The Book on Fire (11 page)

We were utter strangers who shared a heart, Siamese twins separated
at birth, and we were enemies. Every day she threatened to kill me, and every
day I eked my life a little farther with an adroit metaphor, a catchy
adjective.

“All right, I’m stronger now,” she’d say, striding briskly into the
chamber where I waited for her, reading, and she’d walk up to me, hand lifted,
teeth clenched, while my tongue scrambled for a sentence to deflect her blow.
“Did I tell you about the time I stole from the dead?” I might say. Or, “Once,
as I was fondling the Pharaoh’s favorite wife ...” and her resolve would
founder like a wave subsiding on the shore. She’d stand a few minutes, hand
raised, while I gabbled, but her arm would slowly descend, she’d sag to the
ground and put her head on her knees and berate herself.

“You’re a wizard!” she shrieked.

“Hush, what if the others hear?”

“Let them hear, let them come. They’ll be stronger than I am.”

She’d beg me to leave the library for good. “Look, no one will ever
know. I won’t tell. You don’t have to leave the city; just don’t come to the
library anymore.”

“All right.”

“Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

And I’d tell my story and she’d drink her glass of wine, and when I
broke the story off and stood to go, was almost through the doorway, she’d
whisper, “Balthazar.”

“Yes.”

“You’ll come tomorrow, won’t you?”

I’d nod. And she’d sigh and tell me which room to meet her in.

****

There
was always a space between us, even if we sat side by side on a sofa. Our
ankles never clicked together, our hands never lighted on the other’s shoulder
or knee, as if we were strange magnets, simultaneously attracted and repelled.
She had no hair to fall accidentally against my arm. I could still feel the
bright stripe on my neck where her hand had rested the first day. Sometimes I
saw her place the tip of her bitten finger against her lips, so I knew she
still felt my teeth in her flesh. I knew that if I raised my hand toward her
she’d sway back, as though a breeze moved through me. I knew precisely how
close I could move my skin toward hers before she’d shy away.

****

We
read to each other, reviving that lost art. Certain books are loveliest shared
this way. We lay side by side on carpets, the magnetic gap between us, and took
turns reading. Reader and readee. The best books to read aloud have shortish
chapters, cadenced sentences, songs and verses, lots of illustrations. We
gloated over pictures. The tattered
Dawn Treader
at anchor on Dragon
Island, the waterpipe-puffing caterpillar, the cat walking by his wild lone. We
pored over maps of imaginary lands, more real to us than any country on the
actual globe. We pointed out Oriathon and Minas Tirith, Arrakis and Selidor.
Just as rereading is utterly different from first readings, so reading aloud is
such a separate experience from solitary reading, a new word should perhaps be
coined. To read a cherished book aloud to someone who also knows the book by
heart is an experience closer than any conversation, closer than making love;
the same reefs and swells crossed at the same time, the chuckles rising in
tandem. You feel you’re speaking into her blood.

She read more deeply than I: “You see, Balthazar, how dangerous
desire is—the tiniest craving can rearrange the world inordinately. Take Lucy.
There’s nothing she likes more than the touch of fur. So she enters the
wardrobe. A hundred pages later, the king of beasts is on his way to sacrifice
himself for her brother, and for all believing Narnians, but that sacrifice is
not the climax of the book. The climax occurs on the walk to the Stone Table,
when Aslan allows Lucy to do what she has longed to do: place her hands in his
mane. Place her hands in the fur of God. The whole book has led to this point.”

Sometimes her voice would break as she read, sometimes mine, and
then we’d pass the book to the other, riding the emotion, like passing a morsel
of plum between mouths, taking in the other’s saliva along with the taste of
the fruit, trying to extrapolate the other’s taste. I imagined touching her. I
imagined her continuing to read while I inched the cotton of her robe up her
thighs. But we never touched. As our hands passed the book back and forth, our
fingertips never met. Only our voices curled toward each other. I imagined her
body as a book. I imagined holding her as I would a book, opening her, turning
her, being drawn in, perhaps tearing a page, folding a page, jotting a note on
her inner thigh, her armpit. The small poetry of her eyelashes, the incunabula
of her bones.

****

We
were sitting in a room of books about rainstorms, some so vivid their pages
were permanently drenched. I could hear, faintly from the shelves, the
muttering of thunder, and the candlelight was augmented by pins of lightning
escaped from blue bindings. I had been telling her about the thieves in the
Kanisa.

“Tell me about Zeinab,” she said. “You said you’d... that you’d...”

“I fucked her.”

“Is she your lover?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“A true thief should never make a permanent liaison, especially not
with another thief. It goes against the nature of our art. Anyway, I don’t know
who she is. I don’t know what lies beneath her veil.”

“She’s scarred.”

“It hardly matters. I’m sure she’d never lift her veil, and I have
no desire to rip it away.”

“Yet you have to lift every cover of every book you come across. Are
you afraid, Balthazar?”

“Call it fear if you like. This is what I know: she cursed in her
orgasm. The bells tinkled. Then she burned my book.”

“Tell me about your books.”

So I told her about the books in the Pension Scheherazade, the
single shelf of my private library, and could see the need in her face, the
look of a child after her first lick of peach sherbet.

“Bring them to me,” she said.

“No.”

Her lips quivered. Then I saw a craftiness enter her eyes. “We’ll
copy them, it will take a month. You can have them back.”

“You’ll give me the copies and keep the originals. No thanks.”

“I have to read them.” She stamped, really angry now.

“You can.”

“How?”

“Come with me.”

She was silent for a minute. Then: “You rascal. After all I’ve done
for you, to try to trick me into leaving the library.”

“What have you done for me?”

“Let you live. Let you read the books I love.”

