Rama and the Dragon

by Edwar Al-Kharrat

  The cognac bottle was emptied after the whisky bottle. Mikhail said: Just a minute. I have a surprise for you. I was hiding it for you. He went to his room to bring back a bottle of vodka. When he came back carrying the clear, translucent liquid in the bottle with baffling Cyrillic letters, he was met with applause. He said: This is the best of what they have. They have nothing else except caviar perhaps. ‘Abd al-Jalil laughed with them. Rama came back, having washed the glasses under the large tap—the water had not run for a moment then it poured forth in a heavy stream. The location of seats changed for no reason with a sort of spontaneous mobility and liberation. Samia moved next to Mahmud, silent, with her heavy eyes, in her hand an appetizer plate of soaked lupine seeds. Salwa and Nura sat together facing ‘Abd al-Jalil and Mikhail. As for Rama, she distributed the glasses and filled them. Her seat happened to be next to that of Samir, very close in fact. She clinked her glass to Samir’s, and gazed at him as she was drinking. Her subdued and immersed look gave her away in an instant. Mikhail was drinking glass after glass of vodka and smoking on an empty stomach. The faces and the conversations around him were glowing, at times becoming defined with dazzling precision, then clouding and melting in a sensually soft effect. A pit of pain, the sense of impending loss, was a hard stone implanted in the resilience of such collegial company, storytelling, and drinking. It formed a hump rising above the hushed din of the tape recorder, which was emitting a nerve-straining, forgotten music that no one was listening to. The pit was a piercing piece of shrapnel covered by slippery delay, derision, deferment, and ambiguity.

  Following the fatigue of drinking, singing, and laughter, that of jokes, random dallying, and concealed flirtation with hands and legs, the farewell greetings came heavy with satiation and excitement. Steps toward adjacent and facing rooms were quite determined but slow. There were staggering “good-nights and sleep-tights,” with hands gesturing and the last of light laughter.

  Mikhail was in the final moments of troubled sobriety at the border of intoxication, without having overstepped it. Intuitively and without precision, he sensed now the rest of the night’s drama. When he returned to his room, he hurled himself on his bed with his clothes on. He waited in a daze without thinking. He could not estimate how much time had passed before he was dialing her room number. The telephone rang for a long time, seeming to penetrate the night. He put the receiver back, raised it again, redialed, heard the ring again, persisting and stubborn. For a third time, he dialed. Certainty and doubt were equally rising in his mind. She could not have fallen asleep and she could not have gone out. At last the ringing ceased unexpectedly, and her voice came weakly, hesitating and knowing: Hello. He said he had forgotten his cigarette pack in her room—he couldn’t go out to buy cigarettes now, could he come and fetch it? She said, having resolved her hesitation in a decisive tone that put an end to the situation: Yes, come. Samir is with me.

  Despite that, he did go.

  He does not know how he managed to knock on the door and then see Samir opening the door with his youthful body and boyish looks, bare-legged, wearing a light, beige, chamois sport jacket, and nothing else, over his flesh. Samir said in a very calm tone: Come on in.

  Everything seemed unreal. Rama was sitting in bed with stubborn features, her back leaning on the bedstead next to the wall, her knees up under the white sheet; wearing her white, short, nylon nightgown that he knows so well. Above her head, a picture with gaudy colors—as if he were seeing it for the first time—of palm trees under the Pyramids and a camel driver watering his camels. The table lamp is the only one lit. Everything is familiar, but his contact with it has been disrupted. In the shock of knowledge and certainty, everything moves slowly, with a special rhythm, and in a way that cannot be stopped, in the trajectory of another world in which he has no place. In the light of the definitive and perfectly clear situation, the blow is not felt, as if the heart, having felt an unbearable weight and having become tightly gripped, has lost the ability to feel. She says to him: Have you gotten your cigarettes? He has lost the capacity to say even a word. He hears her from this strange other world to which there is no connecting bridge. It seems to him that Samir is looking at him and simply waiting with no embarrassment, no sense of triumph. Nor does he feel resentment or rancor toward Samir either. In fact, he does not quite absorb the fact that he is there.

