Rama and the Dragon

by Edwar Al-Kharrat

  In the tiled corridor under its stony unpainted ceiling sat a long Istanbuli sofa covered with an embroidered peasant fabric and small rumpled, stuffed cushions. Asyuti armchairs with their long wooden backs and a tightly-woven plaited mat exuded a pale bronze sheen in the faint morning light. The mat was glued to the ground as if sprouting directly from it with ferocity and power.

  He glimpses a female figure through an open window: she feels with trained, sensitive hands the teats of the buffalo—full and painfully swollen with milk—employing slight and comforting pressure that empties from them the toil of pleasure-giving. The milk trickles intermittently and hits, in light sprays, the walls of the black earthenware pot lined with foam the odor of fresh hot cream. The two hands have their own skill in releasing pleasures. They feel about the taut column and press on the back of the neck. They encircle the green shoots of arugula just above their roots and pull them with their moist mud out from the edge of the small canal under the upright, steady, reddish flax stalks.

  She had said to him: You know, Mikhail, I am not difficult at all. This is just a sip of water for me, a mouthful of plain fresh bread. I can climax in a minute, I know how to give myself pleasure.

  I do not see myself except beneath the murderous, solid light on Cairo’s cement, among its ancient stones, amid the clamor of asphalt and the whiz of elevator buttons, amid hoarse groans of metallic cars that possess none of the elegance of earthenware pots, nor the fresh-ness of plants plucked with their roots from the soil, taking along knotty grains of earth’s dark moisture, almost breaking up, grain after grain. I bury my yearnings in the soil of the old earth and forget them. You are a field full of clover flowers and flax; on your bosom are the fruits of love. Do you hear the twittering of my birds perfumed with the pungent scent of myrrh, the quacking of geese amid reeds in the night of my childhood on which the sun never rose? I long no more for the sun-bread that is instantly cooked, without yeast or oven, on wooden boards under the sun of Akhmim on the roof of the elevated old house whose staircase rises in the shaded, fresh midday darkness. I long no more for the thick, white crust enveloping the cooked doughy core that melted in the mouth with a fertile, erotic scent. My sympathy for earthy plants—tender and fierce at the same time—has dried out. Nothing excites me any more except the flutter of transparent feminine fabrics on the shining body folds, the skillfully intelligent coloring, the embellishment of brilliant, sly, undulating music of metallic surfaces and polished plastic, reflecting in their roundness and sharp lines the echoes of distinct glittering images. When you say to me that my love penetrates your body like an aimed taut lance, my bird fumbles around in the wind; when you come to me, you are joy itself. The hawk has steady wings in the heart of the sky; it neither dives to attack nor rises up. I recall the dark-red lipstick with small mirrors, silver-striped with aluminum frames on ready-made corners; I recall the blue turquoise eye shadow on the eyelids, full of hot painful fluid. I recall them when I wallow my face in the embers of cool grass close to the earth’s soil, the nearby waters of a canal the color of light coffee, with eddies of sluggish water swiftly whirling handfuls of shaggy grass and other innocent-looking trash toward the hand-dug openings to fields having the color of your bosom and its fresh nakedness. I feel no more than a slight yearning for the other Mikhail, as if he had achieved manhood in a bygone world. I stretch my hand to him, but it doesn’t reach any-thing. We are strangers. I and the other I. We know each other totally, invisible barriers of estrangement stand between us, refusing passage.

  She narrated to him:

  This relation between me and him is very special. Not in the sense that may come to your mind (his belief in her was on hold). I will tell you his story with me, but promise not to tell it to anyone. Never. Do you promise? The question of privacy is not related to me but to him. It is a matter of his security, possibly his life, I am not exaggerating. Don’t say ‘Rama and her stories.’ No one in the wide world knows this story except three, and I am one of them. I am the only one who did not actually partake in the story. It was on the first dawn of 1959, when Nasser imprisoned them. Do you recall?

