A Curse on Dostoevsky Read Online Free PDF Page B

justice—both his and mine. Listen, young man, that dog of a director was a traitor who needed to be punished. Which is what I did. I couldn’t wait for a change of regime in order to take him to court!” Another drag on the chillum, and a pause. “Now the regime has changed … These days any idiot thinks he can take the law into his own hands, with no investigation or trial. As I did then. So what! The purpose of punishment is to wipe out the betrayal, not the traitor … These days I ask myself whether this kind of law and punishment isn’t in itself a crime.”
    Having been totally absorbed by your father’s voice and features I suddenly jumped, and asked him if he had read
Crime and Punishment.
He looked confused, then burst out laughing. “No, young man, no! Life … I have read LIFE!” And suddenly he was quiet. For a long time. I was quiet too. He was smoking, I was thinking. Each of usin our own world. My world was full of you. I was trying to think of a way to get your father to talk about you. Suddenly he began speaking again, but still about his own concerns
.
    “The era of the Khalq was over; it was the turn of the Russians. Shortly before they left, rockets were raining down left, right, and center. One day the Archives were hit. We were all in the office. Myself and my two colleagues whom you saw just now rushed to save the most important documents from the flames. Then another rocket landed, and all three of us were covered in blood.” He nodded, regretting their courage. “Now, we are disabled. Who gave us a medal? Who remembers us? No one!” Silence, again. Memories, again, and regrets, remorse … “Ever since then I stay home with my wife and kids. I have to cover the rent, and feed them all. Who’s going to pay for that? When I went to ask for money, they insulted me. They said I was a traitor because I’d worked for the communist regime. So I had no choice; I pawned all those precious documents I had saved. My landlord took them; he knew their value. But then he died. A heart attack. Only his wife and daughter were left, and I had to renegotiate the whole thing with his wife, Nana Alia—and what a bitch she is! A dirty illiterate! Not only did she never give me back the documents, she also increases our rent every month. We no longerown anything. My poor wife has pawned her dowry items to that cow, and her jewelry … And now my daughter has to work for her to pay the rent.”
    I wanted to stand up and shout, “So that’s where Sophia is!” and throw my arms around your father
.
    “What do you do for work?” he asked, wrenching me from my delight. “What’s your name again?”
    I told him my name, and that I worked at the university library. After a silence, in which he looked at me tenderly, he said: “I can see that you’re an educated man, from a good family.” Another pause. “I’ve two children. A girl and a boy. My daughter is pure and innocent …” He stood up. “It’s late. I have to go home. She’ll be worrying about me …”
    We left the smoking room and lost ourselves in the gloomy, dusty fog of dusk. After a few steps in silence, your father continued as if he’d never stopped speaking. “But war recognizes neither purity nor innocence. That’s what terrifies me. It isn’t the blood or the massacres—what frightens me is that dignity and innocence are no longer valued. My daughter, like her mother, is the purest, most noble …” Again a silence, a long one this time, that went on until we stopped in front of your house. “This is my house!” he said, opening the gate. Trembling, I moved to shake his hand, but he stopped me. “You’re going home? You tookme out and walked me all the way here, and now you think I’m going to let you go home?” He invited me in. As soon as I set foot inside I took a huge gulp of air, the air you had breathed. I held it for as long as I could as I followed your father through the little courtyard, under