Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra (4 page)

At the very edges of the bus routes that served the school were
money-men and accountants, some of whom farmed chickens (for their eggs or maybe their tax efficiencies), whose sons and daughters
we could visit at birthday parties. Did these ‘Millionaires’ Row’ houses really have four bedrooms? With attention we could
find out. Whose kitchen had less Fablon and more Formica? Should Marley floor tiles be polished? Did parquet flooring have
always to be made of wood and was it harmed by sledging across it on cushions? My father played Tom Lehrer’s mutually assured
destruction song ‘We’ll All Go Together When We Go’ when guests came for a drink. But was this acceptable or not? Why was
Jill not playing with Sophie? Why was Peter not out with Maurice, the bank manager’s son? Why was he always stuck in that
box room? And where exactly did everyone go on holiday?

Summer was the great unequaliser. On the North Sea coast, only thirty-or-so miles away, the skies were known equally to all
masters of air defence and to their sons who watched wheeling gulls and weightless terns above cold brown waves. But the beaches
beneath were crisply divided. Clacton, Walton and Frinton were significantly different. We always went to Walton-on-the-Naze,
the middling one of the three, which had the widest concrete esplanades where children could ride bikes. Clacton-on-Sea had
slot machines and candyfloss booths where ‘other people’ could waste their money. Frinton-on-Sea had no candyfloss, no caravans
(we always stayed in a caravan), no fish-and-chip shops, not even a pub, just jubilee gardens and what was known, only by
warnings not to walk on it, as ‘greensward’.

Maurice’s family went to Frinton. Did Rothmans Avenue families prefer Frinton too? By the time of my eleventh birthday in
1962, it sometimes seemed that they did. Our Marconi estate was small, confined and had only one entrance to the world. Once
inside it we could always roller-skate through the class lines. On the coast, it was an
impossible walk, and even an awkward drive, between three neighbouring towns that seemed built deliberately to show how apart
from one another we could be.

My father was a typical Marconi engineer of his time in every respect except one: he rejected the right to insist that there
was only one right path. That was his grace and glory. He never stopped me preferring stories about science to the understanding
of what science actually did. He did not invade the box room. If lumps of clay looked to me like anything other than lumps
of clay, that was not a problem for him. He did not much like the Coleridge and the Tennyson being on hand. But he did not
take them away.

He read the fiction that I wrote about my manufactured hero, Professor Rame. He even praised it. There was ‘no future in it’
but he was never much concerned about the future. I wish I could say that he had first introduced me to Cleopatra. But there
was only a short consultation a few years later (he consulted me, which is why I remember it) about whether ancient names
would be suitable for Marconi weapon systems. Would
Caesar
or
Cicero
be better than
Blue Streak
or
Blue Steel
for the weapons guided by our great metal tower, the one that protected the estate from electric storms and the British state
from communism? How about
Cleopatra
? Absolutely not, he said. A missile could not be named after a woman, even a queen.

Alexandria became much later a favourite city. But the only place here that he ever mentioned was one called Settee Street.
Maybe it is here still. He knew that Cleopatra’s capital, stretched out between a lake and the shore, had once had a great
lighthouse, a radar mast in reverse, a tower aiming to be seen rather than to see, an exchange of particles and waves, the
line on which my father made his world.

Once the Cold War was over he had to switch his interests to
foreign and smaller customers. Once the Russian warships had left Egypt’s biggest harbour, there were opportunities here both
for arms-dealers selling modern radar dishes and for archaeologists uncovering ancient lighthouse parts. Alexandria hosted
a navy which needed help against its enemies and that was the kind of place my father sought for the rest of his life.

In 1960 he much approved of the schoolteacher who told us vicious war stories from ancient myth to illustrate the virtues
of modern deterrence. After I brought to class his family
Aeneid
he was pleased to learn that he owned the final half, the books of marching through Italy, not of loss and doomed love. My
father liked to see people as electro-machinery, as fundamentally capable of simple, selfless working. His own mind was closed
to the communications of religion or art. He had a peculiar intolerance of violins and the soprano voice. He most of all loved
jet-streams in the skies over air shows.

