by André Aciman
When I awoke it was almost evening. We went for a walk on Avenue Henri Martin, past Lamartine’s fountain, reaching the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. Did I want to cross the street into the Bois, lovely toward sunset, asked my aunt as she scanned the gray, sodden landscape whose bare trees made me think of cold Corot winters in La Ville d’Avray. Maybe on our next walk, I answered. I had never seen Paris so empty. Christmas, they explained.
When we reached the corner of the street, on a whim, I touched the outstretched hand of Rodin’s statue of Victor Hugo. “Never loved Hugo,” said Aunt Elsa, looking at the bearded poet. Then she started to talk of old Signor Ugo, who had become an Egyptian citizen in the hope of spending his remaining years in Egypt. “Even became a Moslem, calls himself Hag Gabalzahri,” said Aunt Elsa. “He teaches yoga to officers of the Egyptian army.” “But what a survivor.” “Not a survivor, a chameleon.” “An opportunist.” “A madman,” they agreed.
As it got dark, we walked back by way of Avenue Victor Hugo and stopped in a café. It was mostly empty, and as soon as they saw the old ladies they brought us tea. My grandmother ordered an almond pastry, which she insisted was for me. “You used to like these so much,” she said. I replied I would eat only half, but as we talked, I ended up eating the whole thing. There was something warm and snug about the empty café on Christmas Day, and, looking at the two old women, who had finally managed to take off their thick wool coats without my help, I wanted to hold their hands and promise them many, many things.
Soon, the place began to fill and more voices could be heard around us, many speaking Spanish or Portuguese—servants in the Seizième Arrondissement.
Across the street, families were already standing in line outside the Cinema Victor Hugo. A group came and sat next to our table and ordered Ricards.
“Do you want to go to the movies tonight?” suggested Aunt Elsa.
I shook my head. They said they went once a week, pour se dégourdir, to brighten up a bit.
When it was time to pay, Aunt Elsa said she would pay for her share—roughly a third of the check. Outraged, my grandmother told her she didn’t need her third, or her fourth, or her sixteenth! She would pay for the whole thing herself. Aunt Elsa would have none of it, and opened her purse, seizing coins of various sizes, which she counted awkwardly with wrinkled, arthritic fingers.
“I don’t want your centimes, keep them for your heirs,” barked my grandmother to her sister, who had never had children.
As each struggled furiously to put on her coat and be the first to leave the establishment, the venom between the two nonagenarians reached such a peak that my grandmother lost her patience and told her sister she could no longer live with her. She was tired of eating as though they might starve the next day—especially since they had so very few days left in the first place. “Speak for yourself,” snapped Elsa, reminding her sister that she was fully aware I had brought her a dozen Oral B toothbrushes from America and not one of them had she offered to give her. “You may say you’re going to die soon, but when it comes to giving me a toothbrush, you act as though you’re going to outlive ten sets of dentures.”
So saying, Aunt Elsa crossed the empty street and began walking home on the opposite sidewalk of Rue Longchamps. I shuttled between them, but they refused to make up, each saying it was up to the other to apologize. When I delivered the negative report from one sister to the other, each had only one thing to add: “Let her croak.”
We returned home in time for their television show. They made up when Aunt Elsa tripped against the foot of a chair. “She’s almost blind,” whispered my grandmother. “You ask why I won’t leave her. She’s got no one.” We had yogurt, jam, and cheese, à l’américaine—that is, in front of the television.
I looked out the window and followed a long, revolving beam traveling above the city and lighting up a smokey, pinkish trail in the sky. “The Eiffel Tower,” said Aunt Elsa who had come up to the window and was leaning against me. “She’s beginning to forget,” she whispered. “She thinks I haven’t noticed. She’s got no one, either.”
Later that evening, both sisters made me promise not to do anything lavish or elaborate when the time came. Feeling awkward, I smiled and promised and was trying to brush off the subject until I realized that what they meant was centennials. “Those days are long gone. Small visits are all we ask.”
When I returned twenty years later, with my wife, the city had hardly changed. I still remembered the station names; the café on Avenue Victor Hugo was the same; and the shop on the Faubourg Saint Honoré where my grandmother had bought me a tie was still there, except much bigger and filled with Japanese tourists. The Victor Hugo movie theater had disappeared. In the old café around the corner, we ordered a café crême and a ham sandwich each.
Avenue Georges Mandel was quiet in the early evening. As we neared the corner where Aunt Elsa had lived, her building suddenly came into view.
I pointed upstairs and showed my wife the window from which Aunt Elsa had thrown her husband’s pipe on New Year’s Eve to make a wish. I showed her the building nearby where Maria Callas had lived. They had spoken in Greek to her, corrected her Greek once.
We took pictures. Of the building. Of me standing in front of the building. Of her taking pictures of me standing in front of the building. She asked again which floor they had lived on. The fifth, I said. We looked up. The windows of Aunt Elsa’s studio were unlit and the shutters drawn. Of course they’re unlit, no one’s home, I thought to myself. They’ve been dead for twenty years! But then, the apartment couldn’t have stayed empty for so many years; surely it belonged to someone else. I seemed to recall that Vili himself had sold it. Still, what if it had never changed hands in all these years, if nothing had changed, if no one had even picked up the fork or touched the cardigan Aunt Elsa let fall before being rushed to the hospital on the night she died? What if her furniture and her china and her clothes and everything she hoarded throughout her life kept vigil for her and remained forever and only hers by dint of the life she had spun around them?
