Rama and the Dragon

by Edwar Al-Kharrat

  She said: Would it have been all right? Would you have been satisfied if I broke down crying on the phone? I was agitated and had no idea what to do.

  Then she said to him as she was wiping off her tears with the back of her hand, as if she were a little girl: Sorry; so childish. It’s a childish thing. I’ll take the kitten to the veterinary doctor. I know a clinic nearby.

  When he asked the next day: What happened?

  She said: What? What do you mean?

  He said: The kitten.

  She said with an indifferent voice as if she had forgotten, and in a decisive tone as if she wanted no sequel, explanation, or commentary: She died.

  Despite that, he said: Do you know that in southern Egypt when a person dies, we wash his clothes in the Nile. We also throw into the Nile the first childhood lock of hair.

  He asked himself: Is that in order to place the end of things in the Nile waters, to entrust its flow with the mystery of beginning too?

  She didn’t say a word, as if what he had already said was more than necessary, no need really. As if they were sharing in a crime. That’s how it felt. Was the sharing of a grave sin a feature of love or a sign of distancing and separation? His feeling of guilt could not be explained at all by this silly, insignificant death in which he’d played no part. He said to himself: No death is insignificant; none is silly. And he said: Did I really play no part? He said: Now I understand the induced guilt that happens in love, what’s meant by “crimes of the heart.” I could have never imagined it—this guilt that manages to emerge from a destructive fit while questing for the impossible.

  He entered the small bedroom, before dawn, felt the fields and the Nile behind the unpainted walls. At the door the dogs were still whining in the aftermath of their meal. From behind the open window, he caught sight of the large palm trunks with their dusty, curved, and cracked surfaces standing in a square, lit by a single bare electric lamp. She had said to him: This is Manal’s room. She is spending the night with one of her girlfriends. The bathroom is this way. Goodnight. She left him for her room. He did not have his pajamas, but the summer was merciful. The blue sheet was light and gentle on his body, feminine with its embroidered edge. It exuded the aromas of a sleepy girl who has not yet become a woman: a very slight fragrance of a feminine body not yet bloomed. There were large posters on the wall: Che, Elvis, two European horses with heavy, short legs running on a sandy seashore, water drops flying around their manes and open mouths, frozen by the camera’s eye in a luminous, melodic pattern. A study desk, one end flush against the wall, had on it an old-fashioned phonograph with a collection of discs, some black and bare; others in their colorful, torn covers. Amid textbooks, fashion magazines, French novels with yellowed pages, English hard covers, and dictionaries lay small and large dolls in faded-color fabrics, twisted bead necklaces thrown about on the shelf, a very small plastic doll with one arm cut off—the kind that infants in their first months play with—which she had kept. He felt he was violating a child’s sanctum. He put on his trousers, slipped his bare feet into his shoes, walked carefully to the bathroom, feeling wakeful eyes and watchful spirits in the sleeping house. Without a gush, a weak stream of water poured from the tap. He wiped his hands with his handkerchief, felt the roughness in the small kilim under his feet. He went back to bed, covered himself, and plunged his head back against a soft pillow which he had to fold twice. He picked up an English book and read a few lines about Cromwell’s revolution. A gentle and strange mewing which he could neither locate nor comprehend made him get up again. He looked around and picked up from the lower bookshelf two newly born, frog-like kittens. Their slight bodies, almost boneless, clung to his hands and to the edges of the bookshelf, mewing weakly, pleading. He opened the door and put them in front of it, returned, closed the door, and turned off the light.

  He enters into a narrow corridor between two rows of successive, unending, slim columns, and he puts his offering on the awesome altar. He hears the cry of the black goose at night under the priest’s knife and hears his prayer: In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, O God give us patience when afflicted, O angel of mercy, O angel! The tingling of silver in the round, dark, shiny, ceramic pot, the living offering with its flying feathers shrieking between the hands that will set its body on fire with rising incense and the aromas of grilling, of cinnamon, and of aged musk. In the darkness, men pass between columns into the temples of priestesses nude beneath white diaphanous gowns, performing their votive offerings and fulfilling the right of Isis-Astarte for six days and nights. Around him rise walls of entrenched millenary stones, up to the dark clouds in a distant, engraved ceiling, open to the sky. Around him huge, lofty, rounded columns spring up—the arms of ten men insufficient to encircle a single one. The capitals of these columns’ fully rounded, three-dimensional circularity are almost invisible. They are topped by granite lotus and mysterious petrified sugar canes in the light of stars that he touches without burning his fingers. On large marble tiles, smoothed by the touch of bare feet and by bodies rolling in unending suffering—in the grip of unrelenting oppression, amid the steady columns that never shake or fall down, scratched by the fingernails of those who are dying in agonies of passion, injustice, and famine—the columns never fall. Children’s fixed eyes, dimmed by dispossession and devoured by inflammation, fasten their power on the columns, but they never fall. Below the steps of the columns the fields are covered by still, reddish waters from the Nile’s flood season, taking in the fertility dough, reaching the depths of the silent, black womb. ‘Amm Tadrus under the row of thin, outer columns bends at night with an adze on two qirats of earth, having wrapped his hair with a striped, dark red, large, Mahalla kerchief, with sweat drops hanging from his taut spiked cheekbones, and a long row of men who neither talk nor look at anything, standing up and bending in formulaic rhythm until they reach the farthest field beneath the mountain slope—when will their suffering end?

