Rama and the Dragon

by Edwar Al-Kharrat

  Calling her by name, voicelessly, covered up all other voices.

  He said to himself: When you lose something, you know it will not be replaced. No making up. Yet you refuse the sensation of loss. You revolt against it with all your might, just as a living creature revolts against all that death brings about. You reject it as if you were demolishing heaven with your naked hands, as if you had fallen on the soil of the grave knocking its ground with your closed fists and saying No, No. Yet the pit remains inside you. The loss is there. Something that’s been mangled, removed from the very fabric that envelops your life. There is no hope in retrieving it. You must bear it, bear the unbearable void of loss, live with it. In fact, why even live? You see yourself dead. You carry death with you. A dead man walks inside you. A moving coffin concealing a buried man without a lid and without shrouds: you.

  Angry, sad, wild nights. Stormy, agitated nights. Knocks demolishing the grounds of the heart by rebellion. Frustrated calls and rejection hiding inside the total silence.

  He said to her: I spent angry, sad, and wild nights.

  She said to him: Why?

  Because I didn’t hear from you. You wouldn’t talk to me. I haven’t seen you.

  She laughed. Is that all? All right, I’ll speak to you every day. But you’ll get bored.

  She did not, however, speak to him every day. She did not phone him. His self-mockery was not light, to say the least. The days became an infernal journey into his innermost being. The notebook of the journey had closed covers.

  In the light of a winter morning when they were by themselves on the dusty, broad, and black marble staircase she once said: As you wish, my love. I surrender to you.

  In his own country he had lived his life as a stranger. But at that moment he knew what it meant to be called ‘my love’ by the woman he also loved. He knew for the first time, and in her bronze-colored, tender-skinned arms, the taste of dwelling in one’s homeland.

  What was the use telling her that ‘my love,’ heard in his language and in a strange land, were sweet thrusts? But hadn’t all lovers said this already?

  Love and death were unspeakable, unrepeatable. Truth, an impossible illusion.

  He did not tell her: My own intuition of losing you has taught me that one loves alone and dies alone. I sense that even death will not obliterate loneliness. After a life condemned to loneliness we die, but even then there’s no deliverance. We meet no one. Death folds the book, seals it. And love? Love is a lie, a passionate desire to escape loneliness, an unrelenting rush toward complete melding into a union, a flaring together. But even then it revolves around loneliness. And it ends by consecrating a loneliness more bitter than death. We love alone. Love is an incurable loneliness.

  In the dark of night he screamed with shut mouth. Not true, it cannot be true, no.

  Silence. No response.

  She said to him: We have reached maturity. We can control ourselves.

  He didn’t tell her that convulsions had peeled off his reason, disturbed his equilibrium. He did not ask her which was truer, hence nearer to life’s fount: This warm union? This continuous presence at every moment, yes, at every moment? Or these painful convulsions?

  He wanted to say: But my love, I live them together, it’s a torrent, an embracing passion and regression, a rupturing blow, a continuous clashing and separating, a psychological fabric rupturing and soldering, splitting and uniting in constant revolution that fails to distinguish between truth and non-truth. Your love for me is both there and not there, asserted, refuted a thousand times a day in my fantasy.

  You said once: I love you.

  We were in the midst of blazing fire.

  You never said it again.

  Your silence. Your continuous closeness, yet remoteness, in whose various paths you defend yourself so well with sharp, alert intelligence. Your life runs in locked compartments, one barred from the other, separated. Desperately you protect each insulating wall. Dear heart, does the real you exist within this maze of ramparts? Behind the fortresses erected in front of my face? In front of the world’s face? In front of your own face? Do you exist in the world of these spheres that touch without overlapping? That accompany each other but never join? Do you exist in each lone world that runs strangely apart from the others?

