Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra Read online

  Its base, however, was as high as we could go. To climb the column was presently impossible. When the British ruled Alexandria there were picnics on top. There were scaffolds and ladders and the braver broad-skirted ladies of the town could take a January lunch there, spreading tablecloths on the cold granite, looking down on the guardian sphinxes, remembering Lord Nelson’s victory on the Nile and comparing the site to Trafalgar Square.

  Some of them probably knew the truth about their picnic site: that the pillar was not erected by Pompey, nor even by Julius Caesar as a place for Pompey’s head. In Cleopatra’s reign the column was a mere part of the Serapis temple buildings, maybe a support for the library or the machinery which measured the rise and fall of the Nile, that essential source for tax-collectors. Even when Septimius Severus was commissioning his theatre, this massive monument was quietly lying on its side, somewhere on its ancient destruction site. It was a much later Roman emperor, Diocletian at the end of the third century, who ordered it erected for himself.

  The column has no connection to Pompey at all. Visitors today are invited to think otherwise only if they wish. But when earlier grand tourists wanted to imagine the moment when Cleopatra’s time in power began, some historical flexibility was helpful. Without palace walls to climb, with no lighthouse except below the waves, much the best place to imagine Cleopatra as a 21-year-old, a queen who was fighting as well as sleeping alongside Julius Caesar, was on a picnic at Pompey’s Pillar.

  Colonne Pompée

  Socratis’s driver arrived with a packed lunch from the Cecil Hotel. Mahmoud seemed mildly surprised to see him. He said he wanted to stay here and share the olives, bread and cheese but that sadly he had to go. If I was happy to wait here for the afternoon, one of them would collect me later.

  I offered to pay for the lunch. I was beginning to be worried about never paying. ‘There is no need for that,’ Mahmoud said, in the manner of a schoolteacher or nurse. ‘You are our guest.’

  In the early afternoon a band of young American women arrived beside the guarding sphinxes, the two massive half-human, half-cats that flank the pillar to east and west, looking south to Africa. The site is scattered with many sphinxes both alone and in uneven lines, lost avenues for forgotten parades. But these two are special.

  At first sight they look almost identical, smug and half-smiling, two men who could make themselves into god-cats whose tails, more than two thousand years on, still stand sharp and firm, ready to flick away impertinence. The slightly fatter one on the Sun side of the pillar is Ptolemy I, Soter, the self-styled saviour, sponsor of Euclid, snatcher of Alexander’s body and founder of Cleopatra’s royal line. On the Moon side is his son, Ptolemy II, Philadelphos, named as the lover of his brothers and sisters, cultural despot, father of Alexandrianism, buyer of poets and critics and their books.

  For seventeen hundred years these creatures gazed over the westernmost lake of the Nile delta. Today their view is blocked by a leather-treatment plant and mud-covered apartment blocks strewn with sheets, as well as by an American female sports team. The women are dressed in short red skirts and form a human pyramid. The highest of them is hugging and kissing the younger, rounder Ptolemy, somehow emphasising the difference from his father.

  The group is closely chaperoned by a white-shrouded guide and two soldiers. The guide lectures them on the legacy of Tutankhamun, the heretical young pharaoh who was removed from all records until his tomb was discovered in 1922. This is the postcard child of whom neither Ptolemies nor even their librarian knew anything at all. Both the sphinx faces are of Tutankhamun, the guide says firmly.

  She must know that she is lying, that these are not the faces of a boy and that, whatever the uncertainties of ancient Egyptian identification, these chubby cats of slightly varying fatness cannot be of King Tut. She has chosen his name (there can be no other reason) because it is the only name that her charges have heard before.

  Ras el Teen Street

  I have spent the last hour of today in the most relaxed and traditional of tourist pursuits, looking at carpets. When Socratis arrived at Pompey’s Pillar to bring me here, he was not at all relaxed, scrambling through the zoo of sphinxes, unusually pleased to see me.

