Out of Egypt: A Memoir

by André Aciman

  Quail!

  Every autumn, quail would descend on Egypt from as far away as Siberia and, as soon as they caught sight of land, would literally drop from the sky, exhausted. That afternoon a bird had fallen in our garden right next to where my grandmother was having tea with Arlette Joanides and her daughter, who were leaving Egypt and had come to say farewell. Instinctively my grandmother had taken the elaborate needlepoint canvas on which she had been working for over a year and thrown it over the exhausted quail. The bird, though it was faster than the old woman, was too tired to fly away. It kept hopping about our garden until it was joined by two more birds that must have fallen earlier, unbeknownst to my grandmother. This was far better than anything she could have dreamed of, and the old woman began to yell. Everyone came rushing to her rescue until they saw the birds, and then they joined the trapping party.

  From adjoining gardens as far back as Rue Mordo we could hear similar screams as everyone at home or on the street dropped whatever they were doing to catch this exquisite manna that tumbled from the heavens each year.

  And yet, despite the great joy they brought that day—to Abdou, although he would have to start dinner all over again; to Aunt Flora, who had almost forgotten her wound and was resolved to keep it from my father; and to my grandmother, for whom quail season coincided with the making of fruit preserves—still, the sight of this peerless Egyptian delicacy struggling for life as it tried to elude our frenetic grasp never failed to announce the arrival of autumn and the end of our summer in Mandara.

  No one stayed on in Mandara after quail season. By early October, the streets were deserted, with only a few Egyptians, mostly Bedouins, remaining where they lived all year round. Packs of stray dogs—some young enough to have been adopted by summer residents who then left them behind at the end of the season—would come out from everywhere, scrounging for food, sometimes landing at our door, always barking, especially at night. By then, the beaches were completely empty, the Coca-Cola shacks were all closed, and, at night when we drove back from the movies, ours was the only light on our street, a faint, forty-watt flare beckoning from our kitchen, where Abdou would wait up for us, listening to Arab songs on the radio. Sometimes, though, he would have gone back to the city at night, and then there was no light awaiting our return, and Mandara would become a ghost town, and all one heard when my father turned off the car radio, and then the engine, was the sound of our movements in the car, the sound of our steps along the pebble path leading to our door, and, behind the house, down by the bend near al-Nunu’s shack, the sound of waves.

  Once in the house, my first impulse was always to turn on the lights in the entry and rush down the oppressive corridor and light up one room after the other—the veranda, the kitchen, the living room, even the radio in my bedroom, hoping to liven the entire house and give myself and my parents the illusion that there were still summer guests in the house who would presently come out of their rooms. One could even nurse the illusion of guests to come.

  At midnight our anonymous caller asked whether we had been to the theater. My father told him the name of the film we saw.

  We stayed at Mandara very late into the fall that year. We always stayed too long. It was my mother’s way of refusing to admit summer was over. But there was another reason for delaying this year. After Mandara, we had decided not to return to Cleopatra but to move instead to Sporting, so that everyone in the family might be together. My mother was put in charge of selling all the furniture at Cleopatra.

  I saw the apartment at Cleopatra for the last time a few weeks later, when my mother asked me to go up with her to set aside clothes for Abdou and Aziza. All of our furniture was now covered in sheets, and the window shutters were closed tight, lending our apartment, usually so sunny in October, a gloomy, sepulchral air, while the old sheets, which I could remember Abdou hastily throwing over sofas and armchairs at the very last minute before leaving for Mandara early that June, looked like tired, old, deflated phantoms. “All of it will be sold,” said my mother with a pert, busy air that could easily be mistaken for anger but which was her way of showing enthusiasm. She loved novelty and change and was as excited now as she had been on moving here five years earlier.

  I never met the man who bought all of our furniture, nor did I witness the transaction nor the actual lining up of our bedroom and dining room furniture on our sidewalk at Cleopatra. Aziza said Abdou was the only one who wept. I came back one day after school to find the place empty. “Maybe we shouldn’t have moved,” said my father. His voice sounded different now that the rugs and the furniture were gone.

