2

Rue Memphis

To the two ladies who were to become my grandmothers one day and who met for the first time in ’44 in a small marketplace in Alexandria eyeing a suspiciously old catch of red mullet, this was indeed a very small, very strange world. Past their first, shy, tentative remarks spoken from behind thick lipstick and respectable hat-veils, something like intense sunshine erupted on their speech and suddenly the two strangers, who had known each other by sight for more than a decade without ever daring to utter a word to the other, began to twitter away with the heady good cheer of old classmates picking up exactly where they left off fifty years earlier. Each was accompanied by a boy servant whom neither trusted or talked to but whose job it was to trail behind his wise old mazmazelle—all European ladies of a certain age and station were called mademoiselle or signora in Egypt—and watch her pick out the good from bad fruit, hear her haggle in the most incomprehensible Arabic, intervene if things got out of hand, and finally ferry the load from one food vendor to the next until he was sent home to start cooking lunch. Mazmazelles would not think twice of touching raw liver with their bare hands, or of fingering the gills of red mullet to prove the fish wasn’t at all fresh that day; but they never took anything from the loutish food vendor’s hand. That was the boy servant’s task. Mazmazelles were then free to do as they pleased until about one o’clock, when their husbands came home to eat and sleep.

“No mullet then,” concluded one to the other. “Such a shame, though. To think that all these years I’ve been buying bad fish and didn’t even know it,” she said sadly.

“It’s in the gills. Not the eyes. Gills must be bright red. Otherwise, don’t buy.”

“Such a shame,” repeated the meeker of the two as they made their way home. “All these years living exactly across the street from each other, and not so much as a peep for a greeting.”

“But why didn’t you ever speak to me?” insisted the one who knew everything about fish.

“I used to think you were French,” replied her meeker neighbor, implying high-society French.

“French? And whatever made you think I was French? Je suis italienne, madame,” she added, as if that were a far greater distinction.

“As am I!”

“Yes? Are you? But we are from Leghorn.”

“But so are we! What a marvelous coincidence.” A small world indeed, they said in Ladino (which each insisted on calling Spanish), a language each found out the other spoke because, at the fish vendor’s stand, as one tried to explain why the mullet were not good that day, it suddenly occurred to both that of the six to seven languages each spoke fluently neither knew the name for mullet except in Ladino.

When it was time to say goodbye, both agreed to meet and shop together early the next day.

“She is so distinguished,” reported the meeker of the two to her husband that day. “Distinguished my eye,” he had snickered. “Her husband owns a billiard hall.” “Why, is your bicycle shop much better?” she retorted. “A hundred thousand times better.” He had even raised his voice.

Heedless of her husband’s pronouncements, she was determined to refer to her neighbor as une vraie princesse, while the other, who must have had more or less the same conversation with her husband, concluded that although her neighbor may not have been très high-class, she was nothing short of une sainte.

The Saint was a gentle, melancholy grandmother who sometimes spoke to herself and who often lost and forgot things. She forgot where she hid them or whom she was hiding them from. She lost keys and gloves, forgot names, dates, debts, and quarrels. She would lose the thread of her story and, drawing a blank in her mind, grope about for ideas, stringing idle words together, hoping to convey a semblance of continuity if she spoke fast enough, not realizing that her rapid succession of non sequiturs was precisely what betrayed her lapses most. Sometimes, feeling totally disoriented, she would own defeat. “It’s nothing, it happens to everyone,” she would say, taking a deep breath, trying to suppress a surge of anxiety. “I’ll remember later,” she would promise, knowing that, in the Italo-Byzantine world she came from, if a sneeze in mid-sentence confirmed the truth of what one was saying, forgetfulness was a sign of deceit. She tried to allay this suspicion by punctuating those sudden pauses in her speech with little oaths, such as On my daughter’s eyes or On my mother’s tombstone, but, by dint of swearing so often, she herself began to doubt her own tales, thinking, as happens so often among the elderly, that perhaps she was exaggerating more than she was forgetting.

When she had trouble remembering your name, she would search for it through an elaborate maze of other names in the family, thus betraying where you ranked in the hierarchy of her heart: first her son, Robert, then his three daughters, me, then her daughter who was deaf, her brothers, neighbors, her husband.

She cried once when I told her I had seen Uncle Robert in a dream. “And what did he say to you?” she fretted. More than a year had elapsed since his expulsion from Egypt after the 1956 war, and by then her life was entirely unsettled. “He said his daughter wanted to bring you a present,” I lied, thinking my dream would make her happy. But according to established Levantine custom, dreams always portend the opposite of what they say, which implied that her son in France was desperately in need of funds for his children.

Hence the frantic shopping for clothes, the scrupulous wrapping of parcels, the tireless standing in line at the post office, followed by epic worry sessions in the living room every evening as she, and anyone who happened to be visiting at that time, would sit and stew and fill themselves with as much gall as each could secrete, waiting for confirmation that the package had not fallen into the hands of the police or that some crafty postal clerk had not looted its contents. Wrapped in cobalt-blue paper, durable string, and stained with brittle reddish wax seals so old they bore her maiden name, her parcels were the product of a mind so naïve and so transparent that they might have fooled a master spy but not a child: a pair of homeknit overalls for each of her granddaughters, medicine that was hard to come by in France, a naughty assortment of rock candy carefully wrapped in colored cellophane paper, and, as though stitched by thoughtful celestial hands, a folded hundred-pound note sewn discreetly into the cuff of a child’s shirtsleeve. Her husband would find out sooner or later, and there were bound to be scenes. But her grandchildren come first she told the Princess, who, more than ever now, was convinced that this was truly a saint, though she noticed—as those who loved her sometimes did not—that her mind had already started to wander. “She is like a dove,” the Princess went on, “totally without bile.” “And without brains, either,” her husband had once replied.

A month later word arrived that the candies, overalls, magazines, and the petite surprise woven in by the hands of fate had arrived safely. “I knew it, I always knew it,” she exclaimed with great glee. “Then why did you worry so much?” asked the Princess, who had spent too many evenings soothing her neighbor’s worst fears to see them so readily dispelled now. “Because if I hadn’t worried, they might not have gotten there,” she replied, as though this were the most evident truth in the world. “I don’t understand,” added the Princess. “If you don’t understand, Madame Esther, then you don’t understand,” she would retort curtly, meaning she was certainly not about to divulge rituals that were so elaborate and so delicate that merely thinking about them, let alone discussing them with the uninitiated, might strip them of their spell.

“But please explain,” the Princess would insist, waiting to see what demented piece of logic might surface in her neighbor’s explanation. Like all mystics, however, the Saint refused to be baited.

“Madame Esther, I may not be learned,” she would say, “but I’m very sharp, très lucide. I sniff things out long before they happen.” Whenever she suspected someone was trying to make fun of her or pull the wool over her eyes, she would indicate her nose with an admonitory upraised index finger, as if her nostrils were a passageway to a venerable sixth sense. “And she thinks she’s sharp,” the Princess’s husband would scoff, sometimes even in the Saint’s presence. “She’s got the brains of a turnip, and the demented goathead goes around claiming she’s sharp—please!” Unruffled by the smirks around her, she would raise her inspired index finger, point to her nose a few times, smile her faint sagacious smile, and, whispering in my direction, say, “Let them. They think I don’t know, but I know.” She would look around sadly and sigh, reminded of yet sadder things in life.

“I’d give everything to see you grow into a young man. But that’s for an otra venida,” she would smile, referring to another lifetime, the one to come, that storehouse of might-have-beens and second-time-arounds where all of life’s blemishes are polished over and edged in gold and filigree.

That was my cue, for on hearing her speak of la otra venida, I would lunge toward her and clasp her tightly, while she struggled with mock annoyed shoves, like a person about to be tickled or embraced in public, feigning to ask how dare I kiss her now after doing what I had done—which was to outlive her and deprive her of me someday. But then, seeing that I refused to release my hold, she would slacken and cease to fight and hug me back, staring into my face as if to make out whether I was indeed worthy of so much love, finally taking a deep, intoxicated breath, filled with longing and premonition and the yearning to inhale my entire being. All I had to do then was squeeze a bit harder, and out would come the sob she had been struggling to contain.

“You love me, I know, but you must love your other grandmother more,” she would say.

“Pathologically Sephardi,” observed Aunt Flora, who had witnessed the scene and had no patience for these emotional torsions that go by the name of love on the Mediterranean. “Nothing was ever more hostile,” she told me years later, “than this gnarled, twisted selflessness that chokes you like a bad debt and always makes you feel slightly unworthy and always unkind in the end.”

“But why won’t you let him say he loves you more, Madame Adèle?” Aunt Flora would protest half-jokingly on those hot summer afternoons when they drew the shutters to keep the sun out of the Saint’s living room while the two women played music for four hands. It was upon the Princess’s recommendation during the last days of the war that the Saint had hired Aunt Flora as a piano teacher. Now, a decade later, they had become like mother and daughter.

