Albert Cossery - A Splendid Conspiracy

Tears were now streaming down her cheeks. She seemed sorely afflicted by her lover’s running away.

“Hankering for a handkerchief,” said Medhat with commiseration. “That doesn’t surprise me. What you just told me merely confirms my opinion.”

Salma said no more, but this time her silence was not heavy with the rancor and bitterness that had put Medhat on the defensive. She looked at him doubtfully, as if she were attempting to understand things with which she had had no contact for many long years. A loving, tragic anxiety could be read in her eyes. She’d wound up growing fond of Samaraï and his ardent, fanatical love that had remained a mystery to her, and to which she was hardly accustomed. Over the past few days she had felt alone, abandoned by everyone. She became aware of an emptiness caused by Samaraï’s absence, a void that even her hatred of Chawki could not fill; she now regretted not having listened to her unhappy lover’s proposals and having been cantankerous and vindictive with the only person who had thought about saving her from her self-destructive folly. Perhaps she should have left this city, forgotten her lost youth and the man who had taken advantage of her, to begin a new life elsewhere. She was already twenty-two, and the veterinary student had been her last chance to renounce her status as a dishonored girl and abandon her extravagant quest for an illusory revenge. But now it was too late. She was overcome with dread at the thought of the person who had vanished; she could not dissociate his disappearance from the recent kidnappings in the city. Already she could picture her lover dead, his corpse dismembered and rendered unrecognizable, lying among the rubble of some wasteland. Once again this vision made her shiver; she readjusted the collar of her dressing gown around her breasts, then asked in a low and trembling voice, as if she feared divulging her secret foreboding:

“Do you think he may have had an accident? Could he have been kidnapped like all those other notables of whom we’ve never found a trace?”

Medhat began to laugh. It seemed to him that Salma was going much too far, exaggerating the tragedy out of sheer feminine vanity.

“But that poor fellow is no notable. No one would think of kidnapping him. He would very quickly become a burden to his kidnappers. I would not want to be in their shoes.”

“You’re forgetting that he always carried on his person all that money he’d inherited.”

The sudden surfacing of this detail made Medhat oddly attentive. Samaraï’s disappearance was taking on new meaning. It was true; Samaraï carried his entire fortune everywhere he went. Medhat had noticed it several times, but had forgotten. In this light, the kidnapping seemed entirely plausible. He could not help but see something epically comic in the idea that the veterinary student had ended his career in this way. He snickered, finding the situation quite humorous.

“Well, that’s one less veterinarian in this country. But what does it matter? I’m sure the animals won’t suffer from such a loss.”

“Still, he was your friend!” cried Salma. “You were the one who brought him here and introduced him to me as a delightful companion and a brother. You seemed so concerned about making life pleasant for him. On top of it, you tried desperately to convince him not to go back to the capital, as if you were in love with him! I don’t understand your reaction now that he may be dead.”

She began to cry softly, which irritated Medhat; really, this was not a spectacle to inflict on him so early in the morning. He had admitted his disappointment in Samaraï to Salma, and now seemed the appropriate time to reveal the heinous truth about her lover’s outmoded and stupid mentality. Medhat was not going to let himself be persecuted in this way without reacting.

“I never told you, but I made a mistake. I thought he would be a positive element in our group. I took him for an intelligent boy, able to grasp all the childishness of his smug pursuit of a degree in veterinary medicine. At first he gave me the impression he had understood, but that was just show. In truth he simply wanted a few days of vacation and had nothing against sleeping with you as a bonus. He had never seen a thing in his life, that peasant! Rather than behaving properly and savoring such simple happiness, he had the cheek to want to take you away with him to live in the capital. The height of ingratitude! In short, he disappointed me and I refuse to fret over this imbecile any longer. In any case, nothing has happened to him; that would be too much to hope for.”

“It’s all my fault. I chased him away. What will become of me if they’ve killed him? Tell me, how could I go on living?”

It was difficult to quell Medhat’s optimism with words of this sort. He, too, knew how to exploit the rules of tragedy and he made sure to give a comforting and even slightly mundane tone to his own lines of dialogue:

“Don’t worry. He’s probably getting drunk somewhere. I’m sure he’ll be back soon.”

“Try to find him. Tell him I forgive him everything and he can come back.”

In spite of himself, Medhat was touched by this unforeseeable change of mind. Until now he had always thought that Salma tolerated the veterinary student like some inevitable curse and that she had nothing but scorn for his turbulent passion. But Samaraï’s disappearance was turning her into a tearful lover admitting her faults and ready to forgive all transgressions. Had she by chance begun to love Samaraï, or on this occasion was she resorting to just another subterfuge because of her constant need to play an ill-starred role in her relations with men? How could one know? It was as pointless to try to penetrate the unbalanced mind of a woman as it was to attempt to read the future in coffee grounds. In any case, Medhat had had enough of this funeral. All he wanted was never to see the veterinary student again. Still, he said:

“You can count on me. I’ll start looking for him right away.”

He made as if to get up from his chair, but Salma reached out her arm to hold him back.

“Stay and have lunch with me. I don’t feel like being alone.”

He was about to decline the invitation when the little servant girl who was feverishly drying the dishes at the sink shot a quick glance his way, as if she were expecting him to accept. Medhat caught this glance and said joyfully:

“Of course, with pleasure.”

The young servant girl’s body trembled ever so slightly and Medhat looked forward with glee to all the teasing that would go on between them during lunch. Lost in the pain of her putative widowhood, Salma suspected nothing.

The morning sun had vanished by the time Medhat left Salma’s house. A gray sky darkened the alleys emptied at siesta time, and he wondered how he should spend his afternoon. He had promised the young woman to look for Samaraï in every nook and cranny of the city, but in truth, for him everything was simple, everything had been resolved long ago. The affairs of this world had no influence — good or bad — on Medhat’s behavior. The veterinary student was merely a fleeting episode, a tiny insignificant blemish, not vital in the least. It was one of life’s imponderables, like when one slips and breaks a leg or when one realizes in the middle of screwing a girl that she’s older than one thought. Still, he could not manage to shake the event from his mind completely. Samaraï, by running away like this — without saying goodbye or thank you — would forever remain a mystery, disturbing the peaceful course of all their lives and fueling his legend by his heroic death. It might in fact be necessary to find Samaraï’s hiding place, if only to put an end to the malicious rumors and to discredit the cheap romanticism that his absence was creating in Salma’s mind. The probability of a kidnapping by unknown hooligans who were stripping the city of its notables seemed rather slim to Medhat, despite the lure of the inheritance money that this improvident capitalist carried around in his pocket as if it were a packet of peanuts. Medhat decided that he needed to discuss the problem with Teymour and headed toward the new lodgings rented a short while ago across the river. The place was in his own neighborhood, but he had yet to visit it.