Out of Egypt

by André Aciman

  “And if she doesn’t invite you?”

  “If she doesn’t invite me, I will still find a way to thank her for already knowing why I would have refused her invitation.”

  “If they invite me, I’m going all alone, then,” said the Saint.

  At lunch on the day of the centennial, in honor of the man who had ridiculed them all of his life, both Uncle Vili and Uncle Isaac read eulogies for my grandfather. The seat would have remained empty, said one of them, had it not been filled by his grandson. Because of the number of guests, dining tables were moved into my great-grandmother’s bedroom, a huge corner room with two balconies and plenty of sunlight. While one of her sons was speaking, my great-grandmother, seated at the center of the table, had taken a small decanter of olive oil that stood in front of her and poured a few drops on her empty plate. She sprinkled some salt on the oil, tore a small piece of bread, dunked it into the oil, and, holding the bread in place with one hand, pricked it with the fork she held in the other and brought it to her mouth.

  “I can’t help it—I’m hungry,” said the old woman as she caught an admonitory gaze from one of her septuagenarian daughters.

  After the speeches were over, someone toasted the memory of my grandfather. Everyone said, “Amen.” My grandmother, who was seated next to me, turned to her neighbor, Madame Victoria, and said, “I used to tell him, ‘Your head is in the clouds’; and he would say, ‘And you, Esther, your feet are underground.’ Look who’s underground now.” Madame Victoria smiled philosophically, remarking, “My husband used to say I looked old enough to be his mother. And yet, I buried him, remarried, and outlived a second husband.” The smile disappeared from my grandmother’s lips as she cast another look at her mother’s chin, which was shining with oil. “Elsa, wipe off her chin before the oil drips on her dress,” she said.

  My great-grandmother wore a black lace dress that day. Next to her was seated her older brother, who had come from Turkey purposely for the occasion of his younger sister’s centennial. I remember shaking his big, fat, miller’s hand and staring at that gruff immobile mass of flesh, only to hear the man produce the sweetest strain in his “Bonjour, jeune homme.” For the pictures that were taken that day, my great-grandmother posed standing, very upright and very alert, her thin dark lips tightly pursed, which was how she smiled, a restrained, cunning, murky look in her eyes. In her hand she’s holding my grandfather’s cane.

  She was asked to make a little speech to the thirty or so family members who had gathered for lunch that day. Since she did not know French or Italian well enough to speak for a minute without making at least ten mistakes, she gave a small blessing in Ladino which ended with the cheerful though rather flat salud y berakhá, health and blessings. But urged by her sons, she finally yielded and began to speak in a halting, heavily accented French, saying that she had lived in Egypt for exactly fifty years, that half her life had been spent in Egypt, and the other half not in Egypt, and that the part not lived in Egypt was lived abroad—and yet in all these years, she went on proudly, she had never learned more than fifty words of Arabic. “One for every year,” snickered her elder son Nessim. She knew Arabic so poorly, she explained, that one day she had asked an Arab servant to help her make a bed. The man suddenly blanched and grew flustered and asked her to please reconsider. She had no idea to what he was referring and insisted they go and make the bed together—until a Greek chambermaid informed her that what she had told the servant in Arabic was, “Come with me together in the bed.” The irony, which escaped no one in the room, was not that the extremely old matron could make such a dreadful mistake but that had she insisted, the poor servant would have had to comply. Everyone burst out laughing.

  By late afternoon, guests had begun to arrive. When I awoke from my nap, the house was filled with noise. By evening, they were crowding the corridors, the entrance hall, and the two living rooms. Many of the men sported rows of medals, emblems, and rosettes on their chests, some with larger medals hanging from striped bands around their necks, everybody looking like retired members of a small brigade meeting on the anniversary of a significant battle. Someone took me into the kitchen, where the maid Latifa got me dinner. Members of a musical quintet had just finished eating and were busy brushing the crumbs off their dark suits and wiping their mouths with handkerchiefs, which they put back into their pockets. They were not due to start for a while yet.

