The Book on Fire (18 page)

“No.”

“What?” I gripped the edge of the sheet.

“You’re forbidden to enter the library again.”

“By whom?”

“By me.”

“Why?”

“You want another book in your wardrobe, Balthazar. In a blue dust
jacket. I don’t want to be pawed and cosseted. I don’t want to be cataloged.
All my life I’ve been stashed away, folded up, handled with care. I don’t want
to be a book on your shelf.”

“Zeinab put you up to this.”

“No.”

I was silent a while. Then: “How will you stop me?”

“The librarians won’t be sleepwalking this time. I’m going to have
to tell them I was kidnapped. They’ll be more vigilant. And you forget that I’m
trained to defend the books.” As she had during our first conversation, she
brought her hand down in a semicircle, laid its edge against my neck. “Are you
crying?” she said. “Don’t cry. Here, sweetheart, sweet dreams, silverfish,
don’t cry.” She touched my face, let her fingers rest on my cheek a moment,
then put her hand in her lap.

For a long time we sat side by side, without touching. At last she
said, “Well, Balthazar.”

“Would you like coffee? Something to eat?”

“No. I’ll wait till I’m underground. Thank you, though.”

“You seem happy.”

“Do I?”

I tugged her fingers, bit one gently.

“Don’t fret,” she said.

“No.”

“I’ll get dressed.”

She went into the wardrobe and came out after a while, wearing her
niqab.

We walked along the corniche, past flower girls and perfume sellers
and distraught lovers. When we reached the lighthouse she put her palms on the
corniche wall and leaned across, looking at the sea. She closed her eyes and
inhaled, then took off her glasses and buffed them on her veil. She turned to
me.

I uncovered the trapdoor in the lighthouse floor, lit a candle, and
we descended into the dark. The stations of the way to the library—the dark
river, the tombs of the scribes, the bones of the book thieves—which had been
holy because they led to her, were now nightmarish as they had been at my first
entrance. At the threshold of the room with the sarcophagus I turned, placed a
hand on her arm.

“Come back with me.”

“Balthazar.”

“All right. All right. Kiss me, then.”

Her lips were so soft, tasted of cinnamon. Then she entered the
sarcophagus. I closed the cover.

VII. Winter Rain

If
you’re going to stare and sleep, Alexandria in winter is a fine place to do it.
Here you can wander along the corniche, laying your forehead on the cool
lampposts while waves shatter on the stones. Here you can sit for hours over
cups of coffee, smoking waterpipes. Here you can nurse a bottle of Omar Khayyam
through a bereft evening at the Elite, watching passing djinns through misted
windows.

I slept and slept, sometimes escaping daylight altogether, so the
world seemed to have entered an age of darkness. I could not read. The book on
my lap grew heavier with each turned page, as if I held a slab of wood, glass,
iron. I laid it aside and simply stared at the ceiling. Some serial plumbing
catastrophe had left concentric brown rings above my head, like the orbits of
erratic moons. I followed those orbits for hours, listening to the trams
groaning like whales as they ferried souls through the city.

I slept so well. Early winter in Alexandria is excellent sleeping
weather, the air just chilly enough you don’t want to leave your cocoon. I’m
not ordinarily a talented sleeper: too many books to read. A jangling bell or
quarrel in the square and I’m instantly awake, salivating for cardamom coffee,
a page of metal Bembo. But now the effort of dragging off the blankets and
pulling on my robe and walking to the door and unlocking it and turning the
handle and opening it and calling to Abdallah seemed inordinate labor, so I’d
stare at the ceiling a while, then close my eyes. Sleep was always there, a
blink away. While I slept, Abdallah brought sandwiches and fruit. I woke and
ate a few bites, slept again, and the plates had been cleared. I told him to
turn visitors away. I heard Nura gently chiding one evening, Koujour hassling
him on another. I wouldn’t have minded a visit from either, but couldn’t pull
free of my pillow.

Then one afternoon the proprietor came in demanding the rent. I
asked him to hand me the trousers I’d slung over the back of my chair and my
jacket from the wardrobe but dredged up a single guinea. Grudgingly, he granted
me a week’s grace.

Astonishing what a week in bed can do to one’s appearance. I peered
into the face of a mendicant or desert father: crushed, bearded, hair soft
greasy spikes. I shaved, showered, drank four cups of coffee, and set out
groggily over the rooftops.

