The Book on Fire (5 page)

“Less free than we are, strangely. They can’t go underground again,
but also they can’t stray too far from their bones. They can’t move from city
to city. They can’t cross water.”

“What do they look like? Describe a ghost for me.”

“Some like you or me. Some like smoke or mist; you could mistake
them for the damp. Some are just a feather along your spine; you know they’re
passing, you wait.”

“Why don’t I see them?”

“Maybe you do. What we think we see is just a fraction of what we
see. Everything that’s out of focus, at the edge of vision, all the
afterimages, the speckles on our eyeballs—our minds sift them out. And what
about the blinks? Our minds step over them, but how much of our days are spent
in those moments of darkness? We could make another story from darkness and
afterimages. And you see Zeinab, don’t you?”

“Who is she? What does she want?”

“She’s nothing more than a ghost, I suspect. What does she want?
What all ghosts want: rest. Sleep. She wants to go back underground.”

“So what’s keeping her up here?”

“Unfinished business.” He tipped more melon seeds into my palm.

“How deep do you go, Karim?”

“Only the catacombs.”

“Is there nothing lower?”

“Chambers and caverns, fabulous wealth. Or so I’ve heard. I don’t go
there.”

“Scared?”

“I know too much. Too many tales, they can’t all be false.”

“Tell me one.”

He shook his head, munching. Then he laid his heavy hand on my
thigh. “Don’t try, Balthazar. Don’t go down there. I need someone to eat melon
seeds with. I need someone to beat at badminton.”

****

When I
queried at the Kanisa Prometheus about what lay beneath the mosaicked church
floor they cast their gazes into their tumblers, fiddled with captured pawns.
“Let the dead walk with the dead,” they muttered, and Abuna Makarios held a
finger an inch from my nose. “Let the bones lie,” he said. So I dropped the
subject, guessing this was Alexandrian bugaboo. Thieves, though they work in
the dark, were children once, and were not immune to the specters summoned by
nursemaids to keep them indoors, in bed.

Later that evening, I was engrossed in a chess game with Koujour
when Zeinab whispered in my ear: “Scared of heights?”

I shook my head.

“Come,” she said.

I toppled my queen and left with her, shrugging off the dirty
glances of Karim and Amir.

****

She
led me that night to the clustered minarets of the Jamiat Abu al-Abbas
al-Mursi. The mosque was empty. A breeze riffled the pages of a Quran on a
lectern near the minbar. We removed our shoes, placed them in an alcove, and
walked into carpeted darkness. She was ahead of me, but vanished once we
entered the mosque. Footsteps mute on the carpet, niqab precisely the blue of
the nighttime interior, so from behind, without glitter on her eyes, she was no
longer there. I only glimpsed her when she entered the spiral stairwell of the
minaret, and hurried after her.

“Not this one.” She pointed to the far wall, and I threaded the
stairwell of the eastern minaret, a child caught in another’s game. From our
slotted cages we eyed each other, but she was already slipping out, over the
marble bulb, to the copper moon at its peak. She passed over the stone as
smoothly as a blue shadow, but I slipped on my ascent, caught myself on an
arabesque. Lunging, I reached the metal sickle and hauled myself into its
curve. It was comfortable as a bathtub, a bath of Mediterranean night, breezes
sloshing against my torso.

Zeinab lay in the facing crescent, soles against the copper above
her head. She pulled a flask from her garments, took a swig, and slung it
across to me: tin asteroid wobbling between moons. Warm karkadeh.

“Got a light?” she asked. I flicked her my matches, saw the flare,
caught them back. Snug in our copper hammocks, we smoked. If I reached up I
could pluck that star, that one just there. The corniche was deserted except
for a single carriage that ticktocked down the cobbles. I counted out the
minutes as it entered the knotted alleys of Anfushi.

“Do you bring all your dates up here?” I asked.

“I’ve never been here before.”

“Why did you bring me?”

“You don’t like it?”

“It’s lovely.”

