Which brings me back to the mitzvot. I could only access my mother—I could only channel my mother—by immersing myself into all the obtainable detail of her life and times. These details, far from imprisoning me in a grid of dreary factuality, provided the means for making the imaginative, dare I say artistic, leap into her soul. So often during my years of work on Who She Was, I envisioned my brain divided, with one part doing the cerebral chores of locating witnesses and discovering documents while the other part was reacting viscerally to my findings.
Let me explain with a single example: my mother’s college transcript. One might think of an academic record as just so much data. To me, it was a decoding ring. The transcript told me that my mother had spent eight years earning her degree. That she had transferred twice in the process, once from Brooklyn College to City College’s coed downtown campus and the second time from the day division into the night school. That she had majored in business administration. That she had earned mostly Bs and a number of Cs.
Most interestingly of all, the transcript carried two handwritten notations. One identified my mother as the recipient of a New York State scholarship in January 1941, at the time she graduated from high school. The other, dated two years later, indicated the scholarship had been revoked.
Until I gazed upon this transcript, I knew little of my mother’s college career, and that only because I had heard it through my father. The version he had gathered from my mother and passed along to me was that she had attended college on a scholarship and had graduated magna cum laude. Such achievements appeared plausible enough, given that my mother had been the valedictorian of her high school. My sister had somehow inherited the medal to prove it.
The college transcript revealed that my mother had lied about her college record, had plodded slowly to commencement, a long way from cum laude. It revealed that, for some reason, she had set aside her academic passions—Latin, French, math, journalism—to take a more utilitarian course of study. And as for those notations, they led me to an archivist for New York State. From his records I determined that my mother had lost the scholarship because, when she switched into night school, she could not squeeze in enough credits each semester to qualify as a full-time student.
Which brought me to another question and another set of documents. The question was why she would have left Brooklyn—the best public, coed liberal-arts school in the city as of 1941—for City downtown, and why she would then have left the day session for the night division. The documents were the Social Security records for my mother and my grandfather, which I requisitioned from a federal archive. In those printouts, I could track where each worked and how much each made for every three-month interval. They showed how, as my grandfather failed even in the late stages of the Depression to find regular work, my mother took on ever more responsibility. By age eighteen she was the chief breadwinner for her family, and earning that bread meant shunting college to the nighttime hours and choosing a major that promised employment rather than enlightenment.
As I put all this information together in my brain, I felt the effects in my heart. I understood the experience of a daughter, at once dutiful and resentful, having to defer her own dreams. I never could have conjured those emotions out of my life. I grew up in the easy assurance I would attend college. I graduated in four years, endowed by my father. I worked part-time jobs only to give myself spending cash. I supported my household by little more than taking out the garbage, and I often needed to be reminded to do that.
But typed letters and handwritten notes on decades-old paper stirred in me the necessary empathy. And this process was repeated countless times in my three years of working on the book. An aluminum bracelet spoke of the marriage proposal from her first boyfriend that my mother turned down. A letter from a friend to that friend’s fiancée in the navy brought me into a workplace conversation, including my mother, about how the Germans should be punished for the Holocaust. A docket of court papers unveiled the demise of her first, failed marriage.
I do not mean to make it sound like the revelations came readily. Documents conversed with other documents. Snapshots meshed with other snapshots. I often went out to interview my mother’s friends and relatives and coworkers carrying the materials I had unearthed, using those artifacts to stir memory and not infrequently to help correct fallible memory.
Several critics took Who She Was to task for being “too factual” and thought me hopelessly naïve for writing that “facts can lead to truth.” At the risk of sounding like the stereotypically embittered author who remembers every bad review, I must confess that their attacks angered and depressed me. Not for a second did they lead me, however, to doubt my methodology, my entire approach to family history. Had I wanted to invent a life for my mother, I would have written a novel. And someday, I hope, I will move into fiction. But as an act of reclamation and reconciliation, as a way of reaching beyond the grave, I needed to make memory from stubborn, recalcitrant reality.
