IX. The Winter of Universal Suspicion
ALTHOUGH no season was entirely free of mistrust, only that year’s winter was and always would be known as “the winter of universal suspicion.” The name became so firmly attached that at one point it almost seemed to be part of the season itself and to have taken the very place of the thing it described. In fact, that is nearly what occurred. Allegedly, when people looked up at the sky toward the end of the autumn, instead of observing, “Well, winter’s here to stay,” they would say, “Suspicious weather, isn’t it?” or “Don’t you think suspicion has come rather early this year?” Schoolteachers were even supposed to have had the children chanting out loud, “There are four seasons in the year. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Suspicion”; and so on. Thus, in spite of the preventive measures proposed by the scholar A. K., that is probably what would have happened. In his third letter of denunciation, A. K. stressed that it was his rival Jaqub Har who had first put about the idea of substituting the name for the things and that he possessed definite evidence, which he reserved the right to submit to the sovereign once it was complete, which showed that the degenerate linguist was about to make a pernicious proposal for redesignating not just winter, but time in general — in other words, that the word time should be replaced by the word suspicion. The third letter of denunciation went on to say that after the repeated failure of his efforts to make his wife pregnant, the incorrigible Jaqub Har had come to think that time itself was worn out in this world, and that since it was now living outside of time, humanity would soon be obliged to adopt a time from another world, presumably from hell, unless it was to purloin the time zone of dogs and jackals. That was therefore what would have happened despite all the preventive measures proposed by A. K. (of these, the eleventh recommendation was the emasculation of Jaqub Har), had investigations in hand not been pursued with redoubled intensity during the spring, with the result that, since the winter had been defined as the season of universal suspicion, the spring should have been called the season of hypersuspi-cion — and as for the summer, the climate became so much more oppressive that no epithet could be found to describe it, and that was even more the case in the following autumn, which was so much later than usual that people feared it would never come, a fear exacerbated, in the view of A. K., by the sinister theories of Jaqub Har.
That winter remained the only season to be designated in that way simply because, as usually happens, people tended to remember not the height of a curse but its two termini, that is to say its start and its end, but as in this case there was no sign of an end, what was mostly registered in collective memory was the brink of the abyss.
Normally, the greater the scope of an investigation, the greater need it had of deep foundations, just like a building, The gravity of an inquiry depended on the time and place of the crime. Though promptness could be impressive, investigating an offense that had been committed only two or three weeks before could easily make the facts seem merely ephemeral things. At the other extreme, inquiries into crimes committed forty years ago may well be superficially impressive as evidence of the great rigor of a State that lets nothing pass even if it has a half-century’s silt laid over it, but, like an earthquake with a distant epicenter, they run the risk of diffusing anxiety and making it less intense.
That winter’s investigation was of middling scope. It went back about seven years, on average, fully sufficient to terrify at least two generations.
What was most curious about it was its localization in space. Whereas the minutes of investigations normally referred to two kinds of space, the real kind (the tomb with the corpse, the scene of the murder, etc), and the unreal kind, also called impossible space (the rantings of a demented mother-in-law, nightmares, and so on), the new inquiry was located neither in the one nor the other, but in both at the same time.
In brief, according to the official announcement the clue to the puzzle that the investigation was seeking to elucidate was to be found inside the pyramid, at a point located roughly between the one hundredth and the one hundred and third steps, to the right of the vertical axis, in the heart of the darkness where the stones were heaped upon each other in a boundless agony that neither human reason nor unreason could properly imagine.
The puzzle seemed both decipherable and indecipherable at the same time. It appeared inaccessible, since dismantling the pyramid was inconceivable — for most people, at any rate. It is true that some said: “What if, one fine morning, what with all the heat and the boredom, Cheops decided, just like that, to do the unthinkable, to do what no Pharaoh before him had ever dared? What if he gave the order for the pyramid to be taken down, step by step, until the evil was laid bare?”
The ambivalence of the puzzle terrified every living soul. It was only a few yards away, right there, under its stone cowl. It was in between the two forms of life, but not entirely in either one, like the unburied dead, or like a living person walking through the market arm in arm with his ghost, of whom you could hardly decide which one made the more terrifying sight.
What was now generally understood was the way it had all started seven years earlier, with the howling of a jackal on the night of a full moon. The animal had followed the block of stone from the quarry at Abusir, across the Saqqara desert, to the outskirts of Memphis, and the itinerary, as well as some other details, had now been corroborated by more than one witness. The magician Gezerkareseneb had spent a whole night wandering about the face of the pyramid with a flickering torch in order to make out the exact position of the stone, the place where its journey had finally come to an end. Comparisons between the data that he collected and statements by witnesses, and especially a study of the quarry’s delivery notes, of the stone’s bill of lading in the archives of the Ferries and Waterways Department, of the first and second control certificates, and the results of various complicated calculations that apparently had nothing to do with these documents, established the fact beyond any possibility of error that the fatal stone was the two hundred and four thousand and ninety-third piece in the south slope, or, in the recording system used in the general inventory, stone n° 92 308 130393 6.
The figure looked rather bizarre, but everyone paid much more attention to what might be hidden in the pyramid than to the block’s actual number.
Most people imagined it was a papyrus, in other words a secret document containing some threat or blackmail attempt, or else a warning for the future in case time suddenly changed its direction or its speed, as Jaqub Har had supposedly foretold.
Despite the oddness of its number, the formal identification of the stone nonetheless damped down the general level of anxiety. At least people knew that they were dealing with a piece of stone that had been hewn from a quarry, cut and shaped by stonemasons, inspected by a benevolent or threatening inspector, certified by a seal placed on it by a warehouse official, loaded onto an eight-oared ferry, then hauled on a buffalo cart whose drivers, like all their fellow hauler, had bellowed, spat, and sworn the whole journey long, had got drunk or else had pushed some peasant girl into a muddy field by the wayside. (Sometimes, the attackers got themselves so covered in mud from head to toe that they could not tell who was who any more and ended up raping each other,) Then it had been past the officials who recorded goods arriving at and leaving from the central depots more inspectors., dockers (who “docked” the stone by securing it onto the dolly that slid up and down the ramp), pullers and pushers, and superintendents., before finally reaching the stonelayers.