Rama and the Dragon

by Edwar Al-Kharrat

  The elevator’s wood was old, shiny, of an expensive type like that of the reception desk. The polished parquet floor was something from Alexandria’s glory days. The elevator flapped along its transit upward, emitting a metallic rumbling that seemed to come from sudden, repeated jolts.

  Her first kiss that night tasted of sand, salt, metallic rust, and nostalgic search for a peaceful haven.

  He glanced from the side window, above a narrow lane planted with naked trees, at an inhabited building with lit windows. His own window curtain was not yet drawn, so he tried to pull it closed. Something was holding up the curtain’s metal rings where it normally slid along its bar. He selected one of the room’s chairs, steadied it beneath the curtain, and climbed up on it. Using his two hands, he pulled the two parts of the curtain toward each other. They grated along the white metal rod with a rusty sound but refused to close all the way. He said to her: Rama, do you have a safety pin? She said: What? Ah, the curtain! She could not find what he requested in her swollen handbag, so he felt with his fingers along the back of his jacket collar, and found a pin. Using it, he attached the two sides of the curtain together, but even then, a voyeuristic triangular slit remained, high up on the curtain but wide open nonetheless.

  He pulled back the cover of the bed and felt the soft pillow. His hands relished the ironed fabric. He took off his jacket and stretched out lazily.

  Another window on the bed’s side of the room presented a group of panes foggy with sea mist. Nevertheless, a long chink of sea shore and winter lights was available. He watched the waves hurl what seemed to be handfuls of water, splashing with minute drizzle, upon the low Corniche fence. Some of the sea wall’s stones had fallen to the pavement, and lay inclined on their sides, looking tiny and insignificant.

  She said to him: I’ll be back in a moment—and started toward the bathroom. He said: Rama, can you let me get in first for a moment, please? Aren’t you going to open your suitcase? She said: No, I don’t want anything from it.

  He dashed in, splashed water on his face, and within minutes had run his electric razor, showered, gasping in cold water. He stepped out in his pressed pajamas—the folds still evident—and felt glowing in his newly bathed body. Then she used the bathroom. He heard water pouring over her. The bedroom felt warm and closed, welcoming and sheltering; he took off his pajama top and slipped into the bed. Suddenly she was out of the bathroom walking toward him naked. He said: Rama, wait a moment. She said: I am still so shy in front of you. But the next moment his bare chest felt her breasts while they embraced: Darling! He smelled in her body a whiff of Sudanese sandal perfume, and he felt the passion of love raising them up and bringing them down in the wonderful excitement that they knew so well. Yet they could never stop exploring this world of flesh with its quiet herbs, gentle warmth, and dew.

  She will be saying to him as they return the following day: You know, Mikhail, I am a woman and need love. Women dry out and wilt if they are not loved, if they do not make love. Yesterday was the first time for many months. I feel an equilibrium again in my body and in my soul. It’s a good feeling.

  And he will look at her but not respond. It will occur in his mind, afterward, in the pangs of silent, slow torture, that she was exaggerating a little, and that there was no need for such a comment. He has forgotten about her life and needs in their love mist, in an act that might be voluntary but only vaguely so. Why then does she remind him of those things?

  He said: Where shall we dine?

  She said: Your call, love. I don’t know. It’s your city.

  In their desolation apart from one another, they knew few hours of intimacy, the peace of the senses, the banishing of anxiety monsters that followed such a brief wintry squall of love.

  They walked to the Corniche: the sky was immense, the waves knelling deeply against the sea wall. The restaurant was empty, its glass front covered with a layer of mist from the sea against which a reflection of lights gently played, a swerving of red and blue rays. The grilled shrimp and dry white wine tasted crisp, fresh. They spoke sparingly but without tension or watchfulness. The crashing of waves on the huge, square, cement stones below the restaurant came to them as a muted echo, repeated with intermittent persistence, slightly intoxicating. They watched pine trees swaying in the night breeze on the other side of the street and felt they were alone, in need of nothing. White clouds were on the move above the sea’s dark surface. Suspended behind the distant citadel was a half moon. The citadel seemed small, black, looking like a bit of old tin.

