Come Clean, Horelma

Mikhail Gorbachev is the latest to be drawn into the absurd story of the $97 million sale of London's Toprak Mansion. Last week, the former Soviet leader was feted at the 23,000-square-foot house by the real estate agent who sold it to a person he calls Hourieh Peramaa, supposedly a Kazakh refugee who fled the Central Asian country at the age of 17 in 1950 or 1951. Her husband is identified as Horelma Peramaa.

Here's how Kevin Sullivan at The Washington Post describes the party and a Persian beauty who is identified as Hourieh's daughter-in-law: Yassmin, 33, an elegant and towering woman in a remarkable red "hello, boys" dress, worked the room but politely declined to comment when approached by a reporter.

All right, folks, does anyone know a Kazakh named Hourieh? Why does this woman never speak? How did she cross one of the most secure borders in the world during Stalinism?

And who really owns that mansion?

Horelma and the Six-Foot Beauty

The British press says it has resolved the mystery of the Kazakhstan buyer of a 50-million-pound ($97 million) London mansion about two weeks ago. As readers of this blog recall, the British newspapers reported that a Kazakhstani named Horelma Peramam had made the largest new property purchase in British history. The trouble was that I and no other O and G reader had ever heard of such a Kazakh name, nor any other similar Central Asian name.

Here is the answer, say the British newspapers. Her name is Hourieh Peramaa, and she is a 75-year-old, diminutive woman who fled from Kazakhstan at the age of 17, and ended up in an Iranian refugee camp. There she met a medical student named Horelma, whom she married, and ended up a billionaire by investing quietly in real estate across Iran and Europe.

Call me a skeptic. This would mean that Hourieh crossed into Iran in 1950 or 1951, when Stalin was still alive. If she reached Iran, she crossed either from Turkmenistan, or sailed over the Caspian and fled across from Azerbaijan, among the most policed borders in the world.

Now, I actually have spoken with Uzbeks in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz whose families fled Tajikistan and Uzbekistan during the Basmachi rebellion in the late 1920s and early 1930s. They hired "dog men," as they called these gentlemen who hung out in the Amu Darya River wearing dog skin, and for a price smuggled people into Afghanistan.

Did these dogmen still exist two decades later? Or their equivalent? I'm sure that I'm missing something here and am ready to stand corrected.

This said, Hourieh did a wonderful job of public relations by trotting out her striking, 6-foot-tall daughter, Yasmin (pictured above), to tell the tale.