Free The Book on Fire by Keith Miller Page B

munching, clothes stuck to my skin, feet sloshing in
my shoes, glasses speckled so the scene fragmented into kaleidoscopes. I handed
my paperback to a beggar.
    ****
    Back
in my rooms, I ran a hot bath and soaked a long time. When I got out, the rain
had stopped. The streets were a dewy spider web. I sat on the balcony sipping
wine, watching the crowds on the corniche and listening to the Ramadhan carols.
    ****
    I woke
into an afternoon quieter than usual, as the fasting households slept away the
hours till sundown and the recitations of theholy bookcoiled
like smoke from the minarets. I fasted as well, watching the preparations for
the iftar, the great pallets of bread on the heads of bicyclists, the basins of
kosa and mahshi, the saucers of dates. For an hour, the streets bubbled with
quarrels as citizens rushed homeward and then, as the sun dipped to the water,
miraculously emptied, as if all the people had been poured out. There were
several minutes of hush, the whole city suspended. I could see the diners
sitting on mats outdoors, hands poised over dates, and then the sea swallowed
the last droplet of sun, igniting the prayer calls, and hands went to mouths.
The hawkers of tamarind juice, trundling tuns of sloshing mahogany liquid,
began to clash their plates together. I ordered coffee.
    That evening, when I finally returned to the thieves’ church, there
was a moment of silence after Abuna Makarios opened the door, then cacophony as
the thieves rose from their chairs and crowded round. “We thought you’d
drowned!” they cried. “We searched the hospitals and prisons and the morgue.
You’re so pale, so thin. Where have you been?”
    “Might there be an arak on offer for someone returned from the
dead?” I inquired, and they scrambled to fetch me a glass, but I realized, as I
settled into an armchair and looked around at their eager faces, that I could
not reveal my adventure, imagining a sudden dash for the lighthouse and the
plundering of those silent graves.
    “Did you leave Alexandria?” Karim asked.
    “I did and I did not. I was farther than a world away, yet we
probably passed within a stone’s throw of each other at times. Would anyone
care for a game of chess?”
    Though they whined, I would not release my secret. That evening,
Makarios tried to get me drunk and Koujour sulked. Nura tried to bribe me with
a syringe and Karim took me aside and feigned distress at the termination of
our friendship, but I smiled and nodded and would not talk. Only Zeinab said
nothing. She watched me, but I could not read her eyes. She was fasting a
whore’s fast, thief’s fast, all night, waiting to sip her karkadeh and eat a
date at dawn.
    We went out walking, in the gorgeous night, with the revelers. She
gestured to the minarets. “Do you see the angels dancing? All night long.”
    I saw nothing but passing clouds and shadows, but didn’t wish to
tamper with her visions. “Where do they sleep in the day?” I asked.
    “There are secret pockets in this city, where they read the burning
books.”
    “What are you reading?”
    “It’s the month of the angel’s book. You’ve read it, or pieces of
it, or you’ve heard pieces of it, from minarets, on the radio, but I have
swallowed it whole. To have swallowed the book and sung it out on a winter’s
night in Alexandria is to be burned alive. I weep as I sing, and it seems I’m
not singing but being sung by the angel’s song.”
    “And then you burn it?”
    “No need.”
    As we walked through the festive streets, I pondered holy books, the
books delivered to us by angels. In deserts. Why do angels love deserts so? Is
it the spareness that attracts them, the horizons? The loneliness? In how many
caves, on how many rocks are angels waiting, their voices full of poetry as the
wind is full of light. All we have to do is encounter them, it would seem, and
their voices are released into our ears. If our ears are unstoppered.
    And perhaps this is the crux: perhaps