A decade after we left Dorset Avenue, for a bigger house with an orchard and a cellar, the whole estate began a slide into
another age. Miss Leake retired. The Marconi families moved away. It was no longer a place where every house shared the same
business. There were no longer newts, nor anything but grass, in what was once the mysterious ‘bomb-hole’. The great clay
statues were cleared from the gardens, leaving only a few lumps behind.

Bibliotheca Alexandrina

An hour ago Mahmoud sent a message to the Sea Fountain cafe (‘Dead Fountain’ would be more accurate) telling me to meet him
here at the Alexandria library, ‘anywhere close to the catalogues’. His
neatly written message, in an envelope from the Metropole, was delivered by a driver in a stiff plastic suit. It contained
a map and directions and an apology from Socratis who needed ‘to visit his mother’. Surprisingly obedient (I am not quite
sure why) I gathered my papers, paid my bill, stretched my legs and left. The cable in the mouth of the Dead Fountain’s sphinx
gave a swaying farewell.

I went back down Nebi Danial and along Al Horreya, this time trying to imagine how it might have looked in Cleopatra’s time,
with Corinthian columns instead of French china shops. I took a left turn at the Roman fort and floral clock, the old city
gateway, and walked on to the new Alexandrian library, invisible until it is reached, a shallow bowl of glass by the sea.

Waste paper was swirling in the wind. The hot-chocolate cafes were empty. An armed guard of anxious young soldiers waited
and watched as though for a visit from unusually senior officers. The only welcome came from headscarfed school students scampering
through the sculpture park between a green stone tornado, a green crescent moon and a grey head of the great Alexander.

There was no mention in Mahmoud’s note of any specific time to meet. But a change of seat was anyway overdue. The peacock
pattern of the cafe furniture is still imprinted on my flesh. This new chair is a luxurious contrast, designed for keyboard-tappers
in the new glory of the very newest Alexandria, a library built at Greek billionaires’ expense to remind Egyptians and their
visitors that Greeks made this city, and that there is more to history here than pyramids and Pharaohs.

The shelves are designed to evoke Cleopatra’s family library, the most ambitious book collection ever attempted. Today, whether
because of terrorist bombing or excessive security, it is almost empty, evoking only to the very few. What do I do while waiting
for the
promised arrival of my guides? First I ask myself to forgive my own vanity. Secondly, I seek my own name in the catalogues
and ask – only idly – what, if anything, of me has survived this far?

After Professor Rame’s adventures there was no further fiction. So I have no need to look among the novels. In my life as
a newspaper editor and reporter I must have written millions of words of journalism. Most of them were anonymous ‘leading
articles’ on now forgotten issues of lost days. But there might perhaps be traces here of my foreign correspondent’s life.

In the print catalogue there is a French translation of my first book,
Thirty Days
, a daily diary which covered my time spent with Tony Blair and George W. Bush during the Iraq War in 2003. This
Trente Jours
will possibly impress Mahmoud. But to use the ‘electronic archive of the world’s press’ demands more technical skill than
I can muster. The screen shakes and so do I.

Is it worthwhile ordering any other books? Two desks away there is a huge pile of Latin classics awaiting an absent reader’s
attention, each one tagged with its own ticket. The
Aeneid
is in a single dark-blue volume. Its requester may not come. If he or she does arrive, I can politely return it or wait to
see if its absence is noticed. To begin at Book Seven with Caieta has always been a good introduction, however little I understood
of it fifty years ago. I can go there again.

The
Aeneid
was the epic that Rome’s first emperor, Octavian who called himself Augustus, hoped would expunge the memory of Cleopatra,
a figure whom he made a symbol of everything he was against. The Egyptian queen was, in this version, a seductress, an oriental,
a capricious autocrat who melted pearls in wine. Her conqueror intended Virgil’s poem as a victory speech, proof that Alexandria
had been defeated and true Roman virtues made triumphant.

But immediately I am bidden to stop. A librarian appears as though to take back the book for its rightful borrower. There
is a thudding behind her. Mahmoud and Socratis are finally here, waiting impatiently by the catalogues, not allowed further
entry because it is too close to closing time. They are gesturing at me to come out. I point to my watch. I will be with them
in a few minutes. There are limits to being led by unknown guides.

