Rama and the Dragon Page 7

  My darling. My earth and my heaven. Forever my glory and my defeat. I carry you inside me. When will we meet so that our encounter will no longer carry the crack of permanent separation—when we meet and we stop being I and you? Where there is no before and no after … When tomorrow becomes a shooting star that our embraced hands will not let go of.

  Such were his moments in the city that she called “our city.”

  When he climbed the last narrow stairway, and she opened the door of her room, he found himself suddenly alone with her.

  After she put his suitcase down on the floor, she stood in front of him with all the glory of her presence. She was looking at him with curiosity and an imperceptible smile, waiting. There was tension in his body and soul from jittery and sharp exhaustion, from boyish worries. He said to her: Rama … Rama … I can’t believe it.

  He stretched his hands to hold her face between his palms. Her eyes were still waiting.

  He dashed to her. In a second, she was in his arms.

  He felt her round back and all her chest filling his arms, her face under his lips.

  Before suffering had departed from his flesh, a new, heavy sense of peaceful juice was penetrating his body, descending unto the dark region.

  Rama … Rama … I can’t believe it.

  He could not—even in this intoxicated mood that her presence triggers, in this slow whirlwind of merging and inner chaos—he could not forget as he said to himself: Here she is in your arms, with you alone, what more do you want? He did not forget that perhaps everything happened by sheer chance. That he is only accepted as he is, just as things that befall one accidentally are accepted. Why is love fused with his very being, his physical being, his stature in the world, with the position of his feet on earth?

  She said to him: We will meet in few minutes. I’ll go to my room; you relax for a while, wash your face. You must be very tired.

  He did not recognize the tone of disappointment and forbearing. It was barely there, to the point where he did not sense it except days, weeks, and months later. In the ravings of his dreams that bring back all her presence—her image, her looks, her intonation, her words, her touch-again and again without end, mixed with an indissoluble bitterness.

  She was sitting on the narrow bed. The large and small suitcase lay scattered on the floor, on the cushions, on the other bed. She leaned on the smooth dark mahogany screen. Her face was radiant with light tan, the opposite of the light coming from the room’s window, half-veiled with a white curtain, revealing cold and strange ceilings, tips of trees behind the glass—green, ripe, sparse leaves hanging on the black trunk with its ripped, hard bark.

  He said to her: Wait … Wait a little … I haven’t forgotten.

  His voice indicated real joy, dismissal of burdens, a drawing in toward his beloved. In an agitated hurry, he opened the small suitcase and drew out a little green-eyed, green-robed doll.

  He said to her: I haven’t forgotten … Look … Look into her eyes … Doesn’t she remind you of something?

  He put the doll next to her face and looked at them side by side. The hazel-green eyes that appear to him in dreams and wakefulness, in life and death, shining brightly in his darkness, always open, always missed. He asked her once, as he was looking at her eyes—spellbound as ever when he looks at that special, non-earthly charm, at that enchantment in which he finds himself falling weightlessly toward a depth he can never reach, with no hope of hitting bottom: Rama, what is the color of your eyes?

  She said: Their color changes all the time, as I am told. Hazel, I believe. They are dark when I am nervous, anxious, or sad. In the changing light, they change too … Like the eyes of cats.

  He said: Hazel. Honey. Green. I don’t know…. They have strange dark rays … Emitted from the peripheries of the cosmos.

  She said: Hazel? No. … I don’t think so.

  She said to him: Oh, how beautiful. My doll … Thanks, my love.

  As she was raising the doll in front of her face in the light, she said: How lovely she is. She held the doll to her chest and gave Mikhail a quick kiss of gratitude—with childlike pleasure.

  Later, he said to himself: … then forgot all about it with childlike cruelty.

  Smiling, playful, as if looking for another kiss, he said: Wait, I haven’t finished yet.

  She said: What else?

  She said it with the same slight curiosity, as if she were finding him somewhat unusual, while having a good time.

