Death and the Dervish (Writings From An Unbound Europe) (32 page)

I said, trying to defend myself:

“Life always sinks downward. It takes effort to avoid that.”

“The idea drags it down because it begins to contradict itself. And then a new idea is developed, an opposing one, and it is good until it begins to be turned into reality. What is, is not good; what is good is what is desired. When people come across a pretty thought they should keep it under glass, so it won’t get dirty.”

“Then there’s no possibility of putting the world in order? And everything is only error and eternal attempts?”

He did not respond. The thought he had spoken was strange, strange at the beginning. Afterward I did not care.

“This is also the world. We’re underground. To put it in order means to make it worse.”

Then the nonsense began. It seemed to me that I was aware of it, but I could not escape. There was an irresistible pleasure in that nothingness, in that floating without effort or aim. A leaf floating down a careless stream. An unburdened and uncontorted thought. A capricious and pretty
game with no purpose. Hovering without fear. A whim that you do not regret, a pleasant and unavoidable necessity, like breathing, like the flow of blood.

“For whom will it be worse?” I asked, unconcerned.

“For us. For them. We’ll imprison one another. We’ll get used to it. We’ll turn into moles, into bats, into scorpions.”

“We won’t even get out. We’ll come to love the silence and the darkness.”

“We won’t get out. We’ll stay here forever. We can’t live without eternity.”

“We won’t forget one another.”

“We’ll imprison our adversaries up above; we’ll banish them to the earth. And we’ll forget about them.”

“
‘When they’re pulled from hell, they’ll be thrown into the river of life.’”

“They’ll be unhappy up above. They’ll cry: ‘Give us a little darkness. We were together with you!”’

“And we’ll say to them: ‘Find darkness for yourself. Create it yourself!”’

“How unhappy they’ll be! They’ll cry: ‘Release us! Let us come down below!’ And we’ll say to them: ‘That’s your own fault. You didn’t believe us.’”

“That’s your own fault. Remain up above.”

“Occasionally I’ll go up to the earth.”

“You always rebel.”

“You’ll be a mole-dervish. You’ll make sure that we never begin to see, that we never wander out of our dark world.”

“We’ll protect our world.”

“I don’t want to be a mole.”

“We’re growing claws. And fur. And snouts.”

“I don’t want to be a mole. Go.”

I was squatting, with my forehead against the rough, wet wall, without the strength to move away.

Someone was standing above me.

He helped me to get up.

“You’re being released. Your friends are waiting for you.”

I reminded myself, with distant, anemic thoughts, that I should rejoice, but I did not even try. I did not feel any need for that.

“Where’s Is-haq?” I asked Jemal. “He was here.”

“Don’t worry. About others.”

“He was here, a moment ago.”

An unknown man was waiting in the passageway. Three of them had brought me. Now I was not important.

“Let’s go,” he said.

We walked through the darkness silently. I kept running into the walls; the man held me up. We walked; in my thoughts I would flee, and would return only after a long time to wonder: Who’s waiting for me? And I did not care. I would wonder: Did Is-haq escape? And I did not care. And then we staggered out of a greater darkness into a lesser one. I realized that it was night, transient: beautiful is everything that is not eternal, the night and rain, the summer rain. I wanted to stretch out my arms so that it would wash away the subterranean mud and extinguish the fire in me. But my arms hung powerless, useless.

PART 2

10

      
He who defiles his soul will be unhappy.
¹

A CHILD SPOKE ABOUT HIS FEAR, LONG AGO. IT RESEMBLED A little song:

      
In the attic

      
there’s a beam that hits you on the head,

      
there’s a wind that bangs the shutters,

      
there’s a mouse that peeps out of the corner.

He was six years old. His cheerful blue eyes watched the soldiers with admiration, and me as well, a young dervish-warrior. We were companions and friends. I do not know whether he ever loved anyone so much in his life as he did me, because I always met him joyfully and never acted as if I were older than he.

