The Last Seder
When my father put down the receiver, he looked at us in the dining room and said, “It’s started.” No one needed to be told what he meant. It was common knowledge that these telephone calls came at all hours of the night—threatening, obscene, abusive calls in which an unidentified voice claiming to represent a government office asked all sorts of questions about our whereabouts, our guests, our habits, reminded us that we were nothing, that we had no rights and would soon be driven out, like the French and the British before us.
Until then, we had been spared these calls. Now, in the fall of 1964, they started. The voice seemed to know all about us. Indeed, it knew all our relatives abroad, read all our mail, named many of my friends and teachers at the American School, which I had been attending since leaving VC four years earlier. It knew everything. It even knew about the incident of the stone that day. “And I bet you’re enjoying quail tonight,” it said. “Bon appétit.” “A bad omen,” said my grandmother.
Aunt Elsa said she hated Wednesdays. Bad things always came on Wednesdays.
My father said he too had had premonitions, but what had the voice meant about the incident of the stone?
At which point Aunt Flora decided to tell him. Earlier that day we had joined the crowd that lined the Corniche, waiting to get a look at President Nasser, standing for hours in the sun, cheering and waving each time anything resembling a motorcade came around the bend of Montaza Palace. Then we saw him, perched in his Cadillac, waving with a flat, open palm, looking exactly as he did in the pictures. People began to cheer, men and women jumping and clapping, waving small paper flags. A girl in a wheelchair, perched at the edge of the sidewalk almost touching the curb, had been holding a rolledup sheet of paper tied with a green ribbon. Now the president had passed and she was still holding it, looking disheartened and crying. She had failed to drop her written message into his car. Abdou, who had come with us, had noticed her earlier and said she probably wanted the Raïs to pay for an operation or a new wheelchair. Her older brother, equally distraught—and probably blaming himself for failing to maneuver her close enough to the motorcade—was busy telling her it didn’t matter, they would try the next time. “I don’t want to live like this,” she wailed, covering her face with shame as he wheeled her away toward a part of Mandara we did not know.
On our way home a stone hit Aunt Flora on the leg. “Foreigners out!” someone yelled in Arabic. We never saw precisely who had thrown it, but as soon as she shouted, a group of youths immediately began to disperse. The stone had hit her on the ankle, but it didn’t break the skin, there wasn’t any blood. “As long as I can walk—” she kept saying, rubbing her shin with her hand. Then, remembering the bottle of cologne in her bag, she applied some liberally over the bruise, occasionally massaging her leg as she limped along.
No sooner had we reached home that afternoon than we came upon another commotion, this time in our garden, where everyone was screaming, including al-Nunu who, on hearing the sudden noise, had come out of his hut armed with his machete. Al-Nunu was yelling the most, followed by Mohammed and my mother, everyone racing about in the garden, even my grandmother, who was now yelling at the top of her lungs. I asked Gomaa, al-Nunu’s helper and catamite, what was the matter. Out of breath, Gomaa shouted, “Kwalia!”
Quail!
Every autumn, quail would descend on Egypt from as far away as Siberia and, as soon as they caught sight of land, would literally drop from the sky, exhausted. That afternoon a bird had fallen in our garden right next to where my grandmother was having tea with Arlette Joanides and her daughter, who were leaving Egypt and had come to say farewell. Instinctively my grandmother had taken the elaborate needlepoint canvas on which she had been working for over a year and thrown it over the exhausted quail. The bird, though it was faster than the old woman, was too tired to fly away. It kept hopping about our garden until it was joined by two more birds that must have fallen earlier, unbeknownst to my grandmother. This was far better than anything she could have dreamed of, and the old woman began to yell. Everyone came rushing to her rescue until they saw the birds, and then they joined the trapping party.
From adjoining gardens as far back as Rue Mordo we could hear similar screams as everyone at home or on the street dropped whatever they were doing to catch this exquisite manna that tumbled from the heavens each year.
And yet, despite the great joy they brought that day—to Abdou, although he would have to start dinner all over again; to Aunt Flora, who had almost forgotten her wound and was resolved to keep it from my father; and to my grandmother,
for whom quail season coincided with the making of fruit preserves—still, the sight of this peerless Egyptian delicacy struggling for life as it tried to elude our frenetic grasp never failed to announce the arrival of autumn and the end of our summer in Mandara.
No one stayed on in Mandara after quail season. By early October, the streets were deserted, with only a few Egyptians, mostly Bedouins, remaining where they lived all year round. Packs of stray dogs—some young enough to have been adopted by summer residents who then left them behind at the end of the season—would come out from everywhere, scrounging for food, sometimes landing at our door, always barking, especially at night. By then, the beaches were completely empty, the Coca-Cola shacks were all closed, and, at night when we drove back from the movies, ours was the only light on our street, a faint, forty-watt flare beckoning from our kitchen, where Abdou would wait up for us, listening to Arab songs on the radio. Sometimes, though, he would have gone back to the city at night, and then there was no light awaiting our return, and Mandara would become a ghost town, and all one heard when my father turned off the car radio, and then the engine, was the sound of our movements in the car, the sound of our steps along the pebble path leading to our door, and, behind the house, down by the bend near al-Nunu’s shack, the sound of waves.
Once in the house, my first impulse was always to turn on the lights in the entry and rush down the oppressive corridor and light up one room after the other—the veranda, the kitchen, the living room, even the radio in my bedroom, hoping to liven the entire house and give myself and my parents the illusion that there were still summer guests in the house who would presently come out of their rooms. One could even nurse the illusion of guests to come.
At midnight our anonymous caller asked whether we had been to the theater. My father told him the name of the film we saw.
We stayed at Mandara very late into the fall that year. We always stayed too long. It was my mother’s way of refusing to admit summer was over. But there was another reason for delaying this year. After Mandara, we had decided not to return to Cleopatra but to move instead to Sporting, so that everyone in the family might be together. My mother was put in charge of selling all the furniture at Cleopatra.
I saw the apartment at Cleopatra for the last time a few weeks later, when my mother asked me to go up with her to set aside clothes for Abdou and Aziza. All of our furniture was now covered in sheets, and the window shutters were closed tight, lending our apartment, usually so sunny in October, a gloomy, sepulchral air, while the old sheets, which I could remember Abdou hastily throwing over sofas and armchairs at the very last minute before leaving for Mandara early that June, looked like tired, old, deflated phantoms. “All of it will be sold,” said my mother with a pert, busy air that could easily be mistaken for anger but which was her way of showing enthusiasm. She loved novelty and change and was as excited now as she had been on moving here five years earlier.
I never met the man who bought all of our furniture, nor did I witness the transaction nor the actual lining up of our bedroom and dining room furniture on our sidewalk at Cleopatra. Aziza said Abdou was the only one who wept. I came back one day after school to find the place empty. “Maybe we shouldn’t have moved,” said my father. His voice sounded different now that the rugs and the furniture were gone.
I asked him if he was going to throw away all those books on the floor. No, he replied. We would take them to Sporting. Meanwhile, he was leafing through what looked like twenty
to thirty thick green notebooks, tearing out occasional sheets that he intended to save. I asked him what he was doing. “These are notebooks I kept when I was a young man.” Was he going to throw them away? “Not all, but there are things here I would rather disappeared.” “Did you write anything against the government back then?” I asked. “No, nothing political. Other things,” he said, unable to conceal a tenuous smile. “Some day you’ll understand.” I tried to tell him I was old enough to understand. But I knew what he’d say: “You think you are.” He said he could still remember witnessing his parents’ emptied home thirty years before on the day they had left Constantinople. As had his father seen his own father’s home. And our ancestors before that as well. And so would I, too, one day, though he didn’t wish it on me—“But everything repeats itself.” I tried to protest, saying I hated this sort of fatalism, that I was free from Sephardi superstitions. “You think you are,” he said.
I looked at the apartment, incredulous at how much larger it was without furniture.
I tried to remember the first time I had seen it, five years earlier. My grandmother and I had gotten lost in it, mistaking our way through doors and corridors, watching the workers sanding the floors and putting up a wall to create an additional room for someone called Madame Marie. I remembered the kitchen talk in the month of Ramadan, the smell of fresh paint and of newly restained furniture and of Mother’s jasmine, and the window she threatened to throw herself from each time she thought she’d lose my father. I remembered Mimi and Madame Salama. They had moved to Israel. Monsieur Pharès lived in Florida; Abdel Hamid was paralyzed from the waist down; and Madame Nicole’s husband had converted to Islam and finally repudiated her for behavior unbecoming a wife. Fawziah worked for an Egyptian family who treated her poorly. Monsieur al-Malek was now a second-tier schoolteacher
in Marseilles waiting for a pension. And Abdou’s son, Ahmed, so full of kindness, was shipped back from Yemen after a guerrilla patrol had captured and beheaded him.
Then, without warning, Aunt Flora, too, received a telephone call. In her case, the voice informed her that she had two weeks to leave Egypt. She left, as did other family friends, in the fall of that year, just a few days after we moved to Sporting. We knew our turn would come.
