by André Aciman
To my surprise, I did not get the stick; instead, Miss Badawi called home and announced that I was suspended from school for the day. My mother and Madame Marie hopped into a cab and were there to pick me up in less than half an hour. With Madame Marie as her interpreter, my mother apologized to Miss Badawi and promised that from now on I would have an Arabic tutor every day.
Outside school grounds, when she asked me why I had not studied the poem, I broke down and cried.
“We’re taking the tramway home,” she said.
We boarded the second-class car at the Victoria terminal and headed directly to the upper deck, all three of us crammed into a tiny space in the open-air porch to the right of the spiral staircase. Before boarding, my mother, a born and bred Alexandrian, remembered to buy heated peanuts for the ride. It was windy, and light gray patches hovered over what was sure to remain a bright, sunny day. From where we perched, I could see the stuccoed school turret rising above the dining hall where, at this time, my classmates were queuing up for lunch. I thought of the food, always the same cheap, nauseating, doughy rice laced with bits of meat. Someone in school had composed a little rhyme in Arabic, which, unlike every other Arabic poem I ever heard, I shall never forget:
Captain Toz,
akal al-lahma,
wu sab al roz.
[Captain Phooey
gobbled the meat
and left the rice.]
I almost laughed out loud as I thought of these words. I told my mother the words, for she had seen me smile and wanted to know why. She also remembered bad food from her boarding days at Madame Tsotsou’s and said she knew how cruel teachers could be. She laughed about Captain Toz, wondering how he managed to avoid the dread rice. At VC we had to eat everything on our plate. “Or else?” she asked. “They hit you very hard.” “We’ll see,” she said, dipping her fingers into the paper cone of peanuts.
The tram began to rumble and squeak. Soon it cleared the curve at Victoria and began to pick up speed to the next station.
“We won’t go home,” she said on impulse. “We’ll go downtown.”
This was a miracle. We were going to travel from one end of the city to the other, and eventually, after lunch, would have forgotten all about Miss Sharif and Miss Badawi and the paean to Arab unity. “Stop worrying so much!” said my mother when I kept asking about what she thought Miss Badawi might tell my father. She turned to her right and named the first station after Victoria, wearing that blithe, high-spirited, girlish smile that could infuriate my father when he was reporting gloomy news; then he’d call her the most irresponsible, selfish optimist he knew, because she refused to put on his frown and worry.
“This is Laurens,” she said, pointing to the next station, whose platform at that hour was silent and deserted. And before I knew it, she named all of the stations on the Victoria line, a litany of French, Greek, German, Arabic, and English names that are forever braided in my mind with the image of my mother riding up on the impériale, wearing sunglasses, her colored scarf and dark hair flying about her face against the backdrop of the sea, smoking a cigarette and trying as hard as she could to divert my mind from my worries at school. I would never forget their names: Sarwat, San Stefano, Zizinia, Mazloum, Glymenopoulo, Saba Pasha, Bulkley, Rouchdy, Moustafa Pasha, Sidi Gaber, Cleopatra, Sporting, Ibrahimieh, Camp de César, Chatby, Mazarita, Ramleh.
Nearing Rouchdy, I saw row upon row of ancient villas with large trees and gardens, some even with fountains. As the tram swerved and tilted to the left, I suddenly knew I had spotted the Montefeltro home. It, too, like so many others, had been converted into an Arab public school. Loud girls wearing khaki smocks swarmed about the garden. When I mentioned Signor Ugo to my mother, she said he had become a history teacher at the Lycée Saint Marc.
“We’ll go to the movies,” she said.
After Ramadan that year, my father decided to hire an Arabic tutor: Sheikh Abdel Naguib. All I remember was his extraordinarily smelly feet and his calloused hand resting on my thigh when he corrected my pronunciation of the Koran. He taught nothing but the Koran, and all he did each time was have me memorize one or two sections, or suras, though without ever bothering to explain them to me. My assignment was to copy suras many, many times every day.
