Death by Publication

by J. J. Fiechter

  “You know very well. It’s the new issue of the magazine. Take a look at page three, you’ll find a story that’s very—anyway, a text you’re familiar with.”

  I couldn’t help but admire the restraint he displayed in what had to be an important moment in his young life, seeing his name in print for the first time. But he was too much in control of his emotions—assuming he had any to control—to show the slightest pleasure, even if it was narcissistic. Jeanne Brisson was looking at the magazine over his shoulder.

  “Well, well,” Nicolas murmured, acting as if he were surprised. “I see someone has been rummaging through my wastebasket. Could it have been you, my dear Edward?”

  “But that’s the story you submitted to me, as you well—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he cut me off. “Completely ridiculous. I wrote that when I was fifteen. You could at least have had the courtesy to ask my permission before publishing it!”

  “But I thought that. . . You told me that. . .”

  “Please, Edward!”

  That was the final blow. I should have reacted then and there. Protested, lost my temper, told him off in no uncertain terms. Because of him I had just lost my two best friends. Because of him I had been caught off guard in the street, completely distraught. And he’d had the gall to act indignant, simply to show off in front of Miss Brisson! Even worse, he had pretended as he glanced at the story not to notice that I had rewritten it for him to eliminate all the embarrassing plagiarisms. . . .

  Like a beaten dog, I slunk away, my tail between my legs, more miserable than I had ever been in my life. The sad fact was, I had been completely incapable of standing up for myself.

  The following issue of the Middle Eastern Review appeared less than two months later. Till then, I had been in charge of ferreting out potentially publishable material and making the initial selection, which I would then submit to my “editorial board.” But in the new setup Nicolas would determine the table of contents all by himself. Need I add that most of the new magazine’s contents were the work of one Nicolas Fabry? My efforts consisted chiefly of rewriting his texts, under the guise of smoothing out his English, which was less than perfect. In exchange, I had the right to “include” some of my own work. If I put that word in quotes it is because it was the very word Nicolas used, to make it clear that it was only through my role as managing editor that this rare privilege was granted me. In other words, my work would never have made it into the magazine on its own merits.

  Under these circumstances, I simply turned over the magazine to Nicolas to do with as he wished. He soon grew weary of it, and the Middle Eastern Review passed quietly into history.

  Chapter 4

  Having given up the magazine, I sought refuge more and more frequently in the catacombs of Kom el-Chugafa, on the Hill of Tiles. It was my refuge.

  I felt safe here, far from the harsh real world, far from the sounds of the war that had just broken out back in Europe. Denmark and Norway had been invaded and conquered, and Hitler was pursuing his preordained path of conquest. Most of the tourists in Egypt had decided they had better cut short their visit and return home, leaving me virtually the sole master of this underground archaeological marvel.

  As I descended the circular staircase, flanked with hand-carved niches and graves, I left all my worldly worries and sorrows behind. In the main room of the catacombs, with its funereal beds carved into the rocks on all sides, I felt completely at peace. A faint light illuminated the walls, making the Gorgon masks, the Roman caduceuses, and the obelisks of the pharaohs come alive, pulling me back into the past. I could have stayed there for hours, seated on my bed of stone, lost in my thoughts, dreaming of times long gone, until Mansour, the guardian, arrived to announce by tapping on the glass casing that it was closing time. Then it was a real struggle for me to wrench myself away from my idle forays through history and force myself back into the twentieth century.

  Although we had not had more than a dozen exchanges in the year that I had been coming here, Man-sour and I had become good friends. He was an authentic Bedouin chief, who had been chased out of the Libyan desert by the approach of the war. He and his whole retinue—which included several wives and God knows how many children—had sought refuge here in Egypt, where they barely managed to keep body and soul together, thanks mainly to his post as guardian of the catacombs. Once he had invited me into his “home”—little more than a shanty pieced together with wood and tin—to share with him the ritual glass of mint tea that Bedouin chiefs offer their honored guests.

