Suddenly she bent down panting. When he turned back, she was below him. He caught sight of her ample bosom. Its bronze flesh was glowing and rounded, imprisoned in her décolleté dress. She pulled off her shoes, held them in her right hand, then straightened herself up and resumed climbing toward him. She insinuated her arm into his and pushed him gently. Off they went, running again. She was laughing—a special laughter, almost soundless—in a joy that had no pretext, a pure joy of the moment. In the moonlight, the dark nail polish of her toes gleamed then disappeared. Her plump toes contracted on, then let go of, the black asphalt as she dashed along in confidence.
She panted happily, saying to him: I haven’t run like this for years.
Their ascent was effortless, without resistance, as if plunging through an immaterial element. From below, unseen, came the gentle roar of the sea—an invitation, an unformulated promise.
They reached the road’s pinnacle where it sloped down beneath their feet. In front of them, from below, shone the tops of the Corniche street lamps. With their whitish bulbs they resembled radiant fruits, one next to the other, sprouting from iron boughs, surrounded by bright, round halos of seaside mist.
Suddenly she pulled him toward her as she was sitting on the sidewalk, on the slightly moist, grainy, black basalt stones. Her knees went up as she seated herself: round and bare, their flesh taut on bones of living, pink granite. He looked at her at the moment of pausing before he sat down next to her. Her hair was pulled back, combed flat on her head, surrounding her delicate face and fine eyebrows. Her eyes looked up at him with innocence and contemplation: A chaste, cleansed, white expression as if gazing out of something welling up from within—splendid and vast but indescribable. Dark, very large and round, her eyes. Her delicate cheekbones made her face resemble a girl’s: virginal, milky.
She put her arm on his shoulder and brought her face toward him in a gesture of love, incomparable for its simplicity and intimacy, for its deep connectedness.
She said: Are you tired from running?
He shook his head. Tenderness, gratitude, and a gentle craving arrested his words. He kissed her quickly and lightly on her cheek with warm, dry lips. She looked at him in a quiet, speculative gaze, keeping her visions and dreams to herself. She was contemplating him in her own context—that of possession. Already it seemed she was gazing alone into the realm of the future. Knowledge, not communication, filled her gaze.
She began to sing, not apart any longer but from within her relation to him, in a hushed voice—her breathing still fast and controlled, with a slight hoarseness:
O, sea captain, take me with you,
It is better for me.
Learning a trade enlarges the mind,
It is better for me.
Take me: a sailor to pull the towline,
It is better for me.
Her hands were firm leavened dough in his; her subdued cooing song stabilized his breathing. His unsteadiness came not from running but from his flare-up of physical longing.
The wind of passion
Passes by,
Coaxing us.
We lean toward it,
Our braids flying.
The wind of passion
Passes by,
Inclining us to stray.
Let the world stray;
We will not stray
A patrol policeman with his tall figure and old-fashioned gun came unexpectedly from a dusty side street. The moonlight on his dry southern Egyptian face deepened the shades and protrusions of his noble cheek bones. The rhythm of his regular footsteps did not change, and they could not tell from his facial shadows whether he was looking at them or simply straight ahead. She whispered in his ear: By God, we’ve been caught, Mr. Courage. Even though his heart was bothered as usual by distant, childish fears, he whispered: Don’t worry. No one is kinder than a patrolman, especially these southern Egyptians transplanted to Alexandria. She continued whispering: Chauvinist! Then she added, in one breath and in a loud but gentle voice, which, when joined to her pleading tone, her confidence, haughtiness, and sovereignty, was of the kind that only women of aristocratic background can come up with: Please, Sergeant, is Rushdi Pasha Station on the left or the right side of the sea?
The policeman stopped for a second, said with an honest voice, with the tone of a man who ultimately knew his position on the social ladder: On the right, Madam. And he continued on his way with calm, unhurried steps. They looked at each other furtively, barely able to conceal their laughter. Instead, it roared inside their chests—an implosion. Their eyes dampened from the surge of withheld mirth.
