Death and the Dervish (Writings From An Unbound Europe) (56 page)

But it did not come to interrogations. Everything was settled in my absence, although the final part could only be settled with me.

Toward evening Kara-Zaim came to find me. He was upset, more on his own account than on mine. Maybe he would not even have come if it were not time for me to pay him his monthly salary; then he usually brought me news he considered important. He also thought this news was important, and this time he was right.

First he wanted to raise the amount, because he had had to pay the mufti’s servant. He had found everything out from him.

“Is it so important?”

“Well, I think it is. Did you know that the courier arrived this morning from Constantinople?”

“I know. But I don’t know why.”

“On account of you.”

“On account of me?”

“Swear you won’t give me away. Put your hand on the Koran. Like that. They’re going to imprison you tonight.”

“Did he bring any kind of order?”

“It seems he did. The katul-ferman.”

“So they’re going to strangle me in the fortress.”

“So they’re going to strangle you.”

“What can I do? That’s fate.”

“Can you flee?”

“Where can I flee to?”

“I don’t know. It’s just a thought. Don’t you have anyone to help you? Like you did Hassan.”

“I didn’t help Hassan.”

“It’s all the same to you now. You did, and let it remain at that. You did, you helped him; don’t tear down your own monument to yourself.”

“Thank you for coming. You’ve exposed yourself to danger for me.”

“What can I do, Sheikh-Ahmed? Poverty drove me to it. And you should know I’m sorry.”

“I believe you.”

“You’ve helped me a lot. I came to life with you. My wife and I speak of you often. And now we will even more so. Do you want to kiss one another farewell, Sheikh-Ahmed? We were once on the same battlefield. They left me cut up and you in one piece, but you see, fate wants you to go first.”

“Let’s kiss one another farewell, Kara-Zaim. And speak well of me now and then.”

He went away with tears in his eyes, and I was left in my dusky room, stunned by what I had heard.

I could not doubt it, it was certainly true. I had been trying in vain to deceive myself with crazy hopes: it could not have turned out differently. The vali had raised a floodgate, and the torrent was carrying me away.

Helpless, I repeated: death, the end. And I did not fully comprehend it, as I once had in the fortress dungeons, when I had waited for it with indifference. Now it seemed far away to me, incomprehensible, although I knew everything. Death, the end. And suddenly, as if my eyes had been opened by the darkness threatening me, I was struck with the terror of nonexistence, of that nothingness. So that is death, so that
is the end! A final encounter with our most horrible fate.

No, never! I want to live! No matter what happens, I want to live. Even if only on one leg or on a narrow precipice until death, but I want to live. I must! I’ll fight, I’ll bite with my teeth, I’ll run until the skin falls off the soles of my feet. I’ll find someone to help me, I’ll put a knife to someone’s throat and demand that they help me—I helped others!—and even if I didn’t, it doesn’t matter, I’ll run from the end and from death.

Resolute, with the strength that stems from fear and from the desire to live, I started for the door. Calmly, only calmly, so rashness or a nervous look won’t give me away. Night will fall soon; the darkness will hide me, I’ll run quicker than a greyhound, more quietly than an owl; dawn will find me deep in some forest, in some distant region. I just shouldn’t breathe so noisily, as if I were already on the run, and my heart shouldn’t beat so wildly; it’ll give me away, like a bell.

But suddenly I collapsed. My courage disappeared, along with my hope. And strength. It was all in vain.

Piri-Voivode was standing in front of the courthouse, and three armed guards were walking in the street. For me, I knew.

I left for the tekke.

I did not turn around to look at the courthouse. Maybe I had been there for the last time, but I felt nothing. I did not want to, nor could I think about anything. I was empty inside, as if my insides had been pulled out.

In the street, by the bridge, a youth came up to me. “Forgive me. I wanted to go into the courthouse, but they wouldn’t let me see you. I’m from Devetak.”

He laughed when he said that, and explained immediately. “Don’t be angry because I’m laughing. I always do that, especially when I’m nervous.”

“Are you nervous?”

