The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit

by Lucette Lagnado

  It is hard for gods to come down to earth, let alone wake up and find themselves married to ordinary mortals. And that, of course, is what my lovely young mother had turned out to be. The delicate, exquisite porcelain figurine he had spotted years back at La Parisiana had shown herself to be a seething bundle of resentments. She had never accepted him as he was, a man who couldn’t possibly be chained down to a single house, or a single woman, even for a single night.

  Her rival proved more than she could handle: it was none other than Cairo herself, the city whose charms were so boundless that a young housewife, even a pretty and educated one, couldn’t possibly compete.

  My siblings became hapless witnesses to the constant clashes. The arguments could erupt at any time, early in the morning when Dad came home from synagogue, midday, as he sat down to have lunch at home, hoping to rest during the afternoon siesta, or even as night fell, and they were getting ready for bed, and a soft breeze was blowing. He was getting dressed because his evening was only beginning.

  The scenes had been going on since the first year of the marriage, with occasional truces, when the children were infants and distracted her. Now, since the death of the baby, Edith was in a state of perpetual fury, and her bitterness and despair had finally reached his sisters’ ears. There were no secrets in Ghamra, and they warned Leon that the threats seemed real this time: Edith was determined to end the marriage.

  As Suzette watched in a corner, our aunts calmed Edith down by repeating what women have told each other through the ages. They offered, in effect, a Levantine version of “boys will be boys,” telling her les hommes sont comme ça and appealing to her common sense. Edith, chérie, remember the wonderful family you have. Edith, chérie, keep in mind the primary victims of any separation, and besides, what is the harm in a man going out for some rounds of poker every night? Let him live, they’d say: a man has to live. You know, Edith chérie, he is devoted to his family, and you are the only woman he loves.

  My aunts were too delicate, too sensitive, to remind her that she really didn’t have a choice. Cairo in the 1950s didn’t look kindly on a woman without a man. Though Edith had been talented enough to land a prestigious job at fifteen as a schoolteacher, it was far from clear if she could work again in these turbulent postrevolutionary times, or that the pay would be enough to support her and the children—that is, if my father even let her keep my brothers and sister. Even in the best of times, tradition, religion, culture, and the law were all on the man’s side. But now, with Jews losing their businesses and their jobs because of the ruthless new regime, and the constant sense of danger as the Jewish community unraveled and more and more families left Egypt, a woman alone wouldn’t have a chance of surviving.

  Besides, my mother still had far too vivid memories of her own fatherless upbringing, when Alexandra couldn’t even scrape together enough to feed them, the months and years when she went hungry because they were literally too poor to eat. That is what divorce meant for a woman with no means and why she was, in effect, a prisoner of Malaka Nazli and had been since the age of twenty.

  My father, for his part, cast a cool glance on the growing turbulence at home. He knew that he was in a position of strength, and no matter how much Edith wanted it, she would never be able to go through with a divorce. That could only come from him, and he had no desire to get out of the marriage, and no one else he wanted to marry. He had the beautiful children he always wanted, including the sons who would carry on his name. He had fulfilled his obligations. As long as he was home Friday night for the Sabbath dinner—and he always was—then he felt free to go about as he wished the rest of the week.

  Through all of Edith’s outbursts, it never occurred to my father to take the one step that would have instantly quieted her and reduced tensions: to change his lifestyle, to refrain from going out, or merely to come home a little earlier. Even if he’d wanted to, even for the sake of a fragile and illusory peace, the promise of harmony at home, it would have been impossible.

  My father’s life at night, his wanderings in white across a darkened Cairo, were as essential to him as oxygen.

  FROM AN EARLY AGE, my oldest brother learned to be a buffer between my warring parents. At first, the simple fact that César was the firstborn son, his place secure in a family that valued male children above all others, made him my mother’s natural defender and protector. Dad could no longer express annoyance with her because she had produced the desired heir. The fact that César was a quiet, sweet-tempered child made it that much easier for him to assume the role of peacekeeper. He also projected uncanny maturity and understanding. Both my parents felt they could trust him—and each seemed convinced he loved them more.

