“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 welclass="underline" 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)…