Aunt Elsa used to say that when bad things happen they come in threes. If you broke two plates, no one was really surprised when a third fell from your hands. If you cut yourself twice, you knew that a third cut was already hovering, waiting for the perfect alignment of sharp object and skin. If you got scolded twice, if you failed two tests, or lost two bets, you simply cowered for a few days and tried not to look too dismayed when the third blow came. When it did come, however, you would never say it was the last of the three. You had to pretend that a fourth might follow or that perhaps you had counted wrong or that this millennial rule had just been changed to confound you. That was called tact. It meant you were not presumptuous and would never dare trifle with the inscrutable machinations of fate.
Of course, we always sensed that our midnight caller knew exactly how we thought about these things. He would call twice and then not call again that night, knowing we would not go to bed until his third call came. Or he would call three times, let us sigh in relief and then, just as everyone was getting ready to retire, call again. “Is he there?” the voice would ask, meaning my father. “No, we don’t want to speak with him. Just checking.” “Who were your guests tonight?” “What did you buy today?” “Where did you go?” And so on.
Harassment calls began to punctuate all our evenings—by
their absence as much as by their presence—reminding us that what were agreeable family evenings could easily deteriorate into bitter feuds as soon as grandmother hung up the telephone. “But why did you have to answer. Didn’t I tell you not to?” my father would complain. “And why couldn’t you tell him where I was?” he would add. “Because I don’t think it’s his business,” his mother would reply. “But why do you persist in being rude to them? Why provoke them?” he would shout back at her. “Because this is what I felt like doing. Next time you answer.”
Part of the late-night caller’s ploy lay in calling when he knew my father was not home. Then, sometimes, thinking it was my father or even a friend calling late in the evening, I would pick up the receiver, and the stranger’s voice, seemingly so harmless, even obsequious, would begin saying things I knew I should know nothing about. At other times, it was a rough street vendor’s voice barking questions whose purpose I couldn’t fathom, much less know how to answer. He would always end with the same words: “Tell him we’ll call again tomorrow.”
A day would pass. Then another. Sometimes three. Then two phone calls in succession. No one would pick up. “Maybe it’s your father,” my grandmother would say. It wasn’t. Then no calls for another week.
Perhaps, the law of jamais deux sans trois didn’t hold after all. But then, just when you were on the verge of giving up on it, it showed signs of renewed regularity—just long enough, that is, to trick you again.
Now, it so happened that Aunt Elsa had had strange forebodings the week before the Egyptian government nationalized all of my father’s assets. Une étrange angoisse, a strange anxiety, right here, she kept repeating, pointing to her chest. “Here, and here, sometimes even here,” she would say, hesitantly,
as though her inability to locate the peculiar sensation in her chest made it more credible. “Something always happens when I have these feelings.” She had had them on the eve of President Kennedy’s assassination. And back in 19914. And of course in 1939. Madame Ephrikian, warned by Aunt Elsa to leave Smyrna in 1922, still called her une voyante, a seer. “Seer my eye!” exclaimed my grandmother behind her back.
“She’s swallowed a cheap barometer, and it rattles inside her old rib cage. Whatever is itching her there, you can be sure it’s just her conscience.”
My grandmother was alluding to a quarrel the sisters had had over who would get Uncle Vili’s prized nineteenth-century barometer following his sudden escape from Egypt. Uncle Vili liked to hunt duck, so, naturally, the sisters quarreled over who would inherit his rifles as well. One day, the rifles, the barometer, and his golf clubs disappeared. “Les domestiques,” alleged Aunt Elsa. “Les domestiques my eye!” replied my grandmother. “She swallowed them, just as she’ll swallow everything we own one day.” “We don’t have to worry about that now,” interjected my father, “the Egyptian government has already thought of it.”
The news that my father had lost everything arrived at dawn one Saturday in early spring 1965. The bearer was Kassem, now the factory’s night foreman. He rang our bell, and it was my father who opened the door. Seeing his boss look so crushed on guessing the reason for his untimely visit, the young foreman immediately burst into a fit of hysterical crying. “Did they take her, then?” asked my father, meaning the factory. “They took her.” “When?” “Last night. They wouldn’t let me call you, so I had to come.” Both men stood quietly in the vestibule and then moved into the kitchen while my father tried to improvise something by way of tea. They sat at the kitchen table, urging one another not to lose heart, until both men
broke down and began sobbing in each other’s arms. “I found them crying like little children,” was Aunt Elsa’s refrain that day. “Like little children.”
The crying had also awakened my grandmother, who, despite protestations that she never slept at night on account of the “troubles,” was a very sound sleeper. She shuffled all the way into the kitchen to find that Abdou, who had just come in through the service entrance, had also joined in the tears. “This is no good,” she snapped, “you’ll wake Nessim. What’s happened now?” “They took her.” “Took whom?” “But the factory, signora, what else?” he said using the pidgin word for factory, al-fabbrica.
My grandmother never sobbed. She got angry, stamped, kicked, and grew flushed. Aunt Elsa was right when she claimed that her sister cried out of rage—like Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor—and not out of sorrow. Her eyelids would swell and grow red, and with the corner of her handkerchief she would blot away her tears with flustered and persistent poking motions, as though, in her fury, she was determined to inflict more pain on herself. This was the ninth time she had seen the men in her life lose everything; first her grandfather, then her father, her husband, five brothers, and now her son.
A moment of silence elapsed. “Here,” she said, mixing sugar in a glass of water and handing it to my father. It was reputed to calm one’s nerves. “I’m having tea, thank you,” he said. But Abdou, who was still sobbing, said he could use it. Meanwhile, Aunt Elsa kept repeating, “See? I knew it, I knew it. Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I?” “Do you want to shut up!” shouted her sister, suddenly shoving a large bowl containing last night’s homemade yogurt along the kitchen countertop with such force that it exploded against the wall. “Who cares?” she shouted, anticipating her sister’s reproach. “Who cares at a
time like this, who?” She began to pick up the shards while Abdou, still sobbing, begged her not to bother, he would pick them up himself.
It was the noise of this quarrel that finally woke me that Saturday morning. I could tell something was amiss. As happened each time someone died, everyone’s instinct was always to keep the bad news from me. Either the names of the deceased were scrupulously withheld from everyday conversation, or, when the names were mentioned, those present would heave a sigh signifying something nebulous and clearly beyond my scope, adding the adjectival pauvre, poor, to the name of the afflicted like a ceremonial epithet conferred on the occasion of one’s death. Pauvre was used for the departed, the defeated, and the betrayed. “Pauvre Albert,” my deceased grandfather; “pauvre Lotte,” my deceased aunt; “pauvre Angleterre,” who had lost all of her colonies; “pauvres nous,” said everyone! “Pauvre moi,” said my mother about my father. “Pauvre fabrique” was on everyone’s lips that day. The last time they had used that expression was when the factory’s main boiler exploded, severely damaging the building and almost ruining my father.
I found my father sitting in the living room with Kassem and Hassan, whispering instructions to them. When he saw me, he nodded somewhat absentmindedly, a sign that he did not want to be disturbed. I picked up the newspaper—a a grown-up habit I was trying to acquire—and sat by myself in the dining room. I had heard at the American School that all young men in America read the newspaper first thing in the morning with their coffee. Coffee too was on my list. One sipped and thought of things to do that day and then remembered to go on reading one’s newspaper. No yogurt this morning. Instead, the smell of eggs and bacon and of butter melting on toast wafted from the kitchen. I had seen American breakfasts
in movies and at school and had instructed Abdou I wanted eggs with bacon every Saturday.
The early-spring sun beamed on the brown table in the dining room, spilling sweeps of light down the backs of the chairs and onto the faded red rug. My grandmother was like me; we liked bright rooms whose shutters were kept open all night and day, liked the clean, wholesome smell of sun-dried sheets or of sun-washed rooms and balconies on windy summer days; liked the insidious, stubborn eloquence of sunlight flooding under the door of a shuttered room on unbearable summer days; even the slight migraines that came from too much sun we liked. Through the window, as always on clear Saturday mornings, sat patches of unstirring turquoise in the distance, rousing the thirst for seawater which all schoolboys in Alexandria knew, and which seduced you into thinking of long hot hours on the summer beaches. Two more months, I thought.
When my grandmother walked into the dining room, she tried to hide that she had been crying. “Nothing,” she replied to my unasked question. “Nothing at all. Here is your orange juice.” She shuffled toward me on her ever-grieving bunions, kissing me on the back of the head, and then pinching my nape. “Mon pauvre,” she said, passing her fingers through my hair. “Couldn’t this have waited a while longer, couldn’t it?” she kept muttering, nodding to herself. Then, sensing I was about to renew my question, she said, “Nothing, nothing,” and drifted out of the dining room. I ate my eggs in silence. Then my mother walked in and sat across from me. She, too, looked upset. Nobody was eating. So they had quarreled. But I hadn’t heard her shouting.
