The Book on Fire (21 page)

When we were done we walked together through the bright rain. In the
midst of the slaughter, a girl stood beside a basket of rain-washed
strawberries and I bought a paper bagful and paid her what she asked and we ate
strawberries and walked among the dead and dying beasts.

****

She
led me to the cemetery in Azarita. Daily I’d walked past its walls, or ridden
past them in carriage or tram, and never thought to enter. The dead possess no
books, and anyway I’d seen them, the cadavers, the underground citizens of this
small metropolis. But now she took my hand and led me through the ruined
archway into the acres of winged people and sleeping lions. After all the
seasons in Alexandria to come at last into this lovely, forgotten oasis. The
miniature houses of the dead, with pediments and porticoes and tiny flowerbeds
where burly bumblebees rootled. The spaces between the stones were rich with
wildflowers and grass gone to seed, that gorgeous fleeting pale gold. Within
the tombs were small benches and plates of clean bones and dry seeds, petals
and butterfly wings. In coming days it would be shadowed with black-robed women
gibbering extended animal howls of pain while they flailed at their cheeks and
bosoms and ripped their palms on fresh plaster. But now this was a zone of
stillness. We negotiated our way around canted crosses and lovers whose lips
would never meet and never draw away and one-winged angels and vases containing
a finger of green flower-broth. Sepulchers rose like elfin apartment blocks, a
dozen niches, each with its contents of two hundred and six bones arranged in
various patterns. Among the bones cats slept. Near the gate, the flowerbeds
were tidy, the photographs pristine behind glass, but as we pressed deeper she
led me through shrubs whose names surfaced as we crushed their leaves
underfoot—thyme, lavender, bay laurel—among stones from which the lettering had
been entirely scoured by centuries of weather or libations, and statues eroded
to knobs and spindles.

At the back of the cemetery, neglected jasmine formed a messy bower.
And beneath it, like a tiny temple, a little tomb stood, jasmine up its
pillars, no door. On the swept space before it, a bench flanked the libation
brazier, which was filled with ash. I peered into the tomb. Clean bones.
Medallions of candle wax decorated with triangles of moth wing, a worn cushion,
a waterpipe, coffee paraphernalia, and, in a corner, a pile of postcards, tram
tickets, pressed flowers, old lace. “Bookmarks,” she said. “I collect them for
Amir.”

“So you are a ghost,” I said. “As Karim claimed. As I’d guessed.”

“Of course. But which of us is more alive?”

I sat on the bench while she brought out the waterpipe and banged
the stem free. In the brazier, using a paperback for tinder, she lit a fire,
arranged charcoal, and set a pan of coffee beans among the coals. She tamped
the apple tobacco into the pipe, then with brass tongs added an ember and
handed me the nozzle. As the beans began to shine and smoke, she shimmied the
pan, wafting the fragrance to my nostrils with the side of her palm. Once they
had achieved a glossy darkness, she tipped them into a mortar and ground them
savagely. She poured the ground coffee into the round-bellied earthenware
coffeepot, added water, and set it on the coals, murmuring the coffee rhymes.
When the liquid had frothed up the prescribed three times, she plucked the pot
off the coals and poured me a thimble cupful. It was thick, fragrant, potent.
Not till we had drunk three cups did she sit straight-backed on her cushion in
the manner of the old storytellers, arrange her blue skirts decorously about
her, and turn to face me. And while I gathered her tale, as if her words
spawned violence, the festive gunshots and chanting swelled, became myriad,
punctuated by the knocking of bombs, so that she finished her telling beneath a
sky of scudding gunsmoke.

Zeinab’s Tale

I was raised a princess in a great palace along the eastern
seafront. A palace of a thousand rooms, a hundred staircases. I grew up
surrounded by canaries of gold wire that sang in human voices and mirrors that
reflected, on moonlit nights, my soul, and clocks that not only told the time
but decoded my dreams. Rooms of magi bearing gifts of frankincense and
liquorice and rooms of choirs of blinded castratos. Trained monkeys wearing
tasseled fezzes swung from chandeliers. Belly dancers slept all day in
silk-lined chambers while Nubian lutenists murmured lullabies. A house of
uncountable treasures but only a single book. A single book that lay in a room
of its own, in a locked case, to which my father possessed the only key.

