Free The Pyramid by Ismaíl Kadaré Page A

us from the weight of its stones . . . Hell, that’s just daydreaming! Have people lost their wits? Can a witch regurgitate all that she has eaten? To make her do so you have to put her to torture, cut her up into little pieces—come on, witch, spit it all up, or 111 knock up your mother too! But that’s just nonsense. Supposing you did get hold of it and squeeze it hard, what would come out of it?—A huge fart and nothing more.
    Cheops’s jawbone hurt For a second he felt completely empty. Then he blinked. They don’t like you, he said aloud, It wasn’t yet compassion that he felt. All the same, now that people were foulmouthing the pyramid, he felt less ill-disposed toward it.
    He was naturally entitled to despise it. He could even detest it. But they had no right... no right to go so far ...
    He had fallen into the grip of some devilish tool. It was hard for him to understand what he should like and what he should abhor. Sometimes he felt as though it were he himself who bore that horrible lump on his back, yet it was the others who were complaining of it.
    He felt no bitterness. He and his ugly hump stood together, together against the world.
    Cheops raised his eyes. What he could see spread out against the sky was his own dust. That’s what it was. The dust of kings. Alas! he sighed. Sometimes he regretted not having adopted another means of crucifying Egypt. One of those immemorial devices that his ministers had come up with from the ancient archives, about twenty years ago, on that unforgettable November morning. He could have set people to digging that great underground hole that would have been undetectable on the surface ... Involuntarily, he often found himself thinking of how such a hole could be designed. First darkness, second darkness. On down to the fifth, the seventh darkness, the darkness of darknesses. Pitch dark. That’s what the Egyptians deserved. They weren’t worthy of his uprightness. They had always preferred shameless manipulation and occult oppression. Whereas his own pyramid rose up right there, in the very heart of the State, as if to say: Here I am!
    They don’t like you, he repeated silently. His exasperation with the pyramid had now given way to a kind of pity for it. “But I’ll show them . . . I’ll show them . . . No, you don’t need them to like you!”
    He would not force them to love the pyramid, though that would not have been very difficult. He would get his own back on them in another way. He would get them to spin out paeans of praise for the pyramid in exact proportion to their hatred of it. He would thus degrade them remorselessly, humiliate them in each other’s eyes, in the eyes of their wives and children as well, and in their own consciences. He would destroy them little by little and in the end turn them into nothing more than worms.
    Cheops realized, he was going round in circles like a lunatic. He got a grip on himself, and though his knees had not stopped trembling with repressed rage, he managed to keep himself still. Since he had come back to the marble shelf, he naturally decided to calm down by reading the biography of his father’s afterlife. But to his amazement his hands failed to reach out for the sky-blue scroll but went instead once again toward the other. He had heard that drunks who wake up with a hangover ask for another cup of what had put them in that state, because oddly enough it was the drink most likely to clear their heads.
    The word postpyramidal, which caught his eye in passing, gave him the same kind of fright as the sight of a snake in years gone by. He had expected it to return ever since he came across it in the report before last. It hadn’t been a chance occurrence ... Another era ... The postpyramidal period ...
    So he wasn’t the only person to be racking his brains about what would happen after the completion of the pyramid. Others had thought about it before him seriously enough to forge a whole new word for it.
    All of a