by Tom McCarthy
“We should head back to town,” says Petrou. “When’s the next…?” He runs his finger down the tram timetable. “Would you look at this?” he clucks exasperatedly. “The French and English parts list different times!”
On the way back they pass the Royal Tombs.
“That’s the Soma,” Petrou says. “Where Alexander’s body’s meant to lie.”
“Meant to?”
“It’s almost certain that it never made it here. The Ptolemies liked to believe it did, and had themselves buried on this spot. The prophet Daniel too: his mosque’s above the founder’s vault. And there’s a little Isis temple here as well, just where the Rue Rosette and the Rue Nebi Daniel meet: a whole funerary complex-at the heart of which, unfortunately, there seems to lie a void.”
His eyes have been fixed on Serge’s chest while he’s been speaking, on the spot that he asped earlier. They remain there while the tram pulls up at a stop Serge recognises as his own, and move with it while Serge steps down onto the pavement, saying good night.
He spends his evenings at home, trying to write his report. The Corona ’s set up at a writing desk beside the window; on the wall above it, Serge has pinned a map of Alexandria and its surrounding region. He’s not sure what to write: the Ministry already know which wires have been torn down, which installations damaged; his brief’s the “different angle,” the “wider perspective.” He glances at the map from time to time, hoping for inspiration, glazing his eyes and moving his head from side to side in an attempt to set its lines, ridges and contours into some kind of motion that in turn might furnish him with what the RFC used to call a “narrative”-but these always seem to sense him coming in advance, and lock themselves in frozen immobility. The Nile ’s mouth, around Rosetta, forms the shape of a mons veneris. Running his gaze across its inverted triangle back towards the city’s more rounded sphere one evening, he passes the dot denoting Ramleh, and recalls the snipped-up snakes. “Wreaking sacrilege,” Ferguson said: he was probably right. Closing his eyes, Serge tries to hear what chants, or curses, might have been intoned around the totem posts embodied by the poles, but manages only to pick up game-moves whispered down Ting-a-Ling wires strung up over walls and hedges.
Many attacks on communications,
he starts to type,
seem to be carried out in areas of no military import, and with little practical end. The inconvenience caused to the overall machinery of empire by the interruption of the chain of orders between (for example) a country club and its caterers is negligible. From a symbolic point of view, however…
He pauses; it strikes him that he should have used the word “perspective” instead of “point of view.” He pulls the paper out-all five sheets of it: the three white ones and the two carbon sheets between them-winds a new stack into the machine, and starts again:
A majority of attacks on communication networks seem to be perpetrated in areas…
His knuckle’s got a carbon-smudge on it; he wipes this off against his wrist-and, as he does, begins to ponder the issue of Widsun’s appendix, his prolegomena. Glancing at Rosetta again as he once more replaces the pages, he types out in block capitals:
PUDENDUM ADDENDUM
Then he leaves, heading for the Iris Cinema. He goes there often: he’s seen the film currently showing there, Love’s Madness, three times. There are bars in his neighbourhood, but he doesn’t feel an urge to visit them: he likes the rhythm of typing, watching a film whose every move he knows and can anticipate, returning home, re-reading the pages he wrote earlier, then typing more. Sometimes he just sits and thumbs the carbon paper, letting its smooth, luminescent blackness rub off onto him while he stares through the pane-less window at the other blackness, the one outside. Sounds carry through this: music spilling out of cafés, the clang of metal cups, ships’ sirens sounding in the harbour. Beneath this, less audible but equally persistent, a rustling, hissing noise that animates the city at all times. Alexandria ’s air’s electric, harsh with static: lightning discharges flicker above it occasionally, but never bring rain; fireflies glow and fade, like faultily wired bulbs. It seems to Serge at times that in the city’s pulses, in its interrupted flows, there lurks some kind of unrequited longing. This is what he hears in the muezzin’s chants threading meshed balconies, or in the cries of tradesmen and the wails of beggars filtering through palm trees. More than anything, it’s what he hears in Petrou’s voice, its exiled, hovering cadences-and what he sees in Petrou’s face and body, his perpetual slightly sideways stance: a longing for some kind of world, one either disappeared or yet to come, or perhaps even one that’s always been there, although only in some other place, in a dimension Euclid never plotted, which is nonetheless reflecting off him at an asymptotic angle; and reflecting, it increasingly seems, straight towards Serge.
