Stretched out on a burlap-covered mattress on the floor, Teymour was dreaming of his young saltimbanque. There was nothing luxurious about the apartment that Felfel had found for him in the old city. It consisted of one fairly large room with a window that looked out on an alleyway and a small alcove that served as a kitchen. Teymour had furnished it with a hermit’s attention to detail, taking only a few necessities from his father’s house. Ever since he could come here on occasion to escape the family atmosphere, Teymour had been savoring a freedom that reminded him of his years abroad when he was pretending to study arduously and endlessly. Not that his father made him submit to any strict rules of behavior, or that he had to go along with any rites and customs which no longer meant anything to him, but he felt that he would be betraying young Felfel’s guileless love were he to live in a physical comfort and bourgeois prosperity that distanced him spiritually from her. Old Teymour hardly criticized him for his life of leisure and had never again mentioned the chemical engineering position he had set aside for him in the sugar refinery; suffering from early senility, he seemed to have forgotten that his son, after a long stay in a distant country, had obtained a degree that placed him among the elite of his generation. The diploma was now hanging in a gilded wood frame on the wall just above Teymour’s mattress, as if it were the very proof of the triumph of fraud. It was on seeing the naked walls of his pitiful lodgings that Teymour had had the clever idea of placing the phony diploma — fruit of a victory over himself and the dark forces of reaction — in full view of his visitors. Thus, at any moment he could contemplate this first-rate relic from his past that symbolized for him all the failings of the notorious values that govern this world. But most unexpected was the fact that exhibiting this diploma had helped spread his reputation even to the lowliest hovels. In effect, through his housekeeper — whose husband was a knife grinder — the entire neighborhood had become aware that he was a learned engineer, and this had earned him respectful nods and words of praise from all the wise and erudite men with which the city teemed as he passed in front of their doors or sat down in a café. Teymour was thrilled by his prestige among the people inasmuch as it offset the exorbitant price he had paid for the document. He congratulated himself for at last having derived some benefit from it.
He cast a sardonic glance at the frame hanging above him, then got up and went to look through the slats in the closed shutters at what was brewing on the streets. After a moment he was surprised to see Medhat appear, strolling casually with the alert and inquisitive concentration of someone roaming through an exotic market. He hurried to open the door to the landing, then came back to squat on the mattress, leaving the only chair for his guest.
It immediately struck Teymour that Medhat was very excited by some new fact and that he had come strictly with the intention of sharing it, but that he would not reveal it right away. In such circumstances Teymour knew it was pointless to rush Medhat; in the end he would talk without prompting. Medhat did not pretend to go into raptures about how beautiful the place was; still, he took the trouble to walk around the whole room — not in order to admire the nonexistent furniture, but out of courtesy to his host — and stopped in front of the diploma on the wall, studied it closely, then nodded his head in satisfaction.
“It’s magnificent,” he said. “Did it cost you a lot?”
“Yes, quite a lot. But you see it has its uses. It gives the room a studious air that keeps malicious gossip at bay. It is the guarantor of my respectability in the neighborhood.”
“It was a good idea to hang it there. It’s better than a work of art. Unfortunately, you can’t sell it — your name is on it.”
“I did think about it, though. But to whom would I sell it? We don’t know any fool who wants a diploma.”
“The only one we know has disappeared. And it wasn’t a diploma in chemical engineering that he wanted, but one in veterinary medicine.”
“Samaraï! How did he disappear?”
“In a completely honorable and definitive way: he died.”
“When? I knew nothing about this. How did you find out?”
Medhat smiled at Teymour’s incredulous air, but at the same time he seemed to regret having let himself walk into a trap in this way. He had inadvertently divulged his secret too quickly. Noticing the single chair, he sat down sighing, stretched his legs and began to stare at Teymour with gentle condescension. Then he recounted the whole story from beginning to end, from Salma’s anguished appeal to him, to his meeting on the bridge with Rezk, and finally to his discovery, thanks to his own perspicacity, of the true assassins.
“What do you say to that? It was so simple, and yet nobody thought of it. Believe me, all those vanished notables went to Wataniya’s. Most of them are rich hicks who come to the city to sell their crops or their cattle and who have a lot of cash on them, not to mention jewelry — gold rings and watch chains. Their first thought, once they’ve taken care of business, is to go have a good time in a brothel. And then it’s child’s play for Wataniya and her colossus of a husband to kill them and bury them in the empty lots that surround the house. I’m sure my reasoning is flawless.”
“Fine,” said Teymour, “but what are we going to do?”
“If you ask me, we’re not going to do anything.”
“You mean we’re going to keep this to ourselves?”
“Naturally. It’s none of our business. If bastards are killing other bastards, what does that have to do with us? You don’t realize how lucky we are! We are going to sit back and quietly watch the slaughter of notables. Could there possibly be a more delightful spectacle?”
“In that case, I’m afraid it is our business. You’ll see that it will not take long for Hillali to accuse us of Samaraï’s disappearance. Samaraï was a friend of ours and he went around with us the whole time he was here. We will be questioned and possibly imprisoned.”
“If he makes that mistake, he’ll look ridiculous. We didn’t kill anyone. And first he’ll need to find the corpse. Without a corpse he cannot begin the slightest proceedings against us. He is so obsessed with his political conspiracies that he’ll never think of Wataniya’s brothel. I wouldn’t have thought of it myself if Rezk hadn’t mentioned that he’d seen Samaraï go into the brothel with his entire inheritance in his pocket. That detail opened my eyes.”
“Poor Samaraï. It’s as if he were an innocent victim chosen by fate.”
“I don’t agree. Samaraï had a slave mentality. And slaves are not innocent. They collaborate in running this vast universal dupery. Deep down he only got what he deserved.”
“He wasn’t a bad guy.”
“An ambitious guy is not a good guy for long. By getting his degree, Samaraï wanted to succeed in finding a place in this society we abhor. In a few years he would have become worse than everyone else. A self-important man about town.”
“Perhaps,” said Teymour, recalling Medhat’s suspicion toward him, Teymour, when he had seen him come home with his diploma. “And that’s what you thought of me when I returned from abroad.”
“Not exactly. I trusted you. The friend I had known before could never stoop so low.”
From the alleyway could be heard the harsh voice of a gossipmonger scolding her children with the hot-tempered extremism of poverty. Medhat listened to her enumerating the fatal illnesses that she wished on them and was dumbfounded by her knowledge in this field. There were some he had never even heard of, for they were new. “She must listen to the radio,” he thought. Then he turned back to Teymour and said: