Out of Egypt: A Memoir

by André Aciman

  For weeks the Schwab tolerated his brother-in-law’s inducements until, one day, he finally exploded. And he did so in style: he borrowed Vili’s cherished little phrase, spun it about him awhile like a bodkin to let Vili know that he, the Schwab, known to the rest of the world as Aldo Kohn, and more specifically as Kohn Pasha, was no pushover either. Uncle Vili was totally trumped. Not only was he pained—that was his word for it—by his brother-in-law’s mistrust, but there was something unbearably vexing in having been flayed with his own knife. It was a low, unsportsmanlike thing to do; it was just another instance of Ashkenazi duplicity. Uncle Vili rarely spoke to him again.

  An exception occurred in 1930, when it became obvious that the family had been cheated of the prosperous twenties. It was at about this time that Uncle Vili suggested the family emigrate elsewhere. America? Too many Jews already. England? Too rigid. Australia? Too underdeveloped. Canada? Too cold. South Africa? Too far. It was finally decided that Japan offered ideal prospects for men whose claim to fortune was their exalted, millennial role as itinerant peddlers and master mountebanks.

  The Japanese had three advantages: they were hardworking, they were eager to learn and compete, and they had probably never seen Jews before. The brothers picked a city they had never heard of but whose name sounded distantly, and reassuringly, Italian: Nagasaki. “Are you going to peddle baubles and mirrors too?” asked the Schwab. “No. Cars. Luxury cars.” “Which cars?” he asked. “Isotta-Fraschini.” “Have you ever sold cars before?” He enjoyed ribbing the clannish brothers whenever he could. “No. Not cars. But we’ve sold everything else. Rugs. Stocks. Antiques. Gold. Not to mention hope to investors, sand to the Arabs. You name it. And besides, what difference does it make?” asked an exasperated Vili. “Carpets, cars, gold, silver, sisters, it’s all the same thing. I can sell anything,” he bragged.

  The Isotta-Fraschini affair started with everyone in the family rushing to invest in the Middle Eastern and Japanese distributorship for the cars. A Japanese tutor was hired, and on Monday and Thursday afternoons, all five brothers—from Nessim, the oldest, who was over fifty and not entirely convinced about the venture, to Vili, twenty years younger and the demonic propounder of the scheme—would sit in the dining room, their notebooks filled with what looked like the most slovenly ink stains. “Poor boys,” Aunt Marta would whisper to her sister Esther whenever she peeped into the dark, wood-paneled room where tea was being served to the classroom. “They haven’t even mastered Arabic yet, and now these confounded sounds.” Everyone was terror-struck. “Raw fish and all that rice every day! Death by constipation it’s going to be. What must we endure next?” was Aunt Clara’s only comment. There would be no more time for painting, she was warned. She would have to help in the family business. “Besides, all you’ve ever painted are portraits of Tolstoy. It’s time to change,” commented Uncle Isaac.

  Their mother was also worried. “We build on bad soil. Always have, always will. God keep us.”

  Out of spite, no one in the family had ever asked the Schwab to invest a penny in the venture. His punishment would be to witness the clan grow tremendously rich, and finally realize, once and for all, who was and who wasn’t.

  Two years later, however, he was approached by his wife and asked to contribute something toward the immediate expenses of the firm. The Schwab, who, aside from gambling, hated to invest in intangibles, agreed to help by buying one of these expensive cars at a discount. It soon emerged that, aside from giving each of the five brothers a car, the newly established Isotta-Fraschini Asia-Africa Corporation had sold only two cars. Three years later, after the business collapsed and the demos were returned to Italy, only two persons in Egypt could be seen riding Isotta-Fraschinis: the Schwab and King Fouad.

