A Curse on Dostoevsky

by Atiq Rahimi

  Here?

  He bends down. Touches and explores the chain around his ankles.

  I had barely recovered my voice.

  Already, I am doomed.

  Already, I am dying.

  Dying, without a word, the final word?

  He huddles his head between his knees.

  He does not weep.

  Suddenly, there is the abrupt sound of a door opening, and then footsteps shuffle down the corridor. He springs up, bends his ear to the door. The footfall approaches and then stops. The jangling of a bunch of keys, and the door opens. The harsh light of a torch scours the gloom, blinding Rassoul. A young bearded man points his gun at Rassoul and then waves in someone who has remained in the corridor. The face of the clerk appears. He comes in carrying a small tray in one hand, and a weak lantern in the other. Rassoul rushes forward to greet him. “Don’t move!” screams the guard. The clerk turns toward him: “In the name of Allah, don’t shout so loud!” and comes into the cell to hand Rassoul the tray. “We told you to stay and eat with us, and you didn’t want to. You seemed in a hurry to get here … so, are you happy now?”

  “No.”

  “But this is what you wanted, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but not like this.”

  “How, then? Did you think they would take you to the Intercontinental Hotel, in a flower-strewn car, with an orchestra playing?”

  “I’m talking about the sentence, not the welcome. This sentence without a trial. I don’t want to leave the world without saying anything, without having the last word.”

  “Who do you think you are? The Prophet? Because your name means the Holy Messenger?” The clerk puts the lamp on the ground. “Sit down and eat something!”

  “Where is Commandant Parwaiz?”

  “Who is Commandant Parwaiz?”

  “The head of security for Kabul; he works at the Ministry of Information and Culture.”

  “So?”

  “I want to see him.”

  “It’s already dark. They’ve announced a curfew tonight. There’s a lot of fighting outside; even a fly wouldn’t risk the journey. I’m going to stay here with you for a while.” He says to the guard: “We would like a few minutes together. Can you take off his chains? I swear he won’t try to escape. Don’t worry. He came here because he wanted to.”

  “And he’ll leave because he wants to, as well!”

  “I’ll take responsibility. You know me. He’s a Muslim too. He’s made a mistake—let him unburden his heart.”

  The guard thinks for a moment and then yields, asking for a little tobacco. Rassoul offers him his pack. “He smokes Marlboro, the bastard!” He takes two, returns the pack, and leaves.

  The clerk sits down. “Come on, eat something.” He pushes the tray toward Rassoul, who isn’t hungry, or doesn’t feel like eating.

  “Eat! You’ll feel hungry once you start eating. Give yourself a little nourishment so that your blood can irrigate your brain; that way you might understand something! Why must you joke around with these guys?”

  “I’m not joking. I want to be sentenced because I’m a murderer, not because my father was a communist.”

  “You are either naïve, have never lived in this country, or don’t know anything about Islam and fiqh. You know, in sharia, killing someone is a crime dealt with by qisas: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. And that’s it. It is a sentence concerned with the claims of man, so the victim’s family decides the punishment. You, on the other hand, as a communist, represent fitna, discord. Therefore, you are judged by the law of hudud, equal penalty, a punishment established by the claims of God. Do you understand? I hope this isn’t a riddle for you.”

  “I understand perfectly. But first of all, my father was a communist, not me! And …”

  “No, you don’t understand anything! Since when has anyone been judged as an individual in this country? Never! You are not what you are, but what your parents and tribe are. But perhaps that’s a little complex for you. Come on, eat something!”

  “Even you don’t take me seriously.”

  “I take you seriously, but I don’t understand you, because even you don’t really understand what’s eating at you. Is it guilt? Or the absurdity of your crime?”

  “Neither. It’s a profound discontentment with life.”

  “Now don’t mix things up. It’s because you are struggling to come to terms with your crime, your guilt …”

  “I’m struggling to come to terms with my crime, because it hasn’t surprised anyone. And no one understands it. I am weary. Weary and lost …”

  Weary and lost, and with these five words suspended in his soul: What is to be done.