  He said: I haven’t known the ecstatic joy that makes the heart fly and goes beyond the senses, since the days of our early discovery—days that can never return. That was when the old locked doors opened and revealed whole zones of light-headedness and intoxication, fiery and wakeful, that I’d never known existed. Remember when we were walking together in the empty street at night, and you kissed me on the mouth all of a sudden, nothing but spontaneous affection and gratitude? It sealed something inside me, completed it. We started a journey then with no idea where it would take us.

  He held her hand and said: Shall we go back?

  The column seemed distant at that moment, the martyrs necessary.

  It is just as it happens in his dreams: going out and coming in; doors, elevators, stairways—a constant searching for her, an agitated and perplexing trajectory of muddled numbers and directions. At night when he knocked at her door, the face of a taut-skinned man, awake and tired, in his underwear, with disheveled hair, appeared. With two large, wrinkled hands, he held the door cracked open and gazed out with a lightly sarcastic smile. Mikhail mumbled an apology—her door was the next one, he realized.

  It was unlatched, swinging inward when he tapped on it. At that very moment she was getting up for him. In the early morning light, she was in a gown coming up to mid-thigh. She raised her arms to embrace his head, showing her light brown underarm hair against the brown flesh of her body. She kissed him on the mouth—a quick kiss—then turned and closed the door.

  She said to him: Mikhail, did you drop your keys somewhere?

  He patted his key pocket then passed his hands through all his pockets. His mind started wandering in all directions, wondering where the keys might be.

  He said: Did you find them somehow?

  She said: You know, about an hour ago, in the early morning, maybe at seven o’clock, I heard a knock. I sleep, as you know, with nothing on, naked.

  Swiftly, it occurred to his mind that he did not know this fact.

  She said: And the door was open. I don’t like to lock it on myself at all.

  He knew that much.

  She said: I was half slipping into my gown when Mahmud entered. He said good morning then asked for small change—at that hour. He wanted to go shopping and only had large bills. Imagine. As he was leaving, he bent down and picked up a set of keys. He handed them to me without a word. I think he knew whose they were.

  So they had fallen from his pocket the night before, when he’d thrown off his clothes before entering the bed with her.

  He was not yet acquainted with her world whose corners were interlocked with other well-knotted relationships. He laughed, covering his anxiety and lack of immediate comprehension.

  Later will come the hours of love that resemble treason, not fulfillment. Cold physical anger will push him to make love, lying to himself. The one act will exist adjacent to the other—intimate physical penetration while feeling she is foreign, a stranger on whom he is thrust despite himself. Pushed with a violence from which no salvation is possible. Without affection or tenderness. Simply the raw body responses, a riot in the flesh that should be repressed. Then suddenly the awakening: dripping cold sweat from a nightmare. A scorching, dazzling awareness in the darkness. The horror of the inevitable and definitive discovery that the lie has come, not to be forgiven or erased.

  In the midst of his rush for her—in a restaurant, in a café, in a movie theater, at home—he offers her his severed
head on a burning solar tray. She yawns. Words wilt in his mouth; he falls into a stupor. Has she taken him for granted to this point, so carelessly? When she saw the look—wounded, no doubt—in his eyes, she said half apologetically, as she was twisting the knife in the wound: Haven’t you always told me you wanted me to be myself? Here I am being myself.

  In a third course of time, at the end, his greeting to her in a crowded station resembled a final farewell. He wanted a break with the unresolved, effusive suffering, even if it meant delivering an uncalculated blow that wrecks the heart. So be it. He saw how that was scaring her, how she shrank back the way a sunflower leaf will do. He said to himself hurriedly: this is because she can’t accept rejection. These reactions are deep-rooted, entrenched. Her little doll, no matter how varied its forms, is forever in a locked box, never thrown away, nor given to someone, nor taken for granted; it always remains in some corner. This is the crux of the matter.

