She said to him: Mikhail, will you open the window a little?
The urban clamor gushes in at once in mixed tones, pitches and rhythms. They arrive just in front of the Ambulance Center, and the clamor suddenly increases. Running toward them—as if attacking the front of their car, then swerving—come a group of boys in jallabiyas, pajamas, and loose trousers, jumping between the bumper-to-bumper creeping cars. The boys try to avoid the wheels of the trolley tram which, having raised the mass of its enormous body, stands in a tilted position, blocking off half the street. Cars from a suspiciously empty area come dashing at them; they circle and turn swiftly in the opposite direction, almost bumping into the slow-advancing traffic. Not too far away, loud explosions and shouts of men sound weak in the brouhaha of automobile clamor.
A demonstration beside the Ambulance Center. Go back. Madam, go back. A demonstration. The police are shooting. Hands point, signal and disappear. Two police officers run—solitary and silent, as if they are running in a sporting event—toward the voices. Glass breaks and flies about. Slogans indistinctly articulated. In a wink—with unusual, exceptional speed—her car moves backward along an incredibly narrow strip, circulating and maneuvering between cars charging from all intersecting, parallel, and opposite directions, amid the moans of brakes and the groans of horns. Her car backs toward a dusty side street with a narrow passageway that widens in front of her. Along open shops and cafés on the sidewalk people are smoking their hubble-bubbles. There is stagnant water in the sand. The narrow wooden doors have leathery-looking layers of accumulated dust. Laundry is spread on iron balconies, round-leaning, seeming glued together in the dark. In front lay odds and ends of things: cardboard boxes, tin cans, pieces of wood, trashy stuff too difficult to haul away by hand—all reflected in shadowy outlines in the light-ponds of street lamps. Huge dilapidated trucks are creeping slowly from a side street whose walls close around them. In front of a car-repair shop—tools, keys, and wheels on its dusty floor—stands a car with its bowels open. Beneath it, difficult to distinguish from the street dirt, stretch two thin black legs of a boy-mechanic, his face buried.
She swerves to avoid the stretched legs and barely misses the monstrous truck blocking the street. They find themselves away from the warmth of the crowds, from the friendly din, from the lights of grocers, mechanics, fabric shops, and vegetable carts. In the vast dusk he inhales the scent of the Nile water. Concrete columns, half constructed, sprout spiky branches of twisted iron skewers. Arranged heaps of wood rise up, pallid as bare bones. Deserted wet tram-rails shine in swamps of gravel and solidified dark cement. From this unusual angle the blurred, not so distant TV building towers. Into the sky of the winter night, lit with a strange glow: red clouds yellowed by the reflection of sodium lamps suggest a fire.
She is confused by multiple directions; he is taken by the spell of this unexpected ruined site in which an incomprehensible and deserted construction has been placed. She stops for a moment; she, too, is astounded. In the darkness, her face is mysterious, lit by a discrete light. He says: Let’s go back to Zamalek. This way. Abu’l-Ela Bridge is nearby. She says: No. He says: Then to Heliopolis, straight on from the Corniche Road then Shubra. I don’t think anything’s blocking that road.
A window is an unhealed wound in the massive wall. Behind such wounds the urban blood flows and gushes, himself exiled within. The strings connecting his wounds to those of the windows get snipped apart; nothing links them. The morning light falls on the plain white wall turning it into a dazzling, taut, warm sheet, as if it were a deathbed or an anatomy slab. The living fertile body, the one body, multiplied by thousands—here bloated, uncouth, and over-swollen with ill-gotten food; there emaciated and hollow, revealing yellowish bones thrown out on the floor of hunger and silence. This body of people rushes and gushes in the veins of Old Cairo: the martyred, sullied, patient, licentious, obscene, loud, gilded, somber-faced, breath-choked. This body with its continuously burning eyes. This peopled body stretches, sobs, twitches, flows, swells, explodes, disbands; suddenly burns and screams. The cars speed on silently. “Forbidden. Go back. Go back. Take Salah Salem Road. Forbidden from here.” Scattered stones and broken bricks in the midst of the asphalt. Minute glass crystals, their sharp-tipped fragments, are shavings on a black background. Upside down, ripped, and twisted signs. The lampposts inclined and somber with their open shaggy-wired heads.