ANDRÉ ACIMAN
Rue Delta
• • •
WITH AN EXCERPT FROM
Out of Egypt: A Memoir
FROM Out of Egypt: A Memoir
I left the piazza and returned to the station and for the first time that day made out the hollow sound of water lapping against the city. Soon after, an almost empty vaporetto arrived. Once inside, I made for the stern deck and sat on the rounded wooden bench along the fantail. Then the engine gave a churn, and a boatman released the knot. As soon as we began moving, I put both legs up on my bench, the way schoolboys ride the open-air deck on trams in Alexandria, staring at that vast expanse of night around me and at the gleaming silver-jade sweeps trailing in our wake in the middle of the Canal Grande as we cut our way deeper into the night, gliding quietly along the walls of the ancient arsenal like a spy boat that had turned off its engines or pulled in its oars. Up ahead, scattered light posts studding the lagoon tipped their heads above sea level, while the moonless city drifted behind me as I caught the fading outline of Punta della Dogana and further off the dimmed tower of San Marco looming in the late night haze. Roused by the searching beam of our vaporetto, splendid Venetian palaces suddenly rose from their slumber, one by one, lifting themselves out of the night like shades in Dante’s hell eager to converse with the living, displaying their gleaming arches and arabesques and their glazed brocade of casements for a few glowing instants, only then to slip back into darkness and resume their owl-like stupor once our boat had passed.
After San Zaccaria, the vaporetto took a wide, swooping turn and headed across the lagoon toward the Lido, the boat doubling its speed, chugging away loudly, with a cool wind fanning our faces, easing the thick scirocco weather, as I reclined and threw my head back. So we’ve seen Venice, I thought, mimicking my grandfather’s humor as I turned and watched the city sink into timeless night, thinking of Flora and all the cities and all the beaches and all the summers I too had known in my life, and of all those who had loved summer long before I came, and of those I had loved and ceased to care for and forgot to mourn and now wished were here with me in one home, one street, one city, one world.
Tomorrow, first thing, I would go to the beach.
• • •
Rue Delta
After celebrating what was to be our last Passover seder in Egypt four decades ago, I remember watching all the adults in my family leave the dining table, make their way through a long corridor, and reach the dimly lit family room. There, as happened each year, everyone sat quietly, listened to music, played cards, and invariably put everything aside when it was finally time for the nightly news broadcast on Radio Monte Carlo. I never liked Passover, but this year’s, our last in Egypt, was different, so I sat and watched the adults. When it was time for them to converge on the radio, I came up to my parents and told them I wanted to go out for a walk. I knew they were always reluctant to let their fourteen-year-o
ld boy roam the neighborhood streets alone by night, but this was my last time, and the walk was to be, without my knowing it, perhaps, my own version of an aimless, farewell stroll when you find yourself walking not just to see things for the last time or to take mental snapshots for the benefit of what Wordsworth would have called the “after years,” but to get a sense of how something as intimately familiar as Rue Delta, with its noises and odors and busy crowds and the sound of surf thudding nearby, could, in less than twenty-four hours, after having watched me grow up, cease forever to exist. It would be like taking a last, hopeless look at someone who is about to die or to become a stranger but whose hand still lingers—warmly—in ours. We try to imagine how we’ll live and who we’ll be without them; we try to foresee the worst; we look around for tiny reminders whose unsettling reappearance in future years could so easily jolt us with unexpected longing and sorrow. We learn to nip memory, like a bad weed, before it spreads. All along, though, we are no less puzzled by the loss, which cannot sink in yet, than we’ll be, decades later, when we land on the same street and feel that coming back doesn’t sink in either. No wonder Ulysses was asleep when the Phaiakians put him down on his native soil. Leaving, like coming back, is a numbing experience. Memory itself is a form of numbness; it cheats the senses. You feel neither sorrow nor joy. You feel that you’re feeling nothing.
