The Candidate

by Zareh Vorpouni

  Now that Minas understood, now that these things had already come to pass, it was easy to have misgivings. And this was precisely what he couldn’t forgive in himself, particularly the instructive hours he had spent with Hortense, while his friend, tense as a bow, willfully headed straight toward his own destruction. But the final blow was dealt the day he introduced Ziya to Vahakn. It was at one of the cafés on Boulevard Saint-Michel. That day, Vahakn, as though he were engrossed in his game and focused on taking it to the very end, asked Minas to leave: “Go take a walk. You’re in my way.”

  After shooting a sharp look at the sidewalk, he waited patiently for a roaming, unsuspecting victim in the crowd, like a fisherman tossing his net into the water. As soon as he identified the person, he needed to concentrate on him with controlled focus. The person he chose would save him from having to pay for his coffee. As soon as the prey crossed into his territory, he would jump up from his seat to find a reason to strike up a conversation. It was inevitable. In those rare instances when the ruse failed, he would offer a stock apology. “I’m sorry, I made a bet with my friend to see who you were,” he would say, gesturing toward the entrance of the café, where no one was waiting. Often Minas became an unwilling witness to Vahakn’s modus operandi. Unwilling, because whenever Vahakn was at it, Minas usually made himself scarce. The mastermind preferred to work alone. He would approach his prospective victim with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. “Do you have a light?” he would ask. Accepting the light, he would inhale the smoke with gusto, pleasantly serious, while little by little a sunny smile would spread across his face. “What nice weather we’re having,” he would offer, and with a graceful nod of the head, would add, “Thank you.” His lips burned with the desire to move to the next stage, but in the meantime, there wasn’t much else he could do except fawn and simper like the wisps of cigarette smoke rising into the air. He winked and his face took on a certain harshness, like someone straining to hold a monocle in his eye socket, but it would pass soon enough and he would kindly and politely drop the bait. “I think I know you from somewhere,” he would say. He understood the eloquence of silence. He kept quiet as if expecting an answer, even though he knew no answer was coming. The silence brought with it a chill that he tried to balance with never-ending, groveling “excuse me”s. It was at this point that his prey would often exit the scene, mumbling something under their breath.

  Vahakn wasn’t upset when he returned to his chair, rubbing his hands together in delight. Of course it was impossible to win every time, but he knew he had at least turned strangers into acquaintances, making them easy targets for his unsavory tricks. “Hey, hello there! Come, let’s have a cup of coffee.” This way, the city filled with infinite possibilities and day by day he added to his number of customers, which would one day grow to include the entire city.

  On days that he would lose a prospect, Vahakn was careful not to show his frustration. He knew that it would surely invite the waiter’s attention. As it was, the waiter always kept a watchful eye on him. Vahakn never gave up. There always came a moment when the waiter wasn’t around. That was Vahakn’s cue to slip away quietly. But the sidewalk was still teeming with feet. Evening had descended and the air had cooled. He started to feel cold. He really needed something warm, but it was more to earn the waiter’s confidence that he ordered a cup of coffee.

  “Very hot!” he yelled after the waiter, who was already inside the café.

  Demanding customers always inspire trust and weaken the vigilance of waiters. It was the right time. He stood up. The waiter was out of his sight and Vahakn was out of the waiter’s line of vision. But he had barely gotten up to leave when he muttered, “There he is,” and sank back into his chair, almost dazed. Like a cat, he put his paws on his stomach and followed the circular movements of his prey with wide eyes. There was a pair of shoes that hesitated on the sidewalk among the throng of countless others, a pair that contradicted each other, as though each shoe belonged to a different person. The filthy, worn shoes must have been brown once. It was easy enough to imagine them without feet, just phantom shoes thrown onto the sidewalk, kicked around here and there by the stampeding crowd, like phantom ships tossed around by raging waves. “Here’s an interesting case,” he thought, like a doctor pondering an unusual illness. “A rare bird,” he continued. In the same moment, the waiter brought his coffee, and as he was setting it down on the table, he blocked the curious scene unfolding on the street. Annoyed, Vahakn shoved the waiter aside and his hand hit the cup, spilling pungent black coffee onto the table. Fortunately, the filthy, worn shoes were still there, meaning that he would soon take his revenge on them for causing the accident. Meanwhile, the shoes paced the sidewalk for a moment, then returned to the lamppost and stopped, the tips pointed outward, forming an obtuse triangle that seemed to be yawning.

