by André Aciman
The first thing one did when abattoir came was to get vaccinated. No country would allow us across its border without papers certifying we had been properly immunized against a slew of Third World diseases.
My father had asked me to take my grandmother to the government vaccine office. The office was near the harbor. She hated the thought of being vaccinated by an Egyptian orderly—“Not even a doctor,” she said. I told her we would stop and have tea and pastries afterward at Athinéos. “Don’t hurt me,” she told the balding woman who held her arm. “But I’m not hurting you,” protested the woman in Arabic. “You’re not hurting me? You are hurting me!” The woman ordered her to keep still. Then came my turn. She reminded me of Miss Badawi when she scraped my scalp with her fingernails looking for lice. Would they really ask us to undress at the customs desk when the time came and search us to our shame?
After the ordeal, my grandmother was still grumbling as we came down the stairs of the government building, her voice echoing loudly as I tried to hush her. She said she wanted to buy me ties.
Outside the building, I immediately hailed a hansom, helped my grandmother up, and then heard her give an obscure address on Place Mohammed Ali. As soon as we were seated, she removed a small vial of alcohol and, like her Marrano ancestors who wiped off all traces of baptismal water as soon as they had left the church, she sprinkled the alcohol on the site of the injection—to kill the vaccine, she said, and all the germs that came with it!
It was a glorious day, and as we rode along my grandmother suddenly tapped me on the leg as she had done years earlier on our way to Rouchdy and said, “Definitely a beach day.” I took off my sweater and began to feel that uncomfortable, palling touch of wool flannel against my thighs. Time for shorts. The mere thought of light cotton made the wool unbearable. We cut through a dark street, then a square, got on the Corniche, and, in less than ten minutes, came face-to-face with the statue of Mohammed Ali, the Albanian founder of Egypt’s last ruling dynasty.
We proceeded past a series of old, decrepit stores that looked like improvised warehouses and workshops until we reached one tiny, extremely cluttered shop. “Sidi Daoud,” shouted my grandmother. No answer. She took out a coin and used it to knock on the glass door several times. “Sidi Daoud is here,” a tired figure finally uttered, emerging from the dark. He recognized her immediately, calling her his “favorite mazmazelle.”
Sidi Daoud was a one-eyed, portly Egyptian who dressed in traditional garb—a white galabiya and on top of it a grossly oversized, gray, double-breasted jacket. My grandmother, speaking to him in Arabic, said she wanted to buy me some good ties. “Ties? I have ties,” he said, pointing to a huge old closet whose doors had been completely removed; it was stuffed with paper bags and dirty cardboard boxes. “What sort of ties?” “Show me,” she said. “Show me, she says,” he muttered as he paced about, “so I’ll show her.”
He brought a stool, climbed up with a series of groans and cringes, reached up to the top of the closet, and brought down a cardboard box whose corners were reinforced with rusted metal. “These are the best,” he said as he took out tie after tie. “You’ll never find these for sale anywhere in the city, or in Cairo, or anywhere else in Egypt.” He removed a tie from a long sheath. It was dark blue with intricate light-blue and pale-orange patterns. He took it in his hands and brought it close to the entrance of the store that I might see it better in the sunlight, holding it out to me with both hands the way a cook might display a poached fish on a salver before serving it. “Let me see,” said my grandmother as though she were about to lift and examine its gills. I recognized the tie immediately: it had the sheen of Signor Ugo’s ties.
This was a stupendous piece of work. My grandmother looked at the loop and the brand name on the rear apron and remarked that it was not a bad make. “I’ll show you another,” he said, not even waiting for me to pass judgment on the first. The second was a light-burgundy, bearing an identical pattern to the first. “Take it to the door,” he told me, “I’m too old to come and go all day.” This one was lovelier than the first, I thought, as I studied both together. A moment later, my grandmother joined me at the door and held the burgundy one in her hands and examined it, tilting her head left and right, as though looking for concealed blemishes which she was almost sure to catch if she looked hard enough. Then, placing the fabric between thumb and forefinger, she rubbed them together to test the quality of the silk, peeving the salesman. “Show me better.” “Better than this?” he replied. “Mafish, there isn’t!” He showed us other ties, but none compared to the first. I said I was happy with the dark-blue one; it would go with my new blazer. “Don’t match your clothes like a pauper,” said my grandmother. The Egyptian unsheathed two more ties from a different box. One with a green background, the other light blue. “Do you like them?” she asked. I liked them all, I said. “He likes them all,” she repeated with indulgent irony in her voice.
