Rama and the Dragon

by Edwar Al-Kharrat

  She said in a dry, decisive tone, interrupting him: It’s better not to discuss the subject.

  She had told him before that she used this statement whenever she felt annoyed with a disagreeable interrogation. Was he not now in that area? So be it.

  Stubbornly and childishly, he said: In fact, it is better to discuss it.

  She said: All right. Logically, dialectically, I am with you until the end. Haven’t I left everything, everyone, in order to be with you for six days and six nights, all alone? What does this mean? Do tell me. And you say I don’t love you!

  Suddenly he realized the absurdity of his endeavor, the very effort of speaking up. Words. What were they? How could he emerge from the dilemma of this lie that has the face of truth, at the same time wearing a thousand faces?

  Feeling his masochistic impulse and unable to escape it, he said to himself: Hamlet.

  He laughed anxiously, trying to find strength within his defeat.

  —A thousand times a day: Hamlet. Without glory, without ghost, prison, or sword—a unique Hamlet who shuns his individuality in the herd. Poison—what a commonplace. Yet we learn to adjust to it. Whether I like it or not, the sand raised by the herd’s hooves fills my mouth. I deceive myself: either the unique, the rebellious, the leader, or nothing, or none. It’s not true I’ve laid down my weapon. I can’t help but be in the beastly, competitive, fighting army.

  She had said to him “Dearest one”—that is all that he still possesses, all that’s left, provided she meant it. If she meant it for only a few days, a few hours, if only for a moment! Are we in front of a still body lying on an autopsy slab? When the relation between us dies, there will be no need for an autopsy.

  It will never happen.

  He heard the sound of God’s fluttering on his submerged head in baptismal waters. No annunciation was in it, only the portent of the angels’ trumpets on the Day of Judgment.

  He was one step ahead of her. They were coming back in the quiet, dim street under steady silent trees that resembled witnesses. He stopped suddenly, turned back, and kissed her without a word. That was what he had wanted to say to her. She responded, affectionately and receptively. Her lips opened up obediently—she, the wild one, who never obeyed anyone or anything. The bells of a distant church tolled. He heard the silvery bells three times, drawn-out, as if announcing a funeral. A large tanker truck, silent and sealed, passed by with its huge round belly full of diesel.

  On the night of January first, the Balloon Theater was packed. Within the fluttering fabric of the tent, it was a mixed crowd excited in its rush toward a familiar entertainment. Amid the brouhaha, they were waiting for the musicians, singers, and dancers, anticipating the small wrangles, the calming requests prefaced by “Praise the Prophet,” and the moving of chairs to the front rows on the floor covered by sawdust. Some civil servants of the host organization, the Union of Arab Workers’ Syndicates, had donned the Palestinian kufiya; their women wore black milaya wraps. The orchestra sat in its pit under the stage, with the curtains down. The confused sounds of tuning up, of mewing and howling—the gushing and ringing of wind instruments and the banging of drums—mixed with the rapping of Coca-Cola peddlers on their soft drink bottles and the calls from peanut and melon-seed vendors. At first, he and Rama sat apart, then he asked permission from his neighbors to let her have a seat next to him. She settled down silently on the narrow bamboo chair, while a vendor of bean and felafel sandwiches extended his hand between them, his commodity wrapped in oil-soggy paper, toward a family with several boys and girls sitting behind them. A long row of boisterous soldiers wounded in the October War dashed in. They exchanged greetings and laughed, calling out to each other by name and supporting themselves on shiny metal crutches. They were limping and leaning on each other with half arms and amputated legs. Under the military caps some heads were still wrapped with bandages. Some were pushing wheelchairs occupied by motionless soldiers wearing long, clean, white jallabiyas. They crowded the first rows, carelessly and with self-assurance, taking the middle and the sides of the stage. Proud of themselves, they were also proud of the people making room for them affectionately—a little irritated but tolerant—while not betraying pity for anyone. A tall, slender soldier blooming with youth jumped on the stage, threw his crutches on the ground in a loud, deafening bang and stretched his leg in the khaki trouser folded just under the knee, pinned with a large safety pin at the place of a leg that was no more. He leaned against a back wall of the wings, stretching himself out in preparation for a long soiree’s merry-making.