  As for him, he was indeed taking the matter seriously even though he was in a light-hearted mood, experiencing a rare joy. It was not a gift, rather a symbol, despite the fact that the distinction was not exactly clear to him.

  He removed the light paper and opened the elongated, dark card box and brought out a bracelet and a necklace—modern with an abstract design of unusual patterns in colors of burnt rust, glowing. He extended his hand with the bracelet and she gave him her arm silently, with a look of receptiveness, obedience, and contentment, as is if it were a look of love. For a moment, he could not understand her look, then he remembered and encircled her surrendering wrist with the delicate plates and fastened the bracelet, then surrounded her neck with the necklace and embraced her.

  She said to him: Ah, you have learned what I love … I love unusual ornaments.

  He said to her: Yes.

  Her hands fondled the necklace hanging on her full, cozy, soft chest. His heart was filled with desire and tenderness for her. Suddenly he remembered when he gave her a silver bracelet for her birthday. She had given him her wrist saying: Put the bracelet on me. And she surrendered her hand on the table. She apologized for not being able to spend a long time with him, saying that she had relatives and guests at home. He accepted the unfulfilled dream of spending the evening with her, the evening of her birthday, celebrating it with her alone. In the dark car as they were on their way to her house, she had said to him: Give me a cigarette from the pack on my lap. He picked up the pack from her thighs, and was stirred as he lit it for her. When he went back later he found the matches in his pocket with his pack. As soon as he left his car, he saw her turning into the narrow, crowded street, next to the bridge in Bulaq. He said to himself: She is going to the old house of her friend. He is her “relatives and guests.” That night, as many nights before, he was torn by attacks of hushed madness, attacks that refuse to lose their claws and whose biting fangs plunge and scorch. Their stings within himself do not heal; they return constantly, again and always. He says to himself smiling: There is not a single part left unbranded. He laughed in silence from the salt filling his eyes.

  It seemed to him that she—with her characteristic intuition—knew what he was feeling. She jumped from the bed and said: Come on, let’s go … I have to show you the city … There’s still time in the day. They went down together, for the first time, on the narrow stairway. Before they went out, the girl in the hall, with the pleasant face, smiled and greeted her. The streets were calm, silent, unfamiliar. His chest tensely and powerfully bore all the burdens of the old stings, barely dissipated.

  On her birthday, she had said to him: I have a command of the art of speech. From my childhood, I discovered that words please people and calm them. But inside, I do not feel a thing.

  She had said to him once: Why don’t you talk when you are the master of words?

  You, Rama, are the first word.

  He said to her in the flow of his internal, silent dialogue with her, which stormed him and tore him constantly while he appeared calm among people, friends and strangers, at the office or among crowds:

  It is you who master the art of speech. How wonderful your mastery is … As for me, I do not know how to talk … And when I do talk, I don’t say anything, in fact. How many arts do you master? Do you also master the art of body-offering while keeping your heart intact, unconquered, untouched? From within, you don’t feel a thing … Is it a powerful, irresistible force that pushes you toward such mastery? As for me, I cannot stand t
his splendid art… I want madly and desperately, as well, what is beyond words and what is beyond the body. I want them together: the word, the warmth of corporeal love, and what lies beyond them—the blossoming of the heart. In front of accomplished mastery I am paralyzed, I freeze. Life’s waves desert me … I watch you admiringly—mad with anger and despair, as if I were an animal in a dark hole.

  She said to him once: Don’t ever believe what I say. Believe only what I do … Lived actions: concrete and real.

  What are you doing, Rama, what are you doing? I want to believe you …

  He said to her once again when they reached the stage in which, wittingly or unwittingly, they were tearing each other through slow torture: For you, I am nothing but a temporary, passing, and accidental event, just like many others.

  She did not respond. He remembered that she said once to him: Don’t ever have me judge our relationship.

