The Alexandria Quartet

by Lawrence Durrell

  ‘But he is dying, Clea.’

  Clea made an inarticulate moaning noise of protest. ‘What can I do, Nessim? He is nothing to me, never was, never will be. Oh, it is so disgusting — please do not make me come, Nessim.’

  ‘Of course not. I simply thought as he is dying —’

  ‘But if you think I should I will feel obliged to.’

  ‘I think nothing. He has not long to live, Clea.’

  ‘I hear from your voice that I must come. Oh, Nessim, how disgusting that people should love without consent! Will you send the car or shall I telephone Selim? My flesh quails on my bones.’

  ‘Thank you, Clea’ said Nessim shortly and with sadly downcast head; for some reason the word ‘disgusting’ had wounded him. He walked slowly back to the bedroom, noticing on the way that the courtyard was thronged with people — not only the house servants but many new curious visitors. Calamity draws people as an open wound draws flies, Nessim thought. Narouz was in a doze. They sat for a while talking in whispers. ‘Then he must really die?’ asked Nessim sadly, ‘without his mother?’ It seemed to him an added burden of guilt that it was through his agency that Leila had been forced to leave. ‘Alone like this.’ Balthazar made a grimace of impatience. ‘It is amazing he’s alive at all still’ he said. ‘And there is absolutely nothing.…’ Slowly and gravely Balthazar shook that dark intelligent head. Nessim stood up and said: ‘Then I should tell them that there is no hope of recovery. They will want to prepare for his death.’

  ‘Do as you wish.’

  ‘I must send for Tobias the priest. He must have the last sacraments — the Holy Eucharist. The servants will know the truth from him.’

  ‘Act as seems good to you’ said Balthazar dryly, and the tall figure of his friend slipped down the staircase into the courtyard to give instructions. A rider was to be despatched at once to the priest with instructions to consecrate the holy elements in the church and then come post-haste to Karm Abu Girg to administer the last sacraments to Narouz. As this intelligence went abroad there went up a great sigh of dreadful expectancy and the faces of the servants lengthened with dread. ‘And the doctor?’ they cried in tones of anguish. ‘And the doctor?’

  Balthazar smiled grimly as he sat on the chair beside the dying man. He repeated to himself softly, under his breath, ‘And the doctor?’ What a mockery! He placed his cool palm on Narouz’ forehead for a moment, with an air of certitude and resignation. A high temperature, a dozen bullet-holes.…’ And the doctor?’

  Musing upon the futility of human affairs and the dreadful accidents to which life exposed the least distrustful, the most innocent of creatures, he lit a cigarette and went out on to the balcony. A hundred eager glances sought his, imploring him by the power of his magic to restore the patient to health. He frowned heavily at one and all. If he had been able to resort to the old-fashioned magic of the Egyptian fables, of the New Testament, he would gladly have told Narouz to rise. But… ‘And the doctor?’

  Despite the internal haemorrhages, the drumming of the pulses in his ears, the fever and pain, the patient was only resting — in a sense — husbanding his energies for the appearance of Clea. He mistook the little flutter of voices and footsteps upon the staircase which heralded the appearance of the priest. His eyelashes fluttered and then sank down again, exhausted to hear the fat voice of the goose-shaped young man with the greasy face and the air of just having dined on sucking-pig. He returned to his own remote watchfulness, content that Tobias should treat him as insensible, as dead even, provided he could husband a small share of his dying space for the blonde image — intractable and remote as ever now, to his mind — yet an image which might respond to all this hoarded suffering. Even from pity. He was swollen with desire, distended like a pregnant woman. When you are in love you know that love is a beggar, shameless as a beggar; and the responses of merely human pity can console one where love is absent by a false travesty of an imagined happiness. Yet the day dragged on and still she did not come. The anxiety of the house deepened with his own. And Balthazar, whose intuition had guessed rightly the cause of his patience, was tempted by the thought: ‘I could imitate Clea’s voice — would he know? I could soothe him with a few words spoken in her voice.’ He was a ventriloquist and mimic of the first order. But to the first voice a second replied: ‘No. One must not interfere with a destiny however bitter by introducing lies. He must die as he was meant to.’ And the first voice said bitterly: ‘Then why morphia, why the comforts of religion, and not the solace of a desired human voice imitated, the pressure of a hand imitated? You could easily do this.’ But he shook his dark head at himself and said ‘No’ with bitter obstinacy, as he listened to the unpleasant voice of the priest reading passages of scripture upon the balcony, his voice mixing with the murmuring and shuffling of the human beings in the courtyard below. Was not the evangel all that the imitation of Clea’s voice might have been? He kissed his patient’s brow slowly, sadly as he reflected.

