Of course, it wasn’t her skills alone that had originally propelled her into this position. Alice Cattaui was born into the Suarez family, one of the wealthiest in Egypt. Her husband, the pasha, was an engineer by training who had made his own vast fortune running the country’s lucrative sugar-refining concern, Kom Ombo. Yussef Cattaui Pasha was a founding board member of Banque Misr, the first Egyptian bank in a country where all the financial institutions were foreign owned. He was also president of the Jewish community, a mission he took to heart as did his wife, because ministering to Cairene Jews who were destitute was part of the Cattaui heritage, and essential to the family’s sense of noblesse oblige.
The neo-Gothic “Villa Cattaui” wasn’t the largest mansion in Garden City, but it was certainly the most exotic. In this dreamlike corner of Cairo favored by the British, it stood out for its turrets and vaulted arches and stained-glass windows, but what made it unique was a library that housed more than sixty thousand volumes, handpicked by their bibliophile owner. The library was the pasha’s great love, and he had designed it to be the most sumptuous part of the villa. It had its own wing with rows and rows of intricately designed wooden cases; behind glass were sets of leather-bound volumes Yussef Cattaui had acquired throughout his life—rare first editions of any and all subjects that interested him.
The pasha and his wife both entertained frequently. Madame Cattaui was a striking figure, small with impeccable posture. Her clothes were bought in Paris (though she did, of course, have favored couturieres in Cairo), and she was rarely seen without her multiple strands of pearls and the special Queen Nazli pin encrusted with emeralds and diamonds and rubies that she wore like a badge of honor. The brooch signified she had unfettered access to all the royal palaces.
At home at Villa Cattaui, cooks and nannies and governesses and housekeepers were there to attend to every need. When the Cattauis’ two grown sons, Aslan and René, got married, they had their wives move in with them. Each brother took over a floor of the mansion. That was the way you lived in Cairo, whether you were in the humblest or the most elegant part of town. It was a culture where families—affluent, poor, or that small percentage that was middle class—stayed together. It wasn’t unusual for multiple generations to reside under one roof, though the roof was rarely as luxurious as the one at 8 Ibrahim Pasha Street.
The pasha’s wife was in perpetual motion. The court, the galas, the state dinners, the pressures of attending to a difficult and headstrong queen while fulfilling her duties to the king would have been exhausting for most human beings, but Madame Cattaui seemed unstoppable as she raced across Cairo on one royal mission or another.
Friday afternoon was set aside for high tea, when she received important women passing through—the princesses and other members of European nobility who were visiting Egypt and craved an audience with Queen Nazli.
Afterward, it was quiet at the Cattaui residence, as it was in different parts of the city. Cairo was so respectful of its Jewish population that even la bourse, the stock market, shut down in observance of the Sabbath, as did many banks.
Sunday night, there was a festive meal at home with the family and selected friends. Everyone dined on plates rimmed with gold, featuring the distinctive Cattaui monogram. Guests couldn’t help noticing the grand piano in the main drawing room, which was covered with pictures of the European aristocrats who had met with the pasha’s wife.
Madame Cattaui was completely at ease in Cairo’s high society and indeed dominated it. But she was equally committed to her work in a very different part of Cairo, the older neighborhoods where the Jewish communal institutions were situated. She took a special interest in the schools the Cattaui family had founded and were still bankrolling; her work there was as important as her duties toward the king and the queen.
It was only a short car ride from Garden City to the heart of Daher and Abbassiyah, yet it was a journey few residents of the leafy villas made, at least not regularly, and that is why the pasha’s wife stood out.
She was a constant visitor to L’École Cattaui, the little Jewish private school in Sakakini the family had founded, and which prided itself on giving the finest and most rigorous education in all of Cairo. She’d also go regularly—every Tuesday in fact—to the Sebil, the massive communal Jewish school that catered to children who lacked means.
The students at the Sebil lived for Tuesdays and the glimpse they caught of the striking woman in silk and pearls. While she was clearly a grande dame, she had a gentle air about her. If children looked thin, or came to school in threadbare clothing, she would go over to them and then gently quiz their teachers. Were they in need? Could she possibly help?