My father, though of royal lineage, had
not allowed vice or gluttony to destroy him as had his predecessors. He ate
sparingly, a little rice with lamb, he drank only water. He smoked thin brown
cigarettes he rolled himself. He was dreadfully scarred, resembling a man
roughly pieced together from fragments of other men. A great slash had cost him
one eye and half an ear, he was missing two fingers on his left hand, and he
walked with a limp. Yet he carried his scars with dignity, for they were the
signs of his accession. He had survived a dozen assassination attempts. On one
occasion a crow had overturned a poisoned glass of coffee. On another, he had
insisted that his enemy take the first puff of a poisoned waterpipe. And on a
certain autumn evening he had placed his royal cloak around my mother’s
shoulders as they stood on a balcony and an assassin had planted the dagger
between the wrong shoulder blades.

I had a single brother who, though
younger, was of course in line to succeed my father. But as a child he followed
me like a dog, echoing every word I said, demanding to wear what I wore. During
the day, my father held court beside a fountain in the center of the palace,
alternately stroking his hennaed beard or the white mane of the blue-eyed lion
that slept beside him. Sometimes he allowed us to attend those sessions, to
bang his scepter on the floor and play ninepins with rubies the size of
pigeon’s eggs, for, though a steward of violence, he indulged his children.

My father was frugal in his personal
habits, but exceedingly generous toward those he hosted. His guests reclined on
hand-embroidered silk, helping themselves to choice sweetmeats, opulent
tobaccos, rare coffees. Once a visiting ambassador, at the height of summer,
expressed a longing for cherries. My father dispatched a message by pigeon post
across the sea to a caliph in Lebanon. The next morning half a hundred pigeons
arrived at the palace, each with a pair of cherries tied to its feet. But on
another occasion, after a visitor had displeased him, he sent us from the
courtyard. Glancing back, I saw the fountain spout pink. The impassive eunuch
mopped blood from the tiles while my father wiped his dagger meditatively on
his shawl.

Once a week he took us to the sword room,
where we watched as he fenced with the master, for he kept himself in fine
fettle. If he was in a pleasant mood, he’d hand me a curved dagger, cumbersome
as a scimitar in my little fists, and teach me to lunge and parry. I remember
the day I first drew his blood, a pinprick on his forearm, and he tossed me in
the air and declared that I was more worthy of his name than my brother, who in
truth was of a timid nature.

Every evening, after the day’s business
was completed, and following the prayers, my brother and I joined my father in
the sacred chamber. There he would dredge the key from his robes and unlock the
case and take out the book. Seating us on either knee, he held the book before
us and read the tales it contained. The book was huge, its cover inlaid with
emeralds and aquamarines. The pages were the color of old ivory, textured like
linen. Their borders were decorated with petals and vines, stars and birds,
painted with brushes of a single hair, in vermilion and peacock and liquid
gold. Each page a month in the making, the labor of a battalion of the finest
miniaturists, who had been ceremonially blinded upon completion of the task.
And in the center of every page lay the pool of snarls and speckles that I did
not yet know were precious to me, that I did not yet know were forbidden.

My father, as he read, followed the lines
with his finger. He read slowly, in the singing voice he reserved for those
tales. He allowed me to turn the heavy pages. Those were holy hours. I remember
his stiff beard against my cheek, his scent of tobacco and ambergris, for he
always kept a little silver box of the precious substance among his garments.

But the day my first blood appeared, when
as usual I followed my father and brother into the chamber of the book after
the evening prayers, he turned at the threshold and crouched and took my
shoulders in his maimed hands. Then he explained that I was now entering my
maidenhood, and that reading was not an art appropriate for princesses. I wept
and clawed and would not leave, twining my fists in his robes, and at last he
slapped my cheeks and called for a servant to take me away.

So, while my brother learned to fence and
ride, to hunt with the bow and the spear, to debate and to read, I was tutored
in the arts of a princess. I learned to apply kohl and pluck my eyebrows and
embroider cushion covers. I learned to lower my eyes and speak in soft tones
and walk with soundless tread. But also I learned to dance.

