Rama and the Dragon Read online

  English translation copyright © 2002 by

  The American University in Cairo Press

  113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt

  420 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018

  www.aucpress.com

  Copyright © 1980 by Edwar al-Kharrat

  First published in Arabic in 1980 as Rama wa-l-tinnin

  Protected under the Berne Convention

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Dar el Kutub No. 7149/01

  ISBN 978 161 797 187 7

  Designed by Andrea El-Akshar/AUC Press Design Center

  Printed in Egypt

  Translator’s Preface

  1 Mikhail and the Swan

  2 A Boat at the End of the Lake

  3 Narrow Stairway and the Dragon

  4 Rama: Asleep Beneath the Moon

  5 A Crack in the Old Marble

  6 A Broken-Legged Pigeon beneath the Pillars

  7 Isis in a Strange Land

  8 The Amazon on White Sand

  9 Craving and Reed Stalks

  10 A Copper Mask with Gaping Eyes

  11 Diocletian’s Column

  12 The Phoenix Born Daily

  13 Death and the Fly

  14 The Ninth and Last Day

  When Rama and the Dragon appeared in 1980, it constituted a new and dazzling narrative mode. Since its initial appearance—and it has now gone through several printings—Arabic fiction has not been the same. The impact of Edwar al-Kharrat’s aesthetics and stylistics on contemporary Arabic writing is analogous to those of Proust in French and Joyce in English. But al-Kharrat is neither Proustian nor Joycean. He is unmistakably himself: a powerful intellectual assimilating the heterogeneous currents of twentieth-century thought, while remaining rooted in the history and meta-history that surround Egypt, his homeland. Al-Kharrat is deeply aware of Egypt’s many cultural layers, from its religiously complex ancient and medieval heritage to its often ambiguous and conflicted status as a modern nation. The clamor of competing voices and opinions and the struggle for liberation have led to resistance and civil repression, and consequently to inevitable challenges to intellectual and artistic life in Egypt.

  Rama and the Dragon dramatizes, in a new way, the different strands that, when woven together, help to define Egypt: Pharaonic, Greco-Roman, Nubian, Arab, Coptic, Islamic, Bedouin, and Mediterranean. These influences constitute both a richness and a source of polyphony.

  The impact of Rama and the Dragon on Arabic fiction comes from its uncanny poetics. It is refreshingly strange as a narrative style, yet renders a thoroughly familiar and intimate reading as it conjures the heritage of classical Arabic, colloquial dialogues, Quranic sublimity, and Biblical intertext, along with mythic and folk motifs. It is a work that makes one feel—with its ironies, dislocations, and paradoxes—the disjointed world we belong to. It also evokes in its meandering text and verbal elegance the richness of Arab literary tradition. The loving care with which al-Kharrat’s discriminating pen describes details resembles the fine brush of a medieval miniature painter in its exquisite and painstaking labor. The modulation and exfoliation of motifs in Rama and the Dragon partake of the arabesque.

  Perhaps most crucially, Rama and the Dragon does not proceed along linear trajectories—clear beginning to clear end. Rather, it presents, often abruptly, a series of scenes, memories, and dialogues as viewed through the lens of the protagonist Mikhail, which is juxtaposed to the way Rama, his beloved, looks at things. Mikhail and Rama, though individualized as characters, represent two contrasting modes of living, two worldviews: that of the unifying, obsessive lifestyle whose roots begin with the early monastic, hermetic Christians of Egypt; and that of the easy-going, varied, and cosmopolitan lifestyle born of the city. The novel portrays Egyptian life principally in the 1960s and 1970s while harkening back, via intensely remembered images, to the 1950s, even occasionally to the 1940s. Public demonstrations and their brutal suppressions, underground activities and their deadly dangers, horrors of detention and torture, memories of individuals permanently exiled: these realities and their aftermaths are played out as conversation and meta-conversation between Mikhail and Rama. Egypt seeks freedom and fulfillment, so too do Mikhail and Rama, with results that are inevitably passionate.

