He said to her: We also talked about how intelligent and cultivated you are, also about your beauty.
She said: God bless you!
Unlike death, despair is not a mode of repose from worry. It is a modulation on suffering. Indeed, it is a total loss, unacceptable. A thread of wily hope remained intertwined with his despair. A sharp pain, it burned while turning over endlessly. When, when will he be done with it? At every moment, despair was growing teeth that plunged into his flesh with new stings.
He said to her: Don’t you resort to a kind of Machiavellian love?
She said: You know I forgive such thoughts of yours. Otherwise, you wouldn’t dare say them.
He said: I don’t know. I am not looking for forgiveness or anything.
Then he said: I miss you. I feel lonely without you.
She said: Me too.
He said: I don’t believe it.
She said: Don’t believe it then.
She said this in her cold, decisive, final tone, in her special, unromantic way of finishing with something that needs no further argument, as if to say that she would not match him in his facile, running emotions. A major decision for her … what there was between them was more entrenched. This thought calmed his infatuated heart for a moment, returning an inner smile to him.
In this world where the Amazon’s struggle never ceases, where the Amazon never steps down from her winged horses, she is perhaps avenging the glories of her father Ra, triumphing alone in her inner world, with her special truth, with no accounting to anyone, in the midst of a displacement process that never reaches its goal.
The toy sheikh in the shop window looked as if mean circumstances had thrown him, a stranger, among all the dolls holding tight plastic fists to their immutable eyes and with fixed smiles revealing delicate mouths like pomegranate seeds, with ponytails made of yellow thread, wearing small embroidered dresses. All of them stood among can openers, oriental perfume bottles, poorly made ballpoint pens shaped like pharaonic obelisks, colored cups, amber necklaces with large beads, and imitation gold earrings handmade of copper. Behind them hung Kardasa jallabiyas of gaudy colors, trophy jugs encircled with sickly orange and blue spangles, and a thousand and one types of trashy trinkets produced by tourist souvenir factories, light in weight, exorbitant in price and taste. The sheikh looked at him with two bright, black beads. He had a hollowed face of gray cloth, a beard made of shaggy, spun cotton wicks, a native gown falling down in fixed folds, hands dangling next to it in loose sleeves, and a low Moroccan tarboosh with a black tassel, around which an elegant white turban was wrapped.
He said to himself: She will be delighted with it. A rare sheikh: dignified, lonely, and miserable in the midst of this festivity.
He said: She’ll add him to the procession of disjointed, frail-bodied dolls and ghost dummies she’s so fond of embracing.
She had said to him: No one captivates me more than Don Quixote. I just love him! He stumbles, stutters, fails, sets forth all solemn, without an inkling that he’s a washed-up has-been, that his values and manners have long been gone. Perhaps you didn’t know that I follow the Quixotic creed and its eternal rituals.
He said: You? You can relate to the creed of old age and failure?
She said: It’s true that I hate incompetence in all its manifestations, whether it’s daily work, militant activity, archaeology, transportation—not to mention that I hate it in love.
He said: When did love become a matter of competence or incompetence? The issue’s not love-making, but love itself.
She said: No emphasis on the making? Come now, my darling.
Certainly he had no answer for this.
She said: Incompetence, no. But Don Quixote, I die for him. I have various first editions of Don Quixote. I am learning Spanish to communicate with him in the original. I also collect paintings and statues of him in all the variations. Have you noticed my small iron statue, hollow with longish limbs? Quixote’s ancient nag Rosinante has protruding bones. His towering lance has fallen beside him, gratuitously and pointlessly. His pale, sunken, metallic face hangs in dry hopelessness. I just love my darling Don Quixote.
Why did he suddenly realize that Don Quixote was also a certain former prime minister of the Sudan? That suave, elderly gentleman had passed his glory days without knowing it and was now exiled among windmills, his lance become a tennis racket smacking balls that neither came nor went.
