The Great Train Ride for Bassanda - Ch. 14
Notes on Ismail Durang
[Dictionary of Bassandan National Biography; interpolations by Winesap, c1985]
b Bassanda circa 1884.
Martial artist, bowed-string virtuoso, percussionist, linguist, cartographer, assassin. Protégé of the General and the Colonel. Lover (c1906ff) of Cécile Lapin.
Born somewhere in the Bassandan Alps but understood to have been orphaned or otherwise dislocated from family; there were stories that he was the son of a Bassandan mountain girl and a wandering mercenary soldier. Indirect evidence for that latter imputation comes from the fact that he was particularly known for carrying, and employing with deadly efficiency, the Gurkha kukri (scythe-bladed) knife.
[Winesap comments, 2002: “Post-Soviet research confirms that Durang’s Gurkha father was tortured to death by Tsarist secret police for ‘revolutionary gangsterism’ c1885.”]
Subsequent genealogical research in uncatalogued sections of the Archives, though there is very little information on his origins, confirms some other relations. He was definitely a nephew of the smuggler, gunrunner, trader, ship-captain, and World War I partisan Davoud Gora: this much is confirmed in the accounts of the 1906 Great Train Ride for Bassanda, which may have averted the nation’s annexation by Tsarist forces.
More concrete documentation exists to confirm that he was the uncle of the dancer Emmiana Garrett Danesi (born 1924), a great-uncle (by reason of his romantic liaison with Cécile Lapin) to the singer/dancer Ani Hamim Gassion (born 1947), and second cousin to the singer/dancer Caitrìona Freya Aibnat Mardanīš (born 1946), the latter two being documented as members of both the mysterious 1885 Victorian ‘Steampunk’ Band and the Great Southwestern Desert post-Apocalyptic ‘Sand Pirates’ Band of 1881. He was also just possibly the natural father, by Cécile Lapin, of the singer Mudry Urodzeny Gora (born at Argentan in Normandy).
An unknown series of events—possibly a university scholarship, or the necessity of escaping either Tsarist conscription or the secret police after their murder of his father—brought him to the east coast of America at the age of 17, as a chess prodigy: having been trained in the complex historical tradition of three-dimensional Bassandan draughts, he found Western chess a relatively humdrum and simplistic exercise. It is even possible that he made his way to the West on the strength of a Wilhelm Steinitz scholarship from the New York Chess Club, established in memory of that Austrian master. Durang is rumored to have been a sparring partner of the young Capablanca at New York University (c1902) but became bored after surpassing the skill of his Cuban contemporary. Though he did not continue in the world of competitive chess, he carried a brilliant strategic mind and sense of tactical ferocity with him into new fields of activity in the cause of Bassanda.
While in New England, he contributed to Olive Dame Campbell’s lectures at Harvard (1902-03) as a “native informant,” during which period he met Algeria Main-Smith (see “The Lawrence Clan and the Ivy League,” elsewhere in the Correspondence). An inheritor—so it seems—of Gurkha fighting techniques through the maternal line, in the same period he received further training in Chinese martial arts and traditional internal medicine with Main-Smith’s bodyguard, Master Li Bao, at that time serving as ethnological consultant on Pacific Rim cultures for the Peabody Museum of Salem, Massachusetts.
Durang was a life-long student of the complex and virtuosic bowed strings of the East, including lyra (Crete), lira Calabrese (Italy), and kemençe (Turkey, Greece). Immediately prior to the events detailed in the Great Train Ride of 1906, he was in Vienna as a teenaged apprentice to the instrument-builder Otto Schenk (nb: it is now thought that this public involvement as luthier may have been cover for clandestine activities on behalf of Bassandan independence, in that fin-de-siécle capitol).
A key protagonist in the “Great Train Ride” of Cécile Lapin, Professor Habjar-Lawrence, the General, and Colonel Torres, on the Orient Express and Trans-Caspian Railroads, which brought the esoteric Documents from Paris to Bassanda in the immediate wake of the 1907 Tsarist Incursion. Though Bassanda was of no great strategic importance, it had for over a thousand years been a pawn in European imperial conflicts, especially vis-à-vis avenues to Asia and access to warm-water ports. The arrival of those Documents and their swift adoption to create anti-aggression weapons was directly responsible for that invasion’s defeat—a conflict the Tsar more successfully fomented a year later in the Bosnian Crisis, one of the early catalysts for the outbreak of war in 1914.
[Winesap interpolation, 2002: His CHEKA file, briefly unredacted during the Gorbachev era of glasnost, revealed that even as a teenager he was known to the Tsarist secret police; the records document a bounty on his head from the age of 16. It would appear that he became an active, deadly threat to agents of the Russian government following the sacking of his mother’s village, in the northern Bassandan Alps, at the hands of Cossack border raiders, around 1901—this may in fact account for his flight to the West and appearance in the Americas. The details of the deaths of his mother and sisters are not recorded but there is no documentation of their survival after that year.]
