by André Aciman
Signor Ugo told my father to make a right turn, and then another that led up a very steep hill. A turbaned Bedouin with two daughters wearing nose rings emerged from a small hut to watch our car spin its way up the sandy path. “You can see the monastery across the tracks.” In front of us was a rather large and dilapidated villa whose surrounding walls were lined with spikes and barbed wire. As we pulled up, another Bedouin opened a large gate and my father continued uphill until we reached a level pebbled roadway leading through a meticulously well-kept arbor flanked by manicured fields and flower beds. We finally stopped before what looked like an old, run-down chapel. As soon as we got out, the smell was unmistakable: we were in the middle of the desert, and yet, from this cold promontory, we could see the familiar beaches of Mandara and Montaza extending for dark-blue miles toward the deep, with short white lines streaking the immediate shoreline.
“Vré pezevenk!” shouted a tall, bearded man as soon as he saw Signor Ugo getting out of the car—“You pimp!” He had been supervising a gardener working a plot of flowers. He began to walk toward us with a pair of hedge shears and a broad smile, rubbing the dirt from his fingers with a rag. “Pezevenk kai essi!” Signor Ugo retorted in half-Turkish, half-Greek—“Pederast yourself!” They shook hands heartily, as the tall, bearded Greek brought the shears close to Signor Ugo’s groin and pretended to make small cutting motions. Then, turning to my father and me, “What, more conversos?” he said jokingly, greeting us with his broad smile well before Signor Ugo introduced us. “Conversos of my stamp, if you understand,” he added. “I understand, I understand,” said Father Papanastasiou. “Communion on Sundays, but Fridays the Shema. In other words, an alborayco, a halfbreed. A pezevenk,” said the Greek priest. “Precisely!” snickered Signor Ugo. “With you Jews nothing is ever clear,” the Greek continued. “Come, have some lemonade.” Then, turning to my father, he explained that their friendship went a long way back, “since before the war.” I didn’t ask which one. He explained that alborayco came from al-Burak, Mohammed’s steed, which was neither horse, nor mule, male nor female. “Poor Jews, you’re citizens nowhere and traitors everywhere, even to yourselves. And don’t make that face, Ugo, your own prophets said it, not me.”
The first thing Father Papanastasiou said once we moved into his study was, “I am not like the others.” My father nodded as though to confirm that this had been obvious from the very start. “And do you know why?” A long pause followed, almost as if he expected an answer from us. “I will tell you why. They are priests first, and men last. But do you know what I am?” Again a long pause. Should one say yes or no? I looked at the room, cluttered with what must have been hundreds of icons and old books. A rancid odor of incense filled the air. It was even on my hands and in the glass of lemonade he had offered me. “I will tell you what I am: I am a man first,” he said, raising his thumb, which he jiggled a bit, “then I’m a soldier,” raising his index finger as well, “and then a priest,” raising his middle finger. “Ask anyone. Him too. These hands,” he said, producing a pair of colossal fists that would have intimidated Peter the Great, Rasputin, and Ivan the Terrible, and could easily have crushed the keyboard of the old Royal typewriter sitting on his desk, “these hands have touched everything and they have done everything—do you know what I mean?” he said, turning to me and staring with such intensity that I whispered, “Yes, I do.” “No, you don’t,” he snapped, “and, God willing, you never shall or you’ll have me to answer to. And frankly I don’t know which is worse, God or me.”
“Vassily, stop your confounded nonsense, and let’s get on with it,” interrupted Signor Ugo.
“But I was just chatting,” he protested.
“You’ve got the boy trembling all over as if he saw Satan himself—you call that chatting?”
“Chatting. What else?”
“Vassily, sometimes you speak and act no better than a Greek shepherd from Anatolia. And do you know what?” said Signor Ugo, turning to my father and pointing to the typewriter. “This fellow here is a world authority on Fayum.”
My father immediately concluded that the burly priest must be a specialist in disease control, especially since Fayum was known for its contaminated waters. He started to say he had heard that many peasants were dying of something uncannily reminiscent of cholera. Did Father Papanastasiou think cholera might soon strike in Egypt then?
