Fariba Hachtroudi - The Man Who Snapped His Fingers

I have been vegetating. For at least a week. Without a computer screen, a book, or a newspaper. I’m like a grub. It’s impossible to work, to read, or to think. I run myself to exhaustion. I have to force myself back down to earth. I have to remember my promise. That’s the best thing I can do for the late Colonel. Immerse myself in his life again. Bring his love back to life.

End of a new chapter. I take my finger from the keyboard. The telephone rings. There’s a man, a certain Yuri, on the line. He introduces himself as a friend of Ala the Colonel. His English is as ragged as his voice, his Slavic accent. He wants to see me. It’s urgent. The Colonel’s name was Ala. I’ve just found this out. It’s moving. I would like to know more. But I’m wary. This Yuri makes me uncomfortable. I ask, What is this regarding? And I immediately regret my words, I sound like some little bureaucrat. I’m not a secretary. I’m not someone who is particularly important. Fuck, says Yuri on the other end of the line, not the least bit aggressive. And I repress my desire to laugh and say fuck, and not fuck you too. He says it again, Fuck, don’t tell me you didn’t know they bumped off my buddy! Do you want to know more about it or just fuck it? I tell him to come to my house. He’ll be here in an hour. He has the address.

Yuri is tall and thin. It’s hard to tell how old he is. He has disheveled hair the color of wheat. Fluorescent green eyes of the sort to rip into a faint-hearted soul. I have him sit down in the living area of my studio. I go to make some tea. Yuri doesn’t move. Stares into space. I put the tray down on the coffee table. He takes a big, battered book from the inside pocket of his overcoat. Sets it down among the glasses and the teapot. He has no intention of moving it, that’s obvious. I pour the tea. Too bad if his book gets splashed. He points to the title, in Cyrillic characters, and says War and Peace. Tolstoy is my intellectual guide. And it is the first of the month. I wait. In silence. Somewhat taken aback. He asks, I don’t suppose you have any vodka? All I have is cognac so I offer him some. It’s okay, let’s have cognac. Yuri insists heavily on his consonants. The C in cognac, or earlier, the K in his incomparable fuck, which he pronounces “fook,” consonants grating on my ears. I point to the bottle on the shelf behind him. He reaches for it, shakes it gently, murmurs, This is what you call a drop. He empties the bottle, what was left of it, that is, into his glass of tea. He begins sipping his drink. He looks pleased. His gaze is sparkling. He has the eyes of a devil and an angel, half and half. Yuri picks up his book. Strokes it nonchalantly. He says, Every first day of the month I read a chapter from War and Peace. This edition dates from 1899, he adds solemnly. It’s a treasure that will go with him until he dies. I am starting to lose my patience. I gulp down my tea all in one, and burn my palate. He notices that I am irritated. Be patient, I will explain. It is in this book that I found what I must leave with you. Ala was a clever guy. He knew all my habits. The rituals I never depart from. One month ago, when he left the envelope in the middle of the book, he knew I would find it this morning between eight and nine o’clock. And that’s exactly what happened. I look at Yuri, my eyes open wide. He says, The envelope contains two letters. One for me, the other for you. He hands me the two envelopes. I can keep both of them, he made photocopies. I grab them and shove them into the pocket of my trousers. My way of saying, you can go now, I want to be alone to read them. Yuri’s gaze hovers, avoids mine, drifts aimlessly, Back and forth between the pocket of my trousers and the window. His way of replying to me, I understand, but I’m staying, I haven’t finished yet. Yuri is the stubborn sort. I sink into the armchair. All right. I have time. I’m all ears. He begins talking. About the vital importance of rituals. The world has been based on rituals since time immemorial, he says. Whenever you have more than one two-footed creature, rituals will prosper. A detention center is no exception. The more lost a poor soul is, the more he will cling to his rituals. Everyone has their little obsessions. Ala had his. Yuri has his. They had a few together. Reading War and Peace in the 1899 edition, every first of the month, was a must — he pronounced it “moost”—for Yuri. For Ala, the must was his weekly pilgrimage to the planetarium. He went there as soon as it opened. And only came back out at closing time. Yuri tells me — in full knowledge of the facts — that the security people had trouble getting rid of him. He says, Twice I went with him. He was like a sleepwalker. He stared at the ceiling and the hemispheric screen, watching one projection after another. He didn’t move. The guy was petrified, a real zombie, says Yuri. Wednesday evenings were devoted to their ceremony of tales from olden times and faraway places. Yuri was the moderator. He provided the vodka and embarked Ala with him upon his stories. He doesn’t recall exactly when their nocturnal sessions began. Oh, it must have been one of those bluesy evenings when Ala asked him if he knew anything about stars. Yuri was a poet, after all. Yuri was astonished: he might be a poet, but no astronomer. Ala was so sad and disappointed he could cry. That’s when the idea for the ballads was born.