The sky above him cleared off and appeared to drop down upon them, turning noiselessly over in front of his eyes as if it were breaking apart.
Did all this happen? Did such joy really happen to me?
He could not tell if he was recalling an experience or conjuring a daydream.
Clinging to this transcendent experience he said: For the first time in twenty years, no, twenty-five years, death seems attractive. I see it, feel its presence. My hand is reaching for it, but I stop it. My hand feels tense under an irresistible pressure that pushes it to cling to death and its awe, just as it would cling to a rescue jacket, even if clinging for just one moment, away from that which is unbearable, unbearable, unbearable. Not since distant youth has death seemed so close, so seductive, as with the interface of love and its double.
In the darkest hours of silence, when I stumbled at last on the rubble dreams of justice, crumbling under the frustrations of wilted yearning for the dawn of wishful Utopias on earth … When liberation-visions of the poor masses, humiliated for centuries, became discredited … During the long years of despair and solitude in front of the tyranny of the world, and the silence in front of the drawn fangs of repression … While floating like a wreck on the turbid waves and the confused noise of glory … Even then I desperately defended in my inner self, in some corner in me, the basic right of counterattack. But now … !
Did she say in a neutral voice: Haven’t we agreed not to consider the significant themes? Not to pose the great questions and not to articulate the real answers?
This is his secret, intimate inferno. It locks him within gates that will never open. Are these his first steps in the land of insanity, through the scorching winds of loss? He doesn’t know what she said to him, what she did not say. He doesn’t know what has happened, what he fancies has happened. Is it an act of recollection to save this scene from the void of oblivion? Or is it an illusion extracted from the claws of reality?
He said to himself: Reality has nails, teeth. He asked himself: Are you insisting on intoxicating yourself with words, words, words with capital letters? Then he said: To be sure, my blood’s been poisoned. Knowing this strange geography where dream and reason intermingle is not a comfortable thing.
They were standing under Diocletian’s column.
He said to her: Look at this beauty! How can the rock become a lofty, unbending rose and the granite possess the voluptuousness of a rounded youthful body?
She said: Isn’t it easy enough to say it’s a phallic symbol?
He said: Yes, it’s easy, and meaningless. Pedantry and sophistry if you wish. But no, I am thinking of the magnitude, of the horror, and of the inevitability of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of my ancestors’ bodies on whose bones this column stands. This beauty with all its cruelty was the bait that the martyrs’ bodies fell for—my Coptic forebears with their arid stubbornness, or should I say glorious stubbornness? But what is the point either way?
She said: Pure martyrdom seeks no use.
He said: As for us—who have not yet been martyred—we are searching. We are those whose suffering is neither engraved on a stone nor mentioned in a book.
The violence of his response was a blow, but only against himself.
They took a taxi, an old Fiat, a yellow Alexandrian taxi with small folded seats. Its antiquated glass barrier had a round hole that linked the fro
nt part of the car with the back. She had purposely slipped her fingers under his thigh knowing their effect. They passed what remained of the old Alexandrian quarters: Karmuz, Bab Sidra, and Kum al-Shuqafa. They passed through the streets of his youth, once a network of large and leafy boulevards with a tram clanking merrily on its middle ground, the road beside it paved with clean, shiny basalt. Now he saw crumbling houses, squeezed next to each other; a clamor of bottleneck traffic crowded with cars, horse-driven carts, trucks overladen with cotton bales teetering slowly toward Mina al-Basal and al-Qabbari; collisions of mixed processions of men, women, and children wearing shirts, pants, pajamas, jallabiyas, a few milaya wraps, dresses, light creased nightgowns, local shawls, mudawwara kerchiefs, turbans, skullcaps, slippers, wooden clogs, high-heeled shoes, and thong slippers that made crunching noises when walking. Only a few donned with pride and confidence the bulky, puffed, black, Alexandrian sirwal pants.
