Out of Egypt: A Memoir

by André Aciman

  Everyone seemed to agree, including my parents and Aunt Flora.

  “He doesn’t know how to say two words without mumbling, he has no table manners to speak of, and, to be perfectly candid, Henri,” continued Uncle Nessim that same evening, “his English is unacceptable.”

  “I don’t see how I can write Vili and ask him to host the boy for a summer,” added Aunt Elsa. “He’s simply not fit to go.”

  Miffed by her sister’s rebuke, my grandmother reminded everyone that I, at least, attended the famed Victoria College —but without failing to add that, of course, she, too, disapproved of these kitchen-sink fréquentations with Arab servants. And turning to Madame Marie—her spy, as my mother called her—she would beg her to wean me away from these people. Madame Marie, who held Arabs in the utmost contempt, except when she ventured into the service stairway to ask one of them for a cigarette, couldn’t agree more. “Even dogs bark at Arabs,” she would say.

  In turn, everyone in the stairwell never stopped making fun of her. To irritate her further, one of the servants in the building kept repeating a short rhyming couplet ridiculing the Greeks of Egypt. The first line was in Greek, the second in Arabic:

  Ti kanis? Ti kanis?

  Bayaa makanis.

  [How are you? How are you?

  You seller of broomsticks.]

  Unruffled by my new Arab fréquentations, however, my father claimed they were as good a way as any to learn Arabic. “He knows every cook and servant in our building,” he told our guests, the way he would brag that I knew the name of every Greek god and goddess—a revelation that brought no end of sorrow to both Aunt Elsa and Uncle Nessim when they found out that I knew all about Ares and Aphrodite but had never heard of Cain and Abel.

  “He doesn’t even know the story of Abraham and Isaac, let alone the crossing of the Red Sea,” Elsa reported incredulously during our first seder at Cleopatra.

  “What are we, then, pagans?” interjected Uncle Nessim.

  “Madame Marie, you must promise to do something to save this child. Will you promise us that?” said my grandmother.

  Madame Marie, who was so happy to have finally been spoken to in the course of the meal, beamed with pleasure, and promised that everyone could count on her. “Si fidi di me, signora, trust me,” she said in Italian, seemingly forgetting that my mother did not know a word of Italian.

  “Bless you, my dear,” said my grandmother.

  “Salud y berakhá,” echoed my great-grandmother.

  At which Uncle Nessim, who had picked up his Haggadah, began leafing through its pages and resumed his recitation. At a sign given by Aunt Elsa, everyone stood up, including Madame Marie, who had been invited to the seder because my grandmother thought it was too rude to send her home or make her stay in her room during dinner like a servant. Madame Marie, a devout Greek Orthodox from Smyrna, stood up and sat down, dipped her foods in all the requisite dishes and sauces, ate everything she saw us eat, and repeated “Amen” after everyone else, though with the guarded look of a missionary forced to down a tribal brew. Her biggest fear in working for a Jewish family was to be inadvertently converted to Judaism.

  “We say ‘Amen’ too,” she said, attempting to be cordial.

  “All religions say ‘Amen,’” replied my father.

  My father enjoyed teasing Madame Marie by saying that distinctions among religions were entirely superfluous, since we were all brothers under God, Jewish, Moslem, Greek Orthodox, no difference at all—particularly this year, as Passover, Easter, and Ramadan came within days of each other.

  “Indeed,” my father would say, “there is hardly any difference between Easter and Passover, seeing that the Greek word for Easter is paska, which in Italian is pasqua, which itself comes from the Hebrew word pesah. What do you think the Last Supper was, Madame Marie?”

  “It was Christ’s last meal.”

  “Yes, but what were the disciples doing when they gathered for the Last Supper?”

  “Eating, of course.”

  “Leave her alone,” said Aunt Elsa, who had read my father’s drift and rushed to Madame Marie’s defense. “What else were they to do but eat? Besides,” she added, fearful that I, the youngest and most susceptible, might turn into another freethinker, “Easter is one thing, Passover another.” Her curt, peremptory air was meant to rescue Madame Marie from my father as well as to put him in his place for linking the two religions.

