Authors: André Aciman
Out of Egypt (26 page)
I pointed upstairs and showed my wife the window from which Aunt Elsa had thrown her husband's pipe on New Year's Eve to make a wish. I showed her the building nearby where Maria Callas had lived. They had spoken in Greek to her, corrected her Greek once.
We took pictures. Of the building. Of me standing in front of the building. Of her taking pictures of me standing in front of the building. She asked again which floor they had lived on. The fifth, I said. We looked up. The windows of Aunt Elsa's studio were unlit and the shutters drawn. Of course they're unlit, no one's home, I thought to myself. They've been dead for twenty years! But then, the apartment couldn't have
stayed empty for so many years; surely it belonged to someone else. I seemed to recall that Vili himself had sold it. Still, what if it had never changed hands in all these years, if nothing had changed, if no one had even picked up the fork or touched the cardigan Aunt Elsa let fall before being rushed to the hospital on the night she died? What if her furniture and her china and her clothes and everything she hoarded throughout her life kept vigil for her and remained forever and only hers by dint of the life she had spun around them?
stayed empty for so many years; surely it belonged to someone else. I seemed to recall that Vili himself had sold it. Still, what if it had never changed hands in all these years, if nothing had changed, if no one had even picked up the fork or touched the cardigan Aunt Elsa let fall before being rushed to the hospital on the night she died? What if her furniture and her china and her clothes and everything she hoarded throughout her life kept vigil for her and remained forever and only hers by dint of the life she had spun around them?
And for a moment I thought that this might also be true of the apartment on Rue Thèbes, that after sixty years with us it could never belong to anyone else and would be forever ours. I wanted to think that it, too, remained exactly the way we left it, that no one cried or quarreled there, that dust collected in the corners, that children were never allowed to scream as they sprinted past the junk room where Flora loved, Vili wept, and Latifa died.
I looked up again. The windows next to Aunt Elsa's dark studio were aglow. I could see a shadow move from the kitchen to what must have been the dining area. It turned to the window, looked out for a moment, and then turned back. The neighbor who had once complained I wasted too much water when bathing was still alive, then.
But I was wrong. After so many years, I had mistaken the windows. The old stingy neighbor lived behind the dark shutters; the windows that were lit were Aunt Elsa's after all. So she is home, I started, almost allowing myself to rejoice at the thought.
“Didn't you ever want to go upstairs to visit?” asked my wife.
I could almost imagine them looking down from the fifthfloor landing, waiting for us at the end of the stairwell, and in typical Sephardi fashion speaking their joy by complaining
first: “Is it now that you finally deign to visit us?” “Twenty years, that's forever.” “An offering, a prayer, something for us to go on. Instead, nothing!” “That's what comes of living in New York.” “Enough, Elsa. The important thing is he's here now.”
first: “Is it now that you finally deign to visit us?” “Twenty years, that's forever.” “An offering, a prayer, something for us to go on. Instead, nothing!” “That's what comes of living in New York.” “Enough, Elsa. The important thing is he's here now.”
I pictured them fretting about the kitchen to improvise a makeshift dinner despite my protestations that we had just eaten. “You should have warned us.” “But we're not hungry.” “How could you not be hungry?”âmy wife tapping me on the arm, saying “Let them,” almost amused at these distant relatives, dusted off from an ancient find.
Then, realizing it was all hopeless anyhow, that there was no use pretending, “You're too late,” they say, with old age straining their voices. “And we're terribly sorry,” they add in good socialite French, as if we had come at the wrong hour and had just missed late-afternoon tea.
The Lotus-Eaters
I
t had taken my parents three years to find their jewel in Cleopatra. Life at Smouha after the 1956 war had become too unsafe, and so unsavory, they saidâtoo many vagrants, too much dust, so few Europeans. And late at night, Smouha could turn quite eerie, especially when you heard the drone of ongoing rallies with loudspeakers squawking the latest propaganda. What my parents looked for, and eventually found, was an apartment near Sporting facing the sea on one side and the vast banana plantations of Smouha on the other.
t had taken my parents three years to find their jewel in Cleopatra. Life at Smouha after the 1956 war had become too unsafe, and so unsavory, they saidâtoo many vagrants, too much dust, so few Europeans. And late at night, Smouha could turn quite eerie, especially when you heard the drone of ongoing rallies with loudspeakers squawking the latest propaganda. What my parents looked for, and eventually found, was an apartment near Sporting facing the sea on one side and the vast banana plantations of Smouha on the other.