  He said to her: Dear love, St. Michael is my patron, my guardian angel. Did you know I was named after him, the archangel? I was told the Nile wouldn’t flood unless Michael descended on his name day to the Land of Egypt and wept. One drop of his tears and fertile, red waves pour forth. Cracks of barren land fill with thirsty plants swaying joyfully in the soil.

  When I was little, they used to make fatir cakes on my birthday, the day of St. Michael, leader of God’s soldiers with his two-pointed sword. When I ate the oiled, glimmering cakes decorated with ancient Coptic inscriptions, I saw him—my angel, my guardian, my brother—attacking all the lies with his silvery armor and long lance, all the devils crowded in the dark.

  He did not say any of this.

  He did not say to her: Truth for me is the demolishing of ramparts, the outpouring and joining of life’s waters into a sea with open horizon, where two lovers in a frail wooden bark float upon its frothing waves.

  He did not say to her: What I want more than anything—for you, for us—is that you be free with me. Free from the need for self-justification. You, who have met with ghosts in your search through the night, must feel justified simply because you are loved. Love alone needs no further justification. It takes and gives without question. Dear heart, nothing explains or justifies you. Love for me is knowledge. Candor, a burning desire. I don’t want to say I accept you. Why accept or not accept? I only want to say I love you, all of you, without condition, without reserve.

  So I break the rules of the game. Of course. Life being a game, as is love. But I take the risk anyway. I put my heart, naked, trembling, stubborn in its faith, under the pangs of disclosure, without protection. What happens when the barriers and dams give way, when the imprisoned, anxious waters gush from the fenced compartments and collide carrying stony rubble?

  Frightening? Yes.

  The warmth of concealed darkness, of preserved secrets—I know these things. But I also know of bitterness and loneliness behind the ramparts. What happens exactly when the Self unveils its intimate disarray? When its incomprehensible and unjustifiable longings are laid bare? Yes, what happens when the drives of its frenzy and hidden demands are finally revealed?

  In loving you I find myself. Here is how it is: my love is for knowledge, for total wakefulness in front of every sound, every quiver in the voice, every twitch of the eyelid. That is why I find myself when you are not with me.

  A strange and extraordinary thing: the freedom of waves under pale clouds: you away from me. The doors are boulders, rolled tight before the opening.

  This too he did not say: Between me and everything, an insurmountable barrier now stands. Alien sky, alien buildings, people making sense no more than muddled things. I am separated. At sunset, from across the Nile, the air pierces my chest bringing no solace, no joy. The sting of noon sun, the silence of streets at night, the inhaling of cool morning air—all this carries loss, as if a veil, transparent yet solid, could not be removed from the eyes, a veil wrapping the heart, freezing me.

  I miss you.

  He did not say to her: Where is the bliss and peace we knew together? Where is the unspeakable joy in every touch, in every breeze? Where are the outbursts of life gushing, carrying us on the waves of imperceptible pleasures across our magical city? Where are the endless streets beneath our footsteps, their treasures for us alone, lit by bright lamps gleaming from the skies of night and heart? Where is our flourishing city without limits?

  Rama, where are you?

  She sat next to him, the buzzing of the car engine engulfing them—like stubborn waves breaking on rocks. People hurried by, benumbed, the two of them existed in a private world. He drove on the road of cosmic joy, of freedom
, of energy offered generously and potently. Her presence next to him felt abundant, plentiful. His arm crossed hers. He knew the proximity of her bosom, the fullness of her body. It brought him, via a hidden current, on-off, a promise of inexhaustible feminine richness, of sweet water lapping the walls of his soul.

  She said to him: If this happened to you, it would doubtless shake you.

  Her voice was meditative, a distant echo.

  Was that prophecy or promise, my enchantress? An intuition of what will be? Or the first step I didn’t know I was taking on the crust of an earth splitting with explosive grumble? Or were you merely beginning the incantation of your mysterious charm?

  You say to me now: I am happy that you exist, that I met you.

  But you do not go on.

