by Clive Barker
One question in particular loitered in his brain when he left the city. “Do you think you’ll ever see again the people you met on the shore?” a young scholar had asked him.
“I don’t suppose so,” he’d said to the youth. “I was nothing to them.”
“But to the child, perhaps …,” the scholar had replied.
“To the child?” said Zelim. “I doubt he even knew I existed. He was more interested in his mother’s milk than he was in me.”
The scholar persisted, however. “You teach in your stories,” he said, “how things always come round. You talk in one of them about the Wheel of the Stars. Perhaps it will be the same with these people. They’ll be like the stars. Falling out of sight—”
“And rising again,” Zelim said.
The scholar offered a luminous smile to hear his thoughts completed by his master. “Yes. Rising again.”
“Perhaps,” Zelim had said. “But I won’t live in expectation of it.”
Nor did he. But, that said, the young scholar’s observation had lingered with him, and had in its turn seeded another parable: a morose tale about a man who lives in anticipation of a meeting with someone who turns out to be his assassin.
And so the years went on, and Zelim’s fame steadily grew. He traveled immense distances—to Europe, to India, to the borders of China, telling his stories, and discovering that the strange poetry of what he invented gave pleasure to every variety of heart.
It was another eighteen years before he came again to Samarkand; this—though he didn’t know it—for the last time.
By now Zelim was getting on in years and though his many journeys had made him wiry and resilient, he was feeling his age that autumn. His joints ached; his morning motions were either water or stone; he slept poorly. And when he did sleep, he dreamed of Atva; or rather of its shore, and of the holy family. His life of wisdom and pain had been caused by that encounter. If he’d not gone down to the water that day then perhaps he’d still be there among the fishermen, living a life of utter spiritual impoverishment; never having known enough to make his soul quake, nor enough to make it soar.
So there he was, that October, in Samarkand, feeling old and sleeping badly. There was little rest for him, however. By now the number of his devotees had swelled, and one of them (the youth who’d asked the question about things coming round) had founded a school. They were all young men who’d found a revolutionary zeal buried in Zelim’s parables, which in turn nourished their hunger to see humanity unchained. Daily, he would meet with them. Sometimes he would let them question him, about his life, about his opinions. On other days—when he was weary of being interrogated—he would tell a story.
This particular day, however, the lesson had become a little of both. One of the students had said: “Master, many of us have had terrible arguments with our fathers, who don’t wish us to study your works.”
“Is that so?” old Zelim replied, raising an eyebrow. “I can’t understand why.” There was a little laughter among the students. “What’s your question?”
“I only wondered if you’d tell us something of your own father.”
“My father …,” Zelim said softly.
“Just a little.”
The prophet smiled. “Don’t look so nervous,” he said to the questioner. “Why do you look so nervous?”
The youth blushed. I was afraid perhaps you’d be angry with me for asking something about your family.”
“In the first place,” Zelim replied gently, “I’m far too old to get angry. It’s a waste of energy and I don’t have much of that left. In the second place, my father sits before you, just as all your fathers sit here in front of me.” His gaze roved the thirty or so students who sat cross-legged before him. “And a very fine bunch of men they are too.” His gaze returned to the youth who’d asked the question. “What does your father do?”
“He’s a wool merchant.”
“So he’s out in the city somewhere right now, selling wool, but his nature’s not satisfied with the selling of wool. He needs something else in his life, so he sends you along to talk philosophy.”
“Oh no … you don’t understand … he didn’t send me.”
“He may not think he sent you. You may not think you were sent. But you were born your father’s son and whatever you do, you do it for him.” The youth frowned, plainly troubled at the thought of doing anything for his father. “You’re like the fingers of his hand, digging in the dirt while he counts his bales of wool. He doesn’t even notice that the hand’s digging. He doesn’t see it drop seeds into the hole. He’s amazed when he finds a tree’s grown up beside him, filled with sweet fruit and singing birds. But it was his hand did it.”
The youth looked down at the ground. “What do you mean by this?” he said.
“That we do not belong to ourselves. That though we cannot know the full purpose of our creation, we should look to those who came before us to understand it better. Not just our fathers and our mothers, but all who went before. They are the pathway back to God, who may not know, even as He counts stars, that we’re quietly digging a hole, planting a seed …”
Now the youth looked up again, smiling, entertained by the notion of God the Father looking the other way while His human hands grew a garden at His feet.
“Does that answer the question?” Zelim said.
“I was still wondering …,” the student said.
“Yes?”
“Your own father—?”
“He was a fisherman from a little village called Atva, which is on the shores of the Caspian Sea.” As Zelim spoke, he felt a little breath of wind against his face, delightfully cool. He paused to appreciate it. Closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again; he knew something had changed in the room; he just didn’t know what.
“Where was I?” he said.
“Aha,” somebody at the back of the room said.
