V Katharine
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THE FIRST TIME she dreamed of him she woke up be<u></u>side her husband screaming.In their bedroom she stared down onto the sheet, mouth open. Her husband put his hand on her back.
“Nightmare. Don’t worry.” “Yes.” “Shall I get you some water?” “Yes.” She wouldn’t move. Wouldn’t lie bato that zohey had been in.
The dream had taken pla this room—his hand on her neck (she touched it now), his aowards her that she had sehe first few times she had met him. No, not anger, a lack of i, irritation at a married woman being among them.
They had bee over like animals, and he had yoked her neck back so she had been uo breathe within her arousal.
Her husband brought her the glass on a saucer but she could not lift her arms, they were shaking, loose. He put the glassawkwardly against her mouth so she could gulp the chlorinated water, some ing down her , falling to her stomach.
When she lay back she hardly had time to think of what she had witnessed, she fell into a quick deep sleep.
That had been the first reition. She remembered it sometime during the day, but she was busy then and she refused to le with its significe for long, dismissed it; it was an actal collision on a crowded night, nothing more.
A year later the other, more dangerous, peaceful dreams came. And even within the first one of these she recalled the hands at her ned waited for the mood of ess betweeo swerve to violence.
Who lays the crumbs of foo<q></q>d that tempt you? Towards a person you never sidered. A dream. Then later another series of dreams.
He said later it ropinquity. Propinquity in the desert. It does that here, he said. He loved the word—the propinquity of water, the propinquity of two or three bodies in a car driving the Sand Sea for six hours. Her sweating knee beside the gearbox of the truck, the knee swerving, rising with the bumps. In the desert you have time to look everywhere, to theorize on the chraphy of all things around you.
Whealked like that she hated him, her eyes remaining polite, her mind wanting to slap him. She always had the desire to slap him, and she realized even that was sexual. For him all relationships fell into patterns. You fell into propinquity or distance. Just as, for him, the histories in Herodotus clarified all societies. He assumed he was experienced in the ways of the world he had essentially left years earlier, struggling ever sio explore a half-ied world of the desert.
At Cairo aerodrome they loaded the equipment into the vehicles, her husband staying on to check the petrol lines of the Moth before the three mehe m. Madox went off to one of the embassies to send a wire. And he was going into town to get drunk, the usual final evening in Cairo, first at Madame Badin’s Opera o, and later to disappear into the streets behind the Pasha Hotel. He would pack before the evening began, which would allow him to just climb into the truck the m, hung over.
So he drove her into town, the air humid, the traffic bad and slow because of the hour.
“It’s so hot. I need a beer. Do you want one?” “No, I have te for a lot of things in the couple of hours. You’ll have to excuse me.” “That’s all right,” she said. “I don’t want to interfere.” “I’ll have oh you when I e back.” “In three weeks, right?” “About that.” “I wish I were going too.” He said nothing in ao that. They crossed the Bulaq Bridge and the traffic got worse. Too many carts, too marians who owhe streets. He cut south along the owards the Semiramis Hotel, where she was staying, just beyond the barracks.
“Yoing to find Zerzura this time, aren’t you.” “I’m going to find it this time.” He was like his old self. He hardly looked at her on the drive, evehey were stalled for more than five minutes in one spot.
At the hotel he was excessively polite. When he behaved this way she liked him even less; they all had to pretend this pose was courtesy, graciousness. It reminded her of a dog in clothes. To hell with him. If her husband didn’t have to work with him she would prefer not to see him again.
He pulled her pack out of the rear and was about to carry it into the lobby.
“Here, I take that.” Her shirt was damp at the back whe out of the passenger seat.
The doorman offered to take the pack, but he said, “No, she wants to carry it,” and she was angry again at his assumption.
The doormahem. She turo him and he passed her the bag so she was fag him, both hands awkwardly carrying the heavy case in front of her.
“So. Good-bye. Good luck.” “Yes. I’ll look after them all. They’ll be safe.” She nodded. She was in shadow, and he, as if unaware of the harsh sunlight, stood in it.
