Proud Beggars

by Albert Cossery

The moment had come for him to act. Yet he hesitated on the choice of his first victim. Who would go first?

  “I think that one day I’ll kill him.”

  “Who?”

  “My father, of course! And do you know what amuses me the most? That you, perhaps, would be obliged to arrest me. Tell me, Inspector, in spite of all your love for me, would you do that?”

  Nour El Dine lowered his head, as if struck in the heart.

  “By Allah! You’re losing your mind,” he breathed.

  The smoke clouding his brain became more opaque; it seemed he had been sliding down a bottomless well for an eternity. Somewhere outside a child shouted an obscenity, a hungry dog barked feebly, the bell of a streetcar passing in the vicinity began to ring like an alarm signal. All of these noises reached him as if through fog, like sounds from a strange and distant world. He raised his head with the movement of a drowning man, tugged on the collar of his tunic, then sat rigidly, his eyes fixed on the cracked shop wall where the vestiges of a naïve painting of a popular wedding were displayed. The bridegroom could be seen flanked by two friends carrying bouquets of flowers, preceded by uniformed musicians. An open carriage, crowded with guests, followed the procession. The colors had almost disappeared, but the lines of the drawing still kept their original freshness.

  The young man had followed Nour El Dine’s gaze. He smiled.

  “That’s the right way, isn’t it?” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You should get married, Inspector.”

  Stoically, Nour El Dine took this in. The only reply to this obvious, vulgar low blow was to break up with Samir, but he couldn’t make up his mind to do it. He had given himself entirely to this passion; no matter what happened thereafter, he would see it through.

  To escape this derision! To flee this cursed place where everything conspired to defeat him! Resignation, more than hope, gave him the courage to ask, “Don’t you want to dine at my place tonight?”

  “No,” answered Samir.

  “Why? Don’t you want to see me anymore?”

  “If you only want to see me, you can invite me to a restaurant.”

  “But I want to be alone with you. Don’t you feel any friendship for me? Come on, my dear Samir, be a man!”

  Samir seemed to hesitate for a moment, then he broke into a loud laugh; it was the first time he’d laughed openly.

  The baker turned his large greasy face around and stared at them with his glairy eyes wide with amazement. Already two or three passersby had stopped in the entrance to the shop. A scandal! That’s what Nour El Dine feared the most.

  “Calm down. I beg you, no scenes.”

  “What impeccable logic, Inspector!” said Samir. “You mean to sleep with me and at the same time you want me to be a man! Let me tell you, your humor is without equal.”

  “I haven’t made myself clear,” Nour El Dine protested. “That’s not really what I want. My dear Samir, I believe there is a misunderstanding between us.”

  He stood up, straightened his tarboosh, and assumed a resolute air.

  “Excuse me, but I must leave. My duties call me. I’ll see you another time. Peace be with you!”

  With a frown on his face and a haughty step, he passed in front of the dazed baker and left the shop.

  He hurried now, slipping through the maze of alleys, passing by innumerable shacks made of boards and empty gasoline tins. He had regained his martial, conquering air, but in this quarter of ill repute his police inspector’s uniform didn’t impress anyone. To fear the police you had to have something to lose, and no one here possessed anything. It was total, inhuman poverty everywhere, the only place in the world where an agent of authority had no chance of winning respect. Nour El Dine knew the mentality of the inhabitants of this area; he knew that nothing could terrify them or shake them from their strange somnolence. There was neither rancor nor hostility in them, simply silent contempt, an enormous disdain toward the power that he represented. They appeared not even to know that a government, a police force, and a progressive, mechanized civilization existed. The characteristic state of mind of these illiterate people wounded Nour El Dine in the deepest part of his being, showing him the futility of his efforts. He couldn’t help taking this stubbornness, this refusal to collaborate as a personal insult. With every step, he had the feeling that they were spitting in his face. Prey to a growing uneasiness, he perspired. His nervousness soon turned to panic and he stupidly began to run. But immediately he slowed down again, cursing himself and feeling like an imbecile. Anyway, these bastards weren’t going to scare him. He composed himself, resolved to walk with an easy stride, and fixed his eyes straight ahead with the air of a thinking man gliding above the fray.

