Alexandrian Summer

by Yitzhak Gormezano Goren

  In the past—when was it?—Joseph had some dim hopes for his son as his true successor on the track, the one who would seamlessly continue the career he’d started. Now as Joseph waited breathlessly for the signal, he had no illusions. Even if his son won the race, it was all a lie. A deception, trickery. Joseph might have even looked forward to his son’s defeat, or at least accepted it. His son did not deserve to win this race, and since it was all predetermined, and nothing was incidental, there was no reason to assume that the unworthy one would win, even if he was Joseph Hamdi-Ali’s son. For a moment, he felt a strange closeness to the dark Arab, who looked slightly ridiculous in his colorful jockey’s outfit and funny cap, so European, looking as if the cap just happened to fall on his head. But of course, this was only when he stood waiting with the other riders. Not when he flew upon the wind, clouds of dust swirling around him. In those moments he resembled a simoom, an eastern desert storm that blew in and altered the face of the desert in an instant.

  Joseph Hamdi-Ali closed his eyes. Some say they remained closed for the whole race, a fact which gave rise to contradictory interpretations. Some saw it as an incriminating sign, others as a virtue. Some argued that he closed his eyes from fear and guilt, while others claimed that had he really done something foolish and unworthy, he would not have been able to help himself from following the events with open eyes to make sure that his scheme bore fruit.

  When he opened his eyes, David had already won. The boy was peacocking away, all smiles and pride. His victory was complete.

  Complete? Some questioned this.

  General confusion led to doubt. The truth was, and almost everyone admitted it, in the middle of the race Al Buraq began acting out of character, strangely, as if he had no intention of reaching the finish line first. Ahmed tried with all his might to control the dazed beast, but when he finally managed to, only a few seconds later, it was already too late. And in spite of this delay, he still came in second. Second! How much contempt is contained in this word! The difference between second and first is the same as the difference between relative and absolute. This fact was etched on the slate of eternity: Esperance came in a head before Al Buraq. A head might as well be an abyss. Desperation and rage rose, swelled, bubbled as if from the depths of a volcano. Something had to be done, right away! Something had to be done, somehow he had to turn back the hands of time. What was wrong with Al Buraq? Did he suddenly fall ill? And if he did, was it spontaneous or … or … it can’t be! But why not? That had to be it. And even if it wasn’t, this was the moment to cry out in protest. A moment longer, and it would be too late.

  A hair-raising cry of grief left the wrathful Bedouin’s mouth, and though it stank of bad acting, it still managed to shake up the crowd. Some people revolted against the vulgar act, saw it as losing without dignity. But the majority heard entirely different echoes in this cry. Awhile later, in court, some claimed they heard in that cry the protest of all Egypt, trampled under the feet of strangers. Baseless statements, indeed, and yet they might explain the wave of national chaos that began at the racetrack and submerged the entire beachfront of Alexandria. But let us not get ahead of ourselves.

  Ahmed Al-Tal’ooni knew that in spite of the impression made by his theatricalities, the echoes would soon die down if he didn’t make an explicit statement. Now it was time to point an accusing finger. A ridiculous scheme. Nevertheless …

  “Someone drugged my Al Buraq!”

  After the initial shock, there came a mélange of calls of agreement and calls of derision and scorn. First the louder voices were those rejecting such a capricious, unfounded accusation. It was an easy out, an act of childishness, they said. Anyone losing a competition could claim foul play and ask for a recall. But rationality has nothing to do with reality. Against these voices, a dark, consolidated call formulated, sounding agreement in primitive beats, growing louder until they became a threatening thunder, closing in tight, stifling circles, desperately trying to break through.

  Someone sensed the nearing danger and called out to the fallen knight: “Who? Please, tell us, who did this terrible thing?”

  Who?

  The question echoed in Al-Tal’ooni’s mind. So far he hadn’t given it much thought. Now he had to answer fast, before the impression was dulled. Should he blame his Jewish rival himself? He was about to shout hysterically, Daoud Hamdi-Ali, he’s the one who drugged my horse! But at that moment his gaze fell upon two sharp eyes.

  Al-Tal’ooni’s embarrassment only lasted a moment.

