The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [363]
‘No. One must not interfere with a destiny however bitter by introducing lies. He must die as he was meant to.’ And the first voice said bitterly: ‘Then why morphia, why the comforts of
religion, and not the solace of a desired human voice imitated, the pressure of a hand imitated? You could easily do this.’ But he shook his dark head at himself and said ‘No’ with bitter obstinacy, as he listened to the unpleasant voice of the priest reading passages of scripture upon the balcony, his voice mixing with the murmuring and shuffling of the human beings in the courtyard below. Was not the evangel all that the imitation of Clea’s voice might have been? He kissed his patient’s brow slowly, sadly as he reflected.
Narouz began to feel the tuggings of the Underworld, the five wild dogs of the sense pulling ever more heavily upon the leash. He opposed to them the forces of his mighty will, playing for time, waiting for the only human revelation he could expect
— voice and odour of a girl who had become embalmed by his senses, entombed like some precious image. He could hear the-nerves ticking away in their spirals of pain, the oxygen bubbles rising ever more slowly to explode in his blood. He knew that he was running out of funds, running out of time. The slow ly gathering weight of a paralysis was settling over his mind, the narcotic of pain.
Nessim went away to the telephone again. He was wax pale now, with a hectic spot of pink in each cheek, and he spoke with the high sweet hysterical voice of his mother. Clea had already started for Karm Abu Girg, but it seemed that a part of the road had been washed away by a broken dyke. Selim doubted whether she could get through to the ferry that evening.
There now began a tremendous struggle in the breast of Narouz — a struggle to maintain an equilibrium between the forces battling within him. His musculature contracted in heavy bunches with the effort of waiting; his veins bunched out, polished to ebony with the strain, controlled by his will. He ground his teeth savagely together like a wild boar as he felt himself foun-dering. And Balthazar sat like an effigy, one hand upon his brow and the other fiercely holding the contorted muscles of his wrist. He whispered in Arabic: ‘Rest, my darling. Easily, my loved one.’
His sadness gave him complete mastery of himself, complete calm. Truth is so bitter that the knowledge of it confers a kind of luxury. So it went for a while. Then lastly there burst from the hairy throat of the dying man a single tremendous word, the name of
Clea, uttered in the cavernous voice of a wounded lion: a voice which combined anger, reproof and an overwhelming sadness in its sudden roar. So nude a word, her name, as simple as ‘God’
or ‘Mother’ — yet it sounded as if upon the lips of some dying conqueror, some lost king, conscious of the body and breath dissolving within him. The name of Clea sounded through the whole house, drenched by the splendour of his anguish, silencing the little knots of whispering servants and visitors, setting back the ears of the hunting dogs, making them crouch and fawn: ringing in Nessim’s mind with a new and terrifying bitterness too deep for tears. And as this great cry slowly faded, the intelligence of his death dawned upon them with a new and crushing weight —
like the pressure of some great tomb door closing upon hope. Immobile, ageless as pain itself, sat the defeated effigy of the doctor at the bedside of pain. He was thinking to himself, full of the bright fight of intellection : ‘A phrase like “out of the jaws of death” might mean something like that cry of Narouz’, its bravery. Or “out of the jaws of Hell”. It must mean the hell of a private mind. No, we can do nothing.’
The great voice thinned softly into the burring comb-and-paper sound of a long death-rattle, fading into the buzz of a fly caught in some remote spider’s web.
And now Nessim gave a single sweet sob out there on the balcony
— the noise that a bamboo stem makes when it is plucked from the stalk. And like the formal opening