The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit

by Lucette Lagnado

  The prospect of the king’s arrival lent it a special cachet, though truth be told, L’Auberge was more gaudy than elegant—completely over-the-top in its decor, which came to include waterfalls, a swimming pool, and an indoor ballroom, in addition to its famed outdoor dance floor. Like every other nightspot, L’Auberge kept a table empty in case the pleasure-seeking monarch showed up unexpectedly. On a good night, Farouk would arrive and head straight to a table by the dance floor because it offered the best view of all the women in the room.

  Woe to the man whose wife, girlfriend, or escort the king admired. The monarch was notorious for grabbing any woman he fancied, no matter if she belonged to another.

  My father was such a habitué of the different establishments, there wasn’t a club owner who didn’t know him on a first-name basis. If there was a group of British officers—and there invariably was—he would join them at their table, and it didn’t matter that he was both an Arab and a Jew. He was really one of them.

  “Captain,” a voice would cry out in the darkness, “Captain Phillips,” and Leon would scan the familiar khaki uniforms and smile, knowing he was among friends. He would join the officers for a drink, and banter in English, affecting an accent that was almost as posh as theirs.

  They liked my father because he bridged both worlds—he could play the part of the Captain to the hilt, displaying the poise and polish of someone to the manor born, suggesting an education and breeding he’d never really had.

  Sometime in the night, he would treat them to a favorite party trick: he would offer to read their palm, because that was what Egyptians were supposed to know how to do. Taking their hand in his, he would remark how their life line was especially long and that defeat of the enemy was in sight.

  He was relentless about meeting women. It was his great diversion, equal to—and at times surpassing—gambling. But he’d rapidly lose interest and move on, in search of new quarry, new opportunities. His reputation as a flirteur only added to his fascination. If he met a woman who interested him in the course of these evenings, he’d pursue her ardently. But he’d also disabuse her of the notion he was available for more than a passing dalliance. The thrill for him was entirely in the hunt, the courtship, the chase.

  When the evening was over, he’d wander alone back to Malaka Nazli. Only his bride or his intended could ever be permitted to enter his mother’s house. He was never seriously linked with anyone. And, truth be told, some of the alluring, worldly European beauties he courted would have been astonished to see that he resided with an elderly, autocratic Syrian woman who fussed over him as if he were a cross between a god and a child.

  As he pushed open the door, he’d see my grandmother at her usual guard post—a small hard chair in the living room, a kerchief on her head. She hadn’t been able to fall asleep, she’d explain to him in Arabic, because she was so worried about him, fretful about his wanderings across the city. He’d kiss her tenderly on both cheeks, then retreat to his room.

  No matter how much he devoted himself to her care, Leon was entirely immune to her words of reproach. Zarifa could only express her anguish and disapproval by sitting up night after night on that hard-backed chair, her long white hair loose on her shoulders, her blue eyes welling up with tears, waiting for the key to turn and the door to open and her son to reappear. Only then would she allow herself to go to sleep.

  Zarifa of Aleppo.

  Still heady from the night, my dad would linger awake in the privacy of his room. He’d carefully remove his jacket and silk shirt and place his jewels and tie clip and cuff links in a special box. He took exceptional care to fold his shirt and hang up his suit so they could both be worn again. It was almost dawn, which meant a new day—and a new night—were on the horizon.

  MY FATHER PROSPERED AS a businessman in Cairo, but no one could figure out how he made his fortune or even say what he did, exactly.

  He was certainly an avid investor, with a passion for la bourse, the rough-and-tumble Egyptian stock market, but there were also his skill as a broker, buying and selling products that ranged from plain brown wrapping paper and cellophane to food additives, sardine cans, and complex pharmaceuticals; the grocery business he once co-owned with his older brother, Oncle Raphael, specializing in the purest olive oil and the finest cane sugar; his expert knowledge of textiles, especially Egyptian cotton, one of the most desirable fabrics in the world; and his frequent trips to Alexandria for his import-export business, though what he imported and exported is unknown. At some point, he began to do business with the exciting American soda conglomerate that was setting up a beach-head in Cairo—Coca-Cola. He provided some of the key ingredients used to produce the famous soda.

  Even those who watched him firsthand, like his nephew Salomone, weren’t too sure of the nature of his ever-changing business.

  All that is clear is that Leon never held a real job. He never collected a steady paycheck save once, as a teenager, when he briefly went to work for a bank. En route to becoming un banquier, one of the most prestigious occupations in all of Egypt, he found that he couldn’t endure sitting at a desk and hated the hours, the routine, and above all, the need to report to other human beings and be subject to their wishes and whims.

  The Captain could never allow anyone to give him orders.

  Instead, he struck out on his own. As a young man coming of age in British-ruled Cairo, he made himself indispensable to the colonialist powers. He had to overcome two hurdles—the British dislike of local Egyptians, whom they called “wogs,” and their distaste for Jews. Gifted with languages, he mastered seven—English, Arabic, French, and Hebrew, of course, as well as Italian, Greek, and Spanish. This enabled him to function as an interpreter, guide, and go-between, and he could take his British friends to the most obscure parts of Egypt and help them communicate with the most intransigent local characters. In a way, this was his first stint as a businessman, when he became a broker and middleman between two worlds—cosmopolitan colonial Cairo and mystical, sensuous Islamic Cairo.

  There were periods of great prosperity, while at other times he struggled. But he had learned from my Syrian grandmother to keep both his good fortune and his misfortunes to himself, and never, ever showcase his wealth: that was the legacy of Aleppo, the ancient Syrian city where Zarifa and her husband were born and had fled shortly after the turn of the century, along with their ten children, including my infant father. It was a period of turbulence, when many of the Jewish families who had lived in Syria for centuries packed up to go, fearing economic privation as well as religious persecution.

  Tragedy had struck after the family had settled in Cairo. Leon’s father died after a hernia operation. Shortly thereafter, there had been the death of his sister Ensol, the beauty of the family, and her husband, who were either murdered in a train speeding from Cairo to Palestine, their throats slashed by an unknown assailant, or killed in an accident. The tragedy was never talked about, for that was the Aleppo way, but every once in a while my grandmother would cry out, “Ensol, Ensol,” to no one in particular. She and my father had taken in their children and helped raise them, but the bad luck continued. Ensol’s son had gone insane and remained confined year after year in the Yellow Palace, the vast jasmine-scented lunatic asylum located in Abbassiyeh. Another blow came when Salomon, Zarifa’s second oldest son (not to be confused with his namesake, Salomone, who came to live with them from Milan), returned home from the Collège des Frères, the prestigious Catholic school to which even devout Jewish families sent their children, and announced he was converting and entering the priesthood. To a family whose ancestors had been the religious leaders of Aleppo for hundreds of years, the defection was both heartbreaking and incomprehensible, a mystery they would ponder all their lives.

  My grandmother mourned him as if he were dead: in old Cairo, that is what you did with someone who left the faith. Zarifa recovered, yet she never ceased to talk about the old days and the old ways, reminding her children and grandchildren o
f the family legacy. Even in cosmopolitan Cairo, she insisted on following the ways of “Halab,” as she referred to Aleppo in Arabic.

  Barely educated—girls rarely were, in Syria—my grandmother only spoke Arabic, and when she went out, she’d don a chabara, a long, lustrous black robe favored by Arab women that covered her hair and body and reached down all the way to her ankles. She loved to say how in Syria, the family had dined with kings. She never elaborated, and it wasn’t clear if there had actually been monarchs in her social circle in Syria or if she was simply referring to the family’s illustrious past, the time when the family name was revered for the generations of rabbis it had produced and the religious texts they had authored.

  Though Aleppo was long ago, its culture still exerted a powerful, almost mystical hold on all those who traced their origins there, and always would, whether they lived in nearby Cairo, or settled in far more distant capitals—New York, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Johannesburg. To be a Halabi Jew meant obeying a set of social and religious conventions that dated back centuries and almost never changed with the times—rules that spelled out precisely how to live and how to die, how to worship, marry, raise children, and of course make money, because Aleppo’s culture was profoundly materialistic, and wealth mattered second only to God and family.

  Leon was so reserved that no one was ever entirely sure when he was faring well or when he was close to bankruptcy, and that too was a residue of Aleppo, where a man was supposed to trust only his immediate family—blood ties mattered above all—and even they were to be kept in the dark about his work.

  Mostly he did well, except for the Depression, when the grocery business he ran with Oncle Raphael went under.

  Aleppo was also a secretive, almost paranoid culture so that despite being gregarious and sociable, Leon was fundamentally a solitary man. He was always moving. Though he could have taken horse-drawn carriages and taxis to his business meetings, he preferred to get around on foot, maneuvering briskly through streets that often weren’t paved, that were barely more than dirt roads.

  He could traverse distances that would exhaust far younger men; even in his forties, he had remarkable energy and exuberance, and though his favorite outlet was the dance floor at night, he enjoyed wandering for miles around Cairo in the early morning, approaching clients when the streets were still and there was a slight breeze, before the air became heavy and the city shut down because it wasn’t humanly possible to work in the heat of an Egypt afternoon.

  Back in the late 1930s, when he was still trying to rebuild what he lost in the Depression, he took his nephew to work one summer day. Salomone was a strapping young man, almost as tall as Leon, and about twenty years his junior, yet even he couldn’t keep up as they walked and walked in the scorching Cairo sun, paying calls on more and more clients. Leon would approach small vendors—simple fellahin selling juice from stalls the size of a large box. He’d converse with them, and he wouldn’t be at all patrician. On the contrary, he would transform himself into a man of the people like them.

  Once he had cemented a bond, he would whip out his notebook and carefully take down their orders:

  Ten bottles of soda. Eight cans of sardines. A dozen bars of soap. Four large kegs of olive oil. Two sacks of flour.

  To my Milanese cousin, it all seemed so slight and insignificant. Was it possible that his glamorous, aloof Oncle Leon, who was always leaving home for some alluring world beyond Malaka Nazli, was so small-time? That he made his living collecting a few piasters from the sale of a couple of jugs of olive oil and a dozen sardine tins?

  Except that several hours and countless merchants later, Leon was still going strong, jotting down more orders, whereas Salomone was on the verge of collapse. He had entirely lost track of what Leon was doing, and had no idea of the sheer volume of his business, and wanted only to get out of the sun and go lie down in his dark, cool room in the back of Malaka Nazli.

  Within a few years, Dad had graduated from the little grocers near Malaka Nazli to customers that included the largest concerns in Cairo, including Groppi’s, the legendary Swiss patisserie that was a central meeting point for café society, and Spatis, the Greek soda manufacturer whose bottles of fizzy, lemony pop were all the rage in Egypt, and later still, Coca-Cola. He thrived on his reputation as a négociant, a broker, because he could locate any product, however trivial or obscure, and he was known as a man of his word.

  He profited handsomely because he was so unencumbered, with almost none of the trappings of a big businessman—no capital, no overhead, no inventory or backlog, no warehouse, no discernible assets (or liabilities), no employees, and most important of all, no boss.

  He didn’t even maintain a line of credit with his suppliers; he operated on a system of hard cash and absolute honor. Whatever he bought, he paid for then and there. He disdained contracts and signed documents, and when he gave his word, it was enough; he had a special fondness for what he called “gentlemen’s agreements.”

  One of his clients was a purveyor of gourmet products, including spices, canned goods, and culinary supplies. My father would visit the firm on El Azhar Square, by the large mosque, at least once a week. As he swept through the office on his way to meet with the top managers and place his orders, he was careful not to overlook anyone, even lowly clerks. He’d reach into his pocket and fish out some bonbons and fling them on every desk along the way, as if he were throwing dice on a gambling table.

