She said: We belonged to the same cell. I was his superior. Here in Alexandria on the Corniche we conferred all the time. I came to know his character, his kindness, his courage, his heart-felt honesty. I taught him the dream of justice and victory; then he taught me.
He said to her: Yes. The dream of justice. Leave alone for now the dream of victory. Where have these dreams—liberty and the erasing of ugliness from the face of the earth—gone? How we once dreamt in the infancy of this work, each from his or her distinct angle. A revolution against all oppression, physical and spiritual! Rejection of all oppression and exploitation, all hunger and alienation! But now, what’s left of these dreams between our hands? Even the crumbs slip through our fingers. The victims, the martyrs, the sorrows, the enthusiasm that make us soar high and the faith that lights the fire of determination in us, stronger and loftier than all the mountains? We carry it proudly without feeling its weight. Devotion to that which we knew under the title of Struggle, in which the distinctions of day and night disappear, as if the Kingdom of Heaven would arrive on the morrow, just beyond the next corner, right here on earth where we envisioned all its poor multitudes as saints. Nothing carries weight in the midst of this obsession with altruism, self-sacrifice—and world-sacrifice—for the sake of an impossible justice.
She said, as if still dreaming: All the small, practical details that absorb life and are raised above it, when sleeping and when awake—the clandestine pamphlets and newsletters, the never-ending meetings, encounters and proselytizing, the wrangling in discussions as if the future of the world, the future of the human race, or the people’s collective death, all hung on a single phrase, on a single word. Organizing sit-ins, managing strikes, moving demonstrations, coining slogans, planning programs, forming committees, distributing tasks, challenging risks, indifferently and without even considering them as risks, but just as trifles of the moment.
He said: Where did all this go? With it went our youth forever, never to return. The shock of falling into silence cannot be described. I cannot even go back and imagine it. After the fall of these dreams, I learned to party all night and drink until drunk. I learned how to smoke, how to strike up amorous adventures. How trivial they were! In the beginning I was actually puritanical. But along with despair, I became more human, like the rest. I used to come home at dawn every day, so I could go to my office in the morning at the Egyptian Contractors Company, here in Alexandria, and I would sleep in the bus for the seven-minute journey, calculated by my inner clock. I’d wake up by myself, precisely, just before getting out at my stop. I used to involve myself in adventures just for the sake of involvement. I neither knew nor cared about what would happen the next day. Mine was a strange recklessness, pleasing in its immorality and sorrow.
She said: I went back to the sofa in my room and lay on it, motionless and speechless, for the totality of nine months, as if it were a period of inverted pregnancy, after which I did not deliver, but arrived at a new death, another one at the heart of life. I would not open my mouth. I was totally and genuinely estranged. I did not care about the world. I was not interested in it. Up till now, I don’t know how I came back from this maze. I returned, of course, with a wound or, to say it frankly, with an incurable deformation, and I don’t know if it has healed.
He said: Childhood’s gone. We’ve simply grown up. Today we are exiled into our dreams, estranged from our dreams without ever departing from them. What are we doing exactly? You are an archaeologist. So what are you searching for? For some bygone vestiges in the heart of ruins, which your digging will never reach. And I, constructing columns, noting down different styles of architecture, assessing the techniques of ancient engineers no one cares about. Restoration: how useless. What’s the utility in hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Greek? What have you read in your inscriptions and your epitaphs? All this sterile absurdity is invariably written down in all languages, at all times. So what is the use? There are more pleasant entertainments, no doubt.
