The Candidate

by Zareh Vorpouni

  Do you remember that day outside the Billard when I brought my index finger to Ziya’s neck to brush off the imaginary cigarette ash on the knot of his tie? Ziya—the ever-happy Ziya—kept on talking. I don’t know what he was talking about. His hands were dancing in the air. His sharp chin had weakened and seemed to hang. As he spoke, the tension in his small mouth tried to keep his chin from falling. That part of his body was so ugly, but so childlike that it was not lacking a certain charm. What am I saying? This was his charm, the innocence of his expression, which made him endearing. His tiny black eyes would gleam and twinkle whenever he became animated. He was calm, like a summer afternoon, but within, something was raging in the bubbles that swarmed his heart. His dark, matte complexion concealed their existence, but you could sense a hidden, helpless restlessness, a kind of mysterious effect. The expression in his features seemed lifeless. This was the result of the mixture of the Mongolian paleness and the darkness of his skin, but the intensity of his eyes—their sparkling, mischievous darting, which snapped back and forth between you to me—revealed an extraordinary vitality. His gaze traveled back and forth, each time tearing a strip of his smile off his face and tossing it onto your face, where it stayed stuck like gum. In that moment, did you also feel a sense of defiance finding a place for itself inside you, as though leading you to take that stifling mask off your face? Sometimes his gaze would wander and linger on the commotion on the street, his chin low and protruding into the air and his eyes squinting. Was he thinking? No, he wasn’t. Whether he was or not, his pensiveness gave the impression that something had been lost and evoked the sorrow stirred by that loss. I consoled myself by thinking that maybe he had noticed an acquaintance or a girl passing by on the street, and that the reason for his sorrow was that he was with us, that he had fallen victim to our friendship, and was being deprived of a chance to have some fun. One day the strings of this game unexpectedly came undone in front of my eyes, when Ziya once again cocked his head in the air and assumed what had become a familiar position to us. All of a sudden, I realized that he simply chose to be absent from us. Mentally absent, he also imagined himself physically absent from us, too: invisible, an attempt to flee from us like an ostrich burying its head in the desert sand after realizing its enemy is coming.

  Once, when his gaze was floating back and forth between us, it rested on mine for longer than usual. No, not longer, but that’s how it seemed, because his gaze focused on me as it passed; he studied me and went deep into my penetrating gaze for a unit of time that—how should I put this?—can’t even be called an instant. It was precisely the amount of time needed for curiosity to be born and immediately die, during which quite a number of things happened. For instance, his chin suddenly relaxed; his mouth hung open, suspending his words in his voice; his cheeks grew round with the blooming of a fake smile; and his right eye twitched slightly, as if to say, “I know. I know what you want, Vahakn. But I forgive you,” when he sensed the heaviness of the moment in my gaze, embarrassed. Carried away, I turned my gaze to the cigarette ash that my imagination had invented.

  After that, I stopped listening to Ziya’s stories. My eyes were busy constantly searching for specks of ash on the knot of his tie, behind which was the concave part of the throat that yields so easily to the slightest pressure of the thumb.

  An inaccurate inference could be made from what I just wrote. When I say that I stopped listening to him from that day on, it makes it sound like it was a conscious decision on my part. In reality, I should have said that I wasn’t able to listen to him. Indeed, I couldn’t even have done it if I’d wanted to. Whenever I found myself in front of Ziya, my mind became entirely absorbed by the strange shaking in my hands. It was an unease that I couldn’t calm. On either side of me, no matter where I was, my two hands—even though they were part of me—formed a self-governing reality at my sides, independent of me, with demands and a will that evaded my own. I was like two people in one—one in constant conflict with the other. The more my will worked to prevent their free and independent functioning, the more irritated they became and the more they argued, remaining unmoved by the limits of their self-determination. My hands had a mind of their own, and I did too. The two were at odds, in true competition to suppress and surpass each other. Often I caught myself conversing with them. Yes, I talked to them, tried to reason with them. What did I try to reason with them about? I didn’t know. I reasoned, that’s all, and with fierce resolve. Sometimes I would suddenly change directions on a walk, run to the café, sit down at a table, and immediately the argument would begin between me and my hands. I looked at them with the pitiful look of the defeated. They refused to be reprimanded. On the contrary, they were ready to break the table and chair in two. The one thing I managed to do—of course not deliberately, simply automatically, like a person does instinctually in the grips of a headache—was to put my hands on my forehead. With this, the defiance in my hands subsided, but my headache did not. Yet when Ziya approached with a smile on his face and rushed to extend his hand, that calm was different. Both my hands lunged to meet his and clasped them with unusual joy, like friends reuniting after a long period apart.

