Rama and the Dragon

by Edwar Al-Kharrat

  He brought out of her handbag first the postcard that he had sent her on her birthday on which he wrote one phrase, “I love you,” and a comic, multicolored lion with gaping jaws made of shiny cardboard; its eyes were two round marbles moving in their sockets. Along with his card, she had received it on her birthday, by post. She had said to him: Look! It’s from my cousin in Sidi Bishr, an honest lion that kills you with laughter. A ticket from a soccer game that had on it the autograph of Pelé himself; an elegant advertisement for the Palestine Hotel on glossy paper; a reservation slip for fifteen pounds at the San Stephano dated June 6; a black kohl pencil thick and round in its copper tube, whose sides had rusted and whose luster had faded, its tip sharp as a porcupine quill; a sapphire scarab, a dark red nail-polish bottle with a long neck and a white plastic screwtop, a comb to which a few of her hairs were still attached, a large safety pin, an eyebrow pencil, her pocket dictionary of ancient Greek; and a strange, small, faded picture on a light brown postcard of outmoded size of a girl in her early adolescence, naked and slender, in a royal-style, luxurious marble bathtub—her breasts not yet sprouting. In the old picture the bathroom walls were made of veined marble, the sink was oval, with different-shaped bottles and boxes of old brands now uncommon, a water tap as if of pure, massive silver. The girl has slight, protruding bones; even the wilted paper of the photograph still exuded a scorching feminine appeal, a very precocious one. Her hair disheveled, slightly ruffled on the sides, the photograph made in an era when hairdressers and hairdryers were unknown. Her face both very strange and very familiar, in her clear eyes a direct and triumphant gaze, which he recognizes.

  His heart dropped. His eyes were fixed on a context where time had lost its face.

  He saw a love letter on lined paper from a student notebook written in a script of someone clearly uncultivated, with big letters flowing carelessly in a heavy gush of passionate emotions: dense, but not delicate.

  My sweetheart, my duck,

  This is the first time I travel. My mind is at peace not feeling upset. You are in the immortal splendid memories of our first meeting with affection and love. Do you remember the first time I came to you? The first day of Ramadan? That is we have been together for one year. That time under the Pyramid under the moonlight. Do you remember my duck? You sang to me. Remember? I don’t want to put responsibilities on you just ask after me by saying How are you, What are you doing my sweetheart? How can I forget the black and white dress of our immortal night and also the disease of the age you spoke of. Tell me you’ll read this book my sweetheart and I will read it too. We want to settle down my duck. I don’t want you disappointed in the Zamalek apartment. I know I can depend on you completely. I always say No one is like my sweetheart. I met ‘Amm Fanous yesterday in the train to Helwan, he said about you What a splendid girl! I want to answer saying She is my sweetheart and my love. But in the situation not possible. Your words do not leave me, we should have met before. I wish Ahmad and Madiha for our children, why do you object? God keep us for the other my duck.

  Your darling forever

  At the end he could make out the letter M joined and intertwined with the letter H, like the signatures of people who think they are the first and the last in the world, no need for them to clarify who they are.

  He read the letter once, twice, three times; then over and over. He returned everything to the handbag in its former order or disorder, without any change, with a solicitude that he knew was total, as if he were a character in a detective story careful not to leave any fingerprints or evidence. He took off his clothes, moved with what he felt to be mechanical and silent moves in his room from which the world had been shut off. He turned off the light, slept instantly, numbed, as if he had just undergone major surgery.

  Her arm was on his neck, close to his eyes. The light underarm hair on her brown skin. A somewhat dark spot on the elbow with minute, slightly rough bumps. He raised her arm and kissed her lightly on those bumps. His lips felt the difference in the dry skin at the spot touched. His was a kiss of pure affection, as if in consolation and pity for this blemish in her beauty. Within the smoothness of her skin, this flawed flesh made him love her the more and increased his tenderness toward her. She gave him a furtive and angry look; she did not miss the significance of his kiss, as if it could find no other place and was not therefore strictly necessary. A frown clouded her face, but quickly disappeared. There was no gratitude, anger, appreciation, or pardon in her looks. He had insulted her with this unwanted kiss.