  “I give up,” said my father, probably forgetting that everyone had already had the same conversation about the Last Supper that Easter. This time, however, Madame Marie was not about to let him repeat those scurrilous lies about Jesus being Jewish.

  “All I know,” she explained, “is what my mother taught me when I was a little girl. If Jesus and his disciples were doing anything else during the Last Supper, I don’t want to hear it.”

  A fervent believer, Madame Marie was so moved by the Passion of Christ that she wept all through Easter, often speaking of the nails that had gone through the hands of young Jesus and of the crown of thorns he wore as he hobbled up via crucis with this terrible weight on his shoulders and no one there to help him. She cried when she would shut herself in our dark living room early every afternoon and listen to the Greek Orthodox program on the radio, humming along with the liturgy as she began to weep, and weep, and weep some more, her tears spilling over our Grundig, which she would dab with her kerchief, as if the radio itself were an equally devout companion whose tears she understood fully and wished to comfort. She had even cried during the Greek news broadcast and the “Greek Children’s Hour.”

  Madame Marie was also a staunch churchgoer and frequently took me along to cry some more and light votive tapers in memory of her brother, Petro, who, now that he was there (which she would say pointing an index finger to the flaky ceiling of the church), perhaps might intercede on her behalf and help persuade her landlord to allow her to install a much larger pigeon coop on the terrace. When you lit the taper you were not to think of the pigeon coop. Sometimes she lit many candles, not because it reinforced her wish but because she had caught herself thinking each time of the pigeon coop, which automatically invalidated her wish. So she would try again. Each taper cost a piaster, the equivalent of half a penny. Sometimes, satisfied with her prayers, she was on the verge of getting ready to leave the church when I would whisper timidly in her ear, “Madame Marie, light another one. I thought of the pigeon coop.”

  She loved pigeons, and nothing could distress her more than to think of Abdou cooking stuffed dove—an Egyptian delicacy and another source of chafing between them.

  “But they are so gentle, and they have no bile,” she would protest.

  He would say nothing and go on with the slaughter of the birds, which he performed the Jewish way: by slitting the dove’s neck—once, twice—with a very sharp knife. Then, releasing the bird, he would laugh as it flew and flounced about our kitchen, slamming into walls and kitchen cabinets, spattering blood everywhere. “It’s only a dove.”

  To bait her, Abdou, like my father, was in the habit of saying that all peoples, Christians, Moslems, Arabs, Greeks, Jews were the same to Allah. This would infuriate Madame Marie, who would refute Abdou’s claim with a dismissive gesture that reduced Islam to paltry business. And to prove that God was always on the side of Christians, she would tell everyone on the stairway that after the Turks had conquered Constantinople and turned the Hagia Sophia into a mosque, at night all the Greek religious murals which the Turks had painted over would seep through the infidel’s green dye and comfort the few Greeks who had bravely sneaked into the church. When the sultan heard of this he had all the Christians butchered and the icons scraped off the wall until nothing remained.

  Abdou shrugged away this tale with a nonchalant “Mush mumkin, not possible.”

  “And what about Saint George?” she rebutted, almost losing her temper, “Saint George who stopped my husband’s car in the middle of the desert road and warned him about his flat
tire?” Madame Marie believed in miracles. She had seen al-Afreet, the devil himself, once, and had even spoken with him when he came in the shape of Madame Longo’s parrot and had tried to mount her pigeons.

  “Kalam, kalam, words, words,” replied Abdou, knowing he was taunting the Greek fanatic by denigrating the two things she cherished most: her faith and her pigeons.

  Sometimes, unable to control herself, Madame Marie would explode and remind him that everyone would become Christian in the end. “Even Uncle Nessim, even Abdou, and Om Ramadan too,” she said, glorying in the final victory of Christ.

  “Rubbish,” Abdou would jeer.

  “Huh!” she exclaimed. “Pagans, all of you. First there was Noah, then Abraham, then Jacob, then Mohammed, and then came Christ.” She was getting all worked up and, extending her index finger and making a sweeping circular motion with her right arm, declaimed: “Wu baaden al-Messih getu kulu al-Chretiens.”