  One day, upon arriving at the catacombs, I found to my surprise that Mansour was not at his accustomed post. Curious, I walked over to the large, triangular tent that housed his many children, to be greeted by a wild-looking young girl with gray-green, almond-shaped eyes. She was barefoot, and on her face—forehead, nose, and cheeks—were the delicate blue tattoos common to all Bedouins.

  She was dark-skinned and lively, like the halfwild goats that were part of Mansour’s retinue, and she was dressed more in rags than in what one could call clothes.

  “Where is Mansour?” I asked her in Arab.

  “My father is feeling ill.”

  “What’s the matter with him? Nothing serious, I trust.”

  “The heart,” she murmured, thrusting her hand through her rags onto her left breast.

  “A heart attack!” I exclaimed, genuinely upset.

  “Both things,” she said.

  “What do you mean, both things? Could you be clearer?”

  “The heart and the vagabond soul. His heart was choking. But his soul is ill as well.”

  “Is he in the hospital?”

  “Yes, since yesterday. But he gave me the keys.”

  She unlocked the catacomb doors, then disappeared.

  Seated on my stone bench in the banquet hall, I was dreaming of the pagan ceremonies that had taken place there between the lighted columns, opposite the two Anubises, the gods whose task it was to care for the dead, the gods who are lords of the necropolis. . . .

  I was daydreaming, trying to imagine where those who died wandered before they reached the Valley of the Immortals.

  A high-pitched laugh responded to my silent question. A laugh that echoed throughout the vaulted ceiling. And suddenly I saw her, only a few steps away from me, in her tattered dress. It was a strange apparition. I blinked my eyes.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, taken aback by her sudden arrival.

  “But I’ve come to see you, Destry effendi,” she said, hastening to add, “I learned your name from my father.”

  “Would you care to have a seat?”

  She spun around, the way a ballerina would, then sat down on the bench beside me. She laughed again, and her mischievous eyes stared boldly at mine.

  “I’ve been watching you for a long time,” she said. “My name is Yasmina.”

  “How old are you?” I asked her, more for something to say than because I really cared.

  “Sixteen.”

  I knew she was lying. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen, but I could sense that she was no longer a child.

  “You’re lying.”

  She reached over and pinched my lips with her thumb and finger, as if to tell me to hush. It was at that point that I must have made a strenuous effort to leave my historical daydreams behind and move back to my own era. She put her arms around my neck, and I rocked back onto the stone bench. Her mouth locked onto mine, and her tongue began to play over my lips ever so lightly, then moved onto my cheeks. Her hands, stained with henna, circled my body like will-o’-the-wisps in the semidarkness. She hugged me tightly, then opened the buttons of my shirt and snuggled against my chest. I didn’t know how to respond. It wasn’t as if I didn’t know what it was all about. I had lost my virginity years ago. My school friends and I had made our share of visits to the local whorehouse. But the gallant whores of our fair city, overworked by the hordes of soldiers who lined up for their services, were
not of a sort to make young men dream romantic dreams. In fact, my sexual experiences had been purely mechanical. Never before had I felt anything remotely like what I was feeling now, this vertigo, this total sensual abandonment. Yasmina was doing things to me that I had never felt before, and suddenly I desired her. Wildly. Now. Nothing existed in me except this overwhelming need to take her. I ripped off her rags, lay her down beneath me on the bed of stone, slipped my hand between her thighs and possessed her, without the least precaution. I was overcome by an enormous wave that welled up within me and filled my entire being, so strong that I felt my body trembling with desire from head to toe. And at the same time I heard her scream in pain. It was then that I realized Yasmina was a virgin.

