“I’ll pay you for it,” she said.
“I’ll write your letter,” said Gohar. “Do you have what we need?”
“Yes. Thank you for your kindness. Come into my room, we’ll be more comfortable.”
He stood up painfully and followed her into the room. It was the bedroom of a reasonably priced prostitute with a big iron bed, a couch, a chair, and a mirrored armoire. It smelled of powder and cheap perfume. The bed, covered with a pistachio-green eiderdown, was made up; work hadn’t begun yet. Gohar rushed forward to close the shutters; his aching nerves needed darkness; it was his only protection against pain. Arnaba rummaged around in the armoire, took from it a piece of paper and a pencil that she gave to Gohar, then sat down on the edge of the bed and began to watch him with extreme curiosity.
Gohar let himself fall onto the couch, set his cane beside him, and prepared to write the letter. He waited for her to dictate what he should write, but she seemed to have forgotten why he was there. Her behavior was that of someone waiting to have a glorious time. She still had the smile of a depraved young girl.
“You wanted to see Yeghen?”
“Yes,” said Gohar. “I need him for something.”
“Is it very urgent?”
“Extremely urgent. But that’s all right, he’ll come eventually.”
“I’m sorry he’s not here. He might not be long now.”
Gohar’s suffering had become intolerable. It radiated throughout his body at the sound of Yeghen’s name.
“You know him well?” he asked.
“Who? Yeghen? Oh, he amuses me. It seems he’s a poet; he told me so.”
“It’s true,” said Gohar. “He’s even a great poet.”
“How funny! Tell me, is it customary for poets to ask girls for money?”
Gohar was suddenly very interested. He didn’t know Yeghen also practiced the trade of pimp. That was news!
“Why? He asked you for money?”
“Yes. He told me a whole story about his mother. It seems she died and that he needs money for the burial. He swore to me that he’s kept the corpse for a week. What do you think of that?”
Despite the tragedy of the situation, Gohar nearly broke into laughter. He was sure there wasn’t a shred of truth in the story; he knew Yeghen well enough to believe him capable of dreaming up anything to worm money from his numerous admirers. When it came to finding money, especially for buying drugs, Yeghen’s imagination sometimes reached madness.
“And you gave him some?”
“I’m not stupid,” said the girl. “I send all the money I make to my uncle who raised me. He warned me to watch out for pimps.”
“You’re a responsible girl,” said Gohar.
“You’re making fun of me.” The girl laughed.
“Not at all. I’m quite sincere.”
Gohar reflected. His passionate interest in Yeghen’s busy life led him to examine the workings of his mad ventures in great detail. Beyond this story, with its incontestable element of black humor, there was a reality of poverty and deprivation that was impossible to ignore. For Yeghen to resort to hustling money with his mother’s false corpse didn’t especially surprise him; he suspected him of even more cynical things. It could simply mean he was at the end of his resources. There was even a strong possibility that he was out of drugs. Gohar was stunned by this discovery. He suddenly wanted to flee the room in search of Yeghen, but he did nothing.
He looked at the girl.
She was sitting on the edge of the bed, her legs parted, her dressing gown loose on her body, her firm breasts pointing through the silk like two ripe pomegranates. Gohar looked at her indifferently, though perplexed by the girl’s beauty. In this half-light scented with recent wantonness, she acquired a surprising importance. The smile playing on her painted lips seemed to want to lure him into a trap. Gohar was suffocating. The proximity of this young flesh so boldly offered aroused a vague, almost abstract desire in him. It had been ages since he’d wanted to sleep with anyone and had rejected all carnal involvement with people. His life was confined to the simplest things: no longer subject to the violence of passion, it ran smoothly like a placid dream. There was only the drug. Again the intolerable need for hashish assailed him, made him gasp for breath. How long would he have to wait? He felt that his vital organs had grown soft and mushy. He struggled to hold on and managed to overcome the convulsions racking his body. He had to clear up one doubt immediately.
“When did he ask you for money?”
“This morning,” answered the girl. “We chatted for a while. He looked sad and discouraged.”
