The Blind Owl (11 page)

Earlier, in the days before I fell ill, I had been to the mosque a number of times, always more or less unwillingly. On these occasions I had tried to enter into a community of feeling with the people around me. But my eye would rest on the shining, patterned tiles on the wall and I would be transported into a delightful dream world. Thereby I unconsciously provided myself with a way of escape. During the prayers I would shut my eyes and cover my face with my hand and in this artificial night of my own making I would recite the prayers like the meaningless sounds uttered by someone who is dreaming. The words were not spoken from the heart. I found it pleasanter to talk to a friend or acquaintance than to God, the high and mighty One. God was too important a personage for me.

When I was lying in my warm, damp bed these questions did not interest me one jot and at such a time it did not matter to me whether God really existed or whether He was nothing but a personification of the mighty ones of
this world, invented for the greater glory of spiritual values and the easier spoliation of the lower orders, the pattern of earthly things being transferred to the sky. All that I wanted to know was whether or not I was going to live through to the morning. In face of death I felt that religion, faith, belief were feeble, childish things of which the best that could be said was that they provided a kind of recreation for healthy, successful people. In face of the frightful reality of death and of my own desperate condition, all that had been inculcated into me on the subject of judgment day and rewards and penalties in a future life seemed an insipid fraud, and the prayers I had been taught were completely ineffective against the fear of death.

No, the fear of death would not let me go. People who have not known suffering themselves will not understand me when I say that my attachment to life had grown so strong that the least moment of ease compensated for long hours of palpitation and anguish.

I saw that pain and disease existed and at the same time that they were void of sense and meaning. Among the men of the rabble I had become a creature of a strange, unknown race, so much so that they had forgotten that I had once been part of their world. I had the dreadful sensation that I was not really alive or wholly dead. I was a living corpse, unrelated to the world of living people and at the same time deprived of the oblivion and peace of death.

It was night when I stood up from beside my opium brazier. I looked out of the window. A single black tree was visible beside the shuttered butcher's shop. The shadows had merged into one black mass. I felt as though everything in the world was hollow and provisional. The pitch-black sky reminded me of an old black tent in which the countless shining stars represented holes. As I watched I heard from somewhere the voice of a muezzin, although it was not the time for the call to prayer. It sounded like the cry of a woman—it could have been the bitch—in the pangs of childbirth. Mingled with the cry was the sound of a dog howling. I thought to myself, ‘If it is true that everyone has his own star in the sky mine must be remote, dark and meaningless. Perhaps I have never had a star at all.'

Just then the voices of a band of drunken policemen rose loud from the street. As they marched by they were joking obscenely among themselves. Then they began to sing in chorus,

‘Come, let us go and drink wine;

Let us drink wine of the Kingdom of Rey.

If we do not drink now, when should we drink?'

In terror I shrank back from the window. Their voices resounded strangely through the night air, gradually growing fainter and fainter. No, they were not coming for me,
they did not know. . . . Silence and darkness settled down upon the world again. I did not light my oil lamp. It was more pleasant to sit in the dark, that dense liquid which permeates everything and every place. I had grown accustomed to the dark. It was in the dark that my lost thoughts, my forgotten fears, the frightful, unbelievable ideas that had been lurking in some unknown recess of my brain, used to return to life, to move about and to grimace at me. In the corners of my room, behind the curtains, beside the door, were hosts of these ideas, of these formless, menacing figures.

There, beside the curtain, sat one fearful shape. It never stirred, it was neither gloomy nor cheer ful. Every time I came back to my room it gazed steadily into my eyes. Its face was familiar to me. It seemed to me that I had seen that face at some time in my childhood. Yes, it was on the thirteenth day of Nouruz. I was playing hide-and-seek with some other children on the bank of the river Suran when I caught sight of that same face amid a crowd of other, ordinary faces set on top of funny, reassuring little bodies. It reminded me of the butcher opposite the window of my room. I felt that this shape had its place in my life and that I had seen it often before. Perhaps this shadow had been born along with me and moved within the restricted circuit of my existence. . . .

As soon as I stood up to light the lamp the shape faded and disappeared. I stood in front of the mirror and stared at
my face. The reflection that I saw was unfamiliar to me. It was a weird, frightening image. My reflection had become stronger than my real self and I had become like an image in a mirror. I felt that I could not remain alone in the same room with my reflection. I was afraid that if I tried to run away he would come after me. We were like two cats face to face, preparing to do battle. But I knew that I could create my own complete darkness with the hollow of my palm and I raised my hand and covered my eyes. The sensation of horror as usual aroused in me a feeling of exquisite, intoxicating pleasure which made my head swim and my knees give way and filled me with nausea. Suddenly I realised that I was still standing. The circumstance struck me as odd, even inexplicable. How could it have come about that I was standing on my feet? It seemed to me that if I were to move one of my feet I should lose my balance. A kind of vertigo took possession of me. The earth and everything upon it had receded infinitely far from me. I wished vaguely for an earthquake or a thunderbolt from the sky which would make it possible for me to be born again in a world of light and peace.

When at last I went back to bed, I said to myself, ‘Death . . . death. . . .' My lips were closed, yet I was afraid of my voice. I had quite lost my previous boldness. I had become like the flies which crowd indoors at the beginning of the autumn, thin, half-dead flies which are afraid at first of the buzzing of their own wings and cling to some one point
of the wall until they realise that they are alive; then they fling themselves recklessly against door and walls until they fall dead around the floor.

As my eyes closed a dim, indistinct world began to take shape around me. It was a world of which I was the sole creator and which was in perfect harmony with my vision of reality. At all events it was far more real and natural to me than my waking world and presented no obstacle, no barrier, to my ideas. In it time and place lost their validity. My repressed lusts, my secret needs, which had begotten this dream, gave rise to shapes and to happenings which were beyond belief but which seemed natural to me. For a few moments after waking up I had no sense of time or place and doubted whether I really existed. It would seem that I myself created all my dreams and had long known the correct interpretation of them.

