The Book on Fire Read Online Free Page A

the arm he’d been decorating.
    “And what do you do, Nura?”
    “I’m a pharmacist. I have a seaside dispensary.”
    Koujour had stood and was stalking around me. He shoved his face
against mine and peered into each eye. Sweet gust of arak fumes. Then he picked
up my hands and examined them. Iron bangles clashed on his wrists.
    “You need scars,” he said.
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “Scars, scars.” He pulled my palms across the stippling on his
cheeks, and a delicious shiver scampered up my backbone.
    “Koujour was just showing me how my scars are constellations,” Nura
told me, as if in explanation.
    “Zeinab will help,” said Koujour, and returned to his seat and his
arak.
    Baffled, I moved to the next table, where two men bent over a
chessboard. The shadows of the pieces danced, multiple and complicated, in the
candlelight. With a fingertip, the thief across from me nudged a knight from
ebony to abalone, then looked up. The trayful of candle flames blew like leaves
in the sepia lenses of his spectacles. He stood and offered his hand, murmuring
his name: “Amir.” His opponent growled and grimaced, still staring at the
board, then ground his chair back and stood. “Who’s this?” he shouted at
Makarios.
    “Zeinab dragged him in.”
    “Impossible!” He folded huge forearms across his chest and glared at
me. “Where did you meet her?”
    “She was ... she wanted to borrow a book.”
    “Nonsense! Zeinab doesn’t borrow books.”
    “So I learned, to the detriment of my bookshelf.”
    “Had you acquired the book by honest means?”
    “Certainly not.”
    “Good answer. Well, I’m Karim, undertaker by profession.” His hand
in mine was solid as a statue’s. “Do you play chess?”
    “I do.”
    “Badminton?”
    “Badminton?”
    He pointed to a net strung across a mosaicked rectangle in the
center of the apse.
    “Why not?”
    “Zeinab, take over here,” Karim shouted, and fetched two rackets
from the sacristy. But before I joined him on the court, Amir placed a hand on
my shoulder and handed me a book. Glancing at it, I thanked him, then smacked
my pocket. “How—?” I started, but he just smiled and returned to the game.
Zeinab was already hunched over the board, chuckling like a crow.
    Karim and I tapped the shuttlecock into the gloom, where it vanished
a moment before dipping like a throttled dove into the candlelight again. The
other sounds were low laughter and the clink of ice, the warble of waterpipes,
shuffle of chess pieces, scandalous conversations, the background black noise
of bat shriek. Like faced shadows the thieves reclined in their den. What
stories did they tell? I wouldn’t trust a word: all tales, all lies.
    ****
    This
city has harbored a thousand gods and is still within their sway. Hark to the
prayer calls, the church bells, the gnostic groans and Sephardic moaning. Dive
into the bay and glimpse in the gloaming older gods, horned and tailed,
barnacle-skinned, seaweed-haired, sunk to the torso in silt. Glance to the peak
of the lighthouse and witness the handsome golden deities, huge humans,
posturing. You thought thieves were godless? No, we have our divinities. The
true gods are thieves themselves and all thieves, of course, are gods. We come
in the night, to teach you what you love.
    I am perhaps the quietest member of the Kanisa, often curled in a
corner with my nose in a book. The other thieves are readers, of course, as are
all the citizens of this city. Makarios reads his gnostic gospels, and Nura
pulp paperbacks. Amir reads love letters and suicide notes, and Karim reads
epitaphs chiseled into stone. Koujour inhales poetry in half a dozen languages,
then spews it out, mangled and marvelous. But they lack my addiction, my
aficion. Only Zeinab reads as a matter of life or death, but she won’t talk
about the contents of the books, only about the pleasures of burning them.
    Some nights she’ll sit back in her armchair, glass of karkadeh in
one hand, dagger in