The Blind Owl (9 page)

I shuddered. Two or three times I wondered if it was the hand of Ezraïl.
*
Then I fell asleep. When I awoke in the morning my nurse said to me, ‘My daughter'—she meant the bitch, my wife—‘came to your bedside and took your head in her lap and rocked you like a baby.' Apparently a maternal feeling had suddenly awakened in her. I wish I could have died at that moment. Perhaps the child she was pregnant with had died. Had she had her baby? I did not know.

Lying in this room of mine, which was steadily shrinking and growing dark like the grave, I had watched the door throughout my waking hours in the hope that my wife would come to me. But she never did. Was not she to blame for the condition I was in? For three years, or, rather for two years and four months—although, what do days and months matter? To me they mean nothing; time has no meaning for one who is lying in the grave—this room has been the tomb of my existence, the tomb of my mind. All the bustle, noise and pretence that filled the lives of other
people, the rabble-people who, body and soul, are turned out of the one mould, had become foreign and meaningless to me. Ever since I had been confined to my bed I had been living in a strange unimaginable world in which I had no need of the world of the rabble. It was a world which existed within me, a world of unknowns, and I felt an inner compulsion to probe and investigate every nook and cranny of it.

During the night, at the time when my being hovered on the boundary of the two worlds, immediately before I sank into a deep, blank sleep, I used to dream. In the course of a single second I lived a life which was entirely distinct from my waking life. I breathed a different atmosphere in some far-off region. It was probably that I wished to escape from myself and to change my destiny. When I shut my eyes my own real world was revealed to me. The images that I saw had an independent life of their own. They faded and reappeared at will and my volition appeared to exercise no control over them. This point, however, is not certain. The scenes which passed before my eyes were no ordinary dream, for I was not yet asleep. In silence and tranquillity I distinguished the various images and compared them with one another. It seemed to me that until now I had not known myself and that the world as I had conceived it hitherto had lost all significance and validity and had been replaced by the darkness of night. For I had not been taught to gaze at and to love the night.

I am not sure whether or not I had control of my arms at such times. I felt however that if once I were to leave my hand to its own resources it would begin to function spontaneously, impelled by some mysterious motive force of its own, without my being able to influence or master its movements, and that if I had not constantly kept careful watch of my body and automatically controlled it, it would have been capable of doing things which I did not in the least expect.

A sensation which had long been familiar to me was this, that I was slowly decomposing while I yet lived. My heart had always been at odds not only with my body but with my mind, and there was absolutely no compatibility between them. I had always been in a state of decomposition and gradual disintegration. At times I conceived thoughts which I myself felt to be inconceivable. At other times I experienced a feeling of pity for which my reason reproved me. Frequently when talking or engaged in business with someone I would begin to argue on this or that subject while all my feelings were somewhere else and I was thinking of something quite different and at the same time reproaching myself. I was a crumbling, decomposing mass. It seemed to me that this was what I had always been and always would be, a strange compound of incompatible elements. . . .

A thought which I found intolerably painful was this: whereas I felt that I was far removed from all the people whom I saw and among whom I lived, yet at the same time
I was related to them by an external similarity which was both remote and close. My surprise at the fact was diminished by the knowledge that my physical needs were the same as theirs. The point of resemblance which tortured me more than any other was the fact that the rabble-men were attracted as I was to the bitch, my wife, she feeling a stronger appetite for them than for me. I am certain that there was something lacking in the make-up of one of us.

