She was still asleep. Mikhail has wakened from an intermittent, agitated sleep. He has become habituated to this half-awake, discontinuous, sparse sleep during these six days, torn apart by fulfillment and disappointment, by possession and retreat, by anticipation and frustration, joy and mad jealousy, attacks of alienation and perplexity—while all her treasure is within his hands. Her treasure is not his treasure. He has nothing of himself. His objective is to arrive at a different kind of total giving, a state where giving and taking is one thing—nothing is the property of one alone.
He was completing the rituals of shaving. The mirror reflecting his face revealed no message. He felt nothing when the held razor penetrated the skin of his finger. Drops of blood dripped from the wound. He found a piece of white cotton in his overnight kit and stuck the square onto his index finger.
She awoke, opened her questioning eyes, and addressed him in a relaxed drone that failed in masking her concealed, night-drawn tension.
—Good morning.
The voice of a little girl who knows she is loved and wants more love. A voice vibrating like that of a small cat half asleep—its fierce sensuality still very tender and soft. Her fleshy brown breasts glisten and pour within her white, baggy chemise, wafting out a fragrance of sleep and repose as she draws the bed covers to her nude shoulders.
As she slid across the narrow bed, she did not offer him her opened lips. She had once said to him: Don’t stir me. That makes me tense all day.
She said: What happened?
He said: I don’t know … I disfigured myself, I cut myself all over.
He had placed his arm beneath her neck. Her head with its fragrant, wild short hair was on his shoulder wounding him with its singular beauty. He stretched his hand, careful not to drop the white cotton soaked with a drop of blood from his finger.
He said: I cut my finger.
She said: My eye!
The words enraged him. He laughed nervously and said: What does this mean: ‘“My eye”?
He tried to kiss her cheek.
She said, turning her face away: ‘“My eye” is an old phrase of sympathy!
Again, everything deteriorates stupidly in the morning of the last day. He is spoiling these last few hours.
After an earlier encounter, she had said to him: In a few days you will hate me.
He said now: I love you.
She said thoughtfully as if she were looking for something: Yes, in a way. Perhaps.
But I do love you, completely and totally. I love you: that is all. Without definitions, without conditions or specifications. It is absolute. It is the essence, the complete finale. My love for you can’t be contrasted or compared or confronted with anything. I love you and I want you—all of you.
How many times he had said it, how many times he did not say it, how many times he will say it again.
He tried to gather her head to him. She twisted it away. He got up and moved around her other side. In an agitated move he brought his face toward hers. She closed her lips, did not offer him her eyes. He was yearning for a strangely tender gaze. The siege was getting tighter. The stored currents of spontaneous thrust were ebbing. In these few last hours there were only two bodies, stretched out helplessly. Anxiety was no more than failing will. The message that had reached her yesterday: “Cairo, after midnight” was in front of him. A white nightmare and that distant look. She said to him: Don’t try to judge our relation … What do you expect me to say?
This was another world. She was determined to protect herself with fences. She wanted it to be so. Cycles of waiting. Anxiety. Rejection. Frustration! All of it: Perplexity and interrogation, destructive of all resignation to the pleasures of her body. All this had made of him an unsuccessful lover in the early hours of dawn.
She had said to him: Don’t you desire me as a woman?
He said: Yes, yes.
She had looked at him silently yet inquisitively and said:
It seems to me that despite your proclaimed happiness with what is between us, you are unconvinced by it.
Yes, I am. Your soft towering body filled with life excites me, but I don’t want you, Rama, as body only. Haven’t you figured this out yet? Doesn’t this matter to you? I don’t want your body as a barrier between you and me. I don’t want it as a surrogate or solution. I want all of you. I love all of you, and you alone. I do not want the alien deformations lurking within you. This rich, luscious, eternal body revolving around its astonishingly fertile earth, roused by ever youthful tenderness, blossoming with continuous desire, wet with sweet dew, constantly thirsty, its plowed-over brown complexion never satisfied with tears and frequent penetrations—I don’t want that only. I want you, and me, with my shattered dream soldered at last, all together. I want you, Rama, with my love, with our love. I want your cruel earth and skies together. In them the severed head of St. John the Baptist glittering, in the stark burning sun whose sharp edges revolve continuously in this dense purity that I have known, that we have known together in moments of ecstasy, fulfillment, and madness.
