The Book on Fire (24 page)

As the roof caught, the air grew warm enough that we could take off
our sweaters. The restaurant was deserted—the waiters and diners had all gone
out carrying glasses of water to dash them with beautiful, futile gestures
against the walls. We knocked the snow off the wicker and sat cradling our
drinks and laughed. She was so lovely against the flames and the snow. Her hair
had begun to grow in, dark halo. I leaned over, tasted the cream and spices on
her lips. The fire was bright as morning, bright enough to read by.

She reached across and put a slim hand into my pocket and drew out a
book. Opening it, she began to read aloud, slowly, looking up at the end of
each paragraph.

****

What
book is that? you clamor. What book is she reading? And how did we escape?

Listen
...

****

This is how you burn a book: you light a match, you hold it to a
page. It’s not an uncommon activity: biblioclasms illumine history texts.

Choose a book you love, light a match. How pretty it looks in its
jacket of flame. Some books don’t burn well, you have to fan the pages, stir
them with a stick. Others seem hungry for the flames. They’ll keep you warm on
chilly winter nights. An average novel is good for ten minutes of toasty
fingers.

****

Imagine
a world of books. Imagine a planet entirely usurped by a single library, every
tree mashed into paper pulp, every animal slaughtered for leather bindings. And
imagine the inhabitants of that planet, librarians every one, pacing the
hallways with their feather dusters, snacking on dried rat and salted
silverfish. They have no time to read, the library is too enormous. And then
imagine, on that planet, a single match. A splinter of pine, a dab of
phosphorus, held between finger and thumb.

When you burn a page you’re releasing sunlight. Centuries of
sunlight cupped into leaves, trickling through twigs and boughs, stored like
mica in the wood, stacked in the wood like bright words waiting to be spoken.
Years of quiet toil on some forgotten hillside, beneath a shifting burden of
jackdaws and butterflies, toes among gemstones and earthworms, hair wet by
rain, dried in the wind. Much later: chainsaws, pulp vats, rollers. The benison
of the type. The laying on of hands. And then, one day, a match. And all the
days have led to this moment, are caught up in this moment of brightness.

Imagine the planet of books, parched, winds gusting through the
hallways, stirring the dry pages. And then imagine a single match, struck.
You’re an astronaut, peering from your astral shuttlecock, and you watch the
envelope of fire, like a new species of hot flower, a pretty plague of
marigold, flamboyant, bougainvillea, blowing itself out, blowing you into the
stars.

The deep space probe lands millennia hence on a landscape of ash,
afterburners spewing a soft tempest. The bemused explorers fill their hands
with ash, trying to trace from the gray fragments with their iridescent
filigree the genesis of this catastrophe.

****

This
is what happened: we knelt facing each other in the room of the books of the
doomed, the storm of enraged librarians approaching. And then I made a simple
gesture. I tipped my candle forward, touched the flame to a page. At first
nothing happened, but then I saw a flaw in the air at the base of the book, and
a blue thorn snuck over the text. All at once it was wholly alight. A single
burning book, like a lone blooming rose in a garden of buds. I stood back. The
next book crackled into flame. For a minute we watched, mesmerized, as the pile
caught. Fire is beautiful.

She stepped forward with a cry and took my hand. Laughing, we raced
through the library, hand in hand, while the fire dervished through the
chambers behind us. Out the back door, through the burial chambers. Across the
dark river, neglecting to pay in our haste. No more obols for the silent
jackal.

We exited through the lighthouse into the aftermath of celebration
and battle. Still holding hands, walking now, we stepped through broken glass
and pools of blood along the seafront. Before we reached the center of the
corniche, we heard the first sirens and soon saw the spines of flames and the
storm of underlit smoke. People were calling to each other from the balconies
and pointing to the library grounds. Citizens rushed by, carrying jam jars,
wine glasses, demitasses of water. We followed them through the streets to the
iron fence, beyond which the flames spouted from the library roof like the
wings of seraphim. The crowds gathered at the fence, holding their vessels. And
within the fence, the librarians stood, watching the fire. Some of their robes
were scorched, some held cloths to burns on arms and foreheads.

But then, as we watched, a figure appeared on the roof, veiled in
blue, dancing among the flames. For a moment she danced, alone. Then, with a
sound like a great exhalation, the roof collapsed, the flames curling inward,
and she was gone. The watching crowd echoed the sigh. Shireen clutched my arm.
I stroked her fingers. “This is the death she craved, the death she has been
seeking all these years. Her third and final death.”

