Rama and the Dragon

by Edwar Al-Kharrat

  You stretch your finger to my chin stroking a razor’s nick: How boyish!

  My arm on your bare thigh, the short white chemise rolled high, your belly brownish, round and tender. The light herbage dry. From the décolleté in the nylon appeared swells of your breasts. Full of relaxed, supple tenderness, emerging from your chest, they carry the riddle of love, in repose, invincible, mysterious.

  When we went down to the sleepy street, you said to me:

  In the last few days I have been remembering what happened in our enchanted city, recalling it a thousand times.

  I said to you: Yes, it’s as if it occurred in a strange dream, that it didn’t take place …

  You said aggressively: I believe it actually happened.

  I said to you: Yes.

  I hadn’t wanted to deny that it happened. That wasn’t my implication. Was there an accusation in your sharpness, in your defensive leap on behalf of this reality dream besides which my world is empty? Even now I cannot believe it happened. I think of it as a dream shared by chance. How can I be certain that the world surprised me, in its last rays, with this mad joy that falls outside the melodic music of the spheres, given its sharp, wild sweetness?

  You said to me: Won’t you accompany me upstairs?

  Our ascending movement stopped. The electric environment of the lift fell silent. Beneath the light, between the walls of this illumined white well, you held my face with your tender hands, turned it to you where I found your lips anew. The beat of cymbals, the rich notes of deep brass echoed in the loneliness of the empty, glowingly-lit box. Our lips come alive, vibrating, turning and squeezing the flesh of joy slowly exploring by touch alone the walls of mutual yearning. The breath of your heaving chest feels warm between my arms. Only by your wind does the world’s ship move now; your breath fills the effulgent sails, makes the ship’s mast plow the dark, wet sea—in victory.

  He said to himself: Where are the happy moments in the story of this love, in the story of this man? There are not many. That was one.

  He said to himself: It surprised like a confirmation granted but not asked for. It realized the desired promise, at the same time carrying boundless annunciation. How rare these moments of happiness, and how debilitating.

  He did not say to her: O my love, where have the days of annunciation gone? Has the morning of our love touched night so quickly? I detest the night—I detest the night: far face of love’s rock, elevated, cutting, massive, and closed in.

  He said to himself: I will not allow the dream to crush me.

  In his depths lurks an open-eyed solidity. The night neither comes nor goes, and there is no morning. The eyes of a dark sun burn with a mineral black light.

  When evening fell … night became vast wings of heat. Of silence, closing in. The step of hours falls off. Loneliness has its many long hands and dry-boned fingers thrust into the wet earth, leaving a bloodless, voiceless wound. Each shriek of her name wounded the earth anew.

  He said to himself: This is not true. It is not happening to me. This cannot be what actually happens. This unbearable, childish pain. Yet he is not a child, he who is suffering now.

  Pointless.

  He said to himself: Childhood suffering has passed away. Hasn’t it?

  He shouted to the dark walls: Mad? Am I becoming mad? Losing my control over reason? This is funny, petty, absurd. But it is happening to me. I can hardly believe what I see once more! Once more? This is happening in front of me in 1971 in a room in an apartment in a building on a street of a crowded city. This is not happening in the clouds or in some dream. In this chair, among these books, papers, magazines, pinenuts, mechanized music from a Japanese recorder, a yellow lampshade with two one-hundred watt bulbs, a glass top of an old desk, wood and stone sculptures, copies of paintings by Rubens, Renoir, and others, pens and inkpots—all the rubbish people possess and live with. This is where it is happening. I stretch my arm, oppressed by a power that cannot be defeated. I supplicate—is there anything else worth doing? I whisper, fearing I might be heard, your name:

  Rama … Rama …

  A wild call erupts from my depths, from something alien in me. I myself am alien. I stretch an arm in resistance, in hope of a response I know isn’t there. From behind the white ceiling falling on me I supplicate. Yes, I supplicate. Nothing for it but the fervor of prayer, the pressure of nightmare, the agony of beseeching the woman I once embraced, was in love with, hated and loved, whom I took to my heart, knowing her utmost depths: The warmth of her womb, the delicacy of her breasts, the sternness of her eyes, the groans of her rapture, her glory and her defeat, and the taste of her tears. Every day I die. Every day I thirst for this divine woman, this seer and child, this unhappy, serious, laughing woman, the eternal playful lewd and virgin saint. And I don’t know her: she’s a stranger, even if she’s a part of me that cannot be severed. There is no end to her now or ever. An attack of madness? No, enchantment doesn’t befall me. Nor is it magic or passion. A thousand times, every day, I decide to end all this, thinking I can make the break. And a thousand times I find myself once again mired in the sludge of your love, immersed in a succulent dream earth, beyond my will. A stone wounds my ribs. Immersed in sticky muck, I say: I shall uproot the dream from the soil of myself. I shall uproot myself from the dream’s wet earth, even if it leaves behind a piece of me—severed, red, dripping dark liquid. I want the surface of a vast salty ocean with no horizons—no heavy waves blocking my mouth. I open my eyes seeing the water’s thick dregs, the world spread out. And when I wake up I find myself going, always going, to you, invading your world. Which is my world too though I can’t recognize it. Hence, I live by you, but not with you. Isn’t all this true?

  He said to himself: You cannot be sure of what is happening to you. You cannot believe anything while fighting the deadly storm. When death comes, you will deny it, as well. You will not believe: this is a recurring death, an unbearable breaking down, a happening that cannot be grasped.

  He said to himself: In the end, is it an arbitrary matter, in fact wasted and meaningless? Even if she knew of my struggle, she would find it unworthy of mention or, at the most, strange, unnecessary, incomprehensible—all of which amount to the same thing.

  Could she respond with light sarcasm? Pity? Tolerance and acceptance? Understanding and appreciation, or sympathy? Unbearable … All of it amounts to the same thing.

  So what do you want? No one needs this drama.

  Mikhail was standing on the stone-path winding across the shallow gray-green waters of the swamp. He filled his chest with the brushings of salty air. From the tense, transparent horizon a few distant calls of Bedouin, playing or quarreling, bustled. Their wild tone mixing in the distance with an incomprehensible, suppressed boyish gentleness. Successive bullets buzzed and fell sluggishly from the ceiling of the world: the stones of fragile, tender-fleshed dreams fluttering down in desperation. Bullets tore their offered breasts on the nearby shore, on the fence, atop the mounds of black bricks. A few drops of blood oozed, appearing sparse and round on the brown broken flesh, dark heavy points, all of them red springs, like cruel eyes widening behind white, brown, and gray dream feathers. Tiny, the delicate beautiful wings did not help, nor did the breadth of the vast skies. These heart-birds had flown in a thick wave, fluttering upward, running away with their lives from an overpowering danger that pursued them from beneath. Their silvery bills are closed now. Such tender dreams from the world’s ceiling will not find a gravedigger, not here on the salty, sandy soil of the earth. Instead, they are sold in the market place—for a trifle, to satisfy a small craving. Their young brownish breasts hold bones split by the final strike; a little blood oozes.

  I wanted to hold you to me: you, the dream and the world together. How plentiful what I used to want, yet how strictly necessary.

  His arms swung in the air, balancing the forward movement of his body in small leaps on the slippery stones with their wet smooth faces. The green-yellow tufts of the water-moss thr
ived and swayed in the salty waters whose wavelets flowed with the sounds of fresh kisses in the holes within the stones.

  He gripped the railing at the stairway, the touch of rough rusted iron scraping his hands, electrifying them. He heaved his body up by the oblique rails that shook and bent under his weight. The dried wooden risers groaned as he stepped on them. His eyes fixed on their winding, ascending lines, past dark-green memories whitened by salt and sun, down into slits of water glistening between the uniformly straight cracks ahead of him. The rhythm of the swaying wood beneath his feet produced the feel of easy, flexible resignation, mounting with light rapture in his heart. He takes a long road-stretching along the heavy gray waves—as if returning to a forgotten home. Now he goes beyond the sharp reed thickets around him. Between them: stagnating green froth on the surface of dark, dense water. Between the reed tangles lie discarded, rusted cans, one of a pair of wooden slippers—wet and floating without the leather strap—and a black glistening rubber piece from a tire. This broad, dry board walk—with its very innocence and its spotlessly clean, unembellished, wooden body built above the froth, the tangles, and the scum—compels him toward the vast, high water. At an iron stairway immersed in water waits a boat. In the distance, out of a dull foggy gray line, shimmers the far desert shore. Behind it waver ancient white Roman towers and, vaguely delineated, kilns for brick-baking, massive structures nearly effaced by the distance.

