The Blind Owl (10 page)

At that moment I caught sight of his father, the bent old man with the scarf around his neck, coming out of the doorway. He passed by without looking in my direction. He was laughing convulsively. It was a horrible laugh, of a quality to make the hairs on one's body stand on end, and he laughed so that his shoulders shook. I could have sunk into the ground with shame. It was shortly before sunset. I stood up, wishing that I could somehow escape from myself. Mechanically, I took the direction that led to my own house. I saw nothing and nobody in the street. It seemed to me that I was walking through a strange, unknown city. Around me were weird isolated houses of geometrical shapes, with forlorn, black windows. One felt that no creature with the breath of life in it could ever have dwelt in them. Their white walls gave off a sickly radiance. A strange, an unbelievable thing was this: whenever I stopped, my shadow fell long and black on the wall in the moonlight, but it had no head. I had heard people say that if anyone casts a headless
shadow on a wall that person would die before the year was out.

Overcome with fear, I went into my house and shut myself up in my room. At the same moment I began to bleed from the nose. After losing a great quantity of blood I collapsed upon my bed. My nurse came in to see to me.

Before I went to sleep I looked at myself in the mirror. My face was ravaged, lifeless and indistinct, so indistinct that I did not recognise myself. I got into bed, pulled the quilt over my head, huddled myself up and, with eyes closed, pursued the course of my thoughts. I was conscious of the strands which had been woven by a dark, gloomy, fearful and delightful destiny; I moved in the regions where life and death fuse together and perverse images come into being and ancient, extinct desires, vague, strangled desires, again come to life and cry aloud for vengeance. For that space of time I was severed from nature and the phenomenal world and was prepared to accept effacement and dissolution in the everlasting flux. I murmured again and again, ‘Death, death . . . where are you?' The thought of death soothed me and I fell asleep.

In my sleep I dreamed. I was in the Mohammadiyye square. A tall gallows tree had been erected there and the body of the old odds-and-ends man whom I used to see from my window was hanging from its arm. At its foot were several drunken policemen drinking wine. My mother-in-law, in a state of great excitement, with the expression which I see
on my wife's face when she is badly upset—bloodless lips, staring, wild eyes—was dragging me by the arm through the crowd, gesticulating to the red-clad hangman and shouting, ‘String this one up too!' I awoke in terror. I was glowing like a furnace, my body was streaming with sweat and my cheeks were burning. In order to get the nightmare out of my mind I rose, drank some water and dabbed my head and face. I went back to bed but could not fall asleep.

Lying there in the transparent darkness I gazed steadily at the water jug that stood on the topmost shelf. I had an irrational fear that it was going to fall and decided that so long as it stood there I should be unable to fall asleep. I got up, intending to put the jug in a safe place, but by some obscure impulsion that had nothing to do with me my hand deliberately nudged it so that it fell and was smashed to pieces. I was able to close my eyes at last but I had the feeling that my nurse had come into the room and was looking at me. I clenched my fists under the quilt but in fact nothing out of the ordinary happened. In a state of semiconsciousness I heard the street door open and recognised the sound of my nurse's steps as, shuffling her slippers along the ground, she went to buy bread and cheese for breakfast. Then came the far-off cry of a street vendor, ‘Mulberries for your bile!' No, life, wearisome as ever, had begun again. The light was growing brighter. When I opened my eyes a patch of sunlight reflected from the surface of the tank outside my window was flickering on the ceiling.

I felt that the dream of the night had receded and faded like one seen years before during my childhood. My nurse brought me in my breakfast. Her face was like a reflection in a distorting mirror, it was so lean and drawn and seemed to have acquired such an unnatural, comical shape. One might have thought that it had been stretched out by some heavy weight fastened to the chin.