“This is the black market,” she said to me as soon as we left the store, the precious package clutched in my hand, as I squinted in the sunlight, scanning the crowded Place Mohammed Ali for another horse-drawn carriage. We had spent half an hour in Sidi Daoud’s store and had probably looked at a hundred ties before choosing these four. No shop I ever saw, before or since—not even the shop in the Faubourg Saint Honoré where my grandmother took me years later—had as many ties as Sidi Daoud’s little hovel. I spotted an empty hansom and shouted to the driver from across the square. The arbaghi, who heard me and immediately stood up in the driver’s box, signaled he would have to turn around the square, motioning us to wait for him.
Fifteen minutes later, we arrived at Athinéos. The old Spaniard was gone. Instead, a surly Greek doing a weak impersonation of a well-mannered waiter took our order. We were seated in a very quiet corner, next to a window with thick white linen drapes, and spoke about the French plays due to open in a few days. “Such a pity,” she said. “Things are beginning to improve just when we are leaving.” The Comédie Française had finally returned to Egypt after an absence of at least ten years. La Scala was also due to come again and open in Cairo’s old opera house with a production of Otello. Madame Darwish, our seamstress, had told my grandmother of a young actor from the Comédie who had knocked at her door saying this was where he had lived as a boy; she let him in, offered him coffee, and the young man burst out crying, then said goodbye. “Could all this talk of expulsion be mere bluffing?” my grandmother mused aloud, only to respond, “I don’t think so.”
After a second round of mango ice cream, she said, “And now we’ll buy you a good book and then we might stop a while at the museum.” By “good book” she meant either difficult to come by or one she approved of. It was to be my fourteenth-birthday present. We left the restaurant and were about to hail another carriage when my grandmother told me to make a quick left turn. “We’ll pretend we’re going to eat a pastry at Flückiger’s.” I didn’t realize why we were pretending until much later in the day when I heard my father yell at my grandmother. “We could all go to jail for what you did, thinking you’re so clever!” Indeed, she had succeeded in losing the man who had been tailing us after—and probably before—we entered Athinéos. I knew nothing about it when we were inside the secondhand bookstore. On one of the stacks I had found exactly what I wanted. “Are you sure you’re going to read all this?” she asked.
She paid for the books absentmindedly and did not return the salesman’s greeting. She had suddenly realized that a second agent might have been following us all along. “Let’s leave now,” she said, trying to be polite. “Why?” “Because.” We hopped in a taxi and told the driver to take us to Ramleh station. On our way we passed a series of familiar shops and restaurants, a stretch of saplings leaning against a sunny wall, and, beyond the buildings, an angular view of the afternoon sea.
As soon as we arrived at Sporting, I told my grandmother I was going straight to the Corniche. “No, you’re coming home with me.” I was about to argue.
“Do as I tell you, please. There could be trouble.” Standing on the platform was our familiar tail. As soon as I heard the word trouble, I must have frozen on the spot, because she immediately added, “Now don’t go about looking so frightened!”
My grandmother, it turned out, had been smuggling money out of the country for years and had done so on that very day. I will never know whether her contact was Sidi Daoud, or the owner of the secondhand bookstore, or maybe one of the many coachmen we hired that day. When I asked her in Paris many years later, all she volunteered was, “One needed nerves of steel.”
