When he started talking about going off to work in Iraq, his parents went into a tailspin of panic. David, normally the gentlest and most tolerant of men, screamed at his son and called him pathologically disturbed, a know-nothing dilettante, a suicidal maniac. Liz wept, took to her bed, and started gorging herself with heavy doses of tranquilizers. That was in February last year. Sonia had died the previous November, and I was in awful shape just then, drinking myself into oblivion every night, not fit for human contact, out of my mind with grief, but David was so distraught, he called me anyway and asked if I would talk some sense into the boy. I couldn’t refuse. I had known Titus for too long, and the fact was that I felt concerned for him as well. So I pulled myself together and did the best I could—which was nothing, nothing at all.
I had lost touch with Titus after Sonia became ill, and he seemed to have changed in the intervening months. The talkative, goofy optimist had turned sullen, almost belligerent, and I knew from the start that my words would have no effect on him. At the same time, I don’t think he was unhappy to see me, and when he spoke about Sonia and her death, there was true compassion in his voice. I thanked him for his words, poured us two glasses of neat scotch, and then led him into the living room, where we had had so many conversations in the past.
I’m not going to sit here and argue with you, I began. It’s just that I’m a little confused, and I’d like you to clarify some things for me. Okay?
Okay, Titus said. No problem.
The war has been going on for close to three years now, I said. When the invasion started, you told me you were against it. Appalled was the word you used, I think. You said it was a phony, trumped-up war, the worst political mistake in American history. Am I right, or have I mixed you up with someone else?
You’re dead-on. That’s exactly how I felt.
We haven’t seen much of each other lately, but the last time you were here, I remember you said that Bush should be thrown in jail—along with Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the whole gang of fascist crooks who were running the country. When was that? Eight months ago? Ten months ago?
Last spring. April or May, I can’t remember.
Have you changed your thinking since then?
No.
Not at all?
Not one bit.
Then why on earth do you want to go to Iraq? Why participate in a war you detest?
I’m not going there to help America. I’m going for myself.
The money. Is that it? Titus Small, mercenary-at-large.
I’m not a mercenary. Mercenaries carry weapons and kill people. I’m going to drive a truck, that’s all. Transporting supplies from one place to another. Sheets and towels, soap, candy bars, dirty laundry. It’s a shit job, but the pay is enormous. BRK—that’s the name of the company. You sign up for a year, and you come home with ninety or a hundred thousand dollars in your pocket.
But you’ll be supporting something you’re opposed to. How can you justify that to yourself?
I don’t look at it that way. For me, it’s not a moral decision. It’s about learning something, about starting a new kind of education. I know how horrible and dangerous it is over there, but that’s just why I want to go. The more horrible, the better.
You’re not making sense.
All my life, I’ve wanted to be a writer. You know that, August. I’ve been showing you my wretched little stories for years, and you’ve been kind enough to read them and give me your comments. You’ve encouraged me, and I’m very grateful to you for that, but we both know I’m no good. My stuff is dry and heavy and dull. Crap. Every word I’ve written so far is crap. I’ve been out of college for close to two years now, and I spend my days sitting in an office, answering the phone for a literary agent. What kind of life is that? It’s so fucking safe, so fucking dreary, I can’t stand it anymore. I don’t know anything, August. I haven’t done anything. That’s why I’m going away. To experience something that isn’t about me. To be out in the big rotten world and discover what it feels like to be part of history.
Going off to war isn’t going to turn you into a writer. You’re thinking like a schoolboy, Titus. At best, you’ll come back with your head full of unbearable memories. At worst, you won’t come back at all.
I know there’s a risk. But I have to take it. I have to change my life—right now.
Two weeks after that conversation, I climbed into a rented Toyota Corolla and set off for Vermont to spend some time with Miriam. The trip ended with the crash that put me in the hospital, and by the time I was released, Titus had already left for Iraq. There was no chance to say good-bye to him or wish him luck or beg him to reconsider his decision one last time. Such romantic claptrap . . . such childish drivel . . . but the kid was in despair over his ruined ambitions, facing up to the fact that he didn’t have it in him to do the one thing he had always wanted to do, and he ran off in an impulsive attempt to redeem himself in his own eyes.
