I wrote every day and tore it all up, until I became entirely convinced that I had to write. I’ll give you an account of my experiences over this past month as well as of our friendship over these past two years, which has brought me to this point, to this bliss. No, this is not an accusation. On the contrary, I’m grateful to you for showing me what friendship can be and for living with me for a month after I was already dead inside. I’m that lucky one who could survive among the living for an entire month. Only I realized what life was like on this side and what it looked like from here. No, don’t torture yourself with that nonsense we call remorse. This is about something else. Of course, this wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t introduced me to Ziya. But would that have been better? No, absolutely not! I would have just carried on with my miserable life. I would have always remained a candidate. Can someone be a candidate for candidacy for his whole life? At a certain point, you have to become the professor. So I became the professor, Minas. This is why I’m letting myself lecture you, the poet. Yes, don’t argue. Poetry is too sacred a thing for me to let you make a game out of it with ridiculous excuses. Living as a dead man for a month, I know what poetry means. Poets are the ones who inhabit death and see life laid bare. I want you to be proud, just as I was proud of you. Everyone needs a certain measure of pride to be able to live. Did you really think I would have stayed with you? It’s me we’re talking about. I never knew how to stay in one place. Something grabbed me by the hand and flung me every which way. Hurry! How did you expect me not to be a thief and a cheat, eating the hard-earned bread of others? There’s something I have to tell you. My friendship with you was not entirely out of self-interest. If I had left you, I’m sure you would have fallen into the clutches of the people who frequent those upstairs cafés on Boulevard Saint-Michel. The literary types, I mean. Nothing is deadlier to a poet than an environment like that. Our place was fine, the Billard, the cafés of people like Apkar. Never mind that their brawls used to embarrass the ones upstairs. Note that I’m already talking in the past tense. When I say that this is a dead man talking to you . . .
At any rate, promise me, Minas, that you will never go to those cafés. Do you think I didn’t notice your anguish whenever you would walk past and glance over at them? Your eyes would be glued to the door of The Ani whenever we came out of the hotel. Keep to yourself, Minas, alone. Go ahead and burn in your own blaze, but escape the flames like a bluebird. Be one of the accursed. The accursed are God’s spoiled children. I understand why you read Corbière and Lautréamont. Those spurned poets are your brothers in spirit, but you must read in Armenian, in particular. Hate what isn’t written in Armenian. Hate even what is written in French with its astounding beauty. We need to hate, otherwise we will be lost. You can’t imagine the sorrow I felt whenever you would go up to listen to them, especially to the men at La Source.8 Do you know what they were discussing? They were talking about Bergson, Keyserling, and Spengler, as if they were professors, as if nothing irreparable had happened to us. Be careful not to turn into one of those men. One day, all the air will be let out of them. As I said, you have to be alone, alone like a saint before God, alone like a man in love before a woman. I know your life will be filled with bitterness, but you will measure it from within against the bitterness of our people.
Fine, I suppose that all of this sounds like a lecture. This is not why I sat down to write. This came once I started writing and took precedence, because I loved you the most.
Do you remember what you said to me outside the Billard on our way back from seeing Ziya’s bloated corpse?
“Bravo, Vahakn,” you said in amazement. “How did you manage not to give yourself away? Your body language didn’t betray you at all.”
There was nothing clever or masterful about it. If I had been like everybody else, I would have surely given myself away, because the living live in fear of losing their lives. Fear is the enemy. But you’re forgetting that I was already dead and death is a place where fear is afraid to set foot.
Now listen to me. What I’m about to say should not be ignored. The fate of an entire people hangs in the balance. That people is us, a thing called the Armenians. We can all give speeches on Bergson, Keyserling, and Spengler in cafés, we can all—as fathers sitting in our homes in front of our wives and children—work to make a place for ourselves in life and be buried in that place, unaware of the fact that a Turcocidal impulse has been planted in each one of us. A killer plotting in the dungeon of our souls is waiting for the chance to leap out of his hiding place. The Turks didn’t know what they were doing to us when they slaughtered us like chickens, embedding in us their future sentence. Don’t laugh. If someone told me the same thing a month ago, I would have laughed, too. Now we are done laughing. Fini de rire. Finita la commedia. Would you understand if I told you that Ziya’s killer is not the one writing this note? The one writing this note is himself the victim of the other, the one who, the night that Ziya and I were walking along the river, suddenly stepped out of me and started walking alongside me, his arm slung through mine, our bodies almost one. Sometimes I felt that I was looking him right in the face. Even when I took Ziya’s neck between my fingers and pressed, it seemed as though I were a witness to a crime being committed by someone else.
