Out of Egypt

by André Aciman

  “She’s done much worse,” said one of them.

  “We’re leaving,” another broke in. “People are waiting for us at the British Consulate.”

  “Want to come?” she asked.

  He hesitated.

  “You might enjoy it.” She smiled again.

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “Another time, then.”

  Turning to the young man who had been holding the cardigan, she motioned for the car keys.

  “No. I’m driving,” he replied.

  “My car, I drive,” she said peremptorily.

  My father followed them mechanically to the end of the garden. She opened the door to her car, got in, leaned all the way across to unlock the other doors for her passengers, and then rolled down her window with jerky, determined motions, one foot still resting on the pavement as she fumbled with the keys. “My respects to your mother,” she said as she closed the door and started the engine.

  Without budging, he watched the car silently roll out from the consulate grounds, inching its slow, quiet way through the milling crowd and the parked cars and the row of tall palm trees dotting the alleyway, gliding further downhill until, before even reaching the gateway, it took a bold, accelerated turn past the gatekeeper’s hut and suddenly shot outside the compound toward the Corniche.

  All that remained of her as he stood on the spot where her car had been was the memory of that white satin shoe resting on the pavement, tilting sideways as she struggled to unlock the other doors, then resting back on the gravel as she searched in the dark for the key to the ignition. Perhaps, before closing the door, she had even thought of leaving her shoe behind.

  And perhaps she had. For later that night, when he suddenly found himself unable to think of her, or when he felt the memory of her features starting to fade from his grasp, like an anthropologist reconstructing an entire body from a mere bone fragment he would think of that shoe, and from the shoe work his way around her foot, and from her foot, up her legs, her knees, her gleaming white dress, until he had reached her lips, and then, for a fleeting instant, would coax a smile on a face he had been seeing for years across the street but had always failed to notice.

  A few days later, early one Sunday morning, he saw her walking past his garden.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “To the beach,” she replied, pointing to the north. “Are you coming?”

  “Maybe. Who are you going with?”

  “No one.”

  “Wait, I’ll get my bathing suit.”

  They arrived early enough to swim, lie on the sand, talk, and then leave just in time to avoid the churchgoers, who started to arrive after Mass. On their way back, they stopped at a small pastry shop, where he bought her a cake and a lemonade. She had an ice cream as well. She said next time it would be her turn to pay. Amused, he repeated “Next time.” When they reached Rue Memphis, they stopped at her doorstep. He waited for her to disappear into the dark, sunless entrance, stood awhile there, then crossed the street, opened the front door to his parents’ home, and, to his surprise, saw that he was still in time for breakfast.

  At about two-thirty in the afternoon, when the sun started pounding on the veranda floor and he was wondering whether to nap for a few hours or take a chair out under the trees and read a Russian novel there until dark, his mother, looking quite flustered and surprised, rushed out to tell him that Madame Adèle wished to speak with him on the telephone.

  Whatever did she want with him, he wondered? And why the telephone? Then he remembered. Would she really have the bad taste to ask him never to presume to take her daughter to the beach again? Would she use that horrible expression “to compromise my daughter”? He began to regret that fateful moment when he had seen her walking holding a large blue-green towel inside of which she had neatly wrapped her bathing suit. Why did mothers have to meddle in the affairs of their daughters, and what could the two mothers have been saying to each other before summoning him to the telephone?

  His throat tightened.

  “Hello,” he said, a cold, leaden weight sitting on his chest.

  “Hello, am I speaking to Monsieur Henri?” said the voice at the end of the line.

  “Yes, madame.”

  “Monsieur Henri, this is Madame Adèle, Gigi’s mother, calling.”

  So he was right after all. Might as well sit down, he thought, knowing it would ruin his day now. The woman was clearly about to start an admonitory tirade of the kind parodied so well in English movies. Who knows in what benighted, prudish cell of the Dark Ages these people still lived. Her father, it was rumored, prayed every morning and had even disowned his son for marrying a Catholic girl. Daintily, the Saint cleared her throat again.

  “I am calling because of my daughter. She asked me to ask you if you wished to go to the movies with her this afternoon.”

  “This afternoon?” His voice was quavering.

  “Yes, this afternoon. It is somewhat last-minute of her. But that’s how she is.”

  “This afternoon,” he mused.

  “Yes, this afternoon.”

  “And at what time this afternoon?”

  “Let me ask her.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “At three, to be exact.” He heard mother and daughter conferring in whispers.

  “What did she say?” he asked.

  “She said she’ll understand perfectly if you cannot.” Another moment’s silence elapsed.

  “Tell her I can be ready in five minutes. How long will she need?”

  “Oh, she’s ready now.” Again mother and daughter whispered at their end of the line.

  “She thought you’d enjoy seeing Gaslight. Personally, I think it is a grotesque movie, but whoever asked an old lady like me?” giggled the mother.

  “But hasn’t she already seen it?”

  “No.”

  The film was playing at a small neighborhood theater not far from Rue Memphis. In front of the ticket booth, he found her waiting for him with her glasses in one hand and two tickets in the other. “I only wear them for reading,” she explained, “and I need to read the subtitles.”

