Naughtily, he said: How difficult it is to know the names of things before we name them.
She said: Yet the thing remains the same, no matter how it is named.
Later, he said to himself: Of whom was she talking? About a man she really knew with an intimate knowledge that went all the way? Or was she talking about a combination of lived experience and lived illusion? Doesn’t this man have some of my own features? Rather, isn’t he the way I should be in her dreams? Isn’t she talking to you about yourself, using an alternative image?
He said to her in a voice that he strove to make clear: What a man! As if he came out of a novel, rather than Algeria.
She said: It is true. Rarely does one have the chance to get to know a man like him. I don’t know how to explain him to you. He is at any given moment a single, integrated human being, aiming at one goal, moved by one need. But the moment is not something imposed, fixed, frozen. The moments change, and every change brings a new man, also integrated, unified. Yet the moments that pass by, and the ones to come, exist in every moment. They do not pass away completely. They do not pass away at all; they form a concealed and luminous fund in the depth of his oneness.
He said: This I understand.
She said: Without drama. Have I told you? No drama. And he does not feel pity for himself, or at himself. This is what I love in men, first and foremost.
He noticed instantly that she did not use the past tense: “This is what I loved.”
She said: Algiers reminds me of Alexandria. You know, I am going to take you with me to Alexandria—isn’t it your darling city?—and drown you in the sea.
What do you say to your beloved who will drown you in the sea? You say, of course: Do drown me. These are the waves in which we all want to drown, without choking with salt water, instead a calm, delicate drowning, or else a rough, stormy drowning in which one loses one’s self, loses one’s head. You say: No, I’ll never drown, when you have already hit sandy bottom, settling with conscious eyes in your tomb beneath layered, unbearably heavy waves?
She said: I am like the phoenix that they talk about. I revive myself in the seawater.
He said to himself: In the waters of passion, in the baptism of fire.
She said: In the sea salt, in its silence and scorching sun, in the delicacy of its moon.
He said to her: Always youthful. You come out of the scorching water in the tenderness of new youth.
He said to himself: This woman will never perish. She herself sets the number of years according to the dictates of her inner needs. The burning pond of passion is the well in which she sees the wheat-colored flower of her face glittering next to the water’s surface.
He said to himself: She never goes back to something past; she never mentions it. She never says that this or that has happened and ended. Everything is present. Every moment starts anew, as if the past had never existed. Thus the past is neither forgotten nor remembered, because it never exists in the first place. In fact all her stories take place in present tense. As well, she cannot entertain the future. It simply doesn’t exist.
He knew, at a later course of time, that things in her world had many names, also that one name referred to several things and several people too. He learned that differences in her passionate, private convictions faded and disappeared over years, over dreams, people, visions, fancies, facts, challenges, and disappointments.
He said to her: Why are you without your usual dynamism today? I trust this is not a depression cycle?
She said: No, it’s just the change of seasons. It always happens in spring. You know, snakes shed their skins in late spring. We used to find their skins in the courtyards during Baramhat, when I was a kid in Sharqiya. You know that I am from Sharqiya province?
He said: And the birds change their feathers?
She said: Ah, the old phoenix.
He said: The ever-renewed, the born daily.
She said: I have no roots. There is no haven for me in my self, and this scares me. I am a reflection of others. I am destined to be a reflection of the ones I love. I dedicate myself to what they love. I love for myself what every new tyrant in my life loves. This removes me from myself. Each time, I know nothing except what the tyrant wants, without his even saying it.
He said: There is a seed in you, which is your essence. This does not change. No one has known this seed in you. Do you know it yourself? I want to see it in your magic ball. I want to reach the heart of this essence. It’s not impossible, is it?
She said: Our roles have reversed. Nothing is missing from your viewpoint except a broom on which I fly at midnight beside the church tower. So now you’ve become a seer!
They laughed together: a troubled laughter.
