Albert Cossery - A Splendid Conspiracy

stretched out fully clothed on his bed, Medhat was smiling mischievously as he thought of his friend Teymour and how he was about to welcome him into his home. He was far from giving in to the excitement that this reunion ordinarily would have aroused in him. For three days he had been expecting Teymour to appear from one moment to the next and recite his tales of woe. He knew him well enough to be certain that, at this very moment, Teymour was turning his misery over in his mind, believing himself exiled to his own town. And so, Medhat had promised himself not to allude to those six years his friend had spent out of the country and to behave as if this long stretch of time had never existed. He had absolutely no desire to hear the whining of a man stupid enough to fall under the picturesque spell of distant lands. The picturesque bored Medhat. He had an inherent scorn for that mass of fidgety, travel-crazed humanity always running after happiness but in reality only managing to run in circles, incapable of catching anything but a virus. This scorn stemmed from deep instinct rather than from any kind of criticism of society; it had been years since Medhat had any interest in reforming his fellow man. He had better things to do. The battle he was waging was a personal one, renewed on a daily basis, its sole purpose to turn to his advantage a small scrap of the joy that, often unpredictable and difficult to recognize, had been lost among men. With this simple and fundamentally realistic moral code, he managed to be perfectly happy anywhere and everywhere; for Medhat, no place had more of a claim to happiness than any other. And his friend Teymour was not about to prove the contrary by recounting his adventures abroad. Every country has its share of imbeciles, bastards, and whores. You had to be a fool to believe that bigger and better things were happening elsewhere. The only thing that changed was the language spoken; everywhere the same imbeciles, the same bastards, and the same whores could be found expressing the same things in different languages: the novelty consisted of nothing more. Medhat refused to forgive the absurdity and madness of people who learned all kinds of foreign tongues simply to grasp the meaning of the same idiotic remarks they could hear at home for free. He, for one, had never been tempted to trot the globe looking for experiences that were supposed to be transcendent because they took place in distant hemispheres. What was the purpose of changing continents, longing for other surroundings, if you were not even capable of seeing what was around you? Medhat had no reason to criticize the town where he’d spent his whole life. Beneath its deceptive and admittedly depressing appearance were concealed great gifts of madness and murderous rage capable of competing with any world capital. To be convinced of this fact one needed only not to be blind.

His gaze rested mechanically on the child playing on the bedroom floor with an empty cookie box, and he smiled as he imagined Teymour’s coming upon this domestic scene. In truth the child was not his; he had married the mother when she was already pregnant — an eccentric decision on his part. Two years earlier, an elderly worker from the sugar refinery — a good man whom Medhat knew and who lived in his neighborhood — had come to him and confided that one of his daughters, barely nubile, had been impregnated by a municipal street sweeper who had since absconded without a trace. To avoid dishonor the old man could think of nothing but to kill his daughter. He was a peaceful and good-natured fellow, however, not at all a brute, and his role as avenger was repellant to him. Believing Medhat to be the only educated person in the neighborhood, he had wanted to consult him about this sad business. Medhat was pained by the old man’s distress and, sensing the perilous nature of this discussion, tried persistently to change the man’s mind about such a macabre undertaking. The old fellow was deaf to the young man’s advice and did nothing but shake his head and repeat again and again that something must be done quickly because scandal was knocking at his door. The situation was all the more pitiful in that the poor wretch did not even own a knife with which to carry out his plan. He was still waiting, crouching on the ground, staring at Medhat with eyes red from trachoma as if at an oracle. Suddenly a crazy idea came to Medhat, a dangerously optimistic idea but one that seemed to him to be the sole solution acceptable to this dishonored father. He would marry the girl, arrange a wedding feast, and invite all his friends and acquaintances. He would have a wonderful evening to look forward to and, even better, an unhoped-for opportunity to escape his routine: a wedding — his own — now, there was something completely unpredictable in the realm of delights! The old man thought he was joking when Medhat offered to become his son-in-law, but after endless discussion, he left holding his head high, convinced that his entire family had just miraculously climbed the social ladder.

The wedding took place a week later, in the best popular tradition, with a bridal procession, musicians, and a banquet that lasted until dawn. Medhat had never intended to exercise his conjugal rights; he was only thinking of saving an old man from dishonor and, at the same time, planning the wedding to amuse himself. His apartment had two rooms so he had let the girl have one while she awaited the birth of her child; afterward, he intended to repudiate her with dignity. But circumstances caused him to act otherwise. In the first place, the girl was rather attractive and she showed her gratitude with boundless adoration and obedience. She was still a little girl who would stare wide-eyed at the luxury of her new home because, compared to her parents’ sordid shack, the splendor of her husband’s lodgings dazzled her. Medhat had felt too ill-at-ease to explain that he had married her just for the heck of it. During the months of her pregnancy, he grew so accustomed to her presence that he no longer wanted to send her away, and when she gave birth, he kept both her and the child. Now she had grown up and was practically a woman; she had even proved to be a very good housewife. Medhat did not regret the wild idea he had had one day merely to satisfy his love of parties; he was even tempted to sing his own praises. As it turned out, his marriage delighted him; he spent many agreeable hours playing with both mother and child.

The child threw down the empty cookie box and began to moan softly, waving his hands in Medhat’s direction as if to remind him of his paternal responsibilities. But Medhat, who was still preoccupied with the unexpected return of his friend Teymour, appeared to take no notice. The fact that Teymour had stayed away for six years, parading around foreign capitals, seemed as unexceptional to Medhat as if he had been living all that time in a neighboring village. He couldn’t imagine showing the slightest consideration to someone because of a mere question of distance; this would have been like rewarding ignorance. From the very outset Medhat had been stunned by Teymour’s departure; he saw the move as a childish, almost infantile, defect. What was it Teymour had hoped to find by going away? His leaving was not only a betrayal of Medhat, it was also the negation of their shared idea of pleasure, which consisted of enjoying life in all its most basic and ludicrous manifestations. And where on earth were such ingredients more numerous and more obvious than in this very city where at every step the bizarre and the humdrum seemed spontaneously to cross paths? Such a coalition of fundamental absurdities and vain idiocies was not to be found elsewhere. At times Medhat wondered if these enigmatic human beings, these creatures with their unsuspected ways of thinking who moved around him, were part of a living reality or an imagined one — so easily did their actions attain a kind of outrageous lunacy. He had always had the foresight to be at the center of a mysterious and unfathomable universe, more captivating than any other. Having no ambitions of the material sort, thumbing his nose at money and honors, he had found a way to lead a life that cost him little but was rich in leisure, allowing him to increase his already profound knowledge of his city. His contributions to the local newspaper were reduced to one or two articles a month on the destitution of the sugar refinery workers, written in a satiric, provocative tone for which he had acquired a reputation as a subversive. He was not unaware that he was being monitored by the chief of police, who took him for a fearsome conspirator. He reveled in the ineffable absurdity of the authorities’ distrust, for if Medhat did any conspiring whatsoever, it was not with a political aim, but rather always in the hope of creating an amusement of some sort. At the very moment the chief of police was suspecting him of concocting the most horrid plots against the government, Medhat was using every marvel of ingenuity and patience with the aim of debauching a girl whose parents kept her on a very short leash. He could often be found whispering in his friends’ ears, running around the city with a dubious purpose and a secretive air, or stopping for hours beneath a porte-cochère staring at a window in a house across the way. His every move was noted in high places as if its aim were to bring down the regime. Medhat had been fueling this misunderstanding for years, and he got extraordinary satisfaction from it, the likes of which Teymour could never have known abroad. But no doubt that fool was now impervious to the humor of such a situation and was luxuriating in an exorbitant melancholy that could interfere with their future relations. For this reason, Medhat was determined to take away Teymour’s martyr’s crown by refusing to listen to his grievances. He was yanked from his daydreams when Nuri entered the bedroom.