5

The Lotus-Eaters

It had taken my parents three years to find their jewel in Cleopatra. Life at Smouha after the 1956 war had become too unsafe, and so unsavory, they said—too many vagrants, too much dust, so few Europeans. And late at night, Smouha could turn quite eerie, especially when you heard the drone of ongoing rallies with loudspeakers squawking the latest propaganda. What my parents looked for, and eventually found, was an apartment near Sporting facing the sea on one side and the vast banana plantations of Smouha on the other.

My father was delighted with the study, my mother with the balcony; Om Ramadan was ecstatic about the laundry room; there was even a small room for my new Greek governess, Madame Marie. “What a fabulous home,” said the Princess when she came to visit and managed to get lost in the corridor. “How did you ever find it?” My mother said it was the simplest thing in the world: the Venturas, longtime friends of her parents, had finally decided to leave Egypt and were desperate to sell their apartment.

One evening, shortly after we moved in, our dining room was littered with large sheets of sturdy cobalt-blue paper which Abdou had brought from my great-grandmother’s house. “They never throw away anything over there,” my mother had said. Madame Marie, my mother, and Aziza were busily cutting the large blue sheets in four to cover all of my books and notebooks as school regulations required. Someone had telephoned from school complaining that I did not keep my notebooks in good order. Two weeks later the same teacher called again saying that the issue was not just one of neatness—as Abdou, who had taken the call the first time, had erroneously reported to my mother—but one of conformity, of having each book and notebook bound like everyone else’s in class.

A label bearing my full name, properly capitalized, was to be glued to the front of each notebook to indicate the subject, year, class, and volume. The blue paper, moreover, had to be tucked in—tightly—not glued with gummed paper. My mother had no patience with these British-school niceties and wanted to stick the label on the top right-hand corner, as was done in French schools. I insisted that the label had to be placed in the middle of the cover. Would beige paper do? she had first asked. No, it had to be blue, everyone used blue. This was when Abdou remembered the blue paper at Rue Thèbes. He took off his apron, walked to Sporting, and was back in an hour.

“I can’t believe you waited over a month to tell us about this,” said my father, joining the women after work and helping them cover my books while Madame Marie cut the paper. “How could you forget?”

I hadn’t forgotten.

“Then why are we doing it at the last minute?” he asked.

I didn’t know why. Maybe because I thought we’d soon be leaving Egypt and so none of this mattered.

My father, however, did not want to leave, and to prove the point had added another floor to his factory, invested in several apartments, commissioned new furniture, and, to cap his list of fantasies, had enrolled me, when I turned nine, in what throughout his early years in Egypt had always seemed an exclusive institution incarnating the very peak of British splendor: Victoria College.

Victoria College—renamed Victory College after the “victory” of the Egyptian forces over Britain, France, and Israel in 1956—was once the pride of the British Empire’s educational system. Like other famous British public schools, it was a huge compound boasting large, well-trimmed playing fields and an imposing quadrangle, and was governed by a code of discipline that would have left Matthew Arnold’s father, the stout, snub-nosed headmaster of Browning College, thrilled with depraved ecstasy.

English writers, philosophers, and mathematicians had once flocked to teach at VC. Wealthy Britons used to send their sons there, and Alexandria’s elite consistently favored VC over the Lycée Français. Everything at VC was marked by spare, Victorian elegance, from the dark interiors that recalled the brooding opulence of its founders, down to the mournful, petty faces of its teachers, who couldn’t wait to do to children what had probably been done to them for too many years.

Aside from that, however, the British legacy had been reduced to a handful of meaningless features: atrocious food; a reluctance to adopt anything too visibly modern; a ban on chewing gum and ballpoint pens; a gray uniform with navy piping around the edges of the blazer; an obstinate resistance to all types of Americanisms, especially soft drinks; compulsory gymnastics; corporal punishment; and, above all, awe before any form of authority, including the janitor’s. My father, who had never set foot in a British school, and who in typical Sephardi fashion would have given anything to live his life all over again provided it started in an English public school, revered this caricature of Victorian austerity for its enviable aversion to all types of sissy comforts. It made gentlemen out of bullies, and men out of frail, pale-faced boys. It made England England. To his mind, VC was peopled by fair-haired, blue-eyed boys who would one day go to Cambridge and Oxford and rise to the helm of all the great banks and all the great nations that ruled the world. What he failed to notice during our tour of the prestigious institution, one summer day when the school was totally empty, was that VC had essentially become an Arab school wearing the tattered relics of British garb.

After its renaming, VC had fallen on sad days. With the departure of most British nationals, it had become a boarding school for rich Palestinians, Kuwaitis, and Saudis. The rising Egyptian middle class sent all of its firstborn sons there, as did rustic landowners from the Nile Valley and prosperous town mayors. Though VC was still regarded as an English-speaking school, outside of class no one spoke English. One language was favored: Arabic. In class, when a teacher was unable to explain 2πr in English, his speech, which was mostly pidgin to start with, would invariably revert to Arabic. Europeans, Armenians, and Christian Syrians—there were six of us in my class—usually spoke French among themselves. Charlie Atkinson, who didn’t know French, was the last remaining English boy in the entire school. I was the last Jew.

Although by 1960 the study of Arabic had become mandatory for all foreign residents, explanations in Arabic did not much help European boys. Very few of us understood a word of classical or formal spoken Arabic. All we knew was street Egyptian, a sort of diluted, makeshift lingua franca that Egyptians spoke with Europeans. When Mohammed, our servant, telephoned early one morning from the hospital asking to be given the day off because his son had been run over by a truck, he told me, “Al bambino bita Mohammed getu morto,” meaning, “The son belonging to Mohammed has become dead,” adding, “Bokra lazem congé alashan lazem cimetière,” meaning, “Tomorrow he needed holiday because cemetery was needed.” This was not even spoken Egyptian, but in its garbled mixture of French, Italian, and Arabic, it allowed Europeans who never cared to learn Arabic to communicate with the local population.

The little Arabic I knew I had learned at our service-entrance door, which stood wide open on those warm Ramadan evenings in the spring when cooks and servants from up and down our building at Cleopatra would gather around our kitchen, idling away the minutes as they waited for the loud cannon shot from the harbor announcing the time for devout Moslems to eat after the long day’s fast. They would not speak our lingua franca among themselves, but in my presence their conversation would automatically devolve into what could only have seemed a form of baby talk, though it was peppered with light, bawdy notes hovering over their speech like an impudent, spirited sneer.

Om Ramadan would come in and sit in the kitchen with Abdou and Aziza. Fawziah, our next-door neighbor’s maid, would also step out of her kitchen and come into ours, and sometimes all three would sit in the early evening as Abdou sorted the rice or shelled peas amidst the yell of delivery boys running up and down the stairwell and the clatter of plates and cooking utensils. I loved their gossip—pure, malevolent, petty gossip—their complaints, complaints about one another behind one another’s back, about their bosses, my mother, her screaming, complaints about their sons who had turned to crime, about health, disease, death, scandal, housing, poverty, and aching bones. Rumatizm, rheumatism—or, as Fawziah would say, maratizm, which sent everyone laughing each time, because, corrupted into maraftizu, it meant something obscene having to do with women and buttocks.

Sometimes with Abdou, Hisham, and Fawziah, I would sit on a fourth stool, while Abdou clipped away at his large toenails with giant chicken shears, and Fawziah, sitting with the open kitchen door swinging between her knees, drummed elaborate rhythms on both sides of it, tapping away with such speed that it drove our one-armed Hisham to stand up and imitate the vibrant hip twirls of a third-rate belly dancer. Everyone laughed, including Hisham, and we begged him to dance again, the three of us coaxing him with renewed drumming on the kitchen table. To practice that rhythm, I had once tapped it on our dining table, a sound my grandmother found totally revolting and which confirmed all the more the sentiment that I should no longer be allowed to grow up in Egypt. “We must send him to a boarding school in England,” she said.

Everyone seemed to agree, including my parents and Aunt Flora.

“He doesn’t know how to say two words without mumbling, he has no table manners to speak of, and, to be perfectly candid, Henri,” continued Uncle Nessim that same evening, “his English is unacceptable.”

“I don’t see how I can write Vili and ask him to host the boy for a summer,” added Aunt Elsa. “He’s simply not fit to go.”

Miffed by her sister’s rebuke, my grandmother reminded everyone that I, at least, attended the famed Victoria College —but without failing to add that, of course, she, too, disapproved of these kitchen-sink fréquentations with Arab servants. And turning to Madame Marie—her spy, as my mother called her—she would beg her to wean me away from these people. Madame Marie, who held Arabs in the utmost contempt, except when she ventured into the service stairway to ask one of them for a cigarette, couldn’t agree more. “Even dogs bark at Arabs,” she would say.

In turn, everyone in the stairwell never stopped making fun of her. To irritate her further, one of the servants in the building kept repeating a short rhyming couplet ridiculing the Greeks of Egypt. The first line was in Greek, the second in Arabic:

Ti kanis? Ti kanis?
Bayaa makanis.

[How are you? How are you?
You seller of broomsticks.]

Unruffled by my new Arab fréquentations, however, my father claimed they were as good a way as any to learn Arabic. “He knows every cook and servant in our building,” he told our guests, the way he would brag that I knew the name of every Greek god and goddess—a revelation that brought no end of sorrow to both Aunt Elsa and Uncle Nessim when they found out that I knew all about Ares and Aphrodite but had never heard of Cain and Abel.

“He doesn’t even know the story of Abraham and Isaac, let alone the crossing of the Red Sea,” Elsa reported incredulously during our first seder at Cleopatra.

“What are we, then, pagans?” interjected Uncle Nessim.

“Madame Marie, you must promise to do something to save this child. Will you promise us that?” said my grandmother.

Madame Marie, who was so happy to have finally been spoken to in the course of the meal, beamed with pleasure, and promised that everyone could count on her. “Si fidi di me, signora, trust me,” she said in Italian, seemingly forgetting that my mother did not know a word of Italian.

“Bless you, my dear,” said my grandmother.

“Salud y berakhá,” echoed my great-grandmother.

At which Uncle Nessim, who had picked up his Haggadah, began leafing through its pages and resumed his recitation. At a sign given by Aunt Elsa, everyone stood up, including Madame Marie, who had been invited to the seder because my grandmother thought it was too rude to send her home or make her stay in her room during dinner like a servant. Madame Marie, a devout Greek Orthodox from Smyrna, stood up and sat down, dipped her foods in all the requisite dishes and sauces, ate everything she saw us eat, and repeated “Amen” after everyone else, though with the guarded look of a missionary forced to down a tribal brew. Her biggest fear in working for a Jewish family was to be inadvertently converted to Judaism.

“We say ‘Amen’ too,” she said, attempting to be cordial.

“All religions say ‘Amen,’” replied my father.

My father enjoyed teasing Madame Marie by saying that distinctions among religions were entirely superfluous, since we were all brothers under God, Jewish, Moslem, Greek Orthodox, no difference at all—particularly this year, as Passover, Easter, and Ramadan came within days of each other.

“Indeed,” my father would say, “there is hardly any difference between Easter and Passover, seeing that the Greek word for Easter is paska, which in Italian is pasqua, which itself comes from the Hebrew word pesah. What do you think the Last Supper was, Madame Marie?”

“It was Christ’s last meal.”

“Yes, but what were the disciples doing when they gathered for the Last Supper?”

“Eating, of course.”

“Leave her alone,” said Aunt Elsa, who had read my father’s drift and rushed to Madame Marie’s defense. “What else were they to do but eat? Besides,” she added, fearful that I, the youngest and most susceptible, might turn into another freethinker, “Easter is one thing, Passover another.” Her curt, peremptory air was meant to rescue Madame Marie from my father as well as to put him in his place for linking the two religions.

“I give up,” said my father, probably forgetting that everyone had already had the same conversation about the Last Supper that Easter. This time, however, Madame Marie was not about to let him repeat those scurrilous lies about Jesus being Jewish.

“All I know,” she explained, “is what my mother taught me when I was a little girl. If Jesus and his disciples were doing anything else during the Last Supper, I don’t want to hear it.”

A fervent believer, Madame Marie was so moved by the Passion of Christ that she wept all through Easter, often speaking of the nails that had gone through the hands of young Jesus and of the crown of thorns he wore as he hobbled up via crucis with this terrible weight on his shoulders and no one there to help him. She cried when she would shut herself in our dark living room early every afternoon and listen to the Greek Orthodox program on the radio, humming along with the liturgy as she began to weep, and weep, and weep some more, her tears spilling over our Grundig, which she would dab with her kerchief, as if the radio itself were an equally devout companion whose tears she understood fully and wished to comfort. She had even cried during the Greek news broadcast and the “Greek Children’s Hour.”

Madame Marie was also a staunch churchgoer and frequently took me along to cry some more and light votive tapers in memory of her brother, Petro, who, now that he was there (which she would say pointing an index finger to the flaky ceiling of the church), perhaps might intercede on her behalf and help persuade her landlord to allow her to install a much larger pigeon coop on the terrace. When you lit the taper you were not to think of the pigeon coop. Sometimes she lit many candles, not because it reinforced her wish but because she had caught herself thinking each time of the pigeon coop, which automatically invalidated her wish. So she would try again. Each taper cost a piaster, the equivalent of half a penny. Sometimes, satisfied with her prayers, she was on the verge of getting ready to leave the church when I would whisper timidly in her ear, “Madame Marie, light another one. I thought of the pigeon coop.”

She loved pigeons, and nothing could distress her more than to think of Abdou cooking stuffed dove—an Egyptian delicacy and another source of chafing between them.

“But they are so gentle, and they have no bile,” she would protest.

He would say nothing and go on with the slaughter of the birds, which he performed the Jewish way: by slitting the dove’s neck—once, twice—with a very sharp knife. Then, releasing the bird, he would laugh as it flew and flounced about our kitchen, slamming into walls and kitchen cabinets, spattering blood everywhere. “It’s only a dove.”

To bait her, Abdou, like my father, was in the habit of saying that all peoples, Christians, Moslems, Arabs, Greeks, Jews were the same to Allah. This would infuriate Madame Marie, who would refute Abdou’s claim with a dismissive gesture that reduced Islam to paltry business. And to prove that God was always on the side of Christians, she would tell everyone on the stairway that after the Turks had conquered Constantinople and turned the Hagia Sophia into a mosque, at night all the Greek religious murals which the Turks had painted over would seep through the infidel’s green dye and comfort the few Greeks who had bravely sneaked into the church. When the sultan heard of this he had all the Christians butchered and the icons scraped off the wall until nothing remained.