She said to him: I woke up with feelings of tenderness for you.
He wanted to cry, to crush with his two tense hands a hard breakable stone in his own eyes.
In the name of what fragile pride, in the name of what anger, in the name of what fear have I rejected your tenderness?
He only looked at her. Can’t she decipher his looks? She doesn’t want to.
In the station’s cafeteria as they were drinking tea before she left, the smooth walls leading to the wide stairway, he said to her as they were a discreet distance apart: Who knows when we will meet again.
Exasperated and impatient, she responded: God knows!
When his face was next to her cheek in the station, as the train was about to depart, he was being forced to leave her. She would be leaving him also. Her imminent departure threatened him with a sense of complete loss, depriving him of self-possession, of knowing what was going on around him. He recognized nothing except her imposing presence next to his body, her full, self-enclosed presence in his arms. It was a moment about to be over, that would be over, never to return, a moment he wanted to sustain forever. He held her tight with his arms, in complete and stubborn despair—her, whom he knew was absent. He embraced her rejecting—at most tolerant—body. He said to her:
I love you … I love you … Whatever happens, I love you.
She did not answer. She was merciful, giving him, despite everything, a sad kiss.
He said to himself: Whither my journey now? It does not seem to have an ending. Should I learn to accept all this as it is, accept all the demands within me and within her without the need of justifications?
She stood before him on the lake shore. Her legs were planted solidly on the sand’s edge, in pale shallow waters, and he was in the boat he had rented that morning from a gentle-eyed, barefoot, greedy Bedouin boy. The distant brick kilns, red-mouthed with their dense slow fires. The ancient wall of the Roman tower, broken at the shoulder with its gray stones behind the sand dunes quivering in noon glare. The small boat was steady, narrow, fragile on the shallow lake’s heavy surface, as if it was plowing the waters, though not seeming to advance under the leaden skies. The Auberge Resort continued to look near and loom large behind its thin crooked fence.
He said without anger: What have you done with me?
She said: Don’t you know I am an enchantress?
He said: Why did you appear to me just when I was getting prepared for a calm trip to the end of the lake? Why did I fall in love with you? Why do I love you and reject you, reject the unbearable suffering and pain of your love, reject what covers up your spontaneity and gifts? Whoever you are—a goddess, an enchantress, a beloved—why have you kindled the fires of this inferno and started dancing wickedly in them, promising a tenderness never delivered? I was sliding—even from myself—with silent pain until the last rays of sunset disappeared. Circe. Seraph, Siren, your voice—sweet with its suppleness and t
enderness—chases me in the solar glare of the night. Rama, from the ripe fruit of almond between your breasts pour inundating waters … I hear their gushing between the room’s walls. The echoes of the sweet tingle of your words are in my ears. I hear them, I hear them while I am bound by chains in the silence of my room at night. Beasts and leviathans writhe beneath your feet. They open their mouths voicelessly in the faded blue tower. The dry air moves your hair on the skin of your wide soft cheek. Your breath is still on my mouth, fragrant with its singular and intimate scent. I have become fond of you. I know, I know that I will love you. Yet I have never loathed anything or anyone as I loathe you. You said to me once: “I want to kill …” But now I want to kill … Now I know the passion of someone who wants to kill, to destroy, to close the palms of his hands on the sweet precious face, the only thing he has in the world, the face that carries the beauty, cruelty, and strangeness of the whole world. I know the desire of him who wants to hold such a world in his hands, and press with all his passion, yearning, and pain until it is crushed between his hands. You gave me all this glory, the joys of mad pleasures, all the pain, and the bitterness of disappointment at once, together. All that I have in this world, you gave me. Why did you appear in my life? Why did you come?