  Mikhail cannot know or remember—no matter how much he tries—how he went back to his room, how he took off his clothes. He felt the water gushing on his feverish naked body, shaking with uncontrollable shivers under the shower. He felt the weight and volume of the water, but he did not feel its temperature, whether cool or lukewarm, only its heaviness as it poured down. He did not realize until later that his body had become alien to him. In the bathroom the convulsions of nervous vomiting were mixed with crying fits and water pouring on his body as he strove to withhold the roaring of his intestines heaving up in uncontrollable physical contraction that had a will of its own—repetitive until utter exhaustion. He did not know-in the dizziness of pain and fatigue that brought him down to a pro-found pit of agitated visions—how he came to his bed and covered himself with a sheet. Flickers of dreadful, fluttering wings that stretched to cover the length and width of the sky embraced him and rocked him until the mercy of dawn arrived without his realizing it. His sleep was a tattered mercy of torn pieces.

  In the morning when he freed himself from agitated sleep, escaping worrisome waves of visions, he found on the side table next to him a folded paper under the matchbox, a few small coins, two washed cups from the ones she had used, and a small china plate, old and yellowish on the bottom, with a handful of peanuts in it. The leftovers of yesterday’s party. He could not tell what all this was nor could he comprehend it. When he opened his eyes at last in the twilight of morning in the curtain-drawn room, it smelled putrid and stagnant with cigarette smoke and bathroom humidity. Pain awakened with him, stabbing him. A hushed stab that had come to stay, blunted, with a heavy grip. A letter from her was on the paper, written in pencil, in her own large script. He did not read it. When did she write it? When did she enter his room and come with these things? Was his room left open? He felt for his watch under the table lamp. The taste of cigarette smoke in his mouth felt bitter and brackish. It was six in the morning. The day had not yet started. Have I slept at all? Two hours only.

  Dearest,

  When you were talking yesterday, you stood out, and I was overwhelmed by love for you. Your demeanor was lofty, reaching the sky. You were able to make me feel proud of you. So why did you spoil everything? What is the significance of what you saw? We both know it’s a trifle. What happened tonight is nothing. Don’t you know this? I could not help it. I am not asking you to forgive me. I am not asking for anything. What is between us is stronger and the more lasting.

  Your Rama

  He didn’t feel himself breaking into short sobs: a tremor that shook him up, took him away, then returned him completely empty, as if hollow. An unbearable pain. He felt around for an aspirin, swallowed it as he tore apart the letter.

  When he was late and did not come down for breakfast, Mahmud came asking for him. He put his cold hand on Mikhail’s hot forehead. Then Rama came along with Nura and Mahmud; she stayed with him for a while. Mahmud told Rama: I’ll leave him in your care. She brought him, after insisting on it, a cup of tea without milk or sugar. She smoked a cigarette with him without exchanging words. As if she had become the one who was understanding and forgiving.

  Bent over, I am creeping slowly in the dusty narrow neighborhood. All the lamps are off, and the walls are prominent and threatening, as if tilting on me. There is no one in the closed windows, no one behind the walls. Faces have turned away, disappeared. Eyes are silenced, avoiding involvement. Silence is dense, abounding. I creep slowly and on my shoulder there is a bird, which I feel is glued to the base of my neck, light in weight, but with rough feathers. Tightly close to my neck. Firm, not budging. Faceless. I find the point
s of claws on the back of my neck, with the solidity and smell of iron. I glance at their subtle luster. The claws are gripping my shoulder bones on both sides, a grip I can’t liberate myself from. The swan, the roc, the falcon, the phoenix, Braque’s white bird, in the jet blackness of nightmare with two fierce wings. Its beak a pointed, wounding lance. It grows bigger on my shoulders, its weight increases without interruption. Its burdensome presence does not cease. I stand up somehow—with difficulty—in the lonesome darkness. The neighborhood is still empty and long, long. No one else is in this night. No succor. I support myself on the floor by my hand, with all my force, trying to get up from beneath the weight that envelops my shoulders with its claws. Its grip can never be removed. It smells pungent, breath-stifling. Its wings are spread out. It plunges its claws deeper into my bones. Painlessly. There is only its weight: hooks plunging into the bones. All hope of getting rid of it is gone, of saving myself from this unbearable burden. I can no longer stand. I creep with desperate insistence. The speed of my creeping on the dust is diminished. My hands scrape against the rough, pure, unpolluted sand. Beneath it lie gravel and pebbles. Resistance diminishes and I am moving downward. There is no use in any resistance. The ground draws closer, I collapse upon it.

