Balthasar's Odyssey Read Free

smile and shrug my shoulders and execrate foolishness and frivolity, but I can’t help being disturbed.
    In the struggle that goes on inside me between reason and unreason, the latter has won some points. Reason protests, mocks, insists, resists, and I’m still clear-sighted enough to observe the confrontation more or less impartially. But it’s precisely this vestige of lucidity that forces me to admit that unreason is gaining ground in me. One day, if things go on like this, I’ll no longer be able to write as I’m writing now. I might even turn back through these pages and erase what I’ve just set down. What I call unreason now will have become what I believe in then. If that Balthasar should ever come into being, which God forbid!, I hereby hate and despise him, and muster all the intelligence and honour I have left to curse him.
    I know this all sounds rather wild. That’s because the rumours that are dinning around the world have seeped into here. The sort of thing Evdokim said then I hear in my own house now.
    It’s my own fault.
    Eighteen months ago, as business was still flourishing, I decided to ask my sister Pleasance’s two sons to come and give me a hand. My idea was that they should get to know the antiquities trade so that eventually they could take over from me. I had high hopes of Jaber, especially. He was the elder of the two. A diligent, meticulous, studious youth, already almost a scholar before he was a man. The opposite of his younger brother Habib, who neglected his books to roam around the back-streets. I didn’t expect much of him. But at least I hoped he might settle down a bit if I gave him some unaccustomed responsibilities.
    A waste of time. As he has grown up, Habib has become an incorrigible womaniser. He does nothing but sit at the window of the shop, ogling, smiling and paying compliments, and disappearing at all hours for mysterious appointments the object of which I can easily guess. How many young women who live nearby find, when they go to fetch water, that the quickest way to the fountain passes by our window! Habib means “beloved” — names are rarely neutral.
    Jaber stays well inside the shop. His skin grows paler all the time, so rarely does it see the sun. He reads, copies, makes notes, arranges, consults, compares. If his face ever lights up, it’s not because the shoemaker’s daughter has just come round the corner and is sauntering this way. It’s because young Jaber has just read something on page 237 of the Commentary of Commentaries that confirms what he thought was meant by a passage he found yesterday evening in The Final Exegesis. I’m quite satisfied to skim through the most difficult and abstruse volumes out of duty, and even then I often stop for a yawn. Not he. He seems to revel in them, as if in the most delicious sweetmeats.
    So much the better, I thought at first. I wasn’t sorry to see him so industrious. I quoted him to his brother as an example, and even started entrusting some of my own tasks to him. I didn’t hesitate to let him deal with the most pernickety customers. He’d spend hours chatting to them, and though he wasn’t primarily interested in business he usually ended up selling them masses of books.
    I’d have been perfectly satisfied with him if he too hadn’t begun — and with all the ardour of youth — to irritate me with talk of the imminent end of the world and of the omens heralding its coming. Was it the influence of the books he read? Or of some of my customers? At first I thought I could settle the matter by clapping him on the shoulder and telling him to pay no attention to such nonsense. He seemed a very biddable lad, and I believed he’d obey me in that as in other things. Little did I know him, and little did I know the age we live in, and its passions and obsessions.
    According to my nephew, we have an appointment with the end of the world