He said to her: You have no separation between the two worlds, that of reality and that of childhood. This quality in you charms me. On the other hand, you are also realistic, pragmatic.
She said with an obedient look: The world of reality and the world of fantasy, yes, you know a lie is sometimes the only truth.
Are the seven masks of Isis a personification of the truth? A road to a destination, stage by stage? Are they ritual stations in a pilgrimage toward the permanent element that will always be? Or are they talismans and amulets under which the ever-changing, revolving, and throbbing truth is concealed and disguised—the truth that renews itself endlessly even when death approaches it?
When he saw the collection of dolls in her bedroom, he looked for his doll but couldn’t find it. He said nothing. He had been expecting yet denying it at the same time. His realization made him shut up.
He said to her: Rama, isn’t it in the ABC of Love that the lover gets rid of his worries, becomes liberated from uncertainties?
She said: I don’t know, Mikhail. Since you raised the question, why not answer it?
He said: While I’m so uncertain? He laughed.
He said: Are you ready to confront the moment of truth? Is each of us ready to do so?
She said: I have already told you as much as I can, all that’s within me.
He said: And everything that happens with you? Everything? Rama, everything for you is half-and-half. There is hesitation in everything; half of anything is silence. Isn’t it? No escape from this. It’s inevitable. In everything there’s half an adventure, the other half a step backward.
She said: I am fed up. You tire yourself with these half truths. Isn’t this quest for complete truth in itself a half truth? Mikhail, the moment we are in—one moment after another—which may or may not be renewed, as long as we live it honestly and completely, this is all I know and all I need to know of truth.
He called her on the phone, on a whim, without knowing whether she would be there. Her voice came to him permeated with joy, confidence, and peace: Hello!
This joy—this forgetfulness of him—stabbed him. Clearly she did not recognize his voice. Nor was she waiting for him.
After recognizing his voice she said in a hurry, amending: Oh, Mikhail, I’ll talk to you right after lunch.
He said: I think when you talk to me in this decisive tone you mean to say something of this sort: We are mature, old enough, knowing the facts of life, and we are handling this relationship accordingly. It is a taken-for-granted issue that has its limits and its end. In other words, emotions have no place in it.
She said: Yes.
Self-reflecting, he questioned himself: If this is true, why do you want to have tenderness, affection, and compassion declared at every moment? Is this possible? Is it honest? No, it cannot be honest at every moment.
He said to himself, though affectionately addressing her in one of his exalted apostrophes: This delicate tone, can’t you know it except in the act of making love?
He instantly felt that he was deceiving himself. The moments of feminine softness and tenderness in her voice were not rare. They were not frequent, either. True, but then the sky itself dons a velvety scrim on which he manages to rest his face, right?
She said: How are you? How has life been with you?
He said: I am coping.
She said: You are doping?
He said: No, no, not doping. Coping.
In the longish, low keyed, elegant station packed with crowds, he was hurrying, looking around, his heart beating fast. They had already said goodbye in the taxi that had then darted off with him. She had already alighted and gone down the stairs with her small suitcase, wearing a light blue hat. Even earlier they had rushed together in the dark, early morning, before the train’s departure, to a secluded shop overlooking the side of a square ebullient with busy traffic; he had bought her the hat she said she liked precisely because it was a useless thing—it was simply a lovely plaything of no use; wasn’t this the salt of life? Wasn’t this what made the day turn into something special, saving it from being lost?
She had said all this when she saw the intricately designed hat, elegant in a subdued way, in the shop window at night beneath the light of a lamp.
So today she was departing from him, after the cycle had completed itself. They were concealing from themselves—or they seemed to conceal—what had happened because it was precious, valuable, and intricate. It could be examined later, slowly and with care because it was very delicate and significant; thus, it should be enveloped in silence. Regardless, there was, from now, a continuous rapport between their bodies that could not be broken, even when they were separated—a rapport in sleep and wakefulness, when alone or when in the street with people. From now on, and for the first time, their eyes would have that special gentility and tenderness known only by bodies that have embraced and joined in the erotic moment outside time.
But he had gone back to the station. He was breaking their agreement to let her leave by herself, to spare themselves the distress of farewells in the station, the repetition of formulaic statements whose trodden roads have been smoothed by wayfarers with crowded hearts, so as to spare themselves the tense last moments, wanting the train to leave so the ordeal can be finished but also wishing it not to leave, to delay departure at least a few minutes more. He had told the taxi driver to turn around, hoping to meet her as she was about to depart.
He saw the blue hat from a distance. He hurried, running fast toward it. He could see nothing else from a distance in this clouded blur of intertwined people and luggage carts rambling amid platforms, planted trees, newspaper kiosks, cafeteria chairs, and the white faces of big, round clocks.
Her eyes picked him up. She emitted a sigh of surprise. For a moment her face remained slack, as if she did not recognize him. She held his hand with her two hands. She said: Mikhail, I was writing a letter to you in my head. I’ll send it to you as soon as I arrive.
He never received the letter.