  And Rama sleeps beneath the moon with her marvelous, plump, lightly bronze, wheat-colored body, which has ripened and matured beneath the soft skin covering its flesh. Diaphanous, deep red muslin silks fly about her arms that reach without claws, but rather with gentle nails, from fluttering wide sleeves. She arises slowly, deliberately, dancing in a fire in which her stretched body does not burn, but grows, flickers, and shimmers with its inner fire responding to the flame tongues. The two fires embrace in a rite accompanied by slow music emanating from the white ground marble and the bluish hues of combined, transparent levels of an invisible fabric that has neither warp nor woof. The bronze color of mature breasts proceeds gradually from the tan of the plump, flat belly to the blackness of the small, bushy elevation with its dense grass. Her abundant corporeality is soft and earthy, desired and loved, thrown about in the divinity of lofty rising columns. Her legs are silently collapsing columns beneath the tight embrace of ritual ceremony causing the oblivion of this world in which the taut, erect cobra has been slaughtered. Its head has fallen with undermined pride, and its dispersed blood drops have dried and frozen on the white stone, polluting it. He stretches his hand and takes from her neck the large necklace of multiple hoops, with large lapis lazuli and sapphire beads, and the reddish, gold cross chains. The moon burns with an imprisoned yellow fire between the horns of the haughty bull holding up the weight of the sky. Her large eyes with their deep greenness gaze at him while performing the votive offering, paying the price, contemplating him in a voiceless hymn beneath the trembling light of tall candles, lit within several high niches constructed into the sides of the stony walls. The coal-black hue of her broad eyelids is harmonious, for the first time, with her rich red lips shimmering like creamy waves. They penetrate his heart, encircle him, goad his tension into a harmonious, unhindered gush. There is no invasion, only arrival at a planned destination—paved, cozy—as the two bodies roll over and over in the dance of relief and contentment. This painful mask of beauty on her face—the ever recurrent copper mask of his d
ream—the mask of pleasure as she dances, as she loves, is the same pleasure-mask as when she talks, smokes a cigarette, or writes a letter, the same mask of the last moment of love-making in all its modulations. There is a will and a formless determination behind this mask with gaping eyes. It is the mask of the woman with eternal experience in both love and pleasure: it is fixed; behind the quiver of ecstasy lies calculation and planning. By a kind of a predestined faith he continues to seek protection from the ever-tense and threatening risks at the corners of the road. The amulet has never been put to the test. It has neither failed nor confirmed its magical power. His wakefulness at night is anxious, the smoke of his cigarette flavorless.

  In the very early morning, he drank Turkish coffee—sada, bitter—with her on the low roof. From there the gray public square could be seen with its trees, refreshed by their slight verdure. In the morning air, the palm wreaths were dangling with their ample arching leaves. Amid the lolling trees was a warm, reddish glow emerging from clusters of ripe, green dates—the short, swollen, finger-like fruit—which he used to buy as a child from the wrinkle-faced, gentle-eyed southern Egyptian peddler. He used to pay him a big, red coin: a millieme. The dates would break up in his mouth and he would feel them there, sandy and soft, their pungency making his tongue contract.

  Below the roof, the dogs were circulating, sniffing something near the old tractor, its red paint having peeled and partly erased a set of black roman numerals also painted beneath slits cut into its metallic side. He looked around and listened. No trace of the kittens, no sound. Had they been part of his long, agitated dream? She looked at him and said: I heard you at night as you opened the door and removed the kittens. I too did not go to sleep for a while. Did you find Manal’s room reposeful? He said mechanically: Yes, yes.