  The salty air carries a rare fervor of freedom. His feet obey. Into his body comes something like the lightness of soaring into new spheres.

  Close by, a gravid white gull with broad wings expires in silence. Its fall describes the resolution of a blind-intentioned threat.

  She had told him: Darling, don’t turn off the light. I get frightened at night when I wake up alone from my dreams.

  The world has hurt you, my love.

  Who among us hasn’t been hurt by the world?

  We bear it, nevertheless.

  Courage did not come to your aid. Your harsh self-honesty, your commitment to duty—like that of a diligent girl—and more, did not come. Your insistence on attacking, all the earnestness you meet others with, all this desperate struggle for acceptance and affection, all this search that never ceases from giving and offering—offering everything until the very end—this search, this search you cannot resist, provokes you, pushes you relentlessly to a kind of a mad desire for peace and security, for belonging and approval, for pleasing others, for the sense of being wanted and beloved. A child searching for the mast of security and a salvation net as she treads a path populated by ghouls and monsters, finds that the leaves of her green dream have withered and fallen at each blow of the wind.

  You had come in the morning. When you entered the sleepy apartment its voiceless walls were blocking all the waves of the outside world, the strokes of waters having become light, almost forgotten.

  You were next to me on the arm of the chair, not wanting to relax and stay still, or to let your body surrender to my room, which was strange to you, a room in fact filled so often with you, without your knowing anything about it. I put my hands on your knee. Your face was a mask, yet fires blazed yellow in your eyes. The cloudy morning sky behind the room’s delicate, transparent curtains yielded me a touch of temporary relaxation of wounds throbbing calmly, wounds that have since become that bygone moment impossible to cure and never healing.

  The coffee I made for you, after you sat watching me having my breakfast, saying you never eat in the morning and do not need anything. A cup of coffee later, with pleasure, is in your hand now, having cooled without your drinking it. You look around in a room strange to you. Later I learned that it carried a message of rejection and frustration for you. You said that the puritanical inclination in you bars you from many things. You had wrapped yourself with heavy wool and heavy determination. You handed me your first letter without signature, out of context. I read it behind a certain fervor that clouded my eyes:

  I went out in the afternoon alone wandering, seeing my figure reflected in the glass of shop windows. Somewhat lonesome in the crowded street. No one familiar in it. My image in front of me again and again, sent to me by this crowded world; I do not find a thing in this image. I reached Cinema Radio, it was dark and there were crowds. The tumult of oblivion was tempting and I surrendered. And here I am writing to you in the movie’s cafeteria, torn by contradictory desires: to run away from you and to come to you … I want to tell you I am happy because you exist and I’ve met you.

  My darling, I tore your letter in a moment forever repeated, a moment of anger, rebellion. I had been yearning for a certainty that continuously ebbs and flows in rituals of a pathetic drama that both of us enact, playing among others the role of the dispossessed without my knowing the words of the script.

  Silence. In my heart the ever-renewed fear of losing you. This petrified, defaced hollowness that does not shake off, that does not slide off, this fear of losing you, hovering and irrational. As if vaulted by an unmotivated will. Don’t let me lose you. This is not a supplication or a request. It is no more than reporting on a realistic, essential matter. It is the rock of the earth itself. Don’t let me lose you. I shall not lose you.

  Of course our lips did not join. I did not recognize in that room the feel of your body wrought in the torments of a mysterious, but non-sensual yearning. You remained inside your other land with its obscure borders. My hand on your knee feeling beneath the transparent nylon hose—a strange land that I love and whose contours I do not know, that are inaccessible, distant from my touch.

  Our farewell was hurried, our kiss awkward, perplexed.

  On that morning, in that room, you said to me: I want to please everyone. I cannot change my nature … I know this, I know the reason for it, therefore I should be healed, but I am not. I thought knowledge healed things.

  Why tell you that knowledge is tormenting? And what are your torments? Are they so strange that I can’t fathom them? Vulgar tattered maxims? Truths with distorted faces? Shaggy stones carrying inside their marble the spark of green flame?

  He said to himself that among his errors, his sins, his crimes, is that when he loves, he names what he loves. Among his defeats and failures, this is one, at the very least. How bitter is this least! Just the same, he did not tell her:

  My love, pleasing the world is not possible.

  She would not have been persuaded. That much he knew.

  She said to him: This is part of my psychological make-up, something I can’t change.

  Another crime—if he wanted to give it a name—was this: I wanted my love—our love—to be a desperate gamble, the torment of gazing with our open, determined eyes at the Gorgon’s distorted face that kills whoever gazes at her. But after gazing I wanted it to go beyond killing into the heart of blazing darkness. I wanted—and I still want—to lift with our naked arms together all the heavy tombstones immersed in the soil, to dig with our bare bodies-together—all the hollow bits—in front of the fire of open eyes—in the wet, sticky, earthy mud. This very mud is a rich element that has all the innocence, all the power that goes beyond both condemnation and innocence.

  Because you are the dearest to me.

  Despite everything, despite having hurt you—I too know this—and you having hurt me.

  Your loneliness, your lonesomeness, I know it. I bear its burden on my broken rib with its spearhead, white-bone projection, in the air.

  You said to me: There are essential and huge differences between us. Perhaps we have nothing in common apart from loneliness and a certain search.

  You were asleep, your wonderfully brown and round face on the pillow. I gaze at you. I am not quenched. In my mouth a dry bitter thirst. The small lamp behind you was shedding light on your arm. On my lips the taste of my kisses on your brown upper arm with its relaxed flesh and with the tender folds between your arm and your full spilling breast. I turned around to put the lit cigarette, propped on its butt, on the shiny wooden shelf in the inc
arcerated night of the room.

  You turned about suddenly in your sleep, raised your head, eyes open. Did you see me? There was no recognition. One instant in the silence of the sparse light: the gaze of a strange woman on a strange man in one bedroom.

  You fall back. As usual, silence penetrated by repressed mania does not allow me to sleep. Waiting without end, without arrival.

  In the dead silence moans came out from your chest burdened with unbearable weights. A long stretch of moaning—lonesome, strangled, hopeless, not a call of request or expectation. The despair in it was final, complete. An unbearable loneliness. My love, who will rescue you in the hollow, dark region in which the breath of loneliness exhales on you alone? Who can penetrate the boundless stretches of your exile and reach you? This moaning, I still hear it in a terrible dream that never ends.

  I wanted to leap toward you, to put my arm on your shoulder, to graze your soft-skinned cheeks with my lips, not to disturb you in your sleep, just to bring you back to me, to take a load off your chest, to embrace you, to remove your fear of loneliness, to warm your lips with my love, to tell you: My love is here.

  Everything was shaking around me. I was on the bed facing you, frozen in an incomplete movement. I wanted to reach you. I didn’t make a move.

  The moaning emitted from your crammed, stifled chest became softer, suppressed, surrendering to temporary oblivion, to the silence of regular breathing, in total distance, in an exile forbidding my arrival or your return. Neither you nor I … No one … Nothing … The world ceases to be. Nothing … Except that I turn and put another cigarette, propped on its butt, slowly extinguishing, on the wooden shelf with its glittering dark mahogany color, beside the glasses, the book, the key, the silver and copper coins, the tickets of a play we did not attend, the ends of many cigarettes propped on their butts, extinguished and cold, whose fragile, trifling ashes are still on my lips, feeling dry, bitter.

  You had said to me: By the way, don’t get upset. It happens to me occasionally that when I sleep I emit a moan as if someone is murdering me or the like. Don’t worry. It means nothing.