The Book on Fire (15 page)

“Could we see your studio, Koujour? Shireen would love to see your
work.”

“Today yes. Yesterday no, today yes. Come.” We climbed the steps to
his breezy loft, chockful of sunlight, slathered with sunlight, as if it
accumulated on the surfaces like dust. Holy fragrance of linseed oil and
cigarette ash. Zara and Aziza danced. Paintings paneled the walls.

“Oh,” Shireen said. “But this is ... and
this ... isn’t this by
...?”

“She begins to know.” Koujour grinned and nodded. He circled the
room tapping paintings. “Salah al-Mur, Abushariaa, Tahir Bushra, Rashid Diab.”

“You’re a—”

“Yes, yes.”

“But they’re perfect.”

“Yes.”

“Do you make your own paintings?”

He spread his arms.

“Yes of course, but—”

“In the beginning I learn from them. Now they learn from me. In
Abushariaa’s house he has on the wall my painting, with his name. He tells his
girlfriends he can’t sell it. Of course. Too beautiful to sell. He bought it
from a gallery. My painting.”

“Books are—” she pressed her fingers to her veil.

“I know you,” he laughed. “Don’t hide. Balthazar loves you, you love
books.”

“All right. Yes. The more you read the more you realize how books
are trampled into each other, muddy footprints of other books all over the
pages.”

“Thieves!”

Hala called us for supper. She had laid the meal on a mat beneath
the windows and we took off our shoes and sat. No cuisine rivals that of Sudan. There were chickpea falafel, kisra with weka, and cinnamon-flavored kamoniyya. There
were stews of pumpkin and okra, aubergines stuffed with rice and spiced meat,
kofta in tomato gravy. There was a dish of salata beidha and another of salata
dakwa. There were little saucers of red pepper and salt and cumin. There were
glasses of helomur and abrey.

 “Eat, eat!” Koujour and Hala urged if we showed signs of slacking.

When Shireen paused for a moment to glance out the window Hala
looked dismayed. “Is the food not tasty?” she inquired, and Koujour bellowed
“What’s your disease? Why aren’t you eating?”

I grinned at her flustered scrabbling. I knew the routine, and
paused long before I was full to receive the first volley of good-natured
vitriol. I parceled out the admonishments till finally, belly a calabash, I lay
back and shook my head.

Shireen had already conceded. “I wish I could go on and on,” she
said. “Food like this makes you contemplate suicide by overeating.”

The girls helped their mother clear the mat. We moved to the chairs,
moaning and soporific till the ginger coffee arrived. The girls fell asleep on the
sofa in a tangle of dusky limbs and locked hair.

That evening I heard for the first time the tale of the courtship of
Koujour and Hala. I had gathered fragments from Koujour’s abraded outbursts,
but this night Hala told the story, so it came whole. She sat straight-backed,
legs folded under her.

“My father, may he rest in peace, was descended from the Mahdi and
was thus a member of the ruling caste. We lived in a mud-brick mansion in Omdurman, to which rooms had been added over the centuries, so it was a termite hill of
gossiping women and politics. There were always elderly men in jalabiyyas and
loose turbans knocking at the door with their ebony walking sticks, coming to
see my father. And when they glimpsed me they’d arrange meetings with their
sons, spoiled dandies with their own pleasure boats on the Nile. I had bribed
my mother to let me act in a play, something by Aeschylus, pieced from scraps
of papyrus used to stuff mummies. I was a princess, of course, and wore the
gold of my inheritance, and my mother’s wedding tobe. Koujour was the set
painter. I didn’t see him—he was of a lower caste.”

“My father was a slave!” Koujour shouted. The girls twitched in
their sleep.

Hala went on. “He was someone with whom my mother would not have
shaken hands for fear of contamination. But I was backstage and needed to
rehearse my lines and he was sitting on an upturned paint bucket. So our first
conversation was a dialogue of fraught love written millennia before. Later, I
saw that my face had been cunningly concealed in the set, in the pattern of
windows and the flight of pigeons, and still later I saw my face in a downtown
gallery. I bought the painting and invited him to my house for sweetmeats and
guava juice. How naive I was. My mother shrieked that there was an afriit at
the door and ran screaming into the house. My youngest sister fainted. My
father threatened him with a sword.

