Out of Egypt

by André Aciman

  That was good enough for everybody. “It’s already over,” said someone.

  “If Vili were here, we’d be uncorking champagne right now,” said Aunt Marta.

  Overjoyed by the news, my grandmother began jumping up and down in the large entrance hall.

  “Bravo, Esther,” joined Aunt Elsa who also began clapping and skipping about on her septuagenarian legs.

  Behind the half-parted curtains leading into the main corridor, I caught sight of Abdou listening in on the news bulletin. He was standing and leaning forward, half concealed in the dark, his glinting eyes peering out from the heavy folds of the old brown curtain like those of an inquisitive fox frozen momentarily in the headlights, something guilty in the manner his eyes darted away as soon as I caught him staring at us.

  I immediately told my father, who dismissed it the way he always dismissed my grandmother’s complaints about her servant’s petty pilferings. “In their place I’d do the same thing,” he said.

  “Yes, but think of it,” rebutted Uncle Isaac who always claimed to see things from a far broader perspective. “You may understand their nationalistic aspirations, but remember that without us Egypt would still be a desert.”

  “Softly,” said my grandmother, who did not want Abdou to hear any of this.

  “Softly-who-cares!” interjected Cousin Arnaut, who was constantly reminding everyone that the entire family should move to France. “If we can’t say what we think under our roof, then we have no roof!”

  “Spoken like a true poet, ya salam!” exclaimed Uncle Isaac, using an Arab expression denoting profound admiration. “If we can’t say what we think under our roof, then we have no roof. Fear brings out the poet in you.”

  Minutes later a dead silence filled the room as everyone, including the seven or eight children, sensed something solemn in the sonorous voice that suddenly spoke from the old Philco in a stately French accent so different from ours. Radio Monte Carlo! It was the French of movie stars, the French my uncles mimicked but never mastered, the French one made fun of but secretly envied, the French one claimed one didn’t care to speak, the way some might say they didn’t care for certain cheeses because no Brie or Saint André could ever compete with a good, hearty slice of fresh Greek feta. “I always come back to my feta,” Uncle Isaac would say, the way he might have said that he always came back to Aunt Lotte. It was a French that made us feel remote, dated, inferior.

  The voice that spoke to us from far across the dark Mediterranean seemed to come from light-years away, lofty, polished, and unshaken, declaiming the old promise that France would always stand against the forces of darkness. The joint forces had launched strategic air strikes against Egypt. Port Said had fallen. Allied paratroopers had taken Suez.

  “That’s the end of that!” said Uncle Nessim.

  “They’ll be here in a matter of days.”

  Moments later someone was pounding at our door. Uncle Isaac immediately turned off the radio, took the small kerosene lamp, and went to answer it himself, his swollen shadow sweeping across the ceiling as he finally reached the entrance door. It was the porter. He did not wait for the door to open before shouting out curses at us for waiting so long to turn off our lights.

  “Do you want us to get bombed?” he asked in Arabic.

  Uncle Isaac looked at him, stunned. “Of course I don’t want us to get bombed,” he replied.

  “Then turn off the lights, you old Jew, or I’ll have you arrested for spying.”

  The porter did not give my uncle a chance to slam the door in his face, but pulled it shut behind him. In the hallway, I heard him yell the same thing at poor old Madame Silvera.

  That same evening most of the living room and entrance furniture was moved against the walls, mattresses were laid down, and when my grandmother saw that there were not enough mattresses for everyone, she had old blankets, some dating as far back as the Crimean War, taken out of the storage room, and put down for the children to sleep on. All my cousins and I would share the living room for the next few weeks.

  Early the next morning, my uncles asked one of the servants to buy every local newspaper at the main Sporting newsstand. The news was unbelievable.

  “Victory again!” quoted Uncle Nessim.

  “Victory here as well,” replied Uncle Isaac. “‘Not a single prisoner, hardly a wounded soldier among the men defending their motherland.’”

  “How could this good-for-nothing upstart Nasser defeat the combined British and French forces, tell me?” asked Aunt Marta.

