The Arrogant Years

by Lucette Lagnado

  Alexandra was certain her daughter was especially vulnerable to the evil eye because of her beauty and now her teaching job. My grandmother had a thousand injunctions for Edith to chase away the demons and keep those who wished her ill at bay. She believed that running into a priest was unlucky and if my mother ever saw a clergyman coming, she was instructed to cross the street immediately. Now, Sakakini had a Christian girls’ school operated by the Sisters of Sion, so there were many nuns in the neighborhood. The injunction did not pertain to them: Alexandra, educated at a convent school, had a soft spot for nuns and referred to them lovingly as les sisters.

  Every week, my grandmother persuaded Edith to join her in a ritual designed to combat those who might wish them ill. Together, they would burn incense purchased in Old Cairo at the souk el attarine—the souk of the spice merchants. In stalls fragrant with the scent of exotic herbs and spices, you could find the men who specialized in selling bakhour—the strange and powerful incense they prepared themselves by mixing aloeswood and musk and sandalwood and clove and cinnamon and lavender and myrrh and mastic and a thousand other secret ingredients.

  Alexandra would place the incense in a metal container on the floor and throw a match over it. Almost immediately, the small apartment would be heady with the sweet-smelling fumes. She and Edith would walk around the burning incense seven times—once for every day of the week—to chase away any bad luck and to help usher in good luck.

  This was a popular practice throughout old Cairo. There were even “professional” women who came to your home and burned incense and drove away the evil eye for a living. Mostly elderly, they’d arrive bearing their small brass incensory and walk from room to room, shaking it this way and that. The scent of the bakhour lingered for days.

  But what was different about the house in the alleyway was my grandmother’s insistence on burning the incense herself, and the degree of passion she brought to the task, and the fact that she instilled in my mother at a young age such a terror of the evil eye, along with the absolute belief in the power of those fragrant, smoldering bits of powder to shield her from harm.

  My mother blossomed as a schoolteacher; at last, she was enjoying the status and reputation she and Alexandra had craved. When she walked into class now, all the little children immediately rose to greet her.

  Though shy by nature, she emerged as a formidable figure in the classroom. She had a reputation for enforcing strict standards even among her youngest charges. But she also gave of herself more than the typical teacher: If a pupil didn’t grasp a subject, she worked with them in school and after school.

  She even made “house calls”—visiting them at their home to tutor them.

  But she also brought an abundance of charm to her lessons. She could keep her young male charges spellbound with her fantastical stories, and, of course, she was so pretty that even the littlest of little boys were in love with Mademoiselle Matalon.

  And so were some girls. Young Sarah Naggar, who lived on Ibn Khaldoum Street, around the corner from the Alley of the Pretty One, loved to stand on her balcony every morning watching the flow of traffic. She was always monitoring the comings and goings, but her favorite treat was that moment when the lovely Mademoiselle Matalon would pass. She was fascinated by how the teacher carried herself, how her outfits were so dainty and refined—not at all the way other women in Sakakini dressed—and the child could only dream of the day she, too, would put on heels along with frilly white blouses and tailored skirts.

  After a couple of years, Edith was handed a plum—the chance to teach at L’École Cattaui.

  She was back on familiar territory. The tony private school attracted a different class of students—not rich exactly but fairly well-to-do. Their parents had to pay a monthly tuition. The little boys who attended Cattaui arrived every morning looking sparkling and polished in their satiny black uniforms with the large white Peter Pan collar.

  Mom always had a weakness for a nice uniform.

  There was an intensity to the education at Cattaui that appealed to her. Young children were required to study four or five languages—French, English, Hebrew, Arabic, and even Italian. They were constantly being tested and given impromptu pop quizzes and oral exams and dictees, the French equivalent of spelling tests. Forced to think on their feet, children learned how to tackle math problems without relying on pen and paper but by making the calculations in their heads.

  In an effort to emulate the finest Parisian educations—Paris was always the ideal—a battery of teachers were hired who specialized in every subject under the sun: the basics, of course, such as French grammar and language, which my mother taught, as well as English, mathematics, history, biology and the Bible. There were even courses in calligraphy.

