Rama and the Dragon Read online

  In the morning Scheherazade continues her stories as they stroll across elegant, city streets, as they sit in the café at the corner of the Greco-Roman Museum looking for morning coffee again, in the bus and in front of expensive shop windows, as they buy a new pair of shoes for Mikhail, because his tight old shoes were hurting.

  Throughout her stories, she exposes her universe—shades of fantasies, memories, actualities, warm desires, wishes—all of which are turning into something: an event, a word, a spell. He will never know the place of myth in her universe with its streets, vast squares, specific darkness, its many unanswerable questions. Even in the period of early innocence there were slender, sharp-edged goads spurring the skin of myths without penetrating into the delicate flesh, only making incision after incision, the traces of a knife raised on the skin’s surface with its viscous, heavy juice swallowed back up.

  O, my green-eyed brown moon, dim with undying light: You move in your own sphere—with us and not with us—amid engines running and whizzing. Amid the din of jet planes, the whirring of appliances in air-conditioned offices: under the huge, solid stone beneath neon light. Your divine disk embraces the awakened, stretched python forever and ever. Under the primitive and imprisoned spurts of 220 volts and one thousand horses, and the flashes of magnesium reduced to white sand. You, whose charm leaves its powerful effect along the buried wires in cement. Rolls of white linen embrace your haunches, rich with suppleness of dense, undulated clay. Amid the humming of the transistor, the running of magnetic tapes, the giggles—both exciting and desiccated—of the nightclub cassettes in their calculatedly resounding music, with the non-stop dance of images. Their lines and spontaneous forms undulate, infatuated by the changing, out-of-control moments under the electronic buttons—slyly hidden under the flashes of glowing chrome, plastic, and nickel. I told you about the strange jinni of my childhood. I told you how the miseries of that childhood can never disappear. These miseries wake me at night with tears, with sensations of oppression and injustice. In the darkness I realize a wicked jinni has kidnapped my mother, appropriated her form, and come to me from the underworld, from the terrifying, mysterious dark vents of latrines. I told you about my suffering at the hands of this alternative mother with her shaggy hair and bare arms, harboring cruelty, always screaming, dressed in her exact short, light clothes, moist with kitchen waters. She attacks me with her barefooted, oval legs in a paroxysm of physical subjugation, destroying my childish senses and turning them into sharp-tipped, slender fragments, forcing me to lose my nocturnal dream of the good girl that has been metamorphosed by the old witch into a gentle, full-bellied cow, speaking to me as she does in folktales, asking for help in a plaintive womanish voice, pointing to the path under the huge sycamore tree at the head of the well at the end of the field. Hathor on the sharp edge of Bes’s crater. I yearn incurably for my real mother imprisoned under the ground by the wicked jinni. I wait hopelessly for my mother’s return after chasing away the jinni who violated her body and replaced her authority at home, living among us, the children, and sharing the bed of our father. I have told you about my visit to the Alexandrian Serapeum on a school trip, of stepping joyfully into the land of mysteries. The rays emanating from the face of Isis constituted a revelation, turning the rocky, circular wall under Diocletian’s column into a nocturnal sky with bright, bored holes enveloping the ashes of mortal bodies and bones in marble pitchers, after being bleached by pagan burial fires. Alert eyes, star hollows under the yellowish glow of sodium lamps. In the balmy, refreshing, underground air as it blew from the deep vents in the cemetery, I was finding the obscure path of salvation with no known limits. The main well, rock-carved and round, was still deep, dim, and bottomless. We threw a stone in it but never heard its sound hitting the low-lying water in the hollowed earth. We were warned not to step on the wooden planks placed over this well. I was seized with one of those irrepressible desires of childhood. I crossed the lines of life and death with briskness, gambling on life, and I won, as I descended on the other side. The moon-enchantress captivates me with her permanent smile expressing a special understanding that surpasses everything, that cannot be grasped.

  You look at me for a moment with an estranged and distancing gaze. In your look there’s no love or hate, no comprehension or condemnation, not even astonishment. Nothing, only complete disassociation and negation—negation of negation. The look of a being from another world, neither the upper world nor the lower world, simply a world that doesn’t encompass me, does not claim me or negate me. I realize for a moment that it is an exile forever. Yet despite that, no sooner did your eyes flash than they switched off.

  Mikhail had brought with him a bottle of Remy Martin. On the night she came to his room, he opened the tight, odd, shared closet where she hung her clothes to the right of his. Her maxi-dresses and mini-skirts—oft-worn, having acquired her very body folds in their fabric. Her blouses and pullovers—light despite the winter. Her pants. All emitting a faded scent of her own perfume and sweat, of traveling dust—not lost despite washing and ironing. Mikhail brought out the bottle from underneath the clothes hanging in the curious, temporary tightness. After the usual stumbling in removing the cork, he discovered he had no glasses. So he removed their toothbrushes, their separate toothpastes, and the shaving brush to the sink. He washed the round glass and another short, trans-parent, plastic one with hot water from the tap, which gushed out suddenly with a hoarse sound while he was thinking that hot water might deform and bend the plastic. He poured the limpid red liquid.

  She said to him: Do you like drinking a lot?

  He said: No, no, I don’t drink except when I am happy. Wine takes an opposite toll on me in times of worry and sorrow.

  Then he said: In days like those I was telling you about, when I was going through the old, long trial of love, I was like someone suffering from a chronic disease. My whole being was throwing up whatever I drank: cognac, whisky, even wine—especially wine. I used to drink with friends of my first youth, whose leaves have now fallen in various capitals of the world; none of them has been spared. But the misery of love, the frustrating fancies, and the silent suffering remain as hard stones in the heart; nothing can dissolve them.

  She said: I don’t like to drink now. You know I used to drink every night at a set time. I almost became an alcoholic. But I was saved, thank God!

  The Remy Martin bottle was on the mahogany dressing table, covered by a slate of glass reflecting the images of their cologne bottles, perfumes and cosmetics, brushes and combs, the lipstick tube—having rolled and settled next to her inflated open handbag—the ashtray, an Agatha Christie novel, metro and theater tickets, the Kleenex box, a bunch of keys and the crowded familiar things—all reflected in the mirror. On the corner of the mirror she had hung a small white pique handkerchief, embroidered at the edges, washed and left to dry slowly.

  His hand on her round, large, resting thigh as she looks at him.

  In the clouded morning, she combs her strong, dark hair with a big comb. Every small, plump finger in the intense grip of her hand is like an independent being with its own life. She has these dynamic bursts. In moments of love-making, he recognized such thrusts and tautness in every limb, in every part: stretching and tightening, winding and slackening, the sudden push of her tongue inside his mouth—a voluptuous snake, twisting and standing erect, slowly prying around the open moist space. The elevation of the thigh’s sandy bridge, humid with perspiration, beneath it a flood of Ethiopian silt and the roundness of arms encircling it, coming out of the alert nerve center, thick with its charged electricity. She is, then, one and many until every one of her beings reaches a peaceful haven.

  She said to him, as if talking to herself: I don’t even know how to comb my hair. When I get like this, I must be truly in a bad state.

  The small confrontations between them in that small desperate room were accumulating but he did not allow them to explode, as if pushing away a warning charged with threats. Th
e confrontations of love, lust, suppressed jealousies, denied doubts, undefined and diffused anxieties, impediments and failures, efforts of surpassing and tolerance, fall into holes of half-silence and half-articulation, charging glances and gestures with unbearable weights.

  Rama is getting ready to go down, while he is putting his things in his pockets, turning around without a specific intention. She takes off her nightgown with a quick movement, drops it sharply on the bed. Her moves are few and agitated as she is putting on her pantyhose and straightening her breasts in her bra, closing the clasps on her wide tight back with sensitive, trained fingers. All of her is challenging, clearly and simply, all preconceived ideas about the romantic feminine body—its timidity, its invincibility, its inaccessibility. She is standing and moving around: her body—a direct, frank, sensual quotidian event—with no poetic spell, no eroticism, not inducing fantasies or fancies. Strictly a body getting up naked in its very odd and very ordinary feminine severity.