The bony-faced archaeological guard with his faded yellow jacket and narrow, questioning, bored eyes looked at them from within his dark green booth whose paint had peeled away from the tough old wood left from the time of the British, a hut with a pyramid-like ceiling whose dark red roof tiles had fallen down. He gave them two tickets, saying in English: Tourist? Good, good. Welcome, Sir, welcome, Madam. Need one guide?
He said: No, my good fellow. Praise the Prophet, we are from here.
With a slight disappointment, yet also with true joy, the guard said: Ahlan wa-sahlan. You honor us—as if the Prophet were visiting us.
Supposedly she was making an inspection, in secret, without prior announcement. Later she would report what she found to her department boss.
Inside the grounds, she said: Can you imagine? This column used to be an obelisk of Aswan granite, constructed by one pharaoh in an endless chain—I can’t think which Seti he was, the First or Third.
He said: How did our ancestors manage to smooth down the cutting edges of an obelisk and produce this perfectly smooth roundness—perfect in its elegance and magnificent roundness?
This capital of the world, his magical Coptic Greek city with its monks, merchants, and clowns; its actors, singers and artisans; patriarchs and prostitutes; its mob, its coquettes, its soldiers; its one-of-a-kind, interminable library and thousands of public baths; its churches erected underground and its glossy marble columns in the temples; its tortures and festivities—the circus, the lighthouse, the theater, the temples of Jupiter, Zeus, Amon; its public massacres, ghastly incinerations; its wine presses, its golden grain silos; its sailing ships, its anchored ships attached by ropes in the eastern port; its routed priests of the ancient cults; its martyrs from the new Christian heresies; its Jewish philosophers; its geographers and botanists; its poets still composing in the lifeless, ornamental diction of the ancient Greeks; its people people people, nameless, teeming, making a living, eating, giving birth, relishing, moving on to break apart under legendary misfortunes, dying without significance—no one knowing them, no one ever knowing them. He said to her: Here in the capital of the world, they erected this obelisk on top of the bones of youths and atop the horses of Caracalla’s cemetery.
Bringing her body and face close to his, she said: You fanatic Alexandrian!
He said: You know that here in the Serapeum below, about forty years ago, I—as a child—jumped over an impossible well, a bottomless one, and crossed toward a brightly lit square. I often entered the rock-hewn tunnels and felt a kind of freedom in them.
She said: Yes, you told me.
The guard said: Sorry. Descending into these ruins isn’t allowed. The waters have overflowed in them again.
He said: The sewers?
The guard said: God knows. An engineer went down there two months ago, and didn’t make it back.
She asked: When will it open again?
The guard: When God makes things right.
Later she said to him: My office knows nothing about this. If any report was filed, it’s bogged down in our ministry. Or got sent to another ministry altogether.
He said to her: Well, it may still arrive. May God speed it.
The column—a layer of dust coating its large square base—seemed smaller, shorter than he recalled. The dwarf sphinx at its foot seemed wrongly placed, as if it had been abducted from the vast, lonely, extended desert where it belonged. They were circling around the base of the statue, on large pieces of ancient, broken marble, trying to avoid stepping on the rubble and small, sharp, scattered stones that hadn’t been touched by hands in centuries. The column’s capital, with its adumbrated Roman and Byzantine carving, swam above them in a patch of flimsy white clouds that streaked over a clear blue sky that appeared and disappeared. In the pure moist air hung a dusty fragrance emanating from the crowded, vast, Muslim graveyards nearby.
