Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra Read online

  No one wanted trouble. Dividing one group from another was not designed to hurt. It was as natural as breathing. Then, one afternoon in the summer of 1968, the classics library, which was kept in the form room of the classical upper sixth, was ransacked by persons unknown. This, we soon learnt, was a much more serious offence to school rules than surreptitious snogging or serial buggery. It was a public crime. It was a mystery. While V and I ate ice creams at Chelmsford bus station the next day she wanted to know what I had seen, who had seen it first and who was under suspicion.

  On no account, I told her, were we allowed to clear the evidence. I described to her the confetti of grey on the green floor, the occasional piece of cardboard colour, the muddy purples and blues used for binding dictionaries. I slightly exaggerated what I had seen and when I had seen it. She nodded sagely, as though humouring a child.

  So who had done the deed? Who would write Homo on a book of Homer, Virgin on a book of Virgil, mix up pages, tear maps and lexica? Who, without even noticing, would have torn the rough-book with most of my Cleopatra notes? A disaffected airforce platoon of the CCF? A band of chemically enhanced physicists? Germans? The fencing team? She shrugged and broke the empty end of her cone into the waste bin. In V’s view, almost anyone could have had a reason. She was surprised such assaults were not a daily occurrence like all the other assaults that her friends still reported to her.

  For a week there was nothing more to report. But then a book was burned, only one book, but burning, it seemed, was more serious still. The target was a copy of The Greek Anthology, a collection of short poems, many from Alexandria, written over a period of a thousand years, mostly unappreciated except by zealots and at that time, in a school classroom, never opened at all. It had not even burnt well. The culprits had used pages from tattered rough-books (one of them mine) to fuel an inadequate fire.

  Mr W had the job of investigation. I could not tell him anything. No one could. Or, anyway, no one did. I had expected to be sadder at the almost total loss of Cleopatra the Second. Once I would have cared much more but, in truth, I had left it behind. Since no one apart from V knew how far it had advanced, I did not even report the damage.

  Maurice suspected the boy he called Frog, a suitable candidate I agreed. Frog was not a pleasant creature. He was short, squat, obsessive, a day-boy who lived like a boarder, an undesirable hybrid. He was clever but not predictable. He fitted in nowhere. He was always keen to continue his tedious stories after catcalls and abuse, even after chalk had been pushed down his throat. He understood certain jokes perfectly and others not at all. He knew about Nazi medical experiments and once gave a lecture to the classical society, in excessive detail, on how gladiators used to slit each other’s arteries. Perhaps this Frog had been both the ransacker and the burner. He seemed a very likely culprit.

  In V’s view to investigate the crime at all was a silliness that proved how isolated and self-obsessed we were. This was 1968, the year of revolutions from Paris to San Francisco and even changes to modest forms of socialism in Britain. Whoever was protesting, in the rooms between the Memorial Hall and the headmaster’s garden, was not, she thought, protesting anywhere near enough.

  Here was my friend at her most different from the rest of us. Any comparison between what was going on inside school and outside was rare and bold. At Brentwood we knew almost nothing about the wider world in which we lived. Paul Simon sang at our Folk Club and Jimi Hendrix (whom my diary of the time spelt as Hendricks) came to Chelmsford and terrified V’s most liberated friends, trying to dance with them during the interval and to lure them backstage when the show was over. That was the extent of my ‘Sixties’, as the word came later to be used. To understand a sacking of our bookshelves, the classical sixth did not turn to hippies or Vietnam War protesters. We could only go back in time and south in direction for our comparisons, parallels and explanations.

  The headmaster himself took over the case. He conjured extraordinary visions before our eyes, the sack of Rome, the burnings of Alexandria’s Library by Julius Caesar, the monasteries of Africa pillaged by Islamic hordes. It was an unforgettable performance and a perfect end to Cleopatra the Second.

  Despite these efforts no culprit was ever found. There were mutterings about those few sixth-form iconoclasts who did make regular contact with outside life, who studied English, had mirrored glasses, sexual partners and pop-groups in which they sang at weekends. There were also the boy soldiers and airmen of our Combined Cadet Force to consider.

  It was a restricted list. But our physical horizons were in every direction fiercely curtailed. There were areas of ignorance far closer to home than the student politics of Europe and America. Most of the school, as V pointed out, was a city as closed as Moscow. The boarding houses might have been on Baffin Island for all I knew of them. I never reached closer than the cloisters’ changing rooms, crumbling red-brick catacombs where the third and fourth elevens kept their football kit in foul-smelling piles.

  6.1.11

  Hotel Metropole, Place Saad Zaghloul

  It is 5.30 a.m. in Room 114. I meant to finish the schooldays’ story last night but succumbed instead to dried vine leaves and thick Egyptian red wine. There is a message under the door from Mahmoud, delivered by the chambermaid, that he, not Socratis, will collect me for the trip to Pompey’s column at 9 a.m.

  CLEOPATRA THE THIRD

  The screen on which V and I eventually saw Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra together was as wide as the road to London. We met no one we knew. She probably intended it that way. Even if we had been seen, nobody would have taken any notice. There was nothing to know. V and I shared only an intimacy of chance, of neighbourliness on our strange works estate, nothing more. For three hours we watched a tempestuous love story as though it were a National Geographic film about flowers in a desert.

  Before the film we talked again about book-burning. Afterwards we ranged wider but not more warmly. V was still musing most of all on what was not in the film, the lost opportunity to show Cleopatra’s teenage years, the triumphant return of the good daughter and her father, the murder (most satisfying, she thought) of the bad daughter and ex-queen, Berenice.

  With the Roman forces that restored Ptolemy the Fluteplayer to power had come a young cavalry officer called Mark Antony, soon to be a popular figure in Alexandria for preventing many more murders that the king had hoped to commit. We had not seen a glimpse of this in the film, not even a glance across a crowd.

  Nor had we seen anything of Ptolemy’s death, nor of Cleopatra’s consequent coronation (aged eighteen), shared with her younger brother (aged twelve), nothing of her pioneering procession up the Nile to replace a sacred bull that had conveniently died (there is a tablet to commemorate this trip, asking that the gods breathe sweet breath into the beast’s nostrils), nothing of the food shortages that followed her arrival on the throne, the result of inauspicious years of low annual flooding.

  So, we argued, what should be in a Cleopatra story and what should not? If it were to start again, should it include only what was certainly true, only what more than one writer had said was true, only facts that were supported by both writers and by bits of sculpture and inscription found in the ground? Should an author favour what was most likely to be true or what made the best story?

  V’s outrage at the lost years of Cleopatra represented, in the very tiniest of ways, the movements for youth that, in the sixties, even in not-quite-urban Essex, we were all beginning to join. She prized independence, ideas and the possibilities of change. Anyone is an Alexandrian who, like V in those days, liked to take a familiar story and look at it from some novel perspective, who wanted an old hero to be young, who saw a sideshow as the main show. That is what they did in the Ptolemies’ libraries, turning old stories inside out and back to front, for novelty, to show how clever they were, for good reasons and bad. That is what they taught the Romans and two thousand years of storytellers to do.

  V hated the film. She had the advan
tage over me of having seen it before. But that was all. The second time was much worse than the first. Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra was not Alexandrian in any sense that we had talked about – or any sense at all, bar spectacle and slush. We began a quiet bickering beside the popcorn stall about how predictable it had been.

  There was that absurd first scene of smoking corpses on the battlefield of Pharsalus beneath bright-blue sky, men on horses thundering towards Caesar’s tent. Who has sent them, asks a jovial Rex Harrison, fretting blithely over the deaths of the fellow Romans who had been foolish enough to follow Pompey. A dumb messenger answers. He uses the sign language for a bushy beard. A man with just such a beard arrives, thin-faced, eyes nastily close together below a commander’s white plumes blowing from behind. With a booming voice, boldly hiding bad news, he tells the new master of the world that Pompey has escaped his defeat and has fled to Egypt by ship.

