The Book on Fire (13 page)

The waiter shoved the saucers of salads to one side and the seafood
began to arrive. Grilled prawns and calamari, sea bream stuffed with cilantro
and garlic, mussels in parsley and clarified butter. We drenched it all in
lemon juice and set to, she with knife and fork to preserve her gloves, I with
my hands, teasing the white flesh from the fish bones, nibbling the purple
fronds of calamari. After a while she stopped eating.

“What’s wrong?”

She shook her head. “I had no idea. All this. I had no idea.”

“You eat well, in your underground lair.”

“I thought we did. But this calamari. I’ve never tasted anything so
fresh. It’s like eating the sea.”

A waif wandered by with a fistful of tattered stolen roses and I
bought the lot, arranged them in my water glass and set it among the plates.
“Red roses,” I said. “I don’t know what they smell like anymore. They smell
like roses. You tell me.”

She took one and held it under her veil for a minute. “Brown sugar,
peaches, a drop of blood.” She began pulling the petals off, round and round,
till she was left with a tiny burgundy vase. When later she picked up her
napkin she left a dot of blue on it so I thought at first the dye had run on
her gloves, then realized she’d pricked herself on a thorn.

****

Beneath
the city, time was dead, but aboveground, Alexandria was a city of clocks,
cased in brick or granite, high on tiled walls, set like twin-pupiled cat eyes
into archways, the numerals virgin or evolved Arabic, or Roman, or merely their
sideways shadows, the hands chopsticks or spears or wrought-iron filigree. Each
clock told a different time, as if the city was caught halfway through a
wormhole, and I sensed this, the warping of time, as I walked through the
streets, my heartbeat dancing or shuffling. Some clocks had stopped altogether,
or perhaps moved so slowly you’d stand a lifetime waiting for an hour to pass,
and the hands of some whirred like windmills, grinding who knows what temporal
grain. Ask two waiters in the Trianon the time and it would become apparent
they were not inhabiting the same week, let alone the same hour. In Victoria
Station, you had to rely on chance and rumor to board your train. Only the
muezzins, tethered to the sun, kept accurate time in this city, and my heart
had developed five chambers that filled in turn with sand as the earth
revolved. The dawn chorale I loved, a new composition every morning, marriage
of Schönberg, Orthodox chanting, and women wailing for their demon lovers. All
dissonances, and then the occasional resolution, the more precious for being
happenstance.

But her presence skewed time like a nearby star, expanding and
shrinking the days. Two weeks. Fourteen days. And half the time she was
reading. Does it sound like time enough to you? But time is water, time’s a
mustard seed, time’s a molecule of plutonium.

****

I took
her into a city of hands. Palm prints of blood on doorframes, on donkeys, blue
palm prints of children on walls, staving off djinns and book thieves, little
silver hands on silver chains on the breasts of Bedouin women. We watched the
hands of the fatiir-seller slap his dough and fling the fat pale hillocks into
wobbling paper circles, then strew the olives and cilantro and old cheese on
them, crack an egg, fold the dough, and slide it into the oven. We watched the
falafel-seller dab wet green circles into crushed coriander and sesame seeds
and flick them to buzz in brown oil. We watched men twist paper cones for nuts.
Bricklayers, ironmongers, their hands so educated they could forget about them,
look around and chat while their fingers flailed like deft fish.

I took her into a city of lights. The lofty bonfire of the
lighthouse, of course, but also the festival lights strung across alleys, and
the street lamps, those not burnt out, and the sparks of the tram and the
incessant glittering of matches across the city as cigarettes were lit, the
glow of embers, swelling and subsiding with each inhalation.

I took her into a city of smokes. Apple tobacco and clove cigarettes
in sawdusted ahwas. The fragrant wood smoke of the sweet-potato roaster. The
sandalwood saunas of the Nubian households. The incense-sellers, swinging their
chained braziers into shops for a guinea. And of course the smoke—heady,
alarming—of burning paper, because there was always a book burning somewhere in
Alexandria.