And what about her comrade Alphonse, with his shriveled face tanned by the suns of southern Egypt, his deep wrinkles like archaeological sands? At this point, he was nothing but the fruit of a doum palm with a hard pit, his white flesh containing a slip of aging water in it. She always ended her encounters with Alphonse by kissing his dried-up cheek. Then too, look at Ibrahim, her tall friend who used to be a soccer star in the thirties, currently a hunchback, all hollow-eyed, his hair still jet black even if nothing but strings. She goes drinking with him at bars, engages him in intimate chats, thrusting forth all parts of her soft, feminine body dynamically. He could see her alert face while she held her cognac in a childlike way, as if every part of her ripe body was prancing unconsciously with joy, longing to dash off into a new game. What kind of a child had she really been? Naughty, adventurous, daring, unconcerned with grown-ups, not awed by their world? He remembered there was also her boss, always calling her at home, basically asking for free nursing, complaining as aging people do. Her boss used to incline his head toward hers as they read together a demotic text in sloppy handwriting. He could never have enough of her competent affection, her delicate sense of responsibility.
He said to her: You have a peculiar soft spot for men whose pale suns are about to set.
He said to her, as he was hiding behind his back the small box wrapped in silvery paper tied with braided, multicolored string: I have a present for you.
She said: My God, is that so? I love surprises.
He said: This surprise has hidden meanings.
She said: You silly man!
She smiled blankly in expectation, as if he—not to mention she-had simply disappeared, while at the same time her fingers tore through the package’s richly plaited string.
She drew up the sheikh for inspection, its eyes answering her smile with the same sorrowful, blank gaze. Her hand softly patted its beard automatically. She said: Oh, my God! She glanced at him and said: Thank you. All my life, I have wanted him in my apartment.
She replaced the lid on the box, shoved it into her large, plump handbag with its puffed, expensive leather belly—perpetually open, zipper undone. And forgot it, in fact both of them, just like that.
Rama: Her legs are two open sea rocks, two Assyrian columns with white-foamed waves of desire crashing down between them. Mad hounds of Circe howl, run open-mouthed, gnashing their jagged teeth without taking any prey. Rama, I know you better than anyone else. I may not be the best of your lovers, nor the most competent, nor the most active, but I am the one who has loved you the most, the best, or so I believe.
He said to himself: What is this? A vulgar old folktale? Story of a nymphic woman obsessed by sex, craving the security of random accidental love, which she then expects to be renewed ad infinitum?
He said to himself: No, that may be what’s going around about her. To be sure, Shafiq, her old friend, pointed it out most casually: “In her prime, this Rama slept with whole street blocks!”
His friend’s recklessness and cynicism had tied his tongue from responding, had dried his heart and made it crumble like an incinerated leaf.
He said to himself: Have I in fact hurt her?
He said: During certain moments that just went on and on, I wanted to kill her. I hated her as I have never hated anything or anyone. I forgot the unbearable, nameless torment of love. Is that possible? Then my resentment and hate ebbed at the center of my lonely heart. It’s only now that I remember that dimension of her love that flows and gives, and I miss it, long for it.
She said to him: Are you an arch
itect working in archaeological restoration who has wandered into politics, poetry, and philosophy? Or are you a poet, a revolutionary, and a philosopher who wandered into architecture and archaeological restoration?
He said in calm admission: I am a middle-aged Copt, getting on in years, who never got over his childhood.
She said: Don’t turn this conversation into a drama. You know I wasn’t fishing around for such sentiments. Anyway, what shall I say to you, Mikhail? Don’t you see what’s happening around you? Can’t you see that this poetry or mysticism or this je ne sais quoi, whatever it is, chops off and mutilates your self, the world, together with this Egypt to which you are tied as if by disease? I mean, can’t you see reality?
He said: I see, I see; I cannot but see, of course. What I see devastates me. I don’t want… to see. But despite myself I am open-eyed.
She said: You who protest of honesty again and again, don’t you find fakeness, deviation, and lies—intended or unintended, white or not white—in this poetic embellishment or mysticism, in this je ne sais quoi of yours? Don’t you beautify, embellish, and make up? Don’t you see hunger, fanaticism, dirt, greed, falsehood, pauperism, deception, and formless chaos? Can’t you see the coarse physicality of faces with their rotten flesh, all hollow, pulled back with cunning, poverty, sorrow, and ugliness? Aren’t those figures also people? Aren’t they Egypt? I too love Egypt enormously. Who doesn’t love Egypt? But I want you to see it as it is.
He said to her: Please stop it. Do you really think I don’t see? Look, I don’t want to quarrel. I raise my hands up: I surrender!