In the morning, their youthful bodies were glued to each other, inspired by a childlike zeal and innocence. They had wrapped around themselves a rope that gathered them and defined them in the organized outbreak of rebellion, attached to mysterious hopes and ancient, hoarse slogans. The raised, stretched arms are stalks of a tender, tenacious plant swayed by the winds of hope and youth. The peasant woman, still wearing the long village dress with the gauzy tarha wrapping her proud, long-necked head. Her broad, black, yoked jallabiya has a long side slit revealing an inner coarse chemise of blue tint, faded from frequent washings. She walks alone with no worries, pleading loudly to God to protect the youth and guard them from all harm. She is moving on, preoccupied with her own worries as if walking on the side of a canal in the village.
Late at night, the streets were silent. The clamor had receded. There were no more dashing shaky chassis with their grating mechanical whirring, emitting stifling exhaust fumes. Trees appeared beneath electric lights, as if for the first time: leafy, tremendous, owning a dense, nocturnal life. The houses became quiet, having closed in their somewhat frightened inhabitants. From behind locked doors, dim lights could be detected around window crevices.
Beyond the ever-present Nile, unseen and unheard in the darkness, he heard the crashes of other currents, blocked for a long time. The surging of masses in distant successive waves in the stillness of night, coming from the other shore, rising and falling in a rhythm that inspired him with awe. At a distance he cannot distinguish the strong, packed, frequent whiffs that the repressed volcano is stubbornly emitting. The grating deep voice of hundreds of throats threatens the night, the sky, and the shut-off, walled-in houses. It has an appealing and alarming echo that makes his eyes water despite himself. The echo brings back glories of his expired youth with its frustration lying in the deepest layers of his heart, muddy with aches and regrets.
The granite of this haughty body-of-people comes from youth challenging death and atrophy in the early afternoon. No blemish in it, smiling mysteriously as always. Powerful in front of the gods because this body is one of them, pulled from the distant giant polygons of the hot south, pulled from the dimness of candles and the awe of stillness in the distant past, so this body-of-people can rise up with invincible pride. Get up in the provincial, shabby, crowded square amid dusty long shells of trains twisting as they creep imprisoned within their rails or else deserted in parking lots, resigned to a rusty death. And yet he is among his folk, among his people. Around him circulates the non-stop traffic with its wheels and wires, buzzing as if it were a trivial game of the lowest level. The panting sirens are triggered, the red and green lights seem commonplace in the floodlight. The rock-like body-of-people is permanently youthful, its power will not pass away. But the world will pass away, leaving the scars, one scar atop another, thickening around the flesh of the heart. In this crust, the heart’s blood beats with an endless pain.
Theirs are shriveled bodies, disappointed, torn, hermetic, that do not know how to glow with vigor except in the daze of hashish and the quickly-extinguished passions for female bodies. Theirs are unwatered bodies. The dirty desert sands are crumbled grains of rock. Their holiness comes not from the body or the sands. Within this undying body-of-people inflicted with wounds are the sorrows of these perpetual monks across deserts of generations, overcoming their powerful lust. They step over the ardor of their flesh with steadfast, spiritual feet, now rough and cracked. The living slender limbs are alert inside the hard rosy granite, unconquered by time. On the chests, crosses and vessels with crescents and sails made of delicately wrou
ght gold and silver, as if they were lamps extolling the glory of God, illuminated with olive oil in marble niches, carved with the names of the Almighty. Limbs, growing and flourishing, as if they were plants and flowers.