  ‘Have you left the site since lunchtime?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  His driver, it seemed, had seen me in the streets around the western harbour. He frowned. If I wanted to visit anywhere like that, I should go only with him. I was mystified, repeating that I had not gone anywhere. While wholly free to go anywhere, I pointed out, I had not. I had made a careful study of two of Cleopatra’s ancestors instead.

  He smiled and said he would show me the harbour as soon as we had had some tea. His friend, the carpet seller, would be bringing some tea in a moment. Ras el Teen Street, while close to a presidential retreat and a prison, was no safer because of that. Indeed, as Socratis saw matters, it was substantially less safe.

  ‘This is our Christmas Day. There may be repeats of the bombing or reprisals for it. Who can tell?’

  Alexandria, he explained as though to a child, still has its Sun side, the gardens of carefully clipped comic topiary, the herbaceous clock, the new equestrian statue of Alexander the Great whose design kept politicians occupied for years. And it has its Moon side, the port-side streets of rats and rotting cauliflower, a palace protected by its own navy on a grey metallic sea, a site of welding sheds, tombs and sphinxes famed for the disappearance of visitors and tangle of overgrown gardens along the route out to Libya, Tunisia and beyond.

  Now we were on the Moon side. But this was a safe place on the Moon. This carpet shop to which he had brought me was a place for ‘good men – and good carpets too’. There were piles of woven landscapes on the floor, not the usual prayer rugs but street scenes, marshlands and skies. There were holes in the white plaster walls, only some of them covered by tapestries.

  I asked after his mother. It seemed polite to do that. She was, he said, ‘still very unwell’. Did he know anything specific about possible suicide attacks, anything that made him especially anxious for a tourist’s safety?

  He laughed. ‘There will be no suicide attacks. There never have been suicide attacks. New Year was something very different.’ He paused. ‘It was a car bomb, parked and abandoned, not a crazy man in an exploding waistcoat. Only foreigners blow themselves up. Egyptians prefer to blow up other people. The Christians are after revenge and soon they will find it. Something very different is happening.’

  I had with me a copy of The Egyptian Gazette with a ‘forensic reconstruction’ of the officially condemned suicide bomber. We looked at the photofit picture, more like an ape than a man, flat fleshy nose, thinning lips, close-cropped hair and eyebrows added close together as though from a kit of disguises. Socratis snorted. Propaganda, nothing but propaganda, telling the people what they must believe.

  He did not identify the propagandist. He never did mention the President. Once again he made the sign of a hyphen in the air with his hand, palm down, thumb pointing from right to left, swinging from side to side like a cricket umpire signalling four runs. For Mubarak’s heir-apparent son he made a smaller move, half a hyphen. He held his breath, fattened his already ample cheek and flicked his hand like a sphinx’s tale.

  He then had an unexpected question.

  ‘Can you help me please?

  I smiled. I could not imagine what he might want. He explained before I could reply. ‘How am I to persuade my mother that her friends from the bombed church of St Mark and St Peter are truly dead?’

  Ah. Socratis’s mysterious mother. He was harsh about her when we had dinner two nights ago. He was softer now.

  ‘She did not see the aftermath of the explosion herself, as she claimed. She lied to me about that. But she knew three women whose bodies were pulped over the pavement there. That, I know, is true. She too knows it is true. Her friends are dead. But she is still talking about them as thou
gh they are alive, in the present tense.’ I remembered Mahmoud’s dinner-time frustration. The bombing victims too, like Jesus and Cleopatra and Colonel Nasser and everyone else she had elected to her personal pantheon, were still alive.

  ‘Do you have any advice?’ he asked. ‘It is all very difficult.’

  Mother and son, he said, had quarrelled. ‘She is angry, quizzical now, taunting almost. She has known these friends all her life. She has always had a picture of them in her mind. She can recognise them. She knows their names. None of that has changed. She still has their images in her head. She still has their names. Thus they are as alive as they were before.’

  He paused. ‘She does not want revenge. That would be a catastrophic error. It would not even be based on a truth. Or so she says.’

  I could not think what to say. ‘What do others think? Do you expect a revenge attack?’

  He shrugged. He wanted advice on helping his mother, not a request for security briefing.

