PART IV

The disappearance of Justine was something new to be borne.  It changed the whole pattern of our relationship.  It was as if she had removed the keystone to an arch: Nessim and I left among the ruins, so to speak, were faced with the task of repairing a relationship which she herself had invented and which her absence now rendered hollow, echoing with a guilt which would, I thought, henceforward always overshadow affection.

      His suffering was apparent to everyone.  That expressive face took on a flayed unhealthy look - the pallor of a church martyr.  In seeing him thus, I was vividly reminded of my own feelings during the last meeting with Melissa before she left for the clinic in Jerusalem.  The candour and gentleness with which she said: 'The whole thing is gone.... It may never come back.... At least the separation.'  Her voice grew furry and moist, blurring the edges of the words.  At this time she was quite ill.  The lesions had opened again.  'Time to reconsider ourselves.... If only I were Justine.... I know you thought of her when you made love to me.... Don't deny it.... I know, my darling.... I'm even jealous of your imagination.... Horrible to have self-reproach heaped on top of the other miseries.... Never mind.'  She blew her nose shakily and managed a smile.  'I need rest so badly.... And now Nessim has fallen in love with me.'  I put my hand over her sad mouth.  The taxi throbbed on remorselessly, like someone living on his nerves.  All round us walked the wives of the Alexandrians, smartly turned out, with the air of well-lubricated phantoms.  The driver watched us in the mirror like a spy.  The emotions of white people, he perhaps was thinking, are odd and excite prurience.  He watched as one might watch cats making love.

      'I shall never forget you.'

      'Nor I.  Write to me.'

      'I shall always come back if you want.'

      'Never doubt it.  Get well, Melissa, you must get well.  I'll wait for you.  A new cycle will begin.  It is all there inside me, intact.  I feel it.'

      The words that lovers use at such times are charged with distorting emotions.  Only their silence have the cruel precision which aligns them to truth.  We were silent, holding hands.  She embraced me and signalled to the driver to set off.

      'With her going the city took on an unnerving strangeness for him,' writes Arnauti.  'Wherever his memory of her turned a familiar corner she recreated herself swiftly, vividly, and superimposed these haunted eyes and hands on the streets and squares.  Old conversations leaped up and hit him among the polished table-tops of cafés where once they had sat, gazing like drunkards into each other's eyes.  Sometimes she appeared walking a few paces ahead of him in the dark street.  She would stop to adjust the strap of a sandal and he would overtake her with beating heart - only to find it was someone else.  Particular doors seemed just about to admit her.  He would sit and watch them doggedly.  At other times he was suddenly seized by the irresistible conviction that she was about to arrive on a particular train, and he hurried to the station and breasted the crowd of passengers like a man fording a river.  Or he might sit in the stuffy waiting-room of the airport after midnight watching the departures and arrivals, in case she were coming back to surprise him.  In this way she controlled his imagination and taught him how feeble reason was; and he carried the consciousness of her going heavily about with him - like a dead baby from which one could not bring oneself to part.'

      The night after Justine went away there was a freak thunderstorm of tremendous intensity.  I had been wandering about in the rain for hours, a prey not only to feelings which I could not control but also to remorse for what I imagined Nessim must be feeling.  Frankly, I hardly dared to go back to the empty flat, lest I should be tempted along the path Pursewarden had already taken so easily, with so little premeditation.  Passing Rue Fuad for the seventh time, coatless and hatless in that blinding downpour, I happened to catch sight of the light in Clea's high window and on an impulse rang the bell.  The front door opened with a whine and I stepped into the silence of the building from the dark street with its booming of rain in gutters and the splash of overflowing manholes.

      She opened the door to me and at a glance took in my condition.  I was made to enter, peel off my sodden clothes and put on the blue dressing-gown.  The little electric fire was a blessing, and Clea sat about making me hot coffee.

      She was already in pyjamas, her gold hair combed out for the night.  A copy of À Rebours lay face down on the floor beside the ashtray with the smouldering cigarette in it.  Lightning kept flashing fitfully at the window, lighting up her grave face with its magnesium flashes.  Thunder rolled and writhed in the dark heavens outside the window.  In this calm it was possible partly to exorcise my terrors by speaking of Justine.  It appeared she knew all - nothing can be hidden from the curiosity of the Alexandrians.  She knew all about Justine, that is to say.

      'You will have guessed,' said Clea in the middle of all this, 'that Justine was the woman I told you once I loved so much.'

      This cost her a good deal to say.  She was standing with a coffee cup in one hand, clad in her blue-striped pyjamas by the door.  She closed her eyes as she spoke, as if she were expecting a blow to fall upon the crown of her head.  Out of the closed eyes came two tears which ran slowly down on each side of her nose.  She looked like a young stag with a broken ankle.  'Ah! let us not speak of her any more,' she said at last in a whisper.  'She will never come back.'

      Later I made some attempt to leave, but the storm was still at its height and my clothes still impossibly sodden.  'You can stay here,' said Clea, 'with me'; and she added, with a gentleness which brought a lump into my throat, 'But please - I don't know how to say this - please don't make love to me.'

      We lay together in that narrow bed talking of Justine while the storm blew itself out, scourging the windowpanes of the flat with driven rain from the seafront.  She was calm now with a sort of resignation which had a moving eloquence about it.  She told me many things about Justine's past which only she knew; and she spoke of her with a wonder and tenderness such as people might use in talking of a beloved yet infuriating queen.  Speaking of Arnauti's ventures into psycho-analysis she said with amusement: 'She was not really clever, you know, but she had the cunning of a wild animal at bay.  I'm not sure she really understood the object of these investigations.  Yet though she was evasive with the doctors she was perfectly frank with her friends.  All that correspondence about the words "Washington D.C.", for example, which they worked so hard on - remember?  One night while we were lying here together I asked her to give me her free associations from the phrase.  Of course she trusted my discretion absolutely.  She replied unerringly (it was clear she had already worked it out though she would not tell Arnauti): 'There is a town near Washington called Alexandria.  My father always talked of going to visit some distant relations there.  They had a daughter called Justine who was exactly my age.  She went mad and was put away.  She had been raped by a man.'  I then asked her about D.C. and she said, "Da Capo.  Capodistria".'

      I do not know how long this conversation lasted or how soon it melted into sleep, but we awoke next morning in each other's arms to find that the storm had ceased.  The city had been sponged clean.  We took a hasty breakfast and I made my way towards Mnemjian's shop for a shave through streets whose native colours had been washed clean by the rain so that they glowed with warmth and beauty in that soft air.  I still had Justine's letter in my pocket, but I did not dare to read it again lest I destroy the peace of mind which Clea had given me.  Only the opening phrase continued to echo in my mind with an obstinate throbbing persistence: 'If you should come back alive from the lake you will find this letter waiting for you.'

      On the mantelpiece in the drawing-room of the flat there is another letter offering me a two-year contract as a teacher in a Catholic school in Upper Egypt.  I sit down at once without thinking and draft my acceptance.  This will change everything once more and free me from the streets of the city which have begun to haunt me of late so that I dream that I am walking endlessly up and down, hunting for Melissa among the dying flares of the Arab quarter.

      With the posting of this letter of acceptance a new period will be initiated, for it marks my separation from the city in which so much has happened to me, so much of momentous importance: so much that has aged me.  For a little while, however, life will carry its momentum forward by hours and days.  The same streets and squares will burn in my imagination as the Pharos burns in history.  Particular rooms in which I have made love, particular café tables where the pressure of fingers upon a wrist held me spellbound, feeling through the hot pavements the rhythms of Alexandria transmitted upwards into bodies which could only interpret them as famished kisses, or endearments uttered in voices hoarse with wonder.  To the student of love these separations are a school, bitter yet necessary to one's growth.  They help one to strip oneself mentally of everything save the hunger for more life.

      Now, too, the actual framework of things is undergoing a subtle transformation, for other partings are also beginning.  Nessim is going to Kenya for a holiday.  Pombal has achieved crucifixion and a posting to the Chancery in Rome where I have no doubt he will be happier.  A series of leisurely farewell parties have begun to serve the purposes of all of us; but they are heavy with the absence of the one person whom nobody ever mentions any more - Justine.  It is clear, too, that a world war is slowly creeping upon us across the couloirs of history - doubling our claims upon each other and upon life.  The sweet sickly smell of blood hangs in the darkening air and contributes a sense of excitement, of fondness and frivolity.  This note has been absent until now.