My father was delighted with the study, my mother with the balcony; Om Ramadan was ecstatic about the laundry room; there was even a small room for my new Greek governess, Madame Marie. “What a fabulous home,” said the Princess when she came to visit and managed to get lost in the corridor. “How did you ever find it?” My mother said it was the simplest thing in the world: the Venturas, longtime friends of her parents, had finally decided to leave Egypt and were desperate to sell their apartment.
One evening, shortly after we moved in, our dining room was littered with large sheets of sturdy cobalt-blue paper which Abdou had brought from my great-grandmother's house. “They never throw away anything over there,” my mother had said. Madame Marie, my mother, and Aziza were busily cutting the large blue sheets in four to cover all of my books and notebooks as school regulations required. Someone had telephoned from school complaining that I did not keep my notebooks in good order. Two weeks later the same teacher called again saying that the issue was not just one of neatnessâas Abdou, who had taken the call the first time, had erroneously reported to my motherâbut one of conformity, of having each book and notebook bound like everyone else's in class.
A label bearing my full name, properly capitalized, was to be glued to the front of each notebook to indicate the subject, year, class, and volume. The blue paper, moreover, had to be tucked inâtightlyânot glued with gummed paper. My mother had no patience with these British-school niceties and wanted to stick the label on the top right-hand corner, as was done in French schools. I insisted that the label had to be placed in the middle of the cover. Would beige paper do? she had first asked. No, it had to be blue, everyone used blue. This was when Abdou remembered the blue paper at Rue Thèbes. He took off his apron, walked to Sporting, and was back in an hour.
“I can't believe you waited over a month to tell us about this,” said my father, joining the women after work and helping them cover my books while Madame Marie cut the paper. “How could you forget?”
I hadn't forgotten.
“Then why are we doing it at the last minute?” he asked.
I didn't know why. Maybe because I thought we'd soon be leaving Egypt and so none of this mattered.
My father, however, did not want to leave, and to prove the point had added another floor to his factory, invested in several apartments, commissioned new furniture, and, to cap his list of fantasies, had enrolled me, when I turned nine, in what throughout his early years in Egypt had always seemed an exclusive institution incarnating the very peak of British splendor: Victoria College.
Victoria Collegeârenamed Victory College after the “victory” of the Egyptian forces over Britain, France, and Israel in 1956âwas once the pride of the British Empire's educational system. Like other famous British public schools, it was a huge compound boasting large, well-trimmed playing fields and an imposing quadrangle, and was governed by a code of discipline that would have left Matthew Arnold's father, the stout, snub-nosed headmaster of Browning College, thrilled with depraved ecstasy.
English writers, philosophers, and mathematicians had once flocked to teach at VC. Wealthy Britons used to send their sons there, and Alexandria's elite consistently favored VC over the Lycée Français. Everything at VC was marked by spare, Victorian elegance, from the dark interiors that recalled the brooding opulence of its founders, down to the mournful, petty faces of its teachers, who couldn't wait to do to children what had probably been done to them for too many years.
Aside from that, however, the British legacy had been reduced to a handful of meaningless features: atrocious food; a reluctance to adopt anything too visibly modern; a ban on chewing gum and ballpoint pens; a gray uniform with navy piping around the edges of the blazer; an obstinate resistance to all types of Americanisms, especially soft drinks; compulsory gymnastics; corporal punishment; and, above all, awe before any form of authority, including the janitor's. My father, who had never set foot in a British school, and who in typical
Sephardi fashion would have given anything to live his life all over again provided it started in an English public school, revered this caricature of Victorian austerity for its enviable aversion to all types of sissy comforts. It made gentlemen out of bullies, and men out of frail, pale-faced boys. It made England England. To his mind, VC was peopled by fair-haired, blue-eyed boys who would one day go to Cambridge and Oxford and rise to the helm of all the great banks and all the great nations that ruled the world. What he failed to notice during our tour of the prestigious institution, one summer day when the school was totally empty, was that VC had essentially become an Arab school wearing the tattered relics of British garb.
Sephardi fashion would have given anything to live his life all over again provided it started in an English public school, revered this caricature of Victorian austerity for its enviable aversion to all types of sissy comforts. It made gentlemen out of bullies, and men out of frail, pale-faced boys. It made England England. To his mind, VC was peopled by fair-haired, blue-eyed boys who would one day go to Cambridge and Oxford and rise to the helm of all the great banks and all the great nations that ruled the world. What he failed to notice during our tour of the prestigious institution, one summer day when the school was totally empty, was that VC had essentially become an Arab school wearing the tattered relics of British garb.