  Narouz began to feel the diggings of the Underworld, the five wild dogs of the sense pulling ever more heavily upon the leash. He opposed to them the forces of his mighty will, playing for time, waiting for the only human revelation he could expect — voice and odour of a girl who had become embalmed by his senses, entombed like some precious image. He could hear the nerves ticking away in their spirals of pain, the oxygen bubbles rising ever more slowly to explode in his blood. He knew that he was running out of funds, running out of time. The slowly gathering weight of a paralysis was settling over his mind, the narcotic of pain.

  Nessim went away to the telephone again. He was wax pale now, with a hectic spot of pink in each cheek, and he spoke with the high sweet hysterical voice of his mother. Clea had already started for Karm Abu Girg, but it seemed that a part of the road had been washed away by a broken dyke. Selim doubted whether she could get through to the ferry that evening.

  There now began a tremendous struggle in the breast of Narouz — a struggle to maintain an equilibrium between the forces battling within him. His musculature contracted in heavy bunches with the effort of waiting; his veins bunched out, polished to ebony with the strain, controlled by his will. He ground his teeth savagely together like a wild boar as he felt himself foundering. And Balthazar sat like an effigy, one hand upon his brow and the other fiercely holding the contorted muscles of his wrist. He whispered in Arabic: ‘Rest, my darling. Easily, my loved one.’ His sadness gave him complete mastery of himself, complete calm. Truth is so bitter that the knowledge of it confers a kind of luxury.

  So it went for a while. Then lastly there burst from the hairy throat of the dying man a single tremendous word, the name of Clea, uttered in the cavernous voice of a wounded lion: a voice which combined anger, reproof and an overwhelming sadness in its sudden roar. So nude a word, her name, as simple as ‘God’ or ‘Mother’ — yet it sounded as if upon the lips of some dying conqueror, some lost king, conscious of the body and breath dissolving within him. The name of Clea sounded through the whole house, drenched by the splendour of his anguish, silencing the little knots of whispering servants and visitors, setting back the ears of the hunting dogs, making them crouch and fawn: ringing in Nessim’s mind with a new and terrifying bitterness too deep for tears. And as this great cry slowly faded, the intelligence of his death dawned upon them with a new and crushing weight — like the pressure of some great tomb door closing upon hope.

  Immobile, ageless as pain itself, sat the defeated effigy of the doctor at the bedside of pain. He was thinking to himself, full of the bright light of intellection: ‘A phrase like “out of the jaws of death” might mean something like that cry of Narouz’, its bravery. Or “out of the jaws of Hell”. It must mean the hell of a private mind. No, we can do nothing.’

  The great voice thinned softly into the the burring comb-and-paper sound of a long death-rattle, fading into the buzz of a fly caught in some remote spider’s web.

  And now Nessim gave a single sweet sob out there on th
e balcony — the noise that a bamboo stem makes when it is plucked from the stalk. And like the formal opening bars of some great symphony this small sob was echoed below in the darkness, passed from lip to lip, heart to heart. Their sobs lighted one another — as candles take a light from one another — an orchestral fulfilment of the precious theme of sorrow, and a long quivering ragged moan came up out of the empty well to climb upwards towards the darkening sky, a long hushing sigh which mingled with the hushing of the rain upon Lake Mareotis. The death of Narouz had begun to be borne. Balthazar with lowered head was quoting softly to himself in Greek the lines:

  Now the sorrow of the knowledge of parting

  Moves like wind in the rigging of the ship

  Of the man’s death, figurehead of the white body,

  The sails of the soul being filled

  By the Ghost of the Breath, replete and eternal.

