Out of Egypt

by André Aciman

  My father immediately woke me, not as he usually did, by sitting at the edge of my bed and whispering my name, but by tapping softly on my shoulder. A sense of cold, almost mechanical urgency seemed to govern each of his movements, as though he had been rehearsing this for months. He washed my face, dried it with swift, perfunctory dabbing motions, and, for the first time, it was he and not my mother who got me dressed. He was not talking. When we came out the front door to go to the garage, there was no one on the street. Only dogs. One came closer. My father picked up a stone and threw it, and the dog quickly scampered away. Inside the front lobby of the building across from ours, someone had left the light on. It was still nighttime.

  We drove in silence.

  “You shouldn’t have brought the boy,” said my grandmother, tucking her crumpled handkerchief inside the left cuff of her shirt.

  “I want my father to see him, and I want him to see my father.”

  Mother and son whispered.

  It had happened after he came back from the pool hall.

  “Who knows!” she said, biting the point of her diamond ring anxiously to keep herself from sobbing again. “I call it the pool hall in order not to call it other things. Do I know where he goes wandering late at night? He never tells me, I never ask.” She was silent an instant. “He doesn’t want to move. Doesn’t even want to take his clothes off.” When they finally took me in to see him, he was lying on his bed, still wearing his tie, jacket, and trousers. Only his shoes had been removed. His socks were too long for his feet and dangled past his toes.

  As soon as he heard the door, he thought he was speaking to his wife:

  “Don’t come in.”

  “It’s me,” whispered my father.

  The old man’s voice immediately mellowed.

  They spoke in Ladino. Then he spoke to me. “Tu vois ça?” he said, meaning, “Can you believe this? Do you see what’s happening to me?” The Saint came in and took me away.

  A few weeks later, Monsieur Costa deposited me at my grandmother’s house as usual. She shut the gate behind him and, together, we watched his motorcycle roar toward Camp de César. She then looked at the sky and with her usual enthusiasm said, “Just look at this blue! We’ll have a beautiful day at the beach today.”

  As I walked into the house, I felt an unusually cool draft running through the corridor. The voices of Greek merchants and Arab vendors on Rue Esnah crept into the house from the back windows in the kitchen, and the sun beamed starkly upon the kitchen tiles. Even the stuffy smell around the pantry seemed gone, and from the garden the scent of basil filled the house. Something had changed. “I’m going to put this on,” my grandmother said, displaying a light-blue linen and cotton dress with buttons running all the way to her ankles. Nothing had pleased her more than when I asked her in front of everyone at the beach not to wear black.

  When I made to open my grandfather’s door, she whispered he was sleeping, that I should not disturb him. “We should pick fresh fruit for the beach,” she said. But I had heard the faint crackle of my grandfather’s old radio from behind his closed door, and I went to open it, knowing that he was not sleeping now but sitting at his little table listening to his news broadcast. Perhaps he had already heard me come in the house and was about to open the door to meet me. I pressed down the handle to push his door open and felt him pull at the same time.

  I said good morning to him, and just the sound of his name spoken out loud in his room told me he was there. The room was unusually bright, with its windows wide open, overlooking a street I had never before seen or even suspected existed. From one of its shops came the loud sound of a radio I had mistaken for his. The wind had pulled open his door as soon as I had touched the door handle.

  The round table with the radio had been pushed against the wall. His ashtray was sparkling clean for the first time ever, and the mattress on his bed was folded back on the bed frame, like a man performing a back exercise. A bedspread was thrown clumsily over the whole thing, no sheets, just the frayed faded stripes of the ancient mattress. Over the bedstand was a large mound of suits, neatly piled, while in his closet all one heard was the chime of hangers dangling from the metal bar.

  I saw a row of shoes without trees, stashed like limp and lifeless sloughs, under the dresser. He had always said they were older than I was.

