Lawrence Durrell - The Alexandria Quartet

He stood for a while unsure of himself, unsure what to say next.

The factor closed the great doors abruptly behind him, and at once he stood, black against the darkness now, staring up the stairway to where his unknown brother stood with a kind of watchful impenitent awareness. A bat ripped across the light and he saw Narouz’ arm swing with an involuntary motion and then fall to the side again; from his vantage point at the top of the stairway he could shoot, so to speak, downwards upon his targets. Neither said anything for a while; then a door opened with a creak, throwing out a shaft of light across his path, and the factor came out of the outhouse with a broom with which he started to sweep up the fragments of fluttering bodies of Narouz’ victims which littered the earthen floor of the courtyard. Narouz leaned forward a little to watch him intently as he did so, and when he had almost swept the pile of tattered bodies to the door of the outhouse, said in a hoarse voice: ‘Thirteen, eh?’

‘Thirteen.’ His voice gave Nessim a dull neuralgic thrill, for he sounded drugged — the harsh authoritative voice of someone drunk on hashish , perhaps, or opium; the voice of someone signalling from a new orbit in an unknown universe. He drew his breath slowly until his lungs were fully inflated and then spoke upwards once more to the figure on the stair. ‘Ya Narouz. I have come to speak to you on a matter of great urgency.’

‘Mount’ said Narouz gruffly, in the voice of a sheepdog. ‘I wait for you here, Nessim.’ The voice made many things clear to Nessim, for never before had the voice of his brother been completely free from a note of welcome, of joy even. At any other time he would have run down the stairs in clumsy welcome, taking them two at a time and calling out ‘Nessim, how good you have come!’ Nessim walked across the courtyard and placed his hand upon the dusty wooden rail. ‘It is important’ he said sharply, crisply, as if to establish his own importance in this tableau — the shadowy courtyard with the solitary figure standing up against the sky in silhouette, holding the long whip lightly, effortlessly, and watching him. Narouz repeated the word ‘Mount’ in a lower key, and suddenly sat down putting his whip beside him on the top stair. It was the first time, thought Nessim, that there had been no greeting for him on his return to Karm Abu Girg. He walked up the steep stairs slowly, peering upwards.

It was much lighter on the first floor, and at the top of the second there was enough light to see his brother’s face. Narouz sat quite still, in cloak and boots. His whip lay lightly coiled over the balustrade with its handle upon his knees. Beside him on the dusty wooden floor stood a half-empty bottle of gin. His chin was sunk upon his chest and he stared crookedly up under shaggy brows at the approaching stranger with an expression which combined truculence with a queer, irresolute sorrow. He was at his old trick of pressing his back teeth together and releasing them so that the cords of muscle at his temples expanded and contracted as if a heavy pulse were beating there. He watched his brother’s slow ascent with this air of sombre self-divided uncertainty into which there crept from time to time the smouldering glow of an anger banked up, held under control. As Nessim reached the final landing and set foot upon the last flight of stairs, Narouz stirred and gave a sudden gargling bark — a sound such as one might make to a hound — and held out a hairy hand.

Nessim paused and heard his brother say: ‘Stay there, Nessim’ in a new and authoritative voice, but which contained no particular note of menace. He hesitated, leaning forward keenly the better to interpret this unfamiliar gesture — the square hand thrown out in an attitude almost of imprecation, fingers stretched, but not perfectly steady.

‘You have been drinking’ he said at last, quietly but with a profound ringing disgust. ‘Narouz, this is new for you.’ The shadow of a smile, as if of self-contempt, played upon the crooked lips of his brother. It broadened suddenly to a slow grin which displayed his hare-lip to the full: and then vanished, was swallowed up, as if abruptly recalled by a thought which it could not represent.

Narouz now wore a new air of unsteady self-congratulation, of pride at once mawkish and dazed. ‘What do you wish from me?’ he said hoarsely. ‘Say it here, Nessim. I am practising.’

