False Papers

by André Aciman

  I want to buy his picture in the museum shop. There are no postcards of Fayoum portraits. I want to buy E. M. Forster’s guide to the city, but they haven’t had it in a long time. I ask whether they have any of the Durrell books. They haven’t carried those in a long time either. There is, in fact, really very little to buy. And very little else to see. I have seen everything I wanted to see in Alexandria. I could easily leave now.

  An entire childhood revisited in a flash. I am a terrible nostographer. Instead of experiencing returns, I rush through them like a tourist on a one-day bus tour. Tomorrow I must try to find the cemetery again.

  Outside the museum, I am reminded of my grammar school nearby. I remember coming here in high school hoping to pay a quick visit to my old school and getting lost instead. I know I’ve strayed into the once-affluent Greek neighborhood. But I also know that I’m lost exactly where I lost my way thirty years earlier. The thought amuses me. I used to come here for private English lessons twice a week. I remembered the teacher, and her sumptuous home, and the luxurious china in which I, at the age of seven, would have to drink tea. I remember a poem by Wordsworth, the dim-lit living room with many flowers and perfumes, and my father coming to pick me up after tutorial, discussing books with her. I would sit and listen, and watch them talk, as other guests kept arriving.

  I thought I recognized her building and decided, why not, Mademoiselle Nader might still be there. I look at the names on the mailboxes, but there is no Nader. I see the name Monsieur et Madame E. Nahas and assume they are Syrian-Lebanese. Perhaps they might tell me where she lives. As I am ascending the stairs, I happen upon a name on a brass plate; it’s the name of a very old school friend. I ring his bell. The Filipino maid speaks good English; I explain I used to know her employer. He is in Europe, she replies. She shows me into a living room streaming in daylight. I sit on the sofa and scribble a note for him, leaning over to the tea table. Then I hand it to her and ask whether she knows of a certain Mademoiselle Nader. Never heard of her. I say goodbye and continue climbing the stairs until I’ve reached the Nahas residence. They’re not home either, and their maid has never heard of the Naders. A delivery boy, who happens to be coming up the stairs, seems to remember something and asks me to knock at another apartment. An old woman, speaking impeccable French, says that of course she remembers Marcelle Nader, whom she calls Lola. Lola died two years ago, totally alone, impoverished, and broken-spirited. Her family had lost everything during the mass nationalizations of 1961. She and her sister would rent out rooms in their large home, but even then, that hardly constituted an income. When her sister left for Switzerland, Lola was forced to give private lessons to businessmen who, it seems, had other things in mind but who settled for English the more she aged. In the end, she sold her apartment to, of all people, my old school friend downstairs. I hadn’t recognized the apartment at all. Perhaps it was on the same sofa and at the same tea table that I’d learned English.

  Turb’al Yahud, Alexandria’s Jewish cemetery, is located at the opposite end of the Armenian cemetery and lies only a few steps away from the Greek Orthodox. Farther down the quiet, dusty, tree-lined road is the Catholic cemetery. Magdi, a native Alexandrian who is employed by the American school I attended as a child, swears that Turb’al Yahud must be somewhere close by but can’t remember where “I come here only once a year—for my mother,” he explains, pointing to the Coptic cemetery not far along the same road.

  Magdi double-parks and says he will ask directions from the warden of the Armenian cemetery. We have been driving around for more than two hours in search of my parents’ old summer beachside home, but here, too, without luck. Either it’s been razed or it lies buried in a chaos of concrete high-rises and avenues built on what used to be vast stretches of desert sand. Soon Magdi comes out, looking perplexed. There are, as it turns out, not one but two Jewish cemeteries in the area.

  “Which one has a gate on the left?” I say, remembering my very early childhood visits to my grandfather’s grave four decades ago. “That’s the problem,” says Magdi, drawing on his cigarette. “Both have gates to the right.”

  I am dismayed. I can situate the grave only in relation to the left gate We decide to try the nearest cemetery.

