The Candidate

by Zareh Vorpouni

  “Come on,” you said at last, seething with impatience. “Hurry up already!”

  For me, there was no need to rush anymore. Ziya’s note had thrown my mind into chaos. I don’t know how long it took me to get back to the room. No, I didn’t need to rush anymore, but you didn’t know that. I had a fever. I stretched out on the bed, speechless and mute, while your agitation grew, feeding on itself. Soon darkness would fall and it would be impossible to chase after the illusion. I had seen Nicole in the morning, but I hadn’t told you. For one thing, I didn’t have the strength to open my mouth, and then I was surprised to see you in that state. An ocean separated us. We were so far from each other. What tone should I have used to make you understand if I had dared to say, “Minas, don’t run. It’s pointless. You’ll end up feeling deceived.” If you had only heard their laughter that morning, their soul-wrenching, contemptuous laughter. From the silence of my window, I watched you in your haste. Your very being was dangling by a thread that a mean comment, an unkind word, or a throaty snicker would have been enough to snip. The ache of a man in love is truly a thing of beauty. Indeed, to fall in love is to fall ill. As I watched you, I thought of Ziya—the Ziya whom I was about to kill. The Ziya who, sitting with us outside the Billard that evening, was reliving, for our sake, the ache the Armenian woman had caused him.

  Suddenly, noticing the dulled glow in my eyes, you asked me if I was sick and put your hand on my forehead. “It’s hot,” you said. “You’re burning up.”

  You ran out into the street and came back with a box of aspirin, and when my fever went down much later, you were convinced of the good those aspirin of yours had done. But in reality, it was something else. It was something else entirely, my dear Minas.

  With his note, Ziya had raised unnerving suspicion in my mind, set my head on fire, and put out the flames. Your ache, that admirable ache that I would never feel myself, undulated in front of me and got me thinking: here I am, then. I’ll be dead and Minas will one day find peace in Nicole’s arms, in Nicole’s embrace, like Ziya so tenderly embraced the Armenian woman. Can you believe that the one who would soon strangle Ziya had, at that moment, come around to the idea of Ziya’s love by seeing your own love for Nicole?

  They say that a man who is about to die sits down to reckon with his life. My reckoning didn’t take long. It didn’t take long because my awareness of time had come to an end. I reckoned with life as I stood to face death, already feeling its peace, whereas I know for you the minutes sometimes seemed like centuries, like on that day. I reckoned with life and it was the reckoning that cured my fever.

  So I started evaluating everything. Crowns of light fell over my eyes. Was my life only a lie, a delusion, which I’ve recorded here in all of its phases? What if all of this was nothing but the ravings of a madman? How is it, then, that next to both your lover and Ziya’s lover stood Fatma’s shadow? There she was, constantly lusting after that old sadism and offering me her nipples to twist once more like a booger between my thumb and index finger. Fatma was a villager. She was not urbane like Ziya or a poet like you who suffers pain in silence. So all of this is a lie. I have constructed a story for myself to justify my unnecessary, disgraceful life.

  We all think our lives are novels filled with hardship. Many times people have told me their life story, after which they stop, let out a long sigh, and say, “Ah, my whole life is a novel.”

  It’s a novel not by virtue of what we have lived, but by virtue of how we narrate it. I’ve noticed that at least half of each story is a lie. Since every life is incomplete, the imagination completes the incomplete with fiction. So life is a tragedy. Life is like dough thrown onto the world. We complete nature’s unfinished work by kneading, shaping, and molding our own piece of dough.

  I’m afraid that I too have fallen prey to my own imagination, so here I end the rough draft of my novel and sign it in blood.