Compared to Arabic class, nothing could have been more soothing than spending hours at my desk copying the same sura ten, twenty, thirty times while the April sun lingered on my notebook and cast a silent, peaceful spell in my room, gracing the wall, the books, my desk, my hand, and my copy of the Koran like a premonition of intense summer midday light, warm sea weather, and beach-house fellowship.
An old Matisse reproduction in my room beamed and beckoned in the morning light, and between the balusters lining the artist’s balcony in Nice were patches of blue—as always, the sea.
From Abdou’s kitchen came the scent of lime, melons, and overripe cucumber. Any day now, they’d pack everything, throw bedsheets over all the furniture, and off we’d go to our beach house at Mandara. “Lazem bahr,” Abdou had said, “we need the beach.” Ramadan always started one thinking of summer.
I worked away quietly, studiously, filled with the vacuous bliss of medieval scribes who put in a long day’s work at their desk without ever reading or understanding a word of what they’ve copied all day.
But Sheikh Abdel Naguib was not pleased at all. I had missed an entire verse each of the thirty times I had copied the same sura. “But couldn’t you tell the sura made no sense if you omitted this verse?” he asked, raising his voice, to which I would quietly, and respectfully, admit that I couldn’t, because, as was clear to everyone who knew me, I was totally incapable of understanding anything I was reading in Arabic unless it was explained to me first.
Sheikh Abdel Naguib doubled my homework during summer vacation at Mandara by having me copy each sura sixty times. On average, this would take an hour, especially if I calculated the number of lines needed for each sura and began copying the first word sixty times, then next to it the second word sixty times, then the third word sixty times, and so on. Madame Marie, who didn’t know whether my method for recopying the same sura was particularly edifying, would once in a while come into my room and observe my progress, and almost worry, “You’re working very, very hard.”
In the distance, I could make out the drone of the old Bedouin bagpipe player who would appear at around three as he trundled barefoot on the burning sandy roads of Mandara. Everyone referred to him as “the poor devil,” because he continued to wear the shredded remnants of his old British band uniform. After him came the beggar-and-baboon show. And after that, the garbagewoman, al zabbalah—or, in pidgin French, la zibalière—carrying a huge, stinking burlap bag filled with food that had been rotting for days in the heat, knocking at our door every afternoon asking for a glass of water as she stood outside, almost panting from the heat, saying, “Allah yisallimak, ya Abdou, may God save you, Abdou.”
After her knock came the call of the bread-and-biscuit vendor, and the ice cream vendor after him, and then noises made by neighborhood boys who would start to gather not far from our house, saying things I did not quite catch, until, roused from my stupor and straining an ear again, I would realize they were my friends about to head into the sandy hinterland to engage in yet another kite fight. They were tying used razor blades onto the kite’s head and tail.
The Greeks of Mandara had by far the best kites and always won. These were boys from a local Greek orphanage whose two giant kites, named the Paralus and the Salaminia, reigned over the skies each summer. As our kite bore toward them, the Paralus and Salaminia would at first refuse to engage, hissing it away like lazy cobras, ordering it back with a graceful, peremptory swerve and nod of their heads. But once it got close, without warning, first one and then the other came swooping down, tearing through it in two successive strikes without even getting tangled, until our stunned and helpless kite lurched awhile and then came plummeting down in a straight descent, crashing onto th
e sand as everyone scattered for fear of the blades. Two older Greeks would monitor the events from afar, yelling instructions as the fighting got rougher, while their boys chanted and clapped their hands, watching the Paralus and the Salaminia close in on their next target, this time without provocation.
In the back of my mind all through my scribal exercises were images of the Salaminia plunging from above as soon as it caught sight of our poor, unnamed victim and gashing it to pieces with its pointed rostrum. My mind would drift to other things as I kept copying, word after word after word. Then, all of a sudden, in the distance, I made out the victorious chant of the Greek orphans. The Salaminia had won again.
The boys were waiting on the dunes for me to finish copying my suras. Momo (Maurice-Shlomo) Carmona was crying. “They cheated,” he cursed. Someone was holding the skeletal remains of our fallen Icarus: scraps of sliced bamboo cane and torn white canvas made in my father’s factory. Even our parents were sorry for us. “You are wasting too much time,” said my father.