  This gave him a sense of freedom and liberation from all exertions and considerations. It did not cancel his presence with her; to the contrary, it was fixing it in a special way—on a level open to all options.

  She said to him—as she was turning toward him her open back pulled tight by the black bra—in a tone, as if hostile and abrupt:

  Will you please button my dress above the zipper?

  He smiled as he approached her. He could not hug her from the back, could not join the wealth of her haunches to his taut virility, could not press on her as she was so practical-minded and in a hurry.

  His fingers stumbled on the buttons and the buttonholes. He could not find his way in the delicate fabric enveloping the back of her neck. She was patient, but tense, almost hostile in her fixed waiting pose; in the powerful whiffs from her hair and the dew of light sweat on the convergence of her hairline with the back of her strong round neck.

  She said to him: Mikhail, Mikhail, the two buttons up high. Kindly put them into the buttonholes on the side, and let me finish.

  Her patience was running out, almost breaking through a rather frail crust.

  His fingers were one on top of the other, the buttons slipping with every attempt. He became aware of himself, smiled sarcastically at himself and at the whole situation as it was becoming insipid and silly.

  She said: All right … All right, let me try.

  He said, with a voice he recognized as hushed and soft: Good God … Just a moment … Wait … One moment.

  A month later, following their stressful days, she came to him for the first time—after trials, after feeling their way along a road that was beginning to branch out—wearing this very dress. He said to himself: What does she mean? What does she want to relay? What does she want to say?

  As for me, I talked a great deal—though perhaps less than I should have—without saying a thing. I stretched my arms toward her, holding the love I have for her, but what I held remained buried; she rejected it. How can love withstand the distancing of her eyes? She does not know me. All the bounty of her body stands as an impediment between her and my love. She gives me her body, or part of her body, but she—my sealed black earth of antiquity—gives back nothing.

  My hands withdraw from her thigh. I don’t know what to do with the rejected gift except let it decay and spoil between my fingers, taut with generosity. Is the fruit of this love green or rotten? Rama, I want to give, but it is as if you were unable to understand me. Your sweet name is mixed in my mouth with gall: I do not pronounce it: I bite it … An unbreakable stone. O most beautiful name in the universe, O name created for immortality. Rama … Rama …

  A heat heating a headstrong humor, either hushed when it happens, or hastening in hot whisks and hissing whirls. I am harassed by a hoodoo, hankering for holding it off, hewing the hedonistic heart. Vehement exhortations to hostilities with hesitant hatchets amid the inhospitable horse huddles. Vehement hugging. Hysterical horrors. Whetting the whims and overwhelming the households, with whooping and hurting hooves. The havoc of a harrowing Sahara at home. Downhill through hellish hours … Hurdles hovering around me heedlessly. The hurdles lose cohesiveness, behaving like holed hearts. Hoarse humming of helpless whispers. I hover under the hedges of my hazardous house where my hazel whims are halting and hobbling. Horus hovers and halts, hovers and heads down unto the heaths of horticultured wheat. Heaving with honeyed hemlock. Hailing is my haven and harness. Hurling the homesteads, hammering off the hand-cuffs with horrible whiffs. I hug the hounds in the heat of a horrid hurricane. Hawk-eyed horizons behold me. My heart hollowed by humming whispers. My innermost burns with the scorching howl: Freedom, my only truth; my love for freedom sets me on fire.