  My mother also came into the kitchen to see how I was doing. She wore a jet-black dress that sparkled under the kitchen lights and gave off a dark greenish tinge when she opened the refrigerator door to inspect its contents, one hand holding her cigarette far away from the food, the other feeling about in the back of the refrigerator, because she had finally penetrated the mindset of her in-laws and knew that if there was something good to eat they would of necessity be trying to conceal it from one another.

  Having found what she was looking for, she gave me the first spoonful herself and walked out of the kitchen, promising to return soon. “If he wants more, give him more,” she said, already suspecting that the maid would do everything possible to hide once again the jar of whatever it was as soon as my mother had turned her back.

  After my dinner, my grandmother came and took me by the hand, and, walking about the house, introduced me to friends of the family, most of whom were very old and portly and spoke with the same slow, stuffy, melodiously well-articulated French. To my surprise, I caught sight of Hisham, our servant, standing in the middle of the crowd, wearing a fez and the traditional waiter’s garb of which he was so proud, holding with one arm a giant silver platter that was decorated with flowers. He winked when he saw me, and I shouted “ϒa Hisham!” but my grandmother quickly tried to hush me up, for not only was I waving a friendly greeting to a servant but, to her dismay, I must have sounded like an Arab. She took me into another room and introduced me to the wife of an English lord whom everyone called Madame Lord. I exchanged a polite greeting with the woman who spoke with clenched teeth and a high-pitched voice, all the while speaking through clenched teeth myself. This infuriated my grandmother, who shook my arm, saying she would absolutely not permit me to do what I had just done. Madame Lord, who didn’t understand why I was being reprimanded, asked if I would kiss her. I turned my face the other way, watching a man wearing a monocle pick peanuts from a bowl. “Doesn’t want to kiss me, then?” asked Madame Lord, with a mock, coquettish pout. “Oh, just one kiss,” she implored, bending toward me and pointing to the exact spot on her cheek where she wished me to place my kiss. “A man must never refuse,” she said, looking very pleased and petulant in her fumbling impersonation of a French bawd.

  Suddenly the lights went out. Everyone gave an astonished “Ah,” and for a brief moment there was a hushed, expectant hubbub. Then came the sound of a gong. Holding a tall lighted taper in his hand, old Uncle Nessim stood on top of a dinner chair and, with the look of an amused scarecrow on a moonlit heath, announced that one hundred candles would be lit throughout the house and that everyone was welcome to help light them. “But this is absolutely divine,” mouthed Madame Lord, no longer interested in my kiss. Everyone began queuing up as the servants passed out the tapers. Gradually, the northwest corner of the room, where we all stood, grew lighter and lighter. “Come,” said my grandmother, “we’ll be the first to light these here.” And without thanking Hisham, who was handing out the tapers, she grabbed one from his tray. “How beautiful,” said someone looking out the window. “Just fabulous,” said another. “I’ve lighted four, and I’m going to light another and another—oh, so much fun, so much,” squealed Madame Lord, who now looked like a besotted fairy godmother trying to coax her older, paunchy husband to join her as she flitted through the hall looking for unlit candles to touch with her magic wand. She was breathless with excitement. “Here,” said my grandmother, holding the taper in my hand as my mother hovered behind me, kissing me. “Light these two. This one and that one.” She pointed at two candlesticks.

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nbsp; “Three,” I overheard one of the Ayoub brothers say. “We each lighted one. And we are very happy.”

  “We’re honored, messieurs,” said my grandmother.

  “No, it’s we who are honored,” they insisted.

  My grandmother turned to me and, pointing to an unlit candle, said, “This one is for grandfather, because he will be happy you remembered him tonight.” She lifted me up as my father and my mother guided my hand. “And now this one you light for—”

  “I’ll light it for her”—I indicated my great-grandmother; everyone was extraordinarily pleased—“for when she’ll die.”

  There was a chilly silence. “Children,” exclaimed Uncle Vili, who knew how to smooth all sorts of ripples.

  “He is not a cruel boy. He just doesn’t know how to keep his mouth shut,” my grandmother apologized to those who had gathered around to watch me light the second candle.

