Lawrence Durrell - The Alexandria Quartet

The Cabal met at this time in what resembled a disused curator’s wooden hut, built against the red earth walls of an embankment, very near to Pompey’s Pillar. I suppose the morbid sensitivity of the Egyptian police to political meetings dictated the choice of such a venue. One crossed the wilderness of trenches and parapets thrown up by the archaeologist and followed a muddy path through the stone gate; then turning sharply at right angles one entered this large inelegant shack, one of whose walls was the earth side of an embankment and whose floor was of tamped earth. The interior was strongly lit by two petrol lamps and furnished with chairs of wicker.

The gathering consisted of about twenty people drawn from various parts of the city. I noticed with some surprise the lean bored figure of Capodistria in one corner. Nessim was there, of course, but there were very few representatives of the richer or more educated sections of the city. There was, for example, an elderly clock-maker I knew well by sight — a graceful silver-haired man whose austere features had always seemed to me to demand a violin under them in order to set them off. A few nondescript elderly ladies. A chemist. Balthazar sat before them in a low chair with his ugly hands lying in his lap. I recognized him at once as if in an entirely new context as the habitue of the Cafe Al Aktar with whom I had once played backgammon. A few desultory minutes passed in gossip while the Cabal waited upon its later members; then the old clock-maker stood up and suggested that Balthazar should open proceedings, and my friend settled back in his chair, closed his eyes and in that harsh croaking voice which gradually gathered an extraordinary sweetness began to talk. He spoke, I remember, of the fons signatus of the psyche and of its ability to perceive an inherent order in the universe which underlay the apparent formlessness and arbitrariness of phenomena. Disciplines of mind could enable people to penetrate behind the veil of reality and to discover harmonies in space and time which corresponded to the inner structure of their own psyches. But the study of the Cabbala was both a science and a religion. All this was of course familiar enough. But throughout Balthazar’s expositions extraordinary fragments of thought would emerge in the form of pregnant aphorisms which teased the mind long after one had left his presence. I remember him saying, for example, ‘None of the great religions has done more than exclude, throw out a long range of prohibitions. But prohibitions create the desire they are intended to cure. We of this Cabal say: indulge but refine. We are enlisting everything in order to make man’s wholeness match the wholeness of the universe — even pleasure, the destructive granulation of the mind in pleasure.’ The constitution of the Cabal consisted of an inner circle of initiates (Balthazar would have winced at the word but I do not know how else to express it) and an outer circle of students to which Nessim and Justine belonged. The inner circle consisted of twelve members who were widely scattered over the Mediterranean — in Beirut, Jaffa, Tunis and so on. In each place there was a small academy of students who were learning to use the strange mental-emotional calculus which the Cabbala has erected about the idea of God. The members of the inner Cabal corresponded frequently with one another, using the curious old form of writing, known as the boustrophedon ; that is to say a writing which is read from right to left and from left to right in alternate lines.

But the letters used in their alphabet were ideograms for mental or spiritual states. I have said enough.

On that first evening Justine sat there between us, her arms linked lightly in ours, listening with a humility and concentration that were touching. At times the speaker’s eye rested on her for a moment with a glance of affectionate familiarity. Did I know then — or was it afterwards I discovered — that Balthazar was perhaps her only friend and certainly the only confidant she had in the city? I do not remember. (‘Balthazar is the only man to whom I can tell everything. He only laughs. But somehow he helps me to dispel the hollowness I feel in everything I do.’) And it was to Balthazar that she would always write those long self-tortured letters which interested the curious mind of Arnauti. In the diaries she recorded how one moonlight night they gained access to the Museum and sat for an hour among the statues ‘sightless as nightmares’ listening to him talk. He said many things which struck her then but later when she came to try and write them down they had vanished. Yet she did remember him saying in a quiet reflective voice something about ‘those of us who are bound to submit our bodies to the ogres,’ and the thought penetrated her marrow as a reference to the sort of life she was leading. As for Nessim, I remember him telling me that once, when he was in a great agony of mind about Justine, Balthazar remarked dryly to him: ‘ Omnis ardentior amator propriae uxoris adulter est. ’ Adding as he did so:

‘I speak now as a member of the Cabal, not as a private person.

Passionate love even for a man’s own wife is also adultery.’

*******

Alexandria Main Station: midnight. A deathly heavy dew. The noise of wheels cracking the slime-slithering pavements. Yellow pools of phosphorous light, and corridors of darkness like tears in the dull brick faзade of a stage set. Policemen in the shadows.

Standing against an insanitary brick wall to kiss her goodbye. She is going for a week, but in the panic, half-asleep I can see that she may never come back. The soft resolute kiss and the bright eyes fill me with emptiness. From the dark platform comes the crunch of rifle-butts and the clicking of Bengali. A detail of Indian troops on some routine transfer to Cairo. It is only as the train begins to move, and as the figure at the window, dark against the darkness, lets go of my hand, that I feel Melissa is really leaving; feel everything that is inexorably denied — the long pull of the train into the silver light reminds me of the sudden long pull of the vertebrae of her white back turning in bed. ‘Melissa’ I call out, but the giant sniffing of the engine blots out all sound. She begins to tilt, to curve and slide; and quick as a scene-shifter the station packs away advertisement after advertisement, stacking them in the darkness.

I stand as if marooned on an iceberg. Beside me a tall Sikh shoulders the rifle he has stopped with a rose. The shadowy figure is sliding away down the steel rails into the darkness; a final lurch and the train pours away down a tunnel, as if turned to liquid.

I walk about Moharrem-Bey that night, watching the moon cloud over, preyed upon by an inexpressible anxiety.

Intense light behind cloud; by four o’clock a thin pure drizzle like needles. The poinsettias in the Consulate garden stark with silver drops standing on their stamens. No birds singing in the dawn. A light wind making the palm trees sway their necks with a faint dry formal clicking. The wonderful hushing of rain on Mareotis.

Five o’clock. Walking about in her room, studying inanimate objects with intense concentration. The empty powder-boxes. The depilatories from Sardis. The smell of satin and leather. The horrible feeling of some great impending scandal….

I write these lines in very different circumstances and many months have elapsed since that night; here, under this olive-tree, in the pool of light thrown by an oil lamp, I write and relive that night which has taken its place in the enormous fund of the city’s memories. Somewhere else, in a great study hung with tawny curtains Justine was copying into her diary the terrible aphorisms of Herakleitos. The book lies beside me now. On one page she has written: ‘It is hard to fight with one’s heart’s desire; whatever it wishes to get, it purchases at the cost of soul.’ And lower down in the margins: ‘Night-walkers, Magians, Bakchoi, Lenai and the initiated…. ’