Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra (2 page)

Hotel Metropole, Place Saad Zaghloul

After clearing the bed of old paper, I have had a long and dreamless sleep. After a short walk around the square, I am back
in Room 114 with the latest news from here that for most Alexandrians is no longer new. Indeed I must be one of the very last
people in this city to know that persons unknown, at least one of them no longer knowing, breathing or anything, have marked
the arrival of 1.1.11 on their electronic watches with a bomb, detonated thirty minutes after midnight, a mile or so away
outside a crowded church.

It was Mahmoud who told me, a young man from here at the Metropole Hotel. His message was of tense reassurance. He stared
hard, tugged down the lapels of his tight business suit, and spoke with minimal opening of his mouth: there was ‘nothing to
worry about’; everywhere in the world there were ‘suicidists’; the media should not make so much of twenty-three deaths that
happened to have happened in Egypt.

He had an older, unshaven, workman-trousered colleague who mildly disagreed. Socratis was from the Cecil, the rival colonial
refuge on the sea side of the square. He was more relaxed but gave a sharper warning: today, he said, ‘might not be the best
day to visit Pompey’s Pillar or the Library’; even in the early hours there was ‘agitation, alarm and the police are checking
papers’.

This Socratis seemed the senior of these gentle quarrellers. I first
noticed them when I arrived last night. They were waiting like bored cab-drivers beside bags of horse-feed beneath my window.
In the dark I did not ask myself, or anyone else, who they were or why they seemed relieved to see me. In the dirty morning
light I was more curious.

Our brief conversation about the bomb did not provide many answers. Mahmoud slicked down his hair, kept his lips taut and
his words as if from a clipboard. Socratis growled noisily, dribbled from the left side of his mouth and pulled pointlessly
at the curls around his ears. Neither appeared to listen to the other.

‘Why are you here?’, asked Socratis. ‘Nothing comes to Alexandria in the winter except birds to the lake, most of them when
they have lost their way.’ I explained my business and we kept on talking. He too was ‘a man of business’, he claimed. ‘A
bombing is very bad for all business.’ I sympathised. ‘Old Zaghloul is not getting any visitors at all,’ he hissed, pointing
to the police who waved away anyone approaching the giant striding statue that separates the hotels in this square that bears
his name.

I nodded. I was still finding my way. ‘Who was Old Zaghloul?’ I asked. Mahmoud looked impatiently towards the sea. Socratis
answered, but grumpily, like a speaking guidebook: ‘a very modern Egyptian, a father of our country, a hero who in 1924 survived
many years in prison but only a single year as Prime Minister’. He smiled and pulled again at a spring of hair that would
not be kept down.

Old Saad Zaghloul, he added, as though in afterthought, was one of those who thought ‘wrongly’ that he could do business with
the British occupiers of Egypt, while the British thought ‘just as wrongly’ that they could do business with him. ‘Yet all
the time,’ said Socratis, ‘things were going on that first gave us Colonel Nasser and now something much, much … the same.’

He hesitated and swept his right hand from side to side, palm down like a cricket umpire signalling a boundary. Maybe Socratis
is a professional guide – with one or two unofficial opinions. Mahmoud may perhaps be a guide too, even though he has the
complexion of an office-dweller rather than a man of the outdoors. Perhaps he is an organiser of guides, shrinking back nervously
from the restless, blinkered horses.

Or perhaps he is not frightened of the horses but of something else. ‘Careful, careful,’ Mahmoud whispered to both of us with
warmth and a threat: ‘Zaghloul, Nasser, Mubarak, all of them good men.’ Socratis, unmoved and mud-eyed, suggested that we
all meet later in a place he called ‘my cafe’. First he had to make some hospital visits.

I too need to pause. Before I begin this last Cleopatra, the one that this time I will finish, I want to describe myself a
little, to try to see myself as I see Socratis or Mahmoud or as I see the past, revealing first what is easiest to reveal.

So what do I see?

First: a sixty-year-old man, settling into his room, as tall as a wardrobe, as broad as a pillow, hair the colour of a greying
sheet, stubble like a scratchy blanket and a long horizontal scar across his stomach like the crack in the door.

What else?