  Rama … I want to put my two arms on your shoulders, to hug your neck. The tenderness I have for you in my heart fills the world. I want its still, delicate waves—which drown everything—to carry you. I want to bend and kiss your soft forehead, to hold your weeping face to my chest, to get you to relax for a moment between my arms, to erase the pain from your wounded smile. I want you to find with me freedom from perplexity and search, so there are no more questions, my darling. My cheeks open, exposed to the sun of silent dream, the dream of despair, to wallow on the softness of your cheeks. My arms—hanging on the emptiness of tense ribs, thirsting for the suppleness of your breast—demand you. The hard column, taut with the will to plunge into the warm, quivering, moist darkness. Pitch-black waters of the rough waves of tenderness and passion hit bedrock. Multiplied and amplified in their incarceration, the waters inundate and stumble in the enclosed hole of darkness. My lips have suffered dryness for too long. Salt draws lines upon them... The torturing yearning for the dew of your lips and the honey of your tongue. My eyes witness a vision that has never taken place and will never take place, like the splendor of raving: Your eyes kissing me without questioning, without probing, without perplexity, without rejection, without freezing, without despair. A vision not of this world: in your eyes my one and only knowledge. My lips squeezing the taut grapes vibrating with the fullness of their juice, of concealed body wine. My face is attached with gentle pressure to the soft dough. The columns of glory lying on the brown earth under my stretching fingers, containing the whole world. My eyes closed, buried in the supple, round domes. I inhale the scent of elemental fertility. I know by the tip of my electrified tongue the sweet spicy taste. My face in the jungles of your plants wet by the river waters. Their savage scent attacks me. My lips acquire a primitive life in the forests of the body, inquiring, backing then advancing, nibbling and sucking the creamy waters, surrounded by the roughness of the wet herbage, crying in response to escaping cries in the ecstasy of chase and clinging to life. Then the unbearable tension comes and pushes to the last absence, the stab in the open, tender wound of the world, a dance of the last offering where there is no more hunter and prey, sacrificer and sacrifice. Only the flaring glow amid dazzling music of fulfillment, certainty, cosmic explosion, gushing of astral falls, slumping of burning suns into the heart of the skies’ darkness. And I, kissing the sheared-off neck with pleased and pained lips. I hold my slaughtered head between my hands—blood and wine dripping from my mouth. I wipe my lips in streams of hanging, shaking branches of her hair falling on my eyes.

  Mikhail had left her after their first night in their city, having satisfied some of her constant and torturing hunger for tenderness and contentment. Half-asleep, half-reposing, she said to him again as he was going out: Don’t turn off the light, darling.

  In the morning of the following day, when he opened the door of his room, he was surprised to find her—half-surprised as if he had sensed she was there, since he always felt her everywhere, all the time. He will always open his door for her. He will always see her on his path. She will always drop by him; he will always find her waiting for him. She will always come to him, wherever he is. Her presence is a constant fantasy: In the studio in front of his office, in the crowded street, when he goes anxiously to his bed. Her telephone rings, and he will hear her sweet voice, the dearest to him in the world, or he will hear her stiff, dry voice that he hates and whose sternness hurts him. The telephone rings in the silence of the night, before dawn—a persistent, unrelenting ringing. His blood leaps awake in joy and anticipation. Suddenly he is certain that he is hearing the ringing in the ravings of his passion, in total silence. For once, his fantasy indeed had come true all of a sudden. He opened his door, and she was in front of him. The surprise baffled him and paralyzed his heart, making the world boundless.

  Now he watches her walking to the hall bathroom, raising her youthful wheat-colored face in the radiating and transparent morning light, in the silence of the stairway. She looks at him with a shy look of obedience, happiness, expectation, and gratitude. She is in a short nightgown of soft cotton, barely reaching her knees, too wide for her strong, supple body. The weak light falls on her delicate cheekbones from above, putting their fine curves in relief. Her wide eyes whose color he cannot see now—with the look that fills his heart—coming up from a different world, carrying on her head the moon, while the python slept.