“Look,” she said, “they took everything.”
It was like hearing that someone had died, a sinking feeling in my diaphragm and a tickling at the back of my ears. I pushed my plate away. My mother, whom I had not seen get up, was
stirring sugar into a glass of water, saying, “Drink it all up now.” It meant I had had my nerves shaken. I was a man, then.
Even so, I did not fully understand what was so frightful about losing one’s fortune. A few of those we knew who had lost theirs went about living normal, everyday lives, with the same number of houses, cars, and servants. Their sons and daughters went to the same restaurants, saw the same number of movies, and spent as much money as they always had. On them, however, loomed the stigma—even the shame—of the fallen, the ousted, and it came with a strange odor that infallibly gave them away: it was the smell of leather. “Did you smell the abattoir,” was my father’s word for it, whispered maliciously after visiting friends about to leave the country. Every family that had lost everything knew it was destined to leave Egypt sooner or later, and, in one room, usually locked and hidden from guests, sat thirty to forty leather suitcases in which mothers and aunts kept packing their family’s belongings at a slow, meticulous pace, always hoping that things might right themselves in the end. Until the very end, they hoped—and each of their husbands always swore he knew someone in high places who could be bribed when the time came. My father began to boast of the same contacts.
And then it dawned on me. When people came to visit us, they too would sniff out that funny leather smell and whisper abattoir behind our backs as they nosed about our home, wondering where on earth we had tucked all of our suitcases. The abattoir phase was bound to start soon, and with it an accelerated dose of family squabbles. Which store sold which suitcases cheaper? The question would tear our family apart. What articles should we buy for Europe? Gloves, socks, blankets,
shoes? No, raincoats. No, hats. More fights. What would we leave behind? Aunt Elsa wanted to take everything. It figures, said my grandmother, who wanted to leave it all behind. Should we tell anyone? No. Yes. Why? More screaming. And finally, the one question bound to send everyone flying into a rage: Where would we settle? “But we don’t even know the language they speak over there.” “Why, did you know Arabic before coming here?” “No.” “So?” “But it’s so cold there.” “And here it was too hot. You’ve said so yourself.”
Meanwhile, we were given a reprieve, and like a baffled prisoner whose sentence has been temporarily commuted, or a stranded traveler whose return trip is inexplicably delayed, we were allowed to move about freely and do as we pleased, our lives suspended, taken over by unreal pursuits. It was well known that the fallen spent more and worried less. Some even started to enjoy Egypt, especially now that they could splurge, knowing they couldn’t take abroad what the government was determined to seize from them. Others took advantage of the respite and did nothing all day save roam about aimlessly and hang around cafés, affecting, they thought, the unruffled dignity of condemned aristocrats.
When finally I spoke with my father that morning, he said it had come as no surprise. He had gone to bed knowing what awaited him in the morning and had told no one, not even Mother. Then I mustered the courage and asked what would happen now. They still needed him at the factory, he said. But that would pass, and then the inevitable would arrive. What? They would ask us to leave. Everything would have to be left behind. Meanwhile, there were some savings tucked away here and there, though technically we owned nothing. They might let us sell the furniture. But the cars were no longer ours. My father would recall old debts. Bound to be ugly, that. I wanted to know who owed him money. He told me their names. I was surprised. Their son was always having new shoes made. “How
long, do you think?” I finally asked, like a patient imploring his doctor to say things aren’t so hopeless after all. He shrugged his shoulders. “A few weeks, maybe a month.” Then, pausing, he added, “At any rate, for us it’s finished.”
It meant our everyday lives, an era, the first uncertain visit to Egypt in 1905 by a young man named Isaac, our friends, the beaches, everything I had known, Om Ramadan, Roxane, Abdou, guavas, the loud tap of backgammon chips slapped vindictively upon the bar, fried eggplants on late-summer mornings, the voice of Radio Israel on rainy weekday evenings, and the languor of Alexandrian Sundays when all you did was go from movie to movie, picking up more and more friends along the way until a gang was formed and, from wandering the streets, someone would always suggest hopping on the tram and riding upstairs in second class all the way past San Stefano to Victoria and back. Now it all seemed unreal and transitory, as if we had lived a lie and suddenly had been found out.
“What should I do in the meantime?” I asked, emphasizing distress in my voice, because I could not see pretending that life would go on as usual. “Do? Do whatever you want—” my father started to say, letting me already savor the thought of dropping out of school and spending every day that spring going to the museum in the morning and then wandering through the bustling streets of downtown Alexandria, stalking my every whim. But my grandmother interrupted: “Never, no,” she said with growing agitation. “He has to go to school. I won’t accept it.” “We’ll see,” said my father, “we’ll see.” She was about to go on, when he said, “Don’t raise your voice, now of all times, not now.” As she walked out of the room, I heard the tail end of her sentence, “—telling his son to become a degenerate, of all things. Who’s ever seen such a thing? Who? Who? Who?”
At that point a click was heard at the front door and Uncle
Nessim walked in. He had recently abandoned his habit of leaving the house at the crack of dawn and taking long walks along the Corniche, and seeing him now, everyone was dumbstruck. All morning we had been whispering because we were sure he was sleeping in his room. We had never even discussed whether to keep the bad news from him.
The truth is that, at the age of ninety-two, Uncle Nessim was dying of stomach cancer. He would spend hours in bed, crouched in a semifetal position which he said was the least painful—and thus, folded in two, hugging himself, he would sometimes fall asleep. Only once had I caught him in that position. They were tidying his room, and as I passed by his open door, I spied him lying in bed, wearing striped pajamas, holding his chest as if it were the dearest thing he owned. He looked sallow and small. The previous Friday evening, while reading the Sabbath prayers, he seemed absent and exhausted. He did not smile when my father said, as he always did before prayers, “Falla breve, Nessim, make it short.” He ate nothing. His sisters had prepared a special pinkish jelly pudding for him, and it stood staring at him in a glass goblet while he kept reading. He cut the prayer short. But when it was time to eat, he dipped his spoon into the wobbly pudding, played with it, tasted it, and then, sensing we were all staring at him, said he couldn’t. It was then I realized that beneath his dark smoking jacket and the glistening purple ascot peeped the faded, bluestriped outline of his pajamas. He wanted to go to bed. There was no one to take over the prayer. Neither my father nor I knew Hebrew, and both of us refused to have anything to do with prayers, even in French. “This is very sad,” said Aunt Elsa. “There was a time when this room was full of people, full of candles too. The table didn’t even have enough leaves to seat everyone. The house is too big now. And Nessim is not well.”
I remembered the room on those crowded taffi al-nur evenings, generations piled together, the oldest and the youngest separated by a century—so many of us. Now no one was left. They had stowed away the good china and gaudy silverware; dinner was served in one course; someone was always listening to the radio during the meal; and, because Aunt Elsa was put in charge of family expenses, even the wattage of the dining room lamp had been dimmed, so that a weak, pale-orange glow was cast over our faces and our meals, the shade of our last year in Egypt. My mother compared the once-resplendent dining room chandelier to a dying man’s night-light.
The old furniture looked older, drabber, and there were entire sections of the apartment that had probably never been touched since the Isotta-Fraschini days. The service stairway had become so dirty that I never ventured near it. Almost all the furniture was in disrepair, much of it patched together or put aside, waiting for a heaven-sent visitor who, with the patience, know-how, and devotion of a carpenter’s son, might finally remove the gummed paper that held so many caned chairs together in our dining room and perform the long-awaited miracle. “Sand always wins in the end,” Aunt Elsa said, quoting her brother Vili as she ran her finger through the dust that had accumulated on the brown furniture after a particularly fierce hamsin that year. No one cleaned much of anything any longer. The apartment smelled of cloves, not just because they used it in cakes all the time, but because the three remaining siblings used it on their aching teeth.
Nessim was scheduled for surgery two weeks before Passover. As a precautionary measure, he was persuaded to transfer all of his assets to Aunt Elsa. “You watch,” said my grandmother, peeved they had considered her unfit to handle the responsibility because she had suffered a mild stroke a few summers before. “Mark my words,” she said and proceeded
to make gestures mimicking the passage of food from the mouth down the esophagus and into the stomach. “She’ll swallow all of it.” In fact, Nessim’s money was never seen or heard of again.
Strangely, Uncle Nessim had suddenly felt better during the night and had decided to go out for his usual walk at dawn. Everyone was so surprised to see him up and about, that instead of chiding him for taking a walk in his condition they began to pester him with questions. “But nothing’s the matter with me,” he kept saying, “I feel perfectly fine.” “But you could have fallen, or gotten sick. Something might have happened.” “Then I would have died and that would have been the end of that.” When you get old, he used to tell me, you don’t care about death. You aren’t even ashamed of dying.