  He filled a room; the entire staff would stop what they were doing and look up. And unlike most clients who dropped by and chatted familiarly in Arabic, Dad was fond of dropping Britishisms—offering a clipped “Good morning” or “How are you, old chap?” He’d pepper his conversation with “Jolly good,” and some of the staff would call out, “Captain,” and rise and offer a playful salute.

  The company was essential to his business, yet here, too, while he was a sizable client who placed frequent orders, my father never kept an account as so many others did, which would have allowed him to enjoy a line of credit and order as much as he wanted. He preferred to buy only the items he needed—sel du citron, used in baking, for instance—and pay cash, removing wads of bills from his brown leather wallet.

  He had no desire to incur debts, and besides, cash transactions left no paper trail. Nearly all what he did was off the books, and he conducted his business affairs the way he conducted his personal affairs—in strict secrecy, confiding in no one. It was what made him a superlative businessman, and it was the Aleppo way. How he turned a profit ranked among the mysteries of the universe—as elusive as the soft gleam of his jacket, as indefinable as his charm.

  ON FRIDAY NIGHT, HE stopped. He was a different person on the eve of the Jewish Sabbath, arriving well before sundown with a large bouquet of roses for my grandmother and embracing his nephew before preparing for synagogue.

  Zarifa would be in the kitchen, more cheerful than usual because this was the one night of the week she would have her son at the dinner table. She prepared the meats and chicken and rice that were her specialty, cooked in the style of Aleppo, with a hint of fruit. There was also stuffed eggplant—white, not black, because black brought bad luck. Every self-respecting Levantine household was obsessed with warding off the evil eye. On the Sabbath, you avoided dark clothing, dark thoughts, and dark foods. Even black olives were banned from the table to guarantee a good week.

  Dressing for temple required the same attention to detail as dressing to go out on the town. Leon put on a white shirt made of the finest cotton and a white jacket. For jewelry, he liked a more sober tie clip adorned with a single pearl.

  By sunset, the streets around Malaka Nazli welled up with men in elegant suits holding velvet or satin pouches as they walked. They were on their way to temple, and the satchels contained their prayer shawls and prayer books and skullcaps. In a way of life the world has now forgotten, this quintessentially Arab city was supremely accepting of its Jewish inhabitants. Muslims and Jews lived in close quarters
—in the same streets, the same buildings—and usually very harmoniously. No one wore the skullcap outdoors, it is true, religion was a discreet affair—yet it was obvious to anyone that these were Jews on their way to pray at one of the dozen synagogues that flourished around our Ghamra neighborhood.

  My dad had his pick, and depending on his mood, he would pray in this temple or that. He relished a small, simple, deeply intimate house of worship in an alleyway a couple of streets away known simply as “le Kottab,” or the Schoolhouse. Another favorite was Ahavah ve ahabah, the Congregation of Love and Friendship, where his favorite rabbi, a diminutive hunchback named Halfon Savdie, drew a lively crowd because of his eloquence and amiability. Dad adored Rabbi Halfon.

  When services were over, the exquisitely dressed men once again crowded the streets, laughing and joking as they hurried home to their wives and children, anxious to sample the special Friday-night cooking whose smells filled the night air of Ghamra.

  At home, Zarifa had set the dining room table with a white tablecloth, and after my father and Salomone were seated, she and the maid came in with the courses she had devoted much of her day to preparing, since it was necessary to cook both for Friday night and Saturday. Sabbath dinner was a quiet affair, with no cousins or guests or relatives.

  My father poured a cup of homemade wine from a bottle. Everyone stood up as he recited the blessing on the ersatz wine, and afterward he and my cousin went to my grandmother and kissed her hand, then returned to their seats.

  At last my grandmother smiled, delighted to have her tall, handsome son on one side of her, and her dashing grandson on the other. They no longer dined with kings, but she was in the company of two princes.