CHAPTER 1
The Library of Omar El-Mohammedi
April 7, 2014 • 4:15 a.m.
Omar El-Mohammedi had waited all evening to face the task. He’d thought to embark on the disquieting journey that lay before him in daylight, looking for the light’s solace—but he discovered again that, for him, there was no solace anywhere. So, he’d waited for nightfall to hide his heartbreak, but when the sun had set and the big window of his library had darkened, he still could not begin. For a long time, he didn’t even turn on the lamp. It was a moonless night; the blackness settled heavily over him and over his hundreds of books and desk with its scattered papers.
Omar was an old man now, in ways he had not been even a week ago. He breathed and was aware of his own breath, and how his lungs seemed to echo the creak of his leather desk chair as he shifted his weight, how every breath seemed heavier and more difficult than the last. He breathed, time passed —and he reflected that a life might be summed up in those two phrases.
At some point, his daughter, Houda, had opened the library door. He heard her whisper something to herself, but he did not know what she said. She entered the dark room uncertainly, stopping when her thigh made contact with the edge of Omar’s desk. Then, having located herself, she leaned over and turned on Omar’s reading light.
Squinting up at her, Omar knew she wanted to say something, to tell him not to sit here in the darkness, that he should go to bed, that he needed rest. Tomorrow would be monumental—the burial of his son, her brother, Nasser. But Houda respectfully held her tongue. No need to remind Baba of something so heart-wrenching. Instead, she set two small dishes on the desk in front of him—a plate of ful medames, a basket of unleavened bread. Still wearing the black of mourning, Houda seemed part of the darkness, and when she left him, Omar hardly noticed.
That had been hours ago, and now it was nearly dawn. He blinked, taking in his surroundings. Did I sleep? Who knew?
The pool of light Houda had left behind continued to illuminate the plates of food he had no intention of touching. The journal still beckoned; there was no avoiding it. Taking a deep breath, Omar raised his right hand toward the notebook and paused, noticing the trembling of his wizened fingers.
Look at you, old fool, he thought. You’ve spent a lifetime reading the most magnificent books on Earth, and now you’re frightened of a puny diary. What is this compared to the Qur'an, the Upanishads, the Bible, Das Kapital, the Iliad? Nothing, nothing at all.
And yet his hands trembled.
An old man ought not to begin a journey all alone. For him, there ought to have been only one solitary journey, one that had begun a lifetime ago, the final one. But Omar El-Mohammedi understood that it was his fate, now, at the end of his life, to begin again. So, he breathed once more and took up the notebook. Even the first line tore at his heart:
I, Nasser El-Mohammedi, child of Omar El-Mohammedi and son of no one, was born in the Library of Alexandria.
Because I am the child of my father, I was born among books. Here in the city where the modern world was created, where the greatest library humanity had ever seen was built and then destroyed, I entered the universe as if from nowhere and took up my being, shelved between theology and history. Because I was born among books, I am the son of no one.
When I was a child, the Great Library of Alexandria was the study of Omar El-Mohammedi, and my playground was his mind. Between the gentle Islam of his own upbringing and the humanism of his profession, I kicked my football and wrestled with other boys. I thrived in the sunlight of his tolerance and his intelligence, and grew strong; among the other children, I excelled. But from the time I was very young, I understood the playground Omar had created for me was only half a world. I knew the universe was made not only out of light.
My mother, Fatimah, was a strong, kind presence, yet she had a dimension she kept hidden from my father. She was not, I think, conscious that she was hiding part of herself, nor did she consciously reveal this dimension to me, but I nonetheless glimpsed it as a boy. The intelligent daughter of good people with a rigid worldview and fixed expectations, she grew up, like many women everywhere in the world, with thwarted ambitions, bruised by the heavy hand of patriarchy. She nursed angers she had learned never to express, and passions about which Omar El-Mohammedi knew nothing.
I inherited that rage and that lust for transcendence. It led me into the darkness where I upended every pebble. Under one distant stone, I uncovered a long-buried secret that would topple my father’s house of cards by bringing to light the nefarious lie behind my mother’s death . . .
Omar blinked. He reread the sentence, his tired eyes instantly alert.
His mind began to quicken as he skimmed forward, flipping pages at random, searching irascibly for the next part of this unnerving thread that had landed like a grenade on the desk of his study. Heart racing, Omar saw the numerals scribbled at the corner of each page—a cryptogram for which they needed to find the cipher. That’s what the American had explained when he handed over the precious journal—the truth will be hidden in code between the lines. Omar noticed white space following many of the journal entries—blank areas that Nasser had left, then gone back to fill with further reflections—a method that Omar had taught him when he was a boy as a way to deepen his thinking. There were afterthought writings about the iconic Alexandrian gales, scribbles about Qur'anic interpretation, random reflections and memories. What was the pattern?
Omar slowed himself, mocking his own impatience. Nasser may have emerged from Fatimah’s fiery womb, but he had Omar’s blood and temperament too, which meant he’d weave his story like a labyrinth, with trapdoors and hidden hallways. That’s why the American had said the journal must be read with care and deliberation—and yet urgency too. It was a conundrum. With a sigh, Omar released his haste and returned to where he had left off:
My parents were naïve—both of them. I am the child of their mutual, loving obliviousness. But I am the son of no one, save the city of my birth: Alexandria, a capital founded by a brilliant Macedonian tyrant who, longing to be Greek, conquered Greece and then came to Egypt to build the perfect city, which he left behind to become a god. I am Alexander’s child, and like him I will not live long. I am Alexandria’s child, and like her I will live forever. I am the child of every book in Alexander’s great library, scattered to the wind and doomed to fire by conquerors and colonists. And every year, when the first gale comes, it washes the dates and douses in its mercy our smoldering past.
The library in which I was born was an echo of that history. I grew inside an echo. It was in the library of Omar El-Mohammedi that I honed Greek and English; I shaped the clashing sounds of their words against my tongue and read their shapes in books; I saw how alien to each other they are, how they murder each other and beget children on one another’s silences. I am one of those children.
Thank abandoned tomes that were begotten and destroyed in that annihilated library—they are my ancestors, my forebears, my siblings, and my own offspring. The sunlight of my father’s reason, the fire of my mother’s rage, the obliviousness of both . . . fall into that darkness too.
I am the child of everything that ever happened in this city. But if I am the son of anything, I am the son of darkness. Where no eye can see.
Then light came—just the faintest of glows at first, a shimmer beginning to bloom in cracks between the shutters. Soon enough, a fiery ball would rise above the Sinai dunes to the east of the city, sweeping across the sand. Later, when the sun had traversed the sky, they’d be gathering at the cemetery. And then, after the mourners dispersed, Omar would be expected to return to the unnerving journal. It was too much. He felt as if the foundation of his life were under siege, a heavy bombardment laid upon him. The task at hand was excruciating. Why had he agreed to it?
It was the humanitarian in him—but at what price? Omar shuddered at what he might discover in the pages before him. The son he was about to bury, who’d shown such promise in his youth, now lurked only behind a tapestry of words, camouflaged and convoluted by design, to conceal what intelligence officials were convinced was a road map to unspeakable horror.
No one knew Nasser like the scholar who’d raised him. That’s why they’d beseeched Omar to sift through the journal to find the thread that could avert countless deaths and posthumously acquit the boy who’d spent countless hours on his lap in this very room, soaking in the greatest of human achievement. But what if Nasser had ventured to a place that was beyond redemption?
My son, my son; my poor, misguided son.