Lawrence Durrell - The Alexandria Quartet

I had remembered the existence of an old doctor, a Greek, who lived down the street, and it was not long before I managed to fetch him up the dark staircase, stumbling and swearing in a transpontine demotic, dropping catheters and stethoscopes all the way.

He pronounced Melissa very ill indeed but his diagnosis was ample and vague — in the tradition of the city. ‘It is everything’ he said, ‘malnutrition, hysteria, alcohol, hashish, tuberculosis, Spanish fly help yourself’ and he made the gesture of putting his hand in his pocket and fetching it out full of imaginary diseases which he offered us to choose from. But he was also practical, and proposed to have a bed ready for her in the Greek Hospital next day. Meanwhile she was not to be moved.

I spent that night and the next on the couch at the foot of the bed. While I was out at work she was confided to the care of oneeyed Hamid, the gentlest of Berberines. For the first twelve hours she was very ill indeed, delirious at times, and suffered agonizing attacks of blindness — agonizing because they made her so afraid.

But by being gently rough with her we managed between us to give her courage enough to surmount the worst, and by the afternoon of the second day she was well enough to talk in whispers.

The Greek doctor pronounced himself satisfied with her progress.

He asked her where she came from and a haunted expression came into her face as she replied ‘Smyrna’; nor would she give the name and address of her parents, and when he pressed her she turned her face to the wall and tears of exhaustion welled slowly out of her eyes. The doctor took up her hand and examined the weddingfinger. ‘You see’ he said to me with a clinical detachment, pointing out the absence of a ring, ‘that is why. Her family has disowned her and turned her out of doors. It is so often these days …’ and he shook a shaggy commiserating head over her. Melissa said nothing, but when the ambulance came and the stretcher was being prepared to take her away she thanked me warmly for my help, pressed Hamid’s hand to her cheek, and surprised me by a gallantry to which my life had unaccustomed me: ‘If you have no girl when I come out, think of me. If you call me I will come to you.’* I do not know how to reduce the gallant candour of the Greek to English.

So I had lost sight of her for a month or more; and indeed I did not think of her, having many other preoccupations at this time.

Then, one hot blank afternoon, when I was sitting at my window watching the city unwrinkle from sleep I saw a different Melissa walk down the street and turn into the shadowy doorway of the house. She tapped at my door and walked in with her arms full of flowers, and all at once I found myself separated from that forgotten evening by centuries. She had in her something of the same diffidence with which I later saw her take up a collection for the orchestra in the night-club. She looked like a statue of pride hanging its head.

A nerve-racking politeness beset me. I offered her a chair and she sat upon the edge of it. The flowers were for me, yes, but she had not the courage to thrust the bouquet into my arms, and I could see her gazing distractedly around for a vase into which she might put them. There was only an enamel washbasin full of halfpeeled potatoes. I began to wish she had not come. I would have liked to offer her some tea but my electric ring was broken and I had no money to take her out — at this time I was sliding ever more steeply into debt. Besides, I had sent Hamid out to have my only summer suit ironed and was clad in a torn dressing-gown.

She for her part looked wonderfully, intimidatingly smart, with a new summer frock of a crisp vine-leaf pattern and a straw hat like a great gold bell. I began to pray passionately that Hamid would come back and create a diversion. I would have offered her a cigarette but my packet was empty and I was forced to accept one of her own from the little filigree cigarette-case she always carried.

This I smoked with what I hoped was an air of composure and told her that I had accepted a new job near Sidi Gabr, which would mean a little extra money. She said she was going back to work; her contract had been renewed: but they were giving her less money.

After a few minutes of this sort of thing she said that she must be leaving as she had a tea-appointment. I showed her out on the landing and asked her to come again whenever she wished. She thanked me, still clutching the flowers which she was too timid to thrust upon me and walked slowly downstairs. After she had gone I sat on the bed and uttered every foul swear-word I could remember in four languages — though it was not clear to me whom I was addressing. By the time one-eyed Hamid came shuffling in I was still in a fury and turned my anger upon him. This startled him considerably: it was a long time since I had lost my temper with him, and he retired into the scullery muttering and shaking his head and invoking the spirits to help him.