  This Blackbeard is the Publius Canidius Crassus for whom Cleopatra would later write her magically surviving ginestho. Caesar bids Canidius to drink to victory and then to return with his army to Rome. This character seemed of not much significance then. All we wanted to do was to quibble at each other. When we left the cinema for a pub that served the under-aged drinker, we were still arguing about when a biography of Cleopatra should best start.

  V sipped at a gin-and-tonic, smoothed black skirt over black tights, swept back her fringe and looked around nervously in case there was anyone around whom she knew. It would be bad for her to be seen with me and my half-a-pint of beer. To be seen having some sort of row would be embarrassing. It would be better, she said, if we both wrote down what we thought of the film. There was a newspaper competition to find ‘Young Critics’. Her father had noticed it and broken away from his balsa model of the Marconi tower to tell her about it. We should both enter – and try our luck.

  And so we did. After Cleopatra the Second had died in a burnt rough-book, Cleopatra the Third was born on Basildon Bond writing paper, a thick blue extravagance of our house, proudly typed by my mother as a film review, long now lost, for the Daily Telegraph.

  Rue Colonne Pompée

  Mahmoud arrived almost punctually at the Metropole hotel at 9.30, impatient to begin our morning walk. The streets of Alexandria, he said, were becoming ‘calmer all the time’. It was as though he had been practising the phrase. The bombing was forgotten. The ‘criminal suicidist’ was clearly identifiable from his photo-fit picture in the newspaper. There was no mystery, no plot, no problem. Not even Socratis and ‘his imbecile driver’ should worry any more.

  After barely a hundred yards we stopped for a coffee and water. Mahmoud’s impatience had not lasted long. We should see the city today from its highest natural point, he lectured languidly, ignoring the waiter, who just as languidly failed to acknowledge him.

  The Roman theatre was ‘too low’, he began. The library on the Corniche was ‘much too low’. It was strange, he said, that they had built the new library in a place so close to where its predecessor, without the help of global warming, had already slipped into the sea. ‘After a few too many waves’ (he lilted the words as though lightly chiding a daughter for too many sweets), ‘the shallow slope of glass, financed by so much goodwill from around the world, would be underwater, alongside Cleopatra’s palaces once again.’

  I smiled politely. He stopped, frowned and corrected himself, as though some senior officer in a superior department were overhearing. Yes, he had once thought that flooding was a problem for the library but had since been assured that it was not. And there were those who said that the clergy had banned books offensive to Islam. This too was not true. But it was complicated. There were many errors made by foreigners here.

  What, he asked, was my own opinion of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina? ‘Did you like it? Do you want to go back?’

  I paused, grunted, grabbed the menu.

  I wanted to give an answer that he would like. He was my guide for the day. He was not being paid, at least not by me. I was in his debt. But what would be his favoured answer? Mahmoud was proud of his city: he would want me to say how much I liked Alexandria’s new library by the sea. Equally he was contemptuous of nostalgia for antiquity: he might prefer a more critical response. I said eventually that it might have been ‘a missed opportunity’.

  His response was sharp and, as was his way, grammatically precise. ‘A missed opportunity for whom?’ He looked from side to side to side, no longer friendly. For the first time since arriving, I wished I was somewhere else. I suddenly had no interest in Alexandria and its bombings. I was supposed to be in a South African vineyard. Cleopatra was a woman I should have abandoned years ago.

  Or, if I had to be here, I would rather be guided by wild-haired Socratis. I had been mistaken in thinking that the two men were more or less the same. They were not.

  ‘Why is Socratis not here?’, I asked.

  ‘He is busy,’ Mahmoud snapped. ‘His driver is in trouble. There are many people here in trouble.’

  More coffee arrived, with no visible encouragement from Mahmoud. I wondered what the trouble was. I said feebly that I liked the President’s library very much and hoped that it would last as long as its predecessor had done.