She went on with her stories, sipping her second beer:
He was the first I really loved, after my high school infatuations of course. He was my professor at university. A classic case, it happens repeatedly, but ours was different. He was an American lecturer at university, on loan to us for a year, and a member of the Brooklyn Museum Mission. He was only a few years older than me. Tall, with a face tanned by Luxor sun, a thin but full beard. A potential poet was in him. He taught me how to find the poetic in stones, in amphitheaters, in amulets, in terracotta, in worn out ancient coins, in remains of bones, in potsherds, and in pottery. His book—published only this year—is on the goddess Mut, the wife of Amun, and her magnificent temple, constructed on the same axis as Amun’s temple at Karnak. I read the book in manuscript. There was a long review of it in Time magazine. Correspondence between us has been over for a long time, but when he first left I received daily letters, sometimes two or three letters—believe me. Recently I went back to them. For a long period of time I couldn’t read them. I kept them in a wooden container—no, not a coffin—a big cosmetic box, the jewelry box every woman keeps. As you know, I don’t have valuables. A pair of earrings here, a necklace there, suffice; and I keep replacing them all the time. I don’t like gold. Somehow my jewelry continuously disappears. I make my bracelets, brooches, and necklaces available to any friend who comes by and admires them. Servants, relatives, friends of relatives—they’re all welcome to them. That’s why you find my jewelry—of silver, any other metal but gold—constantly changing. Anyhow, Richard asked me to marry him at the end of the year. He was crazy—I was already married. I had separated from my first husband, true enough, but I was still married, and he knew it. The impossibility of our marriage did not occur to him, even though I was an Egyptian, Muslim, married woman in the era of ‘Abd al-Nasser, and he was a Protestant American. It’s true my first husband had left me and was totally out of the picture. His love had been that of a lunatic youth. I discovered in his radicalism and progressivism a sadism difficult to imagine. I shall not tell you how I suffered at his hands. Don’t ask me how he used to torture me physically, spiritually, and emotionally; how he used to humiliate me physically and mentally. I will not speak of it nor do I want to recall anything of it. My mother, of course, was flabbergasted when Richard visited us and asked for my hand. After he returned from his home in Massachusetts, I went to his room. From my youth, I have never been embarrassed by something I believed in, and I didn’t care about doing what needed to be done, or about what people said or did. I can face and challenge others, or remain indifferent, without dramatizing. Such matters are beneath my concern. I spent a week with him—the happiest week of my life—a week in which nothing mattered but us. We did not tire from making love; not a moment of lassitude. We used to eat in bed! Can you believe it? This is not simply talk. Love produces miracles, it is true. As you know, the driving power of action is not simply physical exertion, the mechanical, if you wish.
Mikhail was listening with enchantment to this story untouched by vulgarity. It was this first time in a new friendship, between them, that permitted him to listen in admiration, captivated by a measure of temporal distance—both physical and emotional—to a love story not possible to divulge to a lover. Bel
ow them, the statue under the large restaurant window was illuminated by a strange light, as if emanating from her story.
She said in a sort of dreamy sorrow: I don’t doubt he resents me now.
Puzzled, he said: Why?
She said: When he came back, he found everything had turned against him. The activities of the American Mission had ceased, the lectures discontinued, and the authorities had asked him—politely but decisively—to leave the country. That was during the Dulles period, the crisis between us and the United States. I didn’t see him after that. Then came my divorce. Events overpowered me. Perhaps they still do.
He said to her: Truly you resort to a beautiful and wonderful trick—trick in the good sense of the term—that calls for admiration. When you love something or someone, the veil is removed and you can see what’s in front of you. Haven’t I said you’re an enchantress? This is your true self. Things with us may become confused and fake, but your trick of vision guarantees the purity of truth.