After its renaming, VC had fallen on sad days. With the departure of most British nationals, it had become a boarding school for rich Palestinians, Kuwaitis, and Saudis. The rising Egyptian middle class sent all of its firstborn sons there, as did rustic landowners from the Nile Valley and prosperous town mayors. Though VC was still regarded as an English-speaking school, outside of class no one spoke English. One language was favored: Arabic. In class, when a teacher was unable to explain 2Ïr in English, his speech, which was mostly pidgin to start with, would invariably revert to Arabic. Europeans, Armenians, and Christian Syriansâthere were six of us in my classâusually spoke French among themselves. Charlie Atkinson, who didn't know French, was the last remaining English boy in the entire school. I was the last Jew.
Although by 1960 the study of Arabic had become mandatory for all foreign residents, explanations in Arabic did not much help European boys. Very few of us understood a word of classical or formal spoken Arabic. All we knew was street Egyptian, a sort of diluted, makeshift lingua franca that Egyptians spoke with Europeans. When Mohammed, our servant,
telephoned early one morning from the hospital asking to be given the day off because his son had been run over by a truck, he told me, “
Al bambino bita Mohammed getu morto
,” meaning, “The son belonging to Mohammed has become dead,” adding,
“Bokra lazem congé alashan lazem cimetière,”
meaning, “Tomorrow he needed holiday because cemetery was needed.” This was not even spoken Egyptian, but in its garbled mixture of French, Italian, and Arabic, it allowed Europeans who never cared to learn Arabic to communicate with the local population.
telephoned early one morning from the hospital asking to be given the day off because his son had been run over by a truck, he told me, “
Al bambino bita Mohammed getu morto
,” meaning, “The son belonging to Mohammed has become dead,” adding,
“Bokra lazem congé alashan lazem cimetière,”
meaning, “Tomorrow he needed holiday because cemetery was needed.” This was not even spoken Egyptian, but in its garbled mixture of French, Italian, and Arabic, it allowed Europeans who never cared to learn Arabic to communicate with the local population.
The little Arabic I knew I had learned at our service-entrance door, which stood wide open on those warm Ramadan evenings in the spring when cooks and servants from up and down our building at Cleopatra would gather around our kitchen, idling away the minutes as they waited for the loud cannon shot from the harbor announcing the time for devout Moslems to eat after the long day's fast. They would not speak our lingua franca among themselves, but in my presence their conversation would automatically devolve into what could only have seemed a form of baby talk, though it was peppered with light, bawdy notes hovering over their speech like an impudent, spirited sneer.
Om Ramadan would come in and sit in the kitchen with Abdou and Aziza. Fawziah, our next-door neighbor's maid, would also step out of her kitchen and come into ours, and sometimes all three would sit in the early evening as Abdou sorted the rice or shelled peas amidst the yell of delivery boys running up and down the stairwell and the clatter of plates and cooking utensils. I loved their gossipâpure, malevolent, petty gossipâtheir complaints, complaints about one another behind one another's back, about their bosses, my mother, her screaming, complaints about their sons who had turned to crime, about health, disease, death, scandal, housing, poverty,
and aching bones.
Rumatizm
, rheumatismâor, as Fawziah would say,
maratizm
, which sent everyone laughing each time, because, corrupted into
maraftizu,
it meant something obscene having to do with women and buttocks.
and aching bones.
Rumatizm
, rheumatismâor, as Fawziah would say,
maratizm
, which sent everyone laughing each time, because, corrupted into
maraftizu,
it meant something obscene having to do with women and buttocks.
Sometimes with Abdou, Hisham, and Fawziah, I would sit on a fourth stool, while Abdou clipped away at his large toenails with giant chicken shears, and Fawziah, sitting with the open kitchen door swinging between her knees, drummed elaborate rhythms on both sides of it, tapping away with such speed that it drove our one-armed Hisham to stand up and imitate the vibrant hip twirls of a third-rate belly dancer. Everyone laughed, including Hisham, and we begged him to dance again, the three of us coaxing him with renewed drumming on the kitchen table. To practice that rhythm, I had once tapped it on our dining table, a sound my grandmother found totally revolting and which confirmed all the more the sentiment that I should no longer be allowed to grow up in Egypt. “We must send him to a boarding school in England,” she said.
Everyone seemed to agree, including my parents and Aunt Flora.
“He doesn't know how to say two words without mumbling, he has no table manners to speak of, and, to be perfectly candid, Henri,” continued Uncle Nessim that same evening, “his English is unacceptable.”
