The Blind Owl and Other Stories

by Sadegh Hedayat

  She asked me in a sarcastic tone, “How are you feeling?”

  I replied, “Aren’t you perfectly free? Don’t you do everything you feel like doing? What does my health matter to you?”

  She left the room, slamming the door behind her. She did not turn to look at me. It seems as though I have forgotten how to talk to the people of this world, to living people. She, the woman who I had thought was devoid of all feelings, was offended at my behaviour! Several times I thought of getting up and going to her to fall at her feet, weeping and asking her to forgive me. Yes, weeping; for I thought that if only I could weep I should find relief. Some time passed; whether it was to be measured in minutes, hours or centuries I do not know. I had become like a madman and I derived an exquisite pleasure from the pain I felt. It was a pleasure which transcended human experience, a pleasure which only I was capable of feeling and which the gods themselves, if they existed, could not have experienced to such a degree. At that moment I was conscious of my superiority. I felt my superiority to the men of the rabble, to nature and to the gods – the gods, that product of human lusts. I had become a god. I was greater than God, and I felt within me the eternal, infinite flux…

  She came back. So then she was not as cruel as I had thought. I rose, kissed the hem of her dress and fell at her feet, weeping and coughing. I rubbed my face against her leg and several times I called her by her real name. It seemed to me that the sound of her real name had a peculiar ring. And at the same time in my heart, in the bottom of my heart, I said, “Bitch… bitch!” I kissed her legs; the skin tasted like the stub end of a cucumber, faintly acrid and bitter. I wept and wept. How much time passed so I do not know. When I came to myself she had gone. It may be that the space of time in which I had experienced all the pleasures, the caresses and the pain of which the nature of man is susceptible had not lasted more than a moment. I was alone, in the same posture as when I used to sit with my opium pipe beside the brazier, sitting by my smoky oil lamp like the old odds-and-ends man behind his wares. I did not budge from my place but sat watching the smoke of the lamp. Particles of soot from the flame settled on my hands and face like black snow. My nurse came in with my supper, a bowl of barley broth and a plate of greasy chicken pilaff. She uttered a scream of terror, dropped the tray and ran out of the room. It pleased me to think that I was able at any rate to frighten her. I rose to my feet, snuffed the lamp wick and stood in front of the mirror. I smeared the particles of soot over my face. How frightful was the face that I saw! I pulled down my lower eyelids, released them, tugged at the corners of my mouth, puffed out my cheeks, pulled the tip of my beard upwards and twisted it out to the sides and grimaced at myself. My face had a natural talent for comical and horrible expressions. I felt that they enabled me to see with my own eyes all the weird shapes, all the comical, horrible, unbelievable images which lurked in the recesses of my mind. They were all familiar to me, I felt them within me, and yet at the same time they struck me as comical. All of these grimacing faces existed inside me and formed part of me: horrible, criminal, ludicrous masks which changed at a single movement of my fingertip. The old Koran-reader, the butcher, my wife – I saw all of them within me. They were reflected in me as in a mirror; the forms of all of them existed inside me but none of them belonged to me. Were not the substance and the expressions of my face the result of a mysterious sequence of impulsions, of my ancestors’ temptations, lusts and despairs? And I who was the custodian of the heritage, did I not, through some mad, ludicrous feeling, consider it my duty, whether I liked it or not, to preserve this stock of facial expressions? Probably my face would be released from this responsibility and would assume its own natural expression only at the moment of my death… But even then would not the expressions which had been incised on my face by a sardonic resolve leave their traces behind, too deeply engraved to be effaced? At all events I now knew what possibilities existed within me, I appreciated my own capabilities.

