The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [357]
Yet he sat on looking at the dispirited little creature on the mat and feeling suddenly as if he had been engulfed in a tidal wave of human contumely — so expressed by his admirers in this unwanted gift. He was to be garde-malade, a male nurse to a short-legged lap dog. Was this now the only way left of exorcizing his sadness…? He sighed, and sighing pressed the bell….
* * * * *
XVI
he day of his death was like any other winter day at
Karm Abu Girg; or if it was different it was only in T one small and puzzling detail, the significance of which did not strike him at first: the servants suddenly ebbing away to leave him alone in the house. All night long now he lay in troubled sleep among the luxuriant growths of his own fantasy, dense as a tropical vegetation; only waking from time to time to be comforted by the soft whewing of the cranes flying overhead in the darkness. It was full winter and the great bird migrations had begun. The long vitreous expanses of the lake had begun to fill up with their winged visitants like some great terminus. All night long one could hear the flights come in — the thick whirring of mallard-wings or the metallic kraonk kraonk of high-flying geese as they bracketed the winter moon. Among the thickets of reed and sedge, in places polished to black or viper-green by the occasional clinging frosts, you could hear the chuckling and gnatting of royal duck. The old house with its mildewed walls where the scorpions and fleas hibernated among the dusty interstices of the earth-brick felt very empty and desolate to him now that Leila had gone. He marched defiantly about it, making as much noise as he could with his boots, shouting at the dogs, cracking his whip across the courtyard. The little toy figures with windmill arms which lined the walls against the ubiquitous evil eye, worked un-ceasingly, flurried by the winter winds. Their tiny celluloid pro-pellers made a furry sound as they revolved which was somehow comforting.
Nessim had pleaded hard with him to accompany Leila and Justine but he had refused — and indeed behaved like a bear though he knew in truth that without his mother the loneliness of the house would be hard to support. He had locked himself into the egg-incubators, and to his brother’s feverish knocking and shouting had opposed a bitter silence. There had been no way of explaining things to Nessim. He would not emerge even when Leila came to plead with him — for fear that his resolve might weaken under her importunities. He had crouched there in silence with his back against the wall, his fist crammed into his mouth to stifle the noiseless sobbing — how heavy was the guilt one bore
for filial disobedience! They had abandoned him at last. He heard the horses clatter out of the courtyard. He was alone. Then after that a whole month of silence before he heard his brother’s voice on the telephone. Narouz had walked all day long in a forest of his own heart-beats, attending to the work of the land with a concentrated fury of purpose, galloping along the slow-moving river of his inheritance on horseback, his reflection flying beside him: always with the great whip coiled at his saddle-bow. He felt immeasurably aged now — and yet, at one and the same time, as new to the world as a foetus hanging from the birth-cord. The land, his land, now brown and greasy as an old wineskin under the rain, compelled him. It was all he had left now to care for — trees bruised by frost, sand poisoned by desert salt, water-pans stocked with fish and