  At this, the servants on the stairwell broke up laughing, as did Abdou, Fawziah, and I. It was never clear what she intended to say, for her sentence meant either “After Christ, all the Christians came,” or “After Christ, everyone will become Christian.” But it was that supercilious circular motion of her arm, signifying the universe, that made us laugh each time we mimicked it. Within minutes that gesture had made its way into the annals of the courtyards of Cleopatra.

  When she caught me doing it, Madame Marie immediately threatened to tell my teachers.

  This was no laughing matter, for at VC, anything, even the loss of an insignificant personal item that had nothing to do with school, could be construed as an infraction, and for all infractions the penalty was invariably corporal punishment. There were gradations of corporal punishment, ranked by the severity of the crime or the whim of the teacher: first there was the teacher’s palm, with blows striking wherever they fell; then there was the ruler; then the stick; then the cane, the frightful kharazanah. Within each category there were refinements and variations worthy of the great Marquis himself: for example, one could be hit with the flat end of a ruler or with its metal edge; on one’s flattened palm or on the fingers; on one’s arms or one’s thighs; with a ridged cane or a flat cane; a wet or dry cane; and so on.

  I was hit on my very first day at VC. I was slapped in arithmetic for not multiplying 6 times 8 correctly and got five strikes with a ruler in Arabic class for misreading five words in a five-word sentence. Everyone had laughed. Then I was punished for not finishing my rice and not knowing how to peel a fresh date with a knife and fork. I was made to stand next to the table while everyone else continued eating in the large dining hall. I wanted to take my grandfather’s Pelikan pen and thrust it into the forehead of Miss Sharif, my Arabic teacher, who sat at the head of the table. At the end of my first day at school, when the school bus deposited me at our entrance at Cleopatra, I vomited the little I had eaten. I was immediately washed and put in bed. I said I had met five boys. All were European, all but one spoke French, all had warned me against speaking French.

  After being hit on the hands, students at VC would puff feverishly into their hollowed fists. I had done likewise. There was something soothing in the gesture. I had seen some puff even before being hit. That seemed to help too.

  In the first week, I was hit for saying I had a cold when all I wanted was to avoid undressing in front of the others before swimming class. I was the only circumcised European and I knew, without even being told by my father, that it was better not to let anyone know I was Jewish.

  I was hit for daydreaming, for talking in class, for ink stains left by my Pelikan. I was hit for trying to erase these stains. I was hit for failing to erase them. I spent more time rubbing out a misspelled word than I did trying to write a coherent sentence. I would wet the tip of an eraser with a touch of spit and then, by dint of persistent, delicate rubbing, would either end up making a hole in my notebook paper or dilute the ink until it left an even larger smudge. Permanent damage to your notebook meant you could be hit more than once for the same infraction, since Miss Sharif often forgot she had already punished you for a specific smudge or hole. Tearing the page out did not resolve matters at all; Miss Sharif counted the pages in everyone’s notebooks. Notebooks had thirty-two pages.

  Her arrival at a student’s desk would always signal danger. Unable to see more than a few inches beyond her nose, she would pick up your notebook and hold it up to her eyes, covering her face completely as she stood there, reading awhile, and then, all of a sudden, throw it back at you, hurling one insult after another, as slaps followed the notebook, and kicks the slaps. She threw everything at her pupils’ faces: books, chalk, blackboard erasers, pencil boxes, magazines, shrieking, “Oh, my sister!” before propelling her missiles. She even threw her handbag at me once. Then, of course, came the ruler—though, with me, Miss Sharif had decided that a larger instrument of pain had become necessary, which is why she used a double-decker wooden pencil box whenever she struck my hands.

  I was also hit for having dirty shoes. Shoes had to be shiny at VC, and our spontaneous morning soccer game in the fields left them dirty and caked with mud. As I soon learned, the easiest way to give them a semblance of polish during the headmistress’s inspection was to rub them furtively up and down my socks while standing at attention.

