Death and the Dervish (Writings From An Unbound Europe) (37 page)

Then Hafiz-Muhammed came into my room, or rather he rushed in, excited and frightened. He was almost beside himself. I thought how he needed only to suffer an attack of coughing at that very moment, as he did whenever he was excited, so that I would have to solve the mystery of his frightened face on my own. Fortunately, he saved his coughing for later, and managed with difficulty to stutter that Mullah-Yusuf had hanged himself in his room. Mustafa had just taken him down from the rope.

We went downstairs.

He was lying on the bed; his face was reddish-blue and his eyes were closed, his breathing wheezy.

Mustafa was crouching beside him, giving him some water to drink, opening his tightly closed mouth with a spoon and the thick fingers of his left hand. With a nod of his head he signaled for us to leave the room. We obeyed and went to the garden.

“Unfortunate youth,” sighed Hafiz-Muhammed.

“He’s alive.”

“Thank God, thank God. But why did he do it? Because of love?”

“Not because of love.”

“He’d just left your room. What were you talking about?”

“He betrayed my brother Harun. They were friends and he betrayed him. He admitted that himself.”

“Why would he betray your brother?”

“He was the kadis spy.”

“Oh, God in Heaven!”

It would have been easier for that honest old man, who fed his honesty with inexperience, if I had hit him in the face rather than enriched his experience with that filth.

He took hold of the back of a bench, feebly, sat down, and started crying softly.

Maybe that was best. Maybe that was the most sensible thing one could do.

11

      
The wide world became too small for them,they felt loneliness and anxiety in their hearts.
¹

MY RESTLESSNESS GREW, SPREADING BACKWARD IN TIME: I thought of how I had been surrounded long before then, how others’ eyes had been lying in wait for my every move, waiting for one of them to be wrong. And I had not been aware of anything. I had been walking as if asleep, certain that my affairs concerned only me and my conscience. My spiritual son had been watching over me at someone else’s order, leaving me only the empty conviction that I had any freedom. I had been a captive for years, God knows whose and of how many eyes. In hindsight I felt humiliated and confined, as I had lost even that free space I had imagined was mine, before my misfortune. They had taken it away from me, and it was no longer any use to return to memories. My misfortune had begun long before I became aware of it. Who had not been keeping an eye on me, who had not been listening in on what I said, how many paid or voluntary watchmen had not been following my movements and taking note of my deeds, making of me a witness against myself? Their numbers were becoming terrifying. I had gone through life without fears or suspicions, as a fool walks along a precipice. Now even a secure path seemed like a precipice.

The kasaba turned into a giant ear and eye that caught one’s every breath and every step. I lost the ease and confidence with which I had met people. If I smiled, it looked as if I were trying to be flattering; if I made small talk, it looked as if I were trying to hide something; if I talked about God and His justice, I looked like an idiot.

I did not even know what to do with my friend Mullah-Yusuf. I say bitterly: my friend, but I think it would have been worse still if we had really been friends. As it was, I was not losing anything, as far as he was concerned. I know, I would have been better able to nurture my sense of injury if I could have complained: look at what my friend has done to me. But I did not want that. In that way I would have accused one man, and everything would have been reduced to an affair between him and me, since, hurt by the betrayal of a friend, I would have forgotten about the others. As it was, pushing him away from me and placing him with the rest of them, I increased both the guilt and my loss. I did that subconsciously, in the vague desire for the magnitude to be greater, like my pain, like my effort to get even. I say: my pain, but I did not feel any. I say: my effort to get even, but I did nothing. People had fallen deeply in debt to me, but I demanded nothing from them.

Mullah-Yusuf met me with fear in his sunken eyes; I smiled tiredly, completely black inside. Sometimes, but only sometimes, it seemed to me that I could strangle him while he slept or sat lost in thought. Sometimes I wanted to get him away from me, to send him to another tekke, to another town. But I did nothing.

Hassan and Hafiz-Muhammed were touched by my magnanimity and forgiveness, and surprisingly, I was pleased by their approval of what was not true. Because I had neither forgotten nor forgiven.