“But all the books,” Shireen cried. “My family...”

“Yes. Let us weep for them.”

We turned back and walked, weeping, to the sea. She still gripped my
arm, but I could not have made it without her by my side. Midan Saad Zaghloul
was deserted. Far away I heard a tram approaching, the barest rustle, like
water trapped in the cochlea, swelling to a reef, a drum-roll.

“Here,” I said, as the tram mashed and shrieked into view, drenched
in sparks.

“Number 99,” said Shireen through her tears.

The tram driver was a girl in white, a circlet of jasmine in her
hair, both feet up on the console, a book in her hands. She winked at us and,
though we weren’t at a station, the tram stopped. We got on, the only
passengers. In front of the Trianon the tram curved left, crossed the corniche,
then rode the rails of moonlight, soundless now, across the sea, east and
north. Looking back, we saw the lighthouse topple silently into the bay, the
beacon glowing a moment beneath the water, then doused. Instead of sparks,
falling stars hissed about us into the waves. I turned toward her. I touched
the mole on her neck. She blinked, her pupils brimming. And I saw that her eyes
no longer harbored pages. The pupils were as round and dark as mine. But in her
hands was a book, a new book, a book I’d never seen before. She passed it to
me.

And what book is that? Ah, that is the book we’ve been striving for,
you and I, the book for which we’ve raveled labyrinths, crossed seas, the book
we’ve chased across rooftops, through dark alleyways, down spiral staircases,
the book of our desires, printed in purple blood. Turn the last page, in the
glow of falling stars, fireworks, flaming theaters. Close the cover. Light a
match.

Notes on the Text

For
this second edition of
The Book on Fire
, I have made a few small changes
in the text. Several minor errors have been corrected, and the first and
seventh chapters have each lost a few sentences.

The Arabic lines sprinkled throughout the text are from “The Ruins”
by Ibrahim Nagi, which was set to music and became Oum Koulsoum’s favorite
song. The translation below is by Keith Miller. Lines used in the text are
italicized.

O my heart, don’t ask where love is—it was an architecture of
imagination,

and has crumbled

Let us drink together on the ruins. Recite my sadness as long as my
tears fall.

(Chapter II–2)

How did this love become just a tale, one speech among tormented speeches?

I can’t forget you: you seduced me with your delicate mouth; with
your

hand, like a hand held out to a drowning man;

and with a light like that which comforts a traveler (where has that
light in

your eyes gone?).

My love, once a day I visited the tree of the bird of hope and sang
it my pain.

I still sing my pain, slowly as a beggar, wisely as a judge.

My yearning for you brands my ribcage; the moments are embers in my
blood.

(Chapter III)

Release my hands, give me freedom. I always give until I have

nothing.

Ah, your handcuffs hurt my wrists—why do I clutch them when they do

not hold me?

Unlike you, I always keep my promises. Why do I keep you captive
when I

have the whole world?

I can no longer see my lover. He is poised, reserved, majestic.

His steps are confident; he walks like a king. He is beautiful and
proud,

seductive as the perfume of a pleasant valley, and his eyes contain
sweet

dreams of evening.

Where are you now? In some lofty, light-filled place.

And I am love and a rambling heart: a comfortable embrace approaches

you.

This yearning will be a messenger between us; a drinking companion

handing us a wineglass.

Has love ever seen two such drunkards? We built so much from our
dreams!

We walked on a path filled with moonlight, and our joy leapt before
us.

Laughing like children, we ran till we overtook our shadows.

(Chapter VI)

The enchanted scent vanished, and we woke, devastated, into the day.

Our dreams had vanished with our friend the night.

The light was a tocsin, the daybreak conflagration.

We arrived at the real world and each went our own way.

(Chapter VII)

O insomniac, as soon as you fall asleep you remember your vow and
wake

with a start.

Each time the wound heals, memories reopen it.

Learn to forget, learn to purge yourself of memories.

My love, it’s a matter of faith and destiny. It’s out of our hands:
we were

created to be forlorn.

Maybe someday, after this time of separation, destiny will allow us
to meet.

If someday we met like strangers, acting as if we didn’t know each
other,

don’t claim that this sorrow was our desire: it was the desire of
destiny.

 
(Chapter II–1)

The line Zeinab
murmurs on the corniche wall in Chapter II: “These traces will not dissolve,
for they are woven by the north and south winds,” is from the “Muallaqa,” or
“Suspended Poem,” of Imru al-Qais.

