The Book on Fire (4 page)

The coastline of this long city contains a hundred secluded coves
where oarlocks creak at two a.m. and crates are tumbled, with stifled oaths,
onto the sand. Sometimes, following a tip, the smugglers are apprehended. We
see their photos in the papers: blue-jawed, scar-faced, bespectacled ruffians,
eyeing the camera sidelong or defiantly brazen, beside heaps of leather-bound
loot.

And on the western fringe of the city, where it tapers into dunes,
are the angular orchards from whose leafless boughs hang rotting fruit: the
negligent book-borrowers of Alexandria. Yes, fail to return a borrowed book in
this city and the booksquad, the bibliocommandos, will swing through your
windows at dawn and haul you off to be hanged by the neck until dead.

****

Five
a.m. tramcar. After a barren break-in, I was half asleep in the empty carriage.
The tram howled and lumbered, sparks drenching the glass. At empty stations,
lamps smeared oblongs of greasy light across torn, overlapping posters
advertising religious services, bookstores, belly dancers. The doors folded
open with an ungainly clatter, folded shut, and the tram bucked forward. Slow
rocking meter of tram stops: Zizinia, Gianacles, Shutz, Safar.... At Qasr
al-Safaa I closed my eyes a moment, opened them, and she was beside me, without
a rustle or a breath.

“I thought you always rode the women’s car,” I said.

“I ride wherever I like.”

“How was your luck tonight?”

“Yours was off, I take it.”

I shrugged.

“No books?”

“Plenty of books. Plenty of paper, at any rate. And how was your
luck?”

She drew from within her garments a lovely
Alice
. I touched
it tenderly.

“What did you give?”

“The usual.”

“You’ll burn it tonight?”

“Of course.”

We were approaching Ramleh and she looked out across the bay. Broken
lights scurried on the darkness.

“Imagine the tracks were laid over the sea,” she said. “You could
take the number 99 tram, out over the Mediterranean.”

“Where to?”

“East. North. Somewhere with mountains. Yes. Mountains, pine trees.
Snow. A little mountain town. Children are flying kites on the promenade. It’s
the festival of lights. You drink hot chocolate on the terrace of the hotel.”

“You sound like you’ve taken that tram.”

I couldn’t tell whether the motion of her veil was a nod or the
rocking of the tram carriage.

“This is my stop,” I said.

She was silent, still looking out at the horizon.

“Where are you going?”

“End of the line.”

****

I’m
not a religious man, but even thieves need a confessor from time to time. I
went to Abuna Makarios one evening, early, before the others arrived. He was sitting
in the belfry, eating konafa and drinking coffee and going over the catechism
with an adolescent boy. Sticky strands of konafa had become tangled in his
beard.

He set his plate aside and sent the boy home to his mother with an
affectionate slap on the bottom. I sat beside him on the stained mattress. He
poured me coffee, then slid half a dozen nests of konafa onto a saucer and
passed it to me.

 “How did Zeinab join your congregation?” I asked.

“The others came by invitation. Nura met Amir in the hospital. Amir
found Karim on a tram and was intrigued by the contents of his pockets. Karim
discovered Koujour taking rubbings from gravestones. But Zeinab just showed up
one evening. I was cleansing the church, casting smoke into the corners. When
the smoke cleared, there she was, in front of the altar, as if I’d summoned
her. ”

“What did she want?”

“She wanted to see my books.”

“Did she burn any?”

“She told me they were already on fire. We had an interesting little
discussion. You know, she’s very well read. You’d never guess it, the way she
talks. She’s the least constant member of our congregation, sometimes
disappearing for a month or more. And she’s the only one who’s famous. Even
when she doesn’t show up, we read about her in the papers. Look.”

Makarios pried from among his gnostic gospels a folder of newspaper
clippings, the black-and-white photographs of books on fire. And, peeling
through them, I began to see them as works of art. Books like flowers blooming
in darkness, lit pages scattered like rectangular lily pads across sidewalks.
Books burning in archways and minarets, bookcases on fire, burning books like
stepping-stones, a trail across rooftops, into the night. Leafing through the
stack, the paper yellowing as I descended, I felt, mingled with the horror, a
swelling wonder.