“And if it did, would I care?” growled the latter.
“Not the Fayum of today,” Signor Ugo broke in. “He’s a specialist in the early Christian portraiture from Fayum. He looks at these portraits and in a second can tell you whether they’re authentic or not. He teaches the poor orphans here how to paint nothing else.”
“Speaking of orphans,” said my father, “I have brought something in my car for the boys. Can someone give me a hand unloading it?”
“A hand? And what do you call these?” said the priest raising his voice, displaying two outstretched palms, each as big as the Peloponnese.
We stepped out of the study and my father held open the trunk while Father Papanastasiou unloaded three cardboard boxes. Two young Greeks wearing blue jeans came to get more boxes from the backseat. “What are they?” asked Father Papanastasiou. “Knitted summer shirts for the boys. Mercerized cotton—here, feel,” said Signor Ugo, handing over one of the shirts to the priest. The priest unfolded and examined it. “But this costs a fortune,” he said, almost protesting as he crinkled part of the shirt in his fist, the better to appreciate its velvety sheen. “Vassily, say thank you,” said Signor Ugo. “Thank you.” My father said it was nothing. “When the boys come back this afternoon, we will give them the new shirts. They need Easter presents, the poor bastards.” As they heaped the cardboard boxes in the entrance, I thought it strange that my father had never given me a shirt like that. “I can get you hundreds of them,” he said later in the car, after we had dropped off Signor Ugo at his pension.
“We need to discuss a few things,” my father said to me while staring at the priest. “Do you want to wait in the car?”
I said I would stay in the garden. The three men walked back into the study.
I stood by myself, realizing I was the only one present on the church grounds. The two young men who had helped unload the boxes could be seen making their hasty way downhill, sliding and skipping in the sand, their shoes almost sinking with each step, finally disappearing behind a stretch of palm trees. Then, not a sound, not even the wind, nor the ravens. It was as quiet as it gets in the desert—the silence of the ancient Greek necropolis in Alexandria, or the clear, beach-day silence of early Sunday mornings in the city.
I looked around and couldn’t understand why anyone would bother maintaining such a beautiful garden when the buildings were so utterly run-down. The monastery had probably been a private estate donated to the poor by a wealthy Greek family.
I walked to the edge of the grounds, where a broken-down pergola overlooking the sea created what might once have been a snug little corner for reading or contemplating the water that stretched out to the farthest reaches of Sidi Bishr. To the left, a shanty, mud-hut Arab hamlet hid quietly behind rows of drying laundry. Large birds, hawks probably, descended to feed on a rock nearby.
I looked through one of the windows into the chapel and thought I saw a classroom. There were maps against the wall, children’s drawings, icons, and a picture of Pericles. I walked through a narrow corridor leading into what must have been a very old stable that had long ago been converted into a workshop. Beyond the workshop was another plot of land, this one totally fenced in by giant sunflowers which turned their ghoulish eyes on me and watched my every step as I moved about cautiously. All of a sudden I was seized by the uncomfortable feeling that someone was gazing at me from behind. I instantly turned around.
And then I saw them. Leaning against the stable wall, like two giant overturned umbrellas, with their ribbing exposed and their supple bamboo keels glistening yellow, twice my height and taller sti
ll than I could ever have imagined them —because no matter how close I got to them in the past I had always watched them from afar—were the Paralus and the Salaminia, each with its giant tail coiled many times over on the workshop floor like a huge intestine crammed into a tiny abdomen. The kites looked totally stripped, like unfinished rowboats, vulnerable to my searching gaze. The builders had discarded last year’s cellophane cover sheets and were about to glue new ones. I moved closer to feel the ribs, but with caution, remembering that bamboo cuts worse than glass. Only then did I discover the ramming spikes that could tear other kites to pieces. Unlike ours, these were not discarded razor blades attached to the body of the kite; instead they were sharpened bamboo extensions of the kite’s very skeleton—the difference, as Momo explained to me later, between an old lady wearing dentures and the bite of a strong male wolf.
