Soldier, Salesman, Swindler, Spy
“So, are we or aren’t we, siamo o non siamo,” boasted my Great-uncle Vili when the two of us finally sat down late that summer afternoon in a garden overlooking his sprawling estate in Surrey.
“Just look at this,” he pointed to a vast expanse of green. “Isn’t it splendid?” he asked, as if he had invented the very notion of an afternoon stroll in the English countryside. “Just before sundown and minutes after tea, it always comes: a sense of plenitude, of bliss almost. You know—everything I wanted, I got. Not bad for a man in his eighties.” Arrogant self-satisfaction beamed on his features.
I tried to speak to him of Alexandria, of time lost and lost worlds, of the end when the end came, of Monsieur Costa and Montefeltro and Aldo Kohn, of Lotte and Aunt Flora and lives so faraway now. He cut me short and made a disparaging motion with his hand, as if to dismiss a bad odor. “That was rubbish. I live in the present,” he said almost vexed by my nostalgia. “Siamo o non siamo?” he asked, standing up to
stretch his muscles, then pointing to the first owl of the evening.
It was never exactly clear what one was or wasn’t, but to everyone in the family, including those who don’t speak a word of Italian today, this elliptical phrase still captures the strutting, daredevil, cocksure, soldier-braggart who had pulled himself out of an Italian trench during the Great War and then, hidden between rows of trees with his rifle held tightly in both hands, would have mowed down the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire had he not run out of bullets. The phrase expressed the hectoring self-confidence of a drill sergeant surrounded by sissies in need of daily jostling. “Are we man enough or aren’t we?” he seemed to say. “Are we going ahead with it or aren’t we?” “Are we worth our salt or what?” It was his way of whistling in the dark, of shrugging off defeat, of picking up the pieces and calling it a victory. This, after all, was how he barged in on the affairs of fate and held out for more, taking credit for everything, down to the unforeseen brilliance of his most hapless schemes. He mistook overdrawn luck for foresight, just as he misread courage for what was little more than the gumption of a street urchin. He had pluck. He knew it, and he flaunted it.
Impervious to the humiliating Italian defeat at the Battle of Caporetto in 1917, Uncle Vili remained forever proud of his service to the Italian army, flaunting that as well, with the spirited Florentine lilt he had picked up in Italian Jesuit schools in Constantinople. Like most young Jewish men born in Turkey toward the end of the century, Vili disparaged anything having to do with Ottoman culture and thirsted for the West, finally becoming “Italian” the way most Jews in Turkey did: by claiming ancestral ties with Leghorn, a port city near Pisa where escaped Jews from Spain had settled in the sixteenth century. A very distant Italian relative bearing the Spanish
name of Pardo-Roques was conveniently dug up in Leghorn —Vili was half Pardo-Roques himself—whereupon all living “cousins” in Turkey immediately became Italian. They were all, of course, staunch nationalists, monarchists.
When told the Italian army had never been valiant, Uncle Vili had immediately challenged an Alexandrian Greek to a duel, especially after the latter had reminded him that all those Italian medals and trinkets hardly altered the fact that Vili was still a Turkish rascal, and a Jewish one to boot. This infuriated Uncle Vili, not because someone had impugned his Jewishness—he would have been the first to do so—but because he hated to be reminded that many Jews had become Italian through shady means. The weapons their seconds had chosen for the occasion were so obsolete that neither of the two duelists knew how to wield them. No one was hurt, apologies were made, one of them even giggled, and, to foster a spirit of fellowship, Vili suggested a quiet restaurant overlooking the sea, where on this clear Alexandrian day in June everyone ate his heartiest luncheon in years. When it came time for the bill, both the Greek and the Italian insisted on paying, and the tug-of-war would have gone on forever, each alleging his honor and his pleasure, had not Uncle Vili, like a conjurer finally compelled to use magic when all else failed, pulled out his choicest little phrase, in this case meaning, “Now am I or aren’t I a man of honor?” The Greek, who was the more gracious of the two, conceded.
Uncle Vili knew how to convey that intangible though unmistakable feeling that he had lineage—a provenance so ancient and so distinguished that it transcended such petty distinctions as birthplace, nationality, or religion. And with the suggestion of lineage came the suggestion of wealth—if always with the vague hint that this wealth was inconveniently tied up elsewhere, in land, for example, foreign land, something
no one in the family ever had much of except when it came in clay flowerpots. But lineage earned him credit. And this is what mattered to him most, for this was how he and all the men in the family made, borrowed, lost, and married into fortunes: on credit.
Lineage came naturally to Vili, not because he had it, nor because he mimicked it, nor even because he aspired to it with the leisured polish of lapsed aristocrats. In his case, it was simply the conviction that he was born better. He had the imposing bearing of the wealthy, the reluctant smile that immediately sweetens in the company of equals. He was patrician in thrift, politics, and debauchery, intolerant of poor posture more than of bad taste, of bad taste more than of cruelty, and of bad table manners more than of bad eating habits. Above all, he detested what he called the “atavisms” by which Jews gave themselves away, especially when impersonating goyim. He derided all in-laws and acquaintances who looked typically Jewish, not because he did not look so himself, or because he hated Jews, but because he knew how much others did. It’s because of Jews like them that they hate Jews like us. When snubbed by an observant Jew proud of his heritage, Vili’s answer trickled down his tongue like a pit he had been twiddling about his mouth for forty years: “Proud of what? Are we or aren’t we all peddlers in the end?”
And peddle is what he knew and did best. He even peddled fascism to the British in Egypt and, later, on behalf of the Italians, in Europe as well. He was as devoted to Il Duce as he was to the Pope. His annual addresses to the Hitler Youth in Germany were highly applauded and became a notorious source of strife within the family. “Don’t meddle, I know what I’m doing,” he would say. Years later, when the British began threatening to round up all adult Italian males living in Alexandria, Uncle Vili suddenly rummaged through his closets
and began hawking old certificates from the rabbinate of Constantinople to remind his friends at the British Consulate that, as an Italian Jew, he couldn’t possibly be considered a threat to British interests. Would they like him to spy on the Italians? The British could not have asked for better.
He performed so brilliantly that after the war he was rewarded with a Georgian estate in Surrey, where he lived in lordly penury for the remainder of his days under the assumed name of Dr. H. M. Spingarn. Herbert Michael Spingarn was an Englishman whom Vili had met as a child in Constantinople and who had stirred in him two lifelong passions: the Levantine desire to emulate anything British, and the Ottoman contempt for British anything. Uncle Vili, who had given up his distinctly Jewish name for an Anglo-Saxon one, cringed with half-concealed embarrassment when I told him that this fellow Spingarn had himself been a Jew. “Yes, I recall something like that,” he said vaguely. “We’re everywhere, then, aren’t we? Scratch the surface and you’ll find everyone’s a Jew,” jeered the octogenarian Turco-Italian-Anglophile-gentrified-Fascist Jew who had started his professional life peddling Turkish fezzes in Vienna and Berlin and was to end it as the sole auctioneer of deposed King Farouk’s property. “The Sotheby’s of Egypt; but a peddler nonetheless,” he added, reclining in his chair as we both watched a flight of birds descend upon the murky, stagnant waters of what must have once been a splendid pond. “Still, a great people, these Jews,” he would say in broken English, affecting a tone of detached condescension so purposefully shallow and so clearly aware of its own fatuousness as to suggest that, when it came to his co-religionists, he always meant the opposite of what he said. Following praise, he would always vilify these admirable yet “scoundrel Jews,” only then to change his tune once more. “After all, Einstein, Schnabel, Freud, Disraeli,” he would declaim
with a glint in his eyes and a half-suppressed smile. “Were they or weren’t they?”
