He said to her: Do you blame yourself for something? Maybe you’ve not forgiven yourself.
She said simply and affectionately: Mikhail, don’t be silly.
He said: I am not asking you to forgive yourself. I want … how I want to remove the first cause of your misery, to remove from you the burdens of others.
She said: I don’t know exactly what you’re saying or what you want. But can’t you accept that I might need to live with these burdens. You have to take me as I am.
He said: Truly I can’t imagine you changing.
She said: We all want several things simultaneously.
She is now spreading the butter on the toast in front of her in a detached manner, without looking at him. She does not bother to spread butter on toast for him.
She continues: Isn’t this natural and normal, and shouldn’t we accept it?
He says: I don’t know how to accept things. A meaningless fact, I’m aware. But I don’t know how, believe me. I always reach dead ends.
She says: It’s your nature to be skeptical for no reason.
He says: This is my darkest side. I’m not able to do this—just accept things—with anyone, not at all. I was hoping, for no reason, you’d continue nevertheless to care for me, as you say. I was thinking I might possibly get healed, might justify my existence. About this particular point, yes. I can’t get rid of this childishness.
She said: It’s not childishness. Don’t blame yourself. Do you enjoy feeling guilty?
He said: I know you’ve stopped caring for me already.
She said: Mikhail …
He said: I don’t know why you cared for me in the first place. Was it a sumptuous gesture of yours, a crush, a generosity, simple curiosity? Or was it a supplement to an installment in some series?
She said: You are needlessly unfair and cruel. Not to me alone but to yourself, as well. Can’t you see there’s nothing making me listen to all this from you, except … Can’t you see this?
He said: Yes. Yes, I see it, and I am thankful and grateful.
She said: Don’t ever say that word.
He said: You are very complex. Yet very primitive—simple like first elements. Aren’t you? I don’t know. I don’t know you.
She said: No one knows me better than you. Don’t you know how to speak simply on anything without anatomizing it?
He said: I don’t know how to speak. I don’t play with words, nor do I select them and embellish them. I am in front of something very intricate yet very simple and stern. I am trying to reach this something in you, this foreign yet terribly intimate thing.
She said: I won’t say that I pardon you. There is nothing to be forgiven or forgotten, as they say.
She said to him all of a sudden: Mikhail, how old is your mother?
He was baffled but told her.
She said to him: I’ll see you on Wednesday.
She did not come but called and said: I’ll see you today.
But she didn’t come then, nor did she call.
Their hippie friend goes ahead of them with his girlfriend to the next table. On his chest are metal chains clinking and “Make Love Not War” buttons. His messy beard reveals a smile like those of children, and moist dark lips. He wears an embroidered black Indian jacket with slits on the side, over a thick, soft, ripped, leather vest and heavy-fabric, faded-blue jeans. His wide belt is perforated with ornaments, embellished with silvery, round nails.
He says to her: Good morning.
They agreed to meet at the door within ten minutes. Her voice on the phone was cheerful, gay as an adventurous little girl’s.
He shaved, washed his face, put his hair under the cold water tap. Then he changed his mind, took off his clothes hurriedly and chaotically, throwing them here and there in the unfamiliar bathroom in a manner quite unlike himself. He got into the shower. The water came down on his body splashing and abundant, quickly, as he breathed deeply. He emerged from the shower glowing. A current of renewed youth flowed through him.
The elevator came up for him without delay—a good sign. In ten minutes exactly, he was standing at the door. He noticed, with a sense of self-tolerance, that he still found good and bad omens in little daily things, finding in them signals and warnings.
She came out slowly and gently from the double glass doors, like a large heavy bird, and he smiled at her, a serene smile.
