The Book on Fire (3 page)

“And what do you do, Nura?”

“I’m a pharmacist. I have a seaside dispensary.”

Koujour had stood and was stalking around me. He shoved his face
against mine and peered into each eye. Sweet gust of arak fumes. Then he picked
up my hands and examined them. Iron bangles clashed on his wrists.

“You need scars,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Scars, scars.” He pulled my palms across the stippling on his
cheeks, and a delicious shiver scampered up my backbone.

“Koujour was just showing me how my scars are constellations,” Nura
told me, as if in explanation.

“Zeinab will help,” said Koujour, and returned to his seat and his
arak.

Baffled, I moved to the next table, where two men bent over a
chessboard. The shadows of the pieces danced, multiple and complicated, in the
candlelight. With a fingertip, the thief across from me nudged a knight from
ebony to abalone, then looked up. The trayful of candle flames blew like leaves
in the sepia lenses of his spectacles. He stood and offered his hand, murmuring
his name: “Amir.” His opponent growled and grimaced, still staring at the
board, then ground his chair back and stood. “Who’s this?” he shouted at
Makarios.

“Zeinab dragged him in.”

“Impossible!” He folded huge forearms across his chest and glared at
me. “Where did you meet her?”

“She was ... she wanted to borrow a book.”

“Nonsense! Zeinab doesn’t borrow books.”

“So I learned, to the detriment of my bookshelf.”

“Had you acquired the book by honest means?”

“Certainly not.”

“Good answer. Well, I’m Karim, undertaker by profession.” His hand
in mine was solid as a statue’s. “Do you play chess?”

“I do.”

“Badminton?”

“Badminton?”

He pointed to a net strung across a mosaicked rectangle in the
center of the apse.

“Why not?”

“Zeinab, take over here,” Karim shouted, and fetched two rackets
from the sacristy. But before I joined him on the court, Amir placed a hand on
my shoulder and handed me a book. Glancing at it, I thanked him, then smacked
my pocket. “How—?” I started, but he just smiled and returned to the game.
Zeinab was already hunched over the board, chuckling like a crow.

Karim and I tapped the shuttlecock into the gloom, where it vanished
a moment before dipping like a throttled dove into the candlelight again. The
other sounds were low laughter and the clink of ice, the warble of waterpipes,
shuffle of chess pieces, scandalous conversations, the background black noise
of bat shriek. Like faced shadows the thieves reclined in their den. What
stories did they tell? I wouldn’t trust a word: all tales, all lies.

****

This
city has harbored a thousand gods and is still within their sway. Hark to the
prayer calls, the church bells, the gnostic groans and Sephardic moaning. Dive
into the bay and glimpse in the gloaming older gods, horned and tailed,
barnacle-skinned, seaweed-haired, sunk to the torso in silt. Glance to the peak
of the lighthouse and witness the handsome golden deities, huge humans,
posturing. You thought thieves were godless? No, we have our divinities. The
true gods are thieves themselves and all thieves, of course, are gods. We come
in the night, to teach you what you love.

I am perhaps the quietest member of the Kanisa, often curled in a
corner with my nose in a book. The other thieves are readers, of course, as are
all the citizens of this city. Makarios reads his gnostic gospels, and Nura
pulp paperbacks. Amir reads love letters and suicide notes, and Karim reads
epitaphs chiseled into stone. Koujour inhales poetry in half a dozen languages,
then spews it out, mangled and marvelous. But they lack my addiction, my
aficion. Only Zeinab reads as a matter of life or death, but she won’t talk
about the contents of the books, only about the pleasures of burning them.

Some nights she’ll sit back in her armchair, glass of karkadeh in
one hand, dagger in the other, and describe wounds she’s made. “Wounds are not
all the same,” she says, slicing bright segments out of the candlelight. “We
must strive for beauty in this, as in all things. Your blade must be impeccably
honed, sharp enough to cut a window in a wall, sharp enough to whittle glass.
The line of the wound must harmonize with the position of the limbs. You’re a
painter, the blade’s your brush, the skin’s your canvas. Mark it with scarlet
ribbons and gestural spatters. Use the blood sparingly. A single pretty cut is
more charming than a dozen reckless gashes. The first painters were hunters.
They fell in love with the marks on the hide, and painted to replicate that
emotion. Are you listening, Koujour?”

Of the denizens of the Kanisa she seems to get along best with
Makarios. She mocks Amir and Karim (both in love with her, though Amir insists
she’s a boy), she ignores Nura, she’s cordial to Koujour, sassy with me, but
she and Makarios have bawdy, rollicking conversations.

“Back from your sacrifices, Nephthys?” he’ll say, tearing into a
loaf.

“At least I don’t eat them, you cannibal.”

“Ah yes, if I’m drunk enough I can sometimes feel the
transubstantiation taking place on my tongue. Wheat to meat. Try some.”

“I don’t drink.”

“Just the body, not the blood.”

She took a bite. “It’s bread.”

He guffawed. “Listen, sweetheart: ‘To any vision must be brought an
eye adapted to what is to be seen.’”

“Don’t call me sweetheart.”

“Virago.”

“That’s better.”

****

After
midnight, Zeinab and I sometimes went strolling like a courting couple along
the corniche, through the alleys of al-Atariin, beneath the art nouveau lions
and angels. I never ate out with Zeinab, never went with her to a nightclub,
but there were a couple coffee shops in the old quarter where men and women
could sit in a back corner unharassed, and it was in these places that we ended
up in the hours before dawn.