Suddenly the towers shivered and swayed. Heart walloping, I gripped
the copper. Crockery smashed in a nearby house. A woman began screaming.

“Earthquake,” Zeinab said. “A big one might bring down the
lighthouse. Its foundations are riddled with caverns.”

I imagined that sight, watching the tower, great-grandfather of the
minarets we perched on, crumble and spill sideways into the bay, the colossal
hiss as the seawater doused the flames, the wave surging across the corniche
wall.

She raised a hand. I heard faint footsteps, echoing louder, then a
rustle beneath me. The muezzin’s breath plumed into the damp air, exhaled to
the east, scattered to the south. He muttered, cleared his throat. Light dusted
the east silver and apricot. I closed my eyes, feeling the sun welling against
the brim of the world, dragging in its wake a tide of prayer calls. The devout,
on carpets, on sand, tumbled after the sun, around the world, aligned like iron
filings to the magnet of the Kaaba. I heard the drawn breath, then the first
alif, shaking my throne. “La ilaha ila Allah,” he yelled. “Haya ala al-salah.
Come to prayer. Prayer is better than sleep.”

In the interval between the muezzin’s descent and the arrival of the
dawn worshipers, we slipped out of the mosque, put our shoes back on.

“Breakfast,” she said.

“Thief’s supper.”

We could hear the cries of an early bread-seller along the corniche
and walked to where fishermen and street-sweepers and whores stood around a painted
cart. We ordered bowls of ful drenched in sesame oil, verdigrised with cumin; a
salad of cucumbers, tomatoes, and cilantro; olives with coriander; fried
aubergine; falafel; and fresh brown country bread, and ate on the corniche
wall. The sea nodded drowsily at our toes. Our fingers touched as we reached
for olives and I crossed my legs to conceal my arousal. She slipped the food
decorously under her veil, gloves unsoiled. Then the glasses of cardamom
coffee, viscous and salubrious as molasses.

Setting her glass on the wall, she pulled out her knife and ran a
thumb tenderly along it. Then she took my ink-stained hand in her gloved one
and slowly pressed the knife through the flesh at my wrist, between ulna and
radius, easing it among veins and tendons till a silver triangle lifted like a
canine from the underside. I felt no pain, just the queer shock of seeing my
flesh violated. Shifting my wrist slightly, I could feel the metal inside me.
She closed her eyes and gently withdrew the blade, wiped it clean, whisked it
back into her garments. The cut was so precise, the knife so slender, that the
wound closed instantly, just a line, slightly burred like a misprinted I,
serifed by beads of blood.

“Why did you do that?”

“Wanted to check the color of your blood.”

 My wrist had begun to throb. The sun was a hand span above the
breakwater, the sea a meadow of drifting shadows.

“What would it cost to see your face?”

“Hush.”

“What would it cost?”

“You know what it would cost. Can you sing?” she asked.

“Sorry?”

“Can you sing?”

“No.”

“Neither can I. But it would be a good time for a song.” She asked a
passing boy if he could sing. He shrugged. “Something for the morning,” she
urged, and he sang the sunrise quatrain of the
Rubáiyát
, in an accent
colored by the south:

“Wake!
For the Sun, who scattered into flight

The
Stars before him from the Field of Night,

Drives
Night along with them from Heav’n and strikes

The
Sultán’s Turret with a Shaft of Light.”

When that afternoon I walked
sleepily onto my balcony, the words of the song were still in my mind: “
The
Sultán’s Turret … a Shaft of Light
...” Zeinab had told me that the
foundations of the lighthouse were riddled with caverns, and as I looked across
the bay to the lighthouse I realized she had handed me the key.

IV. Under Alexandria

Beneath
every city is a shadow city, a city of dank hallways, decaying passages, thick
reeking rivers, the filthy highways of rats and roaches, which are nevertheless
at times the haunt of thieves, for that city is tethered to the one above by
clotted umbilical cords. And the earth beneath a city as ancient as Alexandria is rotten with the subterranean anthills of the dead, plantations of bones from
which, one presumes, souls spring on fantastically long stems like potato
shoots from shriveling tubers. And also, of course, this city floats upon a sea
of books.

