The Book on Fire (14 page)

With my bodkin, I pried the cork out of a bottle. We prowled the
room in opposite directions. I could hear her fingers on bindings. She lifted
down a volume, vanished for a page, slotted it back. And I likewise fondled the
books. Thievery always turns me on, but this night my fingers rattled on the
spines; I saw the titles through a veil of blood. When I pulled down a book,
the words were full of innuendo, like inscriptions within a pyramid,
decipherable only on this night, in this palpitant light. My mind was ripe with
openings, but when the shelves brought us round to each other I could not
speak. She clutched a book to her breast, stared at me. I handed her the wine
bottle and she tipped a ruby gurgle down her throat, passed it back. I touched
the corner of the book she held.

“Balthazar,” she said. Her voice so exotic my name seemed a word in
a foreign language.

“What have you found?”

“I don’t know.” She looked down at the volume.

“Let’s read it.” I moved to the sofa and after a moment she followed,
sat beside me, inch-wide gulf between our thighs where dragons whirled, comets
smoked. She opened the book, equally on her lap and mine, and we bent over the
pages. Poetry, perhaps. Her fingers brushed the paper.

“I can’t read the words,” I said.

She lifted her veil. “Read my lips.” We took off our spectacles. I
bent to her. Our fingers met in the trough of pages and we kissed. Flavors of
ink and wine. She fended my hand from her breast, so I abandoned myself to her
mouth, the inept and avid fumbling of her lips. I had forgotten about kissing,
most intimate of the erotic arts. Her eyes were closed. I curled my palm over
her shorn scalp, the fine nap. She drew away, gasping, head back against the
sofa. I tasted the mole on her neck, spice of Zanzibar, then ran my tongue in
the bitter seashell of her ear.

I woke within the perfume of her breath, as the afternoon breeze
shifting the curtains still stirred the pages of my dreams, sweet book of lies.
She slept, book for a pillow, its pages mauled, marked with the spittle seeping
from her mouth. Opening the curtains and shutters, I stood in the book-lined
birdcage and looked out across gables and minarets to the bay flashing like a
gorget on the headland of Anfushi, the sky teeming with clouds—buoyant, it seemed,
only because of my good cheer. She joined me, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.
A crow rocking on a palm frond looked us over, laughing obscenely.

“Well, we’re trapped,” she said.

“Perhaps that crow could carry us away on her back.”

“Or we could just spread our wings.”

“Anyway,” I turned into the room, “there are worse places to be
caged.”

“I’m so hungry.”

As if in answer the rooftop door below us opened and a young girl
stepped out bearing a plate of sandwiches. She was dressed in white and wore a
circlet of jasmine on her brow. There was no place to hide, so we watched as
she creaked up the wooden steps, focus on her feet, then looked up. Her lips
formed a soundless o, then softened. “Are you angels?”

“Quite the opposite,” I smiled.

“What kind of sandwiches are those?” Shireen asked.

“Kofta. Would you like to share?”

“Yes please.”

She set the plate on the floor and we sat around it cross-legged.
The sandwiches were delicious, the plump kofta slathered with tahina, garnished
with tomato and onion. The wine bottle was still a third full, and Shireen and
I passed it back and forth. I offered it to the girl. “Do you drink wine?”

“I’ve tasted it before.” She took a dainty sip, made a face. “Sour.
Is that my grandfather’s wine?”

I nodded.

“How did you get up here?”

“We came in the night, while you were sleeping.”

“Are you friends of my father?”

“No.”

“Why did you come?”

“We’re thieves. Well, I am. She hasn’t stolen anything.”

“Yet,” said Shireen.

“What were you going to steal?”

I waved a hand at the shelves.

“Do you like to read?” she asked solemnly.

“Oh yes,” Shireen and I said in unison, leaning forward. “Do you?”