“Don’t you think I want him to love me more?” the Saint would ask.

“But why not let him, then?”

Irked, my grandmother would answer, “If you don’t understand, Flora, then I’m really sorry.”

On those summer afternoons, it would grow so quiet in the Saint’s apartment—and downstairs on Rue Memphis and all over Ibrahimieh—that, while my grandfather Jacques slept in his room, I too would often doze on the sofa, letting the chatter of the two women and of their piano exercises lull me into a long and restful nap. Sometimes, in mid-sleep, I was roused by the stirring of long spoons in tall lemonade glasses, or by the persistent whispers of the two women, or by a fly wandering about my face, it too woven into a dream along with the music of Liszt and the cooing of turtledoves who would come to rest on the windowsill where yesterday’s rice had been left for them by the Saint.

“At least I want him to love her the same,” my grandmother would insist, as though upholding a stubborn, principled egalitarianism in matters of love.

“But why ask anyone to love anyone the same? Besides, did wanting anything ever move the heart?” Flora would ask, adding, as she did so many years later in Venice, when we walked around Campo Morosini one summer afternoon, that “one seldom loves anyone at all, much less loves them well.”

“You don’t understand, Flora,” insisted the Saint, “I want him to love her so she won’t be jealous of me. I worry. What kind of grandmother do you think she’ll be for him once I’m gone?” “What do you mean, ‘gone’?” “Gone. As in gone away, Flora.” “What are you saying? You’re hardly sixty!” “I meant gone to France, Flora, not gone like that! Gone to England. To Constantinople. How do I know. Gone.” She paused a moment, probably realizing that the other meaning was not so farfetched either. “And besides, how many more do you think I’ve got left?” she asked, meaning years.

Fearing the Princess’s resentment, the Saint resolved to conceal all of my visits from her neighbor across the street. Whenever she met the Princess, she never failed to ask after me, to let it seem she seldom saw me—all of it exquisitely Byzantine but quite pointless, as it would never have occurred to the Princess that she was not the more favored of the two.

Since the Princess was so punctilious in her daily schedule, it was never too difficult to hide my visits from her. At two in the afternoon, having had her lunch and being fully bedecked for a summer afternoon, the Princess would shut the door behind her and leave her house, slamming the green shutters tight one after the other from the outside. She would walk to the tramway station and there either hire a carriage or take the tram two stations up to Sporting where her mother lived and where the entire family was about to have coffee, before setting out for the Sporting Club.

These were the choicest hours of her life and she never let anything interfere with them—not her health, when it failed her, nor anyone else’s. It was then, just after lunch, that my mother would take me to her mother’s.

Often, a neighbor, friends, Aunt Flora, or others would sit on the balcony outside of the Saint’s dining room, and everyone would talk quietly under the delicate shade of a striped awning, hardly a breeze fluttering, with sunlight shifting so slowly that it could be hours before everyone would pick up their chairs and move to an adjacent balcony to resume conversations filled invariably with gossip, tears, venom, and self-pity. When one of the women was moved to cry, she would do so softly, quietly, her face folded into her chest, holding a crumpled handkerchief against her mouth, not because she was ashamed of crying in front of the others, but so as not to wake up Monsieur Jacques, who did not like having his naps interrupted by women whom he lumped together dismissively in the category of sales comediennes, sobbing or no sobbing.

Thus the summer hours would linger, and the Sudanese boy servant, who had taken forever to bring out the rainbow assortment of sherbets, seemed to take yet another eternity to come back to clear the sticky dishes from the balcony. And even then, there were still so many more of these afternoon hours before dusk set in that, in Aunt Flora’s words, Egypt had the longest hours in the world.

“How time passes,” my grandmother would say in one of her unworried moments, thinking that this is how she wanted to end her days, with her friends, her family, her home, her piano, whiling away the hours in the peaceful glow of the noonday sun. This is what she meant by preparing herself for a sound old age, une bonne vieillesse. In her case, une bonne vieillesse did not just mean healthy, vigorous old age, free of ailments and worldly cares, with plenty of time to put her things in order and never ask anyone for anything; it had also come to mean the sort of old age that allows one to be taken by a friendly hand and, preferably in mid-sleep, ferried across to the other side, having been spared both the shame and indignity of dying.

“There she is,” one of the four or five women on the balcony would finally interrupt as soon as they noticed the Princess turning the corner of Rue Memphis and heading home. “Already six o’clock!” someone would exclaim. Instinctively, the Saint would tell me to go inside. “How are you today, madame?” she would shout, her voice flying from her balcony, eager as she always was to be the first to greet anyone—a habit that invariably left you feeling remiss by comparison. For couched in the joy that lit up her face whenever she saw you on the street was the mild, unspoken reproof that your tardiness in seeing her either betrayed a desire to avoid speaking to her or that, if she always noticed you first, it was only because she thought of you more often than you did of her.

This time she greeted her neighbor with exceptional zeal, precisely because, with me in the house, she had every reason to avoid greeting her. She had stood up too swiftly, her flustered expression belying her nonchalant pose against the banister. “Ah, I didn’t see you, Madame Adèle,” said the Princess, stopping exactly under the balcony. From within the living room, through the space between the open French window frame and the door jamb, I spied her familiar handbag and folded fan, watched her raise an awkward hand to block out the sun from her face. “And what are you doing later?” asked the Princess. “Me? Nothing. I was thinking of buying some cloth—my tailor is coming in a few days—but with this heat, I doubt I’ll ever go now.” “If you wish, I can walk with you.” “I don’t know, perhaps another time.” They said goodbye.

“She always fights with her husband,” whispered the Saint to one of her guests. “You should hear the horrible things they say to each other at night.”

Then she would change her mind, and still confused and dazed in her thinking, would shout out to the Princess, “Attendez, wait,” from the top of her balcony after the other had already crossed the street and was about to open the wrought-iron gate to her garden. “Maybe I will buy cloth after all. There are so many receptions this fall, and my clothes are so old, Madame Esther,” she would lament, hinting for the nth time that she had not yet been invited to the Princess’s mother’s centennial ball that was to take place early that autumn.

“Do you want me to come upstairs, then?”

“No, no, I’ll be down in a jiffy.” Then, turning to my mother, she would say, “Wait until we’re gone before leaving.”

Five minutes later, the two mazmazelles could be seen hobbling down the street toward the Camp de César station, one with an unusually wide-rimmed hat, the other carrying a folded fan in one hand, her handbag and a white glove in the other, chattering away in the language that had brought them together and which, despite their repeated reminders to themselves and everyone else in the world that they had absolutely nothing else in common, despite their rivalry, their barbs, their petty distrust of one another, would always rescue a friendship that remained close until the very, very end.

The Saint’s conversation was mostly plaintive, with a repertory of unflagging complaints: her health, her son, those daily reminders of unrest and turmoil in Egypt, the servants, who robbed her down to the last tablespoon of sugar, and her daughter, my mother, whose deafness had robbed her of the best years of her life. Since she was always scattered and vague in her speech, once the mood for complaining had set in, she would digress from one woe to another, weaving a never-ending yarn filled with subplots in which the principal villains were her ailments, heartaches, and humiliations, with herself cast in the role of the hapless victim fending off adversities as best she could, a medieval martyr tied to a post surrounded by advancing dragons—all of it leading up to the gallstones that would drive her out of bed at night with never a soul to complain to except the wind on her balcony, which was where she sat all night, staring at an emptied Rue Memphis, heeding the tick of the pendulum in the hallway with its occasional, subdued gong announcing, as she always feared it might, that it was still very early, and that the hours would crawl into dawn before she heard the quiet, welcome steps of Mohammed coming in through the service door. For now, there was just the stillness and the tireless caterwauling, rising and subsiding in waves, as glinting cats’ eyes flitted about in the dark, crossing Rue Memphis, turning toward her balcony with defiance and suspicion, followed by a limping chienne whom everyone feared. “My nights,” she called them.

“I know,” said the Princess, who would try to steer her neighbor clear of unhappy thoughts, which wasn’t so difficult, for just as the Saint was known to drift from one shoal to the other, with some steering she could be made to sway into the opposite direction and seek out cheerful islands in the sun—as though what ultimately mattered to her when she spoke was not so much her inventory of woes and heartaches as the right to digress, to lose her thread, to say what came to mind, which is exactly what none, particularly her husband, ever allowed her.

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, while she sat alone on her balcony, nursing the gallbladder pain in her side—years before they met over red mullet—the Saint would watch the lights suddenly go on in the veranda across the street, and out would come the Princess wearing a bathrobe, carrying a large cup in one hand, with something like a flat hot-water bottle in the other, followed by my grandfather, his hair undone, staggering about the porch till his unsteady hand grasped the banister and he dropped into an armchair.

Facing one another across Rue Memphis, my grandparents-to-be would sometimes wonder what secret ailment kept the other awake, for neither dared speak, much less inquire into the other’s health by way of neighborly conversation during the day.