Momo would never forgive me. All I would have had to do was take out my penknife and cut the bamboo. We would rule the skies that summer. For a moment, I felt like a Phoenician spy sneaking into an empty Greek shipyard, determined to wreak as much damage to the enemy as possible, only to lose his nerve upon beholding the Paralus and the Salaminia, the pride of the Athenian fleet, sitting majestically on opposite docks awaiting minor repairs.
I walked out of the building and heard my father calling me.
Throughout the silent ride back home, one thought kept galling me: Madame Marie would become so unbearably vain when she found out that we were planning to convert to her religion. Signor Ugo said he had to go to church almost every Sunday. Madame Marie would love nothing more.
But that evening, after depositing Signor Ugo, my father stopped the car in front of our building at Cleopatra, looked at me awhile before letting me out, and said, “Don’t worry, I don’t think we’ll be doing anything with our Greek priest. I couldn’t stand facing him every week. Still, I want to think about all this some more,” he added, as though he planned to do so as soon as we had said goodbye. Then, almost as an afterthought, he said it might be easier to convert to Protestantism. “At any rate, there’s no real rush,” he added, as I shut the door and watched him drive away, knowing I wouldn’t see him before breakfast.
As in previous years, Easter and Passover coincided with Ramadan. But this year the atmosphere was grim, and there were no arguments between Abdou and Madame Marie, and no one complained about my manners. My great-grandmother had had an accident after our small family seder at Sporting. She had woken in the middle of the night and reached for her ginger cookies in the drawer of her bedside table, only to find them missing. Aunt Elsa had removed them, knowing that her mother would not want to eat leavened biscuits during Passover. But the old woman had forgotten about matzoh, and, not finding her favorite snack in its usual place, got out of bed, and on her way to the kitchen tripped on an old stool. She immediately started to bleed from the head, and Uncle Nessim, Aunt Elsa, and my grandmother made several attempts to staunch the flow. One of them put ground coffee on the wound. Dr. Zakour, the new family doctor, was called, and he did what he could, but the old woman never regained consciousness. They had not even called an ambulance.
Later that morning, with everyone milling outside her bedroom, Uncle Nessim finally opened the glass door and closed it behind him, saying, “She’s left us.” Soon after, they covered her up in a shroud, and in a matter of hours she was gone. Madame Marie complained that this wasn’t how it was done among Christians, that Christians doted on you awhile before taking you away. Then she remembered she owed the aguzah, the old one, three pounds. To ward off misfortune, she immediately went downstairs, purchased three loaves of sugared bread, and on her way from the bakery gave them to the first three beggars she found.
We spent a rainy afternoon in the smaller living room. No one cried, no one even said they remembered this or that about her. Abdou came in to ask for the afternoon off, and then someone suggested that the best thing for us was to go to the movies, which we did, all seven of us, including Madame Marie.
Three days afterward, Madame Marie was taken to the hospital to have her gallbladder removed. When she returned weeks later, she had lost a lot of weight, looked old, and complained of eczema on both hands. She watched me eat lunch, asked how I was faring at school, and said she was disappointed to hear that, instead of studying normal religion, I was now in Islam class, as Monsieur al-Malek had recommended. “Have you become Moslem?” she asked. I shook my head. “But what did you tell them when they asked why you wanted to study the Koran?” I said that I had told them my family was thinking of converting to Islam. When I finished my lunch, Madame Marie did not stand up to clear my dishes, as was her habit. Nor did she say anything about washing my hands. Nor did she urge me to begin doing my homework or avoid going into the kitchen to speak to the other servants. She promised to take me to St. Katherine’s one day. Then she drank her coffee, thanked Abdou, and left.
