The Book on Fire (7 page)

There was a glass of wine on the floor beside her, which she forgot
about for long stretches of time. Then she’d sigh and shift on her chair, lift
her eyes, and discover the wine. She’d sip slowly for a minute, the reflection
off the liquid rouging her cheeks, then set the glass beside her and sink once
more within the book.

For an hour I watched her reading, till she reached the last page
and slowly closed the cover and placed a palm upon the leather. Now I saw her
eyes, as she glanced unseeing at the wall above my hiding place. They were dark
and soft, magnified by her glasses. There was something strange about them, but
before I could make out what it was, she looked away. With a rustle, she stood
and placed the book on a shelf. She slipped on her sandals and picked up her
wineglass and candle and was gone. I went to the armchair and knelt, placing my
cheek against the warmth her body had bequeathed. I tried to catch, beneath the
must of the baize and the odor of the books, her scent, but there was nothing.

Walking away from that image, cradling it like a nestling, I
realized I had learned something new about myself. In the world above, I’d
assumed I could spend all day, every day immersed in literature, but I now
discovered a submerged yearning for afternoon sunlight on the bay, curtains
belling in a sea breeze, the swat of Abdallah’s bare feet on the tiles as he
brought me coffee, for ragged flower sellers on the corniche at dusk and the
darting of swallows among minarets, for mosque calls and sandalwood, for
grilled sea bream with red pepper and garlic and lime.

Drifting through the caverns, I pondered the possibilities for
exiting this place. Though I could find my way back to the door that led to the
tombs and sewers under Alexandria, I would still be lost once I entered that
labyrinth. I imagined making forays through those tunnels, returning to the
library when I needed food, till I chanced upon the stairwell that led to the
light. But even as I mulled these options, my feet were guiding me toward the
answer. I found myself eventually in a room that, had I thought about it, I
would have known existed: a room of books about the dark labyrinths beneath Alexandria, cataloging the tombs and their treasures, mapping the caves and tunnels. And I
found among the maps one that spun a red line from the underground doorway of
the library to the stairwell of the tower. Not daring to steal from this place
until I knew more about it, I copied the map onto the inside cover of the
paperback I carried.

So I wound back through the caverns of the Library of Alexandria
till I arrived at the room with the hidden door and exited Eden. With the map
to guide me, it was a short walk to the tower entrance, passing tombs I’d read
my way through, and the skeletons of ancient book thieves who’d lacked my sense
of smell. I taunted their bones, ground their glasses beneath my heels. I
crossed the dark river, retrieving my obol from the impassive jackal, and
arrived at last beneath the lighthouse. Then the long spiral up to the sudden
salt breath of the sea.

****

The
season had shifted while I was underground and I emerged into a rainy Ramadhan,
festival of fasting and feasting. Colored lanterns swung above every alley.
Strings of semaphores cut from old notebooks and dyed in washing blue and
karkadeh fluttered above my head and, darkly, in the puddles below. Children
sent tiny rockets into the slots of sky between the buildings and ran through
the rain with sparklers pouring fire from their fists. The shop fronts were
embankments of hazelnuts, figs, dried apricots. As the sun set, I walked along
the corniche, slowly, like one who has risen from momentous dreams or a long
illness. The world underground was still more vivid than that I walked through.
I bought a rose from every flower-urchin till I clutched a great bouquet. At the
sound of the mosque call, I bought a paper bag of nuts and dried fruit and
walked through the alleys munching, clothes stuck to my skin, feet sloshing in
my shoes, glasses speckled so the scene fragmented into kaleidoscopes. I handed
my paperback to a beggar.

****

Back
in my rooms, I ran a hot bath and soaked a long time. When I got out, the rain
had stopped. The streets were a dewy spider web. I sat on the balcony sipping
wine, watching the crowds on the corniche and listening to the Ramadhan carols.