Some sources suggest that Durang participated, with his uncles and cousins, in anti-imperialist partisan operations in the 1914-18 period: though Bassanda was by this time nominally part of the Russian sphere of influence, subtle and not-so-subtle resistance movements continued, in both the capitol city and the mountains and forests. Subsequent to the abortive invasion of Bassanda in Spring 1907, both Vienna and St Petersburg attempted to use the unrest of the First World War to engage in territorial acquisitions outside the zones of active combat, but after December 1917, the withdrawal of the new Bolshevik government from the international conflict liberated Lenin’s government to turn their attention to more parochial consolidation in the formerly-independent border nations. Bassandan military-political leaders—some of them actually veterans of the Tsar’s imperial armies—skillfully played-off Red and White Russian influences and intentions against one another during the 1917-22 Civil War, but by 1923 the Lenin government had consolidated its hold: Ballyizget would be a Soviet capitol until the German invasion of 1939.
[Winesap interpolation, 2002: At the same time, documents in the Locked-Room Archives suggest a darker, more active, and more deadly role in this same period: a typewritten slip in his files contains the names of more than twenty Russian, Cossack, Austrian, or German officials, each annotated, in Ismail’s small but meticulous hand, with an “X,” a place-name, and a death-date. Not for nothing did the Tsarist police call him “the Assassin.”]
The period 1922-36 is largely unrecounted in his biography, unless there are other fragmentary documents scattered, uncatalogued, elsewhere in the Archives—a key resource, the detailed reminiscences of Cécile Lapin from which the epic 1906-07 account is largely drawn, is missing that crucial decade-and-a-half.[1] It is generally understood that the two had a hand in setting-up escape routes for ethnic minorities in Ukraine and the Caucasus, which sought to mitigate the worst human rights abuses caused by the Stalinist relocation of ethnic minorities, though the hard documentation to support that presumption is largely circumstantial.
On the other hand, given what we now know about the time- and quantum-space-traveling capacities of the gigantic locomotive called “the Beast” (see the accounts of the “Rift Accident” that cast the 1960s Band back in time to the 1880s), it is also possible that Ismail and Cécile might have slipped “sideways” across time-and-space, thus disappearing into another “where-when” (see elsewhere in the Correspondence, on Qaerda-bol’sa theory) thus seemingly vanishing from this world’s historical records while reappearing in others’.
One way or another, in one version of the chronology, by 1936 Durang and Lapin—one of the great romantic partnerships in Bassandan mythic history—were in Spain, assisting in a gunrunning operation set up by Yezget Nas1lsinez, Eric Blair (George Orwell), the General, the teenaged Binyamin Biraz Ouiz, and the mysterious Džonatan Výrobca to supply the Republicans resisting Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces, themselves supported by Nazi Germany. And it was possibly Durang who mysteriously appeared, with Colonel Torres, in an account of the Operation Cobra breakout by elements of the US Army’s 75th Rangers, in July 1944.
[Winesap, 2002: NOTA BENE: familiarity with internal historical contradictions mandates disclosure of another and extremely disturbing timeline suggested by certain loose documents in the Durang folders. As is true throughout the Correspondence—and most particularly in the case of those Friends of Bassanda who seem to have experienced time-travel—there are very fundamental contradictions in Durang’s chronology. The majority of the materials do support the general outline given above. But one short typescript, apparently a fragment of a field report by Cossack commandos circa 1906, alludes to “The Death, in custody, of the prisoner of war and assassin associated with the Western spy networks”—this despite the fact that other documents in the same collection appear to confirm his survival into, at least, the 1940s.
The Hazzard-Igniti theorists of the 1930s suggest that the great risk to Rift travelers was that their individual or shared timelines might, via alternate where-whens, develop internal contradictions. These “Rift collisions,” so the theory goes, carried within them the possibility that the Rift traveler’s timeline—her or his lifeline itself—might suddenly “crash” or “collide” with another variant—or even, simply, blink out. The above-mentioned gaps and contradictions in the Durang timeline suggest, unfortunately, that he might have been the victim of some such “collision”: surviving in one Qaerda-bol’sa but, tragically, losing his life to a Rift collision in another.]
He was twenty-two years old, and an orphan by violence at the hands of the Russians, when, in company with Madame Main-Smith, the General, and Colonel Torres, he met Cécile Lapin in Paris in the autumn of 1906.
[1] However, see also the personal histories of the family of the BNRO singer Ani Hamim Gassion, b1947: Lapin was her great-aunt, and a branch of the family were pieds-noirs in Algeria and Morocco in the 1930s. This in turn provides at least a suggested background for Durang/Lapin involvement in 1930s freedom movements immediately before their activities in Spain. The Civil War (c1936-39) was a proving ground for World War II—both Nazi Germany and fascist Italy allying themselves with the totalitarian forces of Francisco Franco. Other Bassandan freedom fighters likewise associated with Spain in this period include the family of the violinist Marushka Dugarte Orjuela, and the dancer and shapeshifter Ана Ljubak de Quareton.