Still, I could not shake the gravity of Karim’s look, Makarios’
admonitory finger. As I walked along the corniche to Pharos at two a.m., my
satchel crammed with candles, matches, a couple of sandwiches, a compass, and a
paperback, I wondered what arcane honeycomb lay beneath my tread.

As I neared the corner of bobbing caiques, I heard a whisper like a
whetted knife, and turned. She was sitting with her back to the city. I stood beside
her, thighs against the coral. The masts tipped like a grove of bones,
trammeled water sloshing among the hulls.

“Listen,” she said. “After you cross the dark river, close your
eyes.”

“What?”

“Close your eyes, Balthazar. After you cross the river, close your
eyes. You’ll only be able to see in the dark.”

“How do you—?”

“Give me your hand.”

I expected to receive her blade in my wrist once more, but she
pressed something cool and round into my palm. “Put it in your pocket.”

“What is it?”

“Your fare. The dark ferrybeast waits for you. Pay him, and he will
do you no harm. Fail to pay at your peril.”

Though the night was balmy, I shivered as I walked on. What did she
see from beneath her veil? How much did she know?

****

The
lighthouse is the bastion of tourists and lovers and suicides, open to all, and
in my first weeks in the city I had climbed it more than once, skipping up the
countless flights, to pace around the giant flame and the mirrors that bounced
its light to sea. I fingered the hieroglyphs, the cuneiform carved into the
balustrade, graffiti so dense the stone banisters might have been munched by
literate termites. With my bodkin I added my mark—stylized silverfish—then
leaned over the edge, peering north to Knossos, south to Cairo, west to Carthage, east to Jerusalem.

But this night I did not mount the stairs. Instead, I crouched under
the stairwell in the detritus of millennia: orange peels, false teeth, fish
bones, walnut shells, condoms, corncobs, rat hides. I hauled up rank handfuls,
plunging like a careless archaeologist till my nails scraped on stone. In a
minute I uncovered an octagonal tile with an iron ring in its center and, after
rearranging the rubbish around me, lowered myself into the shaft it revealed.

Are you still there? Do you have the courage to make this descent?
Here the adventure begins. Dare to take the first step downward, into the dark.

A stairwell, echo of the one above, augured the rock. I pulled the
tile into place over my head and, clutching a candle, shuffled my way in,
winding so long I felt I must be nearing the earth’s core. Somewhere far above,
the sea shifted in its bed. Though the city had seemed silent, there was the
racket of whispers and the clatter of moth wings and the pale shriek of stars.
In this space, if I stopped and held my breath, I could hear only the surf of
my blood. When I moved again a thousand footsteps rippled from my own. At the
base of the stairwell a passage foundered in darkness, aiming southeast by my
compass.

I entered a cavern glittering with mineral candelabra, through which
a great slow river ran; a river of shit and semen and menses, rich and rank,
the current unraveling my flame to filaments. This is the true democracy. Here,
in gentle reeking wavelets, mingled the shit of pharaohs and bugle boys, whores
and nuns, writers and readers, the lame, the whole, the dying.

A boat rocked in the waves near the shore, a black jackal seated in
the prow. A figure that I had met before, at the farthest boundaries of my
dreams, and had seen in certain illustrations, and among certain hieroglyphs on
temple walls. Trembling slightly, I paid the obol provided by my veiled shadow
and anchored the candle in the bow bench. Freeing the craft, I rowed it to the
far side, the sluggish splash of the oars startling a thousand bats from the
ceiling. They twittered about me like blind swallows on black suede wings. The
dark ferrybeast watched me with pupils that drank light and image and returned
nothing.

****

Beneath
the city, time is dead, and I abominate watches, refusing to be trapped beneath
curved glass, tormented by needles. So the sun might have sped a dozen times
over my head for all I knew, as I drifted through the dark matrix; a
subterranean firefly.

