Rama and the Dragon Page 6

  Jokingly, she cut him off: Oh you had boisterous years? Confess. He said laughingly: Not really; it was, of course, innocent joviality when I used to spend all day and all night in streets, cafés, and cinemas. There was a café in Saad Zaghloul Street called Friskadore. We used to spend most of our time in it, and we used to go to the movies two or three times in one day, taking with us small whisky bottles, Craven A or Pall Mall cigarettes, with a big paper bag of mussels. In the darkness of Cinema Metro we used to drink whisky and laugh at Hollywood melodramas, while nibbling on mussels and throwing the shells at the side of the open paper bag lying on the stately red carpet—with some of the audience ready to give us a drubbing. She said to him: I don’t believe it. Surely you must be inventing it all? He said: Not at all. In those days, I was going through a crisis. He hesitated before he said: It was the emotional crisis about which I have spoken to you.

  Then he spurted forth heatedly about the days of despair, loss of faith in everything, suffering romantic disappointments of which no one was aware. He said: Why do I always associate romance with bitterness and unbearable experience? He laughed to cover up his fear of admitting the old, continuously renewed, striking calamity. Was he sensing it repeating itself now with all its violence and the ferocity of its power? He said, I used to have, in fact, a printed blue silk shirt. It had red, yellow, and white patterns and dots. Also, I owned a pair of black velvet trousers. Those clothes formed a sort of challenge to despair and darkness, a way of dashing into the indifference and derision of everything, but basically of myself and of that which was most precious to me.

  She said, with a distant tone—strong, calm, very polite, as if she were on another level, the same tone of reception she reserved for his heated and naive confessions: I can’t believe it. But we will buy for your sake the velvet trousers and the white polo-neck pullover.

  He did not tell her how he used to doze on the earth—green with wild grass—and inhale the air of the wet, concealed soil, the yellow flowers filling the eye of the sun—large as it is—and the bees stabbing the open core of delicacy, their hostile buzz receiving an absent reception. He did not tell her about the feeling of the Nile bridge’s soft soil in which the bottoms of the feet plunge, so that every footstep finds a slight solidity resisting yet welcoming the print of warm steps. He did not tell her about the splash of rain drops on the jacket and the shirt opened down his neck unto the shivering hot skin and the swarming of a regular, light pouring of water and salt on the face and chest amid wind-blows full of vitality and chill, and the warm, helpless tear-storms. He did not tell her about the cries when running on the street’s asphalt among the lonely eyes and the fires of fear, rebellion, amid the anxiety of the wounded falling next to the iron wheels, and the chains gnawing the sidewalks and the lawns of public gardens. No, he did not tell her about narrow, metallic mouth-vents spitting out brief, dry, final bursts. Then the screams of running people carrying across the white stones between the sea and the street amid the indifferent, watching crowd. The cars that had run silently beneath the calm autumn sun—no, he did not tell her of the hands holding to every brick, to every projecting bulge in the seawall, the scraping of knees with the body glued to it begging for help and clambering up with the force of a last, desperate effort, looking with insane hope for the sensual grapes, their minds holding onto the dark, sourish juice spurting from the brownish, sandy, rounded skin of their beloveds’ breasts. He did not tell her about the light sea waves drowning the many shoes, filling them with water, plunging them down into the soft sands of final oblivion. The demonstrations, no, he could not speak of them.

  He said to her once, at lunch, toward the end of a story, no end as usual, not a real one, as they’d been conversing in a disciplined, calculated way, the way that estranged friends talk to each other:

  Yes, the ideal tone … The golden mean … This is always the rational solution, always logical. It is more persuasive; as it were, inevitable. One has to accept its soundness. This is the issue, in essence. It must be confronted. The Aristotelian solution. That is to say, I am Aristotelian.

  She said to him: Yes.

  He said smiling, self-deriding: I used to think I was Platonic.

  She shook her head as she contemplated him with distant light-green eyes in which there was nothing but utter silence, enunciating nothing.