In order to write I have my back to the sea. The view of the steely Mediterranean is desirable but distracting. This is a
cramped and crowded room – with a high ceiling, generous wall space but little accommodation for another chair. I have not
yet rearranged the furniture. I am standing upright, scribbling in a notebook with a pen pressed against the door as though
it were a desk.

A closer observer – if suitable surveillance were installed – would
see me writing quickly, almost as though I were talking. Just occasionally my jaw moves in emphasis or amplification, a movement
made clearer on unshaven cheeks.

I have no need to look respectable. Twenty-four hours ago I left London unexpectedly, and no one I know will see me here.
I could have fixed to see writers or politicians or critics, the contributors to the newspaper that I edit. I might have brought
crisp, clean clothes, linen suits and a laptop computer. Instead, I am wearing frayed jeans, scuffed suede shoes and am pushing
out words on a notepad against a thin panel of wood.

This is not how it was supposed to be. For the last weeks of my fifty-ninth year, I had a suitcase packed for a different
trip, to the winter sunshine five thousand miles to the south. But Christmas was frozen. The London airports were iced for
many days; and when the ice melted there were too many travellers for South Africa and not enough planes. Egypt was an easier
ticket to buy – from Hampstead to Cairo, to the fluorescent checkpoints of the desert and the Metropole Hotel, to a tiny,
tall room with a balcony overlooking the sea.

Rue Nebi Danial

Socratis gave me instructions about where I should be going next. The walk was short. The directions were simple: right on
Al Horreya, left on Nebi Danial, past the bookshops and piles of trousers where the two streets meet, the Piccadilly Circus
of Alexandria, as the guidebook says; past the lives of Fidel Castro and Richard Burton, catalogues from JCPenney and the
Modern Dining Centre, past dozens of purple overalls, an advertisement for a discussion about
Jean-Paul Sartre in 2002, a brown-and-white radio mast in Eiffel pattern and a tightly shuttered home for French missionaries.

I was told to sit in the cafe by the fountain, the ‘Sea Fountain’ I think he called it. Just before Nebi Danial ends in a
bus station there is a low, iron fence around a sloping, green-marble slab broken by grass. Above a watery-coloured rock sits
a concrete swirl of foam speckled by golden mosaics and on the foam, riding erect, or as erect as anything could ride on so
toppling a tower, is a winged woman with claws, part angel, part sphinx, pushing out a conch shell from which water, powered
by a hanging electric flex, may once have flowed. A Sea Fountain? Yes, this must be the place that he meant.

That was about an hour ago. How long do my new friends expect me to wait? And what do I know about them to make me wait? The
answer is still almost nothing except that they share an interest in one of the very few tourists in town. This interest may
be official or entrepreneurial. It is hard to say. What they cannot know about me is that waiting with paper and pen at a
table is what I am here to do. I am writing about Cleopatra for the last time.

If, as Socratis suggests, this needs to be a day of caution lest al-Qaeda has begun an Egyptian campaign, there is no harm
for me in that. A break may be useful. To write beside a busy street, with the constant hope of interruption, is the best
way for me to write, sometimes the only way. If there are to be no tourist destinations today, there is time for a reminder
of my very first attempt on Cleopatra, for going back fifty years to
Professor Rame and the Egyptian Queen
, to a place in every way different from this L-shaped room of languid waiters and tiny tables that Socratis called ‘my cafe’.

His cafe? I doubt it. He also says that the Cecil is his hotel. He may not even come. He is right, however, that a grey-haired
Englishman
with a few old papers, a pad of new paper and an Arabic guide to classical sites seems unlikely to be disturbed as long as
from time to time he buys a Lipton’s tea, the pale yellow brand name that must have been on these unwashed walls for fifty
years at least.

CLEOPATRA THE FIRST

Once upon a time there was a Professor James Rame, an ageless, characterless male who knew Cleopatra personally. He loved
her. He loved her because she was beautiful, bold and smelt like my mother. This professional alien, space traveller and hero
of a long-lost adventure at the courts of Alexandria, was my first and only fictional creation. I was ten years old.

