Out of Egypt: A Memoir

by André Aciman

  Latifa hated injections and begged not to be given a shot. My mother ignored her pleas and, seeing she was resisting her with erratic kicks, had Abdou and Ibrahim hold her down as she bared her bottom. Latifa let out a violent scream, in which she invoked her mother and all her sisters to come to her rescue.

  “But what on earth are you afraid of?” asked Uncle Isaac losing his temper, stomping into the cluttered maid’s room as though on the point of striking her. She was lying on a makeshift bed, surrounded by ancient karakib. “Do you have to faint each time you hear bad news?”

  “It’s the pain here,” she sighed, pointing to her stomach. “It’s because I worry.”

  “But what do you worry about?”

  She did not say. Instead she told us how a midwife in the building had punctured a hole in the side of her belly and inserted a string which she then pulled out to expel the bad things from her body.

  “Egyptian sorcery! What bad things?” asked my uncle.

  “Do I know what bad things? Bad things,” she insisted.

  She blessed my mother for giving her the injection. Allah had seen her kindness. Then she got up, saying she was feeling much better already.

  While some had been attending to Latifa, the others went on speaking about the most recent turn of events. Someone was confirming rumors that the British were already pulling out of Port Said. The doorbell rang. We heard Abdou’s slippers trail on the marble floor all the way from the kitchen to the entrance. I heard the door close. Was it going to be the police again? I heard Aunt Flora’s voice greet Abdou.

  Flora would stay for dinner. She too had heard rumors that the British and French might ultimately cower before the Russian ultimatum. Yes, she too would have to think of leaving, but where to, she didn’t know. Probably France, though it still wasn’t clear whether German Jews would be just nationalized or also expelled, as it was rumored would happen soon to other Jews.

  Everyone in the living room was speaking of France that evening, with Cousin Arnaut advocating immediate migration. An argument broke out between him and Uncle Nessim. Uncle Nessim was for staying put—“We’ve had a good life here.” “Then why not go back to Turkey? You used to have a good life there too,” said his nephew.

  For dinner we had a huge poached fish in mulled wine and vegetables. Hassan, the chauffeur, who was a reservist in the Egyptian navy, had caught two bluefish while patrolling the Alexandrian coastline that night and at the end of his shift had shown up in his uniform with two very large fish wrapped in newspaper. There was such dissension among the sisters on how to cook the fish that my great-grandmother had to intervene, proclaiming that they had not had a good poached palamita in ages. The vegetables and the fish had also produced a delicious and very thick soup, which that evening my grandmother decorated with sprigs of fennel. Even Aunt Elsa, who despite her lean years in Lourdes had never lost the touch of the bonne vivante, decided the occasion merited opening the good wine.

  After Latifa had removed the soup dishes, Hisham came in carrying a very large fish platter, which he deposited on the buffet. By common consent, he and Latifa had divided the dining room between them, with Latifa serving the elderly women and the children, and Hisham everyone else.

  Suddenly I heard Aunt Elsa call on God and heaven and the Mother of Christ, her jaw dropping as if she had seen death beside her.

  Latifa was nowhere in sight.

  My father and Uncle Nessim immediately got up and rushed to the corner, tossing their white napkins with summary gestures.

  When I looked, I saw large cuts of fish steak scattered over the dining room carpet, a huge pool of unabsorbed fish stock, and, next to the fish, the meek, crumpled figure of Latifa rising to a crouch, one hand clutching her stomach. She cried and apologized profusely, saying she hurt everywhere, she would clean it up.

  “But what did you trip on?”

  She could not remember.

  “Did you break an arm?”

  No. A leg? No. Her back? Maybe, no, not her back. Had anyone said anything to frighten her? No. Was she better now? Only if she did not move. And even then, it still hurt.

  “But where, my girl, where?” asked Uncle Isaac, losing his patience.

  “Here,” she said, indicating her stomach, her belly, her liver, her kidneys, her back.

  “I don’t understand!” he snapped.

