The Buddha's Return (17 page)

“Your Honour, gentlemen of the court,” he said. “It seems to me that we must first try to avoid the temptation of crediting this simplistic interpretation of events, which, wittingly or unwittingly, the prosecution has drawn for us. I must immediately forewarn you that I am not in the possession of a single material argument that is capable of making my task any easier. I have at my disposal only the same material that was available to the prosecution,
and there is not a single piece of evidence about which I would know and the opposing side would not. As you can see, I come unarmed. However, I should like to caution you against jumping to any premature conclusions that may seem logically sound but might lack the element of compassion and mercy that is also the very foundation of justice. And it is to uphold these basic tenets of justice that I now beseech you. But let us turn to the defendant and his two murders, about which the prosecutor so vehemently spoke. ‘A dull-witted and dubious character,’ the prosecutor called him. Yes, it was a dull-witted and dubious character who killed Shcherbakov and in so doing implicated another man, thus jeopardizing his life. You will agree that this second crime, in contrast to the first, was never actually committed, and, as we have been summoned here to examine only established facts, there can be nothing more incumbent upon us than to dismiss this accusation outright. However, I would go further still: the first crime, the first murder, also merits closer scrutiny. Was Amar the real murderer, or was he merely executing a criminal plan hatched by others—a plan that was never his own? Herein lies the most vital question.

“Compare the life story of this man with those of the others surrounding him. Amar was born and raised in poverty, he received no education, worked in the slaughterhouses of Tunis and led a poor and wretched life—that of the unfortunate natives of our African
départements.
Who stirred in him the desire for another life, who had a taste for expensive restaurants, cabarets, the avenues of the Champs Élysées, night-time Paris, debauchery and extravagance, the transition from riches to poverty and from poverty to riches? Who advised Lida to urge for a will to be drawn up? Who discussed the various possibilities—not of killing, of course, but of getting rid of Shcherbakov? Who had need of his money? Compare Amar’s testimony with Lida’s and Zina’s. He conceals nothing, he is incapable even of lying. You won’t find a single tactical error in what either Lida or Zina has said. They knew nothing of the murder, they were devoted to Shcherbakov, they had only the most benevolent of feelings for him. Can you not see the scandalous, brazen duplicity in all this? To love a man—and to press for a will; to love a man—and to sleep in other men’s beds; to love a man—and to spend whole evenings discussing in cold blood how most safely and conveniently to do away with him.

“There are other factors in this case, the exact significance of which remains unclear; however, their existence cannot be denied, and they cast doubt on the probability of that most simple and categorical interpretation advocated by the prosecution. In particular, the role of the young man on whom suspicion first fell and to whom Shcherbakov, for reasons completely unknown to us, left his entire fortune—the role of this student is murkier than
it might at first seem. He had a fair idea of Lida and her mother’s moral composition, and he knew of Amar’s existence. Why then, as the deceased’s closest friend, did he not warn him of the danger in such an association? What exactly did he mean by the mysterious answer he gave under questioning, when, denying that he was the murderer, he uttered the following mysterious words: ‘It was just an arbitrary logical construct’? I do not contest his factual non-participation in the murder; to do so would be pointless after Amar’s confession. Yet the fact alone that he considered it somehow logically permissible and, consequently, practicable seems most odd, and this, perhaps, warrants further investigation.”

The entire defence was built around his original assertion, namely that Amar was only the instrument of someone else’s criminal will, and that he ought to be judged as such. He laid all the blame on Zina and Lida, whose biographies he described in such rich detail, which attested to his extraordinary concern for the case. Evidently he approached his role of defence advocate exceedingly conscientiously, but it did not change the fact that Amar’s fate interested him only insofar as it was linked to his success in the courtroom. He challenged every one of the prosecutor’s arguments—with varying degrees of persuasiveness—but, in contrast to his opponent, he failed to devote enough attention to purely logical considerations, and this seemed to me to be his gravest error. He
closed his speech with an appeal to the court, which turned out to be no less pathetic than the prosecutor’s:

“The prosecution has called upon you to put an end to a series of murders, which, if we are to believe him, will inevitably follow on. If I may be so bold, I should like to state that cruel fate anticipated this eventuality well before the intervention of justice. You may rest assured: Amar will never pose a danger to anyone ever again. He is suffering from an acute form of tuberculosis, his lungs are haemorrhaging, and it would seem to me equally senseless and cruel if justice were to take on the woeful task that his illness has already resolved itself to do. By all accounts Amar has little time left to live: his days are numbered. And I appeal to you for mercy: allow him to die a natural death. The difference in time will be nominal, the difference in result will be nil. He is nevertheless condemned to death; do not take it upon yourselves to alter his inexorable fate. As I have just said, the result will be the same in any case. If you do not pass this sentence on him, you will have one fewer death on your conscience, and this man will die in a prison hospital, carrying with him the grateful memory that, although betrayed by his friends and the woman for whom he risked his own wretched life, he was shown mercy by those who saw him first in the dock, who were ultimately able to understand this dubious, poor Arab who paid for the crimes of others inciting him to kill.”

The verdict was read after an hour’s recess: Amar was sentenced to death. As I watched him, his lips quivered, he incoherently tried to say something, and a heavy shadow fell across his dark face. He saw that it was all over—and I thought then that the ghostly existence of those dead black eyes, that thin swarthy body with the tattoo on its chest, would continue for a short while, but only as an extended formality, and that this man was now essentially no different from those who had been killed on the battlefield, who had died from chronic illness, from the man who had been stabbed by a triple-edged blade and whose spectre had exacted such cruel revenge.

Returning home after several weeks’ imprisonment, I was struck by the imperturbable constancy of everything I had lost on the day of my arrest and which I now regained. Those same people walked down that same street, those same acquaintances dined in those same restaurants; it was the same city and human landscape I had always known. Then with full force I perceived the sinister immutability of existence that was so typical of the people living in my street and that I had pondered that evening, which now seemed so infinitely distant, when I had stood by the window thinking about Michelangelo’s
Last Judgement.
After I had restored order to the room and taken a shower,
I began to shave and looked at myself in the mirror; I was met again by that same, somehow inimical expression on my face. Those former thoughts returned to me with renewed strength, like a chronic headache, this constant searching, as persistent as it was fruitless, for some illusive and harmonious justification of life. I simply had to seek it out, because in contrast to those who held an almost rational belief in some divine beginning, I was inclined towards the notion that this insatiable desire to obtain something intangible could probably be attributed to some imperfection in my sensory organs; it seemed as indisputable to me as the laws of gravity or the Earth’s spherical form. But although I had already been long aware of this, yet I could not stop thinking about it. When taking certain university courses and reading certain books directly relating to them I would subconsciously envy that professor or author to whom practically everything was clear and for whom the history of man represented an elegant series of events whose sole, incontrovertible purpose was to support the basic premises and conclusions of their political or social theories. There was something reassuring and idyllic about this, some metaphysical comfort that forever remained inaccessible to me.

It was a cold March evening; I donned my overcoat, left the apartment and went on a long walk through the streets, trying as best I could not to think about anything, apart from the approach of the capricious Parisian spring
that was already in the air, the bright street lights and motor cars passing by, the absence now of prison, murder accusations and finally, for the first time in my life, the lack of material concerns for the future. I tried to instil in myself in as far as possible a consciousness of this undeniable good fortune of mine, and I kept listing, one after the other, the advantages of my current situation: freedom, health, money, the unimpeded ability to do whatever I wanted and go wherever I pleased. These were utterly indisputable; however, they were unfortunately just as indisputable as they were unreal. And again it began to seem as if I were gradually succumbing to that heavy, inexplicable sorrow, whose attacks could render me defenceless.

