Death by Publication

by J. J. Fiechter

  In the plane I leafed through the Paris newspapers. The Figaro carried a story about the Goncourt on the front page, but the article was relatively short. A brief biography of Fabry, plus a few lines about the ceremony itself at Drouant’s and the reception that followed at the publishing house. No mention at all of the conversation between Peter and his father. That kind of thing would take a while to seep down, turn into gossip, and be picked up by the scandal sheets. If my intuition proved right, the kick-off would come from none other than my obscene conquest of the previous night.

  And then all of a sudden I felt oddly ill at ease. I felt emptied, dizzy, chilled to the marrow of my bones. This last confrontation with Nicolas had done me in. When I had set off to see him in Paris, I had hoped—I had hoped for what, really? That he greet me with a roll of drums and a flourish of trumpets? Like his old friend, without whom he could not operate? Sir Edward the indispensable? Perhaps. And what if he had greeted me in that way, with warmth and affection? Would I have been moved? Enough to switch off the revenge machine?

  I doubt it. In any case, I felt that I had once again been made to play the fool. For how many years now had my blind devotion filled the bottomless pit of his conceit? To him it had always appeared perfectly normal that I be the servant of his destiny.

  During all those long years when he held me in thrall, I had always felt ashamed of myself. Nicolas had been in the limelight. I had remained in the shadows. The way it had been in Alexandria.

  Chapter 3

  Alexandria, Egypt, thirty-five years earlier.

  Edward, my boy, you must learn to be more sociable. You really must. Are you telling me that you don’t even have one friend here?”

  “No, Mom, I don’t,” I grunted, affecting the frightful American accent that so exasperated my mother.

  And it was true. I fled the company of the English boys my own age, who I found to be a bunch of snobs, hopelessly trivial and hatefully arrogant. God had created me both shy and unsociable, and I preferred reading the banned poets to bowing and scraping to my elders and compatriots in the course of some hoity-toity evening. I enjoyed diving into the waves of Stanley Bay and swimming until I was exhausted, or exploring the labyrinths of the Kom el-Chugafa catacombs, much more than showing off in front of some well-brought-up young ladies.

  Whether my mother liked it or not, my only friends were Elias Zarani, the son of a Jewish shopkeeper from Syria, and Irene Pastrodis, the daughter of a Greek pastry chef. It goes without saying that they were not suitable company for the yearly ball held at the Alexandria Country Club. For while all the ethnic groups in the Tower of Babel called Alexandria lived and worked together in peace and harmony, they also knew how to avoid one another, usually in accordance with very simple rules, of which money was the major factor.

  Elias, Irene, and I formed an inseparable trio, united by the common bond of literature, and the three of us had managed to found a small literary magazine, which we baptized the Middle Eastern Review. In its pages we published the work of Egyptian poets, which we translated ourselves, plus of course our own adolescent poetic efforts. Although the magazine appeared irregularly, we had a proud total of one hundred subscribers. Our editorial board meetings took place anywhere we chose to hold them, preferably at the beach or even, at times, in the Mediterranean itself. None of which prevented us from maintaining the most rigorous literary standards. When you are eighteen, tolerance is not your prime quality.

  So it was that I went to the country club dance alone—or, to be more precise, chaperoned by my mother. She doubtless was hoping against hope that in the course of the evening I would meet the girl of my dreams—a pretty, well-brought-up English girl, of course—who would both bring me happiness and do honor to our family. And, to tell the truth, I was pleased to have come, if only to savor the beauty of the warm, lively summer night, lit by a constellation of torches and sumptuous fireworks. To bathe in the odor of jasmine and carob, odors of luxury married to those of misery. From one end of the city to the other, Alexandria assaults the senses with this contrast of smells.

  It was a formal ball, with just the right mixture of tall, flat-chested English girls, wealthy Egyptian young ladies, and younger siblings and cousins from both groups who seemed to spend most of the evening blushing. I could doubtless have found my true love among them, but I was a poor dancer, and not one to make much of an effort on the social front.