All Armenians nurture a Turcocidal impulse in the darkest crevice of their heart. A part of every single piece of bread eaten goes to feed the killer inside, nourishing it continuously with such instinctive force that it will survive for generations to come.
One Sunday, I went to church. As usual, there were crowds inside and outside. Inside were the ones praying; outside were the ones mingling. I went inside, not to pray, but to hear the music of the liturgy. I often go into the churches I come across. Nothing soothes me more than the music of the divine. My whole being coils into my soul. At no other time do I feel anything so powerfully, almost to the point of seeing my own being within me. The liturgy went on and the faithful prayed passionately on their knees, sometimes standing up and making the sign of the cross. The word “God” could be heard through the wisps of incense. I was standing motionless in a corner. I took in the scene through half-closed eyes and my soul filled with the feeling of being surrounded by a congregation that had surrendered itself to an unknown, omnipotent power. Suddenly, I can’t say how, the feeling of that presence began to blur, as if it were being transformed by suspicion. Little by little, it seemed that the liturgy was just preparation for a conspiracy, that from one moment to the next, the will of the congregation would be unleashed by an omnipotent power from above and turn this pious gathering into a mob. Already the clank of the swords resounded in my ears, even though I saw it was just the sound of the dzndzgha ringing.9 The priest, leaning against the holy table at the altar, turned around, raised his paternal hand, and said, “May peace be upon you.” It was in that instant that my mind played a trick on me, making me believe that the priest was in fact about to signal the start of a bloody battle. I jumped up from my seat with both hands clasped over my mouth, stopping myself from yelling into the crowd: “Murderers! Murderers!”
I ran to the park on the Champs Elysées. I felt like a wild beast, but a surprising calm came over me as soon as I sat down on a bench. It was so peaceful underneath the trees. It was a kind of serenity that only a Sunday could bring. I started to think. I thought about my plans. I started to organize my life in my mind. After my breakdown in the church, the quintessentially human practice of organizing a life seemed like a miraculous feat. Go ahead, laugh! If they put a knife in your hand right now and threw a Turk at your feet, you probably wouldn’t have time to laugh. Just as I didn’t with Ziya. And look, this is what happens. Murder, then suicide. Something to be avoided at all costs. That shouldn’t happen. Let’s suppose for a moment that three million Armenians kill three million Turks, causing three million suicides. Who wins? The Turk again, of course, because there would still be fifteen million left. So we must always make sure that the three million Armenian
s are, wherever they may be, still capable of killing three million more Turks and can do it again and again until the very end—the natural end.
Now I’ve come to the point of my letter. By the time this note reaches you, I’ll have ceased to exist. Why? Who is forcing me? My crime will not have left a single trace behind. A clean crime. And yet tomorrow, after I finish writing, I will kill myself. If the same opportunity arises one day, I don’t want you to go the way I have. Don’t argue. Listen. You’re Armenian like me and you have a heart. Having a heart is our biggest danger. Experience has taught me that the resilience of the heart depends on how much hatred we fill it with. Let’s fill it with hatred. Let’s make it swell with hatred. Despite the practical education Hortense gives you, despite her efforts to help you become a man, you’re still a boy, a naïve boy who chases after Nicole, after a shadow. Now that I’m thinking about this, I don’t regret the lesson Fatma taught me. Thanks to her, I was able to carry out my duty as an Armenian. Of course, you don’t understand what I’m talking about. I’ve never talked to you about Fatma. What use was there in telling each other our stories, right? Each one of us has inherited a similar one.
Fatma is the Turkish woman who adopted me. She freed me, so that I could come here. She didn’t know what she was doing either.
We had been walking for days. Our feet were raw. We were hungry and lightheaded and could barely keep ourselves upright. I was so exhausted that I constantly lagged behind. Standing in the middle of the deserted road and raising my arms into the air, I cried and screamed until the corners of my mouth began to tear. I always lagged behind. I was struck with terror whenever I saw the caravan slowly disappear down the road ahead. My mother had to run back to drag me along, begging and pleading, “Son, don’t fall behind. Walk, for God’s sake, walk! The gendarmes will kill you.”
It’s true that those who lagged behind went down with one stroke of the sword. There was no time. The caravan had to keep moving. I couldn’t walk. There were others who couldn’t walk either, old women and children like me. From time to time, commotion swept through the caravan as mothers ran back to collect their children. Lashes of a whip brought the caravan to order and it continued to advance slowly and sorrowfully.
