by André Aciman
Outside, Rue Delta was brimming with people. It was the first night of Ramadan and the guns marking the end of the fast had gone off three hours earlier. There was unusual bustle and clamor, with people gathered in groups, standing in the way of traffic, making things noisier and livelier still, the scent of holiday pastries and fried treats filling the air. I looked up at our building: on our floor, all the lights were out except for Abdou’s and those in the living room. Such weak lights, and so scant in comparison to the gaudy, colored bulbs that hung from all the lampposts and trees—as if the electricity in our home were being sapped and might die out at any moment. It was an Old World, old-people’s light.
As I neared the seafront, the night air grew cooler, saltier, freed from the din of lights and the milling crowd. Traffic became sparse, and whenever cars stopped for the traffic signal, everything grew still: then, only the waves could be heard, thudding in the dark, spraying the air along the darkened Corniche with a thin mist that hung upon the night, dousing the streetlights and the signposts and the distant floodlights by the guns of Petrou, spreading a light clammy film upon the pebbled stone wall overlooking the city’s coastline. Quietly, an empty bus splashed along the road, trailing murky stains of light on the gleaming pavement. From somewhere, in scattered snatches, came the faint lilt of music, perhaps from one of those dance halls where students used to flock at night. Or maybe just a muted radio somewhere on the beach nearby, where abandoned nets gave off a pungent smell of seaweed and fish.
At the corner of the street, from a sidewalk stall, came the smell of fresh dough and of angel-hair being fried on top of a large copper stand—a common sight throughout the city every Ramadan. People would fold the pancakes and stuff them with almonds, syrup, and raisins. The vendor caught me eyeing the cakes that were neatly spread on a black tray. He smiled and said, “Etfaddal, help yourself.”
I thought of Aunt Elsa’s chiding eyes. “But it’s Pesah,” I imagined her saying. My grandmother would disapprove too—eating food fried by Arabs on the street, unconscionable. The Egyptian didn’t want any money. “It’s for you,” he said, handing me the delicacy on a torn sheet of newspaper.
I wished him a good evening and took the soggy pancake out onto the seafront. There, heaving myself up on the stone wall, I sat with my back to the city, facing the sea, holding the delicacy I was about to devour. Abdou would have called this a real mazag, accompanying the word, as all Egyptians do, with a gesture of the hand—a flattened palm brought to the side of the head—signifying blissful plenitude and the prolonged, cultivated consumption of everyday pleasures.
Facing the night, I looked out at the stars and thought to myself, over there is Spain, then France, to the right Italy, and, straight ahead, the land of Solon and Pericles. The world is timeless and boundless, and I thought of all the shipwrecked, homeless mariners who had strayed to this very land and for years had tinkered away at their damaged boats, praying for a wind, only to grow soft and reluctant when their time came.
I stared at the flicker of little fishing boats far out in the offing, always there at night, and watched a group of children scampering about on the beach below, waving little Ramadan lanterns, the girls wearing loud pink-and-fuchsia dresses, locking hands as they wove themselves into the dark again, followed by another group of child revelers who were flocking along the jetty past the sand dunes, some even waving up to me from below. I waved back with a familiar gesture of street fellowship and wiped the light spray that had moistened my face.
And suddenly I knew, as I touched the damp, grainy surface of the seawall, that I would always remember this night, that in years to come I would remember sitting here, swept with confused longing as I listened to the water lapping the giant boulders beneath the promenade and watched the children head toward the shore in a winding, lambent procession. I wanted to come back tomorrow night, and the night after, and the one after that as well, sensing that what made leaving so fiercely painful was the knowledge that there would never be another night like this, that I would never eat soggy cakes along the coast road in the evening, not this year or any other year, nor feel the baffling, sudden beauty of that moment when, if only for an instant, I had caught myself longing for a city I never knew I loved.