Then he came up to her, closer, and she thought for a moment he was going to embrace her. Instead he put his right arm forward and drew it in a gesture across her bare neck so her skin was touched by the whole length of hisdamp forearm.
“Good-bye.” He walked back to the truck. She could feel his sweat now, like blood left by a blade which the gesture of his arm seemed to have imitated.
She picks up a cushion and places it onto her lap as a shield against him. “If you make love to me I won’t lie about it. If I make love to you I won’t lie about it.” She moves the cushion against her heart, as if she would suffocate that part of herself which has brok<bdo></bdo>en free.
“What do you hate most?” he asks.
“A lie. And you?” “Ownership,” he says. “When you leave me, fet me.” Her fist swings towards him and hits hard into the bone just below his eye. She dresses and leaves.
Each day he would return home and look at the black bruise in the mirror. He became curious, not so much about the bruise, but about the shape of his face. The long eyebrows he had never really noticed before, the beginning of grey in his sandy hair.
He had not looked at himself like this in a mirror for years. That was a long eyebrow.
Nothing keep him from her.
When he is not in the desert with Madox or with Bermann in the Arab libraries, he meets her in Groppi Pa<samp>..</samp>rk—beside the heavily watered plum gardens. She is happiest here. She is a woman who misses moisture, who has always loved low green hedges and ferns. While for him this much greenery feels like a ival.
From Groppi Park they arc out into the old city, South arkets where few Europeans go. In his rooms maps cover the walls. And in spite of his attempts at furnishing there is still a sense of base camp to his quarters.
They lie in each other’s arms, the pulse and shadow of the fan on them. All m he and Bermann have worked in the archaeological museum plag Arabic texts and European histories beside each other in an attempt tnize echo, ame ges—back past Herodotus to the Kitab al Kanuz, where Zerzura is named after the bathing woman in a desert caravan. And there too the slow blink of a fan’s shadow. Aoo the intimate exge and echo of childhood history, of scar, of manner of kiss.
“I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do! How I be your lover? He will go mad.” A list of wounds.
The various colours of the bruise—bright russet leading to brown. The plate she walked across the room with, flinging its tents aside, and broke across his head, the blood rising up into the straw hair. The fork that ehe back of his shoulder, leaving its bite marks the doctor suspected were caused by a fox.
He would step into an embrace with her, glang first to see what moveable objects were around. He would meet her with others in public with bruises or a bandaged head and explain about the taxi jerking to a halt so that he had hit the open side window. Or with iodine on his forearm that covered a welt. Madox worried about his being suddenly act-prone. She sneered quietly at the weakness of his explanation. Maybe it’s his age, maybe he needs glasses, said her husband, nudging Madox. Maybe it’s a woma, she said. Look, isn’t that a woman’s scratch or bite?
It was a scorpion, he said. Androus australis.
A postcard. handwriting fills the regle.
Half my days ot bear not to touch you.
The rest of the time I feel it doesn’t matter if I ever see you again. It isn’t the morality, it is how much you bear.
No date, no ached.
Sometimes when she is able to spend the night with him they are wakened by the three mis of the city beginning their prayers before dawn. He walks with her through the indigo markets that lie between South Cairo and her home. The beautiful songs of faith ehe air like arrows, one mi answering another, as if passing on a rumour of the two of them as they walk through the air, the smell of charcoal and hemp already making the air profound. Sinners in a holy city.
He sweeps his arm across plates and glasses on a restaurant table so she might look up somewhere else iy hearing this cause of noise. When he is without her. He, who has never felt alone in the miles of longitude betwee towns. A man in a desert hold absen his cupped hands knowing it is something that feeds him more than water. There is a plant he knows of near El Taj, whose heart, if os it out, is replaced with a fluid taining herbal goodness. Every m one drink the liquid the amount of a missi. The plant tio flourish for a year before it dies from some lack or other.
He lies in his room surrounded by the pale maps. He is without Katharine. His hunger wishes to burn down all social rules, all courtesy.
Her life with others no longer is him. He wants only her stalkiy, her theatre of expressions. He wants the minute a refle betweehe depth of field minimal, their fnness intimate like two pages of a closed book.