  She had said to him that her childhood dresses were not at all elegant, not even properly cut. Her stepmother had said to her once: Come my little one, what is this trifle you are wearing? Let me fix your dress for you. She got hold of the hem of the dress and cut it off while it was on her. It was as if her stepmother had cut off part of her body.

  As for me, I am terrified by rejection too. I sense it in every gesture. I cannot envision myself left in a large, barren square, nor can I feel, with gaping eyes, the rough plain walls or the soft, feminine, and neglected dress.

  In a late stage in this relationship, when I kept missing my chances, kept deviating from the rules of the game, when I failed to live out my predetermined role, there was not even sexual interest. The interconnections became burdensome nightmares, complicated but clearly with a pattern. Wild, angry, lonely nights, stormy nights in the heart of silence. Her name mixed with tears. Her body thrown into an open space attacked by wolves beneath a sky of melted lead. Such is the price of defeat.

  Should he admit that he betrayed her, simply by his silence? By his cracking up? By his sterile childish tears—ashamed as he was of these tears, and knowing the futility of shame? Or is he, like all betrayers, unable to see his treason?

  He said to himself: Who cares about other peoples’ pain? Or even their deaths? No one. Not even their closest loved ones.

  He said to himself: The act of life itself is selfish: a fundamental egoism that does not diminish. It is concentrated around itself: a hard pit that cannot be harmed by anything. Give and take? Granting and accepting? Conferring and consenting? Not at all. Never, never. There is only the open mouth that chews and mangles, taking and taking, paying attention to nothing else, in the process of sheer appropriation and total possession, with teeth and lips.

  He responded to himself: Why do I get so upset about this simple, basic truth that cannot be argued? We live alone, die alone. We suffer alone. Basically we enjoy ourselves alone. Other people are instruments. Sharing: dream of the defeated.

  He said to her: Love is the endeavor in which loneliness should dissolve away. Correct? Yet I ask you. I ask you and you must answer: Does the lover really know the anguished torments of the beloved? The inner dying of the lover? Or is the sharing of this suffering, even if granted, no more than a revolving around the self? I want to know.

  She said sorrowfully and with belated knowledge: I have tormented you a lot. I know. But this has passed. We have known some beautiful moments. Isn’t that enough?

  No, it is not enough; it is not enough, even in the moment of consummation of love itself, that merging forgetfulness in the flesh. Even at that moment, is there anything but the confirmation of the self? At best it is binary and reciprocal, but it never becomes one entity. In fact, this merging confirms a fundamental separation, which can never be soldered, never, never, never.

  Once she said to him in deceptive simplicity: Why this merging, which you search for with such ardor? You act as if we don’t possess human rights, his or her separate sovereignty.

  Then she added, trying to lighten the tension: Or have you become a Sufi? And you, dear sir, whom I thought to be so rational and sedate.

  She said to him, narrating, her lips pursed around a cigarette he had lit for her, enjoying the telling of her tale:

  This city reminds me of Algiers right after the War of Independence. We were part of the Egyptian mission to study and restore Greek and Roman antiquities. We had an Algerian friend whose friendship I valued. I don’t know what has happened to him. I received the last of his letters before Ben Bella’s dislodgment. We used to go out in his black Austin. He had simply confiscated it from a French colonial settler who fled. Yes, a car like Nasser’s. Why are you smiling?

  He said: Revolutionaries everywhere behave the same.

