Rama and the Dragon

by Edwar Al-Kharrat

  At the gas station in Fayoum, a single, strong lamp shines above the faint, small light bulbs casting yellowish rays on tin cans, jacks, tools, pipes, and black inner tubes, dangling and mildly smutty, round and thrown one on top of each other like torn off body parts. A heap of dusty blown tires made of rough rubber, also square tiles having traces of irremovable grease could be seen in the light. He brought her a cup of coffee, lukewarm, the last from the thermos. He offered it without words, and she accepted it. The long car with Samia, ‘Abd al-Jalil, Suzi, and Salwa had returned to its monotonous din, moving along in the nocturnal darkness through obscure fields falling away peacefully on the sides of the agricultural road between brittle agglomerates of nondescript trees.

  Rama woke up, raised her head, and said: Where is Mikhail? I haven’t heard his voice for a while. Where is Mikhail?

  He did not find the strength in himself to respond. He couldn’t trust the tone of his voice. He felt stiff, and he was anxiously silent for a moment as she looked at the back of the car and said with alarm and anxiety: Did we leave him in Asyut? What happened? Did he go with the others in the Volkswagen? Where is he? Several half-asleep voices were raised: But Mikhail is here; here he is … with us. Of course, we haven’t left him.

  Mikhail shook his head. No one laughed. She was silent and everyone went back to their troubled sleep in the stubborn din. Samir was driving with assurance and without moving his head. Mahmud did not speak. Mikhail closed his eyes, painfully awake, seeing her small head swaying on the black leather jacket now.

  She had told him how years before she had been on a mission to the Horus Temple at Edfu. The train schedule had gone awry because of an accident in Asyut. When she arrived at the station late at night, she had missed her train. Or it hadn’t arrived. The station assistant came unshaven with his wilted collar, without tie, wearing an old official jacket with puffed pockets. He told her the situation. She couldn’t find anyone from her group at the station, not the elderly monuments inspector, nor the messenger, nor the foreman. Doubtless they had become convinced that either she’d left before them or hadn’t yet arrived. She said to Mikhail that she wasn’t helpless, or empty-handed as they say. Instead, when faced with a crisis, she glows with energy and never loses her head. She said that after checking with the station manager, she learned that the archaeological group had returned in the official car to the resthouse, and there was no way now to join them. The one and only crumbling horse carriage couldn’t undertake the trip, and there wasn’t a telephone at the resthouse. When she asked the station manager about a hotel where she could spend the night until she could catch the morning train, the kind old man laughed and said: My daughter, you in a hotel in Edfu? Of course, he was generous and helpful, as he should be. She said that ‘Amm Fanus, the station manager, was an old-fashioned, tarboosh-wearing Copt. His white collar was elevated and starched under his official yellow jacket with its round bronze buttons. She said he was over sixty for sure. In those days they did not have birth certificates, and doctors were easy-going when writing down the age, taking into consideration the stipulations related to age for employment. Surely he was seventy, at least. The age lines on his face were soft and his eyes behind the round lenses of his glasses were alert. He carried himself straight and firm. He was a tough Copt, a blue bone, as they say, and terribly kind-hearted.

  ‘Amm Fanus had said to her: You are the lady inspector of monuments? Ahlan wa-sahlan. Welcome. You honor us. You go to a hotel, here, at night, alone, my daughter? Has hospitality disappeared from the world? By God, you are just like my daughter. I swear by God’s bounty that you should spend the night in my home.

  She said she was delighted by him and spent the night with the Coptic family. She had remained a family friend ever since. She said the house was directly behind the station, as was typical of railway workers’ houses. ‘Amm Fanus sent the only porter in the station—a boy with bruised shoulders and black, rough, pock-marked face, who limped a little—with the news home. She said that when she entered the house, his wife came out of bed to warm up dinner for her, mulukhiya with duck’s wing, from the day before. She apologized, would not end her apologies, saying she was keeping these leftovers for ‘Amm Fanus, that they were as fresh as Arabian jasmine, and she kept urging Rama for God’s sake to eat. She offered her fresh, homemade bread, sun-baked that morning. She brought her the nightgown of her daughter Matilda, a medical student in Cairo, and wished her good appetite, saying that a blessed mouthful is good for a hundred. She added: My poor thing, you travel at night for your work. May safety accompany you at every step. Rama said that she spent the night with them, tears of joy and gratitude in her eyes. She had never slept better than that night at their place.

  As for him, all he had was a lukewarm cup of coffee from the thermos, which he poured into its plastic cup in the gas station between two sections of a long, exhausting trip during which she laid her sleeping head on the shoulder of their common friend—his and hers—putting her arm around his in the darkness of the station wagon where sleep and fatigue prevailed.

  He said to himself with faint sarcasm, which he knew was out of place, a sarcasm he could ill afford: From three fishes and two loaves of bread, five thousand ate and were full, and there were even leftovers.

  All day long, he searched her for signs of love’s turbulence and desire’s anxiety. Somehow she seemed content, in fact satiated and self-sufficient, in a hushed physical flourish in the heart of softly rounded, fresh, green leaves. Her flourish neither sharp nor glowing; its thorns neither breaking nor cut off.