In Chapter II, Abuna
Makarios is quoting Plotinus: “To any vision must be brought an eye adapted to
what is to be seen.”

The quatrain sung by
the passing boy at the end of Chapter III is from
The Rubáiyát of Omar
Khayyám
, translated by Edward FitzGerald.

The Italian lines at
the end of Chapter IV are from
Aida
by Giuseppe Verdi:

AIDA

There
... in virgin forests,

Perfumed
with flowers,

in
blissful ecstasy

we
shall forget the world.

RADAMÈS

How
could we forget the sky

that
first witnessed our love?

AIDA

Beneath
my sky love will

be
granted us more freely;

there
in the same temple

we
will have the same gods,

Let
us flee! Let us flee ...

AIDA
and RADAMÈS

Come
with me, together we will flee

from
this land of sorrow.

Come
with me, I love you, I love you!

Love
shall be our guide.

The line Zeinab speaks
in Chapter VIII: “I have cast fire upon the world, and see, I am guarding it
till it blazes,” is from the Gospel of Thomas, one of the Nag Hammadi texts,
translated by Thomas O. Lambdin.

The Greek lines Zeinab
speaks at the end of Chapter VIII are from “The City” by Constantin Cavafy. The
translation below is by Lawrence Durrell.

There’s no new land, my friend, no

New sea; for the city will follow you,

In the same streets you’ll wander endlessly
...

City of Bones

At
midnight on New Year’s Eve, Alexandrians move to their balconies and cast out
old crockery, dolls, toys—anything they no longer need. For a few minutes,
there is a tremendous cacophony, and then they retreat to their apartments to
make merry for the rest of the night.

Early one New Year’s morning, I walked to central Alexandria, and
found it emptied of people. The streets were littered with broken pottery and
glass. I felt as though I was the last survivor of some catastrophe, and that
feeling was the germ of this story.

This story is not intended to serve as a coda to
The Book on Fire
. It is, rather, a companion piece.

He
arrived in the city at nightfall, stepping out of the train into the echoing
station, its great archways surmounted by clocks, each stalled at a different
time. No other passengers disembarked and the station seemed entirely deserted.
It was cooler here—his breath plumed out and he drew his coat closer. The train
pulled away. He stood beside the tracks till its gnash faded, then walked down
the long pier toward the paler arch of the entrance, footsteps throbbing
against the walls. He had expected some odor, but there was only a whiff of
salt and juniper leaves.

Outside the station the sand lay against the steps. He stood beneath
a stopped clock and looked across the landscape of deserted streets and dark
windows. Then he set forth into the empty city. Palm trees rustled like huge
disheveled birds on either side. Above them, the windows were fanged and rayed
with broken glass and broken glass lay in the street, among the drifts of paper
and the wildflowers grouting the cobbles. The sand lay thickly, smoothly
against all edges, softening curbs, submerging glass and broken bricks and
bones, the bones that lay in the street and glimmered, pale globes and stems,
in the darkened rooms. The bones had gathered more thickly in places—in certain
corners, around certain palm trees, the spaces among them as interesting as the
shapes themselves. The buildings rose on either side, great raw stone columns
and domes, ornately knobbed and ribbed, the bashed windows like the broken
lenses of spectacles. Webs and wings of char fanned from some windows and
doorways. The sky seemed filled with smoke, though there was no scent of
conflagration and only a little ash scurried on the sand.

It was all so changed. In the absence of eyes and hips and swinging
arms and laughing mouths and footsteps his gaze floated upward, along the
broken columns, tapping each star of darkness, and saw, as if for the first
time, the knuckles and kneecaps of stone, stone bent into beautiful shapes, and
the iron woven and welded before the dark doorways. How quickly every surface
accumulated sand. Even the chains, even the leaves. His footsteps marked the
soft sand with edges and patterns starkly precise in all this softness. But,
bending to a footprint, he could see its fragile lip already crumbling under
the urging of the breeze.

As he crested the road past the old cinema, he saw the failing light
on the square of sea at the base of the road, framed between walls and the arm
of the corniche. The ruined lighthouse was bulky, squarish, ragged, like a torn
postage stamp sealing the pale sea to the paler sky.

