Death and the Dervish (Writings From An Unbound Europe) (29 page)

“He wouldn’t listen to me,” the man said cheerfully. “But I warned him.”

He took the candle and began to examine the room and rummage through my books. I thought that he would carelessly fling them all over the room, but he carefully returned each of them to its place.

“What are you looking for?” I asked, upset, eager to find out. “Who let you in? How dare you enter the tekke!”

My voice was very soft and very unsure.

He gave me a surprised look, and did not answer.

He found the complaint and read it, shaking his head.

“What are you going to do with this?” he asked, startled. And answered himself: “That’s your business.”

And he put it in his pocket.

When I again protested and said that I would lodge a complaint with the mufti about this, he looked at me with contempt and waved his hand, as if it bored him to argue with such a naive man.

“That’s your business,” he repeated. “Get up and get dressed.”

I thought that I had not heard him correctly.

“Did you tell me to get dressed?”

“I did. But you can go the way you are, if you like. And hurry up, don’t make any problems for either of us.”

“All right, I’ll go. But someone will pay for this.”

“That’s best. And someone always pays.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“Oh! Where are we taking you?!”

“What should I tell the dervishes? When will I come back?”

“You won’t tell them anything. And you’ll come back immediately. Or never.”

This was not a rude joke, but rather an honest remark about the possible outcomes.

Hafiz-Muhammed came into the room, flustered. Everything on him was white—his socks, shirt, face. He resembled a corpse risen from the grave; he was unable to speak. That could have been a bad omen. I expected him to do something, although I knew that the thought was absurd.

“They’ve come to take me away,” I said, pointing at the men who were waiting for me relentlessly. “I’ll come back soon, I hope.”

“Who are they? Who are you?”

“Get moving!” the man said, rushing me. “Who are we?! What fools there are in the world! We can take you as well—then you’ll know who we are.”

“Take me!” the corpse yelled suddenly, since he was so bewildered. “Take all of us! We’re all as guilty as he is!”

“Fool,” concluded the policeman matter-of-factly. “Don’t be in such a hurry. We might just come for you, too.”

“Whoever boasts of violence . . .”

He did not finish the words that might have destroyed him. He was interrupted by a timely cough—it could never have been of more use to him. It racked him, as if all of his blood were rushing into his throat. That was from his excitement, I thought, feeling no sorrow for him, because he was going to stay here. I watched how he shook and squirmed, I watched and stood, alone, fearful at that unwanted departure into the night. But I did not want to show it.

I went over to help him. The policeman stopped me.

“Poor man,” he said calmly; it resembled a reproach or scorn. And he gestured with his hand for me to go out.

In front of the tekke another man was waiting for us.

They walked abreast of me and behind me. I was pinned between them, barely able to breath.

It was dark. There was no moon or stars; the night had no light or life at all. There was only the barking of dogs in the yards, answering distant barks from the hills near the sky. It was past midnight and spirits were roaming the world. Men who still had their freedom were sleeping, dreaming nice dreams in the darkness. And the houses were in darkness, and the kasaba, and the whole world. This was the time of reckoning, the hour of evil deeds. There were no human voices, no human faces except those shadows guarding my shadow. There was nothing; my fiery excitement was the only thing alive in that dark waste.

Here and there, occasionally, a timid rushlight would flicker, because of someone who was sick, because of some child who, in the dead of night, had been awakened by my fear, by some ominous rustling. I was horrified by the thought of those peaceful lives, I pushed them away so that I would not see myself stepping through the darkness toward my unknown fate. I was going somewhere, with no purpose, nowhere, or it only seemed to me that I was going. I was losing my sense of reality, as if I were not in this world, as if I
were not awake. That was because of the darkness, because of the formless shadows, because of my disbelief that this was me, that this could be me. This was someone else; I knew him and watched: maybe he was surprised, or frightened. Or I had gone astray. I did not know where I was; I was somewhere, at some time in my life, following paths that had been destined for me. I had never been in that place and I could not leave it, but right then someone would light a candle and call me into a sanctuary. Yet no one lit that candle, that desired voice did not send me in the right direction; the night continued, as did that foreign place and my disbelief. Everything was a bad dream. I would wake up and breathe a sigh of relief.

