Читать книгу The Cruel Fire - Edward Atiyah - Страница 7

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Faris Deeb opened his eyes the next morning as though awaking from a dream that had taken him to a remote and magical land. For a few seconds, as he drifted back into consciousness, he really thought he had dreamt the strange experience that had befallen him on his way home the night before. Its reality, its indubitable reality came back to him only slowly, bringing sweet and increasing amazement. He tried to recapture the vision, to stand behind the tree, to gaze upon the pool and what he had seen in it. But he could not concentrate in the harsh morning light and amidst the morning bustle of activity in the house. His father’s argileh was already gurgling on the terrace. Mitry was getting ready to go to the shop. Rosa was giving Antoine and Genevieve their breakfast before they set off for their respective jobs. The voices and noises, the comings and goings jarred on his nerves. He was angry and irritable. The vision would not stay in his mind. It broke and splintered teasingly, and the splinters pricked and goaded him. When he had got into his bed at half past midnight, he was resigned to accepting Rosa as a consolation for the vanished excitements of the cabaret and the pool, but the old cow had been asleep and he had not been able to wake her.

“Rosa!” he called, as he finished dressing, “bring me a cup of coffee quickly. I want to go down to the orchard.”

“What do you want to go down to the orchard for?” said Rosa, speaking to herself and the children in the next room, where she was giving them their meal. “Haven’t you sold the crop?”

He heard her but did not answer. He could not even be bothered to inform Antoine of his decision to charge him eight pounds a month for his keep. A desire to keep himself to himself, to remain alone with his thoughts dictated an avoidance of all intercourse with his family. And with himself he was in a state of rage. Bitter tauntings assailed him from the secret places of his mind, hopeless yearnings after a lost opportunity. Why had he been such a fool and coward, refrained from touching after seeing, walked away feebly from the orchard, meditating revenge by complaining to the municipality? Complaining!

He came out on the terrace as Rosa was arriving from the kitchen with his coffee.

“Don’t you want your argileh?” she asked, not from any desire to minister to his further pleasure, but merely as a matter of routine, and so as not to waste the tobacco if he was not going to wait for it.

“No,” he said. “Why? Have you soaked the tobacco? I did not ask you to. I said only coffee.”

“No, I have not soaked it.”

“Here,” said his father, “you can have a draw at mine to go with your coffee.” He offered his son the mouthpiece of the argileh tube.

“I will smoke a cigarette,” said Faris Deeb, taking out of his pocket a packet of American cigarettes which the estate agent had bought him at the cabaret the night before. He lit one, drew at it deeply, and sipped his coffee.

“They’re expensive, these American cigarettes,” said his father, surprised that his son, who never bought any but local cigarettes, should have indulged in such an extravagance.

“I didn’t buy them myself; they’re a present.”

“Mitry tells me you sold the apple crop for a good price,” said Rosa.

“Not so good that you can buy yourself a silk dress,” said Faris Deeb. Looking at his wife, he was filled with a flaming hatred for all women. The Egyptian dancer had eluded him; the woman in the pool had eluded him; even his own woman, whom he dressed and fed, had eluded, was always eluding him now. Cow, lump of dough, even when she was awake! “I shall need all the money I have to buy that property in Tripoli,” he added, by way of a stern warning against any projects involving an increase in domestic expenditure.

“Will you be going to buy it, then?” asked Abu Faris. “Did you have a look at it yesterday?”

“Ay.”

“Did you look at it by moonlight?” asked Rosa. “You were very late coming home.”

The form of her question, and what he had seen by moonlight checked his impulse to chastise her sarcasm with a violent retort. Strangely, he found himself on the defensive, and merely said: “I had to spend the evening discussing it with the estate agent.” This slight, temporary abdication of his power galled him, so he added with cold anger: “Anyhow, how do you know at what time I came home. When I arrived you were sleeping like a cow.”

“I was awake at half past ten, and you had not returned,” she said.

“It’s none of your business when I come home ... I may be late again this evening; there’s some more business I have to transact. And you can’t complain that I disturb your sweet slumbers when I arrive. The dead trunk of a tree has more life in it than you, once your thick head flops on the pillow!” He sipped the last of his coffee and walked out of the house, saying to Rosa, “Send me some breakfast to the shop later; my father can bring it.”

Rosa thought, “Wish I could send you poison and crushed glass to rid us all of you! Why don’t you die? Hundreds of decent people, loved by their families, useful to the world, die every day. But you’ll bury us all and live to be ninety!”

Faris Deeb walked briskly down the footpath that led to his orchard and the pool beyond it. The agitation in his spirit communicated a jerky, stumbling impulse to his legs, and the distant view of the pool drew him with a teasing magnetism. It was still early morning and there were few people about, but the straight golden shafts of the climbing sun were striking here and there into the valley, lighting up pocket after pocket of it. This was the real world, not the phantom world of the moonlit night; but that phantom world was all that Faris Deeb saw with his mind’s eye. Vanished from earth and sky now, yet filling his mind, it had a secret reality which made the day seem like a dead reflection of it. The orchard, when he reached it, was just a congregation of apple trees, as it had always been till the night before, having no meaning beyond itself. He stood behind the tree that had concealed him while he watched the bather, and gazed at the pool. The water sparkled in the sun, but it was nothing more than just water. The rock on which the bather had left her clothes, on which she had stood drying herself, when she came out of the pool, lay above the water—a grey, flat ledge of stone, sterile, yielding nothing. Faris Deeb was bitterly disappointed in all this commonness and barrenness. He had come hoping to recapture the vision, the reality of what he had seen. But what his eyes saw now only interfered with the picture in his mind.

There was only one hope—that the bather would come again that night. This possibility had first occurred to him while he was talking to Rosa a few minutes earlier; and the promise and the challenge of it were now pounding in his heart. Opposite extremes of fear assailed him—fear of doing the thing he desired if he was tempted again, and fear of being too cowardly to do it. Perhaps it was better that he should not come to the pool again that night; anyhow, who said she was coming again? And if he came and there was nobody, it would be a bitter disappointment, and he would feel a fool and be tired and sleepy, waiting in vain till after midnight. And if he came and found her ... ? He turned away from the pool, walked through the orchard and headed for his shop. The sight of the apples hanging heavily on the boughs deflected his thought. The greedy doubt which he always felt after concluding a transaction, however profitable, assailed him again: could he have squeezed another few pounds out of the buyer? But if he was greedy, he was also vain, and he dispelled the doubt with a quick reassertion of his vanity as the most astute dealer in the village, who always got the best of a bargain.