“Well, yes. I’ve been repeating what I’ll say to you for a whole hour.”

“Have you said it?”

“I’ve forgotten everything.”

And he laughed again. He did not look nervous at all.

From Devetak! My mother was from Devetak, I spent half of my childhood in that village. The same hills had surrounded us; we had watched the same river, the same poplars along the bank.

Had he brought my home in his laughing eyes so that I would see it once more, before the end?

What did he want? Had he left his village, as I once had? Was he seeking paths in life wider than those in Devetak? Or was fate playing a joke, to remind me with him of everything, before my great journey? Or was he a sign, a reassurance sent to me by God?

Why did this village boy, who is closer to me than he thinks, appear now, of all times? Has he come to take my place in this world?

Piri-Voivode and the guards were following us. They were waiting at every turn; they would leave me only one way out.

“Where are you going to stay tonight?”

“Nowhere.”

“Let’s go to the tekke.”

“Are those your men?”

“Yes. Don’t pay any attention to them.”

“What are they protecting you from?”

“It’s just a custom.”

“Are you the most important man in the kasaba?”

“No.”

When we went in, he sat down on the carpet in my room. The feeble candlelight shimmered over the depressions in his bony face, and there was an enormous shadow behind him on the floor and the wall; I watched how he ground the plain tekke food with his protruding, iron jaws, maybe even unaware of what he was eating, because he was wondering how this encounter would end. But he was not
worried, either, or unconfident. I had been all of that, then. I remember my first meal. I hardly got three bites down; they almost choked me.

We were different, and yet the same. That was I, different, made of different matter, beginning the same path all over again.

Maybe I would do everything the same again, but everything around me is growing dark with sorrow.

“You surely want to remain in the kasaba.”

“How did you know?”

“Aren’t you afraid of the town?”

“Why would I be afraid?”

“It’s not easy here.”

“But is it easy where we are, Ahmed-effendi?”

“Do you expect a lot?”

“Half of your good fortune would be enough for me. Is that a lot?”

“I wish you more than that.”

He laughed cheerfully.

“May God hear your words. And I’ve had a good start. I didn’t think in my wildest dreams that you’d receive me like this.”

“You’ve come at a good time.”

“At a good time for me.”

Maybe. Why should this path be the same for everyone?

I watched him with interest, maybe even with tenderness, as if I were watching myself, as I had once been, inconceivably young, without experience, without thorns in my heart, with no fear of life. I could barely keep myself from taking him by his bony, hard, confident hand, and reviving the past with closed eyes. Just one more time, if only for a brief while.

In my look he saw a sorrow that had nothing to do with him. He asked, freed by my unexpected attentiveness.

“You’re looking at me strangely, as if you recognize me.”

“I’m remembering a youth who also came to the kasaba, long ago.”

“What happened to him?”

“He grew old.”

“Lets hope that’s the worst of it.”

“Are you tired?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I’d like for us to talk.”

“We can, of course—the whole night, if you wish.”

“Who’s your father?”

“Emin Boshnyak.”

“Then we’re related. And closely, too.”

“Yes, we are.”

“Well, why didn’t you say that?”

“I was waiting for you to ask.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty.”

“You’re not twenty.”

“Almost nineteen.”

I was choking with excitement. We talked about him, about the old hodja, about people I knew, skirting around the only thing that really interested me. Not that I wanted to find out—I wanted rather to talk, to touch everything again, since it had already happened that fate sent him to me on this of all nights, to immerse myself in thoughts about what had been reality only once, and was now only a shadow. But that is all I have. The rest is not mine. The rest is horror.

“How are my father and mother?”

“Well, they’re all right. It could be worse. Harun’s death hit them hard. And the rest of us, too. Now they’ve calmed down a little, but they’re still bitter. They take care of what they have to, and then sit and look into the fire. It’s sad.”

He laughed. His laughter was resonant, cheerful.

“Forgive me. It slips out, even when I’m feeling depressed. And so, they live on. People help them where they can. And they still have some of what you sent.”

“What did I send?”