  He said: How can I not recall? How truly strange all this is. How small the world is. In the morning of that very day, I drank cappuccino with him. I was in Simonds and he entered. I wished him a happy new year and we talked for a while when we were having coffee.

  He lit two cigarettes and handed her one. She grabbed it with awkward, tense fingers.

  —Were you friends?

  —I knew him, but friends? No. I have very few friends. I used to follow his writing and I respected him. He had a sort of dynamism, alert-ness, broad-mindedness. Has this turned awry now? I wouldn’t know.

  Definitely his escapades have no end now, and no logic of course.

  —So you two were friends, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, he and I were friends or something of the sort. Years go by and we don’t know these things … is this your proof that the world is small?

  As if she had listened neither to his childlike wonder nor to his sarcastic tone at this very wonder. As if she couldn’t care less for his discovering in these intertwining trajectories a mystery and significance which he barely tried to clarify. She accepts effortlessly his obsession with finding links, relations, meanings—this chronic but not so serious ailment.

  —On that night he came to me in the early evening. We made a crucial decision. The discussion went on all night, but thanks to this decision, he was one out of three or four who were never detained.

  He said: That is correct. It was Hashem who left via Libya—was-n’t it on a camel? And Abdel Ghani …

  She said impatiently: Of course. If you have some money and some connections, you don’t need a passport or a visa.

  He discovered once again his naïveté. He felt that despite his immersion in the past world of revolutionaries, the virginal days, he had always remained on the margin. The practical details, that is, the most important details, had always been strange to him. His experience with that world was passé now, indeed carefully forgotten, as if it had been the experience of a person he had heard of. How many persons had lived or died beneath his skin?

  She said: For almost three months he didn’t leave the seaside apartment I rented for him in Sidi Bishr. He was with Hasan. Once a week I used to take them what they needed. I used to wash and cook for them and also entertain them. Hasan was arrested later, as you know. It was not possible for Hasan to travel: he wouldn’t accept it. He took a political stance on the matter; or was it perhaps for my sake?

  —How did he travel?

  —He traveled with me to Port Said. Since 1956 I’d had friends in that port: courageous native seamen who still remembered the time we were subjected together to British bullets. We went together in the Ismailiya train; Hasan wore a native jallabiya and I donned the native mudawwara to cover my hair, and the castor gown with yoked bodice. He, of course, could not handle at all the ferrymen and the bum-boat hawkers. But you know how I love people and how people love me. Behaving gallantly means more to those people than anything. Yes, money may be important, but, for them, what is truly necessary is generosity, valor, honor. This is true. And since the days of 1956, they have never forgotten Fatma—the freedom-fighting journalist who crossed with them from al-Manzala. Mikhail, where have those days gone?

  With a faint voice touched by timidity, he said: Such glorious days get forgotten, but in some sense they stay forever.

  She went on narrating her story as if she wanted to finish, in a matter-of-fact, practical manner.

  —From the boat in Port Said, then out to the Italian cargo ship far from shore was easy.

  He said: He is indebted to you for his freedom, for a change in his entire life.

  She said: Mikhail, come off it. Why dramatize? Who knows who owes what to whom? Who knows how life’s trajectory will change any of us?

  He did not say to her: All these stories—narrative weavings of chases and conventional adv
enture plots that cannot be imagined except in fiction and films—happened yesterday, in this place. A good-hearted friend was murmuring some words—inarticulate, insignificant as usual—talking to me in the midst of the New Year crowd with the joyful festivities on the stage at Simonds coffee shop, as we were sipping the lip-burning cappuccino with its light-colored foam, exchanging good wishes for the New Year. “May every year find you well.” “You too.” Anxiously said, yes. With hope and concern, perhaps. But without knowing the seriousness of the blow that was destined to befall him, befall us, that night.

