He had said to himself: In other words, everything I’m not. In the end, she’s saying she doesn’t love me. Then he noticed his silliness.
She had said to him: I sacrifice myself if need be—as you know—for those I love. She looked at him and said: You have not arrived at this stage yet.
Or does she want to say: You will arrive at it. Or does she want to say to the contrary: That is what you are! Despite the cracks. He had said to her: You know that I am not sociable and lack a sense of humor. She said to him instantly: To the contrary, you can dazzle at times when you want to.
He said to her: I wish I could see what you write.
She said, chasing the thought away quickly: Later on, maybe when I finish. Otherwise, the very act of writing is ruined.
He said: Or aborted before it’s born.
She said, with the tone of someone deciding on something already given, without the quiver of a confession: I love particular human traits in you. Because as a human being, as a man, you have particular human traits.
He said with the tone of someone philosophizing, objectively, while the wound in his voice bled: One does not love another because of certain human traits. One often loves because the other has a weakness, even loving this weakness, this shortcoming, this failing. One loves first because the beloved is the beloved. This is not accepting the beloved nor is it a kind of mothering. What’s essential is the will to merge, that there is no self, no other, no twosome, but one: total reciprocal giving and total reciprocal taking.
She said: Even if it were possible, it is very dangerous. It demands more than one can bear.
He tenderly patted her honey-colored hair, as if he were a paternal lover—a soft, combed thicket of thriving plants with the force of primitive, elemental life. Her hair was long and intertwined without being tangled, as if tightly plaited by itself without the interference of anyone, and yet so delicate. It was the hair of a beautiful animal, a repository of irrational powers. Her head lay on his knees; teardrops remained on her serene face, no longer running in an undulating stream after the storm that ripped her handsome facial features. She was relaxed, tired by the fatigue and yearning of an exhausted soul. The luxuriant eyelashes were like shades for two oases in a desert lit by a tranquil sun; the flesh of the eyelids, like leavened dough, slightly swollen as if just awakened from sleep, offered new temptations. The flimsy blouse, décolleté at the breast cleavage, the tightly pressing black bra, full, almost bursting out and overflowing with its luxuriant contents, having a fleshy feel from behind the warm, skillfully woven lace. As she lifts her arms, her breasts stretch backward toward him. She brings his head gently toward hers, so that his mouth falls on her moist lips. His kisses are quick flashes on her lips, cheeks, neck, and chin without distinction, but there is hesitation in his closed eyes. The small silver earring with diamond-like stones is glowing in the half-light with imprisoned and penetrating rays of changing colors as he touches the lobe of her ear in an erotic tenderness. His hands reach to open the buttons of her blouse and find the clasp of her bra with confidence. When the clasp is undone, a delicate, very light metallic bursting is voiced in the silence of his room. Her broad back has been liberated, his hand wide open plies its firm soft curves. Without a goal his mouth still explores her surrendered face. The sighs of the little cat dying are very faint and weak as if coming from a distance, yet very clear, pleading without hope.
Suddenly, she says with a slightly tough voice, hoarse after silence, after weeping, and their fever of the brief corporeal intimacy:
Let go of me. Let go. What are you doing?
She lifts to her chest the withering cat now mewing calmly and says to him: You don’t love me.
He says: I do love you. Simply. That’s all.
She said without enthusiasm, neither accepting nor rejecting: I know it.
He had become bored with this word that now meant nothing. Verbal barriers had closed all exits. He felt annoyed.
The dialogue was broken.
Rama, you broke it.
Nothing is left but one continuous scream of longing, its wave rising continuously toward the sky, shooting up and turning over. The silence and foam of its waves drown me.
He says to himself: Let go of the poetic phrasing. It might be entertaining and somewhat consoling, but it is weightless tin.
There is only this terror of losing, incapable of being measured by weighty words, every time she is late for her appointment, every time she fails to show, every time the telephone remains silent with none of its anxiously promising rings.
I have lost her. Indeed I have lost her. It is over. The cymbals of finale and the uproar of the large resounding drum press upon me announcing the end, the closure.
At night he struggles with terror. Fear stretches its long soft arms, drawing from a well that’s deep, dark, with wide-open mouth. Invisible arms lurk for him. He turns his head on the pillow, saying to himself: What is this childish terror? You are much too old for such fears.
The cracking of something in the stillness makes his nerves jump, and he, in his bed, becomes alert. Under the window, a faint crying voice of unknown character, the crying of a murdered girl years ago in the street demanding a revenge that is not forthcoming. He says to himself, whispering: Afreets? Is it the ghost of the murdered girl? Can this sort of thing actually occur?
Wishing to get up and put the light on, he says to himself: Shame on you. He holds himself from moving, looks for the oblivion of sleep. The house is large, empty, airy as if open and unprotected unto a somber, threatening, empty space.
He calls her with his closed mouth: Rama, Rama. In the echoes of his calls there is something frightening. The faint light reaches him from the glass window of the bathroom door. It seems as if it has come from an outside and foreign world that cannot be reached. Yet it is very familiar: a faint radiation of light from the vents, with invisible contours, as if it possesses the living energy of a botanic species that creeps and steals in, presently quiet, falling on the tiles of the hall outside the open door of his room in a waiting posture. The voice of rational questioning quiets down and the horrors of open-eyed, waking nightmares have taken hold of him as he lies on the large bed, alone now in the clutch of terror. His entire body wails without voice or tears, as if he were drowning and twisting, hushed and breathless, strangled; as if he were beating with arms and legs on a semi-solid earth, only partly responding to his bangs, responding only by its being beneath him, neither going down with him nor plunging him into it.
His body is torn in fourteen fragments, thrown about in the open space. The wailing of Mirages and Phantoms spirals up, becomes louder, eventually explodes as they smash into the sand. The successive rumbling of fire feels like a solid, sharp-edged rain penetrating the unprotected innermost. He buries his head in the semi-earth with a violence born of despairing of salvation and a violence born of its continued search. He risks everything looking for deliverance but none exists for him. The nightmare lid has been locked down on him by the magical, melted lead seal. Tight darkness descends, totally. His body, blocked and breaking out, cannot come up with any movement. Fierce alertness and attempts to escape, wallowing and turning over in fetters made to his size, paralyze his every sound, his every tremor completely, leaving him breathless. Out of hopeless animal fear nothing in his body—constricted by such an evil spirit—obeys him. Dry, repressed weeping shakes him without the moistness of redeeming warm tears. A wild wailing like that of madness: Rama, Rama, Rama.
She said to him: The military camp was in the desert behind the Pyramids. We went to it in an old car, then stayed for three weeks. I completely refused anyone’s objection to my joining the military barracks because I was a woman, that the camp was for men volunteers only. I rejected all talk about training me in nursing, or needlepoint, crochet, or knitting for the soldiers—all the womanish fare that’s neither here nor there as they say, the fare that takes place outside the battleground. I participated in the training on equa
l footing with all. In yellow overalls, I was stronger and quicker to learn than any volunteer. I crawled on my knees, I learned the panther crawl and the monkey crawl, as they call them. I jumped over barriers and climbed rope ladders. I memorized the parts of the Mauser and Kalashnikov better than any old soldier. Soon the glances of doubt and sarcasm and the insinuations disappeared-replaced by gestures and statements of collegiality and equality. I did not allow any encouraging or even admiring words. I asked for absolute equality, received it, then went beyond it. I was stronger in hand, more accurate in aiming, sharper in seeing, more forbearing, quicker in walking, firmer in getting footholds, than any other volunteer. Even the guard from the regular army soldiers who stood outside the fences could not distinguish me from the others.
He said: Who was with you in the training camp?
