The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat Page A

incidents of my nurse’s tales struck an echo which filled me with indescribable delight and agitation. I felt that I had become a child again. At this very moment as I write I experience those sensations. They belong, all of them, to the present. They are not an element of the past.
    It would seem that the behaviour, thoughts, aspirations and customs of the men of past ages, as transmitted to latergenerations by the medium of such stories, are among the essential components of human life. For thousands of years people have been saying the same words, performing the same sexual act, vexing themselves with the same childish worries. Is not life from beginning to end a ludicrous story, an improbable, stupid yarn? Am I not now writing my own personal piece of fiction? A story is only an outlet for frustrated aspirations, for aspirations which the storyteller conceives in accordance with a limited stock of spiritual resources inherited from previous generations.
    If only I could have slept peacefully as I did in the days when I was an innocent child! Then I slept tranquil and easy. Now when I awoke my cheeks were crimson like the meat which hangs in front of butchers’ shops, my body was burning hot and I coughed—how deep and horrible my cough was! It was impossible to imagine from what remote cavity of my body it proceeded. It resembled the coughing of the horses that bring the sheep carcases each morning to the butcher’s shop opposite my window.
    I remember well, the room was quite dark. I lay still for several minutes in a state of semiconsciousness. I used to talk to myself before I fell asleep. On this occasion I was convinced that I had become a child again and that I was lying in the cradle. I sensed that there was someone near me. Everyone in the house had long been in bed. It was the hour just before dawn, the time when, as sick people know, one’s being seems to transcend the boundaries of the world.My heart was beating hard but I experienced no fear. My eyes were open but I could see no one, for the darkness was intense. Several minutes passed. An idea, a sick man’s idea, came into my mind. I said to myself, ‘Perhaps it is she!’ At the same moment I felt a cool hand laid on my burning forehead.
    I shuddered. Two or three times I wondered if it was the hand of Ezraïl. * Then I fell asleep. When I awoke in the morning my nurse said to me, ‘My daughter’—she meant the bitch, my wife—‘came to your bedside and took your head in her lap and rocked you like a baby.’ Apparently a maternal feeling had suddenly awakened in her. I wish I could have died at that moment. Perhaps the child she was pregnant with had died. Had she had her baby? I did not know.
    Lying in this room of mine, which was steadily shrinking and growing dark like the grave, I had watched the door throughout my waking hours in the hope that my wife would come to me. But she never did. Was not she to blame for the condition I was in? For three years, or, rather for two years and four months—although, what do days and months matter? To me they mean nothing; time has no meaning for one who is lying in the grave—this room has been the tomb of my existence, the tomb of my mind. All the bustle, noise and pretence that filled the lives of otherpeople, the rabble-people who, body and soul, are turned out of the one mould, had become foreign and meaningless to me. Ever since I had been confined to my bed I had been living in a strange unimaginable world in which I had no need of the world of the rabble. It was a world which existed within me, a world of unknowns, and I felt an inner compulsion to probe and investigate every nook and cranny of it.
    During the night, at the time when my being hovered on the boundary of the two worlds, immediately before I sank into a deep, blank sleep, I used to dream. In the course of a single second I lived a life which was entirely distinct from my waking