The Alexandria Quartet (140 page)

And then: to sit once more in the simple sunlight, sipping the red wine of St Menas as she broke up the warm brown loaf of French bread, and hunted for a particular cheese or a cluster of dates: while Balthazar talked discursively (half asleep) of the Vineyard of Ammon, the Kings of the Harpoon Kingdom and their battles, or of the Mareotic wine to which, not history, but the gossiping Horace once attributed Cleopatra's distempers of mind … (‘History sanctions everything, pardons everything — even what we do not pardon ourselves.')

So the warm noon drew on as we lay there on the hot pebbles: and so at last — to Balthazar's great delight and Clea's discomfiture — the predicted thunderstorm made its appearance, heralded by a great livid cloud which rolled up from the east and squatted over the city, bruising the sky. So suddenly too — as when an ink-squid in alarm puffs out its bag and suddenly fogs clear water in a cloud of black — rain flowed down in glittering sheets, thunder bellowed and insisted. At each peal Balthazar clapped his hands with delight — not only to be proved right, but also because here we were sitting in full sunlight, fully at our ease, eating oranges and drinking wine beside an untroubled blue sea.

‘Stop crowing' said Clea severely.

It was one of those freak storms so prevalent in the early spring with its sharp changes of temperature born of sea and desert. They turned the streets to torrents in the twinkling of an eye, yet never endured above half an hour. Suddenly the cloud would be whisked away by a scrap of wind, utterly to disappear. ‘And mark me now' said Balthazar, inebriated by the success of his prediction. ‘By the time we get back to harbour everything will be dry again, dry as a bone.'

But now the afternoon brought us another phenomenon to delight us — something rarely seen in summer in the waters of Alexandria, belonging as it did to those days preceding winter storms when the glass was falling steeply. The waters of the pool darkened appreciably, curdled, and then became phosphorescent. It was Clea who first noticed. ‘Look' she cried with delight, crushing her heels down in the shallows to watch the twinkling prickling light spark from them. ‘Phosphorus!' Balthazar started saying something learned about the organism which causes this spectacle but unheeding we plunged side by side and ranged down into the water, transformed into figures of flame, the sparks flashing from the tips of our fingers and toes with the glitter of static electricity. A swimmer seen underwater looks like an early picture of the fall of Lucifer, literally on fire. So bright was the electrical crackle that we could not help wondering how it was that we were not scorched by it. So we played, glittering like comets, among the quiet mariners who sat, watching us perhaps in their thoughts, faintly echoing the twitching of the tide in their canvas sacks.

‘The cloud's lifting already' cried Balthazar as I surfaced at last for air. Soon even the fugitive phosphorescence would dwindle and vanish. For some reason or other he had climbed into the stern of the cutter, perhaps to gain height and more easily watch the thunderstorm over the city. I rested my forearms on the gunwale and took my breath. He had unwrapped the old harpoon gun of Narouz and was holding it negligently on his knee. Clea surfaced with a swish of delight and pausing just long enough to cry: ‘The fire is so beautiful' doubled her lithe body back and ducked downward again.

‘What are you doing with that?' I asked idly.

‘Seeing how it works.'

He had in fact pushed the harpoon to rest in the barrel. It had locked the spring. ‘It's cocked' I said. ‘Have a care.'

‘Yes, I'm going to release it.'

Then Balthazar leaned forward and uttered the only serious remark he had made all that day. ‘You know' he said, ‘I think you had better take her with you. I have a feeling you won't be coming back to Alexandria. Take Clea with you!'

And then, before I could reply, the accident happened. He was fumbling with the gun as he spoke. It slipped from between his fingers and fell with a crash, the barrel striking the gunwale six inches from my face. As I reared back in alarm I heard the sudden cobra-like hiss of the compressor and the leaden twang of the trigger-release. The harpoon whistled into the water beside me rustling its long green line behind it. ‘For Christ's sake' I said. Balthazar had turned white with alarm and vexation. His half-muttered apologies and expressions of horrid amazement were eloquent. ‘I'm terribly sorry.' I had heard the slight snick of steel settling into a target, somewhere down there in the pool. We stayed frozen for a second for something else had occurred simultaneously to our minds. As I saw his lips starting to shape the word ‘Clea' I felt a sudden darkness descending on my spirit — a darkness which lifted and trembled at the edges; and a rushing like the sough of giant wings. I had already turned before he uttered the word. I crashed back into the water, now following the long green thread with all the suspense of Ariadne; and to it added the weight of slowness which only heartsick apprehension brings. I knew in my mind that I was swimming vigorously — yet it seemed like one of those slow-motion films where human actions, delayed by the camera, are drawn unctuously out to infinity, spooled out like toffee. How many light-years would it take to reach the end of that thread? What would I find at the end of it? Down I went, and down, in the dwindling phosphorescence, into the deep shadowed coolness of the pool.