      The chandeliers in the great house whose ugliness I have come to hate, blaze over the gatherings which have been convened to say farewell to my friend.  They are all there, the faces and histories I have come to know so well, Sveva in black, Clea in gold, Gaston, Claire, Gaby.  Nessim's hair, I notice, has during the last few weeks begun to be faintly touched with grey.  Ptolemeo and Fuad are quarrelling with all the animation of old lovers.  All round me the typical Alexandrian animation swells and subsides in conversations as brittle and frivolous as spun glass.  The women of Alexandria in all their stylish wickedness are here to say goodbye to someone who has captivated them by allowing them to befriend him.  As for Pombal himself, he has grown fatter, more assured since his elevation in rank.  His profile now has a certain Neronian cast.  He is professing himself worried about me in sotto voce; for some weeks we have not met properly, and he has only heard about my school-mastering project tonight.  'You should get out,' he repeats, 'back to Europe.  This city will undermine your will.  And what has Upper Egypt to offer?  Blazing heat, dust, flies, a menial occupation.... After all, you are not Rimbaud.'

      The faces surging round us sipping toasts prevent my answering him, and I am glad of it for I have nothing to say.  I gaze at him with a portentous numbness, nodding my head.  Clea catches my wrist and draws me aside to whisper: 'A card from Justine.  She is working in a Jewish kibbutz in Palestine.  Shall I tell Nessim?'

      'Yes.  No.  I don't know.'

      'She asks me not to.'

      'Then don't.'

      I am too proud to ask if there is any message for me.  The company has started to sing the old song 'For He's a Jolly Good Fellow' in a variety of times and accents.  Pombal has turned pink with pleasure.  I gently shake off Clea's hand in order to join in the singing.  The little consul-general is fawning and gesticulating over Pombal; his relief at my friend's departure is so great that he has worked himself up into a paroxysm of friendship and regret.  The English consular group has the disconsolate air of a family of moulting turkeys.  Madame de Venuta is beating time with an elegant gloved hand.  The black servants in their long white gloves move swiftly from group to group of the guests like eclipses of the moon.  If one were to go away, I catch myself thinking, to Italy perhaps or to France: to start a new sort of life: not a city life this time, perhaps an island in the Bay of Naples.... But I realize that what remains unresolved in my life is not the problem of Justine but the problem of Melissa.  In some curious way the future, if there is one, has always been vested in her.  Yet I feel powerless to influence it by decisions or even hopes.  I feel that I must wait patiently until the shallow sequences of our history match again, until we can fall into step once more.  This may take years - perhaps we will both be grey when the tide suddenly turns.  Or perhaps the hope will die stillborn, broken up like wreckage by the tides of events.  I have so little faith in myself.  The money Pursewarden left is still in the bank - I have not touched a penny of it.  For such a sum we might live for several years in some cheap spot in the sun.

      Melissa still writes the spirited nonchalant letters which I have such difficulty in answering save by whining retorts about my circumstances or my improvidence.  Once I leave the city it will be easier.  A new road will open.  I will write to her with absolute frankness, telling her all I feel - even those things which I believe her forever incapable of understanding properly.  'I shall return in the spring,' Nessim is saying to the Baron Thibault, 'and take up my summer quarters at Abousir.  I am determined to slack off for about two years.  I've been working too hard at business and it isn't worth it.'  Despite the haunted pallor of his face one cannot help seeing in him a new repose, a relaxation of the will; the heart may be distracted, but the nerves are at last at rest.  He is weak, as a convalescent is weak; but he is no longer ill.  We talk and joke quietly for a while; it is clear that our friendship will repair itself sooner or later - for we now have a common fund of unhappiness upon which to draw.  'Justine,' I say, and he draws in his breath slightly, as if one had run a small thorn under his fingernail, 'writes from Palestine.'  He nods quickly and motions me with a small gesture.  'I know.  We have traced her.  There is no need to ... I'm writing to her.  She can stay away as long as she wishes.  Come back in her own good time.'  It would be foolish to deprive him of the hope and the consolation it must give him, but I know now that she will never return on the old terms.  Every phrase of her letter to me made this clear.  It is not us she had abandoned so much but a way of life which threatened her reason - the city, love, the sum of all that we had shared.  What had she written to him, I wondered, as I recalled the short sobbing breath he had drawn as he leaned against the whitewashed wall?