A great part of the night had passed by the time I fell asleep. All at once I found myself wandering free and unconstrained through an unknown town, along streets lined with weird houses of geometrical shapes—prisms, cones, cubes—with low, dark windows and doors and walls overgrown with vines of morning glory. All the inhabitants of the town had died by some strange death. Each and every one of them was standing motionless with two drops of blood from his mouth congealed upon his coat. When I touched one of them his head toppled and fell to the ground.

I came to a butcher's shop and saw there a man like the odds-and-ends man in front of our house. He had a scarf wrapped around his neck and held a long-bladed knife in his hand and he stared at me with red eyes from which the lids seemed to have been cut off. I tried to take the knife from his hand. His head toppled and fell to the ground. I fled in terror. As I ran along the streets everyone I saw was standing motionless. When I reached my father-in-law's house my brother-in-law, the bitch's little brother, was sitting on the stone bench outside. I put my hand into my pocket, took out a pair of cakes and tried to put them into his hand, but the moment I touched him his head toppled and fell to the ground. I shrieked aloud and awoke.

The room was still half dark. My heart was beating hard. I felt as if the ceiling were weighing down upon my head and the walls had grown immensely thick and threatened to crush me. My eyes had become dim. I lay for some time in terror, counting and re-counting the uprights of the walls. I had hardly shut my eyes when I heard a noise. It was Nanny, who had come to tidy up the room. She had laid breakfast for me in a room in the upper storey. I went upstairs and sat down by the sash window. From up there the old odds-and-ends man in front of my window was out of sight but I could see the butcher over on the left. His movements which, seen from my own window, seemed heavy, deliberate and frightening, now struck me as helpless, even comical. I felt that this man had no business to
be a butcher at all and was only acting a part. A man led up the two gaunt, black horses with their deep, hollow cough. Each of them had a pair of sheep carcases slung across its back. The butcher ran his greasy hand over his moustache and appraised the carcases with a buyer's eye. Then, with an effort, he carried two of them across and hung them from the hook at the entrance to the shop. I saw him pat their legs. I have no doubt that when he stroked his wife's body at night he would think of the sheep and reflect how much he could make if he were to kill his wife.

When the tidying-up was finished I went back to my room and made a resolution, a frightful resolution. I went into the little closet off my room and took out a bone-handled knife which I kept in a box there. I wiped the blade on the skirt of my caftan and hid it under the pillow. I had made this resolution a long time before but there had been something just now in the movements of the butcher as he cut up the legs of the sheep, weighed out the meat and then looked around with an expression of self-satisfaction which somehow made me want to imitate him. This was a pleasure that I too must experience. I could see from my window a patch of perfect, deep blue in the midst of the clouds. It seemed to me that I should have to climb a very long ladder to reach that patch of sky. The horizon was covered with thick, yellow, deathly clouds which weighed heavily upon the whole city.

It was horrible, delicious weather. For some reason which I cannot explain I crouched down to the floor. In this kind of weather I always tended to think of death. But it was only now, when death, his face smeared with blood, was clutching my throat with his bony hands, that I made up my mind. I made up my mind to take the bitch with me, to prevent her from saying when I had gone, ‘God have mercy on him, his troubles are over.'

A funeral procession passed by in front of my window. The coffin was draped with black and a lighted candle stood upon it. My ear caught the cry,
‘La elaha ell' Allah'.
*
All the tradespeople and the passersby left whatever they were doing and walked seven paces after the coffin. Even the butcher came out, walked the regulation seven paces after the coffin and returned to his shop. But the old pedlarman did not stir from his place beside his wares. How serious everybody suddenly looked! Doubtless their thoughts had turned abruptly to the subject of death and the afterlife. When my nurse brought me my medicine I observed that she looked thoughtful. She was fingering the beads of a large rosary and was muttering some formula to herself. Then she took up her position outside my door, beat her breast and recited her prayers in a loud voice: ‘My God! My Go-o-o-d!'

Anyone might have thought it was my business to pardon the living! All this buffoonery left me completely cold. It actually gave me a certain satisfaction to think that, for a few seconds at any rate, the rabble-men were undergoing, temporarily and superficially it is true, something of what I was suffering. Was not my room a coffin? This bed that was always unrolled, inviting me to sleep, was it not colder and darker than the grave? The thought that I was lying in a coffin had occurred to me several times. At night my room seemed to contract and to press against my body. May it not be that people have this same sensation in the grave? Is anything definite known about the sensations we may experience after death? True, the blood ceases to circulate and after the lapse of twenty-four hours certain parts of the body begin to decompose. Nevertheless the hair and the nails continue to grow for some time after death. Do sensation and thought cease as soon as the heart has stopped beating or do they continue a vague existence, alimented by the blood still remaining in the minor blood-vessels? The fact of dying is a fearful thing in itself but the consciousness that one is dead would be far worse. Some old men die with a smile on their lips like people passing from sleep into a deeper sleep or like a lamp burning out. What must be the sensations of a young, strong man who dies suddenly and who continues for some time longer to struggle against death with all the strength of his being?

I had many times reflected on the fact of death and on the decomposition of the component parts of my body, so that this idea had ceased to frighten me. On the contrary, I genuinely longed to pass into oblivion and nonbeing. The only thing I feared was that the atoms of my body should later go to make up the bodies of rabble-men. This thought was unbearable to me. There were times when I wished I could be endowed after death with large hands with long, sensitive fingers: I would carefully collect together all the atoms of my body and hold them tightly in my hands to prevent them, my property, from passing into the bodies of rabble-men.