“Next morning I woke to see a painting on the road outside our
house, drawn with spilled water in the dust, so it vanished even as I looked at
it. A painting of my face. He invited me to his parents’ house, south of the
city, in the refugee quarter. They were poor. His mother sold her wedding veil
to buy pigeons to roast for me. But the house was fabulous. Koujour had built
it himself, using colored mud, and had worked Nuban designs into the walls. I
saw how beautiful he was.

“We could only meet rarely, clandestinely. We met among the ancient
mausoleums or in the date groves along the Nile. We kissed once. Then, by
chance, my mother’s maternal aunt’s paternal cousin spied us together one
evening, holding hands by the water’s edge, and I was confined to my room.
Shortly after that, Koujour began drinking and fell afoul of the authorities.
He fled to Asmara, beyond the eastern hills.

“For five years, we wrote. I have one thousand, eight hundred and
eleven letters from him. All contain drawings. Some are burned by cigarettes.
Many are stained with tears. His or mine, I no longer know. I still read
through them once a year. Each of those years was sadder than the last. He told
me he’d become a drunkard, he’d started smoking hashish, he’d taken to using
whores, he’d become rich. Come back, I wrote him, even with your red eyes, even
with your pain, even fresh from the embrace of another, come back. But he could
not. I knew I had to make a choice.”

Koujour seized the story. “Asmara. In the evening I walked down the
boulevard. Drunk, always. I looked for whores that looked like her. I saw her
at the other end. Red dress. Too far away to see her eyes, but I knew. I walked
above the street like a bird. We talked for three days.”

“Without sleeping,” Hala laughed. “We drank coffee in Café Sheba and chewed qat and talked.”

****

We
walked back to Midan Saad Zaghloul along the corniche.

“Are you asking me to make that choice, Balthazar?”

“I took you to see Koujour and Hala because they’re my friends.”

“I won’t make that choice. I belong to the library, you must
understand that. These days in the overworld are part of my work as a
librarian, as a reader. I’m here to read your books. You won’t understand this,
Balthazar. I should never have kissed you. You think I’m like your other girls.
I’m not like your other girls. I’m not like your one-night lovers. I’m not like
Zeinab. I’m a creature of dark passages and silence. I was born among books,
and from books. This overworld is a strange and beautiful place, but it’s not
real. Only the reflections of this world are real, you know this, and the
reflections of the reflections. That’s where I belong, in my halls of mirrors.
You have a gap on your shelves you need to fill, that’s why you want me. Isn’t
it?” She turned to me, suddenly vivid, as if she were being spoken to rather
than speaking. “You want another book on your shelves, to gaze at, take down
from time to time and coddle. To read. And then put back on your shelves. Let
me tell you something, Balthazar. No, be quiet, let me say this. You think
you’re freeing me. You’re not freeing me. You’re locking me into your wardrobe.
I’d rather be Zeinab, burning books, than locked in your wardrobe. Let me go
back down.”

“You can go back down.”

“I just came up here to read some books. Can’t you understand that?”

“That’s the part I understand.”

“If you won’t accept that, I’ll just leave.”

“Didn’t you like the twins?”

“Oh, they’re lovely, aren’t they?” She looked out at the sea and
sighed. “I never knew other girls, other children. Only those in books. I had
such long conversations with them. I’d be sent to bed early and I’d lie awake
and have these conversations with the children in the books. Out loud, so the
rumor spread I was conversant with spirits. But they weren’t spirits. You know
that. I could meet them again. But also they weren’t flesh. How I longed to
meet a real child. I willed secret doors to open. I willed children in
illustrations to brush aside the tissue paper and step out of their engraved
cages, but it never happened. Then I grew to teenage and girls arrived at the
gates, girls close to my own age, but still, my childhood was bereft. In some
ways. In others, rich beyond compare.” A pack of boys jostled past but she
didn’t notice them. “I don’t mean to sound ungrateful,” she turned to me
suddenly. “I loved your friends. Thank you for taking me to them.”

“I have other friends, but it might be dangerous to go to them.”

“If only I was stronger.”