Your body is a delicate yet firm papyrus, a field in which hieroglyphic flowers bloom. My bones relax in the soil of your soft body, O Isis, Virgin Mother. My legs embrace your gravel-strewn delta. In my sleep the polygonal obelisk—bursting with imprisoned blood—falls down on me. It catches fire under the sun of your eyes. I hear the singing of your soft, sandy dunes as they entomb the vestiges of my temple. Falcon feathers scatter in the wind, O mother of saints. With my lips I graze the stones of the ancient pyramid’s stones in the walls of your mosques. I enter Memphis victorious and I fall powerless under its fortifications. I am knocked down by a yearning for your deep dark vale where slender reed stalks sway and ripple, soughing hymns and heavenly laws, the words of philosophers, the suffering of martyrs, the prayers of God’s pious saints. My forehead is smudged with the tomb dust that lies beneath Diocletian’s column and I listen to the merciless wailing of the stoned, the slaughtered, the burnt. I embrace you, wrapping my arms around the columns of ancient pharaonic temples with their deeply incised designs, surrounded by incense rising from monks, deacons, priests, and archpriests under the deep, husky voice of the patriarch—hoarse from fasting and long silence. O lady of the apostles, sister of Osiris, I fling myself into your currents of hair whose braids gush green waves. Rust-red waters spring from your underworld. The wells of Fate supply your arteries as you shudder with the fulfillment of desire. Waters geyser forth from the controls of giant turbines, purifying the greenery and choking with the tough leaves of water hyacinth. I kiss you on the forehead and dream of your kisses. I call on death as I turn over with the agony of my sacrificed heart on your white, soft sands. I hear the sound of death in my final rapture and I leave, on the large, cold marble of the column, perfectly dry, perfectly round drops from my blood.
He used to fear night’s fall, firmly sensing what it would bring: This delusion in which events are mixed up and in which he was called to address his fantasies—fantasies now familiar, nightmares domesticated by human faces—in a dialogue of give and take, question and answer. His nerves would leap out and shatter from the jingling of his phone that had not yet rung. Yet he had heard it echo in his cluttered, tranquil room, here at nightfall. The fish-like dream slipped out of his hands in the heavy waves of half-sleep, half-wakefulness, as he wallowed in the lap of the sacred harlot, turned back by the witch-seer who read the unknown, plunging deftly into knotted events, possessing an ability that went beyond the empirical field of sense. The professional, aristocratic belle ceased to speak to him, and the boat that the priestess of Isis steered—casting spells on the scorpions in the marshes of Kemi—upended, sank. He ran away from the police with his Utopian radicalism. Around him rose the bare iron skewers of buildings and massive columns supporting no ceiling. The phoenix, with its tremendous wings, emerged from the flames, fluttering into empty sky at its violent peak.
He addressed her casually, but with an agitated heart: I saw Mahmud yesterday. We talked about you.
She answered with the old folkloric phrase: That must be why I choked and almost died.
He said: May the evil eye stay away. Our talk was benign. Mahmud is a true friend and I am fond of him, but he has a streak of wickedness
along with his intelligence and stubbornness, not to mention his bizarre attachment to Samia.
She said: Bizarre? Love’s never bizarre, or strange. There are no conditions with love, you know. Mahmud is kind and helpless.
He could not bring himself to say to her: The kind friend, of whom both of us are fond, is the very one who said of you, not maliciously—he doesn’t know what’s between us, or does he?—that in the end you were nothing but a nymphomaniac, and that he knew this right after he met you for the first time, that he could have very easily slept with you but chose to run away from problems and complications, as he knew your type of woman too well and never got close to them.
He said to himself: Was that all? Is it only a story of a sex mania? And for me? What’s my role in this story? Instrument? Prey? Or hunter in whose lap fell an easy victim? How painful this is! Is it the story of a middle-aged man saying oft-repeated and memorized statements about himself, an oedipal victim, an eternal adolescent, a loner and recluse, mystically involved with eroticism? These Freudian and neo-Freudian abstractions and terminology recur on the lips of all. Clichès like these are repeated in every age, varying perhaps, but meaning what exactly? What’s the troubling fervor behind them? How can one express it? It cannot be expressed.
Rama and the Dragon Page 24