It was summer, and rain alternated with hot weather. We were bivouacked in tents on a plain full of mosquitoes and croaking frogs, an hour’s walk from the Sava,
²
near a building that used to be an inn, where the boy lived with his mother and half-blind grandmother.

We had already been there three months since the spring, occasionally attacking the enemy, who had dug in along the bank of the river. At first we lost many men, and so we held back, as we knew that we could do nothing against them at
such strength. The rest of our troops were tied down on God-knows-which other battlefields of the vast empire, and so both we and the enemy had gotten bogged down, each an obstacle and hindrance to the other.

That wearisome situation dragged on. The nights were steamy and hot, and the plain breathed quietly in the moonlight, like the sea; countless frogs in the invisible swamps cut us off from the rest of the world with their piercing voices, flooding us with a terrible drone that was calmed only by the misty dawns, while white and gray vapors drifted over us like at the very beginning of the world. Hardest to bear was the punctuality of these changes, their changelessness.

In the morning the mists turned roseate, and the most pleasant part of the day began, without the steamy heat, without the mosquitoes, without the tortures of nights spent half-awake. At that time we would fall into a deep sleep, as if into a well.

When it rained, it was even worse. The horizon narrowed around us. We squatted together and said nothing, tormented by the cold, as if winter were already setting in, or we just talked about anything at all, or sang, irritable and dangerous, like wolves. Our tents leaked and gray rain dripped down on us; water seeped up under our cots. The ground turned into an impassable quagmire, and we were trapped in our misery, as always.

The soldiers drank, played dice under canopies of blankets, quarreled and fought. It was a dogs life, which I led with outward calm, in no way showing that it was hard for me, sitting still, even when the rain drenched me, even when our tent turned into a madhouse, a cage of wild beasts. I forced myself to endure all that unpleasantness and nastiness without a word; I was young and thought that it was a part of sacrifice, but I knew that it was unpleasant and nasty. Both a peasant and softa, I flinched at every curse and vulgar word, until I realized that soldiers use them without even noticing that there is something indecent in them. But when they
really wanted to curse, when they wanted to say obscenities on purpose and with pleasure, it was truly unbearable. They did it with a tranquil fury, with impudent relish, pausing and provocatively listening to the echo of an unnatural coupling of words. I could have wept from desperation.

I heard all sorts of things about life and people that I had not known before. Some of them I listened to with curiosity, some with astonishment. Thus I gained experience, and lost my naïveté without stopping to regret it.

I would sit with the soldiers to the point where I felt nauseated, but I allowed myself to leave only when I calmed back down, dulled my senses, and drifted away in my thoughts, accepting everything as a necessity called life, which is not always pretty. I rarely tried to bring them to their senses. A few times they ridiculed me so cruelly (since, except for my calling, I was no different from them, I had no rank to protect me) that, for their sake and mine, I gave up interfering in what they did. I limited myself to saying the prayers that were a part of my military duties, such as marches or sentry watches. At that time I was struck by the strange, discouraging thought of how a man who is spiritually more developed than others is in a difficult situation, unless he is protected by his position and the fear that position instills. Such a man becomes a loner: his standards are different, useless to others, but they still set him apart.

So most of the time I stayed alone with a book or with my thoughts. I did not succeed in finding a single one of the men whom I would have wanted to befriend. I saw them all together as a whole, as a multitude, odd, cruel, strong, and even interesting. As individuals they were unimaginably insignificant. I did not despise them when I thought of them as a group, I even liked that hundred-headed creature a little, cruel and powerful as it was, but I could not stand them as individuals. My love, or something less than that, was directed at all of them but not at any single one, and that was enough for me.

Once, while I sat in a field, on a rotted stump, in coarse bindweed up to my knees, alone, deafened by the crickets chirping under the hot sun (something was always chirping, screeching, or singing in that plain), troubled by what I had heard from the soldiers about the young woman in the inn, I saw the boy stop in the grass, which reached almost up to his neck. He addressed me trustfully. We already knew one another.

I would have preferred for him not to find me. I felt almost afraid that in my eyes he would read what I had heard about his mother.

