I don’t know how to maintain relations with women, she said. There’s nothing in common between us. I can’t, I really can’t, enter into a conversation about fashion, recipes, types of make-up, problems with servants, or gossiping about others. I don’t know how to put on half a ton of powders and creams every day, tarnishing or beautifying my face with them. As you can see, I don’t use lipstick. There is something masculine in me. They say I am a policeman, an old guard.
He laughed and said: You are sheer femininity.
She said: May God bless you for the compliment.
He said: No, I mean what I said.
After dinner, when having coffee, she said to him: I have an appointment with a Sudanese friend, an exile visiting this country. He phoned me this afternoon and invited me to an unofficial diplomatic soiree. These invitations usually bore me, but I couldn’t refuse. I haven’t seen him for a while, and he is a dear friend, an elderly gentleman. I ask you for a favor. Kindly take me in a taxi to the Clock Square. You are not so busy, are you? This request humbles me, but I have to say I don’t dare take a taxi alone at night.
He said: Is that all? Your wish is my command, my lady, from the bottom of my eyes. I shall apologize and delay my appointment for half an hour.
She said: O my God! You have an appointment? Then no need.
He said: No, no! It is very simple. I’ll take you.
No sooner had the taxi moved away with them—in the intimate, private darkness typical of narrow spaces, while he was gazing at the city, with its people and lights disappearing soundlessly behind the windowpane as the engine roared softly with its hushed, internal, mechanical power—than he had stretched his hand to hers at the same time her hand was moving toward his. The fingers touched, clasped firmly. He felt blood rising to his face for the first time in their friendship. Her voice quivered as she called on him pleading and anxious: Mikhail! He said: Rama, what is happening to us? She said: Mikhail. Mikhail, I don’t know. This was their first and last mutual confession, then a charged silence fell upon them, pregnant with all possibilities.
She tried to pay for the taxi, but he refused, laughing. The driver hesitated for a moment in front of the two different hands, each extending a large sum. Then as a matter of male solidarity the driver quickly took his money. She said to him: Go back in the same taxi, so you can make it to your appointment. He said: No, I will walk you to your destination and enjoy the air. She said: But your appointment? He said: I have time.
He stepped down, they walked together. She clung to his arm with new familiarity and spontaneity. She said: I’ll phone you when I get back. I’ll talk to you; at least wish you good night. He pressed her hand as he parted from her and stood watching as she entered a residential building full of quiet windows. He walked aimlessly, a bit distraught as various scenarios filled his head. Under his feet the streets felt like waves. He was plowing their waters, sailing with spread sails pushed by abundant and prosperous wind.
He said to himself: No, she will probably forget or else it will be too late. She will not call tonight. Tomorrow, she will talk and I will hear her story.
It was one in the morning when he went to bed. Exhausted, his senses were yet alert. A lightness and joy fluttered within him. He had not known such feelings for a long time, and as yet they were vague, without content.
Suddenly, in the profound and enclosed silence the telephone rang loudly. He stretched his hand—alarmed, anxious, not fully awake—as if knowing it was she. The light, he discovered, had been left on and shone brightly. With an unimaginable effort he responded with an awkward but alert voice: Hello!
Her voice came to him, unsteady, low, and womanish: Hello, Mikhail! Have I awakened you? He said: Not at all. I was waiting for your telephone call. How was your evening? She said: Horrible. Let’s not talk about it. I miss you. He said: I miss you too. He looked at his watch. It was after 2:30. She said: Mikhail, I need you. I can’t sleep and I want to talk to you. He said: Now? She said: Yes, now of course. I am in an unbearable state of anxiety and I propose we talk.
Having had the matter slip out of his hand, he said: Do you know what the time is? It’s 2:30. She said: What does it matter what time it is? I am resorting to you. He said: I don’t know. There are certain things we have to take into consideration: we are Egyptians, after all. We’ll talk as you wish, surely, but tomorrow morning. He did not comprehend what was going on. He was frightened. She said: All I want is to talk together, talk, t-a-l-k, like two mature, rational persons, one to the other. One person who needs the other. I need you. That’s all. Her voice was shaking—drinking more than she should have? Sweat oozed from all the pores of his body. His face blazed. He fell silent, didn’t say a thing.