  At first everyone had said he was sleeping. Then they said that he was resting. Then that he was gone. “Don’t disturb him” evolved into “Don’t disturb his things.” His cane, his tobacco case, his deck of cards, his dentures floating in solution, his penknife, his loose things that not even the passage of time could tidy. Then his things began to disappear. I noticed Abdou wearing his shoes. And Mohammed, Abdou’s nephew. The servants did not appreciate shoelaces, so they would pull them out, walking with the instep wide open, their shoe tongues sticking out insolently.

  I recognized one or two ties on my father. Then he stopped wearing them. He said they had been his long before he had handed them down to his father, which was his custom with clothing he no longer wore. The ties, he said, made him think of himself years ago, when he would come home late every evening to listen to his father’s recurring plea that he do something with his life other than read books and dream away his days over an embittered spinster whose love was a field of nettles. Each tie was invested with stirring reminders of distant faces or unspoken hopes that had made its extravagant price worthwhile. “You’re wasting your money, your life, your time,” his father would shout, “and a week’s salary for a tie is criminal.” Then he would agree it was a lovely tie. “Where will you ever wear it, though?” When the son told him he didn’t know, the father replied that neither did he at his age.

  When, several years later, we moved all his garden furniture to our summerhouse at Mandara, something of those hot, peaceful summer mornings came to stay with us as well. Much of the garden furniture had been painted over, but what lingered there was not his presence, not even his memory, but that vague sense of well-being that would fill his sunlit garden when I came looking for him, hoping to hear his cane or his billiard cue, so that we might pluck guavas.

  For years, every time I passed by his garden on Rue Memphis or looked into it from the Saint’s balcony, the thought would flare through my mind: What if he happened to be there right now?

  One evening, just days before leaving Egypt, as I was walking around Ibrahimieh with friends on our way to visit a woman called La Léila, I suddenly stumbled upon the house at 48 Rue Memphis. I was thinking of other things then and had drunk too much wine, but the thought had come so naturally, and with such persistent urgency, that from the man I was about to become that evening, I would gladly have borrowed five minutes to go ring his doorbell and check one last time.

  Impatient with my constant questions about my grandfather, the Princess instructed Monsieur Costa to take me directly to her mother’s at Sporting, where she had moved so as not to be alone in her house on Rue Memphis. The Greek produced himself under our window one morning, and my mother, who by now had accepted that I would be spending a part of every day with the Princess, got me dressed, brought me downstairs, and set me on his motorbike.

  This was Monsieur Costa’s first visit to my great-grandmother’s home on Rue Thèbes. I watched him park his motorcycle as neatly as he could and enter the building with marked reluctance and unease. “Are you sure it is here?” he asked me, knowing that it was.

  “I bring the child,” he told the maid who opened the door, speaking the shortest of sentences to conceal his shortness of breath.

  “And who are you?” asked the Greek maid in French.

  “C’est moi que je suis le Monsieur Costa—it is I which am the Monsieur Costa”—his way of speaking elegant French.

  My grandmother, who happened to be passing by the entrance, shouted his name when she saw him and kissed him as if he were a son returning from a long journey. “What a pleasure to see you, you have no idea,” she said in Greek. “Si
t here, I am sure my brother wants to speak with you. I have to go. As you see, the house is upside down.”

  The whole apartment seemed as if hit by a hurricane. Furniture was scattered about the rooms, the sofas in the entry and the main living room were disordered, and carpets had been rolled up and heaped against the walls, one on top of the other. All my aunts were cleaning the apartment and the maids were on their knees waxing and scouring the parquet floor with a product so strong it was almost impossible to breathe. Everyone was shouting. They were to start cooking for the centennial that afternoon and, according to Aunt Elsa’s plans, the cooking would take many, many days. Aunt Marta, who had poked her face into the living room, was shouting at the top of her voice, almost sobbing; the seamstress had sewn the wrong buttons on her mother’s dress.

  I was told to sit quietly in a corner and not move. I strained my eyes to catch sight of Sporting Beach.