Mikhail saw the gull with its wide-spread wings falling behind the tower’s stones, but not rising up again; he knew its face.
The oars struck soft white sand, moved up and down without sound. The boat, fragile and caught in the sand, was shaking. The soft-sand and yellow waves roiled with fine dust as they carried the boat. It was not moving though he rowed with all his might. The oars scratched against the two iron rings attached to the sides of the boat, emitting a hushed grating. Plunging into the sand, the oars encountered no resistance, going up then plunging again. He was rowing non-stop, feeling neither strain nor obstacles. Meanwhile, the boat progressed nowhere, moored lightly atop a sand body that had no shape.
He looked behind himself and saw a wide, red-colored ribbon, drawn on the surface of the blue lake: a stream of blood poured on the water surface.
When there was light on earth, it happened, as he had foretold. The woman who was not from human progeny met him as he continued oaring, trying to attain the lake’s far shore. She came naked with disheveled hair.
Columns of light and dark silence incline his way, clamping onto him in the late drizzly evening. The road in front of them lies open, empty, obscure. Stretches of a clean, charted world, freshly deserted, start flashing in the scant, watery darkness—neon advertisements, towering glass buildings.
He extends his hand to help her alight from the sidewalk. A puddle is in her way. She wears sandals; a slim leather strap passes tightly between her big toe and the rest of her wet, short, fleshy toes. On their nails, a faded red manicure is peeling. The upper curve of her foot seems plump, desirable.
In her response to his gesture there was, for a moment, an imperceptible aversion, as if an old fixed determination were behind it. She always had her fixed determinations. She did not extend her hand to his. She did not walk arm in arm with him—not once during their entire six days in the city, which she called “our city.”
He said to himself: It was never our city. Our city is a nocturnal dream of dazzling light, ancient, outside time, cut from the archaic walls of the world.
She had said to him on their first night, some months before:
—I have started feeling this from a number of things. First when you used to put your arm in my arm, and second …
In the beginning, when crossing a street—one of those diverse, strange streets they crossed together—he would find warmth and affection in her supple, surrendering arm; he would feel a precious and mutual security. At that time, he felt nothing but a light pleasure, a weightless inner glow.
Later on, he said to himself: The sun, always, rises only once. Not again.
Even now he calls upon the sun. Without interruption. A despair that denies its own existence, a despair that multiplies in ferocity, clamps onto him with a voracity that cannot be revoked.
He said to himself: The sun never responds.
That was their first night in the city she called “our city.” She had said to him, I know it is the city of everyone, but I think of it as our city.
This city was his birthplace.
He had come to it across great trajectories of pain, anxiety, spiritual fatigue. He did not know then that she would be coming to him—as usual—from a world marked by warm fulfillment, by multiple victories that she loved, but that she said contained no significance for her. As if that world were a perpetually air-conditioned world, a continuous luxury of glorified elegance. He had said to her: I can hardly believe that we will meet; she had said to him: Yes we will meet unless a third world war, an earthquake, or a cosmic catastrophe takes place. She had said to him, Help me, my love, in choosing a small gift for an old friend, a truly excellent person, the model of a perfect septuagenarian gentleman, whom I have gotten to know recently and for whom I have great affection. I believe he is very fond of me too. Do you think, for example, these cufflinks are an appropriate present, or what? Choosing a gift for such a friend is so perplexing.
He laughed. She said to him with sudden alertness: Why are you laughing? He said: I am laughing at the entire situation. Yes, shirt buttons, not bad. Or anything you like.
She withdrew inside herself all of a sudden then said determinedly, We have to discuss the tickets, darling, I am afraid I don’t have the time. The voices around them were loud, the place crowded.
But now, at last, he was on his way toward her. An impending sense of catastrophe kept needling him. He wasn’t sure the entire universe had any significance whatsoever. With savage hands he was strangling a din of fierce joy, yet had already fallen into the ruins of anticipating the very worst. Nothing would happen. The train was entering a world silenced by estrangement and loneliness—a world of low gray houses with rain constantly pouring on them. A world enshrouded by an imperceptible fog.