He had left Egypt—to which the family had moved from Constantinople in 1905—a would-be cadet with fire in his gut and quicksilver in his eyes. He had studied in Germany, served in the Prussian army, changed sides when the Italians joined the war in 1915, and after Caporetto sat out the rest of the war in Cyprus as an interpreter, returning to Egypt four years after his discharge, a polished rake in his late twenties whose insolent good looks betrayed a history of shady deals and ruthless sieges in the battle of the sexes. Impressed by his conquests, his sisters judged him decidedly masculine, what with the roguish tilt of his fedora, the impatient Come, come now in his voice, and that patronizing swagger with which he would come up and grab a bottle of champagne you were trying to uncork and say, Let me—never overbearing, but just enough to signal there was more, much more. He had fought in all sorts of battles, on all sorts of sides, with all sorts of weapons. He was a consummate marksman, a remarkable athlete, a shrewd businessman, a relentless womanizer—and yes, decidedly masculine.
“Are we or aren’t we,” he would brag after a conquest, or a killing in the stock market, or on suddenly recovering from a hopeless bout of malaria, or when he saw through a shrewd woman, or knocked down a street ruffian, or when he simply wanted to show the world that he was not easily hoodwinked. It meant: Did I show them or didn’t I? He would use this phrase after negotiating a difficult transaction: Didn’t I promise they’d come begging for my price? Or when he had a blackmailer thrown in jail: Didn’t I warn him not to take me for a pushover? Or when his beloved sister, Aunt Marta, came crying to him hysterically after she had been jilted by yet
another fiancé, in which case his phrase meant: Any man worthy of the name could have seen it coming! Didn’t I warn you? And then, to remind her she was made of stronger stuff than tears, he would sit her on his lap and, holding both her hands in his, rock her ever so gently, swearing she’d get over her sorrow sooner than she thought, for such was the way with lovesickness, and besides, was she or wasn’t she?
Later, he would buy her roses and placate her for a few hours, maybe a few days. But she was not always easily swayed and, sometimes, scarcely would he have let go of her and gone to his study than he would suddenly hear her shrieking hysterically at the other end of the apartment: “But who’ll marry me, who?” she kept asking her sisters as she sobbed and blew her nose on the first rag that fell her way.
“Who’ll marry me at my age, tell me, who, who?” she would ask, shrieking her way back into his study.
“Someone will, you mark my words,” he would say.
“No one will,” she insisted. “Can’t you see why? Can’t you see I’m ugly? Even I know it!”
“Ugly you’re not!”
“Just say the truth: ugly!”
“You may not be the most beautiful—”
“But no one in the street will ever turn around to look at me.”
“You should be thinking of a home, Marta, not the street.”
“You just don’t understand, do you? All you do is twist my words and make me sound stupid!” She began raising her voice.
“Look, if you want me to say you’re ugly, then all right, you’re ugly.”
“No one understands, no one.”
And she would drift away again like an ailing specter come to seek comfort among the living only to be shooed away.
Aunt Marta’s crises de mariage, as they were called, were
known to last for hours. Afterward she had such pounding headaches that she would put herself to sleep early in the afternoon and not dare show her face until the next morning, and even then, the storm was not necessarily quelled, for as soon as she got out of bed she would ask whoever crossed her path to look at her eyes. “They are puffy,” she would say, “aren’t they? Look at them. Just look at this,” she would insist, nearly poking her eyes out. “No, they’re fine,” someone would respond. “You’re lying. I can even feel how puffy they are. Now everyone will know I cried over him. They’ll tell him, I know they will. I’m so humiliated, so humiliated.” Her voice quavered until it broke into a sob, and down came the tears again.
For the rest of the day, her mother, her three sisters, five brothers, and sisters- and brothers-in-law would take turns peeking in her door, carrying pieces of ice in a small bowl for her eyes while she lay in the dark with a compress of her own devising. “I’m suffering. If only you knew how I’m suffering,” she would groan, in exactly the same words I heard her whisper more than fifty years later in a hospital room in Paris as she lay dying of cancer. Outside, sitting with his other siblings in the crowded living room, Uncle Vili could no longer control himself. “Enough is enough! What Marta really needs—we all know what it is.” “Don’t be vulgar now,” his sister Clara interrupted, unable to stifle a giggle as she stood at her easel, painting yet another version of Tolstoy’s grizzled features. “See?” Uncle Vili retaliated. “You may not like the truth, but everyone agrees with me,” he continued with increased exasperation in his voice. “All these years, and the poor girl still doesn’t know a man’s fore from his aft.” Their older brother Isaac burst out laughing. “Can you really imagine her with anyone?” “Enough is enough,” snapped their mother, a matriarch nearing her seventies. “We must find her a good Jewish
man. Rich, poor, doesn’t matter.” “But who, who, who, tell me who?” Aunt Marta interrupted, overhearing the tail end of their conversation on her way to the bathroom. “It’s hopeless. Hopeless. Why did you make me come to Egypt, why?” she said, turning to her elder sister Esther. “It’s hot and muggy, I’m always sweating, and the men are so dreadful.”
Uncle Vili stood up, curled his hand around her hip, and said, “Calm yourself, Marta, and don’t worry. We’ll find you someone. I promise. Leave it to me.”
“But you always say that, always, and you don’t ever mean it. And besides, who do we know here?”
This was Vili’s long-awaited cue. And he rose to the occasion with the studied nonchalance of a man driven to use exactly the words he has been dying to say. In this instance, they meant: Can anyone really doubt that we are well connected?
This was an oblique reference to Uncle Isaac, who, while studying at the University of Turin, had managed to become a very close friend of a fellow student named Fouad, the future king of Egypt. Both men spoke Turkish, Italian, German, some Albanian, and, between them, had concocted a pidgin tongue, rich in obscenities and double entendres, that they called Turkitalbanisch and which they continued to speak into their old age. It was because Uncle Isaac staked all of his hopes on this undying friendship that he had eventually persuaded his parents and siblings to sell everything in Constantinople and move to Alexandria.
Uncle Vili was fond of boasting that his brother—and, by implication, himself as well—“owned” the king. “He has the king in his breast pocket,” he would say, pointing to his own breast pocket, in which a silver cigarette case bearing the king’s seal was permanently lodged. In the end, it was the king who introduced Isaac to the man who was to play such a significant role in his sister’s life.
