Death and the Dervish (Writings From An Unbound Europe) (20 page)

But what happened was not what I had predicted: one soldier rode out ahead and they passed by me in single file. They even greeted me. At first I was surprised, their actions caught me off-guard, all my efforts had been unnecessary, and everything seemed somehow ridiculous: my feeble heroism, my needless steps toward the wall, my readiness to accept insult. Without raising my eyes I walked on, among the people standing in the street and watching me silently. I had been tricked and humiliated. I had been on the verge of becoming one of them, but the soldiers had singled me out.

When I had passed through the gauntlet of their eyes, not daring to look at them, when I had gone into another street where there were no witnesses of my failed sacrifice, my tension abated, and I felt more at ease. I raised my eyes toward people, greeted them and returned their greetings, calmed and quieted, and it became clearer and clearer to me that this outcome was best. They had recognized me, paid me respect, and refrained from using violence against me. And that was what I had wanted, I had even thought to myself superstitiously, standing against the wall: if they pass by in single file, everything will be all right, everything that I intend to do will turn out well. Or maybe I had not, maybe it occurred to me later, when everything had already happened, since before I would have been too superstitious to connect the outcome that I desired with a miracle, with such an impossible condition. But anyway, a miracle had happened—or maybe it was not a miracle, but a sign and proof. How could I have faintheartedly believed that I had been cast out or stripped of my rights? Why would that have happened? Whom would that have benefited? I remained what I had been, the dervish of a distinguished order, the sheikh of a tekke, a confirmed defender of the faith. How
could I be cast out, and why? I had no desire to be anything else, I was not able, I did not want it, and everybody knew that, so why would they prevent me from it? I had imagined everything, I had confused everything within myself unnecessarily; I did not know where the source of my cowardice lay. I had stood in the face of death a hundred times without flinching, and now my heart was like a pebble, dead and cold. What had happened? What had become of our courage? Was it now a cowardly shudder at the hooting of an owl, at a voice stronger than ours, at nonexistent guilt? Such a life is worth nothing. I had swum across rivers with my saber in my teeth, I had crawled on my belly through reeds, listening eagerly for the enemy; I had rushed at guns without faltering, but now I was afraid of one wretched soldier. O misery of miseries, something has happened to us, something awful, we have shrunk to nothing and not even noticed it. When did we lose our way, when did we allow this to happen?

It was still daylight, dim and weary. Shadows were already gnawing at it, but it had to last long enough for me to meet the night without pain or shame. I had known where I was going even before I made the decision to go there. My thoughts were subconsciously directed at him and I hoped that his wife had told him of her conversation with me; we could both pretend that we knew nothing, keeping an apparent secret. We would not discuss Hassan, but my cheerful expression would tell him everything. And even if she had not told him, I had nothing to fear. Maybe it would be better if I went to see her first, to bring her the news of Hassan’s agreement, like a gift. Then it would be easier to talk to her husband.

But it was no use. Cowardice pervades us, it forms our thoughts. May it be damned, it speaks from our mouths even as we are ashamed of it.

I took advantage of that moment of resentment and went immediately, so that I would not put it off forever.

Surprisingly, Aini-effendi received me at once, as if he had been expecting me. No word of my arrival had preceded me, although a hidden presence of people and eyes made itself felt in the corridors.

He met me kindly, with a greeting that was neither eager nor indifferent, without pretending that he was glad or surprised to see me. He was measured in everything he did, wearing a vague smile, and did not try to frighten or encourage me. That was honest, I thought, but I felt ill at ease.

A cat stole in from somewhere, looked at me with its yellow, evil eyes, and went up to him, sniffing him. Without shifting his indifferently kind gaze from me, he stroked the pampered animal, which squirmed with pleasure under his hand, rubbing its neck and sides against his knee, and then climbed into his lap, curled up there, and began to purr, squinting at me menacingly. Now two pairs of eyes were looking at me, both of them yellowish, cautious, and cold.

