From all the articles laid out before him came a rusty smell as of dirty discarded objects which life had rejected. Perhaps his aim was to show people the discarded things of life and to draw attention to them. After all, was he not old and discarded himself ? All the articles in his collection were dead, dirty and unserviceable. But what a stubborn life was in them and what significance there was in their forms! These dead objects left a far deeper imprint upon my mind than living people could ever have done.
But Nanny had told me this story about him and had passed it on to everyone else. . . . With a dirty beggar! My nurse told me that my wife’s bed had become infested with lice and she had gone to the baths. I wonder how her shadow looked on the steamy wall of the bathhouse. No doubt it was a voluptuous shadow with plenty of self-confidence. All things considered, my wife’s taste in men did not offend me this time. The old odds-and-ends man was not a commonplace, flat, insipid creature like the studmales that stupid randy women usually fall for. The old man with his ailments, with the rind of misfortune that encrusted him and the misery that emanated from him, was, probably without realising it himself, a kind of small-scale exhibition organised by God for the edification of mankind. As he sat there with his squalid collection of wares on the ground in front of him, he was a sample and a personification of the whole creation.
Yes, I had seen on my wife’s face the mark of the two dirty, decayed teeth between which he used to recite the Arabic verses of the Koran. This was the same wife who would not let me come near her, who scorned me, and whom I loved in spite of everything, in spite of the fact that she had never once allowed me to kiss her on the lips.
The sun was setting. From somewhere came the high-pitched, plaintive sound of a kettledrum. It was a sound expressive of entreaty and supplication, which awoke in me all my ancestral superstitions and, with them, my fear of the dark. The crisis, the approach of which I had felt in advance and which I was expecting from moment to moment, came upon me. My whole body was filled with burning heat and I felt that I was suffocating. I collapsed onto my bed and shut my eyes. It seemed to me in my feverish condition that everything had expanded and had lost all distinctness of outline. The ceiling, instead of sinking, had risen. I felt oppressed by the weight of my clothes. For no reason I stood up and sat down again upon my bed, murmuring to myself, ‘The thing has reached the limit . . . This is beyond endurance. . . .’ Then I stopped abruptly. After a little I began again slowly and distinctly, in an ironical tone of voice: ‘The thing has . . .’ I stopped, and added, ‘I am a fool’. I paid no attention to the meaning of the words I uttered. I was merely amusing myself with the vibration of my voice in the air. Perhaps I was talking to my shadow in order to dispel my loneliness.
And then I saw an incredible thing. The door opened and the bitch came into the room. So then, she used to think of me at times and in spite of everything I still had reason to feel grateful to her. She knew that I was still alive, that I was suffering, that I was slowly dying. In spite of everything I still had reason to feel grateful to her. I only wondered whether she knew that I was dying because of her. If she did know that I would die perfectly happy. At that moment I was the happiest man on the face of the earth. Merely by coming into the room the bitch had driven away all my evil thoughts. Some sort of radiation emanated from her, from her movements, and brought me relief. On this occasion she was in better health than when I had last seen her. She was plump and comfortable-looking. She had on a cloak of Tus material. Her eyebrows were plucked and were stained with indigo. She was wearing a beauty spot and her face was made up with rouge, ceruse and kohl. In a word she was turned out to perfection. She appeared to be well pleased with life. She was unconsciously holding the index finger of her left hand to her lips. Was this the same graceful creature, was this the slim, ethereal girl who, in a black pleated dress, had played hide-and-seek with me on the bank of the Suran, the unconstrained, childlike, frail girl whose ankles, appearing from under her skirt, had so excited me? Until this moment, when I had looked at her I had not seen her as she really was. Now it was as though a veil had fallen from my eyes. For some reason the thought of the sheep hanging by the door of the butcher’s shop occurred to me. She had become for me the equivalent of a lump of butcher’s meat. Her old enchantment had gone. She had become a comfortable, solid woman with a head full of commonplace, practical ideas—a genuine woman. I realised with affright that my wife was now a grown-up while I had remained a child. I actually felt ashamed in her presence, under her gaze. This woman who yielded her body to everyone but me while I consoled myself with fanciful memories of her childhood, when her face was simple and innocent and wore a dreamy, fleeting expression, this woman whose face still bore the tooth-marks of the old odds-and-ends man in the square—no, this was not the same person as I had known.
She asked me in a sarcastic tone, ‘How are you feeling?’ I replied, ‘Aren’t you perfectly free? Don’t you do everything you feel like doing? What does my health matter to you?’
She left the room, slamming the door behind her. She did not turn to look at me. It seems as though I have forgotten how to talk to the people of this world, to living people. She, the woman who I had thought was devoid of all feelings, was offended at my behaviour! Several times I thought of getting up and going to her to fall at her feet, weeping and asking her to forgive me. Yes, weeping; for I thought that if only I could weep I should find relief. Some time passed; whether it was to be measured in minutes, hours or centuries I do not know. I had become like a madman and I derived an exquisite pleasure from the pain I felt. It was a pleasure which transcended human experience, a pleasure which only I was capable of feeling and which the gods themselves, if they existed, could not have experienced to such a degree. At that moment I was conscious of my superiority. I felt my superiority to the men of the rabble, to nature and to the gods—the gods, that product of human lusts. I had become a god. I was greater than God, and I felt within me the eternal, infinite flux. . . .
