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By Root 13928 0

of some great freehand composition, a cartoon of a woman representing someone released from bondage in the male. ‘Where the carrion is’ she once quoted proudly from Boehme, speaking of her native city, ‘there the eagles will gather.’ Truly she looked and seemed an eagle at this moment. But Melissa was a sad painting from a winter landscape contained by dark sky; a window-bo x with a few flowering geran-iums lying forgotten on the windowsill of a cement-factory. There is a passage in one of Justine’s diaries which comes to mind here. I translate it here because though it must have referred to incidents long preceding those which I have recounted yet nevertheless it almost exactly expresses the curiously ingrown quality of a love which I have come to recognize as peculiar to the city rather than to ourselves. ‘Idle’ she writes ‘to imagine falling in love as a correspondence of minds, of thoughts; it is a simultaneous firing of two spirits engaged in the autonomous act of growing up. And the sensation is of something having noiselessly exploded ins ide each of them. Around this event, dazed and preoccupied, the lover moves examining his or her own experience; her gratitude alone, stretching away towards a mistaken donor, creates the illusion that she communicates with her fellow, but this is false.

The loved object is simply one that has shared an experience at the same moment of time, narcissistically; and the desire to be near the beloved object is at first not due to the idea of possessing it, but simply to let the two experiences compare themselves, like reflec-tions in different mirrors. All this may precede the first look, kiss, or touch; precede ambition, pride or envy; precede the first declarations which mark the turning point — for from here love degenerates into habit, possession, and back to loneliness.’ How characteristic and how humourless a delineation of the magical gift: and yet how true … of Justine!

‘Every man’ she writes elsewhere, and here I can hear the hoarse and sorrowful accents of her voice repeating the words as she writes them: ‘Every man is made of clay and daimon, and no woman can nourish both.’

That afternoon she went home to find that Nessim had arrived by the afternoon plane. She complained of feeling feverish and went early to bed. When he came to sit by her side and take her temperature she said something which struck him as interesting enough to remember — for long afterwards he repeated it to me:

‘This is nothing of medical interest — a small chill. Diseases are not interested in those who want to die.’ And then with one of those characteristic swerves of association, like a swallow turning in mid-air she added, ‘Oh! Nessim, I have always been so strong. Has it prevented me from being truly loved?’

* * * * *

It was through Nessim that I first began to move with any free-dom in the great cobweb of Alexandrian society; my own exiguous earnings did not even permit me to visit the night-club where Melissa danced. At first I was a trifle ashamed of being forever on the receiving end of Nessim’s hospitality, but we were soon such fast friends that I went everywhere with them and never gave the matter a thought. Melissa unearthed an ancient dinner-jacket from one of my trunks and refurbished it. It was in their company that I first visited the club where she danced. It was strange to sit between Justine and Nessim and watch the flaky white light suddenly blaze down upon a Melissa I could no longer recognize under a layer of paint which gave her gentle face an air of gross and

precocious unimaginativeness. I was horrified too at the banality of her dancing, which was bad beyond measure; yet watching her make those gentle and ineffectual movements of her slim hands and feet (the air of a gazelle harnessed to a water-wheel) I was filled with tenderness at her mediocrity, at the dazed and self-deprecating way she bowed to the lukewarm applause. Afterwards she was made to carry a tray round and take up a collection for the orchestra, and this she did with a hopeless timidity, coming to