  Rama and the Dragon can also be viewed as a pastoral hymn in an ironic and erotic key. It is a twentieth-century fin-de-siècle Song of Songs—a Song of Solomon interspersed with apocalyptic revelations in the manner of St. John the Divine. The novel depicts the passions of a courtly lover—of an ‘Udhri poet, to name the Arab equivalent—but with the sensibility of a man molded by the malaise of the age. Mikhail, al-Kharrat’s protagonist, is an image of Majnun Layla reflected in a cracked mirror.

  Our translation strives to stay close to the original while reproducing its luminosity. Its occasional strangeness in English comes from al-Kharrat’s intricate sentence structure and his lyrical indulgences that were, and still are, equally strange and innovative in Arabic fiction. However, the questions raised by the novel are familiar. They are those posed by the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece that the world continues to grapple with: questions of how to be in this world, how to cope with an enigmatic universe. Thus the defamiliarizing originality of the novel echoes the deepest concerns of humanity as they return to us in the form of a literary text. In Rama and the Dragon, the tension that exists between ‘to be or not to be,’ between concurrent urges to struggle or to give up, occupies the heart of the novel.

  The pleasure of reading Rama and the Dragon comes partly from encountering and mastering the challenges of the text. The novel neither tells nor shows in conventional ways. We, as readers, overhear what the protagonists say to each other, also what they say to themselves, often stitched together with the most tenuous of seams. Our sense of Mikhail and Rama arises from bringing into focus these overheard conversations and musings. Composed of fourteen chapters, the novel’s structure corresponds to the fourteen bodily fragments of Osiris in the Egyptian myth, an event alluded to in the novel’s text. Like Isis, who overcomes the dismemberment of Osiris by joining together the dispersed limbs, the reader encounters then sews these chapters together to arrive at the significance of the novel.

  The translation of this superb text went through many versions and corrections, striving to achieve both fidelity and beauty. The translation-in-progress went back and forth across cyberspace for seven rounds, sporadically at first, then intensely, over the course of two years, after which it attained its finale. We have benefited from the close reading of the author—himself an accomplished translator of literary works. His acutely nuanced suggestions have enriched the text beyond what would have been otherwise possible. Also, we are grateful to friends who helped us in so many ways in our task: Abdel-Hamid Hawwas for his guidance in textual issues related to folk culture, Walid El Hamamsy in preparation of the manuscript, Dr. John Cooke, Chair of the University of New Orleans English Department, for generous grants and sincere loyalty to the project, and Neil Hewison, managing editor at the American University in Cairo Press, for his meticulous reading and important feedback.

  Thus spoke Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallaj:

  My intimate companion, not known for betrayal,

  Invited me to drink as a host would his guest.

  As the cup went round,

  He called for the execution mat and sword.

  Such is the lot of him who drinks wine

  In midsummer with the dragon.

  When he entered the nar
row square in Agouza where several side streets met—empty, elegant streets shaded by sycamore, mulberry, and camphor trees—his car flashed into that virginal, sunny morning where sprouts of branches basked, joyfully alert, childlike, around the empty square.

  Chirping birds, darting through trees and dozing balconies, made the square feel like countryside, as if the Nile Road, with its narrow and crowded banks—with its charging cars, trolleys, and buses—lay in a different world.

  The morning air, thickening but still taut with dew, gushed inside the car’s window as he turned the steering wheel with one hand, draping his other hand across the open window port. He was coming out of a transient moment, a faded-blue moment, unreal, entering crowded streets.

  He opened his eyes wider.

  I am in the midst of a dream, he realized.

  It was the same dream that seized him when he fell asleep at night. Just as when he dozed off, he had just called her name in a grieving, tormented tone.

  Or had he?

  Rama, Rama, do you hear me? Will you answer? I love you.