  He seemed satisfied with this. Adjusting his glasses to improve his bureaucratic poise, he went on doggedly with the theme that every city had to be seen from the highest possible place. Height was essential. Height was the quality of the ancient lighthouse that mattered most. He poured salt on to the table and placed the salt cellar so as to make his point. The Pharos was a navigation aid to keep ships from the rocks and a giant advertisement to sailors with library books, slaves, jewels and other things to sell. But its height was its essence, the essence of Alexandria itself, and the tallest tower in the world before the intervention of Monsieur Eiffel.

  There were visitors, he said, who ignorantly expected there still to be a lighthouse here. And there were those who luxuriated in the joy of loss, romantics revelling in nostalgia for a lighthouse that had gone. The ignorant were inevitable. Nothing could be done with them bar the taking of their money. The nostalgic were much more dangerous, sowing illusions of a city that was always lost and had never existed at all.

  When we began our climb I asked for a better map. Mahmoud refused. The ancient city plan, he said, was clear without a modern copy. The rest would be incomprehensible however much I spent at the stationers. Maps, he proposed with airy wisdom, show only how little we know.

  Our target was the highest natural point in Cleopatra’s Alexandria, the Rakhotis hill on the western side, south of the Moon gate, the only place where people lived before Alexander came. Mahmoud was a fluent guide as long as he stayed with his script. In Rhakotis, he explained, was once the temple of Serapis. Greek and Egyptian rites there were most closely fused together. Prophets sang from holes in the ground and dreams of the future rose in smoke. There was also a machine for calculating floods and tax. When the nearby ‘mother library’ became full, this was the site of the ‘daughter library’ for new literary arrivals. Its bleached remains are now the rooms closest to the site of these first scholars’ first desks.

  Mahmoud’s words successfully distracted me from our gentle upward march past the military bases, mosques and underwear markets. He was relaxed while we walked past rows of French furniture in various imperial styles, maybe the market which my father called Settee Street, windows and pavements filled with Louis Quatorze leopards’ feet, Louis Quinze eagles’ wings, Louis Seize fishing tackle, the coy female nudity known as Louis Farouk. When our path was blocked by an old man pickaxing a truck engine, Mahmoud apologised coldly. When the obstacle was a massive mound of children’s underpants, each pair being individually smoothed and elastic-tested by the seller as if she were the proudest mother of their wearers, he exhaled a sad, stoic sigh.

  After almost an hour of feigned shock and disappointments, at women selling Koranic texts, oil rags and black fish, he pointed to a rough brown crown in
the sky above the rooftops. ‘La Colonne Pompée’, he cried out, unnecessarily smoothing his hair and preferring French, as he sometimes did when a scene demanded the added grandeur that the language of the Metropole might provide.

  Rue Karmous

  Pompey himself, known affectionately in his youth as ‘the teenage butcher’, can never, even in his later, lethal Greatness, have been as intimidating as the granite monster that bears his name. Some hundred feet high and ten feet thick, its plinth made from the rubble of royal tombs, it is like a massive ancient weapon threatening everything that lies below. Its polished surface, only lightly stained in deep greens, reds and greys, is missile-smooth.

  Mass and simplicity must have together deterred any who imagined moving it, even from a city where so much has been exported, drowned and destroyed. Pompey’s Pillar, to use its English name, had none of the mystery of an obelisk. It lacked the hieroglyphic signs that Christian plunderers, as well as pagans, thought were the words of God. Its simpler message, hardly surpassed by later conquerors of infinitely greater resource, was of mere brute power. Louis XIV, the Sun King of France, had ambitions to move it to a Paris square and make it bear his own statue. So did lesser French kings.

  If anyone had tried a removal, the column might have smashed through the tombs, bull-pens and book stores, destroying yet more of the village that was here when Alexandria was not yet a city. Alternatively, it could have rolled down the hill, wrecking the workshops, eventually joining other past glories, so many statues of so many Cleopatras, in the sands of the harbour. But, instead, Pompey’s Pillar has stayed in its place. It is still empty and still here.