Rama and the Dragon

by Edwar Al-Kharrat

  The curtains had been lowered on the picture window in the Auberge. The room was dusky as if it existed inside a glass pond whose water had been removed, but whose air remained humid and heavy. Visible through the window, placid Qarun Lake felt heavy, distilling some of its presence into the silent room. Its salty breath blew from behind the wood; the piercing cry of the gull reached them from its distant niche in the secluded sky.

  She opened the door for him and stood next to the bed—her lofty body under an Indian blouse, of light green with dark gold flowers and designs, reaching above her knees, leaving her legs bare. Her protruding breasts under the blouse lifted a little the front hem. Her loose hair was flowing in a dry rustle, like a subtropical plant whose softness masks the presence of multiple saps.

  She said: After I came down from the train at the station, the porter bumped into my back. He was carrying a suitcase. It seemed—God knows how—the lock was open; you know, the small sharp metal tongue. I sensed it scratching my back. There is a cut there, and I can’t reach it.

  Suddenly she turned and lifted her blouse up with both hands.

  Under the blouse she was naked. He was taken aback by the lovely bronze back—a dark marble—yet soft, slippery, gently flowing, powerfully sculpted. He found the scratch: thin and sharp, almost imperceptible. For the first time he saw her buttocks in a standing position: steady, smooth, and full of curves.

  She said with the voice of a calm interlocutor in a parlor room full of people: Do you see it? Is there blood in it? Feel it with your hand.

  The whale swims in the depths of the dark still ocean. The lines of its tremendous body have the smoothness of a slope. And Jonah remained fasting until sunset.

  He touched his finger carefully to the scar. It was a slight cut in the gentle flesh of her back, no bigger than half a finger’s length under the shoulder blade. He smelled—or thought he did—an electric shock triggered in his skin, from tension and anticipation. His blood was throbbing, but the inside air was paralyzing his responsiveness, and keeping him numb in a way he could not understand. His voice was obstructed, he was worried that if he talked it would rattle. His gaze seemed the only thing alive in him.

  Without moving, he said at last: Yes, it is slight; nothing, in fact.

  She dropped down her blouse. The sound of silk falling on her body, ending suddenly at mid thigh, was that of frustration.

  She said while turning toward him: You are tired from the train. The trip was exhausting. Come, sit for a while.

  She turned in a hurried move and bent to straighten a pillow on the bed and to draw a seat for him near her. Caught in a quick glance the vale of her split haunch stirred him, but the moment passed, as if her body had taken a decision to encircle itself, locked, rejecting any touch.

  Later, she said to him: You don’t love me.

  He said in disbelief: I don’t?

  She said: If you loved me, you would take me every time.

  He mused: Did you want failure to come about, though? Was it your very desire? At will and from within, doing what would not lead to fulfillment because you felt a risk, a threat, because you were not willing to undertake the final gamble in a game that went beyond the rules? Because you knew intuitively, without thinking, that there was in this relationship that which goes beyond the usual, repetitive, lovemaking? That such a relationship is not simply the sum total of stabs searching for an oblivion that never takes place?

  He said to himself: What to do? How can I—how can we together—challenge that which I presume to be her authentic desire, to genuinely end this fluctuating, continuously dynamic relation in failure, despite the usual repeated successes? How can we undertake another deep craving toward final fulfillment or toward the finality of fulfillment?

  He said to himself: She was talking to me about love, truth, and freedom while we were overlooking the statue wounded by water gushing on its chest, and looking above its legs, at the raised arms, muscular with masculinity that had reached its apex and was about to fall, but now will never lower no matter how many stone grains the flowing of water scrapes off its edges. Then at night, bright and empty, her words and her eyes were reflecting in a wonderful clarity what was in my own mind. Her mind is a sharp-toothed instrument, reaching to the depths and penetrating easily all the levels of reservation, guarding, and secrecy. Was she talking only in order to extend her arms toward me, with a powerful net, soft-knit, so as to captivate me? I was not the hunter. Or had the hunting journey for me started a long time ago?