  Maybe Ahmed saw guilt flickering in the old man’s eyes, or perhaps he saw the reflection of his own slander, or perhaps he merely saw a suitable victim to latch on to. One thing was clear—Al-Tal’ooni’s cry, “That old man … that damned old man … he’s the one who drugged my horse … Allah, avenge me, avenge me, Allah! I have … I have proof that he … he … it was him!”

  Joseph Hamdi-Ali heard these things and yet did not hear them. Or perhaps he heard them but they simply didn’t register. People crowded around him. Some of his friends pressed him to respond immediately and harshly to this evil slander. Joseph Hamdi-Ali only smiled his usual smile. That hospitable smile known only to sons of the Levant, that smile of acceptance which welcomes calamity. He shook his head and closed his eyes. He was in his own world. That light anxiety, watered down with awkward glee, which gripped him when he learned of his son’s victory, now gave way to fatalistic serenity. He knew now: his son’s victory was a ruse, granting him a short, deceitful moment of illusion, only to inflict upon him, him and not his son, a blow far worse than any he could previously imagine—slander. This petty betrayal by Al-Tal’ooni. How contemptible, how insulting, for his good name and his professional integrity to be manipulated like toys, passed from hand to hand, each handler staining them further.

  And now, with precious moments passing, and Al-Tal’ooni prancing about in an hysterical display, and Joeph Hamdi-Ali seemingly sinking deeper into his own defeat … Suddenly the old Turk pounced with out-stretched arms at the young Arab’s throat.

  Luckily, the two were pulled apart. Officer Nawas, Robby’s father’s good friend, arrived within seconds, and a phalanx of police officers came between the foes. They managed, for the time being, to scare away the Arab mob wildly supporting their hero, whose throat emitted gurgling sounds from the steel grip of the Jew’s fingers.

  “Maut al yahud! Death to the Jews!” the calls came.

  “Sahyuni! Sahyuni!” others shouted. “Zionist!”—that classic opening for riots and protests, for unloading deep, bitter disappointment.

  Nawas and his colleagues tried to stem the tide by shouting back curses of their own. “Klab ibn’l klab,” they shouted, “Dogs sons of dogs,” and brandished their wooden clubs. But they were too few, and the crowd’s rage rose with each passing moment. Later on, after the Officers’ Revolution led by Muhammad Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser, it was discovered that on that day all sorts of factors incited the crowd, factors with different and even contradicting interests, nevertheless united in their hatred of any overprivileged stranger, and first and fore-most, of the British administration. There were representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood, fanatical and violent, and then there were a handful of left-wing students with socialist inclinations, those who within the year would become the most enthusiastic supporters of the Free Officers Movement. Any reason was good enough for an anti-British and anti-Zionist demonstration, for a spontaneous expression of the resentment felt by Egyptians, who saw themselves as having been cheated for centuries.

  Nawas managed to sneak the Hamdi-Alis out of the track, but the mob was now on the streets, unloading its anguish in a sort of carnival that comprised more noise than actual violence. Nevertheless, these protests melted even the bravest hearts, and certainly Grandma’s heart, which had never been too brave. As the protest spilled into the streets, she was on the tram with her friend Renée Marika, on their way home from a visit to Grandma’s sister, Robby’s rich great-aunt,
who lived in a luxury apartment in the Cleopatra neighborhood. That day they hadn’t gone to the race, since Robby’s parents hadn’t either. The Ford offices in Alexandria, where Robby’s father worked, were about to relocate to a modern, expanded complex in Smooha neighborhood, and on that stifling Sunday, employees and their families were invited to a reception to inaugurate the facilities. Robby was there too, proud and happy when his father showed him his new office. Shortly thereafter, his father quit his job as a result of conflict with his supervisor, a Brit with clear anti-Semitic tendencies. In the winter of 1951, the family left the shores of Alexandria by boat, perhaps forever.

  For some reason, the protestors chose to march along the tram tracks, disrupting traffic. Robby’s grandmother and Madam Marika’s tram was also halted, and several protestors got on, like robbers on postal trains in the Wild West, shouting slogans and ambiguous threats. One of them stopped by the two ladies, looked at them carefully as their breath caught in their chests, and muttered in an ominous tone, “Yahudi?”