  Miss Badawi, the headmistress, would insist on inspecting our nails, our lockers, our pockets, our hair. Whenever I reported to my mother that someone at school had looked through my hair, she would immediately begin searching me for lice, for she suspected that schools never check students’ hair unless a lice epidemic was already under way. I remember how we had to hold our heads down as Miss Badawi or Miss Sharif or Miss Gilbertson, my English teacher, searched with their fingers and nails, raking our scalps, roughly. Aside from humiliating you in front of the whole class by announcing that you were a carrier of lice, they would immediately dispatch you to the school barber, who would shave your head so that every scar on your scalp showed. One day they shaved Charlie Atkinson, a lank, blond boy with wavy Rupert Brooke hair and the mildest of manners. He had walked out of the class with hair that caught the sun’s glare. When he returned, everyone burst into laughter. No one could have guessed how small Charlie’s head really was. The next day his father, a corpulent man in his sixties who had lost everything in Egypt but who had never wished to leave the country, stepped out of an immense old Cadillac and, holding his bald son by the hand, walked to Miss Badawi’s office.

  Everyone knew he had come to complain of the injustice committed against his son, and while Miss Gilbertson was busy teaching us grammar, we kept our ears wide open, our hearts pounding so loud that we could not even speak in full sentences when called upon. We heard nothing. Everyone thought the worst. Ten minutes later, there was a knock at the door. Miss Gilbertson, who hated having her class interrupted, barked, “Come in.” It was Charlie. He apologized for being late and tiptoed over to his desk. He sat down quietly and seemed about to open his book to the page being studied in class when, to everyone’s total amazement, he committed the ultimate sin: he lifted wide the cover of his desk. With mischievous relish, Miss Gilbertson was already going over to administer a hiding with her ruler when a voice at the door halted her. It was Miss Badawi. Next to her stood Atkinson Senior. In our excitement, we had failed see them.

  Meanwhile, Charlie emptied his desk as fast as he could, stuffing his books, pencil box, and notebooks into his gym bag. Quietly, as if he had rehearsed his steps so often that he no longer had to give them a second thought, he went over to his locker at the back of the room and opened it with his key, emptying its contents into his bag and pockets. Then, taking out his invincible padded Ping-Pong paddles, the likes of which were no longer available in Egypt, he shouted in an exhilarated, shrill voice, “Who wants these?” Mass hysteria suddenly broke out, and everyone, without thinking of who was or wasn’t watching, shouted a frenzied “I do!” Charlie threw one paddle and then the other into the center of the room. A
mad rush ensued, with everyone falling on Amr, whose desk happened to be in the middle of the room, and who didn’t understand what was happening because he didn’t know a word of English.

  Then Charlie Atkinson walked out. He was last seen standing with his father waiting for their chauffeur to drive around the quadrangle and pick them up.

  A month later they shaved Daniel Biagi’s head.

  Then came Osama al-Basha’s turn. Though his father was Egyptian, Osama’s mother couldn’t have been more British. Osama himself looked typically English, spoke with a perfect accent, and, for fun sometimes, would raise his voice to the pitch of Laurence Olivier, whom he also resembled. He could hardly say a sentence in Arabic. He too was pulled out of Victory College after his haircut.

  I knew my turn would come.

  One day I handed my father a note from my Arabic teacher that I had been carrying in my briefcase for over a week. Father looked at the date on the neatly handwritten French note and asked me if I had been concealing it from him. I said I had forgotten all about it. Predictably, the note complained that I never did my homework, that I never paid attention in class, and that I was bound to repeat the entire grade.

  My father took me into the living room and asked me why I never did my Arabic homework.

  I didn’t know why I never did my Arabic homework.

  “You don’t know?” he asked.

  I didn’t know.

  “Have you ever done Arabic homework?” he asked, as though out of casual curiosity. I thought about the matter for a moment and suddenly realized that indeed I had never done Arabic homework at VC.

  “Not once?” he asked sarcastically.

  “Not once,” I repeated, failing to see that his sarcasm was aimed at me, not at the idea of having to do homework in Arabic.

  My father called in Madame Marie. After shutting the glass door, he began to berate her for not making certain I did my homework. She let him scream, but when he called her an ignorant fool, she slumped into a chair and urged him not to say such things in front of the child. Not even her mother had called her names, and it wasn’t likely that at forty she was going to allow anyone to do so.