  It seemed as if he were laughing at himself, tearing himself apart. The walls of his bedroom, unpolished, unadorned except for their fine curved cracks would awaken him, then begin to close in. The room’s curtain could not deflect a loneliness thrust from the outside upon him. Neither from the skies nor from the surrounding roofs could anything else enter.

  Was love this persistent, unanswerable call that went with him in his sleep—now in his wakefulness too? Was this the call emerging from so long ago—a call without beginning or end?

  Every night he died a small death, was resurrected by morning as a ghost.

  He was not amused.

  I did not suspect such an adolescent in me, he said to her.

  In a moderate tone, soft voice as if lined by sarcasm, he said: All this fantasy and pain, all this ongoing talk, this unrelenting daydream—day after day, hour after hour—doesn’t all this seem very sentimental and adolescent to you?

  Yet in another sense, in a precise, unsentimental sense, it was quite real. Apart from this dream, from his suppressed call, from this painful yearning, everything else was so much floating on shallow waters.

  She said to him: But this is a feeling of genuine life, a good feeling. Two days ago while you were away I sat at my desk and wrote a letter trying to tell you how I too felt. I wrote half a page then tore it up. I found it quite adolescent.

  He was silent, choking. His love had become a prison without window or door.

  He said to himself: A childish element exists at the center of all this. I thought I’d gotten rid of it a long time ago. Where does the disease come from? Childhood? Or is it in the dreariness we impose upon ourselves because we are children no more?

  But this was no relapse to an old disease. It was nothing but life.

  He didn’t laugh at himself. Not this time.

  He said to her: I don’t know how to say it. I don’t know what to say.

  She said: That is why I love you.

  He had never told her that every time he met her, he arrived expecting to find not her but another woman saying, Who are you?

  He never told her: Don’t you feel the weight of prison bars pressing on the open exposed flesh? Don’t you feel oppression taking hold of the heart, taking hold of the horizon? Don’t you feel the unvoiced scream?

  Pride, he realized. He believed the truly significant things were not to be said, were unspeakable. But were there any truly significant things?

  He mused aloud to her: What can one say about death, truth, or love? Everything has been said.

  Words—no matter how passionate and gushing—embodied treason.

  He had told himself once that he was wrong to believe such things. The blight was not in the adolescence of the heart alone. Maturity meant accepting half-solutions, compromises, acknowledging what was your lot, your task, accepting what the world makes possible for you. Maturity meant, as was often said, preserving the freshness of delicate hopefulness even though it could be preserved only through salty waters in the heart of the dry rock of despair.

  Such wisdom seemed cheap. Very unconvincing.

  He said to himself: It is not a matter of relapse into the adolescent. Rather it is the passionate yearning for life, a passion that cannot be extinguished. It is the solid conviction that a man cannot stay alone, that love is not a lie—a conviction denying all fact, challenging all reality.

  Wasn’t this exactly adolescence?

  He became silent, as yet unconvinced either way.

  He said to her: Where shall we go?

  She said: As you like, my love, I am at your command.

  The Tea Island?

  Yes.

  She came before the appointed time. From his table he could see nothing but her. Her beauty created pain. Amid Liberation Square crowded with beasts and monsters, did this pain amount to a definition of love?

  She was wearing her other face. He didn’t recognize it. Yet it was always there, as he knew. A determined longing in her eyes, a loneliness refusing despair. Will you ever find what you are searching for, my love? He saw what others could not see: the blue and green waves of time fixed, not ebbing or flowing. In her eyes, the flesh of seaweed dried by the sun—the flesh of hazel weeds maturing by heat and dryness on a rock untouched by water, though its lower masses drowned in an ancient sea. Her lips, delicate, soft, displayed a neat primitive darkness unspoiled by cosmetic.

  My child, how lonely you are. Like me. Lonely in the course of an agitated crowded life.

  At the end of the night that dashed her to him by the cyclone of love, passion, tears, yearning, and frustration, she said to him: Tell me a story. Don’t leave me until I sleep.