  He said: Am I not Dionysian, as well? I used to think I was a follower of Dionysus.

  She said: You? Dionysian?

  He said: Not even Platonic?

  She said: No. Rather, you are Apollonian.

  She pointed to her head in a definite final gesture: Everything for you passes through here.

  He said smiling: All right. Fine. As long as you are convinced of it. As long as people seem to agree on it. What can I do? Possibly this is true. I have to accept it—God will take care of it. Frankly I am lost among all those Greeks.

  She smiled—a complimentary, polite smile. She did not tell him: You are pretentious without the need to be so.

  Weeks before, she was talking about her friends: writers and poets. The day before, they had been at a reception in the Soviet Embassy, along with the artistic guests, devouring food, gulping whisky non-stop. She said: These poets, how can they? I can hardly imagine. I suppose it’s because they spring from Dionysus. He did not say: Dionysus?

  He did not tell her of the shadows quivering in and out of an ancient thicket of trees in deep summer, napping in the midst of a crowded day along whose edges ran the life of the strange city. Nor did he tell her of the pleasant fear while the burden of Being depended on the delicacy of a branch, quivering, warning of being smashed. Pliant, it moved up and down, never separating from the muscles of the hard, firm wood. The dust of upper-story leaves rained down gracefully on the perspiration of sticky dewy hands in the grip of a life that threatened to fall into a bottomless hole. He didn’t relate to her the pleasure of rising up among a thousand holes in the blueness of the skies, of the leaf of living wood and green sycamore closing in on its raw sap, of the cries announcing in awe, expectation, and pleasure: the danger of the catastrophe. He did not tell her about revolving in gentle valleys, falling in the embrace of death from pleasure, rising slowly at first, then quickly, then feverishly toward new excitements, new compliant waves with a thousand encircling arms, a thousand embracing legs. My heart fulfilled with two shining eyes, dripping affection. He did not tell her of the dazzling, nocturnal sun in which flames danced and licked the parts of his soul as if a tongue were licking the surrendered, rare milk of compassion. (He enjoys these old wounds as they never burnt the heart.) He did not say: Dionysus? The Dionysus of Scotch whisky and gourmet Auberge Hotel dinners in air-conditioned halls? Dionysus of Berlin elegance bought for the lowly price of blood and rhetorically glorified baseness? Dionysus, where exactly do you come from?

  Dionysus of intoxication with the wine of facile cravings, loose sentimentality, and spruced up poems?

  Dionysus walking on the roads’ asphalt, half-dark and half-lit by advertising neon and turned-off lamps, shouting on the stage in front of the semi-bourgeoisie, semi-literati, semi-progressives, semi-traitors suffering from the guilt of cheap verbal ripples.

  Dionysus of washed goblets and china plates on ironed table cloths made in Shubra al-Khayma.

  Dionysus of eager copulations following dances played by the plaintive music of recorders whose timbre has deteriorated, accompanied by the rattle of the electric tape player, radio, pick-up, or the electric band, whose name might well be Black Cats, Forgers, or Chat Noir. All of them nothing but a mark on satin.

  Dionysus of Cairo, Berlin, and Moscow, emptied of everything but bottomless greed and crammed with food, drink, talk, sex—all of it forged, manufactured?

  Some Dionysus!

  She said to him: I can’t imagine you, for example, walking barefoot just for pleasure.

  He said to himself: For her I am but a formula, a type, a kind, a mold. She always says: You, as an intellect
ual; You, as a rational logical person. You as mature adult. He said to himself: Who am I? What am I? Have I really managed to transform myself into a formula and a stereotype? He laughed silently.

  Later it occurred to him that her reference to the Dionysians was a kind of provocation to drive him to reveal himself, to spur him to break the coffin crust enveloping his being. He recalled her eyes. Truly she knew nothing of him except the coffin crust. Who could blame her?

  He said to himself: There is another story.

