The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [145]
Narouz walked out to the summer-house that morning to dis-charge his mission; but first he picked a mass of blooms from the red and yellow roses with which to refill the two great vases which stood on either side of his father’s portrait. His mother was asleep at her desk but the noise he made lifting the latch woke her at once. The snake hissed drowsily and then lowered its head to the ground once more.
‘Bless you, Narouz’ she said as she saw the flowers and rose at once to empty her vases. As they started to trim and arrange the new blooms, Narouz broke the news of his brother’s marriage. His mother stood quite still for a long time, undisturbed but serious as if she were consulting her own inmost thoughts and emotions.
At last she said, more to herself than anyone, ‘Why not?’ repeating the phrase once or twice as if testing its pitch.
Then she bit her thumb and turning to her younger son said
‘But if she is an adventuress, after his money, I won’t have it. I shall take steps to have her done away with. He needs my per-mission anyhow.’
Narouz found this overwhelmingly funny and gave an apprecia-tive laugh. She took his hairy arm between her fingers. ‘I will’ she said.
‘Please.’
‘I swear it.’
He laughed now until he showed the pink roof of his mouth. But she remained abstracted, still listening to an inner monologue. Absently she patted his arm as he laughed and whispered ‘Hush’; and then after a long pause she said, as if surprised by her own thoughts. ‘The strange thing is, I mean it.’
‘And you can’t count on me, eh?’ he said, still laughing but with the germ of seriousness in his words. ‘You can’t trust me to watch over my own brother’s honour.’ He was still swollen up toad-like by the laughter, though his expression had now become serious.
‘My God’ she thought, ‘how ugly he is.’ And her fingers went to the black veil, pressing through it to the rough cicatrices in her own complexion, touching them fiercely as if to smooth them out.
‘My good Narouz’ she said, almost tearfully, and ran her fingers through his hair; the wonderful poetry of the Arabic stirred and soothed him in one. ‘My honeycomb, my dove, my good Narouz. Tell him yes, with my embrace. Tell him yes.’
He stood still, trembling like a colt, and drinking in the music of her voice and the rare caresses of that warm and capable hand.
‘But tell him he must bring her here to us.’
‘I will.’
‘Tell him today.’
And he walked with his queer jerky sawing stride to the tele-phone in the old house. His mother sat at her dusty table and re-peated twice in a low puzzled tone: ‘Why should Nessim choose a Jewess?’
V
o much have I reconstructed from the labyrinth of notes which Balthazar has left me. ‘To imagine is not necessarily S to invent’ he says elsewhere, ‘nor dares one make a claim for omniscience in interpreting people’s actions. One assumes that they have grown out of their feelings as leaves grow out of a branch. But can one work backwards, deducing the one form from the other? Perhaps a writer could if he were sufficiently brave to cement these apparent gaps in our actions with interpretations of his own to bind them together? What was going on in Nessim’s mind? This is really a question for you to put to yourself.
‘Or in Justine’s for that matter? One really doesn’t know; all I can say is that their esteem for each other grew in inverse ratio to their regard — for there never by common consent was any love between them as I have shown you. Perhaps it is as well. But in all the long discussions I had with them separately, I could not find the key to a relationship which failed signally — one could see it daily sinking as land sinks, as the level of a lake might sink, and not know why. The surface colouring was brilliantly executed and so perfect as to deceive most observers like yourself, for example. Nor do I share Leila’s view — who never liked Justine. I sat be-side her at the presentation which Narouz organized at the great mulid of Abu Girg which falls towards Easter every year. Justine had by then renounced Judaism to become a Copt in obedience to Nessim