“Here it is,” said Rezk, pointing to the door.
Samaraï seemed flabbergasted by this rapid arrival at their destination. He glanced at the door, then raised his eyes to the rooftop as if he were looking for a construction defect, a crack in the façade, the smallest risk of collapse of a kind that would prevent him from going in. True, there was nothing seductive about the house, but it was quite obviously solid on its foundation. Samaraï turned to Rezk and said, with a strain of terror in his voice:
“Don’t you want to accompany me? You’ll be my guest, you are a brother. Come, we’ll talk about women and about love. It’s a very mysterious subject, don’t you think? I’d like to discuss it with you.”
“I thank you, but it’s quite impossible,” said Rezk apologetically. “They’re waiting for me at home. Really, I am terribly sorry to leave you.”
Suddenly filled with remorse, Rezk was hesitant to go. He had a premonition that danger awaited the veterinary student behind the blood-colored door; it weighed on his conscience and made leaving seem like an act of treachery. They remained motionless for a long time, staring at each other, like two travelers meeting in a strange place, fascinated by the fluke of the encounter. Then abruptly Samaraï stood up straight, seemed to regain his pride and his energy, and said in a voice that was firm but fraught with terrible melancholy:
“So, then, farewell, my brother!”
He dashed toward the brothel door with the rage of a man fleeing a vengeful fate, opened it, then slammed it noisily behind him.
The noise echoed through the neighborhood like a
voice of misery wailing in a world of iniquity, and Rezk had the foreboding that his companion of a moment before had just vanished forever. He was still thinking about the enormous sum of money Samaraï kept in his pocket that made him so vulnerable. Then, all of a sudden, he grasped the danger of his own situation. He was now completely alone as he wended his way along these narrow, twisting alleys that were more macabre than a cemetery of infidels, and it seemed to him that the dubious shadows cast against the high walls moved with him as he passed by. Although his poverty — visible even to a blind man — had the ability to move the most ferocious murderer to pity, for the first time that night he felt fear clutch at him like a bony old woman and he began to run toward the square whose faint lights in the distance seemed to promise mad merrymaking. The tall streetlamps on their steel stems poured their moribund light down on the immutable peasant woman standing on her pedestal, her hand still stretching toward the horizon, her face fixed in stone reflecting the boundless futility of her gesture. Rezk stopped, relieved to have arrived without incident in this tolerably civilized part of town. It was not yet his time to die; he still needed to live in order to see just how far man’s infamy could brazenly spread beneath the sun without provoking the slightest outcry from the universe. His hatred of Chawki was the scourge and bane of his existence, but it was also his talisman against forgetting all the disparaged miseries and humiliations. As if the intensity of his hatred had caused the living image of this despised individual to materialize in front of him, Rezk thought he recognized Chawki crossing the square at a quick tempo, a black satin cape draped around his shoulders, like a disoriented vampire. He was swinging his cane as if it were a weapon and moving from one streetlamp to another as though trying to follow a projector’s brightly-lit path. Rezk froze with surprise and for a moment thought he was seeing a mirage, a kind of provocation of his suffering; then he leapt with catlike agility on to the dusty ground of the vast square. He drew closer and closer to the man in the cape but, unlike that man, who sought out the light of the streetlamps, Rezk slipped cautiously into the patches of shadow, careful not to show himself. Even from behind and despite the ridiculous way he hopped about — a complete breach with the formal, stilted gait he used in public — Chawki stood out among all the other criminals of his class by a vileness so complete that it saturated the air around him. Rezk’s instinct had not been wrong; it was indeed Chawki heading toward some dark destination. Rezk had simply allowed himself to get swept away; in his zeal he had not yet thought through what he was going to do. He was frightened by whatever it was that had driven him to this pursuit, and by some unformulated notion that was developing on its own, outside of him, vesting him with a purificatory power. Was he going to appoint himself executioner and eliminate Chawki, kill him right then on this isolated square, with as sole witness that hideous statue, symbol of resurrection? But could destroying this prosperous bastard — a highly justified act — obliterate everything else? In any case, Rezk knew he was incapable of violence and rejected the idea with disgust. Most pathetically, he was starting to feel sorry for Chawki.
