Out of Egypt: A Memoir

by André Aciman

  He asked for a few minutes to change.

  Aunt Elsa insisted that as a foreign national he should refuse to leave the house. That would only exacerbate matters, he said.

  Ten minutes later he came into the sitting room wearing his dark astrakhan-collared coat, with his walking stick in one hand and his monocle slung about his neck. He opened his cigarette case and proceeded to fill it with as many cigarettes as he could from a small inlaid box on one of the end tables in the sitting room. Then he went to say goodbye to Latifa, who had sensed trouble and was already weeping. On hearing her sudden wailing, everyone in the room burst out crying as well. As they flocked to follow him onto the landing, he turned around and said, “Please, everyone! Can’t I leave in peace without all of you milling at the door like vultures?”

  My great-grandmother, who had just embraced him, stood impassively in the hallway, more dazed than saddened, leaning on her elder daughter, who began waving the handkerchief she had been using on her nose. Aunt Elsa and Aunt Marta did the same. “Ladies, sisters, ladies, please!” said Isaac as he turned around, pushed his youngest sister inside the apartment, and slammed the door behind him.

  “He won’t last a day if they put him in jail,” wept Aunt Elsa. “He’s finished,” said Uncle Nessim.

  After a moment of silence outside, I heard a thud of people stepping into the elevator, heard the metallic gate rattle shut, followed by the snap of the wooden inner door, its loose glass panel shaking in place. Then I heard the grinding wheeze of the motor and the whine of the counterweight cables in the inner courtyard.

  Morning gradually began to fill the house. Everyone sat in the living room wearing their bathrobes, their hair down, their breath still filled with sleep, stunned as never before, except at news of death. It had never occurred to anyone in the family that Isaac was as vulnerable as everyone else in the world, that there were miracles even he could not work, that he too could be as scared as Latifa.

  A week after Uncle Isaac’s arrest, we received a telegram announcing he was safe in sweet France. “Lucky Isaac,” everyone said.

  Then, just as suddenly as they had started, the air raids stopped, as did the sirens, and the blackout. The war had ended.

  There was no rejoicing at the news, though a general air of relief had to be affected for the benefit of neighbors and servants. But everyone worried. We worried more without the sirens and the blackout than when we banded together in the dark, fearing the worst every evening. My parents decided not to leave my great-grandmother’s apartment. Better to stay together, everyone said.

  Then came rumors of the expulsion of some French and British nationals, and other rumors followed of the summary nationalization of factories, businesses, homes, bank accounts. It was said the fate of the Jews would be no different. We worried. Even my great-grandmother began to talk of moving to France. But she would have to take Latifa, she said.

  Anticipating the worst, everyone in the family spent the ensuing weeks shopping for things we could afford in Egypt but might find expensive in Europe. Since the period in question coincided with Christmas, the frantic, heady rhythm of shopping cast a holiday spell on our days.

  I remember the joy of those December mornings when my mother and I stepped out into the crisp, clean, foggy air of Rue Thèbes as we rushed to catch the tram at Sporting, meeting Aunt Flora a few stations up and spending the rest of the morning going from one shop to the next.

  Store windows were heavily decorated with gift-wrapped boxes, tinsel, and fake snow, with Merry Christmas and Joyeux Noël written in thick cotton letters glued to the back of display windows. The smell of pine hung over every floor of Hannaux and Chalon. At Hannaux, a bearded Santa sat me on his lap and asked whether I had been a good boy. I told him yes, except for the time when I played with the lights during an air raid. He said I need not worry, the war was over. “Ne mens jamais, never lie,” he urged, waving a finger. He let me down, and an Arab boy took my place. Santa spoke Arabic too.

  Both my mother and Flora bought woolen clothing. Winters were fierce in Europe, and they both agreed it was wise to stock up. We bought three very large thick wool blankets, one for each of us. When they were delivered at Sporting early that afternoon, my father screamed, saying that each blanket was so huge it would take up an entire suitcase all to itself. My grandmother agreed with my father. But then she touched the wool and said it would last a lifetime, a good purchase, she would buy one herself. These blankets were impossible to come by in France.