She said: All right. I understand. You are right. No doubt. I am mistaken.
Her voice began to crack. No resistance could stop its breakdown. She said: Please forgive me—as the tears gathered, amplified, exploded over the phone—I apologize, I didn’t mean—the words got lost, buried in her unbearable crying bout, in the pain and sense of rejection and loss, in the night and in the loneliness without hope of comfort. Sweat continued dripping from him without stint, without resistance. He said: Don’t cry. Please, please, Rama, don’t cry. She said intermittently: I am not crying, I am not crying. He said: I will be with you in minutes. Please. I am coming. She could not get her tears to cease flowing, as she said with a tired, surrendered, thankful, and grateful voice: No, no reason to bother yourself. I understand. I am better now. He said: No, that’s enough, Rama. I’ll come right away. I want to come. I wanted to come all along. She said, while the last hushed sighs were making her voice present in his own room as her femininity enveloped and embraced him in its soft, captivating tone: I’ll wait for you.
He changed his night flannels, as they had become moist with sweat. In few moments, which he took to be hours, he dressed. When he went out, he was confounded again. First, he went down to the dark lobby: in his agitation he thought the appointment was there. He was surprised by sleeping chairs, extinguished lights, a detained nocturnal emptiness. He went back perplexed and self-questioning.
He entered her room. But after she opened the door in a hurry, she did not close it herself. Instead, she said to him: Close the door behind you, Mikhail. A single wall window was their only sky, their only light. Agitated, his eyes were slightly blinded in the darkness. She said to him: No, don’t turn on the light. I don’t want light now. I cannot stand it.
The bathroom was lit behind the glass of the closed door. The light was stealing in like trickling water.
She said to him: Come! Sit next to me on the bed.
She was under the white sheet while preparing a place for him on the edge of the bed with her hands. He sensed the bronze color of her bare arms in the faint darkness. The church dome in the window frame seemed to him heavy and flattened.
In her face, the anxiety of the tearful storm lingered. Her cheeks and eyelids seemed round, slightly puffed, adding to her appeal.
She said: We will talk now. Nothing but talk.
This was followed by a belated tearful sigh. He leaned over and kissed her under the eyes. He patted her cheeks and eyelids with his hands in a silent, comforting gesture. She raised her arms and slid his glasses away from his eyes in a deliberate, slow gesture, putting them down next to keys and a cigarette pack under the shade of the turned-off table lamp.
She said: Come, let’s talk. If we analyze the problem objectively and logically we will …
He put his hand on her lips and said: No, no, Rama. No need for logical, objective analysis or for a non-logical, non-objective analysis.
She said: From the dialectical angle, we can look at the issue from the point of view of …
Smiling lightly and affectionately, he said: I don’t want to discuss the issue from any point of view.
Her lips held on to his: the appeal of the lightly fragrant wine breath of her mouth was immediate and sudden. Their first kiss was sudden, u
nexpected. His lips came to know the freshness of the open, slow-moving, and clinging mouth. In her mouth was a light sugary taste—the sweetness of a mature fruit plucked from a mother tree.
He leaned to take her between his arms, and he felt on his chest the weight of her naked breasts under the light nylon, white gown. The music of the spheres was grandly mellow, and heavens resounded with glorious, lofty melodies. The juxtaposition of chests was a fulfillment, a realization of a deep primordial demand that could not be questioned. His arm behind her shoulder held the magnificence of that which he did not know the world could contain.
She said to him: Come next to me.
His move was quick, without thought.
She said to him: Put your hand on my breast.
He felt the virginity of her blooming bosom, its strange innocence while she looked at him with gentle ecstatic eyes. No present, no future, and no past. The moment that does not end is everything. There was no discovery, nor the rush into new recognition. Their knowledge of each other was as old as time: entrenched, having its own principle as if eternal. This determined voracity, this burning desire, this distilled eroticism devoid of the weakness of humane affection. The boat of craving rose with them above deep waves with quiet surface amid the reed stalks. His hands knew their way to the wet and rich jungles as he sailed in no time between the two full and soft legs that he could not see: his face was buried between her breasts.
