Death and the Dervish (Writings From An Unbound Europe) (14 page)

I did not turn around to look at him, I did not believe that he was still there, nor did I know what I could tell him of all this pain, which did not even have a name. And the thought, that I would entrust him with what I would not tell anyone else, was dangerous. I had not chosen a dervish or any of the people whom I knew, but a renegade, a fugitive, a man outside of the law. Did I believe that only he would not be surprised if he heard it? Did I believe that only he would not look upon me with reproach? Help me, O God, to emerge from these trials the same man that I was. And the only way out that I really saw was for nothing to have happened.

      
Salvation and peace to Ibrahim,

      
Salvation and peace to Musa and Harun,

      
Salvation and peace to Ilyas,
²

      
Salvation and peace to Is-haq,

      
Salvation and peace to the unhappy Ahmed Nuruddin.

People went out, coughing and softly whispering. They
left me, and I remained alone on my knees before my pain. Fortunately and unfortunately, I was alone, afraid to abandon this place where I could torture myself with indecision.

A commotion began outside; someone was shouting, someone was making threats—I did not want to hear those words; I did not want to know who was shouting and who was making threats. Everything that happens in the world is ugly. O God, receive the prayer of my weakness; take away my strength and my desire to leave this silence; return me to peace, either the first or last. I thought that something existed between them, a river that had once flowed, its surface covered with the sun’s reflection, shrouded in mist at dusk. It still existed in me; I thought that I had forgotten it, but it seems that nothing is ever forgotten; everything returns from the drawers in which we lock it, from the darkness of apparent oblivion, and everything that we thought belonged to no one is ours. We do not need it, but it stands before us, shimmering in its former existence, reminding and tormenting us. And taking revenge for our betrayal. It is late, O memories, you have come in vain, your powerless solace is useless, as are your reminders of what might have been, since what never happened was never even possible. And what never happened always seems beautiful. You are a deception that gives birth to discontent, a deception that I cannot and do not wish to drive away, since it disarms me and protects me from suffering with a quiet grief.

My father was waiting for me, distraught because of his son, who was all that he had left. I did not exist, and neither did his son: the old man was alone; he waited for me in the inn, alone. Once we had thought that we were one, now we thought nothing at all. First his eyes would ask me, and I would respond with a smile. I would still have that much strength, because of him: I have been told that my brother will be released soon. I would send him away with hope: Why should he leave heartbroken? He would receive no benefit from the truth. And I would return saddened.

I breathed in the fresh May night; it was young and effervescent. I love spring, I thought, I love springtime, it is unwearied and unburdened, it wakes us with a cheerful, lighthearted call to begin anew. It is the deception and hope of each new year; new buds sprout on old trees. I love springtime, I shouted inside myself stubbornly. I forced myself to believe in it; for many years I had hidden springtime from myself, but now I was calling it, offering myself unto it. I touched the blossoms and smooth, new branches of an apple tree at the side of the path; sap rushed in its countless veins. I felt their pulsing, I wished that it would enter me through my fingertips, so that apple blossoms might sprout from my fingers and translucent green leaves from my palms, so that I would become the tender scent of fruit, its silent carelessness. I would carry my blossoming hands before my astonished eyes and extend them to the nourishing rain. I would be rooted in the ground, fed by the sky, renewed by the spring, laid to rest by autumn. How good it would be to begin everything anew.

But there could be no new beginning, nor would one be important. We are not aware when new beginnings arrive; we only discover them later when they have already engulfed us, when everything merely continues. Then we believe that everything could have been different, but it could not have, and so we rush into springtime, so as not to think about nonexistent beginnings or unpleasant continuations.

I walked the streets in vain, trying to pass time that would not pass. Hassan was waiting for me in the tekke. That morning my father had waited for me in the inn, and now in the evening Hassan in the tekke. They were on all paths and at every corner; they did not allow me to leave my worries behind. “Let me know as soon as they release him,” my father had said as he left. “I won’t rest until I hear it. It’d be best if he came home.”

It would have been best if he had never left home.

“Go to the musellim tomorrow,” he reminded me, so I
would not forget. “And thank him. Thank him in my name.”

I was glad that he left; it was hard to look him in the face. He sought a solace that I could offer only with lies. He left with both of them, and all that remained was an ugly memory. We stopped at the edge of the field, I kissed his hand and he kissed me on the forehead. He was my father again. I watched him as he went, stooped, leading his horse almost as if he were leaning on it. He kept turning around, constantly. I felt better when we had parted, but I was sad and lonely. We had parted for good; there could no longer be any mistake about it. We buried one another the very moment that we saw each other for what we were—our last, useless bit of warmth could no longer help us.

I still was standing in the middle of the wide field when my father mounted his horse and disappeared behind a cliff, as if he had been swallowed by the gray rock.

A long afternoon shadow, the somber soul of the hills, crept over the field, darkening it. It passed over me and surrounded me on all sides, the sunlight fled from it, retreating toward the opposite hill. Night was still far away; that was only one of its early signs, but there was something ominous in those dark forerunners. There was no one on this field split by shadow: both halves of it were empty; I alone stood in that divided place as it grew dimmer. I was small in the space that was closing around me, preoccupied by a murky anxiety that I carried in my ancient soul, foreign yet mine. Alone in the field, alone in the world, powerless before the secrets of the earth and the expanse of the sky. But then, from somewhere in the hills, from the houses on the slopes, a song rang out. It penetrated the sunlit area of the field right up to my shadow, as if coming to my assistance, and indeed set me free from that brief, absurd spell.