Le Sebil guaranteed a free lunch to all its students. There were many stories of children going hungry, whose parents couldn’t afford to give them so much as a sandwich to take to class. The school made sure they ate, though it was deeply humble fare. Come noon, in the large dining hall, hundreds of pupils sat at long tables with wooden benches, and the kitchen staff would arrive carrying big steaming pots with the day’s offerings—a bowl of string beans with rice, or stewed potatoes, perhaps some lentil soup.
That was the menu day after day—except Tuesday. On a typical Tuesday morning, there’d already be a buzz about lunch. If the children heard that meat was on the menu, they’d loudly exclaim, “Madame Cattaui is coming.”
The pasha’s wife would arrive, usually with one other society woman in tow. The two would stand in the large cafeteria, carefully inspecting what was served. The school took extra pains to prepare a special meal those days the VIP visitors were expected.
They were the ladies of Tuesday, and they made it a point never to sit down. The children would see them walking up and down the long tables making sure there was enough to eat and that the dishes were clean. If a child wasn’t eating, Madame Cattaui would coax him to finish his meal.
Once lunch was over, the children would sing the traditional after-meal hymn. But there were times a child had lost a parent or close relative. They were encouraged to recite the Kaddish, the Hebrew prayer for the dead. The children noticed the pasha’s wife listening intently as they prayed, and it was as if she were praying with them.
She’d return days later and head for the courtyard. Needy children were pulled aside by their teachers—the students who wore torn shoes and dirty clothes and whose families lived in the ancient Haret-el-Yahood, the Jewish ghetto.
Madame Cattaui proceeded to give out des sandalettes—small, inexpensive leather sandals. She also distributed packets of clothing, usually the aprons children were required to wear as a uniform—along with notebooks and pens and any other necessities their parents couldn’t afford to buy them.
There was a solemn, ceremonial quality to the affair; it was supposed to be discreet, but everyone at school could see what was going on in the courtyard and follow how she handed out the allotment of sandalettes, and which children were lucky—or unlucky—enough to receive them.
When she wasn’t on official duty, Alice Cattaui was a different person. The opulent clothes and couture hats and jewels came off and were replaced by simple black dresses; that is what she preferred to wear at home alone, or to the market to buy vegetables and groceries.
Now that was a task that could have been handled by the servants, yet the pasha’s wife insisted on doing it herself.
She raised her children—then her grandchildren—with a message of stoicism, self-discipline, and tough love.
“Never give in to despair,” she told her granddaughter Nimet again and again.
To her family, her behavior could be mystifying. She looked like a woman in mourning, even on festive occasions. And that is exactly what she was—a woman observing the death of a loved one, except in this case the loved one had died decades earlier.
The rule at Villa Cattaui was never to talk about Indji, the only daughter of the pasha and his wife. She was rarely mentioned by name, yet she seemed to be everywhere, lurking in ev
ery corner of 8 Ibrahim Pasha Street, so that the lives of all of its inhabitants were affected by her, even the grandchildren who had never known her.
Born in 1888, the oldest of the three Cattaui children, Indji was doted on from the start. The photographs and portraits around the house and in the albums attested to her privileged status—dozens and dozens of images of a beautiful child taken from the time she was an infant, and always, or almost always, dressed in white.
As she grew up, the outfits became ever more intricate and luxuriant. One year, Indji posed in an Oriental costume, standing next to a Chinese vase. A year later, she was pictured in a knee-length white dress, high-topped black shoes, and a wide-brimmed hat, smiling mischievously.
Then came the portraits of Indji in her arrogant years. As she grew up, her dresses became longer and more opulent and even as a teenager, she still wore only white. In one photograph, she sat on a thronelike chair, her hair swept up in a pompadour. In 1905, as she turned eighteen, a French artist was commissioned to paint her portrait. She posed standing against a ledge wearing a flowing gown made entirely of white lace and muslin, holding in her hand a single rose. She looked like the classic Edwardian beauty, delicate and dreamy.