She said: Tomorrow you will return, and we will talk formally as required by good manners. As for now, we have a few moments together.
She said: We will wait for our pleasure together, one after the other: each in its turn. We will not hurry.
There was nothing between them except a joy with steady music-its uproar controlled by a strict, spontaneous, uncalculated rhythm.
She said: Wait, till we come simultaneously together.
The waves were lapping between their embracing bodies. Her full thigh on his leg was a spread-out sail of heavy fabric filled by the blowing of joyful wind. Just the same, he was listening from afar to the fluttering of vast wings filling the blocked sky, in a frame of radiant but faint fire, above the joyful bells twinkling: the annunciation of the coming of a new resurrection. Death, where is your darkness? Then the dams broke after their soft rocks trembled under the unbearable anxiety of pleasure. The roaring of the last waves broke out: her abrupt cry from the pain of pleasure was sharp and hushed. The boat that carried them together was shaking in its final shudder in the jungles. It staggered and drowned in the warm pond whose waters streamed off, and on which the breeze collapsed amid the soft reed stalks, burnt and dried up by the sun.
They were traveling once by train when she said to him unexpectedly: I seduced you. Had I not cried when I phoned, you would not have come.
His friend Ibrahim once said to him: Ah, Rama. This woman is incredible. Everything with her goes through there, from below, everything. What a loss! Such intelligence, education, brilliance, self-sacrifice! All of it passes through there: all her mind, her work, her play, her archaeological expertise, her radicalism—all are in the service of the lower part. He added: She used to be, indeed, very beautiful in the past. When she went to Port Said, she became a legend, but now … Who would look at her now?
Mikhail said to himself: For the cynics, everything spirals into a repetitive cynical mold. Is this the story of a woman-nymph, like any other? The flesh of truth is something alive, gentle, soft. It cannot be reduced to a cynical formula; it cannot be a mold among other judgmental molds—ready-made, cheapened by hands, made commonplace by gossip.
He said to himself: I, I look at her and I fully see her. I know a beauty in her that no one else can see: a gentleness that hurts the heart, a childish weakness, also a rock-like force, a hunger not of this earth. I know through her a woman’s body pouring into my arms as well as a stony, harsh wall that cannot be possessed. She has both indescribable affection and absolute indifference—an indifference not even aware of itself. What does it matter if the feet of conquering armies have stepped on the fresh flesh of your truth, endless times? The rock stays, the fertility of the flesh is renewed in the jungles of Manzala swamps and down to the drowned cataracts. The hippopotami, with ugly mouths, gobble tons of dry grass of shooting stars. The Nile waters disappear behind the great dam, and the earth cracks, opening up a network of wound marks without blood. Ghosts, ghouls, and monsters surround me, surround you, you, nymph, you, dark river houri. Phantoms in the gardens of Circe disappear in the burning noon sun on the mountain of Aswan. The crooked tree trunks are laid bare, black, leafless. These are not her sins; they are not her sins. She has no sins. It is my sin that I did not know how to teach her my reality. I remained for her without substance, a chiaroscuro. What, then, is my reality? Do I have any? If so, why do I wish to see it reflected in her green mirror alone?
She said to him: I love you this way, when you are gentle and sweet; I don’t love your fierceness.
He said to her: I want you to open up for me all your inner life, even those things that shock, torture, and frighten. I’ll live them again with you. I will share with you the mad frenzy, if that is what it is called. Perhaps I shall be wounded deeply. Yes, but the wounds are open now, anyhow, and they might never heal as it is. What I mean is that I am ready to live with you. I am capable of it. A shared healing might be in this. I don’t know. What I know is that you’re staying alone inside your loneliness, a relentless loneliness within loneliness, each with its own flavor of cruelty. Your solitude is made by your own hands inside a self-enclosed planet. When will it end? Is this what you want? Or is it that you possess nothing but this? It is not, and it cannot be, your will. Nothing is forced upon us from outside. You know this. There is no need for me to say it.
