Rama and the Dragon

by Edwar Al-Kharrat

  During the prior evening, in the cafeteria, she had begun weeping uncontrollably. She choked out that she could not stay in town after the group departed—though the two of them had agreed to just that, earlier that morning. After last night’s party, she did not return to the hotel until dawn. Neither did Mahmud, Samir, and Ilham. Mikhail had told her, half joking, half bitter, that the phoenix was getting rid of its feathers once again. Her tears—a continuous and limpid outpouring—did not move him. He knew her competence when it came to weeping. He said to himself, this crying is skillfully done, and she easily perfects it. He also said to himself that cruelty to oneself and to the other in the last scenes of this relationship was something to be expected, banal, also a bit too facile.

  The train whistled from a distance. It entered from the dark outskirts of al-Hadara’s sleepy houses. It passed the sandy, dust-swept platform that lay beneath a second coating of trash and old grass displayed in stark relief under the platform’s mobile, dazzling electric light. Mikhail was shaking hands with the group, one after the other, kissing them hurriedly, without too much emotion. They would be meeting up in a couple of days in Cairo, on their way to Edfu and Horus Temple. He came toward her with unhesitating steps, feeling his eyes shining with the decision-making he had taken on, then finished with. She got up from her distraught, seated position. He could see the counter-determination in her body. Everyone’s gaze was directed at her—even if furtively. Samia was gesturing, in a way that could hardly be detected, to Nura. Rama shook his hand. Her grip was strong. She shook his hand twice, three times, without relaxing her grip. She did not lean toward him; his lips did not brush her cheeks with the light, customary kiss. He said to her: Goodbye. She said: So long. Her eyes revealed solidity. No bitterness, no anger, no denial, no consent to a decision, implicit or explicit.

  His steps to the station gate are steady. He turns around once, waves, while they—including Rama—stand on the platform waving back. He says to himself: With such steps the exiles leave their homeland knowing they will never return.

  She had said to him: Nothing, I mean there is no news. Nothing new. Nothing is happening. I want something spectacular to happen.

  He had said: Lucky you!

  She said: Just like that. Where’s the cleverness, the canny judgment, the suavity of expression so typical of you? Wouldn’t it have been more appropriate to say: Oh dear, what a pity!

  He said: Because you are searching for something spectacular, all sagacity—as you say—gets lost.

  She said: Pardon me. I didn’t mean it that way, and you know it.

  He said: I wanted to say, and of course I didn’t know how to say it, that you’re lucky. You can still hope and search for something spectacular.

  There was nothing to distract them from the concentration of their close-lipped, repressed suffering.

  He said: Of course this doesn’t mean anything. It’s just my lack of a graceful way of putting it, as you say.

  The dance was about to end. The echoes of tormenting, joyful music hit the ancient, solid, bare stones. A skull with its socket holes of two gaping eyes leans against the soft, smooth cheek blushing with merriment and pleasure. Funeral dancers with almond eyes, with youthful agility; small-breasted and naked except for a light belt beneath the belly; their hair, plaited in slim, long braids, bedecked in delicate wreathes of lotus and jasmine. The kiss of displayed teeth clinging doggedly to her without lips, sucking the nectar from her supple, open, warm mouth and from her skillful tongue, fast-moving in its quest. She moves from one bony arm with cracked fingers to another in the flare of the last dance, amid stony, pocked faces and distended, thin, bowed bones. Dark greenish faces with protruding eyes press the faces of the smiling, round-cheeked, angelic Cherubs. Bastet, the cat, squats quietly, neutrally gazing on at what is beyond the old men with their dangling bellies, filled with dangling intestines, swinging to an obscene melody. They move in the prescribed steps of the dance, swaying and hurling their arms to indicate a voiding, a finishing off. Their bare ribs in white, dry, open skeletons press against supple breasts filled with firm creaminess. The raised bones of swinging arms and legs start oscillating. These bones end in long fingers of interlocked joints, smacking and clacking around slender waists and firm, plump haunches under transparent dresses quavering in the ecstasy of a fast rhythmic dance toward the darkness of hollow caves, where salty seawaters roar as they crash against the cave’s rock walls, and will continue crashing against those rocks without surcease or hope.

  No. Something resembled hope in this dimness, even if lacking comfort.

  All that I criticize in her—my Love—is that she didn’t really know me. Was her adventure with me—like her adventures with all her men, her conquerors—a matter of knowledge, revelation, some inner triumph that goes beyond me, beyond them? Is it a matter of something that’s not related to us, that encompasses but goes beyond? It is a non-personal, non-individualized element in men that refuses to be defined by reference to positive or negative points.

  Without blaming himself, he said: I never reached the first category of her lovers. But I occupied a niche in her life. Not the bottom niche either.

  No consolation or bitterness in that.

  In the final course of time that they knew together, her face appeared strange, as if he had never known it.

  He said to himself: But this is what happens all the time. Behind the mask of this estrangement, I have known her body and her soul. I have known both their throbbing beats: bare, open, slaughtered, vulnerable, offering no resistance, dripping blood and yearning.

  The music of her voice flowed toward him; she spoke to him as if to a stranger. For the first time, he learned this was not one of the tricks of love. A siren with claws lures ships with an irresistible pull, causing the destruction of sailors’ bodies on her rock, generation after generation. In his estrangement, a new group of her friends, unknown to him, surrounded them. She introduced them one after the other to him, and she introduced him to them. Nothing clings to his ruptured memory: not a name, not an image, as if he were disowning an alien invasion, annulling it. In the debris of memory’s rubble remains a round face laughing and engaging in a long-winded discussion of projects and plans amid introductions, greetings, handshakes, calls, and small talk. She said to the good-natured face with the narrow and clever eyes behind thick-lensed glasses, in an ordinary tone, passing it off as uncontrived, but fooling Mikhail not one whit: I was late for my bank appointment. Yesterday I had a hundred and fifty pounds of legitimate expenses for the restoration account. Tomorrow I’ll return it, or deposit the check. The man with the good-natured face said: Sure, that’s okay. She said: Tonight then, as agreed, we’ll see Chaplin’s Great Dictator. We’ll have a good laugh. Then she suddenly looked at Mikhail as if she remembered him. From now on, he would be outside her ring. She said: Mikhail, will you join us for the movies tonight? He said: Thanks, I’m busy tonight. Everything seemed to him tasteless, confused, silly, incapable of provoking a response. When he returned to his room, he found under the door a white slip of paper without signature: “Mikhail, if you have time, I would like to talk to you.” When he called her on the phone her colorless voice exhibited directness, blankness, and neutrality. She said: Yes. When she opened the door for him, she was wearing a light dress, sleeveless and décolleté, falling on her obviously naked body in a casual and negligent way. She put her hand on her chest: Welcome. Come on in. My apologies. As if she hadn’t actually been waiting for him as a result of their phone conversation. She rectified: You arrived sooner than I expected. With your permission—and she hurried into the inner room. He felt in his mouth a slight but genuine bitterness, from the tip of his tongue. He thought to himself, she is apologizing to me now about her appearance as if I were a visitor making a polite call. On another day, not that long before, she reciprocated by laying herself bare physically and spiritually, the heart getting rid of its sediments. Their reciprocal self-exposure used to be practically a
pillar of faith, a daily ritual.

  She came out wearing her loose-fitting jallabiya studded with small, ancient, bronze coins engraved with the sultan’s dates and signature in the intricate royal calligraphy of tughra. She wore a wrought copper necklace and large, crescent-shaped earrings dangling from under her hair, which she had quickly arranged and pushed to one side of her face.

  He kissed her on the mouth. It was an experimental kiss, a kiss of exploration and recalling. The spirit was not stirred. His soul was blocked behind a stubborn inner obstacle, as if fluttering with small wings, tied to threads of confusion and uncertainty, cemented in another dimension unable to reach this close encounter that his lips practiced, as if to perform a ritual without conviction. His sentiments dispersed. His passion still possessed the strength of a firebrand, but he did not know whether it could become a torch while in detention.

  After a gesture of favorable disposition and a very short response, she left her mouth for him but without participation. Then she put her hand gently on his arm, lifting his hand from her back. She went on showing interest, as if spontaneously, in recovering the routine of familiar gestures, established by their old ways, but without a goal and without enthusiasm.

  She said to him: Mikhail, let’s be friends, act like friends. Can’t we? I invited you to have a drink. Let’s see: I have nothing except the remainder of this Remy Martin, unfortunately or perhaps fortunately. I am not drinking. All I want is to see you for a while, for the sake of the old days. She poured him a glass and gave it to him: Cheers for the old days!

  He remembered the first night, how she invited him to talk, spelling out the word talk as if he didn’t know it.

  He said now: Don’t you want to talk a little? Come on, let’s go out on the town.

  She said: Yes, I dream of sitting with you, somewhere, without conversing, without doing anything, without thinking about anything. Silence with a friend is most conducive for relaxation. I am so tired. I dream of sitting with you alone, silently, in a small bar without drinking; only to relax.

  He said to her: So be it, but I have a small surprise.

  He brought out of his jacket pocket a round bottle of Napoleon cognac. Its bottle glass green and the liquor reddish brown, with a slender neck on which there was a grand golden logo in bold letters.

  She said: Oh, that cannot be resisted! Let’s drink here together.

  She sat barefoot on the floor, having flung her shoes away in a hurry. Her jallabiya was spread out around her, its jingling bronze resonating lightly on the round mat with its white and black hair, loose and long. She told him: This is a monkey skin from Addis Ababa. A friend of mine, a specialist in Coptic history, brought it to me as a gift. With a rigid move, he sat down on the soft skin with his trousers and shoes, next to her, silently, half smiling. His trousers were a bit tight at the knees, so he stretched his legs out and reclined on his elbow. They listened, without much interest, to tapes of revolutionary and popular poems, cynical in their rejection of everything, recited by an elderly voice, hoarse from hashish. The tape recorder looked expensive and modern, having a futuristic design and rigor, as if it were controlling an intricate set of functions. He cared neither for the poems nor for the recital in collapsing voice; and he told her that. She was unhappy with his comment and their discussion on this subject led nowhere.