And for a moment I thought that this might also be true of the apartment on Rue Thèbes, that after sixty years with us it could never belong to anyone else and would be forever ours. I wanted to think that it, too, remained exactly the way we left it, that no one cried or quarreled there, that dust collected in the corners, that children were never allowed to scream as they sprinted past the junk room where Flora loved, Vili wept, and Latifa died.
I looked up again. The windows next to Aunt Elsa’s dark studio were aglow. I could see a shadow move from the kitchen to what must have been the dining area. It turned to the window, looked out for a moment, and then turned back. The neighbor who had once complained I wasted too much water when bathing was still alive, then.
But I was wrong. After so many years, I had mistaken the windows. The old stingy neighbor lived behind the dark shutters; the windows that were lit were Aunt Elsa’s after all. So she is home, I started, almost allowing myself to rejoice at the thought.
“Didn’t you ever want to go upstairs to visit?” asked my wife.
I could almost imagine them looking down from the fifthfloor landing, waiting for us at the end of the stairwell, and in typical Sephardi fashion speaking their joy by complaining first: “Is it now that you finally deign to visit us?” “Twenty years, that’s forever.” “An offering, a prayer, something for us to go on. Instead, nothing!” “That’s what comes of living in New York.” “Enough, Elsa. The important thing is he’s here now.”
I pictured them fretting about the kitchen to improvise a makeshift dinner despite my protestations that we had just eaten. “You should have warned us.” “But we’re not hungry.” “How could you not be hungry?”—my wife tapping me on the arm, saying “Let them,” almost amused at these distant relatives, dusted off from an ancient find.
Then, realizing it was all hopeless anyhow, that there was no use pretending, “You’re too late,” they say, with old
age straining their voices. “And we’re terribly sorry,” they add in good socialite French, as if we had come at the wrong hour and had just missed late-afternoon tea.
5
The Lotus-Eaters
It had taken my parents three years to find their jewel in Cleopatra. Life at Smouha after the 1956 war had become too unsafe, and so unsavory, they said—too many vagrants, too much dust, so few Europeans. And late at night, Smouha could turn quite eerie, especially when you heard the drone of ongoing rallies with loudspeakers squawking the latest propaganda. What my parents looked for, and eventually found, was an apartment near Sporting facing the sea on one side and the vast banana plantations of Smouha on the other.
My father was delighted with the study, my mother with the balcony; Om Ramadan was ecstatic about the laundry room; there was even a small room for my new Greek governess, Madame Marie. “What a fabulous home,” said the Princess when she came to visit and managed to get lost in the corridor. “How did you ever find it?” My mother said it was the simplest thing in the world: the Venturas, longtime friends of her parents, had finally decided to leave Egypt and were desperate to sell their apartment.
One evening, shortly after we moved in, our dining room was littered with large sheets of sturdy cobalt-blue paper which Abdou had brought from my great-grandmother’s house. “They never throw away anything over there,” my mother had said. Madame Marie, my mother, and Aziza were busily cutting the large blue sheets in four to cover all of my books and notebooks as school regulations required. Someone had telephoned from school complaining that I did not keep my notebooks in good order. Two weeks later the same teacher called again saying that the issue was not just one of neatness—as Abdou, who had taken the call the first time, had erroneously reported to my mother—but one of conformity, of having each book and notebook bound like everyone else’s in class.
A label bearing my full name, properly capitalized, was to be glued to the front of each notebook to indicate the subject, year, class, and volume. The blue paper, moreover, had to be tucked in—tightly—not glued with gummed paper. My mother had no patience with these British-school niceties and wanted to stick the label on the top right-hand corner, as was done in French schools. I insisted that the label had to be placed in the middle of the cover. Would beige paper do? she had first asked. No, it had to be blue, everyone used blue. This was when Abdou remembered the blue paper at Rue Thèbes. He took off his apron, walked to Sporting, and was back in an hour.
“I can’t believe you waited over a month to tell us about this,” said my father, joining the women after work and helping them cover my books while Madame Marie cut the paper. “How could you forget?”
I hadn’t forgotten.
“Then why are we doing it at the last minute?” he asked.
I didn’t know why. Maybe because I thought we’d soon be leaving Egypt and so none of this mattered.
My father, however, did not want to leave, and to prove the point had added another floor to his factory, invested in several apartments, commissioned new furniture, and, to cap his list of fantasies, had enrolled me, when I turned nine, in what throughout his early years in Egypt had always seemed an exclusive institution incarnating the very peak of British splendor: Victoria College.
Victoria College—renamed Victory College after the “victory” of the Egyptian forces over Britain, France, and Israel in 1956—was once the pride of the British Empire’s educational system. Like other famous British public schools, it was a huge compound boasting large, well-trimmed playing fields and an imposing quadrangle, and was governed by a code of discipline that would have left Matthew Arnold’s father, the stout, snub-nosed headmaster of Browning College, thrilled with depraved ecstasy.