****

I took
her to the street of booksellers, and she walked through, nodding. She’d read
all the books, and though to most tourists the bookstores of Alexandria seemed
miraculous in the rarity and variety of their stock, none equaled a single
chamber in the underground library. And none, of course, could match the shelf
within my wardrobe.

****

She
wanted to see the zoo, so we took the tram to Nouzha, bought two tickets for a
guinea, and wandered among balloon men and sticky children, past the diseased
elephant and insane monkeys, to the terrible echoing hall of lions, which stank
like an abattoir. The scrawny lions with their outsized paws slept, or trod
soundless ellipses, shoulder blades pistons, while keepers urged children to
thrust skewers of rancid meat at them. Some paid a piaster to let a snarling
cub worry their collars. One beast groaned enormously and gnashed at the bars.

Shireen stood mesmerized. “What do they dream?” she wondered. “If
they were born in these cages, do they only dream about iron bars and screaming
children, or can they imagine running? Can they take their bowl of water and
make a lake, or that window and make a sky?”

We sat by the enclosure of the white oryx and her delicate child, watching
the rickety ferris wheel. Rusty speakers mangled a lovesong.

I bought her cotton
candy, which she consumed with relish, strands melting on her cheeks, tangling
in her eyebrows, and a blue balloon, which she clutched solemnly.

“Our myths of unicorns, they say, come from sightings of oryx that had
snapped off a horn in a fight,” I told her.

“This oryx is the myth for me. I’ve met more unicorns.”

She was as interested in the picnicking families as the animals, and
kept exclaiming over their antics. “Oh, look at that boy! Is he going to do a
cartwheel? Oh, that baby just fell over! What are they eating? What are those
leaves?”

I laughed and tried to keep up with her questions. The families had
brought squares of quilted funerary-tent cloth and laid them out on the scant
grass and opened pots and tins. She relished the textures, the circles of
salads—beetroot, baba ghanoug, watercress, radish—and the knotted blossoms and
polka dots and tiger stripes on the hegabs and blouses, and the unfurling fists
of cigarette smoke.

“It’s all so pretty,” she said. “You know what I like? I like to see
how they sit beside each other and touch each other. In the library we touch,
of course, but we’re not a family. We say we are, but we’re alone, each of us
with our books. Look at how the mother holds her arm to the child. What a
lovely gesture. If I could keep something, put it in my pocket, it wouldn’t be
a rose or a lion’s claw. It would be that gesture.” She sighed, and I looked at
her. “Some things up here are so much stranger than the images I’d taken from
books,” she said. “The sea, coffee at the Trianon, sunlight on palm leaves. And
some things hadn’t occurred to me. Like the wind on your balcony, or how the
horizon shifts as you walk along the corniche, or, well, the boys, the men, how
they jostle and stare. And all the noise—trams and seagulls and radios. But
other things seem strangely diminished or altered. Not less beautiful—it’s all
so beautiful—but the roses aren’t the huge potent blooms of stories and poems,
which cause so much heartache. They’re just flowers. A little tattered, with
thorns. And the lions—where are the golden manes and the earth-shaking roars?”

“Are you disappointed?”

“Not at all. And that’s strange, isn’t it. Somehow these lions,
because I’ve seen their scrawny ribs and their ragged coats, because I’ve seen
them walk around their tiny cages, are more beautiful than their avatars. What
will Aslan be for me now, with mites in his ears and his mangy tail? The rose
Beauty’s father steals, with its bruised petals and aphids—how will this change
the story?”

****

We
took the tram back to Midan Saad Zaghloul. Sidi Gaber, Hammamat Cleopatra, Riyadha,
Ibrahimiyya, Moaskar.... As the tram swayed on, I saw a figure step down into
the doorway. I wouldn’t have noticed him if he hadn’t turned his sepia lenses
to me for a moment. The doors slapped open and he was gone, folded into the
crowd on the platform. Terrified, I clutched my pockets, but my paperback and
lockpick were safe.