  She said to him: I’ll prepare something for you to eat. cognac opens up the appetite. I have olives and basturma. He said: Don’t bother. Cigarettes are my appetizers. She said: Myself, I want something to eat. The cognac has me sweating. I’ll shower and get rid of this jallabiya. It feels heavy now. Do you know how much it weighs? Smiling, he said: No. She said: Ten pounds! I have in fact weighed it. He burst out with laughter. He knew she was naked beneath ten pounds of cloth and bronze. She came back with a small plate that had on it a few soft, wrinkled-skin, black olives in light olive oil. Her face was washed; she had let her hair down and put on a new night-gown that he did not recognize—brick-red, a light fabric, not transparent, but short, coming up to mid-thigh, its hem ornamented with a very thin border of refined white lace.

  He was lying on the large bed with his shoes still on. He had only taken off his jacket. She looked at him with very slight astonishment and imperceptible questioning. She said: I thought you would have made yourself at home and gotten rid of those shoes. He made no response. Their kisses were sensual encounters and juxtapositions. The cognac tingle would not leave him, but that refreshing, glowing wakefulness—where the weight of the body and the world cease to be—was not forthcoming. Her arms around his neck were heavy, her body in her new brick-red nightgown, which he did not know, was slowly moving around his legs in the depths of a difficult dance of the flesh, with meager offering, without music and without words.

  She said to him: No, no, not in this way. The limbs relaxed in the exhaustion of the fall and of the disappointment. She slept next to him while he dozed in successive, short, stifled spans, but never losing himself in the peace of fulfillment and redemption. As he embraced her naked waist, her breasts touched the side of his arm, lifelessly. He left her room just before dawn without waking her up.

  Her telephone was constantly busy the next evening when he dialed on the old black rotary, time and again, with a persistence he could not fathom. Always busy. She had taken the receiver off the hook. She could not be speaking on the phone without interruption. Besides, telephones in this town were not usually out of order. Was she staying out late while the receiver was off the hook? Surely not. Is it another party or a special rendezvous with a new friend? Or does she know from experience the extent of stubbornness that possesses me at times, so she short-circuits any possibility of communication? Thus his obsessions were turning things over. He went on dialing until every possible rendezvous hour had gone by. Three in the morning and he was suffering a strange, desolate, and fanciful insomnia, teeming with nightmares. At last, he fell into the abyss of troubled sleep. When he woke up, as early morning light was stealing in from behind the shutters and the half-drawn curtains, it flashed through his mind that the number he had been dialing all night long was not hers, but his. He was shaken. Calling himself! Imagine such a thing. Yes, yes, how could he have continued to dial his own number from his own phone? Of course the telephone was signaling busy. He still could not figure out his strange error! But was it an error? Or was it a will that went beyond his will, blocking off every road within himself? Who knows? How easily he discovers now this useless thing in the gray cloudy morning.

  He said to her: At times you seem to me like a huge, tree-like boulder with multiple branches and roots. Like those trees that used to be in the old days. Maybe they’re still in al-Azbakiya; do you know them? With twisted trunks, and branches hanging down becoming trunks themselves, penetrating the earth, standing as entrenched columns, one next to the other, each having its own roots. I meant something like this tree when I said you were pagan and multiple.

  Her mind wandered in contemplation. This image of her has either pleased her or upset her.

  She said: Yes, I got married twice and divorced twice. I don’t claim to have been a nun. You know this. Even before marriage I had my youthful flings like all girls do.

  He said to himself: Now, in this new context I can tolerate this admission and put up with it, as if the ardor of the first relation and the blaze of its flames had reached the point of returning to a stoic calm, ordinary now in the scheme of things.

  In the bottom of his heart, he knew that this was, at least, not yet true.

  He said: And me? Where is my place on this tree?

  She said, as she looked at him from a certain distance, from above: You … You remind me of a boy climbing one of the tree trunks with devotion and effort, searching for a fruit, as we used to do in mango season. But your climb on the tree absorbs you and you plunge into the dense leaves, not wanting at times to come down with the fruit.

  They laughed together.

  But a certain penetrati
ng stab took him by surprise as he was laughing. He did not realize that the stab could reach yet a new depth. From frustration to bitterness, from hate to disdain, from aversion to indifference: the classic cycle!

  She said: But you have always managed to keep a mask of reserve and seriousness, so I forget sometimes. My apologies.

  He said: No, it’s nothing.

  This is no mask. It is a granite coffin, and what is inside is not a mummy; it is a living entity in the grip of a tormenting monster, in a chaos of agitation and fires. A soul embodied in an imprisoned passionate body, which knows no way out, no outlet through which to steal away into the blueness of cold sky. It explodes under an unrelenting, continuous pressure, but the granite lid never shakes off.

  He said to himself: Is it true that the search for oneness, from beginning till end, is what destroyed you? And is the wreckage complete, sealed? This persistent, all-consuming endeavor—that seeks to sharpen the points of the world without scratching them—causes you to fall apart, piece by piece. Isn’t that so?