The Book on Fire (12 page)

“Ah, I think—”

“Yes, you know him. The conductor on the Bacchus route. These are
the contents of a searcher’s pockets. There are so many secret obsessions in
this city. Businessmen in love with shoeshine boys, princes with jarveys,
priests with flower sellers. Sometimes I imagine the relationships of this city
as fine threads knotting palace window to garret, steeple to minaret, culvert
to asylum, netting its citizens. After a heavy dew, from the peak of the
lighthouse, you might see the bright web, obscuring the tiles and stones. With
its burden of struggling prisoners.”

In a tiny indigo dining room he lit black candles, then filled our
glasses with Château des Rêves. On antique porcelain, he served me smoked
salmon with brown bread and butter, followed by a prawn curry on fragrant
basmati. We talked about our work. He described the arduous training a
pickpocket requires, the years of practicing in the dark, and assured me that
he could undress me as I sat across from him, without my awareness.

“I’ve searched your pockets, book thief, but only came up with a
paperback.” I clapped my hand to my trousers and he held up the tattered pages,
fanned them, then handed the book across. “Where do you keep your secrets?”

“Who says I have secrets?”

“You have secrets.” I could see a flutter of violet behind the sepia
lenses.

“I have a secret, you’re right, Amir, and this paperback will tell
you as much about it as anything. My secret is also a secret to me.”

“Careful there.”

“I’m always careful,” I said, but his lenses had turned smoky once
more. “Why the obsession with secrets?” I asked.

“Secrets serve the same function spirits do.”

“And what is that?”

“They bind interior and exterior. They can cause untold havoc if
released from their graves and pockets, but also inordinate beauty. I read
through my stash sometimes. They’re so lovely and sad, the unsent love letters,
the unused suicide notes. An unsigned postcard, a stamp-sized photograph with
just a date on the back. Sometimes they’re small, a bead or a pebble, a tiny bone.
You’re about to throw them away, and then see how they’ve been worn and
tarnished by fingering. Look.” Reaching behind him, he pulled from a drawer a
chambered box. Nested in kapok were seeds and stones, morsels of ivory,
fragments of lace, gathered from the pockets of Alexandria.

After the curry, he brought out an immense quivering trifle drenched
in cognac. The conversation turned to love. “Sometimes,” he said, “I’m so
obsessed I can’t think. I find it’s dangerous to try to pickpocket in this
condition. My fingers shake. I have panic attacks. The only cure is pursuit.
I’ll ride the trams till I see him again, I’ll find out where he lives. Then
the seduction. Perhaps I’m rejected. All right. That I can live with. But
obsession is not a state one can survive indefinitely.”

“What about Zeinab?”

“Those sloe eyes are killing me. I’ve started hearing his whisper
everywhere: in the waves, in the tram wheels, on the radio. He whispers his
secrets, but his voice is so quiet, so distorted, I can’t understand what he’s
saying.”

 We retired to the living room. Amir played Abdel Halim Hafez 45s on
an old Victrola. The room was filled with candles. Candles on windowsills,
mantelpieces, in bottle necks, the bottles stuck to surfaces by pleated gowns
of wax. As the evening deepened, he lit more candles, bending to me and
excusing himself in the midst of the conversation, rising and roaming the room,
lighting wicks here and there with stolen matches, lifting a few more cobwebs
from the gloom. I’ve heard that if he wearies of a visitor he’ll snuff the
candles one by one till he sits silently before a single candle, staring at the
flame as if willing it to burn down. But the night of my visit the house was
illuminated like Diwali by the time I left.

After we’d finished the wine I negotiated my way to the water
closet, down a labyrinth of corridors with eroding wallpaper. The corroded
mirror reflected only ghosts and memories. I took a wrong turn on the way back
and wandered into a bedroom. The room was entirely filled by a four-poster bed,
lavender curtains parted to reveal a youth asleep on disturbed sheets. One
ankle was bound to a bedpost. Semen had dried to a lace doily on his brown
stomach.

VI. Lions and Roses

When I
returned to the library the next day it was clear Shireen had been weeping for
hours. “I have to see them,” she said. “Take me to your books.”

She was shaking as we stepped across the threshold, her words
strangled: “It’s just ... it’s just another door.”

“Come.”

She took my hand and we walked up the steps to the sarcophagus. I
could feel her heartbeat in her fingertips. She knew the way, of course, knew
the visions she’d encounter, but was unprepared for the stench, the sparkle of
candlelight on the gold of the dead, the crunch of her sandals on the bones of
inept book thieves. On the ferryboat, she cringed as the bats whirled like
black vellum blown free of bindings. At the base of the lighthouse stairwell
she crouched, head in her arms.

“Let me go back,” she said.

“You can go back.”

I watched her in the light of the candle flame, her head bowed, sobs
quaking her narrow shoulders. “You’re the devil!” she wailed.

“Thief,” I corrected.

She started sobbing again but I held up my hand. “Listen.”

She hushed and we heard, faintly as a stroked earlobe, the dash of
waves on the corniche, and at the same moment a chance trickle of briny breeze
threaded the stairwell to our nostrils.

