The Book on Fire (23 page)

Within the lens Karim cradled, I could see, tiny and topsy-turvy,
the strange pietà we formed, beneath the uncertain light, within the skeletal
walls. Its corpse already ashes, reduced to this remnant. In the dark glass, a
figure detached itself from the group. I looked up. Abuna Makarios had moved to
the sanctuary. I heard his whispering as he readied his vestments and prepared
the tools of the Eucharist, though the chalice was dented, the platen gouged,
the prospherine scorched. He placed the chalice within the ark, the spoon on
top, and spread the prospherine over all. Then he set the paten on the altar
and folded a cloth upon it.

The Orthodox liturgy, as Makarios has explained it to me, is not
adjunct to the world, but is in fact its foundation, the still point in a
whirling, burning universe. It is the continual renewal of the world, in an
elaborate architecture of smoke and song, texture and text, culminating in
transformation: the mystery of mysteries: bread to flesh, wine to blood. And
from this foundation spring the arabesques: gnosticism and blasphemy, sins and
flames. Someday perhaps the liturgy will become entirely surface—tone and clash
and smoke, the sense of the words veiled—and still it will be performed, and
still the magic will occur, renewing and sustaining the world.

The ceremony began with the whispered invocations, inaudible.
Makarios washed his hands thrice with stylized gestures, then paced around the
altar, muttering, casting crosses over every surface. He circled with the
bread, then with the bottle of wine and a candle in upraised fists. At last he
turned to us, spread his palms, and bellowed the opening words: “Let us give thanks!”

Normally the liturgy in the Kanisa Prometheus was background, a
soundtrack to our lies and chess games. But on this night Makarios corralled us
into participation, handing an icon to Nura, the censer to Zeinab, cymbals to
Koujour, a box of incense to me. Only Karim remained in his seat, his mouth a
cut, his eyes dead. We marched around the hillock of frescoed rubble, our
ruckus joining the battle noises and lamentations throughout the quarter.

Makarios invited me to read the Gospel passage, from a book more
than half destroyed. The hand-drawn, illuminated letters slowed my eye and
voice as I stood at the lectern, making my speech unwittingly ponderous. I took
in, along with the words, the decorations, the tiny sketches of winged beasts
and crosses, the wavy margins of burnt paper, and the stuttering of my eye
entered my speech.

During the litany for the dead, Makarios added to the censer a
spoonful from the box I carried, speaking Amir’s name as he did so, and we wept
as the fragrance enveloped us.

He welcomed us to the altar while he prepared the magic. From this
moment, the instant of the transubstantiation, he would not look back. He must
stand facing the altar, through bombs and gunfire, through earthquake and
conflagration, till the ceremony was complete. He swung the censer to the
directions, then removed the prospherine and waved it over our heads, the
rattles shivering. Lifting the loaf, he broke it into unequal parts. He traced
the edge of the cup with his finger and made the sign of the cross within it,
then broke the bread into fragments.

As we filed past, he placed the bread on our tongues, spooned wine
into our mouths. And whether because of the afterimages of the scarred city, or
the emotion of Amir’s death, or because at last I was fully participating, I
wept again.

When we had partaken, we returned to our seats while Makarios
swallowed the rest of the blood and scraped up the last of the lamb. Finally,
laughing, he turned from the altar, holding a basin, and splashed holy water
across us, and we raised our hands and laughed with him. Then, palms
outstretched as they had been at the beginning, he said the benediction, ending
with the words: “Go in peace.” And I realized, in the stillness, that this
exhortation was the simple truth: the violence had abated during the liturgy,
the guns had ceased, and the day dawned with doves and hoopoes.

The thieves left in the new calm, Nura and Koujour supporting Karim,
who was snarling and raging. Makarios went to sleep on the altar, the shredded
curtain his counterpane. And at last Zeinab and I sat in the ruined church
facing each other once more.

“You started this, Zeinab. Where will it end?”

“Who knows? The path of fire is unpredictable. That’s why we love
it. You light a match, sit back, and watch the fireworks.”

“But Amir is dead.”

“So am I. Most of the citizens of Alexandria are. Anyway, it was his
choice.”

“It broke Karim’s heart.”

“Karim has his djinn, at last. Even if he has to create him, summon
him by rubbing the lens of his spectacles. And there is this: Amir has finally
released his secrets. They are settling over the city. Who knows what flowers
will sprout?”