At the far end, by the wreck, I distinguished a convulsive, coiling movement, and dimly recognized the form of Clea. She seemed intently busy upon some childish underwater game of the kind we so often played together. She was tugging at something, her feet braced against the woodwork of the wreck, tugging and relaxing her body. Though the green thread led to her I felt a wave of relief — for perhaps she was only trying to extricate the harpoon and carry it to the surface with her. But no, for she rolled drunkenly. I slid along her like an eel, feeling with my hands. Feeling me near she turned her head as if to tell me something. Her long hair impeded my vision. As for her face I could not read the despairing pain which must have been written on it — for the water transforms every expression of the human features into the goggling imbecile grimace of the squid. But now she arched out and flung her head back so that her hair could flow freely up from her scalp — the gesture of someone throwing open a robe to exhibit a wound. And I saw. Her right hand had been pierced and nailed to the wreck by the steel arrow. At least it had not passed through her body, my mind cried out in relief, seeking to console itself; but the relief turned to sick malevolent despair when, clutching the steel shaft, I myself braced my feet against the wood, tugging until my thigh muscles cracked. It would not be budged by a hair's breadth. (No, but all this was part of some incomprehensible dream, fabricated perhaps in the dead minds of the seven brooding figures which attended so carefully, so scrupulously to the laboured evolutions we now performed — we no longer free and expeditious as fish, but awkward, splayed, like lobsters trapped in a pot.) I struggled frantically with that steel arrow, seeing out of the corner of my eye the long chain of white bubbles bursting from the throat of Clea. I felt her muscles expending themselves, ebbing. Gradually she was settling in the drowsiness of the blue water, being invaded by the water-sleep which had already lulled the mariners to sleep. I shook her.

I cannot pretend that anything which followed belonged to my own volition — for the mad rage which now possessed me was not among the order of the emotions I would ever have recognized as belonging to my proper self. It exceeded, in blind violent rapacity, anything I had ever before experienced. In this curious timeless underwater dream I felt my brain ringing like the alarm bell of an ambulance, dispelling the lulling languorous ebb and flow of the marine darkness. I was suddenly rowelled by the sharp spur of terror. It was as if I were for the first time confronting myself — or perhaps an alter ego shaped after a man of action I had never realized, recognized. With one wild shove I shot to the surface again, emerging under Balthazar's very nose.

‘The knife' I said sucking in the air.

His eyes gazed into mine, as if over the edge of some sunken continent, with an expression of pity and horror; emotions preserved, fossilized, from some ice age of human memory. And native fear. He started to stammer out all the questions which invaded his mind — words like ‘what' ‘where' ‘when' ‘whither' — but could achieve no more than a baffled ‘wh ——': a vague sputtering anguish of interrogation.

The knife which I had remembered was an Italian bayonet which had been ground down to the size of a dirk and sharpened to razor keenness. Ali the boatman had manufactured it with pride. He used it to trim ropes, for splicing and rigging. I hung there for a second while he reached out for it, eyes closed, lungs drinking in the whole sky it seemed. Then I felt the wooden haft in my fingers and without daring to look again at Balthazar I turned my toes to heaven and returned on my tracks, following the green thread.