Baffled heart-shaken groups become separated from the city-body as they wait and anticipate with anxious but controlled curiosity. In the thin, fatigued faces confronting the wind and sun with their inner concerns, and under the films of somber eyes—swollen from lack of sleep—veiled dreams and defiance glitter. The sun is like an open eye with a fixed gaze, neither scorching nor responding. The metallic faded helmets glitter in the sun. The poorly-dressed, agitated, yellowish rows are falling from the freight wagons with discreet thumps over slender legs supported by the effulgent, coarse, new shoe-leather. A commanding yell, faint, abruptly cut off: “Go back. Go back.” The huge rubber tires running then coming to a halt, loom high. In their grubby blackness is a beastly determination. In front of white clouds from low-voiced explosions, groups disperse with uncontrollable fear. The horses’ hooves plunge into the soft asphalt. Towering broad shoulders under the pale faces that cannot grasp anything except the excitement of blood, the agitation of the people, their charged silence alternating with shouts. Desolate, tense, and lonely figures, close to each other, and throngs running with a thousand feet stepping on stones and stumbling on bodies, melting away into safe neighborhoods. Melting away in supportive alleys with bro-ken warehouses, between always-opened doors, as they do not have locks. The dark and narrow stairways becoming safe shelter that cannot be touched by murderous explosions. The dirty, coarse, waterproof, faded-yellow covers dangling on thin skeletal rails, oppressive with their smell of wood and shoe-leather, of iron and stinking gun oil. The spray of bullets echos in the sudden stillness. The rustle of many running feet can be heard in streets emptied of the daily clamor of non-stop nocturnal traffic. Open eyes cannot grasp and will never grasp what has happened. Moans and bell-tolls from a distance. The flames in the winter midday light have ferocious and healing heat. Their light is the color of imperceptible sunflowers. No votive offering—impossible to fulfill—can undo their vengeful, full-throated, hissing voice. The flames lick the yellow government buildings constructed in old-fashioned British style with bare walls and criss-crossed rails on their broken-glass windows. The fire spreads to the cotton stalks and the alfalfa roots on the canals and drainage ditches. It flares up in the barns with heavy black smoke. The death lowing of the slaughtered male buffalo, with blood spurting out silently from its hefty neck—nothing can stop it. The dark-red density flows out onto the crumbling soil with its half-black, half-yellow grains. Columns of black smoke, entrenched, lofty, acrid in the dry mouths, gyrating and going up amid the tongues of flame flying and whirring with wicked glow—colorless in the sun. Crushing of doors, crackling of glass, rending of walls, running with lean, shabby spoils; and calls no one can listen to. The hooves of the horses slam the black basalt rhythmically, emitting repeated echoes in the street emptied of traffic and familiar noise. In the swaying body of the city new and solid, obstinate knots are formed that soon dissolve and melt in mists of tear gas. In front of slim phalanxes of armors, clubs, and helmets, other small knots are formed. They bulge slowly, with outcries like the eruptions of an old painful disease. An outpouring of stagnant water, confined by oppression, by suffering, by daily toils that have neither explanation nor solution. The howling of the Tommy guns with their intermittent echoes, seemingly insignificant, leaves in front of it small bodies that fall suddenly as if they were insignificant piles of sorrow and worn-out clothes. They get transported quickly by hand to the sidewalk in the hope of a mercy that may or may not come. Slender-figured plants bend beneath the blows and collapse. These flowers that bloomed only for the course of a day and then were smashed, will they leave behind them regenerating seeds? The fiery and bitter flowers are quickly put out.
As if Mikhail felt the wounds, the cracks, and the burns in his own slight body, his other body lay buried between desert waves and the belly of soft soil. The dragon fidgeted from the stings of the sharp cuts left by stabbing spearheads. If only it had risen with its blazing eyes and wide-open, flame-blowing mouth with a thousand teeth. If only it had raised its strong firm back, balancing itself on the huge tail covered with scales and taut muscles, then the pillars of heaven would sway and rock the nether world on which the black earth is mounted.