  Vahakn

  Usually he didn’t feel the cold. So why did he feel the chill of that March morning so much? True, he was tired. He had spent the whole night stretched out in bed, reading Vahakn’s papers. The rustle of the papers falling from his hand to the floor, one after the other, seemed like a whisper in deepening silence. Attuned to the sound, he listened to the fading, then dying, of the whisper of the night’s stillness as he gently dropped a sheet of paper onto the pile on the floor. No, fatigue couldn’t be the reason for the cold gnawing at his skin. How many nights had he been out on the street, even in the winter, and had met with courage the cold that found refuge and condensed in the heart of the morning—a cold that, transformed into ice, grated and cracked under his feet. He wasn’t alone. Next to his feet were Vahakn’s feet, which stomped on the frozen ground in anger, causing shrapnel of white ice to fly into the air and fall to the ground like shooting stars. No, he wasn’t alone. So it was the solitude that made him feel the chill, not unlike that spring evening two years ago, when, cold and dejected, he met Vahakn outside the Billard. Only then did his teeth stop chattering, as though Vahakn had suddenly entered his chest and warmed his heart, taking it in his hands. And now they were happy around the table. They were still laughing well past midnight. They turned the passersby into objects of their pleasure, noticing things to make fun of about them. Life boiled in their blood. Their good moods, their convulsive exuberance could only feed their lively warmth. Now and then, though, Minas’s face darkened. The empty coffee cups shattered his cheerful disposition. Vahakn was immediately affected. A shadow fell over his face, making him look pensive, like when passing clouds cast their gloom on the mirrored surface of a lake.

  “What’s wrong?” Vahakn asked.

  “Nothing,” said Minas. “I’m doing really well, actually. In fact, I’ve never felt better.”

  And suddenly he unburdened his mind:

  “You see, I had been so defeated when I came to Paris. I didn’t leave my room for two days. Last night I was out until late. Let me be honest: I left the room because I wanted to put an end to my life in the Seine. But I couldn’t. What can I say? I just couldn’t. On my way back from the river, I couldn’t find the hotel. I have a friend who used to live on Rue Saint-Jacques. I had gone straight to his apartment from the train station only to find out that he had moved. It’s tough to live in Paris when you don’t know anyone. Last night I stayed out on the street. I combed through every street in the neighborhood. I couldn’t find the hotel, even though its image was etched in my mind: the moldy façade pocked by crevices formed by moisture. The entrance was through the café. You have to order something to drink every time you pass through, otherwise they will give you a dirty look. Even if I had found the place, I wouldn’t have dared to go in.

  He couldn’t finish his thought. He fell silent, but soon continued the hotel story to avoid giving himself time to think about what he wasn’t saying.

  “I only remember a name around there. And it’s only because it has to do with history—Danton. I think it should be the next street over. Do you know that street?”

  “No, no, this is the last night,” he replied hastily after Vahakn asked about how many days he still had left to pay. “I spent everything I had to pay for the past four days. I thought it would be wiser to keep the room until I met someone or found something. Paris is such a big city. It’s terrible without a room—terrible.”

  “Forget it. I came out of the winter palace today,” said Vahakn with a disgusted expression in which the pain of a lost opportunity was clear and understood by everyone except Minas. “I have no intention of suffocating between those four walls,” he added, feigning indifference. “We’ll walk together all night. You’ll see that Paris is very interesting at night. You’ll learn about the city, too. That’s how you should learn about it: street by street as if you were turning a book page by page.”

  Minas’s mind was already elsewhere. Vahakn was talking to himself. Minas didn’t even hear his voice. His brain was separated from the world by a dense fog into which he sank slowly, but with
an overpowering weight that pulled him, pulled him down into his inner darkness.

  The outdoor part of the Billard was so nice with its fireplace and lights along the boulevard, which warmed his heart as they watched them.

  “Did you say ‘winter palace?’ What is that?” he asked Vahakn, suddenly coming out of his thoughts.

  Vahakn burst into laughter. Minas’s innocence had disarmed him.

  “Prison, my dear. Prison. Didn’t you know?” he replied cheerfully.

  He shrugged his shoulders slightly, looked into the distance, and focused in on Minas’s face, squinting. He didn’t find what he was looking for. Vahakn had leaned back in his chair to enjoy Minas’s surprise from afar and with relish, but there was no surprise on Minas’s face. To Minas, Vahakn was not a hero. He only saw a bored look in Vahakn’s eyes, in which thoughts sank like a stone falling to the bottom of the ocean.

  Vahakn was about to take his earlier position, a bit disappointed for not having impressed Minas, when Minas asked him, “No beatings?”

  “Oh, no,” Vahakn answered, enlivened, certain that this time he could educate his interlocutor. “Eat, drink, sleep. That’s palace life.”

  “No beatings?” Minas repeated, as though he hadn’t heard Vahakn’s quip.

  “Well, they beat you up at the police station the day you’re arrested.”

  “I know that,” Minas said, curt and dreamy.