*    *    *    *    *

      On these spring mornings while the island slowly uncurls from the sea in the light of an early sun I walk about on the deserted beaches, trying to recover my memories of the time spent in Upper Egypt.  It is strange when everything about Alexandria is so vivid that I can recover so little of that lost period.  Or perhaps it is not so strange - for compared to the city life I had lived my new life was dull and uneventful.  I remember the back-breaking sweat of school work: walks in the flat rich fields with their bumper crops feeding upon dead men's bones: the black silt-fed Nile moving corpulently through the Delta to the sea: the bilharzia-ridden peasantry whose patience and nobility shone through their rags like patents of dispossessed royalty: village patriarchs intoning: the blind cattle turning the slow globe of their waterwheels, blindfolded against monotony - how small can a world become?  Throughout this period I read nothing, thought nothing, was nothing.  The fathers of the school were kindly and left me alone in my spare time, sensing perhaps my distaste for the cloth, for the apparatus of the Holy Office.  The children of course were a torment - but then what teacher of sensibility does not echo in his heart the terrible words of Tolstoy: 'Whenever I enter a school and see a multitude of children, ragged thin and dirty but with their clear eyes and sometimes angelic expressions, I am seized with restlessness and terror, as though I saw people drowning?

      Unreal as all correspondence seemed, I kept up a desultory contact with Melissa whose letters arrived punctually.  Clea wrote once or twice, and surprisingly enough old Scobie who appeared to be rather annoyed that he should miss me as much as he obviously did.  His letters were full of fantastic animadversion against Jews (who were always referred to jeeringly as 'snipcocks') and, surprisingly enough, to passive pederasts (whom he labelled 'Herms', i.e. Hermaphrodites.)  I was not surprised to learn that the Secret Service had gravelled him, and he was now able to spend most of the day in bed with what he called a 'bottle of wallop' at his elbow.  But he was lonely, hence his correspondence.

      These letters were useful to me.  My feeling of unreality had grown to such a pitch that at times I distrusted my own memory, finding it hard to believe that there had ever been such a town as Alexandria.  Letters were a lifeline attaching me to an existence in which the great part of myself was no longer engaged.

      As soon as my work was finished I locked myself in my room and crawled into bed; beside it lay the green jade box full of hashish-loaded cigarettes.  If my way of life was noticed or commented upon, at least I left no loophole for criticism in my work.  It would be hard to grudge me simply an inordinate taste for solitude.  Father Racine, it is true, made one or two attempts to rouse me.  He was the most sensitive and intelligent of them all and perhaps felt that my friendship might temper his own intellectual loneliness.  I was sorry for him and regretted in a way not being able to respond to these overtures.  But I was afflicted by a gradually increasing numbness, a mental apathy which made me shrink from contact.  Once or twice I accompanied him for a walk along the river (he was a botanist) and heard him talk lightly and brilliantly on his own subject.  But my taste for the landscape, its flatness, its unresponsiveness to the seasons had gone stale.  The sun seemed to have scorched up my appetite for everything - food, company and even speech.  I preferred to lie in bed staring at the ceiling and listening to the noises around me in the teachers' block: Father Gaudier sneezing, opening and shutting drawers; Father Racine playing a few phrases over and over again on his flute; the ruminations of the organ mouldering away among its harmonies in the dark chapel.  The heavy cigarettes soothed the mind, emptying it of every preoccupation.

      One day Gaudier called to me as I was crossing the close and said that someone wished to speak to me on the telephone.  I could hardly comprehend, hardly believe my ears.  After so long a silence, who would telephone?  Nessim perhaps?

      The telephone was in the Head's study, a forbidding room full of elephantine furniture and fine bindings.  The receiver, crepitating slightly, lay on the blotter before him.  He squinted slightly and said with distaste 'It is a woman from Alexandria.'  I thought it must be Melissa, but to my surprise Clea's voice suddenly swam up out of the incoherence of memory: 'I am speaking from the Greek hospital.  Melissa is here, very ill indeed.  Perhaps even dying.'

