For Tante Marie, who felt as if all hope had gone from her life since leaving Egypt, being reunited with her older brother was a miraculous event. She saw him as a saintly figure come to show them kindness and compassion amid the bewildering harshness of their new home.
Oncle Raphael was in even worse straits. His health began to fail. Without my father, his trading partner in sardines, jams, and olive oil, to comfort him, still heartbroken by the events in Egypt, Oncle Raphael suffered a heart attack and died. He had been in Israel only six months.
Shortly after arriving in Israel, Tante Rebekah also became ill. She was diagnosed with lung cancer, though she had never smoked a cigarette in her life. Her son David, an enlisted soldier in the Israeli Army, came home to help care for her. Her husband knelt by her bed as she lay dying.
And then there was Alexandra.
My grandmother had landed in the middle of the orange groves of Ganeh Tikvah, an agricultural settlement. It could have been the end of the earth, this desolate patch of nothingness (but lots of oranges) miles from the nearest town. But it was where her son, Oncle Félix, lived, working when he could as a journalist, and it was supposed to be her new home.
In fact, she felt more like an alien from a distant planet. She didn’t know a soul, couldn’t speak the language, and seemed incapable of finding her way around, though even if she had, it wouldn’t have mattered because there was nothing to find.
Home was a narrow bed in the wooden prefab dwelling where my uncle and his wife, Aimee, lived. They were at war, trading barb after barb, accusation after accusation, with my grandmother as a witness.
Alexandra did what she’d always done to escape a painful situation—she went for walks. She left her son’s wooden house and wandered up and down the narrow gravel walkways that were the closest approximation to streets in this godforsaken village, where all one could see for miles and miles were orange groves.
She walked so much, and her manner was so distracted—mumbling to herself, holding on to a cigarette butt—that she attracted the attention of this immigrant community, made up mostly of refugees from distant corners of the Levant—Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, Casablanca.
They were sure that she was mad, this hunchbacked old woman who was always muttering to herself as she paced up and down on the same narrow road, and who would occasionally stop and address them in a language they couldn’t understand. She seemed to be pleading for help but didn’t know how in Hebrew or Arabic.
Alexandra became a figure of pity, or worse, derision. Children made fun of her and laughed in her face, and their parents weren’t much better. In the hardened society that was Israel of the 1950s, Alexandra’s fellow Jews showed her far less kindness, less of that wondrous quality the Egyptians call rahma—mercy, compassion—than she had encountered in Cairo at the hands of Arabs who’d see her wandering around Malaka Nazli.
No one had laughed at Alexandra in Egypt. On the contrary, strangers, moved by her air of distress and helplessness, would often stop and ask her if she needed help. That was the difference between a society that was primarily Middle Eastern, despite its long colonial history, and one that was primarily Western, despite its geography, and longed to be even more so.
My grandmother wasn’t crazy—she was simply lonely and feeling horribly unwanted and unloved. When were Edith and the children coming? she wondered. When would Leon make good on his promise and move the family here, so they would all be together again?
Though she lived with family, she was, for all intents and purposes, alone. She didn’t have a dime, and her son didn’t either. Oncle Félix hadn’t changed a bit between Cairo and Ganeh Tikvah. Though good-natured, he was still undependable. Almost from the moment my grandmother arrived, he’d announce he was going away, and off he’d vanish—to the other end of Africa, or merely to the other end of town.
Back in Egypt, Alexandra’s future had seemed settled, if not exactly ideal. Oncle Félix was said to be waiting for her in Israel in a house set amid farms and bucolic fields. But despite its rich soil and delicious outsize fruit, Ganeh Tikvah was a wasteland as far as Alexandra was concerned, a village with no shops, no theaters, no life—only one small grocery store. It wasn’t a kibbutz, so there weren’t even communal activities that could have lessened her sense of solitude. She couldn’t speak the language, she didn’t know the area, and she didn’t have any pocket money.
And she hated oranges.