Doubt was no longer possible. Yeghen only looked sad and discouraged when he was deprived of drugs. That was the only time his optimism faltered. Gohar was almost ready to succumb to despair, but his confidence in Yeghen’s boundless genius saved him. Yeghen always managed to find drugs in the end; he had a thousand ways to escape disaster. Gohar believed in miracles. Not in grandiose, faraway miracles, but in the simple miracles of daily life. And drugs were such a miracle.
“What do I say to your uncle?”
Arnaba dropped her lascivious smile and little-girl pose to assume a profound and thoughtful air.
“The usual thing,” she said. “Tell him that I’m doing well, that I’m happy here, and that I’m working a lot. I think that’s enough.”
Gohar lowered his head and made as if to begin to write, but, in truth, he still wasn’t able to. Holding the pencil with a trembling hand, he put the paper on his knees and racked his brain for an opening phrase. After all, this man wasn’t his uncle. How would a whore write to her uncle? Gohar hesitated among several possible openings. He knew nothing at all about family sentiment.
He raised his head again and looked at the girl. The desire that had skimmed over him a moment ago hadn’t left a trace; this languid body provocatively abandoned on the pistachio eiderdown had ceased to interest him. Something else had captured his attention—the golden bracelets covering her bare arms.
These golden bracelets had unleashed a powerful emotion in him, and his eyes wouldn’t leave them. For a few seconds he was dizzy; he touched his forehead and shook himself, fighting with all his power against the spell of a terrible thought that was worming its way into him against his will. With wild despair he tried to drive it away, but it resisted his supplications. All that gold represented the value of an infinite quantity of drugs, a source of serene delights for months or even years to come. Gohar tried to figure the exact quantity of drugs he could buy with such a fortune, but the immensity of the task stymied him, and he abandoned his calculations. His dream of traveling returned, not as a distant project but with all the intensity of a feasible action. The journey to Syria became a near and tangible reality. In great detail he imagined this journey to the land of his dreams, where hashish grew in the fields as freely as common clover. The seductive effect that these images of another world had on his brain made him nearly delirious. Suddenly he saw himself attacking the girl to snatch away her bracelets, but just then Arnaba moved her arm, and the jingle of the gold bracelets in the room’s silence terrified him. He quickly came out of his torpor and feverishly began to write.
Arnaba felt proud and amused; she was certain Gohar’s bizarre look was the manifestation of his carnal lust. She knew she was pretty, and so his trembling could only be a sign of his desire for her. She was a village girl, ignorant and primitive, devoid of nuance, stuck in the ways of a primal sexuality. For her, Gohar’s desire was the only reason for his confusion, and she promised herself she would sleep with him to thank him.
Gohar wrote silently, struggling to concentrate. Despite the triteness of the words used, he had trouble composing his sentences. He was plagued by a new torment, completely foreign to his nature. A moment ago he had gloried in the absurd temptation to surrender to violence. Yet violence was the farthest thing from his way of thinking. How then had he come to consider it? He felt he was no longer himself, that someone had ta
ken his place to commit a crime that he condemned with all his heart. It seemed that an unwonted fate was bent on pushing him out of his path, into the insane adventure of man.
“Don’t forget to tell him that I’ll send him money soon.”
Gohar gave a start; while he hadn’t been paying attention, the girl had surreptitiously slid next to him on the couch. Her sudden presence terrorized him; a horrible fear seized him.
“What money?” he said bewilderedly.
“What! You don’t know what money?”
“Oh yes, of course. Excuse me, I’m a little dizzy.”
Despite all her sensual power, Arnaba had never believed that her charms could drive a man to this point; her vanity incited her to increase her advantage. The afternoon was turning out more enjoyable than a carriage ride with Set Amina and the girls. For a moment she had been sorry to have missed that outing; now she had found something better. She edged closer to Gohar, leaned her head on his shoulder as if to decipher the letter, and caressed his knee with an expert hand. As his limbs shook, she saw that he could not hold out much longer; she began to laugh, a nervous, childish laugh.
“You write well,” she said. “I see you’ve been to school.”
He answered without looking at her.
“Yes. Didn’t you go to school?”
“Why should I go to school?” Arnaba said sarcastically. “I’m a whore. With a nice ass, who needs to know how to write?”
“I agree,” Gohar said. “I’ve never heard it put so well.”
“You’re always making fun of me. But that’s all right, I think you’re sweet.”