“Who is she?” I asked.

Makarios plunged a hand into his beard and rummaged there. “Yes, the
question we’ve all been asking. There are goddesses of the sun and goddesses of
the earth, the many-breasted, the six-armed. Goddesses of the floodwaters,
kissing crocodiles; goddesses of the night sky, bellies full of stars: these
are the revealed goddesses. You can find them in any church or temple. But most
potent of all is the unrevealed goddess. We don’t know where she lives, we don’t
know her powers. She has no shrine. And yet she’s the goddess we pray to, the
faceless one. She’s the goddess we dream of, sphinx buried to the eyes. Her
eyes are all we see, but they are not her most important aspect. Crucial to the
goddess is what lies beneath the sand.”

“Can I trust you with my secrets?”

“Secrets are my job.”

“In my rooms I have a shelf of books. Hidden from every eye, from
every hand. Yet she knew the contents of that shelf, and … well, she acquired
one.”

“And then burned it.”

“Yes. But I don’t understand why she couldn’t enter my hiding place
and take the book herself. She wants to burn them—why doesn’t she just go and
burn them?”

“She needs your hands, you see. The gods are nothing but shadows
without our hands, our breaths. They require our offerings, our sacrifices, to
do their work.”

****

I
bought a phial of kohl. Closing the balcony doors, I overlapped the curtains.
Then, standing before the mirror, I slid the brass peg along my eyelashes,
extending the outer corners of my eyelids with long serifs. Zeinab’s niqab had
hung in my wardrobe since our midsummer liaison. I put it on, adjusted the eye
holes, and stared at myself. I inhaled my breath, warm inside the veil. I could
not look away from my eyes, the eyes of a ghost. Suddenly I was vertiginous,
uncertain who I was looking at. Ripping away the veil, I poured myself a glass
of wine.

****

So,
trailing me like a tethered cat, you’ve gathered my life a little, my nights
and desires. You’ve begun to hear my song, the rough voice I use when I sing in
the bath, hoping for a tune. And you’ve sampled a little of my Alexandria. Not, as you see, the city of memory, but the city of imagination, eternally
created, eternally abundant. And the city of books, of course. What’s a book
made of? All the rhymes and jangles in my ears, all the fears and faces, a
fan’s clatter, radio static, the tune in a turning grindstone (miller’s music).
Hours at windows and afternoon dreams, moments just after waking, cities
conjured from street names on obsolete maps, the shapes of unknown scripts, my
own illegible handwriting, the urge to plunder a virgin page. Also the notion
of the book, the grail of the book on the shelf. The book exists, as surely as
if I hold it.

****

Alexandria,
Alexandria. It took me a while to fall in love with her; she’s harsh, raucous,
she stinks. Moving through the streets the first day I couldn’t see a pattern;
each doorway and window frame a different color, the sidewalks a plowed pasture
of broken tiles, the rooftops flat or gabled, towered or crenellated, skyline
sketched by an alcoholic epileptic. A mosque bore seven minarets in clashing
styles, each decreed by a different pasha, and in churches posters were pasted
on ancient icons, marble Virgins cradled plaster Saviors. So I walked the
streets bewildered for a while, and then one day glanced at a facade and saw
that the parti-colored shutters shimmered like a Klee or an Abushariaa and I
thought the disheveled skyline formed a nice counterpoint to the ruled horizon
of the sea. I began to notice the corners of prettiness: red peppers among
platters of sardines, tomatoes on watermelons, narcissi in hillocks of
strawberries. Parakeets against brown walls. Painted cartwheels. Silk roses in
horse harnesses. And this daubing soon seemed necessary and my eye began to
crave roughness and clash, longing for the abrasive textures of Alexandria,
mellowed and melded in the Mediterranean sunlight, the glow of the night city.

