Proud Beggars

by Albert Cossery

  Yet it was absurd to think of Gohar as a murderer. Yeghen still hesitated. However, there was no time to lose. He had been long acquainted with police methods. Gohar would never be able to defend himself if he underwent a rough interrogation. Besides, would he even want to defend himself?

  “Actually, Master, I came to tell you to be careful.”

  “Careful of what, my son?”

  “You run a big risk by staying here,” said Yeghen.

  “It’s useless to panic. The danger may not be as great as you think.”

  Not for a second did he consider denying it. He did not even wonder how Yeghen had discovered he was the murderer.

  “So you know,” he said after a moment.

  “Master, I don’t understand. How did it happen?”

  “I don’t know myself,” said Gohar. “I don’t know how to explain it to you. It always seems that someone else is acting in my place. But don’t think that I want to exonerate myself. Nothing can ever excuse violence. All I remember is that I needed drugs and that I went there looking for you. The girl Arnaba was alone. She asked me to write a letter for her and invited me into her room. For a long time, I was thinking only about the drugs and how to find you. Then, suddenly, I saw the girl’s bracelets and that unleashed the idea of murder in me. I had to take those bracelets.”

  “But those bracelets were worthless,” said Yeghen.

  “I knew that, my son. But at that moment they had acquired a great value in my eyes. And it is that moment that will count.”

  “I’m the guilty one,” said Yeghen. “Forgive me, Master. I should have been there when you needed me. In any case, the point is not to explain an act. The point is to flee. That’s what you must do as fast as possible.”

  “Why flee?”

  “They mustn’t catch you. The inspector who came to see me is a demon. I know him, he won’t stop until he gets his hands on you. I want to help you, Master! Take my advice, I beg you. It’s still not too late.”

  “My dear Yeghen, I appreciate your solicitude, but I don’t want to see you mixed up in this business at any cost. I will manage by myself.”

  “You could never defend yourself against those men. Leave for Syria. The time is right.”

  “How would I go?”

  “I’ll find the money for the trip. Count on me.”

  “Now you’re going to kill someone. This will never end.”

  Yeghen stood up, looked at Gohar for a very long time, then went up to him, bent down, took his hand, and brought it to his lips.

  “You’re the only person whom I love and respect in the world,” he said. “You can take my life.”

  Gohar was moved; he smiled sadly.

  “Let’s not get serious, my son. That would crown our misfortune. Besides, as you yourself said, there is the bomb. It will fix everything.”

  In the next room, it was the woman who was now groaning; her cries sounded like those of a beast being slaughtered. But Gohar did not misinterpret them.

  “You hear,” he said, “everything ends happily. They’re making love now.”

  “You’re sure, Master? Ah, I would love to see that. That must be an incredible spectacle!”

  “I didn’t know you were a voyeur,” said Gohar.

  “In such a case, Master, everyone is a voyeur.”

  They fell silent and remained motionless, astounded, listening to the succession of cries of pleasure in the next room.

  After a while, a metal object tinkled; it was the basin in which the wife of the limbless man was washing herself after lovemaking.

  9

  STREETCAR number 13 jerked along toward the European quarter. The driver was losing his voice from cursing the lazy pedestrians who seemed to take the rails for a peaceful country road. The unfortunate ticket-taker was nowhere to be seen, lost in the crush of passengers. He could only be heard shouting loudly for them to make room for him. That was all he could hope for. At each stop, regulations required him to get off to check on the cars, and he was always nearly left behind. As for making the passengers pay, that was out of the question.

