on both ears, and sent him to his room without any supper. Rather than risk another such punishment, Said reluctantly decided to surrender to Trubetzkoy’s instruction.
As Trubetzkoy kept at the lessons, Said experienced the onset of his first Russian winter. By early November, snow blanketed Saint Petersburg, the sun did not rise until after 8:30 A.M., the waterways that bisected the city were coated with ice, and the pungent aroma of burning coal hung in the air. Even though less than five months had passed since Said arrived in Saint Petersburg, Trubetzkoy decided he had received enough training to be baptized into Christianity.
Of course, there were plenty of churches in Saint Petersburg where Trubetzkoy could have baptized his valet, but as the provincial secretary of Latvia he decided to hold the ceremony in its capital, Riga, so he and Said left on a four hundred-mile journey accompanied by Tatiana Ribeaupierre, a twenty-four-year-old lady-in-waiting to Tsar Nicholas’s wife; Tatiana’s fiancé Prince Nicholas Yusupov; Yusupov’s mother Zinaida; and another young baptismal candidate surnamed Elmas or el-Mal. (Like Said, he was listed on official documents as a “Turkish subject,” but it’s likely that he too was a recently freed African slave.)
On November 24, 1853, or November 12 on Russia’s Julian calendar, Said stood shivering on the columned portico of Riga’s Church of St. Alexander Nevsky, a squat, round, yellow-hued building whose domed roof was frosted with snow. Beside him stood his soon-to-be godparents, Nicholas Trubetzkoy and Tatiana Ribeaupierre, swathed in furs, but he was clad only in a pristine white robe, to symbolize that he was being baptized in a state of innocent purity. He was greeted at the door of the church by the thickly bearded thirty-five-year-old priest, Father Vasili Tzvinyev, who asked him to “renounce Satan, and all his angels, all his works, all his services and all his pride,” and then guided him into the sanctuary, ablaze with chandeliers and candelabras, adorned with gilded icons of dozens of saints, and thick with the fumes of burning incense. At the baptismal font, Said recited the Nicene Creed (“I believe in one God, the Father Almighty…”), was sprinkled with water and anointed with oil, and received his Christian name. No longer would he be called Mohammed Ali ben Said. Now he was Nicholas Said, taking the given name of his godfather and employer Nicholas Trubetzkoy, who had gotten the name from his godfather, Tsar Nicholas I.
It was a memorable ceremony, with half a dozen Orthodox clerics chanting the liturgy. Trubetzkoy was so proud of his valet that he gave him a large gold cross to wear over his Turkish garb—a visual announcement that this former Muslim had embraced the One True Faith. But Said’s religious training had occurred at such a breakneck pace that he had little idea what the baptism meant. “I cannot help thinking that the way I was baptized was not right, for I think that I ought to have known perfectly well the nature of the thing beforehand,” he later wrote.
Then came Elmas/el-Mal, who was also given the Christian name Nicholas, in honor of his godfather, Nicholas Yusupov. There was tremendous symbolism behind these baptisms. Nicholas Trubetzkoy’s father was a hero of Russia’s most recent war against the Turks in 1828–29; Tatiana Ribeaupierre was the daughter of a Swiss-born Russian diplomat who negotiated the treaty to end that war; and until the late 1600s, the Yusupov family had been Muslim, descended from a leader of the Mongol armies that once occupied much of Russia. For these three families to convert two “Turkish subjects” to Russia’s state religion was likely seen as a good omen at the onset of the Crimean War. The church they picked was named after Alexander Nevsky, a medieval Russian leader who had been sainted after defending his country against Catholic invaders from the west while making peace with the Muslim Mongols to the east.
Said assumed that his baptism would end the matter, but the next day he was brought back to the church, where Father Tzvinyev made him kneel for hours to beg forgiveness for his past sins. “As the marble was harder than my knees, I was in perfect agony during the greater portion of the time, and became so enraged with the papa, that I fear I committed more sins during that space of time than I had done in days before. In fact, I am not sure but that a few ungainly Mohammedan asperities of language bubbled up to my lips. But I managed to get through without any overt act of rebellion.”
For Trubetzkoy, the next step was to teach Said a civilized tongue, and as far as he and most other Russian aristocrats were concerned, that meant French, since they deemed Russian to be fit only for serfs, servants, and shopkeepers. At first Said balked at taking on the new language, since he preferred the “sonorous and flowing” tones of Russian to the nasality of French: “For a long time I had an insurmountable disgust for the nasals. The sounds of an, in, on, un, and en, were particularly disagreeable to my ear.” But Trubetzkoy did not relent. He locked Said in his room to make him study, and found other means of coercion until “he succeeded, at length, in hammering enough of the language into me to serve as a basis upon which to make further attainments afterwards.”
Once his rites of passage were over, Said began to enjoy the privileged position that Trubetzkoy had put him into. “I was the prince’s personal servant, going always in the carriage with him… and, as he had never allowed me to associate with the rest of his domestics [valets de chambre were not supposed to fraternize with lower-ranking help], I began to consider myself quite a superior being.”
In Saint Petersburg, Said accompanied Trubetzkoy to palaces, theaters, museums, and cathedrals, as well as the fortifications in Kronstadt that Abram Petrov Gannibal had built more than a century before. “I was much struck with the formidable appearance of this stronghold,” he wrote. And then it was on to Archangelsk, a suburb of Moscow, where the Trubetzkoy family owned a sprawling estate of several thousand acres, including eight small villages where their serfs lived, as well as a huge central palace: “a large and magnificent marble structure, four stories high… filled with immense numbers of paintings and other works of art.” Surrounding the palace were lavish gardens, sculpted fountains, a greenhouse full of tropical fruit trees, and a private zoo with llamas and other exotic creatures. “I had here some of the happiest times of my life…,” Said wrote. “Our life at Archangelsk was spent in recreation on horseback and study, the prince devoting himself in the most remarkable manner to the task of perfecting me in French.”
But even as Said was reveling in his newly restored freedom, galloping on horseback in his flowing Turkish robes through villages of toiling serfs, Trubetzkoy was chafing at being a prisoner in his own country, hemmed in by his godfather, Tsar Nicholas. In a land with a long history of tyrannical rulers, Nicholas was one of the worst. Aided by a secret police force he created shortly after taking the throne, he jailed or exiled dissidents, spied on rivals, tightened censorship laws, and persecuted Jews, Catholics, and Orthodox heretics. “In his character he was extremely unrelenting, and was seldom known to forgive an act of disobedience, however slight,” Said wrote.