****

In
winter, Alexandrians long for summer, and in the furnace of August they crave
the chill, but for a few days in spring they’re content. In spring, the streets
are filled with carts of apricots and little delta peaches. Days of breezes,
shoals of lights skimming across the bay, the air sprinkled with sugar. A few
weeks like gifts before the khamsiin blows in from the desert, fifty days of
yellow skies and scraped nerves, the shutters of every room bulging with pent
quarrels. And then, as the dust storms subside, on one day a year Alexandrians
dye eggs and buy green onions and salt fish and brown bread and venture out to
sniff the breeze. The sun always shines on Sham al-Nasiim, the air is always
polished.

The denizens of the Kanisa Prometheus did not ordinarily circulate
as a group. We met outside the church walls in duets or trios, but on Sham
al-Nasiim our congregation shucked stone and stained glass and strolled
together down to the beach at Chatby. In the lee of the seaside dance hall,
whose barnacled pillars shredded the waves, we spread a kilim on the filthy
sand and laid out, on nests of green onions, eggs dyed with turmeric and
karkadeh. We opened reeking boxes of half-cured fish, uncorked communion wine,
and ate in silence as the sun rose. The fish was so salty, the onions so
pungent, the wine so sour, I felt I was munching the sun itself, sipping the
sea. That first morsel of fish at dawn on Sham al-Nasiim was the most delicious
thing I’d ever eaten, but then I found myself hoarding the wine bottle, the
roof of my mouth flayed, my tongue rough as a cat’s.

After breakfast we swam, Karim and I in our boxers, Amir in his
lavender panties, Makarios in an extraordinary pair of hierophantic
undergarments, black, with suspenders and crocheted crosses, Nura in a lace
monokini, Koujour in the ebony, and Zeinab fully dressed. Amir and Nura dabbled
in the shallows, but Karim stroked out powerfully to an anchored fishing boat,
hauled himself into it, and dove off the prow. Makarios ducked his head, then
stood, arms crossed, water sluicing from his form as though from a breaching
orca. The water beaded as the pelt across his chest and shoulders freed itself,
the cotton at his groin sucked about his bunched beasthood. Zeinab remained
motionless, eyes turned to the horizon. Her niqab floated about her in the
swells. I imagined the sea bream nosing her bellybutton.

By the time we emerged, the beach was crammed and we had to
hopscotch picnickers to the corniche. Their day was beginning, but we silently
parted and walked back to our chambers, our churches, our culverts, to sleep
the holiday away.

III. Minarets

A
year after arrival
in Alexandria, I finally turned my attentions to the library at its center.
This delay was not from cowardice or lack of interest. The library is famously
impregnable and I wanted to be certain in my surroundings, to acquire all the
information I could, before attempting to breach its stone carapace. Though I
will not disown a certain unwillingness to rattle the life I’d built here: my
friends at the Kanisa Prometheus, dawn wine, afternoon coffee, the occasional
late-night rendezvous with a book-whore. Alexandria had seduced me, but, like
all lovers, I had to pry beneath the surface.

No one knows when the library was built, and the stone betrays no
secrets, but all agree it is more ancient by far than the lighthouse, more
ancient than any structure in existence. The librarians are all women, this is
known, and occasionally a girl will arrive from a distant land to stand
empty-handed outside the gate until it is opened and she is ushered in.

Mentioning the library in the Kanisa Prometheus elicited guffaws.
Easier to snatch the earrings off the Empress of China, they said, easier to
nab the pharaoh’s testicles, easier to carry off the Eiffel Tower. Why not steal Halley’s Comet? The Persian Gulf? The island of Zanzibar? And they told
tales of foolhardy bibliomaniacs who’d attempted to enter the library in past
millennia. The adventurer who’d tattooed the open book on his wrist and donned
a gray gown and tried to pass himself off as one of the librarians. His quartered
carcass had hung from the gates for a month till it was picked clean by crows.
The billionaire who’d tried to bribe his way in. He’d been cremated in a
bonfire of his own cash. The sultan who’d arrived with an army of two thousand
men, determined to assault the fortress, liberate the books. Though they bore
scimitars and lances, they were eviscerated by the barehanded librarians and
the sultan’s head adorned a gatepost for a week, eyes cast down and swiveled
slightly inward, as though bewildered by the loss of his body. Mild as the
shaven-headed women looked, they were fearsome warriors and were rumored to
undergo secret training that enabled them to sever a spine with a flick of the
heel, crush a windpipe with a finger-snap.