  I remember that I was watching with fascination as a girl who weighed roughly twice what she should have twisted and turned on the dance floor, moving her buttocks in a circular motion like a gigantic spinning top, when I saw him.

  He was crossing the dance floor at a steady, determined pace, heading directly for our table, and he kept his eyes locked on mine. I had the impression that the air parted on both sides to make way for him. It was beauty—pure, all-conquering beauty—coming toward me, holding out his hand for me to shake, smiling, introducing himself:

  “Nicolas Fabry. I have just arrived here from Paris with my father. He’s the new French consul general in Alexandria.”

  He had the voice of a cello.

  “Edward Destry,” I managed; but, I thought there must be a mistake, a creature this handsome could not have been looking for me. But no, I was wrong, it was indeed me he had been looking for, or rather the editor of the Middle Eastern Review he wanted to congratulate. “For my admirable work,” was the way he put it.

  “Thank you . . . ah . . . thank you very much,” I stammered, sincerely flattered to have a new reader—our one hundred and first—and unsettled that it was he, this creature of light.

  He sat down beside me, and I was ready to do his bidding, whatever it might have been. He wrote prose, I thought I heard him saying. “What a coincidence,” I heard myself responding, “That is precisely what I’m looking for in the magazine.” He would like very much to work with me? Of course, of course. Right now, if that suited him. From the minute I laid eyes on him I was enslaved.

  Dawn was beginning to cast its first faint light on the veranda of the club, and Nicolas and I were still in deep discussion. We had run through the gamut of contemporary literature, the way generals review their troops, in minute detail. He was familiar with all the major French writers, and his pronouncements about their work had the finality of a judge passing sentence. I was impressed. We then moved on to the Middle Eastern Review, and I listened to his criticism of our valiant efforts. In fact, he was murdering the magazine. His barbed comments were so many banderillas thrust into the beast, and blood was oozing from the wounds. He even demolished a poem by my dear friend Elias, and I was furious with myself at not finding the courage to defend him. The problem was, I loved his poetry far too much to feel it needed to be defended.

  Did Nicolas realize that he had gone too far? In any case, he abruptly loosened the intellectual vise in which he had held me captive for several hours and proposed we go look at the sunrise.

  Delighted, I suggested we go to the old fort of Kait-Bey on Pharos Island. He thought that was a splendid idea, and on our way out of the club he rounded up a dozen or so young members to join us. Everyone managed to squeeze into the limousine that was standing in front of the club entrance, awaiting Nicolas’s orders. The driver was fast asleep at the wheel, snoring away peacefully, until an authoritative tap on his shoulder by young Nicolas startled him awake.

  “To the old fort,” Nicolas barked.

  Literature had now been relegated to the background; the Middle Eastern Review was no longer a subject worthy of conversation. Nicolas was on to other things, and within minutes I discovered a whole other person, Nicolas-the-Seducer, Nicolas as Lovelace, the lady’s man for whom, even at that tender age, the code of love held no secrets. My shyness had always kept me from even striking up a conversation with the lovely Nathalie Lherbier, whom I had nonetheless ogled from afar for many years. And here was Nicolas, who had known her for a scant ten minutes, holding her in his arms and whispering sweet nothings into h
er ear as she let her head loll placidly on his shoulder.

  Once we were on the island, he focused solely on her. He put his arm around her waist, ostensibly to help her clamber over the scattered blocks of stone that lay along the path to the fort, while I played the role of guide, conjuring up the gun salutes of the British navy, the majestic beauty of this soaring white-marble tower from which, in times past, burned a fire visible from great distances in all directions. I declaimed about the special sound of the waves crashing on the walls of the fort, and to show off to Nicolas, I went so far as to recite the poem by el-Deraui that I had translated into English:

  From its lofty platform

  I thought that the sea below me

  Was a cloud,

  And thence I saw my friends

  Like stars. . . .