Aunt Marta, who was nearing forty at the time, was eventually married to this man, a rich Swabian Jew whom everyone in the family called “the Schwab”—his real name was Aldo Kohn—and who did little else but play golf all day, bridge at night, and in between smoked Turkish cigarettes on which his name and family crest had been meticulously inscribed in gold filigree. He was a balding, corpulent man whom Marta had turned down ten years earlier but who was determined to pursue her again and, better yet, without demanding a dowry, which suited everyone. At one of the family gatherings, it was arranged to leave the would-be’s alone for a while, and before Marta knew what the Schwab was about, or even had time to turn around and pull herself away, he had grabbed hold of her wrist and fastened around it a lavish bracelet on the back of which his jeweler had inscribed M’appari, after the famous aria from von Flotow’s Martha. Aunt Marta was so flustered she did not realize she had broken into tears, which so moved the poor Schwab that he too started to weep, begging as he sobbed, “Don’t say no, don’t say no.” Arrangements were made, and soon enough everyone noticed an unusually serene and restful glow settle upon Aunt Marta’s rosy features. “She’ll kill him at this rate,” her brothers snickered.
The Schwab was a very dapper but quiet man who had once studied the classics and whose diffident manner made him the butt of household ridicule. He seemed spoiled and stupid, a sure sap, and probably that way as well. The brothers had their eyes on him. But the Schwab was no fool. Although he had never worked a day in his life, it was soon discovered that in the space of two years he had trebled his family’s fortune on the sugar exchange. When Uncle Vili realized that this incompetent, sniveling, beer keg of a brother-in-law was a “player,” he immediately drew up a list of no-risk ventures for him. But the Schwab, who attributed his financial wizardry to luck more
than to skill, was reluctant to invest in stocks because he didn’t understand a thing about the market. All he understood was sugar, and maybe horses. “Understand?” responded Uncle Vili. “Why should you understand the stock market? I’m here to do it for you.” After all, were they or weren’t they all related to each other now?
For weeks the Schwab tolerated his brother-in-law’s inducements until, one day, he finally exploded. And he did so in style: he borrowed Vili’s cherished little phrase, spun it about him awhile like a bodkin to let Vili know that he, the Schwab, known to the rest of the world as Aldo Kohn, and more specifically as Kohn Pasha, was no pushover either. Uncle Vili was totally trumped. Not only was he pained—that was his word for it—by his brother-in-law’s mistrust, but there was something unbearably vexing in having been flayed with his own knife. It was a low, unsportsmanlike thing to do; it was just another instance of Ashkenazi duplicity. Uncle Vili rarely spoke to him again.
An exception occurred in 1930, when it became obvious that the family had been cheated of the prosperous twenties. It was at about this time that Uncle Vili suggested the family emigrate elsewhere. America? Too many Jews already. England? Too rigid. Australia? Too underdeveloped. Canada? Too cold. South Africa? Too far. It was finally decided that Japan offered ideal prospects for men whose claim to fortune was their exalted, millennial role as itinerant peddlers and master mountebanks.
The Japanese had three advantages: they were hardworking, they were eager to learn and compete, and they had probably never seen Jews before. The brothers picked a city they had never heard of but whose name sounded distantly, and reassuringly, Italian: Nagasaki. “Are you going to peddle baubles and mirrors too?” asked the Schwab. “No. Cars. Luxury cars.”
“Which cars?” he asked. “Isotta-Fraschini.” “Have you ever sold cars before?” He enjoyed ribbing the clannish brothers whenever he could. “No. Not cars. But we’ve sold everything else. Rugs. Stocks. Antiques. Gold. Not to mention hope to investors, sand to the Arabs. You name it. And besides, what difference does it make?” asked an exasperated Vili. “Carpets, cars, gold, silver, sisters, it’s all the same thing. I can sell anything,” he bragged.
The Isotta-Fraschini affair started with everyone in the family rushing to invest in the Middle Eastern and Japanese distributorship for the cars. A Japanese tutor was hired, and on Monday and Thursday afternoons, all five brothers—from Nessim, the oldest, who was over fifty and not entirely convinced about the venture, to Vili, twenty years younger and the demonic propounder of the scheme—would sit in the dining room, their notebooks filled with what looked like the most slovenly ink stains. “Poor boys,” Aunt Marta would whisper to her sister Esther whenever she peeped into the dark, wood-paneled room where tea was being served to the classroom. “They haven’t even mastered Arabic yet, and now these confounded sounds.” Everyone was terror-struck. “Raw fish and all that rice every day! Death by constipation it’s going to be. What must we endure next?” was Aunt Clara’s only comment. There would be no more time for painting, she was warned. She would have to help in the family business. “Besides, all you’ve ever painted are portraits of Tolstoy. It’s time to change,” commented Uncle Isaac.
Their mother was also worried. “We build on bad soil. Always have, always will. God keep us.”
Out of spite, no one in the family had ever asked the Schwab to invest a penny in the venture. His punishment would be to witness the clan grow tremendously rich, and finally realize, once and for all, who was and who wasn’t.
Two years later, however, he was approached by his wife and asked to contribute something toward the immediate expenses of the firm. The Schwab, who, aside from gambling, hated to invest in intangibles, agreed to help by buying one of these expensive cars at a discount. It soon emerged that, aside from giving each of the five brothers a car, the newly established Isotta-Fraschini Asia-Africa Corporation had sold only two cars. Three years later, after the business collapsed and the demos were returned to Italy, only two persons in Egypt could be seen riding Isotta-Fraschinis: the Schwab and King Fouad.
The Isotta-Fraschini debacle set the family back by a decade. The clan continued to keep up appearances, and its members were often seen Sundaying in the king’s gardens or arriving in chauffeured cars at the exclusive Sporting Club, but they were flat broke. Too vain to admit defeat, and too prudent to start baiting their creditors, they began tapping second-tier friends and relatives who could be relied on to keep their secret. Albert, their other brother-in-law, a once-prosperous cigarette manufacturer who had abandoned everything he owned in Turkey to move to Egypt, was asked to contribute something toward family finances. He did so reluctantly and after terrible rows with Esther, his wife, who, like her sister Marta, never doubted that blood was thicker than marriage vows.
Albert had ample reason for neither trusting nor wanting to help them. It was upon the clan’s assurances that in 1932 he had finally and recklessly liquidated his cigarette business in Turkey and moved with his family to Egypt, hoping both to invest in his in-laws’ firm and to spare his eighteen-year-old son, Henri, the horrors of Turkish barracks life. As soon as he arrived in Alexandria, however, the clan made it quite clear they were not about to let him into their Isotta-Fraschini schemes. Crestfallen, and not knowing what else to do in Alexandria,
the erstwhile nicotine merchant took the life savings he had smuggled out of Turkey and became the proprietor of a small pool hall called La Petite Corniche, which faced the six-mile coast road known to all Alexandrians as the Corniche.
He never forgave them this trick. “Come, we’ll help you,” he would remind his wife, mimicking her brothers’ repeated appeals to him. “We’ll give you this, we’ll give you that. Nothing! My ancestors were important enough to be assassinated by generations of sultans—now, billiards,” he would mutter as he stood outside the kitchen door each morning, waiting for the assortment of cheese and spinach pastries that his wife baked at dawn. They sold well and were much liked by the pool players, who enjoyed eating something while drinking anisette.