  I asked him if he was going to throw away all those books on the floor. No, he replied. We would take them to Sporting. Meanwhile, he was leafing through what looked like twenty to thirty thick green notebooks, tearing out occasional sheets that he intended to save. I asked him what he was doing. “These are notebooks I kept when I was a young man.” Was he going to throw them away? “Not all, but there are things here I would rather disappeared.” “Did you write anything against the government back then?” I asked. “No, nothing political. Other things,” he said, unable to conceal a tenuous smile. “Some day you’ll understand.” I tried to tell him I was old enough to understand. But I knew what he’d say: “You think you are.” He said he could still remember witnessing his parents’ emptied home thirty years before on the day they had left Constantinople. As had his father seen his own father’s home. And our ancestors before that as well. And so would I, too, one day, though he didn’t wish it on me—“But everything repeats itself.” I tried to protest, saying I hated this sort of fatalism, that I was free from Sephardi superstitions. “You think you are,” he said.

  I looked at the apartment, incredulous at how much larger it was without furniture.

  I tried to remember the first time I had seen it, five years earlier. My grandmother and I had gotten lost in it, mistaking our way through doors and corridors, watching the workers sanding the floors and putting up a wall to create an additional room for someone called Madame Marie. I remembered the kitchen talk in the month of Ramadan, the smell of fresh paint and of newly restained furniture and of Mother’s jasmine, and the window she threatened to throw herself from each time she thought she’d lose my father. I remembered Mimi and Madame Salama. They had moved to Israel. Monsieur Pharès lived in Florida; Abdel Hamid was paralyzed from the waist down; and Madame Nicole’s husband had converted to Islam and finally repudiated her for behavior unbecoming a wife. Fawziah worked for an Egyptian family who treated her poorly. Monsieur al-Malek was now a second-tier schoolteacher in Marseilles waiting for a pension. And Abdou’s son, Ahmed, so full of kindness, was shipped back from Yemen after a guerrilla patrol had captured and beheaded him.

  Then, without warning, Aunt Flora, too, received a telephone call. In her case, the voice informed her that she had two weeks to leave Egypt. She left, as did other family friends, in the fall of that year, just a few days after we moved to Sporting. We knew our turn would come.

  Aunt Elsa used to say that when bad things happen they come in threes. If you broke two plates, no one was really surprised when a third fell from your hands. If you cut yourself twice, you knew that a third cut was already hovering, waiting for the perfect alignment of sharp object and skin. If you got scolded twice, if you failed two tests, or lost two bets, you simply cowered for a few days and tried not to look too dismayed when the third blow came. When it did come, however, you would never say it was the last of the three. You had to pretend that a fourth might follow or that perhaps you had counted wrong or that this millennial rule had just been changed to confound you. That was called tact. It meant you were not presumptuous and would never dare trifle with the inscrutable machinations of fate.

  Of course, we always sensed that our midnight caller knew exactly how we thought about these things. He would call twice and then not call again that night, knowing we would not go to bed until his third call came. Or he would call three times, le
t us sigh in relief and then, just as everyone was getting ready to retire, call again. “Is he there?” the voice would ask, meaning my father. “No, we don’t want to speak with him. Just checking.” “Who were your guests tonight?” “What did you buy today?” “Where did you go?” And so on.

  Harassment calls began to punctuate all our evenings—by their absence as much as by their presence—reminding us that what were agreeable family evenings could easily deteriorate into bitter feuds as soon as grandmother hung up the telephone. “But why did you have to answer. Didn’t I tell you not to?” my father would complain. “And why couldn’t you tell him where I was?” he would add. “Because I don’t think it’s his business,” his mother would reply. “But why do you persist in being rude to them? Why provoke them?” he would shout back at her. “Because this is what I felt like doing. Next time you answer.”

  Part of the late-night caller’s ploy lay in calling when he knew my father was not home. Then, sometimes, thinking it was my father or even a friend calling late in the evening, I would pick up the receiver, and the stranger’s voice, seemingly so harmless, even obsequious, would begin saying things I knew I should know nothing about. At other times, it was a rough street vendor’s voice barking questions whose purpose I couldn’t fathom, much less know how to answer. He would always end with the same words: “Tell him we’ll call again tomorrow.”

  A day would pass. Then another. Sometimes three. Then two phone calls in succession. No one would pick up. “Maybe it’s your father,” my grandmother would say. It wasn’t. Then no calls for another week.

  Perhaps, the law of jamais deux sans trois didn’t hold after all. But then, just when you were on the verge of giving up on it, it showed signs of renewed regularity—just long enough, that is, to trick you again.

  Now, it so happened that Aunt Elsa had had strange forebodings the week before the Egyptian government nationalized all of my father’s assets. Une étrange angoisse, a strange anxiety, right here, she kept repeating, pointing to her chest. “Here, and here, sometimes even here,” she would say, hesitantly, as though her inability to locate the peculiar sensation in her chest made it more credible. “Something always happens when I have these feelings.” She had had them on the eve of President Kennedy’s assassination. And back in 19914. And of course in 1939. Madame Ephrikian, warned by Aunt Elsa to leave Smyrna in 1922, still called her une voyante, a seer. “Seer my eye!” exclaimed my grandmother behind her back.

  “She’s swallowed a cheap barometer, and it rattles inside her old rib cage. Whatever is itching her there, you can be sure it’s just her conscience.”

  My grandmother was alluding to a quarrel the sisters had had over who would get Uncle Vili’s prized nineteenth-century barometer following his sudden escape from Egypt. Uncle Vili liked to hunt duck, so, naturally, the sisters quarreled over who would inherit his rifles as well. One day, the rifles, the barometer, and his golf clubs disappeared. “Les domestiques,” alleged Aunt Elsa. “Les domestiques my eye!” replied my grandmother. “She swallowed them, just as she’ll swallow everything we own one day.” “We don’t have to worry about that now,” interjected my father, “the Egyptian government has already thought of it.”

  The news that my father had lost everything arrived at dawn one Saturday in early spring 1965. The bearer was Kassem, now the factory’s night foreman. He rang our bell, and it was my father who opened the door. Seeing his boss look so crushed on guessing the reason for his untimely visit, the young foreman immediately burst into a fit of hysterical crying. “Did they take her, then?” asked my father, meaning the factory. “They took her.” “When?” “Last night. They wouldn’t let me call you, so I had to come.” Both men stood quietly in the vestibule and then moved into the kitchen while my father tried to improvise something by way of tea. They sat at the kitchen table, urging one another not to lose heart, until both men broke down and began sobbing in each other’s arms. “I found them crying like little children,” was Aunt Elsa’s refrain that day. “Like little children.”

  The crying had also awakened my grandmother, who, despite protestations that she never slept at night on account of the “troubles,” was a very sound sleeper. She shuffled all the way into the kitchen to find that Abdou, who had just come in through the service entrance, had also joined in the tears. “This is no good,” she snapped, “you’ll wake Nessim. What’s happened now?” “They took her.” “Took whom?” “But the factory, signora, what else?” he said using the pidgin word for factory, al-fabbrica.

  My grandmother never sobbed. She got angry, stamped, kicked, and grew flushed. Aunt Elsa was right when she claimed that her sister cried out of rage—like Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor—and not out of sorrow. Her eyelids would swell and grow red, and with the corner of her handkerchief she would blot away her tears with flustered and persistent poking motions, as though, in her fury, she was determined to inflict more pain on herself. This was the ninth time she had seen the men in her life lose everything; first her grandfather, then her father, her husband, five brothers, and now her son.

  A moment of silence elapsed. “Here,” she said, mixing sugar in a glass of water and handing it to my father. It was reputed to calm one’s nerves. “I’m having tea, thank you,” he said. But Abdou, who was still sobbing, said he could use it. Meanwhile, Aunt Elsa kept repeating, “See? I knew it, I knew it. Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I?” “Do you want to shut up!” shouted her sister, suddenly shoving a large bowl containing last night’s homemade yogurt along the kitchen countertop with such force that it exploded against the wall. “Who cares?” she shouted, anticipating her sister’s reproach. “Who cares at a time like this, who?” She began to pick up the shards while Abdou, still sobbing, begged her not to bother, he would pick them up himself.

  It was the noise of this quarrel that finally woke me that Saturday morning. I could tell something was amiss. As happened each time someone died, everyone’s instinct was always to keep the bad news from me. Either the names of the deceased were scrupulously withheld from everyday conversation, or, when the names were mentioned, those present would heave a sigh signifying something nebulous and clearly beyond my scope, adding the adjectival pauvre, poor, to the name of the afflicted like a ceremonial epithet conferred on the occasion of one’s death. Pauvre was used for the departed, the defeated, and the betrayed. “Pauvre Albert,” my deceased grandfather; “pauvre Lotte,” my deceased aunt; “pauvre Angleterre,” who had lost all of her colonies; “pauvres nous,” said everyone! “Pauvre moi,” said my mother about my father. “Pauvre fabrique” was on everyone’s lips that day. The last time they had used that expression was when the factory’s main boiler exploded, severely damaging the building and almost ruining my father.

  I found my father sitting in the living room with Kassem and Hassan, whispering instructions to them. When he saw me, he nodded somewhat absentmindedly, a sign that he did not want to be disturbed. I picked up the newspaper—a a grown-up habit I was trying to acquire—and sat by myself in the dining room. I had heard at the American School that all young men in America read the newspaper first thing in the morning with their coffee. Coffee too was on my list. One sipped and thought of things to do that day and then remembered to go on reading one’s newspaper. No yogurt this morning. Instead, the smell of eggs and bacon and of butter melting on toast wafted from the kitchen. I had seen American breakfasts in movies and at school and had instructed Abdou I wanted eggs with bacon every Saturday.

  The early-spring sun beamed on the brown table in the dining room, spilling sweeps of light down the backs of the chairs and onto the faded red rug. My grandmother was like me; we liked bright rooms whose shutters were kept open all night and day, liked the clean, wholesome smell of sun-dried sheets or of sun-washed rooms and balconies on windy summer days; liked the insidious, stubborn eloquence of sunlight flooding under the door of a shuttered room on unbearable summer days; even the slight migraines that came from too much sun we liked. Th
rough the window, as always on clear Saturday mornings, sat patches of unstirring turquoise in the distance, rousing the thirst for seawater which all schoolboys in Alexandria knew, and which seduced you into thinking of long hot hours on the summer beaches. Two more months, I thought.

  When my grandmother walked into the dining room, she tried to hide that she had been crying. “Nothing,” she replied to my unasked question. “Nothing at all. Here is your orange juice.” She shuffled toward me on her ever-grieving bunions, kissing me on the back of the head, and then pinching my nape. “Mon pauvre,” she said, passing her fingers through my hair. “Couldn’t this have waited a while longer, couldn’t it?” she kept muttering, nodding to herself. Then, sensing I was about to renew my question, she said, “Nothing, nothing,” and drifted out of the dining room. I ate my eggs in silence. Then my mother walked in and sat across from me. She, too, looked upset. Nobody was eating. So they had quarreled. But I hadn’t heard her shouting.

  “Look,” she said, “they took everything.”

  It was like hearing that someone had died, a sinking feeling in my diaphragm and a tickling at the back of my ears. I pushed my plate away. My mother, whom I had not seen get up, was stirring sugar into a glass of water, saying, “Drink it all up now.” It meant I had had my nerves shaken. I was a man, then.

  Even so, I did not fully understand what was so frightful about losing one’s fortune. A few of those we knew who had lost theirs went about living normal, everyday lives, with the same number of houses, cars, and servants. Their sons and daughters went to the same restaurants, saw the same number of movies, and spent as much money as they always had. On them, however, loomed the stigma—even the shame—of the fallen, the ousted, and it came with a strange odor that infallibly gave them away: it was the smell of leather. “Did you smell the abattoir,” was my father’s word for it, whispered maliciously after visiting friends about to leave the country. Every family that had lost everything knew it was destined to leave Egypt sooner or later, and, in one room, usually locked and hidden from guests, sat thirty to forty leather suitcases in which mothers and aunts kept packing their family’s belongings at a slow, meticulous pace, always hoping that things might right themselves in the end. Until the very end, they hoped—and each of their husbands always swore he knew someone in high places who could be bribed when the time came. My father began to boast of the same contacts.