  I feel in the tone of these words an inclination toward a coda, a step toward something finished. Your words, instead of delighting, open a permanent wound. I am convulsed, placed in the mouth of a volcano full of lava, melting all the hard rocks of age. How can two bare hands block such a flow? How can they hold up the structures of a world giving in to convulsions?

  Rama: name of bitter salty water.

  Nobody had ever known such a night. Years—a lifetime—had passed, the sky charged with alarms, the metallic growling rising, along with fragments of exploding sky, then going down in a silence lined with disaster. The quiet locked house at night was fragile, soft-crusted in the heart of the storm that destroyed everything around it. He had been enveloped in an innocent tired sleep, had not yet known the bitter taste that would never go away. The news arrived, while loud shabby music, a song of glory, love with a quavering voice—yours are my heart and my love—played on.

  The clamor deafened the heart, made it bleed. Hollow voices echoed in a desolation where even sorrow lost its meaning. May you live free … May you live free …

  Tears, suddenly. His cracked heart could find mercy nowhere. Love had been offered, wasted, even snubbed. Without his having any protective cover, the storm of tears shook him, threw him about in a savage solitude that would not dissipate. By morning, by every morning, the heaviness of stones sinking within himself, drowning him, refusing to let his heart resurface.

  That morning he wept. But never again. The strings of final solitude brought their music to him. The notes emanated from hearts tortured by old passions, ebbing through the many years though retaining the fire of buried pain, of world-encompassing sorrow. In a muffled way, while the winter sun streaked through his window, he wept.

  He said to himself: My love is always one. Sacred and intimate, yet captured by, offered to, something strange and unknowable.

  No, I cannot admit it. She calls on me, captivates me always. Resist as I might, it is in her arms that I find myself. There is a meaning in those arms that I miss in everything else. My hands are empty; my insides, an open pit.

  He said to himself: You have definitely reached the age of reason, you are a middle-aged man. So what now? Don’t you think this Oedipal interpretation is facile, cheap? Isn’t this matter disjointed, neither here nor there, exceeding the proper subject?

  He said to himself: Just the same I can stand it all. No matter the price, I can live by it.

  He used to think he was tough, did not break easily.

  Now he was prey to the melody of tears.

  He couldn’t believe when he settled down to prison night and called her name, as one might call on freedom, that she didn’t hear him. He couldn’t believe she didn’t know, perhaps even find his situation somewhat entertaining, indicating as it did a most wretched sensitivity. That her life might have other courses, teem with other demands, with other longings and fulfillments, seemed incredible to him. Her name on his lips, the first word uttered in the day, then again during his intimate journeys, he could not believe he wasn’t with her, that there could possibly be no response from her.

  She said to him: I am torn. I want to be close to you yet also to run away. I want to escape to a forgotten island in some far corner of an ocean, to wake in the morning breathing deeply and peacefully, without tension. I want to say to myself: I’ll skip rope in the afternoon! And know that I can do so. Run, play, skip rope.

  She wasn’t smiling. Only her voice carried any flame. Then she smiled and said: Too bad all the islands in the ocean have been bought by American millionaires.

  He had said to her: You make me suffer.

  She said: If it’s any consolation, I’ve suffered no less.

  He didn’t like to pose insignificant questions just to get orderly answers—taut, well-aimed. But now a question he refused to articulate nonetheless refused to disappear.

  Why were you suffering, my love?

  Could there by a link between that which was torturing me, tearing me apart, and your own suffering? Or is it because you were over there, distant and unconcerned about me, the threads of your pain woven by other hands?

  He knew how real, bitter, and unique her suffering was. He also knew she would not allow him to put a hand on it. That with sudden, artificial chatter she would stop him short from approaching this elemental wound. She did not want the wound to heal. In her innermost, she didn’t believe it could heal. In her wound she found in fact a wild pleasure.

  What is the point of cracking with pain when there is no consolation?

  He said to her: Don’t run away from me any more.