Not only had his own circumstances been drastically reduced, but Albert was still expected to help out his wife’s family. And so Vili’s driver, thoroughly convinced that he was picking up money owed to his employer, would stop the car outside La Petite Corniche, walk in, receive a wad of bills, and “remind” Albert that he would be back in a few weeks.
After about the fifth loan, the humble proprietor of the pool hall walked outside with his cue in hand and shattered one of the car windows, informing his brother-in-law, who was skulking in the backseat while the chauffeur ran his errands, that since he was on such good terms with royalty, he should also tap His Majesty for “something to tide him over”—Vili’s euphemism for desperate loans.
Esther was horrified when she heard of the confrontation between her husband and her brother. “But he’s never done anything like this before,” she protested to Vili, “he’s not violent at all.”
“He’s a Turk, through and through.”
“And what are you then, Italian by any chance?”
“Italian or not Italian, I know better than to break someone’s car window.”
“I’ll speak to him,” she said.
“No, I don’t ever want to see him again. He’s a terribly ungrateful man. If he weren’t your husband, Esther, if he weren’t your husband—” started Vili.
“If he weren’t my husband, he wouldn’t have lent you a penny. And if you weren’t my brother, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in now.”
Vili’s given name was Aaron. When he returned to Alexandria in 1922, four years after the signing of the armistice, he had to make up for lost time. With the help of his four brothers, he became a rice expert in one week. Then a sugar-cane examiner. In the space of three months he learned how to cure any conceivable disease afflicting cotton, Egypt’s prized export. In half a year’s time, he had not only toured all corners of Egypt but had also visited every magnate’s home rumored to hold the promise of a young Jewish wife. He married one a little less than a year after returning from Europe.
Having become a respectable citizen now, he reverted to what he liked best of all: married women. It is said that some of his mistresses were so distraught when he was done with them that they would show up on his wife’s doorstep, pleading with her to intercede on their behalf, which poor Aunt Lola, whose heart was the biggest organ in her body, would sometimes do.
Seven years after the war, a woman named Lotte appeared at the family’s residence with the picture of a man to whom she claimed she had been engaged in Berlin. When a consensus was finally reached on the man’s identity, and the woman had put away her handkerchief, she was invited to stay for lunch
with the family, most of whose members were due to arrive toward one o’clock. Vili was the last to arrive, but as soon as he walked in, she recognized his footsteps in the vestibule, stood up, put down her glass of sherry, and ran out screaming, “Willy! Willy!” at the top of her lungs.
No one had any idea what the demented woman meant by calling their Aaron by that strange name, but during lunch, when everyone had more or less regained composure, she explained that in 1914 in his new Prussian uniform he had looked so much like Kaiser Wilhelm that she could not resist nicknaming him Willy. His wife found something so endearingly right about “Willy,” so stout yet so diminutive, that she too began to call him “Vili,” first with reproof, then with raillery, and finally by force of habit, until everyone, including his mother, called him Vili, which eventually acquired its diminutive Greco-Judeo-Spanish form: Vilico.
“Vilico traitor,” his mother said some time afterward.
He protested. “I was really in love with her at the time. And besides, it happened long before I’d met Lola.”
“I wasn’t talking about women. Judas you are, Judas you’ll always be.”
No one had the heart to ship the resurrected Lotte back to Belgium. So Lotte became Uncle Nessim’s secretary, served as a temporary model in Aunt Clara’s art class, then as a sales assistant for Uncle Cosimo, who eventually palmed her off on Uncle Isaac, who finally married her. In the family picture taken at their wedding in 1926 in the matriarch’s sumptuous apartment in Grand Sporting overlooking the sunny Mediterranean, Tante Lotte is standing next to Uncle Isaac on the veranda, her right hand resting on Uncle Vili’s shoulder. Are we, squints Uncle Vili, or aren’t we men who share, men who exact the highest sacrifices, men whom women worship.
In the picture, Isaac is already a haggard fifty-year-old trying
to cover up a bald spot, and Nessim, then close to retirement, looks older than his mother, whose forced good cheer on the day of her son’s nuptials failed to conceal her worries.
“He’s a prince, and she’s a peasant,” she said. “Look how she walks. You can still hear the clatter of Batavian clogs in her steps.”
“And on his head you can still see traces of an invisible skullcap. So they’re even. Leave them alone,” her daughter Esther chided. “All his life with mistresses, and never a wife. It’s about time he married.”
“Yes, but not a Christian.”
“Christian, Jewish, Belgium, Egypt, these are modern times,” said Vili, “the twentieth century.”
But his mother was not convinced. And in the picture she wears the distrustful gaze of a Hecuba welcoming Helen into her fold.
In back of the assemblage, peeping ever so furtively from behind the veranda’s French windows, are the faces of three Egyptians. The maid, Zeinab, no older than twenty and already in the family for a decade, is smiling mischievously. Ahmed, the cook, who is from Khartoum, bashfully attempts to avert his eyes from the photographer, covering his face with his right palm. His younger sister Latifa, a mere child of ten, stares with impish dark eyes into the lens.
While the family tried to recover from the Isotta-Fraschini debacle, Uncle Vili was busily pursuing an altogether different career: that of a Fascist. He had become such an ardent supporter of Il Duce that he insisted everyone in the family wear a black shirt and follow the Fascist health regimen by exercising daily. A punctilious observer of all changes inflicted on the Italian language by the Fascists, he tried to purge acquired
Anglicisms from his speech, tastes, and clothing; when Italy went to war against Ethiopia, he asked the family to surrender its gold jewelry to the Italian government to help finance Il Duce’s dream of an empire.
The irony behind Uncle Vili’s patriotic histrionics is that, all the while proclaiming his undying allegiance to the fascio, he had already become an agent of British intelligence. His induction as a spy provided him with the only career for which he was truly suited from birth. It also encouraged everyone else in the family to remain in Egypt, especially now that they were plugged into the affairs of not one but two empires.
Vili’s induction into His Majesty’s Secret Service in 1936 coincided with another piece of good fortune for the family: his brother Isaac’s flourishing friendship with the new King Farouk, Fouad’s son. It is not clear how Isaac obtained his appointment as a director at the Ministry of Finance, but shortly after his wedding, he also found himself sitting on the boards of most of the major corporations in Egypt. “Fraterism,” which gives to brothers what nepotism gives to nephews and grandchildren, took care of the rest, so that all of my other uncles—Nessim, Cosimo, and Lorenzo—were offered lucrative positions at several banks in Egypt. Vili’s auction business was thriving; his mother’s apartment overlooking that dazzling expanse of beachfront was given a much-needed sprucing up; Arnaut was born to the Schwab and Marta; and Vili finally made up with his brother-in-law Albert.
At first, Uncle Vili tried to conceal the nature of his new career. Only Aunt Lola and Uncle Isaac knew of it. But secrets of this kind he could never resist divulging, particularly since they stirred everyone’s envy and admiration. It was the closest thing to being a soldier again. He carried a pistol wherever he went and, before sitting down to lunch with the rest of the family, he could often be seen fiddling with and loosening his
holster. “What is he,” asked the Schwab, “a gangster now?” “Shush,” Aunt Marta would hiss, “no one is supposed to know.” “But he’s so obvious about it that he must be a decoy. The British couldn’t possibly be that stupid.”