****

She
was not a fast reader. Like all true readers, she savored words, allowed the
books to walk at their own pace. Some books she read in a single gulp; others
needed plenty of air, evenings strolling on the corniche, macchiato breaks. It
was as she meandered through one of these denser books that she said to me one
evening: “You promised to teach me to steal.”

“Why would a pretty girl like you want to learn to steal?”

“Balthazar, you promised!”

“All right, but we’ll need to get you some shoes.”

We went to a certain cobbler’s on Sharia al-Zeitun and he had her
place each foot in turn on a polygon of hide while he traced their contours
with a pencil. We picked them up two days later and she tried them on, executed
a dainty pirouette en pointe.

“They’re like wearing feet,” she said. “Like putting on someone
else’s feet. I could run up a wall like a gecko.”

“Let’s see you do that.”

****

Two
a.m. Late tram to Moharram Bey. We walked up among the art deco villas,
gardenlets of dwarf palms and bonsaied bougainvillea behind lacy ironwork.
Moths spun frail cocoons around lamp-posts, bats gave voice to the stars. In
the sparse light, caryatids and gargoyles watched our passage with shadow-eyed
sentience. I am a connoisseur of likely houses, scouring for a taint of
decline, for neglected flowerbeds, flaking paint on sashes, speckled panes, and
a hint of the romantic: a bouquet of dusty roses hung heads-down, petrified
puddles of wax on windowsills. If a house is too freshly painted, the shrubs
too neatly pruned, I know the denizens have no time to read. Likewise, I shy
away from fashionable wallpaper or spartan interiors: the inhabitants of these
houses spend their evenings baking casseroles and reckoning their accounts. I
passed a couple of possibilities that I might have entered on a less momentous
night; then, at the end of a cul-de-sac I’d never noticed before, I found the
house I craved—cherry pits in the hedgerows, crumbling steps, a sofa on the
balcony, its armrests darkened by soiled soles, empty wine bottles beside it. I
could see a blunted profile behind a curtain, but the head did not turn.

I helped her over the fence and we circled the house, listening at
shutters. Jimmying one open with my bodkin, I peered into the darkness, then
straddled the sill and helped her up. We sat for a minute, my knees against her
thighs, gazing into the darkness. I could hear the jostling of her heartbeat in
her breaths. We entered a lumber room—old packing crates, a rickety rocking
chair, vacant picture frames—but the stench of dust and rat piss could not
conceal the odor that sharpened my hard-on: gilt leather, old pages.

A librarian’s step is not so removed from that of a thief. She was
not silent, but to a sleeper’s ear she might have been a breeze in the
curtains, a rustle of jasmine leaves. We passed through the salon, a plaster
bust of the old scribe of the city on a marble plinth. No need to pause or look
round, her breaths were a leash. The book scent led up the stairs and past the
rooms of sleepers, loud with Arabic snoring and outbursts of unconscious
invective. We glanced in at the twitching dreamers, the children drooling on
calico camels, the somnambulating grandfather pacing the balcony, the sightless
tossers convulsed by solipsistic epilepsies. A baby sat up suddenly, stared at
us, said “Da,” and subsided into her cot. Onto a landing, up another flight,
and still the scent of pages trickled down.

Three flights up we found the little door that led out across the
roof. I looked around, baffled. Was the perfume falling from heaven? But then I
spied the hexagonal tower, its shaky staircase. I took her gloved hand and we
tiptoed among bat bones and discarded carnations. Wooden steps are tricky. I
nudged corners and edges with the ball of my foot till I found the sweet spot
that would take my weight without whining. Once inside, I drew the curtains,
closed the door, lit a candle, and we found ourselves in a perfect little
library, someone’s private obsession. Rosewood shelving, worn sofa in the
center of the floor, rack of wine bottles, cedar humidor.