  “Let’s go,” said Uncle Vili after his brief meeting with Monsieur Costa.

  I got up and gave him my hand.

  “No hand-holding. We’re men,” he said with his usual sharp voice. “Where’s your bathing suit?” he asked peremptorily.

  I hunched my shoulders. I didn’t know. I never used bathing suits. At the beach I would walk around in the shorts I was wearing and when it was time to go into the water, my grandmother would take them off.

  “Don’t tell me he goes naked at the beach like an Arab.”

  “That’s how they do it in their family. Do you think I’m about to teach them how to live their lives?”

  “Arabs! Something must be done.”

  Aunt Elsa, overhearing the conversation, came up to me, took a tape measure from her pocket, measured me, went into her room, pedaled at her sewing machine, and, five minutes later, came out with an antiquated version of a bathing suit. She had even decorated it with colored tassels. “I always said I never liked this business of swimming naked. Here, it’s a present,” she said, extremely pleased with herself. Elsa’s presents were known to have led a previous life in her possession. In this case the cloth had come from an old bedspread she did not have the heart to throw away.

  “Don’t bother to try it on now,” she added. “If it’s too large, use this safety pin.”

  “Come on, giovinezza,” said Vili with the sprightly vigor of vitamin takers.

  When we got to the beach, Vili changed in a jiffy and insisted we exercise first. He began with jumping jacks, while my grandmother looked on in silent admiration. I had watched my father exercise every morning with Monsieur Politi but had never done it myself. Vili said I was flabby. I was not holding my shoulders straight, my posture was altogether wrong, awkward, unseemly. Men did not hold their chest in and tummies out. Chest out, tummy in, like this, he insisted, showing me. “No sense of exercise, or of hygiene either.”

  “Stop it, Vili, you’ll give him a complex,” said my grandmother, who was beginning to grow worried.

  “What complexes? If your posture is bad, how can you swim? How can you swim if your posture is bad?”

  After our warm-up exercises, Uncle Vili said we should race the length of the beach. As we sprinted along the shore, I fell and scraped my knee on a broken shell. “Not to worry,” he shouted after examining the wound. An Englishman who happened to have been sitting where I fell volunteered to go to his cabin and fetch a bottle of alcohol. Scarcely had we refused his offer when a look of sudden horror crossed the Englishman’s face as he witnessed Uncle Vili wet two fingers with spit and apply his saliva quite liberally to my wound. “What alcohol! All animals lick their wounds, and there are more of them than there are of us,” Vili told the appalled Englishman.

  It was a hellish morning, filled with shouting and screaming. After lunch, I broke down and cried, telling my father on the telephone that I never wanted to see my aunts or uncles again. My father remembered all too well the bite of Vili’s tirades, especially before his wedding, when my mother’s deafness had been a subject of frequent dinner squabbling, with Vili leading the pack against her. “Tell Vili to go—!” he said.

  When, after my telephone call, Vili asked me whether the crybaby had reported everything to his daddy, I told him he was un grand idiot. His mother overheard the remark, as did Aunt Elsa, as did my grandmother. “The son of a tarsha, what did you expect,” said Uncle Vili.

  “Poor Esther.”

  Everybody was on edge. Vili threatened to hit me. My grandmother pleaded with him to stay calm. He said he would, for her sake.

  To prevent further clashes that day, my grandmother decided to take me with her to Ibrahimieh, where she wanted to pick up a few more things—her embroideries, creams, spices—and tend a bit to her garden, which she was reluctant to abandon.

  The house at 48 Rue Memphis was dark, the windows tightly shuttered, and most of the furniture draped with drop cloths, with only the feet of chairs and armchairs showing beneath the covering. All the lightbulbs had been removed, and the Persian rugs were gone. I remember my mother’s father saying once, “You watch, the first thing to disappear will be the rugs.” My mother later reported she had seen two of the rugs in the living room at the centennial. “I knew it,” replied her father who hadn’t been invited. “They’re like piranhas. As soon as someone dies, they tear down everything he owns, bring it to the Gypsy queen mother, and there parcel it out among themselves like Ali Baba’s thieves.”