Why don’t people shout when they’re led to their deaths, why don’t they make themselves heard, why don’t they call for help? Why don’t they run? Although they have no one to shout to, nowhere to run to, no one to appeal to: everyone else is asleep, their houses shut tight. I’m not asking this for my own sake, I’m not condemned to death; they’ll release me, they’ll send me back soon. I’ll return alone, along familiar paths and not these foreign, terrible ones. I’ll never again listen to the barking of dogs, their hopeless barking at death and desolation. I’ll close the door, plug my ears with wax in order not to hear. Has everyone whom they’ve taken away heard it? Was this barking the last farewell they ever heard? Why didn’t they shout? Why didn’t they run? I’d shout if I knew what’s waiting for me, I’d run. All the windows will open up and all the doors fly open.

Oh, no, they would not, not a single one. That’s why no one ever runs; everyone knows it. Maybe they’re hopeful. Hope is the pimp of death, a murderer more dangerous than hatred. It’s deceptive; it knows how to win you over, to calm you and lull you to sleep, whispering whatever you want to hear, leading you to the blade. Only Is-haq had escaped. He was taken away that night, as I’m being taken now. No, there were more of them then; he was something else, he
was important to them. I’m not important to anyone. He surely didn’t listen to the dogs barking; he didn’t think that he was dreaming and that he’d wake up; he knew where they were taking him, and he had no hope of staying alive. He did not deceive himself, as others do. He decided at once to run; that was his first and only thought. Therefore he walked meekly, afraid that his thought would call out on its own—it was so strong—and looked into the darkness continuously. There was moonlight, treacherous, hostile, but he looked for a shadow to hide in, searching for the thickest of them. And suddenly he decided to act, when it seemed to him that they were inattentive, and that he would not get another chance. For a single moment, only for a single, short moment, I was he, ready to spring away, ready to run. They were behind me, next to me; we were bound more closely than friends or brothers; now the bonds would break. There would be a violent and painful split between us. Without me they were nothing. They would suffer from this separation and everything would be resolved in imperceptibly small spans of time; we would not even be aware of them. We would know only about the moment of my jump, and again, and again. Every shadow was too transparent, every step too short, every hiding place too open. It was no use. Where could I run to?

My strength gave out at the very thought; I had not even tried. Because I had not made a decision, because it was not for me to decide. That was for Is-haq. This was happening to me; it was less than reality, or maybe more: an impossibility that was actually somehow happening.

They took me from one darkness to another. There were no shapes or places because I could see nothing and was preoccupied with myself, preoccupied with visions that deprived my senses of anything I might otherwise have recognized. The darkness changed; I knew because we were moving and time was passing, although I was not aware of it then.

Somewhere they met someone; they whispered something to each other, and I was again pinned between some others. I had become something valuable that must not be lost. I no longer knew who was with me, although it did not make any difference. They were all the same; they were all shadows; they were all out on this night errand because of me. All of them could be replaced; I could not be replaced by anyone.

When I hit my forehead on a low doorframe, I knew that we had arrived. I had arrived; they would go back. They would be replaced by walls.

“Give me light!” I shouted at the ironbound door, after I had gone in, unable to believe that such darkness could exist anywhere in the world.

That was the last remnant of my habits from outside, the only remaining word. No one heard it, or wanted to hear it, or could understand it. It might have seemed like raving.

Their footsteps disappeared into something that was probably a passageway. And this was probably the prison. And this was probably me. Or was it? Yes, it was, unfortunately. My thoughts were not lost in a dreamlike haze, I did not drift away and see myself from afar, as if I were looking at someone else. I was conscious, awake; everything was painfully clear to me. There was no mistake.