  Meanwhile, Latifa was on morphine all the time. Moments after the injection, she would lie down and, eyes wide open, stare at the ceiling, drooling a bit from the corner of her mouth, a dreamy sigh wheezing out of her half-pursed lips each time she breathed. She would bring her right palm to her chest, slowly pick up some imaginary object there with her fingers, and then, raising the same arm as though pointing to the ceiling, offer to the lamp the clump of air she had just picked from her chest. This went on for hours every afternoon. No one knew why she persisted in this silent mummery, or whether it had any meaning whatsoever. My grandmother eventually brought my mother into the maid’s room and asked her about Latifa’s gestures. My mother understood them immediately. She is offering her soul to God. She is asking God to take her. She wants to die.

  Latifa’s son finally came one afternoon. He was let into his mother’s room by Abdou, who stood watch outside in case the young man decided to wander about and pilfer things in the apartment. He was sixteen but looked no older than twelve, and wore Western clothes. I saw him come in from where I was sitting in the family room.

  “Who is it?” whispered my great-grandmother.

  “Latifa’s son.”

  “And what does he want?”

  Overhearing this exchange, my grandmother put aside her needlepoint and went to meet him. She knocked at the karakib door, walked in, and said she was enchantée to meet him. The young man simply stared at my grandmother and, at his mother’s prompting, finally stood up to offer her the only chair in the room, which she refused. He nevertheless remained standing, shifting about nervously, finally locking his hands over his groin.

  “You will talk to your mother now. Then you will come and see me,” she said leaving the room.

  A few minutes later, the maid’s door squeaked open and the irresolute boy came out, his hands still locked over his groin. I looked at his face to see if he had cried. He looked calm, almost bored. He had not cried.

  “I have talked to my mother,” he said, remembering my grandmother’s exact words.

  “Come, then,” she said, as the boy reluctantly approached the family room. He had probably never been in a living room before in his life and was intimidated by the apartment, the faces, the prying eyes.

  “Your mother tells me you steal,” said my grandmother. “Is that true?”

  The boy did not answer.

  “Answer me!” she said.

  The boy shook his head, then bit his lip and said, “Yes.”

  “Do you want to go to jail?”

  He did not answer.

  “Don’t you know it is wrong to steal? Do you know what they do to people who steal? They bind your feet together, pull them up, and beat them till you can’t even stand when you go to the bathroom. My brother Isaac was very angry when he heard that Latifa’s son is a thief, and next time we hear it, he will tell the king, and they will come and put you in jail.”

  She had almost believed it herself.

  The boy stood expressionless and said nothing.

  “Now, go home. Then, I want you to go to my son’s factory tomorrow. He will give you a job.”

  Latifa must have heard my grandmother’s diatribe, for as soon as her son opened the door to her room to say goodbye again, I heard her bless my grandmother. He stepped into her room again and before shutting the door made an obscene gesture.

  Two days later, Latifa died. My mother and I had left the house to go shopping that morning. Before leaving she had asked me
to wait outside the karakib door while she gave Latifa her daily injection. But I felt something was different. There was a flurry about the servants’ quarters, and Abdou’s eyes were bloodshot. When I asked him, he shook his head and made a gesture to signify that only Allah knew.

  We returned from shopping earlier than planned. As soon as we arrived at our building and took the elevator, I heard screams such as I had never heard in my life. When we opened the door, everyone at home was in tears, including my great-grandmother, who had finally realized what had happened. The screaming was coming from the service entrance. My grandmother told me in Ladino not to go into the kitchen, but I immediately disobeyed her. When I opened the pantry door, the screaming suddenly grew louder. I stepped into the kitchen and saw Latifa’s body laid out on the table. Abdou and Ibrahim were wrapping it up from head to foot in what looked like gray sackcloth, while neighboring servants stood about the service door to see her for the last time. They looked at me but said nothing, though I sensed they disapproved. I did not move from the doorway. Then Hisham, who despite his missing arm was the strongest of the three, hoisted her up on his shoulder and proceeded to carry her down the service stairway.

