They would go to the magical strange place that had known their steps.
As the exhausted train limped into the station, he glimpsed her. She stood on the platform. His heart raced madly, yearning, excited. Among the crowd, not caring about anything else, he drew her into his arms, felt her smooth cheek with his lips. Once again the scent of her erotic, fragrant femininity inundated his face. Mixed with her perfume it reminded him of ecstatic nights. His hand in hers, the two of them in the car, alone, on her ground—which hotel? The Mena House? Shepheard’s? The Semiramis? Or perhaps the Fayoum Auberge … yes, the desert road at noon, hot, glaring, full of mysterious promises.
At the Auberge we took care in front of the staff and chambermaids to play down our happiness, to be on guard concerning our smuggled love. I had brought you a gold ring. You put it on, gently, surprised for once, silenced. The large room above the broad wooden staircase was dim. As soon as the door was closed, rough waves of yearning threw us into each other. With you between my arms, the barriers pressing the founts of my life fell apart in the delicacy of your flesh. Demolished without sound. I filled my heart with your serene eyes, having known none more beautiful. At last I felt your warmth melting the ice around me. I tasted your hot soft lips. Rama, Rama. My strange and wonderful love. Do you love me? You say to me: Yes, yes. I can hardly believe my hands, my face, my lips. I can hardly believe that such love, such joy, exist. The world becomes compliant, reconciliatory, harmonious. Freedom and meaning become sensuous realities between my very arms, across my own body. I can hold them. And they, me.
Suitcases split apart. Clothes fly about. You rejoice at the presents. I smile. For the first time we go to the window and open it for the air of the salty lake, for its still waters with their silvery glitter shining like dark steel plates. The waters’ strong smell drifts in upon hot midday air. The call of a gull in the midst of the void sounds warm, sweet—like the wound of knife in tender flesh. The call falls down from above then goes up again. We laugh for no reason, simply because we are together, in love.
Your limpid virginal rounded bosom—its sweetness eclipses all ecstasy, warm, soft, intoxicating. Your successive hot breathing contains the taste of sweet nectar. This light-headedness, where all things lose their weight, leads us once again to our first steps toward radiant skies illuminated by the sun of your eyes. Then we fall down like predators to the depths, moist with love’s dew where wild flowers grow in wilderness gushing with dense fertility and fierce ripening.
The peace of the resolution of contented reconciliation accepts the loneliness of life. Rather it forgets it, negates it.
We went down to have lunch, then we had a siesta, side by side, and we did not stop from talking and laughing. Your eyes were always smiling, amorous. In them no concealing or watchfulness. Beneath them no quick-moving alert intelligence, but rather assurance and glee.
In the afternoon we walked along the fields. The breeze owned a cool touch. We descended to the salty puddles on the soft sandy shore of the lake. We collected handfuls of whitish gray powder that melted through our fingers. We passed our fingers across each other’s lips and tasted the brine’s sting and laughed. While I was looking at your brown lips, I felt incited by a longing for fulfillment.
None of that happened.
He did not say to her: The fancies of my senses are bitter food that I would not replace with anything else. They are the bread by which I live, the blood-wine that can never satisfy my thirst. Yet I would not stop gulping their destructive liquor.
He did not say to her: After our return, life became pallid, transparent like fancy itself.
Sunset was proceeding on Tea Island. Conversation had drifted into one of those gaps that happen from time to time. Mikhail lit two cigarettes. When her lips pressed on his cigarette at the very place where his lips had left a slight moisture, he felt between his lips the blow of a fleshless kiss, glittering, passing weightlessly.
While she stood in front of him looking at the trees on the far shore, he called to her voicelessly: Rama. Rama, I want to know. Where is the truth between us?
Small Peking ducks in the dark waters stopped quacking. On the pond’s far shore the dense trees seemed threatening, dismal, burdened by a mysterious spell.
A drop of salty water fell into the still pond. With its folded wings and craned neck, a black swan glided silently along the water. The Casino lights poured out in hushed blue. Already people had gone away. Waiters sat in the kitchen talking in low voices, as if afraid.