  “A diplomat he’ll never be,” hissed Uncle Isaac.

  A photographer roaming about the room asked my grandmother to hold my hand. She did, resting her other on the edge of a mantelpiece with the dreamy nonchalance with which she normally affected contemplative, patrician plenitude.

  “A diplomat I don’t see him as either,” agreed my grandmother after thanking the photographer. “There are certain people in this world who talk a lot and cannot keep secrets.” She looked at me reprovingly.

  My father took the taper from my hand and then handed it to my mother, and I watched him help her reach for an unlit candle in the back. “This is for your father,” she said. He kissed her on the cheek. She smiled, and placed a palm along his.

  By now all the rooms were aglow with candlelight, and when the servants opened the windows and balcony doors to let in fresh air, a mild autumnal breeze lilted through the house, swaying the lights ever so gently, as everyone marveled at the effect of the light against crystal.

  “This we’ll never forget,” said Mr. Khatchadourian.

  “Thank you, thank you,” said Aunt Elsa, who immediately turned and complained to Madame Victoria of the awkward way in which Armenians spoke French.

  “Even when in Europe we’ll be, of this we’ll think each year on this one same day. This I promise.”

  “Can’t they ever speak correctly?” she whispered to her sister. “To Cairo we went, from the theater I came, to America we’ll go.”

  A bang was heard in an adjacent room. “Evviva lo sciampagna,” said an Italian gentleman. Uncle Nessim announced that, as the eldest of the siblings, he had uncorked the first bottle. Apologizing for the noise, he wiped his hand with a napkin and let one of the waiters take over.

  “I’ll keep this forever,” he said turning to his mother, staring at the cork as if trying to decipher the precious inscription on its head. “We usually say ‘May you live to be a hundred,’ but now. I don’t know what to say.”

  “Don’t get all worked up now, Nessico,” she replied, tapping him on the arm. “You’ve done enough already.”

  “But there won’t be another,” he protested.

  “No, there won’t.”

  “If only we could start again.”

  “Evviva signora,” cheered the Italian gentleman who had overheard the mawkish conversation and who suddenly began singing “Viva il vino spumeggiante” in a loud stentorian voice, motioning to the band and to all those around him to join him in a chorus, as everyone, even those only vaguely familiar with the aria from Cavalleria Rusticana, joined in the song. “But it’s Ugolino da Montefeltro,” said my grandmother as she blew him a kiss from afar. “He has just returned from France,” she told guests around her, “just back from France.”

  No one had heard Monsieur Costa arrive. But suddenly I saw him standing in the middle of the hallway, looking like a baffled hermit who had strayed into a pagan orgy, scanning the room for a familiar face, dressed as always in his bombardier jacket, his shirt collar wide open, his hair greased back, the trimmed black mustache about to touch his upper lip.

  “Please excuse the disturbance,” he said as soon as he saw my grandmother, “but I must see His Excellency your brother immediately.”

  Uncle Vili came walking quickly, muttering “Ay, ay, ay” to himself, knowing that such a visit could only mean trouble. “Come into the kitchen—no, in here,” he told Monsieur Costa, pointing to a junk-filled room next to the kitchen that sometimes doubled as the maid Latifa’s. “You, out,” said Vili pointing at me. “I want to come in,” I insisted, promising not to utter a word. I was on the verge of crying. “Come in, but not a sound or I’ll kill you.”

  “They caught my brother,” said Monsieur Costa in one breath.

  “That was a risk. Everyone knew that,” replied Vili.

  “Well, yes. They have the money of course. But they also know the numbers of the bank accounts in Switzerland. And they have a list of names.”

  “You mean the fool carried a list of names on him?”

  “Apparently.”

  “But it’s all over, then.”

  Monsieur Costa did not say a word but kept his arms crossed with a look of helpless consternation, as though trying to avert a blow by looking prematurely mortified.

  “I am in as much trouble as you, Your Excellency,” he said in the end. “There is a ship leaving tonight. It’s a Greek merchant vessel, I can guarantee passage on it. I will be on it as well. Now, if Your Excellency will permit me, there are a few other people I must warn as well.” Monsieur Costa took the service entrance and was never heard from again, not even by his wife.

  “Call Nessim and Isaac now—and don’t look so worried, for God’s sake.”

  This was my first secret mission, and I waited for the right moment to tell each of my uncles that they were urgently needed in the chambre des karakibs—which in Arabic meant bric-a-brac. Once I escorted both, I was told to stay outside.

  I tried to listen at the door, but all I heard were exclamations of distress. They opened the door and asked me to bring in my grandmother only. She must have sensed something was amiss, and by the look on Monsieur Costa’s face she knew it concerned the police. Uncle Isaac was advising Vili against taking the ship. Costa could no longer be trusted. Instead, he would arrange for a car to drive him directly to the Cairo airport that same night, from where he could catch a dawn flight to Rome without anyone asking too many questions.

  None of this caught Uncle Vili by surprise. For years he had been liquidating his assets in Egypt and smuggling money to Switzerland in defiance of the Egyptian government’s ban on all shipment of currency abroad. The punishment for the crime was imprisonment and eventual expulsion. Those holdings still in his name in Egypt were kept for appearances’ sake and could easily be sacrificed. He had even managed to ship his clothes as well as his antique furniture to Europe. All he was leaving behind of value was a poorly kept villa filled with junk, rugs, and a Treccani encyclopedia set, given to him by, and bearing the signature of, none other than Il Duce himself. Many years later, that coveted set fell into my hands, only to be sold to a dealer for less than a dollar when we left Egypt.

  Presently, I saw my grandmother come out of the junk room tucking her handkerchief into her left sleeve, shutting the door immediately behind her.

  “What is it?” asked my father.

  “We’ve decided to start the waltz now,” she replied.

  At that moment, the quintet sounded a few notes and everyone cleared the space in the middle of the room to watch Vili, the youngest son, dance a Verdi waltz with his mother on the occasion of her hundredth birthday. Together they took a few rehearsed turns around the room, pretended to stop a moment, and then resumed the dancing, everyone applauding as the couple spun in the light of the hundred candles, until Vili brought her back to where she had been sitting and where my mother waited to help the old lady regain her seat. Without asking, Vili reached out for my mother as he let go of his own, took her into his arms, and suddenly accelerated the pace of the waltz, taking dizzying swirls around the room,
the exinfantryman from the battles of Val Maggio and Sant’Osvaldo wheeling the wheel merchant’s daughter from Ibrahimieh, showing the world that a sixty-year-old rake could still ignite the heart of a thirty-year-old belle.

  When the waltz was over, everyone applauded. Vili returned my mother to my father and said, “I owe your wife many apologies. I should have married her myself.” He took my mother’s hand in his and brought it close to his lips and, still holding it there, whispered, “I won’t see you for many, many years. Goodbye.” My mother blushed and, unsure of what he had just said, smiled and said, “Thank you.”

  Vili rushed to the kitchen, where his brother’s chauffeur had been waiting for him with his brother’s raincoat, his brother’s suit, and a battered suitcase wrenched out of the junk room which his sisters had filled with old clothes so he would not arrive at the airport looking suspicious. The service door was opened, and from the landing outside, an unmistakable smell of zibala, refuse, wafted into the kitchen.

  There, so as not to arouse suspicion among the guests, who had no notion of what was taking place at the other end of the apartment, his sisters had come one by one to bid their most cherished brother farewell. Each wept, washed her face, put on a smile, and went to mingle with the guests while another took her place, exhorting her youngest brother, as each had probably done before both world wars, to behave, be good, and be careful. My grandmother, his senior by almost fifteen years, was the last to say goodbye. “You won’t start now,” she said, “because if you do I will.” “I won’t, I won’t,” he promised. They hugged and kissed, after which Vili asked, “Esther, bless me.” Unable to hold back her tears now, she began weeping aloud, placing a shaking palm upon his head, sobbing the Hebrew words out loud until she had said “Amen.”

  “Come, enough of this,” she said as she kept caressing the lapel of his jacket. “Promise to write. Don’t just disappear.” Unable to speak, he nodded.