One afternoon, we reached a village. Seeing houses drained me of energy even more. The will to walk had left me. I didn’t want to take one more step, though my terrified mother was pulling me by the hand. The Turkish villagers had gathered to watch the miserable procession. My mother didn’t stop screaming. Falling to the ground, I resisted her tugging and asked for water. I couldn’t understand why she refused to give me the water that was so indifferently following its course down the river a few steps away. Suddenly, one of the gendarmes grabbed me by the hand and threw me toward the villagers. My mother, losing her mind, shrieked and screamed, but I didn’t budge. The gendarme tried to kick her toward the rest of the caravan, but she continued to shout weakly, “my son, my son,” choking on her tears. Then the gendarme drove his sword into my mother’s chest. The caravan kept going for better or worse. Worse rather than better. My mother stayed where she was, painting the earth with her blood.
To this day, I still haven’t been able to resign myself to the idea that I was the cause of my mother’s death. But how can I explain the terrifying tyranny of thirst? As I walked, the road suddenly turned into a rushing river. The water swelled, wave after wave, and I threw myself into them with the force of my entire body, only to find myself on the dry, dusty road, clutching dirt in my arms and feeling thirst as heavy as rocks in my mouth.
Fatma took me to her house. She took care of me for days. She soothed and caressed me, pressing me to her chest with all her might. “Oghloum, oghloum,” she used to say, as my mother’s voice still rang in my ears.10 It was only her voice within me. The skin on my body was like a thick hide that nothing could penetrate. Within me was a world where terrible loneliness reigned, where my mother’s screams were drowned out by my sobs, the unfettered lament of a night storm.
Then I started going to the fields with Fatma, but I couldn’t work. I couldn’t have worked, even if I had wanted to. My head was as heavy as a boulder. I couldn’t do anything at all. Every one of her pleas to work encountered resistance in me. Out of the corner of my eye, I would watch Fatma, who, encouraged by my glance, would smile at me and mutter something, her words suddenly stiffening my whole being with an inexplicable inner recalcitrance. Only when I was alone in the summer would my spirit lighten for a moment as I watched larks soar into the sky. But when they pulled their wings in and dipped into the plowed fields, I would suddenly start throwing rocks at them, moved by a fierce rage. And I would cry. I would cry with my whole body. I don’t know what would have happened to me if I hadn’t cried. Maybe my shriveled heart would have split open and emptied out. One day, when I had surrendered to uncontrollable, insatiable sobbing, I started to choke, unable to stop my sobs, until Fatma, startled, ran over to me and took me in her arms.
“Oghloum, oghloum,” she said. “Don’t cry. This is just how the world is.”
But I kept shaking and grinding my teeth.
That was when something terrible happened. Hugging me tightly to her chest, Fatma kissed my cheeks. As she kissed me, I could hear a strange irregularity in her breathing. I remembered my mother’s kiss and Fatma’s kiss frightened me. When my mother kissed me, quickly and anxiously, her kiss moistened my cheeks, calmed my soul, and made me feel as happy as a soldier returning triumphantly from battle. There was something else in Fatma’s kiss. It had such an impatience in it that it reminded me of a fox that I’d seen devour a chicken in our garden early one morning. All of a sudden, I don’t quite know how, fear awakened my numbed heart. I was scared and so I ran. Fatma ran after me. My twelve-year-old legs carried me far from her. I spent the whole day in the forest—confused, shaken, and weak. As it started to get dark, I returned to the house with my head hung and my feet unsteady, like a dog with its tail between its legs. That day, without warning, I resigned myself to my fate. I became a yielding slave.
