The Alexandria Quartet (96 page)

Nessim closed and locked the door, unplugged his telephone and squeezed Serapamoun's shoulder affectionately as he passed behind his visitor's chair to reach his own. ‘I ask nothing better' he said. ‘Speak.'

‘Your brother, Narouz.'

‘Well, what of him?'

‘Nessim, in starting this community movement you had no idea of initiating a
jehad
— a holy war of religion — or of doing anything subversive which might unsettle the Egyptian Government? Of course not. That is what we thought, and if we joined you it was from a belief in your convictions that the Copts should unite and seek a larger place in public affairs.' He smoked in silence for a minute, lost in deep thought. Then he went on: ‘Our community patriotism in no way qualified our patriotism as Egyptians, did it? We were glad to hear Narouz preach the truths of our religion and race, yes, very glad, for these things needed saying, needed
feeling
. But … you have not been to a meeting for nearly three months. Are you aware what a change has come about? Narouz has been so carried away by his own powers that he is saying things today which could seriously compromise us all. We are most alarmed. He is filled now with some sort of mission. His head is a jumble of strange fragments of knowledge, and when he preaches all sorts of things pour out of him in a torrent which would look bad on paper if they were to reach Memlik Pasha.' Another long silence. Nessim found himself growing gradually pale with apprehension. Serapamoun continued in his low smoothly waxed voice. ‘To say that the Copts will find a place in the sun is one thing; but to say that they will sweep away the corrupt régime of the pashas who own ninety per cent of the land … to talk of taking over Egypt and setting it to rights.…'

‘Does he?' stammered Nessim, and the grave man nodded.

‘Yes. Thank God our meetings are still secret. At the last he started raving like someone
melboos
(possessed) and shouted that if it was necessary to achieve our ends he would arm the Bedouin. Can you improve on that?'

Nessim licked his dry lips. ‘I had no idea' he said.

‘We are very troubled and concerned about the fate of the whole movement with such preaching. We are counting on you to act in some way. He should, my dear Nessim, be restrained; or at least given some understanding of our role. He is seeing too much of old Taor — he is always out there in the desert with her. I don't think she has any political ideas, but he gets religious fervour from these meetings with her. He spoke of her and said that they kneel together for hours in the sand, under the blazing sun, and pray together. “I see her visions now and she sees mine.” That is what he said. Also, he has begun to drink very heavily. It is something which needs urgent attention.'

‘I shall see him at once' Nessim had said, and now, turning to stare once more into the dark, untroubled gaze of a Justine he knew to be much stronger than himself, he repeated the phrase softly, trying it with his mind as one might try the blade of a knife to test its keenness. He had put off the meeting on one pretext or another, though he knew that sooner or later it would have to be, he would have to assert himself over Narouz — but over a different Narouz to the one he had always known.

And now Pursewarden had clumsily intervened, interpolated his death and betrayal, to load him still more fully with the preoccupations with all that concerned affairs about which Narpuz himself knew nothing; setting his fevered mind to run upon i parallel tracks towards an infinity.… He had the sensation of I things closing in upon him, of himself beginning slowly to suffocate; under the weight of the cares he had himself invented. It had all begun to happen suddenly — within a matter of weeks. Helplessness began to creep over him, for every decision now seemed no longer a product of his will but a response to pressures built up outside him; the exigencies of the historical process in which he himself was being sucked as if into a quicksand.

But if he could no longer control events, it was necessary that he should take control of himself, his own nerves. Sedatives had for weeks now taken the place of self-control, though they only exorcized the twitchings of the subconscious temporarily; pistol-practice, so useless and childish a training against assassination, offered little surcease. He was possessed, assailed by the dreams of his childhood, erupting now without reason or consequence, almost taking over his waking life. He consulted Balthazar, but was of course unable to let him share the true preoccupations which burdened him, so that his wily friend suggested that he should record the dreams whenever possible on paper, and this also was done. But psychic pressures are not lifted unless one faces them squarely and masters them, does battle with the perils of the quivering reason.…

