Perhaps, though, no one suffered quite as much as Officer Muhsin Abd al-Bari or his unfortunate pregnant wife. By way of consolation and encouragement, she said, “You’re not to blame, this is something beyond man’s imagining.”
“There’s no longer any point to staying on in my job.”
“Tell me how you’ve been at fault,” she said anxiously.
“Wasted effort and being at fault are one and the same thing so long as lives are not safeguarded.”
“In the end you will triumph as usual.”
“I doubt it. This is something quite out of the ordinary.”
He did not sleep that night. He remained awake with his thoughts, overwhelmed by a desire to escape into the world of his mystic poetry, where calm and eternal truth lay, where lights melted into the ultimate unity of existence, where there was solace from the trials of life, its failures, its manipulations. Was it not extraordinary that both the worshiper of truth and this bestial killer should belong to one and the same life? We die because we waste our lives in concerning ourselves with ridiculous things. There is no life for us and no escape except by directing ourselves to the truth alone.
Hardly had two weeks gone by than an incident no less strange than the previous one occurred. A body fell from the last car of Tram 22, in front of Street Ten late at night. The conductor stopped the tram and went toward where the sound had come from, and the driver followed him. They saw on the ground a man dressed in a suit — they thought he must be drunk or under the effect of drugs and that he had stumbled. The driver flashed his torch at him and immediately let out a scream and pointed at the man’s neck. “Look!”
The conductor saw the well-known mark of the cord. They called out, and a number of police and plainclothesmen posted throughout the nooks and crannies of the vicinity hurried toward them. Two people who happened to be passing close by were arrested on the spot and taken to the police station. The incident caused a terrible shock, and Muhsin had to expend yet more hopeless and drastic efforts to no avail. One of those arrested was released (it turned out that he was an Army officer in civilian clothes), while several others were questioned without result. Muhsin tasted the bitterness of defeat and frustration for the fifth time, and it seemed to him that the criminal had none other than him in mind with his devilish pranks. The personality of the criminal made him think of mysterious characters in fiction, or of those creatures which in films descend to Earth from other planets.
—
Inwardly raging with his affliction, he said to his wife, “It’s only sensible for you to go to your father’s house at the Pyramids, far from all this atmosphere charged with terror and torment.”
“Isn’t it wrong for me to leave you in this state?” she protested.
Sighing, he said, “I just wish I could find some good reason for putting the blame on myself or one of my assistants.”
The matter was discussed at length in the press and in detailed articles by psychologists and men of religion. As for Abbasiyya, it was seized by panic. At sundown it became depopulated, its cafés and streets empty: it was as though everyone was expecting his own turn to come. The crisis reached its peak when a child at the preparatory school for girls was found strangled in the lavatories.
Incidents followed one upon another in horrifying fashion. People were stunned. No one any longer paid attention to the tedious details about the examinations and inquiries being made, or to the opinions of the investigators as given to the press. All thoughts were directed to the impending danger that advanced heedless of anything, making no distinction between old and young, rich and poor, man and woman, healthy and sick, a home, a tram, or a street. A madman? An epidemic? A secret weapon? Some foolish fable? Gloom descended upon the semi-deserted district. Terror consumed it. People bolted their doors and windows. No one had any subject of conversation apart from death.
Muhsin Abd al-Bari roamed about the district like a man possessed, checking with the police and plainclothesmen, scrutinizing faces and places, wandering around in a state of utter despair, talking to himself about this despair and the pain of his defeat, wishing he could offer his neck to the murderer on condition that he would spare others from his devilish cord.
He visited the maternity hospital where his wife lay. He sat beside her bed for a while, gazing at her and the newborn child, relaxing his mouth into a smile for the first time recently. Then he kissed her on the forehead and left. He returned to the world in which he wished to be seen by no one. He felt something resembling vertigo. Life: terminated by the cord of some unknown person so that it becomes nothing. Yet without doubt it was something, and something of value: love and poetry and the newborn child; hopes whose beauty was limitless; being in life, merely being in life. Was there some error that had to be put right? And when to put it right? The feeling of vertigo intensified as when one suddenly awakes from a deep sleep.
Reports reached the station superintendent that it had been decided to transfer and replace Officer Muhsin Abd al-Bari. Extremely upset, the superintendent at once went to the room of the officer for whom he had such a high regard. He found him with his head flopped down on the desk as though asleep. He approached and softly called out, “Muhsin.”
There was no answer. He called again, but the man still did not answer. He shook the officer to wake him, and the head tilted grotesquely. It was then that the superintendent spotted the drop of blood on the blotter. He looked at his colleague in terror and saw the mark of the infernal cord around his neck. The police station and its occupants were shattered.
A series of weighty meetings were held at the Governorate and urgent and important decisions were made. The director-general summoned all his assistants and told them in firm, rousing terms, “We shall declare unremitting war until the criminal is arrested.” He thought momentarily and then went on. “There is something no less important than the apprehension of the criminal himself — it is to control the panic that has seized people.”
“Yes sir.”
“Life must go on as normal, people must go back to feeling that life is good.” The questioning look in the probing eyes was answered by the director. “Not one word about this matter will be published in the press.”
He discerned a certain listlessness in the men’s eyes. “The fact is,” he said, “that news disappears from the world once it disappears from the press.” He scrutinized the faces. “No one will know anything, not even the people of Abbasiyya themselves.”
Striking his desk with his fist, he declared, “No talking of death after today. Life must go on as usual, people must go back to feeling that life is good — and we shall not give up the investigation.”
The Man and the Other Man
Out of the fruiterer’s, carrying a conical screw of paper like those used for sugar, the man emerged. He was swallowed up in the vegetable market by a slow, battling stream of people. His smiling, ruddy face, his tall frame stood out, and the other man, from his position by the telephone booth, spotted him and said to himself, “At last — he’ll not escape me.”