‌Truth and Method

Aziz sighed and looked about the square as if trying to find some escape from the memory. He moved his shoulders uneasily, glancing at me in the hope that I would offer some explanation. But I said nothing. What could I have said? His experience had been of the same order as everything else that evening.

Aziz sighed again. Without trying to convey the association of the ideas behind the words, he said: I suppose there is always the expectation that telling others will help in understanding.

Understanding what? I asked, and he flushed as if I had posed a particularly obtuse query. Why, what happened to them, of course, he said.

I felt the need to reassure him. I hadn’t realized the memory of his encounter was so fraught with misgivings. Rising to my feet, I walked over and embraced him. In a reassuring tone of voice, I said: Those two young unfortunates weren’t visitors from the netherworld, my dear Aziz, they were human in every sense. To contend otherwise would be to give way to errant superstition, and there’s been enough of that already concerning the events of that evening.

Aziz shook his head and said mournfully: What you fail to see, and what I have probably failed to communicate adequately, is the great distraction those two strangers have been for me. Unlike you, I’m no teacher of life; I’m a humble man, a waiter in a café, and a modest devotion to duty is all I can offer to complement your storytelling expertise. When something happens for which there is no explanation, it unmoors me.

I understand, I said.

He cast a despondent glance at me. Do you, really? Perhaps you do. After all, you’re a master of memory. More than most, you know about these things. All the same, can anyone truly know what it means to be human in this day and age? Is it possible to know what darkness resides in the heart of man? I ask these questions because it seems to me that there are times when the truth hardly matters any more, though of course one cannot dispense with it. It’s what makes sense – what really makes sense to oneself – that counts for me.

I’d been standing next to him; now I moved away and addressed my circle of listeners. I didn’t speak to any particular member of the group, but my gaze fell on each in turn as they sat cloaked in their blankets and hanbels, rapt absorption in every line of their faces. Speaking slowly, in an even, unhesitating tone, I said:

Certainly it is possible to know what elements constitute a man. Consider me, for instance. You know me as Hassan, the storyteller, for that is how I’ve chosen to introduce myself. I come from the highlands, and I am here to entertain you, because that is my calling, as it was my father’s and his ancestors’ before him. All around me the city spreads out its wares – its many narratives – and I survey them as if from a high place and determine which are worth the telling and which must remain untold, consigned, perhaps with good reason, to the darkness of oblivion. You have gathered around me in the expectation that my imagination is what it used to be, that you can rely on it and on my powers of narration. Tonight, however, I have set up things differently. Tonight I invite you to marry your memories with mine and trace an event altogether unlike any other in our experience. What will that entail? More than anything else, our trusting one another, because it is this element of trust that will give our investigation its freedom, its boldness and tenacity. But who can be the guarantor of its truth? And who among you will stand up and testify that there was indeed a story such as the one that we are now engaged in telling? For each of us carries deep within ourselves a chamber filled with secret memories, and it is a place we would rather not reveal.