But then, wars are won not because one party is the more resourceful, but because the other is a touch more incompetent. The Italians never suspected that Vili had thrown in his lot with the British and continued to use his services in Egypt and elsewhere. Vili was very often absent from Alexandria, either in Ethiopia with the Italian army, or in Italy, or serving in various Italian delegations to Germany. To become still more vital to Italian interests, he made a name for himself as a transportation expert and as a specialist in fuel distribution for desert convoys. How and where he acquired even a nodding acquaintance with these disciplines is beyond conjecture, but the Italians needed anyone they could get. They took advantage of his flourishing auction house as a cover for his frequent comings and goings between Rome and Alexandria. To allay possible British scrutiny, they encouraged him to import antique furniture, and thus, with the help of the Fascists, he managed to purchase rare antiques at a fraction of their cost in Italy only to sell them to Egyptian pashas for a fortune.
He became very wealthy. With time, not only did there accrue to him the many privileges of an English gentleman spy, but his double life allowed him to enact all those elaborate rituals—from breakfast to nightcap—he had always secretly envied the English, while gratifying his undying Italian patriotism whenever he heard the Fascist anthem, or when the Italians—not without German help—finally scored a victory against the Greeks. “We’ve taken Greece,” he suddenly shouted one day, hanging up the telephone with what must also have been Turkish glee in his voice. “We’re finally in Athens”—whereupon everyone at home jumped up and down,
stirring up the Egyptian servants and maids, who would ululate at the slightest pretext for celebration, until someone inevitably sobered up the festivities by voicing concern for Greek Jewry.
Vili’s voice had quivered with excitement at the news, as it did when a group of Italian frogmen stole into the harbor of Alexandria, causing serious damage to two British battleships. Vili was thrilled by the valiant frogmen, but totally disheartened when reminded that he had to condemn their mission. “Gone are the old days,” he would say, meaning the days when you always knew who you were and whose side you were on.
Then something happened. Even he could not quite understand it. “Things aren’t going well,” Vili said. When pressed to explain, he would simply say, “Things.” Unnerved by his answers, his sister Esther would try coaxing him: “Is it that you don’t want to say or that you don’t know?” “No, I do know.” “Then tell us.” “It’s about Germany.” “Anyone could have said it was about Germany. What about Germany?” “They’ve been nosing around Libya too much. It just doesn’t bode well.”
A few months later, my Great-aunt Elsa arrived with her German husband from Marseilles. “Very bad. Terrible,” she said. They would not give her an exit visa. Isaac, who had used his connections with French diplomats once to become a French citizen, had to use them again now to arrange for his sister’s immediate safe conduct. Given her complicated status as an Italian married to a German Jew in France, additional measures were needed, and Isaac obtained for her and her husband diplomatic passports bearing the king of Egypt’s seal. Aunt Elsa complained she had lost her shop of religious artifacts at Lourdes and had spent two years in extreme poverty. “That’s where I learned to be a miser,” she would say, as though this mitigated what all knew was a case of congenital avarice.
Hardly a month later, the Schwab’s twenty-five-year-old half sister Flora appeared in the family living room. Marta immediately saw the writing on the wall. “If all these Ashkenazi Jews begin swarming in from Germany, it’s going to be the end for us. The city will be teeming with tailors, brokers, and more dentists than we know what to do with.”
“We couldn’t sell anything,” said Flora. “They took everything. We left with what we could,” she went on. Aunt Flora had come alone with her mother, Frau Kohn, an ailing, aging woman with clear blue eyes and white skin touched with pink, who spoke French poorly and who always seemed to wear a pleading, terrified look on her face. “They slapped her on the streets two months ago,” explained her daughter. “Then she was insulted by a local shopkeeper. Now she keeps to herself.”
For several weeks early that summer, the streets were rife with rumors of an impending, perhaps decisive, battle with the Afrika Korps. Rommel’s forces had seized one stronghold after another, working their way along the Libyan coastline. “There’s going to be a terrible battle. Then the Germans will invade.” The British, Vili said, were totally demoralized, especially after Tobruk. Panic struck everyone. The small resort town of Mersah-Matrouh on the coast near the Libyan border had fallen into German hands. “They hate us Jews more than they despise Arabs,” said Aunt Marta, as though this were totally incomprehensible. Uncle Isaac, who had heard a lot about German anti-Semitism, had put together a terrifying account, made up of rumors and haunting reminders of the Armenian massacre of 1895, which he had witnessed. “First they find out who is Jewish, then they send trucks at night and force all the Jewish men into them, and then they take you to distant factories, leaving women and children to starve by themselves.”
“All you’re doing is scaring everyone, so stop it right now,” said Esther, who, like other members of her family, had witnessed at least two Armenian massacres in Turkey.
“Yes, but the Armenians had been spying for the British for far too long,” protested Vili, who, in this case, sympathized with the Turks, even though he had fought against them on the British and Italian side during the Great War, while Albert, his brother-in-law, who had fought with the Turks against the British, condemned the massacres as barbarous. “The Turks simply had to put a stop to it in the only way they knew how: with blood and more blood. But what have Jews ever done to the Germans?” asked Uncle Nessim. “The way some Jews behave,” Aunt Clara jumped in, “I’d run them out of this world into the next. It’s because of Jews like them that they hate Jews like us,” she said, eyeing her brother Vili, one of whose favorite maxims she had just quoted. “Then, they’re really going to take us away, you think,” interrupted Marta, her voice already quaking. “Don’t start now with the crying, please! We’re in the middle of a war,” said an exasperated Esther. “But it’s because we’re in the middle of a war that I’m crying,” Aunt Marta insisted, “don’t you see?” “No, I don’t see. If they take us away, then they’ll take us away, and that’ll be the end of that—”
Weeks before the first battle of El Alamein, the matriarch decided to put into effect an old family expedient. She summoned all members of her family to stay in her large apartment for as long as the situation warranted. None declined the offer, and they came, like Noah’s beasts, in twos and fours, some from Cairo and Port Said, and some from as far as Khartoum, where they would have been safer than in Alexandria. Mattresses were laid out side by side on the floor, extra leaves were added to the dining room table, and two more cooks were hired, one of whom raised doves and chickens in the event of
a food shortage. A sheep and two ewes were secretly brought in under cover of night and tied upstairs on the terrace next to the makeshift coop.
During the day, family members would leave and tend to business. Then all would return for lunch, and during those long summer afternoons, some of the men would sit around the dining room table naming their worst fears while the children napped and the women mended and knitted things in other rooms. Warm clothing was particularly needed; winters in Germany were harsh, they said. At the entrance to the apartment stood a row of very small suitcases neatly stacked in a corner, some dating back to their owners’ youth in Turkey and to their school days abroad. Now, blotched and tattered by age, bearing yellowed stickers from Europe’s grand hotels, they waited meekly in the vestibule for that day when the Nazis would march into Alexandria and round up all Jewish males above eighteen, allowing each a small suitcase with bare necessaries.