  She said to him whispering in the last uneasy dawn, as if she were talking to herself:

  You don’t know how much I need love and how much love and pleasure I can offer.

  But I do indeed: I know something about myself.

  Yes, darling, but what do you know about me? Do you know the extent of my pain and desolation? The extent of my love?

  Infinite, boundless, without end.

  He said to himself: When will this pain stop resounding? When will this desolation clear away? An answer cried from the abyss of his darkness. In her arms, in her eyes when they shine, when my face is on her breast, when she recognizes my love, when she says to me, ‘My darling,’ and I know she means what she says. And that she says it to me. Only.

  My darling, you’ll never know how much I love you, how much I need you. Answer me. Do you love me?

  Desolation, formerly tainted with a tincture of hope, seems total now. Its inevitable face fixes me with unblinking eyes. No way out from this silent horror.

  Rama. Rama. How did I lose you? Have I lost you?

  What do we know about the suffering of others even if we loved them? You know nothing of it. What then? Do you know the grief of confession? Who will ask pardon for my suffering? Shall I say: My blood has been shed? Shall I say: This slow death with its strangling hands does not remove, raise, or slacken its grip from my throat, holding on until it breaks the last disc in my fractured bones?

  Rama. I love you yet I hate this love, wishing like a child to die.

  I reject this wish, saying to myself: I am not a child and this love will not ruin me (while it is ruining me).

  … because you do not love me, and I will never know what love means to you.

  You have given yourself, yes, and we have mounted to the climax of pleasure and fulfillment, and fallen embraced, together and naked, unto the soil of infernal frustrations. We have laughed together and you have wept because of me and for me. And I have lived with you for six glorious days. Yet I don’t know, I don’t know who I am for you.

  Silence everywhere.

  In his confused exuberance, he said to himself: Then what? Then what, my agitated soul? She does not love you. This is hardly news. This is a daily story, a shabby, repetitive narrative. Nothing new in it, yet how distressful it is.

  The world will not break down. What is the meaning of all this? Simply nothing.

  He couldn’t believe it.

  Mikhail had sent a telegram with the date of his arrival. As he was walking, wracked by anguish, distraught with dreams and fears, imagining what he would do if he were not to find her waiting for him, if she were not to honor the rendezvous, how he would avenge himself and his love with a thousand vengeful acts. Then he discarded his fears, and imagined her smiling, welcoming, receptive—the glory and the beauty of the world in her—embracing him in the station. Her image resists despair. He will find her in the corridors welcoming him. The throbbing of his tired heart in an agitated rhythm as he carries his luggage in both hands, rushing in the station while feeling as if he is not advancing.

  The first shock arrived, lightly but threateningly, carrying a warning within it: she was not there. He asked about her at the Information Desk. When, with feverish anguish, he approached a police officer in the station’s headquarters, the man gave him an unwelcoming look. His worries—dense, heated—had driven him to these police. Did she have an accident? What happened? The officer, who was not busy, began to handle him gently. Mikhail started looking into the register of messages and the index of names: under the letter M then i then kh. One letter after another, as if distilling the letters of his name, one after the other. He was in need of an echo, a response, waiting in vain for a voice. Could she be in that hotel he had never gotten the name of, in Zizinia, beyond Abu Qir Street? She had drawn a small map in his notebook with the address; it all seemed so recent to him, yet distant as a bottomless past. She might be at another address. She is waiting for him. She will come tomorrow or the day after. Nothing. Then he searches for her at the gate, in the station square that seems empty in a strange way, and at the taxi stand. Nothing.

  She said to him later: I had barely arrived, only minutes before, from the archaeological site at St. Mina’s Monastery. I asked them in the station to write you my message. I contacted the station manager by telephone twice, and I took my precautions: I asked them to put my message under the letters M, i, kh, a, i, l.

  He said to her with despair, not knowing if any of this had actually happened: I searched for your message under all those letters. I didn’t find a thing.