  I fell in love with her on the spot. Hopelessly in love. Her name was on my lips a hundred times a day, raced endlessly through my head. Yasmina . . . Yasmina . . . I kept saying it out loud over and over again. When I wasn’t with her I spent all my time waiting for us to be together again. I loved to death this creature who had appeared out of nowhere. My nerves were constantly on edge, my blood was churning. I suffered and reveled in my suffering, savoring the first fruits of love before she reappeared. My heart was on fire. Yes, I know that’s a frightful cliché, but that’s how it was. I would arrive with my arms filled with sweets; I would embrace her, kiss her madly, completely out of control, and we would spend several hours making love on the old blanket I had sneaked out of the house.

  As soon as her father was back on his feet we had to abandon the banquet hall and find other secret places to make love, for the few tourists who were still in Egypt might have surprised us in the act now that Yasmina no longer was the keeper of the keys. The underground ruins of the ancient pharaohs provided us with a thousand possibilities, and we ended up choosing a little chapel that one could lock with a key as the site of our amorous exploits, with only the Ptolemaic gods who adorned the walls as our witnesses.

  To keep Mansour from becoming suspicious, I continued to pay weekly visits to the banquet hall of the catacombs, where I presumably would continue dreaming of times past. The ritual remained unchanged, the only difference being that my visits became shorter and shorter, and as for the content of my daydreams, their only subject was Yasmina. Sometimes I was overcome with doubt. I imagined that perhaps she did not really love me, that the only reason she had given herself to me was to escape the narrow world of her douar. Once, she had told me, her father took her with him to the fashionable streets of the big city, and she was dazzled by the bright lights, the stores, the markets, and the thousand and one temptations that beckoned wherever you looked. She was dying to escape her desert life. There was no way, she once said, that she was going to settle for the fate of generations of women before her, to live out her life in a Bedouin tent: an arranged marriage, pregnancies one after the other, exhausting, never-ending labors.

  She also had no illusion that flaunting her charms would lead her to the paradise that she envisioned. She knew it wouldn’t.

  Still, I sometimes had nightmares that she would in fact sell herself to the highest bidder, and when I imagined it I suffered the pangs of absolute hell. But the minute I saw her arrive, I chased the very notion from my mind. I was there, ready and willing to save her from her fate. I still believed that love was forever, and I vaguely understood that I could never love another woman.

  We spent every day of that enchanted summer together, and each day was a blessing renewed. No sadness except for my fears ever cast the slightest cloud over us in these months we spent together. We made plans for the future. The world was this chapel in which, like a raging torrent, we made love over and over again. I lived only for love, and when I left her, I prolonged our time together by reliving every minute of the hours just past, continuing to revel in the wonders of her body, her caresses, the way she looked at me while we were making love.

  Everything that stood between us—age, race, station—was as nothing, so great, so undying was my love.

  And then one day Yasmina failed to appear at the appointed hour, and I learned the agony of waiting. I did my best to reassure myself, conjuring up all sorts of reasons why she couldn’t come. And yet I returned home in a terrible state: I was sad, disappointed, and extremely worried. The next day I literally ran to Kom el-Chugafa. Again I waited for her in vain, pacing back and forth in the funeral chapel, listening for the slightest sound from the labyrinth, rushing toward the spiral staircase when I heard, or thought I heard, someone coming, then lying down on the stone and trying to fall asleep, in the vain hope that she would wake me up with a kiss.

  Four long days went by in this way. It was only the following Saturday that I saw her again, and I immediately knew that something had changed. Her smile was different, her eyes were sad. She was slipping away from me, and I needed her so much. Too much. I could not imagine that there could be an end to our happiness. That day I made love to her with a tenderness tinged with fear, and when it was over I did not hear the mischievous laugh that I had learned to love so much.

  She gently explained to me that her father had found her a job as a maid working for some Europeans, and therefore we would not be able to see each other as often as we had. In fact, only one day a week, Saturday, and she wasn’t even sure about that. Her employers were .very demanding, she said. Her hours were long and she was seldom let out of the house. She refused to tell me who they were or where they lived. She gave me a brief parting kiss, then said she would see me at the same time the following Saturday.