He proceeded to light a cigarette and asked for a cup of coffee. Dazzled by his spectacular recovery, Aunt Elsa kept fretting. “I knew it was a kapparah.” Kapparah, in Jewish lore, was the necessary catastrophe that precedes an unforeseen windfall. You do badly at school, but that same afternoon someone you love narrowly escapes being hit by a car; you loose a precious jewel, but then you run into a very old acquaintance you thought had entirely disappeared. Kapparah allowed you to experience bad luck, but with the understanding—and it had to be a vague, uncertain understanding, not a clear-cut deal—that for each blow you received, you averted a significantly worse one.
No sooner had my grandmother heard the word than she shot her sister a venomous stare. “Look at her, the pernicious viper that she is,” she whispered to me, “look how she’s dying to tell him about the factory. She’s going to keep dropping hint after hint until he finds out.” “Not at all,” protested Elsa in whispers. “Can’t one be happy without having one’s motives questioned every time? Living with you is like being in jail sometimes.”
As soon as coffee was brought in, Nessim took his cup and motioned to my father and me to follow him into the living room, then shut the frosted glass door behind him. “They took her, didn’t they?” he asked. My father nodded. “How did you know?” “What am I, stupid?” he interjected. “All I had to do was take a look at all your dour faces.” Then, smiling, “This kapparah is costing you quite a bit, isn’t it?” he said. “But don’t worry, I’m not really better. I just wanted to see the Corniche for the last time.” Then, still smiling, he pointed to the door where the crouched outlines of both sisters could be seen glued to the glass. They moved away as soon as he neared the door.
A week later Nessim died. During the night following his operation, the sutures tore open and blood began to seep into his mattress, soaking the floor beneath. When Aunt Elsa, who was spending the night with him in his hospital room, awoke from a slumber, he was already gone.
“I wonder what the third blow will be,” said my grandmother a few days afterwards. “We don’t need many hints to guess that,” was my father’s reply.
On the morning when the news of Nessim’s death arrived, I awoke to a strange, persistent, owl-like hooting coming from the other end of the apartment. It had probably been going on for hours. I remembered trying to dispel it in my dreams. Finally, I slipped out of bed to see what it was. There were two nurses in the foyer, and with them Aunt Elsa, sobbing. She was seated on the sofa, still wearing her hat and clasping her handbag. She must have slumped down on the sofa as soon as she entered the apartment. Before her was an empty glass of what had undoubtedly been sugar-water. I tried to comfort her by caressing her arm. She didn’t seem to feel it, but when I stopped, she whimpered something inaudible that sounded like a plea. “Stay, stay,” she repeated, but I did not know whether she meant me or her brother. Then the hooting started
again and she began saying things in Ladino, always repeating the same five or six words in a ritual intonation which I could not understand. Abdou was trying to make her drink some more; she kept refusing, turning to him and repeating the same words she had been saying to me. He answered her in Ladino, saying the señora was right, she was right, of course he had had plenty of life left in him, but fate willed otherwise, and who could question Allah. I shot him a quizzical look, wondering what she had been saying, and on our way back to the kitchen he explained, in Arabic, “She keeps saying he was only ninety-two, only ninety-two,” whereupon both of us burst out laughing, repeating “only ninety-two” as if it were the funniest mot de caractère in Molière. The joke spread to Zeinab, across the service entrance, who passed it on to the servants upstairs, and downstairs, down to the porter, to the grocer across the street, and who knew where else.
My grandmother’s reaction was no better. Upon seeing her sister seated half-dazed on the sofa, she immediately threw a tantrum. The two sisters hugged each other, and Aunt Elsa, whose tears had subsided by then, once again began to sob. “See what you’ve made me do,” she kept repeating, “I didn’t want to cry again, I didn’t want to cry.”
The sight was so moving, that I too would have sobbed along with them had I not bit my tongue and forced myself to think of other things, of funny things, anything. But as though guided by a perverse logic, my thoughts, however farfetched and bizarre, seemed determined to lead me back to poor Uncle Nessim, who, until two weeks ago, would sit in the family room busily refreshing his knowledge of spoken Hebrew because he wanted to die in Israel. There was nowhere to turn to forget. I tried to read in my room but could not. No one wanted to speak. Even the servants were unusually quiet. I would go to the kitchen and sit with Abdou and try
to squeeze yet one more droplet of humor out of only ninety-two. But even that seemed stale now.
Uncle Nessim had lent me a nineteenth-century edition of Lord Chesterfield’s letters. He thought I should read them; all young men should, he said. A few days later, Aunt Elsa knocked at my door and asked for the book. It would be put together with his other things, she said. I don’t know how she found out I had it. But a few evenings later, when she was not home, I unlocked her bedroom door and rifled through her possessions, determined to rob her. Not only did I take back the Chesterfield, but I relieved her stamp collection of some of its rarest items. Many years later, while visiting her in Paris, I was helping her arrange her stamps in a new album when it finally occurred to her that she was missing her most valuable specimen. “These Arabs fleeced me well,” she complained, while I threw a complicit look at my grandmother, who, at the time, had found out about my expedition into her sister’s bedroom. This time, however, my grandmother returned an empty gaze. She had forgotten.
That evening, I slipped into Uncle Nessim’s bedroom. I sat on his bed, looking out the window, catching the flicker of city lights, remembering how he spoke of London and Paris, how he said that all gentlemen, of whom he fancied himself one, would have a glass of scotch whiskey every evening. “It will kill me one day,” he prophesied, “but I do love to sit here and watch the city and think about things for a while before dinnertime.” And now, I too would do the same, think about things, as he put it, think about leaving, and about all the people I would never see again, and about this city, so inseparable from who I was at that very instant, and how it would slip into time and become stranger than dreamland. That too
would be like dying. To be dead meant that others could come into your room and sit and think about you. It meant that others could come into your room and never know it had once been yours. Little by little they would remove all traces of you. Even your smell would go. Then they’d even forget you had died.
I opened the window to let in the city noise. It came—though distant and untouched, like the laughter of passersby who don’t know someone’s ill upstairs. The only way to shake off this lifeless gloom was to go out again, or find a secluded corner somewhere and read Cousin Arnaut’s dirty books.
That night we all went to see the late-night showing of the new French film Thérèse Desqueyroux. It was the first time I had been to the theater at that hour, and I was immediately dazzled by this unfamiliar adult world, by its glamour and mystery, the whispered undertones during intermission, the spiffed-up young men two to three years older than I sitting with girls in the back rows, and the strange legend of perfume, mink, and cigarettes, that hovered about women like an elusive presage of love and laughter in crowded living rooms where they sat and talked with the men who loved them, as men and women talked in my parents’ living room when there was company and I had gone to bed.
Later we went to an expensive restaurant in the city, and when I asked whether we could afford it, my father looked amused and said something like, “Don’t worry, it isn’t as bad as all that.” We were with friends, and my grandmother and Aunt Elsa had come, and no one spoke of Nessim, and we ate with hearty appetites, and afterward, as was sometimes our habit, we drove along the Corniche, no one saying a word as we listened to the French broadcast until we stopped the car and got out to take a good whiff of the sea, listening to the bronchial wheezing of the waves as their advancing lines of spray clashed against the seawall.
That night the midnight caller called. Was everyone home? Yes, everyone was home. Where had we been? We’re in mourning, please, leave us alone. Where did you go, he insisted. “May a curse fall on the orifice that spawned you and your mother’s religion,” said my father and hung up.
The following day, returning from tennis, I was greeted by loud howling from the kitchen. My mother and my grandmother were quarreling at the top of their lungs, and Abdou, who normally took Sunday afternoons off, was busily trying to appease them both.
“Here are your damned prunes,” shouted my mother. “Damn yourself, damned ingrate,” retorted my grandmother, her voice cracking with emotion. “Who did you think I was trying to cook it for? For me?” The rest was sputtered in random fragments of Turkish, Ladino, and Greek.
Fearing for her sister, and despite her desire to remain impartial, Aunt Elsa tried to calm my grandmother and whispered something in Ladino, which sent my mother flying into a greater rage. “Always whispering, you two, with your cunning, beady, shifty, Jewish eyes, whispering your furtive little Ladino secrets like two ferrets from the ghetto of Constantinople, always siding with each other, the way she”—indicating my grandmother—“sided with you against her husband until she killed him like a dog, like a dog he died, wouldn’t even let her visit him in his hospital room when he died.” “What do you know, what? You good-for-nothing seamstress from Aleppo,” shouted Elsa now, openly joining the fray. “Aren’t you ashamed to speak like this while Nessim’s body is still warm with life?” “Nessim this, Nessim that,” tittered my mother. “He is well rid of you both. If you knew how he loathed you. Turned him into an alcoholic in his own bedroom, you did. Ha, don’t make me say any more. You killed him, both
of you, just as you killed your husbands. Whose turn is it now? Mine, do you think?”