Strangely enough, as the danger became more precise, its imminence made it seem unreal. A kind of torpor took hold of Gohar. Surrendering to his fascination with the gold bracelets, he no longer reacted to the girl’s touch. In his eyes, the bracelets had acquired an immaterial value; they had come to symbolize the drugs of which he had been deprived since morning.
He hastily finished the letter.
“You know how to sign your name?”
“No,” said the girl. “Just write my name. It’s Arnaba.”
“I know,” said Gohar. “It’s a pretty name.”
He signed the letter, asked her for her uncle’s address, and wrote it on the envelope. Now it was done; he could go, escape this morbid temptation.
“Here’s the letter,” he said.
“Thank you. Keep it and mail it for me. I’ll give you money for the stamp.”
Gohar still didn’t dare move, held by some unknown, pernicious bonds. He was frightened to death by the jingling of her bracelets; his whole being was tense with the fear of that ominous sound. For a moment he suspected she was making those careless movements with her arms on purpose. Had she noticed something? No, for she would have roused the whole neighborhood with her cries; she wasn’t strong enough to enjoy that game.
Arnaba rose first; she crossed the bedroom, broke out laughing, then came back to Gohar and said, “You can sleep with me, if you want.”
He felt like he was drowning, as in this morning’s dream, and that the tumultuous waves of the river in full spate were swallowing him in their depths. He desperately tried to remain afloat, to save a scrap of lucidity. It was hopeless. Nothing remained of his immeasurable desire for peace. Only his savage wish to steal the bracelets resisted the collapse of his consciousness. In his hallucination, he caught a glimpse of vast fields of hashish spread out under the immensity of the sky beyond the bracelets. The vision was so sharp, so pressing, that Gohar stopped breathing. He dreamt he was going to commit a crime, and it seemed simple and easy. Yes, he had to kill this girl; he saw no other way to get the bracelets. This certainty filled him with a dreadful calm.
The young prostitute’s face betrayed her uneasiness; she was no longer smiling. For the first time, she looked at Gohar suspiciously. These signs of a desire that she did not understand began to appear suspect. But her anxiety didn’t last long. With a skillful languor, she removed her dressing gown, threw it on the chair, and stood stark naked before Gohar’s bewildered eyes. She drew near and took him by the arm in an attempt to lead him to bed.
“Come on. Let’s go, quickly.”
Gohar pulled away violently; the clash of the girl’s bracelets sounded like thunder, and he felt his heart stop beating. A cold sweat bathed his limbs. He shivered, jumped up, dragged the girl to the bed, and fell on top of her. His hands had gripped her by the throat before she had time to cry out. She opened her big eyes filled with surprise; she still hadn’t realized what was happening. Gohar couldn’t bear her gaze and turned his head away. He pressed his fingers with all his wavering strength. In a final effort to defend herself, the girl stretched her legs out in front of her. Gohar closed his eyes. There was a long silence full of shadows as Gohar gradually loosened his grip. The girl’s head fell softly back on the eiderdown; she was dead.
He stood up painfully, gasping for breath. Arnaba’s naked body sprawled across the bed in a ridiculous, obscene pose. Now he had to free the bracelets, and that was the worst part of this demented enterprise. Gohar raised her arm, took one of the bracelets, and began to slide it over her wrist. At the same time, he received a shock, his consciousness suddenly returned, and he uttered a little disjointed cry, like a death rattle.
He had just noticed something extraordinary: the gold bracelets were only cheap trash. They had never been gold, and Gohar had always known that. Even a child would have known that, he thought. How could he have made such a gross error? He couldn’t understand it. These bracelets were maybe worth a few piasters, and he had murdered to get them.
He was now very calm. The shock of his mistake had completely sobered him. He left the corpse, picked up his tarboosh which had rolled onto the bed, put the letter in his pocket, and headed for the door. The waiting room was still dark and deserted. Apparently no one had come in all this time. Gohar slowly descended the steps, entered the street with no apprehension, and casually greeted a passerby he didn’t know, out of simple courtesy.
Throughout this whole adventure, he hadn’t found Yeghen. Where was Yeghen hiding? This question troubled him for a long time.
