The Writer told us what he knew about the President. As he spoke, I looked alternately at him, then at Lara’s pallid face in an effort to make out what she was thinking. The President had grown up in a poor family, his father a religious clerk. As with most children of the populace, he had been registered at a free military school. According to the Writer, here the President had been brainwashed and taught that our nation was surrounded by domestic and foreign enemies alike, and that the duty of protecting it had been given to the military alone. They then set out looking for traitors. After finishing school, the President had married, had children, and taken a low-paying government job in one of the country’s troubled areas. On reaching higher ranks, however, fortune had smiled upon him, a wave of nationalistic fervor making it possible for him to rise to the position of state minister.

  “And the upset in the balance of the nation coincides with this period, as it happens!”

  As the Writer nodded his head in approval of these words, I once again found myself admiring Lara’s logical acumen.

  “Yes, he had the sort of mentality where running the country means pitting political, ethnic, and religious groups against one another. He saw this as being the epitome of politics.”

  The truth is that I didn’t really know much about these things. You couldn’t exactly say that I took an interest in politics back when I was living on the mainland. I knew about the contentious election, protest demonstrations, the state of political disquiet, the arrests, the military trucks roaming the capital’s streets, but I didn’t have the foggiest notion about the magnitude or causes of the matter. The official notices broadcast on the radio and TV had frightened us all, making us believe that we were facing great danger. I’m ashamed to say it now, but the claims of arrests, torture, and death gave us the sense that maybe their opponents deserved it.

  At long last I asked the Writer the question burning inside me: “Were you arrested too, during this man’s rule?”

  A shadow crept across his face, his voice growing hoarse, as he muttered under his breath something that sounded like, “That’s another matter.”

  Lara shot me a look that told me to keep quiet, so I did. No matter how hard we tried, there was just no getting the Writer to talk about his past. He’d erected a wall at a point in his psyche that no one could go through. You could get to this point, and never any further.

  As the two of them went on talking, I came to realize that my brain didn’t work the same way as Lara’s, nor as the Writer’s. I tended to focus more on the matter of the good and evil within people and would try to pull the discussion in that direction. A book I read years ago kept coming to mind.

  “Each of us is, in fact, an alligator!”

  They looked at me in astonishment. “Carl Sagan,” I interjected, “believed in something called the R-factor. The letter R stands for the word ‘reptile.’ The R-factor says that because humankind came into being emerging from water onto land, there are still traces of reptilian violence at the root of our brains, and that we are predisposed to violence for the purpose of protecting our territory. In other words, we’re all alligators.”

  At last, I’d managed to direct their attention to this point, now that the Writer had begun to speak of the good and bad within humankind as well. He mentioned Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, and the articles Freud had written about humankind’s destructive tendencies.

  He explained the subject of “nature versus nurture” to us at great length. Are people born evil or are they taught to be evil?

  “These are all just individual theories,” he explained. “I don’t think they’re enough to settle the issue.”

  We spoke for a while about our neighbors on the island. We had mixed feelings on this matter, really. It was clear that there was a group, though small, who were unable to resist the President’s threats and had taken sides with him, participating unwillingly in the massacre. They hadn’t shot at the seagulls, hadn’t broken the eggs, but had only shown up at the site for the sake of appearances. This was in contrast to most of the islanders, who had ignored these threats and hadn’t taken part in the massacre.

  I mentioned something else I’d heard late that afternoon. The President had called the musicians to the scene and asked them to play melodies to support the fight against the seagulls, as well as get people excited about the cause. But none of them had accepted this ridiculous proposal. Our musician friends played music that had such a purity and natural quality about it that you would often forget that it was music at all, believing instead that it was one of the natural sounds of the island. It was a part of our lives. Some evenings it was as though the sounds of the guitar and flute had been echoing on the island for as long as it had existed.

  As this conversation went on through the night, surrounded by the stillness of the island, the sweetly scented lemon balms continued to spray their intoxicating sap, while the ever more powerful scent of geraniums permeated the air, virtually transforming where we were sitting into a magic garden. Something I never forgot, never once put out of my mind, even as the heated discussion went on, was the heart-wrenching love I felt for Lara. I loved her so much that I ached.

  And indeed, my heart was truly aching at that moment. It made it seem as though no matter how serious and heavy the subject matter, everything we spoke about was trivial. I felt like I lived only to see her face and hear her voice. Were they beautiful? Sure, they were beautiful, but what an insignificant detail this was, in my eyes. Were something to happen to her, her face to change, or even to grow ugly, I wouldn’t have noticed. What captivated me about her was something far different from beauty. It was something ineffable: a certain air about her, a certain attitude, a delicate crack in her voice, a barely noticeable shadow across the edge of her lips, the tiny dent that formed on her chin when she laughed…all of these things, each and every one of them, were beautiful, but what mattered even more was that each of us was a twin soul to the other. This was our shelter, the kind in which you remain for a lifetime, and the kind that brims with the exquisite delight of every moment.

