False Papers

by André Aciman

  Everything she owned was on show: her notebooks, her sweaters, Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion clumsily splayed on the floor, a striped ironing board standing next to her bed, a Greek icon, and a domed photo enlarger relegated to the periphery of the room like a demoted hanger-on. Among this scatter of objects was the teapot, over which she had placed a quilted tea cozy. In the cloying comfort of the hot room, the presence of that unusual piece of quilting suddenly thrust me back a decade earlier to the languid fin d’été world of my childhood in Alexandria, where my aging after-school tutors, who began wearing wool early in the fall each year, had sipped tea at my desk. The tiny studio now felt so familiar, so welcoming in its Old World warmth, that I almost forgot it belonged to a flamboyant jet-setter with whom every man in our class claimed to have had the same adventure.

  And so, as I poured the tea the way my tutors had done, I began to feel not happy but exceptionally sheltered and snug in this studio. I wanted to be there for a long time and neglected even to take myself to task for not having seized the moment when I’d held her in my arms, knowing that she’d have kissed me passionately if only I’d been bolder. I liked this room. I knew this room. Perhaps a tiny part of me was already lodged here and wished to come back again and again in the days to come, in search of that moment just after sunset when, switching on the first light and letting the windows turn to mirrors against the darkening sky, I’d watch Cambridge disappear and Alexandria rise suddenly upon the windowpanes.

  The paper on “Tintern Abbey” was not difficult to write. I had written my own paper a week before and had already said all I could think of saying about the poem, so this was to be done more in the spirit of an evening ramble, something I didn’t really have to write and wouldn’t be graded on. Part of me didn’t much care how good it was, especially since I was feeling a tad spiteful. And yet there was a moment of inspiration, though I hadn’t quite registered it yet—something in Wordsworth and me and this girl and this studio and the act of recognizing all too readily now, years after leaving Egypt, years after reading Proust and Leopardi, the unmistakable signals that a memory was about to blossom there.

  While I was writing, I’d get up every once in a while, to drink some water, go to the bathroom, or snoop around the studio. I remember how scant the light was and how startling it seemed to me, even at the time, that this strange, dark, quiet room and this girl and the student I was then were in many more ways than I realized tied together by a poem by Wordsworth entitled “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour.”

  On the eve of Bastille Day, July 13, 1798, the twenty-eight-year-old Wordsworth went with his sister to Tintern Abbey, on the Wye River, a place that he had already visited five years before. That same evening, Wordsworth sat down to write a poem celebrating his return:

  Five years have passed; five summers, with the length

  Of five long winters! and again I hear

  These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs

  With a soft inland murmur.—Once again

  Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,

  That on a wild secluded scene impress

  Thoughts of more deep seclusion …

  The poem he writes, however, celebrates not only the present moment but also his previous visit in 1793, as well as the future memory of both visits.

  While here I stand, not only with the sense

  Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts

  That in this moment there is life and food

  For future years …

  Wordsworth fears losing that future memory, and at the end of the poem he tells his sister, if he dies, she should remember their visit for him.

  Nor, perchance—

  If I should be where I no more can hear

  Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams

  Of past existence—wilt thou then forget

  That on the banks of this delightful stream

  We stood together; and that I, so long

  A worshipper of Nature, hither came

  Unwearied in that service …

  Wordsworth at Tintern Abbey, it occurred to me, was doing more or less what I was doing in this girl’s room: firming up the present by experiencing it as a memory, by experiencing it from the future as a moment in the past. What Wordsworth remembers at Tintern Abbey is not the past but himself in the past imagining the future; and what he looks forward to is not even the future but himself, in the future, retrieving the bone he buried in the past. He purchases at the Exchange of Time what he sells at the Exchange of Place, knowing that, at the end of the transaction, he’ll borrow from Place to purchase from Time to sell back to Place all over again.

  This, in the world of finance, is called “arbitrage”: the purchase of securities in one market for resale in another. As soon as a profit is made, the cycle starts again, with subsequent purchases sometimes paid for with unrealized credit drawn from previous sales. In such transactions, one never really sells a commodity, much less takes delivery of anything. One merely speculates, and seldom does any of it have anything to do with the real world. Arbitrageurs have seats on not one but two exchanges, the way the very wealthy have homes not in one but two time zones, or exiles two homes in the wrong places. One always longs for the other home, but home, as one learns soon enough, is a place where one imagines or remembers other homes.

  Wordsworth was quite given to such mnemonic arbitrage. He builds on air, the way futures traders speculate on margin; he grounds the present on the past, and the future on the past recaptured. His system is elliptical: to use focus A you need to establish focus B, but to establish B you need A. The very act of anticipating an epiphany becomes the epiphany itself.

  In some cases, Wordsworth even layered the anticipation of that epiphany with the recollection of similar anticipations, and hence similar epiphanies, in the past. When Wordsworth went to Tintern Abbey in 1793, he was probably already remembering a trip he’d made to Wales in 1791. This, in turn, suggests that in 1798, when he finally composed “Tintern Abbey,” he was echoing an earlier mnemonic experience. He was not just remembering. He was remembering remembering. His final visit to Tintern Abbey, incidentally, was to take place in 1841. In that year Wordsworth did not write a poem. What we have instead are these words from a letter he sent to his friend Robinson:

  Thence we came along the Wye the banks of which noble river I was truly glad to revisit—to Tintern Abbey where last Tuesday we had the great pleasure of meeting Miss Fenwick and Dora.