She hung there limp now, stretched languorously out, while her long hair unfurled behind her; the tides rippled out along her body, passing through it, it seemed like an electric current playing. Everything was still, the silver coinage of sunlight dappling the floor of the pool, the silent observers, the statues whose long beards moved slowly, unctuously to and fro. Even as I began to hack at her hand I was mentally preparing a large empty space in my mind which would have to accommodate the thought of her dead. A large space like an unexplored subcontinent on the maps of the mind. It was not very long before I felt the body disengage under this bitter punishment. The water was dark. I dropped the knife and with a great push sent her reeling back from the wreck: caught her under the arms: and so rose. It seemed to take an age — an endless progression of heartbeats — in that slow-motion world. Yet we hit the sky with a concussion that knocked the breath from me — as if I had cracked my skull on the ceiling of the universe. I was standing in the shallows now rolling the heavy sodden log of her body. I heard the crash of Balthazar's teeth falling into the boat as he jumped into the water beside me. We heaved and grunted like stevedores scrabbling about to grasp that injured hand which was spouting. He was like an electrician trying to capture and insulate a high-tension wire which had snapped. Grabbing it, he held on to it like a vice. I had a sudden picture of him as a small child holding his mother's hand nervously among a crowd of other children, or crossing a park where the boys had once thrown stones at him.… Through his pink gums he extruded the word ‘Twine' — and there was some luckily in the cutter's locker which kept him busy.

‘But she's dead' I said, and the word altered my heartbeats, so that I felt about to faint. She was lying, like a fallen seabird, on the little spit of pebbles. Balthazar squatted almost in the water, holding frenziedly on to the hand at which I could hardly bear to look. But again this unknown alter ego whose voice came from far away helped me to adjust a tourniquet, roll a pencil in it and hand it to him. With a heave now I straightened her out and fell with a thump upon her, crashing down as if from a very great height upon her back. I felt the soggy lungs bounce under this crude blow. Again and again, slowly but with great violence I began to squeeze them in this pitiful simulacrum of the sexual act — life saving, life-giving. Balthazar appeared to be praying. Then came a small sign of hope for the lips of that pale face opened and a little sea water mixed with vomit trickled from them. It meant nothing, of course, but we both cried out at the omen. Closing my eyes I willed my wrists to seek out those waterlogged lungs, to squeeze and void them. Up and down, up and down in this slow cruel rhythm, I pumped at her. I felt her fine bones creaking under my hands. But still she lay lifeless. But I would not accept the thought that she was dead, though I knew it with one part of my mind. I felt half mad with determination to disprove it, to overthrow, if necessary, the whole process of nature and by an act of will force her to live. These decisions astonished me, for they subsisted like clear and sharply defined images underneath the dazed physical fatigue, the groan and sweat of this labour. I had, I realized, decided either to bring her up alive or to stay down there at the bottom of the pool with her; but where, from which territory of the will such a decision had come, I could not guess! And now it was hot. I was pouring with sweat. Balthazar still sat holding the hand, the painter's hand, humbly as a child at its mother's knee. Tears trickled down his nose. His head went from side to side in that Jewish gesture of despairing remorse and his toothless gums formed the sound of the old Wailing Wall ‘Aiee, Aiee'. But very softly, as if not to disturb her.

But at last we were rewarded. Suddenly, like a spout giving in a gutter tinder the pressure of rain, her mouth opened and expelled a mass of vomit and sea-water, fragments of breadsoak and orange. We gazed at this mess with a lustful delight, as if at a great trophy. I felt the lungs respond slowly to my hand. A few more strokes of this crude engine and a secondary ripple seemed to stir in the musculature of her body. At almost every downward thrust now the lungs gave up some water, reluctantly, painfully. Then, after a long time, we heard a faint whimper. It must have hurt, as the first few breaths hurt a newly horn child. The body of Clea was protesting at this forcible rebirth. And all of a sudden the features of that white face moved, composed themselves to express something like pain and protest. (Yes, but it
hurts
to realize.)

‘Keep it up' cried Balthazar in a new voice, shaky and triumphant. There was no need to tell me. She was twitching a little now, and making a soundless whimpering face at each lunge. It was like starting a very cold diesel engine. Finally yet another miracle occurred — for she opened very blue sightless unfocused eyes for a second to study, with dazed concentration, the stones before her nose. Then she closed them again. Pain darkened her features, but even the pain was a triumph — for at least they expressed living emotions now — emotions which had replaced the pale set mask of death. ‘She's breathing' I said. ‘Balthazar, she's breathing.'