Death and the Dervish (Writings From An Unbound Europe) (9 page)

“At the far end of the garden there’s a shed,” I whispered. “No one ever goes there. We keep old junk in it.”

Then he looked at me. His eyes were lively and distrustful, but they showed no fear at all.

“Hide there until they go away. If they catch you, don’t tell them I helped you.”

“They won’t catch me.”

The certitude with which he said that sickened me. I again felt that unease at his self-confidence, and regretted having offered him a place to hide. He was utterly self-sufficient; he thrust all others aside: I felt as if he had struck me, pushed away the hand that I offered him, disgustingly sure of himself. Later I was ashamed of my irritability. (What else could he do but believe in himself?!) I caught myself feeling that vile need for others to be grateful to us, to show themselves as small and dependent, because that is what creates our favor, nurtures it, and heightens the importance of our deeds and kindness. But his behavior made them seem trivial and unnecessary. At that moment, however, I was not ashamed, I was angry. It seemed to me that I
had become involved in something utterly senseless, but I started through the garden toward the dilapidated shed hidden in the bushes and alder trees. I went without joy, without any justification, without a definite inner need, but I could do nothing else.

The door was open, bats and pigeons lived there.

He stopped.

“Why are you doing this?”

“I don’t know.”

“You already regret it.”

“You’re too proud.”

“You didn’t need to say that. And a man can never be too proud.”

“I don’t want to know who you are or what you’ve done; that’s your affair. Stay here, this is all I can do for you. Let everything be as if we had never met, never seen each other.”

“That’s best. Go into your room now.”

“Should I bring you some food?”

“No. You’re already sorry you’ve even done this.”

“Why do you think I’m sorry?”

“You hesitate too much; you think too much. Whatever you do now, you’ll regret it. Go to the tekke, don’t think about me anymore. If you think anymore, you’ll turn me in.

Was this derision, mockery, scorn? Where did he get the strength to act like that?

“You don’t trust people very much.”

“Dawn will break soon. It wouldn’t be good if they found us together.”

He wanted to get rid of me. He looked impatiently at the sky, which was changing with the pale light of oncoming morning. Yet I wanted to ask him countless questions, I would never see him again. No one could give me the answers but him.

“Only one more thing: you’re alone. Aren’t you afraid? They’ll catch you and kill you. You don’t have a chance.”

“Leave me alone!”

His voice was rough, muffled with anger. It was really unnecessary to tell him what he already knew himself. Maybe he thought that I was indeed a bad man who took spiteful pleasure in his troubles. And he paid me back in full measure:

“Something is troubling you,” he said with his sudden sagacity, which stunned me, catching me in my own hidden turf. “I’ll come to talk sometime, when there’s no danger. Go now.”

He had not told me what I wanted to know; he left me rather to face myself. And what kind of answer could he have given me? What could we have had in common? What could he have taught me?

I opened the window; the room was stuffy. I would have gone down into the garden if he had not been there, to wait out the dawn without sleeping, just as I would up here. It was not far off, the first birds were announcing it with ever louder song as the sky above the dark hills raised its eyelid, showing its blue iris. The trees in the garden were still sleepy, covered with the hazy, thin darkness. Soon, at the first rays of the sun, fish would begin breaking the water’s surface. I loved that morning hour of awakening, it was as if life itself were just beginning.

I waited in the middle of my room with a feeling of unease, but I could not determine its cause. I was bitter, because of what I had and had not done. I had failed on this night filled with danger and unfounded fear.

I strained to hear every rustle, every flutter of birds’ wings, I listened to the even flow of the river, but I was expecting to hear him, or them coming after him. Would he escape, would he stay, would they catch him? Had it been a mistake not to give him away, or not to hide him in my room? He had told me: whatever you do, you’ll regret it. How had he guessed what had not been altogether clear even to me? I did not want to be either for or against him, so
I found a middle position, which was no position at all, since it solved nothing and only prolonged the suffering. I would have to take a side.

