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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