by Tom McCarthy
Petrou works in the Ministry of Communications. He’s charged with co-ordinating names. There seem to be three different names for every street and square in town: English, French and Arabic-beside which a controversy is raging over whether Arabic names should be translated into French or English on official street maps and, beyond this, which of three English systems, each backed by a rival government department, should be used. Petrou speaks about seven languages himself. He’s British, legally speaking, although, apart from a childhood stint in Liverpool, he’s never lived in Britain. His family hail from Greece, via Byzantium, or maybe Trieste, Odessa or the Levant, though he’s never lived in any of those places either. But he seems to have soaked up the idioms and affects of the cities, countries, islands and homelands-in-exile or -abeyance that lurk in his history, and to exude them to the satisfaction of the Bosnian florists, the White Russian dressmakers, the Syrian weavers, Armenian saddlers, Prussian carpenters, Cypriot haberdashers and Italian gunmakers whose premises he visits, Serge traipsing in behind him, on a daily basis, census-taking, plotting the linguistic layout of the city block-by-block.
“I’m doing epsilon through theta today,” he tells Serge as they down a Turkish coffee and a glass of arak pressed on “dear Morgane” (the tradesmen all call him by a variant of his first name: Morgané, Morjan, Morganovitch) and his “new friend” by a kindly proprietor.
“Yesterday was alpha-delta,” Serge replies. “Sounds like we’re walking through the alphabet.”
“Blocks here have always been labelled like that,” Petrou says, adding after a short pause: “This place and lettering go way back together. It was here that the fourth-century Copts devised their alphabet by transcribing spoken Egyptian into Greek figures, then adding hieroglyphs. This city’s where it all began: cultures and languages slamming into one another, making new ones. Where co-ordination started too: Rosetta’s just a short train-ride away. Just think: a single slab that fits all tongues together; second Babel in three feet of stone. The Rue Rosette’s my favourite in all of Alexandria, by virtue of its name alone. Infuriatingly, they’re changing that as well…”
Serge works in the Ministry of Communications too. As he rode from Versoie to London in Widsun’s car, his godfather explained to him what he’d be doing: compiling a report, or reports, that, in ways not yet entirely clear to him, assessed, abetted or advanced, or at least paved the way for the advancement of, the (still largely prospective) Empire Wireless Chain.
“The whole project was mooted years ago,” Widsun told him in the backseat of the chauffeured Ford. “The Egyptian station’s licence was issued in ’14. Why it’s still not up and running is beyond me.”
Serge, staring through glass at racing countryside, was distracted-neither by memories of his crash nor by pharmaceutical cravings (these have been bizarrely absent ever since his re-awakening; the odd faded track-mark on his arm is the only residue of past drug dependency) but rather by his recollection of the fact that, as the vehicle pulled away from the house and up the sloping path, gravel crunching beneath its wheels, he’d looked back to see that, of the people gathered there to wave him off, it was Bodner alone whose face had displayed signs of sadness.
“ Norman ’s committee proposed eight stations,” Widsun went on, voice blending with the motor’s drone, “each two thousand miles apart, relaying from here to every corner of the Empire. The Milner-Eccles report seemed to confirm that this was feasible. But the Dominions are being irksome, and the Cabinet now seem to want to set up a new committee and commission new reports, while simultaneously pushing ahead with the Egyptian station that’s been sitting around half-built for seven years. You’ll be working for Macauley, in Cairo: he’ll be having you prepare a sub-report that he’ll doubtless amalgamate into his own report to the Telegraphy Committee, who, in turn, will report up to the Imperial Communications Committee, who in turn…”
His voice trailed off, and they sat in silence for a while. Then Widsun, shifting his position, stretched his arm out horizontally across the leather bench-seat behind Serge and added, in a confidential tone:
“And if it’s okay with you, I’d like an appendix.”
“An appendix?” Serge asked.
“An appendix,” Widsun repeated. “Addendum, apocrypha, postscript, prolegomena-what you will. A section just for me. Think of it as the lost chapter.”
“What should it contain?”