I did not want to think of his wife, but she emerged from the dark, from far away; I did not want to think of her because of him, stiff and guarded, his hidden hands surely were suffocating in his long sleeves, his face transparent, with thin lips, his shoulders narrow. He was pallid, fragile, as if only water flowed in his veins: What were their nights like in that large, silent house?

He was unbelievably calm, he felt no need to move at all (his stillness reminded me of rigor mortis or a
fakir’s*
power of self-control), and his face wore the same expression that I had met when I came in, with a smile that said nothing deceptively stretching across his lipless mouth. That smile wore me out more than it did him.

Only from time to time, and it always happened unexpectedly, one of his hands would come to life, treacherously, emerging from its sleeve like a snake (hers were like birds). And his eyes would come to life as well whenever they looked into the eyes of his cat, which were the same as his, and softened only then, only for a moment.

I did not know how long I sat like that. Dusk came, then darkness. The phosphorous eyes glowed in his lap. And strangely, his did as well, or so it seemed to me. He had four gleaming eyes. Then candles were brought in (just as they had been on that night, but I was no longer thinking of her, I did not dare) and that was even worse. His dead smile unnerved me, his dead expression frightened me, as did the darkness behind him and the shadows on the wall; I was unsettled by a soft rustling, as if rats were crawling around us. But maybe most troublesome of all was that he never once raised his voice, or changed the way he spoke. He did not get excited or angry, and did not laugh. Words fell slowly from him, yellow, waxen, foreign. Again and again I wondered at his ability to arrange them so well and put them in the right places, because it seemed that they were amassed somewhere in the cavity of his mouth, about to spill out of him and flow away in disorder. He spoke patiently, persistently, confidently; he never once doubted himself; he considered no other possibility, and the few times that I contradicted him he seemed truly surprised, as if his ears had deceived him, as if he had met a lunatic. And he continued to reel off phrases from books, adding his dank lethargy to the centuries of their existence. I was disturbed, and asked myself: Why is he speaking? Does he really think that I don’t know these familiar phrases, or that I’ve forgotten them? Is it his high position that speaks, his prominent office? Does he speak from habit, or to keep from saying nothing? Is he mocking me, or doesn’t he have any words other than those that he’s learned by heart? Or is he trying to torture me, to drive me insane? Is the cat there to claw out my eyes at the end?

Then it occurred to me that he had indeed forgotten all ordinary words, and that was a terrible thought: not to know a single word of your own, not to have a single thought of your own, to be unable to say anything human, to speak without need or meaning, to speak in front of me
as if I were not there, to be condemned to speak by rote. And I was condemned to listen to what I already knew.

Or was he a madman? Or a corpse? Or an apparition? Or the cruelest of torturers?

At the beginning I could not believe my eyes and ears; it seemed impossible that a living man before him and a living prisoner in the fortress could not induce him to speak even a single real word, one relevant to the present moment. I tried to draw him into a human conversation, to make him say something, anything at all, about himself, about me, about my brother, but it was all in vain; he only spoke through the Koran. And alas, he was also speaking about himself, about me, and about my brother.

And then I, too, dove into the Koran. It was mine as much as his, I knew it as well as he did, and there ensued a duel of thousand-year-old words that replaced the ones we usually spoke and that had been created on account of my imprisoned brother. We resembled two broken fountains that spilled stagnant water.

When I said why I had come, he answered with a passage from the Koran:

Those who believe in God and the Last Judgment do not associate with the enemies of Allah and His prophet
,
even if they are their fathers, or their brothers, or their kindred.
⁴

I cried out:

“What has he done? Will anyone tell me what he has done?”

You who are faithful, do not ask about that which might cast you into distress and despair if it were told to you openly
.
⁵

“I’ll be indebted to you as long as I live. I’ve come to have it told to me openly. And I’m already in distress and despair.”