We left the church together, through the aftermath of violence,
sidestepping corpses, splashing through pools of blood, and she stayed with me
as I scrambled to the rooftops, lowered myself onto my balcony. We stood side
by side, looking out over Alexandria. The sky was occluded, underlit by fires
here and there in the city.

“It’s the end of the world,” I said. “What do you talk about at the
end of the world?”

“You don’t. You go to your bed, you go to sleep.”

“And when you wake up?”

“Everything will be changed.”

“You sound so certain.”

“The city has burned before,” she said. “The foundations of these
houses are words and ashes, like a book whose writing has been traced over,
like a tattoo renewed. The phoenix has its rebirth here. Few know this: the
tamarisk it nests in stands in no Arabian desert, but on the outskirts of Alexandria, in a hinterland of rubbish, among bones and fallen tram wires and broken glass.
And few know, as well, how the phoenix desires the fire, craves the fire like a
lover, seeks it like an embrace, and clasps it to her breast. Her plumage is
blue, her wings are tattered, she is flying across Alexandria with the seagulls
and doves and hoopoes, searching the tree that will char her bones.”

“What about your dream? The mountain town, the tram across the sea.”

“The tram exists, yes, number 99. It exists as the phoenix exists,
its circuit as lengthy and elliptical as that of a comet. It rattles and spits
among the stars, celestial streetcar, joining the dots of constellations,
ferrying angels on their errands, till it returns at last to Alexandria,
touching down among fish heads and spent needles and stray cats. Hoping to pick
up a passenger or two. But I’ll never abandon Alexandria. I am tethered to this
city, she holds my bones.

I watched the smoke a
while, then turned, but she was gone. The blue niqab lay across the balustrade.
How many veils did she possess? I realized that I was exhausted: I had been
awake for a day and a night. I stumbled to my bed, kicked off my shoes, and
slept.

IX. Tram 99

I woke at twilight, into a
strange calm. The scent of gunsmoke still in the air. “Everything will be
changed.” Zeinab’s voice still soughed in my ears.

I felt like reading. I called for coffee, then entered the wardrobe.
Lighting a candle, I crossed to the wall where my shelf stood. I raised my
hand, then sank to my knees, my heart emptying itself into my head, because my
shelf was bare. The wall behind it was slightly paler than the surrounding
paint: the jagged ghost of my library. And at last, kneeling before my barren
bookshelf with my face in my hands, I began to guess the awful conspiracy.

Suddenly furious, I slammed out of the wardrobe. Seizing the niqab
Zeinab had left behind, I leaped over the balcony. In the shadow of a doorway,
I pulled on the garment, like pulling on her smoky skin, then followed the
curve of the corniche westward to the lighthouse, seeing nothing but my bare
shelf. I entered through the octagonal aperture, lit a candle and began my
descent. The jackal in the prow of the ferryboat looked into my eyes, accepted
my obol. I opened the sarcophagus, descended the steps.

A librarian rose as I entered. “Zeinab...?” she faltered. I raised
my hand and she backed away. I forced myself to walk slowly for a couple of
chambers, then began to scamper, thief’s soles silent on the carpets and
leveled stone, choosing turnings at random till I was deep within the library.
When I paused for breath, I found myself in a room of books about
bibliodelirium, cautionary tales concerning readers who became so obsessed with
particular volumes they abandoned their homes, their families, their countries,
in many cases their selves, to wander the world like plaintive ghosts, crying
the title of their beloved. Suggested cures included pomegranate juice, mud
baths, and bloodletting, but most authorities admitted such remedies were
seldom efficacious. I waited, listening for some minutes till I was certain no
footsteps echoed after me like ellipses, and then began my search for the
youngest librarian.

She was not in the room of the owl-colored armchair where I’d first
spied upon her, nor was she in her bedchamber, nor in the great central reading
room. I passed through the rooms of books she’d loved, touched each volume as
if it might give me some clue, and indeed, reading those titles again was like
taking hold of a piece of her, like gripping a finger or an earlobe. The want rose
like grief in my gorge.

At last, as if by chance, I found myself once again in the chambers
through which she’d fled the day we’d first spoken. And now my thief’s nostrils
picked up the trace of cinnamon spiked with a single clove. I found her in the room
of the books of the doomed. She knelt on the floor in her blue niqab, head
bowed. Around her were scattered my books, the books from my shelf, returned at
last to their domain. Some were open, some face-down, as if they’d been flung
aside. She looked as if she might be praying over the candle in her hands. When
she raised her face, I could see she’d been crying. “Who are you?” she asked.