****

Alexandria
portions out its seasons by winds: the dozen named winds, each with its
allotted days. From the first wet kiss of Kassem through the yellow gasps of
al-Awwa I spent many hours unobtrusively observing the library and its grounds,
examining the structure for hidden apertures, marking the rotation of the
sentries. I lay sleepless a night and a day, sipping coffee in a rented room
above the library gate, watching for gaps in the vigilance of the librarians,
but there were never less than ten pairs of eyes on the doorway. Boxes of books
sometimes arrived at the gates from overseas, and I wondered if I might
insinuate myself into one of these, but they were carefully inspected even
before they were let into the grounds, as were the crates of fruit delivered to
the entrance every morning. The taunting of my fellow thieves began to chamfer
my resolve, and I wondered if perhaps they were right, that the library was
impregnable, a closed book, that I would live my life unrequited.

The library was not always fenced away from the world. In times
past, scholars and emperors had arrived across seas and deserts and been
allowed past the door. From their accounts I knew that once within the library
they were forced to strip naked, even the most exalted suzerain, the most
sagacious professor, and, leaving their garments folded on a shelf, don
spotless silk gloves and shifts of rough cotton and barefoot enter the great
reading room at the heart of the library. Among spears of sunlight or beneath
the waver of candle flames, they sat at stone benches, in depressions worn by
centuries of restless buttocks, and ordered by name the manuscripts of their
dreams. And they were seldom disappointed, for the Library of Alexandria
contained books like sand, like stars.

When they scribbled the title of the book they pined for, which
perhaps had not been written for a thousand years, one librarian among those
standing at attention around the perimeter of the room would turn and enter one
of the dozen passageways branching from the center of the library. Often the
book would arrive within the hour, but sometimes the patron might sit for half
a day waiting for the librarian to retrieve the volume from the dark web
beneath the city. Among the readers strode shaven-headed attendants bearing
limber rods with which they would lash any who dared utter a word to his
neighbor, or even mutter over a difficult passage. A hierarchy may have existed
among the librarians, but there was no way of telling who served in what role:
their heads were all shaven, their wrists tattooed, they wore identical gray
smocks. Some were tall, some short, some had green eyes or pale skins or moles
on their necks, but all wore the same expression, at once impassioned and
impassive, the expression of a meditating swami or an addict after the first
rush. They responded to questions with a swipe of the rod.

The only sounds in the reading room were the clawing of pen nibs,
shifting of buttocks, stifled sighs. Those who sat on the benches sometimes
raised their eyes to peer into the hallways, though they could report nothing
save gloom and the flutter of footsteps. But each mind strained into those
shafts, imagining the ore that glimmered there. And they wrote of the
remarkable volumes they fondled with silk-clad fingers: great jewel-encrusted
tomes fabulously illuminated; tiny duodecimos with paper fine as peeling skin
after a nasty sunburn; ochre paperbacks shorn of their covers, the only
surviving copy of their print run; books so fragile each page was sheathed in
transparent horn, the sheets stored in cedar chests.

But eventually those chaperoned admittances had been curtailed and
only once in a great while were scholars allowed within the walls, and those
only if they could present impeccable credentials and precise purposes. And
then even they were banned and the library closed itself off, still inhaling
books but never exhaling.

****

As I
wandered through Anfushi one night, ostensibly scouting likely houses to rob,
but my mind in reality consumed with the library beneath my feet, I met Karim
skulking through the streets behind al-Khedewi al-Awal.

“How now, spirit?” he said.

“Whither wander you?”

“Come along.”

We walked up hammocked steps to Pompey’s Pillar. White flowers
glimmered beside the path like droplets of molten moon. A ferret paused above
us, then like a shaken ribbon vanished among the blossoms. We swarmed the
column, fingers and shoe-toes seeking crevices. Gripping the tendrils of the
capital, we swung our legs up and over, hauled ourselves onto the plinth. It
was as broad as a badminton court, frosted with bird shit, sprinkled with
melon-seed shells. “Who eats melon seeds up here?” I wondered.