  Breakfast at my great-grandmother’s was always served à l’anglaise, a custom I had only seen practiced in the movies and which made me feel as though I had entered the most luxurious hotel in the world, where the fresh morning air is always tempered by the welcoming smell of exotic flowers, buffed floors, and hot beverages, butter, toast, and eggs. You helped yourself to whatever you wanted on the buffet and then sat down, while a servant poured coffee, tea, or chocolate. The butter was curled into neat oyster-shaped shells. The dried toast was covered with an embroidered purple cloth, the eggs were kept warm in a large bowl, there were plenty of cheeses and jams. As for the brioches, there were so many of them lumped together in a basket, it was clear you could help yourself to many more than just one.

  “Are you going to eat all this?” asked my grandmother who was helping me with my breakfast.

  I nodded. I watched my mother shake her head at me—I didn’t have to show I had never before seen so much food at breakfast. But I insisted, telling my grandmother, who had intercepted the look on my mother’s face, that I was very hungry.

  “If you say so, then,” said my grandmother, who wanted everyone, particularly those of her sisters who had their children and grandchildren present, to notice that if she let me do as I pleased it was not because she doted on me with the smoochy fondness of Sephardi grandmothers, but rather because ours was a privileged relationship between an unusually enlightened grandmother and her unusually precocious grandchild.

  As always, my grandmother sliced little bread fingers for me, cut the larger tip off the soft-boiled egg, and then sprinkled salt into it. I looked up from my seat next to hers and saw the sun beaming into the dining room. My grandmother’s lavender dress caught the light of this beautiful, quiet morning. I had stepped into a realm of magic and legend.

  When the servant came to pour my hot chocolate, I said I wanted tea instead and, mimicking my grandmother, asked him to please add some hot water after pouring the tea into my cup.

  No one allowed me to live it down. During the ensuing few days, whenever anything was served in the dining room, someone was always bound to ask the servant not to forget to please add hot water to it. Did I need hot water in my soup? Or in my salad perhaps? Or did I want some poured into my glass of water, was it too cold? Uncle Isaac, who loved Aunt Marta’s homemade ice cream, could never refrain from asking whether I wanted hot water in my ice cream.

  “We’ve joked enough. Now leave the boy alone,” snapped my grandmother after the third day. “And from now on,” she said, turning to me, “drink what you’re given without putting on airs, understand?”

  Gone was the enlightened liberalism she had affected earlier.

  “Wants to be a petit monsieur,” teased my uncle. “All he needs is a monocle, a top hat, and off goes our jeune flâneur through the grands boulevards de Paris.”

  Uncle Isaac asked me what I wanted to become when I grew up.

  “An ambassador,” I replied, eyeing my grandmother, who had planted the idea in my head.

  “And of which country?” he asked.

  I said I didn’t know yet.

  “Which country are you a citizen of?”

  I had never thought about it before, but the answer seemed so readily obvious to me that I failed to see why he asked. “France, of course,” I said.

  “‘France, of course,’ he says. Doesn’t even know what country he’s a citizen of, and his grandmother wants him to be its ambassado
r. Do me a favor, Esther, do me a favor! You’re not French, I’m French,” he said to me, with something like venom and a sneer warbling in his graveled voice. “You, on the other hand, are Italian, and not even that—Turkish, to be precise!”

  He looked at me for an instant and then giggled.

  “Didn’t even know it, see? And doesn’t look too thrilled, either.”

  Everyone in the family had talked almost daily about a faraway, gaslit world called Turkey, where ignorance, dirt, disease, theft, and massacres prevailed. It never occurred to me that I was Turkish because of this. I felt sullied, mocked, betrayed. Amid the general laughter, I stared at Uncle Isaac, unable to fathom his twisted loops of irony, not realizing yet that he had the wit, good cheer, and playful devotion to children that mark the cruelest people.