  The Isotta-Fraschini debacle set the family back by a decade. The clan continued to keep up appearances, and its members were often seen Sundaying in the king’s gardens or arriving in chauffeured cars at the exclusive Sporting Club, but they were flat broke. Too vain to admit defeat, and too prudent to start baiting their creditors, they began tapping second-tier friends and relatives who could be relied on to keep their secret. Albert, their other brother-in-law, a once-prosperous cigarette manufacturer who had abandoned everything he owned in Turkey to move to Egypt, was asked to contribute something toward family finances. He did so reluctantly and after terrible rows with Esther, his wife, who, like her sister Marta, never doubted that blood was thicker than marriage vows.

  Albert had ample reason for neither trusting nor wanting to help them. It was upon the clan’s assurances that in 1932 he had finally and recklessly liquidated his cigarette business in Turkey and moved with his family to Egypt, hoping both to invest in his in-laws’ firm and to spare his eighteen-year-old son, Henri, the horrors of Turkish barracks life. As soon as he arrived in Alexandria, however, the clan made it quite clear they were not about to let him into their Isotta-Fraschini schemes. Crestfallen, and not knowing what else to do in Alexandria, the erstwhile nicotine merchant took the life savings he had smuggled out of Turkey and became the proprietor of a small pool hall called La Petite Corniche, which faced the six-mile coast road known to all Alexandrians as the Corniche.

  He never forgave them this trick. “Come, we’ll help you,” he would remind his wife, mimicking her brothers’ repeated appeals to him. “We’ll give you this, we’ll give you that. Nothing! My ancestors were important enough to be assassinated by generations of sultans—now, billiards,” he would mutter as he stood outside the kitchen door each morning, waiting for the assortment of cheese and spinach pastries that his wife baked at dawn. They sold well and were much liked by the pool players, who enjoyed eating something while drinking anisette.

  Not only had his own circumstances been drastically reduced, but Albert was still expected to help out his wife’s family. And so Vili’s driver, thoroughly convinced that he was picking up money owed to his employer, would stop the car outside La Petite Corniche, walk in, receive a wad of bills, and “remind” Albert that he would be back in a few weeks.

  After about the fifth loan, the humble proprietor of the pool hall walked outside with his cue in hand and shattered one of the car windows, informing his brother-in-law, who was skulking in the backseat while the chauffeur ran his errands, that since he was on such good terms with royalty, he should also tap His Majesty for “something to tide him over”—Vili’s euphemism for desperate loans.

  Esther was horrified when she heard of the confrontation between her husband and her brother. “But he’s never done anything like this before,” she protested to Vili, “he’s not violent at all.”

  “He’s a Turk, through and through.”

  “And what are you then, Italian by any chance?”

  “Italian or not Italian, I know better than to break someone’s car window.”

  “I’ll speak to him,” she said.

  “No, I don’t ever want to see him again. He’s a terribly ungrateful man. If he weren’t your husband, Esther, if he weren’t your husband—” started Vili.

  “If he weren’t my husband, he wouldn’t have lent you a penny. And if you weren’t my brother, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in now.”

  Vili’s given name was Aaron. When he returned to Alexandria in 1922, four years after the signing of the armistice, he had to make up for lost time. With the help of his four brothers, he became a rice expert in one week. Then a sugar-cane examiner. In the space of three months he learned how to cure any conceivable disease afflicting cotton, Egypt’s prized export. In half a year’s time, he had not only toured all corners of Egypt but had also visited every magnate’s home rumored to hold the promise of a young Jewish wife. He married one a little less than a year after returning from Europe.

  Having become a respectable citizen now, he reverted to what he liked best of all: married women. It is said that some of his mistresses were so distraught when he was done with them that they would show up on his wife’s doorstep, pleading with
her to intercede on their behalf, which poor Aunt Lola, whose heart was the biggest organ in her body, would sometimes do.

  Seven years after the war, a woman named Lotte appeared at the family’s residence with the picture of a man to whom she claimed she had been engaged in Berlin. When a consensus was finally reached on the man’s identity, and the woman had put away her handkerchief, she was invited to stay for lunch with the family, most of whose members were due to arrive toward one o’clock. Vili was the last to arrive, but as soon as he walked in, she recognized his footsteps in the vestibule, stood up, put down her glass of sherry, and ran out screaming, “Willy! Willy!” at the top of her lungs.