He had said: In these streets, over forty years ago maybe, I obscurely sensed, rather smelled in the air—just like that—the fragrance of frank sexuality, without even knowing it. Had I reached seven? I can’t remember. I might have been younger. But I recall the ‘Attarin Street and Hamamil Street tram that used to be yellow, clean, and elegant with its wooden seats, gleaming in the early morning sun. The air was cool, humid, gentle. I was walking, possibly running, stretching my steps to hurry while my hand was in my father’s. He was holding in his other hand his black ebony cane with its ivory handle, sculpted in the form of a bird’s head, a falcon; its eyes a semi-precious gemstone, something green. He towered next to me, all security and love. His long coat flew about in the air over his light brown, sakaruta silk caftan and the wide belt. Possibly he was rushing to make an appointment at the wikala storehouse in front of Kum al-Nadura. The street was wide, the carriage drivers were showing off, with their red-brown horses lifting their heads in their copper bits, exhaling suddenly from their nostrils and neighing. I would shudder a little in front of their height and awesome dignity. The large wood warehouses with their extended stone fences and massive iron gates wide open, their dark insides, under the arching doorway vaults, ending in vast sunny yards in which piles of newly sawn wood, planed, dark yellow, planks of equal size, rose. They seemed long and immense. How do they carry such boards, raise them up, and arrange them with this geometrical precision? A few shops: in their doors a white marble stand on which there was a scale with two copper trays and a black iron needle, sharp tipped, swaying with refined sensitivity. Do you remember those kinds of shops? Behind the scale, they had shelves lined with cigarette packs—Coutarelli and Matossian, Gazelle tobacco—round glass jars of candy; on both sides of the scale were white mirrors written on in fancy English letters I didn’t know and also in calligraphy, the thulth and naskh styles. In those days, they didn’t use the riq‘a script nor the hybrid scripts common in today’s handwriting. Despite myself I read them all with an audible inner voice, as if reading was a duty not to be passed over. I spent my childhood—I still do—reading advertisements, not missing a single letter. The street tiles under my feet were large, black, and smooth, each tile slightly concave, full of strength, attached in geometrical patterns, and gleaming. They must have been sprayed and the water had not altogether dried—it was very early in the morning.
My father said: Let’s go through here. I know a short cut that’ll get us there in a jiffy.
With my father I entered a long narrow alley with low houses close upon each other, painted pale yellow. Their iron windows and balconies were closed above turned-off lamps of clear curved glass in the shape of inverted bells. The carts purveying liver and pickled eggplant were empty and parked next to the walls; no one beside them. An air of laziness and late sleep clung to the alley. There, on the doorsteps, before narrow wooden doors behind which stood dark staircases, barely seen in the light of the still street, I saw women sitting at ease, right there, on the stony doorsteps in light nightgowns revealing colored underwear. They sat next to each other or faced each other in the alley. Their bare legs stretched on the ground in scandalous relaxation. Heavy black kohl lined their puffed eyelids. Their mouths large and sharply defined, painted pale red, resembled wounds. Was my speeding heart beating from my fast stride and the big strong hand holding mine? Or was it from the sudden wonder at this women’s scene, the like of which I’d never beheld? Their surrender on the floor, early in the morning, made it seem as if they were fishing for things, of which I had no concept, from the few passers-by at that early hour—fishing with their dark, predatory eyes. A standing woman gestured from within her low door, as if she were about to enter—a gesture I could not understand, as if she were calling or warning. She smiled, then laughed once only—an extended, penetrating, wounding laugh that had no interest in anything. In my sudden surprise, I didn’t recognize to whom she was gesturing nor why such aggressive laughter, since no one was in the alley, in front of her door,
but us. A troubling, yet, in a sense, soothing air in that strange narrow alley with its closed windows and balconies. In the exhausted features of these women—lulled, loose, and heedless—and in their strange gesturing was a kind of liberating surrender and enjoyment. It was as if they were playing a game, difficult but pleasant. The game flourished discreetly: cactus plants in the heat of a comfortable and closed glass.
We passed by two women sitting on a doorstep facing each other. I sensed a shudder and a slight fear, in which I found a new taste, not undesirable. Passing through an area threatened by unknown risks, that’s how it felt. Anyway, I was secure enough to handle it. I overheard one of the women say to the other, with an exhausted hoarse voice, nevertheless a biting tone, in the context of an intermittent chat: And so my dear, I made a spectacle out of him. Her bosom was big and hanging on her belly without anything supporting it beneath her slip. Her breasts were mysterious, slightly scary too. Her thighs, to the contrary, were slender, well wrought, bronze without the sun ever tanning them, bare almost up to the belly.