So, to take a breath and end where I began, with Book Seven of the poem: Aeneas and his followers have newly arrived in Italy
after their troubled odyssey from Troy. With good reason the sailors are anxious about their futures, reluctant to let go
of their past. Some of them have already set fire to their ships in order that they might stop somewhere, anywhere.

Dido of Carthage, Cleopatran temptress and corrupter, has burnt herself to death. Aeneas has also buried his father and now,
as he bids farewell to Caieta, wonders whether his nurse will ever be remembered by anyone else. He doubts whether there is
truly any glory in having a name attached to a tomb; but he labels her bones nonetheless.

That has to be the last line. Socratis is scowling. The driver, his suit a sickly mix of yolk and mud, looks as though he
will break the windows. Yes, there was some glory for Caieta. She is still remembered two thousand years on, especially by
readers who begin the
Aeneid
in the wrong place. Biographers want the dead but they have only the living. We must work with the tools that we have.

Hotel Metropole, Place Saad Zaghloul

It is now four in the morning by the clock in Room 114, ten hours since Mahmoud and Socratis arrived together at the library.
I have had more than enough time to establish how little I know of them.

Mahmoud was bright-eyed like a boy on his first day at work. He brought with him a pack of Cleopatra cigarettes, a Cleopatra
Ceramica catalogue of modern bathroom furniture and a DVD of last season’s Ramadan TV series starring an Egyptian queen who
looked a little like my ancient Miss Leake. He quickly noted the existence of
Trente Jours
and said with a studied sincerity that, if he were ever to write a book himself, he would undoubtedly make a journey to this
most famous of libraries so that he could read it here.

At the same time Socratis merely smirked. His face, like a mask of mud, cracked in only the finest lines. Either he doubted
that Mahmoud would ever write a book or he despised my motives in reading my own. This older, calmer man was careful not to
betray himself too much. He kicked one workman’s boot against the other and tugged at the belt of his soft wool trousers.

But there was also a third man, a squat and square-faced driver who had no such qualms, a laugh like an idling diesel engine
and a confident look – as though he knew he represented the true views of both his bosses. Mahmoud was displeased by this
mockery. He became almost embarrassed. His cheeks glowed to match his brown
polished shoes. He scowled. Excessive laughter was improper behaviour, he seemed to suggest, unacceptable rudeness, the response
of a yes-man who said ‘yes’ far too loudly. The driver took no notice. He pushed out his stomach against his soil-stained
plastic jacket. When he could inflate no more, he exhaled with a grumbling sigh.

It was as hard as before to gauge exactly what was going on or even who was in charge. Socratis commanded the chauffeur. But
maybe both of them were there to look after Mahmoud. Does some part of Egypt’s tourism department employ drivers who dress
like their car seats? The guidebooks, which say a good deal about the badges on state uniforms, have no guidance on that.

Eventually Mahmoud tapped his Cleopatra cigarettes against his Cleopatra Jacuzzi pictures. He looked sleek and serious again.
Socratis froze his fissured cheeks into a frown, forcing his man in the upholstery suit to apologise. ‘The wretch’, he said,
expressed ‘the sincerest sadness.’ He did, indeed, look chastened – as though the worst possible thing had happened to him,
as if he had lost his car, as if his parking assistant (an ubiquitous breed in Alexandria) had driven his Mercedes out across
the Corniche, down into the harbour and out among the drowned ruins of Cleopatra’s palace.

After these peculiar pleasanteries were over Mahmoud suggested dinner at our hotel. It was possible to eat well there, he
said, as long as one was with him. Socratis thought that I would prefer Monty’s bar at the Cecil, where the alcohol was more
reliable, where there was wartime memorabilia of Desert Rats and where faded British grandeur might be more comforting in
troubled times than the French kind.

Socratis was the victor. He said smilingly that he would choose the restaurant and Mahmoud would pay the bill. Mahmoud did
not complain. These men had surely to be team players. Each man had some
sort of connection to his hotel although neither seemed to work there or anywhere, or had yet asked specifically if I required
his services or had said what this would cost. I did not press them. This is not journalism. There is no need for certainty
or haste. The driver, cheerfully smirking again, was sent to bring round the car. The doors closed and we were out again past
the green moon and the stone tornado, waiting at the place where the library’s great slope of glass slides into the street
by the sea.