      Undeniably my surprise and confusion emerged as anger.  'But she would not let me tell you before.  She didn't want you to see her ill - so thin.  But I simply must now.  Can you come quickly?  She will see you know.'

      In my mind's eye I could see the jogging night train with its interminable stoppings and startings in dust-blown towns and villages - the dirt and the heat.  It would take all night.  I turned to Gaudier and asked his permission to absent myself for the whole weekend.  'In exceptional cases we do grant permission,' he said thoughtfully.  'If you were going to be married, for example, or if someone was seriously ill.'  I swear that the idea of marrying Melissa had not entered my head until he spoke the words.

      There was another memory too, which visited me now as I packed my cheap suitcase.  The rings, Cohen's rings, were still in my stud-box wrapped in brown paper.  I stood for a while looking at them and wondering if inanimate objects also had a destiny as human beings have.  These wretched rings, I thought - why, it was as if they had been anxiously waiting here all the time like human beings; waiting for some shabby fulfilment on the finger of someone trapped in a marriage de convenance.  I put the poor thing in my pocket.

      Far off events, transformed by memory, acquire a burnished brilliance because they are seen in isolation, divorced from the details of before and after, the fibres and wrappings of time.  The actors, too, suffer a transformation; they sink slowly deeper and deeper into the ocean of memory like weighted bodies, finding at every level a new assessment, a new evaluation in the human heart.

      It was not anguish I felt so much at Melissa's defection, it was rage, a purposeless fury based, I imagine, in contrition.  The enormous vistas of the future, which in all my vagueness I had nevertheless peopled with images of her, had gone by default now; and it was only now that I realized to what an extent I had been nourishing myself on them.  It had all been there like a huge trust fund, an account upon which I would one day draw.  Now I was suddenly bankrupt.

      Balthazar was waiting for me at the station in his little car.  He pressed my hand with rough and ready sympathy as he said, in a matter-of-fact voice: 'She died last night, poor girl.  I gave her morphia to help her away.  Well.'  He sighed and glanced sideways at me.  'A pity you are not in the habit of shedding tears.  ça aurait été un soulagement.'

      'Soulagement grotesque.'

      'Approfondir les émotions ... les purger.'

      'Tais-toi, Balthazar, shut up.'

      'She loved you, I suppose.'

      'Je le sais,'

      'Elle parlait de vous sans cesse.  Cléa a été avec toute la semaine.'

      'Assez.'

      Never had the city looked so entrancing in that soft morning air.  I took the light wind from the harbour on my stubbled cheek like the kiss of an old friend.  Mareotis glinted here and there between the palm-tops, between the mud huts and the factories.  The shops along Rue Fuad seemed to have all the glitter and novelty of Paris.  I had, I realized, become a complete provincial in Upper Egypt.  Alexandria seemed a capital city.  In the trim garden nurses were rolling their prams and children their hoops.  The trams squashed and clicked and rattled.  'There is something else,' Balthazar was saying as we raced along.  'Melissa's child, Nessim's child.  But I suppose you know all about it.  It is out at the summer villa.  A little girl.'

      I could not take all this in, so drunk was I on the beauty of the city which I had almost forgotten.  Outside the Municipality the professional scribes sat at their stools, inkhorns, pens and stamped paper beside them.  They scratched themselves, chattering amiably.  We climbed the low bluff on which the hospital stood after threading the long bony spine of the Canopic Way.  Balthazar was still talking as we left the lift and started to negotiate the long white corridors of the second floor.

      'A coolness has sprung up between Nessim and myself.  When Melissa came back he refused to see her out of a sort of disgust which I found inhuman, hard to comprehend.  I don't know.... As for the child he is trying to get it adopted.  He has come almost to hate it, I suppose.  He thinks Justine will never come back to him so long as he has Melissa's child.  For my part,' he added more slowly, 'I look at it this way: by one of those fearful displacements of which only love seems capable the child Justine lost was given back by Nessim not to her but to Melissa.  Do you see?'

      The sense of ghostly familiarity which was growing upon me now was due to the fact that we were approaching the little room in which I had visited Cohen when he was dying.  Of course Melissa must be lying in the same narrow iron bed in the corner by the wall.  It would be just like real life to imitate art at this point.