She came back. So then she was not as cruel as I had thought. I rose, kissed the hem of her dress and fell at her feet, weeping and coughing. I rubbed my face against her leg and several times I called her by her real name. It seemed to me that the sound of her real name had a peculiar ring. And at the same time in my heart, in the bottom of my heart, I said, ‘Bitch . . . bitch!’ I kissed her legs; the skin tasted like the stub end of a cucumber, faintly acrid and bitter. I wept and wept. How much time passed so I do not know. When I came to myself she had gone. It may be that the space of time in which I had experienced all the pleasures, the caresses and the pain of which the nature of man is susceptible had not lasted more than a moment. I was alone, in the same posture as when I used to sit with my opium pipe beside the brazier, sitting by my smoky oil lamp like the old odds-and-ends man behind his wares. I did not budge from my place but sat watching the smoke of the lamp. Particles of soot from the flame settled on my hands and face like black snow. My nurse came in with my supper, a bowl of barley broth and a plate of greasy chicken pilaff. She uttered a scream of terror, dropped the tray and ran out of the room. It pleased me to think that I was able at any rate to frighten her. I rose to my feet, snuffed the lamp wick and stood in front of the mirror. I smeared the particles of soot over my face. How frightful was the face that I saw! I pulled down my lower eyelids, released them, tugged at the corners of my mouth, puffed out my cheeks, pulled the tip of my beard upwards and twisted it out to the sides and grimaced at myself. My face had a natural talent for comical and horrible expressions. I felt that they enabled me to see with my own eyes all the weird shapes, all the comical, horrible, unbelievable images which lurked in the recesses of my mind. They were all familiar to me, I felt them within me, and yet at the same time they struck me as comical. All of these grimacing faces existed inside me and formed part of me: horrible, criminal, ludicrous masks which changed at a single movement of my fingertip. The old Koran-reader, the butcher, my wife—I saw all of them within me.
They were reflected in me as in a mirror; the forms of all of them existed inside me but none of them belonged to me. Were not the substance and the expressions of my face the result of a mysterious sequence of impulsions, of my ancestors’ temptations, lusts and despairs? And I who was the custodian of the heritage, did I not, through some mad, ludicrous feeling, consider it my duty, whether I liked it or not, to preserve this stock of facial expressions? Probably my face would be released from this responsibility and would assume its own natural expression only at the moment of my death. . . . But even then would not the expressions which had been incised on my face by a sardonic resolve leave their traces behind, too deeply engraved to be effaced? At all events I now knew what possibilities existed within me, I appreciated my own capabilities.
Suddenly I burst into laughter. It was a harsh, grating, horrible laugh which made the hairs on my body stand on end. For I did not recognise my own laughter. It seemed to come from someone other than me. I felt that it had often rever berated in the depths of my throat and that I had heard it in the depths of my ears. Simultaneously I began to cough. A clot of bloody phlegm, a fragment of my inside, fell onto the mirror. I wiped it across the glass with my fingertip. I turned round and saw Nanny staring at me. She was horror-stricken. She was holding in her hand a bowl of barley broth which she had brought me, thinking that I might now be able to eat my supper. I covered my face with my hands and ran behind the curtain which hung across the entrance to the closet.
Later, as I was falling asleep, I felt as though my head was clamped in a fiery ring. The sharp exciting perfume of sandalwood oil with which I had filled my lamp penetrated my nostrils. It contained within it the odour of my wife’s legs, and I felt in my mouth the faintly bitter taste of the stub end of a cucumber. I ran my hand over my body and mentally compared it—thighs, calves, arms and the rest—with my wife’s. I could see again the line of her thigh and buttocks, could feel the warmth of her body. The illusion was far stronger than a mere mental picture; it had the force of a physical need. I wanted to feel her body close to mine. A single gesture, a single effort of the will would have been enough to dispel the voluptuous temptation. Then the fiery ring around my head grew so tight and so burning hot that I sank deep into a mysterious sea peopled with terrifying shapes.
It was still dark when I was awakened by the voices of a band of drunken policemen who were marching along the street, joking obscenely among themselves. Then they sang in chorus,
‘Come, let us go and dririk wine;
Let us drink wine of the Kingdom of Rey.
If we do not drink now, when should we drink?’
