4. SERVANTS

Surrounded by water. Water, water, water. In the north, her full breasts dip in the water of the Mediterranean. In the south, the waves of Lake Mariout cool her behind with arousing caresses. In the east, her fingers flutter through the Nile as it runs its brown water with limp sleepiness. In the west, the sea of sand that is the Libyan Desert sends waves of hot breath onto Alexandria’s burning back, feverish with desire. Alexandria. Alex. Sea. Delta. Desert.

“I haaaaate the desert!”

“It’s stifling, and it’s so local. Oh, a picnic on the snowy Alps, in the dense forests of Europe … Oh, Christmas in Paris!”

“When have you ever been to France, Annette?”

“I haven’t, but I went to school at the Lycée français.”

City dwellers. Wild nature? Only in Hollywood movies. The Nile? Too filthy, swarming with Arabs. Sunrise in the desert? Leave that to Lawrence of Arabia, he likes that kind of thing, poor devil. The pyramids? Yes, they’re all right. At any rate, they’re close to Cairo. You can visit them in the morning and then arrange a game of rummy with some friends in Heliopolis. And all the American tourists are crazy about the pyramids, which is saying something, isn’t it? But going all the way to Luxor? Just to see some stones? With all due respect to the temples of Karnak, spending the night there, at the end of the world, among the Arabs, away from civilization? Please.

Yes, that is what they’re like, cosmopolitan to the bone. Speaking to one another in French, English, Spanish, Italian, Greek. They know only the Arabic they absolutely need. Most of the servants speak French, and they are the go-betweens connecting their masters to the locals.

Those who grew up in Israel of the 1950s, in the lap of progressive socialism, the brotherhood of man, the equality of races—at least in theory—must now be chuckling with patronizing contempt; they must find it difficult to understand how cultivated people accepted such backward colonial feudalism. True, Alexandria was rotten to the core, but its rot had roots, was saturated in history. Dig deep through the muck and you’ll find the remnants of a crumbling papyrus, or a lock of hair from the shrunken head of a mummy. Something is rotten, truly rotten, in the kingdom of Alexandria. That’s why I love her so much, Alexandria. A city that lets you live like a carefree lord without even being rich. Of course, you had to be European, or at least Jewish, and of minimal intelligence, and even that wasn’t always a staunch demand. Money? Money was meant to be wasted on pleasures and reveling. Only misers save up for a rainy day. Balls, trips, sailing, racing and card games. You earn between thirty and a hundred pounds per month. You pay four-and-a-half for rent and live in a castle, surrounded by servants, each living on two pounds per month. What a glorious gap! And in fact you are nothing more than a pathetic petit bourgeois. In Europe you would have tightened your purse strings just to get through the month debt-free. All day long, your wife would scrub the floors of the sorry little studio apartment you were able to afford in paradisaical Paris or legendary London. But here, in Alex, Monsieur No-Name easily keeps two slaves working for and worshipping him. You can’t be a nobody if you have two servants, male and female, living and toiling in your home twenty-four hours a day, six-and-a-half days a week (on their half-day off they go to their miserable villages to see their sick parents and their lice-infected little siblings) – all for four Egyptian pounds, two-and-a-half for the men, one-and-a-half for the women.

“They don’t deserve any more than that!”

“They’re so lazy!”

“The worst is when you have a pair of lovebirds on your hands. God help us!”

“He pesters her all day long, and who does she complain to? You, of course. Worse than children.”

“And the women aren’t sainte-ni-touche either.”

“And when they start eating for two—what a nightmare!”

“I had a Bedouin female servant once. Green eyes this big. Then we hired a Sudanese man, black as tar. One day they were cleaning the bathroom together. Don’t ask. Suddenly I heard cries like a woman giving birth. I ran over but the door was locked. I yelled for my husband, Isidore, and he went to get the doorman, and together we broke the door down. What did we find? Don’t ask! The two of them … I’m too embarrassed to even hint at the state we found them in. She, the poor thing, her clothes all torn, lying in the bathtub, almost passed out. And he, naked and black, beating her to death. She must have refused him …”

“Horrible!”

“And that’s nothing. You know my aunt Fortunée, right? My mother’s sister. Once she was alone at home and asked her servant, his name was Ahmed, if I’m not mistaken …”

“They’re all called Ahmed.”

“At any rate, she asked him to go down and pick up her husband’s suit from the cleaner’s. He said, ‘I won’t budge until you sleep with me!’”

“Nooooo!”

“What do you mean, no? She told me herself. But you know Fortunée, she doesn’t scare so easy …”

“I would have died right on the spot.”

“All calm and collected, she tells him: ‘Fine, why not? An attractive guy like you! Wait for me here, I’ll go prepare myself.’ The Don Juan was so confident of his conquest that he wasn’t even careful. She ran downstairs, to call the doorman. And meanwhile, he prepared himself …”—the first, hesitant purrs of laughter are sounded among the ladies—“and when they came upstairs, she and the doorman, they found him ready. Ha ha ha!” The solitary purrs join in to form a light, steady bellowing, still uneasy. But embarrassment slowly evaporates. Now the laughter is mischievous, envisioning. In a moment it will become enormous, wild, somewhat sick. Victorian society in Alex binds itself by the webs of convention, and so the slightest hint of lechery gives way to emotions and urges buried deep under the blanket of appearances. It’s hard to imagine that any of these respectable ladies went so far as to imagine the proud organ of the brash black man, but even that is not out of the question. And if we may, for a moment, part from the narrow and strict realm of facts and amuse ourselves with conjectures, I would suspect the elegant, snobbish, quasi-aristocratic Madame Livia (there are no real aristocrats in Alexandria). And how can we know what goes on in the minds of matrons in their forties, with their spotless reputations? In any case, she is the one now calling her friends to order, reminding them assertively that they did not convene here in order to gossip, but for a serious, respectable endeavor—the game of rummy. Please, Geena, it’s your turn to shuffle!