The Alexandria Quartet (57 page)

Narouz felt as if he were subtly drugged by the haze rising from the water of the canals. ‘Playing by the river' he went on. ‘She has fallen'; he could hear the breathing of his mentor becoming deeper. She has fallen' intoned the Magzub. Narouz went on: ‘No-one is near her. She is alone. She is dressed in blue with a butterfly brooch.' There was a long silence; then the magician groaned softly before saying in a thick, almost gurgling tone: ‘You have seen — to the very place. Mighty is God. In Him is my scope.' And he took a pinch of dust and rubbed it upon his forehead as the vision faded.

Narouz, deeply impressed by these powers, kissed and embraced the Magzub, never for one moment doubting the validity of the information he had been granted in the vision. He rose to his feet and shook himself like a dog. They greeted one another now in low whispers and parted. He left the magician sitting there, as if exhausted, upon the ground, and turned his steps once more towards the fair-lights. His body was still shaking with the reaction as if afflicted by pins and needles — or as if an electric current were discharging through his loins and thighs. He had, he realised; been very much afraid. He yawned and shivered as he walked and struck his arms against his legs for warmth — as if to restore a sluggish circulation.

In order to reach the carpenter's yard where his horse was stabled, he had to traverse the eastern corner of the festival ground, where despite the lateness of the hour there was a good deal of hubbub around the swings, and the lights still blazed. It was the time when the prostitutes came into their own, the black, bronze and citron women, impenitent seekers for the money-flesh of men; flesh of every colour, ivory or gold or black. Sudanese with mauve gums and tongues as blue as chows'. Waxen Egyptians. Circassians golden-haired and blue of eye. Earth-blue negresses, pungent as wood-smoke. Every variety of the name of flesh, old flesh quailing upon aged bones, or the unquenched flesh of boys and women on limbs infirm with the desires that could be represented in effigy but not be slaked except in mime — for they were desires engendered in the forests of the mind, belonging not to themselves but to remote ancestors speaking through them. Lust belongs to the egg and its seat is below the level of psyche.

The hot blank Alexandrian night burned as brightly as a cresset, reaching up through the bare soles of the black feet to warm the incorrigible hearts and minds. In all this frenzy and loveliness Narouz felt himself borne along, buoyant as a lily floating on a river, yet burrowing deeply into the silence of his own mind as he went to where the archetypes of these marvellous images waited for him.

It was now that he saw, idly, a short scene enacted before his eyes — a scene whose meaning he did not grasp, and which indeed concerned someone he had never met and would never meet: except in the pages of this writing — Scobie.

Somewhere in the direction of the circumcision booths a riot had started. The frail canvas and paper walls with their lurid iconography trembled and shook, voices snarled and screamed and hobnailed boots thundered upon the impermanent flooring of duck-boards; and then, bursting through those paper walls into the white light, holding a child wrapped in a blanket, staggered an old man dressed in the uniform of an Egyptian Police Officer, his frail putteed shanks quavering under him as he ran. Behind him streamed a crowd of Arabs yelling and growling like savage but cowardly dogs. This whole company burst in a desperate sortie right across Narouz' tracks. The old man in uniform was shouting in a frail voice, but what he shouted was lost in the hubbub; he staggered across the road to an ancient cab and climbed into it. It set off at once at a ragged trot followed by a fusillade of stones and curses. That was all.

As Narouz watched this little scene, his curiosity aroused by it, a voice spoke out of the shadows at his side — a voice whose sweetness and depth could belong to one person only: Clea. He was stabbed to the quick — drawing his breath sharply, painfully, and joining his hands in a sudden gesture of childish humility at the sound. The voice was the voice of the woman he loved but it came from a hideous form, seated in half-shadow — the grease-folded body of a Moslem woman who sat unveiled before her paper hut on a three-legged stool. As she spoke, she was eating a sesame cake with the air of some huge caterpillar nibbling a lettuce — and at the same time speaking in the veritable accents of Clea!