  Suddenly I burst into laughter. It was a harsh, grating, horrible laugh which made the hairs on my body stand on end. For I did not recognize my own laughter. It seemed to come from someone other than me. I felt that it had often reverberated in the depths of my throat and that I had heard it in the depths of my ears. Simultaneously I began to cough. A clot of bloody phlegm, a fragment of my inside, fell onto the mirror. I wiped it across the glass with my fingertip. I turned round and saw Nanny staring at me. She was horror-stricken. She was holding in her hand a bowl of barley broth which she had brought me, thinking that I might now be able to eat my supper. I covered my face with my hands and ran behind the curtain which hung across the entrance to the closet.

  Later, as I was falling asleep, I felt as though my head was clamped in a fiery ring. The sharp exciting perfume of sandalwood oil with which I had filled my lamp penetrated my nostrils. It contained within it the odour of my wife’s legs, and I felt in my mouth the faintly bitter taste of the stub end of a cucumber. I ran my hand over my body and mentally compared it – thighs, calves, arms and the rest – with my wife’s. I could see again the line of her thigh and buttocks, could feel the warmth of her body. The illusion was far stronger than a mere mental picture; it had the force of a physical need. I wanted to feel her body close to mine. A single gesture, a single effort of the will would have been enough to dispel the voluptuous temptation. Then the fiery ring around my head grew so tight and so burning hot that it sank deep into a mysterious sea peopled with terrifying shapes.

  It was still dark when I was awakened by the voices of a band of drunken policemen who were marching along the street, joking obscenely among themselves. They sang in chorus:

  Come, let us go and drink wine;

  Let us drink wine of the Kingdom of Rey.

  If we do not drink now, when should we drink?

  I remembered – no, I had a sudden flash of inspiration: I had some wine in the closet, a bottle of wine which contained a portion of cobra venom. One gulp of that wine, and all the nightmares of life would fade as though they had never been… But what about the bitch?… The word intensified my longing for her, brought her before me full of vitality and warmth. What better could I do than give her a glass of that wine and drink off another myself? Then we should die together in a single convulsion. What is love? For the rabble-men it is an obscenity, a carnal, ephemeral thing. The rabble-men must needs express their love in lascivious songs, in obscenities and in the foul phrases they are always repeating, drunk or sober – “shoving the donkey’s hoof into the mud”, “giving the ground a thump”, and so forth. Love for her meant something different to me. True, I had known her for many years. Her strange, slanting eyes, small, half-open mouth, husky, soft voice – all of these things were charged with distant, painful memories and in all of them I sought something of which I had been deprived, something that was intimately connected with my being and which had been taken from me.

  Had I been deprived of this thing for all time to come? The fear that it might be so aroused in me a grimmer feeling. The thought of the other pleasure, the one which might compensate me for my hopeless love, had become a kind of obsession. For some reason the figure of the butcher opposite the window of my room occurred to me. I remembered how he would roll up his sleeves, utter the sacred formula “besmellah”* and proceed to cut up his meat. His expression and attitude were always present to my mind. In the end I too came to a decision, a frightful decision. I got out of bed, rolled up my sleeves and took out the bone-handled knife which I had hidden underneath my pillow. I stooped and threw a yellow cloak over my shoulders and muffled my neck and face in a scarf. I felt that as I did so I assumed an attitude of mind which was a cross between that of the butcher and that of the old odds-and-ends man.

  Then I went on tiptoe towards my wife’s room. When I reached it I found that it was quite dark. I softly opened the door. She seemed to be dreaming. She cried, loudly and distinctly, “Take your scarf off.” I went over to her bedside and
bent down until I could feel her warm, even breath upon my face. What pleasant warmth and vitality there was in her breath! It seemed to me that if only I could breathe in this warmth for a while I should come to life again. I had thought for so long that other people’s breath must be burning hot like mine. I looked around carefully to see if there was anyone else in the room, to make sure that none of her lovers was there. She was alone. I realized that all the things people said about her were mere slander. How did I know that she was not still a virgin? I was ashamed of all my unfair suspicions.