The swan stopped at the iron fence with its slender bars, in front of their table. She floated in place, looking with glassy dark-green eyes. In her rounded body was an invincible, embedded, challenging softness.
Mikhail stood up. He jumped briskly to the pond, his feet plunging into the loose mud. Water went up to his knees. His hands held the swan, his fingers surrounding its long neck, pressing against its slender rounded ribbed bone. The silk black feathers slid over his hands, exciting him.
The swan did not emit a sound. She did not raise a last cry. Her sharp and extended beak did not open. Her wings did not flap or flutter. In her agony she nevertheless kept her lofty neck strong, solid in the squeezing hand in the dark. Mikhail plunged yet deeper in the water, wrapped his arm around her body, clutching it to his bosom. The stagnant water was at his face. He tasted its muddy flavor with its light rotten sweetness. The swan remained towering, haughty, delicately round, floating on the surface of the water without being engulfed by it.
The mud gave way beneath his feet. His legs slipped into soft welcoming tender mud pulling him down with irresistible longing. Inside he yelled out a silent cry of repose in the face of the swan’s body sliding, almost escaping from his hold, while he quietly squeezed the folded wings in his arms over the cold rounded flesh.
The mud opened. He plunged in, sucked down by dark stillness. Yet he turned the silent swan that leaned on her side between his arms.
One large circular wave spread out on the surface of the water reflecting a final redness from one torn piece of cloud sinking to the horizon.
All of this really happened.
When earth became illuminated and morning arose, I went down to the pond. There I saw a woman, not of human progeny. I shuddered to look at her. Her skin was tender, soft. Her love persists in my flesh.
Light filtered through the world’s ceiling—lambent behind white clouds. Behind the clouds lay a low building, the Auberge. The sun’s blaze and gusts of salty wind had engraved tiny dots in its gray stone, in the interlaced planks of its wide gates. The glass windows in front were shut with curtains drawn. A delicate fence meandered roundabout, broken here and there. The lake water seemed silvery to his touch, solid with light waves. Small mounds of bricks were pressing against the soft sandy earth, darkened by salty seepage.
A bullet cracked the air from afar. He said to himself: It is one of the Bedouin hunting quails. Then adding: To sell them to tourists and townspeople. Suddenly the sky ripped open with the rumbling of a MiG fighter jet, amplifying its thunders among the clouds. It swept away, the thunders trailing off in the distance.
When he had opened his eyes on waking, he had said to himself: We’ll take a boat, go out in the midst of the lake.
He was stepping on stones jutting through the shallow water. The water flowed toward a wooden bridge lofted over it. His feet felt the wet stones’ solidity. But with each step, his black cloth shoes felt as if they would slip on the sticky water moss. Small snails sprouting on the stones cracked apart, inaudible in the spacious air. He was hopping from stone to stone, smiling to himself, stretching his arms to balance his quick and precarious movements. He felt new life—an alertness in the air with its pungent smell, its slight chill. For a moment he stood inhaling from the delicate white sky.
Rama … Rama …
A tormenting, burning yearning to go back to her soft warm arms, to embrace her shoulders, to return to her eyes: an attack of yearning. The suppressed call rises again. Rama, Rama,
what happened? Where are you? How do you stand with me now?
He said to himself: This yearning will not crush me; its rising waves will not drown me and envelop me like a wave of tears lifting me up then dropping me down. I will not let these crushing waters swallow me in their depths and fill my eyes with hot salt.
I burst into a scream, blocked by the salty waters.
Strong will and firm intention do not have the last word.
She had said to him: He does not add a dramatic touch to things.
She was talking about a friend of hers whom he did not know. How many friends does she have? What kinds of relationships? Was she accusing him, hinting at the dramatic thread in his comprehension and view of things?
He looked at her as he always did, trying to find out who she was.