“Ah, yes, Atva. My father lived there all his life, but he dreamed of being somewhere quite different. He dreamed of Samarkand. He told his children he’d been here, in his youth. And he wove such stories of this city; such stories …”
Again, Zelim halted. The cool breeze had brushed against his brow a second time, and something about the way it touched him seemed like a sign. As though the breeze was saying look, look …
But at what? He gazed out of the window, thinking perhaps there was something out there he needed to see. The sky was darkening toward night. A chestnut tree, still covetous of its leaves despite the season, was in perfect silhouette. High up in its branches the evening star glimmered. But he’d seen all of this before: a sky, a tree, a star.
He returned his gaze to the room, still puzzled.
“What kind of stories?” somebody was asking him.
“Stories …?”
“You said your father told stories of Samarkand.”
“Oh yes. So he did. Wonderful stories. He wasn’t a very good sailor, my father. In fact he drowned on a perfectly calm day. But he could have told tales of Samarkand for a year and never told the same one twice.”
“But you say he never came here?” the master of the school asked Zelim.
“Never,” Zelim said, smiling. “Which was why he was able to tell such fine stories about it.”
This amused everyone mightily. But Zelim scarcely heard the laughter. Again, that tantalizing breeze had brushed his face; and this time, when he raised his eyes, he saw somebody moving through the shadows at the far end of the room. It was not one of the students. They were all dressed in pale yellow robes. This figure was dressed in ragged black breeches and a dirty shirt. He was also black, his skin possessing a curious radiance, which made Zelim remember a long-ago day.
“Atva …?” he murmured.
Only the students closest to Zelim heard him speak, and even they, when debating the subject later, did not agree on the utterance. Some thought he’d said Allah, others that he’d spoken some magical word, that was intended to keep the
stranger at the back of the room at bay. The reason that the word was so hotly debated was simple: it was Zelim’s last, at least in the living world.
He had no sooner spoken than his head drooped, and the glass of tea which he had been sipping fell from his hand. The murmurings around the room ceased on the instant; students rose on all sides, some of them already starting to weep, or pray. The great teacher was dead, his wisdom passed into history. There would be more stories, no more prophecies. Only centuries of turning over the tales he’d already told, and watching to see if the prophecies came true.
Outside the schoolroom, under that covetous chestnut tree, two men talked in whispers. Nobody saw them there; nobody heard their happy exchange. Nor will I invent those words; better I leave that conversation to you: how the spirit of Zelim and Atva, later called Galilee, talked. I will say only this: that when the conversation was over, Zelim accompanied Galilee out of Samarkand; a ghost and a god, wandering off through the smoky twilight, like two inseparable friends.
Need I say that Zelim’s part in this story is far from finished? He was called away that day into the arms of the Barbarossa family, whose service he has not since left.
In this book, as in life, nothing really passes away. Things change, yes; of course they change; they must. But everything is preserved in the eternal moment—Zelim the fisherman, Zelim the prophet, Zelim the ghost; he’s been recorded in all his forms, these pages a poor but passionate echo of the great record that is holiness itself.
From The Damnation Game
THE LAST EUROPEAN
Anthony Breer, the Razor-Eater, returned to his tiny flat in the late afternoon, made himself instant coffee in his favorite cup, then sat at the table in the failing light and started to tie himself a noose. He’d known from early morning that today was the day. No need to go down to the library; if, in time, they noticed his absence and wrote to him demanding to know where he was, he wouldn’t be answering. Besides, the sky had looked as grubby as his sheets at dawn, and being a rational man he’d thought: why bother to wash the sheets when the world’s so dirty, and I’m so dirty, and there’s no chance of ever getting any of it clean? The best thing is to put an end to this squalid existence once and for all.
He’d seen hanged people aplenty. Only photographs of course, in a book he’d stolen from work about war crimes, marked “Not for the open shelves. To be issued only on request.” The warning had really got his imagination working: here was a book people weren’t really meant to see. He’d slipped it in his bag unopened, knowing from the very title—Soviet Documents on Nazi Atrocities—that this was a volume almost as sweet in the anticipation as in the reading. But in that he’d been wrong. Mouth-watering as that day had been, knowing that his bag contained this taboo treasure, that delight was nothing compared to the revelations of the book itself. There were pictures of the burnt-out ruins of Chekhov’s cottage in Istra, and others of the desecration of the Tchaikovsky residence. But mostly—and more importantly—there were photographs of the dead. Some of them heaped in piles, others lying in bloody snow, frozen solid. Children with their skulls broken open, people lying in trenches, shot in the face, others with swastikas carved into their chests and buttocks. But to the Razor-Eater’s greedy eyes, the best photographs were of people being hanged. There was one Breer looked at very often. It pictured a handsome young man being strung up from a makeshift gallows. The photographer had caught him in his last moments, staring directly at the camera, a wan and beatific smile on his face.
That was the look Breer wanted them to find on his face when they broke down the door of this very room and found him suspended up here, pirouetting in the breeze from the hallway. He thought about how they would stare at him, coo at him, shake their heads in wonder at his pale white feet and his courage in doing this tremendous thing. And while he thought, he knotted and unknotted the noose, determined to make as professional a job of it as he possibly could.