  This would-be superior attitude was almost fatal. Looking straight ahead, he stepped in a puddle of water, slipped, and nearly fell on the ground. Stunned, his movements ungainly, he took refuge near a shack and inspected his shoes and the mud-spattered hem of his pants. The feeling of shame, of irreparably having lost prestige, made him stand a moment without moving, not daring to lift his head. What a laughable spectacle he must have offered to these wretches! Fury gripped him and he swore in a low voice. Then, panting with rage, he straightened up, expecting to hear jokes and laughter fly. But no, no one laughed. Yet it was worse than if they had made fun of him. Samir’s humiliations, still present in his memory, were nothing in comparison to these gazes fixed on him in eternal dismay as though to tear away his supreme justification, to strip him of the only clothes that made him inviolable. He could, at least, defend himself against Samir’s hatred and sarcasm, but how could he respond to this monstrous indifference, more ferocious than the most implacable hatred? Nothing in their behavior expressed aversion or revolt. They seemed to look on him as a mangy dog or vermin. Why didn’t they throw rocks at him? Nour El Dine waited for a movement, but nothing happened. Still this immobility and this deadly indifference. It was only as he resumed his walk that something astounding took place. Standing in the middle of the alley, a little six-year-old girl with features blurred by dirt, raised the hem of her dress and showed him her sex in a gesture of moving simplicity. Nour El Dine blushed and, for a moment, seemed to totter on his feet, then he turned his head away and escaped as quickly as possible.

  He wondered about the meaning of this hallucinatory scene. The young girl’s gesture seemed to belong to a savage, incomprehensible universe. It was a fantastic act that went beyond intelligence, coming straight from the accumulation of rubble and age-old decay. “Cursed breed! Am I condemned to spend my whole life among these pariahs?” As he thought about the role he played in this grotesque drama, a wave of bitterness rose in his throat. What an inept role! What was the government thinking, entrusting him with such a thankless task? What justice could dawn in this trash heap, this field of death and desolation! To look for a criminal—even a first offender—in this gray and sticky mass was an absurdity. He would have had to imprison all of them. Nour El Dine didn’t fool himself; he knew that they were stronger. For years he had learned this from sad experience. Their inalienable misery, their refusal to participate in the destiny of the civilized world, concealed such strength that no earthly power could exhaust it.

  He remembered that he was now hurrying to track down a criminal, and he began to laugh. He had a baleful foreboding that this investigation of a young prostitute’s murder would be filled with mishaps. He had muddled it to the extreme by his tendency to imagine wild mysteries behind a simple crime. His desire to unravel an important affair, to do battle with a worthy opponent, prevented him from seeing ordinary reality. Head lowered, he was charging along, as if capturing this imaginary killer, this assassin belonging to a superior race, could give meaning to his life.

  He breathed a sigh of relief; he was finally out of that hell. It still wasn’t completely civilization, but, anyway, it was more bearable. He was in a street, a real street with cars and streetcars and people who looked alive. They filled
café terraces, sprawled in conceited poses, looking jovial, talking and arguing with fine optimism. They seemed to suspect nothing, as if life were a pleasant thing. Again, Nour El Dine felt bitterness rising in him. Why was he alone doomed to horror? The sight of these people enjoying the leisure of a perpetual holiday made him furiously envious. He begrudged them their indifference, their capacity to disregard the principles of a world whose foundation was sadness and contrition. By what magic had they escaped the common distress?

  The answer to this question was childishly simple: these people didn’t give a damn because they had nothing to lose. But Nour El Dine refused to accept this elementary truth. That would be proof of his own anarchism.

  He saw a plainclothes policeman seated at a table on a café terrace and went straight to him.

  The man stood up.

  “Greetings, Excellency!”

  He was a man of around forty, wearing a long, worn-out black coat and boots with yellow buttons; his skinny neck was wrapped in a large chestnut shawl whose ends flapped at his sides like a crow’s wings. He was one-eyed, but his one eye was worth several, it sparkled with such murderous malice.

