The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [175]
“What the hell are you doing?” I said angrily, to which he replied
“There must be nothing for the Egyptian Police to find.” And then he stopped as if he had said too much. Every mirror bore a soap-inscription. Nessim had partly obliterated one. I could only make out the letters OHEN … PALESTINE….
‘It was not long before there came the familiar knocking at the door and the faces and tumult inseparable from such scenes every-where in the world. Men with notebooks, and journalists, and priests — Father Paul of all people turned up. At this, I half-expected the corpse to rise up and throw something … but no;
Pursewarden remained with his nose cocked to the ceiling, in his amused privacy.
‘We stumbled out together, the three of us, and drove back to the studio where the great failed paintings soothed us, and where whisky gave us new courage to continue living. Justine said not a word. Not a mortal word.’
* * * * *
VII
turn now to another part of the Interlinear, the passage which Balthazar marked: ‘So Narouz decided to act,’ underlining the I last word twice. Shall I reconstruct it — the scene I see so clearly, and which his few crabbed words in green ink have detonated in my imagination? Yes, it will enable me to dream for a moment about an unfrequented quarter of Alexandria which I loved.
The city, inha bited by these memories of mine, moves not only backwards into our history, studded by the great names which mark every station of recorded time, but also back and forth in the living present, so to speak — among its contemporary faiths and races: the hundred little spheres which religion or lore creates and which cohere softly together like cells to form the great sprawling jellyfish which is Alexandria today. Joined in this fortuitous way by the city’s own act of will, isolated on a slate promontory over the sea, backed only by the moonstone mirror of Mareotis, the salt lake, and its further forevers of ragged desert (now dusted softly by the spring winds into satin dunes, patternless and beautiful as cloud-scapes), the communities still live and communicate — Turks with Jews, Arabs and Copts and Syrians with Armenians and Italians and Greeks. The shudders of monetary transactions ripple through them like wind in a wheatfield; ceremonies, marriages and pacts join and divide them. Even the place-names on the old tram-routes with their sandy grooves of rail echo the unforgotten names of their founders — and the names of the dead captains who first landed
here, from Alexander to Amr; founders of this anarchy of flesh and fever, of money-love and mysticism. Where else on earth will you find such a mixture?
And when night falls and the white city lights up the thousand candelabra of its parks and buildings, tunes in to the soft un-earthly drum-music of Morocco or Caucasus, it looks like some great crystal liner asleep there, anchored to the horn of Africa —
her diamond and fire-opal reflections twisting downwards like polished bars into the oily harbour among the battleships. At dusk it can become like a mauve jungle, anomalous, stained with colours as if from a shattered prism; and rising into the pearly sky of the sunset falter up the steeples and minarets like stalks of giant fennel in a swamp rising up over the long pale lines of the sea-shore and the barbaric cafés where the negroes dance to the pop and drub of a finger-drum or to the mincing of clarinets.
‘There are only as many realities as you care to imagine’ writes Pursewarden.
Narouz always shunned Alexandria while he loved it passion-ately, with an exile’s love; his hare-lip had made him timid to visit the centre, to encounter those he might know. He always hovered about its outskirts, not daring to go directly into the great lighted heart of it where his brother lived a life of devoted enterprise and mondanité. He came into it always humbly, on horseback, dressed as he was always dressed, to fulfil the transactions which concerned