  When he woke up, his eyes were salty with dream tears that would not tumble down.

  She had said to him: I am not the most beautiful of women. That much I know. But I claim I am the most tender of women and the most capable of giving pleasure too.

  And he had said to her: For me you are the most beautiful, the most magnificent, the most wonderful, and the most lasting of them all.

  She had responded: What a child you are!

  He said to himself: “Love”? The word seems meaningless, given the baggage it carries. This double game of love and hate is deep-rooted. Around it bubbles repressed blood and, for it self-esteem is shamelessly sacrificed. Why play such a game in the midst of so many other, truly serious matters? What’s the point when there’s already so much meanness and ugliness presenting their claws and fangs? I understand the need for work that will lighten this tyranny in a precise, utilitarian way. After all, what is it that pacifies torment and soothes isolation? The black bones of hunger, oppression, and mass humiliation surround us while the electric, glossy instruments of trivial luxuries accumulate, all of them mangling the earth at the same time. And so what do we do? We make love. Sweat perspires from our two bodies attached forever, as if we had no will at all. Consequently, fragmented visions from the larger world sting, then remain to haunt us.

  He said to himself: Are these obsessions and anxieties our human lot? Are we fated to strive for pleasures accompanied by lashings from innumerable hands, delivered inside rooms with closed doors?

  Mikhail says to her: I have no way out but to conceal my love from you and others. The cycles of longing for you, feeling aversion to you—turns of passion, fervor, repulsion, and ecstasy—I conceal from you and others. You conceal everything about your life from me and I dig with my nail-injured, bare hands into the earth’s layers, as if generations that have neither begun nor ended simply accumulated on the surface of your body, your soul, your heart. Since we hate expressions of sentiment, seeing them as trivial, I have to bear in silence and solitude my heart’s languishing—a heart that possesses no defenses but the strength of a rigorous delicacy and a spirited, sometimes sarcastic awareness with every beat.

  Where have I let you down then? Where have I failed? Why do you reject me? Is it you who are rejecting, or I? Or is rejection a ritual that runs us both? It was not possible for me to reject you, no matter how much I retreated backward. I have not broken our covenant nor infringed upon it. You are the land of my love, the body of my homeland in which I am exiled—no matter how tightly I close my lips on the terrors and torments of silence. You, who welcome all invaders of your bodily sanctums in fresh and sweet acceptance, without condemnation or dissension.

  I do not know your intimate rhythms, the puzzling inner fervor, the mysterious way you greet so many mornings after. Speaking with a thousand tongues and never short of words, you divulge nothing. My beloved, you’re stubborn and willful. You implement your will-how you settle on it, I have no idea—without ever saying: No, never. You procrastinate forever, then circumambulate situations and wills, slowly, taking an eternity. You never allow for time running out. You take however much time to reach your destination—a destination no one knows—within the continuing presence of that radiant, undying first and last father.

  She said to him: I am knocked down by bouts of total immersion in my inner self, in self-inspection and silence, in distance from the entire world. I cling to myself until I reach what resembles a psychological expla
nation, which I accept temporarily, without conviction.

  He said: I want to share it with you.

  She said: Sharing is an exorbitant process.

  He said: I can forbear.

  She said, with silent eyes, neither denying nor accepting him: True. Very forbearing, like me.

  He said: Though I am no love-making instrument.

  She said: That too I know.

  She was wounding him now, intentionally or not.