  I am still not sure what sort of answer would be right. Before I could say anything he rose suddenly and said that he would be back soon. I could continue my notes. Meanwhile his friend the carpet-seller would look after me – and would ‘absolutely not’, he promised, try to sell me a carpet.

  Hotel Metropole, Place Saad Zaghloul

  There was only one carpet that I might have been persuaded to buy. It was larger and wilder than any of the rest, some six feet wide and four feet high, well-trodden before it had been hung on the wall. Its makers (for it seemed the work of many hands) had selected almost precisely the perspective of the city that Mahmoud argued was the best, a picture of Greek Alexandria as seen from a high point in the harbour, from the lighthouse perhaps or the palace wall, a receding view of houses for more than a million people, a mighty city when its full extent was portrayed in tufts and knots, pile and patches, threads of silver, reds and blues.

  It was an unusual piece, perhaps some kind of apprentice work, a demonstration of different manufacturing styles, a means of showing purchasers what was on sale, in weaves, carpet-felts and tapestries. Some parts were of a high quality that even I could detect; others were like rags.

  The foreground was packed with brilliant detail, a long facade of columns, windows hung like stages over a wide, parade-ground promenade. Behind the walls of the closest and largest house, seen from above through an open roof, were marbled rooms for dining and drinking, rooms for preparing to dine and drink, thrones for hairdressers.

  Inside were celebrants, servants and the richest ornaments of those being served. The tapestry-weaver had created glass bowls in blue and gold, white bowls with limbs of men and women in serial couplings around the rim, sharply visible as though through a microscope. The objects behind emerged more darkly as though through distant telescopic sights, different houses, broadly drawn in felt and rags, the homes not so regularly shown in Cleopatra’s capital, the red and brown lanes where the ancient weavers themselves worked.

  To the furthest left of the design, much closer even than the jewel boxes of the rich, so close that a watching queen on her battlements could toss a coin into their cooking cauldrons, were the tight-packed homes of the city’s Jews, knotted letters in Hebrew on the walls. To the right were barred cells for criminals, black-threaded lines over pale cloth windows, barracks for soldiers, for Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, each section marked by their alphabets.

  This was Cleopatra’s city. Those here who spoke Latin were the remains of the army that had restored her father to the throne. They were called Gabinians after the name of their first commander and had stayed as stateless mercenaries, marrying their neighbours, negotiating for land grants and tax exemptions, and keeping whatever order they were best paid to keep. They were part of the panorama and the protection of the city that Alexander had founded and the Ptolemies ruled.

  I must have been too obviously a willing customer. When the owner saw me studying this most striking of his wares, he took it down and laid it on the floor, suggesting possible sums of payment, all of them substantial, in keen defiance of Socratis’s promise.

  The act of removing the carpet from the wall revealed briefly the reverse side, a stranger patchwork in which the richly tapestried sections were almost exactly the gold-and-silver same, the lesser parts a muddy muddle. It also revealed a hole in the wall almost as large as the carpet itself. On the other side, stretching away till the light failed, lay a store of rusting metal, swords and scimitar blades, helmets and armour, a tunnel of khaki and rust. The owner left my carpet on the floor but delicately concealed the hole with a hideous green rug of tufted Arabic letters around a palm-tree grove.

  If I had bought it, I could be looking at it now, instead of the high bare walls of Room 114 and its low-hung souvenirs of Venice. Instead, I said I would think about it.

  CLEOPATRA THE FOURTH

  It was a mild afternoon in the autumn of 1969, at a table on a long lawn beside the stunted remains of what the college guidebook called ‘the lime tree walk’. In my second week as a student everything seemed peculiarly perfect. The lawn was dotted with other students reading and writing at tables. We are all warily watching one another, still seeing and being seen. This was surely the place for Cleopatra. I had already written eighty-five words – and counted each one. The lime trees were like a line of sphinxes, triumphal in their Oxford way, although less regular and more battered than Alexandrian remains. Doubtless there would be other inspirations in my new home.