He had put off the interview with Narouz until he should feel stronger and better able to endure it. Fortunately the meetings of the group were infrequent. But daily he felt less and less equal to confronting his brother and it was in fact Justine who, with a word spoken in season at last, drove him out to Karm Abu Girg. Holding the lapels of his coat she said slowly and distinctly: ‘I would offer to go out and kill him myself, if I did not know that it would separate us forever. But if you have decided that it must be done, I have the courage to give the orders for you.' She did not mean it, of course. It was a trick to bring him to his senses and in a trice his mind cleared, the mist of his irresolution dissolved. These words, so terrible and yet so quietly spoken, with not even the pride of resolution in them, reawakened his passionate love for her, so that the tears almost started to his eyes. He gazed upon her like a religious fanatic gazing upon an ikon — and in truth her own features, sullen now and immobile, her smouldering eyes, were those of some ancient Byzantine painting.

‘Justine' he said with trembling hands.

‘Nessim' she said hoarsely, licking her dry lips, but with a barbaric resolution gleaming in her eyes. It was almost exultantly (for the impediment had gone) that he said: ‘I shall be going out this evening, never fear. Everything will be settled one way or the other.' He was all of a sudden flooded with power, determined to bring his brother to his senses and avert the danger of a second compromising order to his people, the Copts.

Nor had the new resolute mood deserted him that afternoon when he set off in the great car, driving with speed and deliberation along the dusty causeways of the canals to where the horses for which he had telephoned would be waiting for him. He was positively eager to see his brother, now, to outface him, to reassert himself, restore himself in his own eyes. Ali the factor met him at the ford with the customary politeness which seemed comfortably to reaffirm this new mood of resolution. He was after all the elder son. The man had brought Narouz' own white Arab and they cantered along the edge of the canals at great speed, with their reflections racing beside them in the tumbled water. He had asked only if his brother were now at home and had received a taciturn admission of the fact that he was. They exchanged no further word on the ride. The violet light of dusk was already in the air and the earth-vapours were rising from the lake. The gnats rose into the eye of the dying sun in silver streams, to store the last memories of the warmth upon their wings. The birds were collecting their families. How peaceful it all seemed! The bats had begun to stitch and stitch slowly across the darker spaces. The
bats!

The Hosnani house was already in cool violet half-darkness, tucked as it was under the shoulder of the low hillock, in the shadow of the little village whose tall white minaret blazed still in the sunset. He heard now the sullen crack of the whip as he dismounted, and caught a glimpse of the man standing upon the topmost balcony of the house, gazing intently down into the blue pool of the courtyard. It was Narouz: and yet somehow also not Narouz. Can a single gesture from someone with whom one is familiar reveal an interior transformation? The man with the whip, standing there, so intently peering into the sombre well of the courtyard, registered in his very stance a new, troubling flamboyance, an authority which did not belong, so to speak, to the repertoire of Narouz' remembered gestures. ‘He practises' said the factor softly, holding the bridle of the horse ‘every evening now with his whip he practises upon the bats.' Nessim suddenly had a feeling of incoherence. ‘The
bats?'
he repeated softly, under his breath. The man on the balcony — the Narouz of this hastily raised impression — gave a sudden chuckle and exclaimed in a hoarse voice: ‘Thirteen.' Nessim threw back the doors and stood framed now against the outer light. He spoke upwards in the darkening sky in a quiet, almost conversational voice, casting it like a ventriloquist towards the cloaked figure which stood at the top of the staircase in silhouette, with the long whip coiled at its side, at rest. ‘Ya Narouz' he said, uttering the traditional greeting of their common childhood with affection.

‘Ya Nessim' came the response after a pause, and then a long ebbing silence fell. Nessim, whose eyes had become accustomed to the dusk, now saw that the courtyard was full of the bodies of bats, like fragments of torn umbrella, some fluttering and crawling in puddles of their own blood, some lying still and torn up. So this was what Narouz did in the evenings — ‘practising upon the bats'! He stood for a while unsure of himself, unsure what to say next. The factor closed the great doors abruptly behind him, and at once he stood, black against the darkness now, staring up the stairway to where his unknown brother stood with a kind of watchful impenitent awareness. A bat ripped across the light and he saw Narouz' arm swing with an involuntary motion and then fall to the side again; from his vantage point at the top of the stairway he could shoot, so to speak, downwards upon his targets. Neither said anything for a while; then a door opened with a creak, throwing out a shaft of light across his path, and the factor came out of the outhouse with a broom with which he started to sweep up the fragments of fluttering bodies of Narouz' victims which littered the earthen floor of the courtyard. Narouz leaned forward a little to watch him intently as he did so, and when he had almost swept the pile of tattered bodies to the door of the outhouse, said in a hoarse voice: ‘Thirteen, eh?'

