The Alexandria Quartet (7 page)

It was already forty minutes past the hour and he had already given the signal for dinner to begin when the little black telephone extension gave a small needle-like sound. He crossed to the table and picked it up with a sigh, and I heard him say, ‘yes' impatiently; then he spoke for a while in a low voice, the language changing abruptly to Arabic, and for a moment I had the sudden intuitive feeling that it was Mnemjian talking to him over the wire. I do not know why I should feel this. He scribbled something rapidly on an envelope and putting down the receiver stood for a second memorizing what he had written. Then he turned to me, and it was all of a sudden a different Nessim who said: ‘Justine may need our help. Will you come with me?' And without waiting for an answer he ran down the steps, past the lily-pond in the direction of the garage. I followed as well as I could and it could only have been a matter of minutes before he swung the little sports car through the heavy gates into Rue Fuad and began to weave his way down to the sea through the network of streets which slide down towards Ras El Tin. Though it was not late there were few people about and we raced away along the curving flanks of the Esplanade towards the Yacht Club grimly overtaking the few horse-drawn cabs (‘carriages of love') which dawdled up and down by the sea.

At the fort we doubled back and entered the huddled slums which lie behind Tatwig Street, our blond headlights picking out the ant-hill cafés and crowded squares with an unaccustomed radiance; from somewhere behind the immediate skyline of smashed and unlimbered houses came the piercing shrieks and ululations of a burial procession, whose professional mourners made the night hideous with their plaints for the dead. We abandoned the car in a narrow street by the mosque and Nessim entered the shadowy doorway of some great tenement house, half of which consisted of shuttered and barred offices with blurred nameplates. A solitary
boab
(the
concierge
of Egypt) sat on his perch wrapped in clouts, for all the world like some discarded material object (an old motor tyre, say) — smoking a short-stemmed hubble-bubble. Nessim spoke to him sharply, and almost before the man could reply passed through the back of the building into a sort of dark backyard flanked by a series of dilapidated houses built of earth-brick and scaly plaster. He stopped only to light his cigarette-lighter, and by its feeble light we began to quest along the doors. At the fourth door he clicked the machine shut and knocked with his fist. Receiving no answer he pushed it open.

A dark corridor led to a small shadowy room lit by the feeble light of rush-lamps. This was apparently our destination.

The scene upon which we intruded was ferociously original, if for no other reason than that the light, pushing up from the mud floor, touched out the eyebrows and lips and cheek-bones of the participants while it left great patches of shadow on their faces — so that they looked as if they had been half-eaten by the rats which one could hear scrambling among the rafters of this wretched tenement. It was a house of child prostitutes, and there in the dimness, clad in ludicrous biblical night-shirts, with rouged lips, arch bead fringes and cheap rings, stood a dozen fuzzy-haired girls who could not have been much above ten years of age; the peculiar innocence of childhood which shone out from under the fancy-dress was in startling contrast to the barbaric adult figure of the French sailor who stood in the centre of the room on flexed calves, his ravaged and tormented face thrust out from the neck towards Justine who stood with her half-profile turned towards us. What he had just shouted had expired on the silence but the force with which the words had been uttered was still visible in the jut of the chin and the black corded muscles which held his head upon his shoulders. As for Justine, her face was lit by a sort of painful academic precision. She held a bottle raised in one hand, and it was clear that she had never thrown one before, for she held it the wrong way.

On a rotting sofa in one corner of the room, magnetically lit by the warm shadow reflected from the walls, lay one of the children horribly shrunk up in its nightshirt in an attitude which suggested death. The wall above the sofa was covered in the blue imprints of juvenile hands — the talisman which in this part of the world guards a house against the evil eye. It was the only decoration in the room; indeed the commonest decoration of the whole Arab quarter of the city.

We stood there, Nessim and I, for a good half-second, astonished by the scene which had a sort of horrifying beauty — like some hideous coloured engraving for a Victorian penny bible, say, whose subject matter had somehow become distorted and displaced. Justine was breathing harshly in a manner which suggested that she was on the point of tears.