Narouz went to her side at once, saying in a low wheedling voice: ‘O my mother, speak to me'; and once more he heard those perfectly orchestrated tones murmuring endearments and humble blandishments to draw him towards the little torture-chamber. (Petesouchos the crocodile goddess, no less.)

Blind now to everything but the cadences of the voice he followed her like an addict, standing inside the darkened room with eyes closed, his hands upon her great quivering breasts — as if to drink up the music of these slowly falling words of love in one long wholesome draught. Then he sought her mouth feverishly, as if he would suck the very image of Clea from her breath — from that sesame-laden breath. He trembled with excitement — the perilous feeling of one about to desecrate a sacred place by some irresistible obscenity whose meaning flickered like lightning in the mind with a horrible beauty of its own. (Aphrodite permits every conjugation of the mind and sense in love.)

He loosened his clothing and pressed this great doll of flesh slowly down upon the dirty bed, coaxing from her body with his powerful hands the imagined responses he might have coaxed perhaps from another and better-loved form. ‘Speak, my mother' he whispered hoarsely, ‘speak while I do it. Speak.' Expressing from this great white caterpillar-form one rare and marvellous image, rare perhaps as an Emperor moth, the beauty of Clea. Oh, but how horrible and beautiful to lie there at last, squeezed out like an old paint-tube among the weeping ruins of intestate desires: himself, his own inner man, thrown finally back into the isolation of a personal dream, transitory as childhood, and not less heartbreaking: Clea!

But he was interrupted, yes; for now as I refashion these scenes in the light of the Interlinear, my memory revives something which it had forgotten; memories of a dirty booth with a man and woman lying together in a bed and myself looking down at them, half-drunk, waiting my turn. I have described the whole scene in another place — only then I took the man to be Mnemjian. I now wonder if it was Narouz. ‘They lay there like the victims of some terrible accident, clumsily engaged, as if in some incoherent experimental fashion they were the first partners in the history of the human race to think out this peculiar means of communication.'

And this woman, with her ‘black spokes of toiling hair', that lay in Narouz' arms — would Clea or Justine recognize themselves in a mother-image of themselves woven out of moneyed flesh? Narouz was drinking Clea thirstily out of this old body hired for pleasure, just as I myself wished only to drink Justine. Once again ‘the austere, mindless primeval face of Aphrodite!'

Yes, but thirst
can
be quenched like this, by inviting a succubus to one's bed; and Narouz later wandered about in the darkness, incoherent as a madman, swollen with a relief he could barely stand. He felt like singing. Indeed, if one cannot say that he had completely forgotten Clea at this moment, one can at least assert that the act had delivered him from her image. He was wholly purged of her — and indeed would have had at this moment even the courage to
hate
her. Such is the polarity of love. ‘True' love.

He went back slowly, by winding ways, to his carpenter friend and claimed his horse, after first rousing the family to reassure them that it was not a thief who was making a noise in the stable at this hour.

Then he rode back to his lands, the happiest young man alive, and reached the manor as the first streaks of dawn were in the sky. As no-one was about he wrapped, himself in a cloak and rested on the balcony until the sun should wake him up. He wanted to tell his brother the news.

But Nessim listened quietly and seriously to his whole story the next morning, wondering that the human heart makes no sound when the blood drains out of it drop by drop — for he thought he saw in this piece of information a vital check to the growth of the confidence he wished to foster in his wife. ‘I do not suppose' said Narouz ‘that after so long we could find the body but I'll go over with Faraj and some grapnels and see — there can be no harm in trying. Shall I?' Nessim's shoulders had contracted. His brother paused for a moment and then went on in the same level tone: ‘Now I did not know anything before about how the child was dressed. But I will describe what I saw in the ground. She had a blue frock with a brooch in the shape of a butterfly.' Nessim said, almost impatiently: ‘Yes. Perfectly true. It was the description Justine gave to the Parquet. I remember the description. So, well, Narouz … what can I say? It is true. I want to thank you. But as for the dragging — it has been done at least a dozen times by the Parquet. Yes, without result. There is a cut there in the canal and a runaway with a strong undercurrent.'