  He stopped at the corner of Boulevard Saint-Denis. He gathered it was five minutes to six, because just at that moment, the mouth of the metro spewed out the day’s first wave of human vomit. It would continue until one in the morning on the dot, vomiting onto the streets, spilling, swelling, and colliding with a human mass that would slowly lessen in the morning, only to immediately resume, assailing the city with an endless current. The people leaving the metro threw themselves onto the sidewalk as though they were being chased by invisible demons—elbowing one another and looking like they had just evaded death—and started running like ghosts in a frenzy, sleep still lingering in their eyes and the fear of being late for work churning in their minds. Suddenly someone stood on the steps amid that useless jostling and yelled, “Are you crazy?”

  Raising his elbows to make a path through the crowd, Minas immediately recognized Apkar, who was pushing his body forward as he spit out bitter curses. At this, Minas jumped almost mechanically to hide on the corner of Boulevard Strasbourg and instantly regretted it. He knew it was bad. Deeply upset, he wanted to hide his face and, always giving in to impulse, turned his head toward the window of a clothing store. He pretended to window-shop, but all he saw was his own image, which, having grown sullen, was complaining to its bearer. It scolded him. His eyes fell on the blue dress a mannequin was wearing. For a moment, he felt calm, but only for a moment, because although he couldn’t see his reflection on that dress, he knew it was waiting for him in the space between the mannequins. However hard he pretended to take an interest in the dress, he chased out of the corner of his eye the phantom, which stubbornly kept a look of dissatisfaction on its face. He was caught in the trap and couldn’t turn back. Why did he hide? Why did he leave Apkar alone? Of course it was out of shame, so that he wouldn’t be seen as the friend of the surly cripple, his compatriot. Especially his compatriot, a foreigner. Isn’t it in these situations that we are naturally driven to use our own language, so as not to be understood by others? “What is it, Apkar? What happened?” It was precisely in those words that Minas would have found his justification. Yes, he did well to hide. If he had spoken, the others would have discovered his own foreignness and felt emboldened to heap abuses on Apkar. So he had indirectly stood in Apkar’s defense. He was relieved by this realization. He was even proud of having carried out his duty and kept going, but immediately stopped in his tracks. In the shop window, the image hadn’t changed any of its sullenness. It looked straight at him. This time he really was embarrassed. There was warmth in his cheeks. What he had done with that initial impulse had not ceased to be a bad thing. However you looked at it, bad was bad. He could barely recall how he ended up leaving the window. Now that he was alone, no longer surrounded by others, he would show his bravery by forgetting the incident in front of the shop window and his memory lapse, but when he tried to catch up to Apkar, Minas saw that he was already on the other side of the street. He hesitated and, terrified by a new wave streaming out of the metro, was forced to tense his muscles to withstand the brutal force colliding with him on the sidewalk, just as Apkar had done immediately before. Then he remembered Vahakn’s words from that evening outside the Billard, when Apkar had announced his good news. “What?” Vahakn had shot back in contempt. “Do you take me for a slave?” At the time, Minas had interpreted those words differently, but now, yes. Yes, slaves, slaves, look how they’re running, ruthlessly trampling a cripple without even looking down—a vulgar swarm of faceless, nameless waves.

  He caught up to Apkar on the opposite side of the street, but he preferred to follow him from a distance without letting him out of his sight. As Minas walked, synchronizing his steps with Apkar’s, he noticed that his limping was a peculiar sight to be seen. His left foot trailed behind with each step and he pulled it with great effort, dragging it on the ground behind him and then all of a sudden propelling it forward. His body followed a moment later once his left foot was behind him. Then he threw the same foot back to position the bad foot ahead of him. But it was at this point that the worst thing happened. Once his left foot was ahead, suddenly and with all its might, his right foot would take a long step to situate itself a bit farther than the other one, creating an odd balance for the body to follow. To someone watching from behind, the process left the impression of a stormy sea. But there was more than a storm in the movements of a man constantly trying to find his balance; in particular, there was Apkar’s perfect torment, which manifested itself in his heart and on his face in those deep, craggy furrows. Seeing that Apkar was in fact moving, Minas tried in vain to convince himself that his limp was common, or at least commonly seen, a matter of getting used to it, and that the suffering he imagined in Apkar did not correspond to reality. And yet his own attempt at persuasion did not take hold. The cripple’s pain was undeniable. If it wasn’t a physical kind of pain, then it was certainly a moral one that must have opened in Apkar a deep hole that kept him away from his own kind and, whatever the sort of pain, did not allow him to feed his most basic human emotions.