  It is dark, and the clerk cannot see these words in Rassoul’s eyes the way he saw them in the eyes of the donkey.

  He must tell this old man the Nayestan story. Perhaps he will understand it.

  So he tells him.

  This time, he lingers on two moments in the tale. First, the strange feelings he had in the reeds at the end of the day, when he woke from a deep sleep: “I was invaded by a feeling of dread—vague at first, and then palpable. It was accompanied, bizarrely, by a strange sense of detachment. A detachment that didn’t come from inside me; it was there, in the sky, the reeds, the wind, outside me … Everything was slipping away from my body, my spirit, in a word from my djan. Everything was moving away from me. Where did this sense come from? The empty sky? The breeze in the reeds? My father’s futile waiting? I still don’t understand.”

  After that, of course, he describes very closely the look in the donkey’s eyes. This time, he reads another feeling into that look: “It wasn’t only expressing his helplessness, What is to be done, but also his weariness, begging: ‘Do away with me!’ That’s what the donkey was asking. It didn’t understand what had happened. It felt condemned to walk up and down the same path forever. Therefore, it wanted to die. And because it was unable, it was asking us to carry it out. By forcing its execution on us, it also made us reflect on our own situation, our own lot.”

  The clerk gives Rassoul a piece of bread, and takes one for himself. As he dips his bread into the stew, he says, “That is a beautiful story. It reminds me of one by Mullah Nasrudin. One day, Mullah returns home happy and full of joy. His wife asks him why. Mullah replies: ‘I’ve lost my donkey.’ His wife retorts: ‘And that makes you happy?’ He says: ‘It does! I’m happy because I wasn’t riding the donkey when I lost it, or I would have lost myself, as well!’ I know this isn’t the time to be telling funny stories, but your story made me think of it. You were lost because the donkey was lost. And today, you want to be condemned to death because that is what the donkey taught you! It is good, very good, to learn everything from everything: even the desire to die, and especially from a beast.” He stands up. “Tomorrow, as soon as dawn breaks, at first prayers, I will search out your commandant. Now eat, and sleep.” He takes his lantern and leaves, reciting in the silence of the corridor: “The Revelations of Devout and Learn’d / Who rose before us, and as Prophets burn’d, / Are all but Stories, which, awoke from Sleep, / They told their fellows, and to Sleep return’d.” He disappears into the black intensity of the night.

  * * *

  Rassoul sits down. His cell has been invaded by the smell of food. Repellent. He picks up the tray and carries it out. At the end of the corridor, a weak light ruptures the darkness, drawing Rassoul to a half-open door. He finds the young guard smoking a joint. Rassoul hands over the tray and the guard thanks him, and offers him a drag. “I’ve been here eight months. You are my first and only prisoner. Didn’t you have anything better to do than hand yourself in, and create work for us? What did you do?” he asks, stuffing some bread into his mouth.

  “I killed someone.”

  “Your father?”

  “No.”

  “Your mother?”

  “No.”

  “Your brother?”

  “No.”

  “Your sister?”

  �
��No. No one in my family. I just killed an old woman.”

  “In vengeance?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They fall silent, sleepy, staring blankly at the wreaths of smoke flowing up from the burnt wings of an owlet moth, come to honor the lantern’s flame.

  ARAY of light shines through the window, illuminating a section of damp, crumbling wall covered in prisoners’ graffiti. A philosopher has scribbled “Everything passes in the end”; someone who must have been in love: “Love is not a sin,” and finally, a poet:

  I myself am stupefied

  And by dreams occupied,

  The world entire is deep in slumber,

  I, impotent to speak; they, incompetent to hear.

  Rassoul knows the graffitti off by heart. He has already heard it, already read it. But it is the poem that intrigues him most. Who wrote it originally, and then on this wall? When? And for whom?

  For me.