  She told him that the night when her father died she woke up whimpering, but she didn’t sob. It wasn’t possible for her to sob, even her mother’s tears couldn’t get her started. He was lying on the bed, a life full of adventures, love, and fortune ended and the energy that swept like a storm stopped. He had once raised the slender, bony, little girl, with her long braids, between his arms and tossed her toward the ceiling, as if he were granting her the sky. She would touch the ceiling with her little hands. The push of his hands surrounding her waist controlled and released her, sending her lightly up, then grabbing her in a tight embrace while her fluttering, plain dress flew about and air blew between her bare legs. Suddenly his gay, adventurous, and excessive flings with beautiful women—radiant and magnificent as if they were from another world—came to a halt. All his glories and victories fell silent. The incredible legend had arrived at this stillness: motionless, in front of her in a room lit by a single faint lamp. The door of the room was open, leading to a dim hall, while her mother whimpered. His closet was slightly ajar, not properly closed.

  His pictures hanging on the walls: in complete military outfit, in masterly control, his eyes self-assured, with a rigorous face, yet having a meek touch. His tight trousers pressing his long legs and giving them a robust look. Here he is with the old-fashioned flying helmet, as if he were in control of the skies, with his smile—both daring and timid—offering the photographer and the world the profile of a pale brown face. His lips, thin like hers, firm. Beneath them is indicated a slight shudder about to manifest itself at the slightest emotional reaction. She knows the touch of his lips on her cheeks and their long, light, firm, tight pressure. His hazel green eyes—with which he gazed at what no one else saw—are tormented and stern. They exude tenderness and enfold secrets that used to shake the entire country—secrets that he will never divulge to anyone now. And here he is riding his horse as if he were about to come out of the frame. Here he is fencing, extending his arm with a long, slender, tip-shaking sword; on his face a mask of wires with a slender-thread net. With her as an infant in his lap, proudly showing her off to the photographer, to the whole world, vaunting the dearest in his world. He had said to her, when she went to him, childishly crying: Don’t ever forget that you are my daughter!

  No one could take her out from the room of his last slumber. Calm, relaxed in his yellow bronze bed with its back stand, its round slender posts
and gleaming balls atop its four corners. She spent the first night with him, staying up, just the two of them. She kept a kind of night vigil praying sensuously with her hands crossed, though without rites and cults. But he had already departed—no words, no movements from him. Her lonesomeness was not that of loss and solitude; it went much deeper. Now that he was dead, he was with her alone, truly, for the first time. She didn’t doze, couldn’t recall how the night passed. Did it pass? The bounty shrivels in front of her eyes, and love—all of it—will never respond to her heart-rending call, escaping endlessly from her flat childish chest, the chest of a girl waking up hungry in front of a cooking fire for food she will never taste. The rough sea has come with its last wave, passed over her, and drowned her. Its water dwindles away in the thick firm sand—the world’s flesh—as it recedes and dries out unable to offer anything. She remembers only a tiny black fly that keeps buzzing in the stifling room. It is taken aback by night, light, and death. It moves in quick gyrations straining the nerves, then descends suddenly and alights on his fair, wrinkle-free forehead. It settles there, and no one shoos it away. An ugly fly with a sticky round small body moving its wings and its many minute hairy legs; secure, turning its head on the sole sun that had not set and will not set. Standing on his forehead, he who burst with fire and flood, who could not bear ugliness in the slightest of things. It moves slowly on his forehead and he leaves it alone. He does not shudder in anger with his husky voice that makes the four corners of the world shake. Her eyes are glued to the fly. She falls into the grip of unconscious and misty fascination, yet very alert, awaiting some miracle, but nothing happens.

  At the bottom of this fixed, dark enchantment that does not partake of time, neither night nor day, she said she knew in a definitive way that he had died. She was shattered from within, soundlessly and without tears. Dry-eyed, she was carried out, putting up no resistance.

  This is what she told him.

  She never ceases to look for the love that died in her long, ever-changing dream, the love she’ll never find again.

  My child, your childish body will never be lifted again. The power and tenderness of that first grip are not of this earth.

  He said to himself: This is a classic case.

  She said to him in the morning: All’s well that ends well.

  He said to her: Do you want to say that everything has ended?

  She said sharply: Nothing has ended; probably it hasn’t even started.

  The last bouts of that which is between us, like the last stages of a fever, attacking, retreating, drowning me then ebbing off—they aren’t over yet?

  This epistle of mine to you is nothing but the cry of a lonely solitary. It is natural, familiar, ordinary: just another loner in this ship sailing without end, teeming with loners who fill highlands and lowlands, roads and flanks of the earth. Isn’t that so? Amid crowds in the din of travel, in the whirring of cement mixers, in the rattling of reinforced concrete, in the crashing of bricks and the howling of brakes of transportation trucks stopping suddenly. In the midst of commanding cries from the foreman with his long, clean jallabiya and the sorrowful, rhythmic singing of southern Egyptians that won’t end—their ancient stock resisting extinction—wearing long-sleeved, reddish cotton flannels. On their rags bluish-gray cement spatter has solidified. With them a new clan of school boys wearing long, black, rubber shoes, smoking American cigarettes, applying Brilliantine on their hair, climbing the scaffolding with bare chests and shorts, confidently and proudly earning five pounds a day.