After I had dressed and managed to borrow some money from Pursewarden — while I was on my way to post a letter — I saw Melissa again sitting in the corner of a coffee shop, alone, with her hands supporting her chin. Her hat and handbag lay beside her and she was staring into her cup with a wry reflective air of amusement.

Impulsively I entered the place and sat down beside her. I had come, I said, to apologize for receiving her so badly, but … and I began to describe the circumstances which had preoccupied me, leaving nothing out. The broken electric-ring, the absence of Hamid, my summer-suit. As I began to enumerate the evils by which I was beset they began to seem to me slightly funny, and altering my angle of approach I began to recount them with a lugubrious exasperation which coaxed from her one of the most delightful laughs I have ever heard. On the subject of my debts I frankly exaggerated, though it was certainly a fact that since the night of the affray Pursewarden was always ready to lend me small sums of money without hesitation. And then to cap it all, I said, she had appeared while I was still barely cured of a minor but irritating venereal infection — the fruit of Pombal’s solicitude — contracted no doubt from one of the Syrians he had thoughtfully left behind him. This was a he but I felt impelled to relate it in spite of myself. I had been horrified I said at the thought of having to make love again before I was quite well. At this she put out her hand and placed it on mine while she laughed, wrinkling up her nose: laughing with such candour, so lightly and effortlessly, that there and then I decided to love her.

We idled arm in arm by the sea that afternoon, our conversations full of the debris of lives lived without forethought, without architecture. We had not a taste in common. Our characters and predispositions were wholly different, and yet in the magical ease of this friendship we felt something promised us. I like, also, to remember that first kiss by the sea, the wind blowing up a flake of hair at each white temple — a kiss broken off by the laughter which beset her as she remembered my account of the trials I was enduring. It symbolized the passion we enjoyed, its humour and lack of intenseness: its charity.

*******

Two subjects upon which it was fruitless to question Justine too closely: her age, her origins. Nobody — possibly not even, I believe, Nessim himself — knew all about her with any certainty.

Even the city’s oracle Mnemjian seemed for once at loss, though he was knowledgeable about her recent love affairs. Yet the violet eyes narrowed as he spoke of her and hesitantly he volunteered the information that she came from the dense Attarine Quarter, and had been born of a poor Jewish family which had since emigrated to Salonika. The diaries are not very helpful either since they lack clues — names, dates, places — and consist for the most part of wild flights of fancy punctuated by bitter little anecdotes and sharp line-drawings of people whose identity is masked by a letter of the alphabet. The French she writes in is not very correct, but spirited and highly—flavoured; and carries the matchless quality of that husky speaking-voice. Look: ‘Clea speaking of her childhood: thinking of mine, passionately thinking. The childhood of my race, my time…. Blows first in the hovel behind the Stadium; the clock-mender’s shop. I see myself now caught in the passionate concentration of watching a lover’s sleeping face as I so often saw him bent over a broken timepiece with the harsh light pouring down noiselessly over him. Blows and curses, and printed everywhere on the red mud walls (like the blows struck by conscience) the imprint of blue hands, fingers outstretched, that guarded us against the evil eye. With these blows we grew up, aching heads, flinching eyes. A house with an earthen floor alive with rats, dim with wicks floating upon oil. The old money-lender drunk and snoring, drawing in with every breath the compost-odours, soil, excrement, the droppings of bats; gutters choked with leaves and breadcrumbs softened by piss; yellow wreaths of jasmine, heady, meretricious. And then add screams in the night behind other shutters in that crooked street: the bey beating his wives because he was impotent. The old herb-woman selling herself every night on the flat ground among the razed houses — a sulky mysterious whining. The soft pelm noise of bare black feet passing on the baked mud street, late at night. Our room bulging with darkness and pestilence, and we Europeans in such disharmony with the fearful animal health of the blacks around us. The copulations of boabs shaking the house like a palm-tree. Black tigers with gleaming teeth. And everywhere the veils, the screaming, the mad giggle under the pepper-trees, the insanity and the lepers. Such things as children see and store up to fortify or disorient their lives. A camel has collapsed from exhaustion in the street outside the house. It is too heavy to transport to the slaughter-house so a couple of men come with axes and cut it up there and then in the open street, alive. They hack through the white flesh — the poor creature looking ever more pained, more aristocratic, more puzzled as its legs are hacked off. Finally there is the head still alive, the eyes open, looking round. Not a scream of protest, not a struggle.