  They were standing at the top of a street stairway. A loose iron chain with thick rings extended between two ancient columns. They stood waiting for a taxi on the first stair, smooth-edged from footsteps. The sky was the color of pale gray pearls: clear under insubstantial white clouds, having the same transparency as that of the morning following the night he had met her. Her face was calm; his heart was quiet and content in that extinguished light beneath the slow, stretched clouds.

  She said to him: Mikhail, is this the first time you have broken the chains and liberated yourself from repression?

  Later on, he reflected she had not said to him that his love-making was romantic, but in fact pure and purging, in a certain sense, founded on tenderness and sensuous devotion verging on ritual worship, that his hands, lips, and tightly taut body were unravaged by use and vulgarity.

  He said: Yes, it is the first time.

  She said: That pleases me.

  Without any quiver in the tone of her voice, she decided something that had importance but triggered no excitement. As if the matter had not been, for him, a stunningly beautiful discovery, an earthquake that shook the walls of his life, breaking and piling the rocks into the split and cracked yet clean-cut and pure-edged.

  How can she be so closed to communication when she chooses, or when her taste or distaste chooses? She rebuked him by her sheer presence. Alone, it denied him, negated him, voicelessly and effortlessly.

  After six days, she told him: You slew the dragon.

  And she said: Thank God we are traveling today and moving on.

  He said to her, obstinately: Thank God in any case. But I cannot say, here and now, and despite everything, “Thank God,” were it not that for Him alone one offers thanks.

  She said to him: Of course, you are free in what you say and what you don’t say.

  He accompanied her to the station, nevertheless, and he embraced her, thinking it was farewell, but he knew in his innermost that it was not farewell.

  From the dragon’s teeth planted in my heart, bushy dark-green twigs of reed flourish and sway.

  In his mind he saw her on the roof of their old house in Ghayt al-‘Tnab. She was distant and up in the raw morning light next to the low roof fence with its unpainted stones. She had the obedience and the bronze coloring of his thin, gentle sister Aida, with her southern Egyptian features and dark eyes. She had Aida’s secretive face while also Rita’s briskness—Rita, the Greek girlfriend of his youthful days who dropped out of his life without him noticing it—with her light blond hair. She had also the daring of their Jewish neighbor—in their house in Muharram Bey, a long time ago. She had the creamy body of his neighbor with its penetrative openness and cleanliness, with its special glow that excited his precocious sexuality. She had his neighbor’s joyfulness in the mornings as she hummed intermittently a song, happy with her opulent body, rested after sleep. As he was on the unlit stairway, bending and gazing at her from below, he saw in her something of all the women he knew. On the stairway, he recollected dispersed earrings, shirt buttons, shiny metal rings, safety pins, and large, round mother-of-pearl buttons. He recalled his hands rubbing the sand on the stairway as he searched, finding these spilled-over things, as if poured out from the sewing box that was originally a round cookie box decorated with an image of an ancient European city, which his mother kept when he was a child. He would collect them in his hands, finding difficulty in holding onto them and keeping them between his fingers. All this took
place as she was descending from up high. Our footsteps on the stairway were silent as we went down into the dark night, for once without being surprised and without the need for explanation. The steps of the stairway were twisting around us, their wooden fence shining darkly from blackness and age.

  I knew then that everything was ready to move to another house. The big horse-driven cart was at the door. Packages and parcels were tied by thin cords; wooden boxes and palm-frond cages for chickens and vegetables were filled with household odds and ends, covered with old rags that used to be white sheets, and tied with twine. The cupboards, chairs, and tables were arranged carefully in a row in the cart after having been disassembled, and having their nails and screws placed into a special drawer on the cart’s side.