There, amid these bodies that derive—from their closeness-warmth and inspiration, pouring and overflowing the narrowness of their monotonous, packed life. There, amid these bodies that have assembled, do assemble, and will always and forever assemble in endless and arranged droves, shouting with a voice that is not simply the aggregate of their voices, but a voice coming from another realm. Gesturing, there, with hands that are considerably greater than the sheer number of actual hands, raising to the sky a pharaoh, the ancient one, with renewed faces, offering themselves, their blood and their soul, as sacrifice for him, looking for redemption, presenting their oblation to the pharaoh—he, the glory-maker—he, who makes the blood burst out; he, the caller to peace prayers. The bodies supplicate in front of Amon, the all-powerful, the almighty, the donor of bread, love, and pardon. These bodies make their way toward freedom, toward the sun with its mighty and merciful fingers. They know vaguely, but with certainty, that their sun is hidden inside their hearts. There, with them, is Mikhail’s place and freedom. There, with them, he knew the intoxication of a wine not of this earth, of which she, Rama, is a part. There, with them, he knew this heat flowing into his blood as if resurrecting him from death. There, he did not realize that his voice had died out, and that those rhythmic slogans for which his ribs are swaying are theirs only, that he alone did not have a voice. There in 1946, the hand that threw the bomb was distant from him, yet it was his hand too. He did not hear the explosion and the British military vehicle that turned over suddenly, like a struck hawk, not far from the stern-looking, dark bronze statue. The soldiers with funny yellow shorts, a bit beneath the knee, jump down. In their hands a Tommy gun with short muzzle, drawn but not firing. They run inside the encircled wooden kiosk before a deep clamor follows them. In the following desolate nocturnal silence, the bullets have amplified echoes with a deep hollow ring to them. The bodies falling under the wheels by invisible shots, no one knows where they come from, as if they are suddenly the bodies of desert hermits—emaciated, thin, wasting, let-down, forgotten, no paradise awaiting them. When will the Kingdom of Heaven come? Without glory, thrown about on pebbles and sand, the hawks roam around them for a short while then suddenly attack from the heart of the white burning sky.
Yes, I love you. But in my love there is an inevitable betrayal.
He said to himself: This internal combustion is meaningless. This silence, too, is betrayal. You, alone, voiceless with no love of your own. Yes, I love you, and in the heart of this love lies a silence, a nucleus of inevitable betrayal. Nothing is inevitable. Crimes are forgotten, pass away, are probably pardoned. Nevertheless, in passing they leave no trace. Even the bones of victims and martyrs dissolve without being avenged, without justice, melting in the sand and dry soil.
But the flowers of rebels stay with open claws.
He said to her: Rama, we hardly know each other. There are entire regions in yourself, in your life, of which I know nothing and will never know. And there is a kind of entrenched, profound, and discreet intimacy between us as if it were there from before the beginning of time, an intimacy which overcomes all estrangement, and which needs no recognition.
When they returned in the early morning, the car stopped at the traffic light in the small square that had the smooth sculpture, the big cat with smooth sides. Its face was vacant, withdrawn—the hand on its head seems weightless, as if it were not there—the cat kneeling in almost obscene gesture. The old traffic policeman stands bored, almost dozing. The police officer with his transparent plastic helmet and dark, tight clothes amid the cars, moving his head slowly and haughtily
. A man calls out, without warmth, without rhythm: “Dustrags for ten. For ten, dustrags,” holding in his hand a spread-out, clean dust rag that he swings monotonously while no one looks at him.
On the sidewalk next to the tall light post, beyond the thriving, thick trees, suddenly rises next to him this bare and dry tree, as if life had withdrawn from it. It is no longer waiting for spring. Impressive with its dark wood and black veins, its limbs intertwine sternly, as if the tree had long forgotten the pain that had caused it to split, to become tangled, distorted, and to fold upon itself. Its scream is frozen and mute with shrinking arms, stabbing the sky with twisted, slender, trailing long fingers, without hope, without despair.
She leisurely opened her eyes. The morning, locked up in the room, was a satiated, quiet monster. Her relaxed body emitted a sigh of pleasure when stretching its naked, contented limbs. She said once more: Good morning, my darling. With a stolen kiss—a quick alighting of two delicate lips, having the gentleness of a soft-beaked bird pecking at a grain not out of hunger, but out of affluence. She stretched her arms around him, her body becoming taut with rising wakefulness.
Her eyes, two glittering rock-lakes, had in them this permanent open question, neither admitting nor accepting anything; knowing nothing, surrendering to nothing. She said, inclining her side toward him, as she gathered the faded-white sheet around her body:
Rama and the Dragon Page 12