The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [45]
‘Of course not.’
‘But if you think I should I will have to.’
I said nothing. Cohen was in a sense already dead and buried. He had lost his place in our history, and an expenditure of emo-tional energy on him seemed to me useless It had no relation to the real man who lay among the migrating fragments of his old body in a whitewashed ward. For us he had become merely an histor ic figure. And yet here he was, obstinately trying to insist on his identity, trying to walk back into our lives at another point in the circumference. What could Melissa give him now? What could she deny him?
‘Would you like me to go?’ I said. The sudden irrational thought had come into my mind that here, in the death of Cohen, I could study my own love and its death. That someone in extremis, calling for help to an old lover, could only elicit a cry of disgust — this terrified me. It was too late for the old man to awake compassion or even interest in my lover, who was already steeped in new mis-fortunes against the backcloth of which the old had faded, rotted. And in a little time perhaps, if she should call on me or I on her?
Would we turn from each other with a cry of emptiness and dis-gust? I realized then the truth about all love: that it is an absolute which takes all or forfeits all. The other feelings, compassion, tenderness and so on, exist only on the periphery and belong to the constructions of society and habit. But she herself — austere and merciless Aphrodite — is a pagan. It is not our brains or instincts which she picks — but our very bones. It terrified me to think that this old man, at such a point in his life, had been unable to conjure up an instant’s tenderness by the memory of anything he had said or done: tenderness from one who was at heart the most tender and gentle of mortals.
To be forgotten in this way was to die the death of a dog ‘I shall go and see him for you’ I said, though my heart quailed in disgust at the prospect; but Melissa had already fallen asleep with her dark head upon my knees. Whenever she was upset about anything she took refuge in the guileless world of sleep, slipping into it as smoothly and easily as a deer or a child. I put my hands inside the faded kimono and gently rubbed her shallow ribs and flanks. She stirred half-awake and murmured something inaudible as she allowed me to lift her and carry her gently back to the sofa. I watched her sleeping for a long time.
It was already dark and the city was drifting like a bed of sea-weed towards the lighted cafés of the upper town. I went to Pas-troudi and ordered a double whisky which I drank slowly and thoughtfully. Then I took a taxi to the Hospital.
I followed a duty-nurse down the long anonymous green cor-ridors whose oil-painted walls exuded an atmosphere of damp. The white phosphorescent bulbs which punctuated our progress wallowed in the gloom like swollen glow-worms.
They had put him in the little ward with the single curtained bed which was, as I afterwards learned from Mnemjian, reserved for critical cases whose expectation of life was short. He did not see me at first, for he was watching with an air of shocked exhaus-tion while a nurse disposed his pillows for him. I was amazed at the masterful, thoughtful reserve of the face which stared up from the mattress, for he had become so thin as almost to be unrecogniz-able. The flesh had sunk down upon his cheek-bones exposing the long slightly curved nose to its very roots and throwing into relief the carved nostrils. This gave the whole mouth and jaw a buoyancy,
a spirit which must have characterized his face in earliest youth. His eyes looked bruised with fever and a dark stubble