His only anxiety was the confession. Despite his working with books day in, day out, words weren’t his strongest point: they slipped away from him, like beauty from his fat hands. But he wanted to say something about the children, just so they’d know, the people who found him and photographed him, that this wasn’t a nobody they were staring at, but a man who’d done the worst things in the world for the best possible reasons. That was vital: that they knew who he was, because maybe in time they’d make sense of him in a way that he’d never been able to.
They had methods of interrogation, he knew, even with dead people. They’d lay him in an ice-room and examine him minutely, and when they’d studied him from the outside they’d start looking at his inside, and oh!, what things they’d find. They’d saw off the top of his skull and take out his brain; examine it for tumors, slice it thinly like expensive ham, probe at it in a hundred ways to find out the why and how of him. But that wouldn’t work, would it? He, of all people, should know that. You cut up a thing that’s alive and beautiful to find out how it’s alive and why it’s beautiful and before you know it, it’s neither of those things, and you’re standing there with blood on your face and tears in your sight and only the terrible ache of guilt to show for it. No, they’d get nothing from his brain, they’d have to look further than that. They’d have to unzip him from neck to pubis, snip his ribs and fold them back. Only then could they unravel his guts, and rummage in his stomach, and juggle his liver and lights. There, oh yes, there, they’d find plenty to feast their eyes on.
Maybe that was the best confession then, he mused as he retied the noose one final time. No use to try and find the right words, because what were words anyway? Trash, useless for the hot heart of things. No, they’d find all they needed to know if they just looked inside him. Find the story of the lost children, find the glory of his martyrdom. And they’d know, once and for all, that he was of the Tribe of the Razor-Eaters.
He finished the noose, made himself a second cup of coffee, and started work on getting the rope secure. First he removed the lamp that hung from the middle of the ceiling, then he tied the noose up there in its place. It was strong. He swung from it for a few moments to make certain of it, and though the beams grunted a little, and there was a patter of plaster on his head, it bore his weight.
By now it was early evening, and he was tired, the fatigue making him more clumsy than usual. He shunted around the room tidying it up, his pig-fat body wracked with sighs as he bundled up the stained sheets and tucked them out of sight, rinsed his coffee-cup, and carefully poured away the milk so that it wouldn’t curdle before they came. He turned on the radio as he worked; it would help to cover the sound of the chair being kicked over when the time came: there were others in the house and he didn’t want any last-minute reprieve. The usual banalities filled the room from the radio station: songs of love and loss and love found again. Vicious and painful lies, all of them.
There was little strength left in the day once he’d finished preparing the room. He heard feet in the hallway and doors being opened elsewhere in the house as the occupants of the other rooms came home from work. They, like him, lived alone. He knew none of them by name; none of them, seeing him taken out escorted by police, would know his.
He undressed completely and washed himself at the sink, his testicles small as walnuts, tight to his body, his belly flab—the fat of his breasts and upper arms—quivering as the cold convulsed him. Once satisfied with his cleanliness, he sat on the mattress edge and cut his toenails. Then he dressed in freshly laundered clothes: the blue shirt, the gray trousers. He wore no shoes or socks. Of the physique that shamed him, his feet were his only pride.
It was almost dark by the time he finished, and the night was black and rainy. Time to go, he thought.
He positioned the chair carefully, stepped up onto it, and reached for the rope. The noose was, if anything, an inch or two too high, and he had to go on tiptoe to fit it snugly round his neck, but he fitted it securely with a little maneuvering. Once he had the knot pulled tig
ht against his skin he said his prayers and kicked the chair over.
Panic began immediately, and his hands, which he’d always trusted, betrayed him at this vital juncture, springing up from his sides and tearing at the rope as it tightened. The initial drop had not broken his neck, but his spine felt like a vast centipede sewn into his back, writhing now every way it could, causing his legs to spasm. The pain was the least of it: the real anguish came from being out of control, smelling his bowels giving out into his clean trousers without his say-so, his penis stiffening without a lustful thought in his popping head, his heels digging the air looking for purchase, fingers still scrabbling at the rope. All suddenly not his own, all too hot for their own preservation to hold still and die.
But their efforts were in vain. He’d planned this too carefully for it to go awry. The rope was tightening still, the cavortings of the centipede weakening. Life, this unwelcome visitor, would leave very soon. There was a lot of noise in his head, almost as though he was underground, and hearing all the sounds of the earth. Rushing noises, the roar of great hidden weirs, the bubbling of molten stone. Breer, the great Razor-Eater, knew the earth very well. He’d buried dead beauties in it all too often, and filled his mouth with soil as penitence for the intrusion, chewing on it as he covered their pastel bodies over. Now the earth noises had blotted out everything—his gasps, the music from the radio, and the traffic outside the window. Sight was going too; lace darkness crept over the room, its patterns pulsing. He knew he was turning—there was the bed, now the wardrobe, now the sink—but the forms he fitfully saw were decaying.
His body had given up the good fight. His tongue flapped perhaps, or maybe he imagined the motion, just as surely as he imagined the sound of somebody calling his name.
Quite abruptly, sight went out completely, and death was on him. No flood of regrets attended the ending, no lightning regurgitation of a life-history encrusted with guilt. Just a dark, and a deeper dark, and now a dark so deep night was luminous by comparison with it. And it was over, easily.