  As he started down the stairs with the body, I heard the screams soar into an almost predatory chorus of piercing shrieks echoing in the inner courtyard. All the maids in the building were leaning out of windows, waving handkerchiefs, sometimes two or three women crammed in one window, howling after Latifa, begging her to come back, imploring Hisham, as was the custom, not to take her away from them, not to take her away, some even tearing the clothes they were wearing, slapping their faces, banging their heads against the wall, screaming, “Ya Latifa! Ya Latifa!”

  The next day, my grandmother asked to take me for a walk. We went to Petit Sporting, bought a penny’s worth of roasted peanuts coated with salt, and ended up in Ibrahimieh. From there we headed to Rue Memphis, where we met a lame beggar sitting on the curb of a sidewalk. “Here, give him these,” said my grandmother, handing me a few coins. “For Latifa’s soul,” she added. We paid a short visit to her old house, which she had recently rented to a Copt family. I waited outside while she went in to pick up an envelope. A boy immediately came out and stood without saying a word, eyeing me suspiciously.

  Then we walked across the street to visit the Saint. She looked tired and sad, said she had not slept in over a week. The government had just frozen all of their assets; their son and his family, who were French nationals, had already received their expulsion notices. Her turn was sure to come soon. Meanwhile, she just hoped her husband had a way of finding money, because otherwise there wouldn’t be any left to buy food or pay the servants.

  “But I did not know you were French,” interrupted the Princess.

  “We’re as French as you are Italian, Madame Esther. A lot of good that does us!”

  “At least Italian Jews are allowed to remain,” answered the Princess. I had heard her say to Uncle Nessim, “Thank God we’re Italian.”

  The Saint was beside herself; she might never see her son or granddaughters again. Whoever wanted to go to France? Why couldn’t they stay in Egypt, even as paupers?

  The two ladies bid each other a happy Chanukah.

  That evening before dinner, Cousin Arnaut welcomed the possibility of expulsion from Egypt, saying that we should all move to an equally large apartment in Paris and, from there, “start again.” No one had died, no one was hurt, and no one was too old to start anew, he said, as though enumerating the positives. Uncle Nessim stared at his mother and at my grandmother, saying nothing. Nor would anyone be allowed to starve in France, continued Cousin Arnaut. After all, everyone knew someone who was somebody in Paris, and if we didn’t, we had the looks and the talents to aspire to any circle of our choosing.

  But this was a counterfeit Vili speaking. Elsa and Nessim had determined they weren’t budging for the moment. My father, too, refused to go. Business couldn’t be better, he said. His now ranked among the best textile mills in Egypt. He was thinking of building another factory in Cairo. “Build one on Mount Etna too,” said my great-grandmother.

  A totally unexpected event occurred during dinner. A siren suddenly started to wail. Everyone froze on the spot. “This time it’s an atomic war, I know it,” whimpered Aunt Marta, bursting into tears as she buried her head in her son’s chest. No sooner was the siren heard than the lights began to go out in clusters all over Sporting. People were running down the street screaming “Taffi al-nur! Taffi al-nur!” all over again. “But the war’s been over for weeks now,” protested Dr. Alcabès, who was visiting that evening. “It’s a hoax, keep the lights on, I say.”

  “Ben, we don’t want trouble—let’s turn off the lights,” said my grandmother.

  “It’s a hoax all the same. They’re doing something under cover of darkness and they don’t want anyone to know.”

  Out came the kerosene light. Aunt Elsa pulled the curtains over the windows of the living room, shut all the doors, and thanked her frugal good instincts for not removing the sheets of blue paper that had lined our windows only a week or two earlier.

  Presently, we began to hear a strange rumble, not of distant antiaircraft guns, as I suspected at first, but of armored vehicles and many, many trucks being mysteriously convoyed through Alexandria. At one point our house began to tremble under the loud jolts of tanks thudding and whining their way past Rue Delta onto Avenue Ambroise Rally.

  “What did I tell you,” said Dr. Alcabès, who was peeking through the opening between the curtains. “This has nothing to do with air raids. They’re redeploying men elsewhere and they don’t want anyone to know it. I bet you these trucks are filled with prisoners and wounded soldiers whom the Israelis have just released, and now they’re being ferried back home under cover of darkness.”