We passed Saba‘ Banat Street, where the tram was jingling along joyfully. We passed the roundabout in front of the Labban Police Station, where my eyes glimpsed with pleasure the shop of a European patisserie where we used to buy harisa when returning home. The harisa was on the spread-out, large, round, dark copper tray with its appetizing light brown color, its surface gleaming, the walnuts and hazelnuts—ivory white lobes planted in the flesh of the sweet dish—slightly protruding on the surface. The early evening before returning home—the day’s best moment—was when I had in my hands the cardboard box and felt the warmth of its half pound of aromatic harisa, whose honey oozed over the wrapping oilpaper. When we approached Kum al-Nadura, a lot of square, triangular, green, white, and blue flags were fluttering on ropes and masts, and a huge black ball was hanging. This meant a ship was coming from the sea carrying vast, unlimited promises. We moved across agglomerations of houses and a shabby depot of wholesale onions, sackcloth, chicken cages, vegetable baskets, smithies, basturma ropes on which dark round masses of cured meat with their penetrating smell were hanging, the photographer’s shop with photographs behind the glass: smiling faces with fixed eyes, plucked eyebrows of women in the shape of very thin arches like black semi-circles, their lips painted in the shape of small hearts; the big merchants in their jallabiyas and waxed moustaches, with tarbooshes and long canes. Another world entirely. Nothing left of it now but its debris. Where did it go?
This was his story.
The whole group was enjoying a short relaxing break under the umbrellas. In front of them were small, slender, green, narrow-waisted tea glasses, china coffee cups with blue designs, tall Stella bottles, and short Coca-Cola bottles. Chips of the backgammon game were moving quickly in successive strokes and chess pawns were falling down. The young Nubian waiter with his white jallabiya, red belt, and big turban seemed like a schoolboy acting the role of a waiter. Suddenly, for a second, he saw her at a distance, alone, as if she were an empty island amid waves. She brought her hand down from her forehead to her eyes, shutting them and slowly rubbing them. Her lips, tense in a silent lonesome torment—a slice of pain severed from her suddenly, despite herself. That was painful for him. He set out to go to her while his heart was melting. Then his inner motion came to a halt, suddenly and intently.
I was violent with myself, and I have reached a decision and made up my mind.
When it was time to return, he would loiter so that he would not find himself close to her. He glimpsed her looking at him, and he sensed that despite everything, she was calling him. He pretended to be busy. Inwardly he made fun of this infinitesimal, typical maneuver of lovers, until someone else took the empty seat next to her. He sat next to Mahmud, unwillingly but patiently, as if he were not paying attention to anything, and he valiantly engaged Mahmud in a lengthy conversation about difficulties of work and of techniques of monument restoration, of the stupidity of officials and their old-fashioned ideas, their insistence on destructive routine, the shortage of funds, the slowness of implementation, the strange character of archaeologists. Throughout, however, as he turned his head, laughing boisterously and gesturing enthusiastically, he glimpsed the long gaze Rama was casting upon him. Calm and thoughtful, she conveyed a double-edged apology and complaint, both to him and to herself. In his firm determination, there was self-challenge and a slight vengeance. In it was a pain squeezing him into its strong grip, into contractions concealed beneath laughter.
Rama, Rama, my last call, why do I find myself alone as if loneliness were the norm; and if I must find myself alone, why can’t I find the power to bear it? There should be such power. Or is this loneliness really a necessity, instead of a typically childish complaint? Either way, it’s an unacceptable weakness. Why don’t I find the old warmth in your eyes, those eyes I see as both beautiful and harsh inasmuch as they are prudent and reproachful? Even when I said to you that which I never say to anyone, not even to myself—whether awkwardly, gushed, or interrupted, slightly confused and fervent, I was trying to open with difficulty, incompletely—yes, without competence—old doors rusted shut because they have not been opened since their closure. I was trying to decode the echoes in the tone of your voice, of that clamor whose wild noise is heard day and night, the clamor of raw monsters attached to the walls of my self, clinging by nails and teeth, never closing their eyes. I embrace them, despite their deformations, unable to set myself free from them.
Why do I speak to you when my words come out sparingly and with difficulty, when I find in your eyes nothing but a neutral, contemplative gaze which adds to the confusion of my words, finding myself plunging alone, further and further, with motionless hands, into the swamps of this shallow-water desolation?
He said to himself: Why?
Because in you, my old friend, is a fundamental weakness that you claim as a fundamental strength. That is all.