  He silently told her: You are the first letter and the last.

  The taxi took him to the address. The last moment and the first moment arrived. Now he is here. After he puts down his heavy suitcase and the lighter luggage, he asks about her with a voice that he tries to steady while his chest quivers within.

  From that moment everything seemed to be taking place in another world. He would believe nothing of it. Voices were very clear, very distant, as if from behind a barrier. Surprise. Denial. Negation. The moment of loss that does not end. The faces of strangers and the running to addresses given by strangers. No. Sorry. Not here. No, no, nothing. You have come too late, no, we are sorry. The suitcase feels very heavy, the weather has this worrisome mixture of humid heat and cold. The winter sky starts to cloud up in the openings between low roofs and beautiful lofty columns. Empty décor, and the suitcase almost slipping from his hands. A silent, suppressed madness in his boiling blood. He feels the sweat on his face. He has another address in Sidi Bishr and a telephone number. She had said it was her cousin’s. Should he go there now? Should he call and inquire? Is she sick? What happened? Not there? Has she come back? No. Indeed she suggested she would never go there unless there was a cosmic catastrophe or a war. At last, he decides to give in, no matter what, to the last address recommended by a stranger. He has no other address. A hotel called Victoria in Zizinia, in a quiet alley shaded by trees. The bell rings. A pleasant face signals to him to push the door. As he starts to ask if—suddenly, in this address that he came across by sheer chance, he hears her saying in a low voice: There you are. At last.

  She comes to him. In the midst of this incredible derangement. How beautiful she is. How strange her eyes are. How wonderful the roundness of her beloved body that he knows—no, that he doesn’t know.

  The first surprise was this supple, obedient, alert body that confronts him and attracts him—always as if it were the first time—with irresistible charm, with invisible fine threads that never snap. How she gushes with conversation that never ends: how she waited for him, how she left her new address at the other address. How she confirmed it once and again. How she asked here and there. How she took all precautions, how she called the station by phone. How she spent a night in the Archaeological Rest House at al-’Amiriya. How she traveled and came back, how she saw the doctor and will be seeing him again, how she came only this afternoon by train, how she sent him a message via the station’s information desk, how she was about to get up and call again, how she reserved a room for him, anyway—And how are you doing? How was your trip? How she almost gave up hope of his coming today. And where is your luggage? Is that all? Let me help you. I’ll carry this for you. No, it’s light. Let me. I’ll carry it for you. Come. This way.

  He’s still disoriented from the shock. His footsteps move in a still desolate place, as if he has lost all capacity for joy and wonder.

  He climbs the nar
row stairway behind her as she mounts the crooked steps. Distraught, he almost stumbles beside the faded red carpet, surprised by the elegance of a hotel he did not know. Her dynamic strong back bends in front of him. She pants as she climbs, exclaims then returns to him, her chest rising and falling, vibrating under his eyes. She says: We climbed the wrong stairway. Not this way. You made me take the wrong way. Let’s go down from here … Come along.

  The yearning for her, the suffering because of her, narcotizes him. Suddenly his anxious, mobilized footsteps are charged with a repressed and unexpected briskness that he cannot explain.

  She told him later as she was remembering: You seemed exhausted, tense, completely lost.

  By chance he knew, later, that he had the wrong telephone number, even though she had repeated it twice in front of him when he had been writing it down. He also learned that the other address that he had was incomplete.

  Did everything, then, happen by sheer chance? Was she really intending not to meet him? Everything points to it. Could his perplexity reach this point? Did she accept him as he was with his shortcomings when he appeared, as she would accept something that happened by chance, as a fact of life? Did she take him along her way without hesitation since he had arrived anyway through strange coincidence? Is he no more than a stop-gap, an exterior filling for her, not really needed? If he is not totally rejected, is it because he comes like that, without her insistence or rejection? He is convinced neither by this nor by its opposite. He turns the matter in his mind continuously. The unending ravings of perplexity.