Out of Egypt

by André Aciman

  “You sound like a typical parvenu juif,” jeered his daughter.

  “And what else are we if not des parvenus juifs?”

  After lunch he insisted we have coffee alone together, “Lui et moi seuls,” he told the others. “Come,” he said, pointing to the kitchen, where he proceeded to brew Turkish coffee. “You see, all you need is a little pot like this, preferably made of brass, but aluminum will do. I had this one made in Manchester. By a Greek. But do you think our antiques dealer is smart enough to figure out that’s all he had to do? Never! That’s why I go to him every once in a while. As long as he remains stupid and as long as I am lucid enough to know it, then things are well with me. Do you see?” he winked at me, complicity beaming in his eyes. I nodded but missed the point. It occurred to me that I would never have lasted a day in the world of his youth. “De l’audace, toujours de l’audace,” he replied. “You see, in life, it’s not only knowing what you want that matters. That’s easy. It’s knowing how to want.” I was not sure I understood this either, but again I nodded. “But I was lucky. I had a good life,” he went on. “Life gives us all a few trump cards when we’re born, and then that’s it. By the time I was twenty I had already wasted all of mine. Life gave them back to me many times. Not many can claim the same.”

  When coffee was ready, he took out two demitasses and proceeded to pour, holding the pot precariously high above the cups and aiming the coffee into them, the way good Arab servants did, to allow the brew to cool somewhat as it was being poured. “May God rest his soul, but no one made coffee like your grandfather,” he said. “A snake, with a cleft tongue, who bubbled like milk when he lost his temper and then cut you to pieces, but still, the best brewer of coffee in the world. Come.” He indicated the drawing room as we passed through a different corridor. The room was filled with antiques and Persian rugs. On the glistening old parquet sat a band of afternoon sunlight in which an overfed cat had fallen asleep, its legs stretched out awkwardly.

  “See this smoking jacket?” he said. “Feel it.” I leaned over to him and touched the fabric on the shawl collar. “At least forty years old,” he said, looking terribly amused. “Guess whose?” “Your father’s,” I said. “Don’t be stupid,” he snapped, practically losing his temper. “My father died eons ago.” “One of your brothers’?” “No, no, no.” “I don’t know then.” “I’ll give you a hint. Guess who made the cloth? Best fabric in the world.” It took me a while. “My father?” I asked. “Right. Woven in the basement of his factory in Ibrahimieh during the war. This jacket belonged to your grandfather Albert.”

  “He gave it to you?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes.”

  “On what occasion?”

  “After he died. It was Esther who gave it to me. Where would you ever find such fine wool nowadays? It’s one of the few things I treasure,” he joked. “Here, feel again!” he ordered.

  Ever the master salesman, I thought. “Let me explain,” he said, his face uncomfortably nearing mine. He looked around to see no one was listening.

  “Do you remember Flora, la belle romaine, as we used to call her?”

  It was Flora who had taught me all about the pianist Schnabel, I replied.

  “That’s right. During the war, in the days of Alamein, we all stayed in your great-grandmother’s house. You have no idea how crowded it was. Well, one day, in walks this dark-haired, beautiful, but painfully beautiful woman who plays the piano every evening, who smokes all the time, who looks a trifle worn but sexier for it, and who flirts with all of us, though you’d swear she didn’t know it. In short, we were all madly in love with her. Madly.”

  “What does that have to do with my grandfather?”

  “Wait, let me finish!” He had almost lost his temper. “Well, the tension was such—you have to realize there were at least seven grown men in the house, not to mention younger men who were just as predatory—that every day we would start quarreling. Over nothing, and over everything. Your grandfather and I quarreled every day. Every day. Then we would make up and play backgammon. And then quarrel again. Do you play backgammon?”

  “Poorly.”