  The apartment door is unexpectedly open. I realize the place has been robbed and emptied. The tiles are bare; there are dark traces on the wall paint where the removed pictures have been hanging for a long time exposed to the sun and air. The kitchen door slams and I see the thief stealing away in the darkness. His grating presence triggers in me a frightening shudder, as if he were coming from another world with its own laws. I see him from his back—a strong, tall, agile youth—as, wearing shirt and pants, he is descending the stairway, running and escaping—as if he were carrying with him everything in this world. I feel a sense of final and complete loss that can never be rectified. The resounding cry in my throat does not come out: it is stifled. I want the world to shake, the walls to crumble down on the open, nocturnal sky. The cry of help and the call for aid in the final moment of life gets no response, no relief. Despair is an unbearable blow, but the cry is not realized.

  And the sigh is open and frozen.

  He was walking on Sa‘d Zaghlul Street, hurrying on. The air coming from the sea was humid. A light drizzle was falling on his head, hitting his face gently, when he heard his name on the sidewalk from behind: Mikhail, Mikhail. As always he could not believe that it was possible to have someone call him in any place at any time. The asphalt was shining, and the cars slipping by seemed warm on the inside, in the afternoon light. He turned around, as if unintentionally. Rama appeared walking hurriedly toward him under an open, colorful, transparent umbrella, smiling and panting a little. Water was dripping from the umbrella’s edges onto the side of her shoulder. They exchanged a quick kiss on the cheeks, somewhat unintended; she was not expecting it publicly in the street. Suddenly, raindrops, having accumulated from the side of the umbrella as she leaned slightly with it, were pouring on his face. Laughing, he shook the water off. She told him she was sitting in the Trianon Café when she had seen him through the window. She said, in a hurry, that she had spent two days already in Alexandria and was leaving early the next morning. She was staying in a nearby pension in the Shatby quarter, overlooking a vast, lonesome Christian cemetery with very white, fragile statues and tombstones. The drizzle struck the tight umbrella fabric rhythmically as he entered beneath it, alongside her, for protection. People were dashing around them indifferently. She said that her friend Alphonse had chosen this strange, depressing, and stirring pension, close to the sea but also close to downtown. Her face was shimmering with a warm bronze glow in this dry circle, detached from the world yet in its very focus—a circle he felt was theirs alone, together. He laughed without pretext. She looked at him; her smiling, questioning glance preserved its distance. He said: Come on, I will have coffee with you. Won’t you invite me to a cup of coffee? She said: By all means. Come, let me introduce you to Mahmud Bey. He is the new Director of the Archaeological Inspectorate. Yesterday, we passed by Kom al-Dikka and the Serapeum and the new archaeological digs in Mareapolis. He is great fun. Very old, very polite, and very humble. He depends on me and needs me at every step, whether related to inspection or not. Come.

  His heart dropped quietly and he became depressed: They had thus returned to the world of people, friends, colleagues, compliments, and social conversations. He had been hoping, as he usually did, for a special encounter. She had frustrated their privacy. He drank his coffee with neither enthusiasm nor eagerness. Their farewell to one another was lukewarm, polite, indecisive—as usual.

  It was happening yet again: his fancies were circulating around her. He was daydreaming of her, addressing her in his mind. He heard light knocks on the door, opened it indifferently only to find her standing there. He could not believe it. It occurred to him that something miraculous attended her presence at his door, as if he had established her there by his fancy, something inside him magically becoming embodied.

  The expression on her face, a beautiful mask collapsing in embarrassment, confirmed the moment’s strangeness.

  She said to him: I rang the bell but never heard it sound inside.

  Tension was in her eyes—threatening imminent dissolution, however—and something resembling shyness.

  She carried in her arms, next to her chest, a small living creature swaddled in a white towel.

  Perplexed and dazed, he said: Come in, come in. Welcome.

  She sat on the divan under the window with open curtains. The sun behind her—the light morning rays behind her head with her hair pulled up—turned her bronze color into an old, soft, dark tableau set within a halo of fluid light. In this dim tableau, her eyes blazed. His heart once again fell into passionate, adoring admiration and anxiety. He instantly saw in the towel a kitten, gray with yellow stripes, gazing just above the folds, with fixed eyes, emitting no sound. He almost laughed, but her expression stopped him.