  She had tied her hair like baladi women, with a small white scarf. Her plump feet were in the small slippers on the dark red mat. On the stairway, all is strange, profoundly quiet, morning calm. Once again he tastes happiness. Merely her look at him carried with it this rare taste that he seldom knows. He says to her, half-whispering, his chest flowing with tenderness: Good morning, darling. He says to her: I’ll come to you soon. She nodded with her head, smiling sweetly, a smile so pure—so rare, as well. Because it was a smile without planning, without staging, without mastery.

  In the afternoon, she said to him: Did the scarf shock you this morning? I like to tie my hair with it. I find it practical and fun. Why not? My mother tells me when she sees me with it: What is this? For shame. I laugh. What do you think? Is it shameful to dress like baladi women? I said to my mother: What’s wrong with it? Isn’t it practical, useful, attractive, and easy to use as well? What do you think?

  The white fine fabric on her hair seemed to have acquired something of the air, also the dynamism of her hair, something of her body warmth itself. Its color had faded a little; the fabric had shriveled, become compliant and soft with intimate folds from the effect of tying it frequently on her locks and from such a tight wrap. He embraced her head and kissed her. He forgot for a moment what her question “Does the baladi scarf shock you?” implied. He forgot for a moment that she always viewed him as a fixed formula, a formula of rigid judgments and conventions by which he is supposedly bound. A shade in the tone of her question persists in his mind later. The cycles of questioning, recalling, and suffering raise him up and down without stopping, yet he does not land on a shore.

  They were in the car, after the end of their six days, after the end of a stifling dusty morning—the last morning choked with quarrels, disputes, anger, disappointments. The harsh and hushed sun was dripping heat and humidity. Traversing the distance to the station was long, very long, full of silent gaps and a sense of bitterness. When he put his hand on hers, there was rejection and rigidity in her touch. But they spoke, though she did not care to show her mastery of speech. He sensed her dismal outlook to the coming unknown days. She said to him: You shouldn’t have come with me. We should have said goodbye to each other in the hotel. It doesn’t make sense for you to insist on coming with me to the station, when you will be making this trip again this afternoon. Twice in one day. Useless. Do you know … you have slain the dragon.

  He was somewhat startled and said: What?

  She said: You slew the dragon. You know in the old legends, in the tales of courtly and uncourtly love, the knight demonstrates his devotion by slaying the dragon. He goes out to the desolate woods after he gives his be
loved a handkerchief or a token. Then he departs alone, surmounts all difficulties, overcomes all trials. And endures the hardship … Until he slays the dragon; and you have slain the dragon …. She quickly emended: And this is neither satirical nor humorous … I mean what I say.

  He did not say to her: Do I still need to demonstrate my love? I do not want to demonstrate or refute a thing. All of this falls beyond demonstration and refutation. Do you, yourself, need proof and evidence for demonstrating or refuting? You do not cease, time after time, to speak as if you were wondering, as if you were uncertain. Don’t you feel that which is breaking loose, day and night, in my inmost? Doesn’t it show any signs? Don’t you feel that which can never be separated from my life?

  A hoarse roar wrecks the chest’s rods, an earthquake shakes his insides. Broken, solid stones, cut by nails and claws from the core of his heart, come down. The two hands with their contracted fingers dig ponds dripping blood into his harsh inert walls. The fingers scrape off the petrified heart that beats stubbornly, regularly.

  He screams within himself: Agh! Me! He bellows and holds back his parted mouth, agape from the full cry. His scream, never put off, never voiced, fills all the breaches, all the holes, all the wounds, all the gaps in heaven and earth.

  I have not slain the dragon. I am living with him. His teeth are piercing my heart in an embrace until death.

  She said to him: Do you know that I want to travel with you to a small, sleepy, rugged island with red-leaf trees? Seawater around it to see and feel. Salty air in every corner. Unreachable except by hours of ocean liner travel. Do you know? The two of us beneath a hot dry sun on an old ship—one of those slow, flat ships made of iron and wood? And the two of us living in a white-stone house with fishermen, in a stone harbor where there’s only one café and one grocer, who is also the barber and the carpenter, and from whom we buy our bread and provisions every Saturday? Would you like to come along, with me?