‘Thirteen.'

His voice gave Nessim a dull neuralgic thrill, for he sounded drugged — the harsh authoritative voice of someone drunk on
hashish
, perhaps, or opium; the voice of someone signalling from a new orbit in an unknown universe. He drew his breath slowly until his lungs were fully inflated and then spoke upwards once more to the figure on the stair. ‘Ya Narouz. I have come to speak to you on a matter of great urgency.'

‘Mount' said Narouz gruffly, in the voice of a sheepdog. ‘I wait for you here, Nessim.' The voice made many things clear to Nessim, for never before had the voice of his brother been completely free from a note of welcome, of joy even. At any other time he would have run down the stairs in clumsy welcome, taking them two at a time and calling out ‘Nessim, how
good
you have come!' Nessim walked across the courtyard and placed his hand upon the dusty wooden rail. ‘It is important' he said sharply, crisply, as if to establish his own importance in this tableau — the shadowy courtyard with the solitary figure standing up against the sky in silhouette, holding the long whip lightly, effortlessly, and watching him. Narouz repeated the word ‘Mount' in a lower key, and suddenly sat down putting his whip beside him on the top stair. It was the first time, thought Nessim, that there had been no greeting for him on his return to Karm Abu Girg. He walked up the steep stairs slowly, peering upwards.

It was much lighter on the first floor, and at the top of the second there was enough light to see his brother's face. Narouz sat quite still, in cloak and boots. His whip lay lightly coiled over the balustrade with its handle upon his knees. Beside him on the dusty wooden floor stood a half-empty bottle of gin. His chin was sunk upon his chest and he stared crookedly up under shaggy brows at the approaching stranger with an expression which combined truculence with a queer, irresolute sorrow. He was at his old trick of pressing his back teeth together and releasing them so that the cords of muscle at his temples expanded and contracted as if a heavy pulse were beating there. He watched his brother's slow ascent with this air of sombre self-divided uncertainty into which there crept from time to time the smouldering glow of an anger banked up, held under control. As Nessim reached the final landing and set foot upon the last flight of stairs, Narouz stirred and gave a sudden gargling bark — a sound such as one might make to a hound — and held out a hairy hand. Nessim paused and heard his brother say: ‘Stay there, Nessim' in a new and authoritative voice, but which contained no particular note of menace. He hesitated, leaning forward keenly the better to interpret this unfamiliar gesture — the square hand thrown out in an attitude almost of imprecation, fingers stretched, but not perfectly steady.

‘You have been drinking' he said at last, quietly but with a profound ringing disgust. ‘Narouz, this is new for you.' The shadow of a smile, as if of self-contempt, played upon the crooked lips of his brother. It broadened suddenly to a slow grin which displayed his hare-lip to the full: and then vanished, was swallowed up, as if abruptly recalled by a thought which it could not represent. Narouz now wore a new air of unsteady self-congratulation, of pride at once mawkish and dazed. ‘What do you wish from me?' he said hoarsely. ‘Say it here, Nessim. I am practising.'

‘Let us go indoors to speak privately.'

Narouz shook his head slowly and after consideration said crisply:

‘You can speak here.'

‘Narouz'
cried Nessim sharply, stung by these unfamiliar responses, and in the voice one would use to awaken a sleeper.
‘Please.'
The seated man at the head of the stairs stared up at him with the strange inflamed but sorrowful air and shook his head again. ‘I have spoken, Nessim' he said indistinctly. Nessim's voice broke, it was pitched so sharply against the silence of the court-yard. He said, almost pitifully now, ‘I simply must speak to you, do you understand?'