Eleven hours on, that all seems an age ago now. On the cloudless, windswept balcony of Room 114 it is almost morning. It has
not been a good night in the hotel where, as the brass key fob boasts, ‘the temple of the great love of Cleopatra and Antonio
was born’. I am staring drowsily at golden lights, a green tower, lines of red underscored by white neon. There is a deafening
dawn chorus of musical cars and whinnying horses. But at least, inside this tall tube-like, golden-wallpapered room, the hours
of poisoning are almost past.

Before dinner, as we sat in the Cecil bar, Socratis asked again why I was here, why I was spending winter weeks in Alexandria
when other tourists, the seasonally knowing and the temporarily terrorised, were not. I told him the truth. If it were not
for unseasonable Christmas snow over the British skies, I would not be here. I would be somewhere warmer and further away,
toying perhaps with my Cleopatra story but, as before and so often, not seriously writing it. He seemed disappointed to hear
that. He wanted me to want to be here (he said so several times) even though the assault on his fellow Copts meant that I
had to be careful where I went. He very much wanted me to have a successful trip.

This was new information. Socratis is a Copt, a man of the world’s
most ancient Christian church. Mahmoud is the man of Islam. Both like to stress continuity, differences that should not be
exaggerated, a past that little changes.

My own knowledge of Egypt does not go back much before the conquest by Alexander the Great or forward beyond the last Romans.
All I know about its religion is that in the unimaginably long pre-Alexandrian history of this country men worshipped dogs
and kings among many gods, except for a brief revolution in the fourteenth century
BC
when there was just one. After the failure of these first one-god believers, all the many holy beasts rapidly returned, mingling
with Persian and Greek gods when different conquerors came, multiplying for more than a millennium until the Jews and Christians
again brought ‘one god’ to Alexandria and until the Muslims did the same.

In old Zaghloul’s idea of a modern Egypt, forged in prison and in power a hundred years ago, religious differences were not
supposed to matter. Now they matter more, to foreigners as much as to the Egyptians themselves. British bishops, while patronising
about primitive Coptic beliefs, have anguished over the bombs and persecutions. British politicians have supported President
Mubarak, especially when he has hunted down Muslims of an equally primitive kind – and promised to keep the worst of them
in jail.

The three of us sat down for our first course of oily squid and parsley. There was nameless fish and minced meat ahead. Socratis
seemed content but quietly so. Mahmoud took charge although he looked as though he would much prefer to be elsewhere, sometimes
as though most of him was elsewhere, leaving behind little more than a puritan stare above a menu.

When Mahmoud spoke it was as though from the standard handbooks of public relations. He blamed all reporters who threatened
national solidarity and the tourist trade. Novelists and poets, he added, could be even worse. Too many artists came here
when they would rather be in a different place, looking for something that had disappeared or never existed and then complaining
when they could not find it.

He particularly deplored the Cecil Hotel bookshop which year after year promoted E.M. Forster’s First World War guidebook
to Alexandria, ‘a work whose author would rather have been in India’ and who called his subject ‘the spurious east’. And there
was always and everywhere Lawrence Durrell’s
Alexandria Quartet
, which, ‘for anyone who could finish it’, made the city out as a place of prostitutes, plutocrats, drunkards and primal religion.
Of all the foreigners who had ruled Egypt, he said, ‘the English were forever the most foreign’. Socratis nodded sagely at
that.

As we ate and drank, I was sympathetic to Mahmoud – or tried to be – denying the slightest ambition to bewail a city of dreams
that had somehow died. I have no nostalgia for the sexual invention and cosmopolitan beauty that Lawrence Durrell and E.M.
Forster so longingly describe. I have not arrived with half-admitted hopes of the city being what it used to be at some other
time or something or somewhere other than it is. I am not looking for souls of poets dead and gone. I may try to imagine the
colonnaded streets of Alexander the Great’s successors but that does not mean I yearn for them or despair of what came next.

Afterwards Socratis took us upstairs to ‘after dinner at Monty’s bar’. Vodka arrived. Socratis and I drank it. Mahmoud, a
dutiful man of his faith, did not. On the other side of the dark-wood, low-ceilinged room, a group of tropically dressed military
men, Australians, Americans and a Spaniard, were more seriously enjoying their alcohol. There was not a woman in sight. We
were running out of things to say.