  Robby’s grandmother, by her own account, almost wet her pants with fear. She was speechless. Her face attested louder than a hundred witnesses to her Jewish identity, and, as a result, to her friend’s as well. They were left to pray to the heavens, and they might really have needed a miracle, if not for Renée Marika’s resourcefulness. That very moment she smiled mischievously. “Us? Of course not. We’re Greek, are we not, Kiria Papadopulos?” she said, turning to her pale friend.

  “Né, né,” answered Grandma in the language of Homer. “Yes, yes.” Then the two went on to converse freely in Greek, until the man shrugged and moved to another car. They continued conversing en grégo even after getting off the train. The two had been fluent in the language ever since their childhoods spent in Balkan territories with shifting borders. Robby’s grandmother was from the town of Dedeagach by the Dardanelles, an area with much experience in the Greco-Turkish War, and later named Alexandroupoli. Renée Marika was born in Rhodes. Greek was her mother tongue, along with Ladino—which we used to call Español—the language of nostalgia, each word giving way to yearning for faraway Spain, with which we’ve had such a tumultuous romance.

  That evening the protests died down, and by the time Robby got home no trace was left of them. The protestors did not smash store windows or set tires on fire. True, they screamed at the tops of their lungs, but such screams dissipate in the twilight, when a light breeze blows, allowing throats to breathe freely, fear to diminish and the heart to rejoice.

  34. INVESTIGATING JUDGE

  The investigating judge flipped through the dossier dis-interestedly. Hamdi-Ali, Tal’ooni. Suddenly his curiosity was piqued, realizing that Hamdi-Ali was Jewish, in spite of his seemingly Arab name. The investigating judge had no issue with Jews. Many of his friends were Jewish, and he was proud of that. Tal’ooni v. Hamdi-Ali. He didn’t like mixed cases, where animosity between nationalities and religions complicated a conflict between two men. Well, what have we got here? Drugging a horse in an attempt to fix a race and … attempted murder. Attempted murder? Well …

  The heat in the dark office was unbearable. An exhausted ceiling fan lazily dragged its blades, its hum putting the investigating judge to sleep. A fly circled his nose. “George!” he called to his Coptic assistant, sitting in the adjacent office in front of piles of paperwork. George returned his pen to its blotter and ran in bowing to hear his supervisor’s wishes.

  “Ahwa,” said the lawman, swallowing the first letter of the word for coffee, qahwa. In Egypt no one pronounced that heavy q, which might be why Egyptian Arabic always sounded more refined to the European ear.

  “Aywa, ya sidi,” answered the young clerk, pushing his fez slightly in subordination.

  Maybe the coffee would wake him up, the investigating judge thought, and shot George an affectionate, paternal smile. With deep gratitude, the young man bowed his way back out the door. Accompanied by a symphony of typewriters, he walked down the depressing gray hallway. When he reached the young secretary at the end of the passage he saw her putting on makeup in front of a small compact mirror. She spotted him from the corner of her eye and quickly hid her makeup kit, but she’d been caught. George said nothing. His accusing look was more than enough. “The old man wants a coffee,” he said with authority. His mission had been accomplished and he returned to drown in paperwork.

  The girl stood up, walked downstairs to the doorman and gave him the order. The doorman looked aggravated, but jumped up immediately. “Khaled! Ya bne’l kalb, you son of a bitch, wake up!” he called out. Khaled, his young son, would be the one to walk the two hundred yards to the nearest café. “Sukar ziada!” Extra sugar, the doorman ordered. “It’s for the bey,” he added with importance. The bey liked his coffee sweet. To tell the truth, the investigating judge wasn’t really a “bey” at all, but he enjoyed the doorman addressing him as such, and sometimes repaid him with bakshish. Out of sincere gratitude, the doorman continued to use the title even when the judge wasn’t around, and especially when speaking to his son, Khaled. He wanted to make sure the title became engrained in him as well, so he never forgot to use it when in the presence of the great man.

  The coffee was brought over by the café owner himself, in peasant pants, a hooked mustache and a jaunty fez. He wouldn’t take the risk of entrusting the high clerk’s coffee to the hands of one of his employees, who, with their pigheadedness, might lose the kaimak. Then the bey might complain that the coffee he sells is nothing but sewer water. Once the coffee was placed in front of the investigating judge, along with a glass of very cold water, the man sighed deeply and said nothing. The café owner immediately asked the reason for this heavy sigh.