  Under the excessive stage lighting a tallish singer was mewing, her dress’s embroidery of spangles and beads shimmering in alternating colors. On her face was a carefully applied, smooth, glossy, heavy makeup, including a considerable amount of kohl on her bright eyes. She was swaying back and forth on legs concealed by a wavy maxiskirt, lamenting in an affected tone, swaying with a persistent artificiality that sought to support her whining. The soldier in the wings of the stage clapped his hands, shouted in a voice of loud, confident rapture: Allah! Once more, lady; by the Prophet, once more …

  She gestured to him with her memorized, professional moves and pointed to the orchestra to repeat. Beside himself, he shouted, “May God guard you!”—demonstrating that he knew how to live proudly and joyfully with an amputated body. In the streets, he would always encounter his likes on the pavements, spread there with books and newspapers next to traffic lights, pushing themselves along with severed arms, beseeching each car window with their faces. Their flesh having healed at the joints, become tight and swollen, smooth and red in a raw way, dead or almost, they moved their half-arms up and down skillfully, knowing how to use them—without shame—performing a task, going through a routine. At least, they were not ashamed of their bodies, even if they no longer took pride in them.

  In the folds of such a rejected, wrecked, and slight body Mikhail feels an identification, latent all along his own body, spread out amid the touches of gentle waves and the roughness of deaf rocks against which red waters crash and rise. The tremendous body explodes in hushed, concealed anger and in the ecstasy of self-mutilation. The body wounds itself and stabs its guts with nails and knife, pressing with determination on something he does not comprehend. The swellings break open, in search of an unattainable cure. The fracturing of bones and the falling of stones and glass join in a single rhythm. The heartfire burns suddenly within walls painted with colors, obscured by Cairene dust, in the rude and insolent wood.

  This inner dragon lets me down, slips free from me. I feel him as an Other, a stranger, close and clinging to my innermost. How often I have tried to deny him.

  Mikhail said to himself: When the cock crowed three times … He laughed. Who hanged himself? Who was Peter, and who was Judas? Regardless, I ignore and forget this other, inner person. A slender, sharp razor slices his finger until the bone is electrified and his knee scrapes on a stone in the soil, somewhere. The knee’s wound doesn’t heal, a crust forms that he removes over and over, yet it keeps re-forming.

  Mikhail said to himself: Do I know how to live a full life, with his person in me? This stranger who doesn’t obey me. He knows me, but I do not know him. A matchstick burns in my hand, my foot stumbles in a hole I can see clearly from a sufficient distance. This other man does not know submission; in his inner darkness he’s a tyrant: lofty, granite-like with a mysterious smile. His eyes are locked open though lacking pupils; he is ancient, steady as a rock, silent. His inner agitation never slackens. I gaze at him in a black mirror, which is the dream itself. I do not avert my glance.

  I knew him, this Other in myself, in the flights of erotic passions, under political torture on the edge of death, and in the harsh grip of love, becoming a mere subject matter, a mere instrument, a mere something banished with no life but retaining the endlessly stubborn beat of mechanical determination. The soul ebbed from him a long time ago; his sister separated from him; he’s become isolated. Nothing is in him but
the current of thick sap with its flow and ebb, a wiped rag that possesses sheer mechanical movement from within. I see him with an external eye. There is no more unification, only dualism and the torture of banishment, a resignation that can hope for no consolation. He moves and throbs with a determination that I’ll never understand.

  She said to him: I have a gift for you.

  He said, with a yearning that stirred him out of utter stagnation: Really? What is it? Where?

  She said: It will always be with you, though no one will see it.

  He never received her present. He never recognized having received her present. Did she ever give it to him?

  He was attentive as she told him about herself: Back then, I used to be slender, in fact skinny. Tahiya Karim painted me nude. I was modeling, yes, naked. My tableau is now exhibited in the Guggenheim in New York.

  Smiling and without conviction, he said: When I go there, I shall make a point to see it.

  She told him how poets had dedicated poems to her, composed in colloquial and classical Arabic, and how she took under her wing a young poet who came from the farthest south of Egypt: a violent-tempered, unpolished young man, touchy and ignorant of Cairene ways. He would break a whisky glass and the drink would flow on the carpet, leaving a mark on the armchair. Appetizers would fall from his fork on the tablecloth and on his lap. But the radio and newspapers made of him a knight, because he had written new mawwals in the classical mode during his detention.

  He saw now a sculpted bust positioned at the side of her hallway in dim light on a low side table between the door and a wooden, open-shelved study with neglected books, crammed-in newspapers, magazines, and bibelots made of ceramic, glass, and cheap metal.

  She said: Ah, you noticed it? Do you recognize me in it? A young sculptor, whom I used to see and entertain at my house occasionally, made it for me. I put up with what he thought was his love for me, his “only love.” He was so pathologically sensitive, I didn’t want to turn him down. He died thinking he loved me. Look how he sculpted the mudawwara kerchief, putting it on my head like a baladi girl. I used to be very thin-faced then. Isn’t that so? He died from TB, young and unknown.

  He said anxiously: Who is it? Sultan? Gamal Sultan?

  She looked at him trying to dodge the question.

  Instantly the tip of a thorn, an old pain stung him. This sculptor whom he was so fond of, whose purity and spontaneity he knew! He had met him for the last time in al-Mubtadayan Street in a dusty, crowded, noisy, Cairene noon. That was in the period before cars swept the streets, drowning them in their incessant circulation. He was having his lunch: a cheese and felafel sandwich wrapped in the newsprint of al-Masa.

  He had said he had to go home—a two-room apartment on the top of a high-rise building that he pointed to—and wait for the Acquisition Committee at three o’clock. He said he was doing something that he thought would be important, and anyhow, he was selling a work of his to the Alexandria Art Museum. In his hoarse voice, he expressed hope for the future, though he was critical and tense with life—his last gush of life, as it turned out. He too was resentful about the political and artistic state of things, yet he was jolly. He said his health was improving, that he had left the hospital in good health. His face was dark and warm; his protruding cheekbones soggy with the flow of sweat drops—a continuous stream without breaks. They agreed to meet. He embraced him and felt the dry and hollow ribs of his chest under the not very clean, short-sleeve shirt. It was an embrace of unfulfilled brotherhood. The agreed-upon meeting never took place.

  She said: Did you know him?

  He said: Yes.

  Your green eyes—their wavy surface whose depths I do not fathom—sing to me of loss and estrangement. I am warmed in those dark eyes. My repose lies in their thick, burnt honey. Deep, yet I know how deep; I plunge confidently into their depths, whose taste was in my mouth since weaning. As for the eyes in the soft mask, which make me slip into estrangement and repudiation, they are planted on a hot rocky land, blasted by a sun I do not know.

  In their last private encounter, she will open the door. She will be wearing a light homely dress without sleeves that falls carelessly on her desirable body—a body he had known so well, a body he had undressed and experienced in both successful and failed erotic duels. She will welcome him casually, without ceremony. She will apologize for her looks, then rush inside to change her dress, as if he were a stranger. Despite everything, he will experience the least possible measure of bitterness and sarcasm at himself, at her, at the whole issue. Thus proceeds the endgame of love and loss. He will enter the elegant, open, modern kitchen with its polished, clean instruments, its silent-flame stove, its futuristic tap mouths bursting out with water that gushes forth in sudden, intermittent blasts—dazzling and quickly disappearing, mechanical, like magnesium flashes. She will beg him in a formal way to relax as if he were at home. Then she will tell him in a quiet, disappointed tone: I thought you were going to take off your jacket and shoes, and actually relax. The light lunch will be made up of artificially-flavored canned food, carefully and hygienically cooked, served on small, colorful, plastic plates that will stand next to stiff-edged paper napkins. She will talk to him, in ready-made phrases extracted from the commonplace treasury, about the constantly renewed Arabic music, about colloquial poets, about politics, about art books that have become exorbitant and thus a matter of mere fashion and display; she will talk about the October victories of 73, the predicament and glory of Egypt, the absence and funeral of Nasser. He will drink two beers, feeling lethargic and slow. He will not care for the ice-cold beer out of the square-sided, white, small fridge of hers. When he leaves, she will plant a kiss on his cheek. He will embrace her for a moment, recalling in his heart a lost affection that will never return and he will feel, in contrast to his dried-up body, the freshness and power of her familiar body beneath the loose-fitting, black jallabiya embroidered with silvery threads. In his arms, she will be like a stony relic, softly throbbing with the memory of timeworn yearnings; in her voice will be a warm quiver, self-reflexive, now hopeless and without regret, as she says to him: So long. After that, no encounters except chance crossings: amid plenty of people, whether in offices or stations.

