Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra Read online

  We had already discovered that we barely knew each other. Maurice to me was little more than a memory of jokes and parties and my mother’s aspirations that we be better friends. He was a dimly recalled comic turn on the Brentwood stage, a ghostly wing three-quarter who occasionally stood against me on a fog-shrouded field while our parents took colour slides of third-team matches.

  When I had lived at the centre of the red clay estate, he had lived beyond its borders. His father was a bank manager not a plane-spotter, his sister had ridden her own ponies and their impossibly large house had parquet flooring – more like a lake than a floor, an icy lake, acres and acres of tempting polished wood. At birthday parties we could carefully slide on tasselled cushions around silver photo-frames and slender-legged cabinets of china.

  On the wooden lake floor we could float, or sail, or fly, or be whatever was in our minds. There were games where all the players had labels on their backs, Robin, Hood, Maid, Marian, Miss, Leake, Bill, Ben. The losers were those last to find their partners. Maurice wanted to win. He wanted to be witty and sophisticated and, inasmuch as a child can be either, he was often both. His parents had taken me with him once to the smartest, emptiest beaches of the North Sea, to a London theatre and a restaurant, to the Planetarium and its magic dome of stars.

  After we arrived together in Brentwood in the same junior school winter of 1962, his life was spent in ice-bound boarding houses while mine passed by on buses so cold that the cigarette smoke froze. He soon disappeared still further behind the barriers and distinctions of life at that time. While I was a runner, he was an actor, a specialist in drunken porters and butlers. He was a historian not a classicist, and his only connection to our classics classes had been his peculiar antipathy to Frog, whose expertise in vivisection and dying gladiators most of us were able to ignore.

  Our knowledge of each other was almost wholly an illusion. Our friendship was still in the future. But at Trinity some of the larger sets of rooms had to be shared. Two newcomers from the same school seemed, to the adjudicating authorities, to be the ideal people to share them. Frog’s Oxford application, we learnt with pleasure, had been rejected.

  Maurice, I soon learnt, had a very specific aim in uniting the characters of Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra. He wanted to be all these characters himself, to play them all in the chief theatrical event of the first term, the inter-college competition for short plays known as Cuppers. This was the casting session for the bigger university productions in which he hoped to play a part.

  On his first day in Oxford he had met a new friend, not a student but a trainee director at the New Theatre down by the station. This boy was a fanatic for the then fashionable American manipulator of Shakespeare, Charles Marowitz. The Marowitz Hamlet, Maurice began to argue, was ‘a masterpiece of compression, comprehension, rhythmic bonding’, everything that was good. Could we not produce some sort of equivalent Cleopatra, cutting and combining whatever scenes would make the audience’s ‘heart beat as one with the player’s’ or, if I had not quite taken his meaning, give him the biggest opportunity to make an impression? Only a single scene was necessary, in which the three characters would have an inner dialogue, revealing their essential single identity. I would write it. He would be it. Triumph would follow.

  At a time when life seemed compressed as never before and when cultural shocks came every day, the request did not seem as ridiculous as it does now. Surely an ensemble could become a single being and a single being could stand for everything that the ensemble once was? Why not? Amusing? Maurice liked to amuse but not this time. He looked disdainfully at the afro-curls of my hair above the astrakhan dust of my coat. He was horribly serious as only a soft-jacketed student with ambition and a big cravat can be.

  I looked at him, and out across the long lawn to the college gates that were to be reopened only when a Stuart was restored to the English throne. He looked at me, and down to the parts of the golden-stoned quadrangle that Sir Christopher Wren had built, and sideways to those that he had not. He stared hard and straight into my eyes. We would need the text in a week.

  It did not seem a good idea to make him angry. We were, perforce but not reluctantly, at the beginning of another bit of life together. I was the one who knew about Cleopatra. What part of the story did he want? He stamped impatiently, already well into the sherry-hour. It was easiest to describe the possibilities through the scenes of the film. He knew of other versions too but Elizabeth Taylor and William Shakespeare were already slightly Marowitzed in his mind.