For a long time I did not leave the door and the sharp smell of rusted iron. This was the place where I first stepped into the darkness that had been destined for me. I had already known it for a few moments and thus it became less dangerous. Then I started to walk around, searching it, blind, relying on my fingertips, feeling everywhere the heavy dankness of uneven walls, as if I were at the bottom of a well. And the dankness was also under me, I felt it with my feet, which stuck to something ugly and slimy. Without finding anything, I soon reached the door again and the sharp smell of iron. It seemed more bearable than the stench of the dankness.

A confined emptiness, a walled-in desolation. I would see very little there, and did not know whether I needed what I had known before. Nothing of mine was of any use to me, neither my eyes, nor hands, nor feet, nor experience, nor reason. I could just as well have gone back to the state of Hafiz-Muhammed’s first living beings.

All of my life and effort for these few feet of dankness and this complete sightlessness!

That new abode of mine was small, but it was large enough for me to lie down had it been dry. Walking around in that grave, I found a stone next to one wall and stood by it, but would not let myself sit down. I could still make decisions. It was as if I were waiting for the door to open and for someone to release me: Come on, get out! Maybe all the others had been so reluctant to sit down in the dankness and mud, hoping for something, waiting, giving up on waiting whenever they lost hope. It does not take long. Soon I, too, sat down on the stone—that was a transition—trying not to lean against the wall. But then I did, and I felt the dankness slowly seeping into me. That quiet decomposition into water and nothingness could begin; there was nothing else for me to do.

I did not know whether my wounds had hurt before then, without my being aware of it, or whether they had yielded before things that were more important. Now they made themselves felt, either because the time had come for them to hurt or my body had rebelled against my forgetfulness and reminded me of its presence. I unconsciously accepted this sudden help and began to rub my wounds with my fingers, spreading out the pain, evening it out so that it would not be in one place. I pressed the cuts so that they would not bleed, and felt my blood sticky on my hands. The previous evening they had washed my wounds in the tekke with camomile tea and clean cotton, but now I was rubbing the dirt from the walls into my torn flesh, and did not care. I did not think about what was going to happen;
I thought only about what was happening then. The pain was strong, it began to burn in the darkness. It was my only existence; my body was returning me to reality. I needed that pain; it was a part of my living self, something I could understand, similar to the pain one feels in the outside world. It was a defense against darkness and the futile search for any answer at all, an obstacle that kept me from remembering my brother—he might appear on the black wall of this grave of mine, with a question that I could not answer.

I fell asleep covering one of my wounds with my palm, as if I were trying to keep it from disappearing, sitting on the stone against the damp wall. And I woke with it burning again under my palm, as if in a nest. It lived, it hurt. “How did you sleep?” I wanted to ask it. I was not alone.

I was glad when I noticed a small opening in one of the walls under the vault. Morning revealed it to me, and although daylight remained a desire and vague sensation, my darkness was no longer so complete. Morning had broken in the outside world, and shed a little light on me as well, although my night continued. I stared at that dark-gray spot above me, encouraged, as if I were watching the most beautiful roseate dawn on the broad hillsides of my childhood. Dawn, light, day—they existed, even if only as hints; not everything had disappeared. And when I turned my eyes away from that meager light, I was blinded. The darkness in my dungeon was again impenetrable.

Only when I grew accustomed to it did I realize that eyes were nevertheless necessary in this eternal night. I looked around, but I recognized only what my fingers had already seen.

The square opening in the door swung open with a creaking sound, but neither light nor air came in. Someone peered in from the other darkness. I went up to the opening and we looked at each other from up close. His face was bearded, featureless. There was nothing on it, neither eyes nor mouth.

“What do you want?” I asked, afraid that he would be unable to answer. “Who are you?”

“Jemal.”

“Where have they brought me? What is this place?”

“We give out food once a day. Only once. In the morning.

His voice was hoarse, dark.

“Has anyone asked about me?”