      There were some nurses in the room busy whispering round the bed, arranging screens; but at a word from Balthazar they scattered and disappeared.  We stood arm in arm in the doorway for a moment looking in.  Melissa looked pale and somehow wizened.  They had bound up her jaw with tape and closed the eyes so that she looked as if she had fallen asleep during a beauty treatment.  I was glad her eyes were closed; I had been dreading their glance.

      I was left alone with her for a while in the huge silence of that whitewashed ward and all of a sudden I found myself suffering from acute embarrassment.  It is hard to know how to behave with the dead; their enormous deafness and rigidity is so studied.  One becomes awkward as if in the presence of royalty.  I coughed behind my hand and walked up and down the ward stealing little glances at her out of the corner of my eye, remembering the confusion which had once beset me when she called upon me with a gift of flowers.  I would have liked to slip Cohen's rings on her fingers, but they had already swathed her body in bandages and her arms were bound stiffly to her sides.  In this climate bodies decompose so quickly that they have to be almost unceremoniously rushed to the grave.  I said 'Melissa' twice in an uncertain whisper, bending my lips to her hair.  Then I lit a cigarette and sat down beside her on a chair to make a long study of her face, comparing it to all the other faces of Melissa which thronged my memory and had established their identity there.  She bore no resemblance to any of them - and yet she set them off, concluded them.  This white little face was the last team of a series.  Beyond this point there was a locked door.

      At such times one gropes about for a gesture which will match the terrible marble repose of the will which one reads on the faces of the dead.  There is nothing in the whole ragbag of human emotions.  'Terrible are the four faces of love,' wrote Arnauti in another context.  I mentally told the figure on the bed that I would take the child if Nessim would part with her and, this silent agreement made, I kissed the high pale forehead once and left her to the ministrations of those who would parcel her up for the grave.  I was glad to leave the room, to leave a silence so elaborate and forbidding.  I suppose we writers are cruel people.  The dead do not care.  It is the living who might be spared if we could quarry the message which lies buried in the heart of all human experience.

      ('In the old days the sailing ships in need of ballast would collect tortoises from the mainland and fill great barrels with them, alive.  Those that survived the terrible journey might be sold as pets for children.  The putrefying bodies of the rest were emptied into the East India Docks.  There were plenty more where they came from.')

      I walked lightly and effortlessly about the town like an escaped prisoner.  Mnemjian had violet tears in his violet eyes as he embraced me warmly.  He settled down to shave me himself, his every gesture expressing an emollient sympathy and tenderness.  Outside on the pavements drenched with sunlight walked the citizens of Alexandria, each locked into a world of personal relationships and fears, yet each seeming to my eyes infinitely remote from those upon which my own thoughts and feelings were busy.   The city was smiling with a heartbreaking indifference, a cocotte refreshed by the darkness.

      There remained only one thing to do now, to see Nessim.  I was relieved to learn that he was due to come into town that evening.  Here again time had another surprise in store for me, for the Nessim who lived in my memories had changed.

      He had aged like a woman - his lips and face had both broadened.  He walked now with his weight distributed comfortably on the flat on his feet, as if his body had already submitted to a dozen pregnancies.  The queer litheness of his step had gone.  Moreover, he radiated now a flabby charm mixed with concern which made him at first all but unrecognizable.  A foolish authoritativeness had replaced the delightful old diffidence.  He was just back from Kenya.

      I had hardly time to capture and examine these new impressions when he suggested that we should visit the Etoile together - the nightclub where Melissa used to dance.  It had changed hands, he added, as if this somehow excused our visiting it on the very day of her funeral.  Shocked and surprised as I was, I agreed without hesitation, prompted both by curiosity as to his own feelings and a desire to discuss the transaction which concerned the child - this mythical child.

      When we walked down the narrow airless stairway into the white light of the place a cry went up and the girls came running to him from every corner like cockroaches.  It appeared that he was well known now as an habitué.  He opened his arms to them with a shout of laughter, turning to me for approval as he did so.  Then, taking their hands one after another, he pressed them voluptuously to the breast pocket of his coat so that they might feel the outlines of the thick wallet he now carried, stuffed with banknotes.  This gesture at once reminded me of how, when I was accosted one night in the dark streets of the city by a pregnant woman and trying to make my escape, she took my hand, as if to give me an idea of the pleasure she was offering (or perhaps to emphasize her need), and pressed it upon her swollen abdomen.  Now, watching Nessim, I suddenly recalled the tremulous beat of the foetal heart in the eighth month.