“What do you mean?”

“If I was stronger I’d just stay in your rooms reading. I’d order
you to bring me food, I wouldn’t talk with you. But I’m a coward. I had no idea
how seductive moonlight could be. Roses, lions, the sea, all this,” she lifted
a hand.

“You don’t have to go back.”

She moved to the corniche wall. The water was a morass of shadows,
all sparkle drowned. After a while she said, “I need to read. Quick, take me to
the books.”

****

Zeinab
had told me that rare books are more satisfying to burn. Likewise, a reading
environment shapes the books we read. Though we claim to vanish between the
pages, though we cannot drag our eyes from the print, yet reading a book on a
night train, cross-country, and reading the same book under a parasol in a
rainstorm are utterly separate experiences. I took her to my favorite reading
spots. A certain café in al-Atariin, where the waterpipes drew nicely and the
cardamom coffee was potent. The breakfast room of the Cecil. The derelict
dancehall over Chatby beach. The balcony of the Yacht Club. Montaza beach. We
read our books side by side. Sometimes, by chance, we turned the pages in
unison, as though our reading was a ritual, choreographed, and sometimes our
rhythm was syncopated, pages waving like slow semaphores.

****

We
still read together, before we slept. Once, as we pored over an illustration, I
jostled the book and we each received a paper cut from the same page. Gently, I
tugged the finger from her mouth and pressed it to mine. Our joined blood
turned purple. I dabbed a purple bindi between her eyes.

Then we kissed. But in the throes of her lips a whiff of the
city—carrion, brine, ash—snuck over the balcony. Eyes closed, I imagined a veil
beneath my face.

I was constantly terrified Zeinab would appear, but I never saw her.
Or rather, I saw her everywhere, in every archway, sieved through mashrabiyya,
silhouetted behind curtains. Among the mermaids in the sea, beneath every
niqab, every time Shireen donned her blue garment. I smelled her when I stepped
onto the balcony. Daily I imagined her slipping into my rooms. I imagined her
laughter, like a crow fried on a tram-wire, like spectacles crunched underfoot,
like lightning in the radio, like the clashing bells on the fringe of a veil.

****

I took
Shireen dancing one night, at the Tempest. Her niqab exotic as any punk paint
in that space. Ignoring surly stares from whores I’d had, I led her through the
fug to a leather sofa. We held hands and drank arak, watching the revelers jig
and stomp. Colored lances of light sliced across her eyes. When she’d drained
her glass I pulled her up, tugging against her resistance, and led her to the
floor. She shouted in my ear but I could hear nothing but Asala. The glitter
ball sprayed a tinsel spindrift over the churning bodies. Dancers making
clothed love, tongues braided, hips a single pendulum. The jerkers, the
tremblers, those whose buttocks possessed independent buttock-brains. The comic
dancers. The drunk staggerers clutching bottles. She danced like a leaf,
twisting away from my side and blown like a blue leaf through the crowd,
wafting miraculously among elbows and knees, arms at her sides, then raised
like boughs. Buffeted, riveted, I stood still to watch her. After a while I
fetched my arak and squeezed into a seat near the dance floor. She danced for
hours, the leaflike quivering and gusting, finding gaps in the throng, bare
feet scattering coins of light, toenails polished by colored light, eyes lifted
into the smoke, or closed as if she slumbered there on the dance floor,
sleepdancer.

Deaf, we did not speak as we walked back to my rooms at dawn. She
was still dancing as we slipped between the sheets. The room tipped like a boat
about our locked lips. She pulled my hands onto her breasts, crushed them into
her ribcage, but slapped me away when I tried to undo a button.

She woke with a moan, pressed the heels of her palms into her
temples. Her lips crackled open. “Water,” she said. I filled a glass at the
tap, held it while she drank. Then she staggered over to the sink and let the
water spill into her cupped hands, dunked her face in it, gulped it down. She
hawked up a clot of gray phlegm, then coughed till she threw up. Vomit all over
the mirror. Stench of bile and warm arak. She looked at me aghast. “You’re the
devil!” she said, strings of vomit swinging from her lips. Gripping the
porcelain and howling, she puked again. I shouted to Abdallah for tea.