Despite the frantic packing and last-minute sale of all the furniture, my mother, my grandmother, and Aunt Elsa had decided we should hold a Passover seder on the eve of our departure. For this occasion, two giant candelabra would be brought in from the living room, and it was decided that the old sculptured candles should be used as well. No point in giving them away. Aunt Elsa wanted to clean house, to remove all traces of bread, as Jews traditionally do in preparation for Passover. But with the suitcases all over the place and everything upside down, nobody was eager to undertake such a task, and the idea was abandoned. “Then why have a seder?” she asked with embittered sarcasm. “Be glad we’re having one at all,” replied my father. I watched her fume. “If that’s going to be your attitude, let’s not have one, see if I care.” “Now don’t get all worked up over a silly seder, Elsa. Please!”
My mother and my grandmother began pleading with him, and for a good portion of the afternoon, busy embassies shuttled back and forth between Aunt Elsa’s room and my father’s study. Finally, he said he had to go out but would be back for dinner. That was his way of conceding. Abdou, who knew exactly what to prepare for the seder, needed no further inducements and immediately began boiling the eggs and preparing the cheese-and-potato buñuelos.
Meanwhile, Aunt Elsa began imploring me to help read the Haggadah that evening. Each time I refused, she would remind me that it was the last time this dining room would ever see a seder and that I should read in memory of Uncle Nessim. “His seat will stay empty unless somebody reads.” Again I refused. “Are you ashamed of being Jewish? Is that it? What kind of Jews are we, then?” she kept asking. “The kind who don’t celebrate leaving Egypt when it’s the last thing they want to do,” I said. “But that’s so childish. We’ve never not had a seder. Your mother will be crushed. Is that what you want?” “What I want is to have no part of it. I don’t want to cross the Red Sea. And I don’t want to be in Jerusalem next year. As far as I’m concerned, all of this is just worship of repetition and nothing more.” And I stormed out of the room, extremely pleased with my bon mot. “But it’s our last evening in Egypt,” she said, as though that would change my mind.
For all my resistance, however, I decided to wear one of my new ties, a blazer, and a newly made pair of pointed black shoes. My mother, who joined me in the living room around half past seven, was wearing a dark-blue dress and her favorite jewelry. In the next room, I could hear the two sisters putting the final touches to the table, stowing away the unused silverware, which Abdou had just polished. Then my grandmother came in, making a face that meant Aunt Elsa was truly impossible. “It’s always what she wants, never what others want.” She sat down, inspected her skirt absentmindedly, spreading its pleats, then began searching through the bowl of peanuts until she found a roasted almond. We looked outside and in the window caught our own reflections. Three more characters, I thought, and we’ll be ready for Pirandello.
Aunt Elsa walked in, dressed in purple lace that dated back at least three generations. She seemed to notice that I had decided to wear a tie. “Much better than those trousers with the snaps on them,” she said, throwing her sister a significant glance. We decided to have vermouth, and Aunt Elsa said she would smoke. My mother also smoked. Then, gradually, as always happened during such gatherings, the sisters began to reminisce. Aunt Elsa told us about the little icon shop she had kept in Lourdes before the Second World War. She had sold such large quantities of religious objects to Christian pilgrims that no one would have guessed she was Jewish. But then, at Passover, not knowing where to buy unleavened bread, she had gone to a local baker and inquired about the various qualities of flour he used in his shop, claiming her husband had a terrible ulcer and needed special bread. The man said he did not understand what she wanted, and Elsa, distraught, continued to ask about a very light type of bread, maybe even unleavened bread, if such a thing existed. The man replied that surely there was an epidemic spreading around Lourdes, for many were suffering from similar gastric disorders and had been coming to his shop for the past few days asking the same question. “Many?” she asked. “Many, many,” he replied, smiling, then whispered, “Bonne pâque, happy Passover,” and sold her the unleavened bread.
“Se non è vero, è ben trovato, if it isn’t true, you’ve made it up well,” said my father, who had just walked in. “So, are we all ready?” “Yes, we were waiting for you,” said my mother, “did you want some scotch?” “No, already had some.”
Then, as we made toward the dining room, I saw that my father’s right cheek was covered with pink, livid streaks, like nail scratches. My grandmother immediately pinched her cheek when she saw his face but said nothing. My mother too cast stealthy glances in his direction but was silent.