It was then that I saw my grandmother, who clearly could not tolerate much more of this, do something I had never seen done in our family: she slapped herself on the face. “This for allowing my son to marry her. And this”—she slapped her other cheek, harder—“for begging, begging him to remain faithful to her.” “Don’t do that,” shouted my mother, “don’t do that.” She grabbed both of her arms. A quick look at Abdou signified, “Get her a chair.”
Things immediately began to subside. “Do you want to have a stroke, so he’ll be able to blame me for the rest of my life? Enough like this!” Meanwhile, my grandmother had slumped on the chair next to the telephone in the corridor, holding her head in her hands. “I can’t go on like this, can’t go on like this. I don’t want to live, let me die.” “Die?” exclaimed my mother, “she’ll outlive all of us. Sit down. Abdou, bring some water for the signora.”
Finally Abdou and I separated the trio, and I discovered how the quarrel had started. Mother and daughter-in-law had disagreed on the recipe for haroset, the thick preserve made from fruits and wine that is eaten at Passover. My mother wanted raisins and dates, because her mother used raisins and dates, but my grandmother wanted oranges, raisins, and prunes, because this had been her family’s recipe for as far back as she could remember. “Maudite pesah! Cursed Passover!” cried my grandmother. Sugared water was promptly distributed to all three in their respective rooms. “Your mother should be put away, this is not a life,” said Elsa. When I went to see how my mother was doing, I made the mistake of telling her what Aunt Elsa had said, whereupon she got up and stomped into Elsa’s room, ready to start another row. “But I didn’t mean anything by it,” she pleaded, beginning to sob. “Ach,
there is no end to this. Poor Nessim, poor Nessim,” she lamented, then changing her mind, “lucky Nessim, lucky Nessim.”
At that moment the doorbell rang. I was convinced it was one of the neighbors coming to complain about the noise. Instead, standing at our door were two Egyptian gentlemen wearing three-piece suits. “May we come in?” one asked. “Who are you?” “We are from the police.” “One moment,” I said, “I will have to tell them inside,” and, without apologizing, shut the door in their faces. Immediately I rushed inside and told my grandmother, who told Aunt Elsa, who told Abdou to tell the gentlemen to wait outside; she would be with them presently. Aunt Elsa locked her bedroom door, then went to wash her face before walking calmly into the vestibule. “May we come in?” they repeated. “I am a German citizen,” she declaimed as if she had been practicing these lines with a third-rate vocalist for many, many months, “and will not allow you into this house.” “We want to speak to the head of the household.” “He is not here,” she replied. “Where is he?” “I do not know.” “Who is he?” asked one of the two, pointing at me. “He is a child. He doesn’t know anything,” said Aunt Elsa who, only a few days before, had said I was quite a jeune petit monsieur.
Although she had just sprinkled her face after crying, Aunt Elsa’s glasses were smeared by a white film, probably dried tears, which made her look tattered and poor and certainly not the grande dame she was trying to affect at the moment. “Cierra la puerta, shut the door,” Aunt Elsa told me in Ladino, referring to the door leading to the rest of the apartment. This was the first time she had ever spoken to me in Ladino, and I pretended not to hear and stood there gaping at the two policemen, while my grandmother, who didn’t want to interfere with her sister’s handling of the men, kept shuffling up and
down the long corridor, peeking furtively into the vestibule, only to turn around and walk back along the corridor, pinching her cheeks—a gesture of anxiety in our family—as she repeated to herself “Guay de mí, guay de mí, woe is me, woe is me.”
Meanwhile, at the other end of the apartment, my mother, who was not even aware of the policemen’s visit, was weeping out loud, and Elsa, who could not understand spoken Arabic very well, kept straining her ears, apologizing for the noise within. “She is crazy,” she said to one of the policemen, referring to my mother. “Toc-toc,” she smiled, rotating her index finger next to her skull, “toc-toc.” The policemen departed, leaving a warrant for my father. “I made them go away,” she said.
Another disaster occurred no more than an hour later. Abdou had left, taking whatever remained of his day off. My mother had gone to wash her face, and, after leaving the bathroom, went directly to her room and slammed the door behind her. My grandmother, who hated sudden noises, winced but said nothing. A while later, on my way to the living room, where I planned to read by myself, I felt something damp about my feet. It was water. Mother, as I immediately realized, had once again forgotten to turn off the faucet and had flooded the bathroom, kitchen, and corridor areas. I rushed to tell her of this latest mishap, and as we were coming out of her room, I saw my grandmother standing in the dark corridor, looking at the ceiling, trying to determine where all this water had come from.
My mother rushed to the kitchen, took as many burlap rags as she could find and immediately threw them on the floor, asking me to help her roll the carpets away from the flood. She then brought a large pail, and kneeling on all fours, was attempting to soak up the water with the rags, wringing and unwringing swatches of cloth that bore the pungent odor of
Abdou’s floor wax. “I forgot to turn off the faucet,” she lamented, starting to weep again. “Because I am deaf and because I am crazy, deaf and crazy, deaf and crazy,” she repeated to the rhythm of her sobs. My grandmother, who was also on all fours by now, was busily wringing old towels into the pail, soiling her forearms with the grayish liquid that kept dribbling from the cloth. “It doesn’t matter, you didn’t hear the water, it doesn’t matter,” she kept saying, breaking down as well, finally exclaiming, “Quel malheur, quel malheur, what wretchedness,” looking up as she wrung the towels, referring to the flood, to Egypt, to deafness, to having to squat on the floor like a little housemaid at the age of ninety because we no longer had servants on Sunday.
Early that evening, the caller rang. “Why were you not at home this afternoon?” asked the voice. “May you rot in sixty hells,” replied my father.
“I want you to sit down and be a big boy now,” said my father that night after reading the warrant. “Listen carefully.” I wanted to cry. He noticed, stared at me awhile, and then, holding my hand, said, “Cry.” I felt a tremor race through my lower lip, down my chin. I struggled with it, bit my tongue, then shook my head to signal that I wasn’t going to cry. “It’s not easy, I know. But this is what I want you to do. Since it’s clear they’ll arrest me tomorrow,” he said, “the most important thing is to help your mother sell everything, have everyone pack as much as they can, and purchase tickets for all of us. It’s easier than you think. But in case I am detained, I want you to leave anyway. I’ll follow later. You must pass one message to Uncle Vili and another to Uncle Isaac in Europe.” I said I would remember them. “Yes, but I also want each message encoded, in case you forget. It will take an hour, no more.”
He asked me to bring him a book I would want to take to Europe and might read on the ship. There were two: The Idiot and Kitto’s The Greeks. “Bring Kitto,” he said, “and we’ll pretend to underline all the difficult words, so that if customs officials decide to inspect the book, they will think you’ve underlined them for vocabulary reasons.” He pored over the first page of the book and underlined Thracian, luxurious, barbaroi, Scythians, Ecclesiastes. “But I already know what they all mean.” “Doesn’t matter what you know. What’s important is what they think. Ecclesiastes is a good word. Always use the fifth letter of the fifth word you’ve underlined—in this case, e, and discard the rest. It’s a code in the Lydian mode, do you see?” That evening he also taught me to forge his signature. Then, as they did in the movies, we burned the page on which I had practiced it.
By two o’clock in the morning, we had written five sentences. Everybody had gone to bed already. Someone had dimmed the lamp in the hallway and turned off all the lights in the house. Father offered me a cigarette. He drew the curtains that had been shut so that no one outside might see what we were doing and flung open the window. Then, after letting a spring breeze heave through the dining room, he stood by the window, facing the night, his chin propped on the palms of his hands, with his elbows resting on the window ledge. “It’s a small city, but I hate to lose her,” he finally said. “Where else can you see the stars like this?” Then, after a few seconds of silence, “Are you ready for tomorrow?” I nodded. I looked at his face and thought to myself: They might torture him, and I may never see him again. I forced myself to believe it—maybe that would bring him good luck.
“Good night, then.” “Good night,” I said. I asked him if he was going to go to bed as well. “No, not yet. You go. I’ll sit here and think awhile.” He had said the same thing years
before, when we visited his father’s tomb and, silently, he had propped his chin on one hand, his elbow resting on the large marble slab. I had been asking him questions about the cemetery, about death, about what the dead did when we were not thinking of them. Patiently, he had answered each one, saying death was like a quiet sleep, but very long, with long, peaceful dreams. When I began to feel restless and asked whether we could go, he answered, “No, not yet. I’ll stand here and think awhile.” Before leaving, we both leaned down and kissed the slab.
The next morning, I awoke at six. My list of errands was long. First the travel agency, then the consulate, then the telegrams to everyone around the world, then the agent in charge of bribing all the customs people, then a few words with Signor Rosenthal, the jeweler whose brother-in-law lived in Geneva. “Don’t worry if he pretends not to understand you,” my father had said. After that, I was to see our lawyer and await further instructions.
