Minas wandered near the café and refused to admit to himself that he had come to meet Vahakn. He knew that he wouldn’t see him there, even if he suspended his disbelief, as he was now, leaning against the lamppost and looking into Vahakn’s eyes like a fish moving closer to its bait. “Who knows where he is now? Busy hunting for new prey.” Faith is blind, as they say, like addiction. And there, sitting outside the café, Vahakn searched for his mouth. He didn’t have one to scream with and had a wild urge to scream to keep from raving. He had left his mouth in the bundle with the rest of his body parts. His eyes looked more like noise than a gaze—a scream that couldn’t rise. It fell with sharp, tragic laughter. In his veins, he felt a movement akin to the coiling of a snake, which pulled him down toward the earth, toward the ground, toward the mud. He realized then that the bundle in the distance had come undone. His mouth had fallen out. Like a caterpillar taking on a new form, he felt complete. After a short, almost imperceptible jolt, the parts came together and he could at last scream aloud: “Hey, Minas!”
Dearest Sir,
I wonder if you have received my letter. I’m getting impatient waiting. I’m constantly waiting for the mailman, as if you were somehow obliged to write to me. I know we all have our own pain, but what can I do? I’ve lost my mind. I was fine until now. I told myself that once he got tired of wandering, he would just come home one evening and it would be like he had never left. He would come home after work. Every day I imagine making his meals, setting the table, sitting and waiting. I tell myself that he will sit down at the table as soon as he gets home. Now that he never will, I don’t know what to do. My heart is restless. Before at least I used to fill the time by thinking about him and the meals I would cook for him. I constantly want someone to talk to about these things to avoid thinking about them. But I don’t have anyone to make my heart feel lighter. Can you understand the void that I’ve fallen into?
How is it that he reached that point? No, he shouldn’t have done this to me.
Yours sorrowfully,
Arshalouys Vahakn
The sheet of paper on his desk was still blank, but he had already started to fill it with his gaze. For more than an hour his eyes furrowed the page, which surrendered to the caress of his pen. Like an expectant father, he anxiously anticipated the result. He vacillated between writing and not writing. In that moment, he took hold of the pen and rested its tip on the paper. The black pen waited with extraordinary patience to run across the pristine whiteness of the page, while he, taut with resistance, refused to obey the order. And yet, based on a natural inclination, he was filled with a sense of compassion and gave in. Pen in hand, he drew some quivering lines that represented the words “Dearest Madame.” Why “dearest” and not “dear,” as he had written before, reserving for himself the simple role of relayer of information? The current carried him away and it was too late to swim against it. He realized he had come into a game that had already begun. He gently laid the pen on the desk, outside the margins of the paper. There was something so provocative about seeing the pen on the sheet of paper that it made him empty his heart in a flood. He seemed somewhat serene, but it was a false serenity, like a dog that buries a bone it’s been thrown in a sign of protest, but having kept an image of it in its mind, drools and dozes sweetly with its head resting on its paws.
He rested his head on his right arm and closed his eyes, too. He tried to sleep. He stopped thinking. He felt sick—at least he wanted to believe he was. Thinking of work in the morning, he wanted to go to bed. He couldn’t move. Now he could finally write. Did he have to? No, he didn’t. So he slept like a baby. The evening had been crushed at the edge of the night. The deepening silence in the room had become overstimulated to the point of becoming audible. The silence was a faint buzz in his ear canal, while beyond him, its wide waves spread endlessly across the city and beyond. Suddenly he felt a jolt. He sat up and took hold of the pen. The silence in his ears was no longer a buzz.
Dearest Madame Arshalouys,
Please accept my apologies a thousand times over. Believe me, it has not been unwillingness or indifference that has kept me from writing. If I say forgetfulness, I would be wrong again. It’s not that I’ve forgotten to write, but more that I haven’t written like this before. How can one remain indifferent to your inconsolable pain, particularly after Vahakn entrusted me with the responsibility of consoling you? Neglect on my part would be unforgivable. In your letter, you write about an emptiness that doesn’t take much effort for me to understand. We share a similar condition. I say “we” because whenever Apkar opens his mouth—Vahakn must have written to you about him—he talks about nothing but our unfortunate friend. All of a sudden, you will see him fall into a profound inner void before he finishes his thought.
Of course, it would be impossible to go on like this forever. It would be impossible to carry around a dead person with us like this. Life is for the living. We must wait and be patient until the storm passes. Time takes care of everything. They say that there is calm after the storm—the bigger the storm, the greater the calm.
Let’s wait and be brave until that day, which I hope comes soon.