  An ibis falls toward the cultivated fields of corn, upside down in the sky: meek and steady, soaring without movement, not covering a distance nor taking time. Suspended, his wings are not moving.

  The dark inner sky opens up suddenly, rising, illuminated. The fall is complete. It has never taken place at all. Incomparable lightness: every weight has been removed. The stone columns are lofty and elegant in the old southern Egyptian church, ending in a distant dome without light. The jubilant wild flowers of the heart on the colored glass, across the scorching sky, are purple red, flaming with pride. The sun behind the leaded stained glass is calm. The church stones are warmed by skins of ancient lichen. There is a sublime silence of eminent significance. In it peace has overcome all tension.

  In the end we were conducting love rituals as an act of faith, no more.

  We were not making love, nor was love being made through us.

  He used to feel an impure, agitated joy when stumbling upon her by chance, on a field trip, amid Greek columns constructed in the pharaonic style in the desolation of the seemingly calm and meek sand. Simply their togetherness, without planning, under the warm stones towering to the sky in this narrow gallery between repetitive, unchanging columns—as if these pillars composed a monophonic tune in some fixed, timeworn harmony—gave him temporary security, though without assurance as to the next moment.

  Mikhail used to feel himself unable to focus on one sensation when photographers aimed and snapped their cameras. Or when water flasks opened, gurgling out their reviving drops. Or when feet plunged into soft sand, only to be extracted with difficulty, bestowing vigor to the legs, charging the muscles with vim, constricting the whole body into something new. Or when shoes struck tiny, ribbed fragments of dusty granite, the eyes rolling in darkness, night-blind from the sun’s recent dazzle, or as laughter tinkled in the vast expanse, echoing amid the stone columns, the entire group seeming scattered around the small temple and throughout its only open colonnade.

  Her short field trip has brought her next to him: they are gazing now at the granite capital with lotus, plaited with sophisticated elegance and excessive beauty, much more dainty than it should be. It does not have the reverence of imposing and timeworn rigor. Seemingly Byzantine in retrospect.

  He looked at her in the shade. Her face had a particular beauty, having reached its high-strung perfection then declining. The next moment it might collapse, melting into final decomposition. Although the moment never came, it was always threatening explosion.

  They rode in the roaring Volkswagen on the sandy road through vast desert. She told him that she belonged to the cult of moon-worshippers and spoke of divine prostitutes.

  But here between the columns, she is in her dark jeans that envelop her full thighs. The two hafts of her heavy, shapely haunches sway slowly when she lifts her feet from the grip of the surrounding sand, time and again. She seems as if her amulets and talismans have dried out and withered away, consecrated by deities who have died, who ceased to possess the energy for impinging on life. Something like the echo of love and apprehension was clamoring in his heart. The opening of her bursting blouse revealed the upper slope of her bosom where tiny, separate drops of perspiration clung to the taut skin, each shining by itself, round and perfectly precise. Her green eyes, after the scorching light, seemed blurred in the ever-changing, dark, humid, stony shade.

  He said: I didn’t hear from you yesterday at the Center. You didn’t call.

  She said: I was sick. My temperature was a little high last night, so I went to bed early with an aspirin and squeezed a lemon on my forehead.

  As usual, he did not believe her. He said: Hope you get well soon. Somehow I can’t see you as sick.

  He meant, of course, that she was neither in her bed nor in her room. Yesterday, in the early evening, he had seen—without her noticing him—a concealed smile on her lips, dreaming of a forthcoming and awaited pleasure.

  She said in a defensive tone, hostile and challenging: I’m not so sure you intend that as a compliment. You always picture me as some rock, like Gibraltar or the Himalayas; as if I can’t be a human being who falls sick and recovers, and who—like everyone else—suffers physically and mentally at times, as if I am not a woman.

  He said: A woman you are, indeed, a real woman. You are telling me?

  She said: Aren’t we seeing your usual suave self right now?

  He said: I really meant you are a superwoman. There’s an element in you that goes beyond the limits most of us know. Haven’t I told you that you are an enchantress?

  She said: Oh, stop it! At times, I feel especially vulnerable, as if I don’t possess certain immunities.

  He said: But I don’t know how to say it … you are immortal. You’re not touched by death.

  She said: If our car had gotten lost in the middle of the desert, you’d know just how wrong you are.

  He said: May you be protected!