He did not tell her: Doesn’t it happen in life? Doesn’t every moment play a role in a hidden tragedy—whether one is resigned to it or not—a tawdry and voiceless tragedy? This persistent pressure to sink to the ground and plunge into the soul’s soil—isn’t it sheer pain? The world, of course, is drenched in pain.
Yes, she would have said to him, no doubt: Yes, but let’s not add a halo of theatrical light. Let’s have a sense of proportion, let’s not be banal.
The tragedy, my love, is that our life is banal. And this tragic element recurs. It follows no structure, no formula. Maybe pain is both its form and its essence. But in every moment it has the heat of matchless cruelty. Words have no meaning; naked living flesh can only shiver with the burns of this tragedy. There’s no formula here, no word to embody it, communicate it, signify it. This I know—but not how to say it.
Everyone knows what I’m saying, one way or another.
No escape from the siege of banality, no escape from the shabby face of this tragedy.
Desire’s unquenchable yearning envelops him in his silent room and it cannot be resisted—no matter how much denied.
She had said to him: In the afternoon, perhaps—but only perhaps—I can come to you. If I can’t, I wish you a happy trip.
Happiness? Another story.
He does not add a dramatic touch to anything. But this pointless wait, this intimate tie that enhances his life—albeit through yearning, through silent dialogue with her—has been ruptured now. He yearns simply to hear the tone of her voice, to feel the warm tone, the warmth of her breath, of her sound. He does not hear her—as if he will never hear her. His will in all this is necessarily frustrated. Nothing will happen. There are no means. Everything has been cut off. He said to himself: Go down now, go and look for her in the nocturnal streets of Cairo, along the Nile, and at the bridge we crossed together.
I leave the side street to my right—which leads to narrow alleys crowded with fantasies, half-truths, and suffering—going toward the old house that continues to haunt me pressingly, bringing to me the awesome terrors of madness. I go beyond the street for which I harbor useless resentment. I forget it for a moment as I forget many things, or I cruelly push them to oblivion with my hand. I ask the taxi-driver to take me on the nocturnal road. Stopping at a cigarette kiosk, I ask the way to her. I turn into slanting streets and knock at her door.
A thousand apologies immediately take shape in his fantasy, a thousand arguments. The scene of a strange visitor in the late night—as he travels at dawn—and with it, events evolving. From the shade, characters from her other life appear, forming a circle around him. He is confounded by a siege of greetings and welcoming. Ahlan wasahlan. Would you like a beer? Have you had dinner? How are things? He suppresses his fantasies, squeezes with his hands the blood of clumsy imagination—for none of it will happen.
What remains is loneliness, the eternity of loneliness. The horizon that cannot be reached. When will he exit from this vast, empty loneliness with no need, or hope, for an end?
When the tear-wave came over him—as it comes to him often now—and ebbed, bobbing him around despite his efforts and tearing him apart in its total prison, the whole house exuded the smell of fear. An irrational fear—beyond comprehension and grasp, the breath of something alien and lurking, threatening him in an ambiguous yet sure way, present and lasting. The windows were open onto the night heat—a blank, locked heat closing on the frightful alien breaths inside him. He could not move. His resistance to the fear was crumbling. Despite earlier intentions, he lifted the telephone receiver, pulled himself together as he was once again ridiculing himself; none of this was new in his behavior:
Hello! You there, how are you, ‘Amm? What are you doing? Not at all, I’m leaving in few hours. I wanted to see you before I go. Okay, yes … if you can come … I’m alone at home … yes … Certainly, I feel rather lonely … if you could come!
A part of him ripped into shreds; he felt the tremor in his voice:
Not at all … In fact I’m very lonely and somewhat terrified.
He laughed hesitatingly.
—I don’t know, never … a fear like this … that has no meaning … This is not the first time that I’ve traveled … After an hour? Yes, great … I’m waiting for you.
Then, total collapse. Everything lost its contours. All measures, useless. Nothing was left but waters of pain and loneliness gushing with difficulty from the rock, sculpting the rock. Nothing left but a suppressed, hoarse howling, the howling of a beastly grief with its sharp, bared teeth, though without resistance.
