The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [75]
I suppose it was that night, while she was dressing for dinner that Nessim came into her room and addressed her reflection in the spade-shaped mirror. ‘Justine’ he said firmly, ‘I must ask you not to think that I am going mad or anything like that but — has
Balthazar ever been more than a friend to you?’ Justine was placing a cigale made of gold on the lobe of her left ear; she looked up at him for a long second before answering in the same level, equable tone: ‘No, my dear.’
‘Thank you.’
Nessim stared at his own reflection for a long time, boldly, com-prehensively. Then he sighed once and took from the waistcoatpocket of his dress-clothes a little gold key, in the form of an ankh. ‘I simply cannot think how this came into my possession’
he said, blushing deeply and ho lding it up for her to see. It was the little watch-key whose loss had caused Balthazar so much concern. Justine stared at it and then at her husband with a somewhat startled air. ‘Where was it?’ she said.
‘In my stud-box.’
Justine went on with her toilette at a slower pace, looking curiously at her husband who for his part went on studying his own features with the same deliberate rational scrutiny. ‘I must find a way of returning it to him. Perhaps he dropped it at a meet-ing. But the strange thing is….’ He sighed again. ‘I don’t remem-ber.’ It was clear to them both that he had stolen it. Nessim turned on his heel and said: ‘I shall wait for you downstairs.’ As the door closed softly behind him Justine examined the little key with curiosity.
* * * * *
At this time he had already begun to experience that great cycle of historical dreams which now replaced the dreams of his childhood in his mind, and into which the City now threw itself — as if at last it had found a responsive subject through which to express the collective desires, the collective wishes, which informed its culture. He would wake to see the towers and minarets printed on the ex-hausted, dust-powdered sky, and see as if en montage on them the giant footprints of the historical memory which lies behind the recollections of individual personality, its mentor and guide: in-deed its inventor, since man is only an extension of the spirit of place.
These disturbed him for they were not at all the dreams of the night-hours. They overlapped reality and interrupted his waking mind as if the membrane of his consciousness had been suddenly torn in places to admit them.
Side by side with these giant constructions — Palladian galleries of images drawn from his reading and meditation on his own past and the city’s — there came sharper and sharper attacks of un-reasoning hatred against the very Justine he had so seldom known, the comforting friend and devoted lover. They were of brief dura-tion but of such fierceness that, rightly regarding them as the obverse of the love he felt for her, he began to fear not for her safety but for his own. He became afraid of shaving in the sterile white bathroom every morning. Often the little barber noticed tears in the eyes of his subject as he noiselessly spread the white apron over him.
But while the gallery of historical dreams held the foreground of his mind the figures of his friends and acquaintances, palpable and real, walked backwards and forwards among them, among the ruins of classical Alexandria, inhabiting an amazing histor ical space-time as living personages. Laboriously, like an actuary’s clerk he recorded all he saw and felt in his diaries, ordering the impassive Selim to type them out.
He saw the Mouseion, for example, with its sulky, heavily-sub-sidized artists working to a mental fashion-plate of its founders: and later among the solitaries and wise men the philosopher), patiently wishing the world into a special private state useless to anyone but himself — for at each stage of development each man resumes the whole universe and makes it suitable to his own inner nature: while each thinker, each thought fecundates the whole universe anew.
The inscriptions on the marbles of the Museum murmured to him as he passed like moving lips. Balthazar and Justine were there waiting for him. He had come to meet them, dazzled by the moon-light and drenching shadow of the colonnades. He could hear their voices in the darkness and thought, as he gave the low whistle which Justine would always recognize as his: