A Void (32 page)

back in a flash, holding a Bristol board in his hand, a board with

26 subdivisions, 26 units, all of which had a portrait photograph

- all, that is, but for a solitary blank unit.

"It wasn't blank till now," said Amaury. 'That photograph that

you hold in your hand was stuck," - pointing at it — "in this fifth

unit that's now vacant. A burglar took it from my flat, almost

thirty springs ago this April. Although I was both sad and

angry at such a stupid act of criminality, I admit I thought

it at first fairly trivial and hardly worth worrying about. But,

within just four days of my loss, my son Aignan lay dying in

Oxford!"

A sob rising uncontrollably to his throat brought his accusation

to a halt.

"Amaury," I said in my turn, as kindly as I could, "that photo-

graph that you found in my boxroom isn't yours. It's my own,

and it always was. You must trust your old pal."

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"But . . . but what's this all about?" said Amaury, now visibly

brought up short.

"Isn't it obvious?" said I. "My photograph's a copy of yours!"

"You had this man's photograph, too?"

"That's right."

"But why?"

"Just cast your mind back to as many as four occasions on

which I'd drop hints as to how oddly similar my biography, so

to say, was to yours. Two of a kind, branching off from a common

trunk - our pasts not simply similar but matching up point by

point - that's you and I, Amaury!"

Amaury cut in. "I do call to mind your dropping such hints.

And it was always on my mind to ask you about it all, in privacy.

In fact, I was counting on you to pass on any such information

that you had on our kinship, or on that conundrum which is my

past and about which, alas, I know almost nothing. But our

discussion was so long I couldn't find an opportunity to talk to

you about it. Past midnight as it is, I don't think it's right for

you now to hold off laying all your cards out, without flinching,

without holding anything back . . ."

I took this on board, although adding:

"As you wish. But not in this room. It's too dark and it's too

cold. Why don't you and I pop down to Augustus's cosy smoking

room? A stiff drink might warm us up."

"Okay," said Amaury. "You go downstairs. I'll follow you in

just a tick."

At which point, our companion hastily ran off, his hand clasp-

ing his Bristol board of photographs.

So I was first in Augustus's smoking room. I hung around for

almost half-an-hour, drinking a glass of first-class aquavit.

Abrupdy, I was struck by a loud din coming from downstairs.

I ran as fast as I could but I still had to go fairly slowly, gropingly,

as it was as black as tar. I got downstairs, though, without

stumbling too much, and saw, in a sort of gloomy, glowing

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chiaroscuro, Amaury stuffing a substantial manuscript into a

gigantic kiln - substantial, that is, by dint of how thick it was.

With a frisson of suspicion, I could not but cry out, "What is

that - that manuscript that's almost burnt to a crisp?"

Amaury, furious, visibly not caring to say anything that I might

find incriminating, at first took a long look at his manuscript -

a manuscript that was now turning brown, and now black, and

now shrinking and curling up - and finally sat down on a folding

chair, pointing out a tall stool in front of it and proposing that

I sit on that.

"Okay, Arthur, you want to talk. So talk."

"Now? In this stockroom?" I said, looking around doubtfully.

"I . . . I was waiting for you in Augustus's smoking room."

"No," said Amaury, with an obstinacy that I was starting to

find a bit irritating. "Start talking now."

"But why?"

"You can't say it's dark in this room - or cold - or . . . "

I stuck to my guns.

"Or what? What's wrong with you?"

"Nothing. Just sit down and talk. If not. . ."

"If not . . . what?"

"It's our only opportunity . . ."

Naturally, I found his conduct intriguing and, struck by his

obstinacy, I had no option but to humour him. So I sat down,

lit a cigar and got down to brass tacks:

"I'd always said that a day would dawn on which I'd inform

you of my Saga - and this is it. You'll also find out that it's a

story involving you as much as yours truly. That Damnation

that's pursuing you is on my trail too. Its shadow is falling on

both of us. My blood is yours, Amaury, for my papa is also

yours!"

"What!" said Amaury, aghast. "You and I - siblings!"

"Just so. Siblings in a common affliction and a common

fatality!"

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"But how did you find this out?" said Amaury, now avid to

know, to drink his poison to its last drop. "Who told you this

thing of which I was told nothing?"

"Oh, I long had a faint intuition of it, of this baffling fact, this

fact that nobody had any guts to talk about, this fact about which,

in truth, nobody had any information at all, and it took much

of my youth and adulthood to find out what I could about it,

building supposition upon supposition, trying out idiotic

assumptions, drawing hasty conclusions, computing, calculating,

imagining, filling in bit by bit this mystifying jigsaw, this

intimidating taboo, in which, as I was conscious, a solution was

hiding.

"What a lot of work I put into building a circuit of possibly

fruitful contacts — paying a bunch of lazy, parasitical informants

on a monthly basis, bribing librarians to drag out any old and

musty parish roll just as long as it might contain information

about my family background, buttonholing all sorts of corrupt

public officials, politicians, solicitors, councillors, diplomats,

administrators, assistant administrators and assistant sub-

administrators, right down to a city hall charlady and an account-

ant's copyboy, all of whom, frankly, I paid a lot to obtain nothing

much. I had finally to sift through a mountain of information,

trying to distinguish what was important from what was insig-

nificant, what was simply too fantastic from what was just poss-

ibly so, racking my poor old brain to find, from fact to fact,

from obscurity to obscurity, a point of global articulation, an

organising factor, as you might say, that was always just slipping

out of my grasp.

"I did find things out, though, I gradually got to know what

it was all about, I got a hold of it at last. In a word, I hit

upon a solution and I now know all I want to know about my

upbringing, my past!