I lifted the veil.

“No,” she said. “No. I told you not to come.”

“You stole my books.”

“I didn’t know what else to do. It took me all night. I got the last
books out just as dawn broke, so I heard the beginning of the feast. I’m
exhausted.”

“Zeinab put you up to this.”

“No. Well ...”

I knelt in front of her, the books between us. “What did she whisper
to you, that night?”

“Just a date: the eve of the double feast, she said. She told me
you’d be out of your rooms. I didn’t understand what she was saying. Then I
came back down and couldn’t find anything to read. I wandered along the
shelves, looking for books. Miles and miles I walked, deep under the sea,
looking for a book. But all I could think about were the books on your shelf,
the books I’d read aboveground.”

“So you stole them.”

“I didn’t know what else to do.”

“The city is burning above our heads, do you know that? She set the
city alight to lure me away from my books.”

She said nothing, just laid a hand gingerly on one of the spread
pages.

“They’re back where they came from,” I said.

“What?”

“Haven’t you guessed? These are the books she passed out of the
bars, how many lifetimes ago. She’s been waiting all this time, to get them
back underground. But she needed our hands.”

“Why does she want them underground?”

“I think she’d say the day’s not over; the story’s not finished
yet.”

“Balthazar—”

“Listen,” I said. “No, listen, I have to get this out. This is what
I wanted to say. I love to watch you read, I love the way your fingers touch
the pages, I love the way your eyes move behind your glasses. I love your voice
when you read aloud. At last I’ve learned who I am. I’m a thief. I’m here to
steal. Come with me ...”

“It’s too late. Have you forgotten?”

“That you can kill me? No. And how many nights have I lain awake
desiring that death. Listen Shireen, I can’t read. The books have lost their
savor. You’ve unmade me, unbound me.”

“It’s too late,” she said, and suddenly placed her hands over her
eyes. “Oh, what have I done?”

“It’s not too late.”

But she held up a hand. In the sudden stillness I heard the rushing,
like an incoming tsunami, of a thousand bare feet, of wind in robes.

“Would you rather be torn apart by a thousand librarians? Or will
you receive my hand? Come, Balthazar. I’m not afraid anymore. Such a long
journey you’ve taken toward this touch.” She lifted her arm. We knelt facing
each other in that terrible room, while the sound of footsteps swelled like
rain.

****

The
tram touched down on iron rails at dawn, far to the north and east, and
immediately veered inland, upward. Peering out the windows, we could see the
mountains above us, turbaned in rainstorms. We wound up through the zones of
euphorbia and eucalyptus, jacaranda and bougainvillea. Lovebirds beat among the
boughs like escaped illuminations. Then we were among pines. The air grew
cooler and we could see our breath. We pressed together on the wooden bench and
I took off my jacket and put it around our shoulders. As the grade steepened
the tram slowed, tottering through tunnels, racket battering off the walls. We
passed a little station, flowerboxes crammed with geraniums hanging from the
eaves, the mustachioed stationmaster with his feet up, smoking. Rich whiff of
hashish. The tram was moving so slowly he was able to hand earthenware cups of
milky coffee through the window. We shouted our thanks and sipped the sweet
coffee as the tram teetered over gorges, on delicate stone arches, the curly
ice-green rivers hurtling below.

One hundred and thirty-six tunnels to the mountain town. The sky had
cleared by the time we pulled into the station. It was deserted. We got out and
thanked the driver and she touched a finger to her jasmine circlet and tinkled
the bell and the tram pulled out, empty, heading farther up, into the frozen
landscapes, among polar bears and icebergs, and then, I imagined, on rails of
northern lights, deeper, higher, past the moon and the planets, into the zones
of galaxies and outer space, gathering speed, mauling time in its celestial
circuit.

We took a room at the hotel behind the station. Polished concrete
floors, dusty paintings in the hallways, at which I peered as we walked up the
four flights. Goddesses with a dozen breasts, a dozen hands clutching roses,
flames, hearts, books. We had to pause for breath on every landing. My fingers
shook so I could hardly match the brass key to the hole, but inside, the fire
was already lit on the hearth. We leaned our elbows on the sill, noses pressed
to the cold glass, looking down past angled tin roofs through gulfs of blue.
Hills, cities, seas, all lost under leagues of oxygen.