  She said to him: I worked in theater, as well. I was an actress at university, which is not all that important, I know. But we formed a troupe with the prestige and dedication of a professional troupe. Beside my other talents, I discovered I had a knack for acting. My performance is natural, spontaneous in a trained way.

  He said: I don’t know what’s staged in your life and what lies behind the stage.

  She said: I also worked in nursing, as you know, after three months training, after the attack on Port Said. The wounded soldiers wanted me specifically to change their bandages. They appreciated the detailed care I took with down-to-earth bodily functions, without resorting to hollow words that meant nothing, that amateurs and the inexperienced think will mean so much when it comes to nursing. I am not turned off, nor do I feel disgusted, nauseated, queasy, fuddled, or lacking in discretion when faced with the details of life and death. When bodies are troubled and deranged, throwing up their contents or anxiously craving to ingest bodily requirements, when body juices are decomposed, or when heavy, gluey excretions flow out, I don’t find it disgusting or incomprehensible. I accept it all, acknowledging it and dealing with it in a spontaneous way.

  He said: I don’t care who you are, what you are, what you do, or why. I just care for you. You, alone. But you are something else behind all this, besides all this. And that part is you.

  End of my unending desire.

  He said: The precious thing is scratched, in fact broken, by lies. What are lies? What is the precious thing?

  He said to her: Yes, lying is the foundation of all human relations. How can a lover manage with his beloved, a man with his wife, friends with enemies and ninnies, without a lie here or there, white lies, possibly gray, pink, or black lies? How can we say tha
t such lies are insignificant, in fact irrelevant? Lies are the lubricating oil without which people would be scratched and fractured in their encounters, confrontations, and in their comings and goings. It is so, even between man and himself. I, on the other hand, want innocent, rigorous, and completely honest confrontations. I want an attachment with the purity found in lead. Do I thus conceal a terrible lie? My hands want to remove the mask even if they rip apart the flesh of the face beneath it.

  The predatory bird—the length of two stretched arms—whose body is an open-breasted corpse collapsed beneath the weight of collective guilt and lies. How terrible are obituaries: draped in black on stiff, hard cards. The final seal. The loss that you suddenly recognize with definitive knowledge, that it cannot be made up for. In the sky, the stabbed corpse with silent heart. The eyes, in the aftermath of every agitated rebellion, strike or blow with two wide wings cleaving the clouds and breaking the sky’s layers. On his hands now, following the shock of falling down, the corpse is dry, arid, shriveled. Even the traces of decomposition and decay have disappeared. So has the putrid smell and fermentation. The corpse has undergone the last stage of death. The blazing sun has whitened it, rendering it stiff and rigid. It seems to him fragile: no sooner is it fingered than it crumbles and flies away in a vast coppery horizon. But no, it remains between them. So it will always be: a loved corpse that death cannot efface or wipe out.

  The long narrow street was craning upward with force, filled with repressed but ready energy. They were going toward the sea below, sensing from afar its fervor, glory, its unassailability. To their left, the ramparts of Mustafa Pasha camp rose high and massive. Its huge stones embodied exceptional rigor, reminiscent of the Spartan spirit of Imperial Roman army corps in the old Necropolis, or the severe discipline of Bonaparte’s soldiers, or of British cannons or Italian detainee camps—not to mention the inscrutability of Egyptian barracks. They continued running beneath the ramparts toward the sea. The road was imbued with a nocturnal light making their way long—with its moist air—as it climbed upward toward the night’s few stars and a dazzling half moon. On the right, the gardens of locked villas with stony balconies, solidly constructed in the neoclassical French style, shone white in the moonlight. An English-style church tower surprised them. Amid the thicket of camphor and royal Indian palm trees with slender white trunks and amid the foreign mallow plants with luxuriant green leaves flung on iron fences elegantly wrought, flashing with dew as if capable of inhaling the garden’s wintry, verdant fragrance, the high, disciplined lines of the steeple seemed out of place.