Your grieving friend,
Minas
Apkar was furious that day. He was exactly the opposite. He was calm after a dreamless night. As he dropped the letter into the mailbox, he already felt a change in his mental state. He felt that he must have done good work. He thought he had freed himself of the letter’s disturbing consequences. The consequences were now seen in a different light. Even an image of Arshalouys had been sketched in his mind’s eye as he arranged the words of his letter and saw a kind of harmony—not calm and still a bit distressed—bring about a knowing smile in the relaxed lines of her face. Arshalouys seemed beautiful—perhaps he wished she were. Why did he want her to be like that? Beautiful Arshalouys. In his imagination, he beamed at her blooming smile, but it was intercepted by Hortense whom he had forgotten was there, hunched and leaning against the door, just at the moment he glanced at her. Her preoccupied expression opened to draw in the light of a smile that Minas had intended for somebody else. Hortense couldn’t have known the journey that smile had taken to faraway places where fog always descends on the roads. Hortense smiled back with a look that exuded gratitude. In that moment, her unpainted lips were about to move when Minas stopped her.
“Yes, I got it,” he snapped. “I’ll bring you your coffee. I’ll bring it.”
He didn’t recognize himself. He was a completely different man, confident and self-possessed. Ever since last night, the Hortense who leaned against the kitchen door had retreated and the Hortense who descended the marble stairs like a countess, Madame Hortense Bédier, had emerged. Now he was in control of the game. The apprenticeship was over. “Now I’m the professor,” he said to himself. He wasn’t the same person who jumped when Hortense gave orders. He was inexperienced then—shy and weak—when Hortense, with the gentle touch of her delicate fingers on his head, silently guided those love games with such care—yes, I must admit it—with such refined care that he didn’t feel as if he was being coaxed. She spared his sense of male pride, while his head, innocently subjected to Hortense, traveled over the sensitive parts of her naked body, greeting them with kisses as he passed from one to the next.
The heavy velvet curtains were drawn. Their deep red and fragrance had made the air heavy, almost palpable. Minas kept going like a swimmer in the water, a tray in hand. Hortense was lying on the bed. She was reading a book, or pretending to read to give her waiting some kind of purpose. When she lifted her head, she suddenly blushed and grew nervous, like a bird folding its wounded wings and waiting on the edge of a bush for the helping hand of a kind stranger. And that’s what happened. Her petite body, naked under her lingerie, fell into his arms with all her warmth. He wanted to make her melt with his kisses, with the little love games he had learned from her. Now he wanted to return them to her, multiplied, perfected. Minas was up against Minas. After the w
restling match, what remained in his arms was a small woman—a girl, practically—whom he looked at intently, like an executioner looking at his victim. She was so tired that she couldn’t move—it was as though she had already ceased to exist. But he kept staring, not at the creature immobilized by his gaze, but at that thing that, born of his sudden lust, was the embodiment of his lust and came to life slowly, imperceptibly, her breasts heaving with the waves of air she was breathing in. He threw his arms around her neck, forming a firm, passionate ring. His lips perched on her mouth, like the bee on a flower, not to offer a kiss, but to extract one, to pack into the kiss the jumbled, scattered, and shattered fragments of his inner being.
The silence, hanging from the curtains on the windows, was a group of sleeping bats that weighed heavily on the room. In that oppressive atmosphere, he struggled to find what was tormenting his imagination. The mingling odors of bodies, dirty water, and wasted semen prevented his mind from chasing after a lost image that, at times, was a body falling from his limp arms, the countess descending the marble stairs. In particular, it was an image that fled to the edge of his thoughts and lingered there, irrefutable and shapeless. That was the misery of his search, because it was at once the product of his imagination and its immediate disappearance. He shook his head, as though it would help untangle his thoughts, and the heaps of image shards spilled out like bats that, terrorized by the light pouring through the window, fled in every direction toward the dark folds of the curtains. And yet the image remained unbreakable, disturbing his search with perfect effort. He tried in vain to stand up and walk through the ruins that filled the room. He was tired of those endless ruins, because they kept resurrecting an image of the Armenian, of the essence of his nation.
Then he gave up, called off the search, and tried to sleep.