We pounced on her, I suppose, and dragged her out into the street; at any rate I can only remember the three of us reached the sea and driving the whole length of the Corniche in clean bronze moonlight, Nessim's sad and silent face reflected in the driving-mirror, and the figure of his silent wife seated beside him, gazing out at the crashing silver waves and smoking the cigarette which she had burrowed from the pockets of his jacket. Later, in the garage, before we left the car, she kissed Nessim tenderly on the eyes.

All this I have come to regard as a sort of overture to that first real meeting face to face, when such understanding as we had enjoyed until then — a gaiety and friendship founded in tastes which were common to the three of us — disintegrated into something which was not love — how could it have been? — but into a sort of mental possession in which the bonds of a ravenous sexuality played the least part. How did we let it come about — matched as we were so well in experience, weathered and seasoned by the disappointments of love in other places?

In autumn the female bays turn to uneasy phosphorus and after the long chafing days of dust one feels the first palpitations of the autumn, like the wings of a butterfly fluttering to unwrap themselves. Mareotis turns lemon-mauve and its muddy flanks are starred by sheets of radiant anemones, growing through the quickened plaster-mud of the shore. One day while Nessim was away in Cairo I called at the house to borrow some books and to my surprise found Justine alone in the studio, darning an old pullover. She had taken the night train back to Alexandria, leaving Nessim to attend some business conference. We had tea together and then, on a sudden impulse took our bathing things and drove out through the rusty slag-heaps of Mex towards the sand-beaches off Bourg El Arab, glittering in the mauve-lemon light of the fast-fading afternoon. Here the open sea boomed upon the carpets of fresh sand the colour of oxidized mercury; its deep melodious percussion was the background to such conversation as we had. We walked ankle deep in the spurge of those shallow dimpled pools, choked here and there with sponges torn up by the roots and flung ashore. We passed no one on the road I remember save a gaunt Bedouin youth carrying on his head a wire crate full of wild birds caught with lime-twigs. Dazed quail.

We lay for a long time, side by side in our wet bathing costumes to take the last pale rays of the sun upon our skins in the delicious evening coolness. I lay with half-shut eyes while Justine (how clearly I see her!) was up on one elbow, shading her eyes with the palm of one hand and watching my face. Whenever I was talking she had the habit of gazing at my lips with a curious half-mocking, an almost impertinent intentness, as if she were waiting for me to mispronounce a word. If indeed it all began at this point I have forgotten the context, but I remember the hoarse troubled voice saying something like: ‘And if it should happen to us — what would you say?' But before I could say anything she leaned down and kissed me — I should say derisively, antagonistically, on the mouth. This seemed so much out of character that I turned with some sort of half-formulated reproach on my lips — but from here on her kisses were like tremendous soft breathless stabs punctuating the savage laughter which seemed to well up in her — a jeering unstable laughter. It struck me then that she was like someone who had had a bad fright. If I said now: ‘It must not happen to us' she must have replied: ‘But let us
suppose
. What if it did?' Then — and this I remember clearly — the mania for self-justification seized her (we spoke French: language creates national character) and between those breathless half-seconds when I felt her strong mouth on my own and those worldly brown arms closing upon mine: ‘I would not mistake it for gluttony or self-indulgence. We are too worldly for that: simply we have something to learn from each other. What is it?'

What was it? ‘And is this the way?' I remember asking as I saw the tall toppling figure of Nessim upon the evening sky. ‘I do not know' she said with a savage, obstinate desperate expression of humility upon her face, ‘I do not know*; and she pressed herself upon me like someone pressing upon a bruise. It was as if she wished to expunge the very thought of me, and yet in the fragile quivering context of every kiss found a sort of painful surcease — like cold water on a sprain. How well I recognized her now as a child of the city, which decrees that its women shall be the voluptuaries not of pleasure but of pain, doomed to hunt for what they least dare to find!