This returned Hassan to me, as well as the almost inexplicable satisfaction that his friendship gave me, a kind of inner glow, absurd, almost nonsensical. But I accepted it like
a gift and wanted it to continue uninterrupted.

“It was smart of you to leave him alone,” he said, not mentioning kindness, but rather benefit. Occasionally his approval sounded harsh. “If you get rid of him, another will come. This one’s less dangerous, since you know who he is.”

“No one’s dangerous to me any more. I’ll leave him alone and let him live the best he knows how. I can’t even hate him. I even pity him.”

“So do I. It’s incomprehensible that someone can live only off misfortune—his own and that of other men. That he remembers his own and prepares that of others. Mullah-Yusuf surely knows what hell looks like.”

“Why didn’t you tell me when you found out?”

“It wouldn’t have prevented anything. Everything had already happened. I wanted to let you look for it and get used to the idea. God knows what you’d have done if you’d found out with no warning.”

“I thought that I’d do something when I found the man who did it. But I can’t do anything.”

“You’re doing a lot,” he said seriously.

“I’m not doing anything. I’m letting time pass. I’ve lost my bearings, there’s no longer any joy in what I do.”

“You shouldn’t think that way. Do something, don’t give up.”

“What?”

“Go on a trip. Anywhere. Home, to Yohovats; change the scenery, people, sky. It’s time for haymaking. Roll up your sleeves, take a place among the mowers, and work up a sweat. Wear yourself out.”

“My home is a sad place now.”

“Then come with me. I’m getting ready to go on a trip to the Sava. We’ll stay in flea-infested inns or under beech trees. We’ll travel across half of Bosnia, and go over to Austria if you want.”

I laughed: “You think everyone likes to travel, just as you do. You even think it’s medicine.”

I had touched him in the right spot; his strings began to hum. “Everyone should be ordered to travel from time to time,” he said, getting fired up. “Or even more: no one should be allowed to stop in one place any longer than necessary. A man isn’t a tree, and being settled in one place is his misfortune. It saps his courage, breaks his confidence. When a man settles down somewhere, he agrees to any and all of its conditions, even the disagreeable ones, and frightens himself with the uncertainty that awaits him. Change to him seems like abandonment, like a loss of an investment: someone else will occupy his domain, and he’ll have to begin again. Digging oneself in marks the real beginning of old age, because a man is young as long as he isn’t afraid to make new beginnings. If he stays in the same place, he has to put up with things, or take action. If he moves on, he keeps his freedom; he’s ready to change places and the conditions imposed on him. How can he leave, and for where? Don’t smile, I know we don’t have anywhere to go. But we can leave sometimes, creating the illusion of freedom. We pretend to leave, and pretend to change. But we come back again, calmed, consoled by the deception.”

I never knew when his words would turn into mockery. Was he afraid of definite assertions, or did he not even believe in anything definite?

“Why are you constantly going away? To maintain the illusion of freedom? Does that mean that freedom doesn’t exist?”

“It does and doesn’t. I go in circles, I go away and come back. Free and bound.”

“Then should I go or stay? Because apparently it doesn’t matter. If I’m bound, then I’m not free. And if the goal is to come back, then why go away?”

“But that’s the point of it all: to come back. To long for someplace else, to leave and to arrive again at the place where you started. If it weren’t for the place that you’re tied to, you wouldn’t want it or any other world, either; you
wouldn’t have anywhere to depart from, because you’d be nowhere. And you’re also nowhere if that’s the only place you have. Because then you don’t think about it, long for it, or love it. And that’s not good. You need to think, to long for something, to love. So get ready to go. Leave the tekke to Hafiz-Muhammed, get rid of them and let them get rid of you, and prepare to arrive, on a calm horse, with sores on your backside, at the gates of another empire.”

“That doesn’t exactly sound like a triumph.”

“Sores are sores, you old dervish.”

“But the place is a little inconvenient.”

“The place is like any other. You can’t ride on your head, someone might think it strange. It would seem like rebellion. So are we agreed?”

“Yes. I’m not going anywhere.”