“If I knew that I’d write it myself,” Widsun chuckled. “You’ll be there; I’ll leave it to you to decide what things should come to my attention.” He looked out of the window himself, as though scanning the blur of vegetation for a pattern, then continued: “These are ‘interesting times,’ as the old Chinese curse would have it. There’s… stuff happening in Egypt that I’d like to keep abreast of.”
“Like an Amazonian,” Serge muttered.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a… nothing. Carry on.”
“Send it to me separately. Think of it as our direct line: one that bypasses chains, committees and the like.” He brought his head right down to Serge’s and half-whispered: “You’ll be my little spy.”
Serge, digesting this rather cryptic commission, felt a sour taste gathering inside his mouth-a taste that returned each time he subsequently pondered Widsun’s request: bitter, and massing from further inside, like some peptic reflux.
After disembarking in Alexandria and reporting to the Ministry’s office on the Rue de France, expecting to be handed tickets for that evening’s Cairo train, he was informed that he’d be staying here for a while, “surveying damages.”
“Damages to what?” he asked.
“His Majesty’s communication network,” Major Ferguson, head of the Alexandria section, told him. “After we deported Zaghlul, the Egyptians chose to vent their anger not just on our businesses and residencies, but also on telegraph wires, phone lines and the like. Even the poles sometimes: hacked them down with a real vengeance, like a tribe of Red Indians wreaking sacrilege against enemies’ totem posts. Which they were, in a way.”
“How so?” asked Serge.
“Way I see it,” Ferguson said, picking up a salt biscuit from a bowl on his desk, “a phone box is sacred. No matter how shoddy, or in what obscure and run-down district of which backwater it’s in, it’s still connected to a substation somewhere, which is connected to a central exchange, which itself forms one of many tributaries of a larger river that flows straight to the heart of London. Step into a box in Labban or Karmouz, and you’re joined in holy trinity with every lane in Surrey, every gabled house in Gloucestershire.” He slipped the biscuit into his mouth like a communion wafer, then continued: “You’ve been attached to us-semi-attached, until Cairo has need of you-to assess the impact of these acts of telecommunicative blasphemy. You’re our attaché for detachment-our détaché.” Brushing crumbs from his shirt, he smiled, pleased at his witticism.
“Why not just get some engineers to do it?” Serge asked.
“Engineers are engineers,” replied Ferguson. “They understand wires and insulators, nothing else. What we want from you is a different angle on it all, a wider perspective.”
“Perspective was never my-” Serge began, but Ferguson cut him off.
“You’ll be taken around town by… Ishak Effendi Benoiel!” he called to his secretary.
“Yes, Effendi?” the man asked, appearing, notepad in hand, in the doorway.
“Go and dig out Petrou for us, would you?”
Petrou shuffled into the office several minutes later. He looked shy, and stood slightly sideways-on to Ferguson and Serge.
“Petrou, Carrefax; Carrefax, Petrou,” Ferguson intoned perfunctorily, reaching for another biscuit. “Name co-ordinator and détaché: you’ll make a great pair.”
So it is that, after sitting in on tedious morning meetings at which land purchase, hemp and fibre cultivation, steam-cotton-press importing and coin-mintage or marsh-drainage tendering are discussed in English,
Arabic and pidgin French with bureaucrats from two more ministries housed in the same building as theirs and one more housed two Attic blocks away, Serge and Petrou set out on their daily jaunt round Alexandria. The city’s long esplanades sweep them from shop to shop, the awnings, balconies and palm trees shading their heads and marking their progress with a rhythm of half-repetition that seems almost regular. Motor cars and horse carts slide around them, cutting into and out of one another’s paths like intersecting eras. Native men in European dress embellished by red flowerpot fezzes hurry past them carrying briefcases of legal documents, newspaper copy or insurance claims; others in long robes roll barrels down the road with sticks; groups of schoolchildren in multi-coloured dreamcoats process along pavements hand-in-hand like paper-figure chains. The robes remind Serge of pyjamas, lending the city a sleepy look, as though it had just now been roused, or half-roused, from its slumber. Hawkers’ chants float through the air towards them as they pass the French Gardens each day; howls and cries spill out at them from the Cotton Exchange; flag staffs bristle in their honour as they move down the Rue Chérif Pacha. Trams carry them, past churches Maronite, Presbyterian and Anglican, banks Roman and Egyptian, mosques with a hundred different types of minarets, from General Post Office to Canopic Way, past the Gate of the Sun, through Turkish Town, across Mahmoudied Canal from one shore to the other and then back again.