  The day after his “I know, I know,” he left me a note at the hotel. “Please forgive me for my inconsiderate behavior last night,” he wrote. “Love is so blind that it makes me forget how sensitive you are. Once again, I ask for your forgiveness and beg you not to see any ulterior motives in my words. Until tonight, Ziya.”

  You went to work. Left alone, I couldn’t go out as usual. I was afraid. I’d had a premonition. When I did go out, it felt as though someone else was in my place, roaming the forest of the Parisian crowd. Hands in my pockets, I let my fingers graze Ziya’s note now and again, letting its shock pass through my fingers. No, this particular letter did not resemble any of the ones from before. Gone was the spirit of forgiveness. Suddenly, I encountered a different Ziya. But what was it exactly? My mind couldn’t rest. I couldn’t stop seeing his gaze in front of me, hidden within the folds of my eyes. Anywhere I went, it would follow. If I turned right, it did too. If I turned left, it followed suit. It was calm only when I walked straight ahead, but the gaze remained fixed on me, not letting me go. It stopped feeling that panic that seized it whenever I turned back—a panic for which I no longer have an explanation—but it threw itself into imminent danger. It was terrified when I accidentally put my hand in my pocket. I didn’t need to see the words in the letter. They were already recorded onto my tongue and I repeated them like a broken record. Sometimes I had an uncontrollable urge to open the letter in my hands and look straight into the eye that was hidden there, the one that played an evil game with my fingers when I had my hand in my pocket. It was one thing to know that the eye was there through the simple, trembling touch of my fingers; it was quite another to suddenly have it in your open palm, under your nose, and to look at it face to face—of course, not without trembling. I didn’t have to look at it to start trembling. Thinking about it was enough and realizing that I was the one who put Ziya’s eye in my mind, retrieving it from my memory. Afterward it became very hard to purge my mind of such a scheming image, like a fly that comes back to the same spot to rest on the same wound after being shooed away.

  Then I pushed myself to go to the Jardin du Luxembourg. I circled the park. After the morning’s gusty rainstorm, the sun had come out and lounged like a houseguest. The park, of course, was filled with people, but when Nicole and Monique passed by the Grand Bassin, laughing arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder—perhaps they had been telling each other funny stories—they seemed to be lost in a daydream. Their laughter sounded like a pizzicato and rose like bubbles, not only making them oblivious to their surroundings, but also making the whole park seem deserted. It was as though as they passed, the park offered itself to them and became theirs. They sauntered through it freely as if it were a dream. The park was a dream. They were not. They had long disappeared. The lace of the dream hung over the eyes of the park’s
visitors and estranged them as much from themselves as from their surroundings.