  From the man who wrote what is arguably the most moving poem in English Romantic literature, and probably the most eloquent poem on memory ever written, this sounds almost intentionally flat. Perhaps it was not intentional at all. Perhaps this is simply how an aging and bewildered Wordsworth responded to a situation that had become far too gnarled for his poetic imagination. Wordsworth had already written his elegy on returning to Tintern Abbey. To write about Tintern Abbey again in 1841 he would have had to write a poem invoking not only his present visit but also his 1793 and 1798 visits (and possibly his 1791 visit). And Wordsworth, as his Yarrow tryptich shows, was incapable of seeing the elaborate implications of his poems beyond a certain point.

  I finished the essay on Wordsworth and, after tearing off the striped yellow sheets of paper and stapling them neatly on the girl’s table, I proceeded to the next page of the notebook. Without giving the matter any thought, I began to write a story about going back to a place that was my own Tintern Abbey: Alexandria.

  In the story, a young man returns to Alexandria. This, however, is by no means a momentous return journey. He is back in Alexandria because the ship on which he was sailing to Greece has made an unscheduled stop for repairs. While minor work is being done to the vessel, he decides to take advantage of the fortuitous layover and proceeds to stroll about a city he knew a decade before. He is wearing dark flannel trousers and a rumpled white shirt. For lack of anywhere els
e to go, he finds himself drawn to the city’s Jewish cemetery, where he decides to visit his grandfather’s grave. The road is very dusty, as all unpaved Mediterranean roads are.

  Standing outside the Jewish cemetery, he taps at the gate, hears no answer, and taps again, harder. Finally, the warden grumbles behind the door and opens it. The place looks exactly as he remembered it: a row of trees, a gravel path, a pebbled alleyway between the graves, and serene morning silence within. He glances around at the old tombstones and then—perhaps to make conversation—asks the aging caretaker how he makes ends meet, given that there are no visitors or Jewish “clients” left in Alexandria. The warden points to an old Coca-Cola icebox. Students heading to and from the university sometimes come in for a Coke. This is Alexandria’s cemetery row, and people stop by. As they talk, the young man hears the cackle of a brood of chickens picking their way between the graves. Like many Bedouins in Egypt, the warden also earns a living by selling fresh eggs.

  The young man and the warden proceed to look for the grandfather’s grave. Neither of them has any idea where to find it. On impulse, the man thinks back to the last time he went to the cemetery—with his father, ten years before—and, as if by a miracle, he finds himself threading between the odd-shaped tombstones suddenly locating the one he is looking for. It occurs to him as he stares at the inscription on the marble that, unless he makes an effort to remember where it is, he’ll never be able to find this grave again, should he return in years to come. The notion amuses him, because he doubts he’ll ever come back again.

  The warden, who had gone back into his hut, returns with a bucket of water to clean the marble slab. The young man pours the water slowly, going at the task with unexpected zeal, perhaps in order to avoid asking himself why he’s come here at all or what he expected to find. He gives the warden’s son some change and asks him to get a Coca-Cola. The boy rushes behind the hut and comes back, holding a bottle awkwardly in both hands, as though he were carrying a struggling hen by the neck. Once the young man is in possession of the bottle, he does something he remembers his father telling him he should never do: he places it on the gleaming flat marble, heaves himself up, and sits on the warm slab. It is a beautiful sunny day. He is sweating. He knows it will only get hotter. He lights a cigarette. His feet are dangling from his perch. He could just as easily be sitting on the edge of a swimming pool.

  And as the young man sits on the slab under the scant shade offered by a palm tree, his thoughts turn to the beach, to the beaches of Egypt especially, and to how he has remembered them over the last ten years, first from Italy and then from New York. He realizes suddenly, in a sort of delayed double take, that if he looks over the cemetery wall he will see his favorite body of water in the world, lying scarcely two minutes away.

  The last time he stood by this marble slab, he remembers, he was thinking about Italy, a country he feared and had never seen. His father had already purchased their tickets on an Italian liner, and an uncle had promised to meet them in Naples. Now, thinking about Egypt’s beaches makes him long for the fountains of Rome, especially on those dry, scorching Italian summer days when a fountain is all the beach an impoverished exile can get.

