Albert Cossery - A Splendid Conspiracy

“I asked you not to go out at night wearing all those rings that attract attention. Have you forgotten that criminals are prowling about our city? You can be sure that we will all be affected were we to lose you.”

“I’ve told you,” answered Chawki as if trying to excuse himself. “I cannot take them off; they’re stuck to me like leeches.”

He held out his hands, shaking his head with an expression of fatal powerlessness and, at the same time, he shuddered in hindsight at the idea that he had traveled through all those dark lanes risking death or kidnapping at every step. In truth, he had not even tried to remove his rings; they were the mainstay of his confidence and his haughtiness and, without them, he would have felt as ignored and naked as a beggar.

“What is most upsetting,” said Medhat, “is that they take away the body. So we wouldn’t even be able to attend your funeral. Oh, and while we’re on the subject, I hear that the hired mourners, whose business is collapsing, have banded together to protest the incompetence of the police. But that’s a mistake on their part; the police don’t give a damn about the decline of our popular trades. However, I think that a notice addressed to our assassins requesting they return the bodies of those who have disappeared to their families would have excellent results.”

“You could stick it in your newspaper,” said Teymour.

“That’s exactly what I plan on doing tomorrow,” replied Medhat in all seriousness.

“Your cynicism delights me,” said Chawki, smiling wanly. “Still, only a few people have disappeared. I don’t think this can cause your mourners irreparable damage.”

“You forget that the men who have disappeared have all been prominent citizens, and among the very richest. In such cases, these mourning mercenaries charge the highest prices. Any one of these funerals would have brought in more than those of a hundred poor wretches. So, you see, my mourners do have something to complain about.”

“I feel sorry for those good women,” said Chawki, who from time to time liked to show that he did not lack a sense of humor.

“Stop frightening me with your macabre conversation,” interrupted Salma. “These stories are keeping me from sleeping at night. And those poor little ones,” she said, pointing to the young girls. “You’re going to make them die of fright.”

“We have nothing to fear,” said Ziza. “They only go after men.”

“If they were attacking women,” said Salma, shooting a poisonous glance at Chawki, “it wouldn’t take me long to find the guilty party.”

“What does that mean?” stammered Chawki, who seemed profoundly perturbed by the young woman’s perfidious allusion.

“It means,” Salma replied spitefully, “that it could only be you. How many women have you already murdered? And if they did not die, it was no thanks to you. In any event, it’s as if they had.”

Chawki raised his eyes to the ceiling and made a face to show he was too reasonable a man to respond to such illogical accusations.

Just then Imtaz, holding Ziza’s head in the crook of his arm, began to speak to the young girl in such a way as not to be heard by the others.

“Now is the time to excite him. Go do your belly dance. You promised me.”

“You really think I should?” asked Ziza, who was terror-stricken at her mission to excite Chawki. “What should I do if he tries to touch me?”

“Slap him,” Imtaz responded coldly. “A good slap in the face, don’t forget.”

“Won’t it cause a scandal? He looks like my father, you know.”

“So? They all look alike. As you get older, you’ll see that all the bastards resemble one another, not only morally, but physically as well. And tonight’s your lucky night because you’ll be able to slap your father through a third party, with no fear of reprisal.”

“Would it be all right if I did it another time? I’ve had too much to drink; I don’t feel so great.”

“I order you to do it immediately,” said Imtaz caustically. “I don’t like pretentious girls without nerve.”

“Don’t be angry,” begged Ziza. “Just to please you, I’ll be brave.”

She immediately slid off Imtaz’s lap and, with steady steps, walked over to the phonograph where she began looking for a record to suit her dance project. A moment later, the sounds of folk music could be heard in the room. The young girl positioned herself in front of Chawki, squatted down and, grabbing the fingers of her victim, pretended to admire his precious rings.

“What lovely rings!” she said in a tone of exaggerated rapture. “Where did you steal them from? I would be capable of anything to own ones like these.”

From where he was sitting, Chawki could see Ziza’s breasts through the neckline of her blouse, and he was pierced by a desire to stroke those globes of delicate flesh that seemed to be scoffing at him. Sensing that the entire group was watching the girl’s audacious moves extremely attentively, however, he refrained from risking the slightest gesture.