“We’ll take the Ragheb Pasha tram to Anfoushi-that’s the Red Crescent one; then a Moharram Bey tram on to Karmouz-that’s the Red Circle one; and then the Circular tram onwards to Shatby-that’s the Green Triangle one,” Petrou informs Serge one Monday afternoon.
“Circles, triangles, crescents: how very geometric,” Serge replies as they board the double-decker drawing up beside them.
“That started here as well,” Petrou says as it pulls off again.
“What did?”
“Geometry. Euclid was Alexandrian: worked under Ptolemy Soter, the first one. Eratosthenes as well: he calculated the diameter of earth from the sun’s shadow as it fell across the city’s streets at noon. And Sostratus, their contemporary, conceived Pharos, the great lighthouse, as an expression of shape and form and boundaries: dividing sea from land and light from dark, cutting the night up into cones and blocks and wedges…”
They’re jolted slightly as their tram glides through a junction where the tracks from two lines intersect. The rails form cords and sectors on the ground, arcs, ratios and reciprocals. Another tram slides along a curve, joining the intersection from another angle; as it does, its trolley-poles swing out above its roof until they’re almost perpendicular to both it and the overhead wires; then they align themselves again, like arms of gramophones.
“ Alexandria was on the Nile as well as the sea,” Petrou’s telling him. “But the Canopic mouth silted up sometime in the twelfth century, defeating the main purpose for which Alexander built the city in the first place.”
“How?” asks Serge, holding the hand-rail.
“He wanted it to be the great hub of the world, connecting everywhere to everywhere else. More than that: it would be Greece ’s grand self-realisation, its ascent, beyond itself, into a universal condition. Über-Greece: a kind of simulation better than the real thing ever was. His version would assimilate all other cultures, all their gods and figureheads and what have you else, and conjoin these beneath the canopy of a transcendent, modern Hellenism in which reason, science and knowledge would all flourish. Alexander was a co-ordinator too.”
“So why didn’t it work?” Serge asks.
“He died,” shrugs Petrou, “without ever seeing it finished. His fellow Macedonians, the Ptolemies, took over, and started marrying their sisters in the old Egyptian manner. Then the Mouseion and its famous library burned down. Octavian saw the place as no more than a grainhouse, for storage and shipment back to Rome. The later Roman emperors just passed through on their way to visit the antiquities of Upper Egypt, and neither the Arabs nor the Turks saw much of value here. Nowadays we Europeans treat it as a trading colony on the shore of an alien continent. Oh: there’s the Ptolemaic dyke. We get off here. If you look closely, you can see the route it took…”
Petrou knows everything about the city. He seems to have absorbed it almost chemically: blotted it up, the subsequent reaction dictating his elemental constitution. It strikes Serge that if you cut a graft off him, a cross-section, and mounted it on a slide-tray beneath a microscope, then what you’d see would be a cellular combination of every Greek-speaking Jewish draper whose yarmulke’s made from Alexandrian cotton, each partially French-descended native clerk proudly twiddling his Second Empire moustache as he describes the tract he’s writing in his leisure hours about the horticultural benefits of Napoleon’s Egyptian reign, the Austro-Hungarian confectioners whose Viennese profiteroles bear the distinctive taste of local sugar, the Maltese photographers, Levantine booksellers and Portuguese tobacconists they visit every afternoon-a combination, too, of the cells of the Persians, Romans and ersatz-Greeks who people his daily talk: all of them, right back to the sister-wedding Ptolemies.
One day, their habitual round of morning meetings cancelled due to strikes by native civil servants, they begin their peregrinations early, stopping in on an Albanian shoe-maker whose shop, it turns out, has been vandalised the night before.
“A running battle, Morganou,” he half-wails as he crouches on his floor, sweeping up broken glass. “Up and down the street, hour after hour.”
“Who was fighting?” Petrou asks.
“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 h
is 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.