The Book on Fire

The Book on Fire

Keith Miller

The Book on Fire

by Keith Miller

© 2009

2
^nd
edition 2011

Kindle edition 2013

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and
events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real
people, or events, is purely coincidental.

“City of Bones” first appeared, in somewhat different
form, in
The Arabesques Review
.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce
this book, or portions thereof, in any form. The right of Keith Miller to be
identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Author website:
millerworlds.com

Cover and Interior illustrations by Keith Miller

An Immanion Press Edition

http://www.immanion-press.com

[email protected]

Acknowledgments

For assistance
in various forms during the writing of
The Book on Fire
, I would like to
thank Sofia Samatar, Peter Dula, Lionel Thompson, Edward Miller, John Ashaiya,
Mark Sawin, Alaa Bahy, and the inimitable Storm Constantine.

Many texts were helpful to me during the writing of
the novel, but I would like to particularly acknowledge the following:
The
Nag Hammadi Library
, ed. James M. Robinson;
Cairo: The City Victorious
by Max Rodenbeck;
Christians in Egypt
by Otto Meinardus;
Alexandria:
A History and a Guide
by E.M. Forster;
Library: An Unquiet History
by Matthew Battles; “A Study of Shamanism in the Nuba Mountains” by S.F. Nadel;
and Michael Haag’s wonderful
Alexandria: City of Memory
.

Contents

I
 Entrances 

II
  Communion of
Thieves 

III
  Minarets 

IV
  Under
Alexandria 

V
  The Youngest
Librarian 

VI
  Lions and
Roses 

VII
  Winter Rain 

VIII
  Catching
Fire 

IX
  Tram 99

City of Bones

I. Entrances

Call me
Balthazar. Call me silverfish, sweet dreams, the end of the rainbow. Call me
dust devil, night owl, will-o-the-wisp. Call me the man in the moon. But call
me Balthazar, and place a book in my hands. And what book is that, the book I
reach for? Ah, that is why you are reading, of course; that is why I am here,
in my thin-soled shoes and soiled leather jacket, a knife in my belt and a coin
in my pocket, a wink and a grin at the ready, to lead you toward that book. And
to lead myself toward that book, because this is a journey we will take
together. You can almost see it, the book of our desires, its green morocco
binding tooled in gold, the five raised bands on its spine, the uncut pages
like sealed lips waiting to be slit with a dagger, the dagger you use to peel
your oranges, slay your enemies. (Because this book is also fruit, is also
demon.) Or perhaps it’s a soiled paperback lacking a cover, half the pages dyed
in blood and wine, every corner creased, the margins filthy with fingerprints,
shopping lists, scraps of verse...

****

If you
approach Alexandria from the sea, the library is hidden and what grabs your
gaze as you near landfall is the lighthouse, steeple of fire, stuck like a
spear into the glitter of the bay. So arresting is the beacon that as the boat
bucks and you clutch the gunnels you fail to notice the crowded waterfront, the
broken ring of the corniche, the bright speckling of other boats around the
wharf, until you’re almost through the arms of the breakwater. But then you
look down and Alexandria is before you, all minarets and a multitude of windows
like spaces in a loosely woven fabric, like coarse dusty cotton folded and
twisted and crumpled, the colors ink watered to barest cinnamon, faded rose,
jaundiced lavender, the lemon of light through glass. Over the city, like a
sprinkling of spices, hangs the dust. If you’re lucky you arrive at twilight
and the calls to prayer chord and jar and doves scatter, curling up till they
break free of earth’s shadow and batter the vanishing sun to shreds.

As your boat slips with a flutter and a groan alongside the other
hulls and masts, the first scents surface after the day of brine. Cardamom and
wet cunt, randy goat and roasted garlic, putrid fish heads, steaming horseshit,
frying aubergine, ylang-ylang. All this with the sweat of the dockers and the
seaweed reek of the pilings. A brown hand reaches to haul you onto the boards;
suddenly stable after the hours in a salt cradle, you lurch to keep your
balance. Stevedores bellow in a dozen languages, shrugging burdens onto
dunnage. Jarveys in spats and scarlet jackets approach, and touts from seedy
hotels murmur prices in your ear, while porters squabble over your traveling
cases.

****

My
books stashed in the Pension Scheherazade, I set out that very night to explore
the city, entranced and baffled by the graffiti in six scripts and the mishmash
of mashrabiyya, minaret, Coptic cross, Gothic arch. Architecture of stone, but
also of light: shadows cast by wrought iron, sieved moonlight across marble,
shadows thrown on interior walls by unseen inhabitants.

