The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [108]
It is difficult to describe how unspeakably strange I found it to sit beside this vulgar double of the Nessim I had once known. I studied him keenly but he avoided my eye and confined his con-versation to laboured commonplaces which he punctuated by
yawns that were one by one tapped away behind ringed fingers. Here and there, however, behind this new façade stirred a hint of the old diffidence, but buried — as a fine physique may be buried in a mountain of fat. In the washroom Zoltan the waiter confided in me: ‘He has become truly himself since his wife went away. All Alexandria says so.’ The truth was that he had become like all Alexandr ia.
Late that night the whim seized him to drive me to Montaza in the late moonlight; we sat in the car for a long time in silence, smoking, gazing out at the moonlit waves hobbling across the sand bar. It was during this silence that I apprehended the truth about him. He had not really changed inside. He had merely adopted a new mask.
* * * * *
In the early summer I received a long letter from Clea with which this brief introductory memorial to Alexandria may well be brought to a close.
‘You may perhaps be interested in my account of a brief meeting with Justine a few weeks ago. We had, as you know, been exchang-ing occasional cards from our respective countries for some time past, and hearing that I was due to pass through Palestine into Syria she herself suggested a brief meeting. She would come, she said, to the border station where the Haifa train waits for half an hour. The settlement in which she works is somewhere near at hand, she could get a lift. We might talk for a while on the platform. To this I agreed.
‘At first I had some difficulty in recognizing her. She has gone a good deal fatter in the face and has chopped off her hair carelessly at the back so that it sticks out in rats’ tails. I gather that for the most part she wears it done up in a cloth. No trace remains of the old elegance or chic. Her features seem to have broadened, become more classically Jewish, lip and nose inclining more towards each other. I was shocked at first by the glittering eyes and the quick incisive way of breathing and talking — as if she were feverish As you can imagine we were both mortally shy of each other.
‘We walked out of the station along the road and sat down on the edge of a dry ravine, a wadi, with a few terrified-look ing spring
flowers about our feet. She gave the impression of already having chosen this place for our interview: perhaps as suitably austere. I don’t know. She did not mention Nessim or you at first but spoke only about her new life. She had achieved, she claimed, a new and perfect happiness through “community-service”; the air with which she said this suggested some sort of religious conversion. Do not smile. It is hard, I know, to be patient with the weak. In all the back-breaking sweat of the Communist settlement she claimed to have achieved a “new humility”. (Humility! The last trap that awaits the ego in search of absolute truth. I felt disgusted but said nothing.) She described the work of the settlement coarsely, un-imaginatively, as a peasant might. I noticed that those once fine ly-tended hands were calloused and rough. I suppose people have a right to dispose of their bodies as they think fit, I said to myself, feeling ashamed because I must be radiating cleanliness