  It was the signal for a release, for now the inescapably terrible scenes of a Coptic wake were to be enacted in the house, scenes charged with an ancient terror and abandon.

  Death had brought the women into their kingdom, and made them free to deliver each her inheritance of sorrow. They crept forward in a body, gathering speed as they mounted the staircases, their faces rapt and transfigured now as they uttered the first terrible screaming. Their fingers were turned into hooks now, tearing at their own flesh, their breasts, their cheeks, with a lustful abandon as they moved swiftly up the staircase. They were uttering that curious and thrilling ululation which is called the zagreet, their tongues rippling on their palates like mandolines. An ear-splitting chorus of tongue trills in various keys.

  The old house echoed to the shrieks of these harpies as they took possession of it and invaded the room of death to circle round the silent corpse, still repeating the blood-curdling signal of death, full of an unbearable animal abandon. They began the dances of ritual grief while Nessim and Balthazar sat silent upon their chairs, their heads sunk upon their breasts, their hands clasped — the very picture of human failure. They allowed these fierce quivering screams to pierce them to the very quick of their beings. Only submission now to the ritual of this ancient sorrow was permissible: and sorrow had become an orgiastic frenzy which bordered on madness. The women were dancing now as they circled the body, striking their breasts and howling, but dancing in the slow measured figures of a dance recaptured from long-forgotten friezes upon the tombs of the ancient world. They moved and swayed, quivering from throat to ankles, and they twisted and turned calling upon the dead man to rise. ‘Rise, my despair! Rise, my death! Rise, my golden one, my death, my camel, my protector! O beloved body full of seed, arise!’ And then the ghastly ululations torn from their throats, the bitter tears streaming from their torn minds. Round and round they moved, hypnotized by their own lamentations, infecting the whole house with their sorrow while from the dark courtyard below came the deeper, darker hum of their menfolk sobbing as they touched hands in consolation and repeated, to comfort one another: ‘Ma-a-lesh! Let it be forgiven! Nothing avails our grief!’

  So the sorrow multiplied and proliferated. From everywhere now the women came in numbers. Some had already put on the dress of ritual mourning — the dirty coverings of dark blue cotton. They had smeared their faces with indigo and rubbed ash from the fires into their black loosened tresses. They now answered the shrieks of their sisters above with their own, baring their glittering teeth, and climbed the stairs, poured into the upper rooms with the ruthlessness of demons. Room by room, with a systematic frenzy, they attacked the old house, pausing only to utter the same terrifying screams as they set about their work.

  Bedsteads, cupboards, sofas were propelled out upon the balcony and hurled from there into the courtyard. At each new crash a fresh fever of screaming — the long bubbling zagreet — would break out and be answered from every corner of the house. Now the mirrors were shivered into a thousand fragments, the pictures turned back to front, the carpets reversed. All the china and glass in the house — save for the ceremonial black coffee set which was kept for funerals — was now broken up, trampled on, shivered to atoms. It was all swept into a great mound on the balcony. Everything that might suggest the order and continuity of eardily life, domestic, personal or social, must be discarded now and obliterated. The systematic destruction of the memory of death itself in plates, pictures, ornaments or clothes.… The domestic furnishings of the house were completely wrecked now, and everything that remained had been covered in black drapes.

  Meanwhile, down below a great coloured tent had been pitched, a marquee, in which visiting mourners would come and sit through the whole of the ‘Night of Loneliness’ drinking coffee in silence from the black cups and listening to the deep thrilling moaning up above which swelled up from time to time into a new outbreak of screaming or the noise of a woman fainting, or rolling on the ground in a seizure. Nothing must be spared to make this great man’s funeral successful.

  Other mourners too had now begun to appear, both personal and professional, so to speak; those who had a personal stake in the funeral of a friend came to spend the night in the coloured marquee under the brilliant light. But there were others, the professional mourners of the surrounding villages for whom death was something like a public competition in the poetry of mourning; they came on foot, in carts, on camel-back. And as each entered the gate of the house she set up a long shivering cry, like an orgasm, that stirred the griefs of the other mourners anew, so that they responded from every corner of the house — the low sobbing notes gradually swelling into a blood-curdling and sustained tongue-trill that pierced the nerves.

