The Book on Fire (20 page)

When I came to, Koujour had doffed his mask and Makarios was
blotting his brow with a corner of his cassock and they were examining in the
dawn light a blade-like object. I sat up.

“Do you feel better?” Makarios inquired.

Closing my eyes, I did an internal assessment. “I feel a bit washed
out.”

“Yes, washed,” said Koujour. “Look. From your stomach.” He held up
the object for my inspection and I saw it was a palm leaf. As he shifted it
against the stained glass I saw the bright prickling and read the message.

I lay back. “I see,” I said. “Thank you.”

VIII. Catching Fire

For
years the religious factions of Alexandria had been honing their rhetoric—those
who trusted in a single book (but which one?), those who claimed the purpose of
human existence was to amass as large a library as possible, those who insisted
illiteracy was the only way to salvation, those who believed we were all
characters in a book read by the demiurge. Each sect had developed an
architecture codifying its beliefs, and so the churches, mosques, synagogues,
and temples had sprung up in the hinterlands of the city, with symbolic stained
glass and friezes, and even the proportions of minaret to dome, of lintel to
post meaningful.

****

Some
zodiacal catastrophe had occurred in this fateful year to cause a confluence of
the festivals of Eid al-Adha and Orthodox Easter, a marriage that had never
happened before and, according to the magi shuffling their horoscopes, would
never happen again. Bedouin led flocks of sheep, fattened on delta alfalfa,
across the bridges and through the back streets, till every lamppost supported
its tethered beast and steaming dung speckled sidewalks, and the city was
buffeted by their alto bawling. Knife grinders worked through the nights,
wedges of sparks sprinkling every alley as they pressed blades to whirring
stones. Overhead, stars of woven palm leaves hung from windows, and children on
doorsteps plaited palm leaves into abstract basketry, spangled with scarlet
flamboyant flowers and sprigs of bougainvillea. Choirs practiced Easter carols,
and the poetry of God spiraled from every minaret, the beautiful rhymes coiling
in the air and dissipating. Every house was made ready, swept and scrubbed, and
the steps and streets were swept and doused in preparation for the feast. Even
the maimed cats of Alexandria, with no fish heads to pick at, washed
themselves, and the filthy sparrows preened their wings.

****

I was
sitting on my balcony at twilight, eve of the double feast, a book on my lap,
but not reading, just rubbing a page between finger and thumb, smoking a
waterpipe, and pondering the kisses I had lost, the books I’d never see again.
An elaborate moon, incised like old ivory, passed behind the rotting silk of
clouds, drawing across gables and minarets huge silver brushstrokes that
evaporated like water on hot pavement. The sea was a mess of silver and
shadows.

Suddenly I realized that the window across the curve of the bay,
that I’d been resting my eye upon, was changing. The light pried at its box,
tearing the frame of the night. And suddenly I was awake, after the weeks of
sleepwalking. I leaned over the balcony, peering at the flag of light, fiery
semaphore. Then I was up and running, caroming through the stairwell like a
cotton-clad billiard ball, then across to the corniche, scampering over the
crooked cobblestones. The first siren brayed, and I arrived on the scene
minutes before the fire truck. A crowd had already gathered, composed of
neighbors in nightcaps and galabiyyas, infants clutching dolls, a couple of
journalists popping bulbs and bending toward faces, pencils agitating. And the
owner of the burning books, on his knees in the dust, whacking his cheeks with
his palms, calling the names of the lost characters like the names of burning
children. None comforted him. There are no words adequate to comfort those who
have lost their libraries.

The burning room was in the upper story of a Turkish house, balcony
cantilevered over the street on carven struts. The window was entirely fire.
Broken pages erupted to the stars, lit, ripped, and tossed among the stars by
pale hot fingers. Almost impossible to pull my eyes from that beauty, but I
turned my back on the fire and peered through a scrim of afterimage at the
surrounding rooftops. And, a moment before it spun and vanished, I saw the slim
bell-shape, smokeprint, blotting stars.