  “Il faut toujours consulter César,” my mother began to say, and—voilà—a legend was born:

  If you need counsel, even on the thorniest problems, go immediately to see César.

  Dad began taking my brother along to work and business meetings. He was only a little boy, seven or eight years old, but my father figured it was never too early to start grooming him to be a businessman and entrepreneur, and lectured him on the need to look and dress impeccably when seeing clients.

  Meanwhile, my mother took to confiding in my brother because she valued his quiet insights. To both my parents, he was far more soothing company than Suzette, who was, from the start, such a wayward child. My sister reacted to the troubles at home by behaving ever more fretfully and becoming more rebellious. Early on, my mother had made the mistake of telling her the story of how Leon had reacted to her birth, forever turning daughter against father.

  Unlike Suzette, my brother seemed to grow calmer with each of my parents’ outbursts. Yet no one was more startled than he when my parents told him they were going on a trip to the Abbassiyah district, and that he was coming along. As he sat in the taxi between Mom and Dad, the ten- or twenty-minute ride to the neighborhood on the far side of Malaka Nazli seemed endless and somewhat scary, since my brother had no idea where he was being taken, and why. He noticed that my parents weren’t speaking to each other, that they only addressed him. Mom seemed especially nervous, and she was holding his hand tightly. Dad was cooler and more detached, gazing quietly out the window as the scenery changed from the lively elegance of our boulevard to the poorer, bustling streets of an older Cairo, crowded with open-air stalls where traders and merchants peddled cheap wares.

  Occasionally my father would reach into his pocket and offer him a bonbon, which made my brother oddly more anxious, since he wondered what kind of journey they were undertaking; if it was simply a family outing, then why didn’t they include Suzette and Isaac, who had stayed behind on Malaka Nazli?

  At last, the taxi came to a stop in front of a small building where Cairo’s Jewish community maintained some offices. César, still holding both my parents’ hands, followed them into the office of a tall, forbidding-looking man who wore a dark skullcap on his head, and whom Mom immediately addressed as “Hacham,” the honorific for rabbi. He invited them all to sit down around his desk.

  “Quel gentil petit garçon,” the rabbi said, praising César as a sweet child. Both my parents smiled graciously, but Mom was clearly on edge.

  This was as far as the small talk went. The rabbi immediately began to quiz my parents on the state of their marriage. What was so wrong? Why had life together become so impossible? All the while he spoke, he kept peering at my brother, sitting quietly in the seat between Mom and Dad.

  The rabbi noticed that unlike other children he’d observed in similar situations, César had a remarkable ability to sit absolutely still.

  “Ce garçon est très bien élevé,” the rabbi told my mother, who loved when someone noticed César’s perfect manners.

  “Votre fils est très beau,” he told my father—Your son is very handsome. Dad nodded, pleased at hearing yet again that he had produced a beautiful son.

  With these two deft compliments, the holy man managed to place my brother on center stage
—precisely where he wanted him to be.

  In Cairo of the 1950s, there were no high-powered divorce lawyers or marriage therapists, the weapons of choice in America for a feuding couple. If problems erupted, members of the extended family—aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws—would immediately swarm around the troubled household, prepared to say and do what was necessary to keep a couple together.

  But when that failed, or if it worked only for a time, the rabbis were summoned.

  The hachamim enjoyed extraordinary cachet in a community that was both devout and worldly. Men and women, rich and poor, the educated classes who lived en ville and the impoverished, at times illiterate Jews of the Old Ghetto, and all those in between, were taught at an early age to revere their rabbis, and, most importantly, to defer to their judgments.

  Called in to mediate when all else was failing, they were on the front lines in the battle to hold relationships together in the face of hostility, infidelity, abuse, violence, or simply a waning of love and desire—issues that in modern Western societies would lead to a rapid dissolution of the marital contract.

  But not in Cairo.

