Lawrence Durrell - The Alexandria Quartet

At one corner of the L-shaped block of buildings she laid down a small observatory which housed a telescope of thirty magnifications. Here Nessim would sit night after night in the winter, dressed in his old rust-coloured abba , staring gravely at Betelgeuse, or hovering over books of calculations for all the world like some medieval soothsayer. Here too their friends could look at the moon or by altering the angle of the barrel catch sudden smoky glimpses of the clouds of pearl which the city always seemed to exhale from afar.

All this, of course began to stand in need of a guardian, and it came as no surprise to them when Panayotis arrived and took up his residence in a tiny room near the stables. This old man with his spade beard and gimlet-eyes had been for twenty years a secondary school teacher at Damanhur. He had taken orders and spent nine years at the monastery of St Catherine in Sinai. What brought him to the oasis it was impossible to tell for at some stage in his apparently unadventurous life he had had his tongue cut out of his head. From the signs he made in response to questions it might seem that he had been making a pilgrimage on foot to the little shrine of St Menas situated to the west when he had stumbled upon the oasis. At any rate there seemed nothing fortuitous about his decision to adopt it. He fitted it to perfection, and for a small salary stayed there all the year round as watchman and gardener.

He was an able-bodied little old man, active as a spider, and fearfully jealous of the green things which owed their life to his industry and care. It was he who coaxed the melon-bed into life and at last persuaded a vine to start climbing beside the lintel of the central doorway. His laughter was an inarticulate clucking, and he had a shy habit of hiding his face in the tattered sleeve of his old beadle’s soutane. His Greek loquacity, dammed up behind his disability, had overflowed into his eyes where it sparkled and danced at the slightest remark or question. What more could anyone ask of life, he seemed to say, than this oasis by the sea?

What more indeed? It was the question that Nessim asked himself repeatedly as the car whimpered towards the desert with hawkfeatured Selim motionless at the wheel. Some miles before the Arab fort the road fetches away inland from the coast and to reach the oasis one must swerve aside off the tarmac along an outcrop of stiff flaky dune — like beaten white of egg, glittering and micashafted. Here and there where the swaying car threatens to sink its driving-wheels in the dune they always find purchase again on the bed of friable sandstone which forms the backbone to the whole promontory. It was exhilarating to feather this sea of white crispness like a cutter travelling before a following wind.

It had been in Nessim’s mind for some time past — the suggestion had originally been Pursewarden’s — to repay the devotion of old Panayotis with the only kind of gift the old man would understand and find acceptable: and he carried now in his polished briefcase a dispensation from the Patriarch of Alexandria permitting him to build and endow a small chapel to St Arsenius in his house. The choice of saint had been, as it always should be, fortuitous. Clea had found an eighteenth-century ikon of him, in pleasing taste, lying among the lumber of a Muski stall in Cairo.

She had given it to Justine as a birthday present.

These then were the treasures they unpacked before the restless bargaining eye of the old man. It took them some time to make him understand for he followed Arabic indifferently and Nessim knew no Greek. But looking up at last from the written dispensation he clasped both hands and threw up his chin with a smile; he seemed about to founder under the emotions which beset him.

Everything was understood. Now he knew why Nessim had spent such hours considering the empty end—stable and sketching on paper. He shook his hands warmly and made inarticulate cluckingnoises. Nessim’s heart went out to him with a kind of malicious envy to see how wholehearted his pleasure was at this act of thoughtfulness. From deep inside the camera obscura of the thoughts which filled his mind he studied the old beadle carefully, as if by intense scrutiny to surprise the single-heartedness which brought the old man happiness, peace of mind.

Here at least, thought Nessim, building something with my own hands will keep me stable and unreflective — and he studied the horny old hands of the Greek with admiring envy as he thought of the time they had killed for him, of the thinking they had saved him. He read into them years of healthy bodily activity which imprisoned thought, neutralized reflection. And yet … who could say? Those long years of school-teaching: the years in the monastery: and now the long winter solitude which closed in around the oasis, when only the boom and slither of the sea and the whacking of palm-fronds were there to accompany one’s thoughts…. There is always time for spiritual crises, he thought, as he doggedly mixed cement and dry sand in a wooden mortar.

But even here he was not to be left alone for Justine, with that maddening guilty solicitude which she had come to feel for the man whom she loved, and yet was trying to destroy, appeared with her trio of Arabs and took up her summer quarters at the oasis. A restless, moody, alert familiar. And then I, impelled by the fearful pangs her absence created in me, smuggled a note to her telling her either that she must return to the city or persuade Nessim to invite me out to the Summer Palace. Selim duly arrived with the car and motored me out in a sympathetic silence into which he did not dare to inject the slightest trace of contempt.

For his part Nessim received me with a studied tenderness; in fact, he was glad to see us again at close quarters, to detach us from the fictitious framework of his agents’ reports and to judge for himself if we were … what am I to say? ‘In love?’ The word implies a totality which was missing in my mistress, who resembled one of those ancient goddesses in that her attributes proliferated through her life and were not condensed about a single quality of heart which one could love or unlove. ‘Possession’ is on the other hand too strong: we were human beings not Bronte cartoons. But English lacks the distinctions which might give us (as Modern Greek does) a word for passion-love.

Apart from all this, not knowing the content and direction of Nessim’s thoughts I could in no way set his inmost fears at rest: by telling him that Justine was merely working out with me the same obsessive pattern she had followed out in the pages of Arnauti. She was creating a desire of the will which, since it fed secretly on itself, must be exhausted like a lamp — or blown out.

I knew this with only a part of my mind: but there I detected the true lack in this union. It was not based on any repose of the will.

And yet how magically she seemed to live — a mistress so full of wit and incantation that one wondered how one had ever managed to love before and be content in the quality of the loving.

At the same time I was astonished to realize that the side of me which clave to Melissa was living its own autonomous existence, quietly and surely belonging to her yet not wishing her back. The letters she wrote me were gay and full and unmarred by any shadow of reproof or self-pity; I found in all she wrote an enlargement of her self-confidence. She described the little sanatorium where she was lodged with humour and a nimble eye, describing the doctors and the other patients as a holidaymaker might. On paper she seemed to have grown, to have become another woman.

I answered her as well as I was able but it was hard to disguise the shiftless confusion which reigned in my life; it was equally impossible to allude to my obsession with Justine — we were moving through a different world of flowers and books and ideas, a world quite foreign to Melissa. Environment had closed the gates to her, not lack of sensibility. ‘Poverty is a great cutter-off’ said Justine once, ‘and riches a great shutter-off.’ But she had gained admittance to both worlds, the world of want and the world of plenty, and was consequently free to live naturally.