  “I thought so. At any rate, it becomes quite evident that Flora has singled me out. Of course, I make no passes, I have to behave—in my mother’s house and all that, and my wife snooping about, you understand. I have to move very slowly. So I finally say to your grandfather, ‘Albert, this woman wants me. What should I do?’ He says, ‘Do you want her?’ And I say, ‘Don’t you?’ He does not reply. So I say to him, ‘Albert, you’ve got to help me.’ That cunning wretch of your grandfather smiles awhile and finally says, ‘I’ll see.’ Everyone else knew—Frau Kohn, your grandmother, Isaac. Everyone, except me. I found out about them years later, when Flora came to visit us here and saw me wearing his smoking jacket. She recognized it immediately.”

  “Yes?” I asked.

  “Don’t you get it?”

  I shook my head.

  “She probably had it made for him as a present. I felt like a complete dolt. The only woman I wanted and never slept with. Being jealous like this after forty years, what a dolt!” A moment of silence elapsed. I was tempted to tell him it was not my grandfather but my father who had loved Flora on those summer nights of 1942, and that the jacket was his, not his father’s. My grandfather had simply “inherited” it from his son, the way he “inherited” everything my father stopped wearing. But I said nothing, for I wanted my grandfather to win one bout against Vili. “You should have seen us back then, though,” he went on, “everyone asking her to play the piano, everyone drinking more cognac than was usual, waiting for all the others to tire and go to sleep. Frankly, staying up so late was never my style.”

  I watched him relish his revelation as he picked up both our emptied demitasses. “Come,” he finally said. And before I knew it, he had taken me to the garden, where his grandson and his wife were reading the local newspaper.

  “Have you had your little chat?” asked his wife.

  “We have indeed,” replied Vili.

  A small incident occurred over dinner. A couple of Gypsies were observed through the dining room window roaming the grounds. Without hesitating, Vili went into the drawing room, got his shotgun, and fired two shots in the air, rousing the dogs and the horses. “Have you gone mad,” his daughter shouted, jumping up and trying to grab the gun from his hands. “They could kill you if they wanted to.”

  “Let them try. Do you think I’m afraid of them? I’d go after every one of them—” And then it came, as a farewell present, as a memento of my visit to England, a final concession on his part to the visitor who had come to hear the words spoken from his own lips. “Me afraid of them? Me frightened? What do you think? Am I or aren’t I?”

  That night, he came into my room to say farewell to me. “I insist on adieu,” he said, “because at my age one never knows.” He stared at my things, looked over my books, picked one up with something like mock scorn on his face. “Do people still read this?” “More than ever,” I replied. “Another Jew,” he said. “No, a half-Jew,” I said. “No. When your mother is Jewish you are never half-Jewish.”

  Perhaps it was the subject, or maybe this was why he had come upstairs to my room, but he asked about his mother. I told him what I could remember. No, there had been no pain. Yes, she was lucid until the very end. Yes, she still laughed and still made those short, lapidary pronouncements that made one squirm like a trampled worm. Yes, she understood she was dying. And so on, until I told him that she couldn’t see well because she had developed cataracts, and that a light, yellowish film had veiled her eyes. I had said it in passing, not thinking that cataracts were a particularly serious impairment.

  “So she couldn’t see then,” he said. “She couldn’t see,” he repeated, as though trying to scan in the words and the syllables themselves some secret meaning, some revealed purpose behind the cruelty of fate and the vulnerability of old age. “So she couldn’t see,” he said like someone
gripped by a sorrow so powerful that all he can do is repeat the words until they finally bring tears to his eyes.

  “You won’t understand this,” he said, “but I think of her sometimes. Old, lonely, everyone gone, and, now that you mention it, blind, dying practically all by herself in Egypt. And I think of how I could have made things better for her had I not misspent my life trying out all these flimsy schemes of mine. But then, that is how life is. Now that I have the house, I haven’t got the mother. And yet I wanted this house for her. Sometimes, I think of her simply as mother, the way children do when they need something only mothers have. You would think because I’m old enough to be a great-grandfather that I couldn’t possibly think of my mother in those terms. Well, I still do. Strange, isn’t it?” He smiled, placed the volume back on my nightstand, and, perhaps meaning to surprise me, began quoting in French the long, sinuous prose of the first few sentences.

