She Had Shown Him the Distant Plains
They say she left him. It is written in books. It is found in their letters. But to understand why the books lie and the letters deceive, we have to go back even further than their trip to Russia. She was twice his age, married to an even older man, a woman with an obscure past and an uncertain future. He was a young poet living with his mother in an undisturbed city known for its old houses leaning on each other, and bridges that craftily led him from windows that kept looking at him to other windows that kept looking at him.
But it was even worse. Even if you took the day off, he said, outside the city to run in the fields, at the end of the day, you had to come back. And when you finally came back, the windows, or else those standing behind them, would be looking at you intently and with anticipation, forcing you to be the one they recognized, because they knew that when you entered the house they would all be there in the library, sitting in the dark, while you stood under the yellow light of the single lamp, wishing you had no face. And you knew they had already decided how to fashion your life, a decision made while standing behind a window, puffing desires and hopes, or else sitting in an armchair, digesting blames and failures.
So, he accepted her invitation to come with her to Russia. We’ll have a meeting with Tolstoy, she said. They went in the summer, when the trees and shrubs and flowers and meadows were all competing with each other to present them with a verdant display of vibrancy, and the train they were on never seemed to stop, as it traveled eastward for days looking for a hidden church, showing them those seemingly endless plains and enormous skies, while they made love every evening, her hunger, his young body, and the murmur of the tracks whispering her name over and over, almost like eyelashes over her breasts.
It was there that he first perceived the distant plains, sensing the enormity of their emptiness, feeling the immense landscapes pulsing with the life of the gods, these same remote and rolling plains from which the rains would later rise, climbing to heaven and then dropping upon his city, with its upturned windows looking at the skies, finally accepting their loneliness. He never knew such open spaces ever existed without the eyes looking at him from every single window, always demanding his love, wishing he were someone else.
But even the widest plains are not endless, he learned, and even the longest journeys come to an end. So on their way back, while he was sitting on the train, watching the onion-shaped churches going by, she sat across from him, looking at his reflection in the window as if looking at a mirror, so deeply was her every feature filled with his young, seductive face. And she knew he would leave. Now that she had shown him the distant plains, he would not be able to return. He would leave his mother, his city, his newfound married lover, and begin his life.
And so at the first stop outside Russia, she called the porter, kissed her lover on the mouth, and got off the train. He remained seated.
You Come Back to Alexandria
And you come back to Alexandria. It is not as if you’ve been there before. But you’ve visited the city so many times while looking for the poet, that it now looks as familiar to you as if you had been there. Yet it’s the Greek city you were looking for, the hedonic Alexandria of exquisite music and sensuous beauty, the city that he took with him wherever he went, except that he never went too far away.
And so you come back to Alexandria, the earthly city, for the first time, and you walk the streets looking for its former glory, looking for the poet. But the Greek city is no longer there, and the poet has long since died. Even his spirit refuses to walk the streets, or else that is what you think. The houses, so self-confidently elegant, that housed the British and Greek and other sundry foreigners, colonial or otherwise, have long faded, just as the colonial powers faded at the very time the houses were built. They now house a mass of humanity that does not know of the poet. It does not read Greek. It does not read at all. And in the elegant gardens, or rather the once-elegant gardens, that were once home to such lovely and refined tea parties, you find mud-brick houses of the shantytown variety housing more of the buzzing humanity.
And it’s the smell that really hits you hard, the ripe odor of sweat and ruinous old age, of fermenting decay and human refuse.
But beauty cannot be buried and hidden for long. It peeks out in the form of a rusted wrought-iron gate, partly broken, that now serves as the door to a mud-brick hut, still revealing its elegance and clean style despite its age. Beauty shows itself in the brown eyes of the little boy, too large for his face, the boy that now looks at you and does not know of the poet. Never will. It’s in the face of the old cobbler, sitting at the entrance to his small cubicle of a workshop, mending shoes. And it’s in the café that was not painted since the Greek left, where the men sit outside playing backgammon, drinking bitter coffee.
When you enter, you know he’ll be inside, sitting there in the inner room of the noisy café, bent over his table with newspapers as his companions. He invites you to join him at the table. He’s been waiting for you, he says. You sit down and the waiter brings coffee on a brass plate together with a glass of cold water. The poet reads you a poem he has just written and it shows its elegance and clean style, despite his ruinous old age. And despite the fact that he has just written it, you know the poem by heart. It has been in your head for so long that when he hesitates, you can complete the line for him. In deference to his age, you don’t, and he, looking directly at you for the first time, concludes the poem.
And so here, in a city full of people who do not know your language, nor his, you have just found the poet. And now that you’ve found him and he has read you your poem, you know that you didn’t have to come to Alexandria after all. It was in your head all along.
A Monologue at the Apartment
A poet used to live here back then, sir, in this apartment, when she was not famous, not famous at all, and later critics would spend so much time discussing what she meant, and the dreams she wrote down, and whom was she shouting at in her poems, such desperate shouting, but I know better, because you see, sir, I was here in the apartment next door, and she rented this apartment when she was not famous, not famous at all, because it was the only apartment she could afford, being so close to the Jordanian Legionnaires and the border that divided this holy city, this miserable city, and in the apartment across from her, there was this woman who had seen her two sons killed by the Germans in the war, and during the day she would walk next to the walls—never in the center of the room—always next to the walls, and at night she would call out to her sons, shouting their names, and when she began shouting, I would sit down on the floor and cover my ears and wait, and her shouting was so sad and lonely that the legionnaires who were just across the no-man’s-land would get mad and would begin shooting, but not at us, no they did not, they shot high above our heads, just to make her stop and she would call her sons’ names until she’d hear the shooting, which calmed her down, and she would sit on the floor, leaning against the wall, always against the wall—never in the center of the room—and would fall asleep, and I would later take her to her bed, but the poet next door would write down her dreams—no, not her own dreams, but the dreams of the woman who called out to her sons and would only quiet down when the Jordanian Legionnaires would start shooting, aiming at a distant God.