I call her ‘the bitch' because no other name would suit her so well. I do not like to say simply ‘my wife', because the man-wife relationship did not exist between us and I should be lying to myself if I called her so. From the beginning of time I have called her ‘the bitch', and the word has had a curious charm for me. If I married her it was because she made the first advances. She did so by design and fraud. No, she had no kindness for me. How could she ever have felt kindness for anyone? A sensual creature who required one man to satisfy her lust, another to play the gallant and another to satisfy her need to inflict pain. Not that I think she restricted herself to this trinity, but at any rate I was the one she selected to torture. To tell the truth she could not have chosen a better subject. For my part I married her because she looked like her mother and because she had a faint, remote resemblance to me. And by this time not merely did I love her but every atom in my body desired her. And, more than any other part of me, my loins—for I refuse to hide real feelings behind a fanciful veil of ‘love', ‘fondness' and
such-like theological terms: I have no taste for literary
huzvaresh.
*
I felt as though both of us had pulsating in our loins a kind of radiation or aureole like those which one sees depicted around the heads of the prophets and that my sickly, diseased aureole was seeking hers and striving with all its might towards it.

When my condition improved I made up my mind to go away, to go somewhere where people would never find me again, like a dog with distemper who knows that he is going to die or like the birds that hide themselves when the time to die has come. Early one morning I rose, dressed, took a couple of cakes that were lying on the top shelf and, without attracting anyone's attention, fled from the house. I was running away from my own misery. I walked aimlessly along the streets, I wandered without set purpose among the rabble-men as they hurried by, an expression of greed on their faces, in pursuit of money and sexual satisfaction. I had no need to see them since anyone of them was a sample of the lot. Each and every one of them consisted only of a mouth and a wad of guts hanging from it, the whole terminating in a set of genitals.

I felt that I had suddenly become lighter and more agile. My leg muscles were functioning with a suppleness and speed which until then I could not have imagined to
be possible. I felt that I had escaped from all the fetters of existence and that this was my natural mode of movement. In my childhood, whenever I had slipped off the burden of trouble and responsibility, I had walked like this.

The sun was already high in the sky and the heat was intense. I found myself walking along deserted streets lined with ash-grey houses of strange, geometrical shapes—cubes, prisms, cones—with low, dark windows. One felt that these windows were never opened, that the houses were untenanted, temporary structures and that no living creature could ever have dwelt in them.

The sun, like a golden knife, was steadily paring away the edge of the shade beside the walls. The streets were enclosed between old, whitewashed walls. Everywhere were peace and stillness, as though all the elements were obeying the sacred law of calm and silence imposed by the blazing heat. It seemed as though mystery was everywhere and my lungs hardly dared to inhale the air.

All at once I became aware that I was outside the gate of the city. The sun, sucking with a thousand mouths, was drawing the sweat of my body. The desert plants looked, under the great, blazing sun, like so many patches of turmeric. The sun was like a feverish eye. It poured its burning rays from the depths of the sky over the silent; lifeless landscape. The ground and the plants gave off a peculiar smell which brought back certain moments of my childhood. Not only did it evoke actions and words from that period of
my life, but for a moment I felt as though that time had returned and these things had happened only the day before. I experienced a kind of agreeable giddiness. It seemed to me that I had been born again in an infinitely remote world. This sensation had an intoxicating quality and, like an old sweet wine, affected every vein and nerve in my body. I recognised the thornbushes, the stones, the tree stumps and the low shrubs of wild thyme. I recognised the familiar smell of the grass. Long past days of my life came back to me, but all these memories, in some strange fashion, were curiously remote from me and led an independent life of their own, in such a way that I was no more than a passive and distant witness and felt that my heart was empty now and that the perfume of the plants had lost the magic which it had had in those days. The cypress trees were more thinly spaced, the hills had grown more arid. The person that I had been then existed no longer. If I had been able to conjure him up and to speak to him he would not have listened to me and, if he had, would not have understood what I said. He was like someone whom I had known once, but he was no part of me.

The world seemed to me like a forlorn, empty house and my heart was filled with trepidation, as though I were now obliged to go barefoot and explore every room in that house: I would pass through room after room, but when I reached the last of all and found myself face to face with ‘the bitch' the doors behind me would shut of their own
accord and only the quivering, blurred shadows of the walls would stand guard, like black slaves, around me.