She said: All of them, from Reserve Officers to Intelligence, from Communists of all shades and factions, to the Muslim Brothers, from the National Guard to the Popular Resistance, from the Misr al-Fata Party, to the Old Wafd Party, to Trotskyites and Independents. Also, there were the usual lot of visionaries who later died at Port Said, or were wounded and maimed by the bullets and bombs of the British and the French, or who later died or were beaten and humiliated in the prisons, in the desert detention centers of the Revolution. All of them, the core, the elite of the country. And where have we gotten to?
He said: The struggle continues. It does not die, not from thousands of years ago on to eternity.
She said: Oh, do please leave off the romanticism.
He said: Who would have believed it? Those days stormed our hearts with joy, with the ecstasy of sacrifice. But we soon returned to extended silence and perplexity.
She said: It was three weeks when night joined day. I’ve never known a time more difficult nor more pleasurable than this period among men. Soft sand not only filled my pulled-back hair under my khaki cap, but also clung onto my eyelashes and in the crevices between my toes. I invented a device for taking a shower from the scant drinking water: a bucket hanging on two blocks of wood, going up with a rope attached to a pulley, another rope bringing the bucket mouth down. The water, having the smell of rust, yet refreshing, flowed down in small, slight, miserly gushes, then it would pour down all at once. I sucked in my breath from surprise while standing naked behind a single curtain on one side strung on wooden pillars and made of tenting—the other side open to the winter sun.
He said: You were a true Amazon. In fact, I think you have always had this Amazonian side latent behind all your femininity.
She said: The Amazon is a female first and a fighter second.
He said: Fortunately, today’s Amazons do not have to fight with bows and arrows.
She looked at him, the two of them laughing at the same moment. He was not late, not for a second, but his laugh was tense.
He said: So that they don’t have to cut off one breast.
She said: No, both of mine are here, safe and sound.
He said: You’re telling me! I know they are there. May they sleep tight.
She said: This hard training was very helpful when I went to occupied Port Said. My name then was Sitt Fatma of Manzala.
He said: I can imagine your enthusiasm for the exercises. You are tough despite your delicateness.
She said: The basic exercise was shooting. But there were other endurance exercises: withstanding thirst and hunger for calculated hours, handling scorpions and snakes, exercises like that of the Lightning Brigades, but to a lesser degree, and also Japanese wrestling. No one could ever throw me down on the floor. These were the most enjoyable exercises.
The defiant Amazon storms men, breaking fences of their forts, wrestling with them in an unending hardy embrace in dazzling nightmares, riding horses toward horizons that can never be reached; her quiver is never emptied of arrows.
She said: What were you doing then?
He said: My battle ended early, before that. I came out of the detention camp and I cleared away from both revolutionary and political work. The abyss of despair paralyzed my heart for a long time. I got to know Cairo streets by night. We were constructing public housing. Then the iron and cement ceased coming. The buildings became standing vestiges before they were constructed. Some of them were used as assembly centers for the youth of the National Guard and Popular Resistance. Guns were distributed to them in front of me with live ammunition, even though they did not know how to use them. I was the first person to show up on the morning the British and the Israelis landed in Port Said. I and those southern Egyptians, then the rest.
She said: We should have met there fifteen years ago. Imagine what kind of change would have taken place in our lives if we had been together in the military camp.
He said: I’m sure you were very beautiful even in the yellow overall with your hair under the khaki cap.
She said: Fundamentally, life was very beautiful then. Promising. Hope had no limits.
He said: As for now …
She said: I am happy with what took place between us.
He said: It is, in itself, the most wonderful thing that has happened to me, whatever the reasons or justifications.
However, a tragic seed of perdition had entered the very foundation of what happened, whatever its results were to be.
The tragedy happens and moves on. What does ‘what happened’ mean? It happens, and that is that.
She said to him: Why not? Let me make people happy. Inasmuch as they want to be, no matter how. Let me give it to them. What do I lose? Even if I fail to bring myself real happiness, for what is happiness?