Abdou shrugged away this tale with a nonchalant “Mush mumkin, not possible.”

“And what about Saint George?” she rebutted, almost losing her temper, “Saint George who stopped my husband’s car in the middle of the desert road and warned him about his flat tire?” Madame Marie believed in miracles. She had seen al-Afreet, the devil himself, once, and had even spoken with him when he came in the shape of Madame Longo’s parrot and had tried to mount her pigeons.

“Kalam, kalam, words, words,” replied Abdou, knowing he was taunting the Greek fanatic by denigrating the two things she cherished most: her faith and her pigeons.

Sometimes, unable to control herself, Madame Marie would explode and remind him that everyone would become Christian in the end. “Even Uncle Nessim, even Abdou, and Om Ramadan too,” she said, glorying in the final victory of Christ.

“Rubbish,” Abdou would jeer.

“Huh!” she exclaimed. “Pagans, all of you. First there was Noah, then Abraham, then Jacob, then Mohammed, and then came Christ.” She was getting all worked up and, extending her index finger and making a sweeping circular motion with her right arm, declaimed: “Wu baaden al-Messih getu kulu al-Chretiens.”

At this, the servants on the stairwell broke up laughing, as did Abdou, Fawziah, and I. It was never clear what she intended to say, for her sentence meant either “After Christ, all the Christians came,” or “After Christ, everyone will become Christian.” But it was that supercilious circular motion of her arm, signifying the universe, that made us laugh each time we mimicked it. Within minutes that gesture had made its way into the annals of the courtyards of Cleopatra.

When she caught me doing it, Madame Marie immediately threatened to tell my teachers.

This was no laughing matter, for at VC, anything, even the loss of an insignificant personal item that had nothing to do with school, could be construed as an infraction, and for all infractions the penalty was invariably corporal punishment. There were gradations of corporal punishment, ranked by the severity of the crime or the whim of the teacher: first there was the teacher’s palm, with blows striking wherever they fell; then there was the ruler; then the stick; then the cane, the frightful kharazanah. Within each category there were refinements and variations worthy of the great Marquis himself: for example, one could be hit with the flat end of a ruler or with its metal edge; on one’s flattened palm or on the fingers; on one’s arms or one’s thighs; with a ridged cane or a flat cane; a wet or dry cane; and so on.

I was hit on my very first day at VC. I was slapped in arithmetic for not multiplying 6 times 8 correctly and got five strikes with a ruler in Arabic class for misreading five words in a five-word sentence. Everyone had laughed. Then I was punished for not finishing my rice and not knowing how to peel a fresh date with a knife and fork. I was made to stand next to the table while everyone else continued eating in the large dining hall. I wanted to take my grandfather’s Pelikan pen and thrust it into the forehead of Miss Sharif, my Arabic teacher, who sat at the head of the table. At the end of my first day at school, when the school bus deposited me at our entrance at Cleopatra, I vomited the little I had eaten. I was immediately washed and put in bed. I said I had met five boys. All were European, all but one spoke French, all had warned me against speaking French.

After being hit on the hands, students at VC would puff feverishly into their hollowed fists. I had done likewise. There was something soothing in the gesture. I had seen some puff even before being hit. That seemed to help too.

In the first week, I was hit for saying I had a cold when all I wanted was to avoid undressing in front of the others before swimming class. I was the only circumcised European and I knew, without even being told by my father, that it was better not to let anyone know I was Jewish.

I was hit for daydreaming, for talking in class, for ink stains left by my Pelikan. I was hit for trying to erase these stains. I was hit for failing to erase them. I spent more time rubbing out a misspelled word than I did trying to write a coherent sentence. I would wet the tip of an eraser with a touch of spit and then, by dint of persistent, delicate rubbing, would either end up making a hole in my notebook paper or dilute the ink until it left an even larger smudge. Permanent damage to your notebook meant you could be hit more than once for the same infraction, since Miss Sharif often forgot she had already punished you for a specific smudge or hole. Tearing the page out did not resolve matters at all; Miss Sharif counted the pages in everyone’s notebooks. Notebooks had thirty-two pages.

Her arrival at a student’s desk would always signal danger. Unable to see more than a few inches beyond her nose, she would pick up your notebook and hold it up to her eyes, covering her face completely as she stood there, reading awhile, and then, all of a sudden, throw it back at you, hurling one insult after another, as slaps followed the notebook, and kicks the slaps. She threw everything at her pupils’ faces: books, chalk, blackboard erasers, pencil boxes, magazines, shrieking, “Oh, my sister!” before propelling her missiles. She even threw her handbag at me once. Then, of course, came the ruler—though, with me, Miss Sharif had decided that a larger instrument of pain had become necessary, which is why she used a double-decker wooden pencil box whenever she struck my hands.

I was also hit for having dirty shoes. Shoes had to be shiny at VC, and our spontaneous morning soccer game in the fields left them dirty and caked with mud. As I soon learned, the easiest way to give them a semblance of polish during the headmistress’s inspection was to rub them furtively up and down my socks while standing at attention.

Miss Badawi, the headmistress, would insist on inspecting our nails, our lockers, our pockets, our hair. Whenever I reported to my mother that someone at school had looked through my hair, she would immediately begin searching me for lice, for she suspected that schools never check students’ hair unless a lice epidemic was already under way. I remember how we had to hold our heads down as Miss Badawi or Miss Sharif or Miss Gilbertson, my English teacher, searched with their fingers and nails, raking our scalps, roughly. Aside from humiliating you in front of the whole class by announcing that you were a carrier of lice, they would immediately dispatch you to the school barber, who would shave your head so that every scar on your scalp showed. One day they shaved Charlie Atkinson, a lank, blond boy with wavy Rupert Brooke hair and the mildest of manners. He had walked out of the class with hair that caught the sun’s glare. When he returned, everyone burst into laughter. No one could have guessed how small Charlie’s head really was. The next day his father, a corpulent man in his sixties who had lost everything in Egypt but who had never wished to leave the country, stepped out of an immense old Cadillac and, holding his bald son by the hand, walked to Miss Badawi’s office.

Everyone knew he had come to complain of the injustice committed against his son, and while Miss Gilbertson was busy teaching us grammar, we kept our ears wide open, our hearts pounding so loud that we could not even speak in full sentences when called upon. We heard nothing. Everyone thought the worst. Ten minutes later, there was a knock at the door. Miss Gilbertson, who hated having her class interrupted, barked, “Come in.” It was Charlie. He apologized for being late and tiptoed over to his desk. He sat down quietly and seemed about to open his book to the page being studied in class when, to everyone’s total amazement, he committed the ultimate sin: he lifted wide the cover of his desk. With mischievous relish, Miss Gilbertson was already going over to administer a hiding with her ruler when a voice at the door halted her. It was Miss Badawi. Next to her stood Atkinson Senior. In our excitement, we had failed see them.

Meanwhile, Charlie emptied his desk as fast as he could, stuffing his books, pencil box, and notebooks into his gym bag. Quietly, as if he had rehearsed his steps so often that he no longer had to give them a second thought, he went over to his locker at the back of the room and opened it with his key, emptying its contents into his bag and pockets. Then, taking out his invincible padded Ping-Pong paddles, the likes of which were no longer available in Egypt, he shouted in an exhilarated, shrill voice, “Who wants these?” Mass hysteria suddenly broke out, and everyone, without thinking of who was or wasn’t watching, shouted a frenzied “I do!” Charlie threw one paddle and then the other into the center of the room. A mad rush ensued, with everyone falling on Amr, whose desk happened to be in the middle of the room, and who didn’t understand what was happening because he didn’t know a word of English.

Then Charlie Atkinson walked out. He was last seen standing with his father waiting for their chauffeur to drive around the quadrangle and pick them up.

A month later they shaved Daniel Biagi’s head.

Then came Osama al-Basha’s turn. Though his father was Egyptian, Osama’s mother couldn’t have been more British. Osama himself looked typically English, spoke with a perfect accent, and, for fun sometimes, would raise his voice to the pitch of Laurence Olivier, whom he also resembled. He could hardly say a sentence in Arabic. He too was pulled out of Victory College after his haircut.

I knew my turn would come.

One day I handed my father a note from my Arabic teacher that I had been carrying in my briefcase for over a week. Father looked at the date on the neatly handwritten French note and asked me if I had been concealing it from him. I said I had forgotten all about it. Predictably, the note complained that I never did my homework, that I never paid attention in class, and that I was bound to repeat the entire grade.

My father took me into the living room and asked me why I never did my Arabic homework.

I didn’t know why I never did my Arabic homework.

“You don’t know?” he asked.

I didn’t know.

“Have you ever done Arabic homework?” he asked, as though out of casual curiosity. I thought about the matter for a moment and suddenly realized that indeed I had never done Arabic homework at VC.

“Not once?” he asked sarcastically.

“Not once,” I repeated, failing to see that his sarcasm was aimed at me, not at the idea of having to do homework in Arabic.

My father called in Madame Marie. After shutting the glass door, he began to berate her for not making certain I did my homework. She let him scream, but when he called her an ignorant fool, she slumped into a chair and urged him not to say such things in front of the child. Not even her mother had called her names, and it wasn’t likely that at forty she was going to allow anyone to do so.

“Madame Marie—” By now my father had lost his patience altogether, explaining that my failure to study Arabic could easily be construed as a seditious act against the present regime. Everyone had to study Arabic.

“But none of the other European boys studies Arabic,” I interjected.

“Well, those who are leaving may not have to worry about Arabic. But since we’re not planning to leave,” he continued, “let us at least pretend that Arabic is important to us. Now let me see the latest assignment.”

I opened my briefcase and produced an Arabic book whose pages had not even been cut yet. I told him I had to learn a poem by heart.

“Where is it?” he asked.

I tried finding the page in question but because the pages had not been separated, I wasn’t able. “It’s on page 42,” I finally remembered.

“The class is on page 42 already and you’ve not done any homework yet?” he asked as he helped me separate the pages with a penknife.

The poem was accompanied by an illustration of a young Egyptian soldier waving a scimitar at three old men clothed in three tattered flags. The first was wearing the Union Jack, the second the bleu-blanc-rouge, and the third, a bald, short man with wiry sideburns, a large hooked nose, and a pointed beard, was shabbily draped in the Star of David.

I looked at the twenty-line poem and found myself sweating as I stared at words that were literally swimming on the page.

“My eyes are burning,” I said.

Madame Marie inched her way closer to me and looked at the poem over my shoulder. It was her way of avoiding my father’s glare.

“I can’t read,” I said.

“You can’t read?” he started. “Let me understand. You not only don’t know the poem but you aren’t even able to read it?”

I nodded.

“So how do you plan to learn it by heart if you can’t even read it?”

“I don’t know,” I answered, continuing to look down at my book only to realize that I had begun to tremble. I wanted to conceal the shaking by staring more intently at the picture, but my breathing was too shallow, and my chin shook as though it were held by loose wires. I caught myself slurring a few words. I knew there was no turning back, I was almost certainly going to cry.

“What’s the matter now?”

“Nothing,” I sobbed.

My father saw the picture.

“I don’t care how you do it,” he said, “but by tomorrow morning you’ll have to know this poem by heart.”

“How is he going to learn it if neither you nor I can even read Arabic?” asked Madame Marie.

“We’ll get Abdou to help him.”

My father yelled out Abdou’s name. Seconds later, a knock was heard on the living room door. Abdou was carrying a saucer on which wobbled a glass of water. The water was for me; he had heard me crying.

“I want you to help him learn a poem by heart.”

“But I can’t read.”

“Does anyone know how to read Arabic here?”

“There is my son Ahmed,” said Abdou. “Do you want me to call him?”

“Call him, call him,” yelled my father. Then, turning to me, he added: “Go have dinner now, and we’ll see what happens once Ahmed arrives.”

“All the same, children should not be taught such ugly things,” whispered Madame Marie to my father, referring to the picture.

“Ugly or not ugly, he’ll do what everyone else does.”

Half an hour later, visitors arrived. Our downstairs neighbor, Madame Nicole, who was Belgian, came with her Egyptian Coptic husband. Our other neighbor, Sarina Salama, who was Jewish, showed up with her daughter Mimi, and their friend Monsieur Pharès, the painter. Drinks were offered. Mohammed was sent out to buy salted peanuts. Everyone had gathered to decide which film to see that evening. The choice was between Sayonara and Gunfight at the OK Corral. My mother, Madame Salama, and Mimi refused to see a western. Sayonara sounded wonderful, but gunfights and gunshots—out of the question! My mother asked whether Abdel Hamid, Madame Salama’s millionaire Egyptian lover, would want to join. “He’ll come, but only after the theater lights are out. I have to buy him a ticket—me buy him a ticket!—and leave it at the ticket booth in the name of Monsieur César.” “But isn’t Marlon Brando Jewish?” interrupted Mimi, referring to the government’s policy of not showing films with Jewish actors

—which is why Cleopatra never opened in Egypt. Edward G. Robinson’s films were banned as well, as was anything starring Paul Newman, thought to be Jewish. Ben Hur, The Ten Commandments , and Exodus also were never shown in Alexandria; they portrayed Jewish themes. Kirk Douglas, however, was so prototypically American that it would never have occurred to the censor, nor to anyone else in Egypt, including us, that his real name was Issur Daniilovich. Monsieur Pharès snickered at Mimi’s comment, adding that it was just like Jews to think all famous people were secretly their brothers.

My mother leaned over to my father and softly asked whether they could take me to the movies with them. “Who’s ever heard of a boy his age going to the movies in the middle of a school week?” came his raised voice.

We heard a gentle tap on the door. It was Abdou. “My son is here,” he announced. I caught Ahmed’s face peeking in from behind the door.

“Good,” said my father, standing up and shaking Ahmed’s hand. He ordered Abdou to give his son something to eat, knowing he had been fasting all day. My father put his hand into his pocket and took out a one-pound note, which he gave the young man. Ahmed stepped back and refused the bill, saying he had not come for the money. My father insisted, saying he was very grateful that he had come during Ramadan and that he would be hurt if the young man refused him. Abdou’s son said, “Mush lazem, it’s not necessary,” while my father almost pleaded with him, “Lazem, lazem,” until Ahmed relented.

