Death and the Dervish (Writings From An Unbound Europe) (10 page)

He looked at me apprehensively, trying to conceal the attention and interest that my confused story had called forth in him, but his ruddy, smooth face, fresh with water and the morning, became lively and restless.

“Is he still in the garden?” he asked softly.

“He didn’t leave before dawn, and he won’t dare during the day.”

“What do you think we should do?”

“I don’t know. I’m afraid of sin. If he’s guilty, people will eventually reproach us, and that wouldn’t be good for the tekke. But if he’s not guilty, sin will fall on our souls. And only God can know where a man’s guilt lies; men cannot.”

It was the hour when all colors are brighter, all random noises louder, the hour of a roseate half-light still heavy with the night’s shadows, the hour of the clarity of incipient day. But on this day I felt no joy at the fresh morning, I joined the previous day with a new one, without having alleviated my worries with sleep.

When I returned from the mosque, still upset in spite of the morning prayer, I found guards in the garden with Mullah-Yusuf. They had searched through every corner and looked through the shed, but the fugitive was not to be found.

“Maybe I was mistaken,” I said to the dissatisfied guards.

“You weren’t mistaken. He escaped yesterday and hid somewhere.”

“Were you the one who called them?” I asked Yusuf after the guards had left.

“I thought it was what you wanted. Otherwise you wouldn’t have told me.”

In any case, it did not matter; that was best. I had freed myself from responsibility and guilt, and no one had been caused any harm. I should have felt relieved and stopped thinking about the night before.

But I kept thinking about it, more than I could justify in any way. I walked around the garden. The footprints were visible on the sandy path, side by side, one of them shoeless. That was all that remained of him, that and some broken branches of snowberry, an image of his outstretched arms and legs on the door, and the presence of something unusual that hovered under the boughs of the old trees—a new tinge, an absence of emptiness and desolation, freshness after a storm. Now that he was out of reach and there was no danger to me from him nor to him from me, I thought about that stranger in a very peculiar way, as if he were a torrent, a brisk wind, as if he had come in a dream. He began to dissolve, my experience renounced him, a living man could not have gone away from here unnoticed. The footprints did confirm his presence, but those tangible traces did not eliminate a strange sense that I felt but did not completely understand. He had escaped from the guards, through a window in his house when they came for him; he had smashed through the prison wall and jumped from the cliff and entered an unfamiliar gate without respect for the property of others; he had disappeared, but his step had not been heard by the sentries that were waiting all around, as if he were a spirit. He had not trusted me, he no longer trusted anyone, he was running from others’ fear as much as from the cruelty of the guards, sure only of himself. I was sorry
that he had lost all his faith in people, he would be unhappy and empty inside. That was why he was still alive and free, to be sure, but I would not have liked for him ever to learn that I could have been to blame for his doom. This man did not concern me, we owed nothing to each other, and he could do me neither harm nor good; yet I would have been glad if he could carry a nice thought of me into his solitude, if in his utter distrust of people he remembered me differently than the others.

Later I watched Mullah-Yusuf copy the Koran, outside, in front of the tekke, in the dense shade of a branchy apple tree; he needed even light, without flashes or shadows. I observed his full, rosy hand as it drew in the complex curves of the letters, an endless row of lines across which the eyes of others would roam without even thinking of how long that difficult task had taken, or maybe without even noticing its beauty. I had been surprised the first time I saw this young man’s inimitable skill, but after so long I still marveled at it. The refined curves, ornate loops, the balanced wave of lines, the red and gold beginnings of the verses, the floral designs in the margins—everything was transformed into a beauty that perplexed the beholder, that was even slightly sinful, as it was not a means, but an end into itself, important in and of itself, a dazzling play of colors and forms that diverted attention from what it was supposed to serve. It was even somewhat shameful, as if from those ornamented pages a sensuality emerged, maybe because beauty is in and of itself sensual and sinful, or maybe because I did not see things as I should have.