Professor Rame and the Egyptian Queen
, a fantasy of golden hair and blue skies (or so I like to think), was written in what my parents used to call a ‘box room’,
almost square and about the size of this cafe alcove. A near-perfect cube, it contained a high wooden desk and it doubled
as a home for water tanks and staircase support. Just as in Room 114 at the Metropole, it was easiest to write there while
standing.

The rest of the little red-brick house was filled with radio noises,
Mrs Dale’s Diary
and the permanent hum of a Hoover. But in the windowless box room there was silence. The bare plastered walls, pink as a
story-book pig, were protection against invasions from beyond.

Outside in the garden there were other walls, solid mounds of what my father called Essex clay. To him it was dead, inert,
inevitable wasted earth abandoned by builders in a hurry. To a child it was like living flesh or warm plasticine that I could
punch, climb, cut, try to mould, try not to offend. Half a century ago, behind the back doors of
semi-detached houses on the Marconi works estate, a mile from Chelmsford, were hundreds of slimy-sided cubes of this clay,
newly cut by machines, soft but indestructible, leaden red by day and looming brown by night, garden obstacles that at a child’s
bedtime might become an Egyptian temple or an ancient Roman face or a Russian.

My first Cleopatra was a phantom, a dream in the dark. When she joined Professor Rame’s Egyptian adventure she became a bit
more than a mud-red face, more than a mouth, a nose and a neck. She had a name. She did things, felt things and made things
happen. I am sure she did. But I cannot remember any of them or anything of how I imagined her.

I can guess that Professor Rame’s hostess had some of the finer female characteristics, those that went with perfume and jewellery,
not with oven-cleansers or Kilner Jars, with my mother’s ambitions not her insecurities, with my sister’s bright blond hair
not her noisier toddler habits. But I can only guess. I would give much now for a few sentences of how Cleopatra and the professor
first met, that first clash of other worlds. But the name is all there is. Sometimes one just has to accept the absence of
memory as better than the pretence of it.

There is nothing so very wrong in remembering only a name. Much of what we know of antiquity are names, the names of lost
people, plays, histories, the names of learned treatises, works on medicine, on how to prevent slaves escaping and how to
apply make-up. My own Cleopatra (as I saw her then), the seventh woman of her name to rule in Egypt after its submission to
the Greek generals of Alexander the Great, wrote a treatise about make-up. Or maybe she had her name attached to someone else’s
lipstick tips: librarians and booksellers even then believed that a work was more likely to be read under the name of a celebrity.
If history had happened differently,
mascara might have been all we knew about her. Instead, she became the lover of two great Roman generals and, as some came
to say, changed the history of the western world. On Cleopatra’s name there is space enough to pile a mountain.

Professor Rame’s own name was different. It was invented as a disguise, a suggestion of what I was supposed to become. My
professor wore an adult form of school uniform, National Health pink-rimmed glasses and was a master of engineering science.
He had to be. He could hardly be a professor of anything else if he were to travel in space and time.

Imagination of the ancient world was a luxury in 1959. Engineering was the necessity, in our case radar engineering. For my
father and the men who lived around us, seeing the invisible was a profoundly practical matter. Max Stothard was a designer
of military machines that made us safe.

In our house there was no time for the nonsense of any history older than the century. Ours were homes built in anxious haste,
dug out of a butcher’s farmland below a giant steel aerial mast that had been erected against the Communists as soon as the
Nazi threat was past. The mobilisation of men and material to watch for Cold War missiles was as urgent as in the hot wars
– from Crete to Alamein – in which my father and his engineering friends had learnt their craft. In former fields, beside
a town that already boasted the title ‘Birthplace of Radio’, we were the families whose fathers understood klystrons, tweeters
and ‘travelling-way tubes’ for the long-distance radar that kept the enemy at bay.

Every man on the estate knew either about the transmitters that saw things faraway in the dark or about the various electric
valves that powered a radar’s eyes. They worked at benches, not at desks. There
was a wartime spirit still. The interest was not the Korean War, the one that filled the headlines of the
Daily Telegraph
of 28 February 1951, the issue my mother kept in the sideboard because it marked the day of my birth. Still less did it stem
from the Suez War, a nasty disturbance that might as well have happened in Cleopatra’s Egypt for all the concern it created
for us. Our war was the war with Moscow.