‘I see' said Narouz, cast down.

‘It is difficult to know.' But Nessim's voice sharpened its edge as he added: ‘But one thing, promise me. She must never know the truth from your lips. Promise.'

‘I promise you that' said his brother as Nessim turned aside from the hall telephone and came face to face with his wife. Her face was pale and her great eyes searched his with suspense and curiosity. ‘I must go now' said Nessim hurriedly and put down the receiver as he turned to face her and take her hands in his. In memory, I always see them like this, staring at each other with clasped hands, so near together, so far apart. The telephone is a modern symbol for communications which never take place.

VIII

‘I
told you of Scobie's death (so wrote Balthazar) but I did not tell you in detail the manner of it. I myself did not know him very well but I knew of your affection for him. It was not a very pleasant business and I was concerned in it entirely by accident — indeed, only because Nimrod, who runs the Secretariat, and was Scobie's chief at three removes, happened to be dining with me on that particular evening.

‘You remember Nimrod? Well, we had recently been competing for the favours of a charming young Athenian actor known by the delightful name of Socrates Pittakakis, and as any serious rivalry might have caused a bad feeling between us which neither could afford on the official level (I am in some sense a consultant to his department) we had sensibly decided to bury our jealousy and frankly share the youth — as all good Alexandrians should. We were therefore dining
à trois
at the Auberge Bleue with the young man between us like the filling in a meat sandwich. I must admit that I had a slight advantage over Nimrod whose Greek is poor, but in general the spirit of reason and measure reigned. The actor, who drank champagne in stout all evening — he was recovering he explained from a wasting malady by this method — in the last analysis refused to have anything to do with either of us, and indeed turned out to be passionately in love with a heavily moustached Armenian girl in my clinic. So all this effort was wasted — I must say Nimrod was particularly bitter as he had had to pay for this grotesque dinner. Well, as I say, here we all were when the great man was called away to the telephone.

‘He came back after a while, looking somewhat grave, and said: “It was from the Police Station by the docks. Apparently an old man has been kicked to death by the ratings of H.M.S.
Milton
. I have reason to believe that it might be one of the eccentrics of Q branch — there is an old Bimbashi employed there.…” He stood irresolutely on one leg. “At any rate” he went on “I must go down and make sure. You never know. Apparently” he lowered his voice and drew me to one side in confidence “he was dressed in woman's clothes. There may be a scandal.”

‘Poor Nimrod! I could see that while his duty pressed him hard, he was most reluctant that I should be left alone with the actor. He hovered and pondered heavily. At last, however, my finer nature came to my rescue just when I had given up hope. I too rose. Undying sportsmanship! “I had better come with you” said I. The poor man broke into troubled smiles and thanked me warmly for the gesture. We left the young man eating fish (this time for brain fag) and hurried to the car park where Nimrod's official car was waiting for him. It did not take us very long to race along the Corniche and turn down into the echoing darkness of the dock-area with its cobbled alleys and the flickering gas light along the wharves which makes it seem so like a corner of Marseilles circa 1850. I have always hated the place with its smells of sea-damp and urinals and sesame.

‘The police post was a red circular building like a Victorian post office consisting of a small charge-room and two dark sweating dungeons, airless and terrible in that summer night. It was packed with jabbering and sweating policemen all showing the startled whites of their eyes like horses in the gloom. Upon a stone bench in one of the cells lay the frail and ancient figure of an old woman with a skirt dragged up above the waist to reveal thin legs clad in green socks held by suspenders and black naval boots. The electric light had failed and a wavering candle on the sill above the body dripped wax on to one withered old hand, now beginning to settle with the approach of the rigor into a histrionic gesture — as of someone warding off a stage blow. It was your friend Scobie.