Once outside they found delight in centuries-old buildings, their partly ruined, high fences surrounded by entangled trees. The branches were crooked, dense, dark green, tender, tumbling down. Delighted too by the old shiny tram, with its rails chattering between the black basalt strips of pavement in streets with few passersby. Delighted by lit windows of closed stores and bookshops, with terrace cafés and their leather and aluminum seats under large umbrellas with colored fabric, leaning under steady neon lights. Delighted with stairways, with marble columns, old and luminous beneath the animated lights seeming to dazzle with their own intelligence. They laughed at the good-hearted faces of old ladies with emaciated bodies. As for the younger set, they turned around together looking at the elegant steps of bare, curved legs beneath miniskirts. Their attention was drawn to the effective simplicity of a church below street level with its old medieval style, devoid of ornamentation. They noticed the boring pornographic film signs and the dimly lit vestibules of their entrances. Their footsteps were light as they walked through large squares with fountains sprinkling clear water beneath towering trees. They went down narrow and deserted streets between high, massive walls with no vents. Red traffic lights stopped them at wide boulevards packed with huge, lofty department stores as the crowds of the evening mixed in a calculated pattern, with a succession of cars and engines pushing and rising suddenly to hoarse roaring, then soon enough falling into a regular whirring. At the intersections he took her tender hand, which felt small in his. Whenever they crossed streets to the opposite side she put her arm in his with spontaneity and a sense of assurance as they watched the intricately decorated and packed-up shop windows—the dark ones and the ones with sly, rotating, colored lights. They conversed freely with the joy of discovering a new city and a new friendship. His eyes were gazing at her with admiration, affection. Her eyes in that rounded, soft face of hers were stealing speculative glances at his eyes without any indication of danger or threat.
He said to himself: The beginning was quite innocent, childlike, not even recognized for what it was.
They descended a few steps to a cafeteria and a restaurant decorated with marble and tin plates, lit by cheap lights, choked with warm odors of food and coffee, with whirring and whizzing sounds emanating from mighty stoves and bright kitchen devices. They ate off small round plates on top of carefully folded, frail, paper table mats of light brown color with a sketch of the Coliseum, the restaurant’s logo. They drank espresso coffee, he felt its unusual pleasure, its aroma alone, erasing the food’s fatty taste in his mouth.
They ascended back to ground level and walked beneath dark arches supporting solid buildings, walked amid huge columns around which so many signs were glued that no vacant space on the flesh of the curving black marble was visible in the dusk. She clapped with her hands as she ran up other stairways that seemed without end. No sooner did she sit on the large marble upper landings than she jumped up laughing, saying that the marble was cold, having sat on it with her light skirt and been bitten by its chill. Over them soared the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, made of white stone, looking in the night lights somewhat worn out, their edges smoothed over. They discussed whether to enter the narrow street that went up suddenly, ruggedly toward a huge fence that blocked its end. They wondered whether it was a dead end or turned into some surprising way out. They decided to venture climbing up. He said to her: Aren’t you tired yet? Doesn’t climbing bother you? She said: And you? He said: I am ready to walk on, to go up and down in this strange city until morning. She said: Me, too. Their shared sense of adventure brought them together in the late evenin
g advancing on this bright, magical city, its breath cooling, its alleys leading to closed fences—a city protective and tender with its gravid columns inelegant but solid, with large, tarnished buildings on which advertising lights were attached, closing and opening their electric eyes in mechanical sequence revealing a shabbiness that had stolen into a side of the city’s ancient glory.
They came all of a sudden onto the vast Station Square. The breeze was cold, piercing, making the sides of her skirt fly about her fleshy legs. He felt the wind both invigorating and biting in his chest. They joined their arms into each other’s as they quickly went down toward the straight and broad street. He asked her: Shall we take a taxi? She said: Goodness, no. Are you sleepy? He said: Not at all, and he laughed happily. Then he said: I’ve never been as alert as I am now. Coffee is not the reason, at least not the only reason. She looked at him again as if with admiration and astonishment, without denying or rejecting. She said: Are you always so precise, adding reservations and clarifications in every statement you utter? He said: The pleasant company in the first place is what wakes up everything in me. She laughed—a very small laugh—but did not comment. He felt, however, her arm pressing his ever so slightly, signaling that she received the message, or thanking him for the message.