Exactly a year from now, I vowed, I would sit outside at night wherever I was, somewhere in Europe, or in America, and turn my face to Egypt, as Moslems do when they pray and face Mecca, and remember this very night, and how I had thought these things and made this vow. You’re beginning to sound like Elsa and her silly seders, I said to myself, mimicking my father’s humor.
On my way home I thought of what the others were doing. I wanted to walk in, find the smaller living room still lit, the Beethoven still playing, with Abdou still clearing the dining room, and, on closing the front door, suddenly hear someone say, “We were just waiting for you, we’re thinking of going to the Royal.” “But we’ve already seen that film,” I would say. “What difference does it make. We’ll see it again.”
And before we had time to argue, we would all rush downstairs, where my father would be waiting in a car that was no longer really ours, and, feeling the slight chill of a late April night, would huddle together with the windows shut, bicker as usual about who got to sit where, rub our hands, turn the radio to a French broadcast, and then speed to the Corniche, thinking that all this was as it always was, that nothing ever really changed, that the people enjoying their first stroll on the Corniche after fasting, or the woman selling tickets at the Royal, or the man who would watch our car in the side alley outside the theater, or our neighbors across the hall, or the drizzle that was sure to greet us after the movie at midnight would never, ever know, nor ever guess, that this was our last night in Alexandria.
ADDITIONAL PRAISE FOR
Out of Egypt
“A splendid rendition of life over fifty years or so in the prosperous business class in Alexandria, ending with the expulsion of the author’s Jewish family.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“To find Alexandria in these pages, all rosy and clear-eyed from the tonic of André Aciman’s telling, is the greatest imaginable gift.”
—James Merrill
“With this book Aciman has made his readers a happy gift … . Out of Egypt gives much pleasure.”
—Chicago Tribune
“An extraordinary memoir of an eccentric family, a fascinating milieu, and a complex cosmopolitan culture. This beautifully written book combines the sensuousness of Lawrence Durrell, the magic of García Márquez, and the realism of intimate observation. A rich portrait of a surprising and now-vanished world.”
—Eva Hoffman, author of Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language
“A scintillating portrait of a family and a world that were narrowly clannish and exuberantly cosmopolitan … Sand has obliterated a sixty-year Alexandrian garden; or would have if Aciman had not restored it in the grace of language and memory.”
—Newsday
“Sharp and sublime … A moving performance.”
—The Jerusalem Report
“A marvelous memento of a place, time, and people that have all disappeared.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“The book’s pleasures are such that one has to remind oneself it is not just an affectionate memoir of a beloved place and buoyant childhood, but also a chronicle of continuing Jewish diaspora.”
—The Washington Times
“Aciman’s pungent prose is filled with telling detail … . Out of Egypt is a rich and moving memoir of his clan’s days there.”
—Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“[Aciman] may have gone out of Egypt but, as this evocative and imaginative book makes plain, he has never left it, nor it him.”
—International Herald Tribune
“Aciman delivers a clear-eyed eulogy of a lost past and a family in decline … . A skillful portrayal of an extraordinary clan.”
—Kirkus Revie
ws
Also by André Aciman
FICTION
Call Me by Your Name
NONFICTION
False Papers
The Proust Project (editor)
André Aciman is the author of False Papers and Call Me by Your Name. Born in Alexandria and raised in Egypt, Italy, and France, Aciman teaches comparative literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center and lives in Manhattan with his family.
OUT OF EGYPT. Copyright © 1994 by André Aciman. All rights reserved. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.picadorusa.com
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First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
eISBN 9781429998772
First eBook Edition : March 2011
The author gratefully acknowledges Commentary for publishing three chapters of this work in a slightly altered form.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Aciman, André.
Out of Egypt : a memoir / André Aciman.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-42655-2
ISBN-10: 0-312-42655-0
1. Aciman, André. 2. Aciman family. 3. Jews—Egypt—Alexandria—Genealogy. 4. Alexandria (Egypt)—Genealogy. I. Title.
DS135.E42A433 1996
962’1—dc20
95-34143 CIP