  This sensation lasted only a minute. Suddenly from outside the door came the sound of a sneeze and I heard a stifled mocking laugh, of a quality to make the hairs on one’s body stand on end. The sound contracted every nerve in my body. If I had not heard the sneeze and the laugh, if the man, whoever he was, had not given me pause,* I should have carried out my decision and cut her body into pieces. I should have given the meat to the butcher opposite our house to sell to his customers, and, in fulfilment of a special resolution, I myself should have given a piece of the flesh of her thigh to the old Koran-reader and gone to him on the following day and said, “Do you know where that meat you ate last night came from?” If he had not laughed, I should have done this. I should have had to do it in the dark, so that I should not have been compelled to meet the bitch’s eye. Her expression of reproach would have been too much for me. Finally I snatched up a piece of cloth which was trailing from her bed and in which my foot had caught, and fled from the room. I tossed the knife up onto the roof, because it was the knife that had suggested the idea of murder to me. I got rid of a knife which was identical with the one I had seen in the butcher’s hand.

  When I got back to my room, I saw by the light of my oil lamp that the cloth I had taken with me was her nightdress: a soiled nightdress which had been in contact with her flesh; a soft, silk nightdress of Indian make. It smelt of her body and of champac perfume, and it still held something of the warmth of her body, something of her. I held it against my face and breathed deeply. Then I lay down, placed it between my legs and fell asleep. I had never slept as soundly as I did that night. Early in the morning I was awoken by my wife’s clamours. She was lamenting the disappearance of her nightdress and kept repeating at the top of her voice, “A brand-new nightdress!” despite the fact that it had a tear in the sleeve. I would not have given it back to her to save my life. Surely I was entitled to keep an old nightdress of my own wife’s.

  When Nanny brought me my ass’s milk, honey and bread I found that she had placed a bone-handled knife on the tray beside the breakfast things. She said she had noticed it among the old odds-and-ends man’s wares and had bought it from him. Then she said, raising her eyebrows, “Let’s hope it’ll come in handy some day.” I picked it up and examined it. It was my own knife. Then Nanny said in a querulous, offended tone, “Oh yes, my daughter” (she meant the bitch) “was saying this morning that I stole her nightdress during the night. I don’t want to have to answer for anything connected with you two. Anyway, she began to bleed yesterday… I knew it was the baby… According to her, she got pregnant at the baths.* I went to her room to massage her belly during the night and I noticed her arms were all black and blue. She showed them to me and said, ‘I went down to the cellar at an unlucky time, and the Good People gave me an awful pinching.’” She went on, “Did you know your wife’s been pregnant for a long time?” I laughed and said, “I dare say the child’ll look like the old man that reads the Koran. I suppose it gave its first leap when she was looking at the old man’s face.”* Nanny looked at me indignantly and went out of the room. Apparently she had not expected such a reply. I rose hastily, picked up the bone-handled knife with a trembling hand, put it away in the box in the closet and shut the lid.

  No, it was out of the question that the baby should have leapt when she was looking at my face. It must have been the old odds-and-ends man.

  Some time during the afternoon the door of my room opened and her little brother came in, biting his nail. You could tell the moment you saw them that they were brother and sister. The resemblance was extraordinary. He had full, moist, sensual lips, languid, heavy eyelids, slanting, wondering eyes, high cheekbones, unruly, date-coloured hair and a complexion the colour of ripe wheat. He was the image of the bitch and he had a touch of her satanic spirit. His was one of those impassive, soulless Turkoman faces which are so appropriate to a people engaged in an unremitting battle with life, a people which regards any action as permissible if it helps to go on living. Nature had shaped this brother and sister over many generations. Their ancestors had lived exposed to sun and rain, battling unceasingly with their environment, and had not only transmitted to them faces and characters modified correspondingly but had bequeathed to them a share of their stubbornness, sensuality, rapacity and hungriness. I remembered the taste of his lips, faintly bitter, like that of the stub end of a cucumber.

  When he came into the room he looked at me with his wondering Turkoman eyes and said, “Mummy says the doctor said you are going to die and it’ll be a good riddance for us. How do people die?”

