“Youngsters are quite loose compared to our generation,” Awad agreed. “Women are in the streets at odd hours of the night. The veil is a mask. It’s no indication of moral attitudes. For some it’s to attract attention.”
“Mores have changed,” Khlat added, sweeping her hair out of her face with both hands. “My husband makes the hadj to Mecca. I go to the beach in a bikini.”
Awad smiled indulgently. “You’re not typical. It’s part of your exotic charm and appeal. But our young people are not integrated with the rest of the world. They go to Europe but—”
“The culture has become impoverished,” Khlat said.
“Students smoke sheesha, fool around on computers and watch videos, not the news,” Hamouda joined in.
“The quality in my time was different,” Awad said. “Even poor students at the university were interested in learning.”
“They were more cultured,” Hamouda suggested.
“Those were the people I mixed with,” Khlat said. “The intellectuals.”
“I remember going to Cairo to the book fair,” Professor Awad said, “just to buy one French architecture magazine.”
“The new rich—” Khlat started off, but Awad interrupted her. “It’s always the same. There’s no model to follow. My grandfather worked his ass, as they say, and made a small fortune. But he had models. Now there are no models. Society today doesn’t promote this kind of thing.”
I had the horrible, itchy, post-haircut feeling that I was trapped in Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians.” Trampling on one another’s lines, the trio continued to kvetch that the world had gone to hell in a handbasket, and that far worse was imminent. Snug in this glass and chrome office, sheltered by the Bibliotheca, surrounded by every known communications device, they nevertheless felt cut off and frightened. Some menace, some rough beast, some unimaginable horror advanced over the horizon. Or had it already done its damage and withdrawn into the desert?
They might have rattled on and on had a strange shape not lurched into the room. No, not a barbarian. It was a benighted one-legged man in a wheelchair. “Oh, god,” Khlat groaned. “He’s here for money, and I don’t have a penny.”
I dug a few bills from my pocket, and the man grabbed them and rolled away to the next office.
“Poor fellow,” Awad said.
“You know him?” I asked.
“Of course. He worked here for years. Then he developed diabetes and lost his leg.”
“Now he comes to the library to beg?”
“Where else? He knows us. We know him.”
I waited for one of them to say more. When nobody did, I asked whether they saw any significance in the incident. They shook their heads.
To me it seemed a caricature of conditions in Alexandria. While we sat in the Bibliotheca, bloviating about literary matters and deteriorating mores, people in the streets lived and died without basic medical care and social services. It was almost tragic. Almost grotesquely humorous. Almost worth mentioning. But what could I have said that wouldn’t sound judgmental and intolerant?
Awad broke the silence. He was having guests to his home tonight, and he invited me to join them and continue our conversation. But I begged off, and thanked him and the two women for their hospitality.
Before leaving the library, I toured the Awad Collection. Much of it had been drawn from the professor’s family’s heirlooms—maps, historical papers, paintings and photographs of Alexandria as generations of foreigners had seen it. Or at least as they had conceived it. From the instant the first colonialists arrived, there had always been this parallax between the factual place and the fanciful vision of it. Now, it seemed to me, even its own citizens couldn’t see it clearly.
That night I roamed the back lanes of Anfushi, where a street market thrummed until the late hours. It smelled of seafood and eastern spices, fresh meat and deliquescing vegetables. The stalls had radios tuned to a chaos of stations—classical Arabic, Koranic chanting, old albums of the long-dead popular singer Oum Kalthum, new covers of Lionel Richie hits. Lionel aside, the rest of the music sent up strange reverberations. To borrow from Saul Bellow, there were “winding, nasal, insinuating songs to the sounds of wire coat hangers moved back and forth, and drums, tambourines and mandolins and bagpipes.”
Some shops and all the cafés had TVs blasting soccer from Spain, South America and England. Despite the profusion of goods and the frenetic hawkers, few people bought anything. Like me, they were here for company, not commerce. School kids, niqabed women, married couples and oldsters on crutches congregated to see and be seen. Only I was out of place and unnoticed, able to watch without being looked at or spoken to. A definite advantage for a traveler, but one that was beginning to make me question whether I actually existed.
The next morning I slept through the alarm clock. Or rather, I heard it and incorporated it into a dream. A hurricane had smashed into Key West, and the emergency siren was shrieking. Frozen with fear I lay in bed in Florida, listening to shutters bang and the front door split into kindling.
I woke to find a mustachioed man in a blue smock beaming down at me: “Good morning. Ready to clean your room, sir.” He had started showing up earlier each day, inquiring whether I was happy with his services.
I dressed and went downstairs to the breakfast buffet. It was good food and plentiful-freshly squeezed fruit juices, cereals, eggs any style, beef sausage patties, croissants and sticky buns. But every mouthful reminded me that I was stuck in Alexandria another day waiting for my visa. I had been here a week now and was ready to hit the road.
When I phoned my contact in Libya, he counseled patience, he had things under control. He or one of his minions would meet me at the Egyptian border, and drive me along the coast, stopping at the battlefield in Tobruk and the Greek ruins at Cyrenaica, a region that he referred to as the Libyan Alps. He stressed that I had to accept the caprices of the Leader Moamar Qaddafi and his Great Socialist Peoples’ Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.
I reminded him that in prepayment for hotels and meals and a mandatory guide, I had already shelled out $3,000—and still my visa hadn’t cleared bureaucratic channels. But he promised me it was a dead-solid certainty. Soon he would fax a copy of my visa. Then, at the border, he or his man would produce the original.
The pressure of these contingencies—or was it the high calorie breakfast?-caused a queasiness in my stomach. My health had been fine so far. I hadn’t touched my stash of medications except for a daily antidepressant and a beta blocker three times a week to keep my heartbeat regular. But at the back of my mind—okay, occasionally at the forefront—there was a needling disquiet.
To counter it, I made myself move, setting off for an appointment with the curator of the Alexandrian Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF), Bassim Baroni, whom Justin Siberell had urged me to contact. At an intersection, I climbed the usual slag heap and had started my cautious descent when the ground gave way beneath my feet and I tumbled into the street, like a turtle flipped on its shell. I realized then that Alexandrians are indeed a people of remarkable urbanity. To save me from embarrassment, they passed by without so much as a backward glance.
I made it to the forum on time, but Baroni had visitors and asked me to wait. Shaking sand out of my shirtsleeves and pant legs, I sat in the hall, where I overheard a conference on “Art, Shelter, Visibility and Love?” The moderator explained that ACAF’s mission was to encourage “contemporary arts practices that have social implications. We hope to refresh the arts in Alexandria. A new generation is coming.”
This sounded all too much