“The sea,” I said.

She sighed, polished the tears away with her sleeve, and we started
up the steps.

As we entered the base of the lighthouse, I took her hand again and
helped her up the last step. We stood in the doorway looking out. She stared at
the sea.

“Here.” I pulled a blue niqab from my satchel. She slipped into it,
adjusted the eyeholes. I handed her the gloves.

She put her glasses on over the veil, glared at me. “You prepared
for this. Kidnapper.”

I shrugged.

Like a pair of conservative newlyweds we walked down to the corniche
wall. A gust of spray spattered our glasses and we took them off to wipe the
lenses, glancing myopically at each other.

“It’s—” her voice faltered.

“Well?”

She put her glasses back on, spread her gloved hands. “Much more ...
chaotic than I’d imagined. I’d imagined the waves going tap tap tap on the
shore but the pattern is looser. The waves are all different sizes. I hadn’t
thought of that.”

“Come. It will soon be dawn.”

The corniche seems straight as you walk, but every time you look up
the skyline has shifted drastically, as if each step shoves the world out of
alignment. I peered at Alexandria through her dewy lenses that night, saw the
fresh rinds of moonlight on the domes and minarets. We walked slowly. She
refused my arm, though she stumbled often on the misshapen stone. I noticed for
the first time, seeing her walk in the open, that her shoulders were slightly
bowed, her head curled slightly forward on her neck like that of a dove. She
did not know what to do with her hands, fingers still caressing phantom pages.
And I recognized my own posture in hers: the reader’s slouch. A sleuth might
have guessed us siblings from our pigeon-toed gait, our wire-framed spectacles,
the sense of something missing.

We came to the green bite out of the center of the corniche, crossed
the road and walked round the back of the Cecil to the Scheherazade, up five
flights, past the snoring proprietor, to my rooms.

****

And
now the time has come to reveal that my rooms are not precisely those you
entered, how many pages back. There is, for example, another demitasse,
brown-and-gold, beside the black-and-gold one on the shelf. In the wardrobe are
several extra hangers with new cotton dresses and blouses. And beneath my
bookshelf, in the hidden room, is a cot, with new linen folded over a new
quilt, and a new pillow plumped. Beside the cot is a small escritoire with a burgundy
leather writing surface, and upon it a green half-leather notebook, a slender
silver fountain pen, a bottle of blue ink. There’s a pot of strawberry jam
beside the candle on the end table.

She scented the bookshelf as soon as she stepped across the threshold.
Passing blind into the wardrobe, she shoved through the cotton with a clacking
of coat hangers. Her belief made of the back a curtain of shadows. Dashing into
the room, heedless of the wine and jam, she rushed to the shelf. But she
swooned as soon as she began reading the titles, swaying into my arms. I
carried her to the chair, lifted her veil, and fanned her with a chapbook till
her eyelids stirred.

“I was dreaming,” she said.

I shook my head, pointed to the shelf.

She started up again, a drunken gleam in her eyes, but I gripped her
arm.

“Slowly,” I said. “You’ve had plenty of excitement for one night.
Eat something first, drink a glass of wine.”

She closed her eyes, nodded.

I opened a hamper of bread and salads and laid out a little picnic on
the carpet—saucers of white cheese with tomatoes and dill, olives, tahina,
watercress, marinated aubergine.

She ate daintily, frugally, tearing off neat fragments of bread and
dipping into each plate in turn, placing the olive pits in a row at the rim of
a saucer. She sipped the wine. Constantly her eyes strayed to the books. “How?”
she said.

“A lifetime of labor, that,” I told her. “Each book on that shelf is
a year of my life.”

“I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it, Balthazar.” She swayed, and
I reached toward her, afraid she might faint again. But she brushed me away.
Setting aside her glass, she knelt before the bookshelf. “These are the missing
books. The books I’ve known were out there. Every time a box arrived from
overseas, I ran to check, to see if these books were among them. So there are
two libraries in Alexandria. May I read now?” she asked plaintively.

“First the dawn,” I told her. “Bring your wine.”

She could not go onto the balcony. “Too much space,” she said, and
made me set a chair inside the doors. She’d seen the sunrise only as angled
stems in the great reading room.

As the sun welled from the sea, she exclaimed: “Why is it so big? Is
it the end of the world?”

“The beginning.”

“Look how wide the sea is. Look, look, and boats, and how the light
dances!” She’d never seen a palm tree or a fountain. Standing and gripping the
jamb so she could peer over the balustrade, she laughed at the urchins chasing
each other around the statue in the square. Then she sat again, looked into the
room. “It’s too much,” she said. She had to set the wineglass down with both
hands. “Too much all at once, the books and the sea. I don’t think I can manage
it.”

“It’s time for thieves and librarians to turn in, anyway,” I said
gently. “Would you care to bathe?”

“I’ll wait till morning. Or afternoon, I suppose. Goodnight,
Balthazar. I don’t know whether to thank you or slap you.”

She passed into the wardrobe.