One morning in late February, Serge makes his way to the Ministry through streets thronged with jubilant Egyptians.
“ Independence,” a sour-face colleague informs him as he enters the half-empty building. “ Ferguson wants to see you.”
“ Independence,” Ferguson repeats, equally sourly. “Could have been avoided, if the will had been there. Never trusted Milner, between you and me. He’s got one big concession, though, as far as we’re concerned.”
He looks at Serge conspiratorially, as though the meaning of his statement were explicit. Serge stares back at him blankly.
“Communications!” Ferguson snaps. “ Britain reserves the right to maintain both military and civil offices in Egypt ‘to protect,’ as the wording has it, ‘her Imperial Communications.’ ” His hand dips into the biscuit bowl on his desk and flaps around, finding it empty. “Ishak Effendi-!” he begins to call out, then breaks off. “Opportunist. Can’t trust half the people here. They’ll probably be back in two weeks’ time, promoted to positions of…” He shakes his head, then, remembering why he summoned Serge in the first place, announces: “You’re being transferred to Cairo. Order came through from Macauley’s people just before our operators here abandoned their posts. Seems this independence thing has jolted Cairo, or Whitehall, or whatever ill-informed sub-sub-committee’s charged with the issue at the moment, into action: they’re finally getting the Empire Wireless Chain’s Egyptian station up and running.”
“When do I leave?” Serge asks.
“Day after tomorrow. Better go and pack.”
“And my report?” Serge asks. “It’s finished, more or less.”
“What report?”
“Perspective. Sacred phone boxes. I’ve typed it in tripl-”
“Oh, that. Yes. Drop it off in my secretary’s box…”
Petrou insists on spending one last afternoon with Serge. He takes him to the museum. The place is virtually empty: Egyptians are too busy celebrating, Europeans cowering indoors, to visit the salvaged jetsam of their city’s patchwork past. The two men roam through galleries lined with inscribed tombstones, framed papyri, cabinets of scarabs.
“This is Arsinoe, done as Eurydice,” Petrou says as they pause before a statue of a woman holding her distended stomach, as though pregnant. “She was the wife of the second Ptolemy, Philadelphus: his sister, seven years older than him. When she died of indigestion, he was inconsolable.”
“Bad ptomaines,” murmurs Serge, but Petrou doesn’t hear him.
“And this,” he continues, laying his hand on Serge’s chest once more and drawing him towards the next exhibit, “is Thoth done as Hermes, or Hermes as Thoth, depending on which way you look at it.”
“Oh, he’s the one with the cap,” Serge nods. “Cupid.”
“Inventor of writing,” Petrou tells him, “god of magic, measurer of time, keeper of divine records. Thoth-Hermes was supposedly the author of the Hermetic books of Roman Egypt. And here’s Bast and Sekhet.”
“They look like cats,” Serge says.
“They are, of sorts: Sekhet has a lioness’s head and holds a golden flower, to represent the sun, whose heat she takes into her body and
re-emanates. Bast is a standard cat-god. In pharaonic times his statue was everywhere.”
“Is that what ‘pharaoh’ means?” Serge asks. “ ‘Sun’? Like the phare at Pharos?”
“No, it means ‘house,’ ” Petrou answers. “ ‘Great house.’ ”
They move on into a room full of small statuettes.
“Funerary art,” Petrou comments. “Dead children.”
Serge peers at a row of them. One shows a small boy sitting on his mother’s shoulders, while the one next to it has the same child, or perhaps one similar to him, riding a toy chariot full of grapes that’s drawn by dogs. Another shows seated pupils taking lessons.
“Relics from early Jewish settlers,” Petrou tells Serge. “Early Christian too. And Greek, of course: the various religions’ figures all blur into one another. This, for example,” he continues, leading Serge down the row as though he were a dignitary to whom state officials must be introduced, pausing before a bull-headed figure, “is Serapis, the deity clobbered together for the city by the first Ptolemy, Soter: Dionysus, Osiris, Apis, Zeus, Asculapius and Pluto all rolled into one. It all began here: city of sects and syncretism.”
“And incest,” Serge adds.
Ignoring his words, Petrou leads him to a large scroll that bears what seems to be a diagram: in black and white, above a set of interlocking rings inset with smaller circles that hold images of birds, compasses or clock-faces, a female figure rises. She, too, is largely composed of circles: round breasts with concentric nipples between which rests a pendant circle with a cross, or aerial, above it; a round womb in which floats a rounded baby; and, above her shoulders, a head formed by the sun, a perfect orb. Words annotate the diagram from every angle: “Lumen Naturae,” “Oculus Divinus,” “Tinctura Physica,” “Water,” “Soda,” “Terra,” “Blood.”
“Sophia,” Petrou says reverently.
“So fear what?” asks Serge.
“Her name: Sophia. Wisdom of the Gnostics. Syzygy of Christ.”
Serge is silent for a while, then says:
“Syzygy: I know about that. That’s why those orbs are dark.”
He points to two eclipsed suns on the right side of the constellated rings. One of them is blank, like carbon paper; the other has a skull set in it. Above these, to their left, a river, flat as the Canopic Nile-mouth, wends its way up between her legs.
“Philo of Alexandria devised her, to bridge the gap between man and Jehova. She’s the Logos, Dweller in the Inmost. Look between her breasts.”
He points; Serge follows his finger with his gaze and sees, hovering above the aerial-cross, its frame formed from a square inset with other squares for windows and its roof made of a triangle, a great house.
“Philo was a Jewish Platonist,” Petrou continues, “but the Christians picked up the Logos baton and ran with it. For them, Sophia’s a sad figure, symbol of our descent. Valentinus-an Alexandrian too-has her undone by love: desiring too ardently to be united with God, she falls into matter, and our universe is formed out of her agony and remorse.” Petrou’s eyes shift to Serge’s chest as he continues: “As an unknown theologian-yet another Alexandrian-wrote of her: ‘She is more beautiful than the sun and all the order of stars: being compared to light she is found beyond it…’ ”
It’s dusk; the museum’s rooms and corridors are murky. The two men stand quite static, Petrou sideways-on to Serge, his gaze fixed on his chest-as though they, too, were sculptures, syncretic overlays of eras and mythologies, gods, mortals and their relics. They remain like this as Petrou continues, in a voice becoming fainter all the time, his recitation:
“ ‘For after this cometh night…’ ”
His words trail off. Serge turns away from him, towards the window. Through it, in the gloaming, he can see a firefly pulsing photically, in dots and dashes.
ii
The train to Cairo runs through the Wady Natrun soda fields. Serge knows, because he’s sat in on at least two meetings about the issue, that the concession to develop these is held by the Egyptian Salt and Soda Company-but it’s good to set a proper landscape to an abstract history of bribery, fraud and ineptitude. Between the grey hulk of a factory and the isolated monasteries that wobble in the heat-glare, a giant mineral lake stretches. Despite the heat, the lake seems to be covered with a layer of ice; what’s more, the ice has crimson patches on it, as though baby seals had been clubbed there. Trickling streams of claret link the patches to blue and green pools. Above the blushing, multicoloured tracts stand impossibly large birds, perched on lumps of salt that look like towering icebergs.
“The mirage,” says the Scotsman sharing Serge’s compartment, noticing him staring in bemusement at the scene.
“It’s an illusion, then?” Serge asks. “There are no birds?”
“Oh, there are birds all right. But the light’s bending and expanding them. Ditto the salt.”
“You’re seeing it too?”
“We’re both seeing what the light’s gradient as it hits the warmer air is conveying to our retinas.”
“And the crimson?”
“Natron deposits rising to the surface.”
This man is an optician, as it turns out. He shows Serge his ad in the Gazette (his logo: a hieroglyphic eye-symbol beside a suspiciously anachronistic-looking pair of glasses done in the same style), then retreats behind the same newspaper, emerging from time to time to comment on its contents, none of which are to his liking.