I moved in with Miriam in early April. Three months later, Katya called from New York, sobbing into the phone. Turn on the television, she said, and there was Titus on the evening news, sitting in a chair in some unidentified room with cinder-block walls, surrounded by four men with hoods over their heads and rifles in their hands. The quality of the video was poor, and it was difficult to read the expression on Titus’s face. He looked more stunned than terrified, I felt, but apparently he had been beaten, for I could dimly make out what appeared to be a large bruise on his forehead. There was no sound, but over the images the newscaster was reading his prepared text, which went more or less as follows: Twenty-four-year-old New Yorker Titus Small, a truck driver for the contracting company BRK, was abducted this morning en route to Baghdad. His captors, who have yet to identify themselves with any known terrorist organization, are demanding ten million dollars for his release, as well as the immediate cessation of all BRK activities in Iraq. They have vowed to execute their prisoner if these demands are not met within seventy-two hours. George Reynolds, a spokesman for BRK, said his company is doing everything in its power to ensure Mr. Small’s safety.
Katya arrived at her mother’s house the following day, and two nights after that we switched on her laptop and looked at the second and last video shot by the kidnappers, the one that could be seen only on the Internet. We already knew that Titus was dead. BRK had made a substantial offer on his behalf, but as expected (why think the unthinkable when profits are at stake?), they had refused to shut down their operations in Iraq. The slaughter was carried out as promised, precisely seventy-two hours after Titus was torn from his truck and thrown into that room with the cinder-block walls. I still don’t understand why the three of us felt driven to watch the tape—as if it were an obligation, a sacred duty. We all knew it would go on haunting us for the rest of our lives, and yet somehow we felt we had to be there with Titus, to keep our eyes open to the horror for his sake, to breathe him into us and hold him there—in us, that lonely, miserable death, in us, the cruelty that was visited on him in those last moments, in us and no one else, so as not to abandon him to the pitiless dark that swallowed him up.
Mercifully, there is no sound.
Mercifully, a hood has been placed over his head.
He is sitting in a chair with his hands tied behind him, motionless, making no attempt to break free. The four men from the previous video are standing around him, three holding rifles, the fourth with a hatchet in his right hand. Without any signal or gesture from the others, the fourth man suddenly brings the blade down on Titus’s neck. Titus jerks to his right, his upper body squirms, and then blood starts seeping through the hood. Another blow from the hatchet, this one from behind. Titus’s head lolls forward, and by now blood is streaming down all over him. More blows: front and back, right and left, the dull blade chopping long past the moment of death.
One of the men puts down his rifle and clamps Titus’s head firmly in his two hands to prop it up as the man with the hatchet continues to go about his business. They ar
e both covered in blood.
When the head is finally severed from the body, the executioner lets the hatchet fall to the floor. The other man removes the hood from Titus’s head, and then a third man takes hold of Titus’s long red hair and carries the head closer to the camera. Blood is dripping everywhere. Titus is no longer quite human. He has become the idea of a person, a person and not a person, a dead bleeding thing: une nature morte.
The man holding the head backs away from the camera, and a fourth man approaches with a knife. One by one, working with great speed and precision, he stabs out the boy’s eyes.
The camera rolls for a few more seconds, and then the screen goes black.
Impossible to know how long it has lasted. Fifteen minutes. A thousand years.
I hear the alarm clock ticking on the floor. For the first time in hours, I close my eyes, wondering if it might not be possible to sleep after all. Katya stirs, lets out a little groan, and then rolls onto her side. I consider putting my hand on her back and stroking it for a few seconds but then give up the idea. Sleep is such a rare commodity in this house, I don’t want to risk disturbing her. Invisible stars, invisible sky, invisible world. I see Sonia’s hands on the keyboard. She’s playing something by Haydn, but I can’t hear anything, the notes make no sound, and then she swivels around on the stool and Miriam runs into her arms, a three-year-old Miriam, an image from the distant past, perhaps real, perhaps imagined, I can barely tell the difference anymore. The real and the imagined are one. Thoughts are real, even thoughts of unreal things. Invisible stars, invisible sky. The sound of my breath, the sound of Katya’s breath. Bedtime prayers, the rituals of childhood, the gravity of childhood. If I should die before I wake. How fast it all goes. Yesterday a child, today an old man, and from then until now, how many beats of the heart, how many breaths, how many words spoken and heard? Touch me, someone. Put your hand on my face and talk to me . . .