  “Good night, Herr Doktor,” he said abruptly.

  “Good night, Dr. Spingarn,” I replied, resigned never to ask how he had come to know this passage by Proust.

  Half an hour later, on my way to the shower, I was stopped by my cousin and his wife. “If you’re quiet you won’t regret this.” They explained that every evening, between ten and eleven o’clock, Vili would listen to the French-language shortwave broadcast from Israel. I expressed surprise. “It’s always the last thing he does. Then he turns off the lights and goes to sleep.” “So?” I asked. “So, you’ll see.” For a while we waited outside his door. “It’s the same thing every night,” she whispered. Were they going to knock and ask to be admitted, or were they simply going to barge in on him? “You’ll see.” Finally, we heard the Israeli national anthem. It was followed by various signing-off signals. “It’s about over now,” my cousin warned. Something gave a click in his room. Vili had just turned off his radio. Then we heard the sound of bedsprings yielding under his weight, followed by a rustle of sheets, and suddenly the band of light went out from under the door. All was quiet for a second. And then I thought I heard it, a faint, reedy, muted buzzing, emanating from within the small room like a vapor of sound working its way out the keyhole, under the door, through the cracks in the lintel, filling the dark silence where we three stood now like incense and premonition; an eerie garble of familiar words murmured to a cadence I too had learned long ago, whispered as if in stealth and shame.

  “He’ll deny it if you ask him,” said my cousin.

  2

  Rue Memphis

  To the two ladies who were to become my grandmothers one day and who met for the first time in ’44 in a small marketplace in Alexandria eyeing a suspiciously old catch of red mullet, this was indeed a very small, very strange world. Past their first, shy, tentative remarks spoken from behind thick lipstick and respectable hat-veils, something like intense sunshine erupted on their speech and suddenly the two strangers, who had known each other by sight for more than a decade without ever daring to utter a word to the other, began to twitter away with the heady good cheer of old classmates picking up exactly where they left off fifty years earlier. Each was accompanied by a boy servant whom neither trusted or talked to but whose job it was to trail behind his wise old mazmazelle—all European ladies of a certain age and station were called mademoiselle or signora in Egypt—and watch her pick out the good from bad fruit, hear her haggle in the most incomprehensible Arabic, intervene if things got out of hand, and finally ferry the load from one food vendor to the next until he was sent home to start cooking lunch. Mazmazelles would not think twice of touching raw liver with their bare hands, or of fingering the gills of red mullet to prove the fish wasn’t at all fresh that day; but they never took anything from the loutish food vendor’s hand. That was the boy servant’s task. Mazmazelles were then free to do as they pleased until about one o’clock, when their husbands came home to eat and sleep.

  “No mullet then,” concluded one to the other. “Such a shame, though. To think that all these years I’ve been buying bad fish and didn’t even know it,” she said sadly.

  “It’s in the gills. Not the eyes. Gills must be bright red. Otherwise, don’t buy.”

  “Such a shame,” repeated the meeker of the two as they made their way home. “All these years living exactly across the street from each other, and not so much as a peep for a greeting.”

  “But why didn’t you ever speak to me?” insisted the one who knew everything about fish.

  “I used to think you were French,” replied her meeker neighbor, implying high-society French.

  “French? And whatever made you think I was French? Je suis italienne, madame,” she added, as if that were a far greater distinction.

  “As am I!”

  “Yes? Are you? But we are from Leghorn.”

  “But so are we! What a marvelous coincidence.” A small world indeed, they said in Ladino (which each insisted on calling Spanish), a language each found out the other spoke because, at the fish vendor’s stand, as one tried to explain why the mullet were not good that day, it suddenly occurred to both that of the six to seven languages each spoke fluently neither knew the name for mullet except in Ladino.

  When it was time to say goodbye, both agreed to meet and shop together early the next day.

  “She is so distinguished,” reported the meeker of the two to her husband that day. “Distinguished my eye,” he had snickered. “Her husband owns a billiard hall.” “Why, is your bicycle shop much better?” she retorted. “A hundred thousand times better.” He had even raised his voice.

