“I don’t give a damn about that cursed bomb! It doesn’t change your situation one bit.”
“But it does, Excellency. Think for a minute. What could I fear, faced with the threat of the bomb?”
The air was growing stifling. The street noises suddenly stopped without reason, as if life had drained away forever. Nour El Dine was fascinated by Yeghen’s ugliness; he couldn’t tear himself away from the sight of this pitiful nudity that made him want to vomit. He was grimacing like someone with stomach cramps.
“Are you perhaps unwell?” asked Yeghen. “I’m sorry for what I said. You know, that bomb business was a joke. There’s nothing to worry about. Anyway, they’d never drop it around here. It would cost too much. Believe me.”
“Shut up, you miserable clown! Come on, get dressed, we’re leaving.”
“At this hour?” implored Yeghen. “Have pity on me, Excellency. What have I done to you?”
“You’re going to get dressed, you son of a bitch!”
“Very well. At your service, sir! Only just don’t push me around.”
Yeghen jumped to the foot of the bed and found his clothes thrown pell-mell on a chair. He dressed quickly, then opened the bedroom door.
“After you, sir!” he said, bowing very low.
Nour El Dine left the room followed by Yeghen. Down in the street, they looked at each other for a moment as if to recognize each other. Yeghen was jovial.
“I invite you to have a coffee, Excellency!”
Nour El Dine grabbed Yeghen by the arm and pulled him along rapidly, muttering between his teeth, “It’s poison I’m going to offer you, not coffee.”
8
LIT BY the flickering candle flame, Gohar’s face reflected ecstasy. Seated on the only chair in his room, his hands on his knees, he leaned his head against the door that separated him from his neighbor’s flat. What he was hearing was beyond anything he had ever hoped for. Amazement held him fast, his mind strangely receptive, conscious of being the only witness to an extraordinary event. This ecstatic state had already lasted for a while. His eyes closed, Gohar savored with inexpressible contentment the diverse phases of a domestic quarrel. Each of the words pronounced on the other side of the wall struck him like a sparkling truth, illuminating the shadows of his consciousness.
For several days, the flat of his dead neighbor had been occupied by new tenants. It was a couple made up of a man with no arms or legs, a beggar by trade, and his wife, a big, athletic-looking gossip, as imposing as a ten-story building. Each morning she would deposit her husband on a sidewalk in the European quarter, then return at nightfall to bring him back home. Gohar had met them once on the stairway. The woman was carrying the man on her shoulder as she might have carried a water jar. She had answered Gohar’s greeting in a loud, sepulchral voice, capable of freezing the blood in the veins of an especially brave man. She had a harsh look and the arrogance of a woman equipped with a man.
Gohar couldn’t believe his ears; the more he listened, the more trouble he had imagining the scene unfolding in the next room. The woman was creating a classic scene of jealousy with the limbless man. Gohar heard the man defend himself energetically. He denied the woman’s accusations, then abused her in turn, accusing her of debauchery, sorcery, and eating cadavers. Finally he began to moan and to demand his food. But the woman remained deaf to his famished cries and continued to assail him with insults and reproaches.
Gohar’s amazement was all the deeper since he had thought for a long time that nothing could surprise him. To be jealous of a basket case! Really, the possessive frenzy of women knew no limits. Gohar was grateful to women because of the enormous sum of stupidity that they brought to human relations. They were capable of making a jealous scene with a donkey, for no better reason than to make themselves interesting.
He was beginning to feel a lively interest in his new neighbors. Despite its sordid and pitiful side, this family spat opened incomparable perspectives on humanity to him. What a godsend! He rubbed his hands, blessing the miraculous accident that made him witness to the somber mystery of a couple without having to leave his room. He wouldn’t have traded his place for all the pleasures of creation.
The fraud was so obvious, so universal, that anyone, even a moron, could have detected it without effort. Gohar was still indignant at his own blindness. It had taken him many years, the monotony of an entire life devoted to study, before he judged the true worth of his teaching: a monumental swindle. For more than twenty years he had taught wicked nonsense, subjecting young minds to the yoke of an erroneous, woolly philosophy. How could he have taken himself seriously? Had he not understood what he read? Hadn’t his lectures ever struck him as being full of impudent hypocrisy? What an inconceivable failing. Yet everything should have put him on guard. The least history text, ancient or modern, that he had explicated for his students’ comprehension, overflowed with a million lies. History! Granted, you could misrepresent history. But geography! How could you lie about geography? Well, they had managed to pervert the harmony of the globe by tracing on it borders so fantastic and arbitrary that they changed from one year to another. What especially astounded Gohar was that he had never used his introductory remarks to alert his students to these changes. As if they were a matter of course; as if an official lie were of necessity true.
Such an accumulation of lies could only give birth to complete confusion. And the result was anguish in proportion to the world. Gohar now knew that this anguish was not metaphysical. He knew that it was not an inevitability of the human condition but that it was provoked by a deliberate will, the will of certain powers that had always fought against lucidity and simple reason. These powers considered straightforward ideas their deadliest enemies because they — the powers — could prosper only in obscurantism and chaos! They struggled with all their might to present facts under the most contradictory appearances, those most likely to support the notion of an absurd universe, with the sole aim of perpetuating their domination. Gohar rebelled with all of his soul against the concept of an absurd universe. Indeed, it was under the cloak of this so-called absurdity of the world that all crimes were perpetrated. The universe was not absurd; it was simply ruled by the most abominable gang of scoundrels that had ever soiled the surface of the planet. Actually, this world was cruelly simple, but the great thinkers to whom had fallen the task of explaining it to the uninitiated could not bring themselves to accept this for fear of being scorned as simpleminded. Besides, one ran too great a risk trying to explain things in a simple, objective manner. Unfortunate precedents showed that men had been sentenced to torture for having suggested an honest, rational explanation of certain phenomena. These precedents had served their purpose; they had had a salutary effect on later generations. No one had the courage to express clear, precise ideas anymore. Abstruse thought had become the only safeguard against tyranny.
It was not his thirst for martyrdom that had driven Gohar to renounce the errors of his long past. He had not left the university where he taught and his bourgeois apartment in the European quarter with any intention of propagating a new doctrine. He saw himself as neither a reformer nor a prophet. He had simply fled from the anguish that oppressed him more and more each day. This anguish had washed over entire continents. Where would it stop? Here it was now, battering with its devastating waves the banks of this islet of peace where Gohar had found refuge. He wondered how long the native quarter would resist this poisoned wind. For years, no doubt, perhaps for a whole century. To be illiterate! What an opportunity to survive in a world doomed to massacre! Gohar had arrived at this fundamental conclusion: bloodthirsty power had no hold on individuals who didn’t read the newspapers. Anguish could not reach these people. Miraculously, the native quarter was the only inviolate place in the country where a healthy life animated by simple reason flourished. Everywhere else the most unbelievable madness reigned. However, all danger of contagion had not been expelled: there was the radio. The invention of the radio seemed to Gohar the worst manifestation of the devil. The ravages of this little box that could be seen everywhere seemed to him more destructive than all of the explosives combined.