As they walked down the street in long strides, she told stories, how there were three boys among the youth of Munira neighborhood who all loved her at the same time, and she used to go with them to the movies and to the Gezira Club in its bygone days of splendor: I was very young, ten or eleven, still a little girl, and there was nothing. She said it while passing her other hand lightly over her round erect bosom that seemed to glow in the lit night beneath her flimsy blouse in the cold breeze. She emitted a hushed short laugh: When I went to boarding school in Alexandria, the three of them used to send me letters secretly via a common friend who went weekly to Cairo. I didn’t travel to Cairo except once every two or three months. You know my father was busy with his many unending stories, responsibilities, and affairs with the Palace and the Army, with politics, art, women, and businessmen.
She said, suddenly, in a context all her own: I am ready to give up my life for those I really love.
She questioned him with a look. His sense of her was permeated with tenderness, affection, admiration, as he smiled at her stories, getting to know her world.
She said to him: Aren’t there such stories of love in your childhood? All young people at that age have such stories.
He said: I never knew the meaning of childhood.
She laughed: Come on. Don’t be unreal.
At another time she might have said: You are still a child of sorts.
He said: You have a point. I have what resemble love stories, but they are not stories. They have no external drama or events. They are rather fantasies of love, dreams of love, both torments and splendors of childlike and adolescent infatuation—hidden and held back. I used to be very shy and introverted, living mostly with myself. Probably I still do.
She said: It’s true to a certain extent, but we cannot say you are an introvert—though possibly reserved and sedate.
They laughed. She said: But I love in men this reserve and calmness. Words and things from them have a value because they are rare.
He said: I too have mad escapades.
She asked in an incredulous tone: Really?
It never occurred in his mind that he was tapping the thresholds of love’s realm that would open up for him hours of joy he could never have imagined—no more than a few hours but enough to fill an entire life with an inextinguishable glow. He would also fall into an anguish of torments he thought he could never have known—persistent, invasive, inconsolable anguish, seemingly without end, with no hope of crossing its vast, shaggy, prickly labyrinths. It never occurred in his mind—not for a moment—that in these first hours he was beginning to fall in love with her.
There was not a single policeman to be seen in the vast city; it was bright, pleasant, empty. It received them in its bosom with open arms, as if it were meant for them only. Like Hansel and Gretel, like the Sultan’s Daughter and Clever Hasan, in the land of fairy tales, they did not know they were at the intersection between the way of regrets and the way of him who goes and never comes back—about to face a she-ghoul whose questions are unanswerable. Their footsteps took them in a thrall of discovery and release toward a summery dawn.
Holding his hand, she was talking as they descended the narrow staircase in a hurry toward the small old yard where the light of a lamp shaking in the breeze fell on the closed door of a small hotel. In the midst of the yard was a white statue of an elegant, naked boy surrounded by rings of densely green flowers. She said: You know I can fabricate a million white lies and half a million rosy lies, really, but in crises you will not find any one to depend on better than me. Try me.
He smiled and didn’t take the matter seriously then. It was more appropriate for him to forget it. Her mind, like her body, was quick moving, constantly jumping around with an inner force. She liked to formulate intelligently worded phrases to surprise her audience. In fact he was not surprised, nor did he want to respond to her game by feigning surprise. He was not interested in splendid words and skillful performance but in what lay beyond them: the experience that seemed to him unusual, at times exceptional.