“This is my favorite place in the world. I come up here after
school. Mama makes me sandwiches and I’m allowed to read till my father comes
home. When I grow up I’m going to become a librarian. Or a tram driver. I
haven’t decided yet.”

“This is your grandfather’s library?” I asked.

She nodded. “He comes up here in the evenings sometimes to drink
wine and read. But he doesn’t remember very well these days. I think he just
holds the books, because that’s what he used to do.”

“What books do you like?” I asked, and we talked about books for a
while. I watched the slow blossoming of her face as she realized she’d
encountered beings like herself, whose lives were more than half fiction.

The sun had candled a minaret. “When does your father come home?” I
asked. She looked to the west. “Any time now.”

“We have to get out of here. Can you help us?”

“I thought you were going to steal.”

“We’ll leave them here for you.” I smiled.

But Shireen picked up the book she’d used as a pillow. “I’ll take
this,” she said.

“Can I come with you?”

“I wish you could, darling. But not now. I have a feeling we’ll meet
again, though.”

She looked down, then into our faces. “All right. Wait here. When
you hear a noise, go down the stairs and out the back. There’s a place you can
climb over the garden fence.”

“You’re the angel,” Shireen said.

The girl took the plate and empty wine bottle and trotted down the
steps. A minute later we heard a crash and a shriek, voices and footsteps, and
we dashed down the stairs. I looked back as we passed out the back door and saw
the bust of the scribe in fragments on the floor of the salon, and the girl
with her ear in a woman’s grip. But she was smiling.

****

The
next evening, Shireen stood on my balcony, looking down across the midan. A
wedding party clattered by, beating time on the sides of carriages, the horses
decorated with wreaths of jasmine and streamers of triangular primaries.
Shedding flowers and colors, they chanted past under the date palms, down the
tram tracks. I placed my hand on her nape and she shied, turning to me, lips
bending, then bitten, her eyes brimming. I reached out a finger to touch her
eyelid where a crumb of tear stood, and she raised her hand as if against a
blow.

“I thought ...” I said.

“No.”

“What did last night mean?”

“Too much wine.”

“You didn’t like the kisses?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“What are you saying?”

“Let me read, Balthazar.” She left the balcony, and I heard the
hangers clacking as she entered the wardrobe.

I fell asleep reading, and continued reading in my dream, though the
book seemed to have been grafted into my fingers. My face sank closer and
closer to the pages. Then from the ditch emerged a hand. The fingers touched my
face. I woke, and fingers moved on my cheek. I could feel the weight of her
body on the mattress. She brushed her lips against mine, sideways, twice,
thrice, till they stuck, and I lay still, rocked by my heartbeat, succumbing to
her flavor.

****

We
went to the rose gardens in Nouzha one afternoon. It was full of hoopoes and
torn paper. The flamboyant trees were on fire, quilts of flame thrown across
the leaves, almost too bright to look at. I’d brought a pocketful of little
apples and we ate those as we strolled along the flagged paths, tossing the
cores into the mulch. She bent to the roses, sampling colors.

“Yellow are nicest,” she said. “Caramel and sunlight.”

“You’ve been reading too many books.”

She gathered a handful of petals and held them to my nose and I
puffed a fragrant apricot flurry about our heads. I loved to hear her giggle,
fresh as a child’s. Couples sat on benches beneath the flamboyants, faded love
notes shuffling about their feet. We spied on their slow-motion struggles, a
boy’s arm sidling across the bench to descend gentle as a moth on the girl’s
shoulder, her careful flinching, his casual shifting so his knee nudged her
thigh, her drawn breath, the sudden emergence of her nipples against her
bodice, his elbow trying to stanch his hard-on, and meanwhile their faces
tilted up and out and they chattered aimlessly, while the boughs clashed behind
them and petals fell in drifts of flame about their feet.

“What happens to the couples?” she asked.