“It would have been so indiscreet,” said the Saint when asked by the Princess’s husband why she had never even waved at night.

“I’m a refined woman,” she added with mild apology in her voice.

“I’m a refined woman,” he mimicked and right away would slip in a word or two in Ladino. “Sit here and don’t move,” he said, himself seized by the intimacy that had sprung up between the two women. “You are one of the very few people here who speak Ladino well. The others belong to my wife’s family, and they’re too stuffy to speak real Ladino. Do you think I’ll let you go now that I’ve found someone to speak with?”

Phrases like “sit here and don’t move” set the tone for a friendship that was to last until the day my grandfather died —he always pretending to want to shock her, she pretending to tolerate someone who was too much of a scalawag to be taken seriously, and the Princess, always fast to find fault with her husband’s manners, forever eager to shield Madame her neighbor from her husband’s wanton humor. It was an easy familiarity that came as much from the city and the world where they were born as from the language they spoke in it. To the three who had discovered one another, Ladino spoke of their homesickness for Constantinople. To them, it was a language of loosened neckties, unbuttoned shirts, and overused slippers, a language as intimate, as natural, and as necessary as the odor of one’s sheets, of one’s closets, of one’s cooking. They returned to it after speaking French, with the gratified relief of left-handed people who, once in private, are no longer forced to do things with their right.

All had studied and knew French exceedingly well, the way Lysias knew Greek—that is, better than the Athenians—gliding through the imperfect subjunctive with the unruffled ease of those who never err when it comes to grammar because, despite all of their efforts, they will never be native speakers. But French was a foreign, stuffy idiom and, as the Princess herself would tell me many years later, after speaking French for more than two hours, she would begin to salivate. “Spanish, on the other hand, réveille l’âme, lifts up the soul.” And she would always slip in a proverb to prove her point.

The Saint and the Princess met at least twice a day, once in the morning on their way to the market, and once after the Princess had come back from her sisters. Since her husband was rarely in his billiard hall after six, all three would regularly have tea in the Princess’s garden, under an old linden tree whose perfume filled the late afternoon air until it was time to move indoors, where more tea was served.

The Saint’s husband, a Jew born in Aleppo who spoke no Ladino, would often return from work and peek through the wrought-iron fence into the arbor. Sometimes, having opened the gate to the Princess’s garden and made his way past the guava trees, Monsieur Jacques would look through the living room window and knock at the glass door with something of a grudge. “It is time to go home,” he would tell his wife after perfunctory pleasantries with the owner of the pool hall. “Just when we were beginning to enjoy ourselves,” someone would say. “Spanish, Spanish,” the Aleppid would mutter as he and his wife crossed Rue Memphis on their way home, “always your damned Spanish,” while she apologized for not being home yet, trying to explain to a man whose native tongue was Arabic why she had tarried past her usual hour.

“But it’s only a quarter to seven.”

“I don’t care. By eight o’clock I want to have supper.”

“But Mohammed is cooking it at this very moment,” she protested. “What’s the matter with you?”

“What’s the matter? I’ll tell you what’s the matter. I don’t like having to come looking for my wife in another man’s house, that’s what.” He was working himself into a temper, and the more he felt his anger rise, the more he was convinced he was right.

Monsieur Jacques was the type of husband who was jealous of his authority, not of his wife, just as he loved his comforts, not those who provided them. He despised Ladino because everything about it conspired to exclude him from a world whose culture was foreign to him, as much by its customs and sounds as by its insidious niceties and clannish etiquette. The more his wife delighted in speaking it, the more repulsive it became, and the more it pleased her to remind him—as her father had reminded her to remind him—that Arabic may have been Arabic, but Spanish was always going to remain Spanish!

To him Ladino was a form of cackling, and he called his neighbors’ home a chicken coop, a poulailler, referring to them as the “owners” of the “henhouse,” not knowing that they had come to regard his inability to enter into their world with the stately arrogance of erstwhile Ottoman masters. “Syrian hypocrite” and “dirty Turk” were bandied about behind everyone’s back, all of which inevitably devolved late one Sunday afternoon, as both men were returning from their respective cafés, into a face-to-face confrontation in which the degenerate turc barbare called the juif arabe a “dirty, scoundrel Jew.” Stunned, the bicycle shop owner, who was quite devout, said thank you, thank you, which was how the insulted taught the insultor a lesson in good manners, reminding the pool hall owner that he was truly tempted to insult him back but had decided otherwise, seeing that the Turk’s own wife, as the entire neighborhood could hear clearly enough when the Princess lost her temper, did so better than anyone else in the world.

Everyone was sufficiently hurt and shamed, including the Princess, who found herself implicated in a quarrel that should have stayed strictly between the men. Monsieur Jacques vowed never to set foot chez les barbares, Monsieur Albert thanked him for staying out of people’s homes, and both resolved never to say bonjour whenever they happened to meet on Rue Memphis. Only the Saint was left untouched, though she was the most perturbed of the four, and would continue to do everything to bring about a reconciliation between both families. “You may say whatever crosses your mind when you’re angry, Monsieur Albert,” she chided, a few days after the incident, “but that—never! Never!” she repeated, her nether lip quivering, her eyes welling up. Her simple, stainless soul had peered into an ugly, scurrilous world from which her strict upbringing had always protected her.

“But he didn’t mean anything by it,” the Princess said to Monsieur Jacques, trying as well to repair the damage. “Do you think the kettle means anything when it goes about calling other kettles black? How could it if it’s a kettle itself?”

“How could it, madame? Easily. First, by forgetting it’s black. Then by forgetting it’s a kettle in the first place—which it should be proud of being, considering such kettles don’t survive five thousand years unless there’s a good God watching over them. And let me tell you something else, Madame Esther: any kettle that slanders its own kind is no kettle worthy of my home, and certainly not of God’s kitchen!”

“Monsieur Jacques, don’t get carried away now. I was only speaking about a sixty-year-old man who is very sick and to whom life has been good in such small doses you’d think God’s kindness was squeezed out of an eye dropper. He is a very unhappy and bitter man. His is an old kettle with hardly a whistle left to it.”

“The whistle is quite intact, thank you very much,” said the infidel Turk when the Saint reported this conversation to him and, as usual, was lured into playing cards with him. “My wife should be the last to judge such things, seeing she is the most unmusical woman in the world.”

“But she loves to hear me play the piano,” the Saint responded.

“I wasn’t talking about piano music.”

The Saint paused.

“Oh, I see,” she said.

“No, you don’t,” he was about to reply but caught himself and said, “You see through everything, don’t you, down into the most hidden recesses of the heart. And yet you never let on that you do. Meanwhile you’ve figured us all out, you with that dangerous flair of yours.” To which she replied with her favorite little apothegm. “I may not be learned, Monsieur Albert, but I am sharp, sharp enough to see that you are poking fun at me right now.” She sorted out cards and produced a winning combination. “Thank God I can win at cards, for otherwise you would think me a real dolt.”

“Madame Adèle, where were you when I was a young man?”

“Monsieur Albert, don’t speak like that. God gave each of us the life we deserve. You yours, and me mine.”

“You yours, and me mine,” he mimicked as he shuffled the cards. “Do you think we can persuade Him to reserve a berth for you in my cabin when it’s time to take the long journey?”

“When the time comes for that, I want to return to my parents.”

“Not to Monsieur Jacques?”

“Monsieur Jacques has given me his life. His afterlife he can give someone else.”

She pondered her cards a moment. “Will your wife be joining you in the afterlife?” she said with a lambent tremor on her lips, averting her eyes.

“Jealous as she is—”

“Who, your wife? How little you know women, Monsieur Albert.”

“And how little you know my wife! She is so spiteful that if she were to die before me, she would immediately send for me so as never to allow me to forget I was ever married to her.”

Indeed, the Princess’s jealousy had nothing to do with love. The more she disliked her husband, and the more he fled from her, the more she was afraid of losing him. She was a model of dutiful solicitude because she wished him dead in small doses every day—which is how he loathed her, with the scrupulous devotion of weak, unfaithful husbands. She was attentive to his minutest needs: his specially brewed coffee in the morning, his ration of spinach pastries at noon, her special consommés for his special rice, the dried fruit sauce for his lean meats, his lightly starched shirts and neatly pressed handkerchiefs whose creases she was forever smoothing; down to the way she would decorate his plate with assorted cheeses, dips, and olives when it was time for his raki at night—in all this, she was the most punctilious of wives, begrudging him nothing, yet with every gesture reminding him that she had brought nothing into his life save those things he had never asked for. Ironically, he had far greater need of her love—of which she had some—than she had of his—of which there was none.

“You should never say such things about her,” said the Saint, who was always eager to come to anyone’s defense, partly because she was kind and didn’t like to encourage slander, but also because her little rebukes always seemed to force people to intensify their original indictments of others.

“She’s been the perfect wife for you: your cook, your maid, your nurse, your seamstress, your barber, your mother even. How many times has she saved you from certain ruin? She’s the most intelligent woman on Rue Memphis.”