  No one had any idea what the demented woman meant by calling their Aaron by that strange name, but during lunch, when everyone had more or less regained composure, she explained that in 1914 in his new Prussian uniform he had looked so much like Kaiser Wilhelm that she could not resist nicknaming him Willy. His wife found something so endearingly right about “Willy,” so stout yet so diminutive, that she too began to call him “Vili,” first with reproof, then with raillery, and finally by force of habit, until everyone, including his mother, called him Vili, which eventually acquired its diminutive Greco-Judeo-Spanish form: Vilico.

  “Vilico traitor,” his mother said some time afterward.

  He protested. “I was really in love with her at the time. And besides, it happened long before I’d met Lola.”

  “I wasn’t talking about women. Judas you are, Judas you’ll always be.”

  No one had the heart to ship the resurrected Lotte back to Belgium. So Lotte became Uncle Nessim’s secretary, served as a temporary model in Aunt Clara’s art class, then as a sales assistant for Uncle Cosimo, who eventually palmed her off on Uncle Isaac, who finally married her. In the family picture taken at their wedding in 1926 in the matriarch’s sumptuous apartment in Grand Sporting overlooking the sunny Mediterranean, Tante Lotte is standing next to Uncle Isaac on the veranda, her right hand resting on Uncle Vili’s shoulder. Are we, squints Uncle Vili, or aren’t we men who share, men who exact the highest sacrifices, men whom women worship.

  In the picture, Isaac is already a haggard fifty-year-old trying to cover up a bald spot, and Nessim, then close to retirement, looks older than his mother, whose forced good cheer on the day of her son’s nuptials failed to conceal her worries.

  “He’s a prince, and she’s a peasant,” she said. “Look how she walks. You can still hear the clatter of Batavian clogs in her steps.”

  “And on his head you can still see traces of an invisible skullcap. So they’re even. Leave them alone,” her daughter Esther chided. “All his life with mistresses, and never a wife. It’s about time he married.”

  “Yes, but not a Christian.”

  “Christian, Jewish, Belgium, Egypt, these are modern times,” said Vili, “the twentieth century.”

  But his mother was not convinced. And in the picture she wears the distrustful gaze of a Hecuba welcoming Helen into her fold.

  In back of the assemblage, peeping ever so furtively from behind the veranda’s French windows, are the faces of three Egyptians. The maid, Zeinab, no older than twenty and already in the family for a decade, is smiling mischievously. Ahmed, the cook, who is from Khartoum, bashfully attempts to avert his eyes from the photographer, covering his face with his right palm. His younger sister Latifa, a mere child of ten, stares with impish dark eyes into the lens.

  While the family tried to recover from the Isotta-Fraschini debacle, Uncle Vili was busily pursuing an altogether different career: that of a Fascist. He had become such an ardent supporter of Il Duce that he insisted everyone in the family wear a black shirt and follow the Fascist health regimen by exercising daily. A punctilious observer of all changes inflicted on the Italian language by the Fascists, he tried to purge acquired Anglicisms from his speech, tastes, and clothing; when Italy went to war against Ethiopia, he asked the family to surrender its gold jewelry to the Italian government to help finance Il Duce’s dream of an empire.

  The irony behind Uncle Vili’s patriotic histrionics is that, all the while proclaiming his undying allegiance to the fascio, he had already become an agent of British intelligence. His induction as a spy provided him with the only career for which he was truly suited from birth. It also encouraged everyone else in the family to remain in Egypt, especially now that they were plugged into the affairs of not one but two empires.

  Vili’s induction into His Majesty’s Secret Service in 1936 coincided with another piece of good fortune for the family: his brother Isaac’s flourishing friendship with the new King Farouk, Fouad’s son. It is not clear how Isaac obtained his appointment as a director at the Ministry of Finance, but shortly after his wedding, he also found himself sitting on the boards of most of the major corporations in Egypt. “Fraterism,” which gives to brothers what nepotism gives to nephews and grandchildren, took care of the rest, so that all of my other uncles—Nessim, Cosimo, and Lorenzo—were offered lucrative positions at several banks in Egypt. Vili’s auction business was thriving; his mother’s apartment overlooking that dazzling expanse of beachfront was given a much-needed sprucing up; Arnaut was born to the Schwab and Marta; and Vili finally made up with his brother-in-law Albert.

