Proud Beggars (16 page)

“Well? Have you found him?” asked Nour El Dine.

“I must say it was a tough job. Still, I finally found him. That son of a whore changes residence almost every two hours. He doesn't have an easy conscience, evidently.”

Nour El Dine grew impatient.

“Where is he now?”

“Number 17 on this street.”

“A hotel? What's the name?”

“I don't know; there's no sign. He's staying on the second floor, the room facing the stairs.”

“Very well, you may go. I don't need you anymore.”

“As you wish, sir!”

Nour El Dine left the one-eyed policeman, crossed the street, and slowly followed the sidewalk bordered by decaying odd-numbered buildings. After a few minutes' walk, he finally stopped before number 17; for a moment, he inspected the dilapidated façade, looked right and left as if he feared being seen going into such a shabby hotel, then crossed the threshold and entered a fetid, somber hallway. No clerk came to meet him; the place seemed long abandoned. Guided more by his instinct than by his visual organs, Nour El Dine came to a stone staircase with worn steps and climbed to the second floor. When he reached it, he glimpsed what looked like a door in the darkness and began to bang on it with his fist.

No one answered his frantic knocking. Nour El Dine strained to listen: nothing moved inside. Without waiting any longer, he turned the doorknob, opened the door, and entered a room whose size and furnishings he couldn't make out for lack of light. It was still the same darkness, barely attenuated by the feeble daylight seeping through the slats of the closed shutters. Nour El Dine's first impression was that the room was empty. Little by little his eyes became accustomed to the shadows and he perceived a bed, and in this bed a human form lying under the covers.

“Hey, you! Wake up!”

The form lying under the covers remained inert as a corpse. Nour El Dine grew annoyed and began to think that the man might be dead. He approached the bed and with unspeakable disgust raised the blankets. This operation revealed the naked body of a man, whose skeletal thinness would have terrified the hardest of hearts.

“May Allah preserve us!” murmured Nour El Dine.

The cold he felt at being thus uncovered had more effect on the sleeper than an earthquake, because he woke up, blinked his eyes, yawned, and finally asked, “What's this?”

“Police!” Nour El Dine yelled, as if he wanted to break all resistance in the sleeper's mind with this single word.

But the word “police” clearly held no terrors for the bed's occupant, for he replied with perfect calm, making as if to go back to sleep, “You can search everywhere; there isn't a speck of hashish in this room.”

“It's not that,” said Nour El Dine. “Come on, get up, I want to talk to you.”

“Talk to me!” exclaimed Yeghen, now completely awake. “By Allah! Inspector, how have I deserved this honor? How can I be of use to you?”

“I've come to talk to you about a murder.”

“A murder, Excellency! What a black day!”

“You can say that again. It's a black day for you.”

Yeghen threw back the blankets completely and sat up on his bed, his legs folded under him; with his rickety torso, bony face, and wild eyes, he resembled a Hindu fakir shrunk by fasting and mortification.

“A murder!” he repeated. “What does a murder have to do with me?”

“I'm going to tell you. But first, answer me—do you know that one of the girls at Set Amina's house was strangled a few days ago?”

“I heard that,” said Yeghen.

“It seems that you are a habitué of the house.”

“That's true.”

“Then you knew young Arnaba?”

“Very well. She was the most beautiful of the lot.”

“So! Since we agree on all that, can you tell me where you were at the hour of the crime?”

Yeghen didn't even bother to think, or to ask what the hour of the crime was; he was sure not to be wrong. He answered smoothly, “I was sleeping, Excellency!”

“Where were you sleeping?”

“I don't know. I sleep everywhere.”

“So, you son of a bitch, you don't know anything about this affair?”

“No, on my honor! I don't know anything. I could perhaps give you some information about certain drug dealers. But a crime! Really, that's beyond my power.”

“Let me tell you that you are a prime suspect.”

“Me! But I was sleeping, Excellency. How can an intelligent officer like you make a mistake like that?”

“Stop the monkey business!” Nour El Dine scolded. “I know how to make you talk!”

He realized he had just uttered an absurdity, one of those commonplaces he often used in the course of an interrogation and which meant absolutely nothing, despite the threat they implied. The truth was that he felt sick with disgust and almost moribund. In this state he would never make anyone talk, at least as long as he continued to breathe the polluted air of this room. He glanced toward the window with closed shutters, ardently desiring to open them but trembling at the thought of letting in daylight. Darkness suited him; it prevented Yeghen from noticing his agitation. From the street rose the deafening noise of cars, the curses of nearly demented carters, and the interminable clanging of streetcars trying desperately to open a path through the eddying apathetic crowd. These stale sounds of life nearby revived his will. Looking for some furniture to lean against, he took a few steps and ended by sitting on the edge of a table. This visit was going to be a total failure if he didn't change his tactics. The difficulty of an interrogation with Yeghen lay in the fact that the fellow was gifted with a subversive intelligence that made fun of everything. He was an old offender and an inveterate hashish smoker; he was in contact with all of the dealers and ne'er-do-wells in the native quarter. Still, Nour El Dine didn't believe he was guilty. What he was after here was simply a trail, a clue that could lead him to the real killer. He knew that the man before him was exempt from all violent passions, taking nothing seriously, except drugs, and thus could be suspected only of cowardice; he was incapable of committing a crime. Because for Nour El Dine, to be unaware of the vicissitudes and abominations of existence was a sure sign of cowardice. Could
he
permit himself not to take life seriously? Where would the world be if misfortune no longer mattered?

Once more he was overcome with bitterness, and he gave Yeghen a haunted look. He couldn't help finding something laughable and distasteful in this whole situation. This naked, emaciated man seated on his bed undergoing police questioning seemed like an absurd, unnatural thing. Mockery was everywhere. It was the last straw when Yeghen began to laugh.

“There's nothing here to laugh about,” said Nour El Dine. “You're involved in dirty business.”

“Excuse me, Excellency! But the world is becoming more and more amusing. Don't you think so?”

“What makes you so optimistic?”

“The bomb,” said Yeghen.

“What bomb?”

“You haven't heard about the bomb? Really, Inspector, you astound me! Even children know this. It seems they've invented a bomb capable of destroying an entire city with one blast. You don't think that's funny? What would amuse you then?”

For a moment Nour El Dine was dumb with stupor, trying to understand. This interrogation had become pure folly.

“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.”

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.