  Early one afternoon, while everybody was napping, I heard the sudden grief-stricken cooing of a turtledove who had lost her young to a kitten. She was dizzily circling the inner courtyard, rending the afternoon silence, telling everyone in the kitchen of her sorrow, while her mate watched her swirl around the courtyard, almost smashing into the masonry at each turn.

  I opened the glass door that connected the living room to the dining room, stepping into the place where, scarcely an hour before, the grown-ups had loudly debated our prospects. “There is nothing to do but wait,” Isaac had said. “The banks are closed. They’ve sealed the doors to my office. The only person willing to extend me credit is my tobacconist.”

  He was worried. The British and the French forces had undoubtedly won. Yet there was not a sign of them.

  “If it worries you so much, why not ask someone in the cabinet?” suggested my great-grandmother.

  Isaac, the Talleyrand of the family, had never found the courage to tell his mother that such a cabinet hadn’t existed in years, and that, as a consequence, he no longer knew anyone in government. “I’ll see,” he had said, looking down as he peeled an orange, slowly, suddenly slipping a strip of the rind flat against his front teeth to imitate a monster’s mouth, which he knew would scare me.

  “If they’ve taken Suez and Port Said, why aren’t they in Cairo or Alexandria?” asked the old courtier.

  “The Germans took France faster than this!” added Aunt Marta, looking duly perplexed.

  “I must see Ugo,” replied Uncle Isaac. “He will know.”

  Not a sign of our lunch remained now, only a vague scent of citrus, laced into the perennial stuffy odor of cloves, cinnamon, old cloth, and old people that greeted you whenever you wandered into the house. My great-grandmother liked ginger biscuits. She liked tea. She was always cold. I heard her cough in the next room. One of the maids was stoking embers in the old stove. The servants were eating leftovers.

  Once I had shut the glass door behind me, the dining room became as peaceful and quiet as Aunt Clara’s timeless still lifes along the wall. The dead partridge, the Anjou melon split in two, the emptied wine flask with wildflowers, the trapped pheasant strung on a noose sitting next to dried fruit and autumnal hunting gear in a small English country house. Everything was brown. A sad, sodden, dreary brown filled the room with its beige curtains, faded sheers, and its pale oak furniture and yellow-stained walls on which a muted cast of light gave the day a languid quality between noon and early evening, in a month that was no longer fall but not quite winter either.

  Part of the reason the room had an oppressive dun shade was that every piece of cloth in it, down to our napkins, had been dyed in tea, which gave otherwise yellowed, stained, aging white cloth a perpetual tan shade. Everything that had lost its color was ultimately dyed in tea. Even hard-boiled eggs at Passover were dyed in tea.

  Aunt Marta’s forest scene portraying the tale of Actaeon hung above the buffet, displaying the metamorphosed hunter fending off his own dogs, while fellow stag-hunters begin to close in from around a tawny grove, eyeing the frightened stag as they hurl their spears. An old, tawdry piece of dark embroidered cloth had been placed on the dining table, with a bowl of walnuts to hold it in place.

  “So,” I heard Uncle Isaac’s voice from the entrance hall. He had taken his walking stick, his hat, and his coat and was asking his sisters whether any of them might want to join him for a long walk. None would go. Uncle Nessim had already gone off to play golf. Everyone else was sleeping.

  “Then he’s coming,” said my uncle, pointing at me. My grandmother hesitated.

  “Where are you going?” she asked with wide-open, suspicious eyes.

  “I’m going for a walk.”

  I could tell she was struggling not to ask again.

  She helped me put on my coat and forced me to wear an old, smelly, borrowed scarf.

  As soon as we were out of the building, we headed for the tramway station. On the tram, I felt uncomfortable watching Uncle Isaac arguing with the conductor that I should pay a reduced fare being so young.

  We got off several stops later at Bulkley. As we walked up an incline, I looked through the trees and saw a row of villas with large gardens and wrought-iron gates. We continued to head east until we reached a narrow, empty road, littered with dry leaves that crackled underfoot.