Ahmed hardly had time to eat a morsel before he was rushed through the corridor and into my bedroom, where his father indicated a chair next to my desk. The young man removed his jacket, let it drop on my bed, then, changing his mind, picked it up and placed it neatly around the back of his chair. He sat down, bringing the chair closer to my desk, smiled, and blushed uncomfortably, his thin, olive-hued hand shaking as he flipped through the book in search of page 42. Seeing that the rest of the pages in the book had not been separated, without the slightest comment, he stretched back, put his hand deep into his pocket, and took out a small penknife, and with deft, decisive motions of the wrist, proceeded to separate the pages with his blade as he had learned from a local sheikh who had taught him to read and write. After cutting the pages, Ahmed held the book opened flat on my desk and pressed his hand up and down along the binding without hurting the spine, until the book yielded and stayed open on page 42.

He blushed again, perhaps because our reversed roles made him feel awkward, but also perhaps because he suddenly realized that he would have to teach a Jew a poem vilifying Jews.

He read the poem once to himself. Then, as my Arabic teacher would do in class, he spoke out the first few words, repeated them, and then waited for me to say them back to him. He did not explain the poem; no one ever explained the poems. They were always about poison, Jews, vengeance, and motherland. But he said the words with a slow, deliberate air about him, never correcting my mistakes save by repeating the words the right way, and always smiling each time I said something, as if I were doing him a special favor merely by mouthing unfathomable words in classical Arabic.

In the space of an hour I had learned the poem by heart. “Read it to yourself before you go to bed and as soon as you wake up,” he said, as though prescribing medicine, for this was how he had learned almost all the Koran by heart. I told him that I did not know how to read very well. “Do you want me to teach you?” he asked, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “It’s very easy,” he added.

We spent the next hour learning how to spell the words in the poem. Then, before leaving, he made me recite the poem again. “See how easy it was—and you were so scared,” he said as Madame Marie walked us to the kitchen. I thought I had concealed my fear quite deftly.

In bed, I began leafing through the book before turning to the poem, staring at illustrations of brawny Arab youths lunging toward the liberation of Palestine with their spiky bayonets, while a thousand jittery Jewish noses took aim at the intrepid victors, who were trampling the flag of Israel. Dead bodies lay strewn upon the sand. Every page with a poem on it was accompanied by a similar drawing, except for the Mother’s Day poem, where the artist had sketched a sort of languid, middle-aged Egyptian mother lavishing her love upon seven children, the eldest of whom brandished the giant flag of Egypt in one hand, and the portrait of President Nasser in the other. He was wearing a cross between a cadet’s uniform and school apparel, with shirt sleeves rolled up to his shoulders.

Suddenly I was seized with panic, the thought cramping my chest. What if I forgot the poem I had learned that night? I immediately repeated the first few words to myself. No, they were all in place, nothing forgotten.

Later that night, I was awakened by the light patter of rain on my windowpane. With intense joy and gratitude, I listened to the peaceful springtime showers on the streets of Cleopatra, realizing, from the sound of the rain, that the water was not dribbling down the slats of my shutters and pooling along the windowsill, but tapping directly against the panes themselves. To please me, Abdou had gone against my mother’s orders and left the shutters wide open so that light might stream in at dawn and fill the room and remind me of summer mornings at our beach house at Mandara. I wondered why she was always set against leaving the shutters open, especially when you could see lights from nearby buildings reflected on the ceiling at night.

I turned on my shortwave radio and listened to a French song.

Hours later, I heard Mother tiptoe into my bedroom. I judged from the rustle of her clothes that she had rushed to see me while still wearing her coat. They had danced—I knew she liked dancing—and when she bent down to kiss me, I made out the scent of wine on her breath. I was happy for them.

As soon as I awoke the next morning, I scanned my mind to see if it still bore traces of the poem. To my utter surprise, I found that the poem hadn’t budged.

When I walked into the dining room, I saw my father eating a soft-boiled egg. He was wearing a bathrobe and had just come out of the shower. Next to him was seated Monsieur Politi, also eating a soft-boiled egg. Abdou was standing behind my father, pouring tea from the teapot, obviously eager to hear his son complimented.

My father asked about my late-night tutorial. I told him I had learned the poem by heart. He asked me to recite it. I shook my head. Then, turning to Abdou, he asked, “Does Ahmed want to give him private lessons?” Abdou said he could have asked for nothing better, except that his son was soon to be inducted into the army and would not be free for another two years. “Pity. We’ll have to find another tutor.”

Never would Arabic be as easy as it was that evening with Ahmed.

During a short recess that day in school, I made fun of Amr, who, like many Arabic-speakers, had never learned to distinguish between b and p in English pronunciation. That morning Miss Gilbertson had tried to teach him the difference. From. her mean and benighted point of view, it must have seemed that Amr was refusing to learn out of spite. She called him up to the front of the class, took out a piece of paper which she tore into very tiny confetti, and put five or six of these pieces into her palm. She then brought her hand close to her mouth and uttered a loud b. Nothing happened. “Now see the difference,” she warned, and produced a p sound, at which the confetti went flying from her palm. “Here, you try it.” She placed little pieces of torn paper in Amr’s palm. “Say buh,” she said. “Buh,” he repeated. Nothing happened. “Now say puh.” Whereupon Amr said, “Buh.” “No, puh,”she insisted. “Buh,” he repeated. “No, you fool, it’s puh, puh, puh.” She began raising her voice, blowing all the confetti out of both their palms. “Buh, buh, buh,” he repeated, trying very hard to please her, and then, seeing she was upset, produced a last, defeated, hopeless—“Buh.”

By then the class was beside itself, some of us falling from our seats with laughter. Even Miss Gilbertson, who never laughed and who had a malignant stare permanently riveted to her face, was smiling broadly, first giggling at each of Amr’s failed attempts, and finally bursting out laughing herself, which gave the class license to break into an uproar, while Amr stood befuddled and crestfallen until it occurred to him that there was no reason why he shouldn’t laugh with the others, which he did.

At recess, I ran into Amr and jokingly asked him to “Blease bass de bebber.” He knew I was making fun of him and called me “Kalb al Arab, dog of the Arabs.” This was too offensive, and I lunged at him, both of us tussling on the playing field until the headmistress, Miss Badawi, hurried over and separated us. “You should not be fighting,” she yelled. “But he insulted me,” I argued. “He called me ‘dog of the Arabs.’” She did not give me time to finish my complaint. “But you are the dog of the Arabs,” she replied in Arabic, smiling, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

Stunned, I was almost sure I had misconstrued her words. I was even about to protest again. But I said nothing and went to the bathroom, where Michel Cordahi, a native Frenchspeaker who came from one of Egypt’s wealthiest Christian families, helped run water over my scraped knee. I cleaned myself as best I could and arrived in Arabic class with my legs still red from the fall.

Before the recitation was to start, Miss Sharif briefly went over the poem and had the class name all of the Arab nations in the world. The poem itself was a long, high-minded, patriotic ode dedicated to the unity of the Arab world. It calumnized almost all the nations of Europe and, in its envoi, stirred all Arab boys and girls to free the last two Arab countries from the yoke of foreign dominion: Algeria and Palestine. France was suitably anathematized, as was England. Finally, by way of perorating her little speech, Miss Sharif inveighed against the Yahud, the Jews, throwing her fist in the air in an imitation salute, and sending the adrenaline rushing through my body each time she mentioned the word. The students responded to Miss Sharif’s battle cries, asking questions and voicing their agreement, which only intensified the vehemence of their outrage. Handwritten posters in colored ink, which the students had brought in, hung along the walls of the classroom, decrying imperialism, Zionism, and the perfidy of the Jews.

Something ugly and dangerous prevailed in class whenever the Yahud were mentioned. All I could do was stiffen helplessly and wish that some unknown force might come and take me away, that the ceiling might fall on Miss Sharif, that a terrible beast might squirm its way out of the sea and yawn at our classroom door. Without budging from my seat, I would try to make myself scarce, stare into the void, and drift away.

While Miss Sharif was speaking to the class about Nasser’s vision of a united, Pan-Arab nation, I waited for the inevitable. She had warned I’d be the first to recite the poem that day, and I already knew that at the end of her prefatory remarks she would go to her desk, search for her glasses in her handbag, open her book, and, turning her gaze to the window, as if her thoughts had wandered a bit and were still hovering on VC’s giant, green cricket field, would suddenly call my name. I waited to hear it any moment now. Quietly I tore out a very tiny corner of my notebook and drew a Star of David on it. It might bring me good luck. Not knowing what to do with the star, and not wishing to leave it lying about in my desk or in my pockets—which were always subject to summary inspection before the entire class—I put it in my mouth, moved it around a bit, and then let it stick to my palate, where it rested, untouched by my tongue or by my teeth, as Michel Cordahi had told me he did with the Host.

Once again I searched through my mind for the words of the first verse. They were still there, all of them, like children who haven’t shifted a limb since being put to bed hours earlier. I contemplated them almost lovingly.

Then Miss Sharif called my name. A shot of adrenaline coursed through me, along with a cold, numbing spasm.

I went to the front of the class, cleared my throat, cleared it again. I would try to deliver the poem fast and be done with it. I spoke out the title, recited the first verse, which merely restated the title, and, rather pleased with myself, was already searching hard for the third line, when all of a sudden the poem disappeared.

I recognized some of the phrases the boys in the front row kept whispering to me, but I was unable to put them together. Besides, knowing that Miss Sharif must also have heard their taunts and whispers, I didn’t know whether to acknowledge them with a passing smile or merely stare into space, pretending I hadn’t heard them.

“This is an important poem, the most important poem in the book,” she said. “Why didn’t you study it?” I did not know why I hadn’t studied it. “I don’t know what to do with you any longer,” she said, working herself into a temper. “I don’t know, I just don’t know—oh, my sister!” She exploded in a rage, ready to strike me any moment now. “Oh, my sister!” she yelled again, letting fly all the colored chalk with which she had drawn a map of the Arab world. “We shall have to go to see Miss Badawi.”

It was only on our way to Miss Badawi’s office that it finally dawned on me, on this nippy, sunny morning, that she would almost certainly resort to the stick, maybe even the cane.

Much, much worse, however, was the fear that my father would come to know of my crime and be furious that evening. Once again he would tell me that in failing to remember the poem I was probably showing government informants that in my parents’ home no one took Arab education very seriously. This was almost sure to ruin my parents.

To my surprise, I did not get the stick; instead, Miss Badawi called home and announced that I was suspended from school for the day. My mother and Madame Marie hopped into a cab and were there to pick me up in less than half an hour. With Madame Marie as her interpreter, my mother apologized to Miss Badawi and promised that from now on I would have an Arabic tutor every day.

Outside school grounds, when she asked me why I had not studied the poem, I broke down and cried.

“We’re taking the tramway home,” she said.

We boarded the second-class car at the Victoria terminal and headed directly to the upper deck, all three of us crammed into a tiny space in the open-air porch to the right of the spiral staircase. Before boarding, my mother, a born and bred Alexandrian, remembered to buy heated peanuts for the ride. It was windy, and light gray patches hovered over what was sure to remain a bright, sunny day. From where we perched, I could see the stuccoed school turret rising above the dining hall where, at this time, my classmates were queuing up for lunch. I thought of the food, always the same cheap, nauseating, doughy rice laced with bits of meat. Someone in school had composed a little rhyme in Arabic, which, unlike every other Arabic poem I ever heard, I shall never forget:

Captain Toz,
akal al-lahma,
wu sab al roz.

[Captain Phooey
gobbled the meat
and left the rice.]

I almost laughed out loud as I thought of these words. I told my mother the words, for she had seen me smile and wanted to know why. She also remembered bad food from her boarding days at Madame Tsotsou’s and said she knew how cruel teachers could be. She laughed about Captain Toz, wondering how he managed to avoid the dread rice. At VC we had to eat everything on our plate. “Or else?” she asked. “They hit you very hard.” “We’ll see,” she said, dipping her fingers into the paper cone of peanuts.

The tram began to rumble and squeak. Soon it cleared the curve at Victoria and began to pick up speed to the next station.

“We won’t go home,” she said on impulse. “We’ll go downtown.”

This was a miracle. We were going to travel from one end of the city to the other, and eventually, after lunch, would have forgotten all about Miss Sharif and Miss Badawi and the paean to Arab unity. “Stop worrying so much!” said my mother when I kept asking about what she thought Miss Badawi might tell my father. She turned to her right and named the first station after Victoria, wearing that blithe, high-spirited, girlish smile that could infuriate my father when he was reporting gloomy news; then he’d call her the most irresponsible, selfish optimist he knew, because she refused to put on his frown and worry.

“This is Laurens,” she said, pointing to the next station, whose platform at that hour was silent and deserted. And before I knew it, she named all of the stations on the Victoria line, a litany of French, Greek, German, Arabic, and English names that are forever braided in my mind with the image of my mother riding up on the impériale, wearing sunglasses, her colored scarf and dark hair flying about her face against the backdrop of the sea, smoking a cigarette and trying as hard as she could to divert my mind from my worries at school. I would never forget their names: Sarwat, San Stefano, Zizinia, Mazloum, Glymenopoulo, Saba Pasha, Bulkley, Rouchdy, Moustafa Pasha, Sidi Gaber, Cleopatra, Sporting, Ibrahimieh, Camp de César, Chatby, Mazarita, Ramleh.

Nearing Rouchdy, I saw row upon row of ancient villas with large trees and gardens, some even with fountains. As the tram swerved and tilted to the left, I suddenly knew I had spotted the Montefeltro home. It, too, like so many others, had been converted into an Arab public school. Loud girls wearing khaki smocks swarmed about the garden. When I mentioned Signor Ugo to my mother, she said he had become a history teacher at the Lycée Saint Marc.

“We’ll go to the movies,” she said.

After Ramadan that year, my father decided to hire an Arabic tutor: Sheikh Abdel Naguib. All I remember was his extraordinarily smelly feet and his calloused hand resting on my thigh when he corrected my pronunciation of the Koran. He taught nothing but the Koran, and all he did each time was have me memorize one or two sections, or suras, though without ever bothering to explain them to me. My assignment was to copy suras many, many times every day.

Compared to Arabic class, nothing could have been more soothing than spending hours at my desk copying the same sura ten, twenty, thirty times while the April sun lingered on my notebook and cast a silent, peaceful spell in my room, gracing the wall, the books, my desk, my hand, and my copy of the Koran like a premonition of intense summer midday light, warm sea weather, and beach-house fellowship.