Suddenly, sensing a failure of hospitality, Socratis took over responsibility for the night. He pushed down, as ever vainly,
on his bouncing curls. He said all would have been much better if his mother had been with us. He blurted this out, as though
this had been his secret all along. His mother was the one who knew about Cleopatra. She had talked about her often when he
was a child. She knew all about Alexandria’s leaders, King Fuad, King Farouk, Colonel Nasser, Anwar Sadat and everyone.

To his mother these were ‘all good men’, just as Mahmoud had said. She knew about the great Alexander of Macedon, who had
been here so short a time, and Queen Zenobia of Palmyra, whose short reign as a conqueror of Alexandria is sometimes forgotten,
as well as Queen Cleopatra whose life and death are remembered so well.

Mahmoud looked anxious – as though he had heard this all before and knew we were heading for bad places. After a third round
of toasts, Socratis, fatter faced and softer eyed, seemed to be mocking his absent mother. Or was he repeating dutifully her
views of rulers’ virtues? If only, he said, she had been able to meet me and speak for herself. If only she were not still
so upset by the bombing of her church.

Her church? So it was her own church that had been bombed? Had she been inside with the doomed New Year celebrants of St Mark
and St Peter of the Seal? Well, no, Socratis admitted. But she had heard the blast. She had said so, and her son believed
her. She had immediately visited the scene. Or maybe not. She had claimed to have done so. Socratis was doubtful. It hardly
mattered. The old lady, he said, had vivid descriptions, ‘gnarled green cars and blood-sprayed walls, bodies wrapped in newspaper,
women who could not piece together their husbands, fathers scrabbling for each lost limb of a child’, and other horrors that
she would not and could not relate. And she had questions? What happened to the souls of people who when they died were not
whole people? It was ‘a curse on Alexandria. If only Jesus had never come here.’

Mahmoud and I stared at each other across a plate of sagging biscuits. The balance of our talk had changed. The teams had
changed. The conversation was becoming ridiculous. I said carefully that I would like to have met Socratis’s mother. I would
have liked it very much, more than to have heard this peculiar version from her son. That was when I first felt the grip of
poison, indigestible words and foods together.

Mahmoud’s reaction was, as ever, to blame the newspapers and television reporters, those who had made her see what she had
not
seen. The media was the message, he said proudly. My own best effort was to say, with due hesitance, that I did not know of
Jesus ever visiting Alexandria. The Saviour had come here in his ‘missing years’, Socratis replied, not quite meeting my eyes
and flicking shreds of olive towards the portrait of General Montgomery on the Monty’s wall. ‘Where else would he have come
than to the greatest city there had ever been?’

Mahmoud sagged again. He circled a forefinger around his ear to signal a mockery of this madness. He pulled air from his mouth
in a silent blah-di-blah. All this Jesus and Cleopatra was the sound of the mother speaking through the son and Mahmoud had
heard it too often before. ‘And HE is still here,’ Socratis added with capital emphasis. If Jesus is still here, I asked,
does your mother think that Cleopatra and King Farouk are here too? He showed no sign of taking offence. ‘The monarchs are
only sometimes here’, he replied firmly, ‘but they never go away far.’

I looked away. I feared I was going to laugh. Mahmoud began to reply but stopped and decided to settle the bill instead, looking
mournfully at the vodka tax, the expensive vice of others. I offered to pay but was dismissed with a sweep of hands from both
men. Mahmoud did not drink a drop of spirit but at that moment he looked drunk, a reluctant debauchee, whose last act at the
table was to light up a Cleopatra. He asked if I would have preferred him not to smoke? No. Mahmoud picked up his credit card
receipt, inhaled deeply and followed his friend from the room.

This was all over by ten o’clock. Since then I have had two hours’ sleep. Perhaps the cause of the food-poisoning was a particularly
damp bread roll, a slice of mollusc cooked too little or too long ago. The conversation did not help. Whatever the cause,
a peculiar lightness of
stomach or the perpetual lights of trams and cars, the prospect of further wakefulness seems assured. On the narrow strip
of carpet between the bottom of the bed and the thin French desk lie accusing scraps of Cleopatras from the past.