Under Alexandria, the dead slumber; parched cadavers and scoured
bones and the freshly decayed, palaces of maggots, slouch in a welter of
possessions they cannot finger. I wandered through the burial chambers of
scribes and poets; the walls illustrated books of their lives. Here the
shaven-headed scribe handed a manuscript to the king, here speared his enemy
with an outsized pen, here accepted a goblet of ink from a pert-breasted
priestess. Prying open the lid of a poet’s sarcophagus, I peered into his
wrecked face, trying to know from the shape of his skull what words he might
have written. Other poets sat cross-legged, finger bones still clutching
styluses, eye sockets bent to stone tablets where their last or greatest poems
were written. And I could not resist reading them, and reading the walls,
trying to decipher the archaic scripts. Gods crouched in corners; winged,
beaked, clawed. Overhead were stone fronds, frescoed sky, so, squinting, I
could almost imagine myself in the open air, strolling along the shore of Lake Mareotis or beside one of the canals where the Nile frayed into the delta.

I moved on, among caskets of gold and gemstones enough to keep the
entire Kanisa Prometheus ecstatic for a dozen lifetimes, if they’d had the
courage to enter the dark, but I remained unmoved. Books are the only true wealth.
What lasting pleasure is there in fingering clammy metal or wads of grimy cash
or even a sackful of cowries? But a bookshelf is a stash forever opening new
eyes, sprouting new limbs, shouting in new voices.

Several times, in passages or caves or within the graves themselves,
my candlelight snagged a moon, full or half, and I bent to a skull from whose
raw cheekbones spectacles dangled. My twinned splinter of flame and tiny
shadowed face stirred in the lenses. Sometimes, ancient puddles of wax lay beside
the bones of these bespectacled skeletons, sometimes rusted paper knives and
pen-nibs. The mysteries of the underground seemed impenetrable.

I passed cataracts of urine like shaken golden tresses and fetid
pools about which rats crouched on cocked forelimbs like squalid diminutive
lions at water holes.

There was no telling how far I had walked. Though I tried to keep
southeast by the compass, the fickle maze constantly forced me off course, so I
had no idea if I was nearing my goal. For all I knew I was deep under the sea
or halfway to Cairo. In a queen’s crypt, I ate my sandwiches on a dusty throne
and smoked a cigarette as I read the story of her life. Then I evicted the
mummy—light as papier mâché within her linen shroud—and napped in her granite
cot, beneath the painted gaze of vultures.

When I woke, I lit the candle again and counted those remaining.
Though I had filled the satchel, I’d used more than half my store and still saw
no signs of the library. Also, though I tried to keep to passages that slanted
upward, I suspected I was being shunted deeper, fathoms of rock between me and
the forgotten sun, the mythic moon. I began to retrace my steps, but soon found
myself in chambers I had not seen before and understood suddenly how desperate
was my situation, how foolish I had been. I had no food save dust; no one knew
of my plight. In a few days I’d curl up in a gold coffin, unable even to read
myself into endless sleep.

For an hour, I charged recklessly through the tunnels, hoping
fortune would chaperone my choices, then realized I was only exhausting myself.
I sat where I was, my back against a wall, and stared at the dwindling flame.
Finally I recalled Zeinab’s advice: “You’ll only be able to see in the dark.”
What could she have meant? Though it was terrifying, like cutting away a
lifeline, I blew out the candle, and let the darkness close around me. Winding
through the stone web, among baubles and bones, my eyes had swallowed my body.
Heart deafening me, I’d inhaled images. Now I let the glitter fade.

I’d been in dire situations before, in open boats on stormy seas,
bookless in the Sahara, but had never felt more certain of my impending demise.
At last I recognized the bespectacled skeletons that scattered these dark
hallways. They were the book thieves of past millennia, who’d wandered into
this labyrinth, as I had, and had failed to find the library or their way out.
No wonder the thieves had a taboo against entering the subterranean ways, if
none who entered them ever returned. My chuckle was joined by a consumptive
choir, sniggering away into the tunnel.