He has been disassembled by her.
And if she has brought him to this, what has he brought her to?
When she is within the wall of her class and he is beside her in larger groups he tells jokes he doesn’t laugh at himself.
Uncharacteristically manic, he attacks the history of exploration. When he is unhappy he does this. Only Madhe habit. But she will not even catch his eye. She smiles to everyoo the objects in the room, praises a flower arra, worthless impersonal things. She misinterprets his behaviour, assuming this is what he wants, and doubles the size of the wall to protect herself.
But now he ot bear this wall in her. You built your walls too, she tells him, so I have my wall. She says it glittering in a beauty he ot stand. She with her beautiful clothes, with her pale face that laughs at everyone who s<big>..</big>miles at her, with the uain grin for his angry jokes. He tinues his appalling statements about this and that in some expedition they are all familiar with.
The minute she turns away from him in the lobby of Grop-pi’s bar after he greets her, he is insane. He knows the only way he accept losing her is if he tio hold her or be held by her. If they somehow nurse each other out of this.
Not with a wall.
Sunlight pours into his Cairo room. His hand flabby over the Herodotus journal, all the tension in the rest of his body, so he writes words down wrong, the pen sprawling as if without spine. He hardly write down the word sunlight. The words in love.
In the apartment there is light only from the river and the desert beyond it. It falls upon her neck her feet the vaation scar he loves on her right arm. She sits on the bed hugging nakedness. He slides his open palm along the sweat of her shoulder. This is my shoulder, he thinks, not her husband’s, this is my shoulder. As lovers they have offered parts of their bodies to each other, like this. In this room on the periphery of the river.
In the few hours they have, the room has darkeo this pitch of light. Just river a light. Only when there is the rare shock of rain do they go towards the windout their arms out, stretg, to bathe as much as they of themselves in it. Shouts towards the brief downpour fill the streets.
“We will never love each ain. We ever see each ain.” “I know,” he says.
The night of her insisten parting.
She sits, enclosed within herself, in the armour of her terrible sce. He is uo reach through it. Only his body is close to her.
“Never again. Whatever happens.” “Yes.” “I think he will go mad. Do you uand?” He says nothing, abandoning the attempt to pull her within him.
An hour later they walk into a dry night. They hear the gramophone songs in the distance from the Music for All ema, its windows open for the heat. They will have to part before that closes up and people she might know emerge from there.
They are ianical gardehe Cathedral of All Saints. She sees oear and leans forward and licks it, taking it into her mouth. As she has taken the blood from his hand whe himself cooking for her. Blood. Tear. He feels everything is missing from his body, feels he tains smoke. All that is alive is the knowledge of future desire and want. What he would say he ot say to this woman whose openness is like a wound, whose youth is not mortal yet. He ot alter what he loves most in her, her lack of promise, where the romance of the poems she loves still sits with ease in the real world. Outside these qualities he knows there is no order in the world.
This night of her insisteweh of September. The rain irees already dried by hot moonlight. Not one cool drop to fall down upon him like a tear. This parting at Groppi Park. He has not asked if her husband is home in that high square of light, across the street.
He sees the tall row of traveller’s palms above them, their outstretched wrists. The way her head and hair were above him, when she was his lover.
Now there is no kiss. Just one embrace. He untugs himself from her and walks away, then turns. She is still there. He es back within a few yards of her, one finger raised to make a point.
“I just want you to know. I don’t miss you yet.” His face awful to her, trying to smile. Her head sweeps away from him and hits the side of the gatepost. He sees it hurt her, notices the wince. But they have separated already into themselves now, the walls up at her insistence. Her jerk, her pain, is actal, is iional. Her hand is near her temple.
“You will,” she says.
From this point on in our lives, she had whispered to him earlier, we will either find or lose our souls.
How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled.
I was in her arms. I had pushed the sleeve of her shirt up to the shoulder so I could see her vaation scar. I love this, I said. This pale aureole on her arm. I see the instrument scratd then punch the serum within her and then release itself, free of her skin, years ago, when she was nine years old, in a school gymnasium.
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