The Book on Fire by Keith Miller

Author:Keith Miller
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Immanion Press
Published: 2013-03-11T00:00:00+00:00

VII. Winter Rain

If you’re going to stare and sleep, Alexandria in winter is a fine place to do it. Here you can wander along the corniche, laying your forehead on the cool lampposts while waves shatter on the stones. Here you can sit for hours over cups of coffee, smoking waterpipes. Here you can nurse a bottle of Omar Khayyam through a bereft evening at the Elite, watching passing djinns through misted windows.

I slept and slept, sometimes escaping daylight altogether, so the world seemed to have entered an age of darkness. I could not read. The book on my lap grew heavier with each turned page, as if I held a slab of wood, glass, iron. I laid it aside and simply stared at the ceiling. Some serial plumbing catastrophe had left concentric brown rings above my head, like the orbits of erratic moons. I followed those orbits for hours, listening to the trams groaning like whales as they ferried souls through the city.

I slept so well. Early winter in Alexandria is excellent sleeping weather, the air just chilly enough you don’t want to leave your cocoon. I’m not ordinarily a talented sleeper: too many books to read. A jangling bell or quarrel in the square and I’m instantly awake, salivating for cardamom coffee, a page of metal Bembo. But now the effort of dragging off the blankets and pulling on my robe and walking to the door and unlocking it and turning the handle and opening it and calling to Abdallah seemed inordinate labor, so I’d stare at the ceiling a while, then close my eyes. Sleep was always there, a blink away. While I slept, Abdallah brought sandwiches and fruit. I woke and ate a few bites, slept again, and the plates had been cleared. I told him to turn visitors away. I heard Nura gently chiding one evening, Koujour hassling him on another. I wouldn’t have minded a visit from either, but couldn’t pull free of my pillow.

Then one afternoon the proprietor came in demanding the rent. I asked him to hand me the trousers I’d slung over the back of my chair and my jacket from the wardrobe but dredged up a single guinea. Grudgingly, he granted me a week’s grace.

Astonishing what a week in bed can do to one’s appearance. I peered into the face of a mendicant or desert father: crushed, bearded, hair soft greasy spikes. I shaved, showered, drank four cups of coffee, and set out groggily over the rooftops.

That night, for the first time since the expedition with Shireen, which had yielded only her kiss—priceless, but not currency enough to buy a cup of coffee—I moved through the city with my satchel. Being horizontal for so long seemed to have affected my balance, because I slipped twice on the gables, once escaping a plunge to the street below only because my belt buckle caught in a rain gutter. Trying to jimmy the window of a house in Mahmoudiyya I first broke my lock pick, then tore a fingernail, then yanked the window open so violently I smashed the glass.

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