That night, for the first time since the expedition with Shireen,
which had yielded only her kiss—priceless, but not currency enough to buy a cup
of coffee—I moved through the city with my satchel. Being horizontal for so
long seemed to have affected my balance, because I slipped twice on the gables,
once escaping a plunge to the street below only because my belt buckle caught
in a rain gutter. Trying to jimmy the window of a house in Mahmoudiyya I first
broke my lock pick, then tore a fingernail, then yanked the window open so
violently I smashed the glass. A dog barked in a neighboring yard and lights
came on in an upper floor. Still I stood leaning on the windowsill, staring
stupidly into the dark house, till I heard shouts and footsteps, and I turned
and lumbered off.

Running cleared my head a bit and the second break-in went more
smoothly, though I realized once I’d entered the house that it was uninhabited,
barren of books. On the third burglary the scent of paper finally entered my
nostrils like smelling salts. I found my way to a room of shelves, but my
skills were eroding or my timing was off, because the stash I encountered was
savorless. The delicious books were gone, stolen or burned, and I ran my finger
in the slots where they had stood, trying to imagine the titles, trying to
imagine the hand that had snatched them away. Do you know what it is to lose
your art? Your skills foundering, as though your fingertips crumbled like a
leper’s at the touch of paper or skin.

****

I read
through the books on my shelf, as she had, and they were changed because she
had read them. And though they sustained me in my sorrow, though I felt that
without my shelf of books I would long ago have let go, they were not enough.
Though I possessed the most beautiful books in the world, they were not enough.

****

Season
of winter rains. Kassem veering into al-Faida al-Sughayara. The sky steeped in
ink, crows hurled across rooftops. Shivering, I walked along the corniche,
cigarette fuming within my fist. The water spilled down the striped awnings of
the seafront cafés, pocking dents into the flagstones, and I imagined the drops
denting my skull as well. The chairs lay tipped against the tables, forgotten
ashtrays overflowing onto the tin. Everyone else had taken shelter behind
shuttered windows. They sat indoors, heads wrapped in blankets, sipping tea and
whining about the weather, but walking in the rain seemed the only sane
activity to me.

Alexandrian women, learning of the departure of a loved one, enter a
series of practiced, ritualized gestures and cries, beating their faces with
stiff palms, a tuneful animal in their throats. Thus they tame their grief and
keep the djinns at bay. I was heir to no such ritual. Abandoned, I succumbed to
my sorrow, drowning, and thought I might never surface.

In Midan Saad Zaghloul I sat on the edge of the fountain and
listened to the chattering palm fronds and some half-remembered song on the
radio.

The rain entered my
collar and trickled down my spine. I tried to remember conversations with
Shireen, but couldn’t summon a single word. They survived, on this afternoon,
as texture and weight, as one might remember holding a starfish or an
artichoke. The words fell away and I was left with a roughness beneath my
breastbone, an ache in my shoulder blades, as if I’d been carrying something
heavy, as if huge wings had recently been hacked away.

What was she reading now? I imagined her sitting in her owl-colored
armchair. If I closed my eyes I could almost dream myself into the book she
read, the rain on my nape her fingers on the spine. An empty tram slished past,
turning up silver sillion of rainwater. After a while, I went back to my rooms
and took a bath.

****

I
cannot let you go, Shireen, and cannot fathom what you are becoming. Sitting in
these cafés, by the sea, in this harsh season, staring at rain, at panes and
pages washed by raindrops and unshed tears, I cannot tell you, cannot speak
you, but I hold what you were for me like a pebble, hot obol on my eyelids,
under my tongue. How many words passed between us? And now, in the throes of my
soliloquy, I recall only one, the sound of my name, spoken in your voice, which
is the subdued, impassioned voice of a reader, of someone who occasionally
whispers words, testing words on the tongue, of someone who samples
conversations and gestures, shrugging them on and off like clothing.

