The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit

by Lucette Lagnado

  They disappeared, almost overnight, those dreamy red hats. Suddenly, men began to don caps and felt hats and straw hats and jaunty borsalinos. Ironically, many in the affluent classes took to wearing classic, imported European headgear, though the point of the revolution had been to rid Egypt of its foreign influence. By ruling against the tarboosh, the generals were taking action against an icon whose origin was Turkish but which was now as Egyptian as the Pyramids or the Sphinx. And sure enough, years after the fez was declared illegal, it became increasingly popular for doormen and attendants working the posh hotels around Cairo to wear them as they greeted tourists who wanted a taste of the “real” Egypt.

  Leon took his collection of tarbooshes with black tassels and stashed them away in his closet, next to his treasured British regulation pith helmet. He never wore a tarboosh out on the street again, though he was determined to hold on to them, and enjoyed simply fingering their soft velvety contours and playing with the tassels.

  EDITH WAS EXPECTING AROUND the time of the abdication. It was a difficult pregnancy, and she wasn’t feeling at all well. She was weak and feverish and in pain, yet the family doctor who came to examine her didn’t have a clue what was wrong. She grew worse in the final weeks of her pregnancy, complaining of headaches and stomachaches, but everyone assumed it was the child she was carrying, her fourth, that was taking a toll—Pauvre Edith était si delicate (“Poor Edith, so fragile”)—so no alarm bells were sounded and no special measures were taken.

  For years, she’d been helped by Simcha Allegra, the midwife who had delivered all my siblings without any complications. The midwife was so seasoned, so capable, it was almost as if a physician was beside the point.

  Except it was different, this time. There were only complications.

  My mother was so ill when she went into labor, it was a miracle she survived and the baby was born healthy. Seeing the little girl who was so perfect, so pretty, made everyone feel almost hopeful at first, as if the worst was over. The infant cried on cue and her limbs were well formed and her breathing regular, but most striking were her eyes—a doll’s eyes, vivid, dazzling, baby blue.

  My brother and sister who had waited anxiously in the dining room throughout the labor were allowed to see the infant, if briefly. Suzette took one peek at the child and declared her beautiful. That was the verdict of everyone who had a glimpse of the newborn—qu’elle était simplement ravissante—a gorgeous, magical child. She had a fair complexion and a soft fuzz of light brown, almost golden hair.

  They named the baby Alexandra, after my maternal grandmother who was always in our house, fussing over the little girl, who filled her with a joy she hadn’t felt in years.

  But Edith was getting worse. She seemed confused and delirious at times: she’d wake up to feed the baby and then fall back asleep, exhausted. But it was never a restful sleep. She was always moaning, or crying out for people from the past—her brother, the lost baby of the souk, or else Isaac, the father who had abandoned her.

  Alexandra would chain-smoke her cigarettes, wander outside, and return to find her daughter so sick she couldn’t open her eyes. It didn’t help to appeal to Leon. Alexandra knew from the start that the marriage was an unhappy one, and she blamed my father for Edith’s misery and herself for having approved the union that afternoon at La Parisiana. Yet she’d always been afraid to stand up to him or protect her daughter.

  Even now, at this critical juncture, with two lives hanging in the balance, my father and my grandmother could barely communicate. Aware of the danger his wife and daughter were in, Leon had summoned all the doctors he knew to Malaka Nazli; yet none seemed to know what was wrong.

  Alexandra suddenly discovered a well of strength within her that spurred her to take action. She left Malaka Nazli and walked, cigarette in hand, to the home of her stepdaughter, Rosée. Over a steaming cup of Turkish coffee, she confided the drama that was unfolding in our house.

  “Edith est en danger. Je suis folle d’inquiétude,” she told Rosée—Edith is in danger, I am worried sick.

  In times of crisis, the two women agreed, there was only one person to turn to, Rosée’s brother. Oncle Edouard, my grandfather Isaac’s son from his first marriage, was a charismatic figure, the head of my mother’s side of the family. He had managed to climb out of poverty, and as he prospered, he kept the extended family afloat. Because of his work as a pharmaceutical salesman, he knew all the leading specialists of Cairo as well as the most up-to-date drugs. My mother adored him, this half brother who was more like a father to her.

  Oncle Edouard.

  Informed that Edith was in danger of dying, Oncle Edouard rushed to summon one of the leading infectious disease specialists in Egypt. Together, the two men made their way to Malaka Nazli. My father greeted them with relief: he may have been the unchallenged ruler of Malaka Nazli, but he always knew when to cede power.

  The white-coated physician instantly made a diagnosis. “C’est la fièvre typhoïde,” he declared, confident and grim, and everyone felt shaken at his words. Typhoid fever was the scourge of Egypt.

  It seemed so obvious now. But while widespread, it was often misdiagnosed. Still, so much could have been done differently, if only they had known. There were medicines that could have been administered, doctors who could have assisted in the delivery, not merely a midwife. Most important, mother and child would have been separated.

  The doctor insisted on immediately removing Baby Alexandra from Edith, who had continued to nurse her despite her own debilitated state. But it was undoubtedly too late, he warned somberly. Because my mother had held her and fed her, it was likely the bacteria had spread to the infant.