Later in the afternoon some members of the family would go out, and the women might stop at the Sporting Club. But by teatime most were already home. Dinner was usually light and quick, consisting of bread, jam, fruit, cheese, chocolate, and homemade yogurt, reflecting Aunt Elsa’s tight management of family finances, Uncle Vili’s spartan dietary norms, and my great-grandmother’s humble origins. After dinner, coffee would be brought out and everyone would crowd into the living room to listen to the radio. Sometimes they listened to the BBC, other times to the Italian stations; the reports were always confusing.
“All I know is that the Germans need Suez. Therefore, they must attack,” Vili maintained.
“Yes, but can we stop them?”
“Only for the short term. Long term, who knows? General
Montgomery may be a genius, but Rommel is Rommel,” Uncle Vili decreed.
“Then what shall we do?” asked Aunt Marta, always ready to break into hysterics.
“Do? There is nothing we can do.”
“What do you mean there is nothing we can do? We can escape.”
“Escape where?” asked Esther turning red.
“Escape. I don’t know. Escape!”
“But where?” continued her sister. “To Greece? They’ve already taken Greece. To Turkey? We’ve just barely gotten out of there. To Italy? They’d throw us into jail. To Libya? The Germans are there already. Don’t you see that once they take Suez, it’ll all be finished?”
“What do you mean, ‘finished’? So you do think that they’ll win?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Vili sighed.
“Just come out and say it. They’ll win and then they’ll come and take us all away.”
Vili did not answer.
“How about going to Madagascar, then?” offered Aunt Marta.
“Madagascar! Please, Marta, do me a favor!” interjected Uncle Isaac.
“Or South Africa. Or India. What’s wrong with just keeping one step ahead of them. Maybe they’ll lose.”
There was a moment’s pause.
“They won’t lose,” said Aunt Flora finally.
“Since you’re so quick to talk, Flora, why haven’t you already left, then,” asked Marta, almost seething with contempt. “Why are you still here?”
“You forget that I’ve already left one place.”
Aunt Flora drew deeply on her cigarette, thought awhile,
and then exhaled with a dreamy, wistful air, leaning toward the tea table from the corner of the sofa where she was sitting, and stubbed out her cigarette. Everyone had turned to her, the women and the men always wondering why she habitually wore black when green was what matched her eyes best. “I don’t know,” she added, still gazing at her hand, which continued slow, stubbing motions long after she had put out her cigarette. “I don’t know,” she hesitated. “There’s nowhere to go. I’m tired of running. I’m even more tired of worrying where to run. The world isn’t big enough. And there’s not enough time. I’m sorry,” she said, turning to her brother, “I don’t want to go anywhere. I don’t even want to travel.” Silence filled the living room. “The truth is, if I believed we had a chance, I’d hide in the desert. But I don’t believe it.”
“Such pessimism, and at so young an age,” Vili broke in, assuming the condescending smile of a man who knew all there was to know about frightened women and how to placate them. “It’s not written that the Germans have to win, you know. They may lose. Their fuel supplies are terribly low, and they have overextended themselves. Let them attack Egypt, let them venture as deeply into Egypt as they want. Sand always wins in the end—remember that,” he continued, advocating the strategic restraint of Hannibal’s foe, Quintus Fabius Maximus, known to history as Cunctator, the temporizer.
“‘Sand always wins in the end.’ Really, Vili,” Aunt Flora said mockingly and walked out to the balcony, where she lit another cigarette. “Whatever does he mean?” she scoffed out loud, turning to Esther’s son, who was also smoking on the balcony.
“Sand always wins,” repeated Vili with surprised emphasis, as if it should have made perfect sense the first time. “Their invasion plans may be flawless, but we are better armed, better supplied, and we have more men. You’ll see what damage a
few months of desert sand can do to Rommel’s armored cars. So, let’s not abandon hope. We’ll find a way. We’ve survived worse enemies before, we’ll outlive this one too.”
“Well said,” replied Esther, who, for all her grim realism, loved positive thinking and could never bring herself to believe that disaster was as imminent as all that. “I knew you would come up with something in the end,” she said, eyeing her silent husband with that scornful, doubtful look that all members of her family reserved for their spouses during family gatherings.
“As long as we have courage and stand together and don’t panic and don’t listen to idle rumors floating between seamstress this and hairdresser that, sisters,” he emphasized, “we’ll pull through this one as well.” He declaimed this exhortation in the only style he knew: by borrowing from Churchill and Mussolini.
“So we wait, in other words,” concluded Marta.
“So we wait.”
And there it was, poised in midair, hovering in the wings like a pianist cracking his knuckles before making a long-awaited appearance, or like an actor clearing his throat as he walks onto the stage. It was ushered in by the confident glint in his eye, the arching of his back, and that all-too-familiar quiver in his voice as it rose and reached the perfect pitch: “We’ve waited things out before, we’ll wait this one out as well. After all, each of us here is a five-thousand-year-old Jew—are we or aren’t we?”
The mood in the room livened, and Vili, who had a good touch of demagoguery in him, turned to Flora and asked her to play something by Goldberg or Brandenburg, he couldn’t remember which.
“You mean Bach,” said Flora, walking up to the piano.
“Bach, Offenbach, c’est tout la même chose, it’s all the same.
Todos Lechli, all of them Ashkenazi,” he muttered. Only Esther heard him say that. She immediately turned and grimaced a severe shush, “She understands!” But Vili was unmoved. “There is only one thing she understands, and all the men in this room know what it is.”
The Schwab’s half sister did not hear this exchange. She took off her ring, placed it next to the keys, and began playing something by Schubert. Everyone was overjoyed.
And she played till very late that night, till one after the other, everyone had gone to sleep, and she played softly every night, ignoring the men who were growing tired of waiting up for her, deriding Esther’s son and his shallow Wertherisms when they ended up alone in the living room one night and she had stopped playing and he had tried to kiss away all that heartless talk of love in the time of war. In the maid Latifa’s room, which was Flora’s now, she had taken off her ring again and her earrings and, depositing her glass of cognac on a makeshift bedstand, had said, “Now you can kiss me.” But she kissed him first. “It means nothing,” she added as she looked away and lit the kerosene lamp, bringing down the wick till it glowed less than her cigarette. “As long as we’re clear that it means nothing,” she said almost enjoying the cruelty with which she foisted despair on everyone.
Then came the wonderful news. The British Eighth Army had managed to halt Rommel’s advance at El Alamein and, in the fall of 1942, finally mounted a decisive attack upon the Afrika Korps. The battle lasted twelve days. At night, everyone in the family would stand for hours on the balcony, as if waiting for holiday fireworks, straining their eyes west of the city to catch a glimpse of the historic battle that was to decide their fates. Some smoked, others chatted among themselves or
with neighbors upstairs or downstairs, likewise perched on their balconies, waving at one another, grimacing hope and resignation, while, from emptied rooms, came an incessant crackle of shortwave bulletins announcing the most recent developments in North Africa. A distant, half-inch halo hovered over the western horizon, swaying in the blackout, suddenly beaming like an approaching vehicle coming uphill, only to fade again, a pale amber moon on a misty night. All they heard was a distant, muffled drone, like the whir of fans on quiet summer evenings or the sound of the large refrigerator humming in the pantry. People went to sleep to the faraway rumble of battle.
