A parked motorcycle blocked my way. Did it belong to a grave-digger? Or was it a grave marker? And what about the rusty engine in front of the adjoining tomb?
A grizzled old man carrying groceries in a string bag called out, “What’s your name?” Before I could answer, he shouted his: “Nabil.”
I kicked at the rusty engine. “What do you suppose this is?”
The old man, wearing a woolly sweater on this sweltering day, regarded me as if I were the one suffering from heatstroke. “It’s a car motor.” What else? “You Amriki?” he asked, again not awaiting an answer. “I have brothers in Houston and Albany. One city hot, one city cold.”
“Where do you live?”
He motioned up the dusty path. “Once this road was big. Now small because of more dead.”
“You live in the cemetery?”
His face contorted in a bemused expression. Now he knew I was nuts. “No, no. I take shortcut to house.” Warily, he backed away, leaving me to the enigma of the engine.
As I returned to rue Anubis, I spotted a billboard rearing above the necropolis, another of the improbable sights that the city always seemed to drop in my path. Spilling over with photos of smiling babies, the sign advertised a fertility clinic.
In a packed communal minibus, I headed east on the Corniche from Chatby toward Montazah Palace. From the rear-view mirror swung an eclectic collection of sacred and profane objects—a miniature soccer ball, wooden rosary beads, a tiny striped soccer jersey and a Coptic holy card. To further confuse matters, the radio blasted Koranic chants and the dashboard was upholstered with what looked to be a wolf pelt. My fellow passengers helpfully passed my money to the driver, then returned the change hand to hand.
The Corniche curved along for miles, lined on one side by beaches and cabanas, and on the other by condos and hotels, including a Four Seasons with a Starbucks on its terrace. In the summer, before Nasser took over, in the ’50s, the king and his court and thousands of government officials used to decamp here to escape Cairo’s brutal heat, and Alex had served as the country’s seasonal capital. Today the city still swells by a million or more during the months when the coast is twenty or thirty degrees cooler than inland. But on this April afternoon, the beach season had yet to start, and lounge chairs were chained to the pavement outside boarded-up cafés.
During World War I, Forster had worked as a volunteer at Montazah Palace when the Spanish-style Mudejar castle had served as a military convalescent center. Its gardens were still a healing refuge, its trees and shrubs thoughtfully labeled—casuaria, oleander, date palm, tamarisk. On the quiet streets, husbands taught their wives and daughters to drive, safe from the maelstrom outside the wall. Everywhere on the grass, girls in hijabs paired off with boys. But the young here were definitely not in one another’s arms. They sat at a demure distance, separated by the leftovers of picnic lunches.
Then an extraordinary phenomenon electrified the air and focused all eyes. As a young European woman walked by, a prurient hush fell over paradise. Although she wore a modest shirtwaist dress, she radiated the erotic charge of a G-stringed pole dancer. Her hair was uncovered and hung in lustrous ringlets. A week in Alexandria had redefined my notions of sensuality. Like those red-eyed Biblical elders leering at Susannah in her bath, I felt my thin blood pulse.
On Sunday, a workday in Egypt, I returned to the Bibliotheca Alexandrina to see Sahar Hamouda, the Mediterranean Center’s deputy director. On the esplanade out front, university students milled around a pair of glinting sculptures. One was Prometheus Bearing Fire: Symbol of Knowledge. Synonymous with Creativity and Imagination. The other was a brushed aluminum bust of Alexander the Great. Over the door for paying customers, a sign proclaimed the current exhibition, “Bio-Vision Alexandria: New Life Sciences, From Promise to Practice.”
At Hamouda’s office, I discovered that we wouldn’t be having a one-on-one conversation about the Cosmopolitan Era. Seated on a couch, I confronted a panel of three that reminded me of my PhD oral exams. Along with the sweet, plump Hamouda, there was a middle-aged woman with melodramatic hair, highlighted by henna. She introduced herself as Mona Khlat, and said she was a writer and former teacher.
The third party, a man in a swivel chair, volunteered nothing about himself, not even his name. But when Hamouda referred to him as Professor Awad, I divined that this august eminence in slacks, open collar shirt and Top-Siders was Mohammed Awad. An architect educated in Alexandria and London, he was the center’s director and the founder of the city’s Preservation Trust. Awad embodied Alexandrian cosmopolitanism and was a ruling authority on the subject.
As I had with Ibrahim Abdel Meguid, I asked whether it bothered them that Alexandria was best known through European writers. Durrell, for instance.
Awad cut me off. Like the two women, he spoke English with a British accent: “Durrell writes badly of Alexandria. He’s not popular here. When I read Durrell I don’t think it’s about Alex. I don’t think he’s truthful.”
“Too romantic,” I suggested.
“No, romanticism isn’t the problem. The problem is factual accuracy. Not even the names in Durrell exist. I don’t know any Nessims or Justines. Only Clea means something to me because I knew the real Clea—Clea Bardero, the artist she was based on.”
I brought up André Aciman and his memoir, Ouf of Egypt, but Professor Awad wasn’t one to grant extra credit to a hometown boy. “Aciman is not very accurate. His own experience as an expelled Jew overwhelms his book. His was a quite particular experience at a time of crisis.”
“Particular?” I asked. “Certainly the crisis was personal and deeply felt. But Aciman’s family weren’t the only Jews expelled from Egypt.”
“I don’t know how much of a victim he was,” Awad said. “He talks about cruelty to him at school. I went to Victoria College with Aciman. The teacher he complains about was cruel to everybody. So it wasn’t because he was a Jew. Nobody knew or cared that he was Jewish.”
“We are a very open society,” Mona Khlat piped up.
“During the Cosmopolitan Era, Alex was like Shanghai or Thessalonika—multicultural, multilingual, multiracial,” the professor said. “Much more refined than New York City. We didn’t have discrimination against blacks and Jews and foreigners.”
“In many ways that’s still the case,” Khlat said, while Hamouda kept silent.
“You should attend my lecture tomorrow,” Awad told me. “It’s in French. Do you speak French?”
“Yes, I—”
“Three things contributed to our cosmopolitanism,” he powered forward, counting on his fingers. “The stock exchange, the port and our legal system. As early as 1870 we had institutionalized international law. What other country had that? Egyptians are quite civilized because they have had contact with other civilizations.”
“That remains the case,” Khlat insisted. “I’m a Christian. I’m married to a Muslim. My husband lived in the United States and became more and more Islamic. He went through various phases of fanaticism. But I wear a bikini.”
Awad reached over to a desk and retrieved some papers. They were old bordello licenses. “I’m looking for a license for a homosexual bordello. I know it exists, but I can’t find it.”
Khlat contributed another example of what she considered Egyptian tolerance. “Prostitutes used to sing a song when they came back clean from their medical checkups: ‘Safe I went. Safe I come.’ That’s a popular song we sing now whenever we return from a journey.”
Timidly, I asked how they reconciled Egyptian tolerance with the treatment of women who