After walking out of our building, I automatically headed toward the coast road, known as the corniche of Alexandria, which used to be very poorly lit in those years, partly because not all streetlights worked, but also because President Nasser wished to foster a wartime atmosphere that kept his countrymen forever fearful of a sudden Israeli air raid. There was always, during those evenings in the midsixties, a suggestion of an unintended, bungled blackout, which, far from bolstering morale, simply betrayed Egypt’s rapid decline. People always stole street lamps and pothole covers; seldom did anyone bother to replace them. The city simply grew darker and dingier.
But nighttime in Alexandria, during the month-long feast of Ramadan when devout Muslims fast until sundown every day, is a feast for the senses, and as I walked past the throng and stalls along the scantly lighted street, I was, as all European-Egyptians of my generation will always remember, accosted by wonderful odors of sweetened foods that not only were begging me to grasp how much I was losing in losing Alexandria but, in their overpowering, primitive fragrance, trailed with them a strange sense of exhilaration born from the presage that, finally, on leaving Egypt, I would never have to smell these earthy smells again, or be reminded that I had once been stranded in what was for so many of my generation a blighted backdrop of Europe. I was, as always during those final days of 1965, at once apprehensive, eager, and reluctant to leave; I would much rather have been granted an eternal reprieve—staying indefinitely provided I knew I’d be leaving soon.
This, after all, was precisely how we “lived” Egypt in those days, not just by anticipating a future in Europe that became ever more desirable the more we postponed it, but by longing for a European Alexandria that no longer really existed in Egypt and whose passing we were every day desperately eager to avert.
In Europe, however, I found that I longed to go back to an Egypt from which I had longed to get out. But I did not want to be back in Egypt; I simply wanted to be there longing for Europe again.
Pascal says somewhere that virtues are sometimes seldom more than a balancing act between two totally opposing vices. Similarly, the present is an arbitrary fulcrum in time, a moment delicately poised between two infinities, where dreams of the future and the longing to return find themselves strangely reversed. What we ultimately remember is not the past but ourselves in the past imagining the future. And, frequently, what we look forward to is not the future but the past restored.
Similarly, it is not the things we long for that we love; it is longing itself—just as it is not what we remember but remembrance we love. A good portion of my life at my computer in New York City today is spent dreaming of a life to come. What should my real memories be one day but of my computer screen and its tapestry of dreams? Europeans in Egypt spent so much time thirsting for happiness beyond Egypt that, in retrospect now, some of that longed-for happiness must have rubbed off and scented our life in Egypt, casting a happy film over days we always knew we’d sooner die than be asked to relive. The Egypt I craved to return to was not the one I knew, or couldn’t wait to flee, but the one where I learned to invent being somewhere else, someone else.
Every reader of my memoir Out of Egypt comes face-to-face with a disturbing paradox when I reveal that my Passover night walk comes not in one but in two versions—and that both, in fact, have been published. In the first version, which appeared in Commentary in May 1990, an Arab vendor sells me a falafel sandwich just as I reach the coast road; in the second, published in my memoir in 1995, the vendor hands me a Ramadan pastry and refuses to take any money for it.
In both versions, I stare out at the night sea and nurse the same thoughts vis-à-vis an Alexandria I’m already starting to miss. There is a significant difference, however, between the two versions. In the book, I stand alone. In the magazine, I am walking not by myself but in the company of my brother. Indeed, since I was a rather shy, indecisive boy, it was my younger brother, by far the more daring and enterprising of us two, who was more likely to have come up with the idea of taking such a walk on our last night in Egypt. The notion of eating leavened bread or sweet cakes on the first night of Passover could only have been his, never mine, though I was the atheist, not he.
My brother had a bold, impish side to him. People used to say that “he loved things” and that “he knew how to go after them.” I didn’t even know what they meant when they said such things. I was never sure I loved anything, much less how to go after it. I envied him.