My father had left the house at dawn, I was told. Mother had been put in charge of buying suitcases. My grandmother took a look at me and grumbled something about my clothes, especially those “long blue trousers with copper snaps all over them.” “What snaps?” I asked. “These,” she said, pointing to my blue jeans. I barely had time to gulp down her orange juice before rushing out of the house and hopping on the tram, headed downtown—something I had never done before, as the American School was in the opposite direction. Suddenly, I was a grown-up going to work, and the novelty thrilled me.
Alexandria on that spring weekday morning had its customary dappled sky. Brisk and brackish scents blew in from the coast, and the tumult of trade on the main thoroughfares spilled
over into narrow side-lanes where throngs and stands and jostling trinket men cluttered the bazaars under awnings striped yellow and green. Then, as always at a certain moment, just before the sunlight began to pound the flagstones, things quieted down for a while, a cool breeze swept through the streets, and something like a distilled, airy light spread over the city, bright but without glare, light you could stare into.
The wait to renew the passports at the consulate was brief: the man at the counter knew my mother. As for the travel agent, he already seemed apprised of our plans. His question was: “Do you want to go to Naples or to Bari? From Bari you can go to Greece; from Naples to Marseilles.” The image of an abandoned Greek temple overlooking the Aegean popped into my head. “Naples,” I said, “but do not put the date yet.” “I understand,” he said discreetly. I told him that if he called a certain number, funds would be made available to him. In fact, I had the money in my pocket but had been instructed not to use it unless absolutely necessary.
The telegrams took forever. The telegraph building was old, dark, and dirty, a remnant of colonial grandeur fading into a wizened piece of masonry. The clerk at the booth complained that there were too many telegrams going to too many countries on too many continents. He eyed me suspiciously and told me to go away. I insisted. He threatened to hit me. I mustered the courage and told the clerk we were friends of So-and-so, whose name was in the news. Immediately he extended that inimitably unctuous grace that passes for deference in the Middle East.
By half past ten I was indeed proud of myself. One more errand was left, and then Signor Rosenthal. Franco Molkho, the agent in charge of bribing customs officials, was himself a notorious crook who took advantage of everyone precisely by protesting that he was not cunning enough to do so. “I’m
always up front about what I do, madame.” He was rude and gruff, and if he saw something in your home that struck his fancy, he would grab and pocket it in front of you. If you took it away from him and placed it back where it belonged—which is what my mother did—then he would steal it later at the customs shed, again before your very eyes. Franco Molkho lived in a kind of disemboweled garage, with a makeshift cot, a tattered sink, and a litter of grimy gear boxes strewn about the floor. He wanted to negotiate. I did not know how to negotiate. I told him my father’s instructions. “You Jews,” he snickered, “it’s impossible to beat you at this game.” I blushed. Once outside, I wanted to spit out the tea he had offered me.
Still, I thought of myself as the rescuer of my entire family. Intricate scenarios raced through my mind, scenarios in which I pounded the desk of the chief of police and threatened all sorts of abominable reprisals unless my father was released instantly. “Instantly! Now! Immediately!” I yelled, slapping my palm on the inspector’s desk. According to Aunt Elsa, the more you treated such people like your servants, the more they behaved accordingly. “And bring me a glass of water, I’m hot.” I was busily scheming all sorts of arcane missions when I heard someone call my name. It was my father.
He was returning from the barber and was ambling at a leisurely pace, headed for his favorite café near the stock exchange building. “Why aren’t you in jail?” I asked, scarcely concealing my disappointment. “Jail!” he exclaimed, as if to say, “Whoever gave you such a silly notion?” “All they wanted was to ask me a few questions. Denunciations, always these false denunciations. Did you do everything I told you?” “All except Signor Rosenthal.” “Very good. Leave the rest to me. By the way, did Molkho agree?” I told him he did. “Wonderful.” Then he remembered. “Do you have the money?” “Yes.” “Come, then. I’ll buy you coffee. You do drink coffee,
don’t you? Remember to give it to me under the table.” A young woman passed in front of us and father turned. “See? Those are what I call perfect ankles.”
At the café, my father introduced me to everyone. They were all businessmen, bankers, and industrialists who would meet at around eleven in the morning. All of them had either lost everything they owned or were about to. “He’s even read all of Plutarch’s Lives,” boasted my father. “Wonderful,” said one of them, who, by his accent, was Greek. “Then surely you remember Themistocles.” “Of course he does,” said my father, seeing I was blushing. “Let me explain to you, then, how Themistocles won the battle at Salamis, because, that, my dear, they won’t teach you in school.” Monsieur Panos took out a Parker pen and proceeded to draw naval formations on the corner of his newspaper. “And do you know who taught me all this?” he asked, with a self-satisfied glint flickering in his glazed eyes, his hand pawing my hair all the while. “Do you know who? Me,” he said, “I did, all by myself. Because I wanted to be an admiral in the Greek navy. Then I discovered there was no Greek navy, so I joined the Red Cross at Alamein.”
Everyone burst out laughing, and Monsieur Panos, who probably did not understand why, joined them. “I still have the Luger a dying German soldier gave me. It had three bullets left, and now I know who they’re for: one for President Nasser. One for my wife, because, God knows, she deserves it. And one for me. Jamais deux sans trois.” Again a burst of laughter. “Not so loud,” the Greek interrupted. But I continued to laugh heartily. While I was wiping my eyes, I caught one of the men nudging my father’s arm. I was not supposed to see the gesture, but I watched as my father turned and looked uneasily at a table behind him. It was the woman with the beautiful ankles. “Weren’t you going to tell me something?” asked my father,
tapping me on the knee under the table. “Only about going to the swimming pool this morning.” “By all means,” he said, taking the money I was secretly passing to him. “Why don’t you go now?”
Two days later the third blow fell.
My father telephoned in the morning. “They don’t want us anymore,” he said in English. I didn’t understand him. “They don’t want us in Egypt.” But we had always known that, I thought. Then he blurted it out: we had been officially expelled and had a week to get our things together. “Abattoir?” I asked. “Abattoir,” he replied.
The first thing one did when abattoir came was to get vaccinated. No country would allow us across its border without papers certifying we had been properly immunized against a slew of Third World diseases.
My father had asked me to take my grandmother to the government vaccine office. The office was near the harbor. She hated the thought of being vaccinated by an Egyptian orderly—“Not even a doctor,” she said. I told her we would stop and have tea and pastries afterward at Athinéos. “Don’t hurt me,” she told the balding woman who held her arm. “But I’m not hurting you,” protested the woman in Arabic. “You’re not hurting me? You are hurting me!” The woman ordered her to keep still. Then came my turn. She reminded me of Miss Badawi when she scraped my scalp with her fingernails looking for lice. Would they really ask us to undress at the customs desk when the time came and search us to our shame?
After the ordeal, my grandmother was still grumbling as we came down the stairs of the government building, her voice echoing loudly as I tried to hush her. She said she wanted to buy me ties.
Outside the building, I immediately hailed a hansom, helped my grandmother up, and then heard her give an obscure address on Place Mohammed Ali. As soon as we were seated, she removed a small vial of alcohol and, like her Marrano ancestors who wiped off all traces of baptismal water as soon as they had left the church, she sprinkled the alcohol on the site of the injection—to kill the vaccine, she said, and all the germs that came with it!
It was a glorious day, and as we rode along my grandmother suddenly tapped me on the leg as she had done years earlier on our way to Rouchdy and said, “Definitely a beach day.” I took off my sweater and began to feel that uncomfortable, palling touch of wool flannel against my thighs. Time for shorts. The mere thought of light cotton made the wool unbearable. We cut through a dark street, then a square, got on the Corniche, and, in less than ten minutes, came face-to-face with the statue of Mohammed Ali, the Albanian founder of Egypt’s last ruling dynasty.
We proceeded past a series of old, decrepit stores that looked like improvised warehouses and workshops until we reached one tiny, extremely cluttered shop. “Sidi Daoud,” shouted my grandmother. No answer. She took out a coin and used it to knock on the glass door several times. “Sidi Daoud is here,” a tired figure finally uttered, emerging from the dark. He recognized her immediately, calling her his “favorite mazmazelle.”
Sidi Daoud was a one-eyed, portly Egyptian who dressed in traditional garb—a white galabiya and on top of it a grossly oversized, gray, double-breasted jacket. My grandmother, speaking to him in Arabic, said she wanted to buy me some good ties. “Ties? I have ties,” he said, pointing to a huge old closet whose doors had been completely removed; it was stuffed with paper bags and dirty cardboard boxes. “What sort of ties?” “Show me,” she said. “Show me, she says,” he muttered as he paced about, “so I’ll show her.”
He brought a stool, climbed up with a series of groans and cringes, reached up to the top of the closet, and brought down a cardboard box whose corners were reinforced with rusted metal. “These are the best,” he said as he took out tie after tie. “You’ll never find these for sale anywhere in the city, or in Cairo, or anywhere else in Egypt.” He removed a tie from a long sheath. It was dark blue with intricate light-blue and pale-orange patterns. He took it in his hands and brought it close to the entrance of the store that I might see it better in the sunlight, holding it out to me with both hands the way a cook might display a poached fish on a salver before serving it. “Let me see,” said my grandmother as though she were about to lift and examine its gills. I recognized the tie immediately: it had the sheen of Signor Ugo’s ties.