****

I woke
into an afternoon quieter than usual, as the fasting households slept away the
hours till sundown and the recitations of the
holy book
coiled
like smoke from the minarets. I fasted as well, watching the preparations for
the iftar, the great pallets of bread on the heads of bicyclists, the basins of
kosa and mahshi, the saucers of dates. For an hour, the streets bubbled with
quarrels as citizens rushed homeward and then, as the sun dipped to the water,
miraculously emptied, as if all the people had been poured out. There were
several minutes of hush, the whole city suspended. I could see the diners
sitting on mats outdoors, hands poised over dates, and then the sea swallowed
the last droplet of sun, igniting the prayer calls, and hands went to mouths.
The hawkers of tamarind juice, trundling tuns of sloshing mahogany liquid,
began to clash their plates together. I ordered coffee.

That evening, when I finally returned to the thieves’ church, there
was a moment of silence after Abuna Makarios opened the door, then cacophony as
the thieves rose from their chairs and crowded round. “We thought you’d
drowned!” they cried. “We searched the hospitals and prisons and the morgue.
You’re so pale, so thin. Where have you been?”

“Might there be an arak on offer for someone returned from the
dead?” I inquired, and they scrambled to fetch me a glass, but I realized, as I
settled into an armchair and looked around at their eager faces, that I could
not reveal my adventure, imagining a sudden dash for the lighthouse and the
plundering of those silent graves.

“Did you leave Alexandria?” Karim asked.

“I did and I did not. I was farther than a world away, yet we
probably passed within a stone’s throw of each other at times. Would anyone
care for a game of chess?”

Though they whined, I would not release my secret. That evening,
Makarios tried to get me drunk and Koujour sulked. Nura tried to bribe me with
a syringe and Karim took me aside and feigned distress at the termination of
our friendship, but I smiled and nodded and would not talk. Only Zeinab said
nothing. She watched me, but I could not read her eyes. She was fasting a
whore’s fast, thief’s fast, all night, waiting to sip her karkadeh and eat a
date at dawn.

We went out walking, in the gorgeous night, with the revelers. She
gestured to the minarets. “Do you see the angels dancing? All night long.”

I saw nothing but passing clouds and shadows, but didn’t wish to
tamper with her visions. “Where do they sleep in the day?” I asked.

“There are secret pockets in this city, where they read the burning
books.”

“What are you reading?”

“It’s the month of the angel’s book. You’ve read it, or pieces of
it, or you’ve heard pieces of it, from minarets, on the radio, but I have
swallowed it whole. To have swallowed the book and sung it out on a winter’s
night in Alexandria is to be burned alive. I weep as I sing, and it seems I’m
not singing but being sung by the angel’s song.”

“And then you burn it?”

“No need.”

As we walked through the festive streets, I pondered holy books, the
books delivered to us by angels. In deserts. Why do angels love deserts so? Is
it the spareness that attracts them, the horizons? The loneliness? In how many
caves, on how many rocks are angels waiting, their voices full of poetry as the
wind is full of light. All we have to do is encounter them, it would seem, and
their voices are released into our ears. If our ears are unstoppered.

And perhaps this is the crux: perhaps we’re constantly banging into
angels, on street corners, entering tramcars. We sever them slamming doors and
topple them off windowsills and trample them underfoot in theaters. And they
are shouting at us, seizing our shoulders, crouched on our shoulders and
seizing our heads, bawling in our ears, but we’re closed vessels, and from our pencils
dribbles this spillage, fragments glittering in the jam. Perhaps only in
deserts, or fasting, or underground, can we pop our corks and hear the angels
whole.

****

It was
wonderful, over the following days, to spend time in the sun, under the sky, to
read on my balcony and watch the crowds on the corniche, but my thoughts were
constantly settling, like rain, through the cracks in the cobblestones, seeping
under foundations, to the vaults of books. And though I walked through the
alleys of Alexandria, my mind traveled among books, for I found that, even away
from the library, its patterns remained in my skull, and in my dreams I sought
this book and that, imagined the marvelous rooms where they might be found,
imagined the books that stood beside them, and thus could wander from book to
book till I was far away, lost in subterranean groves.

