The sun paints the yards in front of the wooden houses in its particular brightnesses, changing the dust and sand into embers on the flaming rocks. Nicola enters his wooden house. The house consists of a single room. In one corner is an iron bed, similar to those used by the sick in hospitals or by miners and army officers. The room contains an eccentric collection of stones and instruments, relics from the life of a mining engineer; and there are maps of the desert on the wooden walls. Nicola has not eaten this day. He remembers that when he sees a can of fish on the iron table. He purses his lips in a gesture of denial and lifts a liquor bottle only to find it empty. He picked it up yesterday and also found it empty; and he will do the same thing again later and again find it empty. For where would liquor come from, in this desolation?
Nicola stands naked in the room. His European body long ago acquired a dark tan. The thick hair on his head has turned whiter than the white of cotton. He is neither thin nor heavy. He stretches his hand toward another bottle of red-colored alcohol, puts it to his lips, and pours some of it down this throat, and it burns like fire inside him. He presses his arms to his chest and belly so as not to twist in that familiar pain. It is another form of punishment he inflicts on himself.
Nicola walks over to a chessboard on its small wooden table, picks it up and carries it outside to the yard. On the board are several chess pieces in their faded black and red, standing in the same positions they occupied when Nicola suspended the game two days ago. He stands over them, contemplating them in his nakedness. The red king faces a direct threat from the black bishop, which is being guarded by the knights. Meanwhile the black king faces an indirect threat, but Nicola presses the attack with two red rooks. The black continues winning. When it is the red's turn to move, Nicola takes hold of the red king and retreats with him to the home square of his knights. Then he moves around and repeats his attack on the red king, using the black rook from its position behind the bishop. Then he withdraws the red king to the second bishop position and continues to attack. After a pause he changes sides to face the oncoming attack and escape from it. For Nicola this is no mere entertainment or means of killing time. He is himself the player and his opponent; he is the red and the black at the same time.
Between two moves on the board, Nicola re-enters his wooden house and gulps another helping of burning alcohol. Writhing, he returns to the yard and pursues his attack on himself and defense of himself, in the ritual of suffering that he has established. But the result as well as the ritual is predetermined. It is inevitable that the game will have a loser at the end. And Nicola's indomitable strength lies in the fact that he knows he will lose, and yet in spite of that he continues to play the game.
How strange the chessboard is, with its carved pieces like little statues that move across it, each according to its position and prestige. The king is the ruler; the knight and the bishop, attendants. The queen is his support; the rook his citadel and haven. As for the pawns, they are his subjects. All come out of the same package, ruler, knight, and peasant; but each faces his lot according to his destiny.
And Nicola's destiny is failure, and hence failure is his lot. He stands there at his chessboard as if crucified on an invisible cross, re-enacting over and over his destined failure, repeating it like that ancient Greek who was doomed to push his rock upwards forever to the impossible summit. No sooner would he reach the top, than down the rock would come tumbling, and he'd descend the mountain again, only to ascend with it once more. So Nicola repeats his penance daily until the sun disappears in the West, and blackness crawls thickly over the yellow, red, and green of the desert, covering it completely. With evening the scorching heat turns into a stinging breeze, then becomes numbing cold. The mountains loom like mythical shadows in this infinity. Nicola cannot see clearly anymore and finds a blanket to wrap around himself. He crouches with his back against the rocks of the Darhib, rocks which seem to have turned to ice, until Mars appears, carnation red in the East over the Arabian peninsula, while Jupiter swings in the West above the Libyan desert. And Nicola's thoughts wander in the firmament.
SECOND
WHENEVER ANYONE SPOKE OF HIS OWN COUNTRY, Nicola would feel dejected and withdraw from the conversation. For what land could he call his own?
His family had emigrated from one of the small Russian cities when he was ten. His father settled in Istanbul and practiced dentistry. That was all Nicola knew of him before he himself left Istanbul and traveled with his brothers, leaving each one in a different place as he went. Nicola stole the “secret” of knowledge from his odyssey, but the price of this knowledge was exorbitant. Over the more than twenty years of his travels the letters from his brothers had lost their way to him, unable to follow him in his constant relocations.
Nicola settled temporarily in one of the Italian cities, where he came to know a mining engineer from one end of the city and a woman from the other end. The woman was a Caucasian emigrant in her early thirties. She possessed that type of striking beauty that conquers the senses, overwhelming them with an ecstatic tremor of promise from the first look. At that time, Nicola was easily captivated by women. And yet this attraction to women was marked by a certain reserve that might be interpreted as chastity. Such an air of chastity seemed out of place in Italy, in the place geographers name the Mediterranean basin, where women are considered bait in the sea of appetites around them.
The Caucasian woman told him, “I will make a copy of you, Nicola, and nail you to the earth with it.”
With each woman he met, he dreamt of love and understanding that could reach such a point of perfection that they might travel together through place after place, constantly journeying rather than seeking the warmth, security, and comfort of one spot. None of the women he met could really understand this, and so it always became a friendship on one side, and love on the other, and this ironically made his search for the perfect partner endless.
This contradiction must have been what attracted the emigrant Caucasian whom he met on one of the Italian beaches. He learned that her name was Ilya. She ran a restaurant on the beach with her father, a brutish, surly man who used to beat her in front of customers. When Nicola was hired to work in the restaurant, she gave herself to him almost immediately. He had been at work for only six or seven hours and had not yet become acquainted with his new sleeping quarters in the rear of the restaurant's storeroom, when Ilya seduced him for the first time. She did not succeed in possessing him this way, however. His body was with her, but his soul was far away, longing for new and varied places, places where it had never been, while she talked about the restaurant, and about her dream project of a casino perched high on a rock overlooking the shore and bathed in soft lights where lovers would dally under artificial greenery. Security was her dominating hope. Nicola was a young man of flexible principles whose judgment had not yet ripened, so he gave in to her and married her. Within a year she had a child.
She told him, “I will duplicate you, Nicola, and bear you a boy who will nail you to the earth. He will weigh down your wings and keep you from flying away.”
But she bore him a girl, and they named her Ilya. And so he had two women in his life, each named Ilya, both linked to him by feelings of deep friendship which failed to become love; one was his wife and the other his daughter.
When the elder Ilya began plotting to get rid of her brutal father, who represented a stumbling block to her ambitious plans, she planned on using Nicola's help. She told him that one blow on the back of her father's head would be sufficient. It would relieve the old man of all his suffering and leave them with enough capital to forge young Ilya's future.
During those days, Nicola frequently met his other friend, Mario, the mining engineer; and his friend mentioned to him a great land with an extraordinary history, a land split in two by the Nile. It reached from the desert to the shores of the sea and was filled with mountains containing a variety of minerals and ores. It was a land not ruled by its people. Anyone who wished could go there and explore and obtain a permit to drill and eventually become the owner of one of those great mountains.
Nicola became obsessed with this idea and started to dream of himself as the owner of a mountain which would make him unique. His dreams relieved him of listening to the constant plotting of his wife against her father. Finally he made up his mind to leave,