The next year at VC was no better than the first. By the second month it became obvious I was failing every subject, including art.
One morning Madame Marie warned me that my father had received a telephone call from Miss Gilbertson expressing renewed concern over my work. My father wanted to speak to me, she said. I could hear his vigorous puffing as Monsieur Politi counted indefatigable one-and-two’s in his thickly accented Judeo-Arab French. My mother had awakened earlier than usual and was wearing a green bathrobe; her jet-black hair, still wet from the shower, was hastily combed back. She was cutting my croissant into little slices, and was particularly solicitous of me during breakfast.
Abdou looked at me almost ruefully. “Shid haylak,” he whispered as my father walked into the room. “Courage.”
“Well?” asked my father.
I said nothing. I hated vague preambles to what was clearly going to escalate into a bitter scolding. Mother sat with her arms crossed, looking down, as though she herself was about to be chided. I stared at her, almost imploring her to smile, or at least return my gaze.
“Leave us,” said my father to Madame Marie. “You too,” he told my mother after Madame Marie stood up. Madame Marie waited at the door for my mother to join her.
“No, I’ll stay,” she insisted, trying to contain her anger while dismissing Madame Marie.
“Always, always meddling,” he started. “It’s between him and me, him and me.”
“And I’m his mother. And that shit of an Englishwoman could just as easily have called me instead of you, me instead of you!”
“And spoken through whom? Abdou?” asked my father, ironically. “And don’t call her a shit in front of the boy.”
“Just get on with what you have to say to him. Can’t you see you’re upsetting him by keeping him waiting?”
“Then let me tell you what I’ve decided,” he said, turning to me. “I’ve already spoken about it to Miss Gilbertson,” he continued, meaning to emphasize this fait accompli, “and she agrees it would be an excellent idea for you to move into her home and live with her as a boarder for a while.”
It came as the most terrifying threat in my life. I could think of nothing else for the rest of the day, for the rest of the week, the rest of the school year. The prospect haunted me like an evil spirit, insinuating itself everywhere, undoing every joy.
“I’m sorry, but this is crazy!” exclaimed my mother.
“Crazy yourself!”
“And you’re a monster.”
At some point during breakfast, once my father had collected himself, he managed to explain his plan with kindness and something verging on apology in his voice. My study habits, my command of English, my work in Arabic, my discipline, even my bearing—everything had degenerated. Something drastic was needed. Since going to a boarding school in England was precluded—Jews were allowed neither to send money abroad nor come back to Egypt once they had exited the country—the choice was either to hire a tutor or to send me to a local boarding school. We had already tried the first. As for boarding school, my father had his doubts; he imagined such places as being full of merrymaking pranksters and nighttime pillow fights, places where no one did any studying at all.
For a fee, however, I could live with Miss Gilbertson. After all, she was not so terrible. She would teach me what all English boys my age knew. She would civilize me out of Abdou’s kitchen and out of my mother’s tempestuous reach.
All I could think of when I imagined Miss Gilbertson’s home was a small, dark bedroom, a pair of striped pajamas, my toothbrush standing next to hers in the bathroom, and old brown furniture in an old brown apartment where all one did was read alone, eat alone, or sit alone at a long brown table in the evening under the scowling vigilance of old Britain. Miss Gilbertson would pry into my secret world and monitor my dreams, my most secret, shameful thoughts with the castigating gaze of a corrections officer and director of conscience. My mother said she would never let it happen, that I needn’t worry. But my grandmother supported the project. Aunt Elsa thought, ‘Why not?’ Madame Salama snickered and guaranteed it never hurt a boy my age to be left alone with a depraved spinster. Her lover, Abdel Hamid, opined that it might have the opposite effect, and Madame Nicole concluded that whatever parents did for their children always proved wrong in the end. Besides, she added, parents had the most deleterious influence on children, so why not separate them, since they were bound to be at war?