Indji Cattaui as a young girl in Cairo, dressed as always in white.
Before the painting was finished, Indji Cattaui fell ill with typhoid fever. It was the curse of Egypt—la maladie du pays. An insidious disease that was rampant in the hot summers, it was as easy to catch as the flu. Because of the primitive public health measures, there were constant outbreaks of the dreaded fievre Typhoide; and in those days before antibiotics it was almost impossible to treat—the fever had to take its relentless course and some survived but many did not. The pasha’s daughter died before her nineteenth birthday and was buried in the family mausoleum.
Indji Cattaui was destined to remain as it were frozen in her coming-of-age portrait—forever eighteen. And that was the burden the pasha’s wife carried, the pain that a thousand soirees and sets of monogrammed china couldn’t lessen.
Madame Cattaui Pasha wasn’t to be seen crying in public—not ever. Her mourning was silent and private and eternal. The painting remained on display in the library of Villa Cattaui. When her oldest son and his wife had a daughter, they named her Indji to honor the young woman but also to console the inconsolable pasha’s wife.
My mother, Edith, who came to know her as a young teacher in Cairo when she worked at L’École Cattaui, and loved her with all her heart—loved her like a daughter—believed Alice Cattaui to be the most formidable woman in all of Egypt. Yet even my mom who became so close with her never had an inkling of the pain that lurked within.
Every few months, Madame Cattaui would get into her chauffeured limousine and quietly instruct the driver to take her to the small family cemetery where she would disappear to linger at her daughter’s grave. She then would return to the car for the drive to Garden City or to work at the palace at Abdeen or the palace at Heliopolis or the palace at Koubeh.
In 1936, King Fouad died suddenly, and the pasha’s wife was left once again bereft—he had been her mentor and greatest patron. But with the same force of personality that had made her essential to Fouad, she became indispensable to his teenage son Farouk, who she had known since he was a baby. She was there when Farouk took power that spring, and she was a witness and intimate participant at his coronation the following year, when more than two million Egyptians flocked to Cairo to watch the seventeen-year-old monarch ascend to the throne.
King Farouk at his coronation, 1937.
Unlike his late father, Farouk was fluent in Arabic and dazzled the crowd when he delivered his first speech in their native tongue.
When Farouk was married two years later, Madame Cattaui became lady-in-waiting to his new bride, Queen Farida. She even emerged as a matchmaker of sorts for Farouk’s sister and the future shah of Iran. Back in 1931, at a party given by the Iranian delegation, the pasha’s wife had paused in front of a painting of the young Reza Pahlavi and remarked: “Who is this handsome young man?”
That was enough to give an Iranian minister an idea: to bring together the two great families of Egypt and Persia. A few years later, the young Pahlavi became engaged to Princess Fawziah, the most beautiful of Farouk’s sisters. The minister credited Madame Cattaui for the union.
The pasha and his wife at their fiftieth wedding anniversary, Cairo, 1930s. Portrait taken by the renowned photographer, Jean Weinberg.
It was such a glittering period. One grand occasion followed another, none more elegant and festive perhaps than when the pasha and his wife marked their fiftieth wedding anniversary—c’etait leurs noces d’or—with a high tea thrown in their honor at Villa Cattaui. Jean Weinberg, the legendary photographer to the Royal Court, took pictures of the occasion. What he produced was vintage Weinberg—a portrait of the pasha and his wife that captured the soul of its subjects.
Yussef and Alice sit regally side by side on a velvet couch. Traces of their sumptuous lifestyle are evident in the carefully assembled frame—the rich embroidered pillows, the elaborate Oriental rugs, the satin and veil window curtains that part dramatically behind the couple.
The pasha looks magisterial in his tarboush, or fez. He holds a cane in front of him between his open legs, in the manner of a typical Middle Eastern gentleman. Alice is every bit as formidable in her flowing dress with an embroidered collar, her signature pearls, and the white gloves she clutches tightly in her hands. On her head is a jaunty cap with ostrich plumes. But while the pasha appears content, a hint of a smile on his face, a glint in his eyes, his wife, the arbiter of Egyptian society, stares straight ahead, serious and sullen and utterly mournful.
