When the writer was attacked, he was delivering a lecture. A young man came onto the stage and stabbed him. A short, agile young man with a stooped back. After hurrying onto the stage, he was dazzled by the dense audience below and lost his balance. For a moment he swayed behind the writer. A clumsy apparition inside a halo, or one of the homeless people near his building after an excessive injection of fentanyl, assuming their characteristic posture—the posture he had tried with all his strength to avoid before going onstage.

Yes. He had hesitated in the audience for a long time. Again and again he gripped and released the knife handle, imagining that in everyone's impression he would be efficient, cruel, as clear as the declaration he was about to make.

He swayed behind the writer for one second, two. Only then did the ageing writer turn. Before their eyes could possibly meet, the young man drove the knife backhanded into the writer's neck, glancing at the audience as he did so to observe their reaction.

The whole room erupted. Shouts, prayers, astonishment.

The young man pulled out the knife. Drove it into the writer's stomach. Then into his eye, leg, arm. His movements grew increasingly fluid.

He forgot what he had intended to say.

The subject of the writer's lecture was the freedom to write, the freedom of speech. He had spent a long time contemplating the subject behind the blinds of his study. He habitually sealed the blinds, locked himself in complete darkness, and now and then peered through a gap to inspect the courtyard.

The writer was himself a victim of unfreedom. He had spent more than half his life in hiding and under false names. The cause was a death order issued decades earlier. The man who issued it was a great idol in a distant country. He publicly declared that a novel from the writer's early career insinuated and insulted an idea he represented. An insult to the idea, the idol stated, was an insult to the regime and to himself. He therefore encouraged followers throughout the world to offer him the writer's head.

The young man was born many years after the order was issued. The great idol was already dead. The young man grew up on a street that had nothing to do with the idol, where every idea had sunk into ruin. On the pavement stood tents, excrement, syringes, underwear, and certain solid-seeming smells. Almost everyone injected drugs. In broad daylight, this gave their bodies the bearing of plants: bent, slow, indifferent to the passage of time. Drifting dust and tiny insects surrounded their faces like the desert's perpetually changing terrain.

Everyone on this street injected drugs except the young man and his mother. His mother came from the great idol's country and always refused to discuss her past with her son. What the young man knew was that she had endured an intolerable journey, reached this land, and given birth to him.

Now she was a domestic worker, an occupation she refused to discuss with her son. The memory that entangled him most was following her from one beautiful house unrelated to him to another, watching her carefully press doorbells and pay the beautiful owners beautiful smiles she had never given him.

I am here to provide service, she would say. Service, service: the pronunciation she failed to correct over an entire lifetime; her principal profession.

The beautiful owner would frown, like every passer-by who almost strayed onto their street, signalling a failure to understand the other person's language, life, choices, circumstances.

The young man and his mother rented the cheapest rooms. Rooms infested with rats. People died frequently. Then he saw police officers standing impatiently in a corner of the stairs, their enormous bodies turned away to defend themselves against an odour they considered the result of indulgence, a fate self-inflicted.

Inside their room, his mother erected a free tent collected at the end of the street to prevent rats gnawing the young man's ears at night. In the darkness she slept with her back to him. The young man punched the air.

He dreamed of becoming a boxer.

The writer was to give a lecture, his first public appearance in a long time. Hundreds of people would attend. His wife tried to stop him. His children tried to stop him. He told them he could not wait to meet the assassins who had accompanied him for decades, to thank them for their astonishing perseverance and faith. If he delayed much longer, he feared they might die before him, nursing their grievance.

What the writer did not tell his family was that he had made extensive preparations for the lecture. He believed the world had broken down to such a degree that he had to make a moral choice. Out of obligation, not because he truly expected to change anything. This moral temptation submerged his fear and shame of appearing in public.

A similar moral temptation, a passion, had urged him decades earlier to write the novel the great idol called blasphemous. In truth, he had never directed much attention towards the idol. In his pages, the man's character differed little from those of paranoiacs and peeping Toms found in certain streets and alleys. Perhaps it was this fairness that offended the great idol.

The idol, who had fashioned himself a lover of literature, studied the writer's novel closely in his old age, placed himself into one character after another, and misread it at every point where misreading was possible. Servants observed that crazed curses often came from his bedroom, whose floor was covered in fragments of pages. A day later, he would order an attendant to bring another copy. In his final years, he even wrapped it in the cover of a holy book and carried it into temples and palaces, like someone in search of a thrill.

Police later discovered that the young man had never read the writer's book. Haltingly, he confessed that he had read two pages; the book's powerful insult to his beliefs made it impossible to continue. In fact, he had once happened to open it at a stall. But he recognised none of the dazzling, almost boastful adjectives. Not one word.

Police went on to discover that the young man had barely read the great idol's holy book either—far less than the time he spent watching short videos posted by the idol's followers.

After his boxing dream died naturally from lack of concentration, he remained for long periods in a basement. A place whose rent depended on his mother's charity and which neither police nor drug dealers considered worth visiting. The city's wastewater rushed through pipes beyond his wall.

As he watched the followers preach, he spent no effort understanding the connection between one proposition and the next (this was also the part the followers tried hardest to avoid). He used most of the time to imagine.

Imagine the father who did not exist. Imagine that perhaps his father was the great idol. Imagine the hero's welcome he would receive if he set foot in the motherland. Imagine the mission he carried. Imagine that he was not a speck of dust passing between human-shaped plants, but the incarnation of a truth increasingly trampled, mocked, humiliated.

The young man drove the knife into the writer's stomach. Into the writer's eye, leg, arm. He did not hurry to deliver a fatal blow. He had changed his mind. He wanted to experience the moment.

But a member of the audience pinned him from behind. Another took the knife. More people pressed down upon his body. He panted like a donkey, the prepared sentence slipping from his lips.

His head was forced against the floor, obliging him to meet the gaze of the writer in the pool of blood. With all his strength, he rolled his eyes upward to escape the writer's scrutiny.

The writer blinked his remaining eye and murmured, I won.