  In another time, I saw you, I saw you incarnated in Manal on the sand of al-Ma‘mura: youthful and aging simultaneously. I held onto myself, for our time had passed. Her narrow forehead and the roundness of her gentle cheekbones; her round, short, muscular legs bare beneath the flimsy summer dress, inspecting with her feet the hot sand in an absent-minded gesture under the leaning umbrella; and the eyes—not yours yet so much yours—with their dark green color penetrating the heart, as usual. She—this you-in-Manal—was alone in the midst of white sands at the shore polluted by summer’s frail, wilting trash: sun-dried reed stalks dispersed by the wind, ripped plastic bags flying about and indestructible, fresh skins of watermelon with their green halves buried in the sand. I did not recognize in you this adolescent, girlish body. I only imagined it under the flesh I had contended with and filled, thus dispelling the years and fulfilling the cravings. I know this rough, abundant, strong hair under the sun with its pungency and wildness, its smoothness and provocation. Traces of its touch remain on my fingers and on my lips. This girl in whose empty, virginal bed I slept once, a bed preserving the impression of her physical fragrance. This unique dual presentation repeating a past and persisting as a model in an eternal world: its dark passions and breathtaking love shake me. She was cut off from the summer world of sea and sand, from the trivialities of a bored and boring bourgeoisie who spend hours on al-Ma‘mura beach under multicolored umbrellas on wet cotton chairs, amid the noise of cassette players—hoarse but lost in the sea air’s larger, continuous din. The children were sloshing around plastic pails full of saltwater that quickly soaked away into shallow holes in the sand. Peddlers were selling newspapers, salted seeds and nuts, candied peanuts, thin sweet wafers, seashell necklaces; supplying the trashy domestic needs of summer vacationers: cups, plates, plastic tablecloths with ludicrous colors. The harsh midday sun pounds the bodies lying about on the sand and in the shade, moistening themselves in the water and getting tanned slowly—bored, neither relaxing nor enjoying themselves. And this dual person was alone behind the sea coast and the row of umbrellas, away from the crowds along the shore with sands corroded by foaming, turbid waves. Having become domesticated, the throng had lost its power and prime. So this person was occupying both a new and eternal context. Around her was an invisible halo from a hidden sun separating her from the world, yet making her the focus of that world, because she was there incarnate, returning to my heart and coming out of it; embodied alone without delusion, thus invulnerable; in fact, unattainable. How painful love can be!

  She said to him: My emotional life is neither troublesome nor complicated. There was only one man in my life: the first one. I was his student. We were engaged but never succeeded in getting married. I told you his story in detail, didn’t I? He is still my true love, my first love. Never mind my marriage; that was not love. As for this first man, he was quite another matter. We spent an entire week in bed without going out. We ate in bed. I have never known anything like it, not in all my life.

  He said to her: A friend of mine told me that when you were in Port Said, during the Occupation, your code name in the Resistance was Fatma. You told me that the Egyptian officers quarreled over you, using revolvers—didn’t you?

  She said: They were very polite.

  He said to her: What is the secret behind your insistence then? Why do you insist on calling all these relationships “friendships”? Why not simply end that nomenclature?

  She said: Is that what you want?

  He said: This obsession of yours to offer everything in order to attract, to please, to make others happy. I know I was not—nor was it possible for me to be—the only one. But you go out of your way to please first this one, then another, and so on. Does this benevolence fulfill an irresistible need you have?

  She said: You could have refused what you call this benevolence of mine. Why do you think I come to you, Mikhail, if I don’t love you—whatever that word means?

  She said to him on their first night: Tomorrow I shall call on you as I would on strangers, but tonight these hours are ours. For as long as these hours last, I’ll call you “my love.”

  She said to him: Dearest one.

  He said to himself: Is this a term of endearment or a formula?

  He said to her: Or is it a tendency of yours for vengeance, for getting even, for settling old accounts? Is it possible for me to step on grounds that might hurt you?

  With glowing eyes, she gestured coldly and in stifled anger.

  He said: You are neither child nor woman, but a woman buried in the heart of a slim child with long braids, with thin and slender face, and hungry eyes. Aren’t you seeking revenge as a result of your first and last lover—the first column on which the monument of your world was erected, and whose tremendous roundness your slim arms could not encircle?

  She said, half objecting: Perhaps.

  He said to her: You have passed your early years, half your life—maybe more—engaged in revolutionary work: a world with its own rules, calculated ventures, concealment, secrecy; where the principle of safety is the principle of survival, and yet you long for a lost sense of security. This path in a dark, labyrinthine cavern, without hope of finding a luminous exit, of finding the aperture to lead you out of your endlessly sensual world …

  She looked at him contemplatively, half-convinced, and said: I … don’t know.

  He said: Then let’s just say you’re searching for unification with a primal scene that can’t be replicated. A diligent search, with trembling and longing fingers that never tire, for the ever elusive ka, your spiritual double, ever present in front of your eyes. Yet you never arrive at this much-desired unification that could calm all this zealotry.

  She said nothing. Her eyes were gaping.

  He said: What frightens and provokes me is the ferocity and ruthlessness of your eagerness for pleasure. What hurts and isolates me is your submersion in a completely silent, locked-in depression.

  She said: What’s the use of this dissection? Stop tormenting yourself, Mikhail.

  He said: Is it the irresistible yearning to quench a sensual thirst that can never be satisfied? A search for security and protection, even if for a fleeting moment—the momen
t of attachment, of doubling, of complementariness, if you will allow such a term? You are, in the end, loved and truly wanted at this moment of total, deified love. The final proof of this moment is its realization, endlessly repeated. Or perhaps we’re all instruments in those hands of yours whose fingers we kiss? You don’t know the bitterness of putting myself, that is, finding myself put, within a group, within a herd, within a legion of men.

  He said to himself: Your wild Freudian interpretations aren’t worth a dime: facile, naive, possibly fake, and deceitful. The truth you claim you’re after is a star you’ll never graze with your fingers.

  She said without cruelty: I don’t know what makes me listen to you. Don’t you possess your own strand of masochism? Why not look into that?

  He said: In fact I do look, and with wakeful eyes. The eyes are not a weapon for amputation. The time for miracles has disappeared. The light hopefully will add flames to the fire.