The Hosnani house was already in cool violet half-darkness, tucked as it was under the shoulder of the low hillock, in the shadow of the little village whose tall white minaret blazed still in the sunset. He heard now the sullen crack of the whip as he dismounted, and caught a glimpse of the man standing upon the topmost balcony of the house, gazing intently down into the blue pool of the courtyard. It was Narouz: and yet somehow also not Narouz. Can a single gesture from someone with whom one is familiar reveal an interior transformation? The man with the whip, standing there, so intently peering into the sombre well of the courtyard, registered in his very stance a new, troubling flamboyance, an authority which did not belong, so to speak, to the repertoire of Narouz’ remembered gestures. ‘He practises’ said the factor softly, holding the bridle of the horse ‘every evening now with his whip he practises upon the bats.’ Nessim suddenly had a feeling of incoherence. ‘The bats?’ he repeated softly, under his breath. The man on the balcony — the Narouz of this hastily raised impression — gave a sudden chuckle and exclaimed in a hoarse voice: ‘Thirteen.’ Nessim threw back the doors and stood framed now against the outer light. He spoke upwards in the darkening sky in a quiet, almost conversational voice, casting it like a ventriloquist towards the cloaked figure which stood at the top of the staircase in silhouette, with the long whip coiled at its side, at rest. ‘Ya Narouz’ he said, uttering the traditional greeting of their common childhood with affection.
‘Ya Nessim’ came the response after a pause, and then a long ebbing silence fell. Nessim, whose eyes had become accustomed to the dusk, now saw that the courtyard was full of the bodies of bats, like fragments of torn umbrella, some fluttering and crawling in puddles of their own blood, some lying still and torn up. So this was what Narouz did in the evenings — ‘practising upon the bats’! He stood for a while unsure of himself, unsure what to say next. The factor closed the great doors abruptly behind him, and at once he stood, black against the darkness now, staring up the stairway to where his unknown brother stood with a kind of watchful impenitent awareness. A bat ripped across the light and he saw Narouz’ arm swing with an involuntary motion and then fall to the side again; from his vantage point at the top of the stairway he could shoot, so to speak, downwards upon his targets. Neither said anything for a while; then a door opened with a creak, throwing out a shaft of light across his path, and the factor came out of the outhouse with a broom with which he started to sweep up the fragments of fluttering bodies of Narouz’ victims which littered the earthen floor of the courtyard. Narouz leaned forward a little to watch him intently as he did so, and when he had almost swept the pile of tattered bodies to the door of the outhouse, said in a hoarse voice: ‘Thirteen, eh?’
‘Thirteen.’
His voice gave Nessim a dull neuralgic thrill, for he sounded drugged — the harsh authoritative voice of someone drunk on hashish, perhaps, or opium; the voice of someone signalling from a new orbit in an unknown universe. He drew his breath slowly until his lungs were fully inflated and then spoke upwards once more to the figure on the stair. ‘Ya Narouz. I have come to speak to you on a matter of great urgency.’
‘Mount’ said Narouz gruffly, in the voice of a sheepdog. ‘I wait for you here, Nessim.’ The voice made many things clear to Nessim, for never before had the voice of his brother been completely free from a note of welcome, of joy even. At any other time he would have run down the stairs in clumsy welcome, taking them two at a time and calling out ‘Nessim, how good you have come!’ Nessim walked across the courtyard and placed his hand upon the dusty wooden rail. ‘It is important’ he said sharply, crisply, as if to establish his own importance in this tableau — the shadowy courtyard with the solitary figure standing up against the sky in silhouette, holding the long whip lightly, effortlessly, and watching him. Narouz repeated the word ‘Mount’ in a lower key, and suddenly sat down putting his whip beside him on the top stair. It was the first time, thought Nessim, that there had been no greeting for him on his return to Karm Abu Girg. He walked up the steep stairs slowly, peering upwards.
It was much lighter on the first floor, and at the top of the second there was enough light to see his brother’s face. Narouz sat quite still, in cloak and boots. His whip lay lightly coiled over the balustrade with its handle upon his knees. Beside him on the dusty wooden floor stood a half-empty bottle of gin. His chin was sunk upon his chest and he stared crookedly up under shaggy brows at the approaching stranger with an expression which combined truculence with a queer, irresolute sorrow. He was at his old trick of pressing his back teeth together and releasing them so that the cords of muscle at his temples expanded and contracted as if a heavy pulse were beating there. He watched his brother’s slow ascent with this air of sombre self-divided uncertainty into which there crept from time to time the smouldering glow of an anger banked up, held under control. As Nessim reached the final landing and set foot upon the last flight of stairs, Narouz stirred and gave a sudden gargling bark — a sound such as one might make to a hound — and held out a hairy hand. Nessim paused and heard his brother say: ‘Stay there, Nessim’ in a new and authoritative voice, but which contained no particular note of menace. He hesitated, leaning forward keenly the better to interpret this unfamiliar gesture — the square hand thrown out in an attitude almost of imprecation, fingers stretched, but not perfectly steady.
‘You have been drinking’ he said at last, quietly but with a profound ringing disgust. ‘Narouz, this is new for you.’ The shadow of a smile, as if of self-contempt, played upon the crooked lips of his brother. It broadened suddenly to a slow grin which displayed his hare-lip to the full: and then vanished, was swallowed up, as if abruptly recalled by a thought which it could not represent. Narouz now wore a new air of unsteady self-congratulation, of pride at once mawkish and dazed. ‘What do you wish from me?’ he said hoarsely. ‘Say it here, Nessim. I am practising.’
‘Let us go indoors to speak privately.’
Narouz shook his head slowly and after consideration said crisply:
‘You can speak here.’
‘Narouz’ cried Nessim sharply, stung by these unfamiliar responses, and in the voice one would use to awaken a sleeper. ‘Please.’ The seated man at the head of the stairs stared up at him with the strange inflamed but sorrowful air and shook his head again. ‘I have spoken, Nessim’ he said indistinctly. Nessim’s voice broke, it was pitched so sharply against the silence of the court-yard. He said, almost pitifully now, ‘I simply must speak to you, do you understand?’
‘Speak now, here. I am listening.’ This was indeed a new and unexpected personage, the man in the cloak. Nessim felt the colour rising in his cheeks. He climbed a couple of steps more and hissed assertively: ‘Narouz, I come from them. In God’s name what have you been saying to them? The committee has become terrified by your words.’ He broke off and irresolutely waved the memorandum which Serapamoun had deposited with him, crying: ‘This … this paper is from them.’
Narouz’ eyes blazed up for a second with a maudlin pride made somehow regal by the outward thrust of his chin and a straightening of the huge shoulders. ‘My words, Nessim?’ he growled, and then nodding: ‘And Taor’s words. When the time comes we will know how to act. Nobody needs to fear. We are not dreamers.’
‘Dreamers!’ cried Nessim with a gasp, almost beside himself now with apprehension and disgust and mortified to his very quick by this lack of conventional address in a younger brother. ‘You are the dreamers! Have I not explained a thousand times what we are trying to do … what we mean by all this? Peasant, idiot that you are.…’ But these words which once might have lodged like goads in Narouz’ mind seemed blunt, ineffectual. He tightened his mouth hard and made a slow cutting movement with his palm, cutting the air from left to right before his own body. ‘Words’ he cried harshly. ‘I know you now, my brother.’ Nessim glanced wildly about him for a moment, as if to seek help, as if to seek some instrument heavy enough to drive the truth of what he had to say
into the head of the seated man. A hysterical fury had beset him, a rage against this sottish figure which raised so incomprehending a face to his pleas. He was trembling; he had certainly anticipated nothing like this when he set out from Alexandria with his resolution bright and his mind composed.
‘Where is Leila?’ he cried sharply, as if he might invoke her aid, and Narouz gave a short clicking chuckle. He raised his finger to his temple gravely and muttered: ‘In the summer-house, as you know. Why not go to her if you wish?’ He chuckled again, and then added, nodding his head with an absurdly childish expression. ‘She is angry with you, now. For once it is with you, not with me. You have made her cry, Nessim.’ His lower lip trembled.