  My friends were shivering in their scanty gala frocks, and I could see that Nicolas was unimpressed by my poem. He was too busy kissing Nathalie. Together on a granite monolith, itself the color of sunrise, they looked in dawn’s early light like the Dioscuri, the twin sons of the god of light to which the lighthouse of Alexandria had been dedicated two thousand years before. As for me, I no longer existed. In a single evening Nicolas had conquered and rejected me. I suddenly was overcome by a terrible feeling of loneliness, of having been unfairly banished. And a wound opened within me that would never heal.

  How can I describe it? From that time on I began to create a vacuum within myself, to abdicate my personality to make room for Nicolas’s wishes and desires. He wanted me to go with him to this place or that? I managed to extricate myself from whatever obligation I might have had. Of course I was free. He called the roll, and I responded “present and accounted for” each time, proud that he should need me. I devoted myself to his every caprice with the pride of modesty, overwhelmed that someone so superior could take an interest in someone like me. When you are young you need role models. Finding nothing lovable about myself, I transferred my love to him. I built an altar to him. Perhaps he, for his part, dreamed of having a slave to validate his authority.

  It is pointless to say how excited I was about introducing my newfound idol to my friends Elias and Irene.

  The encounter took place during the first days of warm weather. To celebrate the arrival of spring, we organized an elaborate picnic on the banks of Lake Mariout, in a tiny oasis on the edge of the desert. I had borrowed my parents’ Land Rover. Nicolas had pressed into service the French consulate’s cook, Mohammad. Elias had brought the lamb, which was to be roasted on a spit, and Irene had taken care of the wine: a bottle of Clos Mariout—a dry white wine—and two bottles of a wonderful Matamir red, a kind of Chateau Margaux from the banks of the Nile. The recent rains had covered the dunes with multicolored flowers, miraculous but ephemeral blankets of pink and white, foreshadowing the fate of all the young men who, in the nearby desert, would soon give up their lives.

  But the cadence of marching boots, the Munich conference that would soon decide the fate of so many, meant little or nothing to us then. The heads of state could sign any pacts they wanted, we couldn’t have cared less.

  The roast lamb was superb. The wines were a work of art. And yet the picnic was a total disaster; I could tell that Elias and Irene could not bear my new friend. Nicolas was the principal culprit, for he showed off shamelessly. Instead of dazzling us, he bored and irritated us with his literary name dropping and smug opinions. I was more than slightly embarrassed for him, and in an effort to make amends I kept filling up everyone’s glass the minute it was empty. I cracked jokes till my face hurt. All I wanted, more than anything in the world, was that we all like one other!

  I especially wanted us all to be friends because, the night before, Nicolas had brought me a short story that he had written in English entitled, “The Life Before Us.” I had virtually promised that it would appear in the next issue of the magazine, without having read it—an act of faith.

  Faith misplaced; it was a shameless plagiarism of Raymond Radiguet’s Devil in the Flesh. So shameless in fact that in this brief, truncated version whole passages had been lifted from Radiguet’s original, word for word. How could Nicolas have been so blatant? I hadn’t found the courage to tell him that his text was not only worthless but scandalous to boot. In reworking the story, I convinced myself, I could camouflage the plagiarism and make the story acceptable to Elias and Irene. Wrong again!

  Back in Alexandria, after the disastrous picnic, I set about reworking Nicolas’s story from A to Z, blue-penciling the stolen passages. But even in its edited version the story remained a pathetic pastiche. Irene declared that it would appear in the magazine over her dead body. Elias added that the story had no place in our review anyway, since there was nothing Middle Eastern about it. I chose the worst of all possible solutions: I changed the layout of the magazine and inserted Nicolas’s story without telling the others. The next day I secretly went with the manuscript pages of the new issue to our Armenian printer, a man named Papazian.

  Normally Papazian greeted me with open arms. A man of considerable culture, he was in the habit of discussing Egyptian poetry with me, usually at great length. I discovered a multitude of poetic treasures each time I went to see him. Thanks to him, the Middle Eastern Review had published a number of texts of extraordinary quality and beauty, of which even the major literary reviews of England and the Continent had no awareness.