I spread my hands. “You’re right. I owe you my life. And in return
I’d like to show you my collection. But I’m damned if I’ll bring it into your
prison.”

She stared at me. “Ogre!” she shouted. “Leave!”

So I left.

****

Walking
along the corniche, I imagined her face against the sea, the sky. I imagined
her hand on the corroded coral of the sea wall. I had only seen her by
candlelight. What color would her skin be in the light of sunrise? Noon? Full
moon?

****

I gave
her a week. A week in which I returned to my old life, drinking macchiatos on the
terrace of the Trianon, reading poetry on the corniche at dusk, dining at the
Elite, visiting my booksellers, playing chess at the Kanisa Prometheus. I even
went out thieving one night. Nura had given me a tip, and I broke into a
palazzo on Sharia Rafaffa. Entering the little library, I bunched scarves
beneath the door, drew the curtains, then lit a candle. Not two paces away, a
veiled figure sat crosslegged on a sofa, a book in her lap. My candle shook,
sending her shadow leaping across the stacks.

“Can you read in the dark?” I whispered, trying to control my voice.

“I was waiting for your light.”

“Let me see your wrist.”

“No.”

“You were a librarian once.”

“Who have you been talking to?”

I was silent.

“Do you know the danger you’re putting yourself in?”

“Reading is a dangerous art,” I said sullenly.

“You have no idea how dangerous. What’s her name?”

“Shireen.”

“And you’re in love.”

“Well ...” I fingered the strap of my swag.

“Of course. How could you resist. Is she pretty?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Describe her.”

“She’s not like the other librarians, not like any other girl I’ve
met. Her blood is blue, her pupils are pages. I can’t read the letters of fire
in her eyes. She’s never left the library, it’s all she knows. When she reads,
she falls into a book, like falling into the sea. I love to watch her read.”

“Oh. That girl.”

“You know her?”

“The library is a primal soup of pages and poems. It was only a
matter of time before it gave birth to a child. I’ll meet her some day.”

“You can’t go back down, can you?”

She stood, whisper of cotton, wash of silver: “I’ve got a book to
burn.”

“Wait,” I said, but she was gone.

I raised my candle to the shelves. But, though the collection was
extravagant and contained several fabulously rare volumes, I completely failed
to achieve my customary thrill. The Library of Alexandria was so enormous, its
treasures so outlandish, the dangers so precipitous, that ransacking these
meager overworld collections seemed a child’s game I could not imagine having
played. Nevertheless, once I’d grabbed a few volumes and stepped from an upper
window, there was some nostalgia in traipsing across the rooftops with my swag,
looking out over the shimmering sea lit by moon, lighthouse, stars. The stars
which are, I imagine, the shorn locks of the virgin librarians, escaped from
their underground sepulchers to form arcane constellations.

****

Riding
a late-night tram, I closed my eyes a moment, then felt fingertips like
feathers on my thigh and, turning, saw Amir’s sad smile, the brown lenses of
his spectacles. “Any luck?” I asked, and he held up a sealed envelope, a diary,
a pressed rose.

“Few pockets lack secrets,” he whispered.

The tram stopped, disgorging its contents, admitting a new flock,
and Amir excused himself with a murmur and shuffled through the aisle, laying a
hand gently on a shoulder here and there to ease his passage, whispering
apologies. Returning, he fanned his treasure like a pack of cards, all hearts,
in his lovely hands. As we approached Mazarita, he leaned to me and murmured,
“Come. Dinner in my rooms.”

Amir wears a somber uniform of three-piece suits and a lavender
cravat. His thick-rimmed spectacles curdle opaque brown at the least light.
When he takes off the spectacles to polish them on his cravat, his eyes are
startlingly beautiful: violet, heavy-lidded, lashes thick as moth antennae. He
haunts the trams, sidling up behind young men and divesting them of the
contents of their pockets, but he’s not after money, and will often leave the
fat wing of filthy notes on the tram seat, or return it surreptitiously to its
owner. What he seeks are secrets. All of us keep on our persons
secrets—postcard, tram ticket, bookmark, letter—and Amir ferrets these out,
hoards them. He is himself a cipher. Meeting you on the street, he’ll inquire
where you are headed, then regretfully inform you that his destination lies in
the opposite direction. Nothing in his countenance or attire sets him apart,
yet he seems to stand at a slight angle to the crowds, and the sidewalks he
paces seem to carry him forward at a slightly slower tempo.

We walked to Sharia Lepsius, where he had an inherited apartment
above a bathhouse, flanked by church and hospital. The rooms, at first glance,
resembled Tutankhamen’s tomb, as glimpsed by Howard Carter through the hole
drilled in the doorway (and through which the djinn passed that would carry him
off). They were redolent of candle wax and semen, crammed with steamer trunks
and Zanzibari chests, chiffoniers and orange crates, stacked on each other,
overflowing, the cases bulging, the drawers stuffed with all manner of objects
dredged from the pockets of Alexandria.

He sat me in a scrollwork sofa stained with ochre islands like a map
of a mythic archipelago and adjusted the shutters to angle the failing light
onto the coffee table. While he worked in the kitchen, I examined the contents
of the tabletop: bottle caps, driftglass, handkerchiefs, seashells, shopping
lists, envelopes, photographs—the spoils of his latest excursion.

He returned with anis and salted almonds.

“Any luck?” I asked, nodding at the loot.

“Oh yes, look here.” His elegant fingers delved, gathering
photographs. “These are his family—mother, sisters, you can see the
resemblance.” He laid them before me one by one. “And then there’s this.” His
trump was black and white, webbed by creases, the face dark and handsome,
framed by fez and galabiyya. Even through the crazing, I thought I recognized
the face. Amir turned the photograph over, and I saw it was cohered only
because a tram ticket had been glued to the back.