Conrad Aiken - The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

“We are friends, then,” murmured Dace. “We are friends!”

“We are the oldest friends in the world. And yet you torture me.”

“I don’t mean to torture you. I am trying to understand.”

“I forgive you, my friend—I forgive you.” And suddenly the Jew leaned down and touched, with his white soft hand, the right hand of Dace, where it rested on the arm of the chair; a touch fawning and horrible. There were tears in his eyes. He patted Dace’s hand twice, with a grotesque and repulsive tenderness, and smiled; then, straightening:

“No one else forgives us—why shouldn’t we forgive each other? God has forgotten us—He only remembers to forget us. Ah, my old friend, let us not forget each other! Let us remember each other all we can, and forgive each other with all our hearts. You see why it is that I want so horribly, so horribly, to have you remember me! To be an outcast, eternal, hated by God and man, unforgiven, loved by none—to be used by God for His own inscrutable purpose, yet punished for it forever! Perhaps God means that we shall be a comfort to each other. Perhaps He means in that way to reward us—to grant us, as recompense, the greatest, deepest, oldest friendship ever known by men.”

“Yes,” said Dace faintly, “why not? Why not? Perhaps He does.”

“I am sure of it, my friend—Judas, I am sure of it! We have a bond, the greatest of bonds. Each of us committed a sin in its way unparalleled. No others have sounded the depths that we have sounded. At the very bottom of the world, most miserable Gehenna of Gehennas, we meet and embrace. Surely that is something! Yes, I believe it is a proof of the essential goodness and wisdom and mercifulness of God. I wrong Him by saying that He has forgotten us! He has not forgotten us. Isn’t it perhaps truer to say that we are a part of God, the part of Him that is evil and that suffers? What a vision! What pride we can legitimately take in being ourselves! In us is concentrated the most intense suffering, the deepest darkness, the most unmitigated horror, of the world.… Let us share it, old friend—on this one day in the year when we meet, for these few uncertain hours in an infinity of torment, let us share our grief and pride, and open our hearts.”

Dace was extraordinarily moved by this speech; but he could scarcely have said whether he was more impressed, or horrified, or amused. So this was where they were—at the bottom of the world, at the bottom of the bottomless pit. What a vision, indeed! And himself and this repulsive shopkeeper, sinister dual embodiment of the world’s evil, embracing passionately in the blown smoke of Gehenna. Treachery kissing obscenity! Laughter would have been a relief to him, but he felt, with a peculiar anxiety, that the moment was not propitious. Wasn’t there still, somewhere in all this, a danger? Something there was which the Jew had said which had alarmed him; but he could not now recall it. Decidedly he must keep his wits with him.

“Yes,” he answered slowly, with averted eyes, “we are old friends, our sympathies ought to be of the profoundest. We are, as you say, in the same boat—if it isn’t flippant to put it in so homely a fashion. We know each other, don’t we?”

“Ah,” said the Jew, “but do you know me as I know you? That is the question that curses me, that always curses me! You are so hesitant, so uncertain! You distress me so with your questions, and the blanks in your memory! If only we were exactly alike, and you remembered, each year, all that I remember!”

“It’s a pity—it’s a pity.”

“A tragedy, rather!… For me a tragedy.… Yet I mustn’t be selfish. That is the part assigned to me—to remember, to be the memory. I must remember your sorrows as well as my own. It is my privilege to remind you. Corfu, for example! Do you remember Corfu?”

“Corfu? No.”

“Tonight in Corfu they are stoning you. Listen!” The Jew lifted a peremptory finger, commanding silence. Dace listened intently, as if he really expected to hear something; but nothing disturbed the sequestered hush of the room save the ticking of clocks, their own breathing, and the sinking of coals in the grate. Why on earth Corfu? An island in the Adriatic, was it?

“I hear nothing,” he said.

“In Corfu, on every Easter Eve, they stone you. Every window is opened, and old crockery, stones, and sticks are flung violently into the streets. I can hear it. I can see the angry faces. I can hear the screams of hate and triumph. And ah, my God, I can feel the stones on my body, in my soul, wretched compassionate creature that I am.… Do you feel them? Do you hear them?”

“Nothing whatever—no.”

The Jew seemed hurt, bewildered. He stared at the floor.

“No—you hear nothing, feel nothing.… I suppose God intended it so.… And yet it seems as if you ought to be prepared. A warning would be an act of mercy. To remember nothing, to experience the tragedy afresh each time! Horrible.”

“A warning? What do you mean?”

The Jew fixed Dace’s eyes intently. What strange light was it that tried there, through the smoke of confused emotions, to flash out? Compassion? Cunning? But the eyelids lowered, the Jew looked away. Then he said tonelessly:

“I mean for your hanging.”

IV.

Dace, at this, felt that his heart had stopped beating altogether. His consciousness flew off like a vapor, he experienced, for a timeless instant, a perfect and horrible annihilation. Then his ears began ringing, his temples were hammered like cymbals, his arms violently trembled. The room came back to him, but smaller, more real and shabby in the candlelight; and the Jew before him, musing in his chair, seemed also unaccountably shabbier and smaller. He felt slightly sick.

“Oh,” with hardly a tremor, “I’m to hang myself?”

“Ah, my dear friend!” wailed the Jew, “my dear friend!” He wrung his hands.

“But here—in this room?”

“It is better so—is it not? That’s as it always is.”

“Oh, it’s always so, I see.… And O’Grady, what about O’Grady?”

“O’Grady? What do you mean?”

“He hanged himself, for you, in Salt Lake City?”

“Not for me—not for me! For God!”

“And Gomez—and the tailor, Fantini?”

“Yes—” the Jew whispered. “They, too. All of them. Every year.… My poor friend! I was afraid, afraid that you didn’t remember. I’ve done my best for you. I’ve tried to—”

“Break the news gently? Yes! So you have. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

The two men stared at each other. It was then Dace who went on.

“There’s the trivial, purely practical matter of the rope,” he said. “I suppose you have the rope.”

“Yes. I’ll get it for you. It’s the same one.”

“The halter of the ass?”

“Yes.”

The Jew rose, sighing, took the candle, and went to a high cupboard in the front corner of the room by the shuttered window. The lifted candle, when the door had been flung back, lighted a tall crucifix within, the figure of Christ carved of a pallid greenish stone. Below it, on the cupboard floor, stood an earthen bowl. It occurred to Dace that the bowl might bear the stains of sacrifice. The Jew lifted from a hook a small coil of rope, closed the cupboard, and returned to Dace.

“There!” he said. “Take it.”

Dace rose, but he did not take the rope. Instead he took up his hat from the taboret. At the Jew’s look of astonished incredulity he laughed.

“No,” he then said. “I shan’t take it—I must be going. It’s late.”

“Going?” stammered the Jew. Then he cried out again, horribly, in his Biblical prophetic voice: “Going, without—”

“Certainly. Going without hanging myself. Do you seriously expect me to hang myself for you?”