And as I sat thus, my thoughts wafted to books, as always when I sit
alone or lie in bed waiting for slippery sleep. I dreamed of bookshelves
wealthy with tooled leather bindings. I could almost make out the titles,
almost feel the grain of the fine oasis morocco under my fingers, almost hear
the poems chanting within their covers, sense the tales unraveling through the
pages. Leaning toward the phantom books, I breathed their odor, that frankincense,
myrrh, golden dust. Scent is the most fragile of the senses, so easily lost or
confounded, but also the most tenacious, twining its tendrils about our
memories. For the blind, and for those who work in the dark—sentries, whores,
thieves—the sense of smell is sharpened. When I opened my eyes, the marbled
endpapers and linen wove pages vanished, as did the slither of turning leaves
and the murmur of poems, but the scent lingered, as if the residue of my
reverie had soaked into these tunnels. I smiled, then sat up and ran my palm
over the rough rock to bring myself back to reality. I sniffed. The scent
remained; elusive, oscillating, but present. And I realized I had known for
many hours that I was near books, but in my haste and terror had neglected to sit
quietly and use my thief’s talent.

Still in the dark, I stood up and, fingers antennae on the wall,
stepped in the direction of the scent. At branching tunnels, I shoved my nose
down each possibility before choosing. Mind in my nostrils, bibliophilic mole,
I wound the thread of that incense through those dark halls till I arrived at a
doorway I was certain contained books. I lit a candle and found myself at the
threshold of a small chamber, flanked on either side by knotted serpents, the
lintel adorned with spread wings. The room was empty except for a single lidded
sarcophagus carven with the likeness of a woman. I paced the perimeter of the
room before I realized the scent rose from the sarcophagus itself. Lifting the
lid I saw no mummy, no chiseled stone bed, but steps leading into more
darkness. A darkness spicy with the odors of brittle paper and crumbling
leather and ancient ink.

The eroticism of thievery is seldom discussed, but any thief will be
able to name that titillation. The nearness of the prize, coupled with the
aphrodisiac scent of books, gave me an indelible erection as I descended the
stairs. At the base of the steps, I picked the lock of a wooden door, then blew
out the candle. Reaching out in darkness, I touched the edges of sliced pages.
I stood motionless a minute, fingers against the book, listening for a breath
or the sigh of a turned page, but only my heartbeat rumbled. I relit the candle
and immediately achieved orgasm. The first sight of that underground treasure
tipped me over the brink and I soaked my pants. I was standing behind a
bookshelf, peering between shelves. For a long time I stood there with my
candle, besotted by my first glimpse of the Library of Alexandria, then moved
out from behind the bookcase.

I was in an irregular cavern, a grotto with several apertures
through which I could see other caverns like the chambers of a honeycomb.
Around the walls, set in nooks cut into the stone, wooden bookcases stood, each
uniquely shaped; some with glassed doors, some inlaid with mother-of-pearl and
exotic woods. Framed engravings and poems and manuscript pages hung on the
walls. Within the cases books stood, slightly disheveled, some leaning
together, some placed sideways upon the others. There were brackets for candle
holders on the walls and carpets on the floor and dilapidated sofas and
armchairs, all piled with worn, embroidered cushions. Beside one sofa, on a
linen-covered end table, lay two thermoses and a battered silver pitcher of
milk and a bowl of brown sugar and several stoneware mugs and a jar of cookies
dusted with powdered sugar and another of salted almonds and a blue bowl of
apricots. Well, you can imagine my transport. Without further ado, I returned
to the bookcase that hid the door and pulled out the book I’d first touched. I
settled myself into a sofa, the cushions about me like a plump embrace, and
poured myself a mug of cocoa. Eating cookies and almonds and apricots, I read
the book from beginning to end, while the semen dried to a new-found islet on
my crotch. And if some savage librarian had chanced upon me during that read,
I’d have opened my arms to her and smiled and said, “Strangle me with your
ink-stained fingers, miss, for I have achieved nirvana.”