She got up now and walked away down the long curving perspective of the beach, crossing the pools of lava slowly, her head bent; and I thought of Nessim's handsome face smiling at her from every mirror in the room. The whole of the scene which we had just enacted was invested in my mind with a dream-like improbability. It was curious in an objective sort of way to notice how my hands trembled as I lit a cigarette and rose to follow her.

But when I overtook her and halted her the face she turned to me was that of a sick demon. She was in a towering rage. ‘You thought I simply wanted to make love? God! haven't we had enough of that? How is it that you do not
know
what I feel for once? How is it?' She stamped her foot in the wet sand. It was not merely that a geological fault had opened in the ground upon which we had been treading with such self-confidence. It was as if some long-disused mineshaft in my own character had suddenly fallen in. I recognized that this barren traffic in ideas and feelings had driven a path through towards the denser jungles of the heart; and that here we became bondsmen in the body, possessors of an enigmatic knowledge which could only be passed on — received, deciphered, understood — by those rare complementaries of ours in the world. (How few they were, how seldom one found them!) ‘After all' I remember her saying, ‘this has nothing to do with sex' which tempted me to laugh though I recognized in the phrase her desperate attempt to dissociate the flesh from the message it carried. I suppose this sort of thing always happens to bankrupts when they fall in love. I saw then what I should have seen long before: namely that our friendship had ripened to a point when we had already become in a way part-owners of each other.

I think we were both horrified by the thought; for exhausted as we were we could not help but quail before such a relationship. We did not say any more but walked back along the beach to where we had left our clothes, speechless and hand in hand. Justine looked utterly exhausted. We were both dying to get away from each other, in order to examine our own feelings. We did not speak to each other again. We drove into the city and she dropped me at the usual corner near my flat. I snapped the door of the car closed and she drove off without a word or a glance in my direction.

As I opened the door of my room I could still see the imprint of Justine's foot in the wet sand. Melissa was reading, and looking up at me she said with characteristic calm foreknowledge: ‘Something has happened — what is it?' I could not tell her since I did not myself know. I took her face in my hands and examined it silently, with a care and attention, with a sadness and hunger I don't ever remember feeling before. She said: ‘It is not me you are seeing, it is someone else.' But in truth I was seeing Melissa for the first time. In some paradoxical way it was Justine who was now permitting me to see Melissa as she really was — and to recognize my love for her. Melissa smilingly reached for a cigarette and said: ‘You are falling in love with Justine' and I answered as sincerely, as honestly, as painfully as I could: ‘No Melissa, it is worse than that' — though I could not for the life of me have explained how or why.

When I thought of Justine I thought of some great freehand composition, a cartoon of a woman representing someone released from bondage in the male. ‘Where the carrion is' she once quoted proudly. from Boehme, speaking of her native city, ‘there the eagles will gather.' Truly she looked and seemed an eagle at this moment. But Melissa was a sad painting from a winter landscape contained by dark sky; a window-box with a few flowering geraniums lying forgotten on the windowsill of a cement-factory.

There is a passage in one of Justine's diaries which comes to mind here. I translate it here because though it must have referred to incidents long preceding those which. I have recounted yet nevertheless it almost exactly expresses the curiously ingrown quality of a love which I have come to recognize as peculiar to the city rather than to ourselves. ‘Idle' she writes ‘to imagine falling in love as a correspondence of minds, of thoughts; it is a simultaneous firing of two spirits engaged in the autonomous act of growing up. And the sensation is of something having noiselessly exploded inside each of them. Around this event, dazed and preoccupied, the lover moves examining his or her own experience; her gratitude alone, stretching away towards a mistaken donor, creates the illusion that she communicates with her fellow, but this is false. The loved object is simply one that has shared an experience at the same moment of time, narcissistically; and the desire to be near the beloved object is at first not due to the idea of possessing it, but simply to let the two experiences compare themselves, like reflections in different mirrors. All this may precede the first look, kiss, or touch; precede ambition, pride or envy; precede the first declarations which mark the turning point — for from here love degenerates into habit, possession, and back to loneliness.' How characteristic and how humourless a delineation of the magical gift: and yet how true… of Justine!