  El Kordi bitterly regretted letting himself be tempted by this barbarous mode of locomotion. He would have liked to escape from this uncomfortable streetcar that was progressing so ludicrously. But now it was too late: all the exits were blocked by clusters of people hanging on to the doors. El Kordi forced himself to be patient; there was nothing to do but wait. His tarboosh had suffered rough treatment in the jostling to get on, and now it hung grotesquely on his head, without his being able to move to straighten it. He found himself wedged between a sleepy civil servant with glasses and a large woman in a faded melaya, who smelled of onions and whose leg systematically rubbed against his. Despite its dubious nature, this touch began to excite El Kordi, making him forget his uncomfortable position somewhat. With an effort, he twisted his neck to see how old the woman was before becoming more excited, but what he glimpsed made him shiver, and he shriveled into his corner, completely put off. The fat thing was more than sixty years old, and she was smiling at him lewdly, revealing her toothless mouth. For a moment she continued her sordid behavior, but El Kordi remained unmoved.

  It was after six in the evening and the throng of passengers continued to grow. The old woman had finally moved her leg, but she still reeked of rancid onions. El Kordi wanted to vomit. He closed his eyes and let himself be lulled by the strident sound of the bell, which the crazed conductor rang without interruption. It was not for the pleasure of a ride that he found himself on this packed streetcar bound for the European quarter. El Kordi had something else in mind. Ever since he had posed as the killer of young Arnaba in his mistress’s eyes, he felt obliged to commit some startling feat to compensate for the lie. Perhaps it would not be a violent crime, but it had seemed to him that he could easily indulge in a robbery. This evening he was planning to carry out a daring project that had been obsessing him for several days. El Kordi often passed a jewelry store, the most luxurious in the city, on Avenue Fouad, and he thought he was smart enough to steal a valuable jewel without getting caught. However, he was still hesitating about the method to use. Despite his nausea, he tried to remember all of the facts about jewelry-store robberies that he had read in magazines or detective novels, but still could not decide on the best method. What was the best method? El Kordi wanted to be innovative in this area. A revolutionary such as himself couldn’t very well operate like a common burglar. His self-respect demanded it. But no new method came to mind.

  Suddenly he felt someone looking at him. He opened his eyes and saw he was not mistaken. Someone was observing him insistently, someone whose face itself was an omen of misfortune. A one-eyed man was seated next to the door, almost facing him and sneakily spying on him. What especially disturbed El Kordi was that he sensed himself being watched by the man’s bad eye, as if the good eye remained neutral and even showed a sort of lenience toward him.

  Implacably, ferociously, the man went on staring at him with his haunting good eye. But El Kordi saw only the bad eye, so that their gazes never met. This delicate situation lasted a long time. El Kordi wondered what the man wanted and if he had ever seen him before. He grew irritated trying to place the man and doing his utmost to understand his provocative attitude. The impossibility of moving to escape this inquisition finally roused him to indignant fury. He wasn’t going to take it lying down. “I’m going to spit in his face. Then we’ll see if he continues to look at me like that.” But fear of provoking a scandal just when he was preparing to commit an audacious theft and needed all his composure prevented him from going to this extreme. He swallowed his saliva.

  The streetcar stopped at a station, started again, and suddenly the ticket-taker’s head appeared in the doorway. Impossible to say by what clever maneuver he had managed this coup.

  “Who doesn’t have tickets?” he called.

  No one deigned to answer this question. The ticket-taker, a skinny individual with a pale face and a shopworn
uniform, became insolent and threatened to stop the streetcar. Trapped, the passengers grudgingly took out their money and paid their fare, as if they were giving alms to the ticket-taker. Only the one-eyed man didn’t move; he was still staring at El Kordi with his single, implacable eye.

  Impatient, the ticket-taker addressed him directly.

  “Hey, mister!”

  “Secret police,” the one-eyed man answered drily without turning his head.