  Our long conversation ended with Lara’s words on Far Eastern beliefs: that each negative event experienced by a person leads to a closing of the person’s chakra, which in turn results in a spread of negative energy. And there you had the reason for the man’s evil. The Writer frowned, indicating that he wasn’t exactly pleased with our particular interpretations of the matter.

  “Then obviously the guy doesn’t have a chakra left in his body,” he said. “They’re all clogged up.” Then, as if he were giving a lecture, he said: “Look, you don’t understand the heart of the problem, which is this: these men are afraid of just one thing, and that thing is a question. It frightens the hell out of them when any questions are asked. And as for those who question the system, they keep up their resistance out of a sense of necessity, even at the risk of self-destruction. Just like Jesus Christ, or Spartacus, or many other examples throughout history. So please don’t go chalking the matter up to the goodness or evil of individuals!”

  “Your point is well taken, but then why is he killing the seagulls? It’s not as though they’re questioning the system!”

  The Writer hesitated for a moment, confused, uncertain of how to answer. Half-joking, he said, “Maybe you’re right. Ah! Don’t get me started!” Then, murmuring, “Besides, wherever there’s evil, everyone there is partly to blame for it,” he got up and tottered home. From the way he was holding his hands to his head, it was evident that his head still ached.

  Both the shotgun-butt blow to his head and the hours he’d spent in the woodshed must have stirred up terrifying memories for him, making it impossible to keep his temper in check, and we could sense from the tone of his voice that he was even a little angry with us. It used to be that he’d only get irritated with me over some issue involving literature. To the tune of: “Is your name Proust? Is your name Borges?” whenever he would catch me imitating some famous writer’s style. But we were in no state to talk about such matters now.

  After the Writer had gone, the two of us carried on with the discussion for another five or ten minutes and then finished our wine. Before going to bed, I told Lara the story of the sparrow and the hunter, meanwhile bemoaning the fact that I hadn’t thought to tell it earlier, because the Writer liked such stories, too. According to this story—told to me when I was a child—there was once a sparrow who alighted on a tree branch with her young in the middle of winter. By and by, they saw a hunter approach them, his mustache frozen, his eyes brimming with tears from the cold. “Look, Ma!” the baby sparrow said. “What a compassionate man he is! His eyes are full of tears.” After warning her young one to be quiet, the mother sparrow then said, “Never mind the tears in his eyes. It’s the blood on his hands you should be looking at!”

  Lara loved the story. Not only were we in the position of the sparrow, but we also knew how to deal with the hunter. We made our way to our bed through the garden’s intoxicatingly sweet fragrances, and began again to make love in our own way that healed us, a soothing balm on our wounds. The way she took me into her, her acceptance of me into her delicate body like a coy princess, was like taking refuge in the rejuvenation and life-saving mercy of a lake in the desert—a lake that you’ve discovered is real and not a mirage! At the end of our long and blissful love-making, and just before nodding off to sleep, I know very well what I felt. Gratitude!

  I was full of gratitude for her: a gratitude so deep that every now and then it would bring hot tears to my eyes.

  THAT NIGHT in the hours just before sunrise, the island witnessed the first mass assault by seagulls in its history. We had yet to discover this as we sprang out of bed, panic-stricken in our belief that a bomb had gone off inside the house. Still half-asleep, we ran to our living room in the direction the noise had come from, the fresh, cool air of morning hitting our faces. The windows were broken. We turned on the light. We saw a seagull lying blood-soaked in the middle of the room. It was quivering and in pain, on the verge of death. It died quickly, stiffening as its head fell to the side. The appearance of the blood-drenched dead seagull was ghastly. We’d seen the dead seagulls on the sea, and before that, the ones that had died along the shore, but this was something completely different, because it was inside our house. It was lying just in front of the couch.

  Lara was quivering beside me. As we began to get over our initial shock, we noticed the clamor and shrieks coming from outside. Glass shattered, the clay tiles on the roofs broke, and flocks of seagulls screeched.

  Daring to poke my head out past the broken window, I saw what seemed to be all the seagulls in the world, gathered on our island. It was as if they weren’t flying, but rather flowing, from one location to another as a single mass, turning the dark dawn’s sky to white. Their shrieks nearly deafened us. We heard shouts rising up from the houses. Then there was a clattering on our roof as well, as if someone had climbed up there and was breaking the tiles.

  We would realize the next day that this, too, was part of the seagulls’ assault. They had picked up large stones from the cove, which they were now dropping on the roofs of the houses. Gathering speed on their way down, they would smash the roof tiles like bullets.

  Though we had read that seagulls were an extremely intelligent species capable of organizing, when we noticed that some had initiated the breaking of roof tiles, while others had taken on attacking the humans, and still others launching kamikaze-style suicide attacks, we couldn’t believe what we were seeing any more than we could believe what we were hearing.

  They were carrying out a systematic, well-planned attack against the islanders and the houses they lived in, in a way that required thought and sacrifice. Some of the seagulls were swooping down on the houses from great heights, hurling themselves against the windows at inconceivable speeds. The resulting collision made for an effect like that of a bomb, the seagulls’ speedy death trajectory causing the windows of the house to explode. The gunfire we’d heard at the onset of the seagulls’ attack had stopped in the meantime.