I love encountering a new city, but that first night in Alexandria I was curiously nervy. Though the citizens I passed paid me no heed, I could not
shake the notion that eyes watched from every shadowed alcove. I kept flicking
round, trying to catch the flag of shadow that always seemed to have just
tucked itself behind a pediment or palm leaf. And in the gnash of passing trams
or the mutter of waterpipes, I thought I heard a voice whispering my name,
whispering the titles of my favorite books.

As I walked I asked merchants and shoeblacks and coconut vendors
where I might find the library, but all either smiled and turned away or
murmured an enigmatic couplet, till I learned that there was a conspiracy
against directing foreigners to the secret center of their city. So I wandered
for an hour or two through the tangled streets until, near midnight, I came out
from an alleyway and beheld a fragment of another world.

I will not forget that first sighting of the library. After the
bells and hurly-burly, the reeks and perfumes, I emerged into the quiet
stirring of leaves, the scents of juniper and thyme. Behind iron bars great
palms stood, spaced far apart, and long-tailed birds of a species unknown to me
beat silently between them. Along the inner perimeter of the fence, like their
own shadows, like denser dusk, the librarians paced in their gray gowns:
barehanded, shaven-headed, the open book tattooed on their wrists. And beyond
the trees and the gray-garbed women the library stood, huge and lovely, with the
colossal grace and fissured skin of an elephant. Its original shape was lost,
the stone clawed and nibbled by millennia of weather—the infinitesimal lick of
raindrops, the scouring of sandstorms—so it resembled a natural outcropping.

As the moon rose, I clutched the bars of the fence, which are the
bars of a prison. We are the prisoners: the citizens of Alexandria, the
bibliophiles of the world. I stared beyond the passive glances of the
librarians to the stone carapace, trying to conjure from dimples and swellings
some eroded sculpture—sphinx haunch, archangel clavicle—but all was
cloud-reading. The library was windowless. There were no portals carven with
winged bulls, no gilded gates attended by liveried guards. The sole entrance
was a door set deep in the stone, slightly smaller than the height of a man.
The roof of the structure was punctured by narrow skylights that angled pale
spines among the minarets, and that must have sprinkled the interior with suns
in the day. Librarians walked along the roof as well, restlessly, hands at
their sides or clasped behind their backs. From a distance they seemed all
alike, sisters of some ascetic tribe.

****

As I
strolled back through the city, my mind so aroused by the notion of the riches
within the library that I viewed the streets through a crimson scrim like the
aftermath of pornography, I heard from a doorway a voice like sandpaper on
iron:

“Sst. What’s your desire?”

I peered into the archway. “Who are you?”

She stepped from the shadow with a sound like crushed glass, but did
not come more fully into focus, because she wore a blue niqab, veil fringed
with silver bells. Indigo gloves up her arms. Only her eyes showed, but even
they were rimmed in a domino of slathered kohl.

“Call me Zeinab.”

“And you want to know what I desire?”

“This is the city of desires. Requited, unrequited. All for a price,
of course.”

Ordinarily, I don’t pick up girls off the street, but, as often in a
new city, I craved companionship. And something about the voice, the veil,
the bells, gave me pause. To hear that voice again, to make certain it was
quite as harsh as it had seemed, I asked: “And what would you cost?”

She named a book.

Reader, this was no ordinary hardcover, nor even a scarce first
edition such as might enhance your shelves. No, the title she mentioned was
among my most precious possessions, freshly sequestered in my seedy pension. It
was inconceivable that she could have known of its existence. Perhaps in
shelving it I’d rubbed it the right way between finger and thumb, and this was
the veiled djinn I’d summoned.

“Never,” I said, and started to walk away. She was beside me—blue
rustle, silver shiver—and then, as we neared the sea, disappeared. I turned
full circle, gaze craning into every shadowed aperture, but she was gone. I
laughed, but my laughter was laced with dread, as if someone had reached out
from darkness and touched my eye.

****

Step
with me beneath the painted signs awry on the graffitoed wall, up six spiral
flights to the Pension Scheherazade. Past rooms occupied by transients, the
rucksacked riffraff who stay a night or a week, festooning the furniture with
threadbare laundry before marching off again under their burdens, having
notched up another city. Past rooms hired by nervous husbands who spend an afternoon
half hour with a fat whore. I sometimes see them leaving, melancholy,
slack-shouldered, like men who’ve lost at cards.

