A Curse on Dostoevsky

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ARE YOU dying, then?

Yes, I’m dying. I’m dying from a hole between the eyes from which a stream of blood is spurting, running onto the mattress, then the kilim, and ending up in a hollow of the floor, where it forms a red pool. The shot rings out in the room, the courtyard, the city. It wakes Yarmohamad. He thinks that someone has fired a shot in the street, outside his house. He turns over in bed. Rona is worried and insists that he check the shot wasn’t fired inside the complex, at me. Yarmohamad doesn’t give a damn. “Good riddance,” he mutters, huddling deeper under the sheet.

At dawn, after prayers, he will come to my room and stand silently at the door.

Why would he come?

Yes, why would he come? He won’t come. My body will remain here. Decomposing. I will be covered in flies. It will be the stink that finally brings him, two or three days later. At first he will only notice the silence. He will knock once. No response. He will push at the door, and it will open easily with a click. On finding my bloody corpse he will panic, aghast at the idea that he might be accused of murdering his tenant. Then he’ll see the pistol in my hand and realize that I have committed suicide. He’ll run to tell Razmodin.

And then?

Nothing. They’ll understand that my suicide was my last sigh at a world that no longer responds to or surprises me.

But, Rassoul, who will say that you’ve committed such an act? Nobody. Not Yarmohamad, or Razmodin. You know perfectly well that suicide isn’t part of your culture. And you know why.

First, in order to commit suicide you have to believe in life, in the value of life. Death has to be worthy of life. Here, in this country, these days, life has no value at all, and therefore neither does suicide.

Next, suicide is considered an ungrateful rebellion against the wishes of Allah. As if you were saying to him: “Here, I’m giving it back before you ask for it, this filthy soul that you introduced into my innocent body!” It’s showing that you are more powerful than him, that you won’t be his slave, his banda. Suicide is giving up your soul, without gratitude.

Before being buried, your body would be whipped. That’s why no one admits to suicide. All suicides are disguised as murders. You will merely be a victim, a shahid, one martyr among many. You who wanted to be an Übermensch.

A shahid? No thanks! That’s what everyone wants, these days. There’d be no point in that. The whole world would have to know that I had committed suicide.

So, go to a busy crossroads, make a speech and then shoot yourself in the head in front of witnesses. That way everyone will know. But even then, no one will understand the theoretical importance of your act. Each person will create their own explanation. One will say: “He was sick”; another: “He smoked a lot of hashish”; someone else: “It was remorse. He behaved badly toward his family”; or “He regretted being a collaborator, a communist, a traitor!”; and, if they eventually find out that it was you who murdered Nana Alia, they will say that it was your bad conscience that led to your suicide. Yes, no one will say that you committed suicide just because you’d come to the end, that your questions lacked a question mark, that all your questioning had come to nothing more than this stupor faced with the sudden absurdity of life. No one will say that you killed a louse, a loathsome, harmful creature, to attain the status of a “great man” and thus take your place in history. What’s more, don’t forget that today, here, in this country, everyone wants to attain that status. Everyone is fighting to become either a ghazi, if he kills, or a shahid, if he is killed. Your nearest and dearest will make you out to be a ghazi, because you killed a madam, and a shahid, because her family killed you in vengeance. On your tombstone they will write: “Shahid Rassoul, son of Ibrahim,” whether you want it or not.

No. I don’t want that.

Well, then, put down the gun.

So I don’t even have the freedom to commit suicide?

No.

Does God really exist, as Dostoevsky said, to prevent man from committing suicide?

That’s it, you’re off again! No, Rassoul, he was thinking of something else. Your Allah, on the other hand, allows suicide only as a way of bearing witness to his existence and his glory. Any suicide beyond that robs him of his name Al-Mumit, he who deals death.

The pistol slips from his hands.

And so it ends. He will not commit suicide, he cannot. Suicide requires just one thing: the action, and nothing more. No thoughts, no words, no remorse, no regret, no hope, no despair…

Dawn, bolder than Rassoul, ravages the sky, picking off the stars one by one.

And sleep, more rapacious even than dawn, takes over Rassoul’s exhausted body.