  Rome’s cultural attaché in Cairo, a devotee of Mussolini, sent over an Italian teacher, Signorina Messa-Daglia, to help out. She was a blond bombshell, tall, beautiful, and very Aryan looking, who promptly taught her classes the Fascist salute. A Fascist teacher in a Jewish school? Yes: After reciting the Jewish morning prayer in a communal hall, the Signorina’s students greeted her by shouting “Viva Il Duce”—Long live Il Duce—with their arms outstretched.

  But that was the only element of fascism that touched Cairo’s Jewish children. Unlike their peers in so much of Europe in the late 1930s, they weren’t subjected to horrific bouts of anti-Semitism or forced to obey demeaning racial laws.

  On the contrary, from the royal palace where Madame Cattaui was establishing herself in the court of King Farouk, to the humblest alley in the Old Ghetto, Jews at every level of Egyptian society were enjoying unprecedented freedoms and opportunities. Their lives in this Muslim city were filled with possibilities in ways that had ceased to be the case in most of Europe.

  Thrilled with her new position, Edith would get up early each morning, dress carefully with only a hint of makeup to make herself appear older than her seventeen years, and make her way over to Cattaui, a short walk from the alleyway.

  The headmaster, a formidable figure named Monsieur Moline who ran both Cattaui and Le Sebil, took her under his wing. As part of his grand plans to raise academic standards and make Cattaui competitive with the Catholic schools of Cairo, which were said to be more rigorous, he was recruiting the best teachers he could find and was said to have a knack at spotting talent. He was a fan of the lovely and genteel Mademoiselle Matalon, gave her choice teaching assignments, and treated her with extraordinary deference.

  He also introduced her to the school’s most important benefactress, Madame Alice Cattaui Pasha. Once she became known to the pasha’s wife, my mother—an outsider for so long—was finally on the inside; she had found a second home at 17 Rue Sakakini.

  Madame Cattaui Pasha was nearly seventy when my mother came to know her—graceful and proper and dignified yet with a touch of vanity, a hint of la coquette that prompted her to always wear a large choker or kerchief around her neck to hide any telltale signs of age.

  She was very much the grande dame in her couturier clothes and white gloves and Paris hats. Yet she was neither cold nor supercilious. Indeed, her greatness lay in the fact that she could consort as easily with a king as with a child in need of a pair of sandals.

  She also had a well of goodness within her.

  A keen judge of character, she embraced Edith, who found herself the unlikely protégé of this powerful and stately woman. The pasha’s wife became her patron saint and guardian angel and surrogate mother all at once. As a frequent visitor to the school, she could follow my mom’s teaching career and recommend her for new responsibilities. And because this noblewoman had taken such a strong liking to her, the young teacher found herself elevated in everyone’s eyes.

  Edith’s newfound stature was almost enough to make up for all the hardships and deprivations of living with my fragile grandmother. Her relationship with Alice Cattaui Pasha made Edith intensely proud, and that pride lingered through the years and decades, sustaining her even when all se
mblance of pride was gone.

  Whenever Madame Cattaui came to the school, the two would huddle, conferring intently on the questions of the day. Edith clung to her as if she were her mother—a mother with the strength and stability that poor Alexandra could never muster. And Madame Cattaui returned the young woman’s affection, treating her like a surrogate daughter—like the daughter she had lost. Because surely that is what happened: My mother was Indji, returned to life again in the form of a delicate and exquisite schoolteacher.

  The friendship came with privileges. My mother learned all about the pasha, Yussef Cattaui, and his extraordinary and boundless love of literature, the thousands upon thousands of volumes he kept in the private library at Villa Cattaui—every single possible work of note.

  Would she like to borrow some?

  It was a startling offer—deeply affecting to my mother who’d had to scrimp and save to afford a steady supply of books for herself and Alexandra over the years; books were so expensive in Cairo. They’d always relied on friends or cousins to give them access to the works they craved or bought them secondhand.