  By the time morning had arrived, we were afraid to go outside. Because we couldn’t have remained under those conditions forever, after much effort I got Lara to agree to stay at home while I made a bid to stick my nose outside. I had gotten no farther than the garden gate before the seagulls appeared full of wrath overhead. As they began to strike at my head, it was everything I could do throw myself back inside the house, trying to protect myself with my hands.

  That day, we were able neither to go out nor to make contact with anyone. Every once in a while I would peek around a hidden corner to try to make out what was going on. The seagulls’ raid continued intermittently. We tried to cover the broken windows by nailing curtains over their frames, securing the others as much as possible with fabric and furniture. Then we took shelter in our room.

  What was happening to us had taken us by such surprise that we couldn’t think straight. But we were well aware of one thing: it never occurred to us to be angry with the seagulls. On the contrary, the hatred we felt toward the President had only increased for causing all of this in the first place. What was he doing during the attack, we wondered? What was he thinking?

  So the day went on like this, the seagulls never allowing us to go outside. It was no different than if bomber airplanes were flying over the island, as if an air raid had been launched against us.

  The next morning, a dense fog settled over the island. It was white as milk outside, the mist so thick you couldn’t see your own hands in front of your face except for a few indistinct figures. This was one of those foggy days that would transform the island into a fairy-tale world; never before had the fog pleased us as much as it did that day.

  Lara and I cautiously stepped outside and began to walk around, keeping our guard up. There were no seagulls in sight, but then again, you never knew. If they were to assemble overhead, we’d be defenseless. First we went to the notary’s house, where we also found the Writer, his musician friends, and some of our other neighbors. Their windows had been shattered too; their houses, ravaged as if by war.

  As could be expected, a significant portion of our meeting was spent cursing the President; he’d done nothing but ruin the island by coming here with his ridiculous ideas. The seagulls weren’t in the least to blame here. What was he going to do now, we wondered? The right thing would be for him to leave the island, to pack up and disappear along with his hateful grandchildren and that heartless wife. We got so angry that we fueled one another’s fire to such an extreme that we were overcome with the need to say it to his face. The Writer felt likewise, and he would be the one to relay our thoughts to the President. He had unwittingly become our spokesman.

  Together we set off in the direction of the President’s house. The fog was so thick that it seemed as though all the clouds in the sky had descended on the island and were drifting at ground level. When I waved my hand, I caused a swirling in the mist. A few more of our neighbors joined us along the way. The members of the island community were finding each other and pulling together automatically. Everyone was furious with the President.

  When we arrived in front of the President’s house, the first thing that struck me were the armed men waiting on the veranda. The sullen-looking men were standing guard with shotguns in hand, but we were so enraged by this point that we were unfazed.

  Speaking in unison, we said we wanted to see the President: “Tell him to get out here—right now!” When the men hesitated, appearing reluctant, we responded more forcefully than before: “Immediately!”

  The President showed up on the veranda a short while later. I couldn’t tell whether his face had grown pale or it only seemed that way to me, but it was obvious that he was considerably shaken up.

  “Well, there you have it,” he said. “Now you’ve seen just what dangerous creatures the seagulls are, haven’t you, my dear neighbors? You kept ignoring me even as I tried to warn you of that fact. You were defending these savage creatures against me. Tell me, just how are they any different from terrorists, huh? Just how?”

  “Do you have no shame at all?” blurted out the Writer. “Where do you get the guts to say such things? Don’t you see what you’re doing, don’t you see what’s become of the island, the state you’ve put us in?”

  The Writer was having a fit, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, saying, “Don’t you? Don’t you? Don’t you?!” over and over again. We backed him up, wagging our hands at the President as we looked at him in anger. His men seemed slightly confused and surprised. They appeared to be having doubts for the first time since coming to the island.

  I felt particularly proud of the Writer for the way he’d defied and nearly managed to scare the President that morning. He stood there fearlessly facing the President and his men, demanding that they give him an account of their actions.

  “What, you’re blaming me now?” said the President, though he sounded less forceful than before. “Am I the one who broke all the windows, all the tiles on the roofs? Am I the living bomb that attacked your houses? Was I the one to force you to stay indoors? Please! Let’s get real here! We should be putting our heads together to figure out how to save ourselves from this disaster, not blaming each other!”

  “It is not civilized behavior to kill the young of birds!” the Writer cried. “Attacking the seagulls, killing their babies, and smashing their eggs out of the blue like this is nothing if not the worst form of brutality there is.”

  “Yes! Yes! That’s right!” we began to shout, when the seagulls suddenly appeared overhead like bats out of hell and began diving down on us, tearing at us with their beaks. We tried to run away, our hands raised above our heads for protection, obscuring our view. Gunfire rang out, the sound of seagull cries indecipherable from human screams. We had no choice but to run to the President’s house, as it was the nearest shelter available. His men had taken cover at the edge of one of the windows, volleying a steady stream of gunfire at the seagulls, a few of them falling to the ground.