  What a wealth of details lie in hiding, in anticipation, in disguise and bargaining, in traveling third class in trains, entering ports, crossing borders with small boats on rough waves. He said to himself: There is nothing strange at all, no more tension in all this than what you would find every day, at every step, in every direction, with any intention or hidden purpose. These details, no one knows; they are your own concern, and no one else cares about them. In them alone lies the drama. It is something between you and yourself. No one knows the tension except you. Daily, practical life that moves on and stops for nothing immerses you in its swift current just the same. Who cares to know whether you are a highly-educated revolutionary pursued by the State, or a simple traveler with round face and a jacket covering your native jallabiya, struggling to make ends meet for your family? Who cares to know if this woman with the ouya-embroidered mudawwara head-cover and the old overcoat worn over the gown is a militant mistress, an affectionate friend, or a housewife traveling to her family in Port Said? Throngs of people circle around each other, bumping each other for a moment. Their bumps are calculated and limited, having recognizable conventions and rituals to which no one pays too much attention. All encounters are practical, clear with familiar patterns. The important thing is to have with you the money for the ticket and to stand in line with the people, to know the door you knock upon and the man you greet, the café in which you will find him and smoke shisha with him, or drink tea with him. As for the paths, they have been charted and are open, teeming with footsteps—their codes well known.

  He said, as if continuing a dialogue with himself: Really, Rama, do you know that death, love, and freedom are all abstractions, illusions, and idées fixes that no one sees and no one knows? The contraction of the heart muscle, the expansion of the chest, the storming of the brain—no one knows these things except from inside one’s self, in one’s own experience. All that others know of me is abstraction, approximation, impression. The important thing is the steady hand, or at least the one whose shaking is not evident, as long as it grasps what is needed. Pray for the leg that knows where to set its foot, even if on the inside it’s wobbling. Be satisfied with the familiar tone of voice that knows what’s required and pays the price. All this is not trivia.

  She said: You move quickly from one extreme to another. Freedom, love, and fear are surely not abstractions. You are, like him, a Copt and a southern Egyptian, and you know it.

  He said: What? He a Copt? I never knew it. He didn’t seem so.

  She said: Of course he is. What do you mean “he didn’t seem so”?

  He said: A Copt? Don’t you mean, of Levantine origin?

  She said: A Copt, a Copt from southern Egypt.

  He said: Then he is a kin of sorts—from my part of the country!

  He laughed, enjoying this new face of kinship between himself and the old revolutionary who had exiled himself.

  She said: His mother had a strange and decisive role in his life—of course. And he’s still a Mama’s boy. He was married, had children, divorced, but he continues to be madly devoted to his mother. Twice he failed in marriage, because he conceived of women as facile harlots. As for the wives, he saw in them a sacred mother for whom he would always yield. But then things always got turned on their heads. Unhappy in his intimate life, he doesn’t feel quite right except with a one-night woman. In the end he’s very much torn apart.

  A question flashes in his mind suddenly: Whom is she talking about? Whom does she mean?

  Later she said to him: Mikhail, I think you viewed me as the evil dimension in your life, the dimension of corruption, decadence, and unethical pleasure. Your conceptions drove me mad, but I hid my feelings from you.

  He was surprised. For the first time she surprised him genuinely. In fact, he was alarmed. It had never occurred to him that she saw him this way. So little did she know him. She saw in him the chaste puritanical man who drops the primness of good behavior once he’s with her, surrendering for a wicked moment of pleasure.

  He exclaimed: What? Is this possible? Strange. Very strange. Impossible. Can’t be true.

  She was silent but not convinced. He was honest but not convincing. In many instances honesty is not convincing at all. But why was he alarmed?

  He thought anxiously to himself: Did she know how to be the woman with whom he felt the absence of taboos?

  He knew that she, herself, did not give a hoot for sexual conventions—all of them put together—not matrimony or fixed special relations between a man and a woman, or all other varied financial-sexual institutions.

  He said to her: It’s not important what you narrate and what tale you tell. What’s important is that you are the narrator.

  She said: I don’t know what you mean.

  There was, however, a look of understanding in her eyes.