“This is my perch,” Karim said, sitting on the edge of the capital,
kicking his legs. He pulled a paper cone from a shirt pocket, poured a heap
into my palm, and began slipping the seeds into the left corner of his mouth,
cracking them, ferrying the shells out the other corner, where they stuck to
his lips and chin.

Karim is as solid as a coffin, head set like a baroque pearl into
his great neck. He moves with deliberation, is always laying a hand on my thigh
or forearm as he talks, fingers heavy as ingots, as if working among djinns has
made him more substantial than other men.

“Where were you coming from?” I asked.

“Catacombs.”

“Any luck?”

“Look.” He loosened the drawstring of his swag, lifted out ancient
trinkets: a silver mirror, carious as old iron, a lapis lazuli hand to ward off
the evil eye, gold coins stamped off-center with a stylized lighthouse, a few
beads.

I rolled the beads in my palm. “What are these?”

He sorted among them, plucked out two. “This is glass, this is
emerald.” He held them to the moon. “What’s an emerald worth?”

“A stroll on the corniche.”

“A game of backgammon.”

“Stuffed grape leaves.”

“A handjob.”

“But not a book.”

“Really? How’s that?” He turned to me.

“An emerald’s just a pretty stone, but a book is a world.”

“So I’ve heard. But books don’t last. Paper burns.”

“Books are alive, so they die.”

We sat for a while looking down over the city. Bats tinkled by. At
night, the zones of the city revealed themselves as textures of light. The
close mesh of Anfushi, windows skewed, crushed together, the shapes of the
light contorted by figures at windows, smoking, reading. The looser elegance of
al-Atariin. In the distance, the Gothic wafers in Mahmoudiyya and the stately
arches of the Cecil. We could hear a late-night quarrel from some window, a
weary lovesong from another, accompanied by a semiquavering violin, the voices
and music eroded and meshed by the wind.

“How did you get into
your line of work?” I asked.

“Graverobbing’s an ancient profession in these parts. Like most
professions in this city, it runs in families, and there are hierarchies.
Common graves are raided by commoners, the middle class by the bourgeoisie. But
I’m of the royal line. My paternal great-grandfather raided the tombs of Ramses
and Akhenaten. My great-aunt on my mother’s side made off with Hatshepsut’s
jewels. Took her a year of planning. She burrowed through the desert, drilled a
hole in the burial chamber, and hooked out the gemstones like a mummifier
hooking brains through a nostril. My second cousin on my father’s side tried to
give it up: some moral crisis. Decided to become a farmer. So he sold his
inheritance and bought a plot in the south and planted date palms. But while he
was digging phosphorus in a bluff near Nag Hammadi, he bashed open an old pot
filled with books. They’re underground again,” he gestured with his chin to the
library, whose spangled hump we could see from our perch, “and my cousin lives
in a twenty-room house with four wives.

“I’m a little different, though. Or so I like to think. I have the
calling, sure, but there’s something deeper. Even when I was a boy I used to go
to cemeteries. It was quiet. I liked the little houses. The stone people,
almost kissing, almost touching, forever. Or till their heads fell off. I loved
the day when families took picnics to graves, eating red dates and guavas. I
wanted that holiday every week.” He slapped the stone between us: “This city is
built of broken tombs. Every wall has stones ripped from pyramids and
mausoleums. We sleep on gravestones. That’s where I’m happy—among the dead.
Well, you’re good company, Balthazar, but all those ...” he waved a hand at the
windows and shook his head.

 “What does that say about me?”

“Thieves have one foot in the other world already. Don’t you love
the dark? Bones, the clean polish of bone, is so much more erotic than flesh.
And the whisper of a ghost is more of a turn-on than that of a mortal, don’t
you think?”

“You’ve met ghosts?”

“Of course. A graverobber in this land must be half magician. I know
the spells to lull them. Libations have to be poured out at certain doorways.
In my family, we learn these things as soon as we can talk.”

“Can they go where they want, the ghosts? Are they free?”