  “Well? Have you found him?” asked Nour El Dine.

  “I must say it was a tough job. Still, I finally found him. That son of a whore changes residence almost every two hours. He doesn’t have an easy conscience, evidently.”

  Nour El Dine grew impatient.

  “Where is he now?”

  “Number 17 on this street.”

  “A hotel? What’s the name?”

  “I don’t know; there’s no sign. He’s staying on the second floor, the room facing the stairs.”

  “Very well, you may go. I don’t need you anymore.”

  “As you wish, sir!”

  Nour El Dine left the one-eyed policeman, crossed the street, and slowly followed the sidewalk bordered by decaying odd-numbered buildings. After a few minutes’ walk, he finally stopped before number 17; for a moment, he inspected the dilapidated façade, looked right and left as if he feared being seen going into such a shabby hotel, then crossed the threshold and entered a fetid, somber hallway. No clerk came to meet him; the place seemed long abandoned. Guided more by his instinct than by his visual organs, Nour El Dine came to a stone staircase with worn steps and climbed to the second floor. When he reached it, he glimpsed what looked like a door in the darkness and began to bang on it with his fist.

  No one answered his frantic knocking. Nour El Dine strained to listen: nothing moved inside. Without waiting any longer, he turned the doorknob, opened the door, and entered a room whose size and furnishings he couldn’t make out for lack of light. It was still the same darkness, barely attenuated by the feeble daylight seeping through the slats of the closed shutters. Nour El Dine’s first impression was that the room was empty. Little by little his eyes became accustomed to the shadows and he perceived a bed, and in this bed a human form lying under the covers.

  “Hey, you! Wake up!”

  The form lying under the covers remained inert as a corpse. Nour El Dine grew annoyed and began to think that the man might be dead. He approached the bed and with unspeakable disgust raised the blankets. This operation revealed the naked body of a man, whose skeletal thinness would have terrified the hardest of hearts.

  “May Allah preserve us!” murmured Nour El Dine.

  The cold he felt at being thus uncovered had more effect on the sleeper than an earthquake, because he woke up, blinked his eyes, yawned, and finally asked, “What’s this?”

  “Police!” Nour El Dine yelled, as if he wanted to break all resistance in the sleeper’s mind with this single word.

  But the word “police” clearly held no terrors for the bed’s occupant, for he replied with perfect calm, making as if to go back to sleep, “You can search everywhere; there isn’t a speck of hashish in this room.”

  “It’s not that,” said Nour El Dine. “Come on, get up, I want to talk to you.”

  “Talk to me!” exclaimed Yeghen, now completely awake. “By Allah! Inspector, how have I deserved this honor? How can I be of use to you?”

  “I’ve come to talk to you about a murder.”

  “A murder, Excellency! What a black day!”

  “You can say that again. It’s a black day for you.”

  Yeghen threw back the blankets completely and sat up on his bed, his legs folded under him; with his rickety torso, bony face, and wild eyes, he resembled a Hindu fakir shrunk by fasting and mortification.

  “A murder!” he repeated. “What does a murder have to do with me?”

  “I’m going to tell you. But first, answer me—do you know that one of the girls at Set Amina’s house was strangled a few days ago?”

  “I heard that,” said Yeghen.

  “It seems that you are a habitué of the house.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Then you knew young Arnaba?”

  “Very well. She was the most beautiful of the lot.”

  “So! Since we agree on all that, can you tell me where you were at the hour of the crime?”

  Yeghen didn’t even bother to think, or to ask what the hour of the crime was; he was sure not to be wrong. He answered smoothly, “I was sleeping, Excellency!”

  “Where were you sleeping?”

  “I don’t know. I sleep everywhere.”

  “So, you son of a bitch, you don’t know anything about this affair?”

  “No, on my honor! I don’t know anything. I could perhaps give you some information about certain drug dealers. But a crime! Really, that’s beyond my power.”

  “Let me tell you that you are a prime suspect.”

  “Me! But I was sleeping, Excellency. How can an intelligent officer like you make a mistake like that?”

