Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra (12 page)

Its base, however, was as high as we could go. To climb the column was presently impossible. When the British ruled Alexandria
there were picnics on top. There were scaffolds and ladders and the braver broad-skirted ladies of the town could take a January
lunch there, spreading tablecloths on the cold granite, looking down on the guardian sphinxes, remembering Lord Nelson’s victory
on the Nile and comparing the site to Trafalgar Square.

Some of them probably knew the truth about their picnic site: that the pillar was not erected by Pompey, nor even by Julius
Caesar as a place for Pompey’s head. In Cleopatra’s reign the column was a mere part of the Serapis temple buildings, maybe
a support for the library or the machinery which measured the rise and fall of the Nile, that essential source for tax-collectors.
Even when Septimius Severus was commissioning his theatre, this massive monument was quietly lying on its side, somewhere
on its ancient destruction site. It was a much later Roman emperor, Diocletian at the end of the third century, who ordered
it erected for himself.

The column has no connection to Pompey at all. Visitors today are invited to think otherwise only if they wish. But when earlier
grand tourists wanted to imagine the moment when Cleopatra’s time in power began, some historical flexibility was helpful.
Without palace walls to climb, with no lighthouse except below the waves, much the best place to imagine Cleopatra as a 21-year-old,
a queen who was fighting as well as sleeping alongside Julius Caesar, was on a picnic at Pompey’s Pillar.

Colonne Pompée

Socratis’s driver arrived with a packed lunch from the Cecil Hotel. Mahmoud seemed mildly surprised to see him. He said he
wanted to stay here and share the olives, bread and cheese but that sadly he had to go. If I was happy to wait here for the
afternoon, one of them would collect me later.

I offered to pay for the lunch. I was beginning to be worried about never paying. ‘There is no need for that,’ Mahmoud said,
in the manner of a schoolteacher or nurse. ‘You are our guest.’

In the early afternoon a band of young American women arrived beside the guarding sphinxes, the two massive half-human, half-cats
that flank the pillar to east and west, looking south to Africa. The site is scattered with many sphinxes both alone and in
uneven lines, lost avenues for forgotten parades. But these two are special.

At first sight they look almost identical, smug and half-smiling, two men who could make themselves into god-cats whose tails,
more than two thousand years on, still stand sharp and firm, ready to flick away impertinence. The slightly fatter one on
the Sun side of the pillar is Ptolemy I, Soter, the self-styled saviour, sponsor of Euclid, snatcher of Alexander’s body and
founder of Cleopatra’s royal line. On the Moon side is his son, Ptolemy II, Philadelphos, named as the lover of his brothers
and sisters, cultural despot, father of Alexandrianism, buyer of poets and critics and their books.

For seventeen hundred years these creatures gazed over the westernmost lake of the Nile delta. Today their view is blocked
by a leather-treatment plant and mud-covered apartment blocks strewn
with sheets, as well as by an American female sports team. The women are dressed in short red skirts and form a human pyramid.
The highest of them is hugging and kissing the younger, rounder Ptolemy, somehow emphasising the difference from his father.

The group is closely chaperoned by a white-shrouded guide and two soldiers. The guide lectures them on the legacy of Tutankhamun,
the heretical young pharaoh who was removed from all records until his tomb was discovered in 1922. This is the postcard child
of whom neither Ptolemies nor even their librarian knew anything at all. Both the sphinx faces are of Tutankhamun, the guide
says firmly.

She must know that she is lying, that these are not the faces of a boy and that, whatever the uncertainties of ancient Egyptian
identification, these chubby cats of slightly varying fatness cannot be of King Tut. She has chosen his name (there can be
no other reason) because it is the only name that her charges have heard before.

Ras el Teen Street

I have spent the last hour of today in the most relaxed and traditional of tourist pursuits, looking at carpets. When Socratis
arrived at Pompey’s Pillar to bring me here, he was not at all relaxed, scrambling through the zoo of sphinxes, unusually
pleased to see me.

‘Have you left the site since lunchtime?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

His driver, it seemed, had seen me in the streets around the western harbour. He frowned. If I wanted to visit anywhere like
that, I
should go only with him. I was mystified, repeating that I had not gone anywhere. While wholly free to go anywhere, I pointed
out, I had not. I had made a careful study of two of Cleopatra’s ancestors instead.

He smiled and said he would show me the harbour as soon as we had had some tea. His friend, the carpet seller, would be bringing
some tea in a moment. Ras el Teen Street, while close to a presidential retreat and a prison, was no safer because of that.
Indeed, as Socratis saw matters, it was substantially less safe.

‘This is our Christmas Day. There may be repeats of the bombing or reprisals for it. Who can tell?’

Alexandria, he explained as though to a child, still has its Sun side, the gardens of carefully clipped comic topiary, the
herbaceous clock, the new equestrian statue of Alexander the Great whose design kept politicians occupied for years. And it
has its Moon side, the port-side streets of rats and rotting cauliflower, a palace protected by its own navy on a grey metallic
sea, a site of welding sheds, tombs and sphinxes famed for the disappearance of visitors and tangle of overgrown gardens along
the route out to Libya, Tunisia and beyond.

Now we were on the Moon side. But this was a safe place on the Moon. This carpet shop to which he had brought me was a place
for ‘good men – and good carpets too’. There were piles of woven landscapes on the floor, not the usual prayer rugs but street
scenes, marshlands and skies. There were holes in the white plaster walls, only some of them covered by tapestries.

I asked after his mother. It seemed polite to do that. She was, he said, ‘still very unwell’. Did he know anything specific
about possible suicide attacks, anything that made him especially anxious for a tourist’s safety?