  He walks up to the wall and runs his hand over the writing. But the sound of footsteps striding up the corridor freezes his fingers on the letters. Someone opens the door and several armed men burst into his cell, their faces hidden in the gloom. Rassoul huddles into himself, before glancing up at the sound of a familiar voice.

  “And how is our watandar?” It is Parwaiz, accompanied by the clerk and two other men. Rassoul leaps to his feet: “Salam!” Parwaiz is surprised: “Well, now! You’ve got your voice back?”

  “Yes, two days ago.”

  “Then you can tell me the whole story, at last. I want to hear it all, in your own words.”

  “I went to hand myself over to the law.”

  “So the court clerk told me,” says Parwaiz. Rassoul continues: “The night I was first brought to your office, I had just committed a murder.”

  The commandant leaves the cell, motioning Rassoul to follow him. “There is no such thing as coincidence! Why did you kill?”

  “Why? I don’t know.”

  Parwaiz stops and stares at him: “Like all of us!”

  “That may be. But …” He stops. The clerk takes his chance to interrupt: “Commandant sahib, he killed to save his fiancée.”

  “What did your fiancée do?” Parwaiz asks Rassoul, who finds himself unable to speak. He is ashamed, and his silence speaks louder than words.

  “Nana Alia wanted to train her up …”

  “Yes.”

  “You did right, then,” says Parwaiz with a conviction that stuns Rassoul and provokes a laugh from the clerk behind him. Rassoul stops walking; he thinks I did right? Parwaiz is not taking me seriously, either—and he is Head of Security, a mujahideen, a man of the law. He says: “What do you mean, I did right? It was murder, premeditated murder …” Faced with the commandant’s silence, he falls silent again.

  They enter the building that houses the Law Archives. The clerk leaves them at the door to a large furnished room, nodding at Rassoul as if to say not goodbye but You idiot!

  Parwaiz drops into a battered old sofa and invites Rassoul to sit down opposite him. He continues, as if he had never stopped speaking: “In your position I would have done exactly the same thing.”

  “But what was the point—I wasn’t able to change anything, for my fiancée or myself. It did no one any good. It has caused more suffering than good.”

  “To do good, one must first suffer …”

  “Worse still, my life has become hellish. I’ve lost both my fiancée and the money … A murder for nothing … Even the body has disappeared. Everyone just thinks Nana Alia went to the countryside. Tell me, could any crime be more absurd?”

  “First, tell me why you didn’t see your crime through to its proper conclusion?”

  “That’s exactly what I’ve been asking myself. Perhaps because I wasn’t able to …”

  “Or because you didn’t want to. Because you are not a thief. You are a good man.”

  “But it was also Dostoevsky’s fault.”

  “Dostoevsky? What has your beloved author done now?”

  “He stopped me from carrying the act to its conclusion.”

  “How so?”

  “The moment I lifted the ax to bring it down on the old woman’s head the thought of Crime and Punishment flashed into my mind. I was struck to the very core … Dostoevsky, yes, it’s him! He stopped me from following in Raskolnikov’s footsteps, becoming prey to my remorse, sinking into the abyss of guilt, and ending up in prison …”

  “But where are you now?”

  Rassoul lowers his head and mutters: “I don’t know … nowhere.”

  “Rassoul-djan, you read too much. That’s fine. But there’s one thing you should know: your fate is written in one book and one book only: the Lawh Mahfuz, the ‘Preserved Tablet,’ written by …” he points up at the ceiling, where a few flies are buzzing around. “Other books cannot change anything, in the world or in a person’s life. Listen: Was Dostoevsky able to change anything in his country? Was he able to influence Stalin, for instance?”

  “No. But if he hadn’t written that book he might have murdered someone himself. And he gave me this conscience, this ability to judge myself, and to judge Stalin. That in itself is huge, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, it is huge,” agrees Parwaiz, before retreating into a long silence. Then he says: “That is why I congratulate you on your conscience and your act!” He smiles. “You managed to wipe out a loathsome element of our society. The death of this woman must have been a great relief to many people. In fact, that explains the disappearance of her body—it was probably her own family. And if you hadn’t murdered her, someone else would have; Allah would have; a rocket would’ve fallen on her … who knows! So you must see that you have helped several people …”

  “And what about me?”