She hesitated for a moment and said: Whatever it is, it is a good thing.
He said to himself, once again, repeatedly, endlessly: This talk is exactly what I cannot fathom and what I don’t understand. It cancels me, classifies me in a category of an anonymous and common base, not aiming at the unique, singular goal that cannot be repeated, but toward an element in me which I feel is common and dispersed even in its most intimate special moments. No. There is none of the glowing particularity with its unique and extraordinary sharpness in all this philosophy of hers.
He said to himself: How foolish we are, how miserable. Can there be a fundamental uniqueness when we dismiss our identities and become instruments, yes instruments, performing a function. Even if that function is wasted in the clutch of a cosmic fever?
She said to him: You have attained a stage of maturity that a man your age rarely manages to reach.
He said: You mean that competition—assailing my foes and fighting for the prize—has ceased to have great significance for me? You mean a kind of inner liberation that you are happy with, for my sake, since I have stopped believing that I can hold the universe in my fist, hence cannot possess it and refashion it, as I used to think in earlier times?
She said: However, you still respond harshly to people.
He said: I?
She said: You can’t stand their company. In the end, you are a satirist and a mocker.
He said: This is not true. Who am I to satirize people? I believe I know their suffering, their defects; even their crimes I do not condemn, let alone satirize. Even those who are full of themselves and are conceited I do not mock. They simply amuse me and I enjoy them!
She said: Why this faint smile that never blossoms completely? Of course you do have a kind of a giggle. But …
He said: Hasn’t it occurred to you that it’s a small trick of self-defense? But of course, you would have thought of that. Maybe my smile represents a kind of ethical decision.
Annoyed, she responded: There is something else I’ve not put my hands on.
He said: Yes, ethical. As you always say, I approach people treating them according to preconceived ethical judgments. Perhaps so. Yet it’s also true that in the context of ethical judgments I accept them on the grounds that they are people who act rightly and wrongly, suffering perpetually, searching despite themselves for their pleasures and joys, whatever they are. T
rue?
He went on: Not at all. All this is not true. Who can claim for himself the right to make ethical judgments? How unhappy people are and how fierce as well! To the contrary, I cannot judge anyone.
She said: Precisely. There is always a frame of reference even when you deviate from its rules. First of all, ethical judgment is present as an issue, then you reject it or you don’t. This is another matter. Even when you reject it, it is still there, overshadowing your entire behavior and life. That is why you enjoy it and smile sarcastically at people.
He said: Possibly. As for you, you are fortunate enough not to have ever had this. You accept people almost in a physical way. You enter with them in a direct relation, an organic one, even a spontaneous one, without ever entering into your mind the possibility of an ethical judgment, without ever having any ethical criteria in the first place. There is nothing to condemn in all this, there is not even anything disgraceful about it. It’s simply that people and men are an extension of you, yourself.
The canon of her faith is a full life at every moment.
She once said with a touch of jealousy: Svetlana Stalin got married six times. What a woman, what a cyclone. And no one can count the lovers of George Sand.
He said: We too have had our legends: Amina, Samia, and Tahiya.
She said: I am my father’s daughter. He lived his life well and fully, by length and breadth. Indeed, he filled his life with everything: love, adventure, politics, women, wealth, bankruptcy, beauty, bullets, people of all walks of life, with glories and frustrations. He lived a full life.
Thoughtfully, he said: No doubt you are your father’s daughter.
She used to move around other people’s tables all morning in the Auberge garden. The waters of the dark-colored, vast lake seem to melt away in the sand amid the stones under the cement fence, looking out of place on the moist sand. The swaying shades under the umbrellas gave her face a special luminosity. She laughed softly and faintly as she raised the foaming beer mug, and as she ran after the big, colored ball, while yelling and leaning on the shoulders of Mahmud so as not to fall.
Rama and the Dragon Page 18