  She said with a dreamy, almost erotic look: Ben ‘Ammar was a revolutionary of the pure type; able to forget bygones completely and start from scratch each time, after each failure, without regrets and especially without bitterness. This bitterness is what I cannot stand. It is a sure sign—I’m not saying of weakness—but of something worse, of hesitation and confusion. He knew how to welcome life and its pleasures, taking his fill without excesses, without squandering, without false abstention. He also knew how to put up with blows. He was dismissed from his army committee after Independence, and he started anew. He was entrusted with planning the decentralized, self-managing economy of the autogestion. He took the task seriously, tried his utmost, and called on his imagination. But they removed him to the cultural committee in the Liberation Front. His responsibilities included antiquities. He used to come out with us wild bird hunting—what are they called, sandgrouse? Anyway, that was in the northern swamps, a few hours away from Algiers, near the sea. It was just like Manzala, over by Port Said: reed, brush, and clear shallow waters over solid sand. The strong black Austin knew the way. He was always in a good mood, and his shot never failed. He never added a dramatic veneer to anything, no matter how dramatic the situation was.

  He said: A man of many talents; a man for all seasons.

  She said without blinking: A man who cannot be matched. He was a brilliant conversationalist. He was not fluent in Arabic, but I learned from him the Algerian dialect. At moments of emotional excitement he forgot his French. There was a potential writer, an accomplished novelist, in him; but he never wrote a word. As for me, I do not love nature. I wouldn’t lie to you and tell you, for example, that I love opera. I simply don’t love it. Just like that. All intellectuals in Egypt love opera, say they love opera.

  Interrupting and with a sense of honesty and duty, he said: I love opera.

  She said: Nor will I say that I feel ecstasy when the sun sets or rises in the fields, or that I find in it a symbol for le je ne sais quoi. Or for that matter the chanting of birds. Do birds chant or sing? They make noise; that is all. They twitter, titter, or trill, as they say. But sing like ‘Abd al-Halim Hafiz?!

  He said: You are right. Most people resort to ready-made molds for their so-called aesthetic judgments. They select among prefabricated groupings of canned emotions.

  She said: I don’t deny that perhaps a few have genuine feelings, virginal and intimate, in front of nature. I think you’re one of them.

  He said: But does this “nature” exist? I believe what people do is a constituting part in making nature. I don’t believe in another nature, separate, imaginable without interference from man or his existence. This is particularly so in Egypt. Do people who speak about nature know it? The pallid imagery they believe in is taken from translated poetry and from the clichès of innovative though not especially inventive literati. As for me, nature in Egypt is entirely made by people’s hands, with one exception of course: the desert. After you go beyond the telephone wires, telegraph wires, and the new electricity towers, you’ll find the terror and the magic of pure desert—its complete immunity from human penetration.

  He was pleased she saw eye to eye with him. At every moment he was discovering they met in areas where he formerly thought himsel
f isolated, sequestered.

  She said: When Ben ‘Ammar spoke of a sunset, of a hunting expedition in the mountain, or of a political struggle in a committee, he was able to make me forget everything else, to make me live with him, to love nature and hunting, to be a partisan in his political struggle.

  He said: He is single-minded then in every project of his, having one overriding purpose.

  She said: Yes. But not quite. For example, he did not claim that he abstained from non-marital relations, because it would have been a lie. He simply didn’t want to wreck his marriage. He looked as if he were twenty-eight when in fact he was in his forties. His wife seemed in her fifties though she was probably in her thirties. You can count then how much older than him she seemed. But she was dear to him, and he was intent on her as one would be on that which cannot be replaced.

  He was trying to overcome his sudden jealousy, which he felt was out of place. She had not missed the slightly sarcastic tone and rejection in his response to her story. She had simply chosen to ignore it, if only for the time being. He became silent, waiting.

  She said: Yet he was able to come back, if need be, to discuss an issue, after several days following the end of a violent polemic around it—a polemic worked to his advantage—to tell you that you were right, that he had thought it over, and come to see what you wanted to say I mean by that, he was not self-centered. He had no need to negate the other.

  He said: He was not a man cut out of a single mold. He did not have a single god.

  She said: He might have been torn on the inside, but he was whole at the end of day. Perhaps not the ideal model of perfection, but integrated. Everything in him—even his inner fragmentation—complemented his other dimensions. In no way do I mean he was tepid and calculating. His exuberance and passion matched his prudence and careful weighing of matters. He called things by their own names.