  Like the youngest of adolescents and the most naive of them, I write your name. Rama … Rama … And I want to hail you, to call you. I hear my voice quivering despite myself, tearful again and again. How absurd all this is. I want to say I love you. Do you hear me? I ask you, do you halloo me too? I laugh and make fun of the innocence of all this. A raw emotion? How cheap it is. How banal all this love, these calls and simmering desires to see you once again, to embrace you, to plunge into your earth. How disdainful this blazing yearning to gather you between my arms, to drown my face in your bosom, this constant sense of impossibility—social, emotional, possibly physical. This is a new and odd sensation for me, always and constantly problematic. A dubious matter, it tortures with sharp, nay, dazzling awareness. Is all this a cheap, raw emotion? Isn’t this the madness of adolescence, or second adolescence? How come I do not resist, and why resist anyhow? Why this suffering ablaze with constant, unflinching, smoldering embers with white-snow fires? A dazzling point, a solid unbreakable core buried beneath the earth with no radiation. The eye cannot behold it, given its enclosed brightness within bounded limits. A suffering that hurls everything to the four corners of the earth, a suffering that can’t stand silence. In the end it shouts, screaming with all its voice, fumbling among the bodies of the planets, closing the open mouths of oceans. It is a suffering that pulls unto itself the pillars of the world, rending them. They thunder and fall in an earthquake or a sandstorm. He chokes, as if his body were being scraped off rocks, moistened with salty water drops. Around him the sleeping hyenas, with ostrich legs, awaken and dig the ground to throw away the open fingers and sharp joints that have never grasped anything. The fish with their meek red beaks nipping then letting the sky’s seed fall, the radiating planets that decayed, their over-ripe flesh rotting. The tits of a lioness with discerning eyes, dripping milk, honey, and sweet-tasting blood that etches opaque, thin streams into the luxurious, soft soil. The she-panther soars with her gentle wings—her soft feathers fluttering as they fall down on the angelic prayer of the cherubim and seraphim with their sixty wings quivering in loud flutters, filling heavens and earths. The well beyond the Waqwaq mountains with its smooth, soft, worn-out marble stairs sucks the milky flow until it reaches the deep, rent navel of the earth, still hanging on it the cord of shriveled, transparent flesh that will soon fall off, and a thousand human faces, pale and suffering, are revealed through the ebbing blood, faces gazing but uttering nothing in their voiceless dream. And you, my love, sleeping in my lap under the moon. Your face floating amid the ruins of the broken world around me, on the dark, turbid waters of my love. Your face floats with fixed open eyes: two dazzling black suns that tempt me in this endless night:

  When he lifted the telephone receiver in the heart of night, her voice reached him, fervent and intense, almost breaking down:

  I want you … I want you to take me … Come now.

  He said nothing.

  —I want to sleep … Come make me sleep … Please.

  His voice tensed to speak then faltered. The waters of his heart and body stopped running. Was she crying from lust and craving or searching for support and help?

  He said as if he did not know what he was saying: Not tonight. Not tonight.

  Without explanation.

  Her dry-winded, an
xious warmth, like the khamsin, was parching the night, making it splinter, with no hope of healing. Is it a banal struggle between two wills or is it preservation of the gift, the grace, the donation—an act of sparing her from gratuitous wasteful fall?

  He went to his empty bed and slept—his limbs relaxed, confident and ready. Was the smile to himself in the darkness a smile of an easy victory or that of a hidden, incomprehensible flesh ritual?

  Later she said to him: If you really loved me, you wouldn’t hesitate to take me, every time and immediately.

  She did not wait for his response.

  When they made love for the first time after a long absence, she slept, also, for a few minutes in his lap, in the sweltering night under an almost tropical, round moon shining behind thick glass. Her breath coming out of her relaxed chest under his arms had a childlike regularity. He was careful not to move his arms under her shoulder. Sleeping next to him, strong-bodied, with large haunches and thriving breasts with sweet blood-and-milk-running veins. The insects and worms of the earth buzz and hum in the din of their craving and fulfillment. The beasts in the moon outside have been satiated with their prey. Her face had turned red beneath her luxuriant black hair. Then she woke up suddenly, completely, as if she had been all the time in the same state, unchanged, without transformation. She said calmly, without smiling or apology: