Tom McCarthy - C

“Young people: Arabs, Greeks, Italians. Maltese as well, you can be certain.” Standing up, he brushes his head against one of the strips of flypaper hanging from the ceiling, then tears a double-page from the Egyptian Gazette lying on his counter. As he lowers himself again to sweep the glass fragments into the paper, Serge runs his eye over the pages now exposed. Their columns, like the flypaper, form long, narrow bands. One lists the ships at quay in Port Said: Lepanto in 71; Nickios, 28; Aurora, 77. Their export manifests descend the adjacent column: ten tons caustic soda, half a million cigarette papers, five tons haricots. On the far side, the sports: Sett’s taking on Naylor in a ten-round bout at CISC and Othello’s favourite over City of Cork and Archduke Ferdinand in the Heliopolis Oasis Stakes at odds of 3-2. Between these long strips, in a thicker column, the Revue Commerciale, in French, compares Nile Gages with last year’s. Coton is down, Sel et Soda Egyptien’s down, the Agricultural Bank’s down 1/16, trading at £4 3/16. Along the central crease run ads, all for insurance: Sun Insurance, Anagnostopolou Insurance, Caledonian Insurance (agent: Levant Company, 8c Passage Chérif)…

“They sell protection against riots now,” the cobbler moans, his own eye following Serge’s as he straightens. “I should have bought this last week.”

“You’d do well to buy it this week,” Petrou tells him. “I fear more trouble’s to come.”

“I’ll buy, I’ll buy-but the price doubles now, I tell you, Morganou. And next week, double again! And if,” he adds, his eyes rolling heavenwards in deterrent supplication, “independence should come, an emperor’s ransom will not guarantee my shop!”

Later that same day, they visit the Cleopatra Stationery Store, and Serge buys a ribbon for the Corona typewriter he’s borrowed from the Ministry to write his damage report, his détaché dispatch. He buys a small black notebook, and some carbon paper too: official documents, he reasons (although no one’s told him this), should be in triplicate.

“She was an Alexandrian as well,” Petrou says as they catch a Circular tram outside.

“Who?”

“Cleopatra. Came to the throne at seventeen. Her brother, Ptolemy Thirteen, also her husband, was just ten-and there were two more siblings, eight and five. The whole court was a nursery.”

“Didn’t she wrap herself up in a tapestry or something?” Serge asks.

“In a carpet, yes. For Caesar. Her real love was Antony, though: that’s the one that got immortalised. She poisoned herself after his death, with an asp.” Turning to face him, he pokes his pronged hand against Serge’s chest and starts reciting:

Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,

That sucks the nurse asleep?

The hand stays there for a while; then Petrou turns slightly sideways again, so that he’s partly facing Serge and partly the elegant Ramleh beachfront that’s slipping by.

“Dryden has it bite her arm,” he carries on after a while. “That’s the way Plutarch said it happened. Statues of her and Antony as Isis and Osiris were discovered here…”

Serge, watching beach-huts and parasols that seem to move against a sea dotted with small sailing boats that seem not to, pictures a dual-pointed needle sinking into flesh. The tram’s slowing down; Petrou’s signalling to him to get off.

“Telegraph wires are cut just… where is it?” he mumbles as they stand at the trackside, turning left and right. “Ah! Here. See?”

“Yes, I do,” says Serge. The wire has been cut in two like a piece of string-and then cut further, with the detached stretch itself snipped into several shorter pieces on the ground. The tram-wires that run beside it are untouched. Petrou steps back and turns half-away again, deferring: telecommunication’s Serge’s brief, not his. Serge stares at the dead copper snakes for a few seconds, as though they could tell him anything, then follows Petrou’s gaze towards the beach. It’s late afternoon; beyond the yacht club, on past the casino, the wet sand’s turned the colour of oxidised mercury. The scene itself has a détaché air: it seems to bear the same relation to reality around it as a photograph-perhaps of somewhere else. The ladies promenading in white hats and dresses, the cravated men hauling their dinghies a few feet up the beach before heading towards the clubhouse, the pale children patting sandcastles: these seem to have been transposed here straight from Torquay, Cannes or Saint-Tropez-as though, in fading light, Europe, like Alexander’s Greece, were simulating itself, trying with a dogged persistence to block out the growing knowledge that it can’t take root here, that it won’t work.

“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: