His family was singularly victimized by death. Something inside told him that, for this reason, perhaps he himself would live long, and a wave of sorrow swept over him. Every manner of death was reasonable compared with his brother the policeman’s: a man big as an ox killed by the brickbats of the demonstrators. What a death! He had not known who they were nor had they known who he was. Othman regarded what had happened with the eyes of a spellbound spectator. It made absolutely no sense to him. True, he learned a lot from the perusal of history; he knew about history from the most ancient times up to the eve of the Great War. He knew about revolutions, but he had never lived them or reacted to them. He had seen and heard about things, but always kept aloof and wondering. No common sympathy had ever gripped his heart to draw him to the battleground; and he was always bewildered at the way groups of eminent statesmen and their supporters fought each other. He had been hounded all his life by poverty and hunger, and this had left him no time to extend the range of his thought to the outside world. The alley shut him in, its preoccupations unknown to everyone else, savage, violent, unending. Today, he was conscious of one goal only, a goal at once sacred and profane, which had nothing to do, as far as he could see, with the strange events that took place in the name of politics. He told himself that man’s true life was his inner life, which governed his every heartbeat and which called for toil, dedication, and enterprise. It was something holy, something religious, and through it he could achieve self-fulfillment in the service of the sacred apparatus known as the Government or the State. Through it the glory of man was accomplished on earth, and through man God’s will was accomplished on high. People applauded other, indeed quite contrary, things; but these people were foolish and fraudulent. So he never forgave himself for not having secured a full view of the Director General’s room and of his singular personality which set the entire administration in motion from behind a screen—in precise order and perfect sequence, recalling to the ignorant the stars in their courses and the wisdom of heaven. He sighed deeply. He recited the Fatiha once more and said by way of farewell, “Pray for me, Father!” He moved around the grave, whose two headstones had fallen and whose corner had cracked, and said, “Pray for me, Mother!”

SIX