The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [231]
On the night in question he must have dozed off, for when he woke he found to his surprise that all was dark. A brilliant moon-light flooded the room and the balcony, but the lights had been extinguished by an unknown hand. He started up. Astonishingly, the balcony was empty. For a moment, Narouz thought he must be dreaming, for never before had his father gone to bed alone. Yet standing there in the moonlight, battling with this sense of incomprehension and doubt, he thought he heard the sound of the wheel-chair’s rubber tyres rolling upon the wooden boards of the invalid’s bedroom. This was an astonishing departure from accepted routine. He crossed the balcony and tiptoed down the corridor in amazement. The door of his father’s room was open. He peered inside. The room was full of moonlight. He heard the bump of the wheels upon the chest of drawers and a scrabble of fingers groping for a knob. Then he heard a drawer pulled open, and a sense of dismay filled him for he remembered that in it was kept the old Colt revolver which belonged to his father. He suddenly found himself unable to move or speak as he heard the breech snapped open and the unmistakable sound of paper rustling — a sound immediately interpreted by his memory. Then
the small precise click of the shells slipping into the chambers. It was as if he were trapped in one of those dreams where one is running with all one’s might and yet unable to move from the same spot. As the breech snapped home and the weapon was assembled, Narouz gathered himself together to walk boldly into the room but found that he could not move. His spine got pins and needles and he felt the hair bristle up on the back of his neck. Overcome by one of the horrifying inhibitions of early childhood he could do no more than take a single slow step forward and halt in the doorway, his teeth clenched to prevent them chattering. The moonlight shone directly on to the mirror, and by its reflected light he could see his father sitting upright in his chair, confronting his own image with an expression on his face which Narouz had never before seen. It was bleak and impassive, and in that ghostly derived light from the pierglass it looked denuded of all human feeling, picked clean by the emotions which had been steadily sapping it. The younger son watched as if mesmerized. (Once, in early childhood, he had seen something like it — but not quite as stern, not quite as withdrawn as this: yet something like it. That was when his father was describing the death of the evil factor Mahmoud, when he said grimly: ‘So they came and tied him to a tree. Et on lui a coupé les choses and stuffed them into his mouth. ’ As a child it was enough just to repeat the words and recall the expression on his father’s face to make Narouz feel on the point of fainting. Now this incident came back to him with redoubled terror as he saw the invalid confronting himself in a moonlight image, slowly raising the pistol to point it, not at his temple, but at the mirror, as he repeated in a hoarse croaking voice:
‘And now if she should fall in love, you know what you must do.’) Presently there was a silence and a single dry weary sob. Narouz felt tears of sympathy come into his eyes but still the spell he ld him; he could neither move nor speak nor even sob aloud. His father’s head sank down on his breast, and his pistol-hand fell with it until Narouz heard the faint tap of the barrel on the floor. A long thrilling silence fell in the room, in the corridor, on the balcony, the gardens everywhere — the silence of a relief which once more let the imprisoned blood flow in his heart and veins. (Somewhere sighing in her sleep Leila must have turned, pressing
her disputed white arms to a cool place among the pillows.) A single mosquito droned. The spell dissolved.