  These professional mourners brought with them all the wild poetry of their caste, of memories loaded with years of death-practice. They were often young and beautiful. They were singers. They carried with them the ritual drums and tambourines to which they danced and which they used to punctuate their own grief and stimulate the flagging griefs of those who had already been in action. ‘Praise the inmate of the House’ they cried proudly as with superb and calculated slowness they began their slow dance about the body, turning and twisting in an ecstasy of pity as they recited eulogies couched in the finest poetic Arabic upon Narouz. They praised his character, his rectitude, his beauty, his riches. And these long perfectly turned strophes were punctuated by the sobs and groans of the audience, both above and below; so vulnerable to poetry, even the old men seated on the stiff-backed chairs in the tent below found their throats tightening until a dry sob broke from their lips and they hung their heads, whispering ‘Ma-a-lesh.’

  Among them, Mohammed Shebab, the old schoolmaster and friend of the Hosnanis, had pride of place. He was dressed in his best and even wore a pair of ancient pearl spats with a new scarlet tarbush. The memory of forgotten evenings which he had spent on the balcony of the old house listening to music with Nessim and Narouz, gossiping to Leila, smote him now with pain which was not feigned. And since the people of the Delta often use a wake as an excuse to discharge private griefs in communal mourning, he too found himself thinking of his dead sister and sobbing, and he turned to the servant, pressing money into his hand as he said: ‘Ask Alam the singer to sing the recitative of the Image of Women once more, please. I wish to mourn it through again.’ And as the great poem began, he leaned back luxuriously swollen with the refreshment of a sorrow which would achieve catharsis thus in poetry. There were others too who asked for their favourite laments to be sung, offering the singers the requisite payment. In this way the whole grief of the countryside was refunded once again into living, purged of bitterness, reconquered by the living through the dead image of Narouz.

  Until morning now it would be kept up, the strange circling dances, the ripple and shiver of tambourines, the tongue-trilling screams, and the slow pulse of the dirges with their magnificent plumage of metaphor and image — poetry of the death-house. Some were early overcome with exhaustion and several among the house-servants had fainted from hysteria after two hours of singing thus; th
e professional keeners, however, knew their own strength and behaved like the ritual performers they were. When overcome by excess of grief or by a long burst of screams, they would sink to the floor and take a short rest, sometimes even smoking a cigarette. Then they would once more join the circle of dancers, refreshed.

  Presently, however, when the first long passion of grief had been expressed, Nessim sent for the priests who would add the light of tall bloodless candles and the noise of the psalms to the sound of water and sponge — for the body must be washed. They came at last. The body-washers were the two beadles of the little Coptic Church — ignorant louts both. Here a hideous altercation broke out, for the dead man’s clothes are the perquisites of the layer-out, and the beadles could find nothing in Narouz’ shabby wardrobe which seemed an adequate recompense for the trouble. A few old cloaks and boots, a torn nightshirt, and a small embroidered cap which dated from his circumcision — that was all Narouz owned. Nor would the beadles accept money — that would have been unlucky. Nessim began to rage, but they stood there obstinate as mules, refusing to wash Narouz without the ritual payment. Finally both Nessim and Balthazar were obliged to get out of their own suits in order to make them over to the beadles as payment. They put on the tattered old clothes of Narouz with a shiver of dread — cloaks which hung down like a graduate’s gown upon their tall figures. But somehow the ceremony must be completed, so that he could be taken to the church at dawn for burial — or else the ceremonial mourners might keep up the performance for days and nights together: in the olden times such mourning lasted forty days! Nessim also ordered the coffin to be made, and the singing was punctuated all night by the sound of hammers and saws in the wheelwright’s yard hard by. Nessim himself was completely exhausted by now, and dozed fitfully on a chair, being woken from time to time by a burst of keening or by some personal problem which remained to be solved and which was submitted to his arbitration by the servants of the house.