This was a stupendous piece of work. My grandmother looked at the loop and the brand name on the rear apron and remarked that it was not a bad make. “I’ll show you another,” he said, not even waiting for me to pass judgment on the first. The second was a light-burgundy, bearing an identical pattern to the first. “Take it to the door,” he told me, “I’m too old to come and go all day.” This one was lovelier than the first, I thought, as I studied both together. A moment later, my grandmother joined me at the door and held the burgundy one in her hands and examined it, tilting her head left and right, as though looking for concealed blemishes which she was almost sure to catch if she looked hard enough. Then, placing the fabric between thumb and forefinger, she rubbed them together to test the quality of the silk, peeving the salesman. “Show me better.” “Better than this?” he replied. “Mafish, there isn’t!” He showed us other ties, but none compared to the first. I said I was happy with the dark-blue one; it would go with my new blazer. “Don’t match your clothes like a pauper,” said my grandmother. The Egyptian unsheathed two more ties from a different box. One with a green background,
the other light blue. “Do you like them?” she asked. I liked them all, I said. “He likes them all,” she repeated with indulgent irony in her voice.
“This is the black market,” she said to me as soon as we left the store, the precious package clutched in my hand, as I squinted in the sunlight, scanning the crowded Place Mohammed Ali for another horse-drawn carriage. We had spent half an hour in Sidi Daoud’s store and had probably looked at a hundred ties before choosing these four. No shop I ever saw, before or since—not even the shop in the Faubourg Saint Honoré where my grandmother took me years later—had as many ties as Sidi Daoud’s little hovel. I spotted an empty hansom and shouted to the driver from across the square. The arbaghi, who heard me and immediately stood up in the driver’s box, signaled he would have to turn around the square, motioning us to wait for him.
Fifteen minutes later, we arrived at Athinéos. The old Spaniard was gone. Instead, a surly Greek doing a weak impersonation of a well-mannered waiter took our order. We were seated in a very quiet corner, next to a window with thick white linen drapes, and spoke about the French plays due to open in a few days. “Such a pity,” she said. “Things are beginning to improve just when we are leaving.” The Comédie Française had finally returned to Egypt after an absence of at least ten years. La Scala was also due to come again and open in Cairo’s old opera house with a production of Otello. Madame Darwish, our seamstress, had told my grandmother of a young actor from the Comédie who had knocked at her door saying this was where he had lived as a boy; she let him in, offered him coffee, and the young man burst out crying, then said goodbye. “Could all this talk of expulsion be mere bluffing?” my grandmother mused aloud, only to respond, “I don’t think so.”
After a second round of mango ice cream, she said, “And now we’ll buy you a good book and then we might stop a while at the museum.” By “good book” she meant either difficult to come by or one she approved of. It was to be my fourteenth-birthday present. We left the restaurant and were about to hail another carriage when my grandmother told me to make a quick left turn. “We’ll pretend we’re going to eat a pastry at Flückiger’s.” I didn’t realize why we were pretending until much later in the day when I heard my father yell at my grandmother. “We could all go to jail for what you did, thinking you’re so clever!” Indeed, she had succeeded in losing the man who had been tailing us after—and probably before—we entered Athinéos. I knew nothing about it when we were inside the secondhand bookstore. On one of the stacks I had found exactly what I wanted. “Are you sure you’re going to read all this?” she asked.
She paid for the books absentmindedly and did not return the salesman’s greeting. She had suddenly realized that a second agent might have been following us all along. “Let’s leave now,” she said, trying to be polite. “Why?” “Because.” We hopped in a taxi and told the driver to take us to Ramleh station. On our way we passed a series of familiar shops and restaurants, a stretch of saplings leaning against a sunny wall, and, beyond the buildings, an angular view of the afternoon sea.
As soon as we arrived at Sporting, I told my grandmother I was going straight to the Corniche. “No, you’re coming home with me.” I was about to argue. “Do as I tell you, please. There could be trouble.” Standing on the platform was our familiar tail. As soon as I heard the word trouble, I must have frozen on the spot, because she immediately added, “Now don’t go about looking so frightened!”
My grandmother, it turned out, had been smuggling money
out of the country for years and had done so on that very day. I will never know whether her contact was Sidi Daoud, or the owner of the secondhand bookstore, or maybe one of the many coachmen we hired that day. When I asked her in Paris many years later, all she volunteered was, “One needed nerves of steel.”
Despite the frantic packing and last-minute sale of all the furniture, my mother, my grandmother, and Aunt Elsa had decided we should hold a Passover seder on the eve of our departure. For this occasion, two giant candelabra would be brought in from the living room, and it was decided that the old sculptured candles should be used as well. No point in giving them away. Aunt Elsa wanted to clean house, to remove all traces of bread, as Jews traditionally do in preparation for Passover. But with the suitcases all over the place and everything upside down, nobody was eager to undertake such a task, and the idea was abandoned. “Then why have a seder?” she asked with embittered sarcasm. “Be glad we’re having one at all,” replied my father. I watched her fume. “If that’s going to be your attitude, let’s not have one, see if I care.” “Now don’t get all worked up over a silly seder, Elsa. Please!”
My mother and my grandmother began pleading with him, and for a good portion of the afternoon, busy embassies shuttled back and forth between Aunt Elsa’s room and my father’s study. Finally, he said he had to go out but would be back for dinner. That was his way of conceding. Abdou, who knew exactly what to prepare for the seder, needed no further inducements and immediately began boiling the eggs and preparing the cheese-and-potato buñuelos.
Meanwhile, Aunt Elsa began imploring me to help read the Haggadah that evening. Each time I refused, she would remind
me that it was the last time this dining room would ever see a seder and that I should read in memory of Uncle Nessim. “His seat will stay empty unless somebody reads.” Again I refused. “Are you ashamed of being Jewish? Is that it? What kind of Jews are we, then?” she kept asking. “The kind who don’t celebrate leaving Egypt when it’s the last thing they want to do,” I said. “But that’s so childish. We’ve never not had a seder. Your mother will be crushed. Is that what you want?” “What I want is to have no part of it. I don’t want to cross the Red Sea. And I don’t want to be in Jerusalem next year. As far as I’m concerned, all of this is just worship of repetition and nothing more.” And I stormed out of the room, extremely pleased with my bon mot. “But it’s our last evening in Egypt,” she said, as though that would change my mind.
For all my resistance, however, I decided to wear one of my new ties, a blazer, and a newly made pair of pointed black shoes. My mother, who joined me in the living room around half past seven, was wearing a dark-blue dress and her favorite jewelry. In the next room, I could hear the two sisters putting the final touches to the table, stowing away the unused silverware, which Abdou had just polished. Then my grandmother came in, making a face that meant Aunt Elsa was truly impossible. “It’s always what she wants, never what others want.” She sat down, inspected her skirt absentmindedly, spreading its pleats, then began searching through the bowl of peanuts until she found a roasted almond. We looked outside and in the window caught our own reflections. Three more characters, I thought, and we’ll be ready for Pirandello.
Aunt Elsa walked in, dressed in purple lace that dated back at least three generations. She seemed to notice that I had decided to wear a tie. “Much better than those trousers with the snaps on them,” she said, throwing her sister a significant glance. We decided to have vermouth, and Aunt Elsa said she
would smoke. My mother also smoked. Then, gradually, as always happened during such gatherings, the sisters began to reminisce. Aunt Elsa told us about the little icon shop she had kept in Lourdes before the Second World War. She had sold such large quantities of religious objects to Christian pilgrims that no one would have guessed she was Jewish. But then, at Passover, not knowing where to buy unleavened bread, she had gone to a local baker and inquired about the various qualities of flour he used in his shop, claiming her husband had a terrible ulcer and needed special bread. The man said he did not understand what she wanted, and Elsa, distraught, continued to ask about a very light type of bread, maybe even unleavened bread, if such a thing existed. The man replied that surely there was an epidemic spreading around Lourdes, for many were suffering from similar gastric disorders and had been coming to his shop for the past few days asking the same question. “Many?” she asked. “Many, many,” he replied, smiling, then whispered, “Bonne pâque, happy Passover,” and sold her the unleavened bread.
“Se non è vero, è ben trovato, if it isn’t true, you’ve made it up well,” said my father, who had just walked in. “So, are we all ready?” “Yes, we were waiting for you,” said my mother, “did you want some scotch?” “No, already had some.”
Then, as we made toward the dining room, I saw that my father’s right cheek was covered with pink, livid streaks, like nail scratches. My grandmother immediately pinched her cheek when she saw his face but said nothing. My mother too cast stealthy glances in his direction but was silent.
“So what exactly is it you want us to do now?” he asked Aunt Elsa, mildly scoffing at the ceremonial air she adopted on these occasions.