An old Matisse reproduction in my room beamed and beckoned in the morning light, and between the balusters lining the artist’s balcony in Nice were patches of blue—as always, the sea.

From Abdou’s kitchen came the scent of lime, melons, and overripe cucumber. Any day now, they’d pack everything, throw bedsheets over all the furniture, and off we’d go to our beach house at Mandara. “Lazem bahr,” Abdou had said, “we need the beach.” Ramadan always started one thinking of summer.

I worked away quietly, studiously, filled with the vacuous bliss of medieval scribes who put in a long day’s work at their desk without ever reading or understanding a word of what they’ve copied all day.

But Sheikh Abdel Naguib was not pleased at all. I had missed an entire verse each of the thirty times I had copied the same sura. “But couldn’t you tell the sura made no sense if you omitted this verse?” he asked, raising his voice, to which I would quietly, and respectfully, admit that I couldn’t, because, as was clear to everyone who knew me, I was totally incapable of understanding anything I was reading in Arabic unless it was explained to me first.

Sheikh Abdel Naguib doubled my homework during summer vacation at Mandara by having me copy each sura sixty times. On average, this would take an hour, especially if I calculated the number of lines needed for each sura and began copying the first word sixty times, then next to it the second word sixty times, then the third word sixty times, and so on. Madame Marie, who didn’t know whether my method for recopying the same sura was particularly edifying, would once in a while come into my room and observe my progress, and almost worry, “You’re working very, very hard.”

In the distance, I could make out the drone of the old Bedouin bagpipe player who would appear at around three as he trundled barefoot on the burning sandy roads of Mandara. Everyone referred to him as “the poor devil,” because he continued to wear the shredded remnants of his old British band uniform. After him came the beggar-and-baboon show. And after that, the garbagewoman, al zabbalah—or, in pidgin French, la zibalière—carrying a huge, stinking burlap bag filled with food that had been rotting for days in the heat, knocking at our door every afternoon asking for a glass of water as she stood outside, almost panting from the heat, saying, “Allah yisallimak, ya Abdou, may God save you, Abdou.”

After her knock came the call of the bread-and-biscuit vendor, and the ice cream vendor after him, and then noises made by neighborhood boys who would start to gather not far from our house, saying things I did not quite catch, until, roused from my stupor and straining an ear again, I would realize they were my friends about to head into the sandy hinterland to engage in yet another kite fight. They were tying used razor blades onto the kite’s head and tail.

The Greeks of Mandara had by far the best kites and always won. These were boys from a local Greek orphanage whose two giant kites, named the Paralus and the Salaminia, reigned over the skies each summer. As our kite bore toward them, the Paralus and Salaminia would at first refuse to engage, hissing it away like lazy cobras, ordering it back with a graceful, peremptory swerve and nod of their heads. But once it got close, without warning, first one and then the other came swooping down, tearing through it in two successive strikes without even getting tangled, until our stunned and helpless kite lurched awhile and then came plummeting down in a straight descent, crashing onto the sand as everyone scattered for fear of the blades. Two older Greeks would monitor the events from afar, yelling instructions as the fighting got rougher, while their boys chanted and clapped their hands, watching the Paralus and the Salaminia close in on their next target, this time without provocation.

In the back of my mind all through my scribal exercises were images of the Salaminia plunging from above as soon as it caught sight of our poor, unnamed victim and gashing it to pieces with its pointed rostrum. My mind would drift to other things as I kept copying, word after word after word. Then, all of a sudden, in the distance, I made out the victorious chant of the Greek orphans. The Salaminia had won again.

The boys were waiting on the dunes for me to finish copying my suras. Momo (Maurice-Shlomo) Carmona was crying. “They cheated,” he cursed. Someone was holding the skeletal remains of our fallen Icarus: scraps of sliced bamboo cane and torn white canvas made in my father’s factory. Even our parents were sorry for us. “You are wasting too much time,” said my father.

The next year at VC was no better than the first. By the second month it became obvious I was failing every subject, including art.

One morning Madame Marie warned me that my father had received a telephone call from Miss Gilbertson expressing renewed concern over my work. My father wanted to speak to me, she said. I could hear his vigorous puffing as Monsieur Politi counted indefatigable one-and-two’s in his thickly accented Judeo-Arab French. My mother had awakened earlier than usual and was wearing a green bathrobe; her jet-black hair, still wet from the shower, was hastily combed back. She was cutting my croissant into little slices, and was particularly solicitous of me during breakfast.

Abdou looked at me almost ruefully. “Shid haylak,” he whispered as my father walked into the room. “Courage.”

“Well?” asked my father.

I said nothing. I hated vague preambles to what was clearly going to escalate into a bitter scolding. Mother sat with her arms crossed, looking down, as though she herself was about to be chided. I stared at her, almost imploring her to smile, or at least return my gaze.

“Leave us,” said my father to Madame Marie. “You too,” he told my mother after Madame Marie stood up. Madame Marie waited at the door for my mother to join her.

“No, I’ll stay,” she insisted, trying to contain her anger while dismissing Madame Marie.

“Always, always meddling,” he started. “It’s between him and me, him and me.”

“And I’m his mother. And that shit of an Englishwoman could just as easily have called me instead of you, me instead of you!”

“And spoken through whom? Abdou?” asked my father, ironically. “And don’t call her a shit in front of the boy.”

“Just get on with what you have to say to him. Can’t you see you’re upsetting him by keeping him waiting?”

“Then let me tell you what I’ve decided,” he said, turning to me. “I’ve already spoken about it to Miss Gilbertson,” he continued, meaning to emphasize this fait accompli, “and she agrees it would be an excellent idea for you to move into her home and live with her as a boarder for a while.”

It came as the most terrifying threat in my life. I could think of nothing else for the rest of the day, for the rest of the week, the rest of the school year. The prospect haunted me like an evil spirit, insinuating itself everywhere, undoing every joy.

“I’m sorry, but this is crazy!” exclaimed my mother.

“Crazy yourself!”

“And you’re a monster.”

At some point during breakfast, once my father had collected himself, he managed to explain his plan with kindness and something verging on apology in his voice. My study habits, my command of English, my work in Arabic, my discipline, even my bearing—everything had degenerated. Something drastic was needed. Since going to a boarding school in England was precluded—Jews were allowed neither to send money abroad nor come back to Egypt once they had exited the country—the choice was either to hire a tutor or to send me to a local boarding school. We had already tried the first. As for boarding school, my father had his doubts; he imagined such places as being full of merrymaking pranksters and nighttime pillow fights, places where no one did any studying at all.

For a fee, however, I could live with Miss Gilbertson. After all, she was not so terrible. She would teach me what all English boys my age knew. She would civilize me out of Abdou’s kitchen and out of my mother’s tempestuous reach.

All I could think of when I imagined Miss Gilbertson’s home was a small, dark bedroom, a pair of striped pajamas, my toothbrush standing next to hers in the bathroom, and old brown furniture in an old brown apartment where all one did was read alone, eat alone, or sit alone at a long brown table in the evening under the scowling vigilance of old Britain. Miss Gilbertson would pry into my secret world and monitor my dreams, my most secret, shameful thoughts with the castigating gaze of a corrections officer and director of conscience. My mother said she would never let it happen, that I needn’t worry. But my grandmother supported the project. Aunt Elsa thought, ‘Why not?’ Madame Salama snickered and guaranteed it never hurt a boy my age to be left alone with a depraved spinster. Her lover, Abdel Hamid, opined that it might have the opposite effect, and Madame Nicole concluded that whatever parents did for their children always proved wrong in the end. Besides, she added, parents had the most deleterious influence on children, so why not separate them, since they were bound to be at war?

Then my father did what he always did in times of stress: he stalled. The idea itself was never abolished; it was simply remanded, suspended, and, like Dreyfus, I was never officially absolved. Even when it became clear that my father himself questioned the wisdom of his project and had more or less given it up, no one dared remind him that he had abandoned it, for fear of encouraging him to think about a matter which had been unofficially dismissed precisely because he believed it was still being thought about. Perhaps, in the end, my father simply tired of the idea.

Monsieur al-Malek, my new tutor, was the next best solution. An Arab Jew, Monsieur al-Malek spoke English, French, and Arabic fluently and was the current headmaster of the École de la Communauté Israelite. He would ring our bell every weekday evening at five, greet everyone in English, including Abdou, whose language he knew better than Abdou himself, and would ask me whether I could kindly show him to my room. There he would open my briefcase, rummage for evidence of mischief or deceit on my part, invariably find it, upbraid me, and proceed to go over my Arabic and arithmetic assignments. “I won’t tell your father,” he would say at some point in every tutorial, “but these hours are almost wasted. You’re not applying yourself,” he would add, and, closing his book, would explain by means of examples taken from the lives of his two sons what applying oneself meant.

During tutorial it often happened that I would make out the happy signs that the living room was crowded with guests who had come for tea and drinks. Nothing was more welcome than the muted sound of the doorbell, followed by the rehearsed startled ecstasy of Abdou’s exclamations as he opened the door to Mr. or Mrs. So-and-so and the tap of shoes on the hard wooden floor leading into the living room.

One evening, Monsieur al-Malek dawdled a bit longer than usual before leaving the foyer, and it was there that he ran into my mother who, more out of courtesy than inclination, asked him to join the guests for tea. He resisted, but on being urged once more, consented, and then took off his coat, which he had just put on, gave Aziza his hat, and stood at the entrance to the living room, rubbing his hands as though he had just walked in from the cold. There he was hailed by my father, who liked him even less than my mother did but had a lot of respect for a man who everyone said was a very learned teacher.

My father poured scotch into his glass, threw in a large ice cube, and then asked him whether he wanted it plain or with Vichy water. “Vichy, Vichy,” said Monsieur al-Malek as though he always drank scotch with Vichy water. He sipped it once and said it was excellent. “Johnnie Walker, naturally!” he added. “I can’t stand this man,” whispered Aunt Flora, who was also there among the guests that evening and whose voice was totally drowned out by the sound of traffic rising from the avenue. Mother had kept the balcony windows open that night, and scented drafts from the Smouha plantations and from the jasmine someone had brought blended in with the intimate, stale smell of cigarettes, giving our living room a sensual, luxuriant air.

Suddenly, there was a ring at the door. Abdou was heard shutting the kitchen door leading to the main entrance, and before he had time to proclaim his pleasure, a loud voice thundered, with Abdou finally appearing at the living room door holding a gentleman’s wide-brimmed hat in his hand. Behind him was the gentleman himself, trailed by his wife. “But it’s Ughetto!” shouted my grandmother.

“And Ugo it is,” he said storming into our living room with strides that screamed “Make way.” “For you, for you, and for you. More I couldn’t get,” he said as he distributed presents from his most recent trip abroad. He had brought ten prized Tobler chocolate bars, which the company—including Monsieur al-Malek, my grandmother, Madame Marie, and Abdou—devoured on the spot. Signor Ugo had also brought my mother an immense bottle of Crêpe de Chine, for me a child’s Plutarch’s Lives, for my father the latest edition of the Larousse dictionary—things one could no longer buy in Egypt. Our last Larousse dated back six years.

“Ugo, you’re an angel,” said my grandmother as she unpacked and stared at the hand blender he had brought her from France. “This is a miracle.” Everyone sat and admired the small device with its tiny helical blades. They had never seen anything like it. “How does it work?” asked Madame Salama. “I’ll show you right now,” said Signor Ugo’s wife. Almost the entire living room marched to the kitchen to watch my grandmother whip up one-minute mayonnaise. A whir was heard in the kitchen, and sixty seconds later my grandmother, followed by a retinue of exultant ladies, returned victorious, brandishing a large glass containing a yellowish paste which she held out in her right hand as the Statue of Liberty holds out her beacon. Everyone wanted to try.

As they filtered back into the living room, Signor Ugo called out to my grandmother in Italian. “Sit next to me, you old witch,” he said, “I want to feel young again.” Everyone started to laugh, including my grandmother, who had been very quiet that evening, because earlier on, while waiting downstairs for Abdou to help her into the elevator, she had run into Madame Sarpi, who had accidentally knocked her onto the marble floor, and then, to make matters worse, fallen on top of her. “Ugo, be quiet, my legs are killing me.”

“Amputate, darling, amputate!” Which inspired him to tell a bawdy joke about a very well-endowed idiot who, in order to sneak his way into a harem disguised as a eunuch, had said, “Amputate, amigo, amputate.”

His wife implored him not to tell the joke, but tell it he did, and with gusto, especially when the moment came for the punchline. “Ugo, you’re disgusting,” she said, slapping him on the shoulder. “I burn for you, darling,” he replied, “Ardo, ardo,” he added, preparing to bite her.

“Ugo, wherever you go you bring joy,” said my grandmother. “Now tell us what to do. We’re so worried about the boy. His Arabic teachers hit him all the time, and now he won’t study for school at all.”

I pretended not to listen and continued speaking with Aunt Flora.

My mother was quiet. Abdel Hamid, Madame Salama’s lover, immediately jumped in, insisting that discipline was all that a child should know. “Everyone exaggerates the feelings of children—but parents, too, have feelings,” he added. “Besides, teachers don’t hit without a reason, you know.”

“He never studies,” chimed in Madame Marie.

“That’s not the point, one must understand why,” interjected Monsieur al-Malek, who till then had remained silent to survey the situation before risking a comment. Monsieur Pharès, the painter, brought a bent index finger right next to his nose and, with repeated curved motions, meant to suggest a parrot’s beak, made fun of my hooked nose. “No, that’s not the reason, either,” added Monsieur al-Malek, passing a platter of cakes to Abdel Hamid. Abdel Hamid, who was diabetic, kept staring at the cakes, and then passed them on to Madame Nicole. “The problem is that we never try to get inside a child’s head,” insisted Monsieur al-Malek. “One needs patience. And plenty of psychology.”

“Patience and psychology are very nice words, but it’s gone too far, to say nothing of what they’ll think”—my father meant government informers—“when they see that in this house we totally disparage everything to do with Arabic culture. They already know everything that goes on in this house,” he went on, “so can’t we try to be a bit more inconspicuous and be like everyone else for a change?”

“They are the last people you should worry about,” said Aunt Flora, turning to my father. “It’s him you should think of. They shouldn’t hit him.”

My mother nodded. She said she found the practice barbaric.