Chawki was skillfully navigating toward the sources of light while frantically waving his cane so as to scare off invisible demons. His goal now was not to parade himself in front of a backward people, but to reach, as quickly as possible, Imtaz’s house, where special festivities were to take place in his honor. For the moment, his concern was to stay out of the shadows and not be mistaken for a common capitalist by brazen assailants. It was his massive smugness and his belief that the esteem in which the entire city held him made him untouchable that had dictated this particular course of action. Even the lowliest scoundrels would hesitate to disrespect such a highly placed person. But like all courses of action, this one was not devoid of a certain stupidity; it wasn’t entirely impossible that the kidnappers or other evil-minded dregs of humanity were ignorant peasants straight out of their countryside and thus totally unaware of Chawki’s position as an esthete and illustrious notable. If this were the case, it would obviously be sheer lunacy to show himself in the light. He was exasperated by this quandary that called upon his speculative faculties, and that tremendous anxiety was preventing him from resolving. The lewd, stirring image of the young schoolgirl from a good family waiting for him at Imtaz’s house set his flesh ablaze almost to the point of orgasm and made even more dreadful the possibility of some mortal danger that would deprive him of a prey he had so fervently coveted just when he was about to do with it as he pleased. Spurred on by his depraved predilections, he hoped to find in this barely nubile child the innocent offspring of a family of his acquaintance, as if by sleeping with the daughter he would at the same time absorb the respectability of her parents, and he anticipated a positive influence on his waning virility from this act of sacrilege. As it happened, his sensuous nature had recently begun to show some signs of flagging that necessitated the use of various aphrodisiacs. There was a good chance that the young girl was still a virgin, and Chawki felt his stomach clench on realizing he had forgotten to supply himself with the life-saving drug. And so his most terrible fear was coming true: possessing the girl was becoming an intrepid task in all likelihood doomed to fail. But it was too late now to remedy his oversight. To go back the way he’d come, after suffering so many torments, demanded an amount of courage and daring he could no longer even imagine. Despite the fact that he was constantly quickening his pace, it seemed to him that he was barely moving forward, and that the former actor’s house existed only in his mind, a mind overexcited by the vision of the young schoolgirl waiting for him naked on a bed in an obscene pose. This feeling was analogous to what he experienced in his nightmares when, hunted down by his former mistress, the irascible Salma — transformed for the occasion into a devouring female whose mouth dripped blood — he fled, but with the alarming sensation that however much he tried to accelerate the movements of his legs, rather than carrying him farther from the hideous creature, they were only decreasing the distance between them. Then his thoughts were flooded with malicious joy at the idea that from now on he was safe from the young woman and her abominable fulminations. What a blessing that this veterinary student had wound up there; that imbecile had done him a great favor by attacking him. What cheered Chawki most in this matter was that he would no longer have to pay an allowance or offer gifts to a woman who had ceased to play any part in his sexual fantasies. He was thinking about this with glee in the depths of his miserliness when suddenly his attention was drawn to a faint dancing light, very much like a ray of sunlight reflected in a mirror, and which he assumed was the reflection of a knife blade brandished above his neck by some individual standing behind him. For a brief instant he remained motionless, under a spell of terrible indecisiveness. Then, twirling his cane, he turned around to fight off the fatal stroke that was about to obliterate him. At that moment the phenomenon reoccurred with incredible speed — a tiny glimmer flittering in every direction — and he managed to locate its origin. He had been too quick to lose his head; the glimmer was coming from the ring he wore on his right hand, the one that held the cane; its stone glittered as soon as it caught a hint of light. Before Chawki had gone out, recalling Imtaz’s advice, he’d managed to take off all his rings except one that remained embedded in his flesh despite his struggles to remove it. It was a very valuable ring, with a large diamond that blazed like fire and that in all probability signaled his approach for miles around. He tried to hide his hand beneath the cloth of his cape, but this made it impossible for him to defend himself efficiently; his left hand was too clumsy to handle the cane in a fight for his life. This new worry threw him into indescribable confusion and only half-consciously did his eye perceive a human shape threading its way stealthily through the shadows. An icy shiver ran through Chawki as his gaze swept over the square intently seeking a section of wall or a tree trunk as shelter in his hasty retreat; all he found was the statue’s plinth. He took a deep breath, then ran toward this monument to deceit; since it belonged to the government, in his mind it was obliged to protect him from envious men and outcasts. His body pressing against this feeble rampart like a fly on a sticky windowpane, his cane raised above his head in a final burst of heroism, he held his breath and listened carefully for the intruder’s footsteps. After a moment, hearing nothing, he edged out from behind the pedestal and what he saw crushed his last hope of resistance. A man was heading calmly toward the statue with the satisfied air of an assassin confident in his strength and convinced that his victim had no chance of escape. Chawki would have liked to cry for help, to wake the entire city with a horrific roar, but either because the difficulties of this night had made him lose his voice or because his social standing forbade him from resorting to such unseemly extremes, no sound emerged from his throat. His fright, however, vanished all at once as soon as he could make out his pursuer’s tiny figure. The anemic appearance and rough clothing of this odd stroller were evidence of undeniable poverty. Chawki felt reborn. The man could not be dangerous in the least; Chawki could easily get the better of him with a few well-dealt blows of his cane. With the courage of the coward faced with someone weaker than himself, he rushed out all aquiver from behind the pedestal, cane raised, ready to knock senseless this poor wretch who looked anything but ferocious.