Effendi

CHAPTER 52 28th October

“I’m finishing a story . . .” Hani looked up, her head balanced on one hand and her elbow resting on her knee. “But I can always end it now . . . ?”

She had her back to a wall and was sitting in late-afternoon sunlight, on a small balcony recessed into the sloped glass roof of the bibliotheka.

“No need.” The chief librarian looked momentarily flustered, as if having caught herself being unforgivably rude. Which wasn’t something that usually worried Madame Syria. “I just didn’t see you come in.”

“Are you sure you don’t need the machine?” insisted Hani, holding up her borrowed laptop, its solar panels still outfolded.

“Mmmm?”

Madame Syria had been going to check the status of the library’s electronic texts, when she noticed the balcony door was open. Obviously she had plenty of better things to do than this. And even if the core was dead and every e-book missing, as she rather suspected, she was still responsible for 1.25 million real books, the kind people opened and held in their hands.

And anyway cultural vandalism was nothing new. Seven hundred years after the original bibliotheka began, Christian fanatics had destroyed all five hundred thousand of its manuscripts, including original works by Sophocles and Aristotle.

Even before that, the razing of the annexe on the orders of Theodosius had lost forever the Alexandrian Geographica and condemned Europe to a thousand years of the belief that Jerusalem was the centre of the world and that the world was flat.

“Madame Syria?”

The woman blinked to find Hani still patiently holding out the machine.

“No,” the woman said hastily. “That’s quite all right. I need to do something downstairs anyway.”

It was easy to forget a small girl, what with the chaos in the city as well as in the library, particularly when the child was so quiet and beautifully behaved. And Madame Syria didn’t really begrudge the girl use of the computer. There were two non-Web machines working downstairs, both outdated leather-bound models. Just why only the three laptops out of seventy-five varied machines still worked was anyone’s guess, though Madame Syria put it down to the fact that they’d been redundant models, stacked in a box in the lower basement, awaiting disposal. Originally there’d been five, but one had died almost immediately and one early yesterday. Fatal errors of memory, apparently, but then everyone had a few of those.

“I’m going to get a coffee,” said Hani. “Would you like one?”

The chief librarian nodded without thinking, then frowned. “I don’t think your voice is programmed into the coffee machine,” she said apologetically, remembering too late that this was an irrelevance, the Zanussi was dead.

“There’s a stall.” Hani looked round, as if about to impart a heavy secret. “At the top of Boulevard Zaghloul. It’s much better than the coffee here. When there is coffee here,” she added to clarify the matter.

“And His Excellency allows you to cross the road by yourself?” The librarian glanced over the edge of the balcony to the avenue below and suddenly realized just how stupid a question that was. Apart from an elderly man in a souf sitting on a bench, the road outside was completely empty of traffic. Though a makeshift donkey cart sporting wheels borrowed from a motorbike was approaching from one direction, followed by a horse-drawn calèche, its leather roof raised against the possibility of rain.

She thought it was further proof of the child’s good manners that Hani didn’t point out that traffic problems were unlikely. Instead, the girl just nodded.

“Oh yes,” said Hani, “I’m allowed to cross roads. In fact the bey allows me to do what I like.”

Madame Syria smiled and decided to go with the bey’s niece to buy coffee. It was true that she really needed to use the child’s machine but that could wait until Lady Hani finished her story.