It is not my custom to allow strangers within my defenses; the only
people allowed to breach my boundaries are Abdallah the errand-boy, who brings
my coffee, and the occasional one-night wench. But, though we have been
acquainted only a few minutes, you are no stranger. I do not know you but you
are bound to me, closer than a mother or a bride. Our ribs are braided, our
tongues twisted to a single cord, your systole is my diastole. You are welcome
behind my oiled lock and supple hinges.

This is the robber’s lair, the thief’s den. Perhaps you wished for
cases of knives and drying blood in the washbasin, a bullet hole in the mirror,
but I keep a tidy residence. The room contains a desk, a bed, and a wardrobe.

Just inside the balcony doors, on an unvarnished wooden table, are
jars of pencils and kneaded erasers and razor blades, Japanese rice paper, bone
folders, wooden rulers—the tools I use to refurbish the books I steal, to lift
library marks and owners’ names, to reset the leather and rebind if need be.
I’m not above tampering with my goods, adding false publication pages to
transform them into first editions, binding in substitute signatures to lend
them the veracity they need to attract point-maniacs and tinkle a few more
guineas into my pocket.

But where are the books? you ask. Ah, step this way, over to the
wardrobe. The wardrobe? you say. And what’s so special about this wardrobe? Let’s
stand back a moment and examine it. Plain cedar, varnish clinging in chitinous
scabs to the grain. Paneled doors with chipped handles screwed on askew. Open
them. Sharp-edged cotton—blue shirts, tan trousers—a few mothballs, and
shadows. No matter how bright the afternoon, or how wide I fling the curtains,
shadows pool in the recesses of the wardrobe like ink spilled in the corners.
Come with me, that’s right, step up into the wardrobe, sidle past the clacking
hangers, loving the caress of cotton, and, if you’re lucky, through the shadowy
back. Are you still with me? Welcome then, doubly welcome, charmed one, whom
the gods and djinns have blessed.

We find ourselves in a room with a kilim on the floor and a portly
armchair in a corner, a little table beside it bearing a candle in a brass
holder. And beside the armchair a single shelf of books. But where is this
room? you stammer. The wardrobe backs onto the wall of the adjacent room, does
it not? And do you carry the wardrobe with you? What do you do in other cities?
How...?

Hush, best not to pry too hard there, you don’t want to wake
yourself up. Gently, gently, that’s right: slumber, my sweet. Now then, hearken
to my lullaby. No, I do not haul wardrobes around. There are wardrobes in every
city in the world that will suit my purposes. How does the magic work? That is
not a function of the wardrobe, my friend. Of course, the magic does not work
for everyone. Some, genuine though their desire may be, knock their foreheads
on the back panel, fingertips bristling with splinters. Others may enter the
wardrobe only until they reach a certain age, and then the shadows are nailed
fast. For some, the wardrobe seems to open and shut on a whim—one day allowing
them passage, the next as solid as a coffin.

Anyway, my sleeper, you’re inside. Softly now, as we approach the
inner sanctum, the holy of holies. Slip the sandals from your feet. Bare and
bow your head. Close your eyes a moment and ponder your peccadilloes, for this
is sacred ground.

The shelf is not overly long, as you see, shorter than might be
expected for the collection of one who has spent decades foundering in pretty
typefaces. After half a lifetime in dusty hallways, crouching in shadowed
libraries, churning through pages by candlelight, this is what I have surfaced
with: a single shelfload more precious, more lasting than a diamond elephant,
rarer than the mkoli mbemba. These are my books, these are my books. I never
travel without my books. Step forward, reach out your hand, touch one...

The cover of a book is a portal you open at your peril, peering into
the gloom between ornate jambs. What moonlit ripple in those shadows, what
damsels? What nightingales, suzerains, and belly dancers await you? What
infidels, hierophants, lepidopterists, prestidigititators, what incubuses,
changelings, charlatans, waifs, pixies, pederasts, gourmands, cherubim? Here
are the rainbow zebras and indigo octopi, the cherry glowworms and tartan
chameleons of the inner eyelid, those demon figments we read when we dream.
Here are the cities, the seas. The nights, our own breathing, ten thousand
kisses. Here are baskets of suns to be broken like bread and nets full of
seahorses and here like strung gemstones the screams of the tortured and moans
of the tattooed, the dove-coos of mothers and the caterwauling of a gypsy
girl’s orgasm.