The Buddha's Return (16 page)

“It was as if nothing had happened,” he said.

He replaced the key in Lida’s handbag and she, once the dance had finished, walked over to their table and asked Amar where he had been. He replied:

“You can thank me later. It’s done.”

But when he revealed to her a little later exactly how it had been done, she, according to Amar, flew into a rage. She told him that he had acted like an absolute fool, that he would ruin them all, that I would doubtless be able to prove that I had no part in the murder, and that both the inspector and the investigator would not treat me as
they would treat him. After this Amar made a fatal error: he concealed from Lida the fact that he had stolen the statuette of the Buddha.

Lida’s testimony fundamentally differed from Amar’s version of events: she had known nothing of the murder until it was officially discovered by the maid who came to Shcherbakov’s every morning, when she opened the door—she had a key to the apartment—to find Pavel Alexandrovich’s corpse, which she immediately reported to the police. Lida and her family had never discussed any murder plans; the conversations that Amar mentioned had obviously been meant in jest: both Lida and her parents were on excellent terms with Shcherbakov and less than anyone would have wanted him dead. Pavel Alexandrovich himself had broached the need to make a will, but only because he had a weak heart and it was prudent to do so. She had been unable to inform the police that Amar was the murderer because he had threatened also to kill her if she breathed so much as a word of it to anyone.

I learnt all these details from various newspaper articles; confronted by the tragic events that had put an end to Pavel Alexandrovich’s life, as well as those that had effected my release and material well-being—which had come about almost as unexpectedly as his—I became ever more convinced that Amar and Lida’s fate, as with Pavel Alexandrovich’s death, had been a part of some complex scheme that was not devoid of a certain ominous
logic. After he was stripped, the police doctor noticed on his chest a tattoo which read: “
Enfant de Malheur
”.
§§§
Now he faced the guillotine or a lifetime’s hard labour. That it was he who had committed this murder, which Lida had opposed not on principle but on solely technical grounds, was no accident. This was the final episode in his battle against the world to which he had been denied entry—because he was half-Arab, half-Pole, because he was barely literate, because he was poor, because he was consumptive, because he was a pimp, because there they spoke of things he did not know, in a language he did not understand. In any case, he had wanted to become a part of this world because it contained money, lavish apartments and motor cars—but most importantly, money. He was motivated not only by that, but by some vague understanding that another, better life awaited him there, one that could be accessed merely by stepping over the body of an old, defenceless man. Herein lay the error of his conceit—the desire to escape the living conditions in which he had been born and raised. He had naively supposed that in his hand he held the means by which to achieve his aim: a triple-edged knife. He had imagined that another man’s late-night visit to the victim, much like the one that actually killed him, would mislead the investigator and everyone else. He had failed to grasp that he was as helpless as a child before these people, and that
for his desperation and this illicit attempt to change the order of things he would pay with his own life. He was a condemned man even before the trial started, and his fate had long already been sealed, whatever the circumstances of his life. All this, of course, seemed to result from a string of coincidences: Tunis, meeting Lida, her acquaintance with Pavel Alexandrovich in Paris. Yet the inherent sense of these coincidences remained inalterable and would have been exactly the same even if they had been different. It would have changed nothing—or almost nothing.

He was on his own now. No one shared in his fate, and he could count on no help or compassion from any quarter. Lida would never support him, because she was too clever for that, and others—his friends—turned their backs on him, too, because they were essentially indifferent to his lot. Neither the investigator nor the people who tried him felt any hatred towards him, nor were they consumed by a thirst for revenge; he fell under such-and-such an article of the law, whose distant author, naturally, had no particular man in mind when he wrote it. And it seemed entirely inconsequential to everyone who had played a certain role in his fate that he, Amar, would presently cease to exist. Of course at first glance there was some easily demonstrable justice in all this—something of the same order as the peculiar logic that had led him to the guillotine. But this justice was far removed from the classical triumph of good over evil. No one had ever spent
time explaining to Amar the difference between right and wrong, or the deepest intricacies of their connotations. If he had gathered anything from what was happening to him, it could only have been one thing: that he had made a mistake in his calculations. But for this, no consciousness of his guilt, nor any remorse for what he had done, would have tormented him. Pavel Alexandrovich’s money would have been spent, and everything would have been just fine—until, that is, new evidence surfaced, leading him more or less back to his current position. However, it was more than likely that he would have died of consumption before this. He had the misfortune of belonging to that great mass of people—beyond his personal affiliation with the criminal world—whose interests every state lawmaker and almost every social and philosophical theory in existence would never fail to invoke; they provided material for statistical comparisons and conclusions, and it was in their name that revolutions had taken place and wars had been waged. But they were just that—material. Until then, while Amar had been working in the slaughterhouses of Tunis, covered in bloody, foul-smelling slime and earning in a month as much as his advocate would spend in Paris during the course of a single evening with his mistress, his existence had been economically and socially justified, although he had no knowledge of this. But since the day he stopped working he had become expendable. What could he say in his defence? In what way and to whom
was his life necessary? He was no longer a unit of manpower, he was neither an office worker nor a bricklayer, neither an actor nor a painter, and so that tacit social law, uncodified but implacable, no longer recognized his moral right to live.

Even on the face of it he had been of absolutely no interest whatsoever until the moment he uttered that it was he who had killed Shcherbakov. In the wake of this admission a vacuum formed around him, and in this vacuum was death. Even the advocate defending him looked upon him only as a convenient pretext to practise his judicial rhetoric—because what ultimately did it matter to him, to this
maître
who lived in a comfortable apartment, to this young man who earned very well indeed, who took a bath daily, who had a loving and attentive wife, who read books by contemporary authors, who loved Giraudoux’s plays and Bergson’s philosophy—what did the fate of some dirty, consumptive Arab murderer mean to this distinguished gentleman, far removed from any such reality?