  “Leave her to me,” said my grandmother as she signaled to my mother to help. I heard them laying Latifa down on a sofa in the sitting room. And then I heard a weak, beseeching voice. She was imploring my mother not to give her another injection. Aunt Elsa and Aunt Marta were busy picking up slices of fish and throwing rags on the carpet, muttering to themselves, “How will this ever clean, how will this ever clean?” while their mother, looking down from her seat like a bird from its cage, gave directions on how to dab the sauce without rubbing it into the carpet. Cousin Arnaut proclaimed it did not matter in the least, since we were probably leaving Egypt in a few weeks. “It matters, yes!” shouted Uncle Isaac, losing his temper. “The carpet is still ours, and a very valuable one at that.” The mess on the carpet troubled him less than the prospect of having to leave the carpet behind. In years to come, that corner of the rug always remained darker than the rest, and if one tried hard enough, as I did almost a decade later, one could always make out a distinctly pungent fishy odor hovering about that entire area, which, in the fashion of cartographers, we dubbed Latifa’s Corner.

  When Dr. Alcabès finally came, he walked straight into Latifa’s room. “Latifa, oumi, sit up,” he ordered in peremptory Arabic while he felt for her pulse. Latifa refused, trying to pull her wrist away from his hand, all the while clinging to my grandmother. Hisham, who had seen her faint, said she had never been to a doctor before and was more frightened of doctors than she was of butchers. “As well she should be,” said Dr. Alcabès.

  “She’s such a comedian, though,” interjected Uncle Isaac.

  “But can’t any of you see she’s almost green! Where are your eyes!” thundered the doctor. “Her face is greener than a zucchini.” Then he held her hand a moment. “Does it hurt here?” he asked, indicating her right waist. She nodded. “And sometimes here?” he asked touching her belly. Again she nodded.

  “And when does it hurt?”

  She looked around to second-guess whether he too was trying to catch her lying.

  “But it always hurts. More and more and more.”

  He told her she had to lie down. Then he said he would give her an injection. She began to struggle. He told her it was to kill the pain. “You’ll see, you’ll see,” he said in Arabic as he held her hand, waiting for my mother to boil the syringe. “You’ll feel better.”

  “Well, Ben?” asked my great-grandmother after the injection, turning to the doctor.

  “She’s finished.”

  “Finished by what? Fear?” exclaimed Uncle Isaac.

  “Really, Isaac, sometimes you’re as thick as a mule.”

  His Excellency bristled at the doctor’s remark.

  “I don’t understand this at all. One moment she’s fainting and shaking and turning yellow each time there’s an air raid, and now she’s finished? Just like that?”

  “Isaac, let Ben speak,” said my grandmother.

  “Indeed, let him speak. Because I’d like to know who’s the real mule here,” said Uncle Isaac.

  Dr. Alcabès paid no attention. “It’s a tumor blocking her liver. When the growth touches the spinal nerve, the pain is so unbearable, she faints. Simple.”

  “And what will you do now that it’s so simple?” asked Uncle Isaac.

  “Do? Nothing.”

  “Surely they operate on these things nowadays. We’re not in the Middle Ages, I hope.”

  “There’s nothing to do, understand!”

  Dr. Alcabès finished his coffee and said he had to rush to see another patient. He took my mother to the side and gave her something from his pocket.

  “Morphine,” said my mother
after he was gone.

  “Morphine, I didn’t know it was morphine,” exclaimed Aunt Marta, who had missed the earlier exchange between Uncle Isaac and Dr. Alcabès. “But then, if it’s morphine, it’s cancer, it’s cancer,” she whimpered as if death were suddenly knocking at her door as well. She feared pain, doctors, and injections so much that she had sworn everyone—and would always remind them—to let her die should she be stricken with an unbearably painful disease and ask to die—which she never did as she lay writhing with Latifa’s sickness years later in a hospital ward in Paris, battling to live on despite the pain, which in her case lasted more than nine months and in Latifa’s barely two weeks.

  The next morning, my grandmother and Aunt Elsa decided to officiate at a ritual to ward off further misfortune. The ceremony, called faire boukhour, from the Turkish word buhur, which means incense, consisted of placing a smoking censer on the floor and having everyone in the household take turns jumping over it—first the men, then the women, then the servants. My grandmother and great-grandmother said a prayer in Ladino, and all the men, including Uncle Isaac, who was the most Westernized of the family, and my father, who hated ceremonies of any sort, leapt in turn, like children forced to play hopscotch.