Yuri points to the empty cognac bottle and makes a face. Nothing more to drink? he asks. Anything but tea. Something more substantial, he says. Would beer be substantial enough? Not really, but he’ll make do, he has no choice.

I go and fetch two bottles of Eriksberg. No glasses. I like drinking straight from the bottle. So that’s perfect. He does too, and not just beer. We laugh. We drink a toast. We relax. Yuri gulps down his first bottle of beer in one go. Ala couldn’t understand why a poet didn’t know anything about stars and galaxies! He got all worked up about it. To cheer him up before he started crying, I told him, that big dumbass, I’ve got something much better than stars. The Iliad and The Odyssey , my friend. Who are they? he asked, the fool. I said, Concentrated humanity, plus gods, your fucking sky and all the rest along with it, you dumbass. And I set sail with him that very evening. Once upon a time… By the end of the week Ala was so hooked on Achilles that there was no way I — Yuri shook his empty bottle. I brought him another. I reassured him. My supply of beer is not inexhaustible but it is at least fairly substantial. Again he says, I don’t know how many times I told him the story about Achilles. That’s my whole tragedy, he would say. He made the story his own. He couldn’t get enough of it. It had become a personal matter. Yuri looks at me, embarrassed. I suppose you’ve read — I nod before he finishes his sentence. Right, I may as well tell you, forget Ulysses or Oedipus or Phaedra. Not even Urania… I found out too late that his daughter was called Urania. I didn’t even know he had a daughter. He told me when we were at the Imperial. At the restaurant. Ah, what an unforgettable evening. We stayed up all night long, would you believe. Fook, I miss the dumbass, says Yuri, despondently. A catch in his throat.

I bring all the bottles I have. Eight in all. I line them up before him. He says that the evening at the Imperial should have gotten him thinking. In a disordered rush, he tells me everything that goes through his head while he empties the bottles one by one. He talks fast. Gets muddled. Gropes for words. Says fook every other sentence — with words to fill in, hyphens, ellipses, exclamation marks, question marks — and then it’s time for fook again. Most of his disjointed discourse is incomprehensible to me. An incoherent outpouring of sadness, regret, the refrain of I-couldn’t-help-him, I-didn’t-know-how-to-help-him, I-should-have-helped-him. He drinks the last sip from the last bottle of beer and says, Ala wore me out with his wife. First her ocher dress, then her golden gaze, then let’s lay it on some more, and I’ll finish off the bottle of vodka to the health of her intelligence. Are you trying to give me a hard-on or what, I would say, to calm him down. No way! Not even jealous, that dumbass Oriental. He just laughed. So I tuned out the rest. I didn’t see it coming. I should have. I’d never seen him like that. I should have sensed bad luck was coming, with its underhanded tricks. He’d gone too soft for me to worry. And yet clearly he was saying goodbye. With a flourish. The real dumbass in the story was me. Fook, I’d never seen a man so in love. He was obsessed by only one thing, for his wife to be proud of him. Dead or alive. Looks like he’s dead. For keeps. You know what you have to do now. Yuri jumps to his feet. The ball is in your court, he says, standing by the door, his big volume of War and Peace under his arm. Don’t let this go unpunished. They killed him. They can stick their bullshit human rights up their ass. Yuri rushes down the stairs as if the building were on fire. Without saying goodbye.