  I said, “Tell her I have been dead for a long time.”

  “Mummy said, ‘If I hadn’t had a miscarriage the whole house would have belonged to us.’”

  I involuntarily burst out laughing. It was a hollow, grating laugh, of a quality to make the hairs on one’s body stand on end. I did not recognize the sound of my own voice. The child ran from the room in terror.

  I realized then why it was that the butcher found it pleasant to wipe the blade of his bone-handled knife on the legs of the sheep. The pleasure of cutting up the raw meat in which dead, coagulated blood had settled, like slime on the bottom of a tank, while a watery liquid dripped from the windpipes onto the ground – the yellow dog outside the shop, the severed ox head on the floor, staring dimly, and the heads of the sheep themselves with the dust of death on their eyes, they too had seen this, they too knew what the butcher felt.

  I understood now that I had become a miniature God. I had transcended the mean, paltry needs of mankind and felt within me the flux of eternity. What is eternity? To me eternity meant to play hide-and-seek with the bitch on the bank of the Suran, to shut my eyes for a single moment and hide my face in the skirt of her dress.

  All at once I realized that I was talking to myself and that in a strange way. I was trying to talk to myself but my lips had become so heavy that they were incapable of the least movement. Yet although my lips did not stir and I could not hear my voice I felt that I was talking to myself.

  In this room which was steadily shrinking and growing dark like the grave, night had surrounded me with its fearful shadows. In the light of the smoky oil lamp my shadow, in the sheep-skin jacket, cloak and scarf that I was wearing, was stretched motionless across the wall. The shadow that I cast upon the wall was much denser and more distinct than my real body. My shadow had become more real than myself. The old odds-and-ends man, the butcher, Nanny and the bitch, my wife, were shadows of me, shadows in the midst of which I was imprisoned. I had become like a screech owl, but my cries caught in my throat and I spat them out in the form of clots of blood. Perhaps screech owls are subject to a disease which makes them think as I think. My shadow on the wall had become exactly like an owl and, leaning forwards, read intently every word I wrote. Without doubt he understood perfectly. Only he was capable of understanding. When I looked out of the corner of my eye at my shadow on the wall I felt afraid.

  It was a dark, silent night like the night which had enveloped all my being, a night peopled with fearful shapes which grimaced at me from door and wall and curtain. At times my room became so narrow that I felt that I was lying in a coffin. My temples were burning. My limbs were incapable of the least movement. A weight was pressing on my chest like the weight of the carcasses they sling over the backs of horses and deliver to the butchers.

  Death was murmuring his song in my ea
r like a stammering man who is obliged to repeat each word and who, when he has come to the end of a line, has to begin it afresh. His song penetrated my flesh like the whine of a saw. He would raise his voice and suddenly fall silent.

  My eyes were not yet closed when a band of drunken policemen marched by in the street outside my room, joking obscenely among themselves. Then they sang in chorus:

  Come, let us go and drink wine;

  Let us drink wine of the Kingdom of Rey.

  If we do not drink now, when should we drink?

  I said to myself, “Since the police are going to get me in the end…” Suddenly I felt within me a superhuman force. My forehead grew cool. I rose, threw a yellow cloak over my shoulders and wrapped my scarf two or three times around my neck. I bent down, went into the closet and took out the bone-handled knife which I had hidden in the box. Then I went on tiptoe towards the bitch’s room. When I reached the door I saw that the room was in complete darkness. I listened and heard her voice saying, “Have you come? Take your scarf off.” Her voice had a pleasant quality, as it had had in her childhood. It reminded me of the unconscious murmuring of someone who is dreaming. I myself had heard this voice in the past when I was in a deep sleep. Was she dreaming? Her voice was husky and thick. It had become like the voice of the little girl who had played hide-and-seek with me on the banks of the Suran. I stood motionless. Then I heard her say again, “Come in. Take your scarf off.”