  Later, on their way home, she looked up at her living room window and saw that it was dark. “My mother must be at your mother’s.”

  He opened the gate, and together they walked past the arbor where he knew he would have been sitting all by himself till now, reading Tolstoy until it got dark, hoping—as he always did on Sunday evenings—to avoid meeting his father, who always urged him to put down his books and go out and “live” for a change. “All these books, and all these clothes, and all these pipes, but never a woman on Sundays!” the old man would jeer. No doubt, on seeing him with the girl tonight, his father would have stepped out into the balcony and whispered, “So, we’re flirting with the neighbors now.”

  The girl said she would be willing to go out another time. When he asked which films she hadn’t seen, she almost laughed, she had seen all of them.

  “The girl is beautiful, but don’t forget she is what she is,” said his father three months later as they walked along the Corniche one evening.

  “I know. And so?”

  “Well, if it’s going to be ‘I know and so?’ we’re never going to be able to discuss this thing rationally. You see, not only does she have to live with her misfortune, but so will you. If it’s marrying you want, there is always Berthe Nahas. She’s beautiful, she worships you, she has money, and her father can set you up very, very nicely.” His father itemized each of Miss Nahas’s attributes on a different finger of his hand. “As for love, well, either it comes naturally, or it comes later, or it never comes at all, in which case she’ll be busy with the children and you’ll be busy elsewhere.

  “There is also Micheline Joanides, Arlette’s daughter. You saw the face her mother made when she saw you speaking to Gigi. Or Arpinée Khatchadourian. Christian, that’s true, but at least she can hear.”

  “Not Arpinée,”
said the son.

  “You’re right. With her drooping, bloodshot eyes swimming like a pair of beets in white potato soup—you’re absolutely right. Ugly outside, ugly inside.”

  “Whoever said I wanted to get married in the first place?”

  “With the Saint’s girl, you can only get married,” said the father.

  “I did see her with others, you know.”

  “They let her roam freely, but no one’s fooled. They’re miserly, bigoted, Arab-shantytown Jews imitating the fast-car, cocktail-lounge airs of Europeans. But they’re Arabs through and through. He’ll live in scrounging misery until the day of his daughter’s wedding. Then he’ll glow like a pair of patent leather shoes.”

  “I know what I’m doing.”

  “And suppose,” said the father as they watched the waves break against the beaches of Ibrahimieh, “suppose you want to speak to her in the dark. I don’t mean ‘Pass me the glass of water,’ but other things.”

  “She reads my mind better than anyone. I can’t even lie to her.”

  “A good quality in a mistress, or in a mother. But in a wife?”

  The son did not reply. He remembered his mother’s cruel words. “She’s a gem of a girl, but cripples I don’t want.”

  The father took out his aging silver cigarette case, removed a small penknife from his pocket, and sliced a cigarette in two. “To smoke less,” he explained. He was about to put the other half back into the case when he changed his mind and offered it to his son.

  “And so,” he said as he took his first puff, pensive and remote, letting his unfinished sentence trail about him like the smoke from his cigarette.

  “Does Flora know about the bicycle queen?” asked the father.

  “Yes.”

  “And what does she say?”

  “What should she say?”

  Flora had said almost nothing when he broke the news to her on their way home from her music school by tram one evening. “I should have known,” she had said. “How silly of me not to have seen it.” Then, with that note of smiling resignation with which she greeted joy in others’ lives when there was so little of it in her own, she complimented him on his choice, and then, as if choking on her words, finally broke down: “Tell me one thing, though. I’ve played more music in your house than anywhere in the world, and I know how much it’s meant to you—at least how much you claimed it did. And yet here you are with a woman who doesn’t know what music is, who can’t even hear it.” She paused a moment. “I swore to myself I would never say this to you.” He was about to mutter something in his defense when she broke in: “But why her?”

  The temptation to blurt out something cruel or flippant was almost irresistible. Then he realized it was the question that had prompted his cruelty, not the woman asking it. “I don’t know. I don’t even think I know her well enough yet. But she knows me better than I know myself.”

  When he began to explain what he meant, he had used the word marriage to avoid the more obvious word love.

  “Then it’s worse than I expected,” said Flora, with thwarted anger quivering on her smile. “I knew I should never have asked. I’ve already heard—and said—more than I should. I hope you’ll forgive me.”

  As they approached the next station, she put the book she wasn’t reading back into her bag and stood up. He looked surprised; this wasn’t her station.

  “I’m getting off here if you don’t mind,” she said. “I’ll walk the rest of the way. I need to get some air.”

  She made her way down the crowded aisle, stepped down the tram stairs, and stood on the platform, looking meek and crestfallen, rummaging through her old purse for a match, while a man, wearing a galabiya, eyed her intently, clearly about to beg for a cigarette. A pang of sorrow raced through his mind, and he felt for her as he watched her looking at him with helpless submission in her eyes. Revenge always comes too late, he thought, and only after time, indifference, or forgiveness has evened the score.

  “Then she was upset,” said his father. “She’ll never forgive you.”

  “When I wanted her, she wasn’t sure; now that I’m taken, she wants me.”