****

But
dreams are no substitute for a book in the hand. I returned to the lighthouse,
paid my obol, and entered the library through the back door. I woke a thousand
books over the next few months, reading for days on end, sustained by coffee
and cookies and the sandwiches I carried in with me, till my mind was so full
of stories and characters I felt I was constantly dreaming. Ah, the wonders of
the Library of Alexandria. There are, in the world, sights to make you draw
breath, clutch your forehead: Kilimanjaro from the Serengeti, the pyramids at
Karima, Cape Town, Santorini Island. There are strange beasts on this planet.
Have you seen the turaco’s flight? Have you heard the chameleon’s song? Have
you seen the pygmies dancing or listened to a didgeridoo? These things are
marvelous, but are not equal to a single room, a single book, in the Library of
Alexandria. The things in the world are bound by the laws of nature—by gravity,
three dimensions, the speed of light—but in a novel nature explodes; you
somersault through the ether, glimpsing rabbits with pocket watches, hobbits
and marsh-wiggles, resurrections, talking fish, lonely minotaurs.

But the pleasures of the library were not only to be found in the
books. Half my time there was spent stalking the youngest librarian. I spied on
her for entire nights, watched her read for hours on end. I admonished myself,
telling myself I should be reading, I should use this precious season to inhale
more books, but could not pull away from her, the reading girl, from her sighs,
the rustle of her fingertips on pages.

****

As I
strolled along the corniche muttering one evening, newly risen from the earth,
Koujour blocked my path. I stared at him. He seized my arm and led me across
the road to the Cecil. We entered through the revolving doors, into the odors
of pipe smoke and wood polish, walked past dusty potted palms and huge
gilt-framed mirrors, and took the paternoster to the roof. Koujour tipped the
lift attendant and they exchanged a few words in Nyima Nuban. The rooftop
garden was deserted save for a couple leaning together in a corner. We ordered
gin and tonics and sat in the wicker chairs, smoking and watching the swallows
over the water.

Koujour can paint like Lucifer himself, but he can’t talk. Talking
with him is like talking with a foreigner who speaks a language related to
yours, but not mutually intelligible. He brushes the air with his hands as he
speaks, so after our conversations I wish I could slice out a square of sky,
hang it on the wall.

“I saw you walking.” The smoke of his cigarette drew spirals, halos.
He bent out over the sea, so I had to lean forward to hear him. “You were
walking, not here. Your eyes. You saw.”

“I don’t know if I can talk about it, Koujour.”

“Something beautiful. A girl? A painting?”

“Have you ever wished you could step into a painting? Live in it?”

“I walk in paintings, sleep in paintings.”

“Imagine you’d dreamt about a painting, all your life. Then you
found it. What would you do?”

“Steal.”

“Why do you steal, Koujour? Why don’t you make your own paintings?”

“I make my own paintings.”

“Of course, but—”

He made a bowl of his palms. “Here are colors. I eat them. There’s
nothing new.”

“But surely—”

“No. They think it’s new, but no!”

“All right.”

“Take me to your beautiful.”

“I can’t.”

“Tell me sometime.”

“Maybe sometime, Koujour.”

“You want advice? I give advice. Nuban advice. Listen. You see the
beautiful, you take it. Now. Don’t wait. Take. With your hands.” He was
grappling with the air, ash spilling into his drink.

“Thank you, Koujour. How’s Hala? How are the girls?”

“Ah, the girls. One says this, the other says this. You know.”

“They’re fighting?”

“No. They have their world. With Hala they fight. Girls like to kill
their mothers.”

“And your painting?”

“The painting.” He snorted, made small circles with lifted palms.

“Not going well?”

“Like the Nile at Khartoum. You know the Nile?”