There were countless reasons to do both, to destroy him and to save him. I was a dervish, a defender of the faith and of my order, and to help him meant to betray my convictions, to betray what had been an unblemished part of my life for so many years. If they caught him it would be bad for the tekke as well, and it would be even worse if it became known that I had helped him. No one would forgive me, and it was almost certain that someone would find out; he would tell them, either out of spite or fear. It would also be bad for my brother. Both for my brother and for me. I would have worsened both of our positions; some connection, some consistency would be found in such an act. It would look as if I were avenging my brother, or helping another man since I could not help him. There were also enough reasons to hand him over to the authorities—let him settle his dispute with justice the best he could.

And yet, I was human, I did not know what he had done, and it was not for me to judge him. Even justice can err; why should I have taken responsibility for him and burdened myself with possible remorse? There were also enough reasons to help him. But they were somehow pale, not convincing enough; I devised them and gave them importance only so that they would serve to protect me from the real reason, the only reason that mattered: that I had tried to absolve myself through him. He appeared at the very moment when he could have tipped the scales of my indecisiveness. If I condemned him, if I gave him over to the authorities, I would circumvent the dilemma and remain what I had been, in spite of everything that had happened, as if nothing had happened, in spite of my imprisoned brother and the sorrow I felt for him. I would sacrifice the fugitive as an unfortunate victim, forget about my wounded self, and continue on the trodden path of obedience,
unfaithful to my own suffering. But if I saved him, that would be my final decision: I would be crossing over to the other side and rising up against someone, against my former self, unfaithful to the peace within me. But I could do neither, my shattered confidence kept me from one, and the power of habit and my fear of returning into the unknown kept me from the other. Ten days before, when my brother had not yet been imprisoned, it would have been all the same to me. I would have been calm regardless of what I did. Now I knew that I was taking a side, and thus stopped halfway, undecided. Everything was possible, but nothing happened.

And he was in the garden, in the old shed in the bushes. I kept looking over there, but nothing moved, nothing could be heard. I was sorry that he had not gone, in that way he would have solved everything himself. He could not escape anymore, he would stay there all day, and all day long I would think about him and wait for the night to save him, or me.

I knew how the tekke woke up. Mustafa got up first, if he had not slept at home. His heavy shoes knocking on the stone tiles of the ground floor, slamming doors, he would go out into the garden and perform the
abdest.*
He blew his nose loudly, cleared his throat, rubbed his broad chest, bowed and prayed hastily, then lit a fire, and took dishes out and put them back, all with such a racket that he woke even those who were not used to rising early. He was deaf, and in his empty world devoid of sounds and echoes noise was but a desire, and when we occasionally succeeded in telling him about his excessive knocking, slamming, crashing, and banging, he was surprised that it could even disturb anyone.

Almost at the same time one could hear Hafiz-Muham-med’s quiet coughing. Sometimes he coughed all night long, and in the spring and fall his cough would become heavy and choking. We knew that he spat blood, but he got rid of the red flecks himself and came out with a smile, with faint
red stains on his cheeks, talking about usual things, not about himself or his illness. It sometimes seemed to me that he had an arrogance of a special sort, striving to rise above us and the world. He performed the abdest with special care, rubbing his thin, translucent skin for a long time. That morning he coughed less, and not so hard as usual; it happened that the mild spring air soothed him, the same air that would devastate him sometime else. I knew that today he would be agreeable, quiet, distant. That was how he took revenge on the world, by not showing his bitterness.

Then Mullah-Yusuf went down. The slow clatter of his wooden shoes showed restraint, it was too measured for his vibrant health. He paid more attention to his bearing than any of us did to ours, because he had more to hide. I did not trust his composure; given his ruddy face and his youthful twenty-five years, it seemed like a lie rather than an affectation. But this was not a firm belief, it was merely a suspicion, an impression that changed according to my mood.