  For two long months I lived only in anticipation of those Saturdays. I seldom went out, and in an effort to make the time pass more quickly I drowned myself in books and writing. Fortunately, there was still Nicolas, with whom, despite the death of the Middle Eastern Review, I continued to dream of future literary fame and fortune. Through our writing would we find immortality. I was still mesmerized by my friend and lived completely in his shadow. Writing was the only area where I felt myself his equal. In fact, I found my ideas more original than his and my style far more brilliant.

  And yet today he is the one who has just won the biggest literary prize in the world—short of the Nobel. He’s the one basking in glory. As for me, I’m still in his shadow. He writes; I revise and correct. I’m his English publisher. Everyone knows him. No one knows me, except for a few professional colleagues.

  At the end of these dark weekly tunnels, these days of melancholy and literature, there was nonetheless a ray of light. Every Saturday I repaired to the funerary chapel to await, with pounding heart, Yasmina’s arrival. I always arrived first, to revel in the voluptuous state of anxiety that enveloped me until she appeared, but also to savor the pleasure of seeing her suddenly emerge out of the shadowy light of the crypt.

  Then one Saturday she arrived draped in an immaculate tara, which veiled her entire body from head to toe. She looked for all the world like some pagan goddess, a virgin, and she refused to let me touch her. She said she could only stay with me for a few minutes. I looked so utterly distraught that she took pity on me and ran her hands through my hair in a tender gesture.

  “Don’t forget to come next Saturday,” she murmured in my ear.

  And then she vanished into the darkness.

  I was never to see her again.

  On the following two Saturdays I returned to the site of our secret rendezvous. I waited for her there in an indescribable state of worry and despair. And I began to imagine all kinds of terrible things. She had fled back into the desert from which she had come. After all, these Bedouin girls were known to be unpredictable and untamable. They preferred the emptiness of the desert sands and winds to the confining life of cities. . . . But that made no sense. I knew that Mansour was an autocrat with his children.

  No, I would reassure myself, it’s nothing more complicated than that her employers are making her work on Saturdays. Hadn’t she told me how demanding they were? Of course, that was it. In the hope of catching a glimpse of her, I would wander for
hours throughout the wealthy parts of the city where the Europeans lived. But she was nowhere. . . .

  Then it came to me in a flash: she was having an affair with someone else! Of course, that was it! And I was overcome with uncontrollable rage.

  After that I imagined the worst. Was it possible that she had been murdered? Could her father, or her brother, have somehow discovered that she had been dishonored, and killed her to cleanse the family of the opprobrium? These crimes of honor among Bedouin tribes was not all that uncommon, and for the most part went unsolved and unpunished. From time to time there would be an article in the local paper about some poor woman, identity unknown, who had been found strangled or with a slit throat. And since the authorities could make no inroads into the Bedouin’s code of silence, there was little or no effort made to solve the crimes. No one was even very shocked by them, for these constantly moving, usually unregistered, members of the population were a law unto themselves.

  I spent my days searching for her. I spent my nights searching for her. I suffered more than I knew any human could suffer. If only I could see her, I kept pleading, if only I could see her one more time!

  At dusk I would climb the Hill of Tiles and there, leaning against a door to the tombs, as darkness began to fall, I would wait, hoping against hope, in a state of utter despair, petrified in my unhappiness, my eyes fixed on the tent where I had first laid eyes on Yasmina. Through the heavy black wool sides of the tent I could make out the silhouettes of people moving about, as I could hear the sound of voices and laughter coming from inside. Her laughter. No . . . not hers. Hours went by, and finally I would head home, sick with despair, my heart pounding so loudly that I could scarcely tell the difference between its incessant beat and the pounding surf of the nearby sea.

  Then, one morning, I saw her picture in the newspaper. Beneath her lovely face, which death had not disfigured, was the following caption: “The Unknown of the Canal.” She had been found on the banks of the Mahmoudieh Canal, stabbed to death. The article went on to say that the autopsy report had indicated that she was pregnant.