‘A couple of weeks ago a woman stomped out of the bar because I didn’t launch into something from The Lion King. “Hakuna Matata”. Jesus Christ.’
We drank in silence. The lime juice snapped at my gums.
‘Piano man. .’ she said.
I laughed quietly.
She asked, ‘Is that something you become by mistake?’
‘By mistake is pretty much it. And it’s not hard to imagine that one day, by mistake, you stop being one too.’
‘So how does a boy from Alburgh mistakenly come to play piano in a bar?’
I mulled that one over.
‘That’s a magic question,’ I said then. ‘The answer is a bridge that runs from then to now, from my very first memories to this very moment.’
I told her about the city where I was born, Alexandria. Dutch mother, Austrian father. We lived in Kafr Abdou, a district popular with expats because it lay out of the way of the roar of hundreds of thousands of cars and millions of people — that infected larynx from which rose the hellish scream of sirens and honking and cursing. One day my father, an artist, failed to return from a trip abroad. Cut and run, halfway through the first verse. His shoes still beside the door, cigarettes still on the table. Not all failed marriages dissolve in strife and pain, sometimes it goes with a single sweep of the sword. I couldn’t remember any real split-up or any major sorrow. It had flown noiselessly, an owl in the night. It took five more years for my mother to fully realize that her husband had left her with a child and a house in Alexandria, and that he would never reply to the telegrams she sent to every corner of the globe where he happened to show his face. All that time she waited for him, living as though nothing were amiss, as though at any moment she might see him standing out there in the garden, that he would come up the steps at a single bound and take her in his powerful arms. Going on as though nothing had happened was her way of protesting against the unfairness of fate. The situation called for, no, it cried out for weeping and wailing or perhaps the racking of silent sorrow. But she gave in to neither, and lived her life in a grand display of denial.
*
Mike Leland closed the bar. I asked him for a bottle of Rémy Martin and the keys to the lounge, so that Linny and I could carry on the evening there. A little later he turned off the spots above the bar. At the front door he lifted his duffel coat from the hook and swung his heavy body into it. His wink was slow with fatigue.
‘Behave yourself,’ he said.
A few coals were still glowing in the hearth, I blew away the ash around them. With strips of bark torn from the split logs beside the fireplace I brought the fire back to life.
‘Careful you don’t blow it out,’ Linny said.
I had blown too hard, the little flames had sunk back into the orange glow.
‘People have a hard time letting a fire be,’ she said.
‘I’ve done this before,’ I said as casually as I could.
Her voice, laced with delicate threads of mockery: ‘You’d rather I didn’t get involved?’
I nodded.
‘That’s always a touchy thing with men, isn’t it,’ she said. ‘Cognac?’
From the ashes there grew an orange blossom, shivering in the gentle flow of my breath. When the fire had acquired enough strength I fed it with a few thin logs of birch. I sat back in the easy chair beside hers.
‘Alexandria,’ she said, ‘that’s where we left off. Please continue.’
Up from my memory loomed Mrs. Pastroudis, my first piano teacher. My mother had signed me up for lessons, she felt that an instrument would allow me to better express my emotions. At the end of each session, Mrs. Pastroudis noted my achievement in a hardbound ledger: finger positioning, finger exercises, scales, harmonics. She wrote excellent! and outstanding! beside all of them. Her warm, heavy hand lay on my head throughout most of the lesson. The piano was in the basement, in her living room. She talked a great deal about the past. Once her family had owned the entire building, now she possessed only the lower floor. She remembered the parties in the salon above her head, the beau monde of Alexandria. On the breath of a sigh, a name would sometimes cross her lips.
‘Constantine Cavafy even came here sometimes.’
Along with the wave of nationalizations set in motion by the young Colonel Nasser, her family had lost almost all its holdings. Revolution is redistribution. Most of the Greeks had left Alexandria, but Mrs. Pastroudis had stayed in order to write excellent! and outstanding! in my ledger.
My mother and I lived alone in our big house. The servants’ quarters were occupied by Eman, the maid. A forest of bushes and trees encircled the villa, overgrown fences separated it from the other homes. The gardener sprayed every day, the leaves were hung with sparkling droplets. No ray of sunlight ever penetrated to the lowest layers, it was damp and dark there, crawling around beneath the growth the red soil clung to your fingers. The trunks were overrun with epiphytes, fleshy, ineradicable. Before the windows were wooden shutters, a guard kept watch at the gate.
The rooms of our house were separated by thin sheets. During the day, blocks of sunlight slid across the tiles, cats lay napping on the warm stones. Beyond each curtain you were lured further into that Byzantine temple. An emerald-green, submarine glow: you could hear your own heartbeat. Voluptuous, I’d call it in retrospect, the One Thousand and One Nights. Perhaps my father had lost his way in my mother’s veiled world of shadows, where eunuchs and odalisques haunted the corridors. His world was that of the barracks, the rectangle.
They called me Caesarion, little Caesar. My pet name. Caesarion was the son of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar. He and I had both been born in Alexandria. In his case, the priests had hastened to announce that he was born of the union between Cleopatra and the god Amon-Ra, in the earthly incarnation of Julius Caesar. Didn’t my mother know that Caesarion was the mocking nickname people gave to Ptolemy Caesar? Little Caesar?
It was my pet name for special occasions.
‘Caesarion, play what you play so well, darling. .’
Then I would take a little bow and climb up onto the piano stool with its pile of cushions. Caesarion was the name of the theater production we performed together, with me as wunderkind and she as the mother who had hatched that golden egg. I played Für Elise and the Moonlight Sonata. A mazurka by way of encore, and that was pretty much my entire repertoire. I slid off the stool, received the cooing and the clapping and let myself be pawed at length by the ladies present. Little princes must be buffed until they gleam. This was Circus Wunderkind, a handful of rickety old pieces I had learned from Mrs. Pastroudis and my mother, who acted as though I were Wolfgang Amadeus himself. Sometimes I shirked the duty of putting myself on display and hid in that gigantic Roman villa. Eman’s slippers would hiss across the tiles as she searched for me — Lewd-week! Lewd-week! It was easy to disappear in that house, built as it was entirely of shadows and bound together by the thick veins of ivy growing outside along the sandy stucco: an exoskeleton turned to wood.
She takes me often to Le Salon Trianon, the Palace of Heavenly Pastries. I am allowed to order my own Douceur Surprise, an Om Ali aux Noisettes or the Trois Petits Cochons. She corrects me when I mispronounce the French. That is her principal contribution to my education. All those pies and pastries revolving in a lighted display case, my nose pressed to the glass I behold the orbits of those galaxies of sugar — the friendly crème caramels! The cheerful Banana Brasiliennes! The prim Tarte aux Fruits! My mother sips at little cups of coffee and smokes cigarettes. She comes here all the time. Beneath the lacquered wooden ceiling she dreams she is in Europe, but then a weird, distorted Europe. An outpost where people try to remember exactly what Europe was, and do their best to make it resemble those memories as closely as possible. At Trianon, air conditioners imitate the coolness of northern Europe, loudspeakers drip the saccharine stalactites of Mantovani. The uniformed staff act as though we were at the Hermitage in Monaco. My mother sees the tatters and spots on the vests of the waiters and the restroom attendants, but the maître d’s impeccable black suit makes up for a great deal.