“I know,” he said turning to the Saint with doleful sarcasm in his eyes. “I know. God gave her the biggest brain in the world. But he gave her nothing else. In her company even an iceberg would catch cold.”

At that moment the Princess returned from her daily visit with her siblings. “How could you two be playing cards in the dark like this?”

“Romance,” explained the husband without looking up.

“But didn’t you hear the news?”

“What news?”

“The war is over.”

To celebrate the armistice, the Princess, who had just walked in with Madame Dalmedigo, decided to improvise a real tea, with meringue, fig and date jams, petits fours, and homemade biscuits, which she kept under lock and key in one of the many cupboards in the pantry. Another neighbor, Arlette Joanides, who was walking past their veranda with her daughter Micheline, was stopped, told of the news, and summarily invited for tea. Half an hour later, Aunt Flora, her mother, Marie Cantacouzenos, and Fortunée Lombroso, still later joined by Maurice Franco and Liliane Arditi, had come also —so that, when Monsieur Jacques arrived home from work, he was informed by his daughter that her mother was still visiting across the street. “Then go fetch her and tell her, once and for all, that her place is here”—indicating their dark and empty living room—“and not there,” pointing to the henhouse. The families were back on speaking terms, but there always remained a certain froid between the men. The eighteen-year-old daughter, who had been reading a novel, slipped a cardigan over her shoulders, rushed downstairs, and in a second was ringing at their neighbor’s door. “I’ve come to tell my mother that my father wants her to come home now.” “Come in and don’t be silly. Where are we, in the Middle Ages?” cried the Princess, who by now had learned to understand the deaf girl’s speech. “We’re having tea and playing cards, come in.”

The young girl came in but continued to linger near the doorway.

“Your father wants me to be home, doesn’t he?” asked the Saint as soon as she caught sight of her daughter standing awkwardly outside the living room.

The girl nodded. The Princess thrust a cup and saucer in the girl’s hands, which she accepted absentmindedly.

“A real tyrant, that’s what he is,” said the Princess’s husband.

“You men are all tyrants,” rejoined Arlette Joanides.

“And what are women, then?” he asked, turning to Monsieur Franco.

“To marry men like you one has to be a fool,” said one of the women.

“Anyone who marries is a fool,” said the Princess’s husband. “But those who stay married after realizing their mistake are criminally stupid.”

“Stop these roguish airs and play,” snapped the Princess to her husband.

“Is what I say false?” he asked the young girl who was now sitting next to her mother.

She made no response.

“How like a woman. Doesn’t answer when it’s not convenient.”

“All this banter about women!” said one of the women, “but when you need us to hem a sleeve so you can go out and impress your twopenny waitresses, you come crawling to us. Marriage!”

“Marriage, indeed!” the Princess’s husband jumped in. “Even life sentences are commuted. But marriage, you have to die first before they loosen that noose.”

“Oh, stop all this nonsense and play your hand,” said the Princess.

At that moment the doorbell rang.

“Will someone open the door?” asked the Princess. The Saint glanced at her daughter and signaled to her to open the door. The girl did as asked and found a man standing there, staring at her.

“Yes?” she asked.

For a moment he started to smile. Then he asked if Madame Something-or-other was in.

He didn’t make out what she said, but she motioned him to wait on the landing. Then, before he knew it, she shut the door in his face and rushed to tell the Princess there was a man asking to see someone.

“A man?” she started.

When the Princess finally stood up and opened the door she burst out laughing. “But it’s my son,” she shouted. “Your daughter wouldn’t let him in,” she said, turning to the Saint. Everyone laughed.

The girl blushed repeatedly.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“But don’t worry, dear, he tricked you, that’s all,” said the Saint to her daughter.

The Princess apologized again for her son’s behavior, while the girl, probably to make up for her gaffe, silently offered to take his raincoat. Then the girl realized she did not know where to hang it and gave it back to him, smiling apologetically without saying a word. Unlike her father, he did not remove his jacket together with his raincoat so as to hang both on the same hanger. He kept his jacket on, checking his watch twice in the space of five minutes, tucking it back into his vest pocket, looking very pleased with himself.

“Who’s winning?” he asked.

“Me, of course,” replied Madame Lombroso.

The servant brought the young man tea, and he took it, turning to the newspaper that was hanging on the arm of the sofa.

“You heard?” asked his mother.

“Yes, I heard. It means the British army won’t be buying from us any longer. Not exactly thrilling news.”

“Always looking at the darker side of things,” said Arlette Joanides.

“It’s a sign of intelligence, madame,” said the Saint, coming to his defense.

The girl sat quietly next to the Saint, looking over her mother’s shoulder while the mother fanned out her cards. Once in a while the young girl would remind her that her father had sent for her. “I know, I know,” her mother would answer, as though trying to stave off an unpleasant thought.

“See what happens when you marry?” said the Princess’s husband, all the while staring at his new hand. “You can’t even play cards.” Then, as an afterthought, he added, “Or maybe all you can do is play cards.”

“Play,” came his wife’s rebuke.

“No, no, let him be as bitter as he wants, that won’t change the fact that he’s losing,” Aunt Flora taunted.

“Losing to you never makes one bitter,” he replied without lifting his head. “But losing to her,” he indicated the Saint, “is a devastating affair.”

“Because he thinks I’m stupid,” said the Saint. “Let him think whatever he pleases. I may not be learned, but I’m very sharp, and I’ll show him who’s stupid tonight.”

“With your luck tonight, it’s no great feat to appear a genius,” he added.

“Luck and a few other things as well.” The Saint indicated her nose.

“Ah, yes, the nose. The nose, ladies and gentlemen!”

“Let him rant all he wants—but am I listening to him? No.”

“I would come to my mother’s defense if I were you,” said the Princess’s son to the Saint’s daughter.

The girl lifted up her face, smiled politely, and shook her puzzled head as if to say it was not her place to speak on such matters.

“Such discretion,” commented the son after all the guests had left that evening. “Never a misplaced syllable, always sweet, and so very gentle. Where have they been keeping her all these years?”

“Don’t you know Syrian Jews?” his father asked, helping his wife clear the cards off the table. “Stealthy to the bone, every one of them, including her, don’t you worry.”

“She’s serene and priceless, she is,” added the Princess. “And rich too. Her father’s in bicycles.”

“She’s stunning,” continued her son.

“Stunning or not, it still wasn’t kind of you to play that nasty trick on her at the door. You should have apologized.”

“But I did apologize. So I played a little trick on her—”

“It would be just like you not to have noticed,” she said.

“Noticed what?” he asked.

“Noticed that she’s deaf.”

“But I spoke to her—”

“Deaf all the same. That loud voice you hear from across the street is hers.”

The son looked totally bewildered. His mother watched him and, reading his mind, hastily added, “Stay away. She’s a good girl.”

Soon someone rang at the door; it was the friend her son had been expecting for more than an hour.

“They’re celebrating at the French Consulate tonight. I’ve been invited.”

“But I haven’t.”

“It’s all right, I’m inviting you now. Hurry. Everyone is celebrating.”

“Won’t it be too crowded, though?”

“Of course it will be too crowded, come on.”

When he returned late that night, my father wrote in his diary that he had finally met her. He did not portray her as the woman of his dreams, nor as the most beautiful, nor did he describe any of her features. Superstitious as ever, he even avoided mentioning her name. She was simply and so clearly her that the need to capture her on paper or to probe the more elusive aspects of her personality proved too elaborate a task for the man who had merely written: I want to think of her. He did not write what he felt upon first setting eyes on her or what he thought of each time he caught his mind drifting toward her. He merely described her gray skirt and maroon cardigan and the way she crossed her legs when she sat behind her mother, the skin of her knee pressed against the edge of the card table as she kept her eyes glued to her mother’s cards. At one point she had smiled when she caught him looking at her, a kind, indulgent smile filled with languor and mild apology.

She tapped him on the shoulder later that evening on the crowded patio of the French Consulate. People brimmed over into the garden and onto the street, where the city’s French, Greek, Jewish, and Italian youth were gathered about in a chaos of standing bicycles and car horns, singing. Everyone had come to celebrate. The same, it appeared, was happening farther off at the Italian and British consulates.

“You’re not dancing?” she asked, when he turned around. He couldn’t understand a word she said.

“Isn’t it too crowded?” he said, thinking she had asked him to dance. Do the deaf dance? he thought, conjuring a grotesque picture of a waltz danced like a tango.

“It’s such a wonderful evening,” she said. She was wearing a sleeveless white cotton dress, a thin necklace, and white shoes, her ruddy tanned skin glistening in the evening light. With a touch of makeup on, and her wet hair combed back, she looked older and more spirited than the shy neighbor’s daughter who all during her visit earlier that evening had kept her schoolgirl eyes riveted to her pleated skirt and her mother’s cards. There was even a suggestion of self-conscious elegance in the way she carried herself, holding her champagne glass with both hands, her elbows almost resting on her hips.