  Divorce was extremely rare, and the rabbis, in particular, exerted such a formidable influence on the mores and lives of Egyptian Jewry that they usually prevailed, so that in the unlikely occasion a couple separated, it was the talk of the community for years to come. And while it was certainly easier for members of the wealthier classes to divorce, it was still taboo. It invariably cost one side of the family a fortune—typically, the wife’s parents, because in a religious divorce under Jewish law, the husband had all the power. It was up to him to grant his wife a formal writ of separation, a document known as a get. If he balked—as many men did, or else made impossible demands for cash, assets, and more—the woman found herself unable to remarry, unable to resume any kind of normal life. She could be rich, lovely, devout—she was still untouchable by other men, a pariah in the community.

  It was easier in Zamalek, but deceptively so. The woman who left her husband to return to her parents’ villa didn’t starve, as my grandmother Alexandra had, but she was still socially ruined. My cousin Marcelle, married off at fourteen to a man in his fifties, begged and pleaded for a divorce from the man she hated, to no avail. She left him anyway. While she was young and extraordinarily beautiful at the time of her separation, no Jewish man would go near her, and she found herself at eighteen facing a life of spinsterhood. Her only options were to marry a Christian or a Muslim. Marcelle opted for a wealthy Muslim and converted to Islam. Her sixteen-year-old sister, Yvonne, fared no better when she left her philandering husband. Her father was able to pay a king’s ransom for a religious divorce, but even that wasn’t enough. To obtain the get, she was forced to give up her baby daughter to her husband, in a deal negotiated by the chief rabbi of Egypt.

  Only then would her unfaithful husband agree to free her.

  It was no accident that César found himself dragged to this 1950s equivalent of a mediation session. The rabbis’ most potent weapons were the children, and they weren’t shy about enlisting them as allies, as a reminder to the couple of the high stakes. It was excruciating and even traumatic for the child, but necessary if the family was going to stay together.

  That morning, both my parents were offered the opportunity to have their say, but to their astonishment, the rabbi kept turning to my brother.

  Who would he prefer to live with in the event of a separation, Mom or Dad? Which parent did he love more?

  Because César couldn’t possibly have answered, because the entire journey, from the endless taxi ride to the session with this holy man, had the feel of a nightmare, because he wanted to cry, or leave the room, the rabbi was able to make his point: that it was wrong, or worse, haram—a sin—to make a child suffer because of a marital dispute, and forcing him to choose between his mother and father was an abomination.

  Years later, César would find he had forgotten many of the detailed exchanges that had taken place, but what he could never, ever banish was the sense of hopelessness he’d felt seated in between my parents in the backseat of the cab, and then in the rabbi’s office, the sense of being a captive, a prisoner, forced to go along on a journey that could only end disastrously.

  “Loulou, never marry a Syrian,” my mother would tell me over and over. And with that warning, she offered me a window into her own universe of sorrow, the anger that she still harbored over her years as the prisoner of Malaka Nazli, long after she had been set free from our pretty house with the multiple balconies, and my father was too old and frail and infirm to be an especially fearsome warden.

  What drove my mother as she repeated those words to me over and over, as if hoping to hypnotize me, was the profound sense of regret she still felt at having stayed, the fact that she hadn’t broken out of 281-Malaka Nazli when she still could, hadn’t ignored the tender, solicitous advice of Tante Rebekah, Tante Marie, and Tante Leila, hadn’t walked out on my father and the rabbi of Abbassiyah.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Essence of a Name

  Your name is your destiny. Change your name, the mystics say, and you will avert even the most terrible fate.

  When I was born, nearly four years after the death of Baby Alexandra, my family felt an overwhelming sense of relief followed by a rush of panic. Simcha Allegra, the midwife who delivered me in the back bedroom of Malaka Nazli, and whose Hebrew and Italian names both meant “joy,” stepped into the parlor to tell my father the good news. He had a new baby girl, the midwife announced, and both mother and daughter were well. She spoke crisply and with authority, as befits a woman who has delivered hundreds of infants.