  To clear our heads before dinner he said that we should climb up to the top of the clock tower, a place where I had not yet been. Nor had I seen anyone else there. It was out of bounds, he said, but he knew the hours when it was unlocked. A charming young porter had told him. We strode out past the office of the college doctor and the room where monks had once brewed Holy Trinity beer. After a tricky climb through a black door, a corridor of black gowns and a bare winding staircase, we emerged into the evening air, he exultant, I merely nervous, among stone statues of Theology, Astronomy, Geometry and Medicine, the college gods surveying circles of sickly sodium light.

  Maurice stood up as though we were on school parade. He gently kicked the larger of the two bells and scanned the lawns and trees. Then he began whispering into the sky. He mouthed lists of names – butterflies, birds, underground stations, film actors. After each Cabbage White, Sparrow Hawk, Golders Green or Olivier, he clapped his hand twice, crack, crack, before moving on to the next one in his mind, Red Admiral, Robin, Leicester Square, Harvey.

  The whispers quickly became shouts. I had watched Maurice play this game before, sitting round in circles in our room, chanting lists, clapping hands until someone in the ring failed to remember a fresh bird or train station and became a loser. I had also played it myself, very badly, not realising how much rehearsal took place among the winners. Maurice often won. High in the tower he looked as confident as I had ever seen him, like a fifth stone statue, Pleasure perhaps or Celebrity. He gave the mossy face of Medicine a kiss and shouted out more names towards the street.

  No one looked up. One Oxford rule which we had quickly learnt was that it was fine to make outrageous displays but not fine to fuss over the displays of others. In homage to Brideshead Revisited it was not uncommon for inebriated aesthetes to declaim from high places, sometimes from The Waste Land, sometimes from symbolist masterpieces of their own. This was only a little different from that: Names of … Clap! Clap! Railway Stations! Clap! Clap! Waterloo! Clap! Clap! Westerham! Clap! Clap! Warley East! Clap! Clap! These were lists paraded as a kind of art, all very Alexandrian in its own way.

  After a few minutes Maurice sat down at the feet of Astronomy and grunted in half-formed sentences as though still playing one of his drunken butlers on the Brentwood stage. He was flying. He had new views. The ‘dreaming spires’ were an idea for outsiders, those who were stuck down on the ground and barely more than tourists. He was not on the ground any more. He was up high. Cleopatra was going to be the next step higher. Could I just remind him of the story again, the version that everyone would know?

  In 48 BC, we gently recalled, Julius Caesar has just defeated Pompey’s armies at the battle of Pharsalus while Pompey himself, as Canidius reports when the film begins, has escaped to Alexandria. I made the dumb messenger’s beard sign to remind him of the scene. He made the same sign back. This became a code between us: it meant that Cleopatra was on our minds.

  Why were they fighting? Maurice seemed genuinely to want to know the answer. The film had not been very clear.

  Pride, I said. That was the main reason. He seemed to sober up. He looked surprised and pleased.

  The civil war did not have to happen, I added in an effort of profundity. Two proud men made political miscalculations. Pompey made a military miscalculation too. Then Caesar made a mistake. Then Mark Antony did. Just one fuck-up after another, or history as it is sometimes called.

  Maurice took a notebook fro
m his velvet pocket and started to write what looked like a shopping list.

  ‘So for all of them life was good as long as it lasted?’

  ‘Yes, you could say that,’ I replied cautiously.

  ‘Then what is the main difference between Julius Caesar and Mark Antony? What will be the hardest part of bringing them together?’

  ‘Antony enjoyed his drink,’ I said. ‘Caesar did not.’

  I paused, and leant back heavily against Theology.

  ‘In fact, Antony was not even ashamed of his reputation as a drunk. He revelled in it.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Maurice. ‘Let’s have more Antony then.’

  The clock began chiming seven o’clock. We covered our ears. Maurice would need his text in a week – a one-entity show, short, complete and comprehensive – so that rehearsals could begin.

  I have been at Pharos for three hours, remembering Oxford among the fishermen, the fairground roundabouts and the market stalls. Mahmoud said he would meet me for ‘a late breakfast by the crocodile’.