The fire truck clanged into the alley and disgorged its fat crew,
cigarettes plugging their maws as if they had learned to live without oxygen.
But as they began laboriously uncoiling the hose, I shouted, startling them:
“Wait!” I ran to the nearest facade and swarmed up, dipping fingers and toes
into mashrabiyya perforations and eye sockets of alabaster saints. From the
rooftop I caught a glimpse of her fleeing form, and dashed after her, tripping
along crenellation, swinging one-handed around minarets, sliding down gilded
domes, leaping gaps. Across the streets of the city lay strings of lanterns and
colored light bulbs, and, like hasty high-wire artists, we scampered over
these. The lanterns were patterned: silk-and-paper cobblestones etched like
evanescent fossils with dragons, butterflies, crescent moons, alphabets, our
footsteps jostling the flames within, so they flared briefly behind us, the shards
of flaming paper soaring.

I chased her, my shadowy book burner, through the quarters of Alexandria that night, across the art deco friezes of al-Atariin, over the gabled hillocks
of Kom al-Dikka, the spires of Ibrahimiyya, the rococo doorframes of Kafr Abdu,
into the steep meadows of Italian tile in Zizinia and Loran. Sometimes I’d
catch sight of her, far ahead, like my own shadow thrown against the stars, but
mostly I was chasing a scurry of blue, a whiff of ash. She circled back, and I
lost her in Moharram Bey.

But almost immediately I heard the sirens, and once again rushed
through the streets. The new fire blazed in a villa in Glymenopoulous, home to
a famous collection of erotica I’d plundered more than once. I watched the
flames catch on vellum, lick like the blue and orange tongues of incubi across
intaglio labia, hand-tinted lilac glans. Dismembered bodies flaking up. Breasts
and thighs gnawed by fangs of flame. By the time I arrived, breathless, the top
floor was entirely alight. I scanned the surrounding towers and rooftops, but
they were barren of the silhouette I desired. Then a gasp from the crowd, and a
figure leapt from a dormer, blue-headed comet, fists trailing fire, hem of her
garment on fire. Buoyed by the heat, she scampered en pointe across fence
posts, shimmied up a wall like an indigo gecko shedding a bright tail, and
vanished. In a moment I was after her. Once again I chased her across the
rooftops, along the tram wires, through the courtyards of Alexandria.

 Across the beautiful light-webbed city we raced. I knew I’d never
catch her, though this was my domain, though she was hampered by her shroud.
She was too swift, too light, could too easily vanish into alcove or grotto.
Yet I had to chase her, as though hoping to catalyze her transformation, as
though by the act of pursuit I might lift her veils, press her face into pages,
into story.

She set a dozen fires that night, leading me across the city. And
before dawn, I almost caught her. I came upon her in Moharram Bey, looking over
a church and mosque that stood side by side, steeple and minaret leaning
together, making a mandala of cross and crescent. She was holding a book in
each hand, and must have just lit them. Smoke trickled from the pages. I stood
mesmerized, unable to move or call out, while the pages caught and blazed. Then
she tossed the books like grenades through stained glass and pointed arch.

I thought I heard her laughter, though it might have been distant
church bells or a premature mosque call. Then she winked out, my blue angel,
and during the roll-call of tram stops back to Mahattat Ramleh my mind’s eye
chased her afterimage, complementary orange against ultramarine flames, the
successive prints of her fleeing form on minarets and bell towers, perched
momentarily on caryatids, hurdling fountains and palm fronds. The tram’s topple
was the fugue against which the images played. The rectangles of sea slid, each
incrementally brighter than the last, between the hotels to my right.

I passed the scene of the first crime, where the fire was dead and
the onlookers and journalists had dispersed to their beds. Only the owner
remained, soot-stained, trying to piece fragments of sodden ash into a word,
just one word, a single word, as the burnt odor sanctified his lamentation.

I sat on the corniche wall, the thrill of the chase still within me
so I was loath to return to my rooms. I shook up a cigarette and lit a match
and at the same moment a single cry to God severed the silence, immediately
followed by a gunshot. The sun burst the skin of the night, the shadows fled
across the bay, and the air was suddenly filled with fireworks and gunshots,
mosque calls and Easter carols. In the excitement I had forgotten the date: the
celebrations had begun.