The tale that the soldiers told was not unlikely. She was the only young woman nearby. The nearest villages could barely be seen on the distant edges of the plain. But they would go there as well, especially at night, I knew it, mostly because of the women, and no one is so inconsiderate as a soldier who knows that he can be killed at any moment but does not want to think about death, who does not want to think about anything and calmly leaves a trail of desolation behind himself. And women are kinder to them because of the old pity that soldiers always inspire, and because their shame leaves them, following the soldiers on their distant wanderings. Where armies pass, grass does not sprout, but children do. But this was hard for me to accept about the boy’s mother. Any woman, only not a particular one. I had been generalizing about the world so much that I began to lose my grasp of it.

Small, seemingly weak, still young, she did not attract attention immediately, but her composed look, calm movements, and the confidence of her bearing did not let a man pass by her with indifference. Then he might discover her eyes, which did not gaze absently, her beautiful mouth, somewhat mocking and defiant, and the harmony of motion that only a healthy and supple body has. She courageously struggled with obstacles in her life. Widowed, she decided to keep the inn, somehow, and the land around it,
which was gradually being destroyed by the war, so that it began to resemble a graveyard and wasteland. She did not leave; she protected her only possessions, trying to turn the misfortune to her advantage. She sold food and drink to the soldiers, let them gamble in the inn, and drew their meager pay from them, giving them what they did not have. She tried to keep her son from the house and the soldiers whenever she could. But she was not always able to. I talked to her about that. “It’s because of him that I work,” she told me calmly. “Life will be hard for him if he starts out with nothing.”

And so, I had now learned that she slept with the soldiers. Maybe she had to, maybe she could not fend them off, maybe she had once agreed and afterward they kept pressuring her so that she got used to it—I do not know. I did not want to ask anyone, but I was bothered by what I had heard. Because of the boy. Did he know, would he find out? And because of myself. Until I heard I had admired her courage, but afterward I thought like any other young man, although I was ashamed of my thoughts. Now she was water that flowed freely, food that offered itself, within arm’s reach. She was no longer protected by anything, except my shame, and I knew that shame is not such a great obstacle. Therefore I bound myself even more to the boy, to protect both of us.

I let him lead me on his childish paths; we spoke a childlike language, and thought childlike thoughts. I was happy when I succeeded in this completely, because I felt enriched that way. We made flutes from reeds and enjoyed the sharp, shrill sound that was produced when the green reed cut the air from our mouths. We carefully whittled an alder branch, carving out the moist pith in order to make a hollow full of hidden sounds. We wove wreaths of blue and yellow marsh flowers to take to his mother. But later I persuaded him to decorate poplar branches with them, so I would not think anything shameful.

“Will flowers sprout on the branches?” he asked me.

“Maybe they will,” I said, myself even believing a little in that floral revival of the gray tree.

“Where’s the sun?” he asked me once.

“Behind the clouds.”

“Is it always there? Even when it’s cloudy?”

“Always.”

“Could we see it if we climbed to the top of that poplar?”

“No.”

“And if we were on a minaret?”

“No. The clouds are above the minaret.”

“And if a hole was made in the clouds?”

Indeed, why don’t people make holes in clouds for boys who love the sun?

When it rained, I sat with him in one of the rooms of his spacious house; he also took me to the attic, and I actually hit my head on one of the beams. He told me his beautiful stories about the big-big boat, as big as his house, which sailed over the river-plain, about his favorite pigeon, which fluttered above his bed on steamy nights while he slept, and about his grandmother who could not see but who knew all the fairy tales in the world.

“Even about the golden bird?”

“Even about the golden bird.”

“What’s the golden bird?”

“Don’t you know?” my little teacher wondered. “It’s a bird made of gold. It’s hard to find.”

Later, I stopped going to the house so often. My thoughts were not pure, and it was hard for me to speak his language. And when I did go, I did not behave naturally. We sat in the kitchen, his mother came in and out, smiling at us, as at two children. I hid my eyes. And I did not want to eat or drink, I refused when she would offer it. I wanted to be different than the others, because I was the same.