He asked, playfully, as if merely in jest:

“And what would you be capable of doing, my precious soul?”

“To start, I’d do a belly dance for you,” Ziza replied. “Open your eyes and watch.”

Ziza swiftly stood up and, without taking her gaze from Chawki, withdrew to the center of the room where she stopped, her face suddenly very serious. Then, slowly, she spread her legs, arched her back, and stuck out her belly; with innate knowledge her entire body began to sway to the monotone and staccato rhythm of the music, following all the phrasings of a lustful dream. The members of the audience, silent and captivated for a moment, quickly shook off their astonishment and, to encourage her, started clapping their hands in time. This rowdy accompaniment seemed to stimulate the dancer’s energy; the tremors she transmitted to her belly became longer and more frenzied, as if this part of her body, returned to its toil of the ages, were obeying an intimate violence independent of her will.

Chawki wanted to live forever so as never to have to take his eyes off this feast of flesh; but fate, ever blind, thwarted his wishes by a ludicrous incident. At the height of his excitement, he suddenly saw Samaraï appear in the living room. This revenant — whose sleep had no doubt been disturbed by the boisterousness of the group — was limping forward, and it was easy to see why: he was wearing only one shoe; he held the other shoe in his hand, brandishing it about like a makeshift weapon with a view to massacre. Without explaining his bizarre behavior, he went directly to Chawki and said firmly:

“Curses on your mother! I’m going to kill you!”

The speed with which Chawki protected himself against the danger by covering his face with his arms accentuated the farcical side of this onslaught even more. Shaking with laughter, everyone in the room stayed where they were and none of them thought to help him. Luckily, the shoe Samaraï tossed at Chawki only hit him on the shoulder. Still, he let out the cry of a chicken having its throat slit, and fainted.

teymour was waiting for felfel in front of the statue of The Awakening of the Nation. In her stylized peasant dress the woman was still raising her arm to encourage a heedless people to revive but, as if responding to her ludicrous call, against the metal railing that surrounded the monument, a vagrant was sleeping, snoring shamelessly and thus undermining the morale of his fellow citizens with his unfortunate conduct; whether by coincidence or design, serious damage was being done to the government’s attempt — by means of this insomniac and imperious peasant woman — to rouse the crowds from their torpor. Teymour endorsed heart and soul the act of this beggar, whose ostensible ignorance concealed an age-old wisdom. The young man was now in a position to appreciate the humor of such a spectacle, seeing in it the expression of the lucidity of an entire people impervious to the entreaties of a propaganda so obviously tendentious. Not so long ago, the vagrant’s attitude would have insulted Teymuor’s intelligence and reinforced his bitterness; now it seemed the only legitimate reaction to the attempt to reduce a people to slavery that lay behind the esthetic of this modern sculpture. Denouncing its decadent symbolism by means of the most passive attitude of all — sleep — showed, he thought, a remarkable ferocity and was imbued with much more meaning than anything any rebellious intellectual, tangled up in his pronouncements, could have done or said against the system that had created the statue to serve its villainous cause. This revelation led him to have joyous confidence in the future and completely transformed his vision of things; already he no longer thought much about all those years spent abroad, and the memories he still retained of them no longer struck the same painful chords. As if trying to help him forget that period of his life, none of his acquaintances ever asked the slightest question about the countries in which he had resided, nor did they seem interested in what he might have done there. At first he found this odd conspiracy of silence somewhat distressing. He could not understand their reserve and thought it almost insulting. He had especially suffered from not being able to recount certain adventures to Medhat; his old friend showed himself to be particularly unreceptive to confidences of this sort, as if he found Teymour’s long absence entirely negligible, nonexistent even. However, having searched and searched for the motives of such indifference, Teymour wound up suspecting that his friends were trying, by their tact, to help him forget a past that they sensed he still missed deep down. He was touched by this show of thoughtfulness, and had done his best to be worthy of their esteem by adapting as quickly as possible to his new existence and by erasing from his behavior and his appearance all traces that could have markedly set him apart from his surroundings. To this end, he’d given up his lavish clothing with its foreign cut and fabric that made him look like a sad-faced tourist roaming the catacombs.