  “Stop the monkey business!” Nour El Dine scolded. “I know how to make you talk!”

  He realized he had just uttered an absurdity, one of those commonplaces he often used in the course of an interrogation and which meant absolutely nothing, despite the threat they implied. The truth was that he felt sick with disgust and almost moribund. In this state he would never make anyone talk, at least as long as he continued to breathe the polluted air of this room. He glanced toward the window with closed shutters, ardently desiring to open them but trembling at the thought of letting in daylight. Darkness suited him; it prevented Yeghen from noticing his agitation. From the street rose the deafening noise of cars, the curses of nearly demented carters, and the interminable clanging of streetcars trying desperately to open a path through the eddying apathetic crowd. These stale sounds of life nearby revived his will. Looking for some furniture to lean against, he took a few steps and ended by sitting on the edge of a table. This visit was going to be a total failure if he didn’t change his tactics. The difficulty of an interrogation with Yeghen lay in the fact that the fellow was gifted with a subversive intelligence that made fun of everything. He was an old offender and an inveterate hashish smoker; he was in contact with all of the dealers and ne’er-do-wells in the native quarter. Still, Nour El Dine didn’t believe he was guilty. What he was after here was simply a trail, a clue that could lead him to the real killer. He knew that the man before him was exempt from all violent passions, taking nothing seriously, except drugs, and thus could be suspected only of cowardice; he was incapable of committing a crime. Because for Nour El Dine, to be unaware of the vicissitudes and abominations of existence was a sure sign of cowardice. Could he permit himself not to take life seriously? Where would the world be if misfortune no longer mattered?

  Once more he was overcome with bitterness, and he gave Yeghen a haunted look. He couldn’t help finding something laughable and distasteful in this whole situation. This naked, emaciated man seated on his bed undergoing police questioning seemed like an absurd, unnatural thing. Mockery was everywhere. It was the last straw when Yeghen began to laugh.

  “There’s nothing here to laugh about,” said Nour El Dine. “You’re involved in dirty b
usiness.”

  “Excuse me, Excellency! But the world is becoming more and more amusing. Don’t you think so?”

  “What makes you so optimistic?”

  “The bomb,” said Yeghen.

  “What bomb?”

  “You haven’t heard about the bomb? Really, Inspector, you astound me! Even children know this. It seems they’ve invented a bomb capable of destroying an entire city with one blast. You don’t think that’s funny? What would amuse you then?”

  For a moment Nour El Dine was dumb with stupor, trying to understand. This interrogation had become pure folly.

  “I don’t give a damn about that cursed bomb! It doesn’t change your situation one bit.”

  “But it does, Excellency. Think for a minute. What could I fear, faced with the threat of the bomb?”

  The air was growing stifling. The street noises suddenly stopped without reason, as if life had drained away forever. Nour El Dine was fascinated by Yeghen’s ugliness; he couldn’t tear himself away from the sight of this pitiful nudity that made him want to vomit. He was grimacing like someone with stomach cramps.

  “Are you perhaps unwell?” asked Yeghen. “I’m sorry for what I said. You know, that bomb business was a joke. There’s nothing to worry about. Anyway, they’d never drop it around here. It would cost too much. Believe me.”

  “Shut up, you miserable clown! Come on, get dressed, we’re leaving.”

  “At this hour?” implored Yeghen. “Have pity on me, Excellency. What have I done to you?”

  “You’re going to get dressed, you son of a bitch!”

  “Very well. At your service, sir! Only just don’t push me around.”

  Yeghen jumped to the foot of the bed and found his clothes thrown pell-mell on a chair. He dressed quickly, then opened the bedroom door.

  “After you, sir!” he said, bowing very low.

  Nour El Dine left the room followed by Yeghen. Down in the street, they looked at each other for a moment as if to recognize each other. Yeghen was jovial.

  “I invite you to have a coffee, Excellency!”

  Nour El Dine grabbed Yeghen by the arm and pulled him along rapidly, muttering between his teeth, “It’s poison I’m going to offer you, not coffee.”