Lawrence Durrell - The Alexandria Quartet

T hat second spring the khamseen was worse than I have ever known it before or since. Before sunrise the skies of the desert turned brown as buckram, and then slowly darkened, swelling like a bruise and at last releasing the outlines of cloud, giant octaves of ochre which massed up from the Delta like the drift of ashes under a volcano. The city has shuttered itself tightly, as if against a gale. A few gusts of air and a thin sour rain are the forerunners of the darkness which blots out the light of the sky.

And now unseen in the darkness of shuttered rooms the sand is invading everything, appearing as if by magic in clothes long locked away, books, pictures and teaspoons. In the locks of doors, beneath fingernails. The harsh sobbing air dries the membranes of throats and noses, and makes eyes raw with the configurations of conjunctivitis. Clouds of dried blood walk the streets like prophecies; the sand is settling into the sea like powder into the curls of a stale wig. Choked fountain-pens, dry lips — and along the slats of the Venetian shutters thin white drifts as of young snow. The ghostly feluccas passing along the canal are crewed by ghouls with wrapped heads. From time to time a cracked wind arrives from directly above and stirs the whole city round and round so that one has the illusion that everything — trees, minarets, monuments and people have been caught in the final eddy of some great whirlpool and will pour softly back at last into the desert from which they rose, reverting once more to the anonymous wave-sculptured floor of dunes….

I cannot deny that by this time we had both been seized by an exhaustion of spirit which had made us desperate, reckless, impatient of discovery. Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment: only there does its satisfaction lie. A hidden desire for some sort of expiation dictated Justine’s folly which was greater than mine; or perhaps we both dimly sensed that, bound as we were hand and foot to each other, only an upheaval of some sort could restore each to his vulgar right mind. These days were full of omens and warnings upon which our anxiety fed.

One-eyed Hamid told me one day of a mysterious caller who had told him that he must keep careful watch on his master as he was in great danger from some highly-placed personage. His description of the man might have been that of Selim, Nessim’s secretary: but it also might have been any of the 150,000 inhabitants of the province. Meanwhile Nessim’s own attitude to me had changed, or rather deepened into a solicitous and cloying sweetness.

He shed his former reserve. When he spoke to me he used unfamiliar endearments and took me affectionately by the sleeve. At times as we spoke he would flush suddenly: or tears would come into his eyes and he would turn aside his head to hide them.

Justine watched this with a concern which was painful to observe.

But the very humiliation and self-reproach we felt at wounding him only drove us closer together as accomplices. At times she spoke of going away: at times I did the same. But neither of us could move. We were forced to await the outcome with a fatality and exhaustion that was truly fearful to experience.

Nor were our follies diminished by these warnings; rather did they multiply. A dreadful inadvertency reigned over our actions, an appalling thoughtlessness marked our behaviour. Nor did we (and here I realized that I had lost myself completely) even hope to avert whatever fate might be in store for us. We were only foolishly concerned lest we might not be able to share it — lest it might separate us! In this plain courting of martyrdom I realized that we showed our love at its hollowest, its most defective. ‘How disgusting I must seem to you’ said Justine once ‘with my obscene jumble of conflicting ideas: all this sickly preoccupation with God and a total inability to obey the smallest moral injunction from my inner nature like being faithful to a man one adores. I tremble for myself, my dear one, I tremble. If only I could escape from the tiresome classical Jewess of neurology…. If only I could peel it off.’ During this period, while Melissa was away in Palestine on a cure (I had borrowed the money from Justine in order for her to go) we had several narrow escapes. For example, one day we were talking, Justine and I, in the great bedroom of the house. We had come in from bathing and had taken cold showers to get the salt off our skins. Justine sat on the bed naked under the bathroom towel which she had draped round her like a chiton. Nessim was away in Cairo where he was supposed to make a radio broadcast on behalf of some charity or other. Outside the window the trees nodded their dusty fronds in the damp summer air, while the faint huddle of traffic on Rue Fuad could be heard.

Nessim’s quiet voice came to us from the little black radio by the bed, converted by the microphone into the voice of a man prematurely aged. The mentally empty phrases lived on in the silence they invaded until the air seemed packed with commonplaces. But the voice was beautiful, the voice of someone who had elaborately isolated himself from feeling. Behind Justine’s back the door into the bathroom was open. Beyond it, a pane of clinical whiteness, lay another door leading to an iron fire-escape — for the house had been designed round a central well so that its bathrooms and kitchens could be connected by a cobweb of iron staircases such as span the engine-room of a ship. Suddenly, while the voice was still talking and while we listened to it, there came the light youthful patter of footsteps on the iron staircase outside the bathroom: a step unmistakably that of Nessim — or of any of the 150,000 inhabitants of the province. Looking over Justine’s shoulder I saw developing on the glass panel of the frosted door, the head and shoulders of a tall slim man, with a soft felt hat pulled down over his eyes. He developed like a print in a photographer’s developing-bowl. The figure paused with outstretched hand upon the knob of the door. Justine, seeing the direction of my glance, turned her head. She put one naked arm round my shoulders as both of us, with a feeling of complete calm whose core, like a heart beating, was a feverish impotent sexual excitement watched the dark figure standing there between two worlds, depicted as if on an X-ray screen. He would have found us absurdly posed, as if for a photograph, with an expression, not of fear but of guiltless relief upon our faces.

For a long time the figure stood there, as if in deep thought, perhaps listening. Then it shook its head once, slowly, and after a moment turned away with an air of perplexity to dissolve slowly on the glass. As it turned it seemed to slip something into the right-hand pocket of its coat. We heard the steps slowly diminishing — a dull descending scale of notes — on the iron ladder in the well. We neither of us spoke, but turned as if with deepened concentration to the little black radio from which the voice of Nessim still flowed with uninterrupted urbanity and gentleness.

It seemed impossible that he could be in two places at once. It was only when the announcer informed us that the speech had been recorded that we understood. Why did he not open the door?

I suppose the truth is that he had been seized by the vertiginous uncertainty which, in a peaceable nature, follows upon a decision to act. Something had been building itself up inside him all this time, grain by grain, until the weight of it had become insupportable. He was aware of a profound interior change in his nature which had at last shaken off the long paralysis of impotent love which had hitherto ruled his actions. The thought of some sudden concise action, some determining factor for good or evil, presented itself to him as an intoxicating novelty. He felt (or so I divined it) like a gambler about to stake the meagre remains of a lost fortune upon one desperate throw. But the nature of his action had not yet been decided upon. What form should it take? A mass of uneasy fantasies burst in.