The Candidate

by Zareh Vorpouni

  Suddenly he felt someone watching him. With a frying pan in one hand, he froze, keeping one eye on the golden omelet and the other on the woman leaning against the closed door, her hands clasped behind her back. The “bitch” had already become Hortense, not the widowed Hortense Bédier, just Hortense.

  “Here we go,” he told himself. “As if I needed this. Now she’s going to come join the parade, too?” She was already clearing a path through the disorder in his mind, slipping out of the circuit to reach the very source of his pain. Who else is outside? Come in, come on in! Ziya, Sarkis, all of you, all of you persecuted people, come inside. It’s a party and everyone’s invited.

  He nervously dabbed his forehead with his free hand, as if trying to blot away the anguish in his mind.

  “Are you ok?” a woman’s voice asked. “I know you lost a great friend. Did you already bury him?”

  “No, Madame. They took him to the morgue. Students will have their fun cutting into him.”

  Now he heard Apkar’s voice, roaring the song, “Oh, Tashnagtsioutioun! Let’s go to Sassoun.”4 He was singing it, drawing out each syllable and making an obvious effort to show his contempt. Hortense quickly turned and glared at him. Did she think mockery was his way of dealing with grief? Her glare softened with compassion just as quickly and she shot Minas a sharp, inquisitive look as she turned her head toward him again. She was right. For the first time since he found Vahakn’s body, his grief burst and caused a painful twinge deep in his heart. With his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, Apkar was bent over the sink, feverishly clanking plates under soapy water.

  “Careful, the guests are sleeping,” said Madame Bédier, tactfully hiding her fear of seeing a broken dish.

  “Bitch!” Apkar growled, without stopping the noise he was making. “How the hell would you understand?”

  How could Hortense know? How could she really know? Only an Armenian could understand his secret. The Armenian would be proud of the secret, proud of the disease. That’s what Hortense couldn’t quite understand. How could she know, when Armenians took such pains to guard their secret so carefully? He took refuge in the secret to the point of losing himself in it.

  Once again, Apkar’s gruff voice rose as unexpectedly as it had before against the peaceful morning silence of the hotel: “Oh, Tashnagtsioutioun! Let’s go to Sassoun.” But we hadn’t gone to Sassoun. That was the problem. We came to Paris, Athens, Aleppo, Beirut, and even farther, to the Americas. Everywhere. Everywhere, that is, except Sassoun. But Armenians, down to the very last one, sleeves rolled up and arms elbow deep in soapy water, will still go on singing, “Let’s go to Sassoun,” until the skin on their hands is chapped and shriveled.

  How could Hortense understand? People can only hope to know what they have lived themselves. We can’t step into somebody else’s skin. The skin. The skin is so tough and resilient that it frightens even surgeons and fills murderers with fear. Skin distinguishes human beings from other living things, from the world, from the universe. Skin alienates human beings from one another and imprisons them within themselves. It’s like the thick walls of a fortified castle that easily collapse with the shock of a dirty look or a harsh word, but not with the sharp cut of a knife.

  How could Hortense know? Dazed by Apkar’s noise, she seemed to be trying to make herself even smaller to avoid a blow that would never come. Hortense—with her sallow complexion, sunken cheeks, tiny black eyes, and pointed chin—was looking all around her, eyes ablaze. Hidden beneath simple lingerie was the morning-fresh, almost childlike body that Minas knew well. Under his fingers, she had writhed in dark, damp soil like a worm enlivened by a caress of light after the stone covering it had been overturned. No, this wasn’t the Hortense who once walked down the stairs like a bride, her body seeming to grow as tall as a poplar tree, her expression pensive and solemn, perhaps like the countess who had likely had the stairs built a century ago. She was the countess whom this bourgeoise of the Third Republic wished to imitate. That day, protected by the contented caryatids, Hortense approached him and, cleaving the sea of silence, asked: “Are you the one Apkar was talking about?”

  Time passed quickly, but he seemed to be advancing very slowly, busy with the miserable task of sorting out his own thoughts.

  The hotel guests woke up one after the other and he prepared their breakfast: one for the Englishman and another for the Frenchman, each one based on their individual tastes, whereas the German was quite at home with the local fare. Sometimes an image froze in his mind like a picture hanging on a wall. He began to ramble, but Hortense kept her eyes on him. She knew that that day a great friend of his had died. She was forgiving, even compassionate.

  “Hurry,” she said. “Send breakfast up to the man in room number twenty-three. He’s in a rush. He needs to leave at nine.”

  Nine o’clock. It was nine o’clock already. Nicole must have been up by then. She would be squinting as her eyes tried to reconcile darkness with light. She would be pulling herself out of bed and stretching her long, delicate torso, yawning to recover the movements of waking hours, and with them, the will that had been led astray during the night. He imagined her standing at the edge of her bed, hesitant and unsure, not daring to take the first step into the day that had begun once again. Suddenly, she froze, tilted her head up, and screamed “Monique!” wildly, like a child calling out for her absent mother.

  He would run to her the moment he finished work. He would wander the streets, the very same streets Nicole would walk through with Monique, who never left her side, arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder, in perfect step. Their bodies, as though fused together, swayed on their heels and convulsed in laughter, creating the rhythm of a song. Why did people, women especially, stare at them with tight smirks across their lips? It’s true that they were a sight to be seen, those two, an extraordinary phenomenon in an ordinary street scene. They walked shoulder to shoulder, wobbling on their knees, their gazes never resting on anyone. It was as if they were alone, all alone, indifferent to the people and commotion around them. Deep in their own dream, they were asleep with their eyes wide open.

  Being the fool he was, he used to go to the Jardin du Luxembourg in the evening. That’s where they had met, right across from the statue of Verlaine. Sitting on a bench nearby, he and Vahakn were gazing at the poet’s devilish head. Now he thought it would be enough to go back to that spot, as he had been doing for days, to find the girls again, as though they had turned into statues and would be waiting for him.

  “Room number twenty-three. Twenty-three!” Madame Bédier snapped.

  Hortense, why are you so patient and calm when we’re together in your room, your lips parted tenderly and your only concern disturbing the silence? Your eyes, entirely mystified, seek mine as if to say, “Don’t get upset. Just work.” So in moments that should be as slow as the Divine Liturgy, why don’t you tell me to hurry up? Instead, you tell me to slow down: “Undressing a woman should be a ritual. You undress a woman like you dress a bride. A woman should never feel it, but all of a sudden find herself naked, enrapt, as though she were dressed for a secret ritual. Love is a ritual, my son. Who taught you to undress a woman so quickly and impatiently as though you were peeling an onion? Is a woman an onion, Minas?”

  “Now that room number twenty-three is taken care of, I am going to say everything I need to say, Hortense. Forgive me, but I can’t help it. I can’t get a hold on the images overrunning my mind. Look, it’s like Niagara Falls in there, except the images aren’t flowing calmly over the edge. They’re gushing over it. Don’t forget that Vahakn is dead.”

  But Vahakn isn’t really dead. Isn’t he, in fact, the one stirring up these frantic emotions in Minas? Vahakn was the one shaking his inner being as he tried to take up residence in it. From his stronghold in him, he launched countless rockets that burst in a thousand directions in the night sky, briefly illuminating the darkness with their fiery florets.

  The room service orders had tapered off. He had time no
w. He started putting the kitchen back in order, just as he was trying to do in his own brain. The coffee pot was empty. He made a fresh pot. He arranged the teacups. Apkar didn’t even have time to lift his head up from the sink. Trays filled with dirty plates arrived one after the other from the floors above. When Minas finally lifted his head and looked toward the doorway where the owner had stood, he was surprised to not see her there. “Vahakn’s legacy,” he muttered under his breath, as a faint smile bloomed and spread across his face. Like water trickling off a roof and freezing into icicles, the smile froze on his face and his gaze strayed, growing timid and distant. Sorrow lurched in his heart and regret rose to mingle with the frozen smile. He felt guilty. Hadn’t he snatched away the job that Apkar had offered to Vahakn? He had interfered and put his nose where it didn’t belong. He had even been afraid that he might have lost the job to Vahakn if he hadn’t been fast enough. And yet back then, he had refused to give his aggression any thought. Only now did he feel the hostile urge that had consumed him so intensely. There he was. Minas saw his image looking back at him in the mirror, speaking to him, and saw the hand—his own—that had rushed to grab somebody else’s things. “I, Minas Yerazian, am a slave. I want to work.” This is how he became the heir to the poorest Armenian on Earth, who left him an immeasurable legacy. If he hadn’t acted so imprudently that day, Vahakn would still be alive because of Hortense and her ways of preserving a man’s dignity. He was the one responsible for Vahakn’s death. The rest was just a story. Nothing more. Here he was, upstairs in the big hall on the first floor where Vahakn should have been. The curtains are drawn. They always are—heavy velvet curtains and dim light as weightless as a fairy on her feet. He is standing in the middle of the room, hesitant and shy. Hortense is on her knees, naked after quickly pulling off her slip, begging him to bite her breasts and pushing them out toward him. Minas, completely still, is struck by the way her eyes are shut and her nostrils are flared, quivering.

  He covered his ears with his hands and tried not to listen, but the plea—stubborn and slick—resisted, coating his ears and skin and slipping into his heart.

  “You know, Apkar, this was supposed to be Vahakn’s job. He wouldn’t have had a chance to think about death here.”

  “Please!” Apkar snapped, without lifting his head up from the dishes. “All of us go down the same path. Sooner or later, both of us will, too.”

  Apkar’s perverse laughter exploded like the porcelain teacup that fell from his hand and shattered as it hit the floor.

  Everything started the day they met Ziya. Thinking of Ziya was not a form of self-justification, but the escape route he was looking for. He didn’t expect to feel a sense of responsibility and now it slowly, stubbornly seeped into the depths of his soul and settled there, spreading like a droplet of water falling onto the sand. He launched into a monologue of what-ifs. What if they hadn’t met Ziya? What if he hadn’t taken Vahakn’s job? It kept Vahakn from meeting Hortense, and because only Hortense knew how to turn a boy into a man, Vahakn had remained a boy. Vahakn’s life was a dangerous game that a little boy would play. He played with life like a boy plays with toys. Minas was also to blame for hitching his life to Vahakn’s for two whole years. Of course, he hadn’t planned on it, but in the end, knowingly or not, he had bound Vahakn’s life to his own, diverting it from its course. He now understood why Vahakn was constantly on the move. He couldn’t stay in one place for too long, because he needed to escape from himself. Every time he changed his address, he became a new man, leaving the old Vahakn behind: a new man wandering around new places, new cities, new streets, new houses, and a new existence that nurtured a new spirit in him. The only problem was that the one he left behind would catch up to him and seize him by the throat, forcing him to flee and face himself once again. Yes, now he understood. In the kitchen, his sense of time had shifted. The work had gradually lessened along with the chance that parasites would creep into his chain of thoughts. He noticed Apkar, who suddenly stood up straight in front of the sink, let out a sigh, and wiped the sweat from his forehead with his right arm. Minas instinctively tensed his body as though bracing himself for a slap, but Apkar, after taking a breath, leaned over the sink again and continued to work in silence.

  He returned to his thoughts, his mental meanderings, and hastily caught hold of their thread, afraid that he hadn’t yet finished the process of accusing, flagellating, and punishing himself. He resorted to talking to himself aloud in the silent kitchen, so he could jump and catch the breaking thread faster and more confidently. “Yes,” he said. Yes, that’s it, he understood perfectly. Everything seemed so simple now. His soul calmed as his guilt became clearer. He had held Vahakn hostage for two whole years, forcing him to gradually sink deeper and deeper into himself, because it was Minas who was blocking his escape route. He was guilty. He was guilty of crumbling weakness, which filled Vahakn with a meaningless sense of pity. The feeling would not have wavered even if he and Vahakn had refused Apkar’s offer. This was his main issue. Why was he always in a state that inspired pity? He stopped at this thought, afraid of probing any further. It only lasted for a moment, because in that brief pause, he felt a sense of disgust that started in his throat and slid down toward his heart. He felt an uncontrollable urge to talk to someone, to share his concerns with someone, and he realized that he could only be open with Vahakn. And Vahakn was gone. The most unbearable part was that there was no possibility of talking to his dear departed friend. He was left with Apkar, whose scoffs he could already hear resounding off the kitchen walls, and Hortense, in whose melancholy eyes the thought was perched, as if at a supreme crossroads, and whose only concern was to endlessly clip the worm-eaten branches, so that the trunk could have a better chance of withstanding the four winds of life. That grimy feeling of disgust settled freely around his heart, besieging it and preparing it for the final onslaught.

  Disgust is the kind of feeling that breaks ground, excavates, and destroys. It annihilates. Wasn’t it the same feeling that led him to step in front of a train two years ago or wander away from the crowd to throw himself into the Seine? Undecided and hesitant, he had drifted along the deserted riverbank for quite some time, feeling the pull of both the flowing river and the city lights. If he had jumped into the water that evening, yes, if he had made a splash and brought about an extraordinary silence as powerful as nothingness itself . . . if that day he hadn’t climbed up the stairs away from the riverbank and slipped into the crowd on Boulevard Saint-Michel that took him to the Billard and made him stop in front of it, he could have just as well gone in another direction, since he hadn’t had anything in particular to do. He could have, for instance, wandered along the banks of the Seine—it certainly would have been better. The first decision is always the best one. Now that he saw himself in the same places, chasing the same obsession and bewildered by the same fear, he remembered that he had been afraid. But why had he been afraid of the river? It was spring and spring promises new life, but springtime in Paris is bitterly cold and the Seine sends chills through all those who throw themselves into it. There was no other explanation. It was fear. Everything scared him, so he failed at everything. It could also be said that hope was what held him back. It’s hope that makes us grapple with danger and death. But Minas breathed out all his hope that day, while Vahakn—it’s true, he had no hope—was still waiting for something. He was waiting and Arshalouys confirmed it: “He was waiting, but who knows what for. He said he was waiting and one time even said, ‘Let’s wait.’” So he went on waiting for something that didn’t come and never would have, if Minas hadn’t thrown Ziya at Vahakn’s feet. Him. Always him. You see? It’s not for nothing that a feeling of guilt is filling him, overflowing like the milk in the saucepan on the stove, catching him by surprise. Quick! He takes a sponge and wipes up the milk, releasing a sour smell into the air, while there, sitting outside the Billard on Saint Michel, Vahakn is overcome with sympathy. Poor boy, he looks like a lost dog.

 
A man pushes his way through the crowd on the street and stops right under the streetlight. At that instant, Minas—our curious lost soul—notices the face of a stranger, who calls to him from the entrance of the café: “Hey, compatriot!”

  Minas stares at the man. Then he stares some more. He doesn’t know him. Suddenly there’s a flash of recognition, but he soon returns to that hazy place behind the dark curtain of his muddled memory. With his head raised and proud and his gaze distant, Minas has the air of a dreamer. The other man raises his eyebrows under a disheveled thicket of hair. The big eyes on his angular face reveal a mellifluent sweetness, glowing with the glimmer of irony. Sitting in the bistro chair, he seems agitated. And yet it’s not his usual interest in solving mysteries that’s preoccupying him at the moment. This time, his peculiar heartbeat tells of something entirely different.

  He liked sitting outside the café for hours on end, lazily surrendering himself to the chair and watching and examining the feet that would approach.

  It happened that a shadow came into his line of sight and caused his gaze to slowly retreat, only to appear again in the wake of the shadow, wholly transformed. He recorded the differences between the feet on the sidewalk, collecting points of comparison like posture, pant cuff, quality of socks, shoes, and finally something else, a breeze perhaps, that helped him solve the mystery. What he did next hinged on that initial calculation. He would gradually raise his eyes to check the subject’s face and confirm his assumption. This bizarre pastime was not a sign of boredom in the least, nor was it a means of deception, as many supposed, even if he did rely on these games to make a living to a certain extent. Afterward he, like the others, was convinced that this way of life was a kind of obligation, dictated by some dark, internal forces that were suddenly revealed right after Ziya’s murder, because at the very moment they were revealed, Vahakn retired from his pastime, despite the high cost of giving up his livelihood. In fact, he had already stopped thinking about living. He stopped caring altogether as soon as he escaped those dark, internal forces, as he called them, that mental state that he carried around—unpredictable, stubborn and obscure—until the moment that Vahakn vanished once and for all, surrendering his entire being to the anarchy of fate.