He stood a while in the center of the crossroads, looking down at
the patch of rustling sea, leaves scurrying across his shoes. Gulls cried. He
started down the slope. Through all the streets, like a tidemark from waist
height to head height, was the palimpsest of graffiti and signs and posters,
the letters curling into each other, blotting and erasing in their excess,
their zeal of communication. The letters and fragments of letters, dark on
light, light on dark, in the dozen languages of the city, made a long tattered
ribbon winding through every street, now denser, now thinner, the coiled,
knobbed, slender shapes congruent with the eroding pillars, the shapes of
sand-blown glass and bone. In the dusk, descending to the sea, he did not read
the words. Underfoot the surf of charred paper rustled.

In the midan, the palms beat their leaves together with a thin,
almost metallic clash. The fountain was dry and filled with sand and bones, and
bones lay propped against the base of the statue like diminutive walking
sticks. The lily garden had collapsed to stubble. He walked around the statue
and down the steps and across to the corniche and stood with his thighs against
the stone. The sea was unchanged, so the landscape he had passed through seemed
a strange dream, and he imagined turning and witnessing the city grind, then
whirl into bustle and color, like a record player churning into life, he
imagined turning into the formal rainbow of flags coiling and striking and the
shuddering pompoms on the bridles of horses and the blown cotton against the
bodies of girls and the castanets of hooves and the bells and calls and the
clapped palms of quarrels, laments on gargling radios and the brushing of soles
on cobblestones and the wailing of children craving balloons. These sights and
sounds rose in a single wave against the corniche wall, sprinkling his face and
subsiding again into the sidewalks and the sea and he was left blotting his
brow and sensing the silence curling in on his nape, huge and palpable. But,
turning, he saw there was nothing to fear. An empty midan. Palm trees, statue,
bones.

He had not thought beyond this, beyond walking down to the sea.
Placing his palms on the stone, he eased up backward onto the corniche wall and
sat looking into the city. No moon yet, only the stars shivering in their
sockets.

After a while, he lifted his wrist to his face to read his watch,
then sniffed, the laughter of a solitary man, and unhooked the strap and
dropped the watch into the sea. What else did he no longer require?

He dropped to the cobblestones, brushed himself off, and walked
across to the hotel. One of the massive earthenware pots beside the steps was
smashed into a hillock of shards and earth and dry roots, but in the other, an
ornamental fig still brandished a few green leaves, though the pot at its base
was filled with their dry, warped companions. The door no longer turned, but
the panes had been kicked in. He stepped through into the darkness of the
foyer, soles crunching on glass and small bones. Here, in this trapped air, mild
scents rose to his nostrils. Dust and leather and, beneath them, traces of the
familiar floor polish and varnish. He could see nothing save the rectangles of
windows facing the sea. Stumbling on bones, he felt his way past the
paternoster to the staircase, then clutched the banister to guide himself up
the steps. Even here, on the carpeted stairs, bones lay. He felt for them with
his shoe-toes, nudged them out of the way. Some clattered down onto other
bones, the echoes swallowed by the carpets and lift shaft. On the landing of
the second floor, he realized he had walked past the first floor. There seemed
no reason to stop. He continued up, on steps less cluttered with debris, and on
the fifth landing felt his way door to door to the end of the hall, and entered
the corner room. A shred of curtain still lingered against the light from the
balcony, shifting like a hung spirit. His eyes had widened to the dark on his
passage up the stairs and he took in the wardrobe, one door awry, the triangles
of mirror on the carpet, the rucked clothes, bones within them, a skull on the
pillow.

He moved onto the balcony and looked down across the bay, across the
dark swathe of city, pale flowers of surf blooming along its ruffled edge. He
kicked the wicker chair to dislodge its pelt of dust and sat looking down at
the sea. In his memory the sea at night was dark. Now, against the dark land,
it was full of light. The waves on the corniche seemed very loud. He wished
he’d brought an apple or tangerine, even a cigarette, but he had arrived
empty-handed. After a while he went inside and removed the bones from the bed,
placing them against a wall, then smoothed the sheets, plumped the pillow. He
lay a long time staring at the vague tracings of light on the ceiling,
listening to the waves.