You staunch man of ethics whose measures have been contorted.
Neither weakness nor strength is this thing?
There was, of course, no response.
He had said to her: In all this story there’s no dialogue; the dialogue did not take place.
She said: But it happened. It happened indeed.
He said: If it happened, then in an unexpected way, in an unfamiliar way that I missed and didn’t recognize.
She said: Yes, it happened.
He said: What a pity!
She said: Don’t ever be sorry.
He had said to her: You know I am southern Egyptian at heart and still am. Southern Egyptians—all of us—believe in one god, with no double.
All our lives between infertile mountains and the deep and narrow valley, on the shores of our only river with its vast and still surface, able to gush in an uncontrollable flood to the outskirts of desolate desert: solitary, believing in a sole god.
She said: How lucky you are! At least you believe, even if in a solitary, unrepeatable one.
He said: This is what I know. I don’t know anything else. I cannot know more than a single entity who can encompass everything. He is everything. My devotion is singular, monastic. As for you, you are polytheistic, as if you came from the African bush, from the farthest frontiers, from the waterfalls of an inner, subtropical area. In this place the cries of deities are dominant and varied. They send out commanding wails from forests of tormenting longings and suffering. Cries of pleasure burst forth, the flaring up of seasonal lightning from rainfall beneath dark, heavy, ripped clouds that look like moving walls of erotic monuments, engraved with thousands of gods in continuous copulation across time.
He said: My desire for oneness, this inclination for the desert, for the monastic, creates in me all this tension you hate, and leads naturally to incompetence. For me, there is only one pole tying down everything in my world.
He said: There is no room for choice, reciprocity, or variation, no place for lessening the power of this unbearable, irresistible enticement toward
a single, unique goal.
He said: Had it not been for the mercy of God, I could have become truly a tyrant who sees the world only in one color, in one tone, all poured in one totalizing cast.
She said: I cannot understand this oneness. I might be persuaded intellectually by it, yes, but that is all. The phenomenon of the many and of variety with all its different manifestations, with all types of beauty and risks, attracts me every time. How quickly I surrender to temptation!
He said: No, your surrender is not giving in to temptation. Perhaps you, yourself, first and foremost, are the maker of temptations. Isn’t that so? You are a goddess too, among other goddesses, in your own right. Maybe you are all the gods in all their infinite images, but you—yourself—are one, unique.
She said with a contented smile: I don’t know. These waters are too deep for me to wade into.
He said: You? You’re an excellent swimmer. It’s me who drowns in a hand’s worth of water.
He said to himself: Does everything happen in this story in closed hotel rooms and in glass-covered train stations? Between windows with drawn curtains and columns of iron and granite?
The railway station at night, the train from southern Egypt is late and the station assistant says that the semaphore has signaled that the train will arrive immediately. Then he says: Wait, no, this is the train from Rosetta. The group has come together on the platform for first-class passengers, sitting on wooden seats, their luggage and packages with them, exhausted and anxious in anticipation. Samia is squatting on the long wooden bench, having crossed, Indian-style, her two slender legs with their bluish-bronze tautness, not minding exposure. She leans her head in its southern Egyptian turban to her hand. She seems as if she has assumed a yoga posture, dozing off in peace. Somehow it appears as if her eyes are open. Mahmud is moving around in the station with his leather sport jacket, made in Berlin, flung over his shoulders, his eyes hollow and gleaming, the skin beneath them loose and arched. ‘Abd al-Jalil comes from the buffet with a tray of Turkish coffee cups, their foaming surface having spilled on the saucers—the dark coffee seems light and quivering—along with bottled water, Alexandrian brand. With alert, catlike eyes Nura puts her head on Samia’s shoulder, who whispers to her, from time to time, with calm, soft, and insinuating words. The train whistles in the station as it enters the platform on the other side. Its fearful and powerful echo resounds under the glass ceiling. Mikhail has gone for no reason other than to escort the group to the station, as he has decided to spend the night in town, and has managed to implement his decision. This is an indication of separation, of initiating a process that cannot be reversed—decisive, even if not altogether finalized. But something has reached its end. There’s no hope of extending its tether. From a distance her gaze hints that she knows.
Rama and the Dragon Page 31