“You’re witnessing the high point of their petty lives. Soon they’ll
start bickering about the trousseau, about whether the water glasses should
have little gold lines around the rims or the faucets porcelain handles. Then
they’ll get married and instantly the boys will discover that the erections
which were ubiquitous as pariah dogs are suddenly rare as unicorns, the simper
they’d found so endearing reminds them of their Aunt Fagr, those thighs which
had seemed so butter-soft under the pressure of their knees are pitted and
rancid as old cottage cheese, and they’ll discover a latent talent for
judicious beatings, ostensibly to keep her in check, but really because it’s
the only thing that turns them on anymore.”

“You sound bitter.”

“Honest.”

“Are there no marriages that work?”

“Only thieves can have true marriages. Thieves, maybe whores and
desert explorers. I’d like you to meet some friends.”

We took the tram to Loran, walked two blocks toward the sea, then up
six flights to Koujour and Hala’s apartment. One of the twins, Zara, let us in,
curtsied, and went to fetch her mother. Hala came from the kitchen, adjusting
her hegab. “Balthazar, you’ve been lost.” She touched my shoulder, then laid
her fingers in my palm. She turned to Shireen. “Welcome. This is your house.”
Then back to me. “Koujour’s working. Shall I fetch him? You’ll stay for supper,
of course.”

“Let him work. We don’t want to bother you.”

“Balthazar! The children are always asking about you. I tell them
you’re too busy. Anyway, you sit.” She waved an arm to the chairs by the bay
windows. “I’ll make tea. Zara! Aziza!”

The girls came running, hands full of pictures they’d made and
special jewelry and new dolls. Zara sat on my lap and counted my fingers while
Aziza showed us the dance she was learning. She put a tin coronet in her hair
and held a scarf in her little fists and swung her head this way and that. Zara
bounced onto Shireen’s lap. “Are you going to marry Balthazar?” she asked.

“I’m just a friend.”

“Are you a thief?”

“No.”

“Balthazar’s a thief, Abba said so.”

“Yes, I know.”

She didn’t know how to touch a child, her hands on Zara’s shoulders
awkward as the boy’s in the rose garden. But Zara was a gentle tutor, squirming
into her embrace so she was obliged to cradle the girl’s body. She smoothed a
corner of Zara’s skirt. “How old are you?” she asked.

“I’m five, but I’m older than Aziza.”

“We’re the same,” said Aziza.

“Yes, but I’m older. Why are your eyes like that?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Have you ever seen a goat’s eyes?”

“In pictures.”

“Have you seen a frog’s eyes?”

“No.”

“Your eyes have a bit of gold like a frog’s eyes.”

“I see.”

Hala came in with the tea, hanks of mint soaking in the glasses.

“Are you ugly or beautiful?” Aziza asked Shireen.

“Aziza!” Hala scolded.

“Well, I can’t see her face.”

“It’s not something you ask.”

“I think she’s beautiful,” said Zara, “because her eyes are like a
frog’s eyes.”

“That’s not very nice.”

“I think it is. I like to look at frogs’ eyes. We find them by the
lake in the park,” she told Shireen.

Koujour came down the steps. “Who’s this?” he asked. He was drenched
in colors and patterns as if he’d been dipped in a vat of kaleidoscopes. One
eye hooped in marigold, peacock stripes on either cheek, a turquoise tika
between his brows. He’d been sketching in oil pastel on his forearms—geometric
palm trees and crocodiles, bark and hide textured by his ornamental scars.
Ignoring me, he stood in front of Shireen. She looked up at him, then at me.

“Ah, my friend,” Koujour hauled me up and embraced me. “Your
beautiful.”

“You see,” Zara whispered to her sister.

“What do they say?” he asked Shireen.

“Sorry?”

“The words, there.” He jabbed at her eyes.

“I can’t read them.”

“Balthazar will read. Tea? Yes. Good. Hala will make food.” He
embraced me again. “My friend.” He turned to Shireen, his hand on my shoulder.
“My friend,” he told her and she nodded.