I had nearly reached the river Suran when I found myself at the foot of a barren, stony hill. Its lean, hard contours put me in mind of my nurse; there was an indefinable resemblance between them. I skirted the hill and came upon a small, green enclosure surrounded on every side by hills. The level ground was covered with vines of morning glory, and on one of the hills stood a lofty castle built of massive bricks.

I suddenly realised that I was tired. I walked up to the Suran and sat down on the fine sand on its bank in the shade of an old cypress tree. It was a peaceful, lonely spot. I felt that no one until then had ever set foot there. All at once I saw a little girl appear from behind the cypress trees and set off in the direction of the castle. She was wearing a black dress of very fine, light material, apparently silk. She was biting the nail of one of the fingers of her left hand, and she glided by with an unconstrained, carefree air. I had the feeling that I had seen her before and knew who she was but could not be sure. Suddenly she vanished. Where she had gone, the distance between us and the glare of the sun prevented me from making out.

I remained petrified, unable to make the slightest movement. I was quite sure that I had seen her with my own two eyes walk past and then disappear. Was she a real being or an illusion? Had I seen her in a dream or waking? All my
attempts to call her face to mind were vain. I experienced a peculiar tremor down my spine. It occurred to me that this was the hour of the day when the shadows of the castle upon the hill returned to life, and that this little girl was one of the old-time inhabitants of the ancient city of Rey.

The landscape before my eyes all at once struck me as familiar. I remembered that once in my childhood on the thirteenth day of Nouruz I had come here with my mother-in-law and ‘the bitch'. That day we ran after each other and played for hours on the far side of these same cypress trees. Then we were joined by another band of children—who they were, I cannot quite remember. We played hide-and-seek together. Once when I was running after the bitch on the bank of the Suran her foot slipped and she fell into the water. The others pulled her out and took her behind the cypress tree to change her clothes. I followed them. They hung up a woman's veil as a screen in front of her but I furtively peeped from behind a tree and saw her whole body. She was smiling and biting the nail of the index-finger of her left hand. Then they wrapped her up in a white cloak and spread out her fine-textured black silk dress to dry in the sun.

I stretched myself out at full length on the fine sand at the foot of the old cypress tree. The babbling of the water reached my ears like the staccato, unintelligible syllables murmured by a man who is dreaming. I automatically thrust my hands into the warm, moist sand. I squeezed the
warm, moist sand in my fists. It felt like the firm flesh of a girl who has fallen into the water and who has changed her clothes.

I do not know how long I spent thus. When I stood up I began automatically to walk. The whole countryside was silent and peaceful. I walked on, completely unaware of my surroundings. Some force beyond my control compelled me to keep moving. All of my attention was concentrated on my feet. I did not walk in the normal fashion but glided along as the girl in black had done.

When I came to myself I found that I was back in the city and standing before my father-in-law's house. I do not know why the route I had followed had chanced to lead me to my father-in-law's house. His little son, my brother-in-law, was sitting on the stone bench outside. He and his sister were like two halves of the one apple. He had slanting Turkoman eyes, prominent cheekbones, a complexion the colour of ripe wheat, sensual nostrils and a strong, thin face. As he sat there he was holding the index finger of his left hand to his lips. I automatically went up to him, put my hand into my pocket, took out the two cakes, gave them to him and said, ‘These are for you from Mummy'—he used to call my wife ‘Mummy' for want of a real mother. He took the cakes with some hesitation and looked at them with an expression of surprise in his Turkoman eyes. I sat down beside him on the bench. I set him on my lap and pressed him to me. His body was warm and the calves of his legs
reminded me of my wife's. He had the same unconstrained manner as she. His lips were like his father's, but what in the father aroused my aversion I found charming and attractive in the boy. They were half-open, as though they had only just broken away from a long, passionate kiss. I kissed him on his half-open mouth, which was so much like my wife's. His lips tasted like the stub end of a cucumber: they were acrid and bitter. The bitch's lips, I thought, must have the same taste.