He said: You share with me all the moments of my life … I want complete sharing.
She said without accepting, not even for a moment: Total sharing is very demanding.
He said: Yes.
She said: Haven’t we agreed that perfection is not of this world? It is enough that we get what we can, if we can.
In his fancy, it was possible to arrive at this absolute love within the prison of conventions that people erect for their lives. In the heart of such impossibility, he wanted to reach her totally, and to give himself totally.
He said: Knowledge for me is love.
She said: What do you want to know? Nothing. Void and emptiness.
He said: You? In the midst of your crowded activity?
She said: The worst kind of void is that in the midst of crowds; in the midst of people, urgent issues, successive problems, and everything emptied on the inside.
He said: It is not emptiness then, but escape.
She said: I want to escape from you.
He said: Isn’t there a kind of escape forward through confrontation?
She said: Last night I did not sleep because of the heat.
He said: You told me you slept well.
She said: I slept well, yes, but not enough, only a little.
She yawned and put her hand on her mouth, looking at him with a half-apologetic glance.
He asked himself, he doesn’t know how many times he has asked himself: Was that an act of self-destruction or an act of self-liberation from the rubble of a previous, repetitive, and unending destruction?
She said: I leave matters to unfold on their own. I take things as they come. Most things do not ever get completed. How many things around us, inside us, are half-made things, partially completed, thus partially incomplete!
Of course he did not tell her: Do you know anything about the long, long hours passing by in which I think of you, for you, in you—talking to you confidentially and at length, with utter bitterness? I shy from such naïveté, from the fact that all this is half-cooked, half-raw, half-crude and wasted, of no interest at all to anyone.
He said to himself: Music tortures me these days. It invades me without resistance, a sort of sensual conquest on the leve
l of blood and guts. It possesses me instantly, opening up all locks and flowing heavily into my veins, as if it were a poison of a very deadly kind, absorbed by every cell in my guts, welcomed and demanded. Music’s indefinite language is a resounding cry. Where are the music of the mind and the spell of its pure geometric lines?
He said to her: You are fortunate, at least for not being romantic at all. I don’t know if you resort to certain escapes from romanticism?
He meant escapes into sensuality, the continuous, diligent search for relaxation of organic tension that can never be quieted, escapes into a non-romantic absorption and drowning. At times, he was surprised and shocked by her calmness, her acceptance, her surrender, and immobility. The morning would stretch into a slow, alienating rhythm, as if it would never leave off. Even the taste of her kisses changed, lacked sharpness and responsiveness, lacked the slightly sugary taste.
With the absence of certainty, numbness creeps into him. His mind falls into a heavy stillness. Even his heart gives up on expressiveness.
She said to him: When someone loves, usually one’s energy gushes at every moment. Creation, creativity, and discovery spring out, even as you drink your cup of coffee, as if you are remaking the world.
He did not mention to her his confusion in the perplexing waves of unanswerable questions: Small waves, turbid and blocking the horizon, without hope of reaching the vast surface of the sea toward the unlimited and extended borders, melding with the open skies.
Sorrow lies in your eyes while cool air and pure blue radiance fill the November sky. This Sea City is my city, diffused in the high noon of its paved road. Your stabbing eyes carry a weight, which cuts the surface of my self to the very bottom, while I am a step apart from you in the high noon of the road. And you, my love, so distant—more illusory than my love fancies. What do I observe in your glances? Is this look, with its alienated depth, yours or my own fancy? And this love that troubles me, possesses me, murders me—is this love my own delusion? What is in your mind, Rama? A depressing, fragile sorrow or a void? The void of a November noon? I don’t know, I don’t know anything about you, my enigmatic love. I don’t know the meaning of your glance. I don’t know who I am for you. I don’t know who you are. The winter void of my taciturn noon. My city escapes me: Fancies, people and their cars, traffic lights and horns, the rattle of trams and the eyes of the people buried in the secrets of their troubles, all silent on the road. All disappearing in November clarity, in distant white clouds hanging on the city ceiling in al-Raml Station. Nothing is left but your gaze—a secret I will never decipher.
Rama and the Dragon Page 20
