Rama and the Dragon Page 8

  The dream that was bright and charging suddenly ebbed.

  He said to himself: The stuff of dream, too, is stony.

  He said to himself: The islands in our narrow sea have neither bread nor trees. They lie parched, waterless, roasting beneath the sun.

  She had said to him: I have stopped believing in dreams, but maybe you can teach me anew.

  He did not say to her: You taught me the impossibility of dreams. True, I believe in them still. But I know better.

  Dream, where is your spine?

  He said to her as he gazed into the unreflective green of her eyes: You never told me if you loved the moon—the dazzling, strange moon on nights when everything has its shadow, when everything is doubled, a separate yet soldered entity, as if living another life?

  She said with neutral voice, as if reciting a memorized, tested, and effective spell: Of course I love the moon, haven’t I told you so? I adore the moon. I belong to the cult of moon-worshipers.

  She said to him: Did you know that I crossed a thousand kilometers in the desert to go to them?

  He said: Who?

  She said: Don’t you know? They are still there in our desert, the women moon-worshipers, veiled in the enclosed oasis, their ancient rituals still powerful. The adoration of the golden disk and sacred prostitution. You know the phenomenon of temple prostitutes. This ancient historical tradition is still alive, and it is said …

  Perplexed, having lost patience, he said: Yes, yes, among the Assyrians, Indians, and in ancient Greece, etc., and reputed to have been among our ancestors. All this is well-known history.

  With an even-toned, lower voice, she said: I knew instantly, as if possessed of a knowledge spawned in me at life’s first moment, that I was their kin. Why are you baffled?

  He said: I’m not. She said: It was a strange feeling, as you would imagine. No reason for it, as you know, but …

  He looked without passion, from behind the somewhat darkened Diesel train’s glass, from within the light din and repetitive rhythm of wheels in their successive, hushed beats. The fields, one after the other, flowed by in a different world: A huge mural painted with faded pastel colors in the boring afternoon sun. Her plump brownish arm next to him on the seat’s arm. Bare, shining with special sensuality. He does not touch it, nor does he want to touch it. Enough for him is the sensation of liveliness radiating from it, enveloping him in the air-conditioned cool air, penetrated from time to time with whiffs of dry heat. Light pours upon them from an exiled day, from the outside, melting in the white, blinding, electric light.

  She had said to him: I will be traveling this afternoon. I’ll see you in a week.

  He had said to her: Do you have the ticket? She had said: Yes. He had said: Will you give me its number? I’ll see you at the station and travel with you. She had said: Can you? He had said: Yes, grabbing his clothes and rushing down after a taxi. After the usual effort, he reached Station Square, bubbling with people and cars. He stood, restlessly, anxiously, in the queue, and recalled a dream similarly crowded, though with love and triumph. After exactly an hour, he was talking with her in contrived calmness, joking with her for having obtained the seat next to her in the Diesel train. He sensed she concealed a stubborn feeling of anger and tension, as if he had swept away from underneath her feet a small piece of land that she had meant to keep for herself.

  Yet the rapture of this successful, albeit small, adventure had made him forget his embarrassment. The Stella beer bottle in front of him on the rusted metal table. The brown, plump, peeled peanuts. The small, round bottle cork with its black spots. The fields getting farther away, behind the narrow and neat agricultural road with its delicate small trees. The rapture of beer mixed with the strong taste of his cigarette, as he exhaled its smoke from his broad, free chest.

  The fronts of mud houses shoot by in the train’s hushed beats—solid masses of matted blond straw, their braided hair. The iron water-wheels appear, disappear at calculated, regular intervals, their blackness glowing with water leakage. Electric power pylons retreat with a planned straight slant: conic, hollow, made of shiny white metal, svelte-ribbed, holding their own language and indecipherable code, rising from humble green fields. Amid them the fellahin, with their small bodies, voicelessly bending with their axes that can hardly be seen, digging their earth with the patience of eternity, surrounded and continuously threatened by the desert that envelops everything. The desert: low-lying in the hollow of fixed, pure, unconquerable time.

  On the edges of the desert the tremendous, bellowing, metallic tractors with their huge wheels gnawing the sand, turning over the soil with their black curved teeth, next to the geometric streams running in smooth, cement canalwalls. Their water, lead blue, shines in the skinny shadow of the newly planted casuarina trees.