How different from Cairo, when even at her lowest ebb, Alexandra could step out of her rented room and find companionship and cheer wandering amid the maze of boutiques and stalls and cafés and restaurants and cinema houses—above all the cinema houses. Not simply the Rialto, her own small haven where even the ticket clerks were her friends, but also the sumptuous cinémas en plein air, outdoor theaters like the Rex and the St. James where it was possible to sit on a wicker chair and feel the cool breeze from the Nile while enjoying a double feature.
She had been enthralled with the new generation of stars of the 1950s—Van Johnson, Deborah Kerr, Rock Hudson, Grace Kelly, and Elizabeth Taylor, always Elizabeth Taylor. How she endeared herself to Suzette by comparing her to Elizabeth Taylor. How she’d loved going to Malaka Nazli and telling Edith’s children the plotlines of the latest films she’d seen—embellishing them, of course, but only a little bit.
The air of Ganeh Tikvah was heavy with the fragrance of orange flowers. Once upon a time, she had loved to sing, “Senti, senti questi fiori d’arancio”—Inhale, inhale the orange flowers; but now she felt she was suffocating, that she couldn’t escape the trees with their immense fruit and the scent that was everywhere.
How she missed her old room and her tanaka, the little coffeepot that was her closest companion.
FINALLY, MY GRANDMOTHER MADE a friend of sorts. Newly married, eighteen-year-old Josette also was feeling lost and homesick. She missed Cairo and its comforts, and her parents who had stayed behind. She thought of Alexandra as an emissary from civilization. At last, someone to share a café Turque and enjoy a pleasant chat in French with—no Hebrew or Arabic, please.
Josette lived with her husband in a small wooden cabin in Ganeh Tikvah that Alexandra frequently passed on her aimless wanderings. She was actually related to my grandmother and Oncle Félix through marriage. Her husband’s grandfather was Isaac, the man who had wed, then abandoned, Alexandra, and his mother was Tante Rosée, my mom’s half sister. It made sense that, once in Israel, Josette and her husband had reached out to Oncle Félix.
In spite of her abject poverty, Josette could tell that my grandmother had that indefinable quality that could only be called class. She had an aristocratic bearing and her French was so exquisite! She was also a natural raconteur, and much as she had once beguiled my siblings, she captivated the young woman. With her exquisite French, Alexandra brought to mind some of Josette’s former schoolmates at the Lycée Français de Bab-el-Louk, the fabulously rich girls who arrived each morning in chauffeured Cadillacs from their mansions in Garden City and Zamalek and whose servants brought them lunch. What Josette couldn’t have known was that once upon a time, Alexandra had been one of those girls.
She found the old woman endearing, the contradictions in her both haunting and fascinating.
On the one hand, she was so helpless, the most helpless person she had ever known. In Israel, even more than in Egypt, my grandmother didn’t have a clue how to cope with the ordinary exigencies of life.
Alexandra was like a flower, Josette decided. But not any flower—the rare, delicate variety that grows on the side of a mountain, the edelweiss, white and lovely and excruciatingly fragile.
There was another quality she couldn’t pinpoint, which was wrapped up in the secret sorrow of the woman. It was an aura of mystery, a sense that she was searching, searching as she walked up and down those narrow pathways shaded by the orange trees, but for what, for what? “She is looking for her son,” the young woman concluded. She hated Félix and blamed him for Alexandra’s
unhappiness.
When Josette’s own parents finally moved to Israel, they settled in an adjoining wooden cabin and instantly embraced my grandmother. Alexandra would wander over to their house during one of her endless walks to nowhere, the way that she had once stopped to see us at Malaka Nazli. Josette’s parents were amiable people. They learned to recognize the shy knock on the door—four taps, and there was Alexandra, cigarette in hand, a slight smile on her anxious face.
She was so painfully thin by then. She was probably starving. There were ripe, delicious oranges literally at her feet. Pieces of fruit littered the grounds of Ganeh Tikvah, and on any one of her walks, Alexandra could simply have bent down and scooped them up. But she never did. She survived, if barely, on a diet of cigarettes, Turkish coffee, and the occasional hard-boiled egg that she ate every couple of days. Though she was delightful company, she seemed terribly distracted, unable to sit still for more than a few minutes, in a hurry to get to her next destination.