“So what exactly is it you want us to do now?” he asked Aunt Elsa, mildly scoffing at the ceremonial air she adopted on these occasions.
“I want you to read,” she said, indicating Uncle Nessim’s seat. My mother stood up and showed him where to start, pained and shaking her head silently the more she looked at his face. He began to recite in French, without irony, without flourishes, even meekly. But as soon as he began to feel comfortable with the text, he started to fumble, reading the instructions out loud, then correcting himself, or skipping lines unintentionally only to find himself reading the same line twice. At one point, wishing to facilitate his task, my grandmother said, “Skip that portion.” He read some more and she interrupted again. “Skip that too.”
“No,” said Elsa, “either we read everything or nothing at all.” An argument was about to erupt. “Where is Nessim now that we need him,” said Elsa with that doleful tone in her voice that explained her success at Lourdes. “As far away from you as he can be,” muttered my father under his breath, which immediately made me giggle. My mother, catching my attempt to stifle a laugh, began to smile; she knew exactly what my father had said though she had not heard it. My father, too, was infected by the giggling, which he smothered as best as he could, until my grandmother caught sight of him, which sent her laughing uncontrollably. No one had any idea what to do, what to read, or when to stop. “Some Jews we are,” said Aunt Elsa, who had also started to laugh and whose eyes were tearing. “Shall we eat, then?” asked my father. “Good idea,” I said. “But we’ve only just begun,” protested Aunt Elsa, recovering her composure. “It’s the very last time. How could you? We’ll never be together again, I can just feel it.” She was on the verge of tears, but my grandmother warned her that she, too, would start crying if we kept on like this. “This is the last year,” said Elsa, reaching out and touching my hand. “It’s just that I can remember so many seders held in this very room, for fifty years, year after year after year. And I’ll tell you something,” she said, turning to my father. “Had I known fifty years ago that it would end like this, had I known I’d be among the last in this room, with everyone buried or gone away, it would have been better to die, better to have died back then than to be left alone like this.” “Calm yourself, Elsica,” said my father, “otherwise we’ll all be in mourning here.”
At that point, Abdou walked in and, approaching my father, said there was someone on the telephone asking for him. “Tell them we are praying,” said my father. “But sir—” He seemed troubled and began to speak softly. “So?” “She said she wanted to apologize.” No one said anything. “Tell her not now.” “Very well.”
We hear
d the hurried patter of Abdou’s steps up the corridor, heard him pick up the receiver and mumble something. Then, with relief, we heard him hang up and go back into the kitchen. It meant she had not insisted or argued. It meant he would be with us tonight. “Shall we eat, then?” said my mother. “Good idea,” I repeated. “Yes, I’m starving,” said Aunt Elsa. “An angel you married,” murmured my grandmother to my father.
After dinner, everyone moved into the smaller living room, and, as was her habit on special gatherings, Aunt Elsa asked my father to play the record she loved so much. It was a very old recording by the Busch Quartet, and Aunt Elsa always kept it in her room, fearing someone might ruin it. I had noticed it earlier in the day lying next to the radio. It meant she had been planning the music all along. “Here,” she said, gingerly removing the warped record from its blanched dust jacket with her arthritic fingers. It was Beethoven’s “Song of Thanksgiving.” Everyone sat down, and the adagio started.
The old 78 hissed, the static louder than the music, though no one seemed to notice, for my grandmother began humming, softly, with a plangent, faraway whine in her voice, and my father shut his eyes, and Aunt Elsa began shaking her head in rapt wonder, as she did sometimes when tasting Swiss chocolate purchased on the black market, as if to say, “How could anyone have created such beauty?”
And there, I thought, was my entire world: the two old ones writhing in a silent stupor, my father probably wishing he was elsewhere, and my mother, whose thoughts, as she leafed through a French fashion magazine, were everywhere and nowhere, but mostly on her husband, who knew that she would say nothing that evening and would probably let the matter pass quietly and never speak of it again.
I motioned to my mother that I was going out for a walk. She nodded. Without saying anything, my father put his hand in his pocket and slipped me a few bills.