  “You’ll never understand women!”

  “I understand enough.”

  “You understand nothing. You don’t even understand men, for that matter, and certainly not yourself.”

  He tossed his cigarette into the sea and finally said he was growing cold. He wanted to go home. Blown by the wind, an Arabic newspaper got caught between his feet. The old man struggled to disengage himself. “This dirty city and the dirty people who live in it,” he said, watching his son’s cigarette spiral like a weak flare and disappear into the water. “From thieving Arabs to Jewish grubbery, it had to be the daughter of a wheel merchant.” Then he chuckled to himself. “At any rate, when it comes to marriage, things always turn out for the worst.”

  A few days later, and after several family rows on the other side of Rue Memphis as well, the Saint began to experience terrible pains in her side. Dr. Moreno came to see her and, on his orders, she was taken to the hospital, where they gave her the choice of having her entire gallbladder or some of its stones removed. In typical Levantine fashion, she deferred the decision to her husband. He was for removing the whole thing. “I want to return to my parents, that’s all I want, Monsieur Albert,” she kept saying.

  “I want to go away and be far from everyone and everything,” she said a few mornings later when neighbors flocked in one by one to her hospital room only to find that she might not be operated on after all. “See, even operating won’t help,” she concluded. “Oh, let me put an end to a life that started on the wrong foot.”

  “But all lives start on the wrong foot—” Albert remonstrated.

  “Stop speaking nonsense, both of you,” said the Princess. “The important thing is to rest.”

  “Yes. To rest, madame, to rest for a very long time, believe me,” replied the Saint.

  The next day, when the Princess’s husband went alone to see her early in the afternoon, she lay quietly in her room, the glaring afternoon sun blocked by a thick curtain someone had pulled across while she was sleeping.

  “Am I disturbing you, Madame Adèle?” he whispered as he pushed open her door and stuck his head in.

  “Who? You? Never, mon cher. Come in, and sit here.”

  He sat next to her bed, and in silence they stared at each other awhile, resigned sorrow limned on their features.

  “So there,” she sighed, crossing her hands.

  “So there, indeed.”

  “I’m waiting,” she sighed.

  “You’re waiting. Did they say how long—” he asked.

  “They won’t talk, but things don’t look good at all, worse than not good.”

  “So this is it, then.”

  “I’m afraid so. This is it. Frankly, Monsieur Albert, I don’t at all feel like dying today.”

  “Courage, ma chère, courage.”

  “But, Monsieur Albert,” she exploded, “I hope you don’t feel obliged to agree with everything I say simply because I say it.”

  “No, no, believe me, I think things are very serious indeed. You don’t look well at all. Even Esther said so yesterday.”

  “You think so too, then? But, Monsieur Albert,” she protested after another pause, “I’m not ready to die.”

  “Whoever is, ma chère amie, whoever is?” A moment of silence elapsed.

  “Monsieur Albert, I don’t want to die.”

  “Do stop fussing like a child. There’s nothing to fear. You’ll die and you won’t even know it.”

  “Oh, Monsieur Albert, stop stoking death on me. I said I didn’t want to die.”

  “Well, don’t die, then.”

  “You don’t understand. I want to die, but not just yet.”

  “After the wedding, you mean.”

  There was instant silence.

  “How well you know me, Monsieur Albert.”

  “All too well. You should have
lived with me, I tell you, instead of clawing your way through life like an old crustacean in a fish tank.”

  The Saint giggled at the metaphor.

  “Gallbladder, my eye,” grumbled her husband a few evenings later when he came to visit her after work only to find the hospital room turned into a regular salon. “All this pain, the moaning, and the sleepless nights, and the doctor, and the ambulance, and the hospital, and what does it all add up to: giggling. Quelle comédienne! Now, my poor mother, may she rest in peace, she really suffered from gallstones. She died of it, poor soul. And without so much as uttering a squeak. In those days they didn’t have painkillers the way we do today —in those days you made a fist, clammed your mouth tight, and suffered in silence so as not to wake up the children.” “The important thing is to eat well,” added the Princess.

  “But I’ve lost all my appetite. I eat so little.”

  “Then why do you keep putting on so much weight?” her husband interrupted.

  “Nerves, that’s why. You’ve been in this room two minutes and already I feel the pain starting.”

  She returned to that same hospital many times during the next ten years until 1958, the year she was to leave Egypt, each time dreading the operation she feared might be the end of her. And when, finally, she had her gallstones removed under emergency conditions, it was an Egyptian doctor at the Jewish hospital who performed the operation. Luckily, peritonitis was averted. Her longtime Jewish surgeon, into whose hands she had entrusted her entire life, had been arrested, had his license revoked, and, it was rumored, would be tried as an Israeli spy.

  By then she was in her sixties and was already beginning to lose her memory. Her head was propped up by pillows, and I remember her wearing a shabby flannel bathrobe, a pearl necklace, and her aluminum bracelet, which she claimed helped her rheumatism. Her hair had thinned quite a lot by then and was matted on her head like a lopsided wig. She struggled to smile each time she looked at me. “This is the end, Madame Esther,” she said when the Princess took me to visit her one spring morning.