One night, the east was already glowing by the time we entered the
café. We ordered an apple-tobacco waterpipe and tea steeped with mint, extra
sugar in hers. The coffee shop boy adjusted the ember of the waterpipe and
puffed through the mouthpiece to clear it. Zeinab slipped the velvet hose under
her veil and the water churned and clouded. Smoke seeped through the blue
gauze. She handed the mouthpiece to me. I loved the first rush of cool, sweet
smoke, but even more I loved the imagined taste of her saliva on the glass
nozzle. I know why the desert poets extolled above kisses and caresses the
saliva of their lovers. Outside, the tram screamed and gasped and sparks rained
across the doorway. Oum Koulsoum’s rough, lovely voice, singing “al-Atlal,” was
nearly submerged in radio static.

“Why am I still alive?” I asked.

“I have hope for you, book thief. I’m taking you under my blue
wing.”

“Are you going to burn more of my books?”

“You’ll have to give them all up for what you desire.”

“And then what?”

“Then you’ll be free.”

I sipped the tea, the furry mint leaves like a woman’s downy upper
lip against my own. “How did you know I had the book? The one you burned.”

“By the look in your eye.”

“And what look is that?”

“The look of someone who’s just eaten a baby. And found it
delicious.”

“You have no way of knowing what that book meant to me, what I had
to go through to acquire it.”

“You have your wardrobe, book thief. And I have my wardrobe. Which
contains the greater treasure?”

“Let me into your wardrobe, Zeinab. Tell me your tale.”

“Like all tales, it comes at a price.”

“Name your price.”

But the mosque call sounded and she was gone. The ember on the
waterpipe was cold. The coffee shop was empty. The boy began to sweep the
sawdust into dingy heaps.

****

To pass the time before two a.m. I sometimes stroll
up Sharia Nebi Daniel to the street of booksellers, between the quarter of
antiques and the ruined amphitheater. The bookstores of Alexandria cater to
every taste. Here is the manically organized bookstore, every volume cased in
cellophane, here the cavernous dustbin, the books seemingly tipped in by a
bulldozer along with half the Sahara, the proprietor snoring in a corner with
his waterpipe. Bookstores that are fronts for seedier operations, so if the
owner’s palm is lightly greased, a row of shelves swivels to reveal a bank of
ancient pornography or gnosticism. Here is the café-bookstore, of course, but
also the bar-bookstore, popular in the evenings, and the stripper-bookstore, in
which the patrons are torn between the novel in their hands and the dancer on
the stage ripping off her dust jacket. Here are the themed
bookstores—bookstores for women, children, missionaries, mercenaries, Martians,
cannibals, the dead.

The proprietors all know me, because I buy my paperbacks here,
bargaining ardently over a couple piasters, while keeping an eye out for the
leather-bound volumes or jacketed hardbacks that trickle in from the old
houses, brought by young philistines trying to salvage a guinea or two by
frittering away their grandparents’ hoarded obsessions. Though I enter the
bookstalls nearly every evening, could recite like poetry the titles of the teetering
stacks, I never fail to feel the tickle in my liver when I come again among the
books, sniff their dust. This is the true heart of the city, this street of
cubbyholes of stacked paper. The library is of course its soul, but it is
hidden. Here, the books circulate like garrulous blood through the city’s
veins. They are bought and reappear, in another bookstore, with fresh coffee
stains, more pages missing.

I begin to know the readers of the city. The one who tears corners
off pages to chew on while he reads, so the books look as if they’ve been
nibbled by rats. The one who marks up the books in purple pencil. The one who
writes inane poems on the endpapers. The one who dog-ears the bottom corners
instead of the top. The one who reads on the beach, so the ditches hold grains
of sand and ribbons of seaweed, and the one who reads in the bath, leaving the
pages buckled and scented with lavender. And what traces do I leave? I am a
thief, I leave no traces.

This is the city of books, where children are admonished if they
don’t bring a book to the breakfast table, where they’re ordered by their
mothers to drop their books and go play on the street, where bedtime tales
sometimes continue, chapter after chapter, till well after midnight, parents
pinching their children to keep them awake. This is a city where men beat their
wives with books, the women shielding their heads with books. A city of
book-whores, who fuck for books, and their bibliogigolos. A city of
book-beggars, who spit on your money, gesturing with their stumps to the
paperback in your hand. I usually carry an extra volume or two to hand out
along the corniche. If I can’t spare a book I’ll give money, but I never
admonish, as some well-meaning citizens do: “Now be sure you spend that on
food, not on books and cigarettes.” I know that books and cigarettes are as
crucial to wellbeing as food. If not more so.

City of bookstores and steeples, libraries and minarets. Where books
and religions mingle, there will always be strife, because books, though they spawn
religions, are also tinder for religious flames. There are those who claim to
have discovered the book St. Peter admires, and maintain that only those who’ve
reread, say,
Alice in Wonderland
, or the Bible, or
Anna Karenina
a thousand times will inspire the Bookkeeper to jangle his keys. Certain
priests and imams claim to have developed the ultimate booklists, and their
followers tattoo the lists on their torsos, chanting the titles as mantras.
There are sects that dress in paper torn from their religious texts; sects that
forbid silent reading; sects that allow only undyed linen bookmarks; sects that
advocate holding a book with the right hand only; sects that abjure dog-earing;
sects whose members wed their favorite books in arcane ceremonies.

Books are smuggled into the city. Alexandria is bordered to the
south by apple orchards and orange groves, and to east and west by desert. From
these directions book smugglers arrive, with their camels trained to walk in
alphabetical order. The clandestine tomes are slipped into the city in the dead
of night by enterprising urchins, who flicker among apple boughs and fallen
fruit, fording canals, parting barbed wire, evading the muskets of book
sentries, to pass their treasures to middlemen on street corners. I have seen
these nighttime rendezvous, from rooftops and upper windows—the approach of a
slim shadow to a bulky one, and the node passing from one to another—as if I
witnessed the transference of a soul or a disease, manifest as a dark
rectangle.