  I don’t know where I went after that. I forced myself onto the street. All that’s stayed with me is walking out of an open gate onto Rue de Vaugirard. After that, my brain didn’t record anything else. Suddenly I found myself sitting on a bench in the park behind Notre Dame at the sharp corner of the island that juts out into the water and splits the river in two. A feeling of hunger twisted my stomach, but I couldn’t eat. I was hungry and unable to eat. It was probably something else that gave me that sensation—something that tricked me into turning my attention toward my stomach. Everything had become unreal since we had seen Ziya’s body together. I knew you had gone home a while ago. The cold had set in. That end of the island is always chilly in the evening because of the raging waters of that part of the river. There was an added chill, which slowly descended from the sky as the evening approached. I made an effort to stand up, mustering up strength by thinking of the food you must have brought home with you. I sat back down. Eating was out of the question as long as that eye was in my pocket, folded into the note, wound into the letters and eating me up little by little, chewing and ruminating. Suddenly my hand flew out of my pocket with the piece of paper. Under my gaze, there was only one sentence. The first lines were completely smeared or had become illegible because of who knows what. So the letter had become: “. . . beg you not to see any ulterior motives.”

  It was like on a stormy night, when lightning strikes and you see, standing right in front of you, the stump of a tree, which moments before had been cloaked in black—how sharp, how clear its dark, dense mass becomes when it’s isolated from the surroundings to which it belongs, how it penetrates your eye and illuminates your consciousness like a thunderbolt. Minas, I understood the hidden meaning in those words through the light that had flooded my mind.

  That day, as he spoke like an old lady with his chin hanging low, not a single word reached my ear. If it did, it flew out as soon as it arrived, because of the roadblock in my mind, which was entirely preoccupied by the ash on his tie. My gaze immediately drifted upward to rest on that spot, so close to his tanned neck, and especially considering the strange feeling I had about the blood circulating beneath his skin, I thought Ziya had guessed that I had been sniffing for his blood, inspiring a dark thought in him. But then my lingering gaze prompted him to give a mischievous wink and puff out his lips as if to say, “I know . . . I know.” The idiot that I was, I turned my eyes away from his accusatory stare and bowed my head in shame like a boy caught red-handed. And yet, do you see how clever he was? Convinced that we hadn’t been able to break through the hidden meaning in his words, he came to us with an apology the following day, as usual, intent on directing our attention to that which he thought had escaped us, to the essential word. The other words had been written to fill space, as decoration, so that he could write the other one, both hidden and obvious, the “ulterior motives,” which could not have been more “ulterior.” He could not have been more provocative in his sly, fake, and meandering manner.

  Now I understand. There is a word that rings in my ear, and then another one and another one still. I don’t know how they stayed there and why now they are waking from their slumber. Their ringing is so loud! Since you weren’t as obsessed as I was, how come you didn’t understand? You’re to blame. Do you know why? Because you think it’s natural: since you can be in love with a French woman, Ziya can be in love with an Armenian woman. It all seems so natural to you. Perhaps it is natural, but tell me, is there anything natural in our lives? In the life of an Armenian? No, don’t you think he told us so tenderly about the love he had for an Armenian woman to convince us of his sympathy for the Armenians? And to go on talking of ulterior motives, when it was his goal to make us feel that motive in the right way, so that—even though we may be far from them and released from them—we will continue to suffer on these distant shores. Oh, Ziya. Ziya. I’ve searched for that gaze of yours ever since, but it never rested on the blacks of my eyes again. It slid over them like oil. I wished for it to return once more and perch on the corner of my eyes like a bird sitting daintily on a tree branch.

  Oh, Ziya’s gaze.

  It was what I sought for days and what led my eyes to rest on the knot of his tie near the spot where the ash had landed, so that when it appeared again, it would be easy to capture right away. Yet, my eyes came to my aid unsummoned and willed it, so that my pursuit didn’t flounder, but burgeoned and ripened, making room for the ash and putting it on the knot of his tie. It was there whenever I looked sharply and intently, whenever it was supposed to be there, because the fluttering of his gaze suddenly seemed close and similar—not similar but identical—to Fatma’s gaze, whenever we used to quietly sit cross-legged around the low, round, wooden table to eat. Fatma’s eyes would be staring at me and watching me, transfixed. Then her stare would flitter, attacking my nerves with a shudder brought about by her hideous fantasies. From her thoughts that thing would happen again and I would contract and tighten to become smaller and more distant. Fatma would stand up and come closer, her maniacal eyes looking into mine as I tried to keep my gaze down on my palms like a boy waiting for a beating. But Fatma, transformed into an uncontainable vortex, would jump on top of me and turn me around with a whack of the arm. In those moments, I felt as if I were a lamb about to be slaughtered, as I had seen her do, holding the animal’s snout in her left hand and slitting its throat with her right.