  —Excuse me, Mikhail. I could not go down without her. She’s feverish. Look! Bring your hand; yes, put your hand on her. Do you feel her high temperature? Isn’t it so? What shall I do, what shall I do? She is quite sick. Refused food and milk, even water. Sniffed it then withdrew her nose.

  He was overwhelmed, had no idea what to do. What could he tell her?

  She said: Do you have lukewarm water? Can you warm up a cup of water? Never mind, I’ll do it. May I? I’ll give her some water. She doesn’t want milk or food. I tried to tempt her. Nothing works.

  Her voice was beginning to break down, and her anxiety and worry were contagious for him.

  He took the wrapped-up kitten from her and placed it gently in the adjacent armchair under an armrest, as if to protect it, and he tried to make it drink. It wouldn’t open its mouth, and its eyes didn’t move. Its frail body throbbed, visibly and swiftly, while its slim, long front legs hung limp, with paws folded under.

  He put his arm on her shoulder and tried courageously to raise himself to the level of the task, even if he could not stop feeling something akin to sarcasm, irony, and vexation while simultaneously acknowledging that something was happening that he did not understand completely and that it was not at all a matter of sarcasm. He approached her face and kissed her lightly on her cheek saying:

  Don’t be concerned. Don’t worry. Isn’t it a cat? Cats have seven lives. It will return to its own self, lovely and healthy as it was.

  She accepted his kiss and looked at him with an appeal for help, but also with reproof. She said while patting the back of the kitten so gently that she barely touched it:

  Is that true? I’m scared. She won’t die; she can’t die.

  He said: No. It won’t die. Of course, it will not die.

  She said: I will not accept her death. Promise me she will not die. Promise me. I want you to promise.

  She broke suddenly into a crying fit. She wept profusely, agonizingly, in a hushed voice. Her tears, spherical and limpid, one drop after another, each separated from the other, dripped down the smoothness of her cheeks, while her bosom shook with crying that would neither stop nor dilute the torment. He took her in his lap without a word, patted her hair, pressed her slowly toward him, as she went on in her stifled crying fit. With no sign of dejection or reluctance, she sought refuge in him, yielding to his embrace, delivering over to him her weighty chest. She felt secure with him as his hand pressed the arc of her ample bosom from the other side, affectiona
tely and gently. He turned her face toward him and wiped off her tears against his mouth without lust or hurry. He felt on his lips a sweet taste mixed with a light, salty flavor. It came to his mind, lovingly, that this light sugary taste was very strange. His lips sought her open, moist mouth in a sort of consolation and slow rhythmic, erotic appeasement. Then his hand descended to the back of her neck, under the hair, firmly touching it; his fingers went down to the zipper in the back of the blouse and opened the bra’s clasp easily, with agility. The muscles of her strong back lay calm beneath his spread-out hand that circulated around to her bosom, feeling its weight and plumpness, embracing it toward him. Under his lips, he felt the sharpness of her small white teeth. He rubbed her back above the narrow waist, and in his hand he felt the heat of her tight, taut skin—youthful and soft—on the side of her plump strong haunch.

  She raised her weeping face toward him as the clear drops, pure and welling, clung to it. In her rounded features no convulsions of crying or contractions of pain were visible. There was anticipation in her eyes, as the rough waves of the storm were quieting down. Her face—of how many masks?—resolved into the one real face, with tears, tears craving and calling for men’s affection. The clarity of this face and its roundness without a blemish, the two strangely fixed eyes having dripped the pure waters of grief, provoked pain and distilled his affection. They exchanged kisses; in her breath the traces of her weeping, now mixed with another tension, in the throes of which her body shook. She raised her hand weakly. Her fingers were almost unrecognizably strange as they pressed his face toward her. Her bare breast was now fully in his hand. In all this intimate closeness, there was no blazing desire to complete a sensual act or to satisfy a lust. She was seeking refuge in him from the evil, from the imminent travail, as if she were performing a magical act. He received her in his arms, in his lap, rather protectively, to confront together the invisible blows, partaking helplessly in the process of childish surrender. He said to her: Why didn’t you talk to me on the phone and relieve yourself? Why didn’t you tell me?