  It was at that moment that, as noted above, Vahakn let out a heart-wrenching groan—“Poor boy, he looks like a dog who has lost his master”—and called out, “Hey, compatriot!” Their eyes met. They kept looking at each other in bewilderment, without a glint of recognition, just an image etched into his mind from the past that made its way into the present. He jumped up from his chair mechanically. He was standing, his brow knit and lips drawn tight, thinking. He waited for the other man to say something. He made some swift motions with his head, so as to wrench the gleam of recollection away from the stranger. His sharp chin, perpetually drooping from too much sneering and mocking, now sunk even lower in his effort to search for a memory. The exertion left his mouth agape.

  “I remember you from somewhere,” Vahakn said, as he approached him. “From Constantinople, maybe? Were you in an orphanage?”

  “No.”

  “From around here, then. How long have you been here?”

  “I’ve just arrived.”

  “From Lyon?”

  “No.”

  “Damn it,” Vahakn said, while in the memory of the other man, an invisible director was starting to set the stage. It was a long street, loud and lively, a cross between a southern city and an eastern city, with sidewalks overrun with Armenian refugees, Africans, and cheap whores. Children’s shrieks echoed in the horns of the cars. It was here that he was now surprised to see himself, staring at his surroundings as though in a dream. There was a thin ray of light in his eyes that illuminated the images in his mind. The city opened like a book, page by page, as the anxious face of the man in front of him melted into the swarming crowd. But he wasn’t the same man who once walked, restless and miserable, the one who went to his friend Ghevont in hopes of finding a job. Despite the doubt he felt, he now saw himself happier in those times, because tucked between his eyelashes was also the scene that would follow soon afterward at home, where he would proudly announce the good news he had received from Ghevont. He would bring relief to his mother’s pained expression. His heart rejoiced, mingling with old sorrow, walking with his soul in perfect harmony as he made his way home to restore a share of his lost pride. It was on this street, as the invisible director made perfectly clear in his imagination, that Ghevont lived with his wife and two children in a seedy hotel called The Ararat. The building’s large façade towered over the street, sheltering countless refugee families between its musty walls. A group of children at the entrance let out cheerful cries, which led him to conclude that their parents had not yet come home from work. Same for Ghevont, so there was no need to rush. He began walking up and down the street, seeing Armenian grocers, barbers, shoe shiners, and throngs of people on either side of him, before stopping, baffled, in front of a shop window. It was a watchmaker’s shop, but the watches were not what drew him to it. It was the book on display in the window. Beside it, a cardboard tag read: “Rare copy. Five francs.” The title was embossed in big silver letters on the cover: Pagan Songs.5 Even now his heart jumps thinking about it. The anguish that rose and spread through his chest swelled in front of the stranger before him, who had given him the chance to revisit his
pain. When the soul has been emptied entirely, an insignificant pain can bring it back to life. This was what happened at that moment in Minas Yerazian’s soul.

  He had walked all day, roaming along the banks of the Seine where the temptation of death often visited him. He was worn out and had no sense of time. It was an old story, lost either in time or in a haze. He remembered that his mother was dead and that he was so estranged from grief that it was now overshadowed by his outrage over a stolen book. At last, he returned from his mental travels through the recent past, which didn’t seem to belong to him. Choosing a curt tone, he hastened to put an end to the stranger’s suspense, and especially to his gaze, which kept stubbornly probing his inner sanctum.

  He lifted his eyes serenely, more out of exhaustion than out of inner calm.

  He looked the stranger in the eye and said, “Marseille.”

  “Could be,” the other conceded, as he extended his hand, trembling like someone caught stealing, immediately adding, “Sit down, let’s have some coffee.”