The church dome from above the roofs asserted itself from the side window, flattened to some extent, not complete in its arch, though perching with repose and calm weight. Its paint had been scratched off, revealing the light gray color of its limestone. Bells hung silent in the tower. Their greenness inside the morning’s shade was that of a dark rusty bronze. Around them flew gulls with spread-out, white wings against the pale blue, swerving and straightening as one mass.
In his daydream he was next to her soft face, hearing the chiming of bells.
Later, he will come to this room and look from the side window to the outside scene again. The sky will seem empty and still—within him—after her dense presence has departed and the place with its walls has been deprived of her teeming energy. The surface of the wallpaper, decorated with small flowers, seems delicate, warm, and tight; not stifling when the agitation of the anguished soul with overlapping concerns settles down.
Wearing blue—a dazzling blue blouse, her hair with a blue head-band—her image was painfully beautiful and distinct.
He said to himself: Every image, every dream, every passing word of love in the music that flows like turbid waters without stopping, every yell for love—a word that carries no weight—in a well-made song, every shrill, popular tune in its mechanical sorrow coming from the transistor and the microphone—all of it scorches my soul and inflames its inner lining with an unbearable fire. Does this make sense? Does it make sense to find myself in love, in flames, with the sides of my heart collapsing without resistance amid the market of ready-made sorrows, bought and sold, pushed about as a non-stop torrent into air-conditioned studios turned into a thousand thousand commercially marketable commodities, popular and far flung?
She said to him in her detached, clinical tone: Mikhail, you did not have a difficult childhood as you claim. That is, based on what you told me. To the contrary, you were overprotected more than you should have been.
He was taken by surprise. He used
to think of himself as neglected, lonesome, wretched in his childhood. He used to tell himself that his childhood was not happy; in fact, he did not really know that childhood that was said to be innocent. But at the moment, he could neither negate nor confirm these thoughts.
She said: But I am happy, happy for you. You have really attained a remarkable maturity, even within the period in which I’ve known you. Rarely do people keep maturing at this age.
She lightened the matter by saying: As for me, I will never attain maturity.
All this was new for him and different from what he thought of himself, so he kept silent.
She said to him: There was almost a brawl between two ferrymen on Raswa’s dock in Manzala, each in his boat and the two boats practically glued to one other. Each man held his long oar like a threatening weapon. Each one insisted that he alone would take me to Port Said, wanting to serve Sitt Fatma joyfully—“from the bottom of his eyes.” In those days I entered Port Said regularly under the name of Sitt Fatma. Once I came with a duck, another time with a couple of chickens along with peasant bread, eggs, and oranges, from the presumed house of my mother to the presumed house of my husband in Port Said. Of course, I was also carrying coded letters; once I carried, under the eggs and bread, a small load of disassembled revolvers and their ammunition, all of it bundled in a piece of local cloth. The center was in Manzala behind the Mustafa Shahin Café.
I was very convincing with my black malas overdress, my mudawarra head cover, my thong sandals, and my castor jallabiya—so much so that the Irish sergeant at the checkpoint got used to me and trusted me. We became almost friends without talking.
The cold weather had settled in. Don’t forget it was December 1956. At the dock, the boats were swaying on the shallow water as if about to capsize. I was standing on the wooden planks steaming with anger, trying to mend things between the two boatmen so my journey could get underway. The sun had set. Other ferrymen had gathered around, trying to settle the matter. Night was thickening, time was running out. All the ferrymen knew Sitt Fatma, were all comrades to some degree. I said to myself: If I allow this brawl to proceed, I’ll never deliver my message tonight, and I know it’s urgent. No point losing your head in such situations. It was obvious neither man would yield to the other. They’d figured out who I was, a journalist so they thought, covering the action surreptitiously. They never charged me anything. As you know, things go this way in our country. So I brought them small gifts saying they were from home: “The Prophet himself accepted gifts, so don’t refuse me.” After first declining, they took what I offered: a basket of oranges, eggs, a pair of pigeons, whatever was handy. The trip took the entire night; we reached the shore of al-Qawati at the peep of dawn. There we crossed a thicket of reeds and sea plants. Those boatmen know all the paths. By day, the journey was dangerous anyway, with the French bombing the lake.
He interrupted her: So you spent the night in a lake, among reed thickets, in a small boat, just you and the ferryman?
She shot him a glance and said decisively: Yes.
She went on: I had to find a way. You know the gallantry of country people. I shouted at the two of them: Is it proper to leave a woman all alone on the platform while night is falling? I went to the elder of the two and I swore: By my God, by my Faith, I am not leaving except with you. Are you content, Captain?