“They’re attacking Europeans randomly,” he tuts. “Says here a whole train was halted by a mob at Damietta, and white men and women treated to ‘the worst indignities.’ ”
Their train also gets held up, although not by a mob: there’s a defect on the Shouba Bridge. It’s almost dawn when they arrive in Cairo. Serge makes his way past mini-phare lampposts, each casting small cylinders of phosphorous light onto the pavement, to the Ministry. He finds it in a complex so expansive as to dwarf the Alexandria outpost: here are the departments of Unappropriated Revenue, State Properties, Public Works, Justice, Irrigation, Ports and Light, Pensions, Public Instruction, Antiquities, the Army of Occupation, the Suez Canal-and, nestled among these, Communications. All of these seem to be undergoing overhauls: offices lie vacant, their contents packed in boxes on the floor; typewriters, all Coronas, stand stacked up against walls, awaiting relocation or, perhaps, evacuation; people move briskly and anxiously down corridors trying to locate other people who are moving down adjacent ones looking for someone else. Whenever Serge stops one of them to ask directions he’s met with an exasperated shrug; it’s by sheer chance that he eventually comes across Macauley, standing in the middle of a room supervising the removal of three wall-to-wall shelves’ worth of box files.
“I’m Macauley,” his new boss, a stout man in his mid-to-late fifties, tells him offhandedly. “If you’re from internal accounts then you’ll have to wait until I’ve relocated. Spreadsheets are all packed.”
“No, I’m Carrefax,” Serge tells him.
“What’s that supposed to mean to me?”
“Serge Carrefax. I just arrived from Alexandria. I’m to work on the Empire Wireless Chain. I should-”
“Ah, yes!” says Macauley, turning to face him for the first time. “Widsun’s boy. Expected you some time ago.”
“I would have been here sooner, but they’ve had me doing… I have it right here.”
He opens his case, fishes out the second copy of his détaché dispatch and hands it over.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” Macauley asks, tossing it into a box that’s being picked up and carried from the room. “First you’re three weeks late; now you’re one week early.”
“Early?” Serge repeats.
“We’re shifting operations to the Central Cairo Station. Offices here will be committed to disentanglement: installing native ministers, advising and liaising, other such nonsense…”
“And the Wireless Chain?”
“Oh, that’ll go ahead-in parallel: through
Abu Zabal and another site. That’s what you’ll be working on-but not yet. Come back in a week. Not here: come to the Central Station. I should be installed by then.”
“And what should I do in the meantime?” Serge asks.
“Bed in, attend receptions, buy some trinkets. If you can hunt down Pollard and Wallis they’ll take you to the lodgings we’ve kept ready for you-assuming that these haven’t since been taken over by some righteous mob…”
The lodgings, near the Ezbekiya Gardens, are intact. From their terrace where he takes his coffee every morning he can see the sun hitting the roofs of Heliopolis, the slopes of Mokatem, the City of the Dead running to Matary. The evenings he spends with Macauley’s men Wallis and Pollard, who are a few years older than him. Having first kitted him up with tie and tails in Orosdi-Back’s department store, they take him, as their boss anticipated, to receptions: at the Gezira, Turf and Jockey clubs, the Mena House, Shepheard and Continental hotels, or chalet-like private residencies in Maadi, Abdine and Khalifa. One such event, hosted by Conte Mario de Villa-Clary, chairman of the Maltese Colony of Cairo, has an undertone of suspicion laced with resentment: of the civil servants by the Maltese, who feel that the former have never quite accepted them as “proper” British subjects, and of the Maltese by the civil servants, who murmur into their canapés accounts of double-dealing, bet-hedging and convenience-flag seamanship. Another, an annual dinner thrown by the Cairo Horticultural Society, is spoiled by a choice of menu-card background that’s deemed unappetising by the majority of those at Serge’s table: entitled “De Metamorphosibus Insectorum Surinamensiun,” it shows a palisade tree, or Erythrina fusca, beset by the moth Arsenura armida, depicted in all phases of its life-cycle. Having grown up surrounded by such insectoid mutations, Serge has no problem with the intersecting carapaces and antennae forming a trellis in which the words “asparagus,” “saddle” and “parfait” sit; in fact, he quite likes the picture, and slips the card, before the table’s cleared, into his jacket pocket to take home with him as a memento.