I could smell the oleaster, the same tree as the night before, which had stifled me with its heavy scent; a song echoed from one of the
mahals,*
the same song as the night before, which had astonished me with its bare shamelessness. A black rage came over me, the same as the night before, which had filled me with fear. I had left the fold, fallen from the circle; nothing sustained me anymore, nothing
protected me from myself and the world, not even daylight shielded me. I was no longer the master of my thoughts and deeds, I had become an accomplice to a crime. I needed to leave, to go somewhere, I needed to get away from this young man who irritated me with his questioning glances. I needed to say something to keep from revealing myself; he knew a lot about who I was that morning. There was something dark in him, cruel but peaceful. I had never seen eyes so passionate yet so confident.

I turned away from him, from the ugly image that I saw in him, and from the absurd hatred that flared in me, choking me like smoke, like something rotten. How calmly he had gone to fetch the guards so that they would capture the fugitive! Not for a moment had he pondered his fate, his life, or his possible innocence. I had tormented myself all night long, he had made the decision in an instant. Now he wrote out his splendid, sinful letters calmly, spinning his miraculous fabric as skillfully, cruelly, and insensitively as a spider spins its web.

I went to the uneven footprints in the sand and rubbed out the traces.

“One of his feet was bare,” Yusuf said.

He watched me, followed my movements and my thoughts. I was overcome by a mad desire to be open with him, so that he would not wonder or guess. I wanted to tell him everything about the fugitive, and everything I thought about him, it would not be nice at all, to tell him about them, about myself, about many things, and to tell him even what I did not think, only so it would be ugly.

“Maybe they’ve already caught him . . .” I said in a daze, almost losing consciousness.

A moment was enough for my caution to warn me and to change my words. This young man frightened me because of what I had wanted to say, because of what I could have become, because of what he might have done.

What I said was unexpected, contradictory to the passion
of my angry decision, which I could barely hide, and the tone of my voice would have been better suited for abuse. He looked at me surprised, as if disappointed.

And then it became clear to me that I had known from the first moment what he would do. When I decided to tell everything to someone in the tekke, when I rejected all the others in advance and chose
him
, when I said that it would be best for us not to get involved, I had been certain that he would call the guards. So certain that after the prayer in the mosque I went for a walk in the neighboring streets in order not to see them catch the fugitive and take him away. I had counted on Yusuf’s heartlessness. I had known that he would do it, but I nevertheless felt disgust and scorn for him when he did. He was the perpetrator of my secret wish, which had not been a decision, the decision had been his. But even if it had been mine, the deed was his.

But maybe I was being unfair toward him. Had he really thought that I wanted to hand over the fugitive to the guards, his guilt lay in his obedience, and that was not guilt. Even the day before I would have called his willingness to be cruel resoluteness. Today I reproached him. It was not he who had changed, but I, and with me everything else.

I wanted to repay him with kindness for a possible injustice of which he was unaware, but that bothered me nevertheless. Although I changed my opinion of him little, my hate had not yet subsided, and maybe I could not hide it well.

I told him that his Koran would be a real work of art, and he looked at me surprised, almost frightened, as if he had heard a threat. Maybe this was because real kindness is rare among us, and if it occurs then it is serving some end.

“You should go to Constantsa
²
to perfect your calligraphy.”

Now his face showed real fear, he could hardly conceal it.

“Why?” he asked quietly.

“You have hands of gold; it’d be a pity if you didn’t learn everything there is to know.”

He lowered his head.

He did not trust me. He thought that I wanted an excuse to send him away from the tekke. I calmed him, as much as his distrust could be soothed in a moment, but a strange feeling of awkwardness persisted in me. Had his distrust existed the day before, the year before, and always? Was I discovering it only now? Was he also afraid of me, as I was of him?

I had never thought like this before: everything changes when a man loses his bearings. And that was exactly what I had wanted to avoid; I did not want to lose my bearings or to change my point of view, because I would cease to be what I had been, and no one could know what I would be then. Maybe I would be someone new and unknown, whose actions I would not be able to determine or foresee. Discontent is like a wild animal, powerless at birth, terrible when it grows stronger.