  She said: Yes.

  The lights on the bridge were flashing, dying out, gliding over the night’s flesh without stabbing it. She pressed his hand in hers, but was absent. She had entered her private retreat. From then on, she dwelled behind fences while smiling at him. Sad smiles. After that, he didn’t see her for days—days as long as eternity. By then the tone of loss had become a leitmotif, a daily entering of his reckless breaths into an endless series of graves. This leitmotif did not lose—despite its fragmented recurrences—the violence of the original shock, occurring time and again, without end.

  He said to her: This fancy, this illusion—this running away in the name of freedom.

  He said (without saying): My love, we destroy with our own hands the structure of our former lives. We bang daily on walls of our self-made prisons, each wall erected over years, with sacrifices no one can evaluate. In these walls our love makes a window unto the sun, a fragment torn from the vast nocturnal sky. Relations rupture, rules collapse and fall apart. So do the light, essential wares of love and books. Other fragments lie torn, are left behind: the music of expectation and anticipation. Adventure steps to the door of an airplane taking off, ourselves within. Could my fancy arrive at a stone house amid olive groves near snow and old cedar trees? At a narrow road twisting under the second-hand car we bought in installments? At rocks’ surface moist with dew? At the abyss of valleys charged with the distant blue haze of lofty trees and shrubs?

  Such are the outbursts of chaste, innocent beasts imprisoned all their lives. Such are the fierce joys of fatigued bodies burdened by the work of erecting monuments to freedom, of creating the impossible. In one heavy blow the false is erased. Tones of muffled voices choke when colliding with the many lights and sounds wavering up, down. You get to know the warmth of dialogue. You, I—become we. We: a pronoun purified, no matter how wounded or polluted by bleeding.

  Having been defiled—and paralyzed—by the crime of silence my hand is spotted by the color of blood, my own and that of my brothers too. This hand, having not been raised, having remained silent, twisting yes, yet dumb, this hand now speaks.

  Enough sinning, my soul exudes a foul smell. It’s the stink of buried decay. Now you, Rama, in a strange, inverse, and miraculous way have purified me, liberated me. You have freed some of the serene-eyed passionate beasts imprisoned in me for twenty years. If you hadn’t freed them, they would have twisted forever behind the bars of my living flesh. For the first time you explore the extended horizons of your world. You come out from that solitary clouded region, half lit, half dim. You live your life as you wish, not from duty
. In fact, duty becomes liberation for you, for me. It becomes the unquestionable right of madness and the seizing of one’s own life.

  Isis, free beneath the fiery eyes of your father Ra, whether by light of the day or beneath the torches of stars.

  He said to her: This fancy, this illusion—this running away, this freedom.

  On that night she had said: We are not hurting others, we are not hurting anyone.

  He did not say to her: The very act of life implies crime and hurt. Either them or us. Or all of us together. Every step on earth, every breath inhaled, partakes of murder, destruction. We choose to kill ourselves, don’t we? Aren’t we really making a terrifying choice of no return?

  She had said to him: Can we construct without first demolishing?

  He said nothing. The force of things, itself, refutes any possible answer.

  When he was in Aswan he sent her a postcard: I remember you and miss you always.

  Later, when he asked her, Did you receive my card, a rosy color merged with the brown color of her soft complexion. She said: Yes.

  She said: You know that I torture myself more than anyone else. I’ve been thinking. Something has collided with us. After something collides with you suddenly, unexpectedly, you cry out: Careful! Why weren’t you more careful?

  He sent her a telegram—from the hot South packed with the vulgarity of traditional outmoded luxuries. He asked her to wait for him at the station. He kept speculating on how to sign the telegram. He spent long hours formulating sentences, choosing signatures, constructing and deconstructing in the spareness of his hotel room.

  He arranged everything, prepared for all contingencies. He would arrive two or three days before his official arrival date. No one would be waiting for him but her.