The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [348]
His sadness gave him complete mastery of himself, complete calm. Truth is so bitter that the knowledge of it confers a kind of luxury. So it went for a while. Then lastly there burst from the hairy throat of the dying man a single tremendous word, the name of
Clea, uttered in the cavernous voice of a wounded lion: a voice which combined anger, reproof and an overwhelming sadness in its sudden roar. So nude a word, her name, as simple as ‘God’
or ‘Mother’ — yet it sounded as if upon the lips of some dying conqueror, some lost king, conscious of the body and breath dissolving within him. The name of Clea sounded through the whole house, drenched by the splendour of his anguish, silencing the little knots of whispering servants and visitors, setting back the ears of the hunting dogs, making them crouch and fawn: ringing in Nessim’s mind with a new and terrifying bitterness too deep for tears. And as this great cry slowly faded, the intelligence of his death dawned upon them with a new and crushing weight —
like the pressure of some great tomb door closing upon hope. Immobile, ageless as pain itself, sat the defeated effigy of the doctor at the bedside of pain. He was thinking to himself, full of the bright fight of intellection : ‘A phrase like “out of the jaws of death” might mean something like that cry of Narouz’, its bravery. Or “out of the jaws of Hell”. It must mean the hell of a private mind. No, we can do nothing.’
The great voice thinned softly into the burring comb-and-paper sound of a long death-rattle, fading into the buzz of a fly caught in some remote spider’s web.
And now Nessim gave a single sweet sob out there on the balcony
— the noise that a bamboo stem makes when it is plucked from the stalk. And like the formal opening bars of some great sym-phony this small sob was echoed below in the darkness, passed from lip to lip, heart to heart. Their sobs lighted one another —
as candles take a light from one another — an orchestral fulfilment of the precious theme of sorrow, and a long quivering ragged moan came up out of the empty well to climb upwards towards the darkening sky, a long hushing sigh which mingled with the hushing of the rain upon Lake Mareotis. The death of Narouz had begun to be borne. Balthazar with lowered head was quoting softly to himself in Greek the lines:
Now the sorrow of the knowledge of parting
Moves like wind in the rigging of the ship
Of the man’s death, figurehead of the white body, The sails of the soul being filled
By the Ghost of the Breath, replete and eternal.
It was the signal for a release, for now the inescapably terrible scenes of a Coptic wake were to be enacted in the house, scenes charged with an ancient terror and abandon.
Death had brought the women into their kingdom, and made them free to deliver each her inheritance of sorrow. They crept forward in a body, gathering speed as they mounted the stair-cases, their faces rapt and transfigured now as they uttered the first terrible screaming. Their fingers were turned into hooks now, tearing at their own flesh, their breasts, their cheeks, with a lustful abandon as they moved swiftly up the staircase. They were uttering that curious and thrilling ululation which is called the zagreet, their tongues rippling on their palates like mandolines. An ear-splitting chorus of tongue trills in various keys. The old house echoed to the shrieks of these harpies as they took possession of it and invaded the room of death to circle round the silent corpse, still repeating the blood-curdling signal of death, full of an unbearable animal abandon. They began the dances of ritua l grief while Nessim and Balthazar sat silent upon their chairs, their heads sunk upon their breasts, their hands clasped — the very picture of human failure. They allowed these fierce quivering screams to pierce them to the very quick of their beings. Only submission now to the ritual of this ancient sorrow was permissible: and sorrow had become an orgiastic frenzy which bordered on madness. The women were dancing now as they circled the body, striking their breasts and howling, but dancing in the slow measured figures of a dance recaptured from long-forgotten friezes upon the tombs of the ancient world. They moved and swayed, quivering from throat to ankles, and they twisted and turned calling upon the dead man to rise.