Only the dancing lessons kept me from
insanity. A monk of Shaolin or a Zulu warrior leads a life of strawberry
sherbet and goose-down coverlets compared with the rigors a novice dancing girl
must undergo. I was forced to stand on my toes for entire days. I spent days
walking on my hands. I trotted the ten thousand steps from the dungeons to the
highest minaret, and back down. I learned to move each muscle of my body
independently. The madame was an exacting tutor. She would teach me a pose,
nudging an elbow a hair’s-breadth this way, that way, adjusting the angle of a
finger, then have me repeat it over and over, beating the soles of my feet with
a silk knout until I could reproduce it precisely. Those were long and terrible
days, naked in the room of mirrors, my body writing an impossible erotic
alphabet in the silvered glass. But the pain and the immersion in my body were
welcome, because they distracted my memory from the book, the pages I craved.

And then one day it was over. The madame
sucked at her cigarette, squinted at me, and said “So, you are free to go. You
have been a good pupil.” I had learned the dance of the veils, the dance of the
knife, the dance of the flame, but now I was confined to my chambers, attended
by slaves, to practice my art and while away the hours with music and daydreams
till my suitors should arrive.

I was a sad princess in a house of
wonders. All day I sat in the topmost tower, gazing over the sea, where the
sails and dolphins were an affront to my incarceration. My maidservants tried
to tempt me with acrobats and baubles and midgets, but I turned them away. I
refused to eat. All I saw, sleeping or waking, were the beautiful pages,
harboring the rectangles of magic. Forbidden.

Reading is the strangest art. Your eye
takes a shape, turns it into music, then story, then spirit, so a curl of ink
laid long ago by a sliver of reed can become, a thousand years later, your own
breath. I had, unwittingly, swallowed those stories, whole, and they crouched
within me. In my dreams my father’s finger still pursued words. I heard his
voice, singing, which became my voice. The shapes of ink spoke. I learned to
read while sleeping.

One night, two a.m., I stole down the
stairs and entered the chamber of the book. In my hand I held a length of bent
wire. It took me many hours, but at last I managed to pick the lock and take
out the book. This is what my father taught me. In caging me, this is what he
taught me: the arts of dancing, and of thievery. That first night I read only
the contents of a single line, perhaps half a dozen words, the art was so new,
as painful as learning to dance. But I returned the next night, and the next. I
read a page, then a chapter. For many nights following, I read the sacred book
by candlelight while the palace slept. I read it once, then over and over.
Though I contained the entire text within me, I could not stay away from the
voluptuous leaves, abrasive on my fingertips, the borders like flower gardens,
the marriage of the letter shapes with the words in my mind, my eyes dancing
with the ink. I loved the scent of the book, the weight of the book on my lap,
which was also the weight of a newborn child.

And then one night, as I sat in that room,
the book on my thighs, the candle in my hand, I felt a cool drop on my neck,
rippling down my spine like heavy rain. I looked up. My father stood behind me,
an unlit lamp in his hand. He must have woken and needed to refill it. A second
drop quivered on the spout, poised to fall. For a moment we stared at each
other. Impossible to read his expression through his scars. Then he emptied the
lamp over my head. The fall of oil met my candle flame and my hair caught
instantly. I looked down through a frame of fire at the burning book, at the
burning pages. That was my first death.

I began to run, down the staircases,
through the hallways, out into the streets of Alexandria, a girl on fire. I ran
along the tram tracks, my face burning away, my voice charring away, to the
library, where I begged entrance. Which was granted.

Cages have tremendous power, Balthazar,
because they keep the energy—the words and dreams and stories—pent, under
pressure. If you want to ensure that a thought will catch fire, put it in a
box, lock it up. When I first entered the Library of Alexandria, I imagined I’d
come home. I’d lost my face, but that was a small price for the riches I’d
acquired. To read unfettered, after the years of believing that a single book
existed in the universe—I was a blue butterfly freed from my cocoon, in fields
of flowers. But years later, after all the books, I realized I was still caged,
and that I was caged because the books were caged. So I began to release them.
I gathered a dozen books, the choicest volumes the library contained, and
handed them through the bars, into the eager hands, before the flesh was ripped
from my bones and my bones were cast outside the library fence.