She said: No, don’t surrender, love. You are a fighter too!
Mikhail and Rama entered the hotel from a side street shaded by trees looking indistinct in the weak light of morning. Beneath the platform of the entrance, their feet grated on spots of yellowish sand that were scattered on the asphalt descending toward the sea. They were both yearning for a refuge to shelter them from the cruelty of the small world and its exhausting beauty, a world moving along its way, not paying any attention to them.
He was holding her hand in the taxi that took its time—inter-minable—in its way across the desert, across Tahrir District, the new villages, the model farms, the chicken hatcheries, Lake Maryut, and the oil refinery that had been relocated there from Suez. One other passenger rode with them, sitting next to the Nubian driver, who silently tended to his job. The passenger was young, exhausted looking. He was, he said, a Palestinian returning from Lebanon to resume his engineering studies at Alexandria University. Unlike most Palestinians, he owned a cool voice, talked without fervor about the war in Lebanon. He spoke non-stop about the various militias clashing in Beirut. He explained, dryly, how entire families in Shiyah were obliterated, how a relative of his had fallen into the hands of a militia group. They raped her collectively, then murdered her with a Tommy gun.
The casuarina trees stood in long lines on both sides of the road, lit by the gentle heat of an early autumn afternoon.
He said that Beirut’s streets were rotting with corpses and rubble, covered by a rancid smoke that stuck to everyone’s noses and mouths. Nothing could wash it off. The rats increased and grew big to the point of attacking homes, adding to the terror. Walkers of the street like himself were finding men castrated, their cut-off sexual organs stuffed in their mouths, pushed with coagulated blood between their blue swollen lips and broken teeth.
Mikhail said to himself: Ramses the Third, the Assyrians, medical doctors of the Byzantine Cross and of the Swastika, sultans of The Thousand and One Nights did this too, each in his own way.
In the reclaimed lands stretching to their right were newly-planted trees and bushes with shades of varying intensity, the lands rolling on flat. The tresses of weeping willow and sycamore trees hung short and dark, reaching the straight canal running in its trough made of cement. A small flock of white and gray geese were floating on a pond the color of café au lait, as if they inhabited a world sketched on stone. The geese were opening their bills, but from inside the roaring car, no sounds came to them.
Killing on the basis of identity, he said to himself, without question or succor, becomes our daily bread. The ID card determines life or death. The militias and the small armies, the generals and the chiefs, the gangs and the patrols, the guerillas and the buddied-up goon squads are beyond count. Alliances, allegiances, and confrontations change from day to day, hour to hour. The say-so of bearded youth with guns, bombs, and rockets carries the day. They don’t know any more whom are they defending and whom are they killing or what they are smashing and destroying, and at whom they are aiming the muzzle of their cannons, rockets, and tanks in neighborhood streets. Their weapons pop and crack in every direction, day and night. The war of open spaces and deserts now takes place in alleys and streets.
Her hand was under his on the vinyl taxi seat. The seat’s color was worn out from desert dust and time. Her hand felt calm, surrendering. A slight numbness had penetrated his entwined fingers. So he spread his hand to squeeze her short fingers and passed his index finger along the tops of her nails painted in a subtle but glossy gray. Suddenly, their tiny taxi was speeding in vain behind a huge oil truck with rounded belly, a wide rusty line cutting its side from the effect of hardened spilled oil.
The passenger said that pregnant women were aborting as they died from thirst in Tall al-Za‘tar, their bodies drying out. Tommy guns faced the children, delirious from starvation and lack of sleep, whenever they strayed from their destroyed shelters. Despite this, he said, Palestine will not die.
