Rama and the Dragon

by Edwar Al-Kharrat

  It seems I have gotten used to sleeping in your arms.

  He smiled at her with a stoic tenderness.

  She said to him as she examined him with her large glowing eyes:

  I know I have a tyrannical streak in me, but you too, my darling, have that streak in you.

  My beloved, your hunger will be satiated. Your sins will be washed away. Your name will be hallowed.

  In the post-midnight light shed by the worrisome, northern summer sky in the partial awakening from profound sleep, replete with confused obsessions, she had said to him: Good morning, darling. Come as you are, quickly. But he had splashed cold water on his face, combed his hair in a hurry, and went to her striding softly. He reclined on the narrow bed. In the dawn, she was looking at him and in her wide green eyes there was an unrelenting question—incomprehensible, neither articulated nor silenced. He was kissing the fingers of her tight, plump hand with its jittery joints, stretching his arm behind her large mane of hair with its strong, exciting, dusty scent. He was feeling the pressure of her head on his forearm, was welcoming it. He attached himself to her grounded body lying on the bed under a light sheet. Inclining toward her, he reached with his hand for her full legs and gripped a thigh’s round, non-swaying flesh. He was silent, still—his hands separated, torn from him. His bones were lulled, his lips—no water running into them—hesitatingly explored the flesh beneath her delicate neck. The lips, open and tremulous, went down to the relaxed, slumbering breasts, while his hands were desperately silent, having settled on the curve of smooth, calm soil beneath her light, black moss. The dawn, enclosed and imprisoned in the room, was heavy and restrictive. Rama was now in his arms sleeping … sleeping.

  You sleep in the arms of your lovers, Rama, in your imprisoned dawn, not reaching the edge of dense light, while anxious wakefulness flows and ebbs at the threshold of your womb, without stopping.

  She said to him: Why should I wake up? What pushes me to wake up?

  Her eyes shine with reproach and request, not hoping for a response.

  The gall in her eyes. Is it the sediment of frustrating days and nights? Is it ambition with wings twisted, one unto the other, in the not completely closed circle of rejection? Is it an aversion to me? I did nothing. I was stranded on her long, narrow bed between the elevated rocks and the sand, as her arms poured toward the lit sea without reaching it.

  She said to him: Why do you look at me?

  He said: I take my provisions for the lean days.

  But of course I am still starved, gazing without quenching my thirst at the salt-watered, green lake.

  I am still calling on you: Rama … Anima … Mandala … My woman … My haven … My cave … My Kemi … My dream … O, merciful Ment, O Mut wife of Amon … O Ma’at, my mirror … My integrity … Maryam full of grace … Buried Demeter, her moist mouth rains manna and mercy … Her womb greedy for semen and destined by the circle of death and the joys of consummation … O mother of the falcon … Mother of patience … Mother of the swaying golden jasmine on the water … Rama …

  When she woke up she looked questioningly into his eyes.

  He said to her: You were with me.

  She said to him: I am, also, used to taking you with me wherever I am.

  He did not say to her: Liar.

  But she knew it and accepted it quietly without a move.

  He bent over her, kissing her full on the lips. Her kiss was neutral, hiding a great deal, knowing a great deal, not divulging a great deal. Her gaze, as he kissed her, carried a weight of self-containment. Her eyes that continued to charm him—those green, mysterious talismans, very close to his own eyes—were not flinching. Her breasts splay under the weight of his chest. He gathers them with his hands; she does not smile, does not sob, does not hold her breath. He unhands her breasts and goes up. His fingers feel the back of her neck, the ground of the thicket-roots of her hair. He holds tightly her round full neck. She looks at him without flinching, without questioning. The muscular neck under his palms is delicate, throbbing and swaying gently as if it were a wave flowing with gentle breath. He feels he is smiling—a somewhat distracted smile—while his grip is hardening on the body that is acquiring from now a special existence as if independent. Her arms stretched beside her are still. Her belly beneath him: strong and solid. The pressure of his twined hands increases a little. He knows he is not smiling now. He whispers to her, a warm whisper encompassing the world: Shall I strangle you, Rama?

  She says to him: Strangle me, my love.

  Without challenge and without surrender, as if she were taking a decision on a fact of life, important but not very serious. She neither accepts nor rejects. He can feel now her neck bones, both rock-hard and resilient, between his unrelenting hands, hands having their own will. In the grip of his palm muscles and finger bones, life waters run in the channels of her neck, in the minute veins. The soft, tender skin swells and rises a little at his finger tips. His hand is inclined toward another decisive, inevitable, unavoidable push toward an act of no return. Fetuses are conceived, plants, animals and rocks are created, spring waters gush out, earthly vales open to let the hands plunge in their mire. The face wallows in the sweet mud, kneaded with wild thyme. The torn limbs are seeds planted in the soil, limb after limb, the generous living flesh thriving and growing in verdure. O lady of the green, I pluck with my hands your ripe breasts. I bend and drown my mouth in your open, moist lips. My face turns over the finger traces—light embers—glossed by my tearful kisses. Your arms surround my head buried in your neck. There is no pardon because there was no guilt. There is neither anger nor contentment, only the funeral rites of love without candles or hymns; serious and meticulous, delicate and tender rites, and probably they mean nothing at the end.

  Mikhail descends the last stairs carved in the earth … The walls, made of Nile mud, surround the oasis that was deserted thousands of years ago. The tender white lotus on the distant columns’ conic capitals—their rocky youthfulness does not wilt. The numerous figures in relief are of men rending the skin of the hot sky and breathing in with confidence the sky’s pure, dark-blue waters. The soot of love-torches that blazed in bygone days is still black on the walls. The open vent in the wall is bright, drowned by the moon in this room in which the ancient prostitute-priestesses slept. In which they groaned and agonized over sacrificial passions, the roaring of virility attacking again and again with the strangling of the taut burial inside living flesh. The breathing of centuries-long dust wounds his chest. Her abundant hair is a forest untouched by knife—her redemptive ransom, during six days, at the talismanic door. In front of him her face flames with her green eyes, half of it silvery, delicate, soft, the other half pocked, torn, reddish, burnt. Its burns, having healed, leave the skin with dark spots and gloomy veins. Her eyes gazing besiege him with an unending supplication.

  He was awakened by dream rustle and dawn’s agitation. The room abounded with her—sleeping next to him—naked under the light sheet, her breathing heavy. He felt the moisture of sweat on her leg, conjured the ampleness of her brown, delicate thigh, and smiled.

  Suddenly he was overwhelmed by desire. He rolled over and put his arm gently across her shoulder. She did not fidget. Who could say for sure that she did not feel him, that she did not know in her deep sleep, in her dark womb, his darkly warm glow of closeness and kinship? Her breathing continued, in-out. Her hair was stuck to the side of her narrow forehead. The wide-open décolleté of her nightgown was sliding off her poured-out breasts. He drew his face close to her neck, recognized anew the fragrance of her sleep, the spice of her lush body. A biting sense of affection, contentment, and rupture coursed through his body.

  My darling, you will never know this moment. You suspect nothing—how complete my love was, how unconditionally granted, how hopelessly serene and unified. Purity without egoism, for you and you alone; tamed, hushed without anguish; its despair total and untainted. You will never know that I let myself be immersed by heavy waters, smiling
or about to smile, in this still, dark-blue sea of my love. Dawn was, then, this sea. Its shores: the fences of the world. I plunge into it. Its sky is boundless.

  He removed the white sheet, wrinkled by use, from her body. He brought down his face from the pillow and put his arm around her hips. He bent his knee slightly in order not to fall from the bed. He rested his cheek on the surface of her round thigh. The roughness of his chin on her tender spot, going down beneath it then holding back. The breathing of the full sleepy body reached him, mixed with the heavy-tasting moisture of the closed, concealed vent.

  His tranquility merged with an unfamiliar anxiety about the next moment, from the danger that it had not yet materialized or even been conceived; nevertheless, it was already carrying a threatening element. From day’s start, each moment had shrunk while he was still living it. When he lowered his face gently on the spreads of her fertile, sweet flesh—now soft and compliant under his solidity—he also fell in an abyss between two times, neither of which existed. Drowning in her body’s tranquility, he tumbled in a vacuum where there was no fulfillment.