  But this time Papazian did not greet me with his usual warmth. Without raising his eyes from his typesetting machine, he asked me coldly to put the manuscript on the table. It was his way of saying that he would appreciate my paying him the fifty pounds sterling that I had owed him for several months now. I had kept Elias and Irene in the dark about the debt, feeling it was my obligation to take care of it by God knows what miracle. Today, however, I vowed to pay Papazian within the week.

  “What!” Nicolas said when he learned of my embarrassment, “Why didn’t you tell me?” And he pulled from his pocket a thick wad of bills that he put on the table.

  “Will this take care of it?” he said.

  “But,” I stammered, “I. . . I didn’t ask you for the money.”

  Still, I ended up accepting it. I was enormously grateful for his immediate display of generosity, and moved as well by his next words.

  “The Middle Eastern Review has got to be saved,” he said emphatically. “Ridiculous that it should go under for such a paltry sum. As long as I’m around—”

  By God, I thought, for all his posturing, here’s a friend who puts his money where his mouth is. Now, to some degree, the magazine was his. All three of us were indebted to him. But I, naive as I was, hadn’t thought that one through at the time.

  I hate to recall the day when this accursed issue of the magazine appeared. It sounded the death knell of the great friendship that had bound Elias, Irene, and me together. For over thirty years now, whenever I hark back to that day, my heart is filled with shame.

  I can still remember vividly the icy welcome I received when I showed up at the Pastrodis pastry shop, where we usually met to celebrate the publication of each new issue. No celebration that day. No multi-colored pastries, no raki to wash them down. Only a cup of Turkish coffee, the powdery dregs of which had already dried on the edges of the glasses. I sat down at the table, expecting the worst. It was Irene who fired the first salvo.

  “Why in the world did you do that?” Her tone was below freezing.

  “I couldn’t help it,” I said lamely.

  “Would you mind letting us in on your little secret?” Elias chimed in.

  “I would have much preferred to have kept you in the dark,” I began. “But I owe you the truth, the whole truth. You may not know it, but the magazine owes a great deal of money to the printer.”

  And I launched into a long, rambling explanation. Instead of admitting that I was completely under the spell of Nicolas, I got tangled up in all sorts of vague and untenable justifications. I made a sorry effort to explain how, because the ma
gazine was ridden with debt, I had allowed Nicolas to bail me out. How then could I refuse to publish his story?

  They didn’t believe a word of it. Worse, they were in no mood to forgive me.

  “Since you want to give the magazine a new tone,” Elias declared, “you can consider that we are no longer involved. We leave the baby in your hands. The only thing I can say is that I hope you don’t sink any lower than you already have. . . . Oh, and give our best to your new mentor.”

  They left the shop without even shaking hands. I remained seated there, completely devastated. I had stupidly offered up my best friends as a sacrifice to Nicolas’s machinations. My only friends, actually. I can still hear the hum of the ceiling fan turning lazily above my head in the pastry shop, stirring my sorrow.

  The rest of the day was just as dreadful. As I was leaving Pastrodis’s shop, my eyes red from the tears I couldn’t hold back after Elias and Irene had deserted me, who should I run into but Nicolas? If that wasn’t bad enough, he had on his arm his current conquest, another of the superb young ladies from school whom I’d been eyeing from afar for several years but never had the courage to speak to. Her name was Jeanne Brisson, and her extraordinary green eyes had already turned more than a few heads in the city despite her tender age.

  Nicolas could see how upset I was and rushed over to me, exclaiming, “What’s wrong, Edward? Tell me what’s bothering you.”

  I could have killed him. I told him that I was suffering from an eye infection and threw in some other pathetic excuse for my sorry state. Then, forcing a smile, I pulled from my briefcase a copy of the new issue of the Middle Eastern Review and handed it to him.

  “What’s that you have there?” he asked with feigned astonishment.