  The old enchantress, the brunette with green eyes, stops her Volkswagen, dusty with the fine sand of the desert. The din of the motor that has been rising and falling for hours and the wheels bumping on the stones in the leveled, sandy road fall silent now. The children of the southern desert with their light, white jallabiyas on their youthful, dry, black flesh. Their eyes, alert and intelligent; their faces gentle. The men with their lofty bodies. In their slenderness the solidity of sprouting palm trunks. In their swift dialect an incomprehensible finesse triggering an inner and intimate ripple in her womb as she removes the car key in a decisive, possessive, and elegant gesture. She opens the door of the hot Volkswagen. The seats are pushed forward to allow passengers to step in. Few words mix with her untamed accent. A thick and wavy swarm of flies. Where is the Center’s headquarters? Here, afandam, behind the mosque. What? To the right. Do you see the minaret, Ma’am, beside the Socialist Union? Please come. You honor us, as if the Prophet were visiting, truly. The kids’ eyes sparkle with pleasure, curiosity, astonishment. The small, sandy square with its small, yellow-green bushes, carefully irrigated. The continuity of locked-up white walls beneath the palm trees. The room furnished with a single military bed, a mat, a hand-mirror hanging on a nail thrust into dry plaster between bare stones. The group divides off into the two neighboring rooms. She falls into her agitated sleep in her white nightgown revealing her plump wheat-colored thighs, until the blaze of heat succumbs behind the open wood-framed window at sentient sunset, its deep red light freshening the evening’s summer air—intoxicating, unbearable in its purity and balminess. Then, a golden lunar disk springs from the sand, glowing with gentle-faced fire, perfectly round, driving her suddenly to total silence and wakefulness.

  The hungry veiled faces, with slits for fiery eyes. Bare, firm arms and legs surrounding, contracting, and surrendering. A fluid flows from the heart of drought. On the sand floors covered with mats, there are none of the obscenities of the wet open mouth. Only purity of the worshiped womb—the origin and destination of all things—the purity of the last uprising of death, and the silence of virgin breasts proud in their loftiness and supple resistance. An undissipated silence falling into the deep vales of the brown belly.

  Toward waves of dark verdure with black gradations under the mud walls. Toward the breath of sleeping animals and the succession of munching jaws ruminating the fodder of fathers and grandfathers in a corner protecting them from the dazzling silvery fires. Toward the flooding of waters existing from time immemorial, the stagnation of dull ponds, the rustling of dense plantation, the sand wind, the gushing of fear in legs running and shoving. Toward the screams of hushed blood and banging clubs, the luster of the metal helmets and dusty, faded armors, the blows fracturing rough bones and the freedom chants, arms pushing to encircle the chest’s rocks, squeezing love and sorrow. Toward the huge column—round, reddish, offensively smooth and bare-headed. Such is the life and resistance of peasants and students.

  Granite oppression and terror roll around him. Whirlpools move away then re-appear, breaking apart then joining together in small stubborn rings. Alone in the distant sky, the piercing calls from these rings seem empty, without echo, hi
tting the stones and the few shining stars. The howling of rubber tires scraping off the earth. The screams of the brakes and the disengaging of the heavy engines with their falling foot soldiers and their fragile, useless armor. The contortions of broken legs and their sudden relaxation under the gripping, tense hands in the act of penetration, possession, ripping off then joining together. And the gushing of white, doughy paste unto the thirst of the eternally fertile, eternally barren earth.

  The fusion of youthful bodies. Their blood boiling with bitter, soft mud, free of debris, borne on sweeping flood toward the moon, toward white flames glowing a moment, then extinguished forever. The darkness of lean bodies in shabby, new yellowish uniforms. Hostile, dark innards choking with stench. Savage puppets stepping to hushed commands, exploding suddenly, falling silent suddenly. Blinded by barbarism they dash around, striking out aimlessly in their upside-down terror. The screams, the agony, the calls of love suffered, the curses of deep loathing colliding into one other.