“I don't see how I can write Vili and ask him to host the boy for a summer,” added Aunt Elsa. “He's simply not fit to go.”
Miffed by her sister's rebuke, my grandmother reminded everyone that
I,
at least, attended the famed Victoria College âbut without failing to add that, of course, she, too, disapproved of these kitchen-sink
fréquentations
with Arab servants. And turning to Madame Marieâher spy, as my mother called
herâshe would beg her to wean me away from
these people.
Madame Marie, who held Arabs in the utmost contempt, except when she ventured into the service stairway to ask one of them for a cigarette, couldn't agree more. “Even dogs bark at Arabs,” she would say.
I,
at least, attended the famed Victoria College âbut without failing to add that, of course, she, too, disapproved of these kitchen-sink
fréquentations
with Arab servants. And turning to Madame Marieâher spy, as my mother called
herâshe would beg her to wean me away from
these people.
Madame Marie, who held Arabs in the utmost contempt, except when she ventured into the service stairway to ask one of them for a cigarette, couldn't agree more. “Even dogs bark at Arabs,” she would say.
In turn, everyone in the stairwell never stopped making fun of her. To irritate her further, one of the servants in the building kept repeating a short rhyming couplet ridiculing the Greeks of Egypt. The first line was in Greek, the second in Arabic:
Ti kanis? Ti kanis?
Bayaa makanis.
Bayaa makanis.
[
How are you? How are you?
You seller of broomsticks
.]
How are you? How are you?
You seller of broomsticks
.]
Unruffled by my new Arab
fréquentations,
however, my father claimed they were as good a way as any to learn Arabic. “He knows every cook and servant in our building,” he told our guests, the way he would brag that I knew the name of every Greek god and goddessâa revelation that brought no end of sorrow to both Aunt Elsa and Uncle Nessim when they found out that I knew all about Ares and Aphrodite but had never heard of Cain and Abel.
fréquentations,
however, my father claimed they were as good a way as any to learn Arabic. “He knows every cook and servant in our building,” he told our guests, the way he would brag that I knew the name of every Greek god and goddessâa revelation that brought no end of sorrow to both Aunt Elsa and Uncle Nessim when they found out that I knew all about Ares and Aphrodite but had never heard of Cain and Abel.
“He doesn't even know the story of Abraham and Isaac, let alone the crossing of the Red Sea,” Elsa reported incredulously during our first seder at Cleopatra.
“What are we, then, pagans?” interjected Uncle Nessim.
“Madame Marie, you must promise to do something to save this child. Will you promise us that?” said my grandmother.
Madame Marie, who was so happy to have finally been spoken to in the course of the meal, beamed with pleasure, and promised that everyone could count on her. “
Si fidi di me,
signora,
trust me,” she said in Italian, seemingly forgetting that my mother did not know a word of Italian.
Si fidi di me,
signora,
trust me,” she said in Italian, seemingly forgetting that my mother did not know a word of Italian.
“Bless you, my dear,” said my grandmother.
“Salud y berakhá,”
echoed my great-grandmother.
echoed my great-grandmother.
At which Uncle Nessim, who had picked up his Haggadah, began leafing through its pages and resumed his recitation. At a sign given by Aunt Elsa, everyone stood up, including Madame Marie, who had been invited to the seder because my grandmother thought it was too rude to send her home or make her stay in her room during dinner like a servant. Madame Marie, a devout Greek Orthodox from Smyrna, stood up and sat down, dipped her foods in all the requisite dishes and sauces, ate everything she saw us eat, and repeated “Amen” after everyone else, though with the guarded look of a missionary forced to down a tribal brew. Her biggest fear in working for a Jewish family was to be inadvertently converted to Judaism.
“We say âAmen' too,” she said, attempting to be cordial.
“All religions say âAmen,'” replied my father.
My father enjoyed teasing Madame Marie by saying that distinctions among religions were entirely superfluous, since we were all brothers under God, Jewish, Moslem, Greek Orthodox, no difference at allâparticularly this year, as Passover, Easter, and Ramadan came within days of each other.
“Indeed,” my father would say, “there is hardly any difference between Easter and Passover, seeing that the Greek word for Easter is
paska,
which in Italian is
pasqua,
which itself comes from the Hebrew word
pesah.
What do you think the Last Supper was, Madame Marie?”
paska,
which in Italian is
pasqua,
which itself comes from the Hebrew word
pesah.
What do you think the Last Supper was, Madame Marie?”
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