He said: People repeat themselves. How boring!
He said to himself: And inside of ourselves, we used to think what was happening to us was exceptional, had never happened to anyone before, could not happen again … Just this call rising from within me, despite me, with your name … Rama … Rama … stirs the muddled waves of love in this dammed-up sea, making my eyes water. Always, always.
Do you remember the night you came to us; we drank together and spoke of your last trip. You were gay as usual; quick and terribly clever in your observations, full of brilliant, sarcastic yet good-hearted comments on your roommate—how you used to find the toothpaste beneath the pillow, and a piece of her underwear suddenly and without reason in your handbag, next to your handkerchief—and we laughed. You also narrated how you had two drinks yesterday and became tipsy quickly. You said you get drunk quickly, and you told me later that you discovered, at one point, suddenly, that you were about to become an alcoholic. And that you resisted. You said you got drunk with your friends and you sang. You said your voice wasn’t at all good for singing, but you broke out in song.
Suddenly I saw you in the desert of the ancient moon, dark bodies of cars, randomly parked at a distance with lights off, winds dry, the taste of soft sand in the nocturnal air. The desert chalet with the door open, people around you, moving about and sitting down, in my painful and awful blurred dream. You singing gaily, not caring. In your singing I detect a tone of despair, as well a call for help, a tone that betrays a challenge sweeping away conventional rules. You, seated in pants on the desert sands.
Was that night the first of Ramadan? Or was it a different night?
You had said to me:
I’m once again inclined to do reckless things. I’m back in the mood of the old rebellion. Perhaps the impossibility of recklessness in front of me, in front of us in this story, pushes me to rebel yet again, defying everything.
He said to himself: My heart cries out with rebellion, my love, and I suppress it. I want to break down the world. I want to break the dream’s rock with one strike, collect the fragments between my hands in wild joy and throw them in the face of other rocks. I want to plant them with the fierceness of a rebellion that cannot be controlled in the heart of the petrified world, and drown them. And from them make stalks emerging beneath the sun, splendid in their dishevelment. I want to squeeze this yearning that implodes in me—between my burnt-out palms, struck by pain—until my heart dries out, solidifies into a column atomizing unto the impossible. I want to collect you—you, my flying, dispersed enchantress—to my chest, my treasure, my glory, my desire and make
you whole. I want to erase with taps of my hand all the freakish disfigured features from the face of the world. I want to tear with my nails the flesh of falsehood that drips as a slow, dull liquid; to strip off the rocky skin, to destroy, destroy, and destroy oppression and savagery—silently, sadly lurking behind its eyes. How dear you are to me! I want to hold in my hands your softly brown face and press your cheekbones, press until their dough is shaped by the bones of my hand, and my empty hands are full in one instant and forever.
The waters fill up with drowning animals howling, open-mouthed, devouring flesh with their long teeth.
I said to you: Yes, yesterday you were at the chalet in the Pyramid neighborhood.
You had not told me where you were; you said in sudden, alert danger as if aware of something: How do you know?
You know how to defend your frontlines, but I too occasionally know something about the art of maneuvering. You related how the straw mat burnt from a cigarette stub or a fire spark. Was there meat grilling along with drinking and singing in this scene? And you told him: Surely man, you are either head over heels in love or numbed.
At that moment I heard in your voice a strange tone whose echoes continue to stab me, each blow more percussive than the last.
On your birthday a car carrying the most dear person in the world turns to the right—not following its route—to a crowded street, toward an old house with a dark, narrow door. We are in a taxi, the front-seat passengers jamming their shoulders together. A reserved glance embodying a secret. A song written on a paper scrap. A talk-in an accent I know so well—on the phone. A white letter reaching far with the words “Cairo, after midnight” at the top. A thousand thrusts tearing my mind with suppressed bare-toothed howling. How light is the weight of things that produce the fabric of death. How plenty, those things around us.
You said to me, in your eyes that playful, tender look:
Are you jealous of him?
—I am jealous of every man in your life. Every man.
Rama and the Dragon Page 3