It is a story told by an idiot, Jull of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

* *
*

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"It's a long story, Amaury, an occasionally confusing, occasionally

trivial and occasionally almost magical story - of that "I for an

I", that's still, continuously, on my trail, on your trail. A story,

too, of that man who originally thought it up and who put it

into action all of 20 springs ago. That man who, right up to his

dying day, would spit on any bid for compassion, any call for

pity. That man who, again to his dying day, had but a solitary

goal: that of winning tit for tat, an I for an I, a tooth for a tooth,

vindicating his oath, satisfying his wrath - in Blood.

"And it was that man who would go out and kill off all our

sons in turn!"

"Him . . . Him . . . " a haggard Amaury was murmuring.

"That's right, old man. You stuck a photograph of him up on

your board but you had no information about him! That curious

individual with his bushy chin and his wispy hair! My papa! Your

papa!"

Amaury was sobbing now, clutching his stomach. "Oh, my

papa! I was totally ignorant of all this! Such a ghasdy man - and

I'm his son! You too! Why?"

"Calm down, Amaury, control your passions. You'll soon

know all about it."

Your papa, my papa (I don't know what to call him, or anyway

I don't know its pronunciation), was born in Ankara.

His was an aristocratic family, of a particularly high rank

locally, and colossally rich: it virtually had, so it was said, a Midas

touch. But a fair distribution of its capital was difficult, for, con-

sisting as it did of about 26 sons, cousins, aunts and so forth, all

of whom had in turn, ordinarily, 5 or 6 offspring, it could count

so many birthrights that it was thought, righdy, that its capital

would gradually diminish until it was totally worn away, notwith-

standing sporadic profits and windfalls.

Thus family tradition had it that almost all that capital should

go to its firstborn son, whilst his young siblings had to subsist

practically on scraps; thus that darling Firstborn would scoop it

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all up, mansions, villas, lands, woods, stocks, bonds, diamonds

and gold ingots, and had no obligation to do any hard work,

whilst his family had to labour away from morning to

night.

Naturally, favouritism that flagrant, with a solitary son

vacuuming up all his family's adoration, risks having a backlash.

So, although our family sought to justify such discrimination as

a way of upholding and prolonging its authority (and a primary

mainstay of this authority was, as always, a substantial working

capital - capital, that is, that couldn't sustain too much dissi-

pation, in a cousin's dowry and so on), a custom was soon to

grow up taking as its basis, by a bias that almost wilfully sought

to instil guilt, not a
Sint ut sunt nut non sint,
but a
soi-disant

moral right which, grading an individual according to his rank,

grants its firstborn all of its bounty, judging him good, virtuous,

candid and kind, whilst justifying giving nothing to any of his

siblings by painting portraits as foul as his was fair.

What was worst of all was that nobody was outwardly indig-

nant or cynical about such a family law; nobody would simply

say,
Summum Jus, summa Injuria
; nobody, firstborn or lastborn,

thought of such an unjust division of his patrimony as anything

but normal, anything but right; so nobody took a stand against

so obvious a misappropriation of funds, so flagrant a corruption

of authority.

In truth, as his only consolation in an unjust world, a victim

of this law had but a solitary fantasy - of his firstborn sibling

abruptly dying and his position passing to that son who had

priority.

So what you had, and almost continuously, was sons without

a sou, hard-up cousins and starving aunts uniting in imploration,

praying for a fatal blow. And, surprisingly, Allah in his com-

passion occasionally did grant such a wish: a typhoon blowing

up without warning, a spasmodic croup, would in fact kill him

off (although a basic contradiction would subsist, with a gap

narrowing bit by bit but not totally closing up).

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At which point it was obvious that such a status quo, both

too soft and too hard, couldn't go on for long as it was.

In fact, you might say that, for its motto, our family would

gradually switch from that of Athos, Porthos, Aramis and

d'Artagnan,
Un pour Tous, Tons pour Un,
to an opportunistic
I'm

All Right Jack (You Scratch My Back, I'll Scratch Tour Back)
that

wasn't as sanguinary as you might think but that would last for

only about six months, and finally to
Homo homini Lupus
, which

was brought into play by such a dramatic stunt that all Ankara,

and in particular its local aristocracy, was full of admiration for it.

A youth of about 18 had in front of him six prior claimants,

a fact that,
a priori
, would disqualify him for good from arriving

at firstborn status. And if Maximin (our prolific assassin) actually

did attain such a status, it was by hatching, plotting, planning,

polishing and finally, triumphantly, carrying out six killings in a

row, six killings that in addition had nothing in common but a

sort of paradoxical imagination.

His first victim was Nicias, a dwarf, a runt, towards whom,

though a bit of a jackal, Maximin had no particular animosity.

Nicias wasn't too bright, though, and killing him, by comparison

with killing a jackal, was akin to taking candy from a baby.

Thus it was child's play for him to worm his way into Nicias's

villa by proposing to instruct him how to draw a bow-and-arrow

according to Buddhist philosophy. And whilst Nicias, who found

such a proposal mystifying if also gratifying, was struggling with

his books, Maximin, brandishing a pickax as hard as a rock and

as slim as a rollmop stick, struck him down with a mortal blow,

fracturing his ischium and provoking a constriction in his

inguinal ganglion, which brought on a suffocating contraction

and, almost instantly, a bout of dizzy fits that would soon turn

into a total blackout, a blackout that was to last for as long as

six days and that would at last kill him off in a local hospital,

much to his country's sorrow, with crowds of curious, gawping

Turks milling about in front of his hospital window, hoping to