‘Let us go indoors to speak privately.’ Narouz shook his head slowly and after consideration said crisply:

‘You can speak here.’

‘ Narouz ’ cried Nessim sharply, stung by these unfamiliar responses, and in the voice one would use to awaken a sleeper.

‘ Please. ’ The seated man at the head of the stairs stared up at him with the strange inflamed but sorrowful air and shook his head again. ‘I have spoken, Nessim’ he said indistinctly. Nessim’s voice broke, it was pitched so sharply against the silence of the courtyard. He said, almost pitifully now, ‘I simply must speak to you, do you understand?’

‘Speak now, here. I am listening.’ This was indeed a new and unexpected personage, the man in the cloak. Nessim felt the colour rising in his cheeks. He climbed a couple of steps more and hissed assertively. ‘Narouz, I come from them. In God’s name what have you been saying to them? The committee has become terrified by your words.’ He broke off and irresolutely waved the memorandum which Serapamoun had deposited with him, crying: ‘This … this paper is from them.’ Narouz’ eyes blazed up for a second with a maudlin pride made somehow regal by the outward thrust of his chin and a straightening of the huge shoulders. ‘My words, Nessim?’ he growled, and then nodding: ‘And Taor’s words. When the time comes we will know how to act. Nobody needs to fear. We are not dreamers.’

‘ Dreamers! ’ cried Nessim with a gasp, almost beside himself now with apprehension and disgust and mortified to his very quick by this lack of conventional address in a younger brother. ‘You are the dreamers! Have I not explained a thousand times what we are trying to do … what we mean by all this? Peasant, idiot that you are….’ But these words which once might have lodged like goads in Narouz’ mind seemed blunt, ineffectual. He tightened his mouth hard and made a slow cutting movement with his palm, cutting the air from left to right before his own body. ‘Words’ he cried harshly. ‘I know you now, my brother.’ Nessim glanced wildly about him for a moment, as if to seek help, as if to seek some instrument heavy enough to drive the truth of what he had to say into the head of the seated man. A hysterical fury had beset him, a rage against this sottish figure which raised so incomprehending a face to his pleas. He was trembling; he had certainly anticipated nothing like this when he set out from Alexandria with his resolution bright and his mind composed.

‘Where is Leila?’ he cried sharply, as if he might invoke her aid, and Narouz gave a short clicking chuckle. He raised his finger to his temple gravely and muttered: ‘In the summerhouse, as you know. Why not go to her if you wish?’ He chuckled again, and then added, nodding his head with an absurdly childish expression.

‘She is angry with you , now. For once it is with you , not with me.

You have made her cry, Nessim.’ His lower lip trembled.

‘Drunkard’ hissed Nessim helplessly. Narouz’ eyes flashed. He gave a single jarring laugh, a short bark, throwing his head right back. Then suddenly, without warning, the smile vanished and he put on once more his watchful, sorrowing expression. He licked his lips and whispered ‘Ya Nessim’ under his breath, as if he were slowly recovering his sense of proportion. But Nessim, white with rage, was now almost beside himself with frustration. He stepped up the last few stairs and shook Narouz by the shoulder, almost shouting now: ‘Fool, you are putting us all in danger. Look at these, from Serapamoun. The committee will disband unless you stop talking like this. Do you understand? You are mad, Narouz. In God’s name, Narouz, understand what I am saying …’ But the great head of his brother looked dazed now, beset by the flicker of contradictory expressions, like the lowered crest of a bull badgered beyond endurance. ‘Narouz, listen to me.’ The face that was slowly raised to Nessim’s seemed to have grown larger and more vacant, the eyes more lustreless, yet full of the pain of a new sort of knowledge which owed little to the sterile revolutions of reason; it was full too of a kind of anger and incomprehension, confused and troubling, which was seeking expression. They stared angrily at each other. Nessim was white to the lips and panting, but his brother sat simply staring at him, his lips drawn back over his white teeth as if he were hypnotized.