Yet the absence of stockings and a handbag and the white outline of what must have been a missing man’s watch on her tanned wrist betrayed a hastily dressed or vaguely underdressed quality, as if after spending all day at the beach, with barely a few minutes to make it to the ball, she had put on the first thing that came her way without drying her hair or feet. Her toes were probably still lined with sand. Somewhere, he thought, watching the dimmed evening lights play off the liquid sheen of her white gabardine dress, was a wet bathing suit, hurriedly taken off and left crumpled on a wooden bench in a friend’s cabin.

“Did you come all by yourself?” he asked, making sure he was facing her when he spoke.

“No, with friends.” Perhaps she wanted to dance.

“Would I know them?” he asked.

“No, but I’ll introduce you,” she said, not thinking he had no interest, taking his hand as she threaded what seemed an endless path through the crowd until they reached the other end of the large terrace, where a group of young men was waiting for her. One of them, leaning against the balustrade, was holding a maroon cardigan very much like the one she had worn earlier in his parents’ home. Was he holding it for her, or had she borrowed it earlier that day and given it back to him? She made the introductions, describing how she had kept her neighbor’s son waiting outside his own home. Everyone laughed—not at her error, this time, but at the way she had closed the door in his face.

“She’s done much worse,” said one of them.

“We’re leaving,” another broke in. “People are waiting for us at the British Consulate.”

“Want to come?” she asked.

He hesitated.

“You might enjoy it.” She smiled again.

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Another time, then.”

Turning to the young man who had been holding the cardigan, she motioned for the car keys.

“No. I’m driving,” he replied.

“My car, I drive,” she said peremptorily.

My father followed them mechanically to the end of the garden. She opened the door to her car, got in, leaned all the way across to unlock the other doors for her passengers, and then rolled down her window with jerky, determined motions, one foot still resting on the pavement as she fumbled with the keys. “My respects to your mother,” she said as she closed the door and started the engine.

Without budging, he watched the car silently roll out from the consulate grounds, inching its slow, quiet way through the milling crowd and the parked cars and the row of tall palm trees dotting the alleyway, gliding further downhill until, before even reaching the gateway, it took a bold, accelerated turn past the gatekeeper’s hut and suddenly shot outside the compound toward the Corniche.

All that remained of her as he stood on the spot where her car had been was the memory of that white satin shoe resting on the pavement, tilting sideways as she struggled to unlock the other doors, then resting back on the gravel as she searched in the dark for the key to the ignition. Perhaps, before closing the door, she had even thought of leaving her shoe behind.

And perhaps she had. For later that night, when he suddenly found himself unable to think of her, or when he felt the memory of her features starting to fade from his grasp, like an anthropologist reconstructing an entire body from a mere bone fragment he would think of that shoe, and from the shoe work his way around her foot, and from her foot, up her legs, her knees, her gleaming white dress, until he had reached her lips, and then, for a fleeting instant, would coax a smile on a face he had been seeing for years across the street but had always failed to notice.

A few days later, early one Sunday morning, he saw her walking past his garden.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“To the beach,” she replied, pointing to the north. “Are you coming?”

“Maybe. Who are you going with?”

“No one.”

“Wait, I’ll get my bathing suit.”

They arrived early enough to swim, lie on the sand, talk, and then leave just in time to avoid the churchgoers, who started to arrive after Mass. On their way back, they stopped at a small pastry shop, where he bought her a cake and a lemonade. She had an ice cream as well. She said next time it would be her turn to pay. Amused, he repeated “Next time.” When they reached Rue Memphis, they stopped at her doorstep. He waited for her to disappear into the dark, sunless entrance, stood awhile there, then crossed the street, opened the front door to his parents’ home, and, to his surprise, saw that he was still in time for breakfast.

At about two-thirty in the afternoon, when the sun started pounding on the veranda floor and he was wondering whether to nap for a few hours or take a chair out under the trees and read a Russian novel there until dark, his mother, looking quite flustered and surprised, rushed out to tell him that Madame Adèle wished to speak with him on the telephone.

Whatever did she want with him, he wondered? And why the telephone? Then he remembered. Would she really have the bad taste to ask him never to presume to take her daughter to the beach again? Would she use that horrible expression “to compromise my daughter”? He began to regret that fateful moment when he had seen her walking holding a large blue-green towel inside of which she had neatly wrapped her bathing suit. Why did mothers have to meddle in the affairs of their daughters, and what could the two mothers have been saying to each other before summoning him to the telephone?

His throat tightened.

“Hello,” he said, a cold, leaden weight sitting on his chest.

“Hello, am I speaking to Monsieur Henri?” said the voice at the end of the line.

“Yes, madame.”

“Monsieur Henri, this is Madame Adèle, Gigi’s mother, calling.”

So he was right after all. Might as well sit down, he thought, knowing it would ruin his day now. The woman was clearly about to start an admonitory tirade of the kind parodied so well in English movies. Who knows in what benighted, prudish cell of the Dark Ages these people still lived. Her father, it was rumored, prayed every morning and had even disowned his son for marrying a Catholic girl. Daintily, the Saint cleared her throat again.

“I am calling because of my daughter. She asked me to ask you if you wished to go to the movies with her this afternoon.”

“This afternoon?” His voice was quavering.

“Yes, this afternoon. It is somewhat last-minute of her. But that’s how she is.”

“This afternoon,” he mused.

“Yes, this afternoon.”

“And at what time this afternoon?”

“Let me ask her.”

There was a moment of silence.

“At three, to be exact.” He heard mother and daughter conferring in whispers.

“What did she say?” he asked.

“She said she’ll understand perfectly if you cannot.” Another moment’s silence elapsed.

“Tell her I can be ready in five minutes. How long will she need?”

“Oh, she’s ready now.” Again mother and daughter whispered at their end of the line.

“She thought you’d enjoy seeing Gaslight. Personally, I think it is a grotesque movie, but whoever asked an old lady like me?” giggled the mother.

“But hasn’t she already seen it?”

“No.”

The film was playing at a small neighborhood theater not far from Rue Memphis. In front of the ticket booth, he found her waiting for him with her glasses in one hand and two tickets in the other. “I only wear them for reading,” she explained, “and I need to read the subtitles.”

Later, on their way home, she looked up at her living room window and saw that it was dark. “My mother must be at your mother’s.”

He opened the gate, and together they walked past the arbor where he knew he would have been sitting all by himself till now, reading Tolstoy until it got dark, hoping—as he always did on Sunday evenings—to avoid meeting his father, who always urged him to put down his books and go out and “live” for a change. “All these books, and all these clothes, and all these pipes, but never a woman on Sundays!” the old man would jeer. No doubt, on seeing him with the girl tonight, his father would have stepped out into the balcony and whispered, “So, we’re flirting with the neighbors now.”

The girl said she would be willing to go out another time. When he asked which films she hadn’t seen, she almost laughed, she had seen all of them.

“The girl is beautiful, but don’t forget she is what she is,” said his father three months later as they walked along the Corniche one evening.

“I know. And so?”

“Well, if it’s going to be ‘I know and so?’ we’re never going to be able to discuss this thing rationally. You see, not only does she have to live with her misfortune, but so will you. If it’s marrying you want, there is always Berthe Nahas. She’s beautiful, she worships you, she has money, and her father can set you up very, very nicely.” His father itemized each of Miss Nahas’s attributes on a different finger of his hand. “As for love, well, either it comes naturally, or it comes later, or it never comes at all, in which case she’ll be busy with the children and you’ll be busy elsewhere.

“There is also Micheline Joanides, Arlette’s daughter. You saw the face her mother made when she saw you speaking to Gigi. Or Arpinée Khatchadourian. Christian, that’s true, but at least she can hear.”

“Not Arpinée,” said the son.

“You’re right. With her drooping, bloodshot eyes swimming like a pair of beets in white potato soup—you’re absolutely right. Ugly outside, ugly inside.”

“Whoever said I wanted to get married in the first place?”

“With the Saint’s girl, you can only get married,” said the father.

“I did see her with others, you know.”

“They let her roam freely, but no one’s fooled. They’re miserly, bigoted, Arab-shantytown Jews imitating the fast-car, cocktail-lounge airs of Europeans. But they’re Arabs through and through. He’ll live in scrounging misery until the day of his daughter’s wedding. Then he’ll glow like a pair of patent leather shoes.”

“I know what I’m doing.”

“And suppose,” said the father as they watched the waves break against the beaches of Ibrahimieh, “suppose you want to speak to her in the dark. I don’t mean ‘Pass me the glass of water,’ but other things.”

“She reads my mind better than anyone. I can’t even lie to her.”

“A good quality in a mistress, or in a mother. But in a wife?”

The son did not reply. He remembered his mother’s cruel words. “She’s a gem of a girl, but cripples I don’t want.”

The father took out his aging silver cigarette case, removed a small penknife from his pocket, and sliced a cigarette in two. “To smoke less,” he explained. He was about to put the other half back into the case when he changed his mind and offered it to his son.

“And so,” he said as he took his first puff, pensive and remote, letting his unfinished sentence trail about him like the smoke from his cigarette.

“Does Flora know about the bicycle queen?” asked the father.

“Yes.”

“And what does she say?”

“What should she say?”

Flora had said almost nothing when he broke the news to her on their way home from her music school by tram one evening. “I should have known,” she had said. “How silly of me not to have seen it.” Then, with that note of smiling resignation with which she greeted joy in others’ lives when there was so little of it in her own, she complimented him on his choice, and then, as if choking on her words, finally broke down: “Tell me one thing, though. I’ve played more music in your house than anywhere in the world, and I know how much it’s meant to you—at least how much you claimed it did. And yet here you are with a woman who doesn’t know what music is, who can’t even hear it.” She paused a moment. “I swore to myself I would never say this to you.” He was about to mutter something in his defense when she broke in: “But why her?”

The temptation to blurt out something cruel or flippant was almost irresistible. Then he realized it was the question that had prompted his cruelty, not the woman asking it. “I don’t know. I don’t even think I know her well enough yet. But she knows me better than I know myself.”

When he began to explain what he meant, he had used the word marriage to avoid the more obvious word love.

“Then it’s worse than I expected,” said Flora, with thwarted anger quivering on her smile. “I knew I should never have asked. I’ve already heard—and said—more than I should. I hope you’ll forgive me.”

As they approached the next station, she put the book she wasn’t reading back into her bag and stood up. He looked surprised; this wasn’t her station.

“I’m getting off here if you don’t mind,” she said. “I’ll walk the rest of the way. I need to get some air.”

She made her way down the crowded aisle, stepped down the tram stairs, and stood on the platform, looking meek and crestfallen, rummaging through her old purse for a match, while a man, wearing a galabiya, eyed her intently, clearly about to beg for a cigarette. A pang of sorrow raced through his mind, and he felt for her as he watched her looking at him with helpless submission in her eyes. Revenge always comes too late, he thought, and only after time, indifference, or forgiveness has evened the score.

“Then she was upset,” said his father. “She’ll never forgive you.”

“When I wanted her, she wasn’t sure; now that I’m taken, she wants me.”

“You’ll never understand women!”

“I understand enough.”

“You understand nothing. You don’t even understand men, for that matter, and certainly not yourself.”

He tossed his cigarette into the sea and finally said he was growing cold. He wanted to go home. Blown by the wind, an Arabic newspaper got caught between his feet. The old man struggled to disengage himself. “This dirty city and the dirty people who live in it,” he said, watching his son’s cigarette spiral like a weak flare and disappear into the water. “From thieving Arabs to Jewish grubbery, it had to be the daughter of a wheel merchant.” Then he chuckled to himself. “At any rate, when it comes to marriage, things always turn out for the worst.”

A few days later, and after several family rows on the other side of Rue Memphis as well, the Saint began to experience terrible pains in her side. Dr. Moreno came to see her and, on his orders, she was taken to the hospital, where they gave her the choice of having her entire gallbladder or some of its stones removed. In typical Levantine fashion, she deferred the decision to her husband. He was for removing the whole thing. “I want to return to my parents, that’s all I want, Monsieur Albert,” she kept saying.

“I want to go away and be far from everyone and everything,” she said a few mornings later when neighbors flocked in one by one to her hospital room only to find that she might not be operated on after all. “See, even operating won’t help,” she concluded. “Oh, let me put an end to a life that started on the wrong foot.”

“But all lives start on the wrong foot—” Albert remonstrated.

“Stop speaking nonsense, both of you,” said the Princess. “The important thing is to rest.”

“Yes. To rest, madame, to rest for a very long time, believe me,” replied the Saint.

The next day, when the Princess’s husband went alone to see her early in the afternoon, she lay quietly in her room, the glaring afternoon sun blocked by a thick curtain someone had pulled across while she was sleeping.

“Am I disturbing you, Madame Adèle?” he whispered as he pushed open her door and stuck his head in.

“Who? You? Never, mon cher. Come in, and sit here.”

He sat next to her bed, and in silence they stared at each other awhile, resigned sorrow limned on their features.

“So there,” she sighed, crossing her hands.

“So there, indeed.”

“I’m waiting,” she sighed.

“You’re waiting. Did they say how long—” he asked.

“They won’t talk, but things don’t look good at all, worse than not good.”

“So this is it, then.”

“I’m afraid so. This is it. Frankly, Monsieur Albert, I don’t at all feel like dying today.”

“Courage, ma chère, courage.”

“But, Monsieur Albert,” she exploded, “I hope you don’t feel obliged to agree with everything I say simply because I say it.”

“No, no, believe me, I think things are very serious indeed. You don’t look well at all. Even Esther said so yesterday.”

“You think so too, then? But, Monsieur Albert,” she protested after another pause, “I’m not ready to die.”

“Whoever is, ma chère amie, whoever is?” A moment of silence elapsed.

“Monsieur Albert, I don’t want to die.”

“Do stop fussing like a child. There’s nothing to fear. You’ll die and you won’t even know it.”

“Oh, Monsieur Albert, stop stoking death on me. I said I didn’t want to die.”

“Well, don’t die, then.”

“You don’t understand. I want to die, but not just yet.”

“After the wedding, you mean.”

There was instant silence.

“How well you know me, Monsieur Albert.”

“All too well. You should have lived with me, I tell you, instead of clawing your way through life like an old crustacean in a fish tank.”

The Saint giggled at the metaphor.

“Gallbladder, my eye,” grumbled her husband a few evenings later when he came to visit her after work only to find the hospital room turned into a regular salon. “All this pain, the moaning, and the sleepless nights, and the doctor, and the ambulance, and the hospital, and what does it all add up to: giggling. Quelle comédienne! Now, my poor mother, may she rest in peace, she really suffered from gallstones. She died of it, poor soul. And without so much as uttering a squeak. In those days they didn’t have painkillers the way we do today —in those days you made a fist, clammed your mouth tight, and suffered in silence so as not to wake up the children.” “The important thing is to eat well,” added the Princess.

“But I’ve lost all my appetite. I eat so little.”

“Then why do you keep putting on so much weight?” her husband interrupted.

“Nerves, that’s why. You’ve been in this room two minutes and already I feel the pain starting.”

She returned to that same hospital many times during the next ten years until 1958, the year she was to leave Egypt, each time dreading the operation she feared might be the end of her. And when, finally, she had her gallstones removed under emergency conditions, it was an Egyptian doctor at the Jewish hospital who performed the operation. Luckily, peritonitis was averted. Her longtime Jewish surgeon, into whose hands she had entrusted her entire life, had been arrested, had his license revoked, and, it was rumored, would be tried as an Israeli spy.

By then she was in her sixties and was already beginning to lose her memory. Her head was propped up by pillows, and I remember her wearing a shabby flannel bathrobe, a pearl necklace, and her aluminum bracelet, which she claimed helped her rheumatism. Her hair had thinned quite a lot by then and was matted on her head like a lopsided wig. She struggled to smile each time she looked at me. “This is the end, Madame Esther,” she said when the Princess took me to visit her one spring morning.

“Not to worry. One more week and you’ll be sitting with your daughter on your balcony, enjoying the sun as you always have and as you always will long after I and all of my siblings are gone.”

“No, madame, you’re made of steel,” said the Saint, remembering how the Princess’s husband had once complained that his wife’s very skeleton was made of steel rods that clanked when she tossed in bed at night. “Besides, we all go when He wills us to go, no sooner, no later.” The Saint assumed that characteristic pinched and pious little air of hers whenever she meant to put people in their place.

As we stood up to leave, the Saint remained in bed, producing a lank rosy hand which she placed gently on the back of my neck muttering a string of words in Ladino. Then, full of love, she bit my arm and kissed it, while I threw my arms around her.

“Don’t I get a hug now?” interrupted the Princess rubbing my hair. Before she had time to finish her request, I had already put both arms around her and was hugging her very tightly, pressing tighter still, because I wanted not only to reassure the Saint that I was finally complying with her wish to love the Princess more, but also to tease her into thinking that, during her sickness, I had done just that. I waited for the Princess to unstiffen and yield to my embrace as the Saint had done on so many occasions. I wanted to hear her own litany of endearments, the accent of her sorrow, of her love, of her passion—and the less she responded, the more I stiffened my grasp. But she did not know this game and, in the end, all she did was utter a squeamish little cry, half giggle, half squeal.

“Look at all this love,” she exclaimed, beaming with joy. “It’s not good to love so much,” added the Princess as she ran her fingers through my hair.

“I try to teach him this too, but he won’t listen.”

As the Princess had predicted, two weeks later the Saint was once again sitting on her balcony with her usual visitors, enjoying the late afternoon sun waning into splendid summer evenings. She swore she felt much younger, now that her Egyptian doctor had worked a miracle. “A generation ago he would have been no better than the boy servant bringing us tea on this balcony,” she said. “Now he’s brought me back to life. He speaks impeccable French. And you should see his office—sumptuous. Not bad for an Arab who is scarcely thirty years old. If he represents the new order here, well, chapeau to the new Egypt.”

“Just wait until they’re all in power. Then you’ll see how the new Egypt will treat you, Madame Adèle,” broke in one of her Greek neighbors.

“I don’t care. This one is a true gentleman. I owe him my life. You’d be surprised, but ever since my operation, I’ve become quite philosophical. I thank God for everything He’s given me; what I don’t have, I don’t miss, and what I can’t get, I don’t want. We are not rich, but we are comfortable; I’ve never loved Egypt, but life has been good here; and almost everyone I love comes to see me at least once a day. Never was I happier I didn’t die.”

“She should have died right there and then,” said Aunt Flora thirty years later as she insisted on paying for our coffee somewhere near Ponte dell’Accademia. “For she died worse than a dog’s death, and in such squalor, you’d swear there never was a God in heaven.”

She collected the change but left the waiter no tip. “Because they’re impertinent fannulloni,” she said. Then, as though to apologize for the restaurant, she added, “I know the food isn’t very good here, but it’s not bad, and I like to sit at this table in the shade and listen to the water and let my mind drift.” She finally put away the toothpick she had been twiddling. “Perhaps this is why I’ve chosen to live in Venice—because no matter where you turn there’s always water close by, and you can always smell the sea, even if it stinks; because there are mornings when I wake up and think the clock is turned back and I’m on the Corniche again.”

Summers were long in Venice, she said, and there was nothing she liked more some days than to take the vaporetto and ride around the city, or head directly for the Lido and spend a morning on the beach by herself. She loved the sea. I loved it too, I said, reminding her that it was she who had taught me how to swim.

I looked at her. At sixty-seven she had the same clear green eyes I remembered and the same tapered, nicotine-stained fingertips that could race across the keyboard when she played the opening bars of the Waldstein. I had not seen her in ten years, and for another five before that. We spoke about Rue Memphis again.

“She wasn’t a bad piano player at all. Her trouble was discipline. And memory. Memory especially. I, on the other hand, have plenty of discipline; as for memory, there isn’t a thing I’ve forgotten. I can still remember the names of all the tramway stops from Ramleh to Victoria.”

I took a paper napkin, unfolded it, gave her my pen and asked her to write them down. She decided I might want those of the Ramleh–Bacos line as well, so she jotted them too.

“Mind you, I remember the old names, not those newfangled, patriotic names which the new regime adopted: Independence Street, Freedom Square, Victory-this-and-that.”

Our waiter, who had been scowling in our direction, turned his face elsewhere and was busily talking to a colleague from across a makeshift hedge separating our restaurant from another. When he sighted a hesitant tourist couple scanning our empty terrace, he went out to greet them and, before they had time to retreat, strong-armed them and asked them to please, follow this way.

She watched the sheepish tourists being escorted to the worst table on the terrace. “I do hate Italy sometimes,” she added. “But then there are days when I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.”

We crossed the bridge and made toward Campo Morosini. Except for occasional groups of young tourists braving the early afternoon heat that Sunday, Venice appeared deserted. The quiet piazza with its white marble and travertine masonries offered scant relief from the sun. Along its western edge, two establishments that were totally vacant at this time of day sported straw chairs neatly packed, three to a table, all of them baking under closed Cinzano umbrellas that studded the cobbled sidewalk. On the piazza, the shops were closed.

She bought me an ice cream.

“Do you need to buy souvenirs or things?”

I shook my head.

“Your mother spends all of her time buying gifts for everyone each time she visits me. I assumed you would too. How about books?”

“No. I came to visit you.”

“You came to visit me,” she repeated, visibly pleased anyone should do such a thing.

We threaded our way through the narrow, empty streets of Zattere while the sun, following an oblique path, cast an ochre-hued glow along the stuccoed fronts of the little buildings lining Calle del Traghetto. One could still make out the faint clatter of plates being washed after late Sunday family luncheons. Several corners later, we arrived at her home. She lived on the ground floor, though the place was sunken below street level. Like most Venetian apartments, hers was extremely small, and her bedroom, with its low ceiling and small window, had all the makings of a sparsely furnished monk’s cell. On the nightstand was an old portable tape player surrounded by a scatter of cassettes: Callas and di Stefano, Wanda Landowska, Paul Anka. She could have been an undergraduate in a college dormitory. On her dresser I caught a picture that could only have been of me, though I had never seen it before. For a moment I was baffled to see that a part of me had traveled all the way to Venice and had been sitting in someone’s bedroom for twenty years before I myself had finally come upon it.

Inside the only other room in her apartment sat two old grand pianos, side by side, leaving little space for anything or anyone else. I had to squeeze behind the first piano to reach the second. The room looked more stuffy yet, because the walls were lined with very old cork tiles. I could not tell how one would go about opening the window.

“I leave the room shut throughout the year. It stinks of cigarettes. But this is exactly how I learned to play. None of my students has ever complained. And if they did—”

She showed me the kitchen where she cooked, ate, wrote letters, read, watched television, corrected homework.

She began to clear the table.

“Can I help?” I asked.

“Sure, just tell me where you propose to put all of these papers.” She dumped an entire bundle of brochures, flyers, scores, newspapers, and unanswered mail into my arms. I looked around and acknowledged defeat.

“On top of the first piano.” I could tell she was happy.

“Meanwhile, I’ll heat up some water and cook the gnocchi. I made them myself. I’ve also baked some vegetables. If there is one thing I know how to do,” she said, kneeling down to light the stove with a match, “it’s how to make good gnocchi.” She tried another match.

“This may interest you,” she said, still concentrating on lighting the stove. “It was your grandmother who taught me how to cook. I gave her piano lessons, she taught me how to cook. ‘One day you’ll need to cook a man a real meal, and piano music is all very nice, but men need un bon biftek, vous comprenez ce que je veux dire, Flora?’ So she taught me Sephardi dishes which nowadays even Sephardim have forgotten how to cook. Fish, artichokes, lamb, rice, eggplant, leeks. And red mullet, of course.”

At which we both chuckled.

“You may laugh, but your grandmother was no fool. She knew exactly how to manipulate people. And the person she manipulated best was the one everyone thought could easily outfox her. Letting her think she didn’t know how to buy red mullet, when she, her mother, and her great-grandmother had been cooking them forever. Or letting her think she thought her a Frenchwoman, which she knew would tickle her no end, when, in fact, they had grown up in the same neighborhood in Constantinople. Or letting her think she was so inferior, and so humble, and so distracted, when all along she knew perfectly well what she was doing.

“To think that I was there with my mother on the very evening they met. That I was waiting to hear from him on the very day they decided to get married. That I, who should have been the first, was in fact the last to know.

“Here,” she smiled, announcing dinner. “I’ve also prepared something I remember you liking years ago. I hope you haven’t changed.”

She apologized for the stainless steel knives with red and green plastic handles that clashed with the silk-embroidered tablecloth she had placed on top of an old kitchen table. In the twenty years since she had left Egypt, she had managed absentmindedly to throw all of her real silverware into the garbage, piece by piece. “The symbolic end of my brother’s fortune,” she said, referring to her inheritance from the Schwab. Only these five silver teaspoons remained—and that because she never used teaspoons, otherwise they too would have wound up at the bottom of the Canal Grande. “Five silver teaspoons,” she repeated, as if this short sentence summed up the ledger of her life.

“Your father kept it secret from me for months,” she said, returning to the subject of my parents. “I can’t begin to tell you how shattered I was. I never showed it—I even became best friends with your mother—but it took me a long time, years, to get over it. Even now, there are still days when I think I never outgrew any of it. And days when I’d like to think that neither has he. You know, we were an odd match —we always left our doors ajar, but we never let each other in. We were right for each other, provided there were others to return to. Left to ourselves, we were always evasive, couldn’t even stay alone together in the same room without feeling awkward and strained.

“Even today, I continue to live my life that way. I cross the street on the slant, I always sit in the side rows at concert halls, I am a citizen of two countries but I live in neither, and I never look people in the eye,” she said, as I, conscious of her effort to do so now, averted my own. “I’m honest with no one, though I’ve never lied. I’ve given far less than I’ve taken, though I’m always left with nothing. I don’t even think I know who I am, I know myself the way I might know my neighbor: from across the street. When I’m here, I long to be there; when I was there I longed to be here,” she said, referring to her years in Alexandria.

“‘You see, Flora,’ the Saint used to say to me, ‘you think too much, and you ask too many questions. In life one must put blinders on, look straight ahead, and, above all, learn to forget. Débarrasser. You cannot live and be your own pawnbroker.’