  Magdi starts the car, waits awhile, then immediately speeds ahead, leaving a cloud of dust behind us. In a matter of minutes we have parked on a sidewalk and ambled up to a metal gate that looks locked. Magdi does not knock; he pounds. I hear a bark, and after a series of squeaks, a man in his early fifties appears at the door. I try to explain in broken Arabic the reason for my visit, but Magdi interrupts and takes over, saying I have come to see my grandfather’s grave. The warden is at a loss. Do I know where the grave is? he asks. I say no. Do I know the name, then?

  I say a name, but it means nothing to him. I try to explain about the gate to the left, but my words are getting all jumbled together. All I seem to remember is a pebbled alleyway that started at the left gate and crossed the breadth of the cemetery.

  The warden has a three-year-old son wearing a very faded red sweatshirt bearing the initials CCCP—not unusual in a place where ancient relics come in handy. Their dog, fleeced from the neck down, has a large bleeding ulcer on his back.

  “Oh, that gate,” the warden responds when I point to another, much smaller gate at the opposite end of the cemetery. “It’s locked, it’s never been used.” Indeed, the gate at the end of the alleyway looks welded in place. I am almost too nervous to hope. But I pick my way to the end of the path and, having reached the area near the left gate, climb over a wild bush whose dried leaves stick to my trousers, turning with a sense of certainty that I am trying to distrust, fearing the worst.

  “Is this it?” asks Magdi.

  I am reluctant to answer, still doubting that this could be the spot, or this the marble slab, which feels as warm and smooth to the touch as I knew it would each time I rehearsed this moment over the years. Even the name looks dubious.

  “Yes,” I say, pointing to the letters, which I realize Magdi can’t read.

  The warden knows I am pleased. His son trails behind him. A fly is crawling around his nose. Both of them, as well as the warden’s wife, are barefoot, Bedouin style.

  I take out my camera. Everyone is staring at me, including the warden’s ten-year-old daughter, who has come to see for herself. It turns out that no Jew ever visits here. “No one?” I ask. “Walla wahid,” answers the daughter emphatically. Not one.

  There are, it occurs to me, far more dead Jews in this city than there will ever again be living ones. This reminds me of what I saw in a box at the main temple earlier this morning: more skullcaps than Jews to wear them in all of Egypt.

  The warden asks whether I would like to wash the tombstone. I know Magdi has to go back to work; he is a bus driver and school ends soon. I shake my head.

  “Why?” asks the warden. “Lazem.” You must.

  I have lived my entire life outside rituals. Now I am being asked to observe one that seems so overplayed and so foreign to me that I almost want to laugh, especially since I feel I’m about to perform it for them, not for me. Even Magdi sides with the warden. “Lazem,” he echoes.

  I am thinking of another ritual, dating back to those days when my father and I would come on quiet early-morning visits to the cemetery. It was a simple ritual. We would stand before my grandfather’s grave and talk; then my father would say he wished to be alone awhile and, when he was finished, hoist me up and help me kiss the marble. One day, without reason, I refused to kiss the stone. He didn’t insist, but I knew he was hurt.

  I pay the warden’s family no heed and continue to take pictures, not because I really want to, but because in looking through the viewfinder and pretending to take forever to focus, I can forget the commotion around me, stand still, stop time, stare into the distance, and think of my childhood, and of being here, and of my grandfather, whom I hardly knew and scarcely remember and seldom think of.

  I am almost on
the point of forgetting those present when the warden appears, lugging a huge tin drum filled with water. He hoists it on a shoulder and then splashes the dried slab, flooding the whole area, wetting my clothes, Magdi’s, and the little boy’s feet, allowing the stone to glisten for the first time in who knows how many decades. With eager palms, we all go about the motions of wiping the slab clean. I like the ritual. Magdi helps out silently, but I want it to be my job. I don’t want it to end. I am even pleased that my clothes are wet and dirty.

  I still can’t believe I was able to find my grandfather’s grave so quickly. Memories are supposed to distort, to lie. I am at once comforted and bewildered.

  In the distance I can hear the tireless drone of Alexandria’s traffic, and farther off the loud clank of metal wheels along the tramway lines—not obtrusive sounds, for they emphasize the silence more—and I am reminded of how far Grandfather is from all this: from all these engines; from the twentieth century; from history; from exile, exodus, and now return; from the nights we spent huddled together in the living room, knowing the end had come; from our years in cities he had never visited, let alone thought some of us might one day call home. Time for him had stopped in the early fifties on this dry, quiet, secluded patch of dust that could turn into desert in no time.

  I look around and recognize famous Jewish names on tombstones and mausoleums. They, too, like my grandfather, were lucky not to have seen the end. But they also paid a price: no one ever comes here. The opulent mausoleums, built in Victorian rococo, were meant to house unborn generations that have since grown up elsewhere and don’t know the first thing about Egypt.

  “Are you happy now?” I want to ask my grandfather, rubbing the stone some more, remembering a tradition practiced among Muslims of tapping one’s finger ever so gently on a tombstone to tell the dead that their loved ones are present, that they miss them and think of them. I want to speak to him, to say something, if only in a whisper. But I am too embarrassed. Perhaps this is why people say prayers instead. But I don’t know any prayers. All I know is that I cannot take him with me—but I don’t want to leave him here. What is he doing here anyway? In a hundred years, no one will even know my grandfather had lived or died, here or elsewhere. It’s the difference between death and extinction.

  I pretend to want to take another picture and ask Magdi, the warden, and his family to pose in front of one of the palm trees, hoping they will stay there after the picture and leave me alone awhile. I can feel my throat tighten, and I want to hide the tears welling up inside me, and I am, once again, glad to cover my eyes with the viewfinder. The warden’s daughter comes closer. She wants a picture by herself. I smile and say something about her pretty eyes. I give her father a good tip.

  Everyone thinks it’s been a good visit. Perhaps all cemetery visits are.

  On my last evening in Alexandria, I and a group of young teachers from the American school have gathered at a pizzeria to celebrate someone’s birthday. We’ve parked on a narrow alleyway, halfway on the sidewalk, exactly where my father would park his car. Everyone at the party orders pizza, salad, and beer. It occurs to me that we might easily be in Cambridge or New Haven.

  By eleven the party breaks up. Before getting into the car, we take a stroll toward the Church of St. Saba. The streets are very dark, and after spending time in the American bar, I am suddenly confronted with the uncanny thought that we are, after all, very much in Egypt still. Maybe it’s the alcohol, but I don’t know whether I’m back in Egypt or have never left, or whether this is all a very cruel prank and we’re simply stranded in some old neighborhood in lower Manhattan. This, I realize, is what happens when one finally comes home: one hardly notices, and it doesn’t feel odd at all.

  Later that night, as I’m looking out from my balcony, I think of the young man from Fayoum, and of the young man of fourteen I used to be back then, and of myself now, and of the person I might have been had I stayed here thirty years ago. I think of the strange life I’d have led, of the wife I would have, and of my other children. Where would I be living? I suppose in my great-grandmother’s apartment—it would have fallen to me. And I think of this imaginary self who never strayed or did the things I probably regret having done but would have done anyway and don’t wish to disown; a self who never left Egypt or ever lost ground and who, on nights such as these, still dreams of the world abroad and of faraway America, the way I, over the years, have longed for life right here whenever I find I don’t fit anywhere else.

  I wonder if this other self would understand about him and me, and being here and now and on the other bank as well—the other life, the one that we never live but conjure up when the one we have is perhaps not the one we want.