I remembered—no, I had a sudden flash of inspiration: I had some wine in the closet, a bottle of wine which contained a portion of cobra venom. One gulp of that wine and all the nightmares of life would fade as though they had never been. . . . But what about the bitch? . . . The word intensified my longing for her, brought her before me full of vitality and warmth. What better could I do than give her a glass of that wine and drink off another myself ? Then we should die together in a single convulsion. What is love? For the rabble-men it is an obscenity, a carnal, ephemeral thing. The rabble-men must needs express their love in lascivious songs, in obscenities and in the foul phrases they are always repeating, drunk or sober—‘shoving the donkey’s hoof into the mud’, ‘giving the ground a thump’, and so forth. Love for her meant something different to me. True, I had known her for many years. Her strange, slanting eyes, small, half-open mouth, husky, soft voice—all of these things were charged with distant, painful memories and in all of them I sought something of which I had been deprived, something that was intimately connected with my being and which had been taken from me.
Had I been deprived of this thing for all time to come? The fear that it might be so aroused in me a grimmer feeling. The thought of the other pleasure, the one which might compensate me for my hopeless love, had become a kind of obsession. For some reason the figure of the butcher opposite the window of my room occurred to me. I remembered how he would roll up his sleeves, utter the sacred formula ‘besmellah’* and proceed to cut up his meat. His expression and attitude were always present to my mind. In the end I too came to a decision, a frightful decision. I got out of bed, rolled up my sleeves and took out the bone-handled knife which I had hidden underneath my pillow. I stooped and threw a yellow cloak over my shoulders and muffled my neck and face in a scarf. I felt that as I did so I assumed an attitude of mind which was a cross between that of the butcher and that of the old odds-and-ends man.
Then I went on tip-toe towards my wife’s room. When I reached it I found that it was quite dark. I softly opened the door. She seemed to be dreaming. She cried, loudly and distinctly, ‘Take your scarf off.’ I went over to her bedside and bent down until I could feel her warm, even breath upon my face. What pleasant warmth and vitality there was in her breath! It seemed to me that if only I could breathe in this warmth for a while I should come to life again. I had thought for so long that other people’s breath must be burning hot like mine. I looked around carefully to see if there was anyone else in the room, to make sure that none of her lovers was there. She was alone. I realised that all the things people said about her were mere slander. How did I know that she was not still a virgin? I was ashamed of all my unfair suspicions.
This sensation lasted only a minute. Suddenly from outside the door came the sound of a sneeze and I heard a stifled mocking laugh, of a quality to make the hairs on one’s body stand on end. The sound contracted every nerve in my body. If I had not heard the sneeze and the laugh, if the man, whoever he was, had not given me pause,* I should have carried out my decision and cut her body into pieces. I should have given the meat to the butcher opposite our house to sell to his customers, and, in fulfilment of a special resolution, I myself should have given a piece of the flesh of her thigh to the old Koran-reader and gone to him on the following day and said, ‘Do you know where that meat you ate last night came from?’ If he had not laughed, I should have done this. I should have had to do it in the dark, so that I should not have been compelled to meet the bitch’s eye. Her expression of reproach would have been too much for me. Finally I snatched up a piece of cloth which was trailing from her bed and in which my foot had caught and fled from the room. I tossed the knife up onto the roof, because it was the knife that had suggested the idea of murder to me. I got rid of a knife which was identical with the one I had seen in the butcher’s hand.
When I got back to my room, I saw by the light of my oil lamp that the cloth I had taken with me was her nightdress: a soiled nightdress which had been in contact with her flesh; a soft, silk nightdress of Indian make. It smelt of her body and of champac perfume, and it still held something of the warmth of her body, something of her. I held it against my face and breathed deeply. Then I lay down, placed it between my legs and fell asleep. I had never slept as soundly as I did that night. Early in the morning I was awoken by my wife’s clamours. She was lamenting the disappearance of her nightdress and kept repeating at the top of her voice, ‘A brand-new nightdress!’, despite the fact that it had a tear in the sleeve. I would not have given it back to her to save my life. Surely I was entitled to keep an old nightdress of my own wife’s.
When Nanny brought me my ass’s milk, honey and bread I found that she had placed a bone-handled knife on the tray beside the breakfast things. She said she had noticed it among the old odds-and-ends man’s wares and had bought it from him. Then she said, raising her eyebrows, ‘Let’s hope it’ll come in handy some day.’ I picked it up and examined it. It was my own knife. Then Nanny said in a querulous, offended tone, ‘Oh yes, my daughter’ (she meant the bitch) ‘was saying this morning that I stole her nightdress during the night. I don’t want to have to answer for anything connected with you two. Anyway, she began to bleed yesterday. . . . I knew it was the baby. . . . According to her, she got pregnant at the baths.* I went to her room to massage her belly during the night and I noticed her
arms were all black and blue. She showed them to me and said, “I went down to the cellar at an unlucky time, and the Good People gave me an awful pinching.”’ She went on, ‘Did you know your wife’s been pregnant for a long time?’ I laughed and said, ‘I dare say the child’ll look like the old man that reads the Koran. I suppose it gave its first leap when she was looking at the old man’s face.’* Nanny looked at me indignantly and went out of the room. Apparently she had not expected such a reply. I rose hastily, picked up the bone-handled knife with a trembling hand, put it away in the box in the closet and shut the lid.