  One day, after school, Edith made the journey by tramway from Sakakini to Garden City. It was like traveling to a foreign country—instead of bustling alleyways, there were quiet, landscaped streets, with homes larger than any she had ever seen, with the exception of Sakakini Palace. Finally, she reached 8 Ibrahim Pasha and was ushered into the wing that housed the sumptuous Bibliotheque Cattaui.

  With its vaulted ceilings and stained-glass windows, the pasha’s library looked like a church—a cathedral of books. On shelves that lined the walls, many shielded by glass, there were all the authors she knew and loved as well as some she had only heard about and longed to read. She glimpsed a set of Flaubert’s Oeuvres Complètes, from Madame Bovary to the Temptation of St. Anthony. Every novel and poetry collection by Victor Hugo was there, including Notre Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) and Les Miserables, both childhood favorites. There was Emily Brontë’s Les Hauts de Hurle-Vent (Wuthering Heights) and Tolstoy’s La Guerre et La Paix (War and Peace) and assorted works of Pascal and Emil Zola and Guy de Maupassant and the Goncourt Brothers, all in first editions. Each had an elegant label pasted inside, with the Cattaui family monogram. And, of course, there was Proust—multiple editions of his works containing every volume he had ever published—in jackets of burnished leather.

  The pasha’s collection was maintained by a librarian who lived in the Cattaui residence. He was courtly and polite and eager to give Edith access to any works she requested. She settled on Les Thibaud, a French War and Peace that was all the rage. The sprawling family epic by Roger Martin du Gare had recently snared the Nobel Prize for Literature. She lugged all eight volumes of Les Thibaud, from Garden City to the alleyway.

  The pasha’s library.

  Once Alice realized my mother’s passion for books, the bond between the two women only deepened. Madame Cattaui became sensitive to a widespread problem within the Jewish community—the difficulty for impoverished students to purchase the books required for their studies. Although she and her husband gave to countless philanthropic funds and communal institutions, she had never focused on the struggle families faced to get hold of needed books until Edith told her about her own travails.

  L’École Cattaui would change all that. Madame Cattaui decreed the school would have a state-of-the-art library and la chère Mademoiselle Matalon would be the one to organize it. That was the extraordinary project entrusted to Edith—to set up a library that would allow even students of modest means, or simply those with great intellectual curiosity, to read and study and take home any books they fancied.

  The two women worked closely together, and my mother was given a budget to order any and all works she felt were important—novels, history and geography texts, biographies, whatever could be of interest to young students. She could purchase them from booksellers as far away as Europe and America; they all knew the Cattauis—the pasha had done business with each and every one of them.

  It was a thrilling assignment, and Edith, still in her teens, rose to the challenge. Driven, committed, and thoroughly impassioned by her undertaking, she had never felt so empowered as when she ordered more books, and money was no object, and she could indulge in all her tastes.

  She performed her duties with such flair that her reward for creating the library came in the form of a new position. Madame Cattaui installed her as the school’s librarian. She now had two titles and two jobs, since giving up teaching her beloved little boys was out of the question.

  Whether she was in the classroom or ensconced in her fledgling bibliothèque or basking in the companionship of the pasha’s wife, Edith had never looked as radiant or appeared so self-confident. She had reached her arrogant years, that period in a young woman’s life when she feels—and is—on top of the world. Although it was a small world, bounded by Sakakini Palace and the careworn Alley of the Pretty One and the Cattaui school, to Mom, it suddenly seemed infinitely grand.

  And perhaps only Alexandra, only my poor superstitious grandmother, trembled at her daughter’s sudden surfeit of joy and good fortune and wondered what evil wind might sweep in to take it all away. She begged her daughter—as Mom would one day entreat me—to be mindful of the mauvais oeil, those malevolent forces that lurked everywhere around a person who seemed to have too much.

  But the rewards kept coming, and my mother’s luck defied Alexandra’s dark misgivings. Mom continued teaching, ministering to the mischievous boys of la maternelle, who were in kindergarten and first grade, and then, her duties in the classroom over, she would turn her attention to the library.

  One day out of the blue, Madame Cattaui arrived with a gift. She handed Mom a key—the key to the pasha’s library.

  My mother would always evoke that moment when Alice Cattaui Pasha placed the key in her hands. As a little girl, I would watch mesmerized as she acted out this scene as if from a long-ago play, recalling what happened in a dreamlike voice and obsessive precision:

  “La clef, Madame Cattaui Pasha m’a donné la clef, elle l’a mis dans ma main”—the key, Madame Cattaui Pasha gave me the key, she put it in my hand, she would tell me over and over again.

  Edith on her wedding day, Cairo, 1943.

  For Mom, the key was a precious and ultimately transformative gift that offered a different way of looking at herself forevermore. She was no longer simply a girl from an alleyway, but the fine and talented Mademoiselle Matalon, beloved by a pasha’s wife, embraced by one of the most powerful women of Cairo.

  · 3 ·

  The Bride Who Set Herself on Fire

  Alexandra had never looked so radiant as that afternoon when she rushed into her brother’s house to announce her beloved Edith had encountered “quelqu’un de très grand,” someone of great stature, high up in the world. He seemed thoroughly smitten and there was suddenly no time to waste: He wanted to meet the family immediately and announce the engagement.

  The words came tumbling out of my grandmother. Edith had captured the gros lot—grand prize in the lottery—as this gentleman seemed to have every quality one could possibly want in a husband: wealth, social pedigree, impeccable manners, and, of course, he dressed so wonderfully, with such style.

  “C’est un vrai aristocrate,” she exclaimed, unable to contain herself—He is a true aristocrat.

  Her relatives, who had long feared that my grandmother would let her daughter become an old maid rather than part with her, were mystified, at a loss as to how to explain this sudden change. Alexandra had always been such a fierce guardian of Edith—for years, no man could ever hope to approach the young woman who was watched more closely than the crown jewels. How many matchmakers had been spurned for daring to suggest a prospect she didn’t think was worthy enough. From the time Edith was fourteen or fifteen, my grandmother had been fending off potential suitors as unimpressive, not educated enough, not wealthy enough, or simply lacking personality. She had ev
en stopped Edith from becoming involved with the one young man who came closest to capturing my mother’s fancy—an étalagiste—a charming young window dresser who worked at the great department stores downtown. He had told her she belonged in one of his windows.

  Anyone who knew Alexandra—who saw how she clung to Edith—suspected she wanted to keep her daughter always by her side on that little balcony, sipping cup after cup of café turc through eternity.

  Now here she was with Edgar and his wife muttering that an engagement—des fiançailles—was close at hand. My grandmother kept talking about Shepheard’s, the hotel favored by British officers and anyone else from the swell set. It was the spring of 1943—the middle of the war—and the Brits were ensconced in every inch of the hotel’s famous bar and veranda. The plan was to meet the prospective groom for high tea.

  “But why don’t you come here to our house,” Marie, Edgar’s wife, told her. She was perfectly prepared to host a luncheon and have everyone over. “Qu’il vient chez nous,” she said—Let him come to us.

  Alexandra, usually so weak and timid, was unusually firm. Absolutely not, she replied—the gentleman, his name was Leon, was insisting on Shepheard’s, and my grandmother was clearly impressed that her future son-in-law wanted to host a get-together in the swankiest corner of Cairo.

  Shepheard’s on Ibrahim Pasha Street was an old dowager of a hotel, fusty and on the careworn side. Yet among the Brits and foreigners who descended on Cairo, anyone who was anyone favored it above all others, including Winston Churchill who would only eat meals prepared by the hotel chef when he met secretly with President Roosevelt. Another fan was the Nazi commander Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. The previous year, when Hitler’s troops were poised a heartbeat away from Alexandria and the British seemed on the verge of losing the battle at El Alamein and with it, the entire Middle East, rumor was that the German “Desert Fox” had gone ahead and reserved a suite of rooms at Shepheard’s. That way, the world would know that Germany had defeated Britain not simply on its battlegrounds but in its barrooms and its tea salons.