“As you see, I’ve only learned how to get rid of my silverware. That’s all. All the rest is dutifully catalogued and neatly stowed away in the book I carry here,” she said, pointing to her forehead. “I forget nothing—not the way things were, nor how I wished they might have been. I’m like old widows who spend hours sifting through objects they suspect may no longer mean much but which they continue to cherish because it takes more time to replace or discard them than to keep them clean.” She was silent for a moment. “Perhaps I remember more because I’ve lived—and loved—far less than my years show.”

She stood up, took down something that had been hiding on top of the refrigerator, and produced her surprise, a large Ottoman dessert made with goat cream called “bread of the palace.”

“What is so pathetic, now that I think about it, is that forgetting is what the poor Saint did best of all. She forgot so much that in the end she forgot who she was. After the government seized her husband’s assets in ’58 and they were forced to flee the country, she arrived in France the most pitiful sight in the world: there she was, the grande bourgeoise of Rue Memphis—with her grandchildren, her pianos, her tea parties—standing at Orly airport as frightened and confused as a five-year-old child.

“Robert, who had gone to meet her, told me years later how lost she looked as she scanned the crowd for him, even after he came up to her and said, ‘Mother, I’m here!’ He tried to embrace her, but she kept pushing him away, declaiming, ‘Mais je ne vous connais pas, monsieur,’ in that fine textbook French of hers. ‘But it’s me, Bertico,’ he said.”

Flora went on to tell me that when the Saint finally did recognize her son, all she did was touch his face and say he looked so old. Then she apologized and said it was because she wasn’t wearing her glasses; she had forgotten them at home. But not to worry—she would send the boy servant to fetch them. Only then did Robert realize the extent of the damage. He had left her a beefy-armed woman who could walk about with a grandchild on each hip. Here was an unkempt, defeated old lady who couldn’t even string together a coherent sentence. The airplane trip had been disastrous; she had cried the whole way.

When they arrived at the bus terminal in Paris and were waiting to get their luggage, my grandmother did the most unexpected thing: she bolted, wandered off. When Robert came back with a porter and the suitcases, he found his father totally beside himself. “What is it?” he asked. “Your mother’s gone.”

They immediately contacted the police. But it took them days. Eventually, they found her—at the opposite end of Paris, beyond the Porte de Clignancourt, without glasses, without dentures or underwear. How she had gotten there or what had happened to her during those seven days and nights we’ll never know. In the hospital, she refused to speak French and, when she wasn’t weeping, would mutter a few syllables in Ladino, saying she had gone back to Rue Memphis as a dog but found no one home.

“I’m told she complained of nothing,” Flora continued. “She always said she was comfortable, that the nuns and nurses were kind to her. But she refused to eat. There were terrifying fights over food. At night she howled in her sleep, a long, plaintive, heartrending howl he says he will never forget. She would call for her mother and for her son. Then she would wake up, remember something, mutter a string of senseless words, and doze off again.”

Silence filled the kitchen. I looked out the window and saw that it was night outside.

“I didn’t know,” I said.

“No one knew. Robert only told me years later.” After a pause she asked, “And now, how about coffee?”

“Yes,” I said. Then, trying to break the heavy silence that had settled over the kitchen, I asked at what time I should take the vaporetto that evening.

She said I had plenty of time. Besides, it depended where I wanted to take it.

“So, then, could we hear the Schubert now?” I asked like a boy who hadn’t forgotten his promised treat.

“Is Schubert what you really want to hear?” she asked, alluding to my letter in which, to earn her forgiveness after not seeing her for so many years, I had written that I still remembered her Schubert on those warm summer afternoons on Rue Memphis. She wrote back saying that my grandmother had never liked Schubert. “But if Schubert is what you remember, well, maybe we did play Schubert then.” I wrote back saying it was the B-flat major sonata. “If you insist,” she conceded. “Maybe I was practicing alone and you overheard it.”

She probably continued to suspect I had made it up. I wasn’t sure that I hadn’t.

“At any rate, you’ll hear Schubert the way I played him when the Germans stood outside Alexandria and everyone in the house thought the world had come to an end. I played it every night. It annoyed them at first, for they didn’t know the first thing about music. But they came to love it—and then me—after a while, because Schubert stood like the last beacon in the storm, tranquil and pensive, an echo of an old world we believed we belonged to because we belonged nowhere else. At times it felt like the only thing standing between us and Rommel was a sheet of music, nothing more. Ten years later they took that sheet of music away. Eventually they took away everything else as well. And we let it happen, as Jews always let these things happen, because, deep inside, we know we’ll lose everything we own at least twice in our lives.

“I played the Schubert on those nights because I knew that, for me, the war, terrible as it was, was no more than a pretext to avoid facing I’d botched up my life.

“I’ll play it now the way Schnabel played it, because this is the way your grandfather, and then your father, heard me play it, and this is how my son, had I a son, would have heard me play it tonight. Sit here.”

I did not take the vaporetto at Zattere that night. Instead, I walked across the Dorsoduro to the Accademia. As soon as I reached the ill-lit floating platform, a beggar, the only soul in sight, told me that I had missed the vaporetto to the Lido. “Bisognerà aspettare, you’ll have to wait,” she said.

With a good forty minutes left, I decided to cross the wooden bridge back to Campo Morosini. The bridge too was empty, and, from where I stood, the adjoining Campo San Vidal, which led up to the church of Santo Stefano, was both dark and deserted. I sighted a rat slinking by on a sunken marble step along the canal, his grayish hair matted to his back, something deft and purposeful in the speed with which he waded through the shallow water and nosed his way through a crack.

“So she played her Schubert for you as well,” they would say, the men snickering, though everyone would be pleased. And I thought for a moment of the crowded apartment in Grand Sporting when the Germans stood outside Alexandria, and of all my uncles and aunts huddled there for protection and solidarity, listening to Flora’s Schubert every evening after the BBC. “Stay after the others,” she had told my father. “There is something I want to say to you.”

I looked across to the station platform and saw the old beggar shuffle away.

I thought of Aunt Flora again, and of how she had come to Venice years ago, and why she had stayed here all by herself, her life thrown away because she never learned to bounce back, not after Germany, not after Egypt. And I thought of her during the war years in Alexandria, riding the tram with my father in the evening, giving small concerts in the city, and how they would walk back home along the Corniche at night, looking out into the dark sea, wondering why, with death so close, it was still so difficult to speak. And I thought of what they might say tonight, walking arm in arm after so many years along these dark and haunted alleys in Venice, where she would show him her favorite café at night, her favorite ice cream vendor, her favorite spot along the Dorsoduro from which to survey the city’s starlit canal and watch one water-city summon up another, silent as they always were together, working their way through strands of time like captured shades on the Bridge of Sighs. Why had she bared her soul to me tonight?

As I walked ahead, the slate-blue pavement of Campo Morosini glistened in the dark night. Scirocco weather, I remembered. Nearing the piazza, I made out the fading lights of a trattoria about to close. A waiter with his collar open and necktie undone was rolling up a striped awning with a long pole crank; another was stacking chairs and taking them inside. Farther away, the two sidewalk cafés we had passed earlier in the afternoon were now crowded with tourists. Tall Senegalese peddlers, carrying large duffel bags, were busy winding up toy birds, which they sent flying above the piazza in full view of the tourists.

I left the piazza and returned to the station and for the first time that day made out the hollow sound of water lapping against the city. Soon after, an almost empty vaporetto arrived. Once inside, I made for the stern deck and sat on the rounded wooden bench along the fantail. Then the engine gave a churn, and a boatman released the knot. As soon as we began moving, I put both legs up on my bench, the way schoolboys ride the open-air deck on trams in Alexandria, staring at that vast expanse of night around me and at the gleaming silver-jade sweeps trailing in our wake in the middle of the Canal Grande as we cut our way deeper into the night, gliding quietly along the walls of the ancient arsenal like a spy boat that had turned off its engines or pulled in its oars. Up ahead, scattered light posts studding the lagoon tipped their heads above sea level, while the moonless city drifted behind me as I caught the fading outline of Punta della Dogana and further off the dimmed tower of San Marco looming in the late night haze. Roused by the searching beam of our vaporetto, splendid Venetian palaces suddenly rose from their slumber, one by one, lifting themselves out of the night like shades in Dante’s hell eager to converse with the living, displaying their gleaming arches and arabesques and their glazed brocade of casements for a few glowing instants, only then to slip back into darkness and resume their owl-like stupor once our boat had passed.

After San Zaccaria, the vaporetto took a wide, swooping turn and headed across the lagoon toward the Lido, the boat doubling its speed, chugging away loudly, with a cool wind fanning our faces, easing the thick scirocco weather, as I reclined and threw my head back. So we’ve seen Venice, I thought, mimicking my grandfather’s humor as I turned and watched the city sink into timeless night, thinking of Flora and of all the cities and all the beaches and all the summers I too had known in my life, and of all those who had loved summer long before I came, and of those I had loved and ceased to care for and forgot to mourn and now wished were here with me in one home, one street, one city, one world.

Tomorrow, first thing, I would go to the beach.