It was true, I had wanted to hand the fugitive over to the guards, and this did not trouble me. He had been a challenge, an incitement, an enticement into the unknown; his deeds were the heroism of fairy tales, a dream of courage, foolish defiance. And he was even more dangerous if all of this were true in my mind only. I needed to kill this irresponsible thought, to entrench myself, with his blood, in a place that was mine, mine according to reason and conscience.

The tekke rested in the sunlight, green with ivy and lush foliage. Its old, thick walls and dark, red roof emanated a sense of security; under the eaves the soft cooing of pigeons could be heard, and it succeeded in reaching my previously closed senses. That was tranquility returning; the garden smelled of the sun and warm herbs. A man needs a place that is dear to him because it is his and because it is protected; the world is full of traps when you have nothing to sustain you. Slowly, I stepped in the high millet with the soles of my feet, touched the pearly snowberries with my hands,
and listened to the gurgling flow of the water. I was settling into my old peace again, like a convalescent, like a returned traveler; I had wandered in my thoughts the entire night, but now it was day, and sunlight. I had returned, and everything was nice again, it had been regained.

But when I came to the place where we had parted before dawn, I saw the fugitive once more: an obscure smile and a mocking expression hovered before me in the heat that was taking over with the day.

“Are you satisfied?” he asked, watching me calmly.

“I’m satisfied. I don’t want to think about you; I wanted to kill you.”

“You can’t kill me. No one can kill me.”

“You overestimate your strength.”

“It’s you who overestimate it, not I.”

“I know. You can’t even speak. Maybe you don’t exist any more. I’m thinking and speaking instead of you.”

“Then I exist. And so much worse for you.”

I tried to smile to myself, feebly, almost defeated. Only moments before I had rejoiced at my victory over him, and over everything he could have meant, but he was already revived in my memory, more dangerous than before.

5

      
Have padlocks been put on their hearts?
¹

THE LONG CORRIDOR THAT RINGED THE OLD INN LIKE A square hoop was so jammed with people that one could not pass. They were waiting in front of a door, excited, crowded together in an irregular circle, in the empty center of which there stood a guard. Others kept coming, and the corridor filled like a clogged conduit. There was the rustling sound of whispers, angry and astonished. The crowd had its own language, different from the language spoken by each of those people. It resembled bees buzzing, or growls. Words were lost, leaving a collective noise; individual moods were lost, leaving a collective, dangerous one.

A traveler had been murdered the night before, a merchant, and now the murderer was to be brought in. They had caught him that morning while he was sitting and drinking peacefully, as if he had not killed anyone.

I did not dare to ask who the murderer was, although his name would not have meant anything to me. I feared that I would recognize it, no matter which name I heard, because I had only one man in mind. I imputed the murder to my fugitive almost without thinking. He had done it the previous night. They had chased him and he had hidden in the tekke; in the morning he went off to drink, thinking he was safe. I was surprised at how small the circle is that closes
around men’s lives, how intertwined the paths are that we follow. Chance had led him to me the night before, and now it led me to see his end. Maybe it would have been best to go, with this discovery and proof of God’s swift justice as a sign and a comfort for me. But I could not leave, I waited to see his face, which had perplexed me the night before, to see his lost confidence or criminal impudence, to reject him. Listening to the hushed conversation around me as to how the murder had been carried out, with a knife to the neck and heart, I thought of how I had been involved in a shameful affair, how I had spent a troublesome night tortured by my conscience, in no way suspecting that the fugitive was a murderer. I was defiled by that encounter, degraded by his words, guilty for his escape and that he could have chosen not to stop foolishly at the café.

But I tried in vain to imagine everything graver than it was, accusing myself and pretending to feel disgust. In fact, I felt better; the painful burden was lifted from me, and the nightmare that had been constantly oppressing me gradually disappeared. He was a murderer, a vile and cruel man who brought death to others on the quick blade of his knife, for no reason, for a word or some gold. With all my heart I wished for it to be true; in that way I would rid myself of him. That was why I felt relieved: I would now expel him from my thoughts and forget about the previous night of madness, which had seared everything within me that I considered sacred. But the murderer was only a wretch, and it did not matter whether I spat upon him or grieved for him, since in me he could stir only a sense of sorrow, or disgust with humanity.