He asked himself about the difference between two states of things. On the one hand, there is the realm of the covert, where promises seem mysterious, set in a common, diffused, indirect lighting—the state of concealed magic and imperceptible appeal. It is where intentions and projects are begot, where beginnings are created and things appear without even feeling that they are taking shape, becoming, and growing. On the other hand, there is the realm of actual events that have taken place, the relationship with its bonds firmly tied, having developed ribs that can be touched, whose solidity can be pressed against. The strange and foreign thing that came to be—and stood up, definitive, dry, and weighty—has characteristics other than the ones that radiated in its dawn. It has its own laws, its trajectory, its limiting darkness.
He wondered about the gap, the crack, the barrier line, even when invisible, between the dream and the intention, between the intention and the realization, between the project and the trunk pushing its rounded wood in the firm land.
That crack was in everything: in love, in building a wall, in poetry, in political parties, even when reaching the outskirts of a new city and entering its suburbs, or when you bought for yourself a book or a shirt.
That first course of time did not come again.
In the following course of time, she said to him: You are worried and not … not sure.
She was trying to find the proper tone, to discover what was on his mind. She came up with a comfortable expression: “not sure.”
After a moment she asked him: Why aren’t you sure?
He said fervently: I am not sure of you. Tell me, to what extent is this worry about assurance justified?
She said: Surely, there is no room for questioning.
He said: What a response! Please do give up being clever with me for a moment. Let’s get down to the heart of things. Does this mean: “Yes, there is no room for a question; you should be assured,” or does it mean to the contrary: “No, there is no need for the question at all.”
He said to himself: Does it mean “Yes, my love for you is constant, not a matter of questioning,” or does it mean, “There is nothing between us to question.”
She said: Lack of certainty is an essential ingredient in this relationship. It’s normal, isn’t it?
He said: No.
She said: To a certain extent, it is, isn’t it?
This seemed to him like yielding on her side. She was meeting him halfway.
He said: Not as far as I am concerned. I want certainty, absolute and definitive.
She said: As for me, I’ll respond later. With a fundamental answer.
Of course, she never responded. In reality, fundamental issues were not a matter for responding or for questioning.
Later, she said: Certain issues are best left hanging. Certain things should never be said.
And that was indeed the only possible response.
Does saying amount to negation, cruel exposure, cancellation? Does definition imply desiccation, reduction, diminishment? Or does saying signify a causing of pain and an uncovering of illusions?
The wall of this soul crumbles from the inside. Drops from its salty water overflow into a wide, intermittent line—rusty and dull.
She had said to him: I am delighted that you exist, and that I have met you.
But this was not enough for him.
Rama was clearly the star of the small party that took place spontaneously after the waves of day visitors had ebbed and the Auberge calmed down.
On opening the window, Mikhail inhaled the lake’s salt odor permeated by the twilight of early evening. Sharp, silver, luminous spearheads of stabbing stars were fixed on the lake’s surface. In the light slap of the waves melting away on the sandy shore and in the air saturated with fleeting putrid gusts of decay, a threatening sensation touched gently, but repeatedly, the edge of his heart.
He drove this dangerous calm away from himself, and went and knocked at her door. When she opened the door, he was instantly met with boisterous cries and greetings by the circle of friends in the room. The party had already started. Lamps were lit on the table, next to the bed, in the ceiling, and in the bathroom. There were two bottles of Vat 69, a bottle of cognac shining with a precious, clear amber, and the reddish, highly suggestive liquor of Bisquit. The glasses were of different shapes: elongated ones made of the usual thin glass and crystal ones refracting light. At a glance, he could see the crowded plates, one next to the other, large and small. Slices of qarish cheese: a dewy, ribbed, and pressed curd. The deep red thin strips of basturma: jerked meat with white fatty veins. The boiled, reddish, and rounded sausage. The splendor of tender green, comely lettuce. The delicacy of mint leaves like spicy, dark green flowers. ‘Abd al-Jalil, stocky and weighed down, the collar of his shirt open, got up. His eyes protruded a little in his Arab-African face. He took her hand to his mouth with its large fleshy lips and said: You, my lady, were the first to teach us to be concerned about the people and to sacrifice everything for humanity. In his voice were the first inklings of tipsiness that come after the first or second drink. He said: Mikhail, do you know that Rama is our mentor? We used to know her under her nom de guerre, Fatma. She is the one who taught me revolutionary principles. Who would believe it? It was twenty-five years ago. She was then-allow me, my lady—a young girl, but a mentor just the same. She was most rigorous, precise, determined, and beautiful as well. The Roneo duplicating machine used to be under her bed.