“In your place, Henri,” said Monsieur Pharès, “I wouldn’t let anyone hit my son.”

My father said that if what they did to me was called hitting, then what should we call the treatment he had received from the Jesuits when he was a boy.

“What do they hit you with?” asked Abdel Hamid.

“A ruler,” I said.

“A ruler! Fancy that, a ruler!” chuckled Abdel Hamid. “In my time they used a bamboo cane and a whip. Remember the bamboo cane?” he said, turning to my father with almost nostalgic recollection. “We also had Monsieur de Pontchartrain’s walking stick, and Père Antoun’s khartoum—literally a garden hose. You never forgot that!”

Aunt Flora insisted that children stop learning the moment they are threatened with corporal punishment. My father said he was not sure, but that he liked to defer to the judgment of professional pedagogues. My grandmother said that an Arab pedagogue was a contradiction in terms. Madame Nicole suspected they jouissaient each time they spanked little boys.

Still, Madame Salama, Monsieur Pharès, and Madame Sarpi held on to the belief that I should stay at VC and make a special effort to apply myself. Monsieur al-Malek agreed, but advised that I be taken out of the Christian religion class and put in Islam class. What difference would it make which religion I studied, since I was neither a Christian nor a Moslem. In Islam class, at least, I would have the advantage of hearing five more hours of Arabic each week, and hearing the best-written Arabic might help a great deal.

“Could be a wonderful idea,” mused my father.

I was reluctant. I did not want to study the Koran, nor did I want to be the only European in a class of Moslems; certainly I didn’t want to have to take off my shoes during religion class, which is what devout Arabs did.

Meanwhile, my grandmother and Montefeltro were debating opposing views. Signor Ugo reminded my father that since we were Italians, it only made sense that I go to the Don Bosco Italian School of Alexandria. All Italians would eventually have to leave Egypt and settle in Italy—so why not learn the language of Italy? My grandmother thought differently. Perhaps we should hire an Italian tutor twice a week.

“A capital idea too,” said my father.

At this point Monsieur al-Malek plunged into the fray as though he held the definitive key to the riddle. “How long do you plan to stay in Egypt?” he asked my father.

“For as long as they’ll let me. What a question!” replied my father.

“Then the boy needs to know Arabic. It’s that simple!”

But my mother disagreed. “Sooner or later we’ll have to leave. And when we leave, all these years devoted to Arabic will have been wasted. Can’t you see? Let him fail Arabic—and let him fail it every year—but meanwhile let him learn things that matter instead of devoting so much time to these disgusting poems where all they teach him is to hate Jews.”

Signor Ugo looked grave. He had started to tell my father how he had seen Dr. Katz at the Muhafza—the municipal headquarters—only a few months earlier. Everyone had read about the famed doctor’s imprisonment on spying charges; his name was brought up at least once a day in class. “It’s worse than in ’58. They can arrest anyone now. They throw you in jail on the most trumped-up charges. They picked me up at my tailor, took me to the Muhafza, stripped me naked, and before I knew it, they had brought in this huge Doberman drooling right in front of my thing there and began questioning me. He can tell when you lie, they warned, tugging at the leash. I was terrified. Things are very bad,” he said, his face clouding the more he spoke.

“They tortured Katz,” said his wife. “Ugo was lucky.”

“Didn’t they know you were Jewish too, though?” asked my father.

“But—but don’t you know, then?” asked Signora da Montefeltro.

“Don’t know what?” asked my father.

“They don’t know!” she said, turning to her husband. “You’ve got to tell them, Ugo.”

“It’s nothing. It’s just that last month we got baptized. Supposedly a precautionary measure, which will end up making no difference in the end, but it was my friend Father Papanastasiou’s idea, and he insisted.”

“And what did you convert to?”

“Father Papanastasiou is Greek Orthodox, so we converted to Greek Orthodoxy. What am I going to do, choose between one form of Christianity and another?”

Our jaws must have dropped.

“Come, come, you Sephardi are no strangers to this, so don’t look so shocked.”

“It’s not that I’m shocked, it’s that your Greek is so awful,” said my grandmother. “You could at least have chosen a more plausible religion.”

“Please! I’ve had enough headaches about it already. If you want a word of advice, I’ll arrange for you to speak to Father Papanastasiou yourself. He’ll make Christians of everyone here—you, Monsieur Abdel Hamid, Henri, Abdou the cook.”

Madame Nicole couldn’t help laughing. My father, sitting next to her, leaned over and smiled something under his breath. She tried to suppress her laughter.

Mimi, who had been sitting almost too quietly next to her mother, wearing her mother’s tight clothes so as to look older and more flashy, suddenly got up, put a handkerchief to her face, and rushed out of the room, breaking into loud sobs in the kitchen. Her mother got up and rushed after her.

“What happened? What’s the matter with her?” asked my grandmother.

“Mimi è una civetta,” sang Signor Ugo—“Mimi is a flirt.”

“She’s crying. That’s what’s the matter,” retorted Madame Sarpi, who was a close friend of Madame Salama.

“But why?” asked Abdel Hamid.

“Because she’s crying,” answered Madame Salama, who had just overheard Abdel Hamid’s question and was returning to the living room. “Mimi’s gone home,” she said indicating the kitchen door. A moment of silence followed. “She calls me at the office, you know,” said my father. “I know,” answered the mother, “just be patient with her, it’s all I ask. It’ll pass.”

My mother turned to Madame Salama. “What’s the matter with Mimi?” she asked.

“The usual,” answered her neighbor.

“Still?”

Madame Salama nodded.

There was another ring and Abdou announced that Kassem and Hassan were at the door.

Kassem and Hassan were mechanics at my father’s factory. They were wearing what looked like gray Sunday suits, not their usual overalls. They were in obvious distress.

Kassem, the younger of the two, was holding a clear plastic box tied with a red ribbon. When he saw my mother step out of the living room, he walked up, greeted her, and gave her the box. “From the two of us.” Hassan, who had stayed back a few steps, was smiling at her. To their thinking, this was a very European gift, and my mother later said they must have spent a lot on it.

She was immediately delighted when she opened the box and produced a silver rose made of gleaming silk. She thanked them and, just to show them, pinned it to her dress right then and there. Abdou brought out two uncapped bottles of Coca-Cola for the visitors. They exchanged news about the barracks. Abdou’s son and Hassan’s brother were in the same regiment.

My father greeted the two mechanics heartily and invited them into the living room. Awkwardly, they entered the room with their bottles in their hands and, not knowing where to sit, proceeded directly to an empty sofa next to the balcony where they sat side by side. Kassem, encouraged by my father, handed Hassan his bottle and began to unroll a very large sheet of tracing paper on which was drawn the model of a strange engine. My father took it to the light, studied it attentively, and declared that this time he liked it.

“You’ll never guess what these gentlemen here have done,” he told everyone in the room. “They’ve taken the boiler of a sunken World War Two German freighter, reinforced it, and installed it at my factory.”

“Why, is your factory sailing away?” joked Signor Ugo, who knew that his joke was a thorny one, for it was common knowledge that the Egyptian government planned to nationalize more businesses and factories that year.

The two Egyptians spoke no French but understood that my father had just complimented them. He then offered them a drink. They were very reluctant and pointed to the Coca-Cola bottles, but yielded in the end. Kassem accepted a cigarette from Madame Salama and held it, Egyptian style, between his pinky and ring finger. They were discussing the famous Egyptian singer Om Kalthum, whom both idolized. Madama Salama offered Hassan a cigarette too, but he declined with the uncomfortable look of people who turn down a dish not because they do not want it, but because they are embarrassed to eat it in front of strangers. “I apologize but I can’t stay,” Kassem then said. No sooner had Kassem spoken than Hassan took his cue and stood up as well. “My wife is expecting me,” explained the older of the mechanics. “Wives!” joked Madame Salama in Arabic. “And yet, without wives where would you men be?” My father walked them to the foyer. “Mark my words, you will be rich one day.” “May God hear you!” replied Kassem.

Only then did I realize who Kassem was. Latifa’s son.

A short while later, Madame Nicole suddenly remembered she had to leave. “Already?” asked my grandmother. “Unfortunately, yes.” “And where to at this hour?” asked Madame Salama. “My seamstress.” “I see. Your seamstress,” echoed her upstairs neighbor. “My seamstress,” smiled Madame Nicole with something of a sigh in her voice, as though to imply that we all had our crosses to bear, and hers was passion. “Ach, Madame Nicole—” said my grandmother. “Bonsoir tous,” said Madame Nicole curtly, picking up her keys and cigarette case from the tea table. “She’s right, the poor woman,” added my grandmother once Madame Nicole had left the room. “Beautiful as she is, and with a husband like hers—”

My grandmother had once heard Madame Nicole trying to escape her husband’s blows, screaming, “Arrête, arrête, salaud,” while he yelled, “Bint al-sharmuta, you whore’s daughter,” both of them going at each other on the metal staircase like a pot banging at a frying pan. “But she hits him too, don’t you worry,” my grandmother went on.

My father walked Madame Nicole to the door. Then, as soon as she was gone, he said he would have to leave to meet a client.

“At this hour of the night?” asked my mother.

“I’ll be back in no time.”

“And leave me alone with all of these people whom I hardly understand? Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”

“It can’t.” Another heavy silence.

“Look, I don’t have the time to argue, but if you want, come with me and see for yourself.”

Defeated, my mother said she would stay home.

“Where is he going?” asked Signor Ugo as soon as he saw my father put on his raincoat.

“I don’t know,” said my mother. I heard Madame Salama say something about patience and fortitude. My mother said she would rather throw herself from the window than go on living like this.

Whenever Mother threatened to throw herself from the window, I always made certain to watch each time she came near one. In bed at night, I would strain an ear and follow her movements around the house. Sometimes I would get out of bed, tiptoe across the corridor, and, from behind the curtain, spy on her as she read a novel on the sofa, or had coffee by herself on the veranda overlooking the smoky fields of Smouha, or sat next to a salesman—a jeweler, or one of the various antiques dealers who came to display their wares in the evening. Sometimes, coming out of bed at night, I would catch her dialing the telephone in secret, alone in the living room, holding the handset in one hand, cupping the mouthpiece with the other, not uttering a sound. I knew she was trying to find my father. But then, sometimes, I heard nothing at all—and I knew then that she had either thrown herself off the living room balcony or gone to visit Madame Salama next door through the service entrance. On this night all the windows in our apartment were neatly closed. Mother had scrupulously placed her leather bookmark in her novel and turned off all the lights except for those in the pantry, for her late-night return from Madame Salama’s. Her bedroom light was on, as always—to let government spies think everyone was at home.

Months later we took Signor Ugo up on his offer and, early one Friday morning, my father and I put on suits and went to pick him up at his pension on Rue Djabarti. He was late, so we got out and waited downstairs on the empty sidewalk. It was one of those translucently quiet early spring mornings in Alexandria when the shops were still closed and the city patiently, almost lazily, awaited morning prayers. A smell of ful, the national bean breakfast, permeated the air. Both of us were hungry. Signor Ugo would probably be outraged if he caught us eating such a poor man’s meal. “And it’s always so messy,” said my father as we decided to give up the thought. Through the pension’s open door came another smell: of coffee and loucoumades, fried dough steeped in honey. “We’ll have to eat something along the way,” said my father.

Signor Ugo was wearing a shimmering silk tie such as he alone seemed to possess; my father later said that only wealthy men of a certain age wore such ties. He also wore a Borsalino hat, a scrupulously pressed tweed jacket, and sparkling goldbuckled shoes. “Aha, so you’re here already,” he said by way of greeting us. “Paulette cannot come. This weather always gives her headaches. Typical Alexandrian: loves the sun, but loves it in the shade.”

“It’s off the Corniche, not far behind Mandara,” said Signor Ugo as he sat down in the front seat and pulled out a pack of Elmas. He tapped his cigarette very lightly on the back of the white pack where, as usual, something had already been scribbled in royal-blue ink.

The Corniche at eight o’clock on this cloudless Friday morning was empty of traffic, and we raced past familiar sights on our way to Mandara, a cool wind fanning through Signor Ugo’s rolled-down window. We passed Sidi Bishr, the largest beach before Mandara, where no signs of summer life had sprung up yet. The beaches were deserted, the billboards along the coast road bore last year’s posters, and none of the small summer shops and stalls that cropped up everywhere during the season were anywhere in sight along the shuttered, unpainted rows of cabins lining the beachfront. Restaurants had not removed last year’s hassiras—bamboo thatches that protected patrons and beachgoers when tables were put out on the sidewalk. Some of the hassiras had mildewed and fallen to the ground and lay flat in the middle of the streets; others hung from wooden rafters, with their ends sweeping the sidewalk, flapping against the wind like trapped kites at the end of summer.

As we neared Mandara, the unpaved road lay covered with caked and hardened sand. A recent hamsin had left sweeps of sand everywhere. Even al-Nunu’s Coca-Cola shack lay almost buried, the sand filling the grooves of the corrugated tin sheets that made up the four walls of his summer home. Another shack, not far from his, had caved in under the weight of the sand.

Signor Ugo told my father to make a right turn, and then another that led up a very steep hill. A turbaned Bedouin with two daughters wearing nose rings emerged from a small hut to watch our car spin its way up the sandy path. “You can see the monastery across the tracks.” In front of us was a rather large and dilapidated villa whose surrounding walls were lined with spikes and barbed wire. As we pulled up, another Bedouin opened a large gate and my father continued uphill until we reached a level pebbled roadway leading through a meticulously well-kept arbor flanked by manicured fields and flower beds. We finally stopped before what looked like an old, run-down chapel. As soon as we got out, the smell was unmistakable: we were in the middle of the desert, and yet, from this cold promontory, we could see the familiar beaches of Mandara and Montaza extending for dark-blue miles toward the deep, with short white lines streaking the immediate shoreline.