I finished my cigarette as the mosque calls tailed off, then went
walking in the dawn. The city erupted. From every doorway children in pajamas
danced, strewing firecrackers, lighting rockets, filling the air with small
thunder. Here and there a firecracker exploded in a child’s hand, or ignited a
child’s trousers or hair, and then there would be a spasm of yowling, quickly
drowned by laughter. Men, adjusting tagiyyas or jacket collars, hurried to
mosque or church for prayers and dawn mass, and the collective chanting made a
great hum across the city, while indoors, women began to cook, buttering
phyllo, rolling vine leaves, for today would begin the great feasting.

After prayers, the slaughter. Fathers emerged with their knives,
called their sons around, invoked the name of God, and slit the throats of
sheep. How strange, and strangely compelling, to watch a creature die. One
moment standing. A gesture, and the next moment it shivers on its side,
coughing thick blood from its new orifice. The children, hungry for this sight,
dashed from slaughter to slaughter, watching the moment silently, then
commenting volubly on the death. Blood ran under their feet and they left small
bloody prints on the cobblestones. The fathers sank their hands into the slit
throats and placed bright palm prints on walls and doorframes, urging their
sons to do likewise. Long drips ran from the prints, so they resembled wet
flowers on slender stems. Then they struggled to hack up the animals, leaping
back as the guts spilled, yanking at the skin, cursing at the tenacity of the
spine.

It began to rain. I walked through the blood-soaked streets.
Everywhere lay hacked heads and opened bodies. Blood ran with the rainwater
across the macadam, in long veins the color of karkadeh, and in the brief
paragraphs of sunshine the puddles sparkled like troves of garnets. Blood
surged into the gutters and then out rainspouts along the corniche and into the
rain-roughened sea. Men in crimson smocks staggered under soaked fleeces and
cats squabbled over severed ears and a boy carried roses and a ram’s head in
the basket of his bicycle.

Young men had already formed processions. Handprints of blood on
faces and banners. They emerged from churches and mosques and bookstores,
singing carols in the ancient liturgical tongues. All carried books in their
hands, Bibles or Qurans or favorite novels, books and palm fronds, books and
knives, books stained with blood. And as they marched they chanted favorite
verses, favorite passages, the words gathering power by being uttered in
unison. I eavesdropped on the rumors: this faction or that had burned the books
in the night, the veiled ambassador had come from this mosque, that church. The
other side, they whispered, had been abroad at two a.m., on a mission of fire.

I never read the daily newspaper, but the paper-boy’s cry caught my
attention, and I turned back. I grabbed the paper from his fist, flapped it
open and pored over the photographs, read the paragraph of wide-eyed prose:
“Caped enigma with a
poetic vendetta ...
struck a dozen locations without warning ...
our photographer, who
happened on the pyromaniac in
the act of ...
despite every effort of the ... incalculable loss to ...
”

The ephemeral—fire, mirage, rainbow, djinn—photographs superbly.
Against a pattern of flaming bookshelves a shrouded figure danced, seeming to
pirouette within the very inferno like a bibliophobic Abednego. Spent
matchsticks in her hands. Close-up of a burning book. Shots of ash and pages
spinning from windows on curtains of smoke. I knew the gestures of those hands,
and I knew the color of the niqab she wore. I could have tinted the photographs
with my watercolors, indigo and pale orange.

But even as I read, I heard her voice, the voice I craved:
“Balthazar—” Turning, I saw Zeinab seated with other mendicants before a
communal tray of fried mutton. “Balthazar,” she said. “Come, break your fast.”
And suddenly I realized how hungry I was. Casting the paper aside I joined her.
We ate in silence, guests of some rich benefactor, beneath an awning outside a
mosque. The meat was fatty and delicious. We dipped it into saucers of salt and
cumin and red pepper, then wiped our greasy fingers on fragments of bread, and
ate the bread.