“Tu ne veux rien manger, chérie?” Josette or her mother would ask, Won’t you have a bite?
Alexandra would shake her head no, and politely excuse herself. She left them to resume her walk, which was both frantic and aimless.
Josette would watch her from the window—a little girl lost in the guise of an old woman, oblivious to her surroundings.
La guigne—bad luck, the evil eye. They had haunted my grandmother her entire life and had followed her here in God’s country, the one place on earth where curses could be broken and destinies reinvented.
“Please, God, don’t let me end up like that,” Josette prayed.
My grandmother was in fact intensely aware of her surroundings. She was also—as Josette had guessed—on the lookout for her son.
But not that son, not my uncle Félix. It was her other son, the blue-eyed child of the souk, that Alexandra hoped to find amid the orange groves. Surely her life couldn’t end like this, in a desolate stretch of nothingness, penniless and unwanted and alone, without her even having solved the essential mystery that had haunted her these many years. In my grandmother’s anguished solitude, being reunited with him had become her obsession once again.
He was all grown up now, but she was sure as only a mother can be that he had left Egypt too, and was somewhere close at hand.
She was persuaded that he too had found his way to the Promised Land.
Ganeh Tikvah, after all, meant the Garden of Hope, and Alexandra kept walking on the dark gravel roads, determined to remain hopeful.
CHAPTER 8
The Arabic Lesson
I am always drawn to photographs that seem to foreshadow events—happy scenes that contain telltale signs of a tragedy still to come. Everyone is smiling, but somewhere on the edge of the frame is a dark smudge, a shadow, so that despite the joyful faces, it is clear that a terrible event is about to unfold.
No matter how often I’ve stared at the last photograph of my father in white sharkskin, I have found no such hints. There he is in the courtyard of Temple Hanan. The occasion is a bris, a circumcision, and several guests have gathered in a large semicircle in front of the graceful Italianate windows. They beam in their soft, flowing silk dresses and tailored suits. At the center, my cousin Edouard is by his wife and mother-in-law, who cradles the newborn in her arms. My dad, though off somewhat to the side, still stands out because of his tall, princely bearing, his confident, easy smile, the fact that he towers over everyone around him, and mostly, his breathtaking elegance.
All the men are wearing dark, conservative suits.
Leon alone is in white.
It is a blissful scene. I have always thought of it as the last happy picture of the Jews of Egypt. Nothing portends of the events to come. There are no hints that within weeks or months it will all be over. The baby’s parents—Edouard, my father’s cousin, and his wife—will take their young son and depart almost immediately for America. The women in their finery will be dispersed to a dozen foreign lands. Temple Hanan will be abandoned, its courtyard empty and forlorn. And my father will never dress, or stand, or smile quite this way again.
The last happy picture of the Jews of Egypt. Temple Hanan, Cairo, 1958.
We didn’t go to Alexandria in the summer of 1958, a break from our tradition of renting a house or apartment by the sea. Life had lost much of its luster after the mass exodus of our relatives. Our house felt forlorn, devoid of its usual visitors. My father fielded letters from Israel, asking when we would be joining the rest of the family.
But after the panic that followed the Suez crisis, there was the semblance of stability. Life seemed to resume its languorous Levantine pace—at least on the surface. Though Father kept reassuring our relatives we were planning to join them, there didn’t appear to be quite the same urgency.
Even so, a lingering effect of the 1956 war was fear, a nagging sense that the Nasser regime was spying on us, that danger was around the corner. The maid, the porter, the street vendor—anyone could be spying for Nasser’s henchmen. My mother would sometimes motion to my siblings to keep silent: “Les murs ont des oreilles,” she would say, The walls have ears, and point to the maid setting the table.