The jolts of the huge diesel engine shake his heart repeatedly, monotonously, imperceptibly. He senses catastrophe. He will not find her, he will know only the shocks of rejection and oblivion.
Here are the two of them in the street. She is now beside him yet distant, lively with her vivacity that never ebbs. Wearing her black and white long dress. Her bronze-colored bosom in the wide, round décolleté of her dress appears soft, slightly pressured against a light dew—the bosom’s tender flesh glistening with tiny droplets. A desire takes hold of him: to bury his lips and face in her bosom.
He said to her: I worry about you in this rain. You are lightly dressed. She said to him laughingly: Don’t worry at all. Rain and cold don’t affect me any longer. In fact, they refresh me. He said: But your sandals. She said: Don’t worry, it doesn’t matter. She went on talking, on and on about the market and the scenes they were passing through, about the prices and the antiques, about the weather, about everything and anything. He was enjoying, from within, the clever outpourings and polished, gentle fluency in conversation. He was also angry: he could see through her tone, through the attitudes of old schoolteacher, mother, and tourist guide all at once. This tone angered him, made him edgy. He said to himself: Probably this dis-cursive gushing is nothing but a delicate, shapeless bridge over the dark, open abyss in the depths of her anguished soul and within a heart agitated with passions, torments, desires, and madness. He said to her one or two days later in a definitive, cutting tone: I couldn’t care less about facts, statistics, and information. These can be obtained from books and libraries. What interests me is something else. This also happens to be my country. Have you forgotten that? It seemed to him as if he were confronting her with his childish pride. Except with a strange and silent gaze of rejection, she did not respond—a huge contrast to her gushing words.
His mind filled with indissoluble, heavy dregs from the last months, weeks, days, hours, as if they were infinitely scattered points of waiting
and suspension, of denial and mad expectation, of joy destroyed by basic, intractable doubt, that of the recently experienced moments of loss, that of total and complete despair when he missed her but could not find her. The savage determined resolutions that he undertook a thousand times, had repudiated a thousand times, as he roamed the streets. The curses and waves of destructive hate and aversion. The final resolutions—final each time—not to lose everything. Yet he loses the one thing of value and significance in the whole world, the only thing he loves and wants more than anything else. Instantly he returns to the agony of infinite possibility tossing him in all directions; having lost everything, he loses his bearings. He is burdened with a strain that he feels is inhuman. Then the shock of encounter, unexpected, after he had inured himself, out of bitterness, to an attitude of carelessness. As if his heart, torn, ruined by stabs and fractures, is no more able to feel joy or anything else. Facing the wonder of this sudden event—her appearance in front of him, totally unexpected—he moves with depressed gait. She … is beautiful, strange. How beautiful, how strange. As usual, she gushes out her mixture of half-lies and half-truths.
In his mind now are these strata of fresh black mud that paralyze his first steps in this city she had called “our city.” She said, I thought it was our city.
His own shoes, tight on his feet, were hurting. He felt uncomfortable about himself—not properly dressed, his clothes not suitable for him, his face shaven in a hurry, washed with cold water. Rainy weather in the summer evening, quasi-hot. Alertness and anxiety make his steps unsteady. Wanting to be finished, he said to her: The first thing I’m going to do is buy a dark gray chamois jacket and velvet trousers of the latest style, of heavy striped black velvet, along with a snow-white polo-neck pullover. He entered for a moment into the game of conversation. Half the game was to escape, to challenge the anguish, burden, and anger he was trying to stifle. The other half was to jocularly present intentions he could not fulfill. She glanced at him, a strange look that continues to rob him of sleep—as if it were permanent, ever present in his heart, this look of astonishment, of distancing and distance. She said: You? I cannot imagine you, I cannot see you in black velvet trousers and a polo-neck white pullover. He laughed, and said, as if talking about someone else: You don’t know me. Twenty years ago, here in Alexandria, during my vagabond and boisterous year—
Rama and the Dragon Page 5
