Out of Egypt: A Memoir

by André Aciman

  “What a day!” said Roxane. She was walking slowly, careful not to spill any of the coffee in her cup, heading for my grandfather’s small, heavy steel table, which, because of the rust, was painted a different enamel color every summer. When the paint chipped at the corners, you could count the layers like tree rings and see how many years it had been in our family —it too, like so many things here, was far older than I was.

  We were about to sit down by the row of balusters overlooking the sea when we suddenly noticed Signor Dall’Abaco on a wicker chair in the corner, with his spindly legs resting on top of the balustrade, tilting back somewhat. “When did you wake up?” asked Roxane. “Hours ago,” he answered, “I came to watch the dawn.”

  I had never seen dawn.

  “Did you sleep well?” he asked.

  “Mmmmmm. Fabulously,” she replied. “Fabulously.” She yawned, stretching her arms.

  “I haven’t seen a morning like this in so long I can’t remember the last time.”

  Roxane looked out to the sea.

  “Is anyone else awake?” she asked.

  “No,” answered Signor Dall’Abaco.

  She was drinking her coffee very slowly, with her feet resting on the balustrade. “Did you want me to make you a cup of coffee?”

  He said he would wait for the others.

  We heard a door open. I was dismayed. Others would undoubtedly ruin the spell of the moment.

  But the sound had come from the garden. Someone must have opened the gate and was heard crossing the gravel path leading to the veranda. And then I realized who it was. I had totally forgotten the small miracle of mornings here in Mandara: the fig vendor. He was always the first to come; then the iceman; then the vegetable vendor; finally, fruits at about ten.

  Roxane picked out two dozen figs and asked him to weigh them. She gave one to each of us. “One,” she said, with an implicit “no more until breakfast.”

  But breakfast was an hour or two away. I suggested we go and buy ful. At this time of the morning the ful was bound to be excellent. “Do you know where to buy it?” asked Roxane, who had never been at Mandara before. I nodded. The ful vendor would stop his van on the corner of Rue Mordo by the side of the sand dunes, and people would come with their large pots. Signor Dall’Abaco said he had never tried Mandara’s ful. Then he confessed he had never had ful before. “But you’ve been living here for thirty years, Mario,” she said. “E pazienza,” he replied, meaning, “And what can I do about that now!” We would have to hurry, I said, because the vendor did not wait long at the same corner. The worst thing was following him around his stops and missing him each time.

  But I was hasty for another reason. I wanted no one to join us or prevent us from going on our expedition that morning. Signor Dall’Abaco said he had to change first, but I assured him shorts were perfectly respectable, there was no one around at this hour. Roxane put on a shirt whose tails she tied around her waist. She was carrying a cigarette in one hand, and in the other a large empty pot.

  I led them to the back garden and into the driveway, where the bees were so loud that the entire arbor sounded like a distant cataract or a big steam engine churning away. Signor Dall’Abaco said he was afraid of bees. I told him they never stung. All one had to do was walk steadily and avoid sudden movements. Both of them believed me.

  Signor Dall’Abaco held open the old door to our garden. We seldom used it, though it was said that this had been the only gate to the villa several decades ago. It, too, like so many other gates in Alexandria that no one used any longer, bore an eroded family crest, a doorbell that failed to chime when you swung the door open, and an old Colonial knocker.

  Signor Dall’Abaco said these old knockers would be very valuable one day. “One day, when nineteenth-century antiques will be impossible to find in Europe, people will come here from all over the world to buy this knocker,” said Signor Dall’Abaco.

  “But it’s worthless,” said Roxane.

  “Mark my words. Come back in twenty years, and it’ll be worth its weight in gold.”

  “Where is your ful vendor?” Roxane cut in.

  “Where is the ful vendor indeed,” echoed Signor Dall’Abaco, who was probably the best disposed person in the world and never minded being interrupted.

  We passed by Momo Carmona’s house. It was still boarded up for winter. Had they moved to Europe or were they just late this year? My father said their uncle had lost everything. Perhaps they had too. I remembered Momo would not go to the beach on the day they had nationalized his uncle, nor had he come to the kite fight that afternoon. Hisham had been reading aloud from a newspaper the names of individuals whose assets or businesses had been nationalized that day. Pleased that my father’s name was not on the list, yet not willing to rejoice quite yet, I asked whether he had read all the names in the newspaper. “Wait, there are many more here,” he said, smiling, as he turned a page filled with columns of nationalized assets: Madame Salama’s lover’s, Aunt Flora’s, Uncle Nessim’s, and nearly everyone’s. My father decided it wouldn’t be prudent to dismiss him now.

  I pointed out Uncle Vili’s old house at Mandara to Roxane and Signor Dall’Abaco. But it did not seem to interest them. Then came the Russian countess’s villa. Whoever lived there now, I wondered. That didn’t interest them either.

  We crossed an unpaved road until we hit on a garden hedged by a hassira. Then came the dunes. The dunes led to one of the beaches of Mandara and, at the other end, to the Greek monastery. Beyond that was the desert.

  Our feet sank in the sand, but the sand wasn’t hot yet, and our only source of discomfort was the shavings of dry bamboo working their way into our sandals. We expelled them by shaking our feet.

  Ahead of us I made out the shape of the ful vendor’s van. We waved and shouted for him to wait for us. He waved back. When we finally reached his van, Roxane handed him the pot. He filled it and wished us a holy Sunday. We stared at him with a puzzled look: Why would a Moslem ever want to wish us a holy Sunday? He must have read our surprise, for, after looking around furtively, he pulled up his sleeve, displaying the inside of his wrist on which a large cross was tattooed. “I’m a Copt.” The current regime was not sympathetic to Copts.

  Though Signor Dall’Abaco was an atheist, Roxane a Zoroastrian, and I a Jew, all three of us wished him a holy Sunday in return. Signor Dall’Abaco insisted on paying. It was his way of thanking us for hosting him for the weekend. I tried to tell him to please let Roxane pay, but he said absolutely not, that he would pay, especially since he had brought nothing, not even a bathing suit. Roxane argued. Then he pleaded. We let him pay.

  To change the subject on the way back, Signor Dall’Abaco said the tattooed sign of the cross had reminded him of Ulysses’ scar which Eurikleia, his maid, recognizes when her master returns to Ithaca after twenty years’ absence.

  Roxane did not know who Ulysses was but she was saddened by the years of exile logged by the old soldier. “Twenty years,” she kept repeating. “Twenty years, that’s something,” she said, as though Ulysses were a contemporary whose unresolved fate was still a source of concern.

  “Twenty years is nothing,” replied the Sienese gentleman, who had not returned to Italy since the late thirties. “When I left Italy, you weren’t even born, Roxane,” he said, as though that was how he now measured time.

  “And I think you’re a bit in love with me, Signor Dall’Abaco.”

  “And I think so too,” he said. Both of them burst out laughing, and the more they laughed, the more she spilled the ful, and the more we all laughed together. “How stupid of me,” she said, “to have brought the pot but not the cover.”

  I looked up into the morning’s crystal glare. The air smelled fresh, new, as though unbreathed by humans, the way it always smells at the beginning of a summer day that is bound to turn unbearably hot. Even the dunes felt clean, soaking up the glare, so that after looking up at the sky we had to look down, to be soothed by the color of sand around us,
unable even to look at the villas ahead. I had only to lift up my eyes, and there would be the sea.

  “The sun burst on the flawless brimming sea into a sky all brazen.”

  It was Signor Dall’Abaco quoting Homer in Greek and then translating into Italian. This, I suddenly realized, must be the sunlight of ancient Greece, of translucent Aegean mornings where glinting quartz extends for miles until it touches the sea, and the sea touches the early-summer sky, and the sky touches every tree and every hill and every house beyond the hills. Today, too, all I need is the presence of water nearby, a clear sky, and intense glare forcing me to look down, and suddenly, wherever I am in the world, my mind will inevitably drift to the most sunlit author of antiquity, only to remember how I encountered him for the first time at Mandara that morning when we trundled back, spilling ful along the sand dunes. Signor Dall’Abaco told us how Ulysses’ companions, after eating of the forbidden lotus, had lost all desire to go back to Ithaca and refused to wander more. After twenty years, he said, Ulysses was the only one who made it back alive.

  “Again with your Ulysses!” exclaimed Roxane.

  “Or so they say,” continued Signor Dall’Abaco. “Dante teaches that, after returning to Ithaca, he went on to explore other lands. Many agree. But I think it is Cavafy, the Alexandrian, who is right. He says that Ulysses wavered, unable to decide between going back to his wife or living as an immortal with the goddess Calypso on her island. In the end, he opted for immortality and he never went back. As the goddess pleads,” and Signor Dall’Abaco began to recite,

  Why spurn my home when exile is your home?

  The Ithaca you want you’ll have in not having.

  You’ll walk her shores yet long to tread those very grounds,

  kiss Penelope yet wish you held your wife instead,

  touch her flesh yet yearn for mine.

  Your home’s in the rubblehouse of time now,

  and you’re made thus, to yearn for what you lose.

  The story of a man who chose his mistress and immortality over wife, child, and home infuriated Roxane. Signor Dall’Abaco simply arched his eyebrows and shrugged his shoulders, as if to say who was he to argue with poets. I asked him to recite more verses by Homer. He did.

  For the first time in my life I knew exactly what I wanted to do this summer, and every other summer after that. I asked Signor Dall’Abaco if he would be willing to teach me Greek. Delighted, he said, but only after Italian class—and still, it might take years. “But then, who knows,” he said with a smile, as we opened the old gate to our garden.

  Signor Dall’Abaco taught me Greek for five years, slowly, sedulously, the way an impoverished Sicilian schoolteacher in Siena had taught it to him years before. After we left Egypt, he continued my Greek lessons by correspondence, selecting passages that I would always translate a bit hastily and with a sense of guilt and obligation. Ten days later, sometimes a little more, I would receive his dishearteningly elaborate and messy comments around my sheet of paper, which now reeked of cigarette smoke from his favorite café, where he liked to scribble—scribacchiare. He would place numerals above most of my words in Greek, the way Aunt Flora put numerals on her students’ score sheets, to indicate the preferred order of the words. When he could not decide which word was best, he would list every Greek synonym that crossed his mind. Reading his letters in my room in Massachusetts years later, I conjured the aging Signor Dall’Abaco writing his eight-page bulletins in small script as he sat and smoked at a small table at Athinéos, overlooking the old harbor, known as Portus Eunostus, the port of good return. There he would translate Greek texts into Italian for me to translate back into Greek, though he knew that I knew that my Greek was growing progressively worse and that these exercises in translation had become nothing but an elaborate pretext for staying in touch. He would describe the city, the sea, the slovenly Cairenes who came up each summer, Roxane, and her husband, Joey, who had grown so fat and bald one wouldn’t know him, ending each of his letters with his immutable formula, “Now I must write,” meaning his other letters, those sent to his lawyers in Italy for a long-standing suit against the Italian government for the return of assets seized by the Fascists before the war. He would have settled for a pension, he used to say. In reply, I described my studies, women, the stuffy hot spells, the cucumber-and-feta-cheese sandwiches a fellow Italian and I ate on Oxford Street as we awaited a beach season that never really came. Lazem bahr, I reminded him.

  “You have crossed the Pillars of Hercules,” he wrote back, “all is possible now!” I was the only human he knew who had gone to America. “But, ahimé!—never become a teacher, for then you’ll eat others’ bread and tread others’ stairwells.”

  I stopped hearing from him. At first I thought it was just like Signor Dall’Abaco to decide it was time to stop pestering me with these fatuous exercises. But then he did not answer my second letter. Or my third. Or my Christmas greetings—of that year or the next. Then I too stopped writing. Perhaps I knew but didn’t want to know. I could have telephoned but I never did. Or perhaps I half-expected I would eventually receive a profusely apologetic letter signed by a man who for almost ten years had ended his letters with the same two words: Lazem scribacchiare.

  Years later, I received a small parcel wrapped in sturdy, recognizable Third World paper. It had come by ship and the string that held the package together was riddled with knots and little lead seals. I did not know the handwriting. I opened it and found a small, cheaply bound book wrapped in wax paper. Alexandrians, edited by Mario Dall’Abaco: an anthology of Alexandrian writers from antiquity to modern times. Some of the poems I had never seen before; others were familiar; the one on Ulysses was Signor Dall’Abaco’s, not Cavafy’s. Not knowing whom to thank, I sent the printer a check.

  A few months later I received another, slightly larger package wrapped in the same cobalt-blue paper, which I had failed to place the first time. Palming my way through the crumpled newspaper in the box, I expected to find more volumes of Alexandrians. Instead I touched something cold, like a palm waiting to touch my own. It was an old bronze knocker. “When we heard they were rebuilding Mandara, we immediately rushed to the villa and it was Mario himself who took it down. He used it as a paperweight. He would have wanted you to have it. He went peacefully a year ago. Remember me, your loving Roxy.” The knocker has never left me. It sits on my desk today.

  6

  The Last Seder

  When my father put down the receiver, he looked at us in the dining room and said, “It’s started.” No one needed to be told what he meant. It was common knowledge that these telephone calls came at all hours of the night—threatening, obscene, abusive calls in which an unidentified voice claiming to represent a government office asked all sorts of questions about our whereabouts, our guests, our habits, reminded us that we were nothing, that we had no rights and would soon be driven out, like the French and the British before us.

  Until then, we had been spared these calls. Now, in the fall of 1964, they started. The voice seemed to know all about us. Indeed, it knew all our relatives abroad, read all our mail, named many of my friends and teachers at the American School, which I had been attending since leaving VC four years earlier. It knew everything. It even knew about the incident of the stone that day. “And I bet you’re enjoying quail tonight,” it said. “Bon appétit.” “A bad omen,” said my grandmother.

  Aunt Elsa said she hated Wednesdays. Bad things always came on Wednesdays.

  My father said he too had had premonitions, but what had the voice meant about the incident of the stone?

  At which point Aunt Flora decided to tell him. Earlier that day we had joined the crowd that lined the Corniche, waiting to get a look at President Nasser, standing for hours in the sun, cheering and waving each time anything resembling a motorcade came around the bend of Montaza Palace. Then we saw him, perched in his Cadillac, waving with a flat, open palm, looking exactly as he did in the pictures. People began to cheer,
men and women jumping and clapping, waving small paper flags. A girl in a wheelchair, perched at the edge of the sidewalk almost touching the curb, had been holding a rolledup sheet of paper tied with a green ribbon. Now the president had passed and she was still holding it, looking disheartened and crying. She had failed to drop her written message into his car. Abdou, who had come with us, had noticed her earlier and said she probably wanted the Raïs to pay for an operation or a new wheelchair. Her older brother, equally distraught—and probably blaming himself for failing to maneuver her close enough to the motorcade—was busy telling her it didn’t matter, they would try the next time. “I don’t want to live like this,” she wailed, covering her face with shame as he wheeled her away toward a part of Mandara we did not know.

  On our way home a stone hit Aunt Flora on the leg. “Foreigners out!” someone yelled in Arabic. We never saw precisely who had thrown it, but as soon as she shouted, a group of youths immediately began to disperse. The stone had hit her on the ankle, but it didn’t break the skin, there wasn’t any blood. “As long as I can walk—” she kept saying, rubbing her shin with her hand. Then, remembering the bottle of cologne in her bag, she applied some liberally over the bruise, occasionally massaging her leg as she limped along.

  No sooner had we reached home that afternoon than we came upon another commotion, this time in our garden, where everyone was screaming, including al-Nunu who, on hearing the sudden noise, had come out of his hut armed with his machete. Al-Nunu was yelling the most, followed by Mohammed and my mother, everyone racing about in the garden, even my grandmother, who was now yelling at the top of her lungs. I asked Gomaa, al-Nunu’s helper and catamite, what was the matter. Out of breath, Gomaa shouted, “Kwalia!”