  He did not comment.

  They had been walking in the broad elegant streets looking unsuccessfully for a cup of coffee until he despaired and gave up. They sat before the museum on a solid wooden bench with rounded back in the slow, late evening. The light of dusk tarried at the edge of the sky, stabbed equally by adjoining lofty towers, with stretched arms, and by triangular roofs whose dark red tiles have faded. The wide, marble, ivory white staircase, lofty but slightly worn down, rose in front of their eyes with an entrenched, steady, and soft dignity. The staircase rose beneath the elegant, skillful Greek columns—blackened designs in their capitals—that faced a row of self-contented, old, and dignified houses. Their longish windows, resembling each other, had lowered curtains. The street was empty. The few cars passing in it were quiet, a depressed light falling on them. Large, heavy, gray-breasted birds jumped around late in the day on the marble staircase and on the columns’ capitals. These pigeons suddenly alighted from house roofs in the early dusk to pick up imperceptible grains under the thick, leafing trees of the small yard.

  Neither of them said anything as there was nothing left to say. But they were together inside this silent spell. The light of dusk revives strange yearnings that he cannot understand: nostalgia for youth, dreams of the adolescent years inside his small room in their old house in Ragheb Pasha. The noise of the living crowded neighborhood has quieted down now. His window overlooks an inner skylight in a wall seizing a slice of Alexandrian sky whose blueness deepens in the twilight, soon disappearing. He would have been reciting youthful poems with their regular beat and childlike sorrows, bittersweet, rocking the dazzling, innocent, first wounds. Tears were sweet then, and gratifying. The yearning of this adolescent, not yet knowing how to be mature, seizes his heart within the old grip—tenderly wrenching the hard, deep sorrows. Across distances of time, the piercing sudden cries of the sunset curlew reaches him, ripping the invisible sky as if with a knife—without answer. He sees a lead-colored pigeon with swollen breast, slow, jumping up with one flattened leg, sprouting light white feathers, on the marble of the staircase, lifting up in vain the other leg from the floor, for it is broken. Doubtless it knows where it is heading with its unsteady, patient, and obstinate steps. He said to himself: Don’t be so considerate. Leave off this sentimentality. It is too facile. A broken-legged pigeon, so what? I guess you find in it some naïve allegory. Won’t you stop making metaphors and similes? You stopped writing poetry a long time ago, didn’t you?

  Sparrows and pigeons, gathering in rings, circle and flap their wings then dart off like arrows to the column capitals, to th
e tangled leaves. He can see no longer his full-chested, heavy pigeon.

  Rama was singing in a low, hoarse voice neither beautiful nor melodic, yet of ambiguous appeal nonetheless. The verbal rhythm was faint amid the marble columns under the summer sky: A white pigeon, how can I get hold of her? Oh, mother, a white pigeon flew away with her partner. Her small mouth hardly opened when she sang. She was humming the song as if she were alone: Oh, mother, he knew her language. It seems to him that he does not know, nor does he want to decode, all the phrases of this language: of the lofty columns, of the pigeon cooing hopelessly with hoarse whispering aloooone, aloooone, of the marble sky and of Rama extending her hand without expecting help. They went off looking for a cup of coffee or an apéritif before dinner, under dusky clouds now darkening, their deep redness fading out.

  An ambulance siren wails like a nocturnal lament. In his agitated sleep, he recalls the lonely cry of the curlew. She turns over in her bed, says with a voice coming from the clouds of slumber:

  Good grief, that sound at night is foreboding.

  He said to himself: What a woman! She too has forebodings and premonitions from incomprehensible portents—she who uses reason, logic, and ruse as intellectual tools!

  He stretches his hand, pats her hair. She shrinks from him then presses her head on his chest.

  When they go down to the restaurant, taking the round, narrow staircase, there is, in the midst of the warmth and vapor of boiling water and in the hum of kitchen tools, a hole of loneliness from which the two of them cannot figure how to extract themselves.