  And so he sat. As he surrendered his body to the back of the chair, he felt his mind shatter bit by bit and his conscious world collapse. Suddenly his body began to shake and he sprang out of a deepening sleep that was about to swallow him. “He’d better pay,” Vahakn thought. He was surprised that he could still think. He even went on thinking, “He’s the one inviting me, right?” It was the first time he had talked to someone since he had arrived. He had turned his monologues, which in the end created nothing but a feeling of emptiness and nonexistence, into an abstraction. Look, he could even extend his hand. He didn’t need much courage for that. And when he did extend his hand, he noticed a pleasant tremor reverberating in the other person’s heart.

  “My name is Minas,” he said, reinvigorated. “Minas Yerazian, Minas of the Yerazian clan, whichever you like.”

  “They call me Vahakn, no last name. Well, Vahaken, officially. The French insist on spelling it that way.”

  “It’s better that way,” Minas replied with sudden excitement.

  From this moment on, he would feel a kind of sad delight. “It’s better that way,” he repeated. “It’s like a Finnish name, like Kekkonen, Varjalainen, Vahaken, right? Nobody would take you for an Armenian. It’s hard to get a job with an Armenian name.”

  Vahakn smiled quizzically. But then his gaze hung on the edge of his thoughts and his expression darkened.

  “No, brother. It’s impossible to separate ourselves from being Armenian. Even if we try, it won’t let go of our collar. Being Armenian is a sickness, a sickness rooted in revenge, and the horrible thing is that it’s revenge without hatred. We Armenians genuinely don’t know how to hate.”

  Minas suddenly discovered the secret of Vahakn’s demise in the words he had said that night. In those words from two years earlier was the weapon—the one that would someday kill him—that was already waiting to ambush him, like a worm gnawing its way out of a piece of fruit. After exacting revenge, only hatred would protect the resilience of the soul, nurturing it with its formidable being. It was as if Vahakn knew, or at least had an inkling, when he said, “And the horrible thing is . . .” “Poor Vahakn,” Minas shuddered. Who knows what monstrous mask the horror wore when it introduced itself to Vahakn at the moment his sinewy fingers gripped Ziya’s throat before slowly letting his corpse slide into the Seine. He lived with that shudder for an entire month. His hands trembled. He couldn’t eat. He couldn’t drink. His eyes were swollen, drained of their vitality after seeing horror up close, face to face. Vahakn died because he couldn’t hate. He couldn’t hate Ziya. On the contrary, he loved him and killed him out of love. Often Minas was jealous of their friendship. “Brother,” Vahakn would say. “We Armenians are a sad people. It’s always possible to be happy with Ziya.”

  At that time, Vahakn didn’t know that he would kill Ziya.

  It was a cool, spring evening, as cool as evenings can be in Paris. Winter was still lingering. During the day, it surrendered to the sun, but in the evening it slowly reclaimed its losses. This is the moment when people can breathe in the fragrance of new budding tree branches. Spring is alive in the smell of the plants. The crowd had already doubled on the boulevards. It was spring. People were outside, walking and taking in the fresh air. Among them were Vahakn and Ziya. They were walking down Boulevard Saint-Michel, laughing and having a great time. Ziya was tall and slim, and as they walked, his handsome face tilted slightly toward Vahakn. As always, his face bore a charming expression. He listened carefully to the silence following a sentence, waiting for the next one, which always lagged because Vahakn took special, excessive care in preparing his words. Ziya filled the pause with the gentle expression in his eyes. Usually his mouth would be half-open, not suggesting naïveté but rather an almost unhealthy sensitivity. Ziya was afraid of hurting other people. He usually suffered even more than the person he offended and thought he was to blame when somebody hurt him—if he hadn’t been there, there wouldn’t have been the chance for it to happen. He was at fault because he happened to be right there at that exact moment. And what if he was the reason for the pain? My God, what did he do? Quick, he has to ask for forgiveness! He had a pathological obsession with being forgiven. His sensitivity would grow heavier and more complicated still, reaching absurd proportions when an inadvertent offense was directed at one of their friends. He had written Vahakn quite a few letters of impassioned regret to beg for forgiveness. Once, in a rush, he had passed him on the street and didn’t say hello. The following day he wrote him an apology: “ . . . I realized it was you only after I had passed you.” If he invited Vahakn and Minas to the movies and one of them complained that the movie was a waste of time, a letter would certainly follow. “I couldn’t sleep all night. Forgive me for wasting your valuable time. Forgive me, my pasha. I know you will, because I know your compassionate Armenian soul, but still I feel the need to ask for your forgiveness” or something to that effect.

  So Ziya was like that, always apologizing for mistakes he didn’t make and always haunted by the fear of an old mistake. To spare the Armenian’s feelings, he developed his sensitivity, cultivating and nurturing it like an exquisite flower. Ziya had cleared the air on the very first day they met. They were sitting outside at the Billard. Having noticed Minas, Ziya let out a loud cry and came to sit next to him. Leaning forward in anticipation, his chin tilted down and his mouth open, he was ready to exchange pleasantries, which could already be seen in the glimmer in his eyes. Vahakn and Minas, both deep in thought, were busy tallying the day’s expenses, counting the money that was left. That night, they had to pay for the room they were renting and couldn’t figure out where the money had gone. Vahakn was horrified by the idea of sleeping on the street. For a while now, ever since he had started looking after Minas, he too had grown accustomed to a warm bed. Losing or spending money could deprive him of this new luxury and it began to alarm him. But when Minas turned to Ziya and introduced him to Vahakn, he instantly forgot his concerns about the bed and the money. Ziya extended his hand, which trembled from the effort it took to formulate the words he was trying to say. Suddenly, with surprising ease, he said, “Nice to meet you, effendi. Very nice to meet you. Minas effendi couldn’t say enough nice things about you. Isn’t that right, Minas effendi?” During the conversation, he lowered his voice and pleaded, “Please, let’s forget the past. What am I guilty of? It’s too bad. I love the Armenians. All my friends in Istanbul were Armenian.” They did forget the past. They were young and life was inviting them to enjoy beautiful things, beautiful sensations. Life was a constant standing invitation. It was that kind of an evening. Outside at the Billard, the cheapest café on the street, Armenian workers would gather every evening in the back hall where they could scream and fight without disturbing the conversations of the other customers. Vahakn loved sitting outside the café. Even in the winter, he would sit by the brazier, his eyes fixed on the glowing flames that showed through the holes. He loved stretching his legs out i
n front of its warmth and leaning against the back of his chair. Sitting across from him, Ziya spoke excitedly about his university lectures, especially one on French literature, which he talked about with a certain reverence. “I envy that you’re staying in this country,” Ziya said abruptly after a long pause, measuring his words in a trembling voice that was anxious not to be misunderstood. It seemed to him that their minds constantly wandered beyond his words, beyond their meaning, walking across muddy fields in search of a secret thought. It was for this reason that Ziya lived with unrelenting torment. Sometimes signs of his turmoil would spark in his eyes, making his shoulders sway and letting him escape, forgetting himself. Ziya seemed uncomfortable when he spoke, like someone who, afraid of falling, uses a cane to walk, even though its necessity is scarcely clear to the outside observer. In the end, he saw that his friends weren’t suspicious and this made him uneasy. His unease came from the fact that Armenians were incapable of leaving the past behind. They lived clung to it like a drowning man clutching a blade of grass. He always forced himself to stay alert. Vahakn would listen to him enrapt, without blinking, encouraging Ziya to keep talking. And he would, but would stop suddenly, bewildered, at exactly the moment his two friends would heave a long, admiring “Oh.” After that, he would pick up his train of thought as though nothing had happened to stop him. Once Vahakn interrupted: “He’s learned quite a bit, our Ziya. It’s too bad that he’ll forget everything once he goes back.” Ziya felt genuinely betrayed by this. What did Vahakn mean? His enthusiasm depleted, mouth agape, an endearing smile across his face, Ziya looked at Vahakn inquisitively, examining the unspoken words in his eyes. Since Ziya’s face wore a curious expression, with light and shadow intermingling to form a contradictory image—his mouth telling of stupidity and the sparkle in his eyes showing profound intelligence—Vahakn burst into laughter and Ziya was infected by it too, but Minas, breaking the silence that had fallen, asked, “And then what?” Ziya took a deep breath and continued his story.