“Vré pezevenk!” shouted a tall, bearded man as soon as he saw Signor Ugo getting out of the car—“You pimp!” He had been supervising a gardener working a plot of flowers. He began to walk toward us with a pair of hedge shears and a broad smile, rubbing the dirt from his fingers with a rag. “Pezevenk kai essi!” Signor Ugo retorted in half-Turkish, half-Greek—“Pederast yourself!” They shook hands heartily, as the tall, bearded Greek brought the shears close to Signor Ugo’s groin and pretended to make small cutting motions. Then, turning to my father and me, “What, more conversos?” he said jokingly, greeting us with his broad smile well before Signor Ugo introduced us. “Conversos of my stamp, if you understand,” he added. “I understand, I understand,” said Father Papanastasiou. “Communion on Sundays, but Fridays the Shema. In other words, an alborayco, a halfbreed. A pezevenk,” said the Greek priest. “Precisely!” snickered Signor Ugo. “With you Jews nothing is ever clear,” the Greek continued. “Come, have some lemonade.” Then, turning to my father, he explained that their friendship went a long way back, “since before the war.” I didn’t ask which one. He explained that alborayco came from al-Burak, Mohammed’s steed, which was neither horse, nor mule, male nor female. “Poor Jews, you’re citizens nowhere and traitors everywhere, even to yourselves. And don’t make that face, Ugo, your own prophets said it, not me.”

The first thing Father Papanastasiou said once we moved into his study was, “I am not like the others.” My father nodded as though to confirm that this had been obvious from the very start. “And do you know why?” A long pause followed, almost as if he expected an answer from us. “I will tell you why. They are priests first, and men last. But do you know what I am?” Again a long pause. Should one say yes or no? I looked at the room, cluttered with what must have been hundreds of icons and old books. A rancid odor of incense filled the air. It was even on my hands and in the glass of lemonade he had offered me. “I will tell you what I am: I am a man first,” he said, raising his thumb, which he jiggled a bit, “then I’m a soldier,” raising his index finger as well, “and then a priest,” raising his middle finger. “Ask anyone. Him too. These hands,” he said, producing a pair of colossal fists that would have intimidated Peter the Great, Rasputin, and Ivan the Terrible, and could easily have crushed the keyboard of the old Royal typewriter sitting on his desk, “these hands have touched everything and they have done everything—do you know what I mean?” he said, turning to me and staring with such intensity that I whispered, “Yes, I do.” “No, you don’t,” he snapped, “and, God willing, you never shall or you’ll have me to answer to. And frankly I don’t know which is worse, God or me.”

“Vassily, stop your confounded nonsense, and let’s get on with it,” interrupted Signor Ugo.

“But I was just chatting,” he protested.

“You’ve got the boy trembling all over as if he saw Satan himself—you call that chatting?”

“Chatting. What else?”

“Vassily, sometimes you speak and act no better than a Greek shepherd from Anatolia. And do you know what?” said Signor Ugo, turning to my father and pointing to the typewriter. “This fellow here is a world authority on Fayum.”

My father immediately concluded that the burly priest must be a specialist in disease control, especially since Fayum was known for its contaminated waters. He started to say he had heard that many peasants were dying of something uncannily reminiscent of cholera. Did Father Papanastasiou think cholera might soon strike in Egypt then?

“And if it did, would I care?” growled the latter.

“Not the Fayum of today,” Signor Ugo broke in. “He’s a specialist in the early Christian portraiture from Fayum. He looks at these portraits and in a second can tell you whether they’re authentic or not. He teaches the poor orphans here how to paint nothing else.”

“Speaking of orphans,” said my father, “I have brought something in my car for the boys. Can someone give me a hand unloading it?”

“A hand? And what do you call these?” said the priest raising his voice, displaying two outstretched palms, each as big as the Peloponnese.

We stepped out of the study and my father held open the trunk while Father Papanastasiou unloaded three cardboard boxes. Two young Greeks wearing blue jeans came to get more boxes from the backseat. “What are they?” asked Father Papanastasiou. “Knitted summer shirts for the boys. Mercerized cotton—here, feel,” said Signor Ugo, handing over one of the shirts to the priest. The priest unfolded and examined it. “But this costs a fortune,” he said, almost protesting as he crinkled part of the shirt in his fist, the better to appreciate its velvety sheen. “Vassily, say thank you,” said Signor Ugo. “Thank you.” My father said it was nothing. “When the boys come back this afternoon, we will give them the new shirts. They need Easter presents, the poor bastards.” As they heaped the cardboard boxes in the entrance, I thought it strange that my father had never given me a shirt like that. “I can get you hundreds of them,” he said later in the car, after we had dropped off Signor Ugo at his pension.

“We need to discuss a few things,” my father said to me while staring at the priest. “Do you want to wait in the car?”

I said I would stay in the garden. The three men walked back into the study.

I stood by myself, realizing I was the only one present on the church grounds. The two young men who had helped unload the boxes could be seen making their hasty way downhill, sliding and skipping in the sand, their shoes almost sinking with each step, finally disappearing behind a stretch of palm trees. Then, not a sound, not even the wind, nor the ravens. It was as quiet as it gets in the desert—the silence of the ancient Greek necropolis in Alexandria, or the clear, beach-day silence of early Sunday mornings in the city.

I looked around and couldn’t understand why anyone would bother maintaining such a beautiful garden when the buildings were so utterly run-down. The monastery had probably been a private estate donated to the poor by a wealthy Greek family.

I walked to the edge of the grounds, where a broken-down pergola overlooking the sea created what might once have been a snug little corner for reading or contemplating the water that stretched out to the farthest reaches of Sidi Bishr. To the left, a shanty, mud-hut Arab hamlet hid quietly behind rows of drying laundry. Large birds, hawks probably, descended to feed on a rock nearby.

I looked through one of the windows into the chapel and thought I saw a classroom. There were maps against the wall, children’s drawings, icons, and a picture of Pericles. I walked through a narrow corridor leading into what must have been a very old stable that had long ago been converted into a workshop. Beyond the workshop was another plot of land, this one totally fenced in by giant sunflowers which turned their ghoulish eyes on me and watched my every step as I moved about cautiously. All of a sudden I was seized by the uncomfortable feeling that someone was gazing at me from behind. I instantly turned around.

And then I saw them. Leaning against the stable wall, like two giant overturned umbrellas, with their ribbing exposed and their supple bamboo keels glistening yellow, twice my height and taller still than I could ever have imagined them —because no matter how close I got to them in the past I had always watched them from afar—were the Paralus and the Salaminia, each with its giant tail coiled many times over on the workshop floor like a huge intestine crammed into a tiny abdomen. The kites looked totally stripped, like unfinished rowboats, vulnerable to my searching gaze. The builders had discarded last year’s cellophane cover sheets and were about to glue new ones. I moved closer to feel the ribs, but with caution, remembering that bamboo cuts worse than glass. Only then did I discover the ramming spikes that could tear other kites to pieces. Unlike ours, these were not discarded razor blades attached to the body of the kite; instead they were sharpened bamboo extensions of the kite’s very skeleton—the difference, as Momo explained to me later, between an old lady wearing dentures and the bite of a strong male wolf.

Momo would never forgive me. All I would have had to do was take out my penknife and cut the bamboo. We would rule the skies that summer. For a moment, I felt like a Phoenician spy sneaking into an empty Greek shipyard, determined to wreak as much damage to the enemy as possible, only to lose his nerve upon beholding the Paralus and the Salaminia, the pride of the Athenian fleet, sitting majestically on opposite docks awaiting minor repairs.

I walked out of the building and heard my father calling me.

Throughout the silent ride back home, one thought kept galling me: Madame Marie would become so unbearably vain when she found out that we were planning to convert to her religion. Signor Ugo said he had to go to church almost every Sunday. Madame Marie would love nothing more.

But that evening, after depositing Signor Ugo, my father stopped the car in front of our building at Cleopatra, looked at me awhile before letting me out, and said, “Don’t worry, I don’t think we’ll be doing anything with our Greek priest. I couldn’t stand facing him every week. Still, I want to think about all this some more,” he added, as though he planned to do so as soon as we had said goodbye. Then, almost as an afterthought, he said it might be easier to convert to Protestantism. “At any rate, there’s no real rush,” he added, as I shut the door and watched him drive away, knowing I wouldn’t see him before breakfast.

As in previous years, Easter and Passover coincided with Ramadan. But this year the atmosphere was grim, and there were no arguments between Abdou and Madame Marie, and no one complained about my manners. My great-grandmother had had an accident after our small family seder at Sporting. She had woken in the middle of the night and reached for her ginger cookies in the drawer of her bedside table, only to find them missing. Aunt Elsa had removed them, knowing that her mother would not want to eat leavened biscuits during Passover. But the old woman had forgotten about matzoh, and, not finding her favorite snack in its usual place, got out of bed, and on her way to the kitchen tripped on an old stool. She immediately started to bleed from the head, and Uncle Nessim, Aunt Elsa, and my grandmother made several attempts to staunch the flow. One of them put ground coffee on the wound. Dr. Zakour, the new family doctor, was called, and he did what he could, but the old woman never regained consciousness. They had not even called an ambulance.

Later that morning, with everyone milling outside her bedroom, Uncle Nessim finally opened the glass door and closed it behind him, saying, “She’s left us.” Soon after, they covered her up in a shroud, and in a matter of hours she was gone. Madame Marie complained that this wasn’t how it was done among Christians, that Christians doted on you awhile before taking you away. Then she remembered she owed the aguzah, the old one, three pounds. To ward off misfortune, she immediately went downstairs, purchased three loaves of sugared bread, and on her way from the bakery gave them to the first three beggars she found.

We spent a rainy afternoon in the smaller living room. No one cried, no one even said they remembered this or that about her. Abdou came in to ask for the afternoon off, and then someone suggested that the best thing for us was to go to the movies, which we did, all seven of us, including Madame Marie.

Three days afterward, Madame Marie was taken to the hospital to have her gallbladder removed. When she returned weeks later, she had lost a lot of weight, looked old, and complained of eczema on both hands. She watched me eat lunch, asked how I was faring at school, and said she was disappointed to hear that, instead of studying normal religion, I was now in Islam class, as Monsieur al-Malek had recommended. “Have you become Moslem?” she asked. I shook my head. “But what did you tell them when they asked why you wanted to study the Koran?” I said that I had told them my family was thinking of converting to Islam. When I finished my lunch, Madame Marie did not stand up to clear my dishes, as was her habit. Nor did she say anything about washing my hands. Nor did she urge me to begin doing my homework or avoid going into the kitchen to speak to the other servants. She promised to take me to St. Katherine’s one day. Then she drank her coffee, thanked Abdou, and left.

A week later, after Madame Marie called to apologize, saying she had found less strenuous, part-time work in a Greek home for the elderly, my parents decided to hire a governess named Roxane, a Persian girl who had studied dance in Spain and who, through a series of misadventures, had landed in Alexandria living with a British journalist who wrote for one of the domestic English-language newspapers. She was young, sprightly, dark-haired, extraordinarily beautiful, and, unlike Madame Marie, who sat in the shade with other nannies while I went bathing in the sea, would hop in and swim faster than anyone. When she came out of the water, she would run to our umbrella and almost bury herself in her towel, with only part of her face and goose-pimpled legs showing. Then she combed her long hennaed hair and lit a cigarette. Her skin beamed in the sunlight, and in the evening at Mandara she would sit on the veranda with my parents, wearing a dark-blue summer frock with white polka dots, the odor of suntan lotion still on her skin as she waited for Joey to come pick her up in his Anglia. She took few things seriously, and everything she said or heard you say seemed to have an unintended edge which never failed to amuse her and which often made me think that I was far more clever than I had ever imagined—which, in my own heady way, was exactly what I needed in order to be frank with someone who seemed to understand not only who I was but who I always wanted to be.

Roxane broke all bounds, came late, took off, and yet offended no one, and with her unflagging mirth and good cheer managed to make me do things and eat things I would never have thought possible. When she was at home I no longer hung out in the kitchen, and when she told me that her brother was called Darius and her father Cambyses, I knew that life could rise above the ordinary and become legendary. In the morning she greeted me with a wily smile, which always made it seem we had said things we were agreed never to repeat to anyone. In the evening we would read Plutarch together. And at night she insisted on reading me a few verses by Hafiz, to ensure a good day on the morrow. She would read the verses in Persian first, translate the meaning, give an interpretation that was invariably farfetched but happy, and then kiss me good night.

The one who fell for her hardest was Signor Dall’Abaco, my Italian tutor, a former aspiring diplomat who had escaped his native Siena during Mussolini’s regime and whom Signor Ugo had dug up for us from the Alexandrian private-lessons circuit, saying the Sienese gentleman spoke the best Italian there was. Signor Dall’Abaco had read every book as well as every magazine. He would borrow magazines from the main Italian bookstore in the city and return them in perfect condition after having read them up and down the tramway line on his way to his various private pupils. Like Monsieur al-Malek, whose displeasure he did not wish to incur and around whose hours he was compelled to work his schedule, he enjoyed tea and cocktails after tutorial, always managing to have himself invited into the living room, because he loved company and because his lonely bachelor’s life gave him so little opportunity to talk about the two things he loved most: literature and opera. He arrived that April and remained my tutor for five years.

When Signor Dall’Abaco began teaching me Dante, he was particularly gratified when my father knocked at the dining room door to ask if he might sit at the end of the table and listen in. Uninvited, Roxane would do the same. Her presence when he spoke about Farinata, Count Ugolino, and Ser Brunetto, or when he told the story of Paolo and Francesca, must have sent his old Sienese blue blood coursing through his veins, for the Persian girl, who could speak Italian only by corrupting her Spanish, seemed to understand the exiled Guelf and the displaced Sienese gentleman as well as she understood Hafiz, Joey, me, and all the men in the world. She understood what it meant to have lost everything and eat salted bread when all your life you’d had the unsalted Tuscan kind. And she understood what it was to rely on others for income, small income.

Tu proverai si come sa di sale
lo pane altrui, e come e duro calle
lo scendere e’l salir per l’altrui scale.

[You will know how salty is the taste
of another’s bread, and how hard the path
to descend and come up another man’s stairs.]

Signor Dall’Abaco was speaking to her, to me, to himself, to Dante.

“If you learn a canto a day,” he would say, “within three months, from now until August, you will know the entire Commedia by heart.” But he may have been speaking to Roxane.

He went on to tell her that when the British had interned all Italian males living in Egypt, he had spent his prison term like Silvio Pellico, the nineteenth-century Italian patriot, memorizing a canto a day. “You, in prison, Signor Dall’Abaco! I cannot picture you behind bars.” The Sienese was moved.

She had said this as we sat in the car on our way to Mandara one Friday morning in early June. Signor Dall’Abaco had come for the day and would later be driven back to the Sidi Bishr station, from where he would take the tram to the city.