  Before leaving my grandmother said she had to go to the bathroom. “Come with me,” she said, not trusting me alone in the house. “Close the door. Just turn around and look the other way.” I heard her undress. I did not shut my eyes but I averted my face as she had asked, when suddenly, past the soap dish, past the tiny bowl on the glass shelf containing moistened quince seeds that she set her hair with every morning, there, just inches from my nose, was my grandfather’s striped bathrobe hanging from a hook on the bathroom door, smelling so much of him that I could almost touch him. So he was here, he was here, after all, I thought, and turned around.

  I will never forget what I saw: my grandmother perched on top of the toilet bowl. Instead of sitting on the seat, she had lifted it up and was squatting with her bare feet on the rim, her seventy-year-old body in a precarious balance. I must have looked appalled, for she immediately tried to reassure me.

  “I can only do it the Turkish way. Since this house lacks a Turkish bathroom this is what I have to do.” Later she said it was also the healthiest way to go.

  On our way back to Rue Thèbes, she urged me never to tell anyone. “It will remain our little secret.”

  Before the day was over, hardly anyone on my mother’s side of the family had not laughed at least once at my grandmother’s expense.

  “I shouldn’t even be speaking with you, but I will,” she told me the next morning on our way to the beach. “Don’t pretend you don’t understand—you know very well what I mean.”

  I never found out who gave me away. But when the Saint heard that the very Princess, who had still not invited her to the centennial, squatted no better than a washerwoman when nature called, she probably couldn’t resist.

  Only very few days were left before the ball, but there was no sign that the Saint or her husband or anyone in their family, with the exception of my mother, had been invited. Having heard, however, that the celebration would last three days, the Saint, still unwilling to accept the snub, secretly hoped that the Princess’s family might change their minds and invite her at the last minute, if not for the first night of festivities, when the wealthiest members of the Alexandrian establishment were to gather, then for the second, or possibly the third day, when friends, fellow club members, and minor business associates would be allowed to sample leftovers. If the neighborhood Copt pharmacist and his Syrian-Lebanese wife and other évolués were invited for the third day, and if her husband’s Greek accountant and the impoverished Silvera sisters were also invited, then surely she would have to be invited as well.

  But she never was. “Because of Jacqu
es,” said the Princess many years later when I asked her why. There was no compunction in her reply, but she was probably annoyed that her grandson couldn’t have figured it out himself. Except for the rabbi of Cairo, who was an Egyptian Jew, Arab Jews had not even been considered as possible guests.

  The Saint and her husband would hear of preparations for the festivities only indirectly each day as my mother paid them a short visit.

  “Blasphemous pagans, the whole lot of them,” said my grandfather on the eve of the centennial, as the tension between Rue Memphis and Rue Thèbes reached an unprecedented high. “The poor man doesn’t have time to turn in his grave, and they’re already celebrating his mother-in-law’s longevity. Mind you, he was no better. He was so sure he would end up outliving his wife that he even asked me once, ‘Monsieur Jacques, do you think I will live long enough to forget I ever married her?’”

  “And what did you reply?” asked his wife.

  “I told him no one had ever lived that long.”

  “At any rate, he hated her family so much that he probably would have refused to go,” Monsieur Jacques added.

  “He wouldn’t have been invited,” said the Saint.

  “Which is why our daughter shouldn’t accept the invitation. It’s a matter of principle.”

  “You don’t want me to go because you haven’t been asked,” retorted his daughter.

  “Even if I were invited, I would say, ‘Madame Esther, I am touched by the invitation, but in honor of your husband’s memory, I feel I cannot accept. Another time, perhaps. But right now, no.’ And that would put her in her place.”