  Then came the women’s turn. Women always jumped with a bashful smile, some lifting up their skirts awkwardly. My great-grandmother was helped in her leap by her two eldest sons, Nessim and Isaac; next came her eldest daughter, and then the others, down to my youngest cousin. Abdou’s turn followed, then Hisham’s. Ibrahim, whose voice was so deep and stern, suddenly broke into an embarrassed, high-pitched giggle as he covered his face with both palms. Then, lifting his galabiya up to give his legs greater freedom of movement, he backed up all the way into the pantry and came dashing into the corridor, leaping over the censer, nearly crashing into Aunt Elsa’s glass bedroom door. Finally it was poor Latifa’s turn—Latifa, who would rather have been left alone in bed but who, in typical Egyptian manner, managed to perform the ritual with good cheer and a broad smile, leaning on Abdou’s shoulder.

  A few hours later, Latifa screamed again. We found her with her hand pressed against her waist. Here she was, she said, thinking she was better, and now the ache was back again, only worse. “Ya satir ya rab, ya satir, ya satir ya rab,” she called to God. My mother reassured her that she was about to give her the same medicine the doctor had given her last night. “Not in front of the boy,” said Latifa. My mother asked me to leave the room. As soon as I heard Latifa gasp, I turned around and peeked through the half-open door. Latifa had white skin. She continued to complain that the injection wasn’t working this time, that the pain was still there. I heard her whining the same words—“Ya rab, ya rab, ya rab, ya rabbi” —repeating God’s name with the drowsy modulation of children who go on crying that they’re not tired long after closing their eyes.

  Mother shut the door quietly behind her. Abdou was waiting outside. “How is she?” My mother bit her lip. Abdou almost tore off his apron by the neckstrap, which is how he would threaten to quit each time he was accused of stealing, and buried his face in it, sobbing, “She has nobody, nobody,” as he walked to the kitchen. Latifa had a son, but he had taken up with a bad crowd and never came to see her.

  At three o’clock in the afternoon, Latifa woke up and was given diluted chicken broth. She complained it lacked salt. Then she said it had too much lemon. Then she said it was probably her sickness playing tricks on her mouth. But she was better now, she just wanted to sleep.

  During dinner that evening, she was shouting again. At first it seemed as though a violent argument were raging in the servants’ quarters, with Latifa shouting as she did when she argued with a neighbor, everyone’s voices squawking in the courtyard like ravens in mad flight. But Abdou and Hisham were in the dining room, and Ibrahim had taken the evening off. Then it struck me that she was screaming at no one at all, that she was screaming all by herself, which made it all the more terrifying, for it was a fiendish, demonic howl which cut into the late November night. My mother, who quickly understood from our expressions that something had happened to Latifa, stood up and went to see what was the matter. My grandmother followed her into the corridor. Then it occurred to both of them there was no more morphine in the house. An urgent call was placed to Dr. Alcabès. He was not home, his wife said, but she would relay the message.

  When we entered Latifa’s room, she was flouncing on the bed. She screamed that twice she had tried to stand up but had fallen back on the bed each time. She had coughed up a large worm and this time trapped it in a glass. “Here,” she said, pointing to a glass covered with a saucer. My grandmother examined the coiled brown worm and told my mother it was because Latifa never washed the salad properly. “Well, don’t worry, you won’t have any more worms,” my grandmother said. Latifa refused to believe her, swearing there were legions of them, biting, squirming, nibbling away at her insides, for each time they bit she could feel it, and she could feel it right now. And suddenly, in the most stridulous Arabic, she shouted frenzied, scattered words of prayer, yelling like a raging madwoman capable of wielding a knife against anyone who crossed her path.

  My mother assured Latifa the medicine would come, but no sooner had she said these words than Latifa uttered another one of her heartrending howls. “Hayimawituni, they’ll kill me!” she yelled, “Hayimawituni!” She meant the worms. And suddenly, from the inner courtyard, came an equally piercing wail from another apartment—“What is the matter with Latifa? Latifa’s dying! Latifa’s dying!”—which sent a panic running throughout the building as maids and servants from various apartments shouted their support, their pity, their invocations to the Almighty, their prayers for mercy.

