by André Aciman
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 e
xpensive 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.