“I want you to read,” she said, indicating Uncle Nessim’s seat. My mother stood up and showed him where to start,
pained and shaking her head silently the more she looked at his face. He began to recite in French, without irony, without flourishes, even meekly. But as soon as he began to feel comfortable with the text, he started to fumble, reading the instructions out loud, then correcting himself, or skipping lines unintentionally only to find himself reading the same line twice. At one point, wishing to facilitate his task, my grandmother said, “Skip that portion.” He read some more and she interrupted again. “Skip that too.”
“No,” said Elsa, “either we read everything or nothing at all.” An argument was about to erupt. “Where is Nessim now that we need him,” said Elsa with that doleful tone in her voice that explained her success at Lourdes. “As far away from you as he can be,” muttered my father under his breath, which immediately made me giggle. My mother, catching my attempt to stifle a laugh, began to smile; she knew exactly what my father had said though she had not heard it. My father, too, was infected by the giggling, which he smothered as best as he could, until my grandmother caught sight of him, which sent her laughing uncontrollably. No one had any idea what to do, what to read, or when to stop. “Some Jews we are,” said Aunt Elsa, who had also started to laugh and whose eyes were tearing. “Shall we eat, then?” asked my father. “Good idea,” I said. “But we’ve only just begun,” protested Aunt Elsa, recovering her composure. “It’s the very last time. How could you? We’ll never be together again, I can just feel it.” She was on the verge of tears, but my grandmother warned her that she, too, would start crying if we kept on like this. “This is the last year,” said Elsa, reaching out and touching my hand. “It’s just that I can remember so many seders held in this very room, for fifty years, year after year after year. And I’ll tell you something,” she said, turning to my father. “Had I known fifty years ago that it would end like this, had I known
I’d be among the last in this room, with everyone buried or gone away, it would have been better to die, better to have died back then than to be left alone like this.” “Calm yourself, Elsica,” said my father, “otherwise we’ll all be in mourning here.”
At that point, Abdou walked in and, approaching my father, said there was someone on the telephone asking for him. “Tell them we are praying,” said my father. “But sir—” He seemed troubled and began to speak softly. “So?” “She said she wanted to apologize.” No one said anything. “Tell her not now.” “Very well.”
We heard the hurried patter of Abdou’s steps up the corridor, heard him pick up the receiver and mumble something. Then, with relief, we heard him hang up and go back into the kitchen. It meant she had not insisted or argued. It meant he would be with us tonight. “Shall we eat, then?” said my mother. “Good idea,” I repeated. “Yes, I’m starving,” said Aunt Elsa. “An angel you married,” murmured my grandmother to my father.
After dinner, everyone moved into the smaller living room, and, as was her habit on special gatherings, Aunt Elsa asked my father to play the record she loved so much. It was a very old recording by the Busch Quartet, and Aunt Elsa always kept it in her room, fearing someone might ruin it. I had noticed it earlier in the day lying next to the radio. It meant she had been planning the music all along. “Here,” she said, gingerly removing the warped record from its blanched dust jacket with her arthritic fingers. It was Beethoven’s “Song of Thanksgiving.” Everyone sat down, and the adagio started.
The old 78 hissed, the static louder than the music, though no one seemed to notice, for my grandmother began humming, softly, with a plangent, faraway whine in her voice, and my father shut his eyes, and Aunt Elsa began shaking her head
in rapt wonder, as she did sometimes when tasting Swiss chocolate purchased on the black market, as if to say, “How could anyone have created such beauty?”
And there, I thought, was my entire world: the two old ones writhing in a silent stupor, my father probably wishing he was elsewhere, and my mother, whose thoughts, as she leafed through a French fashion magazine, were everywhere and nowhere, but mostly on her husband, who knew that she would say nothing that evening and would probably let the matter pass quietly and never speak of it again.
I motioned to my mother that I was going out for a walk. She nodded. Without saying anything, my father put his hand in his pocket and slipped me a few bills.
Outside, Rue Delta was brimming with people. It was the first night of Ramadan and the guns marking the end of the fast had gone off three hours earlier. There was unusual bustle and clamor, with people gathered in groups, standing in the way of traffic, making things noisier and livelier still, the scent of holiday pastries and fried treats filling the air. I looked up at our building: on our floor, all the lights were out except for Abdou’s and those in the living room. Such weak lights, and so scant in comparison to the gaudy, colored bulbs that hung from all the lampposts and trees—as if the electricity in our home were being sapped and might die out at any moment. It was an Old World, old-people’s light.
As I neared the seafront, the night air grew cooler, saltier, freed from the din of lights and the milling crowd. Traffic became sparse, and whenever cars stopped for the traffic signal, everything grew still: then, only the waves could be heard, thudding in the dark, spraying the air along the darkened Corniche with a thin mist that hung upon the night, dousing the streetlights and the signposts and the distant floodlights by the guns of Petrou, spreading a light clammy film upon
the pebbled stone wall overlooking the city’s coastline. Quietly, an empty bus splashed along the road, trailing murky stains of light on the gleaming pavement. From somewhere, in scattered snatches, came the faint lilt of music, perhaps from one of those dance halls where students used to flock at night. Or maybe just a muted radio somewhere on the beach nearby, where abandoned nets gave off a pungent smell of seaweed and fish.
At the corner of the street, from a sidewalk stall, came the smell of fresh dough and of angel-hair being fried on top of a large copper stand—a common sight throughout the city every Ramadan. People would fold the pancakes and stuff them with almonds, syrup, and raisins. The vendor caught me eyeing the cakes that were neatly spread on a black tray. He smiled and said, “Etfaddal, help yourself.”
I thought of Aunt Elsa’s chiding eyes. “But it’s Pesah,” I imagined her saying. My grandmother would disapprove too—eating food fried by Arabs on the street, unconscionable. The Egyptian didn’t want any money. “It’s for you,” he said, handing me the delicacy on a torn sheet of newspaper.
I wished him a good evening and took the soggy pancake out onto the seafront. There, heaving myself up on the stone wall, I sat with my back to the city, facing the sea, holding the delicacy I was about to devour. Abdou would have called this a real mazag, accompanying the word, as all Egyptians do, with a gesture of the hand—a flattened palm brought to the side of the head—signifying blissful plenitude and the prolonged, cultivated consumption of everyday pleasures.
Facing the night, I looked out at the stars and thought to myself, over there is Spain, then France, to the right Italy, and, straight ahead, the land of Solon and Pericles. The world is timeless and boundless, and I thought of all the shipwrecked, homeless mariners who had strayed to this very land and for
years had tinkered away at their damaged boats, praying for a wind, only to grow soft and reluctant when their time came.
I stared at the flicker of little fishing boats far out in the offing, always there at night, and watched a group of children scampering about on the beach below, waving little Ramadan lanterns, the girls wearing loud pink-and-fuchsia dresses, locking hands as they wove themselves into the dark again, followed by another group of child revelers who were flocking along the jetty past the sand dunes, some even waving up to me from below. I waved back with a familiar gesture of street fellowship and wiped the light spray that had moistened my face.
And suddenly I knew, as I touched the damp, grainy surface of the seawall, that I would always remember this night, that in years to come I would remember sitting here, swept with confused longing as I listened to the water lapping the giant boulders beneath the promenade and watched the children head toward the shore in a winding, lambent procession. I wanted to come back tomorrow night, and the night after, and the one after that as well, sensing that what made leaving so fiercely painful was the knowledge that there would never be another night like this, that I would never eat soggy cakes along the coast road in the evening, not this year or any other year, nor feel the baffling, sudden beauty of that moment when, if only for an instant, I had caught myself longing for a city I never knew I loved.
Exactly a year from now, I vowed, I would sit outside at night wherever I was, somewhere in Europe, or in America, and turn my face to Egypt, as Moslems do when they pray and face Mecca, and remember this very night, and how I had thought these things and made this vow. You’re beginning to sound like Elsa and her silly seders, I said to myself, mimicking my father’s humor.
On my way home I thought of what the others were doing. I wanted to walk in, find the smaller living room still lit, the Beethoven still playing, with Abdou still clearing the dining room, and, on closing the front door, suddenly hear someone say, “We were just waiting for you, we’re thinking of going to the Royal.” “But we’ve already seen that film,” I would say. “What difference does it make. We’ll see it again.”
And before we had time to argue, we would all rush downstairs, where my father would be waiting in a car that was no longer really ours, and, feeling the slight chill of a late April night, would huddle together with the windows shut, bicker as usual about who got to sit where, rub our hands, turn the radio to a French broadcast, and then speed to the Corniche, thinking that all this was as it always was, that nothing ever really changed, that the people enjoying their first stroll on the Corniche after fasting, or the woman selling tickets at the Royal, or the man who would watch our car in the side alley outside the theater, or our neighbors across the hall, or the drizzle that was sure to greet us after the movie at midnight would never, ever know, nor ever guess, that this was our last night in Alexandria.