  Now do you understand why I tried to strangle Ziya to death that day outside the Billard? But my restless fingers were suddenly relieved of their tension and I only ended up taking my index finger to the knot of his tie to say with absolute calm, “It’s nothing. Just some cigarette ash.”

  That day I knew how I would kill Ziya. I would strangle him. Did I know? Someone in me did. I hadn’t thought about killing him until that last day, until I reached the Square du Vert-Galant. It hadn’t even crossed my mind, even when we got up to take a walk and wander the streets, over the Pont Neuf and down into the Square du Vert-Galant. We sat in the park on the tip of the island under the trees. As always, it was Ziya who did the talking. I couldn’t talk anyway. We had barely come down the steps before I started to feel empty. I felt infinite pressure, tense and petrified, through which passed not a flicker of thought. Ziya continued his endless stories while his eyes played and his hands danced in the air, his face as pensive as ever. Then we came close to the edge of the water. I had turned my back to the bridge, while Ziya stood tall like a statue against the water in the background. For a moment, he turned his gaze toward the river, dreamy and melancholy. When he turned back to me, he started telling his story again in a soft, low voice, as if someone could have overheard us. There wasn’t anyone in sight. It was freezing along the river on that March night. It was late already—close to midnight. I had forgotten that it was time to go to Les Halles. Ziya spoke so sweetly that it seemed as if he could have gone on talking like that forever, right there underneath the lovely trees of the Square du Vert-Galant on the banks of the Seine, to which he had turned his back. As he gestured, a ray of light from above, from one of the lights on the bridge, suddenly shined into his eyes and illuminated his pupil. He blinked as he uttered a word heaving with meaning, then lifted his head and broke into laughter. Yes, Minas, Fatma was there, on the knot of his tie. Then I realized, at last, that I was going to kill Ziya. I understood this with a sense of complete composure, like a programmed machine that knows exactly where to put its thumb and press, on the very spot where harsh, vigorous pressure can make death instantaneous.

  He could only say one thing—nothing more.

  “What are you doing, Vahakn? Hey . . .”

  Ziya’s lifeless body began to fall and was about to collapse as I slowly laid him down on the ground, his neck still in my hands, which continued to squeeze fiercely. I couldn’t move from where I was. My knees grew weak and I sat down next to his corpse. At the moment I laid his body on t
he ground, gently but calling on all my strength and making complete use of the terrible tension in my hands to prevent him from suddenly collapsing, a shiver passed through my thighs and gradually grew more intense before dying down little by little. Once I was sitting by his corpse, I realized that what had just happened within me was the very same clenched force that I once used to resist Fatma, a struggle followed by a complacent weakness that had kept me unconscious back then in a kind of agony. I must have sat there for a long time before coming out of that moment. First my head awoke, then my senses, and finally my muscles, which I could move very slowly, but without too much effort. I saw the river. Along its shores, the lights from above, lined up like worry beads, flickered and watched over the night’s calm. It was because of that calm that I realized so much time had passed. The city takes on a pensive look after midnight. Then, before I stood up, I knelt down, gently gave his lifeless body a push, and silently surrendered him to the water. He stayed clung to the riverbank for a while, as though he didn’t want to be separated from me, until the current carried him away, calmly and peacefully, at times wavering but always moving, and the farther he went, the deeper the sky became above my head. The distance grew and the corpse became smaller before my eyes. It wasn’t yet morning. Then I climbed up to the bridge and came home. You were sleeping.

  When I came home from the park behind Notre Dame, you were in the room, nervous, trembling, and lost. Poor Minas. You were pacing back and forth along the long intestine that was our room. You didn’t know where to put your hands.