Although Nanny knew that nargileh smoke was bad for me, nonetheless she used to bring a nargileh with her when she came into my room. The fact is that she never felt quite herself until she had had a smoke. With all her chit-chat about her family affairs, about her son and her daughter-in-law, she had made me a participant in her intimate life. Stupid as it may seem, I would sometimes find myself ruminating idly about the doings of the members of my nurse's family. For some reason all activity, all happiness on the part of other people, made me feel like vomiting. I was aware that my own life was finished and was slowly and painfully guttering out. What earthly reason had I to concern myself with the lives of the fools, the rabble-people who were fit and healthy, ate well, slept well, and copulated well and who had never experienced a particle of my sufferings or felt the wings of death every minute brushing against their faces?

Nanny treated me like a child. She tried to pry into every cranny of my mind. I was still shy of my wife. Whenever she came into the room I would cover up the phlegm which I
had spat into the basin; I would comb my hair and beard and set my nightcap straight on my head. But I had no trace of shyness with nurse. How had that woman, who was so utterly different from me, managed to occupy so large a zone of my life? I remember how in the winter time they used to set up a
korsi
*
in this same room above the cistern. My nurse and I and the bitch would go to sleep around the
korsi.
When I opened my eyes in the transparent darkness the design on the embroidered curtain that hung in the doorway opposite me would come to life. What a strange, disquieting curtain it was! On it was depicted a bent old man like an Indian fakir with a turban on his head. He was sitting under a cypress tree, holding a musical instrument that resembled a
sitar.
Before him stood a beautiful young girl, such a girl as I imagined Bugam Dasi, the Indian temple dancer, to have been. Her hands were bound and it seemed that she was obliged to dance before the old man. I used to think to myself that perhaps this old man had been shut up in a dungeon with a cobra and that it was this experience that had bent him double and turned his hair and beard white. It was a gold-embroidered Indian curtain such as my father (or my uncle) might have sent from abroad. Whenever I happened to gaze for a long time at the design upon it
I would become frightened and, half-asleep as I was, would wake up my nurse. She, with her bad breath and her coarse black hair against my face, would hold me close to her.

When I awoke in the morning she looked exactly the same to me as she did on those days, except that the lines of her face were deeper and harder.

I often used to recall the days of my childhood in order to forget the present, in order to escape from myself. I tried to feel as I did in the days before I fell ill. Then I would have the sensation that I was still a child and that inside me there was a second self which felt sorry for this child who was about to die. In my moments of crisis one glimpse of my nurse's calm, pallid face with its deepset, dim, unmoving eyes, thin nostrils and broad, bony forehead, was enough to revive in me the sensations of my childhood. Perhaps she emitted some mysterious radiation which created this peace of mind in me.

On her forehead there was a fleshy birthmark with hairs sprouting from it. I do not remember having noticed it before today. Previously when I looked at her face I did not scrutinise it so closely.

Although Nanny had changed outwardly her ideas remained what they had always been. The only difference was that she evinced a greater fondness for life and seemed afraid of death, in which she reminded me of the flies which take refuge indoors at the beginning of the autumn. I on the other hand changed with every day and every minute.
It seemed to me that the passage of time had become thousands of times more rapid in my case than in that of other people and that the alterations I daily observed in myself should normally have been the work of years, whereas the satisfaction I should have derived from life tended, on the contrary, towards zero and perhaps even sank below zero. There are people whose death agonies begin at the age of twenty, while others die only at the very end, calmly and peacefully, like a lamp in which all the oil has been consumed.

When my nurse brought me my dinner at midday I upset the soup bowl and began to shriek at the top of my voice. Everyone in the house came running to my room and gathered at the door. The bitch came along with the rest but she soon went away again. I had a look at her belly. It was big and swollen. No, she had not had the baby yet. Someone went to fetch the doctor. I was delighted at the thought that at any rate I had given the fools trouble.

The doctor came, with his beard three handsbreadths long, and prescribed opium for me. What a marvellous remedy for the pains of my existence! Whenever I smoked opium my ideas aquired grandeur, subtlety, magic and sublimity and I moved in another sphere beyond boundaries of the ordinary world. My thoughts were freed from the weight of material reality and soared towards an empyrean of tranquillity and silence. I felt as though I was borne on the wings of a golden bat and ranged through a radiant,
empty world with no obstacle to block my progress. So profound and delicious was the sensation I experienced that the delight it gave me was stronger than death itself.