  During our three years in Italy immediately following our expulsion from Egypt, my parents had so little money that my mother had to alter my father’s old clothes for me. The task kept her busy for weeks. He owned several pairs of flannel trousers, and these were the easiest to spare. Thus, I found myself, like the young man of my story, wearing thick gray wool trousers into late spring each year, and I came to dread their unbearable prickly nap, especially when it grew hot, learning to read in my discomfort the first, unmistakable hints of summer. One day, years later, wearing wool trousers in New York, I felt a flush of almost sexual pleasure course along my thighs: it was not that I liked the heat but that it suddenly brought me back to those days in Rome when the pall of wool would send me in search of a fountain, where I could entertain the illusion that I was one step closer to the beach in Egypt and—if the illusion lasted—to our summer house, to my friends and my relatives, and to an entire world I longed to recover: the city I had known as a child, the smells, the heat, the cast of light, the taste of ripe fruit on summer mornings, the sound of a car rolling on gravel with its engine turned off, even the sounds of the flies and of itinerant vendors, or of the city on crowded squares after Sunday Mass. All I needed during those years in Italy was a mild sense of thirst, wool pants, and a quiet, watery spot that muffled the sound of the city and gave the impression that if the day were clearer, a luminous Alexandria would surface suddenly, like the wide expanse of sea facing Xenophon’s soldiers on their desperate journey back through Asia Minor. I learned to love Rome the roundabout way, by investing in it the nostalgia I felt for my first home, and the wool, the heat, and the sweat were as welcome a price to pay as is the foul odor of horse dung around Claremont Stable on West Eighty-ninth Street to a new city dweller who spent his childhood on a farm.

  This is mnemonic arbitrage. Not only did I discover in a girl’s studio in Cambridge a sensation I had experienced in Rome that evoked Alexandria but, in writing about Egypt in New York City years after that, I found myself remembering impressions that took me back not to Alexandria but to Rome, and ultimately to Cambridge.

  Reverse arbitrage is no less unwieldy: when I eventually returned to Egypt in 1995, I caught myself looking at my beloved Mediterranean through tiny side streets and felt a sudden yearning for West End Avenue, looking toward the Hudson River through 106th Street—which had become my dearest spot on earth precisely because it reminded me of Alexandria. I was, in Alexandria, homesick for a place from which I had learned to re-create Alexandria, the way the rabbis, in exile, were forced to reinvent their homeland on paper, only to find, perhaps, that they worshipped the paper more than the homeland or the way that prisoners who express their love for the free world by painting its portrait on their cell wall come to worship the wall and not the world.

  In my story at the cemetery, when the sun grows too oppressive, the young man gets down from his perch and heads toward the warden’s hut. Guessing that the warden hasn’t been tipped in recent years, he puts his hand in his pocket and gives the man a twenty-dollar bill—probably more than a month’s salary for the warden, who accepts it reluctantly and offers the young man another Coke in return. The young man is reminded of the unfair exchange of armor between Glaucus and Diomedes and accepts the Coke.

  But then the warden goes back into the hut and comes out with a tiny object, wrapped in what looks like an old kerchief. It’s an antique silver cigarette lighter, with an inscription. Probably left behind by a Jewish mourner years before. Perhaps that mourner had come back in the same way, dawdled about for a while, smoked a cigarette, and then left, forgetting the lighter To the young man’s surprise, the inscription on the lighter bears all three of his initials He knows that the lighter isn’t his. He has never owned such a lighter. Had the other gentleman left it for him? The young man had come to the cemetery in search of something; this is what he found.

  Campy, to be sure, but this is the mystery, or the epiphany, my imagination concocted on that Indian-summer night in Cambridge. It would take me years to understand the meaning of the gift I had invented. The lighter could only have belonged to the young man—who was, of course, me. He/I had returned to the cemetery before though we hadn’t realized it. We had been taking turns going back there every day for years, each time leaving our lighter in the Bedouin’s care to remind each other that part of us would be forever left behind in Egypt, that part of us had never and would never take the ship.

  I never really finished the story. On another Indian-summer afternoon, four years later, I picked it up again, and looking at its faded canary sheets, I could recollect exactly where I’d been sitting in that studio on Linden Street. I remembered the cast of light, the heat, and my unsettling sense that I’d been had that day. I labored over the story for two months, before finally aban
doning it. It had become too elaborate, clothed in too many memories as in the history of its own revisions.

  I returned to it once more under different circumstances on yet another warm Indian-summer day in a different city. I was sitting on a terrace and had used writing about my return to a sunny day in Egypt as a way of re-creating an imaginary summer day in childhood. It was when I turned my chair away from the sun that I suddenly recalled that the sun’s glare in Egypt is so powerful that you are forced to squint or avoid looking directly at anything, which is why you can’t stare at the sea and why the act of not seeing the sea was the surest sign that there was in fact so vast a body of water nearby.

  In the story as I rewrote it that day, the young man is reminded of the beaches of his childhood, not because his legs are dangling as they would at a swimming pool, but because the glare from the marble tombstone leaves him momentarily blinded.

  It’s possible that my love for the splendid vistas of the sea began not, as I have always liked to think, on the beaches of Alexandria, but on that terrace, just as I learned to love the sun, not as a native, but as a tourist, not in June, but in October. I wanted to take this love, which had blossomed in Rome, in New York, and in Cambridge, and graft it back onto the city I had known as a child. I wanted to repatriate my memories, ship everything back home, including the history of my apprenticeship that Indian-summer evening, when, through the long and roundabout passageways of memory, I brought almost everything I had known and become into one room