  Malaka Nazli, which should have been a house of joy, was again a house of tears.

  Oncle Edouard directed his anger against my father, demanding to know how he allowed his wife to remain in such a state, when he could certainly have afforded to bring in the finest specialists much earlier. Leon didn’t even try to defend himself. He was mute, in shock at all the conflicting events—a newborn daughter, a desperately ill wife, news that both were in peril, and all from as common a disease as typhoid fever, which any competent physician should have been able to diagnose.

  He had to act swiftly to safeguard the other children. As panic swept the house, both César and Suzette were bundled up and taken by taxi to Tante Marie, while arrangements could be made to protect Isaac, who was only a toddler.

  The days turned into weeks. It was such a strange period, when Suzette and César heard nothing about how their mother and their new sister were doing. Because it was the summer, there was no school that would have given their days a structure. My father would stop by to look in on them almost every day, but he was vague and evasive about goings-on on Malaka Nazli.

  Alexandra, undaunted by the prospect of being exposed to the fever, would sing to Baby Alexandra, hoping to get her to flutter her eyes open. After washing her hands in the basin filled with disinfectant, she would gently stroke her and hold her close, this child of her heart, the most extraordinary of all the babies Edith had produced, a blue-eyed princess in a kingdom of brown eyes.

  But the fever took over and Baby Alexandra’s luminous eyes dimmed and her body grew impossibly flushed and warm, and she couldn’t breathe.

  There was nothing anyone could do.

  My mother wasn’t allowed to hold her or comfort her, and she was too sick—mercifully, perhaps—to realize that her baby was dying in the next room.

  There was a chance that Edith would also not pull through, that she wouldn’t be able to overcome the fever. My father opened the house to her side of the family, as they launched an unprecedented offensive to save both mother and child.

  After Oncle Edouard had brought the doctor, Tante Rosée all but moved in. She tended to Mom night and day—never going to sleep, watchful for the slightest change, attentive to my mother’s every need.

  Under the determined care of the indomitable Tante Rosée, my grandmo
ther hovering close by, Edith survived. Baby Alexandra did not.

  Whenever my mother asked, “Où est la petite?” she was told that she was too sick to see her daughter, that it would only put the child at risk. Edith would nod and go back to sleep, retreating to near oblivion. She was still delusional, still confused.

  At last, my siblings returned from their exile. They went from room to room but found no trace of the child. Malaka Nazli was seemingly the same as before, except that it was scrubbed clean and still bore the scent of strong disinfectant. Everyone was silent, especially our mother, who remained in bed all day.

  No one would explain exactly what had happened, no one would say where the baby had gone, and they knew instinctively not to ask questions. It was the way of Old Aleppo never to expose children even to the hint of death. The young were barred from going to a house of mourning. They couldn’t pay their respects, or go to the cemetery, or even wear black because that would bring bad luck.

  SHE LASTED EXACTLY EIGHT days, Baby Alexandra, though years and decades later, she was still there, deep in our consciousness. No pictures of her exist. The tradition was to take a new baby to a professional for a formal studio shot within weeks of her arrival, and that, of course, had not been possible.

  César would speak to me of this lovely child with clear eyes, and Suzette remembered the delicate mound of light brown hair that she had briefly seen. We all obsessed about her in our own way, imbuing her with all the qualities we valued. She haunted me, this child who never grew up.

  “Loulou, you, of course, are Alexandra,” my mother would say to me again and again. For a long time I thought she was comparing me to my grandmother. Only later, much later, did I begin to comprehend that she was invoking the child she missed. I was, to her, the little girl blue, returned to this earth.

  MY MOTHER LOST HER beauty. It was a gradual process, which had begun even before Baby Alexandra, but accelerated with the child’s passing. Her lovely white teeth had inexplicably started to crumble after César was born. With the years, she was left almost toothless, and it became almost painful to look at her, this young woman in her twenties with exceedingly fine features, and the puckered-in mouth of an old lady.

  She became a recluse.

  Edith rarely left 281-Malaka Nazli. The ostensible explanation for her decline, or at least the one my family embraced, was that Mom, who was anemic and ate very poorly, had suffered a loss of calcium after her second pregnancy, a process that intensified with subsequent births.

  She never drank so much as a glass of the fresh, delicious milk that continued to come by way of the goats and cows who still showed up every morning at the back window of Malaka Nazli, with their caretaker offering to fill up a pitcher for only a few piasters. Edith’s beverage of choice was coffee—café Turque—strong, black, with extra sugar to camouflage the bitterness. When she was done, she would turn the cup upside down and read her fortune in the coffee grounds.

  But the absence of joy played as much of a role in Mom’s decline as the absence of calcium. With the death of Baby Alexandra, my mother sank into a profound melancholy. The sadder she became, the more she neglected herself. It didn’t help, of course, that she had never been to a proper dentist, though there were several European-trained specialists practicing in Cairo in the 1940s and ’50s. When she was growing up, she was too poor to see a dentist. After she married my father, she was simply too frightened.

  If Edith’s prettiness had drawn my father to her, it was almost as if she were thwarting him now. In her anger, she seemed to be saying: “If you will not live up to your end of the bargain, I will not live up to mine.”

  My father’s reaction to the death of his daughter was entirely different. After a formal mourning period, he resumed his nocturnal routine. He went alone and never took his wife along, if only to console her, to pull her out of the thick shell into which she had withdrawn.

  For Edith, this was yet more proof of her husband’s selfishness, the fact that he couldn’t relinquish his pleasure-seeking even after a tragedy. Despite years of marriage, my mother had never understood Leon. My father’s habit of leaving home wasn’t much different than Edith’s retreat into the bedroom they no longer shared. Much as she coped by escaping from the world, he found comfort venturing into the world, finding forgetfulness in the endless nights of poker and dancing and solace in the company of other men and other women.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Prisoner of Malaka Nazli Street

  My aunts rushed over to our house the instant they heard the news: Edith wanted a divorce. She was threatening to leave with the children, and Tante Marie, Tante Rebekah, and Tante Leila were beside themselves. It was simply unthinkable. This was a family that, in more than half a century in Egypt, had experienced madness, suicide, murder, adultery, apostasy, and the Holocaust. But divorce? Never.

  Well, maybe not exactly “never.”

  There were the failed marriages of Oncle Joseph’s teenage daughters, unions that had both ended in disaster. But they came from Zamalek, one of the richest and most elegant parts of Cairo. Maybe they tolerated failed marriages amid the mansions of Zamalek, but here in Ghamra, it was almost unknown.

  My aunts stood in the kitchen with my mom, trying to talk some sense into her, but also lending a sympathetic ear. Edith’s mourning may have been muted, almost secretive, but her anger was outsize. She blamed Dad—stubbornly, obsessively, and irrationally—for the events surrounding Baby Alexandra’s passing and her own brush with death.

  “Chez nous, on n’a pas le divorce,” Tante Marie declared, while the others nodded gravely.

  Leon’s sisters were kind, caring women, even oddly modern in their own way, though it was true that Tante Rebekah’s thick coils of hair suggested a woman of another century, the way she wrapped them so tightly around her head. They were confident they could navigate the old world of Aleppo that my father stood for, where a woman’s desires counted almost for nothing, and the slightly more progressive world of a Cairene housewife in the 1950s.

  To their credit, they didn’t automatically take my father’s side. That’s what made them such wonderful women. They were deeply earnest and well-meaning, and my mother felt she could trust them. Though passionate about the need for families to stick together against the world—they had been brought up to value blood relations, above all—they also felt a genuine kinship with La pauvre Edith.

  Tante Rebekah with her husband, 1920s Cairo.

  Their own households, curiously, in no way resembled ours. Rebekah, Marie, and Leila all had husbands who venerated them and were slavishly devoted. Even Henriette, who was married to Dad’s older brother, Oncle Raphael, had put a stop to her husband’s fondness for nightly poker games, insisting he stay at home with her and the children; she gave him no choice but to obey. Some women had such forceful personalities they were able to impose their will, even in the male-centric Levant.

  It was fine among their Arab neighbors for a man to leave his wife behind and go out for his night of fun and games, to lead, in effect, two lives: they could still command respect at home as a father and husband, yet take off without a thought to be with their mistresses, or their friends, or both.

  But not the Jews. Like the Europeans they befriended in the glittering social world of 1940s and 1950s Egypt, if they went out, they went as couples. If it was a night of dancing, the men danced with their wives. If they watched the famed belly dancers who performed around Cairo at the stroke of midnight, their wives sat beside them and laughed and applauded as heartily as they.

  Of course, the Jews of Aleppo were a breed apart—intensely Jewish, intensely Arab. Wherever they lived, in Cairo or Paris, Geneva, São Paulo, or New York, their mentality was similar to that of their Muslim neighbors of old, and they seemed to float through the twentieth century oblivious to the social changes, and specifically to the evolving status of women. My father had left Aleppo as an infant, yet it was his defining identity.

  Like other
Syrian Jews, he played by an ancient set of rules, in which women were adornments—passive, inconsequential, devoid of any power.

  Tante Marie, who was closer to my father than anyone else, was troubled by how her cherished older brother behaved toward his bride. She saw an arrogant, cold side of him she hadn’t noticed before, or perhaps she had simply preferred not to notice it. She would watch him order Edith around. Later, at home, she complained to her children that he treated his wife not much better than the maid. Her own husband, in contrast, was extremely deferential. He felt privileged simply to have married into so grand a family.

  That was the glue holding all these marriages together—that we were descendants of nobility, that we had once dined with kings.

  The grandee past was all that mattered, and no one had perpetuated the myth of our illustrious pedigree better than my grandmother Zarifa.

  Certainly, Leon approached the world from some godlike elevation, and this was partly due to his extraordinary height and bearing, the fact that he was a bel homme and knew it, but also because he had so thoroughly absorbed the fable of our family as told by his mother. He became a living, walking embodiment of all the legends she loved to recount—the private synagogue the family had owned, the thousands of devoted followers who came to pray and study there, the generations of rabbinical leaders and thinkers and scholars, all bearing our name, who had wielded influence and authority far beyond Aleppo.