  Heedless of her husband’s pronouncements, she was determined to refer to her neighbor as une vraie princesse, while the other, who must have had more or less the same conversation with her husband, concluded that although her neighbor may not have been très high-class, she was nothing short of une sainte.

  The Saint was a gentle, melancholy grandmother who sometimes spoke to herself and who often lost and forgot things. She forgot where she hid them or whom she was hiding them from. She lost keys and gloves, forgot names, dates, debts, and quarrels. She would lose the thread of her story and, drawing a blank in her mind, grope about for ideas, stringing idle words together, hoping to convey a semblance of continuity if she spoke fast enough, not realizing that her rapid succession of non sequiturs was precisely what betrayed her lapses most. Sometimes, feeling totally disoriented, she would own defeat. “It’s nothing, it happens to everyone,” she would say, taking a deep breath, trying to suppress a surge of anxiety. “I’ll remember later,” she would promise, knowing that, in the Italo-Byzantine world she came from, if a sneeze in mid-sentence confirmed the truth of what one was saying, forgetfulness was a sign of deceit. She tried to allay this suspicion by punctuating those sudden pauses in her speech with little oaths, such as On my daughter’s eyes or On my mother’s tombstone, but, by dint of swearing so often, she herself began to doubt her own tales, thinking, as happens so often among the elderly, that perhaps she was exaggerating more than she was forgetting.

  When she had trouble remembering your name, she would search for it through an elaborate maze of other names in the family, thus betraying where you ranked in the hierarchy of her heart: first her son, Robert, then his three daughters, me, then her daughter who was deaf, her brothers, neighbors, her husband.

  She cried once when I told her I had seen Uncle Robert in a dream. “And what did he say to you?” she fretted. More than a year had elapsed since his expulsion from Egypt after the 1956 war, and by then her life was entirely unsettled. “He said his daughter wanted to bring you a present,” I lied, thinking my dream would make her happy. But according to established Levantine custom, dreams always portend the opposite of what they say, which implied that her son in France was desperately in need of funds for his children.

  Hence the frantic shopping for clothes, the scrupulous wrapping of parcels, the tireless standing in line at the post office, followed by epic worry sessions in the living room every evening as she, and anyone who happened
to be visiting at that time, would sit and stew and fill themselves with as much gall as each could secrete, waiting for confirmation that the package had not fallen into the hands of the police or that some crafty postal clerk had not looted its contents. Wrapped in cobalt-blue paper, durable string, and stained with brittle reddish wax seals so old they bore her maiden name, her parcels were the product of a mind so naïve and so transparent that they might have fooled a master spy but not a child: a pair of homeknit overalls for each of her granddaughters, medicine that was hard to come by in France, a naughty assortment of rock candy carefully wrapped in colored cellophane paper, and, as though stitched by thoughtful celestial hands, a folded hundred-pound note sewn discreetly into the cuff of a child’s shirtsleeve. Her husband would find out sooner or later, and there were bound to be scenes. But her grandchildren come first she told the Princess, who, more than ever now, was convinced that this was truly a saint, though she noticed—as those who loved her sometimes did not—that her mind had already started to wander. “She is like a dove,” the Princess went on, “totally without bile.” “And without brains, either,” her husband had once replied.

  A month later word arrived that the candies, overalls, magazines, and the petite surprise woven in by the hands of fate had arrived safely. “I knew it, I always knew it,” she exclaimed with great glee. “Then why did you worry so much?” asked the Princess, who had spent too many evenings soothing her neighbor’s worst fears to see them so readily dispelled now. “Because if I hadn’t worried, they might not have gotten there,” she replied, as though this were the most evident truth in the world. “I don’t understand,” added the Princess. “If you don’t understand, Madame Esther, then you don’t understand,” she would retort curtly, meaning she was certainly not about to divulge rituals that were so elaborate and so delicate that merely thinking about them, let alone discussing them with the uninitiated, might strip them of their spell.