  This, at least, has never changed, I think, my mind drifting to my father years ago, when we would stop the car and walk along the Corniche at night, thinking of the worst that surely lay ahead, each trying to give up this city and the life that came with it in the way he knew how This is what I was doing now as well, thinking of the years ahead when I would look back to this very evening and remember how, standing on the cluttered balcony at the Cecil, I had hoped finally to let go of this city, knowing all the while that the longing would start again soon enough, that one never washes anything away, and that this marooned and spectral city, which is no longer home for me and which Durrell once called “a shabby little seaport built upon a sand reef,” would eventually find newer, ever more beguiling ways to remind me that here is where my mind always turns, that here, to quote this century’s most famous Alexandrian poet, Constantine Cavafy, I’ll always end up, even if I never come back:

  For you won’t find a new country,

  won’t find a new shore,

  the city will always pursue you,

  and no ship will ever take you away from yourself.

  And then I remembered. With all the tension in the cemetery that afternoon, I had forgotten to ask Magdi to show me Cavafy’s home. Worse yet, I had forgotten to kiss my grandfather’s grave. Maybe next time.

  In Search of Blue

  Years ago, when I lived in Rome with my mother and brother, and my father was away in France, come Christmas and Easter, and sometimes twice in the summer, we would fill a couple of suitcases and, as though the whole thing had been an improvised whim, would call for a cab, find the 3:30 direttissimo at Stazione Termini, take out the tickets I had purchased the day before on my way home from school—I was the only one who spoke decent enough Italian to buy tickets—and, before we had time to sit and visualize the entire happy stretch of our trip, were off, as if by magic, to Paris.

  Of course, I never thought about the trip beforehand; I pretended to let it be sprung on me. Going to Paris seemed such a farfetched, dreamed-up luxury—an act of hubris almost, considering how poor we were after leaving Alexandria—that it was more out of superstition than thrift that, in an effort not to jinx the trip by assuming it would indeed happen, we invariably found ourselves refusing to buy small presents for those whom we had purposely failed to warn to come meet us at the station.

  The trip itself was quite an ugly affair and lasted eighteen hours. The train originated in Naples and was filled with rowdy furloughed soldiers, mothers of immigrants visiting their children in the north with all manner of roped boxes, and middle-aged secretaries who were unfailingly preyed upon by the soldiers. By the time you were awakened at the border, usually at one in the morning, and heard what you thought were the first wisps of French, you were at once overjoyed and in total misery. You were in France! But in the stuffy second-class compartment—where six, sometimes more, had been sleeping with their shoes off—you might as well have been in a barn.

  On that train ride, however, there were two magic moments, and I knew them both extremely well. One came toward dawn, when through the steamy windows you felt the train speed along the silent fields of Chambéry, where the fog rose between the trees, blanketing the landscape like white tempera. As far as I was concerned, this was the heartland of t
he wonderful, beguiling continent called Europe. The other was far more special. It came about two hours, perhaps more, into the trip from Rome, when our train began to elbow the Tuscan and Ligurian coast, racing past large mansions and castles and unending stretches of cypress trees, all of them overlooking what seemed to be the most placid coast in the world. Every other moment, however, these splendid vistas were interrupted by a tunnel, an old wall, or by houses built too close to the tracks, frustrating my desire to savor these villas and views long enough to imagine I inhabited them. And yet that is how I learned to worship the Tyrrhenian and Ligurian Seas: in abrupt slices, in thwarted splendor, as if the whole thing were unreal and untenable—the way the trip to Paris had to remain unreal and untenable for it to happen.

  I never bothered to stare long enough at the names of the stations along the coast, and the sea always came unannounced. Part of the magic lay in not knowing exactly when it would come, or whether it would come at all, or whether, not being as beautiful as I thought it was, it had come and gone without my knowing.

  For years this wonderful expanse of still and timeless blue, where hills and rippleless beaches seemed made to exist in memory alone, belonged nowhere. I never saw pictures of it, never heard anyone mention it; it simply retreated into a hinterland of tiny places with strange names: Viareggio, Forte dei Marmi, La Spezia, Cinque Terre, Rapallo. I came across some of the names while reading about the lives of Byron, Shelley, and Stendhal. But that was all.