“Why, it’s the end of the world!” cried Teymour, who had grasped Medhat’s cruel ruse.
“But not necessarily for everyone. The article in the paper maintains that only part of the earth will disintegrate on impact. There’s a chance we will escape the cataclysm.”
“I don’t want to be a pessimist, but I have the distinct feeling that the catastrophe will occur here,” predicted Teymour.
“If there is any justice in the world, it surely will,” said Medhat. “Unfortunately, justice is blind.”
“Still,” interrupted Teymour, “it could be a false alarm. Newspaper articles are filled with lies.”
“Not The Progress,” Medhat asserted. “Those people are serious and highly qualified. They don’t write lies.”
The Progress was the name of the newspaper that for months the policeman had been using as a screen when he eavesdropped on the city’s subversive elements. The imminent threat to the planet predicted in this very paper immediately began to torment him. He started to flip warily through its stained, yellowed pages as he sought the article in question. He soon gave up, however, looking quite distressed as he recalled that the news of the comet was in fact very recent. Should he buy a new paper? It would be a costly purchase and he would not be able to put it on his expenses. He closed his eyes to gather his thoughts, assuming that the young men would most certainly continue their discussion on this fascinating subject. After a moment it seemed to him that the murmur of their secret meeting was beginning to grow fainter and he opened his eyes just in time to see them leaving the café. Flustered by this hasty retreat, he looked at his watch, acting out one last time the charade of the missed rendezvous. Then he stood up and, from a distance, followed the young men who were heading nonchalantly toward one of the city’s commercial streets.
: VII:
in the deserted streets, the night exuded an anguish that Chief of Police Hillali perceived without terror, as if the murder and violence that this anguish implied were tempered in his mind by a kindly, almost complicit curiosity about those determined men behind it all. It was with the vague hope of encountering these men and perhaps even falling into their pitiless hands that he had set out on this nighttime stroll through the city. He was haunted by the desire to know, to possess something tangible that would prove his insightfulness in this affair. His right hand resting on Rezk’s shoulder, he walked like an old blind man escorted by his young guide, but this was nothing but a deceptive façade, for never had his gaze been more penetrating. Unfortunately, all he had seen since he had so impulsively begun this perilous stroll was the sinister and depressing spectacle of a city that had succumbed to lethargy and given itself over to the sleep of the dead. Those revolutionaries — kidnappers of notables — had managed by their evil exploits to usher an invisible, corrupting poison into his city, draining its substance. The calamitous atmosphere that now shrouded these unpeopled streets and these dark façades with their tightly closed shutters struck him like a desecration: it grieved him much more than the fate of the few notables who had mysteriously disappeared. He resented these men for having imposed not disorder but total emptiness. Already when he had been sent to this distant province by the authorities in retaliation for his outspokenness, he had found the punishment too severe; nonetheless he had resigned himself, hoping that the tranquility and the easygoing pace of a low-key existence would mitigate the drawbacks of his exile. He viewed it as a kind of early retirement. He was pleased with the idea of ending his days in these quaint surroundings, amidst an unsophisticated people still unfamiliar with the various protests shaking up the world. Ever since these mysterious disappearances had begun, however, fear had plunged the city into an unsettled mood, and driven him into the torments and doubts of an investigation that promised to be explosive. Thus his acceptance of a mediocre but tolerant and inoffensive universe had not been sufficient to pull him out of fate’s clutches. Trudging along with his hand resting on his companion’s shoulder, he gauged with nostalgia just how low he had fallen. He thought about his past as if it belonged to someone who had no ties to him at all and whose life story had been recounted to him by someone else. Images of streets sparkling with lights; cafés with lively, amusing crowds; urbane gatherings appeared suddenly in his mind as if they had been generated by the ill-fated night’s bitter rebuff. He recalled a marvelously beautiful belly dancer who performed in a luxurious cabaret in the capital; she had been his mistress only for a short time but she lingered in his memory with the power of a still-fierce passion. He thought she must be dead by now, or at least old and repulsive, and he immediately felt disgust and horror at his own old age. Alone, he was alone in this city, crushed beneath its malefic torpor; his only refuge was the affection he had for this sickly boy who was not even his son, and whom he had doomed to an ignominious job. Slowly he was yielding to disillusionment, as if these elusive revolutionaries, by the outlandishness of their crimes, were forcing him to acknowledge the absurdity of continuing an investigation aimed at their capture. He was not oblivious to the fact that tonight’s stroll could end in disaster. The responsibility for kidnapping the chief of police would be claimed by those enemies of the state as a dazzling victory against oppression and would mean the definite end of his career. He was fully aware of this, but oddly unworried by such a prospect; he felt a kind of morbid desire — like a suicidal dizzy spell — to fall into the hands of those men who were risking so much in order to change the world.
Their motives were so familiar to him that he had no need to wonder about the aim of their subversive enterprise. It seemed obvious to him that their aim was to destroy the government and the established social order. He himself was not an unconditional supporter of that existing order and he remained ever sensitive to the seductiveness of rebellion. But he was there to defend this order and to foil his adversaries’ conspiracies. His duty did not include despising those who placed their demand for justice above the honors and benefits of enslavement and, in his difficult investigation, he felt closer to the conspirators than to the powers he served. Without admitting it to himself, he respected in their acts a certain moral idea that had not been completely snuffed out in him — far from it. For never had he confused these men with the uneducated criminals and crude intrigues long noted in police files. The theorists behind this terrorism with its violent impact were of an entirely different caliber and were aiming well beyond some sordid interest in the money of their victims, whom they selected with diabolical shrewdness. Only educated and, above all, idle young men — leisure time was absolutely essential for honing one’s critical faculties and elaborating an ideal — could sacrifice their time and future to this fight against iniquity; it was a painful struggle, constantly begun anew. Organizing these kidnappings one after the other without leaving a single trace or proof of their participation revealed an unrivalled expertise in the art of revolution. Hillali caught himself admiring this faultless technique and wondering through what magic they had learned such modern methods of political subversion. They had certainly not learned them in this city that had never, as far back as anyone could remember, had the slightest revolutionary leanings. But perhaps these things could not be learned; perhaps they were simply buried, like a precious gift, in the consciousness of certain beings destined to the noble task of denouncing the infamy of tyrants.
He looked up at the sky streaked with dark clouds behind which the moon made a few brief appearances, like the face of a woman at her window. Then he squeezed his companion’s shoulder, as if to remind him of the importance of their mission and to advise him not to let down his guard. He had noticed that the young man had begun to slip into a gloomy apathy, the result of his sickly state and the severity of the cold.