“That’s news to me,” I said as composed as possible and clicked my cell phone on. I had two messages in my mailbox, but I didn’t know the code I needed to listen to them. I had never learned it.
“Alexandria is very beautiful,” Elisabeth said. She sounded so sympathetic that I had to swallow hard.
Sheila let her cell phone ring. When she finally answered there was an infernal racket all around her. She had tried to tell me, she shouted, but my cell phone was off. She’d be spending the whole time sitting around anyway, on a train or at the reading. Besides, the most interesting part of Alexandria lay underwater. Since she was here, she wanted to see the Pyramids, too.
She could scramble up the Pyramids during the conference, I noted.
She definitely didn’t want to miss the conference, she replied.
“You don’t get to see Alexandria every day either,” I said as if to myself, pressed the red button, and went down to the courtyard.
The driver of the Lada flung open a door, bellowed at me, and pointed to his watch. My cell phone was ringing. I took a seat in the car, slammed the door, and shouted: “Sorry, sorry, sorry!” although this wasn’t my fault.
He threw me a hateful glance in the rearview mirror. My cell phone went on ringing.
Compared to this ride, our first one had been sheer dillydallying. Fine by me. I’d be exaggerating if I were to say I was hoping for an accident. But I was somehow strangely certain one would happen, and I waited for it as if it were a kind of liberation. I know how stupid that sounds, especially in light of what came later. But in those few minutes an accident seemed the easiest, the only possible way out of this screwed-up trip.
There were moments that left me cringing. At one point I actually did shut my eyes when a gaunt old man dressed all in white appeared before our hood as if dropped from heaven onto the multilane road. He wore a white cap, held a cane in one hand, and in the other — I no longer recall. To me he seemed like some mythical figure, an angel from beyond.
I could see him landing on the windshield, could hear the crash — and suddenly the car halted right before his knees, as if his conjuring outstretched arm had stopped us. The next miracle was that no one crashed into us from behind.
As it turned out, the driver of the Lada had been given the wrong time for the train’s departure. And all of a sudden we were friends. He explained to me with something close to cordiality how and where I would catch my train — finding a parking space here at the station was out of the question. He promised to pick me up and zoomed off. Sheila called several times, but as far as I was concerned everything had been said.
Only now as I write these lines do I realize how the later incident has pushed everything preceding it into the background, and how difficult it is for me to recapture those days and hours.
In saying, “You don’t get to see Alexandria every day either,” I had, I believed, separated from Sheila. It had happened quickly. Just as Sheila had linked up with me at the first best opportunity, so she had ditched me at the first best opportunity. I rode toward Alexandria alone, and free. Good thing, I thought, I don’t have to explain anything to Anne. I would write her a postcard from Alexandria and mention the train, which I hadn’t exactly imagined would be the Orient Express, but not quite this dingy and ragtag. Even in first class the upholstery and curtains were beyond shabby.
I dozed away as if in a pleasant dream that relieves us of reality for minutes or hours. On my lap lay the marble gray bilingual Insel edition of Cavafy’s poems, which I had carried around with me since army days. But I wasn’t in the mood to read. Strangely enough I kept picturing the green triangle of the delta as I knew it from maps and had actually seen from the airplane. I was riding through the Nile Delta, and I thought how it was a sin to leave even a square foot of it uncultivated.
Entering Alexandria, you pass by buildings as intimidating as a scene in a Fritz Lang movie. That impression quickly fled when I was greeted on the platform by Mahmud, a truly handsome man in an olive-hued suit, gray shirt, and glowing red tie.
By the time we drove through the shopping district, with stores familiar from Europe, and suddenly turned onto the Corniche, where, beneath the gentle glow of lanterns lining the shore, the harbor basin and the sea now lay before me, I realized that I missed Sheila. Or maybe it wasn’t Sheila I missed, it just seemed sad to experience this all alone.
In the three-quarters of an hour I had to spend in the lobby of the Windsor Hotel, because something wasn’t right with my reservation, I reveled in a, if not painful at least melancholy, sort of pleasure — a somber mood to which I gave way entirely when I was served a cup of tea and a liqueurlike drink I had never encountered before.
When I finally moved into my huge room on the top floor and got the door unstuck to step out onto the balcony, I saw how the arc of lights along the Corniche turned the harbor walls into an almost perfect ellipse. As I breathed in the sea breeze blended with the odor of horse-drawn carriages, I resolved for good and all to begin an affair. I would meet a woman here with whom I felt the same sense of accord as with the schoolgirl that morning in Cairo. This curious euphoria kept me going — despite how tired I was, if not to say exhausted.
The Goethe-Institut is located in the old villa of some industrialist. As my text was being read in Arabic, I had time to check out the audience. Not a single one of the women present ignited my fantasy. The reading seemed endless, the discussion a marathon. Each word, as if it were a step up a mountain, sapped my energies. But all the same, I was in Alexandria. And so I trudged through the conversation, which lasted well past eleven. Then we set out and landed — in the Fish Market. There is also one of these restaurants overlooking the sea on the Corniche of Alexandria. Suddenly I wished I had Sheila there with me, picking up her cell phone and asking, “Mama, guess where I am?”
We were the last guests to be let into the almost empty restaurant. The buffet, however, was still full of fish. I arrived at my hotel between one and two o’clock, slept a few minutes, and then, kept awake by a strange agitation, tossed and turned in bed until dawn. Around seven I fetched Sheila’s toiletry bag, spread her things out on the pillow beside me, sprayed some of her perfume, and dialed her number. As I waited for the ring tone, I pictured the room where Sheila was now sleeping. I was amazed she even had her cell phone on. I was sure I’d hear her mailbox intervene — where you heard her say a rather dejected, “Sheila Dietze”—when she answered. I asked if everything was okay.
“Yes, of course, everything’s okay,” she said. “And how about you?”
“I couldn’t sleep.…”
“And I couldn’t brush my teeth.”
“Your own fault,” I said.
“I’ll meet you at the train, good night,” Sheila said.
I would have loved to creep back into bed after breakfast, but the cleaning women were already in the adjoining room. While waiting in the lobby for more coffee and a cola with ice, I nodded off. But the fact was I had to be alert, had to explore the city, had to experience things Sheila would regret having missed.
Sitting in my easy chair at the Windsor and sipping at my cola as if it were medicine, I could watch a steady stream of children, couples, and a few dawdling loners stop along the parapet of the Corniche to observe something down on the jetty or in the water below. Soon they had formed quite a group of spectators, whom I then finally decided to join.
Before me I found a peculiar sight. At first I thought it was a rope that the five men were dragging. It was a fishnet. The man at the head of the towing line had thrown the end of the rope over his shoulder, the others held on to the net with both hands at their chests, hips, or — turning around backward — under one arm. At first I thought they were getting nowhere since they didn’t appear to budge, but then they moved a few steps forward. The net must have been cast far out in the harbor. Following the great arc that it traced on the surface of the water by sweeping your eye to the right — that is, eastward, in the direction of the library — after about two hundred meters your gaze returned to the Corniche and a second group pulling on the other end of the net and likewise moving in our direction.