  She did not join him; she was sleeping. Her hand did not stretch to join his. Nothing saved him. He could not find a thing to hang onto in his fall, not even when she turned to him—in a state between slumber and wakefulness—emitting a faint sigh charged with a sense of peace and contentment because he was there, because his face was upon her. She embraced his head with her arm pressing it tenderly, and said: Good morning … Darling, come to me. He said, while his mouth was having its fill from exploring her softness: I am with you, my darling. Where else am I? He amended, saying: Good morning. From the dense and sweet silt he lifted his face, while her arm pulled him toward her lap with gentle pressure. Suddenly and passionately he was falling on her open mouth.

  Still, my love, what is separating us? Why this open abyss between our bodies entwined by the sweat of our early-morning cravings? Why this estrangement annulling our very embrace, when your chest is pressing and buried in my arms and your thighs encircling my legs? Your eyes—two round glittering gems—under closed eyelids, where waters of passion and rapturous quests run. Our bodies not yet merged are hot, moist elements, still separate in their tight embrace.

  At the center of this universe, in the trembling giddy heart, at a point on the throbbing, profound circumference, there is an ever-wakeful eye—desolate, and in flames—calling but receiving no answer. It is not death—you will never die—that separates us. And it is not love. You will always love. You are what I love. Is it, then, indulgence? Is a wicked sword—dripping blood, semen, and curdled milk—snipping what’s between us? Your gorgeous tongue licks the sword’s scorching cutting edge. Your concealed scream is a moan of fulfillment, of pleasure and pain. My tongue—an enflamed parched skin—shrinks like an old parchment and falls. I can find no reviving word after dying from rapturous stabbing. All my body is wilted by dry wind.

  Her last quiver was a wave coming from afar. His heart melted, then froze. Her smile between one slumber and another seemed absent, content, self-sufficient.

  When he woke up from his little death, the window looked like a rent in the sky, secluded by its partly drawn white curtain from what he sensed to be the outside cold and hostile air. From behind the separating glass overlooking a bare yard, the ceilings—slanting in sharp-edged lines—seemed old, gray with soot. Alone her brownish round face showed from the sheet covering her: relaxed, content in the faint morning light, redolent of past desires.

  His bones felt light as he leapt from the bed. He looked at the narrow, square court: the stones of its gray floor cracked, clean, marble-like. In the petrified blackish soil of the cracks, no green flourished. The yard was empty. Next to the mute, unpainted stone walls stood a row of huge black round cans, closed with domed lids, moist with morning.

  The only tree springing from these stones with its slender yet solid searing-dark wood was crooked and bending, but not breaking. How many winters of loneliness had it borne? How many storms had it faced, twisting in front of wind-blows without breaking? He felt in his insides the aches and splintering of wood.

  He said to her as they readied themselves to go downstairs:

  Isn’t every leaf on every branch, with its minute, faded-white veins in the gentle green flesh a miracle? Isn’t this laced verdure, delicate to the touch and winding around strong, soft-muscled trunks, this melodic green with infinite shades—mat green, mellow green, hushed green, whispering green, dazzling green, delicate green, dark green, emerald green—a miracle? Aren’t the tiny frail birds flying in the risky and expansive horizon, those animated shooting stars in the galaxies of vast black spheres, a miracle? Hundreds, thousands, countless miracles are repeated effortlessly around us, without the least fuss, without drama. How bountiful all this is, how splendid and abundant! Yet how indifferent we are to miracles happening without interruption. Wondrous is that which cannot be described, wondrous is the silent weave of day and night, continuous forever.

  She said: This is what I find every morning when I open my window. I, too, love trees, as you know.

  He recognized in his wonder an element of naïveté. His was the wonder of children from back alleys, from neighborhoods denied greenery. His soul was captivated by this excessive bounty, always available, yet impossible to possess, no matter how much he scooped out the riches with his palms and eyes, no matter how much and how long he encircled this ever-renewed sensuousness with both arms and legs. The perfect wealth continued to be untouchable, throbbing silently in the richness of her body: growing, thriving, overflowing. In her cadence was the confidence of a sure world, of life taken for granted. This world was her very birthright, received as such, therefore without much fuss.