  Uncle Isaac rushed in, fearful the yelling might attract too much attention. There was a ring, and my father went to open the door. It was Dr. Alcabès.

  “God sends you, Ben,” said my grandmother.

  “You can hear her all the way downstairs.”

  “Give her something fast, Ben, people will think we’re killing her,” said Uncle Isaac.

  Dr. Alcabès made his way into the maid’s room, which he opened without knocking, and, after having had water boiled, administered the injection himself.

  “You’ll make us deaf if you go on,” he jested.

  “Well, Ben?” asked my great-grandmother afterward.

  Dr. Alcabès had consulted with other colleagues. It was too late to operate. Morphine. Perhaps even too much morphine.

  “Maybe we had better send her to the hospital, then,” said Uncle Isaac. “We don’t want trouble.”

  “In her state?” asked Dr. Alcabès. “She may not last the night.”

  “But does she have to scream like that? Isn’t she overdoing it a bit?”

  “Isaac, she’s already no longer with us.”

  The following morning, the porter escorted two men dressed in civilian clothes to our door. They had come from the police station; one of them spoke French, which he had studied, he said, at the École de la Communauté Israelite, a Franco-Jewish school for poor Jews and middle-class Egyptians who wished to give their children a French education.

  “Do you know why we are here, Docteur?” he asked my uncle, who was still in his bathrobe. I was sure they had come because of Latifa’s screaming.

  “I would like to know,” replied Uncle Isaac. His answer was meant to sound peremptory; it came out beseechful.

  The men sat down on the sofa. They were there because of a letter addressed to him. What letter? A letter that was sent from Paris a few weeks ago and which the Egyptian censor had intercepted and decoded. A letter in which an alleged niece announced the birth of a girl “whom we received last week,” he quoted, holding the letter in his hand, “and who is all gold to us.”

  “Well?” asked the officer who spoke French.

  “Well what?” asked my uncle, sounding respectfully peeved. “My niece in Paris gave birth to a girl.”

  “To a girl who is all gold t
o us. What does that mean?”

  “A girl who is very, very dear—I suppose.”

  “You suppose. And does one give birth to a baby—is a baby born, or does one receive a baby, as it says here?” asked the shrewd officer.

  “If one believes in God, then one receives what God sends,” interrupted my grandmother, who until the officers’ visit had been reading Alberto Moravia’s Gli indifferenti, a volume she continued to hold in her hand, a finger tucked between the pages to mark the spot where she had stopped reading.

  “It is true in your religion and it is true in ours,” she continued. “Where is all this leading, anyway?”

  “It is leading to the fact that we have proof you have been sending currency and jewelry abroad, and that you, and your brother Aaron before you, have been doing so for many years.”

  Uncle Isaac denied the charge. He rubbed a finger hastily past his upper lip and, a second later, pinched that same lip between his index finger and his thumb. When I looked at his forehead, it was glistening.

  “I am afraid you will have to come with us,” said the officer.

  “How do you mean, ‘with you’?”

  “You are under arrest.”

  The second officer gripped my uncle’s arm.

  “Please get dressed.”

  “Absolutely not!”

  “Then we’re taking you as you are.”

  “Never. What is the charge?”

  “Treason.”

  “Egyptian claptrap! I am eighty years old.”

  My uncle tried to free his arm, and, it seemed, would have fallen to the ground in the struggle had the other officer not held him in place.

  “You can’t arrest people like this,” my grandmother protested.

  The men did not answer.

  “And where are you taking him?” asked Cousin Arnaut with a breathless pant in his voice as if to suggest he had put up a good fight before abandoning his uncle to his fate.

  They were taking him to the police station.

  It was then I began to smell a terrible odor. I looked around me, looked at my grandmother, who seemed equally perturbed, and then saw something on Uncle Isaac’s slipper and down his ankle. He had turned white. He leaned against the mantelpiece as though about to look at his face in the mirror and, turning around to the group of us assembled in the living room, he whispered, almost without breathing, “Mamá querida.”