  I noticed it was growing progressively darker in the dining room as the pungent odor of burning oil rose from the everfeeble wick in the kerosene lamp. My father had noticed the same thing, for he said, “Elsa, next time, please, a bit more oil in the lamps, at least to tide us over an entire meal.”

  I knew then that as soon as the pounding noise of engines receded, we would hear the all clear, and everyone in the neighborhood and everyone in the room would heave a sigh of relief and finally turn on the lights. If only we could have five, ten more minutes in the dark together. I didn’t even mind not seeing well, and I suspected that no one, including my father, would have cared much if we went on with our meal in the dark, now that our eyes had gotten used to it.

  I would miss these nights, I thought, not the war itself but the blackout, not my uncles or my aunts but the velvety hush of their voices when we turned off the lights and drew closer to the radio, almost whispering our thoughts in the dark, as though the enemy were listening in on us as well. It was the blackout that spelled our evenings together, lengthening our dinners because it was so dark in the dining room we could hardly see what we were eating and were forced to eat slowly. The blackout interrupted tea, cards, conversations, quarrels, crying, visits, only to confer upon our lives a ceremonial, almost liturgical air sanctified by the smell of kerosene and burning oil which hovered over our evenings like incense.

  “Latifa!” called my great-grandmother. She wanted more biscuits.

  “Poor Latifa is gone,” said my grandmother.

  “But where could she have gone to at this time of the night?” she asked.

  A week later, several members of the family were expelled from Egypt.

  Three months after that, four more left voluntarily.

  Followed almost immediately by six others. Everyone settled in France.

  Eighteen months later, the Saint and her husband left for France as well.

  By then only eight of us remained: Aunt Elsa, Aunt Flora, the Princess, Uncle Nessim, my great-grandmother, and us.

  “Poor Latifa would have laughed,” said Aunt Elsa. The muchvaunted apartment in Paris on which Cousin Arnaut had pinned so much hope turned
out to be a studio on the fifth floor of an elaborate fin-de-siècle building on Avenue Georges Mandel—a glorified maid’s room. There was no elevator in the building, and the stairway got narrower and steeper with each floor, the marble steps turning to stone after the fourth, and from stone to squeaking, sunken wood planks after the sixth. Here, I had come from America one Christmas morning in the early seventies to visit my grandmother and Aunt Elsa. We ate lunch in a makeshift dining room separated from what was to be my cot for the night by a fuchsia Art Deco folding screen.

  A dense gray sky lowered over an empty Paris, presaging more rain. It might even snow, said my aunt. Not a sound along the avenue, the unmistakable silence of Parisian Sunday afternoons settling everywhere upon the neighborhood. I heard a Peugeot roar to a stop outside. I looked down. A couple stepped out of a taxi carrying wrapped boxes. Long Christmas luncheons, I thought.

  After eating, we moved to what they had nicknamed the petit salon, another part of the same room, separated by a wood partition. Aunt Elsa offered me an English cigarette from a green tin box, then a cup of Turkish coffee, and we crossed our legs as we sat and spoke, mostly about America. “Man is like a bird, one day he’s here, another there,” said my grandmother, invoking a familiar Turkish parable concerning a certain very lazy sultan who after years spent sitting on one end of his sofa suddenly decides to move to the other end. It meant that despite appearances, people seldom migrate very far, that things hardly change, that life always comes to the same.

  We sat awhile after coffee, until they remembered I was jetlagged. I said it didn’t matter. They offered to let me nap on the sofa, saying they had to mend a dress of Aunt Elsa’s and that I could use the time to doze off awhile. I leaned back on the sofa, and they began to whisper, and I thought I heard someone remove my ashtray and my cup of coffee, and soon I made out the discreet and ever-distant patter of a hand-cranked sewing machine smuggling hurried stitches in between long pauses followed by querulous little-old-lady whispers in a language I had not heard in years and whose hushed, spiteful hisses, punctuated by the sputtering old Singer, took me back to the winter of 1956, when all the women in the household, fearing they might have to leave Egypt on a day’s notice, massed around the only sewing machine at Sporting, taking grudging turns to make or mend clothes for their families.