  He said to himself: When will you finish with your philosophizing, not worth two pennies?

  She looked at him with two limpid lakes for eyes. How deep were they? Shallow, the bottom directly under the surface or of bottomless profundity? Under the sun of those cruelly dazzling, sharp eyes, he sensed the aridity of a desert inside himself.

  Let us not be cruel, Rama. I mean, let us not be cruel with each other. Can’t you see the world around us is overflowing with cruelty, for reason or for no reason. Like walls, people have been scorched by flames and struck by wind: flames of lust and failure, winds of indifference. They are burnt out, shriveled. We too can be cruel—indeed we are. Cruelty is a fragile armor, even if terrifying in form, with its blue, gnarly teeth, its deep jaws open; its eyes unflinching. Have we learned that the only way to stand up to cruelty is through more cruelty? Let us at least not be cruel to each other, if possible, for our strikes are painful and fall on vulnerable spots. We have learned—haven’t we?—where the deadly strikes should be aimed. No matter how much we conceal it, these open wounds bleed at times hot blood and continuously discharge dark drops, without ever healing.

  He said to himself: These small deaths constitute the very fabric of our life: successive, in fact linked and continuous, every day, each moment. Here we are dying as we gulp life with every breath.

  He said to himself: When will you finish with this twopenny philosophy?

  He said to himself: Again you appropriate her voice. This is part and parcel of your old defense strategy. When will you learn to stand alone, to be self-sufficient without finding excuses, without the need to attack in order to defend?

  Fearfully, recklessly, stubbornly, I defend the delicate, throbbing thing, the only part of the body that, if harmed, will turn the body of the whole world into a corpse whose stench will rise to the zenith of immense spheres and make them stink as well.

  He said to her: There was plenty at stake, in fact everything. I gambled with everything. The bet was high: on everything.

  They were coming together toward the lights of the mulid celebration with its clamor and crowds, he holding her arm and she permitting him to do so; she stumbled in a hole on the sidewalk, regained her balance by herself, stood upright and overtook him.

>   But I lost, I lost before the game started. It was not my game. I gambled with everything, on everything, taking a chance, and I lost. I had to lose. No one can bet on everything and win.

  In fact there is no room for winning or losing. The game does not offer turns to start with. All gambling is outside the track. It is invisible and incomprehensible, taking place in the dark.

  Her face, amid rough waves of human beings, is a smooth-sided lighthouse, round and calm. They were leaving the warmth of bodies and stones, the large wooden stores with huge gates, the garages with advertisements for car agencies—Ford, Chevrolet, and Nasr—in broad elongated letters, both English and Arabic; they were leaving behind the long, stony fence surrounding the cobblestone stable of the khedive, on its gate the stone head of a horse; they were leaving the balcony with its delicate posts and carved leaves overlooking the marble shop windows of kebab and liver displaying masses of dangling dark-red slaughtered meat, fishmonger shops with bright tins of fisikh standing in arranged rows.

  Everything here and now is to be questioned. It is not love only, but my very existence, my legitimacy as a human being, as a man. Everything: Truth and deception. Fidelity and treason. Freedom and oppression, both human and divine. You are with me now—not looking at me as if you were, but nonetheless with me. But you are here like the universe—in possession of a firebrand from a sublime and transcendent divinity. There is a cosmic and divine story between us.

  They were pushing around, passing among the lupine-seed carts with their conic paper twists made from the pages of schoolchildren’s copybooks. The carts had yellowish flames rising from their lamps, almost imperceptible beneath the bright light of the old mosque, detectable only through the smoke dispersed in flying thin wisps. The drone of gas lamps, their strong and constant light falling on heaps of chickpeas, yellow and white with splintered sugar-coating. The lamplight was falling, also, on several red mulid sugar dolls, wrapped up in wavy silvery paper and on decorated conic baskets made of palm leaves full of earth almonds.