Lawrence Durrell - The Alexandria Quartet

But he enjoyed lying in the yellow lamplight, picking his teeth with a match and brooding until he heard the hoarse waspish voice of his father call his name.

On the night in question he must have dozed off, for when he woke he found to his surprise that all was dark. A brilliant moonlight flooded the room and the balcony, but the lights had been extinguished by an unknown hand. He started up. Astonishingly, the balcony was empty. For a moment, Narouz thought he must be dreaming, for never before had his father gone to bed alone.

Yet standing there in the moonlight, battling with this sense of incomprehension and doubt, he thought he heard the sound of the wheel—chair’s rubber tyres rolling upon the wooden boards of the invalid’s bedroom. This was an astonishing departure from accepted routine. He crossed the balcony and tiptoed down the corridor in amazement. The door of his father’s room was open.

He peered inside. The room was full of moonlight. He heard the bump of the wheels upon the chest of drawers and a scrabble of fingers groping for a knob. Then he heard a drawer pulled open, and a sense of dismay filled him for he remembered that in it was kept the old Colt revolver which belonged to his father. He suddenly found himself unable to move or speak as he heard the breech snapped open and the unmistakable sound of paper rustling — a sound immediately interpreted by his memory. Then the small precise click of the shells slipping into the chambers. It was as if he were trapped in one of those dreams where one is running with all one’s might and yet unable to move from the same spot. As the breech snapped home and the weapon was assembled, Narouz gathered himself together to walk boldly into the room but found that he could not move. His spine got pins and needles and he felt the hair bristle up on the back of his neck.

Overcome by one of the horrifying inhibitions of early childhood he could do no more than take a single slow step forward and halt in the doorway, his teeth clenched to prevent them chattering.

The moonlight shone directly on to the mirror, and by its reflected light he could see his father sitting upright in his chair, confronting his own image with an expression on his face which Narouz had never before seen. It was bleak and impassive, and in that ghostly derived light from the pierglass it looked denuded of all human feeling, picked clean by the emotions which had been steadily sapping it. The younger son watched as if mesmerized.

(Once, in early childhood, he had seen something like it — but not quite as stern, not quite as withdrawn as this: yet something like it. That was when his father was describing the death of the evil factor Mahmoud, when he said grimly: ‘So they came and tied him to a tree. Et on lui a coupe les choses and stuffed them into his mouth. ’ As a child it was enough just to repeat the words and recall the expression on his father’s face to make Narouz feel on the point of fainting. Now this incident came back to him with redoubled terror as he saw the invalid confronting himself in a moonlight image, slowly raising the pistol to point it, not at his temple, but at the mirror, as he repeated in a hoarse croaking voice:

‘And now if she should fall in love, you know what you must do.’) Presently there was a silence and a single dry weary sob. Narouz felt tears of sympathy come into his eyes but still the spell held him; he could neither move nor speak nor even sob aloud. His father’s head sank down on his breast, and his pistol-hand fell with it until Narouz heard the faint tap of the barrel on the floor.

A long thrilling silence fell in the room, in the corridor, on the balcony, the gardens everywhere — the silence of a relief which once more let the imprisoned blood flow in his heart and veins.

(Somewhere sighing in her sleep Leila must have turned, pressing her disputed white arms to a cool place among the pillows.) A single mosquito droned. The spell dissolved.

Narouz retired down the corridor to the balcony where he stood for a moment fighting with his tears before calling ‘Father’; his voice was squeaky and nervous — the voice of a schoolboy.

At once the light went on in his father’s room, a drawer closed, and he heard the noise of rubber rolling on wood. He waited for a long second and presently came the familiar testy growl ‘Narouz’ which told him that everything was well. He blew his nose in his sleeve and hurried into the bedroom. His father was sitting facing the door with a book upon his knees. ‘Lazy brute’ he said, ‘I could not wake you.’

‘I’m sorry’ said Narouz. He was all of a sudden delighted.

So great was his relief that he suddenly wished to abase himself, to be sworn at, to be abused. ‘I am a lazy brute, a thoughtless swine, a grain of salt’ he said eagerly, hoping to provoke his father into still more wounding reproaches. He was smiling. He wanted to bathe voluptuously in the sick man’s fury.

‘Get me to bed’ said the invalid shortly, and his son stooped with lustful tenderness to gather up that wasted body from the wheel—chair, inexpressibly relieved that there was still breath in it….

But how indeed was Mountolive to know all this? He only recognized a reserve in Narouz which was absent from the gently smiling Nessim. As for the father of Narouz, he was quite frankly disturbed by him, by his sick hanging head, and the self-pity which his voice exuded. Unhappily, too, there was another conflict which had to find an issue somehow, and this time Mountolive unwittingly provided an opening by committing one of those gaffes which diplomats, more than any other tribe, fear and dread; the memory of which can keep them awake at nights for years. It was an absurd enough slip, but it gave the sick man an excuse for an outburst which Mountolive recognized as characteristic. It all happened at table, during dinner one evening, and at first the company laughed easily enough over it — and in the expanding circle of their communal amusement there was no bitterness, only the smiling protest of Leila: ‘But my dear David, we are not Moslems, but Christians like yourself. ’ Of course he had known this; how could his words have slipped out? It was one of those dreadful remarks which once uttered seem not only inexcusable but also impossible to repair. Nessim, however, appeared delighted rather than offended, and with his usual tact, did not permit himself to laugh aloud without touching his friend’s wrist with his hand, lest by chance Mountolive might think the laughter directed at him rather than at his mistake. Yet, as the laughter itself fell away, he became consciously aware that a wound had been opened from the flinty features of the man in the wheel—chair who alone did not smile. ‘I see nothing to smile at.’ His fingers plucked at the shiny arms of the chair. ‘Nothing at all. The slip exactly expresses the British point of view — the view with which we Copts have always had to contend. There were never any differences between us and the Moslems in Egypt before they came.

The British have taught the Moslems to hate the Copts and to discriminate against them. Yes, Mountolive, the British. Pay heed to my words.’

‘I am sorry’ stammered Mountolive, still trying to atone for his gaffe.

‘I am not’ said the invalid. ‘It is good that we should mention these matters openly because we Copts feel them in here, in our deepest hearts. The British have made the Moslems oppress us.

Study the Commission. Talk to your compatriots there about the Copts and you will hear their contempt and loathing of us. They have inoculated the Moslems with it.’

‘Oh, surely, Sir!’ said Mountolive, in an agony of apology.

‘Surely’ asseverated the sick man, nodding his head upon that sprained stalk of neck. ‘We know the truth.’ Leila made some small involuntary gesture, almost a signal, as if to stop her husband before he was fully launched into a harangue, but he did not heed her. He sat back chewing a piece of bread and said indistinctly: ‘But then what do you, what does any Englishman know or care of the Copts?