Many people we knew had lost their businesses to the government, but Leon had almost nothing the government could sequester or confiscate. And so, in a strange way, he was able to continue as he always did—working resolutely alone. He outwitted and outmaneuvered the regime so that it couldn’t seize what was ours. Nasser himself couldn’t have penetrated the layers of secrecy shrouding my father’s myriad business interests.
My father’s routine remained unchanged. He still woke up every day at sunrise to attend services. Afterward, he came home for a light breakfast, then left again to go downtown for meetings with clients. He’d stop to enjoy a glass of cold beer, wander over to the bourse and more business meetings.
He loved to walk across Cairo, and he was so vigorous that even now, nearing sixty, he didn’t feel a need to slow down. Besides, he was energized by all his responsibilities at home, the fact that he had four small mouths to feed, including me, the new baby.
I was, from the start, his personal charge. When he was home, Edith left me in his care and together we went to play in the park across the street, on the campus of Sacré Coeur, or we’d simply stay in his room facing Malaka Nazli; as he worked or leafed through the morning papers, I sipped on milk fresh from the cow that still came to the back of our house each morning, exactly as it had in my grandmother Zarifa’s day.
One morning, cousin Edouard walked by and spotted me in my father’s arms, playing on the windowsill.
“Bonjour, Captain, ça va?” he called out; All’s well?
“Dieu est grand.” My dad smiled.
Edouard was trying to mend fences with my father. Shortly after his son’s bris, word spread he was planning to live in America, a move he’d tried to keep secret until the last minute. Though most of his friends approved, my dad was furious. Now he had to confront the Captain’s full wrath. Edouard’s father was sick, a patient at the old-age home in Heliopolis. How could he abandon him?
My father urged Edouard to stay calm and reconsider: there was no immediate need to leave Egypt now. But my cousin seemed panic-stricken. In his mind, he had no choice but to abandon his home, his job, and his life in Cairo. His wife was adamant; even if life was safer than after Suez, Egypt still held no lasting prospects for Jews.
Another morning, my dad summoned a photographer to come take a picture of the two of us outside Malaka Nazli. I toddled alongside him across the wide boulevard, over to the Convent of the Sacred Heart, whose grand, imposing building made such a perfect backdrop. Neighbors and passersby watched as the photographer set up his tripod and old-fashioned camera in the middle of the street.
My dad spotted a graceful old automobile, a Sheffield, parked in front of Sacred Heart. He picked me up and positioned me on top of the hood. He leaned over, pointing to the camera, hoping he could coax me to smile. He couldn�
�t. I did obey him in one sense, by staring, wide-eyed and unblinking, directly toward the photographer, who promptly poked his head under the black curtain and cried out, “Parfait.”
In the resulting shot, Dad holds me in that tender, protective way that is uniquely his. Though I seem a bit befuddled, he smiles broadly enough for the two of us. He is dressed somewhat informally, in a shirt and tie, but no jacket; I wear a prim cotton dress and real leather shoes, not baby boots, and my hair is styled in a perfect pageboy. The camera captures it all—the joy he has in holding me, the sense of absolute safety I feel nestled in that favorite spot I’ve staked out in the nook of his shoulder, au creux de son épaule.
It is a universe of two, created here on the streets of 1950s Cairo, and it will always be like this, my father and I taking on a vast and difficult world together, with a swagger and a smile and an expensive car we don’t even own. Nothing in the photograph suggests it will ever be any different, that the idyll will ever end.
Leon and Loulou.
It did, and only a couple of weeks later.
My father woke up at four in the morning as was his wont, determined to make the first service at Temple Hanan. He put on his lightest, whitest clothes because it was so brutally warm out, one of the hottest summers he could remember.
He began the familiar ten-minute sprint to synagogue, crossing the alleyway by the side of our house, then turning toward a main street which led to Midan Sakakini, the wide traffic circle anchored by the mansion of the fabled Sakakini family of pashas and beys, then back to the narrow dirt roads he knew so intimately that he could have walked them blindfolded. He had been taking the same familiar path every morning for more than twenty years, since he’d moved with Zarifa to the house on Malaka Nazli.
The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit Page 11