A week later, after Madame Marie called to apologize, saying she had found less strenuous, part-time work in a Greek home for the elderly, my parents decided to hire a governess named Roxane, a Persian girl who had studied dance in Spain and who, through a series of misadventures, had landed in Alexandria living with a British journalist who wrote for one of the domestic English-language newspapers. She was young, sprightly, dark-haired, extraordinarily beautiful, and, unlike Madame Marie, who sat in the shade with other nannies while I went bathing in the sea, would hop in and swim faster than anyone. When she came out of the water, she would run to our umbrella and almost bury herself in her towel, with only part of her face and goose-pimpled legs showing. Then she combed her long hennaed hair and lit a cigarette. Her skin beamed in the sunlight, and in the evening at Mandara she would sit on the veranda with my parents, wearing a dark-blue summer frock with white polka dots, the odor of suntan lotion still on her skin as she waited for Joey to come pick her up in his Anglia. She took few things seriously, and everything she said or heard you say seemed to have an unintended edge which never failed to amuse her and which often made me think that I was far more clever than I had ever imagined—which, in my own heady way, was exactly what I needed in order to be frank with someone who seemed to understand not only who I was but who I always wanted to be.
Roxane broke all bounds, came late, took off, and yet offended no one, and with her unflagging mirth and good cheer managed to make me do things and eat things I would never have thought possible. When she was at home I no longer hung out in the kitchen, and when she told me that her brother was called Darius and her father Cambyses, I knew that life could rise above the ordinary and become legendary. In the morning she greeted me with a wily smile, which always made it seem we had said things we were agreed never to repeat to anyone. In the evening we would read Plutarch together. And at night she insisted on reading me a few verses by Hafiz, to ensure a good day on the morrow. She would read the verses in Persian first, translate the meaning, give an interpretation that was invariably farfetched but happy, and then kiss me good night.
The one who fell for her hardest was Signor Dall’Abaco, my Italian tutor, a former aspiring diplomat who had escaped his native Siena during Mussolini’s regime and whom Signor Ugo had dug up for us from the Alexandrian private-lessons circuit, saying the Sienese gentleman spoke the best Italian there was. Signor Dall’Abaco had read every book as well as every magazine. He would borrow magazines from the main Italian bookstore in the city and return them in perfect condition after having read them up and down the tramway line on his way to his various private pupils. Like Monsieur al-Malek, whose displeasure he did not wish to incur and around whose hours he was compelled to work his schedule, he enjoyed tea and cocktails after tutorial, always managing to have himself invited into the living room, because he loved company and because his lonely bachelor’s life gave him so little opportunity to talk about the two things he loved most: literature and opera. He arrived that April and remained my tutor for five years.
When Signor Dall’Abaco began teaching me Dant
e, he was particularly gratified when my father knocked at the dining room door to ask if he might sit at the end of the table and listen in. Uninvited, Roxane would do the same. Her presence when he spoke about Farinata, Count Ugolino, and Ser Brunetto, or when he told the story of Paolo and Francesca, must have sent his old Sienese blue blood coursing through his veins, for the Persian girl, who could speak Italian only by corrupting her Spanish, seemed to understand the exiled Guelf and the displaced Sienese gentleman as well as she understood Hafiz, Joey, me, and all the men in the world. She understood what it meant to have lost everything and eat salted bread when all your life you’d had the unsalted Tuscan kind. And she understood what it was to rely on others for income, small income.
Tu proverai si come sa di sale
lo pane altrui, e come e duro calle
lo scendere e’l salir per l’altrui scale.
[You will know how salty is the taste
of another’s bread, and how hard the path
to descend and come up another man’s stairs.]
Signor Dall’Abaco was speaking to her, to me, to himself, to Dante.
“If you learn a canto a day,” he would say, “within three months, from now until August, you will know the entire Commedia by heart.” But he may have been speaking to Roxane.
He went on to tell her that when the British had interned all Italian males living in Egypt, he had spent his prison term like Silvio Pellico, the nineteenth-century Italian patriot, memorizing a canto a day. “You, in prison, Signor Dall’Abaco! I cannot picture you behind bars.” The Sienese was moved.
She had said this as we sat in the car on our way to Mandara one Friday morning in early June. Signor Dall’Abaco had come for the day and would later be driven back to the Sidi Bishr station, from where he would take the tram to the city.