  “When your father, God have mercy on his soul, ran the café, he always brought along a little shisha, without me having to ask …” He sighed again and added philosophically, “The things we receive without having to ask, those are the things that bring us real pleasure.” And he sighed once more, as if to say, Nobody bothers to uphold standards anymore …

  “I’ll send the boy over right away with —”

  The clerk fixed his eyes on him, and the café owner hurried to correct himself. “I’ll bring one over myself.”

  The clerk smiled and tossed a coin his way.

  The coffee and the shisha and the cold water alleviated the judge’s sweaty and sticky summer malaise. Even the limp fan seemed to have regained some of its youthful energy.

  Al-Tal’ooni v. Hamdi-Ali.

  The horse racing business.

  The judge, who was addicted to cards and dice, could not understand why people got so worked up about horse racing.

  “ ‘Attempted murder.’ Esh da? What does that mean?”

  He read through the investigation report and the charge sheet. He wrote with pencil in the margins, “assault” instead of “attempted murder.” An old man, nearing seventy, against a young man of twenty-five-years. He shook his head. People had nothing better to do these days. The protests worried him quite a bit as well. The police had arrested some of the loudest big-mouths of the mob, but deep inside he knew that something was cooking in the outskirts, something was bubbling beneath the surface. I can feel it in the soles of my feet, he thought, and when it erupts, no one will be safe. Not even His Majesty, the King. Especially not the king. He set his eyes on the portrait of the young, auspicious Prince Farouk, handsome, smiling Farouk, the way he looked on that hopeful day when he disembarked from the ship that returned him from England to Egypt upon the death of his father, King Fouad. Now Farouk was fat and corrupt. Will they use a guillotine, like in France? A gun in the basement, à la russe? And he, a rather lowly investigating judge—will he be considered small fry, someone not worthy of consideration, or will he earn the honor of being named Enemy of the People, a term so favored by revolutionaries the world over? Why can’t things just remain as they were?

  George walked in to announce the arrival of the litigants with their attorneys. The investigating judg
e finished the remains of his coffee, put the shisha aside, grabbed his prayer beads and sat down ceremoniously behind his heavy black desk.

  The litigants and their representatives walked in and seated themselves on the benches across from one another. The fly landed on Al-Tal’ooni’s nose. He smashed it with a single blow. The investigating judge was put off by such cruelty and impatience, but deep inside he was impressed. That fly had been pestering him since morning and he’d done nothing about it, and now this young man comes in from the desert like a bolt of lightning.

  It wasn’t easy to persuade the stubborn Bedouin to change the indictment. He insisted on “attempted murder” and claimed he’d barely escaped the old man’s claws. Al-Tal’ooni’s attorney agreed with the investigating judge that the accusation was exaggerated, and added that it hurt their chances of conviction.

  35. NO ES A LA MODA HOY

  Joseph sat low on the bench, separate and solitary. He’d heard the words spoken around him only dimly: What difference did it make, he thought, if it was assault or attempted murder? He didn’t care about the legal implications. He was much more upset about the other accusation, the allegedly lesser one, that he’d tried to drug the horse. Any dignified man might lose his mind once and try to strangle his opponent. It’s natural, it’s human, there’s no disgrace in that. But drugging a horse—that is a pathetic act of fraud which tarnishes the name of the perpetrator. Whenever anyone mentioned the matter in passing, Joseph felt a pang in his heart.

  Should we infer from this that Joseph was innocent? That he was not the one to inject the horse with an anesthetizing, paralyzing drug? A blood test performed on the horse found a considerable amount of some such substance. That’s why Al Buraq had not performed according to his natural abilities, and since he lost only by a head, people were sure he would have won if not for this fact. But can we conclude from this that Joseph Hamdi-Ali was the one to do the deed? And if not him –who? Maybe his son David? But that would be almost the same. And if we begin guessing, we might even argue that Tal’ooni himself, or better yet, his trainer, that conniving Greek, fearing they might lose the race, and in order to sabotage their opponent, were the ones doing the drugging. True, this conjecture was overreaching, but no more absurd than some of the others voiced.