As we drove, all of us crammed together with the windows open, Signor Dall’Abaco explained Tosca, and after going over some of the more obvious harmonies, began to sing Cavaradossi’s last aria, and repeated it several times, asking me to sing it, then my friend Cordahi, who had come to stay the night, then—distracted man that he was—my mother, and finally Roxane. Everyone giggled, including Hassan the driver who, to prove he was no fool, sang a few bars himself, unintentionally Arabizing the aria as he sang. Signor Dall’Abaco liked this Middle Eastern touch, and after teaching us the famous choral air from Nabucco, asked Hassan how he would go about singing it. The driver obliged, and there was great mirth in the car, with Roxane mimicking the Egyptian’s treatment of Verdi. Signor Dall’Abaco explained to us the history of the Mohammed Ali Theater in Alexandria and of the big opera house in Cairo, for which the Egyptian khedive had commissioned Aïda. “Verdi came to Egypt?” I exclaimed in total disbelief. “In Egypt and how,” he replied, sounding as patriotic as Miss Sharif.

On our way to Mandara, we came upon my father’s carter, Abou Ali, driving the factory’s carriage on its lopsided wheels. He was headed for Mandara as well, lugging all of our belongings—summer gear, equipment, utensils, toys, even a new ice box, and the giant Grundig that had weathered all of Madame Marie’s sorrows and which my father had replaced with a newer model but never had the heart to part with. Everything was sloppily piled together and swathed in old carter’s cord; the carriage with its cannibalized British tank wheels and its tottering horse, who could hardly canter, looked more like a Gypsy van escaping famine and invaders than a vacation load on its way to a summer home. Hassan waved at the old arbaghi, and Abou Ali waved back with his whip.

Joey was driving his car behind ours, carrying as passengers my grandmother, Aunt Flora, and Uncle Nessim. Aunt Elsa, who was mourning for her mother, had consented to come at the last minute so as not to be left alone at home. But she sulked throughout the trip, thinking, as she never ceased to remind us, that our speeding to Mandara during a period of mourning made us look like avid peasants who had never seen the beach before.

To prove her right, as soon as we arrived, my friend Cordahi and I, along with Roxane and my mother, immediately changed into our bathing suits and were already hastening to go swimming, while Signor Dall’Abaco made himself comfortable on the veranda overlooking the sea, explaining that he had not brought his bathing suit. Perhaps he deliberately tried to look comfortable to discourage us from insisting he go to the beach with us. Or perhaps he felt he had sufficiently overcome his natural shyness by accepting my mother’s lemonade on the veranda and did not wish to pass another test of endurance by complying with complicated beach rituals that were totally foreign to him.

I, however, was only too pleased to practice these rituals— picking up beach paddles exactly where I had left them in September; balancing the weight of the umbrella on my shoulders; finding the same folded beach blanket, sun-tan lotion, or old tennis balls that never seemed to die; remembering to take a second bathing suit in case I wished to change; and packing the old bottle of benzine—and the cotton that went with it—to wipe off the tar which inevitably washed up on the beach and blackened our feet.

The house itself was in full bustle as the servants busily unloaded the cars. Some had arrived the previous evening and had already set up much of the place.

Signor Dall’Abaco’s quiet corner on the veranda seemed the ideal place for a man who was born to stay out of everyone’s way.

I sympathized with his reluctance to go swimming, not just because I had experienced it myself at VC, but because I had seen many of our guests at Mandara, particularly my father’s employees, pretend an irrational fear of the beach when all they were afraid of was us and of getting in our way. Some chose to stay behind while everyone else went swimming simply because they didn’t dare ask us for towels. “Did you have a good swim?” they would ask when we came back from the beach.

My mother told Signor Dall’Abaco he could borrow a bathing suit from a closet filled with suits of all sizes. But he continued to dawdle about the house, whose stuffy and musty air betrayed the closed-up winter months. He even showed an interest in the Spanish furniture and asked whether we ever used the house in the winter. “Sometimes at Christmas,” said my mother.

“Hurry,” Roxane shouted when she caught sight of Joey’s car on the driveway. “We’re going to the beach.”

“You go, I’ll join you later,” he shouted back.

“Allora, Signor Dall’Abaco, are you going to change, yes or no?” asked Roxane.

“All right, but I’m not sure I’ll swim.”

She affected impatience, as though he had been put under her charge as well. Signor Dall’Abaco looked at Joey, who was helping the servants take down the new hassira from the roof rack. He envied the young reporter, probably hated him, and would have given everything to be in his place.

“Maybe the water’s not warm yet—” he had begun to say.

“You must put on a bathing suit,” she insisted, ushering him into one of the bedrooms. The tentative man entered meekly. He waited for me and Cordahi to leave the room and then closed the door behind him, slowly, almost reluctantly, and softly turned the key. We waited almost five minutes. When Roxane knocked at the door urging him to hurry, his nervous voice was heard apologizing, saying that of all the bathing suits he had tried inside, none seemed to fit someone as skinny as he.

When he finally came out he was wearing a suit whose original owner no one remembered but who must have been much thicker and taller than the Italian tutor, for he had rolled the top of the bathing suit several times down his tummy.

Signor Dall’Abaco turned out to be all bones, and his spindly legs didn’t have a speck of hair on them. But what made Roxane burst out laughing was his two big toes, which, without shoes, stood permanently erect. Even my mother noticed them, and, turning to Roxane in front of Signor Dall’Abaco, asked why did he keep his big toes up like that? “I don’t know,” he replied with typical self-derision. “I don’t do it on purpose.” “But don’t you run the risk of falling?” He looked down as though his toes were distant cousins he had always wanted to disclaim. “They don’t bother me,” he said.

We walked to the beach by way of the usual chalky shortcut, and as soon as we crossed the sand we could not wait to jump into the water. Signor Dall’Abaco stood along the shoreline, with his feet in the water and a benign look on his face as he watched us scamper about and dive into the surf. “I told you he wouldn’t swim,” said my mother to Roxane.

And indeed, though he said he loved Mandara, and though he would come two or three times a week in the summer to teach me Dante and De Amicis’ Cuore, spending the rest of the day with us, courting Roxane one year, then Aunt Flora, then my mother, I never saw him swim. In the evening, just after drinks on the veranda with my father and guests from neighboring villas, he would excuse himself and say he had to go back to the city. Usually, someone would drop him off at the Sidi Bishr tramway station, where he caught the night tram to Ramleh, riding second class with his borrowed magazine neatly folded in the left pocket of his imported Italian sport jacket.

After dinner that first evening at Mandara, everyone sat around the dining table with two kerosene lamps lighting the area as we played cards. Aunt Elsa opened a jar of marrons glacés—a rare treat in Alexandria. My grandmother, fearing not enough would be left for the guests, divided one with me; then, seeing there were plenty to go around, divided another, and after that another still. Elsa scolded her, saying that she should either take a whole marron or none at all, but that this habit of cutting things into halves only to eat the same amount in the end was thoroughly distasteful. Uncle Nessim told her to calm herself. Signor Dall’Abaco did not like sweet things. Joey did. He asked Signor Dall’Abaco for his marron and then reached for the jar to stab the last one with his fork. “By all means, ne vous gênez pas, don’t be bashful,” said Aunt Elsa, puckering her lips. Her prized possession was gone in less than five minutes. Joey, who had hung his tweed jacket on the back of his chair, turned around and looked into his pockets, producing two sealed packages of cigarettes: Greys and Craven A’s. “This indeed is a treat,” said my father, who never dared buy anything on the black market. “May I too?” asked Signor Dall’Abaco. “But of course, Signor Dall’Abaco.” “Mario,” corrected Signor Dall’Abaco. “Mario,” repeated the amused Englishman as he downed more scotch. Almost everyone was smoking. Joey offered a cigarette to Abdou, who accepted reluctantly, saying he would smoke it later.

The inevitable subject of school was touched on momentarily. Joey had a colleague, a poet of sorts, whose Greek wife taught at an American school—the best school in the city—and with almost no debate it was agreed that I should go there the following year, VC being no longer viable, especially after what happened the last week of Ramadan.

“As long as there aren’t any repercussions, what your wife did that day was very brave,” said Aunt Flora.

“As long as there aren’t any repercussions,” repeated my father.

“We did worse in our day,” said Aunt Flora, whose years at the conservatory were filled with infractions of all sorts.

“And I was a downright terror,” said Joey, the old pupil from Eton, looking up as he chased an eddy of smoke with his breath. “And, God knows, I’ve done much worse than change into my gym clothes during another class.”

“But this was Islam class,” interrupted my father.

What had happened during Islam class on that particularly warm day in May was that I had secretly taken off my gray trousers and put on white shorts. Then I removed my shirt, without removing my tie. My undershirt. My socks. My watch. Other students had followed suit and were changing as well, except that, out of respect for their religion, they had refrained from putting on their tennis shoes. It was young Tarek who, more out of piety than malice, had alerted Miss Sharif to what had happened. Lifting her eyes from her copy of the Koran, she saw to her amazement a class almost entirely dressed in white. “He’s made them change into their gym clothes,” said Tarek. “Oh, my sister!” she exclaimed, racing toward me and slapping me hard on the head with the book. “Oh, my sister!” she shrieked.

I was summarily hauled off to Miss Badawi’s office.

That evening, when I returned from a soccer game, Roxane noticed bluish stains on the backs of my thighs. Otherwise I would never have told. She tried to brush them off with her palm, then, horrified, ran out and told my mother, who immediately came into my room, asking for an explanation. Roxane’s perturbed face and my tears as I narrated the events of the morning must have moved her to quell her horror, and once I was in the bathtub, she got down on her knees next to Roxane and both women joined in bathing me, so watchful and solicitous with the washcloth that I felt like a soldier having his wounds dressed by two young nuns.

My father was distressed, and all through dinner was trying to decide whether to be furious with the school or with me.

“This time they’ve gone too far,” said my mother.

“No, this time he’s gone too far. He’s insulted their religion, and when he insults their religion we insult their religion, and when we insult their religion, we get arrested, we go to jail, we lose everything and get expelled from Egypt. I don’t need to have my name popping up all the time at the Muhafza. Do you understand now?”

“I don’t want to understand.”

The next morning, as my father was bathing after his exercises, my mother told Monsieur Politi to put on his jacket in a hurry, instructed Abdou to tell the bus driver that I would not be going to school that day, and rushed all of us downstairs, where she ordered Hassan, my father’s driver, to take us to VC. We got there twenty minutes before any of the school buses; the boarders were probably still finishing breakfast. Mother told me to get out of the car. The dumbfounded Politi, his athlete’s chest bulging out of his jacket and looking very much like a gangster’s bodyguard who had forgotten to put on a tie, followed close by.

She led us directly to Miss Badawi’s office, which she remembered from her previous visit. She asked Politi to wait outside. We knocked, were told to wait, and when Miss Badawi finally opened the door, were told by way of greeting that we were not entirely unexpected. Her measured smile conveyed no apology but rather a sense of collected, bureaucratic compassion for the parents of unruly children who are punished for their own good.

My mother, who spoke no English, asked me to tell Miss Badawi that she wished to know what had happened. “You mean yesterday?” she asked. I nodded. Miss Badawi gave a long speech detailing school rules, pacing her explanation to give me time to translate for my mother, all the while staring at me intensely as I tried to convey her version of my guilt to my mother. My mother nodded at each sentence, though I knew I was speaking far too incoherently for her to understand much. As often happened between us, we were going through the motions of communication for the benefit of third parties. At one point, my mother interrupted me, saying, “I know, I understand, tell her I understand,” and then, before I knew what she was doing, she had turned me around and was pointing to the eggplant-colored weals on the back of my legs, touching each one, saying, “Look at this, and this one, and this one here,” with the disparaging manner she would use when unfolding a dress and asking her tailor to take a good look at this blemish, that imperfection, and that stain left behind by his sloppy assistant. Miss Badawi arched her eyebrows like a shopkeeper refusing to take back defective merchandise, alleging that all sales are final.

I had been staring at it for almost five minutes without realizing. It was Miss Badawi’s cane, leaning against a corner behind her chair. So this was the weapon, these the ridges that hurt the most, they looked so harmless. “Yes, but tell your mother we cannot guarantee we will never use the cane on you again. Tell her.” I told my mother they could not guarantee they would never use the cane on me again. I watched Mother nod. Would she back down now? I continued to translate the headmistress’s reiteration of school policies, and then my mother’s subsequent question, until I feared that she would yield.

Suddenly there was a terrible yell. Mother had shrieked at the top of her lungs the way she shrieked at shopowners, servants, and itinerant vendors. The school janitor and gardener had gathered outside on the patio. I watched their faces looking in through the windows. My mother pointed at the cane and said, “Tell her—doesn’t she know this hurts?” I said: “She asked me to ask don’t you know this hurts.” “Of course it hurts,” replied Miss Badawi, slightly put off by my mother’s screams yet wearing the same smile she had when she first opened the door. “We can talk all you want,” her expression said, “but the school won’t apologize.”

It was the smile—the eerie, insolent, pernicious grin with which she once called me “dog of the Arabs” and which had flitted across her face when she asked me whether I wanted the cane wearing my school uniform or my gym clothes—it was this smile that persuaded my mother there was absolutely no hope, that her visit was a lost cause.

Her decision was so sudden that Miss Badawi was still smiling after it happened. “You don’t smile like this with me, not with me,” shouted my mother so loudly that all of VC must have heard her voice that day. More startled than upset, the headmistress brought her palm to her cheek, either in disbelief or to cover the red handprint that was now beginning to blossom there. “But what is this, what is this?” she said in Arabic. My mother picked up the bag she had left on Miss Badawi’s desk and, turning to me, said, “Let’s go.” One of Miss Badawi’s hairpins lay on the floor in front of her door. I pushed it gently with my foot. “I’m reporting you to the Muhafza,” said my mother.

Miss Sharif was standing outside with Miss Gilbertson when we came out of Miss Badawi’s office. As soon as my mother saw Miss Gilbertson, she looked at her directly and said, “Sale putain,” and spit on the ground.

I told her I did not wish to go to my desk or empty my locker. We headed straight to our car, which was waiting for us on the other side of the quadrangle. I never returned to VC again.

We were home in less than twenty minutes, still very shaken by the events of the morning. My father was beside himself when he heard the news. He called my mother names, cursed Hassan and Monsieur Politi, and warned them never to take orders from my mother again. “Anyway, what difference does it make, we’re finished here,” he added.