English writers, philosophers, and mathematicians had once flocked to teach at VC. Wealthy Britons used to send their sons there, and Alexandria’s elite consistently favored VC over the Lycée Français. Everything at VC was marked by spare, Victorian elegance, from the dark interiors that recalled the brooding opulence of its founders, down to the mournful, petty faces of its teachers, who couldn’t wait to do to children what had probably been done to them for too many years.
Aside from that, however, the British legacy had been reduced to a handful of meaningless features: atrocious food; a reluctance to adopt anything too visibly modern; a ban on chewing gum and ballpoint pens; a gray uniform with navy piping around the edges of the blazer; an obstinate resistance to all types of Americanisms, especially soft drinks; compulsory gymnastics; corporal punishment; and, above all, awe before any form of authority, including the janitor’s. My father, who had never set foot in a British school, and who in typical Sephardi fashion would have given anything to live his life all over again provided it started in an English public school, revered this caricature of Victorian austerity for its enviable aversion to all types of sissy comforts. It made gentlemen out of bullies, and men out of frail, pale-faced boys. It made England England. To his mind, VC was peopled by fair-haired, blue-eyed boys who would one day go to Cambridge and Oxford and rise to the helm of all the great banks and all the great nations that ruled the world. What he failed to notice during our tour of the prestigious institution, one summer day when the school was totally empty, was that VC had essentially become an Arab school wearing the tattered relics of British garb.
After its renaming, VC had fallen on sad days. With the departure of most British nationals, it had become a boarding school for rich Palestinians, Kuwaitis, and Saudis. The rising Egyptian middle class sent all of its firstborn sons there, as did rustic landowners from the Nile Valley and prosperous town mayors. Though VC was still regarded as an English-speaking school, outside of class no one spoke English. One language was favored: Arabic. In class, when a teacher was unable to explain 2πr in English, his speech, which was mostly pidgin to start with, would invariably revert to Arabic. Europeans, Armenians, and Christian Syrians—there were six of us in my class—usually spoke French among themselves. Charlie Atkinson, who didn’t know French, was the last remaining English boy in the entire school. I was the last Jew.
Although by 1960 the study of Arabic had become mandatory for all foreign residents, explanations in Arabic did not much help European boys. Very few of us understood a word of classical or formal spoken Arabic. All we knew was street Egyptian, a sort of diluted, makeshift lingua franca that Egyptians spoke with Europeans. When Mohammed, our servant, telephoned early one morning from the hospital asking to be given the day off because his son had been run over by a truck, he told me, “Al bambino bita Mohammed getu morto,” meaning, “The son belonging to Mohammed has become dead,” adding, “Bokra lazem congé alashan lazem cimetière,” meaning, “Tomorrow he needed holiday because cemetery was needed.” This was not even spoken Egyptian, but in its garbled mixture of French, Italian, and Arabic, it allowed Europeans who never cared to learn Arabic to communicate with the local population.
The little Arabic I knew I had learned at our service-entrance door, which stood wide open on those warm Ramadan evenings in the spring when cooks and servants from up and down our building at Cleopatra would gather around our kitchen, idling away the minutes as they waited for the loud cannon shot from the harbor announcing the time for devout Moslems to eat after the long day’s fast. They would not speak our lingua franca among themselves, but in my presence their conversation would automatically devolve into what could only have seemed a form of baby talk, though it was peppered with light, bawdy notes hovering over their speech like an impudent, spirited sneer.
Om Ramadan would come in and sit in the kitchen with Abdou and Aziza. Fawziah, our next-door neighbor’s maid, would also step out of her kitchen and come into ours, and sometimes all three would sit in the early evening as Abdou sorted the rice or shelled peas amidst the yell of delivery boys running up and down the stairwell and the clatter of plates and cooking utensils. I loved their gossip—pure, malevolent, petty gossip—their complaints, complaints about one anothe
r behind one another’s back, about their bosses, my mother, her screaming, complaints about their sons who had turned to crime, about health, disease, death, scandal, housing, poverty, and aching bones. Rumatizm, rheumatism—or, as Fawziah would say, maratizm, which sent everyone laughing each time, because, corrupted into maraftizu, it meant something obscene having to do with women and buttocks.
Sometimes with Abdou, Hisham, and Fawziah, I would sit on a fourth stool, while Abdou clipped away at his large toenails with giant chicken shears, and Fawziah, sitting with the open kitchen door swinging between her knees, drummed elaborate rhythms on both sides of it, tapping away with such speed that it drove our one-armed Hisham to stand up and imitate the vibrant hip twirls of a third-rate belly dancer. Everyone laughed, including Hisham, and we begged him to dance again, the three of us coaxing him with renewed drumming on the kitchen table. To practice that rhythm, I had once tapped it on our dining table, a sound my grandmother found totally revolting and which confirmed all the more the sentiment that I should no longer be allowed to grow up in Egypt. “We must send him to a boarding school in England,” she said.