Balthasar's Odyssey Read Free Page A

that dates from its beginning. Those alive today will have the dubious privilege of witnessing that macabre culmination of History. As far as I can see, this doesn’t make him feel sad or depressed. On the contrary, I think I detect a sort of pride — tinged with fear, no doubt, but also with a certain amount of exultation. Every day he finds some new confirmation of his predictions in Latin, Greek or Arabic sources. Everything is converging, he says, towards a certain date. The date cited in the Russian book of the Faith — if only I hadn’t told him about it! — 1666. Next year. “The Year of the Beast”, as he likes to call it. He backs up his belief with a whole array of arguments, quotations, computations, learned calculations, and an endless litany of “signs”.
    I always think that if you look for signs you find them, and I write this down once again lest, in the maelstrom of madness that is seizing the world, I should one day forget it. Manifest signs, speaking signs, troubling signs — people always manage to “prove” what they want to believe; they’d be just as well off if they tried to prove the opposite.
    That’s what I think. But I’m rattled just the same by the approach of the famous “year”.
    I still remember a scene that took place two or three months ago. My nephews and I had had to work late to finish the inventory before the summer, and we were all exhausted. I’d collapsed on to a chair, with my arms circling my open ledger and a nearby oil-lamp beginning to dim. Then suddenly Jaber came and leaned over the other side of the table, so that his head touched mine and his hands pressed down painfully on my elbows. His whole face glowed red, he threw a huge shadow on the walls and furniture, and he whispered in a lugubrious voice:
    â€œThe world is like this lamp. It has burned its ration of oil. Only a drop is left. See how the flame flickers! The world will soon go out.”
    What with being so tired, and with all that gossip about the coming Apocalypse, I suddenly felt quite crushed by these ominous words. As if I hadn’t even the strength to sit up straight. As if I must just sprawl there and wait for the flame to die away before my eyes and the darkness to swallow me up.
    Then the voice of Habib rose up behind me, laughing, cheeky, sunny, salutary.
    â€œWhen are you going to stop tormenting poor Uncle — eh, Boumeh?”
    â€œBoumeh”, meaning owl or bird of ill-omen — that’s what the younger brother has called the elder since they were children. And as I stood up that evening, suddenly crippled with aches and pains, I swore I’d call him that too from then on.
    But though I do so, and curse and swear, and mutter to myself, I can’t help listening to what Boumeh says, and his words nest in my mind. So that I too start to see signs where before I saw only coincidences. Tragic or instructive or amusing coincidences — but where once I’d have just exclaimed in surprise, now I start, I’m worried, I tremble. And I even think about changing the peaceful course of my existence.
    Admittedly, recent events were bound to unsettle me.
    Just take the business of old Idriss!
    Just to shrug my shoulders as if that didn’t concern me would not merely have been unwise. It would have been reckless and blind.
    Idriss came and sought refuge in our little town of Gibelet, sometimes known as Byblos, seven or eight years ago. In rags, and with practically no belongings, he seemed as poor as he was old. No one ever really found out who he was, where he came from, or what he had fled. Persecution? Debt? A family vendetta? As far as I know he never told anyone his secret. He lived alone in a hovel he was able to rent cheaply.
    The old man, whom I rarely came across and with whom I never exchanged more than a couple of words, came to the shop last month clutching to his chest a large book that he