  What crocodile? The Nile used to be famous for crocodile gods. Not now. Monotheism stopped the gods and the Aswan Dam stopped the crocs. There is no adult specimen in this dusty aquarium beside the site of the ancient lighthouse, only a single fifteen-inch baby, with glowing slit-eyes, nose upturned and tiny toes outspread, the sole representative of the species.

  The creature’s modest tank is crowded, however, by admirers. This is a marine theatre where rival attractions are few. Every young visitor has a notebook. Each one is writing short words in Arabic, one above the other. Maybe these are sentences but I do not think so. They are lists of things they have seen, long lines of water creatures or things they want to buy. In the whole history of writing are there more lists than sentences? Probably.

  Cleopatra, for all the scholars at her command, had no more idea of the origins of the Greek language than for two thousand years after her did we. Only in the early 1950s did an English architect called Michael Ventris decipher the language of some baked clay tablets found in the oldest towns of Greece, relics of the heroic age from the places where Homer’s heroes were remembered – and where some of them may have lived.

  These writings were not in the letters that we now know as Greek but they were in a language that was suddenly revealed as the most ancient of ancient Greek. Scholars hoped that we might soon possess the earliest Greek poems, or find other new clues to the birth of literature. But there was no poetry on the Linear B tablets. There were names scratched in the clay but they were random names, lists that had accidentally been burnt hard by fires, lists of food and farm equipment, livestock and taxes, animals, birds and fishes.

  Mahmoud must have meant a very late breakfast. He has still not yet arrived. There is a growing lunchtime throng here now, a bazaar of wood-carvers, pebble-painters and aquarium-goers where the Ptolemies built their lighthouse. But no one interferes with me – and my companion will be here in his own time.

  Some of the greatest treasures of Alexandria’s library were also lists of names. They were catalogues of characters from Hesiod and Homer, the oldest and wisest of the Greek poets, carefully managed by men such as Didymus Chalcenterus, master of the scrolls in Cleopatra’s reign. Hesiod’s words were the older. In his Theogony he had written on the origins of the Gods, from Chaos to Zeus, incantating Night, Air, Day, Sky, Mountains, Sea, Memory, Oceanus, Coeus, Crios, Theia, Rhea. Hesiod knew of the Nile – and of fifty water nymphs, Eukrante, Amphitrite and Sao, Eunice of the rosy arms, laughter-loving Glaukonome.

  There was a Trinity tutor who used to make us chant these names, a man called Raven, one of those peculiarly valuable teachers who impart little knowledge. Instead he made us listen to lists – outside, on the summer lawns, when I was close to sleep but awake in ways I did not then quite understand

  Homer’s lists were of the ships that sailed to Troy, their captains and their countries, Boeotians, Minyans, Phoceans, Locrians, Athenians. In Alexandria’s library the servants of the Ptolemies loved these ancient catalogues that they could command for their own new catalogues, explaining, expanding, putting words to things, pinning the world and words together, bickering about which came first. Priests might chant directly to the gods. Scholars had no less a role in divining the origins of sacred texts. Priests were falling behind; practical reason was rising.

  Homer’s Odyssey has a single scene set in Pharos itself. That was important. Everything in Homer had a message from the Greek past to the Greek future. In the epics of how the ships and captains of the Iliad came home from Troy, this piece of land existed for the first time beyond itself. It became part of history.

  Mahmoud dislikes nostalgia. But I am going to ask him to think back beyond sentiment to the absolute beginning, to a city functionary in Cleopatra’s Alexandria (any one will do) who is reading about Pharos in the Odyssey. This city, as everyone has always known, was founded by Alexander the Great and built by the Ptolemies. But in Homer there was a legitimacy much greater than that.

  Pharos’s first named inhabitant was a god of the sea, a shape-shifting god called Proteus who kept a flock of seals on the beach. In the fourth book of the poem Proteus meets two of the great names of Greece, Helen whose abduction sparked the Trojan War and Menelaus, who lost her and won her back. When this part of the Odyssey begins, Proteus has captured Helen and her husband Menelaus on their way home and has himself to be captured before he will let them leave.