      It is difficult to describe how unspeakably strange I found it to sit beside this vulgar double of the Nessim I had once known.  I studied him keenly but he avoided my eye and confined his conversation to laboured commonplaces which he punctuated by yawns that were, one by one, tapped away behind ringed fingers.  Here and there, however, behind this new façade stirred a hint of the old diffidence, but buried - as a fine physique may be buried in a mountain of fat.  In the washroom Zoltan the waiter confided in me: 'He has become truly himself since his wife went away.  All Alexandria says so.'  The truth was that he had become like all Alexandria.

      Late that night the whim seized him to drive me to Montaza in the late moonlight; we sat in the car for a long time in silence, smoking, gazing out at the moonlit waves hobbling across the sane bar.  It was during this silence that I apprehended the truth about him.  He had not really changed inside.  He had merely adopted a new mask.

*    *    *    *    *

      In the early summer I received a long letter from Clea with which this brief introductory memorial to Alexandria may well be brought to a close.

      'You may perhaps be interested in my account of a brief meeting with Justine a few weeks ago.  We had, as you know, been exchanging occasional cards from our respective countries for some time past, and hearing that I was due to pass through Palestine into Syria she herself suggested a brief meeting.  She would come, she said, to the border station where the Haifa train waits for half an hour.  The settlement in which she works is somewhere near at hand, she could get a lift.  We might talk for a while on the platform.  To this I agreed.

      'At first I had some difficulty in recognizing her.  She has gone a good deal fatter in the face and has chopped off her hair carelessly at the back so that it sticks out in rats' tails.  I gather that for the most part she wears it done up in a cloth.  No trace remains of the old elegance or chic.  Her features seem to have broadened, become more classically Jewish, lips and nose inclining more towards each other.  I was shocked at first by the glittering eyes and the quick incisive way of breathing and talking - as if she were feverish.  As you can imagine we were both mortally shy of each other.

      'We walked out of the station along the road and sat down on the edge of a dry ravine, a wadi, with a few terrified-looking spring flowers about our feet.  She gave the impression of already having chosen this place for our interview: perhaps as suitably austere.  I don't know.  She did not mention Nessim or you at first but spoke only about her new life.  She had achieved, she claimed, a new and perfect happiness through community-service"; the air with which she said this suggested some sort of religious conversion.  Do not smile.  It is hard, I know, to be patient with the weak.  In all the back-breaking sweat of the Communist settlement she claimed to have achieved a "new humility".  (Humility!  The last trap that awaits the ego in search of absolute truth.  I felt disgusted but said nothing.)  She described the work of the settlement coarsely, unimaginatively, as a peasant might.  I noticed that those once finely-tended hands were calloused and rough.  I suppose people have a right to dispose of their bodies as they think fit, I said to myself, feeling ashamed because I must be radiating cleanliness and leisure, good food and baths.  By the way, she is not a Marxist as yet - simply a work-mystic after the manner of Panayotis at Abousir.  Watching her now and remembering the touching and tormenting person she had once been for us all, I found it hard to comprehend the change into this tubby little peasant with the hard paws.

      'I suppose events are simply a sort of annotation of our feelings - the one might be deduced from the other.  Time carries us (boldly imagining that we are discrete egos modelling our own personal futures) - time carries us forward by the momentum of those feelings inside us of which we ourselves are least conscious.  Too abstract for you?  Then I have expressed the idea badly.  I mean, in Justine's case, having become cured of the mental aberrations brought about by her dreams, her fears, she has been deflated like a bag.  For so long the fantasy occupied the foreground of her life that now she is dispossessed of her entire stock-in-trade.  It is not only that the death of Capodistria has removed the chief actor in this shadow-play, her chief gaoler.  The illness itself had kept her on the move, and when it died it left in its place total exhaustion.  She has, so to speak, extinguished with her sexuality her very claims on life, almost her reason.  People driven like this to the very boundaries of freewill are forced to turn somewhere for help, to make absolute decisions.  If she had not been an Alexandrian (i.e. sceptic) this would have taken the form of religious conversion.  How is one to say these things?  It is not a question of growing to be happy or unhappy.  A whole block of one's life suddenly falls into the sea, as perhaps yours did with Melissa.  But (this is how it works in life, the retributive law which brings good for evil and evil for good), her own release also released Nessim from the inhibitions governing his passional life.  I think he always felt that so long as Justine lived he would never be able to endure the slightest human relationship with anyone else.  Melissa proved him wrong, or at least so he thought; but with Justine's departure the old heartsickness cropped up and he was filled with overwhelming disgust for what he had done to her - to Melissa.