“See? All your fears of being taken away have come to nothing. Didn’t I tell you?” said Vili to his sister Marta when it became clear that the British had scored a decisive victory.
Everyone was readying to leave the old mother’s home. Yet the preparations were slow, uncertain, even dilatory, partly because everyone had grown accustomed to the refugee lifestyle and was reluctant to abandon its solidarity, but also because no one wanted to tempt providence by proclaiming all danger averted. “What’s the hurry?” said my great-grandmother. “There are still many pigeons and chickens left. Besides, one never knows with the Germans. They could be back in a matter of weeks.” Packing, however, continued.
As a going-away gift, the old mother decided to give each of her sons and daughters a crystal goblet bearing golden fleurs-de-lis. They had been manufactured in their father’s glass factory in Turkey.
“This is the last time this apartment will ever house so many,” the old woman explained.
“The way the world is going, I wouldn’t be so sure,” said Esther.
Esther was right. The family would seek refuge in the old
matriarch’s home on three subsequent occasions: once during the Suez War, in 1956; then a decade later; and once, earlier, in 1948, after Vili was hunted down by Zionist agents who beat him severely for spying for the British and then threatened to do the same to other men in the family. Two months later Vili got wind they were on his tracks again and that this time they meant to kill him. He took cover in his mother’s home. One day, he took out his good-luck pendulum and on the table placed a cyanide pill he had been keeping ever since the days of El Alamein. The pendulum said no.
Vili was spirited away to Italy, then to England, where he changed names, converted to Christianity, and forswore all previous nationalities. But it was only about four years later that he resurfaced in Egypt for what proved to be the most spectacular business deal in his career as spy, soldier, and swindler: the auctioning of the deposed king’s property.
“It was the end of the end,” he explained many years later in his garden in Surrey. “The end of an era, the end of a world. Everything fell apart after that.”
By now he was in his middle eighties, he liked horses, candies, and dirty jokes, using a fist at the end of a stiffened forearm to illustrate the ribald tales which he liked to tell in the old style: with bawdy gestures and exaggerated pantomime. Wearing old tweeds, Clark boots, an ascot, and a stained cashmere cardigan, he looked the part he had been rehearsing all his life: a Victorian gentleman who couldn’t care less what his inferiors thought of either him or his clothes. What made his aristocratic bearing especially convincing was that, on looking at him, one immediately suspected poverty.
He had shown me his orchard where nothing good ever grew, the huge lake in need of sprucing up—“But who
cares”—the stables with more horses than there was room for, and beyond these, the woods where no one dared take a walk, a sort of Jane Austen world gone feral. “I don’t know,” he answered when I asked what his woods abutted. “I suppose a neighbor. But then, these English lords, whoever really knows them?”
It was not true. He knew them quite well. In fact, he knew everyone. At the local post office, at the bank, and at one of the pubs where he offered me a beer, everyone knew Dr. Spingarn. “Well, hello” and “Cheerio” slipped from his tongue as though he had spoken English from the day he was born. He knew everything there was to know about soccer. When a Mini Morris stopped us on our way to town one morning, I realized how thoroughly grafted he was onto his new homeland. This was Lady Something-or-other on her way to London, wanting to know whether there was anything he needed. “No trouble at all,” she said after he finally agreed to let her pick up a case of French wine at some merchant. “Sans façons,” she added, pleased to show off her French and promising to have Arthur, the lord himself, deliver it this evening. “Entendu,” we heard her say as she rolled up her window and began speeding up the quiet country road, headed toward the highway.
“She’s as dry as a pitted prune, that one. Like all Englishwomen.”
“I thought she was very nice,” I protested, reminding him that the lady had first gone to his home and, on being told he was out for a walk, had driven about looking for him. “Very nice, very nice,” he repeated, “all of them are very nice here. You don’t understand a thing.”
In town, Vili waved at the local antiques dealer and decided to pay him a visit.
“Good morning, Dr. Spingarn,” said the dealer.
“Greetings,” he replied and introduced me. “Have you found my Turkish coffeepot yet?”
“Still looking, still looking,” chanted the dealer, as he continued to dust an old clock.
“It’s been nine years,” chuckled Vili. “I’m afraid I’ll die before you find it.”
“No fearing that, Dr. Spingarn. You’ll outlive us all, sir.”
“They’re slower than Arabs and twice as stupid. How on earth did they ever manage to have an empire once?” he said as soon as we stepped outside the shop.
Back at home, his wife, daughter, and married grandson and great-grandchild were waiting for us. “See this table?” He palmed the huge antique oak dining table on which food was being served. “I paid five pounds for it. And see these chairs? There were twelve of them. Seven pounds the lot, with eight more in the attic. And this huge clock here? Guess how much.” “One pound,” I guessed. “Wrong! I paid nothing at all for it. It came with the chairs.” He burst out laughing as he spread a thick piece of butter on a slice of bread.
“You sound like a typical parvenu juif,” jeered his daughter.
“And what else are we if not des parvenus juifs?”
After lunch he insisted we have coffee alone together, “Lui et moi seuls,” he told the others. “Come,” he said, pointing to the kitchen, where he proceeded to brew Turkish coffee. “You see, all you need is a little pot like this, preferably made of brass, but aluminum will do. I had this one made in Manchester. By a Greek. But do you think our antiques dealer is smart enough to figure out that’s all he had to do? Never! That’s why I go to him every once in a while. As long as he remains stupid and as long as I am lucid enough to know it, then things are well with me. Do you see?” he winked at me, complicity beaming in his eyes. I nodded but missed the point. It occurred to me that I would never have lasted a day in the
world of his youth. “De l’audace, toujours de l’audace,” he replied. “You see, in life, it’s not only knowing what you want that matters. That’s easy. It’s knowing how to want.” I was not sure I understood this either, but again I nodded. “But I was lucky. I had a good life,” he went on. “Life gives us all a few trump cards when we’re born, and then that’s it. By the time I was twenty I had already wasted all of mine. Life gave them back to me many times. Not many can claim the same.”
When coffee was ready, he took out two demitasses and proceeded to pour, holding the pot precariously high above the cups and aiming the coffee into them, the way good Arab servants did, to allow the brew to cool somewhat as it was being poured. “May God rest his soul, but no one made coffee like your grandfather,” he said. “A snake, with a cleft tongue, who bubbled like milk when he lost his temper and then cut you to pieces, but still, the best brewer of coffee in the world. Come.” He indicated the drawing room as we passed through a different corridor. The room was filled with antiques and Persian rugs. On the glistening old parquet sat a band of afternoon sunlight in which an overfed cat had fallen asleep, its legs stretched out awkwardly.
“See this smoking jacket?” he said. “Feel it.” I leaned over to him and touched the fabric on the shawl collar. “At least forty years old,” he said, looking terribly amused. “Guess whose?” “Your father’s,” I said. “Don’t be stupid,” he snapped, practically losing his temper. “My father died eons ago.” “One of your brothers’?” “No, no, no.” “I don’t know then.” “I’ll give you a hint. Guess who made the cloth? Best fabric in the world.” It took me a while. “My father?” I asked. “Right. Woven in the basement of his factory in Ibrahimieh during the war. This jacket belonged to your grandfather Albert.”