She paused, then said: One time the British entered to search my house. In fact, the house was in a dead-end neighborhood, and they came in the evening after the curfew—had I not been there, the rebel Egyptian officers would have been lost. You know how they were: young, full of enthusiasm, polite and proper, and very brave. But at the end of the day, inexperienced. They kept their military uniforms in this house, whether by instruction or tradition, I don’t know. When at home they wore jallabiyas. When the British banged on the door, I was the countryish woman inside her home in her plain nightgown at her kerosene stove engaged in frying up a dish of green peppers. I had made one of the Egyptian officers lie down on the room’s bed. Then I opened the door looking at the British as Fatma should look, utterly surprised, but following every word as they talked in Cockney. They and the sergeant leading them with his pistol were definitely from south London. Throughout, I remained the country woman Fatma of Port Said. I slapped my chest in lamentation, I pulled my tarha over my disheveled hair. There I was, in my nightgown, with my sleeping husband on the mattress of a bed without sheets. The rest of the Egyptian officers were hiding under the stairway with their guns. At any moment, disaster could have happened. I yelled at the bum-boatman who had led the British to my house, translating for them in port English: Tell them, O brother, may the Prophet’s name protect you. This house harbors no harm. By the Prophet’s life, why don’t you tell them? What have we to do with the disasters that befall us? I broke down in tears. I only realized the intensity of my weeping later, once they had left. When the Cockney sergeant saw this ‘family,’ he unloaded his foulmouthed Cockney curses on the boatman-informant who had claimed there were Egyptian officers to be found in the house. They withdrew and all was well, after a quick search pour la forme.
She fell silent for a moment.
—As for the bum-boatman, he disappeared after that night, leaving no trace. Corpses would float in the canals and the port every day. It was impossible to recognize the identity of a corpse. Oh … ugly, but necessary. Isn’t this the logic of warfare in the end? You cannot close your eyes to it, no matter how torn and contradictory your heart feels.
He said to himself:
What price treason? Yet the person who falters is human too. Murder in all cases—even in these cases—is unforgivable, cannot be compensated for. Murder whether inevitable and necessary is still murder. To recoil from that fact for whatever reason is another kind of treason, another unjustified murder.
He said to her: Yes, this logic cannot be escaped. Necessary murder is inevitable, whatever the direction is. Everything maintains its own grip that cannot be undone.
He said to himself: The nocturnal boat, you and the boatman in his prime, amid the reed thickets all night. You and the young intelligence officers in the distant house at the periphery of the city. You and the bum-boatman, murdered in a way nobody knows how. What is the price of treason? The price of patriotic struggle? Of freedom-fighting?
She had said to him: Do you know that I am writing a novel?
He said: No! A novel too? Isn’t there an end to your talents? You are a great actress, a nurse, an archaeologist who can read dead languages, an old revolutionary, and now also a novelist?
She said: A revolutionary, period, if you please. They say it’s the search for the self. Personally I find no self. It happened to me once that I dropped everything. I stopped searching. I fell into a stupor of indifference. Didn’t talk, eat, or sense a thing. I lay here on this old sofa for a whole nine months. The official diagnosis: clinical depression. The danger of never leaving this indifference was real. Something was inside me that I didn’t know about. I was sectioned off from it. Nor was this border, for good or ill, ever closed down decisively. I don’t know …
He said anxiously, also inquisitively, half-believing: Why? When did this happen?
She said: I don’t want to talk about it. Don’t ask me, please.
He said: Yes, no one really knows the extent of such suffering. Indifference and separation are never a blessing. Does any person truly understand his or her uncontrollable, inner torments?
She didn’t answer. She became oblivious of him, of the whole thing, as if all of it was senseless.
He said, trying to call her back: So what is the story of the novel you are writing?
She said with an enthusiasm born of fantasy that he knew so well: It’s the story of an Egyptian girl who wants to realize her dream completely, in its splendor, without blemish. But in the end she accepts what is available to her.
He said: À la Chekhov?
She said: Not the nocturnal Chekhov. The midday version, in light a
nd sun.
He said: And what is her dream?
She said: This is the topic, the novel’s problem. Does anyone know his dream? This girl knocks on many doors, meets a lot of men, she is also looking for herself.
He said: And she has plenty of relations with them?
She said: Of course. This is the only way a woman can know men, and possibly know herself. A woman may go to bed with thirty men. But only when that happens to her can she reach happiness and fulfillment of an incredible sort, beyond description. When it doesn’t happen, she feels bitterly disillusioned. And it rarely does happen.
Later, she said to him: This happened to me with you once, the first time.
He said to her: You are sociable, extroverted as the expression goes. You are also self-enclosed, extraordinary, unusual. This is true, not a compliment. I am not trying to woo you.
She said: I know, my love.
He said: More than this. You love people, you love men, this is your nature. But isn’t this self-love?
She said: I love people and I fall right on my face. How many times I have fallen!
He said: People? All people? Without distinction?
She said: Yes, every person has his own distinctiveness. But I love the complete man, the total man. He might be broken on the inside. But this is not important. In fact, I think it is necessary. The important thing is that he is total, complete, while carrying the crack inside him. I also want him with a sense of humor, the kind of man who attracts attention, in fact the man who calls forth attention instantly, the one who attracts as soon as he enters a place. He’s the man to whom the waiter comes directly when he enters a restaurant. He’s the one with personality, overwhelming and commanding, even if he never opens his mouth. But the first and last thing should be his honesty. Essential honesty, honesty with himself.
Rama and the Dragon Page 17