Although we lived together, we knew little about one another, since we never talked about ourselves, never openly. We only talked about what we had in common. And that was good. Personal matters were too subtle, murky, and vain; we were to keep them to ourselves if we could not suppress them entirely. Our conversations were largely reduced to general, familiar phrases that others had used before us, phrases that were tried and safe, because they protected us from surprises and misunderstandings. A personal tone is poetry, an opportunity for distortion, or arbitrariness, and to leave the realm of general thought is to doubt it. Therefore, we knew each other only according to what was unimportant, or what was identical in each of us. In other words, we did not know each other at all; nor was that necessary. To know each other meant to know what we should not.

But these general thoughts were not at all peaceful, because with them I was attempting to entrench myself in something firm and secure, so that no turmoil would tear
me out of our common circle. I was walking on the very edge, and I wanted to return to anonymity. This morning I envied everyone, because their morning was an everyday morning.

There was a sure and simple way for me to reduce, or even to eliminate my anguish: to turn it into a common problem. The fugitive now concerned the whole tekke, and it was not for me to make a decision by myself. Did I have the right to hide what had become theirs as well? I could express my opinion, I could appeal on his behalf, but I was not allowed to hide him. That would be the very decision I was trying to avoid. And the decision should be ours, not mine. It would be easier and more honest that way. Everything else would be dishonesty and lies, and I would know that I was doing something forbidden when I had no reason for it. Not even the certitude that it was what I needed to do.

But whom could I talk to? If we acted together, the fugitive would be sacrificed in advance. We would be afraid of one another and speak for those who were absent, and in that case the most acceptable decision was the most severe. It would be easier and more honest to talk with one man; the others would not influence him; reasonable arguments would receive more consideration before fewer ears. But whom was I to choose? Deaf Mustafa was surely out of the question. We were equal before God, but everyone would have thought it funny if I talked to him about it, and not only because he was deaf. He was so preoccupied with thoughts of his common-law wife, from whom he often ran away, sleeping in the tekke for nights on end, and of his five children, both his own and adopted, that he himself would have wondered why I would ask something he knew nothing about. And there were all sorts of things that he was totally unaware of. In this respect he resembled his numerous children.

Hafiz-Muhammed would listen to me absently, with a smile that said nothing. He lived hunched over his yellowed
books of history. For that strange man, and I envied him because of this then, it was as if the only time that existed has already passed, and even the present was only a time that would pass. Rarely is there a man who is so happily excluded from life as he was. For years he had wandered in the East, searching for historical works in famous libraries, and when he returned home with a great bundle of books he was poor and rich, full of knowledge that no one needed except him. Knowledge flowed from him like a river, or a flood; he submerged you in names and events; you would be taken by a fear of the throngs that lived within that man as if they still existed, as if they were not spirits and shadows but living people who acted ceaselessly in some terrible eternity of existence. In Constantinople a military officer had even tutored him in astronomy for three full years, and because of these two sciences he measured all things by the vast expanses of the heavens and time. I thought that he was also writing a history of our times, but had my doubts, since for him events and people could acquire magnitude and significance only when they were dead. He could only write a philosophy of history, the hopeless history of superhuman dimensions, indifferent to ordinary life, which still continues. Had I asked him about the fugitive, he would certainly have felt uncomfortable because I was bothering him with such unpleasant matters on this beautiful morning, which he had met without a fever, and because I was making him think about something so trivial as the fate of a man in the tekke garden. And he would have answered so vaguely that everything would have still depended on my decision.

I decided to talk to Mullah-Yusuf.

He had just finished with the abdest. He greeted me and wanted to leave quietly. I stopped him and said that I would like to talk with him.

He gave me a quick look and lowered his head at once. He was afraid of something. But I did not want to derive any kind of advantage by making him wait, and told him
everything about the fugitive: how I had heard and seen him from my room when he entered the garden and hid in the bushes. He was certainly still there somewhere, and it was just as certain that he was on the run, otherwise he would not be hiding. I told him the truth, which was that I had been, and still was, at a loss as to what to do, and that I did not know whether to report him to the authorities or to leave everything to chance. Maybe he was guilty, the innocent are not chased at night, but I also realized that I knew nothing about him, that I might do something unjust, and God keep me from that. And now we needed to decide whether it was wrong to get involved or not. Was it worse to cover up a crime, if it was a crime, or not to act mercifully?