  “What about you?”

  “What good has it done me?”

  “You must see that you have done something important: you have restored justice.”

  “Justice! But what justice? Who I am to decide if someone lives or dies? To kill is a crime, the most horrible crime a human being can commit.”

  “Watandar, murder is a crime when the victim is innocent. This woman needed to be punished. She had done wrong to your family, your namouss. She had dishonored you. What you did is called vengeance. No one has the right to judge you as a murderer. The end.”

  “Commandant, my problem is not with how others judge me; my problem is with myself. This suffering which gnaws away at me from the inside, like a wound, a festering wound that will not heal.”

  “In that case, there are only two solutions: either you amputate the injured limb, or you grow accustomed to the pain.” He takes off his pakol, turns his head, and points to the back of his skull. “Look at that.”

  Rassoul bends forward to look.

  “Touch it.”

  Rassoul brings his hand up, nervously; his fingers brush the commandant’s skull. “Can you feel anything?” Rassoul hesitates to reply, then suddenly pulls away his hand.

  “Do you know what that is?” Parwaiz replaces his pakol. “A piece of shrapnel. It’s been in my skull for years. It was during the jihad. I had come home to see my wife and son. The Russians had heard we’d come to the village, and they bombed it. Our house was hit by a rocket. A large fragment martyred my family, and a small fragment lodged itself in my skull. I never wanted to have it taken out. I wanted to live with it, so the pain would constantly remind me of my family’s death. Throughout the jihad this piece of shrapnel gave me strength, and hope. A French doctor told me that unless I had it removed, I wouldn’t live for more than ten years. But I don’t want to live for more than ten years.” A loud laugh to lighten his bitter words. “You too have a piece of shrapnel—an internal one, an internal wound, a wound that has given you strength.”

  “What kind of strength?”

  “The strength to live, and to create justice.”

  A young man brings them breakfast. The commandant asks him for news of Jano. “No news. We still haven’t
found him.”

  “What do you mean? He hasn’t just disappeared into thin air! Search everywhere!”

  “I bumped into him four or five days ago,” interrupts Rassoul.

  “Where?”

  “He invited me to drink tea with him in the Sufi chai-khana. Inside, he met some mujahideen with whom you carried out a joint operation during the jihad, against a Russian military base.”

  “Can you remember their names?”

  “They had served under Commandant … Nawroz, I think it was.” Parwaiz is looking more and more distressed. He tells the young man to go to the chai-khana and see what he can discover. After a moment’s thought, he continues: “Take the case of Jano. He is my adopted son. The Russians destroyed his village and massacred his family. But he has a lion’s will to survive, which stems precisely from his desire for vengeance.” He falls quiet, to give Rassoul a chance to ponder his words.

  “Your wounds are wounds inflicted by others. But I inflicted my own wound. Instead of increasing my strength, it is smothering me, leading me nowhere. Sometimes, I think I wanted to murder that old woman just to find out if I was capable of killing, like everyone else …” He lowers his head. Parwaiz pours more tea and Rassoul continues, as if talking to himself: “I saw that I wasn’t cut out for it. The other day I wanted to kill someone else, and I didn’t …”

  “Perhaps that person was innocent?”

  “Innocent? I don’t know. But he had insulted my fiancée, chased her out of the Shah-e do Shamshira Wali mosque.”

  “Is that all?” He puts the tea in front of Rassoul. “You can’t kill without a reason.”

  “Perhaps I wanted to kill him in order to deal with my botched murder.”

  “But that murder would have been botched, too, because you had done it for no reason.”

  “I think that’s what happens. You return to a job in the hope of forgetting the previous one that you think you botched … And that is how crimes continue, in a vicious circle. That’s why I handed myself over to the law, so they could try me and put an end to all this.”