Death and the Dervish

by Meša Selimović

I am forty years old, an ugly age: one is still young enough to have dreams, but already too old to fulfill any of them.

But surprisingly, long afterward I remembered that shameful weakness as an infinite relief: for a brief moment I had been separated from everything and returned to my childhood, under someone’s protection, freed from years, events, and painful decisions.

And around us only the quiet dripping of time. And within me only powerless indifference and lifeless silence. I was like an infidel, I had no inner light.

weapon or a shield. Everything depended on it, not because it would explain anything, but because I could lose all my courage if it were inappropriate. It could make me look ridiculous and impose itself like a judgment about me.

We should kill our pasts with each passing day. Blot them out, so that they will not hurt. Each present day could thus be endured more easily, it would not be measured against what no longer exists. As things are, specters mix with our lives so that there is neither pure memory nor pure life. They clash and try to strangle each other, continually.

Even when I would come to, I did not suffer very much; one has to have strength to suffer.

For him kindness was like the sunrise: something to be watched.

I was not worried about a betrayal or a slip of the tongue. Peace was settling down on me, like pollen, like summer dew, because of those two men. They were two shady trees, two clear springs. Maybe it is a deception, or my memories are turning into odors, but it seems that I really did smell a freshness and a faint scent wafting from them. I do not know which, of pines, of woodland grasses, of a spring breeze, of a Bairam morning, of something dear and pure.

Their luminous serenity, their friendship without exclamations or ornamental words, their pleasure from everything they

She lived for herself, perhaps without even knowing that she was inconsiderate. Like water, like a cloud, like a storm. But perhaps also because of her beauty. I do not have a weakness for women, but her face was hard to forget.