  This is a strange Homeric scene set in the borders between sleeping and waking, uppers and downers, sea and land, man and sea creature. Menelaus’s men want to get out of Pharos. But the winds are against them and they are starving.

  A nymph tells them that they have only one chance. They must hide their human bodies under sealskins, mingle with the sleeping sea mammals and seize Proteus before he wakes from his afternoon nap. Despite the sea god’s wriggling transformation into lion, snake and river, they must wrestle him to the ground, grip him hard until he tells them what they need to know. He has to prophesy the fates of their friends and put the gods of the winds on their side.

  This has never been an important part of Homer’s work. Menelaus’s journey is a sideshow in a great epic poem. It is a minor odyssey within the major one, an interrogation of an aged prophet that Odysseus himself will later repeat when, much more dramatically, he meets his dead friends from Troy in the underworld. Odysseus learns in Hades how he will die. Menelaus learns his own fate at Pharos. But for most readers this was – and is – a paler part of the Odyssey in every way, as Alexandria’s scholars could plainly see.

  Perhaps it was by a lesser writer, a younger Homer. Perhaps the story of wriggling, wrestling Proteus and the men disguised as seals was included in the larger epic to prepare the audience for the more powerful story to come. Yet a sideshow is sometimes more satisfying than the show itself. For a librarian at Alexandria this episode had to be one of the great episodes. It set Pharos island in the fixed history of the world, the history that Didymus and his fellow cataloguers here had only slowly, in the reign of Cleopatra, begun to disentangle from myth.

  Mahmoud eventually does arrive, not by the baby crocodile but at a different place, the tanks of tiny-bodied blue crabs. He seems troubled and not at all threatening today. He has lost his bureaucratic poise. Today I am the calm one, he the one who looks as though he is going to be sick.

  He stares at the sky. Heavy rains and storm winds are coming, he says. There might be lightning and Pharos is dangerous when there is lightning. A sealskin, he says, used to be a good protector. Pharos was once famous for its seals. The greatest emperors used to keep sealskins for good luck. Socratis’s mad mother has a sealskin. But no one else has one any more.

  He is not in the mood to discuss Pharos in history any further. He pushes me out towards the causeway, leading me away past the pedlars, past the holidaying men keen for anything to quieten their children and the women listening intently to the conch shells to hear if the sound is the s
ame as the sound of the sea.

  Church of St Mark and St Peter

  This is the site of the New Year bombing. The blood on the blasted pavements has been washed away. The dead have been removed for reconstruction and identification. Even the carcasses of the cars are gone. It is raining lightly. There is a smell of wet paint and a quiet in the afternoon that is rare in this city. Mahmoud was worried at first about bringing me from Pharos to the bomb site, torn, I think, between a simultaneous need to defend his optimism about the city’s safety and to ensure that I genuinely was safe here. It feels fine. There is an almost empty cafe, an almost silent street, and I will be content here until evening – probably till tomorrow too.

  I said to Mahmoud that I would see him later, after I had moved on with Cleopatra’s story, past the birth of her son, past Caesar’s death and its deadly aftermath. He was not quite satisfied. Would I have wanted to be at the Two Saints church if there had not been a bombing? I said I would. The St Peter to whom the church is dedicated was a particularly significant St Peter, not the ‘rock’ on whom Christ said he would build his church but a Christian martyr from Egypt.

  Alexandria had long been a dangerous place for Christians, I added. Mahmoud waved that I should be quiet. This was not the moment for putting martyrdom in proportion or for joking. Was I making an English joke? He was not sure. I should stop anyway. And was it wise that I should sit here writing about Julius Caesar? It was much better not to write about dictators who met violent ends. Socratis was right about the agitation of the police. I might easily be misunderstood.

  Mahmoud looked suspiciously at the sheets of plain white paper with their smudged carbon-copied type from forty years ago. He was sorry he had been late this morning. He had had to go to the doctor. He had eaten last night in front of an open window and something had upset his stomach.