He liked to get to the beach early enough so as not to “miss the sun,” the way he liked to eat food while “it was still hot.” The sun gave me migraines, and as for warm food, I preferred fruit, nuts, and cheeses. I squirreled my food; he delected in it. He liked meats and tangy sauces, dressings, stews, herbs, and spices. I knew of only one spice, oregano, because I would sprinkle it on my steaks to kill the taste of meat.
My brother would kneel before a basil bush and say he liked the smell of basil. I had never smelled basil until he pointed it out to me. Then I learned to like basil, the way I learned to like people only after he had befriended them first, or to mimic them after watching him ape their features, or to second-guess people by watching how he read their minds and said they were liars.
My brother liked to go out; I liked to stay in. On clear summer days, I liked nothing more than to sit on our balcony at the beach house and write or draw in the shade, watching him race along the sun-bleached dunes toward the beaches, never once turning back, “going after life,” as my father liked to call it.
Years later in New York, when I grew to love the sun, I did so like a tourist, never a native. I never knew whether I loved the sun for its own sake, as he did, or because it reminded me of my summer days in Egypt, where I had always avoided sunlight. I liked the sun from the shade, the way I like people, not by seeking them out but as though I might any moment lose their friendship and should already learn to live without them. I enter into friendships by scoping out exit doors, sometimes by bolting them shut.
My brother understood people. All I understood were my impressions—which is to say my fictions—of people, as though they and I were alien species and each had learned to pretend the other was not.
When, after Egypt, we began to take long walks together in Rome, he liked to change our itinerary, roam, get lost, explore; I liked to go on the same walks each time, for they led to any one of three to four English-language bookstores or to places that were already familiar or that had reminded me of something I had read in a book and which invariably harked back, when you searched deep and long enough and made all the appro
priate transpositions, to something vaguely Alexandrian—as though, for me to feel anything at all, it had to pass through the customhouse not of the senses but of memory. Walking through Rome without groping for inner signposts or without hoping to create new stations to which I might return at some later date would have been totally unthinkable. I wanted him to share my joy each time we repeated a familiar walk or each time it felt as though we were indeed somewhere more familiar than Rome. Understandably, in the end, my brother made fun of my nostalgic antics and, having tired of me, preferred to go out with friends instead.
And yet, though I learned to love my walks without him, I still owe him so many places I wouldn’t have discovered had it not been for him—just as, when I went back to Egypt in 1995, I needed to have him present with me all the time, to officiate my return alongside me, else I’d be numb to the experience. Petrarch’s walk up Mount Ventoux would mean nothing unless his brother were with him part of the way; Freud’s visit to the Acropolis would not cast the dark spell it did without his brother tagging along to remind him of their father; Van Gogh’s steadfast Theo was always there to come to his brother’s rescue; Wordsworth needed his sister to accompany him on his return to Tintern Abbey. I needed my brother the same way.
When I told him in New York one day that I missed our summer house, he reminded me that as a child I was always the very last to head out to the beach because, as everyone knew, I used to hate the beach, Mediterranean or otherwise.
It was his sense of irony, especially the one he aimed at me for hesitating to eat the falafel sandwich on Passover night in the 1990 version of our late-night walk in Alexandria, that I ended up sacrificing when I decided to kill him off in my memoir in 1995. Of course, he didn’t disappear entirely; he came in through a back door when I found myself borrowing my brother’s voice in the later version and, with his voice, his love of life and of this earth and of pastries. Suddenly, I loved the sun though I’d always shied away from it. Suddenly, I was the one who loved the odor of stewed meats and the brush of summer heat; I loved people, I loved laughter, and I loved to lie in the sun and doze off with just a fisherman’s hat thrown over my face, the smell of the beach forever impressed upon my skin, until that smell became my smell as well, the way Alexandria became my own, though I’d never belonged to it, and never wished to. I had stolen his love because I couldn’t feel any of my own.
Tell Me True Page 19