Then my father did what he always did in times of stress: he stalled. The idea itself was never abolished; it was simply remanded, suspended, and, like Dreyfus, I was never officially absolved. Even when it became clear that my father himself questioned the wisdom of his project and had more or less given it up, no one dared remind him that he had abandoned it, for fear of encouraging him to think about a matter which had been unofficially dismissed precisely because he believed it was still being thought about. Perhaps, in the end, my father simply tired of the idea.
Monsieur al-Malek, my new tutor, was the next best solution. An Arab Jew, Monsieur al-Malek spoke English, French, and Arabic fluently and was the current headmaster of the École de la Communauté Israelite. He would ring our bell every weekday evening at five, greet everyone in English, including Abdou, whose language he knew better than Abdou himself, and would ask me whether I could kindly show him to my room. There he would open my briefcase, rummage for evidence of mischief or deceit on my part, invariably find it, upbraid me, and proceed to go over my Arabic and arithmetic assignments. “I won’t tell your father,” he would say at some point in every tutorial, “but these hours are almost wasted. You’re not applying yourself,” he would add, and, closing his book, would explain by means of examples taken from the lives of his two sons what applying oneself meant.
During tutorial it often happened that I would make out the happy signs that the living room was crowded with guests who had come for tea and drinks. Nothing was more welcome than the muted sound of the doorbell, followed by the rehearsed startled ecstasy of Abdou’s exclamations as he opened the door to Mr. or Mrs. So-and-so and the tap of shoes on the hard wooden floor leading into the living room.
One evening, Monsieur al-Malek dawdled a bit longer than usual before leaving the foyer, and it was there that he ran into my mother who, more out of courtesy than inclination, asked him to join the guests for tea. He resisted, but on being urged once more, consented, and then took off his coat, which he had just put on, gave Aziza his hat, and stood at the entrance to the living room, rubbing his hands as though he had just walked in from the cold. There he was hailed by my father, who liked him even less than my mother did but had a lot of respect for a man who everyone said was a very learned teacher.
My father poured scotch into his glass, threw in a large ice cube, and then asked him whether he wanted it plain or with Vichy water. “Vichy, Vichy,” said Monsieur al-Malek as though he always drank scotch with Vichy water. He sipped it once and said it was excellent. “Jo
hnnie Walker, naturally!” he added. “I can’t stand this man,” whispered Aunt Flora, who was also there among the guests that evening and whose voice was totally drowned out by the sound of traffic rising from the avenue. Mother had kept the balcony windows open that night, and scented drafts from the Smouha plantations and from the jasmine someone had brought blended in with the intimate, stale smell of cigarettes, giving our living room a sensual, luxuriant air.
Suddenly, there was a ring at the door. Abdou was heard shutting the kitchen door leading to the main entrance, and before he had time to proclaim his pleasure, a loud voice thundered, with Abdou finally appearing at the living room door holding a gentleman’s wide-brimmed hat in his hand. Behind him was the gentleman himself, trailed by his wife. “But it’s Ughetto!” shouted my grandmother.
“And Ugo it is,” he said storming into our living room with strides that screamed “Make way.” “For you, for you, and for you. More I couldn’t get,” he said as he distributed presents from his most recent trip abroad. He had brought ten prized Tobler chocolate bars, which the company—including Monsieur al-Malek, my grandmother, Madame Marie, and Abdou—devoured on the spot. Signor Ugo had also brought my mother an immense bottle of Crêpe de Chine, for me a child’s Plutarch’s Lives, for my father the latest edition of the Larousse dictionary—things one could no longer buy in Egypt. Our last Larousse dated back six years.
“Ugo, you’re an angel,” said my grandmother as she unpacked and stared at the hand blender he had brought her from France. “This is a miracle.” Everyone sat and admired the small device with its tiny helical blades. They had never seen anything like it. “How does it work?” asked Madame Salama. “I’ll show you right now,” said Signor Ugo’s wife. Almost the entire living room marched to the kitchen to watch my grandmother whip up one-minute mayonnaise. A whir was heard in the kitchen, and sixty seconds later my grandmother, followed by a retinue of exultant ladies, returned victorious, brandishing a large glass containing a yellowish paste which she held out in her right hand as the Statue of Liberty holds out her beacon. Everyone wanted to try.