  Her childish voice, wounding because so soft, was powerless before the infinite expanse of loneliness.

  He felt the warmth of her body, gentle as a child’s under covers, filling his awareness completely. He did not know then the value of the treasure between his hands. Instead he was searching, despite himself, for an imagined truth, being constantly pushed backward by a power he resisted until exhaustion. At that time he was still dazzled by the shock of an unbelievable vision, still struggling with himself. Would he ever learn to liberate himself from his fetters? There was no truth except this elemental, naked, and savage truth, the irresistible truth of the collision of two bodies. More than bodies, it was a meeting of two attractions that swept away separation; it was the soldering of the explosion of the cosmic nucleus, the crashing of celestial spheres powered by a compelling law; it was the embrace of an intimate and inseparable union, the kiss of pressing and unlimited yearning, sudden, sweet—a final fulfillment that could be neither denied nor canceled.

  But in his fantasy, in his steady inability to recognize reality, he lost a fund of love, of warmth, forever.

  She told him once: This frightening physical awareness between us …

  He could say nothing. Multitudes of feelings, from the gushing of a thousand screams of yearning and joy, from flaming calls and hushed joys, wrestled within him.

  A huge, heavy hand suppressed the convulsion while earth revolved, slowly, at night.

  He decided to narrate a children’s story. As he fumbled through it, he enjoyed yet derided the adventure. His voice fluttered with a passion that he, at that time, was scarcely aware of.

  Once upon a time, there was a little Princess who went to the forest looking for something unknown, which, however, she knew was there. The Princess traveled through God’s wide world, moving from one country to another. In her search she met trees, clouds, monsters, and children. But she never found what she was looking for. The sun rose, night came. Always the night. And the search continued.

  This is no way to tell a story, she said. You should give the name of the Princess. Describe her to me.

  Rama. Rama was her name. He laughed shrilly. You should only listen to the story in order to fall asleep.

  In a submissive tone that touched
his heart, a little girl searching for a tiny refuge, unwilling to lose it, she said: All right. Finish the story, my love.

  She said that the Princess found the Knight she was looking for.

  He was not about to believe this old, shabby tale. The few salty drops in his eyes remained unshed.

  She said: Don’t leave me until I fall asleep.

  He did not say: What is the secret of this barren world of yours? This infinite desert surrounding you?

  He drew his arms around her shoulders, at the same time feeling as if his arms were holding up an unbearable weight. In a private world denied to him, she was drowning. In her sleep now, she groaned, burst out gasping, What a strange man!

  He said: Who? Who is the strange man?

  She half woke up and said: What? Who?

  Then slept.

  The strange man? No doubt he himself seemed somehow funny to her, strange. But of course he would never decipher these secrets that not even she could grasp.

  The two of them were inside his small tight car—in a dusk ripped by azure quickly fading—when he perceived her warm abundant breath, exhaling her very own fragrance. It surrounded him, an intoxicating sensation both light and deep—a sensation revealing meaning in everything. Her woman’s breath bore a fragrance from a secret well running with luxuriant waters from a rich inner site.

  She said to him: Everyone loves lovers.

  He looked into her eyes, into the intimacy of two salt lakes on the sands of a hazel desert. Even then, the little car was like a playful cat too happy, too gay, though with claws. The delicate blue band by which she tied her hair suggested to him a special softness. He was overpowered by a desire to taste once more her delicate lips. He longed to touch her face so as to experience that rare and strange fulfillment realized only when she raised her arms to hold him. But he searched her eyes, also, for a truth he could not fathom. Why this search that arrested, that froze the running blood of life?

  He had not yet known the taste of loss.

  Her hand on his in the car exuded peace, redeemed him of his undefined raw worry. The sensation did not go away. It was concrete, organic, raving in its constant presence. Imposing was this feeling: the impact of this hand of unlimited tenderness fixed for a moment on his hand then raised, turning over, under his lips, feeling his face in slow quivering touches.