  Uncle Isaac stopped in front of a villa whose porch was lined with imitation Greek caryatids supporting an upper terrace covered with ivy and jasmine. He rang at the gate. A maid eventually opened the main door and, on seeing him, immediately came rushing out to open the front gate. “Your Excellency,” she exclaimed, “what an honor.”

  Uncle Isaac pushed me awkwardly inside the villa grounds and reminded me to walk properly. “We’ll only stay a moment,” he said. From inside I could hear the strains of loud operatic music.

  “Isaac,” came a shrill man’s voice. “Isaac. Our dear, dear Isaac. Come in, come in,” said the man, extending both hands, with which he shook my uncle’s right hand.

  When we entered the house, we noticed that all the windows had been covered with thick cobalt-blue paper.

  “We haven’t started doing this,” said my uncle, indicating the covered shutters. “I suppose we should.”

  “Absolutely must,” said the elderly gentleman, who wore a maroon ascot and a beige cardigan. “The police came yesterday and were so terribly rude that, naturally, the first thing we did this morning was to have all the windows covered as well.” His wife was just coming out of the library.

  “Isaac, but you’re really unforgivable,” she shouted in the marble hall. “Staying away from us so very long—really, tesoro.”

  Uncle Isaac kissed her.

  “Ali!” she hollered at the top of her lungs. “Tea!”

  “So tell me, caro,” said the man wearing the ascot.

  “I don’t know what to make of it yet,” answered my uncle. Perhaps he was being evasive or, as he would say, diplomatic: say less than you think and mean more than you know.

  “E finita—” said the gentleman, “that’s what you should make of it. La commedia è finita,” he crooned with blithe consternation as he lifted up an arm with the operatic flourish of someone looking for the slightest pretext to break into song.

  “But siamo seri, let’s be serious,” said his wife.

  “Siamo in due,” rejoined her husband, breaking into song yet again, whereupon his most devoted and compatible wife, heeding her husband’s musical inducements, joined him in singing “O soave fanciulla,” in which my uncle joined as well, adding his warbly basso.

  “Aaahh,” sighed the man after the trio had sung and laughed their way into a fit of coughing. “We’ve lived far too long, caro, and have too many wonderful memories to let a bunch of turbaned hooligans frighten us now.” He reflected for a moment. “Hooligans, schmooligans,” he added. “I’ve built this house out of nothing”—he pointed to the marble floor, the marble paneling along the marble staircase, where a creamy afternoon glow graced a pair of marble statues standing inside a sculptured wooden door—“and I’m not about to leave it to them. This here, my friend, is where I plan to die many, many years from now,
like old King David in the arms of his sprightly, young, desirable Bathsheba,” he said, holding his wife by her waist and rubbing his hip suggestively against hers.

  “Ugo!” protested his wife with mock reproof.

  “Ugo!” he mimicked with the rakish petulance of an Old World charmeur. “M’hai stregato, you’ve bewitched me,” he whispered, his mouth rubbing her neck. Then, holding his wife in both arms, he turned to my uncle and winked at him, wearing a crafty, naughty-boy smirk that seemed to allege an air of impish complicity between fellow womanizers. This was Egypt’s most powerful stockbroker, the man whom the country’s European and Egyptian elites trusted with their dreams of fortune.

  “Ugo, tell me, what is happening?” asked my uncle.

  “What is happening?” repeated Signor Ugo with a sprightly look darting from his eyes. “What is happening is that whatever the British and the French take from Nasser they’ll have to give back. The Russians won’t allow them to keep anything, not the canal, not Port Said, not anything. And the irony is that the British already know it, as do the French, though they’ll continue fighting awhile to save face.”

  “But it’s the end, then,” muttered Uncle Isaac.

  “Isaac. I’ve heard—” then he stopped and stared in my direction.

  “Talk. He doesn’t understand.”

  “My friends,” he started, meaning his high-powered clients in the Egyptian government, “my friends tell me that Nasser won’t forgive this attack. There will be serious reprisals against French and British nationals once all this is over. Nationalizations. Expulsions. This includes Jews.”