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The Alley of the Pretty One
There was that blissful hour every afternoon when residents of the Alley of the Pretty One would venture out to their balconies, sit back, and savor their café turc, and the narrow little lane turned festive and joyous. Families put the difficulties of the day behind them. Friends and even strangers strolling in the area were entreated to stop by. Everywhere, there were cries of Ahlan musahlan, the effusive Arabic greeting that manages to say hello and welcome and please come join us in two words.
The ritual of the late afternoon Turkish coffee was sacred throughout Sakakini, a cozy neighborhood where many of Cairo’s Jews lived in small buildings they shared peaceably with their Muslim and Coptic neighbors. Sakakini’s streets were lined with four- or five-story walk-ups; the taller, more stately structures, a few with elevators, could only be found on the adjoining boulevards such as Malaka Nazli. Finally, there were the little serpentine alleyways, dozens and dozens of them, where the residences were ever so humble, made of ancient stone and typically only a couple of stories high.
There, the roads were dusty and unpaved, and even one car could barely get through.
Haret el-Helwa, the Alley of the Pretty One, where my mother, Edith, lived with my grandmother Alexandra, was longer than most alleyways and a bit more distinguished as it had its own mosque, smack in the middle. Five times a day residents could hear the imam’s stirring call to prayer, “Allahu akbar.”
Every apartment had a balcony, and in those days when even a ceiling fan was a luxury, it became an essential gathering place come dusk, when the intense heat of Cairo finally broke and a wonderfully refreshing breeze would drift in from the Sahara.
That is when the balconies would fill up with people—grandparents, rambunctious children, tired housewives—and they’d bring out serving tables crammed with snacks to nibble on, à grignoter, such as freshly peeled cucumbers, roasted pistachios, slices of mandarin oranges, or sticks of sugar cane that everyone young and old loved because they were so juicy and delicious. Occupying the place of honor was the tanaka, the little copper pot with the long handle filled with steaming Turkish coffee, sweetened for good luck.
It was a ritual enjoyed by all. The only difference was that the Jews tended to speak French
among themselves, whereas Muslims conversed mostly in Arabic and the Copts a mixture of the two. But it was a sign of how well everyone got along that in addition to the mosque there were at least four major synagogues within a few blocks.
Whenever a cool breeze would blow in, you could hear the murmurs of relief. “Enfin, de la tarawa”—finally, some fresh air—someone would cry in that mixture of French and Arabic so many favored in this culture that managed to be both European and Middle Eastern.
Most of the alley’s residents were content simply to be outside, enjoying the street life. Even in the evening, vendors were still on the prowl, and you could count on seeing le marchand de robabekiah, the merchant of used wares, pushing his little cart filled with the oddest odds and ends—a broken, naked doll, a rusty cooking pot, a cardboard box. He’d come by chanting “Bekiah, bekiah” (“Old junk, old junk”), hopeful even at this late hour to make a deal of a piaster or two that would redeem his day and make his hard labors walking in the heat worthwhile.
My grandmother Alexandra, who was fluent in Italian, would shake her head at their ignorance, the fact that they didn’t even realize they were citing an Italian phrase—roba vecchia, old clothes—they had appropriated and made their own and turned into a colloquial Arabic expression.
Alexandra and Edith were fixtures on their balcony, joined occasionally by Félix, Mom’s younger brother. They lived on the ground floor—the least expensive dwelling in any building—and even paying for that was a struggle, and most of the neighbors knew it because everyone knew everyone else’s business.
The apartment was small and dark—not much sun ever penetrated the narrow alleyway—and sparsely furnished. The living room in the front had only le canapé, a small couch that doubled as a bed for Félix. My mother and grandmother shared the bedroom in the back. And then there was Alexandra’s piano, the most essential object in the house and the most incongruent, which she played less and less as she grew older.
The Arrogant Years Page 3