Fatma was waiting for me at the door. She brought me inside and we sat together at the table. We were silent. We didn’t speak. After dinner, I went to bed, curled up and trembling, my head buried in my arms, as though to protect it from an impending blow. That night, Fatma sowed in me the seeds of a murderer. For me, the bed was the very edge of the world, beyond which there was nowhere to retreat. This is how resignation settled in me. I had surrendered, but I felt that my resignation was a hidden, puzzling, grinning, unrecognizable kind of determination, which, mingling with my resignation and acting as its support, was like a force condensing in the core of my soul. Of course, I wasn’t aware of this back then. It would be years before I realized it, until Ziya nurtured those seeds and helped them sprout under his warm, misty gaze.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Sometime later, Fatma came into my room. Time suddenly stood still. A sense of looming danger overcame me. I was still and petrified. Fear squeezed my throat again and, burrowing my neck into my shoulders, I summoned all my strength to forget my own existence. I was trying to ignore the danger that mounted as the cautious sound of Fatma’s bare feet padded across the wooden floor toward my bed. My ears were so finely tuned to her footsteps that even when they stopped, their echo resonated in me, carrying with it the shudder of fear. At last, silence settled, spreading and encompassing the entire world, and I felt alone, vulnerable, and helpless. It seemed as if it were my last day, as if suddenly everything were about to come to an end. I kept hugging myself tightly, so tightly that even the force of a knife would be powerless against my strength. The silence grew more threatening, more disturbing. It was a disintegrating silence that wore out even the most determined sense of patience. I threw off my blanket, wanting to put up a final fight and confront the danger face to face. Fatma was standing by my bed with a kerosene lamp in her hand, and . . . how should I put this, Minas? She was naked, completely naked, he
r head resting lightly on one side of the lamp. In the dim light, her lips offered a sweet, pleading smile. Her eyes greedily searched my gaze, looking for the promise of consent and reminding me of the way she drove her shovel into the ground for the next day’s harvest.
Do you know what? Even today I still don’t understand why the infinite sweetness in her eyes—a supplication—terrified me so much that I took my head in my arms in order not to see it, unable to scream and stifling the cry in my throat.
“My son,” Fatma said. “Don’t be scared. Fatma doesn’t want to hurt you.”
Then she got down on her knees and brought her face close to mine. Once again that breathing—driven by a fast, irregular heartbeat, bringing to mind leaves blown here and there in an autumn breeze—came to furrow my face with evil, as I sought refuge on the mattress spread across the floor, clawing at it, clutching it with all of my might. Suddenly, I lost my resistance. This is what sent Fatma into a rage. In her anger, she tried to grab me—begging and coaxing as she tried to hug me, press me against her naked body, and undress me at the same time. She finally succeeded. I had no strength left and just lay there, silent and lifeless. She started to knead me with her body like dough. Closing my eyes to what she was doing, I thought of my mother’s blood, which was still outside on the road. It hadn’t yet been washed away by the rain. Neither my agitation nor my submission could disarm Fatma. The more I tried to avoid her touch, the more violently her passion burned. Do you know what the result of this struggle was? Fatma began beating me with tightly clenched fists, abandoning herself to unbounded rage. I don’t know where her wrath would have ended if I hadn’t suddenly taken her in my arms to neutralize the blows. At the same time, she seized the chance to press me against her chest with such force, such vehemence, that my body began to tremble from a terrifying cramp in my thighs, and I hugged her even more desperately to stop it, to lose myself in her. The silent shudder through my heart and thighs became the last tremors of death. The tremors gave way to a boundless feeling of lethargy as they slowed and disappeared one by one. I felt something warm and wet on my thighs and then right after . . . I don’t remember anymore. What I do remember is that the next morning, to my surprise, I found myself in my bed. I looked around. Everything was peacefully in its place. It seemed that I had spent a long time in the grips of death. I had found a way to make life bearable, to forget life by living in death. This led to my quest to find the moment that opened the door to nothingness, the door that I would pass through. Can you understand that state of mind in which you can no longer feel anything, where all thought is absent? A vegetative state. What am I saying? At least a vegetable has a drive to live. It knows how to veer its course to avoid an obstacle and mount quiet, stubborn resistance against all hindrances, until at last it emerges into the light. Let’s say that I was like an object that was always subdued and never showed the slightest sign of life. You throw it, it lands where you want it to land. If you throw it into a corner, it stays there. If you throw it into water, it sinks slowly to the bottom. If you toss it into the air, it falls back down. Never does it ever resist. Fatma did all of these things to me and I gave in to them. If someone had told me that I was a living being and not an object, it would have surprised me to hear, despite the fact that, as an inanimate object, I would have been incapable of feeling surprise. I used to wait impatiently, yet passively, for those moments when she would come to me, sniffing around like a dog finding a spot to shit. With that hoarse voice of hers she would purr “oghloum, oghloum” as she kissed my cheeks. I was like a piece of timber. On the inside, I was like a wooden plank, but on the outside my arms and legs shook to perform the movements I had been trained to make mechanically. Then we clung to each other like crazy people about to throw ourselves into nothingness. I would end up convulsing, which brought me a dark awareness of something happening outside of me faraway, but which was in fact deeply rooted in me. From deep within, I felt my arms wrap tightly around her body and my teeth and buttocks tighten, shaken by the anguish that people likely feel when they find themselves face to face with death.
The Candidate Page 6