The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [408]
— the invented limitations of human love: but that suddenly the dark air of the night outside grew darker, swelled up with the ghastly tumescence of a sound which, like the frantic wing-beats of some prehistoric bird, swallowed the whole room, the candles, the figures. She shivered at the first terrible howl of the sirens but did not move; and all around us the city stirred to life like an ants’
nest. Those streets which had been so dark and silent now began to echo with the sound of feet as people made their way to the air-raid shelters, rustling like a gust of dry autumn leaves whirled by the wind. Snatches of sleepy conversation, screams, laughter, rose to the silent window of the little room. The street had filled as suddenly as a dry river-bed when the spring rains fall.
‘Clea, you should shelter.’
But she only pressed closer, shaking her head like someone drugged with sleep, or perhaps by the soft explosion of kisses which burst like bubbles of oxygen in the patient blood. I shook her softly, and she whispered: ‘I am too fastidious to die with a lot of people like an old rats’ nest. Let us go to bed together and ignore the loutish reality of the world.’
So it was that love-making itself became a kind of challenge to the whirlwind outside which beat and pounded like a thunder-
storm of guns and sirens, igniting the pale skies of the city with the magnificence of its lightning-flashes. And kisses themselves became charged with the deliberate affirmation which can come only from the foreknowledge and presence of death. It would have been good to die at any moment then, for love and death had somewhere joined hands. It was an expression of her pride, too, to sleep there in the crook of my arm like a wild bird ex-hausted by its struggles with a limed twig, for all the world as if it were an ordinary summer might of peace. And lying awake at her side, listening to the infernal racket of gunfire and watching the stabbing and jumping of fight behind the blinds I remembered how once in the remote past she had reminded me of the limita-tions which love illuminated in us: saying something about its capacity be ing limited to an iron ration for each soul and adding grave ly: ‘The love you feel for Melissa, the same love, is trying to work itself out through Justine.’ Would I, by extension, find this to be true also of Clea? I did not like to think so — for these fresh and spontaneous embraces were as pristine as invention, and not like ill-drawn copies of past actions. They were the very im-provisations of the heart itself — or so I told myself as I lay there trying so hard to recapture the elements of the feelings I had once woven around those other faces. Yes, improvisations upon reality itself, and for once devoid of the bitter impulses of the will. We had sailed into this calm water completely without premeditation, all canvas crowded on; and for the first time it felt natural to be where I was, drifting into sleep with her calm body lying beside me. Even the long rolling cannonades which shook the houses so, even the hail of shards which swept the streets, could not disturb the dreaming silence we harvested together. And when we awoke to find everything silent once more she lit a single candle and we lay by its flickering light, looking at each other, and talking in whispers.
‘I am always so bad the first time, why is it?’
‘So am I.’
‘Are you afraid of me?’
‘No. Nor of myself.’
‘Did you ever imagine this?’
‘We must both have done. Otherwise it would not have happened.’
‘Hush! Listen.’
Rain was now falling in