  Dreamily, she said: When I die I will turn into a red cactus flower in the sand, a prickly cactus blossoming once a year only with a red flower.

  He said: Yes. I know the spines of that cactus. I also know its red flower whose beauty and delicacy are incomparable. But only once a year? Your flowers are many.

  Mahmud had aimed the camera at them as they were absorbed, leaning on the inner shoulder of the stone columns at the edge of the light. The camera snapped, the picture was fixed in that ephemeral immortality of the photosensitive paper.

  Mikhail said: Come let me take your photo now.

  Mahmud said: No, my dear fellow. We only serve. We do not want compensations or thanks.

  He looked at Mahmud without anger. The others joined them.

  They had eaten the cookies and the colored eggs, had finished off the fasikh salted fish and the lupine seeds. The casual flirtation and the passing dalliances were done with. They drank and conversed, jumped rope and played cards, had their siesta in the shade of the timeworn stone on the soft sand. Mikhail felt he was floating above the group, meeting with Rama only by random. She was holding on to Mahmud’s arm and the two of them walked in the sand, talking, while he was turning the pages of a new translation of The Book of the Dead, without interest. Samia had made herself a turban, like those of southern Egyptians, from her white scarf. ‘Abd al-Jalil, Samir, Nura, Salwa, Ilham, Butrus, and Suzi were wearing light, colorful trousers and short-sleeved shirts, low-cut blouses, white skullcaps brocaded in the Nubian style and berets jaunty at one side. Cameras, thermoses, handbags, empty Coca-Cola bottles, half-full bottles of Scotch, nylon bags and wrappers decorated with cigarette advertisements. They were moving around, getting ready for departure. The car doors were open, waiting a short distance away in the sands. Mahmud came to them with his slow steps and
his dry, longish, triangular face, hollowed by lines. His long fingers had fine bones and his bright, carved eyes glowed at them anxiously as if they were evil portents. He was a poet, and she had once said to Mikhail: He is the picture of Dorian Gray … but he is kind.

  Get-ready calls, clapping and shouts: Come on people … We’re late! Gathering up the wrappings, the small bags, and all that was bought: small baskets, primitive straw hats, bead necklaces, dried dates sold by oasis children and adults haggling and bargaining in their obtuse Bedouin dialect; their vehement hands yanking on short sleeves in an effort to draw attention; their wilted eyes, half-closed from successive eye inflammations, and their scrawny bodies.

  She said to him: Show me what you bought.

  A fake, ornamented, puff-bellied scarab. A frail, ceramic Osiris wrapped in shrouds. A mummy smaller than a hand’s palm. Easter had come and gone, but the mummy remained buried in its stone grave. Mary did not come and cry. A bronze Bastet cat with soft cheeks, the length of a finger, alert and confident, lying in waiting position.

  She said without being convinced, as if she were casting doubt on his ability to choose and his expertise in the art of bargaining and buying: Yes, it is fine. Mabruk: May you enjoy it! Beautiful things. You know of course they are not authentic.

  He giggled—burst out with laughter.

  In the commotion of departure and the agitation of return, she disappeared from his sight. The sun was about to set. The long road contained nothing but a boredom of repetitive dunes and black rocks, low and pyramid-like, and their non-stop engine wounding the desert calm with its continuous, extended roaring, unrelenting, with no gap. They were now in the long white station wagon. Samir was driving and the transistor rattled away with anonymous classical music. The car was dim; Mikhail had reclined his head on the back seat, letting it sway in rhythm with the running wheels. Alone, incurably depressed. A soundless, repressed bitterness settled in his heart as he saw her from his back seat. She was tired from the trip, also no doubt from her ventures the night before. She propped her head on Mahmud’s shoulder and slept against his side. Her fluffy hair—that special, primitive, dynamic, rough fragrance he knew so well was tied by a blue ribbon, away from her forehead—now scattered on Mahmud’s dark leather jacket in an intimate, familiar way, a firm physical intimacy with nothing new about it. Dorian Gray’s face was reflected in the car’s interior light, black and glowing, with engraved lines and sculpted features. Worn jealousy could not move him now, only this slow, steady deterioration taking place in a stupor of disappointment. Exhausting silence prevailed among them all. Heads bobbed agitatedly as the station wagon quivered and rolled along with its seamless roaring. Darkness, chilliness, and desolation were stealing into tired bones.