3
THE KEROSENE lamp spread its parsimonious light just to the table’s edge. With his myopic gaze, Yeghen tried to make out his mother’s shadowed face; he could see only her old withered hands busily mending a man’s shirt: no doubt some job for a bourgeois family in town. The mediocrity of this thankless task irritated him like a personal insult, especially since she worked so hard to make it sad. What gravity, what seriousness in her gestures, as if they involved the creation of a better, mysterious world! By this humble task, she seemed to want to lend credibility to the myth of respectable poverty. What a sham!
Yeghen laughed. What made him study his mother’s face this evening? It was an idiotic, unhealthy idea. For a moment, across the years and wrinkles of his mother’s face, he struggled to find a resemblance to his own. He opened his eyes wide and scrutinized the shadows outside the lamp’s circle of light: nothing. His mother’s face remained an enigma. He searched his memory trying to recall her features; it was impossible to summon up a good image. A black hole. It was as if he had never looked at her during all these years. He grew exasperated before the absolute abyss of his memory, wanting to ask her to lean toward the light a little, but he refrained. He didn’t want to trouble her needlessly. He even felt a wave of generosity toward her. “She must have been very beautiful. I must take after my father.” He had no memory of his father either. All the same, it was strange! It now seemed to him that he had never seen up close these people who had brought him into the world and with whom he had lived for years.
But why was he particularly preoccupied with his ugliness this evening? Usually he never even glanced in a mirror. He was afraid, he admitted to himself, that he might frighten himself accidentally. Again, he laughed. The bastards! With what fury they continued to mock him in the newspapers and literary reviews o
f the capital. He had become the laughingstock of the entire cultivated Orient. Those infamous journalists never missed a shot at him; they undoubtedly received a bonus each time they featured his ugliness in their venomous articles. And that bastard cartoonist who had published a drawing of Yeghen with the caption “Condensed Ugliness.” Yeghen found these attacks remarkably weak, at best worthy of little children. Did these imbeciles seriously think they could upset him with such idle chatter? They didn’t know him; his ugliness was a real force of nature.
Perhaps that was indeed the case, except when Yeghen found himself before a judge in correctional court. That was the weak point. He could not be defended. The poor lawyers assigned to his defense lost the little dignity they had and became nearly speechless from shock. They stammered a vague plea without ever looking at him. What a bunch of eunuchs! He despised them more than anything. With the exception of one, whom he would never forget. This one—a man of unprecedented courage, or else simply a humorist—had found a way of comparing Yeghen’s face to that of unrecognized genius. He spoke for an hour. The judge hadn’t laughed; he only seemed overwhelmed, unable to understand. The lawyer’s harangue ended in a silence of stupefaction and incredulity. The judge couldn’t believe his ears; he looked around with a befuddled expression as if coming out of a dream. Finally he got hold of himself and pronounced sentence.
That time the sentence was stiffer than usual: eight months. But Yeghen was happy; he’d had a devil of a good time.
These periods in prison weren’t at all disagreeable for someone like him, able to adapt to circumstances. Instead, they were a kind of repose after the constant fatigue of his nomadic life. Each time he went back in, he reclaimed his position as bookkeeper in the penitentiary administration. This job, which was his by an unspoken assumption, allowed him a certain freedom of movement, and he cut a figure as a great administrator. His talents did not go unrecognized in high places—he was heartily congratulated. All this was grotesque, but it allowed Yeghen to enjoy himself enormously. As soon as he arrived, the odious building, constructed to dishearten men, resounded with tumultuous joy. His jokes and humorous ideas delighted his companions, for the most part inclined to the sadness inherent in their condition. Even the jailers lost their habitual surliness, allowing themselves a certain affability. The prison warden—a passionate admirer of Yeghen’s poems—loved to converse with him; he received him in his office with the deference due a government minister. So, for Yeghen, life in prison continued as on the outside. In one sense, it was even better: he had no material worries. He was housed, fed, and surrounded by convicts, each one more outrageous than the next, bursting with savory stories that were as funny as they were violent. Freedom was an abstract notion and a bourgeois prejudice. You could never make Yeghen believe he wasn’t free. As for drugs, he had nothing to complain about. Hashish circulated inside the prison walls with the same facility as in town; one could procure it in a thousand ways provided one had money.
Proud Beggars Page 4