Mikhail said to himself: Tall al-Za‘tar and Abu Za‘bal, the arenas of the Colosseum, the graveyard of Caracalla, the dungeons of the Inquisition, and the helmets of the Vikings. The hounds trained to mangle the blacks in Rhodesia, the power of the papal bulls, the instructions of political bureaus and central committees. Spartacus, Jesus, Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallaj crucified with thieves, rebels, and fugitives. The cells of the Bastille, the swords of the Crusaders, and the chains of the Saracens. The harlots of Saigon, the victims of Black September, Black June, and all the black months. The Devil’s Islands, no matter how their names differed: Sing-Sing, Tura, Robben Island, and those in the Aegean Sea. The floating corpses in the Nile in Uganda, the bodies stabbed by poisoned spears in Burundi and Rwanda, the crushed ones in Chile, the squashed ones in Bangladesh. The snows of Argentina and the ovens of Dachau. Quartering of limbs, guillotine blades, execution blows. The Khartoum of Kitchener, the Victorian factories of Manchester, the Commune of Paris, and the fields of sugar cane and cotton in Mississippi and in southern Egypt. The huts and putrid wounds covering the face of the earth, and the ghettoes of Harlem, Odessa, and Warsaw. The barbed wires of Siberia and Saharan oases, and the electrodes in women’s breasts and men’s genitals in Algeria and Haiti. The caravans of the Qaramatians and the fall of Baghdad under the blows of Hulagu. The pyres of witches, and white soldiers harvesting jungles and valleys with a wide-mouthed cannon. The slave ships from Guinea and Zanzibar, the whisky, syphilis, opium, and bullets for Red Indians and likewise for Black and Yellow Indians. From Beirut to Guernica, from Berlin to Leningrad, from Sinai to Dayr Yasin, from Carthage to Constantinople, from Jerusalem to Shanghai, from Buchenwald to Munich, from Bombay to Dinshaway, from the Huns to the Mongols, from the Hyksos to the Mandarins to Vietnam, from the Mamluks to the tycoons. Isn’t this the story of every day? Of the first day and of the last day? Isn’t this the principle and the rule? Isn’t this the story of this wise, productive, dreaming, upright, articulate, intelligent, ravishing ape? The bruised living limbs, stamped and torn, and the wounded spirit behind the stifled, concealed eyes; the anguished mind starved by oppression and paralyzed by degradation; all the cards and the values, all the gods and the systems; all the beasts and the preys; all the heroes and the sites, all the epochs and the masks; all the victims and the freaks. The lists do not and cannot end, and the dragon is one, unslain. The lance of St. Michael is blunted, but it is still brand
ished among the stars.
Their taxi reached the Nuzha grounds, trembling over a pair of railroad tracks. It passed beside a tattered banana tree and entered crumbling streets harboring a group of fenced, small factories with graffiti sprawled across their outer walls in outsized, pathetic penmanship. As the taxi sped along, they could read occasional snippets, lit by the street lamps: Elect … The First Detainee of Centers … Hero … They motored past dusty white tents of army guards erected amid dry grass and bushes that would never grow. They hurtled beneath the steel arcs of a dark bridge whose arched stone piers had blackened, and, passing quiet graveyards and gardens planted around racing cataracts of fresh water, they reached the sea, its balmy air redolent of salt and freedom. The Palestinian got out at the Cecil Hotel and said goodbye. Spindrift from the Mediterranean was lashing the Corniche wall, falling on the large broken-up riprap consisting of old, white flagstones. The Corniche highway was empty except for speeding cars under high Zizinya hill that overlooked the dark sea whose surface foam frothed, soundlessly, in successive incoming rows. The few winter nightclubs looked deserted, cold, their red and blue neon signs having lost a few letters. Then, as they proceeded, the silent, shut villas appeared, one after the other, the rust from sea mist having corroded the iron of their tightly closed windows and doors. They felt as if they were entering a city of the dead, empty, of forlorn beauty.
Along a side street lined with silent trees, in the middle of its asphalt surface, sand had been scattered by the constant sea breeze. The taxi driver put their two small suitcases behind the hotel’s glass door. No one stood or sat at the reception desk, where big bronze balls of room keys were hanging out of their pigeonholes. A shaky light from a neon lamp softly hissed in the prevailing silence. They stood looking around until a young Nubian of the new generation arrived wearing an impeccably white shirt with elegant black tie. He glanced at them and was won over. Mikhail said: Good evening. Would you have a room with a bath overlooking the sea? One night, possibly two. He said: Most welcome. Do you have a passport or identity card? He quickly took Mikhail’s passport while she fumbled in her handbag. He said: One passport is enough, Madame. So, I give you a deluxe room. Mursi, he said to the bellboy, take the luggage of the bey and madame to number seven. He handed the bellboy one of the keys with a heavy, polished bronze ball. Over here is the elevator!
Rama and the Dragon Page 25