  El Kordi thought that the streetcar was tipping over, and that all the passengers had stood up in one defensive movement. Actually, he was the only person standing. He had a moment’s panic, then rushed for the door, jumped from the moving streetcar, and began to run toward the nearest sidewalk. When he finally stopped to catch his breath, the streetcar had long ago disappeared in the distance like a dissipating nightmare. Again, El Kordi felt the violent shock he had experienced hearing the one-eyed man state his identity. What a frightful trap he had just escaped! He blessed the luck that had favored him with such a stupid policeman. To reveal who he was like that so as not to pay for his seat! What a dolt! But why were the police tailing him? Certainly not because of the jewelry robbery he was planning. No one was aware of his decision. The police couldn’t read people’s minds. If they were watching him, it was obviously for another purpose. It did not take El Kordi long to figure this out. The police were no longer unaware of the fact that he was a revolutionary; he himself had made that pederast inspector understand this during his interrogation in the brothel. Seen from this angle, the one-eyed man’s tailing became a large-scale operation mounted by the oppressors of the people in order to assassinate him. El Kordi breathed proudly and smiled; a kind of prodigious drunkenness filled his head. Finally he was a real revolutionary, pursued by the police, worrying those in high places. Gohar would no longer make fun of him, as he usually did, when he learned what horrible surveillance El Kordi had suffered.

  He turned around several times to see if he was being followed, but there was no sign of the one-eyed man anywhere.

  Avenue Fouad opened onto the center of the European quarter like a river of lights. El Kordi strolled along the avenue with the disturbing sensation of being in a strange city. In vain did he tell himself he was still in his native country; he could not believe it. All these busy men, who looked as though they had just come from some catastrophe and whose sullen faces expressed mediocre preoccupations, seemed singularly hostile. He found the attitude of the crowd to be morbid and exaggerated: nothing was happening to break its agonizing monotony. Something was lacking in this noisy throng: the humorous details by which human nature could be recognized. This crowd was inhuman. The anguish spreading from it passed imperceptibly into El Kordi and made him yearn for the popular quarter. He already missed the muddy streets and dirty hovels where a banished people mocked their oppressors. There was more hope in the tin shacks of the slums than in this opulent city. Was this, then, that fantastic city where the relentless enemies of the people lived, lurking in their inviolable hideouts? The citadel of oppression was not a happy place. The riches displayed in store windows, the dull majesty of the buildings, the rectilinear rigor of the sidewalks—all this seemed to forbid the least-frivolous thought. El Kordi now understood why Gohar had abandoned this city and its sad comfort.

  The sight of a little newspaper vendor shook him out of his melancholy; he had recovered his world.

  “Hey, little one! Do you have the Greek newspaper?”

  “Do you read Greek, sir?”

  “Yes. Why wouldn’t I read Greek?”

  “By Allah, you see everything in this country!”

  El Kordi bought a copy of the only Greek paper in the city, folded it, and put it in his coat pocket. He had felt a burning need to indulge himself in this idiotic playacting. All the serious activity around him saddened him like a blow inflicted on a naturally happy people. He had wanted to escape a little from this almost palpable anguish, which became ever more intense as he advanced along this thoroughfare lit as if for a grandiose funeral procession. But the pleasure of having amazed a little newspaper boy did not make him forget his project. “Enough joking. It’s time to act.” He was near his goal; a few yards now separated him from the jewelry store.

  What was the word that he had read somewhere that seemed to possess such seductive power? Expropriation. The word came back to him with an aura of glorious conviction. It was not a robbery that he was going to commit, but an expropriation. This thought calmed the apprehensions of a novice thief, although it did not change any of the difficulties of his undertaking: the difficulties were still the same, but the new point of view created a fundamental difference. He was no longer a simple hoodlum indulging in his first larceny. Thus, El Kordi remained faithful to his revolutionary ideal. His first attempt now seemed like the start of an era of rebellion, of long and bloody battles, like the first spark of a fire that would die only with the liberation of the people.

  The grandeur of his task moved him to tears.