  In the midst of this whirlpool of anger and din, when the cries of your flesh, the sighs of your desire and your tormented tears seized me, I used to say to you, I want a response. Never did I mean that I wanted these rational and logical answers, so calculating, taking into consideration future possibilities while evaluating past reflections, analyzing psychological make-ups and social dialectics, such as you give me. This is a favorite game, yet it is trivial and shabby. I can—it was always in the cards for me to do so—play this boring game too, with something akin to sarcasm. But I wanted to find an answer, with you, to this lonely cry, this common, quotidian loneliness, I wanted something to tell me I wasn’t totally alone in the end, that someone heard me at least, knew I was here. I found no response. Nor was it logical or natural to find one. But I never accepted such logic, such a reading of nature.

  She stood at the door, as if hesitating to enter the room. She was wearing a long evening dress, black with large flowers embroidered in colored threads, the back bare, tightly holding her firm bosom. She said to him: Don’t you want to see what I bought? He said: Yes. She said: Come with me. In her curtain-drawn room, lit and exuding a salty breath, she spread on her bed in childish earnestness, and anticipation, hand-woven fabrics in the Bedouin style, a delicate belt from palm leaves, a fired clay jug with a round belly decorated in red, a small gleaming blue pitcher with a slender spout, jewelry in the shape of large yellow crescents with small jingling metal fringes, and necklaces of light yellow amber with their large, lustrous beads. He said: Great, Rama. Most beautiful! She gazed at him thoughtfully and deliberately, radiant with a restrained joy in her eyes, the reflex of one who is waiting in vain. She collected her small treasures, bent down, and shoved them into her large bag. When she stood up, she slowly, cautiously, moved close to him, then kissed him quietly on the mouth—an unexpected kiss, silent, dry, and light, without lingering or eroticism—once and then twice, a kiss of gratitude in a pardon-requesting mode without admission of sin exactly, more a kiss of penance in anticipation of what she knew would happen again.

  Something hung in the air of the room as if in the aftermath of something, waiting for last rites.

  She said to him: You’ve made up your mind on this? You’re not coming to the party?

  He said: No, I am not coming, as I told you. I’m exhausted.

  She said insincerely, as if she were trying to relieve her conscience: Won’t you change your mind? There is still time, you know. He said: No, the time is gone by.

  She said: May I ask you for a favor? He said: Please, do. She said: My handbag. I won’t need it. I have this small purse. And I worry about leaving my handbag like that in the room, as it is open. The purse was black embroidered with silvery threads, studded with what seemed like tiny pearls, soft and flat, beautifully designed. He said: Yes, it is always open, ready for any newcomer! She said: Darling, you are absolutely right!

  She handed him the handbag filled with a thousand and one things, and tried—for the sake of demonstration—to zip the bag. Impossible to do. She shrugged her beautiful shoulders and said: I’ll see you when I come back. It might not be tonight. I’ll be too late. Tomorrow probably.

  She said goodbye to him in a sudden and decisive way, without a kiss, without a word. She had washed her hands of something and was totally preoccupied with something else.

  He watched her as she left. Her firm brown back seemed tender and vulnerable as she raised her arm wrapping around herself a black shawl embroidered with silver designs, making a half turn, as she did, that signaled departure. Her bra straps pressed the flesh of her back, behind the soft fabric, making it look plump on each side. The bra’s lines were evident, directly beneath the décolleté where the roundness of her slightly protruding breasts in the tight dress was defined. As he came out behind her, there was a non-stinging, light mist in his eyes.

  The handbag was in his hands with its expensive, old leather still warm; slightly faded at the folds, having pliable, soft wrinkles; his fingers plunged in its round and full belly. It swelled with things overflowing from its opening, as if about to pour out. The handbag emits her fragrance, that of her skin and of a perfume he knows so well—the perfume that haunts him in tormented nightmares of longing. He did not hesitate, despite the ethical restraint, in emptying the handbag calmly and confidently. His heartbeat was speeding a little, but his wakeful eyes were observing the arrangement of things, with the intention to return them in the same o
rder. Was this a betrayal of a trust? His instant inner response was that somehow he had an indefinite right to plunge into everything related to her, as if they were his own things. After all, what was between his hands was not something strange, but his. He said to himself that he had, in his turn, opened to her himself and everything that belonged to him.

  Later, when the shock faded, leaving him in a cruel, bare, raw light, as if numbed between white walls with rough paint, without curtains, no window, not even a nail, it occurred to him that Rama, without being completely aware, also perhaps wanted, and did not want at the same time, to open this dimension of her intimate life. It was as if she simultaneously wanted and did not want him to take with his own hands and see in the light some of her intimate apparel that still had the warmth of her body folds and their concealed traces. Yes, probably she wanted him to know, to pass through some test.