“God help me! You’re like a capricious girl, with whom you never know how you stand. All right, you bearded, capricious girl, it seems you’re firmly resolved to remain indecisive. But if you change your mind, if you get bored wrestling with a single thought, as with the devil, come and get me. You know where I’ll be.”

I did not want to go anywhere outside of the kasaba. I had wanted to go away, once before, to wander off on unknown paths. But that had been empty dreaming, a powerless desire for liberation, a thought of what could not be.

I no longer had it anymore. This place bound me with the misfortune that had befallen me. It had pinned me here, like a spear. I had few thoughts left, few movements, few opportunities. I sat in the garden, in the sun, or in my room, over a book, or I walked along the river, knowing that I was acting according to habit, without enthusiasm, without enjoying it. But more and more often I caught myself feeling comfortable in the warmth of the sun, with my readings, with the reflections in the water. Life became ordinary, even beautiful, tranquil. It seemed that I really was forgetting; a quiet reigned within me. But then, unexpectedly, for
no apparent reason, unaccompanied by any thoughts that might have summoned it, a fiery stab would pierce through me, like a hidden, torturous pain, like a cramp. “What’s that?” I would wonder, acting surprised, afraid to acknowledge that undesired commotion, burying it with trifles that were within reach of my hands or thoughts.

But I was expecting something.

I was in an indefinite and unstable mood, like a man who is neither healthy nor ill, and who is disturbed more if the symptoms of his illness come and go than if they continue uninterrupted.

I was drawn out of that painful condition by hatred. It revived and steadied me, flaring up one day, in one moment. I say that it flared up, because until then it had been smoldering like a banked fire, its flames darting about, fiercely powerful, searing my heart with their heat. It must have been inside me for a long time. I had been carrying it like a spark, like a viper, like a tumor that had only then begun to spread. And I did not know how it had remained hidden until that moment, or why it had rested and kept silent, not even why it appeared in circumstances that were not any more favorable than they had been earlier. It had ripened in the silence, like every other emotion, and it was born strong and powerful, nurtured by the long wait.

Surprisingly, it was nice to think how it had appeared so unexpectedly, but I had also felt it within myself earlier, and pretended not to recognize it. I was afraid that it would grow stronger, but now I had grown stronger through it, holding it in front of me like a shield, like a weapon, like a torch, intoxicated with it, as with love. I thought I knew what it was, but everything that I had until then thought was hatred was only its empty shadow. This feeling, with which I had been overcome, lived within me like a dark and terrible power.

I will tell, slowly, without haste, how that happened. It really happened like an earthquake.

12

      
Do not think them dead who are killed on the path of God.
¹

HASSAN AND I WENT TO THE GOLDSMITH
HADJI*
-SINANUDDIN Yusuf. He dragged me along everywhere he went; even then I knew that we were friends and that I liked to be with him. This was no longer a need for protection, but rather a need for human intimacy, without any other benefit.

In the Kuyunjiluk
²
we ran into Ali-hodja, who was in old, torn clothes, and worn-out slippers, with an unsightly felt skullcap on his head. I did not like to meet him; he was usually unpleasant. He hid behind feigned insanity so that he could say what he thought. And he did so rudely.

“Do you agree to a conversation that won’t benefit you?” he asked Hassan, without looking at me.

“Yes. What are we going to talk about?”

“Not about anything.”

“That means about people.”

“You know everything. Because nothing matters to you. This morning I asked for your sister’s hand.”

“Whom did you ask for her hand?”

“Her father, the kadi.”

“The kadi isn’t her father.”

“Then he’s her aunt.”

“Fine. What did you say to her aunt?”

“I said: Give her to me for a wife; it’s a pity for her youth and beauty to go to waste for no reason. She’ll never get married if she stays with you like this. And I’ll take a dowry along with her; it all belongs to somebody else anyway. I’ll take upon myself at least a thousand years of your hellfire, so you’ll have it easier. Leave me alone, he said, go your own way. I’m going my own way, I said, why don’t you let her do the same? Do you really hate her so much? I thought that of all the world you at least did not hate her. And you, where are you going?”

“To Hadji-Sinanuddin Yusuf, the goldsmith.”