She said to him: Do you know what time it is now? He said without surprise or astonishment: Yes, around three. She said: Look, look Mikhail …
The sky above the lights of the sentient, nocturnal city was becoming pallid, not yet luminous. He felt its texture getting lighter, more transparent. In the trees, something was worrying the birds—perhaps they sensed the shades of dawn? Not yet awakening or bursting out with chirping or twittering noises, they nevertheless moved here and there from above—a listlessness before waking, a lonely stirring, then quiet again. Something fluttered, or else leaves rustled in the air beginning to cool, as they hurried on without feeling anxious to get back, yet looking forward to a warmth that had nothing to do with the warmth of the heart; the hearts were plenty warm. Small cars with their lights extinguished were crowded, parked beneath deep red, huge, old buildings. Suddenly, she gently pulled her arm from his and lingered a step behind him, bent down on the ground of the sloppy street—unevenly paved with black basalt having been smoothed and made glossy by multiple and successive generations of footsteps and wheels. Rama was purring to herself in a low voice—oooh, a little cat—as she lifted from the ground a gray kitten whose crooked small legs were moving weakly in agitation. Rama was mewing in response to it, holding it to her chest moving it up and down with the keenness of repressed tenderness. When he turned, he was truly surprised. He felt somewhat worried. She said to him: Look Mikhail, the little cat. What is it doing alone here in the street? He said: Doubtless it is looking for its mom, in a nearby shelter. Rama, leave it, so it can return. She said: Mikhail, my heart won’t let me do that. How sweet and small! Let me hold it a little. He smiled but his worry didn’t cease. She gently placed the kitten on the ground as if despite herself, but her hands didn’t want to let go of it. She moved down and sat on her heels next to the kitten, her skirt going up to her upper round thighs, lit by a golden brown glow in the late hours of night. The kitten ran with its shaky legs—purring with the excitement and joy of salvation and, with what seemed to Mikhail, sorrow as well—behind the row of parked cars, toward a dark window with metal bars opening no doubt onto a hole leading to a cellar or a basement under the aged, huge building.
It did not occur to him in the elevator, or next to her room, to kiss her goodbye. They shook hands—her tender flesh a little moist with sweat caused by the sudden internal warmth right after the cool dawn air. Her hand relaxing in his was slack, flaccid, not pressing. He saw in her large, alert eyes affection, tenderness, and contentment. He said to her: Good night, or rather good morning. She laughed. He went back and slept right away. He was genuinely free of concerns, his body feeling peace, opulence, and h
appiness.
In the morning, she was wearing a button-up dress and a shortcut wig the color of her hair. She said: The wig is made from my own hair. At first he did not understand and he looked at her puzzled. She said: I had my long braids cut and made into a wig. Can’t you see? The same color, the same texture of my hair. He exclaimed: That is true! Around her neck she was wearing several necklaces holding small amulets alternating between silver and leather. Their tiny bells jingled and tinkled gently. She said: These are amulets made by an old priest from our town in Sharqiya, written in Coptic, Arabic, and Aramaic. He said: Amulets? Of what? What’s in them? She said: I haven’t opened them. The priest asked me never to do so. Does this surprise you coming from me? I, the scientific materialist, the old Marxist, the believer in Socialism? He said: No, it doesn’t surprise me. I know. She said: I only need them to bring me luck. I am really in need of luck.
Months later, she was wearing the same dress and the same amulet-necklaces. It occurred to him that this had some meaning. He said to her: Remove these ugly sunglasses. She laughed—a rare and surrendering laughter. Then she said: Oh, you never liked these glasses. But she did not remove them. He said to her: Rama, remove these glasses, take them off. She removed them silently and put them in her huge, large, always-open handbag. She never wore them again.
She said to him once: I imposed my will once. So, yes, I am something of a tyrant. You told me that, I know. But you are also a tyrant of sorts, my love.
He said to her: You move freely from one caprice to another.
She said in bad temper: No, I did not mention caprice. I said I loved the freedom of moving about—moving from one moment to another. But I don’t move from one whim to another. In fact every time I move I have with me those I love.
She said: I am used to taking you now with me wherever I go. For me this is friendsh—This is love.
Rama and the Dragon Page 15