  At first, Uncle Vili tried to conceal the nature of his new career. Only Aunt Lola and Uncle Isaac knew of it. But secrets of this kind he could never resist divulging, particularly since they stirred everyone’s envy and admiration. It was the closest thing to being a soldier again. He carried a pistol wherever he went and, before sitting down to lunch with the rest of the family, he could often be seen fiddling with and loosening his holster. “What is he,” asked the Schwab, “a gangster now?” “Shush,” Aunt Marta would hiss, “no one is supposed to know.” “But he’s so obvious about it that he must be a decoy. The British couldn’t possibly be that stupid.”

  But then, wars are won not because one party is the more resourceful, but because the other is a touch more incompetent. The Italians never suspected that Vili had thrown in his lot with the British and continued to use his services in Egypt and elsewhere. Vili was very often absent from Alexandria, either in Ethiopia with the Italian army, or in Italy, or serving in various Italian delegations to Germany. To become still more vital to Italian interests, he made a name for himself as a transportation expert and as a specialist in fuel distribution for desert convoys. How and where he acquired even a nodding acquaintance with these disciplines is beyond conjecture, but the Italians needed anyone they could get. They took advantage of his flourishing auction house as a cover for his frequent comings and goings between Rome and Alexandria. To allay possible British scrutiny, they encouraged him to import antique furniture, and thus, with the help of the Fascists, he managed to purchase rare antiques at a fraction of their cost in Italy only to sell them to Egyptian pashas for a fortune.

  He became very wealthy. With time, not only did there accrue to him the many privileges of an English gentleman spy, but his double life allowed him to enact all those elaborate rituals—from breakfast to nightcap—he had always secretly envied the English, while gratifying his undying Italian patriotism whenever he heard the Fascist anthem, or when the Italians—not without German help—finally scored a victory against the Greeks. “We’ve taken Greece,” he suddenly shouted one day, hanging up the telephone with what must also have been Turkish glee in his voice. “We’re finally in Athens”—whereupon everyone at home jumped up and down, stirring up the Egyptian servants and maids, who would ululate at the slightest pretext for celebration, until someone inevitably sobered up the festivities by voicing concern for Greek Jewry.

  Vili’s voice had quivered with excitement at the news, as it did when a group of Italian frogmen stole into the harbor of Alexandria, causing serious damage to two British battleships. Vili was thrilled by the valiant frogmen, but totally disheartened when reminded that he had to condemn their mission. “Gone are the old days,” he would say, meaning the d
ays when you always knew who you were and whose side you were on.

  Then something happened. Even he could not quite understand it. “Things aren’t going well,” Vili said. When pressed to explain, he would simply say, “Things.” Unnerved by his answers, his sister Esther would try coaxing him: “Is it that you don’t want to say or that you don’t know?” “No, I do know.” “Then tell us.” “It’s about Germany.” “Anyone could have said it was about Germany. What about Germany?” “They’ve been nosing around Libya too much. It just doesn’t bode well.”

  A few months later, my Great-aunt Elsa arrived with her German husband from Marseilles. “Very bad. Terrible,” she said. They would not give her an exit visa. Isaac, who had used his connections with French diplomats once to become a French citizen, had to use them again now to arrange for his sister’s immediate safe conduct. Given her complicated status as an Italian married to a German Jew in France, additional measures were needed, and Isaac obtained for her and her husband diplomatic passports bearing the king of Egypt’s seal. Aunt Elsa complained she had lost her shop of religious artifacts at Lourdes and had spent two years in extreme poverty. “That’s where I learned to be a miser,” she would say, as though this mitigated what all knew was a case of congenital avarice.