The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [351]
Narouz at last, washed and oiled and sprinkled with rosemary and thyme, lay at ease in his rough coffin clad in the shroud which he, like every Copt, had preserved against this moment; a shroud made of white flax which had been dipped in the River Jordan. He had no jewels or rich costumes to take to the grave with him, but Balthazar coiled the great bloodstained whip and placed it under his pillow. (The next morning the servants were to carry in the body of a wretch whose whole face had been pulped by the blows of this singular weapon; he had run, it seems, screaming, unrecognizable, across the plantation to fall insensible in a dyke and drown. So thoroughly had the whip done its work that he was unidentifiable.)
The first part of the work was now complete and it only re-mained to wait for dawn. Once more the mourners were admitted to the room of death where Narouz lay, once more they resumed their passionate dancing and drumming. Balthazar took his leave now, for there was nothing more he could do to help. The two men crossed the courtyard slowly, arm in arm, leaning on each other as if exhausted.
‘If you meet Clea at the ferry, take her back’ said Nessim.
‘Of course I will.’
They shook hands slowly and embraced each other. Then Nessim turned back, yawning and shivering, into the house.
He sat dozing on a chair. It would be three days before the house could be purged of sadness and the soul of Narouz ‘sent away’
by the priestly ritua ls. First would come the long straggling pro-cession with the torches and banners in the early dawn, before the mist rose, the women with faces blackened now like furies, tearing their hair. The deacons chanting ‘Remember me O Lord when Thou hast come to Thy Kingdom’ in deep thrilling voices. Then on the cold floor of the church the sods raining down on Narouz’ pale face and the voices reciting ‘From dust to dust’, and the rolling periods of the evangel singing him away to heaven. Squeak of the brass screws as the lid went down. All this he saw, foreshadowed in his mind as he drowsed upon the stiff-backed chair beside the rough-hewn coffin. Of what, he wondered, could Narouz be dreaming now, with the great whip coiled beneath his pillow?
* * * * *
CLEA
To
MY FATHER
The Primary and most beautiful of Nature’s
qualities is motion, which agitates her at all
times, but this motion is simply the perpetual
consequence of crimes, it is conserved by means
of crimes alone.
D. A. F. DE SADE
I
I
he oranges were more plentiful than usual that year.
They glowed in their arbours of burnished green leaf
T like lanterns, flickering up there among the sunny woods. It was as if they were eager to celebrate our departure from the little island — for at last the long-awaited message from Nessim had come, like a summons back to the Underworld. A message which was to draw me back inexorably to the one city which for me always hovered between illusion and reality, between the substance and the poetic images which its very name aroused in me. A memory, I told myself, which had been falsified by the desires and intuitions only as yet half-realized on paper. Alexan-dria, the capital of memory! All the writing which I had borrowed from the living and the dead, until I myself had become a sort of postscript to a letter which was never ended, never posted…. How long had I been away? I could hardly compute, though calendar-time gives little enough indication of the aeons which separate one self from another, one day from another; and all this time I had been living there, truly, in the Alexandria of my heart’s mind. And page by page, heartbeat by heartbeat, I had been surrendering myself to the grotesque organism of which we had all once been part, victors and vanquished alike. An ancient city changing under the brush-strokes of thoughts which be-sieged meaning, clamouring for identity; somewhere there, on the black thorny promontories of Africa the aromatic truth of the place lived on, the bitter unchewable herb of the past, the pith of memory. I had set out once to store, to codify, to annotate the past before it was utterly lost