  It was one of those rare times in this vast Syrian clan obsessed with producing sons that a baby girl found herself wanted. My birth was seen as a sign that the family’s luck was changing. The all-merciful God who had taken away one little girl from Malaka Nazli had now shown his infinite compassion by giving back a little girl to Malaka Nazli.

  But with the elation came fear that turned into paralysis. Everyone seemed stumped as to what to name me. Names were critically important in determining a person’s fortunes, yet because of the shadow cast by the death of my sister, deciding what to call me turned into a high-stakes game of chance. No one wanted to play.

  My mom secretly thought of naming me Alexandra. She was so happy to have given birth to a little girl, maybe even that girl, minus the blue eyes, she thought to herself, because she was superstitious and believed in the return of the dead. If I were really Baby Alexandra, come back from the other world, then wouldn’t it make sense to give me her name? It was so tempting, so human, to want to try again—to break the spell and defy the odds and give life to a human being who would have that name yet would thrive and prosper and not fall prey to the evil eye. My mom was convinced that anyone who was too beautiful or too good risked being destroyed par le mauvais oeil.

  But who would impose such a burden on a newborn? The name was surely cursed. Look what had happened to her daughter. Look what had happened to her mother—abandoned and bereft as a wife, a beggar living off the alms relatives deigned to give her, reduced to smoking cigarette after cigarette, and running off each day to the Cinema Rialto to escape her woes.

  My grandmother would wander into our house on Malaka Nazli every afternoon as was her wont, the mane of soft dark hair that a governess had once lovingly brushed and tied back with satin ribbons now gathered carelessly in a chignon at the back of her neck. Her fine chiseled features and smooth skin, golden brown from constant walks under the hot sun of Cairo, made her face look years younger than she was, although her posture, the fact that she had become almost hunchbacked, made her appear many years older.

  She was such a loving creature, la Nonna, so tender despite her hard life, so giving despite the fact she had nothing to give.

  Though penniless, Alexandra would come laden with gifts. Typically, these were stacks of books and discarded issues of French magazines she receiv
ed from the phalanx of relatives who looked after her.

  After I was born, she arrived with packages of impossible splendor. Alexandra regarded my birth as almost a religious occurrence. She had adored the blue-eyed girl who had briefly borne her name, had mourned her passing with nearly the same intensity as my mom, and had been plunged into the same boundless despair. But it was her own child she missed, of course, and was still mourning so many years later. For Alexandra, every pathway led back to the lost boy of the souk.

  My siblings and I were the beneficiaries of her thwarted love. In my case, she prevailed on some wealthy cousins—members of the Dana clan who lived in Cairo—to give her the baby wear their own children had outgrown. She proceeded to lavish me with blankets and hand-embroidered bibs and soft towels and impossibly delicate white voile dresses fit for a child princess so that even my father, a connoisseur of fine fabrics, was impressed. My grandmother saw to it that I was covered with all the lace and linens and soft cottons a fretful infant could want.

  Mostly, it was her voice that soothed me when I couldn’t stop crying.

  There was no piano for her to play anymore. The single room she occupied not far from Malaka Nazli had only a cot and a burner on which she kept the coffeepot where she prepared her ten and twelve cups of dark, sweet café Turque, never bothering to rinse it.

  Without a piano, Alexandra’s musical talents found an outlet in the continental melodies she sang to my siblings and now to me. They were songs from the war years—World War I as well as World War II—and she sang them in her lovely voice in both French and Italian, and the family was hypnotized by this music from a lost world.

  My grandmother would shyly approach my crib and begin to sing, not lullabies but grown-up tunes about men who left and the women who pined after them, all set in picturesque lands where the houses were white and the gardens bloomed, the sea was blue and love was forever—“Plaisirs d’Amour,” “J’Attendrais,” “Santa Lucia,” and her most favorite of all, “Torna a Sorrento,” Come Back to Sorrento.