  The passion of vengeance, the ecstasy of breaking the chains of years planted in the core of flesh and bone marrow. The turning over of the compliant, terrified, feminine body. The revelation of the inner part of the feet, the stains of fertile mud and light sandgrains clinging to them. Forts of a guarded roundness elevated on the soft hills of the body. Dashes into laps of attacking fever and throbbing resistance, ever demanding, ever craving. The candor of surrender. The worshipful prayers with eternal incantation. My darling … My love … My freedom. Prayer moans facing the open, violated sanctuary. O sacred and violated land! Bashans, your cruel, horned god will never rape you … Your female’s ecstasy at being taken, your contentment with the blow, the trembling of your rebellious body, prancing, then recumbent—all fresh and sweet—as if annihilated, yet holding on, solidifying and challenging anew. The whispering of lovers—articulating the wisdom of the torn inner tissue. Pouring savagely their suffering, twisting with warm yearning—never stop, my love … O my love … My loss and my only light. The fresh mud welcomes the plunging legs, trunk, chest. Arms fold under its waves. The head descends slowly, open-eyed, knowing. He kisses her, the wavelike lips—supple, plump—close over him. The last bubble in the mud bursts, the mud quivering before its clear, sly, firm smoothness returns. A barbaric white light is a cutting edge wounding the bodies bumping each other. They move close, distant, bump again and again, searching in the revolving delicacy the sensations of birth and resurrection. The roaring of hushed and explosive virility in the anger of flood waters. Meanwhile the sandy embankments tumble down. The moon flies into fragments plunging into the dark belly moving up and down in new lust. The cruel god has fallen. Do come, strict Osiris. Love and heavy drops ooze from her luxurious brown skin, throbbing with calling and rapture in the smell of yeast, heavy, sweet with the fragrance of watered soil, as the final moisture soaks the cracks following a dryness of thirst stemming from the Nile’s yearly nadir.

  Such was the vision of Mikhail.

  Rama asleep next to him in her room overlooking the narrow street flowing along waves of thick trees; following his arrival across labyrinths and mazes, his usual fears. The moon sheds its slender light in the room from behind the glass pane covered by gauzy, white fabric. The small electric bulb (of which she will tell him when leaving at midnight: Darling, don’t turn it off) illuminated with its tawdry glow. Her new white suitcases, monogrammed, lay between the bed and the faded wallpaper of English flowers. Cars hummed by in the early night. Their tires turning on asphalt could be heard from the third floor. Mikhail popped awake, startled by his position—next to her in bed—after all the traveling, waiting, moving around, after the shock of searching and the anxiety of loss, after going downtown beside her new and strange presence.

  The drizzle and the light dinner in the luminous restaurant. Its smooth mahogany and insipid aluminum, the icecream that suddenly fell on his cravat as he was telling her a disconnected story with an enthusiasm that masked his anticipations of the night, the excitement rising in him and making him tense up. Then the return across broad, black avenues kept awake by street lights, then ascending the nocturnal stairway, entering the room speechless, directly drowning in an agitated whirlpool of passion on the narrow bed—half-asleep, half-awake, fatigued, excited, yearning, fulfilled, fragilely tender, then sleep like that of two children one in the lap of the other; her tender, sweet, brown arm on his shoulder.

  The existence of this woman, this child-woman now, next to you sleeping under the moon, her scent and her touch, her relaxed, peaceful body, her thick, strong, rough hair—having the fragrance of wild plants. Her body—healed now from its recklessness, its power subdued, her white nightgown pulled away. Her broad, plump haunches—surfaces revealing a gorgeous, tropical, barbaric fruit, having bent its head and turned its leaves inward. Without tension. Calmly. Relaxed. All her existence secure in you, in your lap, surrendering to your love and affection, accepting your anxieties and worries that can never be tamed. This irreplaceable flesh of tenderness on the bed fills your arms. She has come home to you, no matter the reason. She has sought security in you and gotten rid of her voiceless suffering. Hers is the regular breathing of a dreamless night—an invaluable treasure that nothing can cancel. It will not be lost even if its moment passes. And it will pass. It will definitely pass. But nothing is equal to this now and forever—to this feminine presence, with its great richness and fertility that sought tranquility in you. Her head with its slumbering hair, the still surface of her face that registers no waves. She hands herself to you in utter innocence. She is sleeping in your lap. A rare moment of security. How precious. Yet it moves on. It retreats. A moment outside time, but quickly moving away. Going outside your time. No return. It will not return, and you know it.

  He said to himself: You know, this is only a night, a moment. What will tomorrow bring?

  He said to himself: Her fertile femininity is the only mystery that will remain with you forever. Her gentleness as she sought tranquility in you. The bottom of the wave agitating with love’s violence—with entreaties of love—has subsided. But it will rise foaming again. It will sink and rise again forever and ever.