They walked the earth proudly and plotted wicked intrigues
.
⁶
“Whoever you’re talking about, I can’t believe he’s my brother. God says that of the infidels. My brother is one of the faithful.”

Woe to those who do not believe.
⁷

“I’ve heard that he’s in prison because of something he said.”

There cannot be clandestine understandings or whisperings between three people without God being the fourth among them. Clandestine meetings are the work of Satan, for Satan wants to aggrieve the faithful
’.
⁸

“I know my brother well—he couldn’t have done anything wrong.”

Do not help or aid the infidel.
⁹

“He’s my brother, for God’s sake!”

If your fathers, sons, brothers, wives, and families are dearer to you than God, His prophet, and the struggles on the path to His righteousness, do not expect His mercy.
¹⁰

O faithful ones, avoid suspicion and slander, because slander and suspicion are sinful.
¹¹

I was the one who said that.

I responded in the same measure, with the Koran; I could no longer keep to ordinary words, because in that way he was stronger than me. His arguments were those of God, while mine were those of men. We had not been equal. He was above everything and spoke the words of the Creator, and I tried to place my minute troubles on the scale of ordinary human justice. He drove me to apply eternal measures to my case, if I were not to deprive it of any value at all. At that time I was not even aware that I had lost my brother in those dimensions of eternity.

Even then he defended his principles, and I myself. He was calm and confident; I was upset, almost enraged. We both spoke the same words, but we each said something completely different.

He said:
Neither the skies nor the earth wept for the sinners.
¹²
And I thought: Woe to the man whose standards are the skies and the earth. He said:
Verily, he who defiles his soul will be unhappy.
¹³
And also:
O Zul-qarnain, Gog and Magog are causing discord all over the earth.
¹⁴

And I said:
O Zul-qarnain, Gog and Magog are causing
discord all over the earth.
And:
Verily, he who defiles his soul will be unhappy.
And:
There is truth
,
and there is also error.
¹⁵
And:
Let people have forgiveness and mercy for one another
;
if they want God to forgive them.
¹⁶
And also:
Indeed, man is a great tyrant, and tyrants are farthest from the truth.
¹⁷

To that he was silent for a moment, and then said calmly, still smiling:

Woe to you, woe to you, and woe to you again!
¹⁸

Allah is every man’s refuge
,
¹⁹
I said desperately.

Then we looked at each other. I was shattered by everything that had been said, thinking that I had forgotten my brother and incriminated myself. He was calm and stroked the raised tail of his repulsive cat, which squirmed behind him. I should have left; if only I had not even come. I had learned nothing, I had helped nothing, and I had said what I should not have. Because even the Koran is dangerous if you use God’s words about sinners to refer to those who decide who the sinners are. You will regret a thousand times what you say, but rarely what you keep silent. I had known this wisdom when I had not needed it. It would have been better if I had only listened, and only said what would have been most useful. I had totally forgotten this, and I knew that it was important. It had been important the night before; it concerned him, and me; his wife had said that he knew nothing about it. And I remembered: I had betrayed a friend because of this.

And I told him quickly, trying to suppress the shame that came over me, how I had persuaded Hassan to renounce his inheritance. Nothing more, only that. I did not make any connection with myself, this visit, or my brother. But he would make it, he would have to, and he would not be able to answer with the Koran. There was also a certain spite in this sudden change in the conversation, and a malicious wish to defile him with his own greed.

But I was wrong, again. He did not show at all that he understood me. He was not surprised; I saw neither anger
nor joy in his eyes, but in the Holy Book he found an answer for this occasion as well:

He who seeks is paltry, and what he seeks is paltry as well.

What he said could have meant everything and nothing. The end of the conversation, hidden anger, mockery.

It was useless; he was stronger than I. He resembled a corpse, but he was not: principles raged within him.

The eyes shone in his lap, under his hand, the cat’s eyes. I did not dare to look into his; they scorched me with their icy, phosphorescent glow.