Mahmud said: Let’s toast this beauty first and then toast revolutionary rigor.
The seriousness of charged memories was made lighter by toasting and laughter. Samir got up, with his tall athletic figure and the naïveté of his light-colored face, which combined the meekness of a poet with the harshness of a desperado. He emptied his drink in one go and said: At that time, I was a child roaming the streets of Haifa.
The day before, Rama had got up to dance with Samir. They were taken by the music—coming out of the tape-recorder in a hushed rattle—and by a reciprocal and sudden flair of tenderness. Embracing, they went out to the balcony with its dim lights overlooking the lake. The lake looked to have been dashed to death and lying still on the sand. Mikhail was drinking and talking to Samia, the slender-faced one with profound eyes, as he watched them. The noisy clamor of the tape recorder sought him out among the crowded female bare backs on which the arms of dancers settled in formal and traditional poses. The flutter of silk and evening dresses, perfectly surrounding the curves and bulges, opened up loosely and swaying musically at the legs and hems as the women moved closely and elegantly. There was an agitating uproar in his blood from the fierce blows of ice-cold whisky, from the tiny breasts of Samia, exciting in their finesse under his eyes, from the wild tape recorder rhythms, occasionally torrential, and from the obsessive passions and hankering jealousy.
Rama on the balcony seemed as if hurled into the arms of Samir. She pressed her face into his large shoulder. He bent with his mouth on her black hair tied in an elegant blue hair
band. Mikhail could feel her ample body embraced by the poet who had run away from Israel, and his masculine blood erupted. Suddenly and without any possible resistance, he felt as if he, himself, was churning in the act of love. He put his drink down, held Samia’s hand, and started dancing, slowly and stubbornly.
Now, Rama was again beside Mikhail, her knee tightly next to his leg under the table. Waves of speech and alcohol were flowing within him, hitting him from inside, now lightly and playfully. He was weaving a story with a complicated plot about the adventures of restoring the columns and the steps of the ancient Roman amphitheater and Alexandria’s wall in Kum al-Dikka, and how he once led a mass demonstration against Farouk and ‘Abd al-Hadi, the Chief of the Royal Cabinet, in practically the same spot thirty years ago, and how he had come up with a slogan for the demonstration—“No colonialism or exploitation after today!”—and how they replaced the Union Jack with the green flag while sporadic bullets were resounding hesitatingly and indecisively from the British barracks that was then at Kum al-Dikka. He was involved in the story, narrating his reminiscences and brilliantly captivating the group. Salwa was round and small like a mischievous duck, jolly with a trembling voice. Following the story, she sang Fairuz’s song about Jerusalem in a low, warm, and sensuous voice. Nura, with her oval face and loose blonde hair, spontaneous in her popular dialect, having forgotten the inflections of a voice trained to be delicate and sophisticated, told joke after joke with obscene hints and just that appropriate measure of audacity, without an embarrassing cheapness or cumbersome reserve. Samir recited the radical songs of Sheikh Imam, and said that he had heard them and memorized them in Israel. ‘Abd al-Jalil, having become completely drunk, spoke about al-Numairi, ‘Abd al-Khaliq Mahjub, and ‘Abd al-Shafi. It was clear that he had not visited Khartoum since he was a schoolboy in elementary school. Mahmud spoke of the intrigues among the personnel in the wings of the UN and the corruption of politicians.
Rama and the Dragon Page 27