  I had not chosen Trinity College with any care. The headmaster of Brentwood had offered me, as he put it, because I had ‘shewn real gifts as a classic despite being not good at ball games’. Somehow it was all the better for that. I was here by chance, the best way to be anywhere. I could do whatever I wanted to do. The school had also proposed Maurice as ‘a promising actor’ who was not good at ball games either. That was how things happened then. Trinity had accepted both offers. So had we.

  V had preferred to go to Sussex, Essex, Bristol or elsewhere, following the fashionable view that Oxford and Cambridge were tired and old. Maurice was not disappointed. To him she was a nag and a nuisance. Neither of us was quite sure which campus she had chosen. Nor, at this time of abandoning the past as fast as it possibly could be abandoned, did we worry about it.

  7.1.11

  Hotel Metropole, Place Saad Zaghloul

  It is 6.00 a.m. Socratis is coming in three hours’ time. He has a plan that is too complicated to explain. ‘You will like it,’ his message says. Maybe I will. He will suggest some kind of tour, I think, maybe to meet his mother, more likely to show off his car.

  These are strange days. This time in Alexandria is not what I thought it would be. I never intended to write so much here about my own life. I came with a promise to write about Cleopatra. Instead I am selecting my own memories of past promises to write about Cleopatra.

  But I do select every memory by how much it connects to those promises. It seems random. But there is a reason, a pattern and, in the end maybe, a picture too.

  When V made her first Oxford visit, she missed me and left only a message at the porter’s lodge. On the back of a college map of the city’s streets were her exclamation marks, expletives and what, to an optimist, might have been the mark of a kiss.

  I had never kissed her at school. We had not been that sort of friends. Did I want to kiss her now that we had both moved on? Maybe I did. Any prospect of that, however, seemed poor. Her wording was as direct and dismissive as she had ever been: See you sometime! Who do you stars-and-dashes think you are? Does this place think it is the centre of the world?

  Maybe the porters had not been polite. Maybe she had come deliberately to have her prejudices confirmed. A map which, on one side, showed Oxford at the midpoint of England and, on the other, showed Trinity as the midpoint of Oxford might have fanned the resentment she had already shown.

  This is the first of my two maps on the ill-lit bedspread of Room 114. The four quadrangles of Trinity are certainl
y prominent at its centre. Not everyone would have thought this self-aggrandising or odd. In our Brentwood geography rooms an old pink England had always stood in the central place occupied by Jerusalem in the maps from the school Bible. For map-makers – and even more so for those commissioning maps – the centre has always been wherever one wants it to be, often where one is standing oneself.

  Outwards and beyond there are the dreaming spires. There is the River Isis, the name of the Thames as it drifts past the city boundaries, and of Cleopatra’s patron deity too. Traditional? Yes. Offensive? I did not think so. The map shows also what were then my most useful surroundings, Blackwell’s bookshop, the Bodleian Library, the King’s Arms, the roads from the station that lead to Trinity, to its ragged line of lime trees and the statues of Theology, Astronomy, Geometry and Medicine that look down from the college tower.

  This map is a memoir of a kind. It is with me because it stimulates a certain sort of memory. It reminds me of the people, the sherried, the champagned and my more quietly drugged friends, the white-tied, the flower-haired, the cannabis-smokers who wanted to be hippies, the cannabis-smokers who just wanted to smoke, the tweed-jacketed and the oily-jeaned, the black-bereted and the twin-setted, the Left, the Right and the merely languid. But forty years ago it was only a map. It was never meant to mean anything more.

  The second map on the hotel bed shows the southern flank of the Roman Mediterranean in the first century BC – from Mauretania, where Morocco today stares north to Spain, through Numidia and Africa, shared now by Algeria and Tunisia, to Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, the two halves of Libya, and finally Aegyptus. It is torn from a textbook. It shows abandoned towns, temples to Isis and other gods, and is designed to help the writers of history essays. Cleopatra would never have seen such a map, or a street map either, or used one to fight a war or find a city or a way through a city. That was not what maps then were for. They were political statements, claims of power and ownership, pictures to provoke, just as V had been provoked.