When I stood up from beside my brazier I went over to the window facing onto the courtyard of our house. My nurse was sitting in the sun cleaning some vegetables. I heard her say to her daughter-in-law, ‘We all feel very sorry for him. I only wish God would put him out of his misery.' So the doctor, apparently, had told them I was not going to get better.

It did not surprise me at all. What fools all these people were! When she brought me my medicine an hour later her eyes were red and swollen with weeping. She forced a smile when she saw me. They used to play-act in front of me, they all used to play-act in front of me, and how clumsily they did it! Did they suppose I did not know, myself ? But why was this woman of all people so fond of me? Why did she feel that she had a share in my sufferings? All that had happened was that someone had come to her one day and given her money, and she had thrust her wrinkled black nipples, like little buckets, between my lips—and I wish that the canker had eaten them away! Whenever I saw them now I felt like vomiting to think that at that time I had greedily sucked out their life-giving juice while the warmth of our two bodies blended together. She had handled me all over when I was little and it was for this reason that she still treated me with that peculiar boldness that you find only in widows.
Just because at one time she used to hold me over the latrine she still looked on me as a child. Who knows? Perhaps she had used me as women use their adoptive sisters. . . .

Even now she missed nothing whenever she helped me to do the things which I could not do on my own. If the bitch my wife had shown any interest in me I should never have let Nanny come near me in her presence, because I felt that my wife had a wider range of ideas and a keener aesthetic sense than my nurse had. Or perhaps this bashfulness of mine was merely the result of my obsession.

At any rate I was not shy of my nurse, and she was the only one who looked after me. I suppose she thought it was all a matter of destiny and that it was her star that had saddled her with this responsibility. In any case she made the most of my illness and confided all her family troubles and joys to me, kept me posted on current quarrels and feuds and in general revealed all the simplicity, the cunning and the avarice which went into her make-up. She told me what a trial her daughter-in-law was to her and spoke with such feeling on the subject that one would have thought that the younger woman was a rival wife who had stolen a portion of her son's love for her. Obviously the daughter-in-law is good-looking. I saw her once in the courtyard from my window. She had grey eyes, fair hair and a small, straight nose.

Sometimes my nurse would talk about the miracles performed by the prophets. Her purpose in so doing was
to entertain me but the only effect was to make me envy her the pettiness and stupidity of her ideas. Sometimes she retailed pieces of gossip. For example, she told me a few days ago that her daughter (meaning the bitch) had made a set of clothes for the baby—her baby. After which she began to console me in a way that suggested she knew the truth. Sometimes she would fetch me homemade remedies from the neighbours or she would consult magicians and fortune-tellers about my case. On the last Wednesday of the year she went to see one of her fortune-tellers and came back with a bowl of onions, rice and rancid oil. She told me she had begged this rubbish from the fortune-teller in the hope that it would help me to get better.
*
On the following days she gave it to me in small portions in my food without my knowledge. She also made me swallow at regular intervals the various concoctions prescribed by the doctor: hyssop, extract of liquorice, camphor, maidenhair, camomile, oil of bay, linseed, fir-tree nuts, starch, grey powders, and heaven knows how many more varieties of trash.

A few days ago she brought me a prayer book with half-an-inch of dust on it. I had no use, not only for prayer books, but for any sort of literature that expressed the notions of the rabble. What need had I of their nonsense and
lies? Was not I myself the result of a long succession of past generations which had bequeathed their experience to me? Did not the past exist within me? As for mosques, the muezzin's call to prayer, the ceremonial washing of the body and rinsing of the mouth, not to mention the pious practice of bobbing up and down in honour of a high and mighty Being, the omnipotent Lord of all things, with whom it was impossible to have a chat except in the Arabic language—these things left me completely cold.