Early in the morning, he tiptoed down to the kitchen, carefully avoiding the night guard. Throughout the night, there was something unsteady and tender in his soul, something that suddenly thickened, hardened, and took shape when he stood in front of the stove. The shape was the letter he had written to Arshalouys the day before. Profoundly amazed, he cried out, “Ah ! ça alors.” A match in his hand, he was about to light the burner to make coffee, but immobilized, petrified, he couldn’t do it, because out of the confusion of the night clearly emerged the object of his torturous search, right there facing him, just as they say that one day the Earth burst out of the ocean fully formed. Emerging from his thoughts, that object stood across from him. If he had wanted to, he could have held it in his hands. It seemed so clear and so tangible, even though it was just an image, like an image born of a painter’s mind, that is to say, a concept turned into a painting, hung on the wall, materialized. Minas stared at it in bewilderment. “Ah ! ça alors.” It must be said parenthetically that this French expression of amazement, which is often used in daily life, is a way of remaining disconnected from the story of an interlocutor. “Ah ! ça alors” is just another inconsequential interjection thrown into the air that allows listeners to continue developing their own mental image, preventing interaction between two beings and therefore running counter to the idea of language as a tool for communication. Of course, this wasn’t the case for Minas. In fact, quite the opposite was true. By repeating it three times, one after the other, Minas not only communed with his interlocutor, which in this instance was the letter, but also became it completely. The night—a master of the business of spoiling a game—can so easily blur the line between a Hortense, lovestruck in his arms; a Madame Bédier, elegantly descending the staircase; and an Arshalouys, born of his mind who withdraws into her lair like a shadow, retreating with the dawning of the day. The first task of the day is to put everything in order and arrange it to be able to make use of life, except in the case of someone who dwells eternally in the night, like Minas. So in plain daylight, he returned to his night mode, taking with him the residue of the day’s thoughts: regret. He couldn’t understand why he had written the letter. Well, he had written it. Let’s suppose that writing it had been a responsibility, that he had to write it to calm the heart of a distraught young woman, Vahakn’s wife, except that he had had no right to slide across slippery emotional ground. The more he reread the last letter in his mind, the closer he examined the words he had used—first one by one, separated from one another, then as part of the composition as a whole—and the more he realized that he had corrupted a sentimentalism that his words could not have conveyed if he hadn’t wanted them to, consciously or otherwise, and which could easily capture a heart weakened by misery. Why so informal a tone? His very first words were like two heads leaning in close, “Dearest Madame Arshalouys.” What right was there for this intimacy between two strangers? It could also be interpreted as impudence. Then he could shamelessly retreat and slide into the dim light of easy sinning. Apologies—offered by the thousands as he assumed his self-appointed role of consoler—soften the ground under her feet with the stomping of emotion, circle her heart, besiege it, then suddenly leave and do from afar what the fisherman does when, in a calculated final move, he casts a net, supremely confident in his catch.
And this hadn’t been enough. He still needed to settle her into Hortense, to enjoy an entire night of sex, surrendering to frenzied rapture.
It was already clear to him, beyond any doubt, that he had shamelessly tried to take possession of her as though she were abandoned property. This was the reality, even if his responsibility was legitimate and their correspondence had already become part of a routine. Sitting at the rickety table in his room, the power of their correspondence invited him to plunge deep into the transgression that had already begun, because Minas, pen in hand, was searching for words to entrust to the white sheet of paper on the table to correct the misunderstanding in the previous letter. Fortunately, he did not go through with it. Rather, he couldn’t go through with it, because he became distinctly aware of its impossibility as long as there existed in him two opposite worlds that deliberately flowed into each other, distancing him from his original goal. He couldn’t decide on the phrasing he would use once and for all—at least that was for sure. It wouldn’t do to swing one way and then another. For instance, to write “Dearest Madame” now and another time write “Dearest Madame Arshalouys” or “Dear Madame.” At that moment, he considered this last one the best, but also saw in it a deliberate attempt to break off ties, which he likened to cutting tightly wound rope with a sharp knife.
Meanwhile, night had reached his door. He set the pen down on the paper and put both hands on the table. In that same moment, the silence, which had taken refuge in the closed box of his room, fell on him like a lid. Minas felt the terror of loneliness. It had been the first time since Vahakn’s death that he felt it. He closed his eyes, thinking that it would help him to avoid feeling it, and listened closely. The silence flowed into him, seizing his entire being. Now there were two silences: one was him and his own loneliness and the other was the room, throbbing like the heart of a huge animal. It was probably the impression of an animal that reminded him of the caryatids. Seeing the Hotel of Silence curving the caryatids’ shoulders under its massive weight as well as their silent suffering, people held their breath even before going inside. It was there that the widowed Hortense Bédier guarded the silence like a high priestess and, watching her steps, raised her finger to her lips as she came down the staircase, chiding those who disturbed the stillness: “Allons, allons, silence là-dedans.” Minas knew very well that nobody was disturbing the silence. The concierge walked on his tiptoes to avoid clacking his heels on the marble, while the porter gently turned the revolving door. If he made the slightest noise, he scrunched his head into his shoulders like a student bracing himself for a beating. But every day, Madame Bédier repeated: “Allons, allons, silence là-dedans.” Suddenly he saw Hortense’s face in his imagination. He saw how her right nostril twitched, raising the corner of her mouth and distorting her entire face as she took her index finger to her lips to deliver her da
ily refrain.
The Candidate Page 12