  I have known your seven masks: Rama swan Circe enchantress phoenix cat Amazon Isis; but I don’t know you. I have heard your innumerable voices: the childish, small voice dreading darkness. The complaining voice desperately seeking help in the night of your solitude that occupies the entire center of the day with no relief. The strong voice, unbreakable by blows that would cleave flint. The practical voice handling matters among workers, columns, monuments, and papers, self-confident but without concern for self or others. That’s the voice of running things, of calculated strokes and tools. The passionate voice exciting manhood in your embrace to stab. The sexy voice dripping pure, submissive femininity having nothing in it but the liquidity of a formless flowing. The hoarse, husky voice. The dreamy voice of a world that is all one wave: gently green, blossoming, lunar. I have held your face while you cried from pleasure and bliss. I have kissed your hair while lightning tracked through my heart, with you crying in pain and ecstasy. Frozen, head bent down, I didn’t retreat from your fierce, hostile voice. Bending all of me toward you, I tried to escape through the barrier of your indifferent voice. I have heard your depressed voice and your twittering joyful tones in the rustling of dawn, shaking and breaking from the heart of darkness and arresting isolation. I never believed the voice of contentment and surrender, given with drooping eyes, except when you gave me your hands as if granting me everything. The pleading moans and flowing, stubborn tears I couldn’t dis-regard, so I came to you, again and again, as if I were the one penetrating your oasis effulgent with springs seeping from sands stretching until the end of my years. Your pleasure-cry at the stab of intimate encounter, while I catch between my open palms the suns of your spheres, collecting in my lap the dazzling limbs of the sky.

  He said: Just the same, I love you. While you … I don’t know. I’ll continue to love you, even if you aren’t there. I’ll go on without entering into details. I know I’ll bear this all my life. Yes, I might be wild, stumbling in my steps, primitive if you wish, in the fury of this defiant emotion whose harness I hold with my tightest grip though nothing brakes it. All right, immature if you wish. But I’m tired of being mature and balanced. It’s not boredom that moves me, but the storm inside that flings me around. I half surrender to the storm, partly want it. Have I been able to say it?

  She said to him: You’ve indeed given up a great deal of your rigid Coptic reserve. It used to be impossible for you to entertain even a simple, spontaneous kiss of encounter or an affectionate, easy-going embrace.

  He said: Luckily, I learned from the hands of a master.

  She said: It’s true you’ve learned something from me—but most importantly you’ve learned everything about me. There’s nothing left to know. My life’s an open page for you.

  He said: Nonsense. There’s plenty yet to know, probably the most significant part.

  She was silent, not wanting to argue.

  He said: You still refuse the possibility of being accepted, of being finally justified, despite everything.

  Distraught, she said with frustrated wishing: If that could happen, it would be magnificent.

  Then she went on hurriedly: But raising the question by itself, alone, is what plants doubt in the heart of the entire issue. In fact, it negates it. Justification is not conditional, hence not an issue for consideration. It exists first, without a question.

  He realized at once she was right.

  He said: And yet I am not invasive, possessive, or authoritarian. Those things I cannot be.

  With a silent gaze, as if she realized that he sensed an awkwardness in moving away from the topic, she said: No. You are right.

  His steps before his final appointment with her were taken next to an old red-brick wall, under the shade of dense trees. The last soft rays of sunset were falling as if drawn by a fine-tipped pen, making the wall’s bricks look gentle, soft, firmly of one element. Their solidity melted away. And bygone torments ebbed away. They became memories, no longer resented by the senses in anger or bitterness. The veil of timeworn mystery was removed, erasing all clandestine intrigues. Behind this wall they experienced harmony and the peace of a dreamless sleep. The lowly fence stretched until they faced at its end an old house with a small, patchy garden that blocked the way. The sea whispered, though they could not see it. They retreated toward the clamor of trams, trucks, and shops in the process of turning on their lights, one after the other, in Abu Qir Street. They heard the clip-clop of horse hooves on the asphalt amid cars and buses, and suddenly a seashore patrol in khaki uniforms and brown, dry, shaven faces moved past them, the mounted soldiers holding their long, black guns.

  His hand was on her shoulder as they walked together; he felt the fullness of her heavy steps. They had washed their hands of trying to guess the future, were now surrendering their dispirited bodies to the mystery of sunset lights.

  She said to him: I received your card—you alone remembered my birthday. I’d forgotten it myself.

  He said: How can I forget it? It’s the day the war of 1948 was declared, the same day I was detained by the authorities.

  She said: Better for you if you’d forgotten it.

  He said: Many happy returns. So what happened? I don’t understand.

  She said: I am sad, angry—above all bored.

  There was that concealed dull grief in her face. Her eyes turned navy blue, turbid.

  She said: I can’t understand their silence. I’ve never despised them as much as I do today. How could they let him die like that? In cold blood, while they crossed their arms? Why, they shackled their own hands.

  He said: In revolutionary work, people do die, you know? The so called calculated risks?

  She said: But like this? Gratuitously? In twenty-four hours? A tragicomic sham trial, then a death sentence? He has been put to death! This is murder.

  He said: Yes, but—to be fair—wouldn’t he have done the same thing, possibly worse and far more extensive, had positions been reversed?

  She said: Maybe, but this is different.

  He said: Ah, it is? Why, it’s not different at all. Come off of it with your story of ends and means and such talk. It’s simply unreal, to put it lightly. Don’t ever bring up the story of the people and the dictatorship of the majority, which is the only democracy. All this is childish absurdity at best, and in most cases it is bad faith. No, my dear lady, it is not democracy! Killing a person, even a single one, intentionally and deliberately, for whatever purpose, cannot be justified or compensated by any means. Man is not to be killed at all, and is not to kill. I don’t know of a necessity, of any need for it, not even ethical necessity or what is called justice. Man is not to be killed.

  She said to him thoughtfully: Yes, your position is clear and declared. You have given up on political work and you did not hesitate in announcing it.

  He said: Nothing is left but work from day to day, perhaps making a living, with immersion for sure, with concentration. Submerging oneself, yes. This is everything. Daily work? What is it? What is it worth? Simply crossing from the shore of one day to the shore of another.

  She said: You’re clear and honest. No secrecy. But those who’re involved in the struggle, what are they doing? In light of their work, I am quitting the life you just described. My decision is definitive. Believe me. Don’t say I’m emotional and rash. I’ve studied the question from all sides. I’m leaving everything. I am going back to the underground, as I did so long ago.

  Her voice was quivering again, that feminine quiver that he sometimes came across in their passionat
e and intimate physical encounters.

  She said: Like you, I’d left it all. But now it’s unbearable. I can’t be silent. I can’t stand such disappointment. I’ll go back, and I won’t hesitate to kill. That’s my lot: to kill. Yes, kill, demolish, strike with bullets and bombs.

  He did not smile, and of course he did not believe her. But the frenzy in her reaction, in her quavering voice was real. The irrationality of the image that obsessed her was clear, very much in evidence.

  She said: I won’t shut up. What’s left to this life? Monotony and emptiness.

  He said: You? Your life monotonous and empty?

  She said: Yes, yes, yes. What did you think? All this is emptiness or an escape from emptiness.

  For a moment, silence joined them firmly in the garden of Le Petit Trianon. But it could not relieve the annoyance in their give-and-take, in her fury and anger.

  On the fence of the sunny garden stood pots with small shrubs, trimmed on the sides, excessively cared for. Their green gleamed, as if artificial, because of water spraying. The lightly faded white tablecloths had delicate-lined blue designs. The sun was discrete, the Stella beer in two long thin glasses—its slightly turbid foam having subsided—along with a heap of yellow lupine-seed skins in a saucer.

  It occurred to him that she might be serious and she might very well take this plunge, that it was not necessarily a matter of delirium bursting from the anguish of losing an old and intimate relationship, for surely it was not simply a political relationship. It was more than a simple and final honoring of yet another figure fallen in her battlefield. It was more than loyalty, after her own fashion, to a deep-rooted friendship of heart and flesh alike.

  He said to himself: How strange she is! Her friendship with the exiled prime minister, the elderly aristocratic gentleman, then this too: the famous working-class communist who’s been killed. Both at the same time! How strange her relations are! Perplexing, inexplicable, and as real as if she were Mata Hari or a James Bond character, but neither superficial nor sensational. She has friends—more than friends for sure—on every step in the social ladder and on the psychological ladder too.