‘Drunkard’ hissed Nessim helplessly. Narouz’ eyes flashed. He gave a single jarring laugh, a short bark, throwing his head right back. Then suddenly, without warning, the smile vanished and he put on once more his watchful, sorrowing expression. He licked his lips and whispered ‘Ya Nessim’ under his breath, as if he were slowly recovering his sense of proportion. But Nessim, white with rage, was now almost beside himself with frustration. He stepped up the last few stairs and shook Narouz by the shoulder, almost shouting now: ‘Fool, you are putting us all in danger. Look at these, from Serapamoun. The committee will disband unless you stop talking like this. Do you understand? You are mad, Narouz. In God’s name, Narouz, understand what I am saying.…’ But the great head of his brother looked dazed now, beset by the flicker of contradictory expressions, like the lowered crest of a bull badgered beyond endurance. ‘Narouz, listen to me.’ The face that was slowly raised to Nessim’s seemed to have grown larger and more vacant, the eyes more lustreless, yet full of the pain of a new sort of knowledge which owed little to the sterile revolutions of reason; it was full too of a kind of anger and incomprehension, confused and troubling, which was seeking expression. They stared angrily at each other. Nessim was white to the lips and panting, but his brother sat simply staring at him, his lips drawn back over his white teeth as if he were hypnotized.
‘Do you hear me? Are you deaf?’ Nessim shook, but with a motion of his broad shoulders Narouz shook off the importunate hand while his face began to flush. Nessim ran on, heedless, carried away by the burning preoccupations which poured out of him clothed in a torrent of reproaches. ‘You have put us all in danger, even Leila, even yourself, even Mountolive.’ Why should chance have led him to that fatal name? The utterance of it seemed to electrify Narouz and fill him with a new, almost triumphant desperation.
‘Mountolive’ he shouted the word in a deep groaning voice and ground his teeth together audibly; he seemed as if he were about to go berserk. Yet he did not move, though his hand moved involuntarily to the handle of the great whip which lay in his lap. ‘That British swine!’ he brought out with a thunderous vehemence, almost spitting the words.
‘Why do you say that?’
And then another transformation occurred with unexpected suddenness, for Narouz’ whole body relaxed and subsided; he looked up with a sly air now, and said with a little chuckle, in a tone pitched barely above a whisper: ‘You sold our mother to him, Nessim. You knew it would cause our father’s death.’
This was too much. Nessim fell upon him, flailing at him with his doubled fists, uttering curse after guttural curse in Arabic, beating him. But his blows fell like chaff upon the huge body. Narouz did not move, did not make any attempt to avert or to respond to his brother’s blows — here at least Nessim’s seniority held. He could not bring himself to strike back at his elder brother. But sitting doubled up and chuckling under the futile rain of blows, he repeated venomously over and over again the words: ‘ You sold our mother!’
Nessim beat him until his own knuckles were bruised and aching. Narouz stooped under this febrile onslaught, bearing it with the same composed smile of maudlin bitterness, repeating the triumphant phrase over and over again in that thrilling whisper. At last Nessim shrieked ‘Stop’ and himself desisted, falling against the rail of the balustrade and sinking under the weight of his own exhaustion down to the first landing. He was trembling all over. He shook his fist upwards at the dark seated figure and said incoherently ‘I shall go to Serapamoun myself. You will see who is master.’ Narouz gave a small contemptuous chuckle, but said nothing.
Putting his dishevelled clothes to rights, Nessim tottered down the stairway into the now darkened courtyard. His horse and Ali’s had been tethered to the iron hitching post outside the great front door. As he mounted, still trembling and muttering, the factor raced out of the arches and unbolted the doors. Narouz was standing up now, visible only against the yellow light of the living-room. Flashes of incoherent rage still stormed Nessim’s mind — and with them irresolution, for he realized that the mission he had set himself was far from completed, indeed, had gone awry. With some half-formulated idea of offering the silent figure another chance to open up a discussion with him or seek a rapprochement, he rode his horse into the courtyard and sat there, looking up into the darkness. Narouz stirred.
‘Narouz’ said Nessim softly. ‘I have told you once and for all now. You will see who is going to be master. It would be wise for you.…’
But the dark figure gave a bray of laughter.
‘Master and servant’ he cried contemptuously. ‘Yes, Nessim. We shall see. And now —’ He leaned over the rail and in the darkness Nessim heard the great whip slither along the dry boards like a cobra and then lick the still twilight air of the courtyard. There was a crack and a snap like a giant mousetrap closing, and the bundle of papers in his arm was flicked out peremptorily and scattered over the cobbles. Narouz laughed again, on a more hysterical note. Nessim felt the heat of the whipstroke on his hand though the lash had not touched him.