A few weeks later my father reduced Monsieur al-Malek’s hours. “Children need to rest during the summer,” he explained. However, by equalizing Monsieur al-Malek’s and Signor Dall’Abaco’s hours, he conceded for the first time that Arabic might not be all-important, that we might not stay in Egypt forever.

We never heard from VC about the incident. My report card was disastrous and my grade for Egyptian National Studies, a course taught entirely in Arabic, was—predictably enough —zero. My father, unable to understand how I could have done so poorly, decided to punish me. No movies for the week. Then he forgot and broke his resolution when it rained one evening and there wasn’t anything else to do but head to the movies.

As soon as you awoke at Mandara, the first thing you did was run to the window and see what sort of water you would have that day. Even in bed sometimes you heard the waves from a distance and from their sound already knew the weather. Sometimes the shouting of children from the beaches told you they were catching waves and that therefore the sea was rough that day. But then there were times when you did not hear a sound, not of boys, not of waves, not of vendors, nothing, everything was at a standstill, as though something in the air smothered every sound. And then you knew the water was as smooth as an oil slick—Aunt Flora’s words—not even a ripple.

The house smelled of ground coffee. Roxane was already in the kitchen brewing a small pot, smoking a cigarette. She was wearing her bathing suit. Joey, she said, was still sleeping, everyone was sleeping, none of the servants had arrived. Softly, we opened the door to the veranda, knowing that the view awaiting us, once we lifted the loosely woven curtain, would be nothing short of miraculous. No one was in sight, only a few parked cars with their hoods sparkling in the early morning light, and beyond them—past the sand dunes, and the aged palm trees, and all the villas basking in Sunday silence—the pale-blue sea, glaring in the morning light.

“What a day!” said Roxane. She was walking slowly, careful not to spill any of the coffee in her cup, heading for my grandfather’s small, heavy steel table, which, because of the rust, was painted a different enamel color every summer. When the paint chipped at the corners, you could count the layers like tree rings and see how many years it had been in our family —it too, like so many things here, was far older than I was.

We were about to sit down by the row of balusters overlooking the sea when we suddenly noticed Signor Dall’Abaco on a wicker chair in the corner, with his spindly legs resting on top of the balustrade, tilting back somewhat. “When did you wake up?” asked Roxane. “Hours ago,” he answered, “I came to watch the dawn.”

I had never seen dawn.

“Did you sleep well?” he asked.

“Mmmmmm. Fabulously,” she replied. “Fabulously.” She yawned, stretching her arms.

“I haven’t seen a morning like this in so long I can’t remember the last time.”

Roxane looked out to the sea.

“Is anyone else awake?” she asked.

“No,” answered Signor Dall’Abaco.

She was drinking her coffee very slowly, with her feet resting on the balustrade. “Did you want me to make you a cup of coffee?”

He said he would wait for the others.

We heard a door open. I was dismayed. Others would undoubtedly ruin the spell of the moment.

But the sound had come from the garden. Someone must have opened the gate and was heard crossing the gravel path leading to the veranda. And then I realized who it was. I had totally forgotten the small miracle of mornings here in Mandara: the fig vendor. He was always the first to come; then the iceman; then the vegetable vendor; finally, fruits at about ten.

Roxane picked out two dozen figs and asked him to weigh them. She gave one to each of us. “One,” she said, with an implicit “no more until breakfast.”

But breakfast was an hour or two away. I suggested we go and buy ful. At this time of the morning the ful was bound to be excellent. “Do you know where to buy it?” asked Roxane, who had never been at Mandara before. I nodded. The ful vendor would stop his van on the corner of Rue Mordo by the side of the sand dunes, and people would come with their large pots. Signor Dall’Abaco said he had never tried Mandara’s ful. Then he confessed he had never had ful before. “But you’ve been living here for thirty years, Mario,” she said. “E pazienza,” he replied, meaning, “And what can I do about that now!” We would have to hurry, I said, because the vendor did not wait long at the same corner. The worst thing was following him around his stops and missing him each time.

But I was hasty for another reason. I wanted no one to join us or prevent us from going on our expedition that morning. Signor Dall’Abaco said he had to change first, but I assured him shorts were perfectly respectable, there was no one around at this hour. Roxane put on a shirt whose tails she tied around her waist. She was carrying a cigarette in one hand, and in the other a large empty pot.

I led them to the back garden and into the driveway, where the bees were so loud that the entire arbor sounded like a distant cataract or a big steam engine churning away. Signor Dall’Abaco said he was afraid of bees. I told him they never stung. All one had to do was walk steadily and avoid sudden movements. Both of them believed me.

Signor Dall’Abaco held open the old door to our garden. We seldom used it, though it was said that this had been the only gate to the villa several decades ago. It, too, like so many other gates in Alexandria that no one used any longer, bore an eroded family crest, a doorbell that failed to chime when you swung the door open, and an old Colonial knocker.

Signor Dall’Abaco said these old knockers would be very valuable one day. “One day, when nineteenth-century antiques will be impossible to find in Europe, people will come here from all over the world to buy this knocker,” said Signor Dall’Abaco.

“But it’s worthless,” said Roxane.

“Mark my words. Come back in twenty years, and it’ll be worth its weight in gold.”

“Where is your ful vendor?” Roxane cut in.

“Where is the ful vendor indeed,” echoed Signor Dall’Abaco, who was probably the best disposed person in the world and never minded being interrupted.

We passed by Momo Carmona’s house. It was still boarded up for winter. Had they moved to Europe or were they just late this year? My father said their uncle had lost everything. Perhaps they had too. I remembered Momo would not go to the beach on the day they had nationalized his uncle, nor had he come to the kite fight that afternoon. Hisham had been reading aloud from a newspaper the names of individuals whose assets or businesses had been nationalized that day. Pleased that my father’s name was not on the list, yet not willing to rejoice quite yet, I asked whether he had read all the names in the newspaper. “Wait, there are many more here,” he said, smiling, as he turned a page filled with columns of nationalized assets: Madame Salama’s lover’s, Aunt Flora’s, Uncle Nessim’s, and nearly everyone’s. My father decided it wouldn’t be prudent to dismiss him now.

I pointed out Uncle Vili’s old house at Mandara to Roxane and Signor Dall’Abaco. But it did not seem to interest them. Then came the Russian countess’s villa. Whoever lived there now, I wondered. That didn’t interest them either.

We crossed an unpaved road until we hit on a garden hedged by a hassira. Then came the dunes. The dunes led to one of the beaches of Mandara and, at the other end, to the Greek monastery. Beyond that was the desert.

Our feet sank in the sand, but the sand wasn’t hot yet, and our only source of discomfort was the shavings of dry bamboo working their way into our sandals. We expelled them by shaking our feet.

Ahead of us I made out the shape of the ful vendor’s van. We waved and shouted for him to wait for us. He waved back. When we finally reached his van, Roxane handed him the pot. He filled it and wished us a holy Sunday. We stared at him with a puzzled look: Why would a Moslem ever want to wish us a holy Sunday? He must have read our surprise, for, after looking around furtively, he pulled up his sleeve, displaying the inside of his wrist on which a large cross was tattooed. “I’m a Copt.” The current regime was not sympathetic to Copts.

Though Signor Dall’Abaco was an atheist, Roxane a Zoroastrian, and I a Jew, all three of us wished him a holy Sunday in return. Signor Dall’Abaco insisted on paying. It was his way of thanking us for hosting him for the weekend. I tried to tell him to please let Roxane pay, but he said absolutely not, that he would pay, especially since he had brought nothing, not even a bathing suit. Roxane argued. Then he pleaded. We let him pay.

To change the subject on the way back, Signor Dall’Abaco said the tattooed sign of the cross had reminded him of Ulysses’ scar which Eurikleia, his maid, recognizes when her master returns to Ithaca after twenty years’ absence.

Roxane did not know who Ulysses was but she was saddened by the years of exile logged by the old soldier. “Twenty years,” she kept repeating. “Twenty years, that’s something,” she said, as though Ulysses were a contemporary whose unresolved fate was still a source of concern.

“Twenty years is nothing,” replied the Sienese gentleman, who had not returned to Italy since the late thirties. “When I left Italy, you weren’t even born, Roxane,” he said, as though that was how he now measured time.

“And I think you’re a bit in love with me, Signor Dall’Abaco.”

“And I think so too,” he said. Both of them burst out laughing, and the more they laughed, the more she spilled the ful, and the more we all laughed together. “How stupid of me,” she said, “to have brought the pot but not the cover.”

I looked up into the morning’s crystal glare. The air smelled fresh, new, as though unbreathed by humans, the way it always smells at the beginning of a summer day that is bound to turn unbearably hot. Even the dunes felt clean, soaking up the glare, so that after looking up at the sky we had to look down, to be soothed by the color of sand around us, unable even to look at the villas ahead. I had only to lift up my eyes, and there would be the sea.

“The sun burst on the flawless brimming sea into a sky all brazen.”

It was Signor Dall’Abaco quoting Homer in Greek and then translating into Italian. This, I suddenly realized, must be the sunlight of ancient Greece, of translucent Aegean mornings where glinting quartz extends for miles until it touches the sea, and the sea touches the early-summer sky, and the sky touches every tree and every hill and every house beyond the hills. Today, too, all I need is the presence of water nearby, a clear sky, and intense glare forcing me to look down, and suddenly, wherever I am in the world, my mind will inevitably drift to the most sunlit author of antiquity, only to remember how I encountered him for the first time at Mandara that morning when we trundled back, spilling ful along the sand dunes. Signor Dall’Abaco told us how Ulysses’ companions, after eating of the forbidden lotus, had lost all desire to go back to Ithaca and refused to wander more. After twenty years, he said, Ulysses was the only one who made it back alive.

“Again with your Ulysses!” exclaimed Roxane.

“Or so they say,” continued Signor Dall’Abaco. “Dante teaches that, after returning to Ithaca, he went on to explore other lands. Many agree. But I think it is Cavafy, the Alexandrian, who is right. He says that Ulysses wavered, unable to decide between going back to his wife or living as an immortal with the goddess Calypso on her island. In the end, he opted for immortality and he never went back. As the goddess pleads,” and Signor Dall’Abaco began to recite,

Why spurn my home when exile is your home?
The Ithaca you want you’ll have in not having.
You’ll walk her shores yet long to tread those very grounds,
kiss Penelope yet wish you held your wife instead,
touch her flesh yet yearn for mine.
Your home’s in the rubblehouse of time now,
and you’re made thus, to yearn for what you lose.

The story of a man who chose his mistress and immortality over wife, child, and home infuriated Roxane. Signor Dall’Abaco simply arched his eyebrows and shrugged his shoulders, as if to say who was he to argue with poets. I asked him to recite more verses by Homer. He did.

For the first time in my life I knew exactly what I wanted to do this summer, and every other summer after that. I asked Signor Dall’Abaco if he would be willing to teach me Greek. Delighted, he said, but only after Italian class—and still, it might take years. “But then, who knows,” he said with a smile, as we opened the old gate to our garden.

Signor Dall’Abaco taught me Greek for five years, slowly, sedulously, the way an impoverished Sicilian schoolteacher in Siena had taught it to him years before. After we left Egypt, he continued my Greek lessons by correspondence, selecting passages that I would always translate a bit hastily and with a sense of guilt and obligation. Ten days later, sometimes a little more, I would receive his dishearteningly elaborate and messy comments around my sheet of paper, which now reeked of cigarette smoke from his favorite café, where he liked to scribble—scribacchiare. He would place numerals above most of my words in Greek, the way Aunt Flora put numerals on her students’ score sheets, to indicate the preferred order of the words. When he could not decide which word was best, he would list every Greek synonym that crossed his mind. Reading his letters in my room in Massachusetts years later, I conjured the aging Signor Dall’Abaco writing his eight-page bulletins in small script as he sat and smoked at a small table at Athinéos, overlooking the old harbor, known as Portus Eunostus, the port of good return. There he would translate Greek texts into Italian for me to translate back into Greek, though he knew that I knew that my Greek was growing progressively worse and that these exercises in translation had become nothing but an elaborate pretext for staying in touch. He would describe the city, the sea, the slovenly Cairenes who came up each summer, Roxane, and her husband, Joey, who had grown so fat and bald one wouldn’t know him, ending each of his letters with his immutable formula, “Now I must write,” meaning his other letters, those sent to his lawyers in Italy for a long-standing suit against the Italian government for the return of assets seized by the Fascists before the war. He would have settled for a pension, he used to say. In reply, I described my studies, women, the stuffy hot spells, the cucumber-and-feta-cheese sandwiches a fellow Italian and I ate on Oxford Street as we awaited a beach season that never really came. Lazem bahr, I reminded him.

“You have crossed the Pillars of Hercules,” he wrote back, “all is possible now!” I was the only human he knew who had gone to America. “But, ahimé!—never become a teacher, for then you’ll eat others’ bread and tread others’ stairwells.”

I stopped hearing from him. At first I thought it was just like Signor Dall’Abaco to decide it was time to stop pestering me with these fatuous exercises. But then he did not answer my second letter. Or my third. Or my Christmas greetings—of that year or the next. Then I too stopped writing. Perhaps I knew but didn’t want to know. I could have telephoned but I never did. Or perhaps I half-expected I would eventually receive a profusely apologetic letter signed by a man who for almost ten years had ended his letters with the same two words: Lazem scribacchiare.

Years later, I received a small parcel wrapped in sturdy, recognizable Third World paper. It had come by ship and the string that held the package together was riddled with knots and little lead seals. I did not know the handwriting. I opened it and found a small, cheaply bound book wrapped in wax paper. Alexandrians, edited by Mario Dall’Abaco: an anthology of Alexandrian writers from antiquity to modern times. Some of the poems I had never seen before; others were familiar; the one on Ulysses was Signor Dall’Abaco’s, not Cavafy’s. Not knowing whom to thank, I sent the printer a check.

A few months later I received another, slightly larger package wrapped in the same cobalt-blue paper, which I had failed to place the first time. Palming my way through the crumpled newspaper in the box, I expected to find more volumes of Alexandrians. Instead I touched something cold, like a palm waiting to touch my own. It was an old bronze knocker. “When we heard they were rebuilding Mandara, we immediately rushed to the villa and it was Mario himself who took it down. He used it as a paperweight. He would have wanted you to have it. He went peacefully a year ago. Remember me, your loving Roxy.” The knocker has never left me. It sits on my desk today.