  Once he said to her: You, you will never die.

  She was taken aback. In her denial, there was a touch of acceptance and confirmation.

  Mikhail went out in the middle of the night, descending the few deep-red, carpeted steps between her room and his, having carefully closed the door so as not to scratch the silence. As he was stealing away, a door nearby opened suddenly and a girl came out, about fifteen, slender, her face—in the dim light sneaking down from a high ceiling—pallid, washed, with no make up; her cleanliness childlike. Because he had been surprised by her, she smiled, a smile akin to complicity and plotting. She glanced at the closed door as if she understood and was intrigued by such a nextdoor adventure. She gave him an imperceptible nod. Feeling assured, Mikhail smiled, returned the nod, moving quickly up the stairs to his room. He slept with a smile on his face—one of the few times in his life, as far as he can remember.

  Later on, in another time, as they were descending the broad staircase, carpeted with a different red, luxurious in its faded color, and as their boat was drowning without completely plunging, he would say to her: Let’s descend by the stairway, not the elevator, and be like Orpheus descending to the underworld.

  She would respond: There was no red carpet in front of Orpheus.

  He would not tell her that Orpheus went down by himself anyway, and in the end came up alone.

  In the morning, they went to have breakfast. The restaurant was on the ground floor. Mikhail was feeling his path down the narrow circular stairway, possessed by his usual fear of all unfamiliar places. As for her, she descended with confident steps, as if she always knew where she was going. Her steps were light, belying the fact that she filled this clean lower world with her striking presence so early in the day. The mirrors were painted with advertisements for whisky, cigarettes, and airlines. The li
t lamps exuded a slight energy, metered out in frail, mechanical elegance. The tables were well set with all kinds of well washed and polished commercial silverware. He said to himself: We are not in good old Hades? Surely we are not in …

  The aroma of eggs came to them compromised by, and mixed with, chemical clean odors. The taps and stoves were making intermittent sounds—gushing and stopping, inhaling and breaking out forcefully with full mouths, with meticulously calculated power. The cultivated and processed fruits had been cut into thin small slices or squeezed into colored juice or arranged after washing and drying; small elegant tags of exporting and importing had been glued onto them, as if their tastes had been thereby sweetened, specifying some numbered position on a scale of prices.

  We are in a Hell of organized dining and civilized tearing-apart with silverware plated with ornamental metals from the earth. A Hades of closed-mouth chewing without dirtying one’s fingers, in fact as if you—Mikhail ibn Qaldas, who come from the mud of your red-black country, kneedeep in the elemental and traditional glories of long centuries—as if you were involving neither your mouth nor your stomach.

  Rama gestures him to a table set apart, next to the wall. She selects the light-toasted bread and covers it, all poise, with a layer of creamy butter. She tenders him bread using an intimate, eastern gesture, as if she were a bride, post-honeymoon night, just entering an area of mediated calm.

  She tells him stories whose unfolding flows through the waiting for, during, and after breakfast. I will tell you the story of my neighbor who fell in love with me. We were in Heliopolis, and she was a dance instructor. She came from an aristocratic White Russian family. She always wore a black silk robe-de-chambre with fringes and tassels, decorated with golden yellow and reddish purple, with large, flashy, flowery prints. When she hugged me, her body welded to mine, she wept from an irrepressible lust. I told her, I am really fond of you and I appreciate your sentiment, but sorry. We remained friends, as only best friends can be. There was also the story of our friend, the grandson of the former prime minister. He was a feudal landowner before the Revolution, and he was enamored of the judo trainer in the Club—a huge man from Bulaq. Did you know when I was very young I ate at the table of Farouk? Yes, he used to visit us at home. In his youthful days, he was slender and gentle, but there was in his eyes a concealed, hushed, mad look. When I lived in one room in Shubra al-Khayma, when I was nursing my daughter, I used to keep a Roneo duplicating machine under the bed. I used to have a sewing machine that I worked at night in order to mask the noise of the Roneo: my comrades were printing secret pamphlets. There were always passersby, coming in and out, at all hours of day and night. Of course, the neighbors suspected me, but none of them could confront me with anything. Those southern Egyptian peasant neighbors of mine were really kind. I used to wear my hair in one long braid, never loose, and I didn’t put on make up at all. I used to be strict, serious, with an incredibly slim figure.