I did not escape Hassan’s unsolicited attention. He was sitting with Hafiz-Muhammed on the terrace upstairs, above the river. His soft beard neatly trimmed, he was dressed in a
blue
mintan,*
and wore the aroma of fragrant oils. He was fresh and smiling; he had cleansed himself of three months of travel, of the smell of cattle, sweat, inns, dust, and mud. He had forgotten about curses, mountain passes, dangerous fords through rivers; now he resembled a young aga spoiled by life, which demanded neither effort nor courage from him.

I found them in the middle of a conversation. This cattle drover and former muderris was goading Hafiz-Muhammed into expounding upon his knowledge, so he could contradict him, jokingly, attaching no importance to what he heard or answered. I always wondered at his ability to arrive at clever arguments in casual conversations, disguising them as foolish remarks.

When we had greeted each other, he asked me: “Have you learned anything about your brother?”

“No. I’ll go again tomorrow. And you, how was your trip?

That was best. My worries should be left to me.

He made a few ordinary remarks about his trip, joking about how it always depended on God’s will and the cattle’s temper, and how he changed his will and temper according to theirs. Then he suggested that Hafiz-Muhammed continue his exposition, which was very interesting and very dubious, about the origin and development of life, a question of significance as long as living beings would exist, and suitable for debate, especially at a time when there were no debates and we all died of boredom agreeing with each other about everything.

Hafiz-Muhammed, who for three months had either kept quiet or only talked about the most ordinary things, continued his exposition on the origin of the world, which was strange and inexact, and unsupported by the Koran. But the picture that he developed was interesting. Taken from one of the many books that he had read (God only knows which one), and enlivened by his imagination, it glittered
with the fire of his lonesome fevers, when in delirious visions he saw the beginning and end of the world. It seemed like blasphemy, but we had already become accustomed to it. We hardly considered him a real dervish: he had won the right to be irresponsible, the most beautiful and rarest right in our order, and the things that he sometimes said were not considered too harmful, since they were mostly incomprehensible.

It seemed to me very unusual, almost unimaginable, that a naive scholar would discuss the origin of the world with a clever wag, a good-natured joker, a former
alim*
turned cattle drover and caravan escort. It was as if the devil himself had worked to bring those two totally different men together and to engage them in a conversation that no one could have foreseen.

This young man surprised me again and again with something unexpected that was not easy to explain or justify. Although he was intelligent and educated, everything he did was odd, and none of it predictable. He had finished school in Constantinople, wandered in the East, he had taught as a muderris in a
madrasah,*
worked as an official at the
Porte*
and as a military officer, but he left all of that behind. He went to Dubrovnik for some reason, and returned to the kasaba with a Dubrovnik
³
merchant and his wife. People said that he was in love with that fair-skinned Catholic woman with black hair and grey eyes, who now lived with her husband in the Latin mahal.
⁴
He brought a suit against a distant relative who had taken over his estate and then dropped it when he saw how many children that wretched man had to feed. He married one of the man’s daughters, whom they had thrust upon him as payment for the estate, but when he realized what they had bestowed upon him, he fled without looking back. He left all of them in his house and became a merchant, traveling in the East and West, to the horror of his family. It was hard to say how he had combined so many trades, or which one of them was
his real line of work. None of them, he would say laughing; a man has to live from something, and in the end it is all the same. He was too talkative for service at the Porte, too tempestuous for a muderris, too educated for a cattle drover. People said that he had been driven out of Constantinople; just as many stories circulated about his honesty as did about his dishonesty, about his exceptional abilities as about his utter incompetence. People said he was heartless when he took up the suit about his estate, and that he was a fool when he dropped it; some said that he was shameless because he lived with the lady from Dubrovnik, along with her idiot husband, and others said that he was the idiot because the woman and her husband were taking advantage of him. He was passed again and again through the fine sieve of kasaba gossip, a convenient subject for hundreds of nosy rumors, especially in the beginning, before they grew accustomed to him. But he dismissed everything with a wave of his hand, it was all the same to him, as was everything else in life. He associated with everyone: he conversed with muderrises, traded with merchants, drank with ruffians, laughed with journeymen. He was everyone’s equal in anything he did, but still a failure at everything.

I did not want to talk with Hassan about my brother. He would have been saddened, but not for long; embittered, but not for long. And I was troubled by the previous night’s conversation with his sister. I would have preferred for him not to have come.

Fortunately, he was not pushy. And fortunately, he was interested in their conversation. In that way I was able to delay everything for a while.

Hafiz-Muhammed said that moisture and warmth were the sources of life. The first living creatures sprang up in a rotten dankness, where they had been developing for a long time, without real form, without limbs, tiny round and oblong shapes glowing with the power of life. They swam in their dark blindness, roaming aimlessly, living in water, crawling
ashore, burrowing in the mud. Thousands of years had thus passed . . .

“And God?” Hassan asked.

That was a jocular, yet serious question. Hafiz-Muhammed ignored it.

“Thousands of years thus passed and those small, helpless creatures changed. Some of them adapted to dry land, others to water. They were born deaf and blind, without arms or legs, without anything, and everything developed slowly, according to necessity and after many failed attempts.”

“And God?”

“God wanted it so.”

He had to say that, although it did not sound convincing. But with this inviolable, general assertion Hafiz-Muhammed was removing an inconvenient obstacle more than he was responding to a challenge.

I was surprised at how they both behaved. Hafiz-Muhammed truly denied the role of God in the creation of the world, and Hassan only referred to it in jest, without desiring to pursue the issue or to exploit an advantage that he could easily have gained.

I knew that what Hafiz-Muhammed was saying was only a slight modification of the teachings of the Greek philosophers, which had been adopted by Avicenna
⁵
in his works in Arabic. According to those teachings, man gradually became what he is, adapting to nature slowly, subduing it, the only creature with an intellect. For this reason nature was no longer a secret to him, the space around him no longer a mystery; he conquered and overcame it after his long ascent from worm to master of the earth.