      'Lovers are never equally matched - do you think?  One always overshadows the other and stunts his or her growth so that the overshadowed one must always be tormented by a desire to escape, to be free to grow.  Surely this is the only tragic thing about love?

      'So that if from another point of view Nessim did plan Capodistria's death (as has been widely rumoured and believed) he could not have chosen a more calamitous path.  It would indeed have been wiser to kill you.  Perhaps he hoped in releasing Justine from the succubus (as Arnauti before him) he would free her for himself.  (He said so once - you told me.)  But quite the opposite has happened.  He has granted her a sort of absolution, or poor Capodistria unwittingly did - with the result that she thinks of him now not as a lover but as a sort of arch-priest.  She speaks of him with a reverence which would horrify him to hear.  She will never go back, how could she?  And if she did he would know at once that he had lost her forever - for those who stand in a confessional relationship to ourselves can never love us, never truly love us.

      '(Of you Justine said simply, with a slight shrug: "I had to put him out of my mind".)

      'Well, these are some of the thoughts that passed through my mind as the train carried me down through the orange groves to the coast; they were thrown into sharp relief by the book I had chosen to read on the journey, the penultimate volume of God is a Humorist.  How greatly Pursewarden has gained in stature since his death!  It was before as if he stood between his own books and our understanding of them.  I see now that what we found enigmatic about the man was due to a fault in ourselves.  An artist does not live a personal life as we do, he hides it, forcing us to go to his books if we wish to touch the true source of his feelings.  Underneath all his preoccupations with sex, society, religion, etc. (all the staple abstractions which allow the forebrain to chatter) there is, quite simply, a man tortured beyond endurance by the lack of tenderness in the world.

      'And all this brings me back to myself, for I too have been changing in some curious way.  The old self-sufficient life has transformed itself into something a little hollow, a little empty.  It no longer answers my deepest needs.  Somewhere deep inside a tide seems to have turned in my nature.  I do not know why but it is towards you, my dear friend, that my thoughts have turned more and more of late.  Can one be frank?  Is there a friendship possible this side of love which could be sought and found?  I speak no more of love - the word and its conventions have become odious to me.  But is there a friendship possible to attain which is deeper, even limitlessly deep, and yet wordless, idealess?  It seems somehow necessary to find a human being to whom one can be faithful, not in the body (I leave that to the priests) but in the culprit mind?  But perhaps this is not the sort of problem which will interest you much these days.  Once or twice I have felt the absurd desire to come to you and offer my services in looking after the child perhaps.  But it seems clear now that you do not really need anybody any more, and that you value your solitude above all things....'

      There are a few more lines and then the affectionate superscription.

*    *    *    *    *

      The cicadas are throbbing in the great planes, and the summer Mediterranean lies before me in all its magnetic blueness.  Somewhere out there, beyond the mauve throbbing line of the horizon lies Africa, likes Alexandria, maintaining its tenuous grasp on one's affections through memories which are already refunding themselves slowly into forgetfulness; memory of friends, of incidents long past.  The slow unreality of time begins to grip them, blurring the outlines - so that sometimes I wonder whether these pages record the actions of real human beings; or whether this is not simply the story of a few inanimate objects which precipitated drama around theme - I mean a black patch, a watch-key and a couple of dispossessed wedding-rings....

      Soon it will be evening and the clear night sky will be dusted thickly with summer stars.  I shall be here, as always, smoking by the water.  I have decided to leave Clea's last letter unanswered.  I no longer wish to coerce anyone, to make promises, to think of life in terms of compacts, resolutions, covenants.  It will be up to Clea to interpret my silence according to her own needs and desires, to come to me if she has need or not, as the case may be.  Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?  So that....