Could you let me go? Have you already let go, cast off, books in
hands and pockets to weight you, to ensure your descent? The blue thicknesses
of water and air closing over your face. You will not turn. Are you reading,
Shireen, in your cozy jail? What might have kept you by my side, in the
overworld? Another book, perhaps. Another kiss. How could I have clutched you
to myself? Forever, I want to say. All right: forever. What would it take? I
imagine flaying you, peeling away your skin, using my paperknife to pare the
meat from your bones, and desiring even the bones. I would keep them in an
acacia box with a little gold clasp, each bone individually wrapped in silk. Every
evening I’d take them out and polish them with silk and olive oil. I’d place
your finger bones in my mouth to cleanse them of dust. I’d lay your arm bones
along mine, press the hoops of your pelvis to my groin. I’d leave your eye
sockets turned into the box.

****

There
seemed no hope. Yet I persisted. Why? Habit, perhaps. The ordinary is often the
only savior from drowning. I could feel my grip sliding. What bliss to sink
beneath the lights, into the weightless deep, where obsolete gods slumbered
among angelfish. Not yet, though, not yet. Cling a while to the edges of this
city. What keeps us going? The bitter-chocolate aftertaste of a macchiato? A
phrase of Oum Koulsoum on the radio? A breath of apple tobacco? A pickled
lemon? The sum of these?

****

I returned
to the Kanisa Prometheus. Makarios opened the door, opened his arms to embrace
me, then gripped my shoulders and held me at arm’s length. “What happened to
you? You look dreadful.”

I mumbled something.

“Where’s your friend?”

“Gone.”

“Dead?”

“No. Well ...”

“Girls come and go, Balthazar. Get over it.”

“I’ll be all right. Where are Karim and Amir? And Nura?”

“Karim and Amir have been spending more time together.” Makarios
smiled. “My sermons must have had some effect. Or the communion wine.” Then his
eyes lost their crinkle. “Nura’s in hospital again.”

“Will she be all right?”

“She’s in God’s hands.”

“I’ll visit her.”

“Can I get you anything?”

“Give me some of that wine.”

Koujour and Zeinab were bent over a chessboard. I sat on the arm of
Koujour’s chair and watched the game. He looked up and grimaced. “She’s killing
me.”

Makarios came back with a wineglass in each hand.

“Badminton?” I asked.

“I’ll swat it around with you.”

We didn’t play a game, just batted the shuttlecock across the net.

“What have you been reading?” Makarios asked, puffing slightly,
though I planted the shuttlecock on his sweet spot every time.

“All the old books. But they’ve lost their savor.”

“What’s that?” The shuttlecock bounced off the cross on his chest.
He picked it up laboriously and preened the feathers while he peered at me
across the net.

“I’ve been looking for a good book. Something new, something fresh.
Among your gnostic gospels, is there one for thieves?”

“They’re all for thieves. Even the act of writing a gospel is an act
of thievery. All they can do, the writers of the gospels, is hold their
papyrus, their notebooks, to the sky, and hope they catch fire. Some do, some
don’t.”

The shuttlecock was swinging again. Pop of cork on gut, the ring of
feathers wobbling into the shadows, plummeting in a smooth arc, past the stares
of the saints, into the candlelight.

“Have you ever thought of writing a gospel yourself?” he asked.

“I’m a thief, Makarios. Quite the other thing.”

“The opposite of something is not necessarily its enemy.”

“What do you mean?”

“One way to God is through the demiurge.”

“Have you seen him? The demiurge?”

“Several times. He haunts the cafés of al-Atariin, sharing
waterpipes with his lover.”

“What does he look like?”

“Oh, he’s a handsome bastard all right.”

“And his lover?”

“She wore a veil, color of shadows.”

Later, after Koujour had left and Makarios went to bed, I sat across
from Zeinab.

“Where did you take her?” I asked. “What did you teach her?”

“That’s a secret. But tell me—why her, book thief? What is it about
her?”

“She was born from a book, umbilical cord a bookmark sewn into the
book’s heart. Somewhere in the library is the book that is her mother. To feel
her mother’s embrace she folds herself into pages. Her blood is blue as ink.
When she blinks pages turn, but I can’t read the letters of fire. She was born
with spectacles on her nose. She has a mole on her neck, embedded like a clove,
to keep silverfish at bay. She reads like I breathe. I love to watch her read.
Like watching a beautiful woman fall from a tower, endlessly, the same tug at
the gut. Like watching a beautiful woman drown herself. Her skin is the color
of fallen leaves, of rivers in flood. A particular brown I’ve found so elusive
and so desirable. Kissing her is like reading. I’m obsessed with the image of
her holding a book.”