I can’t be sure, but I think I might have dozed off for a while. No more than a few minutes, perhaps only seconds, but suddenly I’ve been interrupted by something, a sound, I believe, yes, several sounds in fact, a knocking on the door, a faint and persistent knocking, and then I open my eyes and tell Miriam to come in. As the door opens, I can see her face with a certain clarity, and I understand that it’s no longer night, that we’ve come to the cusp of dawn. The world inside my room is gray now. Miriam has already put on some clothes (blue jeans and a baggy white sweater), and the moment she shuts the door behind her, the vireo lets out his first chirp of the day.
What a relief, she whispers, looking at the sleeping Katya. I just checked in on her, and when she wasn’t in her bed, I got a little scared.
She came down a few hours ago, I whisper back to her. Another rough night, so we lay in the dark and talked.
Miriam walks over to the bed, plants a kiss on my cheek, and sits down beside me. Are you hungry? she asks.
A little.
Maybe I should start the coffee.
No, sit here and talk to me for a while. There’s something I need to know.
About what?
Katya and Titus. She told me she broke up with him before he went away. Is that true? She seems to think he left because of her.
You had so many other things on your mind, I didn’t want to bother you with it. Mommy’s cancer . . . all those months . . . and then the car accident. But yes, they broke up.
When?
Let me think. . . . Your seventieth birthday was in February, February two thousand and five. Mommy was already sick then. It was just a few months after that. Late spring or early summer.
But Titus didn’t leave until the following February, two thousand and six.
Eight or nine months after they broke up.
So Katya is wrong. He didn’t go to Iraq because of her.
She’s punishing herself. That’s what this is all about. She wants to implicate herself in what happened to him, but she really had nothing to do with it. You talked to him before he left. He explained his reasons to you.
And he didn’t mention Katya’s name. Not once.
You see?
It makes me feel a little better. And also a little worse.
She’s coming along now. I can smell it. Bit by bit by bit. The next step is to talk her into going back to school.
She says she’s considering it.
Which was out of the question just two months ago.
I grab hold of Miriam’s hand and say, I almost forgot. I read some more of your manuscript last night . . .
And?
I think you’ve nailed it. No more doubts, all right? You’re doing a first-rate job.
Are you sure?
I’ve told a lot of fibs in my day, but I never lie about books.
Miriam grins, aware of the two hundred and fifty-nine secret references buried in that remark, and I grin back at her. Keep on smiling, I say. You look beautiful when you smile.
Only when I smile?
All the time. Every minute of every day.
Another one of your fibs, but I’ll take it. She pats me on the cheek and says: Coffee and toast?
No, not today. I think we should go all out this morning. Scrambled eggs and bacon, French toast, pancakes, the whole works.
A farmer’s breakfast.
That’s it, a farmer’s breakfast.
I’ll get your crutch, she says, standing up and walking over to the hook on the wall beside my bed.
I follow her with my eyes for a moment, and then I say: Rose Hawthorne wasn’t much of a poet, was she?
No. Pretty awful, in fact.
But there’s one line . . . one great line. I think it’s as good as anything I’ve ever read.
Which one? she asks, turning to look at me.
As the weird world rolls on.
Miriam breaks into another big smile. I knew it, she says. When I was typing up the quote, I said to myself, He’s going to like this one. It could have been written for him.
The weird world rolls on, Miriam.
Crutch in hand, she walks back to the bed and sits down beside me. Yes, Dad, she says, studying her daughter with a worried look in her eyes, the weird world rolls on.
About the Author
PAUL AUSTER is the bestselling author of Travels in the Scriptorium, The Brooklyn Follies, Oracle Night, and The Book of Illusions, among many other works. In 2006 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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Paul Auster, Man in het duister
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