****

In the
morning the room was soaked in light. The shadows dispersed, he could see how
faded the cloth and furniture had become, shades of dun. The wardrobe scoured
pale as driftwood by light and sand, tatters of cloth snagged on hangers within
it. The carpet, save for his footprints, was pale with dust, and the shred of
curtain was ivory now, sketched with the faintest tracings, like a page of
manuscript submerged a long time in water. Sitting, he saw he’d ripped the
bedclothes to ribbons in his sleep. The mattress beneath was stained, a brown
archipelago strung along its center. He got up and moved to the balcony. The
waves beat against the shore of the empty city, twigs of light stacked to the
horizon. The daylight made the city more empty somehow, lack of movement
clarifying the lines and angles. Sections of the city had been on fire. Across
some of the facades were the wings of smoke shadow. Stones and bones lay in all
the streets. Scraps of paper stirred fitfully, like fallen butterflies.

He felt lightheaded and realized he had not eaten since the morning
of the day before. He walked down through the empty hotel, in the gloom of the
stairwell, nudging the bones to the outside to leave a clear path along the
inner banister. In the restaurant, its huge windows smashed open to the sea,
plates still lay on tables, bones on some, the shapes softened and cohered by
dust. On one a skull stood, looking out from grottoes of shadow onto the moving
sea.

The only light in the kitchens came from the panes in the doors and
a row of high square windows webbed with dust. Here too were bones, on the
cluttered counters, in the great sinks. Copper-bottomed pans and enormous
knives lay on the tiles. Spiders had woven their nests among upright spoon
handles, but the webs seemed deserted. Here and there were clots of matter that
might once have been fruit or bread, long since shriveled and dusted over.

In the great pantries at the far end of the kitchen, he rummaged
blind, among crates and barrels and bones, until he turned up a jar of olives,
a wheel of cheese, and a carton of rusks. Plucking a knife from the heap on the
floor, he carried his gleanings back to the dining room. He dragged a
tablecloth onto the floor, crockery smashing among arm bones, raising a djinn
of dust that blossomed enormous, window-sashes blocking out chambers of light,
then was sucked away into the hotel. He thought he could still hear the echoes
of falling bones, pattering room to room. He cut a wedge of cheese, ripped the
cellophane off the rusks with his teeth, opened the jar of olives, relishing
the thin hiss of the cellophane, the pop of the lid. He nibbled an olive. The
window at his side was entirely gone and he put his feet up on the sill. When a
large wave battered the corniche, he could feel the spray against his face.

****

He
walked up to the street of booksellers, which had been walled with spines,
titles stacked higher than his head. Often in this city, he felt he was
navigating a gulch, its sides intricately eroded, and this conceit had seemed
even more apt on this street, the books accumulated over millennia, the lower
volumes crushed, compressed, those at eyelevel fresher. The booksellers had
cried their wares, books in their hands like semaphores, reciting tantalizing
phrases, moments of plot, fanning the books to show the state of the pages. The
books were gone, the spaces where they had stood sanded over, bones there. He
imagined the wind rushing down this corridor, between empty mosques and
coffeehouses, dragging at the books, tearing out brittle pages and whirling
them toward the sea, the vacant bindings tumbling after. He found a single
page, trapped beneath a skull, so discolored and buckled he could not make out
a word. The paper disintegrated when he tried to pluck it forth, so he left it
pinned under bone.

****

Next
morning, wandering the streets behind the great central gardens, beneath the
curly ledges of balconies, he came across the museum and walked up the broad
flight of steps, past the ticket counter, a wad of tickets under a paperweight
of finger bones. As he moved through the rooms, what struck him was the sadness
of the eyes. Eyes of men and angels and winged bulls, of marble and lapis
lazuli and egg tempera and mosaic, painted on wood and pottery, all gazing sadly,
sightlessly, past each other at the peeling walls. What was this sad truth they
at last understood? He bent to the plaques beneath the sculptures and icons,
but they were illegible. Some of these faces were those of rulers, others were
gods, or lesser deities, the hierarchies muddled by time and ignorance, so
archangels spread their wings beside cobra-headed gods and saints saluted the
goddess of the night sky. He imagined praying to these gods, these saints. He
imagined the prayer that might enter those deaf ears. What common language did
they speak, these gods whose names had vanished under water stain? There were
rooms and rooms of them, corridors lined with sad eyes, and when a turn brought
him onto a terrace, he saw that there were many more levels, and in every
window he saw the silhouettes of sad faces. He felt comforted by them, by their
silent sadness, by their anonymity, now, to him. Perhaps this was prayer, then,
to pass beneath their still gaze and acknowledge their sadness and the ruin of their
faces. Once he had known the names of some, but though sounds surfaced as he
walked past certain figures, he let them sink again, subsiding below meaning.