‘Now go’ cried Narouz, and once more the whip hissed in the air to explode menacingly behind the buttocks of his horse. Nessim rose in his stirrups and shaking his fist once more at his brother, cried ‘We shall see!’
But his voice sounded thin, choked by the imprecations which filled his mind. He drove his heels in the horse’s flanks and twisted suddenly about to gallop abruptly out of the courtyard throwing up sparks from the stone threshold, bending low in the saddle. He rode back to the ford now, where the car awaited, like a madman his face distorted with rage; but as he rode his pulse slowed and his anger emptied itself into the loathsome disgust which flooded up into his mind in slow coils, like some venomous snake. Unexpected waves of remorse, too, began to invade him, for something had now been irreparably damaged, irreparably broken, in the iron ceinture of the family relation. Dispossessed of the authority vested in the elder son by the feudal pattern of life, he felt all at once a prodigal, almost an orphan. In the heart of his rage there was also guilt; he felt unclean, as if he had debauched himself in this unexpected battle with one of his own kin. He drove slowly back to the city, feeling the luxurious tears of a new exhaustion, a new self-pity, rolling down his cheeks.
How strange it was that he had somehow, inexplicably, foreseen this irreparable break with his brother — from the first discreet phrases of Serapamoun he had divined it and feared it. It raised once more the spectre of duties and responsibilities to causes which he himself had initiated and must now serve. Ideally, then, he should be prepared in such a crisis to disown Narouz, to depose Narouz, even if necessary to … him! (He slammed on the brakes of the car, brought it to a standstill, and sat muttering. He had censored the thought in his mind, for the hundredth time. But the nature of the undertaking should be clear enough to anyone in a similar situation. He had never understood Narouz, he thought wistfully. But then, you do not have to understand someone in order to love them. His hold had not really been deep, founded in understanding: it had been conferred by the family conventions to which both belonged. And now the tie had suddenly snapped.) He struck the wheel of the car with aching palms and cried ‘I shall never harm him.’
He threw in the clutch, repeating ‘Never’ over and over again in his mind. Yet he knew t
his decision to be another weakness, for in it his love traduced his own ideal of duty. But here his alter ego came to his rescue with soothing formulations such as: ‘It is really not so serious. We shall, of course, have to disband the movement temporarily. Later I shall ask Serapamoun to start something similar. We can isolate and expel this … fanatic’ He had never fully realized before how much he loved this hated brother whose mind had now become distended by dreams whose religious poetry conferred upon their Egypt a new, an ideal future. ‘We must seek to embody the frame of the eternal in nature here upon earth, in our hearts, in this very Egypt of ours.’ That is what Narouz had said, among so many other things which filled the fragmentary transcription which Serapamoun had ordered to be made. ‘We must wrestle here on earth against the secular injustice, and in our hearts against the injustice of a divinity which respects only man’s struggle to possess his own soul.’ Were these simply the ravings of Taor, or were they part of a shared dream of which the ignorant fanatic had spoken? Other phrases, barbed with the magnificence of poetry, came into his mind. ‘To rule is to be ruled; but ruler and ruled must have a divine consciousness of their role, of their inheritance in the Divine. The mud of Egypt rises to choke our lungs, the lungs with which we cry to living God.’
He had a sudden picture of that contorted face, the little gasping voice in which Narouz had, that first day of his possession, invoked the divine spirit to visit him with a declared truth. ‘Meded! Meded!’ He shuddered. And then it slowly came upon him that in a paradoxical sort of way Narouz was right in his desire to inflame the sleeping will — for he saw the world, not so much as a political chessboard but as a pulse beating within a greater will which only the poetry of the psalms could invoke and body forth. To awaken not merely the impulses of the forebrain with its limited formulations, but the sleeping beauty underneath — the poetic consciousness which lay, coiled like a spring, in the heart of everyone. This thought frightened him not a little; for he suddenly saw that his brother might be a religious leader, but for the prevailing circumstances of time and place — these, at least, Nessim could judge. He was a prodigy of nature but his powers were to be deployed in a barren field which could never nourish them, which indeed would stifle them forever.
The Alexandria Quartet Page 69