I ran a bath and soaked a long time. When I got out, candlelight
still glowed within the wardrobe. I lay in bed, holding a book but not reading.
It was pleasant to lie there, listening to the sea and the sounds of morning,
and imagine her lying in bed in the next room, sheltered by candlelight,
reading my books.

I woke once during the day and saw her candle was still lit, slept
again, and when I woke in late afternoon her room was finally dark. I tiptoed
out and ordered coffee from Abdallah, drank and read on the balcony while night
rose. The moon tangled with the flags on the Trianon. I read all night, and
still she slept. Finally, as dawn broke once more, I heard a footfall and
turned. She stood framed in the balcony doors. One cheek was creased; a morsel
of sleep lay like a seed pearl in the corner of one eye.

“Hungry?” I asked.

She nodded. “I’d like to bathe first, if I may.”

I showed her the new towel and washcloth laid out, the toothbrush in
its case, the fresh bar of Pear’s.

The Trianon was open by the time she was ready and we stepped out
past the astonished Abdallah, down the stairs and across the tram tracks to
where the waiters were shaking heavy cream linen over the outdoor tables.

“I’ve never eaten breakfast here,” I told her.

“Why not?”

“I’m always asleep.”

“Of course.”

A waiter set menus in front of us and stood by politely.

“What will you have?” I asked.

She looked at the menu. “Oh, everything. I don’t know. You choose,
please.”

I ordered croissants and white-cheese omelets and macchiatos and
glasses of strawberry juice.

A tram ground by and she watched it pass. “I’d hear that sound, in
the distance, while I was on sentry duty. I had no idea what it was. Some
animal, I thought.” In the square, palm leaves shivered, spraying needles of
light, and the light was salt on the sea.

The waiter came with the coffee. She took a sip, lowered the cup, then
brought it back to her lips. “This coffee,” she said. “What makes it ...?”

“Sunlight,” I said. “Sunlight and the view of the bay enhance the
taste.”

“I’d imagined sitting here, tearing the corners off a croissant,
drinking a macchiato, like you’d described. But how foolish I’ve been, thinking
my dreams could match reality. I’d forgotten about colors. And smells. And the
sound of the tram and the harness bells, that hadn’t even occurred to me. Or my
breathing.” She touched a gloved finger to her veil, leaving an ultramarine
blot on the blue. “I don’t know why I’m crying. I’m not suited to this. Perhaps
I should go back underground.”

“Finish your croissant first.”

“All right.”

****

She
read three books in the next nine hours. I slept, and when I woke looked in to
see if she wanted lunch or coffee, but she held up a hand absently, without
glancing from the page. I did a watercolor, hiding eyes and
o
’s in the
archways and windows of the city. I turned at a footstep, saw a woman veiled in
blue, and wasn’t sure who it was.

“I’m not a ghost,” she laughed.

“Sorry, I ... you startled me.”

“It’s lovely.” She touched the painting.

“Dinner?”

She nodded.

We walked along the corniche with the evening crowds. I could sense
her flinch as the young men jostled past, holding hands or punching each other,
shouting insults, all perfumes and pomades, testicles like ripe boils in their
tight trousers, chins and foreheads spangled with amber and garnet pustules.

“You’re hidden,” I whispered. “They won’t touch you in your disguise,”
and she nodded tightly.

We passed the swath of public beach, the water seething with
bathers, men and boys in undergarments, women fully dressed, hegabs swiped by
the waves across their faces, the cold sea bringing up their nipples even
through the layers. Then the corner of fishing boats, reflected colors gashed
by ripples. Boys were jumping off prows of caiques and yachts, light slipping
on their brown bodies, sliding supple as oil across their shoulders and
abdomens. They belly-flopped and somersaulted into the bay, smashing open the
gold dabs of their own reflections.

Crossing the isthmus into Bahariyya, we walked beside the shipyards
to Restaurant Samakmak. The stares of the fish in their nest of ice made her
shiver and she turned away. “You order for me, please.”

We sat outside under an awning, with a view of the sea between the
skeletal boats on stilts. The boat builders were grilling their own suppers on
the sand, over fires of castoff lumber. A waiter smoothed newsprint on our
table, then laid out salads: baba, tahina, khadhra, hummus, badingan, and a
basketful of toasted pita.

“Careful,” I said. “There’s going to be a lot of food. Pace
yourself.”

“I don’t know why I’m starving.”

“Reading makes me hungry too.”

“Oh, Balthazar. I’m not really here, you know. I’m still in those
books. How many lives I’ve lived today. Your wardrobe is outside time, outside
this universe.”

So we talked about books. Have you talked about beautiful books with
a beautiful girl, while sampling fried aubergine marinated in garlic and lemon
and waiting for your calamari to grill? The air was perfect that evening,
slightly scented with myrrh and charcoal, just this side of cardigan weather.
We watched the seagulls resting their elbows on the wind. A young father walked
with his daughter down the sidewalk. The girl was picking up shells and bottle
caps and running to show him and he held them carefully in his hand. They
laughed about something and he lifted her and tossed her in the air, then
nuzzled his beard into her cheek and she giggled and squirmed.