  Like someone waking up from a bad dream, Minas sprang out of his thoughts. The wide boulevard stretched into the distance on that calm, deserted morning. The Maison Saint-Denis and Rue Hauteville were already behind him. The boulevard had started to slope downward slightly and the edge of Faubourg Montmartre had come into view. Apkar was quite far ahead of him near the kiosk that sold newspapers on the corner. Apkar stopped, bought a newspaper, and continued walking. Stopping again to open the paper, he scanned the headlines. Minas stopped too, and as he did, something startled him. He looked around. Fortunately, there was no one there. It was just as he stopped that he realized that he was limping in exactly the same way as Apkar. He quickly brought his hand to his mouth and was about to bite his pinkie. He stood there terrified. If Apkar had turned around and seen him, he would have certainly thought that Minas was making fun of him. Would Minas be able to tell Apkar that it was an attempt to share his pain? But Apkar would still think it was out of malice, and with no chance of being forgiven, he punished himself by continuing to live out the fate of the damned.

  He wistfully remembered those mornings when Apkar would come out of the metro in that same spot. Often under the pretext of celebrating their chance meeting, they would go to Tout Va Bien, have a quick cup of coffee, and then walk side by side. Apkar came by metro from a distance. Minas would go from Luxembourg to Châtelet, walk down Boulevard Saint-Michel, and cross the two bridges over the island where he sometimes stopped, leaning over the edge of the bridge to take in the sleeping river of the early morning, quietly aw
akening underneath its blanket of mist. The massive golden clock on the courthouse rang and its heavy sound lazily released into the air, searching for its way. With this, Minas pulled himself out of the daydream that, once started, did not relent. It was five thirty. Boulevard de Sébastopol was still long, its nose in the air, breathing in the biting aroma of coffee wafting out of the cafés that had just opened for the day. In nice weather, he never went underground. With all his senses, he relished in the unusual scenery on the streets as the night brightened—the virginity of the day. It’s true that he felt both the pain and pleasure of defiling a virgin. The heavy footsteps of the masses on their way to work changed with each season. They were a torrent in the summer, bold and fast, and reluctant in spring, because after a harsh winter, the footsteps gently fell from stiff muscles to linger in the caress of the sweetening weather. But above all, those footsteps were invitations to kindness, which made him enjoy the presence of people. He delighted in watching them fade into the panorama. By then, he was used to the seasons. He recognized them in the air, in the smell and touch of the air, which, to the person heading to work in those early hours of the morning, was different and always new in each season. And when he set foot in the doorway of the kitchen with great satisfaction, he was already sated by life before starting work. That’s why he’d said it. That’s why he’d said, “I want to be a slave.” But that day he hadn’t gone into the kitchen with the same sense of contentment. That day was a lost day. In front of the throng coming out of the metro that had jostled Apkar, he had felt a sense of loss, an awareness that something had been ripped out of him. Someone had stolen something from him while he was walking in Apkar’s heaving footsteps. Strangely, Minas was at ease despite the pangs he felt at the painful sight of his friend, and having achieved a kind of equilibrium by making Apkar’s pain his own, he didn’t know what to make of that unfamiliar feeling rising from below and mingling with the entangled goings-on above, flittering about, nibbling in the dark, gnawing like mice invisible to the eye despite the keen sense of their presence. It would be impossible to figure out where they were and where they were going, because when we prick up our ears to consider the surrounding silence, the chased cease to move, like buzzing insects that suddenly stop when they sense danger, thinking that stillness makes them invisible, quieting down only to start again once we have lost interest. He found himself playing a game of cat and mouse in which the cat did not have an imaginary toy to play with, like Minas, who in that moment, felt within himself the presence of the unknown, both rousing and disturbing, like when we find our house has been ransacked while we were out. It’s the rage that overwhelms us, not so much because of the stolen or lost belongings, but because of the mystery that comes to us from the unknown, putting a face and a name on our own powerlessness. He stopped here. He stopped and his gaze fell inward, where it sought something soothing, just a word even. The word. He suddenly felt the power of the word. “Passez-moi le mot, passez-moi le mot,” a frustrated man says when the right word escapes him in conversation. If Minas had found the word and said it, even the mouse working in the darkness of his deepest layers would be unmasked and be forced to face him. Minas also knew that he couldn’t punish the culprit, demand restitution, or even stroke its back in gratitude.