“Money. Fifty piasters. For us that’s real wealth. And they don’t need much. They eat like birds and mend what they have. That’s not the worst of it.”

Who had sent fifty piasters? Hassan, certainly. This is the night of unnecessary tenderness, the night of good tidings, before the very worst. It has not visited me for a long time, and never will again.

Why did I hesitate to go to the end? After tonight there will be no tenderness. There will be only the inevitable.

“And your parents, how are they? How is Emin?”

“They’re healthy, thank God. But they live a meager life: either the river floods, or the sun scorches everything. Only my father is good-natured, and that makes everything easier. It’s one misfortune to be poor, he says, and yet another to grieve about it. So this way even the one seems smaller.”

“And your mother? Does she know you’ve come to me?”

“Yes, of course she does! My father says: he’s got enough to worry about—meaning you. But my mother says: he won’t cut his head off—meaning mine.”

“Has she grown old?”

“No.”

“She was beautiful.”

“Do you really remember her?”

“Yes.”

“She’s still beautiful.”

“I was coming back from the army then. It was twenty years ago.”

“You’d been wounded.”

“Who told you?”

“My mother.”

Yes, I remember. Tonight I have been remembering everything. I was twenty years old then, or a little older, I came back from the war, from captivity, with fresh battle scars, newly healed or still tender, proud of my heroism, and sorrowful because of something that remained unclear to me after everything. Maybe because of a memory that I
repeated over and over again, because of the solemnity of our sacrifice, which had elevated us to the heavens, so that afterward it was hard to walk the earth, empty and ordinary.

But one day stands out against the others.

I saw that image even in my sleep, when one early morning we decided, knowing that we were surrounded and that there was no way out, to die like soldiers of God the Divine. There were fifty of us in a wooded clearing, above a desolate autumn plain, over which smoke rose from the enemy campfires. They obeyed me; I was sure they all thought as I did. We performed the abdest with sand and dirt, since there was no water. I made the call to prayer, without lowering my voice; we said the morning prayer. We stripped down to our white shirts so we could move more easily, and, with our sabers unsheathed, went out of the forest just as the sun broke over the plain. I do not know how we looked, wretched or terrible: I did not think about that; I only felt a fire in my heart and limitless strength in my body. Afterward I thought I could see that line of young men in white shirts, with bare muscles, with sabers that reflected the light of the early sun, marching shoulder to shoulder in the plain. That was the purest hour of my life, the greatest self-forgetfulness, an alluring flash of light, a solemn silence in which all I could hear were my own steps, miles away. Kara-Zaim was surprised when I said that; he thought he was the only one who knows what a warrior feels (there is nothing I desire now so much as that feeling, but it cannot come back). They were afraid of us, and evaded us for a long time, waited to ambush us for a long time. There were many more of them than us, and a bloody massacre ensued that caused many a mother to wail, both ours and theirs. I was the first, and the first to fall, cut up, stabbed through, battered, but not immediately, not quickly. I carried my bloody saber in front of me for a long time, stabbing and hacking at anything that was not wearing a white shirt, and there were fewer and fewer white shirts. They turned crimson, like
mine. The sky above us was a crimson sheet, the earth below us a crimson threshing floor. We saw crimson, we breathed crimson, we shouted crimson. But then everything turned black, turned into peace. When I woke up there was nothing more, except for a memory in me. I would close my eyes and relive that great moment, not wanting to know anything of defeat, of wounds, of the slaughter of fine men, not wanting to believe that ten of us had given up without a fight; I denied what was—it was ugly. I feverishly tried to preserve my image of our great sacrifice, in all of its flash and fire, trying not to let it fade. Afterwards, when the illusion vanished, I cried. In the spring I returned home from captivity, on muddy roads, without my saber, without strength, without joy, without my former self. I was holding on to a mere memory, like a talisman, but even that became weak; it lost its color and freshness, its vivacity and former meaning. I trudged silently onward, through the mud of the gloomy plains; I spent the nights in silence, in village bowers and inns; I walked in silence, in the spring rains, guessing my direction like an animal, driven by the desire to die in my homeland, among the people who had given me life.