I was walking along one of the little quiet streets that lead onto Boulevard Raspail. On the ground floor of the building I was passing a window suddenly shot open and a phrase of music rang out amid the cold air, stopping me in my tracks—someone inside was playing the piano. I recognized the melody at once: the piece was called ‘Souvenir’, and I had first heard it several years ago, at a concert given by Kreisler. I had attended this concert at the Pleyel with Catherine; as she sat next to me, her misty tenderness had seemed to accentuate the sense of the melody, heightening the theme of memory in Kreisler’s playing. Attempting to translate the movement of sounds into my poverty of words, the meaning was approximately
thus: that the feeling of happy plenitude is short-lived and illusory, it will leave only regret and as such it is a sorrowful yet alluring warning. Because of this I knew that the moment could never be repeated, and I keenly sensed, perhaps because it too could never be repeated, the magic of the violin. This was the year that Catherine had arrived in Paris, to study; I had met her in a little restaurant in the Latin Quarter, where we ate every day and where a huge stove stood in the dining room among all the tables. There were gleaming red pots, a great many sauces spluttering away in their covered pans; it smelt of roasted meats and rich bouillon, and, over all this decorative brilliance of food and cuisine, as if transported here by some miracle from a Dutch painting, reigned an enormous, jolly proprietress, with saucy, gay eyes, raven hair, a high bosom, plump, shapely legs and an unforgettable contralto voice, which seemed almost to echo her Rubens-like power. “Do you remember her, Catherine?” I said aloud, immediately looking around, fearing that someone might have heard me. But there was no one. I continued on, thinking about what I would say to her if I were to meet her.

I would ask her whether she remembered the Kreisler concert. I would ask her whether she still remembered that warm April night as we walked through the streets of Paris and she told me, switching from English to French and from French back to English, about Melbourne, where she was born and raised, about Australia, about her first
girlish love—a tenor in the opera, who before long had married a rich American—about the ships that came into dock, about the thunder of the anchor chains, about the golden-red lustre of the copper on the cruisers and torpedo boats in the sunlight. I would ask her whether she had forgotten the words she spoke to me back then. I would ask her whether she remembered the promise she made. I could hear every intonation in her voice:

“No matter where you are and when it happens, never forget: as soon as you feel strong enough, as soon as the clarity of your mind is no longer obscured, let me know. I’ll drop everything and come to you.”

I would tell her that I had thought of these words in prison, during those first days of my incarceration, when I still had no idea whether I would ever see freedom again.

I would tell her that her face had been distorted and unrecognizable as she had told me that she was with child, that it meant the end for her, that she could not allow it to happen, that there would be time later, that she was only twenty years old, with her whole life ahead of her. This, I am sure, she will never forget: the clinic walls daubed in white oil paint, the little female doctor of indeterminate nationality, her shifting eyes, the agonizing operation that was carried out without anaesthetic and the jolting of the taxi in which I had taken her home to the hotel room, her fainting fits during the journey and how I carried her from the taxi to her bed, how she had put her arms
around my neck and how the vein at the back of her knee had quivered and pulsated. For two months after this I deprived myself of breakfast and lunch, living solely on bread and milk, while I paid off my debts to friends, as she and I had both lacked the money for the operation. That very evening, on the ground floor of the building opposite her hotel, there had been a wedding reception for the concierge’s daughter, who had married some pimply youth in a dark suit, a junior clerk at a funeral parlour. The windows were wide open, and we could see a table decked with a wedding feast, the wooden face of the bride, frozen in an expression of joy, and the deep-crimson pimples of the bridegroom under the electric light. A motley group of relatives was sitting around the table, at times launching in unison into some offensively off-key musical trash. Their voices, however, grew ever more hoarse, diminishing and eventually dying away. Catherine fell asleep, and I spent the whole night sitting in an armchair at her bedside. In the morning, when she opened her eyes and saw me, she said: