The Candidate

  “Who?” Minas asked.

  “Sarkis.”

  “Where did they take him?”

  “Where else do they take crazy people? Charenton.”

  Minas didn’t know whether to be happy that Apkar had started talking again or upset by what had happened to Sarkis. Poor Mr. Bentham—a sweet, harmless, humble man who wanted to “save the nation” with poetry. But no one, no one at all, took an interest in his poems, and yet the poet had a wonderfully innocent smile for all those who turned their backs whenever he extended a hand with his book.

  “But Apkar,” Minas said, jumping out of his daydream. “They only take dangerous people to Charenton.”

  “Didn’t you know? What kind of poet are you who isn’t interested in the Armenian people? He needed to be restrained. He would attack anyone who didn’t want to save the nation. Every day there would be a fight in the street. Do you know Arakel, the tailor? He took Sarkis’s book and threw it right back in his face, sneering. Our Sarkis lunged at him like a lion and started throwing punches. Then the police came to take him away.”

  On a nice May evening, Minas walked up the boulevard thinking about Sarkis, whose pained expression would no longer be seen around and who, perhaps at that moment, had gone crazy out of a feeling of infinite time and punched a heavy door that only opened to those coming in. He stopped in front of the Billard, but didn’t go inside. With Vahakn gone, the café had lost its charm for him. It seemed foreign to him, as if it had never even been part of a fraction of his life. On the sidewalk, there was no longer an invisible hook cast by Vahakn’s gaze and the passersby, who, with their footsteps freed, no longer saw the need for self-defense. They walked, bold and carefree, with a kind of disdain for the absent. He quickly walked past the café. He couldn’t stop in to the upstairs part of the café, where he was heading now, despite Vahakn’s opposition to meeting old classmates from Constantinople who shared his memories. He glanced inside through the door and saw, as always, a meditative Vahan Tekeyan, head bowed over his pocket-size notebook. That evening, with June not too far away, he wanted to go straight to the hotel. For a while now, since the day he finished his manuscript, his mind had been calm. Crumpling up the story and tossing it aside, there was nothing left to do. The curtain had fallen. But instead of staying in his room, he found himself in the Jardin du Luxembourg. He had specifically not said anything to Hortense. He wanted to spend the night in his room. He could have mail waiting for him. He also wanted to read through his manuscript to see if he could give it the structure of a novel. The revisions would take an entire night. It didn’t matter. The next day in the afternoon he could take a nap in Hortense’s room. It would be a deep sleep made even deeper by Hortense’s attentive caresses.

  He had already spent the entire month of May with Hortense, ever since the day that her slight body had rocked him in her arms for hours. That day had put an end to his training period and replaced the burning of his senses with tender warmth. Sometimes, under the guise of checking his mail, he would go to his room, take a stroll through a world of memories, or have dinner with friends at The Ani. Life had found its equilibrium. In the ruins of a passing storm, one way or another, the swallow rebuilds its nest. Minas would build his nest by writing poetry, or by loving Hortense. Loving Hortense? Why did his heart skip a beat whenever that idea came to mind? His vision had darkened, but he could still see fine. The eyes on his face could see. He was by the Fontaine Médicis. He stood in front of the stone statue near the fountain. Around him, here and there, couples were kissing. Across from him were the Palais du Luxembourg and the Palais du Sénat. If he wanted to, he could even see what was hidden from view. Yes, with his eyes closed he could see the museum on the other side of the palais, where there hung a nature morte by—who would have thought?—an obscure Armenian. If he closed his eyes even tighter, he could see the details of the painting, especially the almost trembling light that so sparingly marked the canvas. He saw all of this even as his vision darkened, but he was seeing with his heart and feeling pride in the trembling rays in the work of an Armenian like him, unseen by the world. Under that dim light in his mind, he saw Hortense, as if born of that light. On the narrow, grainy screen, he saw a wavering image of the woman who would always silently caress him and look at him with a deep, pensive furrow between her eyebrows, as if looking from afar, as she had once before, from very far, like a slave or a beggar with an impossible wish. In that humble gaze, he saw her femininity, that passivity that suddenly turns a shy man into a lion. He remained a lion until she rocked him in her arms like a child. And yet it was not that Hortense who made his heart pound, the Hortense who quietly left him alone with his thoughts; who calmed him whenever he dreamed, resting his head in her lap; who inspired the poetry that was given a silhouette by his work each day; who was the clock watching him at night, always waking him up for work with a cheerful song that would renew the day, but also bring about the return of another one briefly hidden, because he found himself feeling that time was endless. Here was the crowd of the city’s workers, whom he met every morning on his way to the hotel, half-awake yet rushing, as though still chased by lingering ghosts from the night before. There is Hortense with her caresses and her warm, smooth body, and then there’s Apkar with his miserable girls. No, it wasn’t that Hortense who had turned him into a sleepwalker in his waking hours, but rather the one who just told him, “The room next door is empty. If you move there . . .” Look, it’s always in the same way with a kind of female finesse, the key to which she had given him herself. She leaves the initiating up to you while she does the ordering, just like the one time she instinctively used her fingertips to guide his head toward the most sensitive parts of her body, where his kisses sowed and reaped love in a way that made him believe he wasn’t an inexperienced boy just discovering those soul-stirring sensations. And this still wasn’t all of it. Now he was seeing clearly. How hadn’t he understood the hidden meaning in her words as she was saying them? He hadn’t felt it in the song, because she knew how to anoint its words. We don’t often fall victim to the chill a snake’s stare can cause, but rather to its mystical song. Before he left, Hortense put her whole heart into a kiss, as if putting his hand to her chest, locking eyes with him, and saying, “Look how it beats for you.” This is how the images fell one after another, with her gaze pensive and searching. The deliberate, cautious movements that accompanied her words tore through their bitterness. “Don’t you think your miserable girlfriend might need to go for a walk or to the theater once in a while? I know, you don’t like to do it. You’ve thought about it already, I’m sure. But you don’t dare, do you? Dare, my friend, dare! Come on, take me. You know I’m yours. I don’t even belong to myself.” Yielding and obedient, he listened with his lower lip hanging open, though not without a certain sense of pride. He was about to say that he would be happy to take her out, but he resisted. His heart hardened in anticipation of an attack and his inner self felt a distant, unattainable absence, when Hortense added, “Tomorrow let’s go to Kilisse and order you a suit jacket.” She hadn’t finished her thought when she took his hand to her face and held it there for a moment, trembling, holding her breath, and then continued in a softer voice, “It’ll be my gift to you. My very first gift.” From the shaking in Minas’s hand, she sensed the hurtful words to come. She had put in a year and a half to reach the moment when she could finally say the words she had prepared with such care, to prevent causing any offense, only slightly scratching the surface of his dignity. She knew the reaction of a kind young man. She offered her love and her body without reservation as a training ground where an inexperienced, fragile boy could mature into a man, so that one day she could say, “It’ll be my gift to you.” Underneath each and every leaf on the stem of a rose is a thorn. It was for this very reason that she put her index finger over his mouth. Her lips immediately followed to seal the silence and perhaps his approval, too.

  But now, as he sat by the Fontaine Médicis and recalled t
hat moment, his wounded pride gained momentum in his heart, like ripples growing into a tidal wave. He felt the full weight of the goal that Hortense had pursued for months, which, now unexpectedly unmasked, appeared to him clearly, while the entire reel of images played in front of him and made everything so clear. A chuckle escaped and turned into uncontrollable laughter. As it went on, the chains binding him loosened link by link. Once he had broken free, without vengeance or even obligation, he saw himself next to Hortense on a night out at the theater, where a friend approached them and asked, “Is this your mother? It’s nice to meet you.” His laughter was now tinged with scorn and left a bitter taste in his mouth. He understood that one way or another he was going to be faced with the need to make a decision. But whatever that decision may have been, his agitation fed continuously on the imaginary, yet innocent, exclamation of his friend, as though it had actually been said. “Is this your mother?” My God, how had he not thought of this? How could he have kept himself from seeing that Hortense was old enough to have a son his age? Where did this obsession with age come from? And why? What purpose would it serve? Of course it was his own mind that invented the idea and invited it inside, as though subconsciously looking to destroy something. He stood up. An almost audible cry needed to escape from his chest. He walked to the part of the woods where he and Vahakn used to sit for hours. He could still feel the echo of the scream he had let out near the Fontaine Médicis a little while before. He didn’t know why he had said Nicole’s name. But Nicole wasn’t in the park and now, as he passed through the streets, the one thing that stayed with him was the sharp glance she had shot at him from the big screen right before he left the movie theater. He wanted to go back to his room and yet he wandered from street to street. Who knows? Perhaps he needed, first and foremost, to purge his mind of the images that haunted him. It took him a long time to get to his room. He went up the half-lit staircase, slowly and hesitantly, pausing for a moment before making a decision. “Yes, I’ll get my bag and go straight to my mother.”

  He still can’t come to terms with what happened a little while later after he had pushed himself out of his room like a crazy person and started roaming the streets, ultimately trying to make sense of everything, taking himself by the wrist and asking, “Is this really me?” He started to think an illusion had taken hold. Where was he? Where was reality? He couldn’t have made up such a dramatic ending. Having reached this point in the story, he had already considered the ending, and a happy one at that. He didn’t know where to turn. If this kind of scene had been written into a novel, I’m sure that any reader would have snickered skeptically, and rightfully so. What a strange turn of events that, in the span of one evening all the characters, or at least those still standing, would seal their fates—unconvincing fates at that—while also leaving him responsible for everything in the whirl of unresolved disorder. When, after the moment of hesitation in which he had decided to leave, he finally continued up the stairs and reached his door, he didn’t realize why the key was in the lock and the door was ajar. He stood in the doorway and looked inside, first straight ahead, then in surprise and amazement. He squinted. Yes, that was her. Who else could it have been? There was no need to ask. It seemed as though he had been waiting for this. It was not in vain that he had agonized over those letters, fearing they might be construed as an invitation. He had tried to avoid that tone, clearly with little success. And here he was. He was always the guilty one wherever he went. Impulsively, without thinking twice, he called out her name as if she were an old friend.

  “Arshalouys, what are you doing here?”

  Arshalouys was sitting on the edge of the bed, her bag at her feet. She stood up confidently as soon as he shut the door, as though she had carefully studied and planned this moment.

  “I’m here,” she said.

  “Yes, you are. But who told you to come?”

  “Oh,” she said, visibly taken aback but not crushed, the back of her right hand over her mouth. “You’ve forgotten. My God, how quickly you’ve forgotten!”

  “What have I forgotten, Madame?”

  “What you wrote.”

  “Which was?”

  “You wrote ‘Get married,’ so I came.”

  Minas, his head in his hands, struggled to keep his composure. He still couldn’t believe it. Was this reality or was this a dream too? What was a dream and what was reality? But this wasn’t a dream. Pulling his hands away from his face, he looked straight at the woman standing in front of him. She was still trying to smile, to turn something into a smile and make it a source of infinite happiness.

  “But I didn’t suggest that we get married. I told you not to be alone. It was just brotherly advice.”

  “Well, you left me with a choice to make. And so I made my choice.”

  “Just like that, all of a sudden?”

  And all of a sudden, he leapt toward the door, which was still ajar, closed it behind him, and left.

  He roamed for quite a while. It was like back in the old days when Vahakn would mysteriously disappear at one in the morning, panting down the boulevard right before the train arrived. Now Minas, mentally adrift, walked through the streets by himself and came to stop in front of the closed shutters of the Billard to find shelter in Vahakn’s shadow. He didn’t go far—to deserted spots along the river, then from street to street, always convinced that he had left the incident far behind, that he had forgotten it, erased it from his mind. When his knees gave way, he stopped walking, deep in thought, and decided to take a trip. He decided to go much farther to his mother, whom he should never have left in the first place. At this, he finally lifted his head. The street sloped straight down, it’s true. It veered slightly in the middle, but what was closer—within view even—was the closed door of his hotel room.

  Paris, June 6, 1927

  Dear Zareh,

  You know about the ongoing French literary debate surrounding “La Marquise sortit à cinq heures.”20 Each new generation in search of itself collides in the very beginning with this issue and treats it with contempt, because it’s the hallmark of the old, conventional novel. By fighting against it, the French novel has achieved the stability, or introspection, that has expelled the marquise. I feel the same kind of contempt. Disgust would be more like it. You can imagine that I feel disgusted when I read, for instance, in one of the last paragraphs of this text: “And all of a sudden, he leapt toward the door.” And this right after the “all of a sudden” in the line immediately above. Here I am debilitated now that the draft of Vahakn’s story is done and I’m supposed to start working on turning it into a novel. The marquise comes out of nowhere and tries to leave. And I can’t keep her from leaving, because when I see her standing arrogantly in the doorway with a look that is both present and absent, cunningly sizing up everything near and far, and when she is about to take a step, exactly at the moment she opens her parasol, it seems as though an entire dream comes undone, disintegrates, scatters, and simmers. Where will the marquise go? This is the question on everyone’s mind and we follow its development with trembling rapture. Where will the marquise go? To the Marquise de Sévigné?21 To a mysterious date in Bois de Boulogne? Or to leafy corner on Île de la Cité? What interests me is the story of Vahakn’s inner world, but what do I see? I see that what I’ve written is something else entirely, if it isn’t just “La Marquise sortit à cinq heures.” Everyone thinks they know why the marquise leaves. This failure saddens me, but also gives me the chance to reconcile with you. It was precisely because of that failure that I didn’t like the first book in your The Persecuted series. It was a bit too marquise-like and yet I fell victim to the same inescapable temptation. I was naïvely convinced that on my own, away from you, I could write a purely psychological story better—on a side note, when will it be published?—as if it were possible to see the soul anywhere else but in the sways of the body. It entails a return to the marquise, who will now leave, and before taking a step, will cast an inexplicable glance all a
round, as though to put out the light in the curious gazes staring at her, so that she can continue her journey through the story.