“He gave it to you?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes.”
“On what occasion?”
“After he died. It was Esther who gave it to me. Where would you ever find such fine wool nowadays? It’s one of the few things I treasure,” he joked. “Here, feel again!” he ordered.
Ever the master salesman, I thought. “Let me explain,” he said, his face uncomfortably nearing mine. He looked around to see no one was listening.
“Do you remember Flora, la belle romaine, as we used to call her?”
It was Flora who had taught me all about the pianist Schnabel, I replied.
“That’s right. During the war, in the days of Alamein, we all stayed in your great-grandmother’s house. You have no idea how crowded it was. Well, one day, in walks this dark-haired, beautiful, but painfully beautiful woman who plays the piano every evening, who smokes all the time, who looks a trifle worn but sexier for it, and who flirts with all of us, though you’d swear she didn’t know it. In short, we were all madly in love with her. Madly.”
“What does that have to do with my grandfather?”
“Wait, let me finish!” He had almost lost his temper. “Well, the tension was such—you have to realize there were at least seven grown men in the house, not to mention younger men who were just as predatory—that every day we would start quarreling. Over nothing, and over everything. Your grandfather and I quarreled every day. Every day. Then we would make up and play backgammon. And then quarrel again. Do you play backgammon?”
“Poorly.”
“I thought so. At any rate, it becomes quite evident that Flora has singled me out. Of course, I make no passes, I have to behave—in my mother’s house and all that, and my wife snooping about, you understand. I have to move very slowly.
So I finally say to your grandfather, ‘Albert, this woman wants me. What should I do?’ He says, ‘Do you want her?’ And I say, ‘Don’t you?’ He does not reply. So I say to him, ‘Albert, you’ve got to help me.’ That cunning wretch of your grandfather smiles awhile and finally says, ‘I’ll see.’ Everyone else knew—Frau Kohn, your grandmother, Isaac. Everyone, except me. I found out about them years later, when Flora came to visit us here and saw me wearing his smoking jacket. She recognized it immediately.”
“Yes?” I asked.
“Don’t you get it?”
I shook my head.
“She probably had it made for him as a present. I felt like a complete dolt. The only woman I wanted and never slept with. Being jealous like this after forty years, what a dolt!” A moment of silence elapsed. I was tempted to tell him it was not my grandfather but my father who had loved Flora on those summer nights of 1942, and that the jacket was his, not his father’s. My grandfather had simply “inherited” it from his son, the way he “inherited” everything my father stopped wearing. But I said nothing, for I wanted my grandfather to win one bout against Vili. “You should have seen us back then, though,” he went on, “everyone asking her to play the piano, everyone drinking more cognac than was usual, waiting for all the others to tire and go to sleep. Frankly, staying up so late was never my style.”
I watched him relish his revelation as he picked up both our emptied demitasses. “Come,” he finally said. And before I knew it, he had taken me to the garden, where his grandson and his wife were reading the local newspaper.
“Have you had your little chat?” asked his wife.
“We have indeed,” replied Vili.
A small incident occurred over dinner. A couple of Gypsies
were observed through the dining room window roaming the grounds. Without hesitating, Vili went into the drawing room, got his shotgun, and fired two shots in the air, rousing the dogs and the horses. “Have you gone mad,” his daughter shouted, jumping up and trying to grab the gun from his hands. “They could kill you if they wanted to.”
“Let them try. Do you think I’m afraid of them? I’d go after every one of them—” And then it came, as a farewell present, as a memento of my visit to England, a final concession on his part to the visitor who had come to hear the words spoken from his own lips. “Me afraid of them? Me frightened? What do you think? Am I or aren’t I?”
That night, he came into my room to say farewell to me. “I insist on adieu,” he said, “because at my age one never knows.” He stared at my things, looked over my books, picked one up with something like mock scorn on his face. “Do people still read this?” “More than ever,” I replied. “Another Jew,” he said. “No, a half-Jew,” I said. “No. When your mother is Jewish you are never half-Jewish.”
Perhaps it was the subject, or maybe this was why he had come upstairs to my room, but he asked about his mother. I told him what I could remember. No, there had been no pain. Yes, she was lucid until the very end. Yes, she still laughed and still made those short, lapidary pronouncements that made one squirm like a trampled worm. Yes, she understood she was dying. And so on, until I told him that she couldn’t see well because she had developed cataracts, and that a light, yellowish film had veiled her eyes. I had said it in passing, not thinking that cataracts were a particularly serious impairment.
“So she couldn’t see then,” he said. “She couldn’t see,” he repeated, as though trying to scan in the words and the syllables themselves some secret meaning, some revealed purpose behind the cruelty of fate and the vulnerability of old age. “So
she couldn’t see,” he said like someone gripped by a sorrow so powerful that all he can do is repeat the words until they finally bring tears to his eyes.
“You won’t understand this,” he said, “but I think of her sometimes. Old, lonely, everyone gone, and, now that you mention it, blind, dying practically all by herself in Egypt. And I think of how I could have made things better for her had I not misspent my life trying out all these flimsy schemes of mine. But then, that is how life is. Now that I have the house, I haven’t got the mother. And yet I wanted this house for her. Sometimes, I think of her simply as mother, the way children do when they need something only mothers have. You would think because I’m old enough to be a great-grandfather that I couldn’t possibly think of my mother in those terms. Well, I still do. Strange, isn’t it?” He smiled, placed the volume back on my nightstand, and, perhaps meaning to surprise me, began quoting in French the long, sinuous prose of the first few sentences.
“Good night, Herr Doktor,” he said abruptly.
“Good night, Dr. Spingarn,” I replied, resigned never to ask how he had come to know this passage by Proust.
Half an hour later, on my way to the shower, I was stopped by my cousin and his wife. “If you’re quiet you won’t regret this.” They explained that every evening, between ten and eleven o’clock, Vili would listen to the French-language shortwave broadcast from Israel. I expressed surprise. “It’s always the last thing he does. Then he turns off the lights and goes to sleep.” “So?” I asked. “So, you’ll see.” For a while we waited outside his door. “It’s the same thing every night,” she whispered. Were they going to knock and ask to be admitted, or were they simply going to barge in on him? “You’ll see.” Finally, we heard the Israeli national anthem. It was followed by various signing-off signals. “It’s about over now,” my cousin
warned. Something gave a click in his room. Vili had just turned off his radio. Then we heard the sound of bedsprings yielding under his weight, followed by a rustle of sheets, and suddenly the band of light went out from under the door. All was quiet for a second. And then I thought I heard it, a faint, reedy, muted buzzing, emanating from within the small room like a vapor of sound working its way out the keyhole, under the door, through the cracks in the lintel, filling the dark silence where we three stood now like incense and premonition; an eerie garble of familiar words murmured to a cadence I too had learned long ago, whispered as if in stealth and shame.
“He’ll deny it if you ask him,” said my cousin.