He laughed. ‘There will be no suicide attacks. There never have been suicide attacks. New Year was something very different.’
He paused. ‘It was a car bomb, parked and abandoned, not a crazy man in an exploding waistcoat. Only foreigners blow themselves
up. Egyptians prefer to blow up other people. The Christians are after revenge and soon they will find it. Something very
different is happening.’

I had with me a copy of
The Egyptian Gazette
with a ‘forensic reconstruction’ of the officially condemned suicide bomber. We looked at the photofit picture, more like
an ape than a man, flat fleshy nose, thinning lips, close-cropped hair and eyebrows added close together as though from a
kit of disguises. Socratis snorted. Propaganda, nothing but propaganda, telling the people what they must believe.

He did not identify the propagandist. He never did mention the President. Once again he made the sign of a hyphen in the air
with his hand, palm down, thumb pointing from right to left, swinging from side to side like a cricket umpire signalling four
runs. For Mubarak’s heir-apparent son he made a smaller move, half a hyphen. He held his breath, fattened his already ample
cheek and flicked his hand like a sphinx’s tale.

He then had an unexpected question.

‘Can you help me please?

I smiled. I could not imagine what he might want. He explained before I could reply. ‘How am I to persuade my mother that
her friends from the bombed church of St Mark and St Peter are truly dead?’

Ah. Socratis’s mysterious mother. He was harsh about her when we had dinner two nights ago. He was softer now.

‘She did not see the aftermath of the explosion herself, as she claimed. She lied to me about that. But she knew three women
whose bodies were pulped over the pavement there. That, I know, is true. She too knows it is true. Her friends are dead. But
she is still talking about them as though they are alive, in the present tense.’ I remembered Mahmoud’s dinner-time frustration.
The bombing victims too, like Jesus and Cleopatra and Colonel Nasser and everyone else she had elected to her personal pantheon,
were still alive.

‘Do you have any advice?’ he asked. ‘It is all very difficult.’

Mother and son, he said, had quarrelled. ‘She is angry, quizzical now, taunting almost. She has known these friends all her
life. She has always had a picture of them in her mind. She can recognise them. She knows their names. None of that has changed.
She still has their images in her head. She still has their names. Thus they are as alive as they were before.’

He paused. ‘She does not want revenge. That would be a catastrophic error. It would not even be based on a truth. Or so she
says.’

I could not think what to say. ‘What do others think? Do you expect a revenge attack?’

He shrugged. He wanted advice on helping his mother, not a request for security briefing.

I am still not sure what sort of answer would be right. Before I could say anything he rose suddenly and said that he would
be back soon. I could continue my notes. Meanwhile his friend the carpet-seller would look after me – and would ‘absolutely
not’, he promised, try to sell me a carpet.

Hotel Metropole, Place Saad Zaghloul

There was only one carpet that I might have been persuaded to buy. It was larger and wilder than any of the rest, some six
feet wide and four feet high, well-trodden before it had been hung on the wall. Its makers (for it seemed the work of many
hands) had selected almost precisely the perspective of the city that Mahmoud argued was the best, a picture of Greek Alexandria
as seen from a high point in the harbour, from the lighthouse perhaps or the palace wall, a receding view of houses for more
than a million people, a mighty city when its full extent was portrayed in tufts and knots, pile and patches, threads of silver,
reds and blues.

It was an unusual piece, perhaps some kind of apprentice work, a demonstration of different manufacturing styles, a means
of showing purchasers what was on sale, in weaves, carpet-felts and tapestries. Some parts were of a high quality that even
I could detect; others were like rags.

The foreground was packed with brilliant detail, a long facade of columns, windows hung like stages over a wide, parade-ground
promenade. Behind the walls of the closest and largest house, seen from above through an open roof, were marbled rooms for
dining and drinking, rooms for preparing to dine and drink, thrones for hairdressers.

Inside were celebrants, servants and the richest ornaments of those being served. The tapestry-weaver had created glass bowls
in blue and gold, white bowls with limbs of men and women in serial couplings around the rim, sharply visible as though through
a microscope. The objects behind emerged more darkly as though through distant telescopic sights, different houses, broadly
drawn in felt and rags, the
homes not so regularly shown in Cleopatra’s capital, the red and brown lanes where the ancient weavers themselves worked.

To the furthest left of the design, much closer even than the jewel boxes of the rich, so close that a watching queen on her
battlements could toss a coin into their cooking cauldrons, were the tight-packed homes of the city’s Jews, knotted letters
in Hebrew on the walls. To the right were barred cells for criminals, black-threaded lines over pale cloth windows, barracks
for soldiers, for Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, each section marked by their alphabets.

This was Cleopatra’s city. Those here who spoke Latin were the remains of the army that had restored her father to the throne.
They were called Gabinians after the name of their first commander and had stayed as stateless mercenaries, marrying their
neighbours, negotiating for land grants and tax exemptions, and keeping whatever order they were best paid to keep. They were
part of the panorama and the protection of the city that Alexander had founded and the Ptolemies ruled.

I must have been too obviously a willing customer. When the owner saw me studying this most striking of his wares, he took
it down and laid it on the floor, suggesting possible sums of payment, all of them substantial, in keen defiance of Socratis’s
promise.

The act of removing the carpet from the wall revealed briefly the reverse side, a stranger patchwork in which the richly tapestried
sections were almost exactly the gold-and-silver same, the lesser parts a muddy muddle. It also revealed a hole in the wall
almost as large as the carpet itself. On the other side, stretching away till the light failed, lay a store of rusting metal,
swords and scimitar blades, helmets and armour, a tunnel of khaki and rust. The owner left my carpet on the floor but delicately
concealed
the hole with a hideous green rug of tufted Arabic letters around a palm-tree grove.