Now it was all over: he had been condemned to death and was awaiting the day when the sentence would be carried out. I recalled his terrible, dark face at the hearing, his black, dead eyes. Naturally he had been unable to follow what the prosecutor was saying, and so too with the defence; he understood only that he had been condemned to death. Listening first to the prosecutor’s words, then to
those of the defence, I was ready to shrug my shoulders and be done with it, so blatant was the artifice of their arguments. Yet it was, of course, inevitable—because in a judicial interpretation every element of a man’s life is inevitably subjected to a fundamental distortion. The prosecutor said:

“We are not here to attack: we have come to defend ourselves. In passing sentence on the accused, we are defending those great principles upon which the existence of modern society and each and every human collective is based. I refer first and foremost to man’s right to life. I should like this to be clear, and for there to be no doubt on this point.

“I reject outright the possibility of there being mitigating circumstances. I deeply regret their absence, for it will mean the death sentence, and if my conscience had permitted me not to insist on such a ruling I would have proceeded without hesitation to an analysis of these mitigating circumstances. Unfortunately, as I have just stated, there are none. It would be a dereliction of my duties if I failed to remind you that we are now judging a man who is culpable of two counts of murder. His first crime regrettably is irreversible. However, the man who would have been the accused’s second victim escaped Shcherbakov’s fate thanks only to the impeccable functioning of the judiciary, that same judiciary in whose name I am now addressing you. The accused’s plan was
constructed in such a way that suspicion was meant to fall on an innocent man, the deceased’s closest friend, a young student who has his whole life ahead of him. If the accused’s plan had been carried out as he intended, there would be in the dock right now a man whose death would be on your conscience. Thankfully that isn’t the case. Although this man in no way owes his life and freedom to the magnanimity of the accused. With that same ruthless villainy he used to dispatch his first victim, he would have sent a second to the guillotine. It is for this reason that I stress this is a double murder. And so if his plight has stirred any pity in you, then just remember that you are perhaps saving several more lives with your good and impartial judgement.

“Let me now direct your attention to yet another point. In both these murders—one executed, the other meditated—never, not even for an instant, was there anything other than cold calculation. I’m the first to admit that not every instance of killing should automatically warrant the death sentence for the guilty party. There is manslaughter as the result of self-defence. There is revenge for outraged honour or insult. Before us lies a whole spectrum of human emotions, each one of which may lead to a tragic end. We would seek vainly to establish any such romantic motives in the murder committed by the man who appears before you. There is no way that this crime could have resulted from the relationship between the actors in this
brief tragedy that you have been summoned to unravel. The accused did not know his victim personally, he had never seen him, nor could he have harboured any ill feeling towards him whatsoever. Any justification or explanation for this crime on grounds of personal or emotional motives—if one allows that personal motives may be a justification for such a crime—is altogether absent here. I shall not labour the heinousness of this crime: the facts are so articulate and persuasive as to render any commentary unnecessary. But I shall permit myself to point out the following: if in the first instance the murderer, a dull-witted and dubious character, was guided by interests of the basest and most material order, then in the second he was prepared to send to the scaffold or to hard labour a man whose disappearance would profit him not a single franc.

“It is not difficult to anticipate the defence’s argument that the accusation of the second, attempted crime has no basis in fact. However, I repeat: that it did not take place should in no way be attributed to any sudden doubt or hesitation on the part of the accused. In returning repeatedly to this second crime, it is my intent to point out to you that the accused is no casual murderer. I beseech you: put an end to this series of murders. Stop it—for if you do not, and if in several years’ time the accused is released, the death of his next victim will be on your conscience.”

This was more or less what the prosecutor said; such was the basic argument of his case. I paid less attention to
the part where he described exactly how the murder had been committed, unsparing of any detail and underscoring in every possible way the beastly, as he phrased it, savageness with which it had been carried out. When it came to Amar’s life, he limited himself to noting that he had been tried several times in Tunis for theft and was, essentially, a professional pimp. The insistency with which he spoke of the second crime struck me as somewhat odd, and I was disposed to think that, while it was possible from a strictly legal perspective to accuse Amar of intending to obstruct the course of justice, he could not be accused of a murder that he had not premeditated, and ultimately had not committed. In any event, it was clear from the prosecutor’s speech that the defendant himself was of no particular interest to him; he examined the case and established a psychological theorem, oversimplifying it to the extreme and reducing its solution to the briefest of formulas.

I doubt whether Amar would have been in any state to listen to this man who was sending him to the guillotine. But that was of no consequence, as even if he had caught every word he would still have been unable to understand. He understood only one thing, that he was being sent to his death, and this for him was the essential part—which came in contrast to the others, for whom what was important was exactly how and with what degree of oratorical persuasiveness, with which metaphors and expressions it
would be done. The prosecutor mentioned Lida and her family only in passing: no formal accusations were brought against them, and he cautioned the court not to make the mistake of ascribing any exaggerated significance to the influence that the family had held over the defendant.

The real attack on Lida and her family, however, came from Amar’s advocate. The prosecutor was a thin, sallow man, who looked as though he had been saturated with tobacco smoke and spoke in a high and surprisingly pathetic voice. He was extremely withered and resembled some ascetic image, temporarily and haphazardly personified in this emaciated human body. It seemed unimaginable that he could be capable of delivering a lyric monologue or of being naked with a woman in his embrace. The advocate had a naive, rosy face, a voice that was at once deep and sonorous, and to listen to him was less tedious that it was to listen to the prosecutor. His speech differed from the prosecutor’s in that it was intended to work on a purely emotive level.