The bed took up half the room, the eiderdown turned back on the
linen. On a scroll-top table was a box of watercolors, and bone folders,
burnishers, brushes, a book of gold leaf. She turned to me. Slowly, I undressed
her, and laid her, brown as a stain, on the white sheets. I imagined placing a
color on her skin. I loaded a sable brush with alizarin crimson, moved to the
bed, and lassoed her navel with a tangerine
a
. She squirmed under the
brush stroke. I dragged the desk over to the bed and calligraphed a rainbow
alphabet across her body, pale
o
circling a nipple, burgundy
b
across the ribs, summer-sky
k
at her heart, lemon
m
and azure
n
on her eyelids. I slashed a liquorice
z
on her left sole, and she cried
out. Then I took the booklet of gold leaf and set about gilding my lover,
laying down the sizing, tamping the thin gold with a wooden spoon, teasing away
the excess. I led her to the mirror. Drenched in mountain light, she was an
illuminated goddess, hands full of nascent poetry.

We made love in a welter of color and a nimbus of breath, letters
offsetting onto the linen, onto my lips, gold in the blood on her thighs. The
windows misted over.

In the enormous bathroom we bathed together, limbs dovetailed in a
tub the size of a dory. I sponged her skin to cinnamon. Gold leaf in the
lavender foam. We dried ourselves on the enormous towels, leaving puddles on
the polished concrete, then scampered naked back down the hall to the room. The
veil cast by our lovemaking had diminished to a silver fringe about the small
panes.

We put our clothes on, and the thick sweaters provided by the hotel,
and went out onto the promenade. It was full of monkeys and balloons and boys
playing cricket and children flying kites. To the north the peaks stood, ripped
white against the voluptuous, astonishing blue. From genial vendors I bought
her a red balloon and a chain of marigolds, a cup of tomato soup and six
sandalwood bangles, and we watched the kite-flyers battle. The kites dipped to
each other and the strings bent around each other, and then one would suddenly
lose its energy and waver gently into the valley while the victor flickered
higher.

We strolled down to the lookout point. I bought coffee and pastries
and we sat on a bench looking at the mountains, colossal and silent, intricate
with glaciers and crevasses, speckled with screes. Snow leopards and frozen
climbers folded into their slopes. It was very cold. We cradled the coffee cups
in our palms, sipping slowly, then tossed the cups onto the heap of shards
below the railing.

I bought more pastries and we walked back up among pony riders, dancing
children with their kites and balloons, and strolling lovers, flowers in their
hair. Clouds had smothered the mountains, lightning bristling within them. By
the time we reached the peak of the ridge the first clouds had swung across the
town. There was a moment of triple rainbows before the rain hit. Hurriedly we
bought umbrellas, while the wind smacked our clothes about us. The ridge was
deserted except for the kite-flyers, who could not let go of the strings.
Several, in pursuit of other kites, toppled over the edge and were carried off
into the storm or plunged down among the trees. Lightning roared down
kite-strings, reducing children to little heaps of smoking ash, which their
companions scattered as they ran. Then, as quickly as it had come, the storm
blew over and the temperature dropped. The rain turned to snow. Sudden hush.
The ash of kites and children was soon subsumed under a white coverlet.

We went into the restaurant on the first floor of the hotel and took
a table by the window. Snowflakes fell against the blue pane with small silent
blows. She made petals from the melting wax of the candle. We ordered a
complicated dish of white cheese in a sauce of almonds and coconut and cream.
White wine. After the meal we ordered hot chocolate. It came in huge blue mugs,
capped with cream, foxed with nutmeg. The snow had stopped falling. We carried
our drinks onto the terrace and looked down over the town. The streets were
constellations of stars. Fireworks boomed and crackled, dyeing the snow suddenly
ruby and saffron, illuminating the rooftops. As I bent to kiss her we heard
shouting to our right, then the noise of shattering glass. Flames licked from
the windows of the theater, where they were performing, on the longest night of
the year,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. More windows burst as we watched
and we saw a frantic shadow pantomime against the flames. Then the actors came
tumbling out through a back exit. Cobweb, Peaseblossom, Moth, and Mustardseed
on fire, rolling about in the snow to quench their flaming wings. Puck, bright
as a girandole, cartwheeling down to the lookout point, shouting: “If we
shadows have offended ...”