  He advanced resolutely toward the window of the jewelry store, as if driven by the clamor of a multitude of starving, oppressed people. He was now but the instrument of a people resolved to take revenge. He stopped, dumbfounded. As if in the water of an aquarium, the precious jewels sparkled in the harsh light, their strange reflections hypnotizing his gaze. El Kordi saw himself transported to the center of an incomparable fairy-tale world. The savage clamor of the unchained masses was silenced; he was alone, crushed by all this inaccessible splendor. Discouragement crashed down on him like a heavy stone. To steal—that was easy to say! But how? By what witchcraft was he going to appropriate one of these jewels, as far away as the most distant star in the sky? The bitterness he felt at his own naïveté brought tears to his eyes again. He remembered his sick mistress bound to a degrading existence in a lice-ridden brothel, waiting for him to come to her rescue. With misty eyes, he contemplated the shimmering treasures in the show window, thinking that with the price of just one of these jewels he could take Naila away from her ignoble destiny. His determination to save the young woman from prostitution and to assure her of a decent life was so strong and so real at this moment that he desperately tried to find a way to commit his theft. But the jewels remained extraordinarily inaccessible, seeming to belong to another universe. He painfully felt all his impotence, closed his fist, and slowly raised his arm to smash the window in one frenzied movement.

  The scent of a violet perfume penetrated his nostrils and informed him of a woman’s presence at his side. He interrupted the movement of his arm, his nerves suddenly relaxed, his being infused with delicious joy. The mere smell of this perfume sufficed to dispel his anger. Without turning his head, he glanced obliquely at the woman standing near him, grave and immobile, as if fascinated by the extent of the riches contained in the window. She was a native girl dressed with uncommon care and elegance. The folds of her melaya and the impeccable cut molded her svelte form, emphasizing the firm roundness of her rump. Although the lower part of her face was hidden beneath a black silk veil, the luster of her almond eyes lined with kohl augured a distinguished beauty. Her entire being emitted an air of sensual mystery that made El Kordi tremble in the very depths of his flesh. She seemed extremely interested in a diamond necklace that almost filled the whole window by itself.

  This superb creature so charmed El Kordi that he did not react for a moment. Then the fear of seeing her go away moved him to whisper, “O beauty, I am sure that this necklace would look marvelous on you.”

  The young woman looked him up and down as if he were an unclean serpent.

  “Yes,” she said. “But where is the man rich enough to give it to me?”

  El Kordi could not think of any answer to this mischievous invitation. The young woman was a whore, but a high-class whore. He certainly wouldn’t offer her a diamond necklace, or even an ear of grilled corn. Who did she think she was? Her exaggerated idea of her market value amused rather than frightened El Kordi. For his pa
rt, he feared nothing: he had nothing to lose in the adventure. This foolish woman did not realize whom she was dealing with. He would have her for nothing! Prostitutes were the kind of women El Kordi seduced with the greatest of ease; he knew their mentality and how to talk to them.

  He was now persuaded that fate had led him here just to meet this aristocratic whore. He quickly tried to find a pleasant way to resume the conversation and especially to make her laugh.

  But the young woman did not give him time; she suddenly turned away from the window and left with the haste of an offended person. No doubt she had interpreted El Kordi’s silence as a rebuff. Did she really think he was going to buy her a diamond necklace? What a madwoman! Instinctively, El Kordi followed her. Then he noticed she was not alone; a little girl with braided hair topped with a rose ribbon and wearing wooden shoes accompanied her. At first El Kordi was vexed, then he concluded that it was a fortunate circumstance. The little girl offered a good way to easily strike up an acquaintance. He rapidly caught up with them and began to walk in step, waiting for the proper moment to intervene.

  He could now appreciate at his leisure the elegant figure of the young woman, who strolled with a swing in her hips, tapping the sidewalk with her high-heeled shoes. She moved like a sleepwalker, eyes straight ahead, indifferent to the desires she excited along the way. Aroused as never before during the course of his amorous adventures, El Kordi experienced some very intense minutes. The vast conflicts that agitated his generous soul had disappeared like a charm. The misery of the disinherited masses, the revolution on the march, the overthrow of evil powers—all that could wait. His only concern was to capture this tempting prey whose lascivious hip-swinging burned his flesh. He was already trembling at the idea of possessing her.