The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit

by Lucette Lagnado

  At my father’s urging, my mother and I began making the rounds of Cairo holy sites, where miracles were known to occur.

  We began by visiting the Gates of Heaven, the most important synagogue in all of Egypt, built in the nineteenth century. Legend had it that its wealthy benefactors had thrown precious gold and silver coins into the foundation for good luck. It was at the Gates of Heaven where my parents were married in the spring of 1943, standing at an altar strewn with white roses.

  My mother took me by the hand up the same marble steps she had climbed as a twenty-year-old bride. The precious Torah scrolls were kept behind a velvet curtain, and she lifted me in her arms so I could kiss the curtain, which itself was holy. “It will bring you luck,” she whispered.

  We journeyed next to Ben Ezra, the synagogue where several of the biblical prophets were known to have lingered. Jeremiah, the prophet of lamentation, was buried beneath the temple’s stone foundation, while Elijah, who was so pure that legend had it that God couldn’t bear to let him die, was said to stop here in between his sojourns performing good deeds across the earth. Ben Ezra was located in Old Cairo, the most ancient part of the city. The morning we went it was deserted, its pews devoid of worshippers.

  As we walked out, my mother left behind a small gift: a jar of white sugar and a bottle of fragrant orange water. They were treats for Elijah, she explained, so he would look kindly on me and come rid me of my Cat Scratch Fever.

  On the other side of the building was the famed Cairo Geniza, an attic where leftover parchments and pieces of prayer books, some dating back hundreds of years, had been “buried,” because it was forbidden to throw away so much as a scrap of paper with God’s name on it. The Geniza’s treasures had been carted off years earlier to Cambridge for scholars to study. But my mother still motioned in the direction of the attic and told me to pray, because even the abandoned burial site was holy and could effect miracles.

  At the end of each of these pilgrimages, my mother conferred with my father. He was engaged in his own efforts to heal me, of course, though they were more discreet. Every morning, he led special prayers either at the Kuttab or Temple Hanan on my behalf. Every night, he lit a glass filled with oil and a floating wick, as he prayed for my recovery.

  We saved the most important journey for last. It was to Rav Moshe, the Temple of the Great Miracles, the synagogue of Maimonides, the great healer himself. The ancient little building was located in the heart of the dusty ghetto known as Haret-el Yahood, literally “the street of the Jews.” It was a neighborhood where only the poorest members of the Jewish community, those whom time and fortune had left behind, still lived.

  None of us ever ventured there. As Cairo Jews prospered, they moved as far away as possible from the Jewish Quarter, renting fashionable apartments downtown or in my family’s area, up and down airy Malaka Nazli Street. They had almost no dealings with those who still lived in the ghetto.

  Except when calamity hit.

  Then, even the most elegant Cairenes voyaged to Rav Moshe, the Temple of the Great Miracles.

  Legend had it that Maimonides, the renowned twelfth-century Talmudist and physician who believed equally in the power of medicine and magic, had performed several of his renowned feats of healing deep inside the temple walls. No one knew exactly what these acts were, but the image of Maimonides practicing both his faith and science within this one small edifice was enough to draw visitors from all over the Levant. The Temple of the Miracles became a kind of Jewish Lourdes. Mothers brought their sick and crippled infants, children accompanied dying relatives, widows and widowers hobbled in by themselves to seek help.

  I followed my mother down a short flight of steps to the cool, dark, cavelike structure that lay beneath the main sanctuary. Small alcoves had been carved out from the gray rock and transformed into sleeping areas, with thin mattresses and pillows, sheets, and blankets. The makeshift beds were so low it was almost like sleeping on the ground. The room was almost pitch-black, with only a few faint rays of light coming through the small square windows, which didn’t even have panes. I could see the outlines of people lying within the alcoves. Some were elderly and lay completely still, but there were also mothers huddled with their crying babies.

  An old man appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and handed us a glass filled with oil. It was the oil of Maimonides, the Great Healer, the Maker of Miracles, he said, as he pointed to a spot in the floor. He whispered that somewhere there, beneath us, Maimonides’ finger lay buried. The man instructed my mother to rub drops of the holy oil all over me to make me well. Was there a special problem? he asked, turning to look at me.

  My mother pointed to my left leg. “Elle a la Maladie des Griffes du Chat,” she replied sadly.

  The man nodded, as if a thousand cases similar to mine had come his way, and Cat Scratch Fever was a common ailment he saw every day. He urged her to pour extra drops onto the afflicted leg. Then he pulled out a collection box. Without saying another word, my mother opened her purse and pulled out coins and bills and stuffed them in the small box. The man bowed and disappeared into the darkness of the catacomb.

  I clutched my mother’s hand as she searched for an empty alcove. When she located one in a corner, she told me to lie down and go to sleep. But first she did exactly as the man had said, rubbing oil over my leg as she said a prayer to Maimonides.

  “Make us a miracle now,” she whispered.

  She looked around furtively, as if expecting the Great Healer himself to step out of the darkness.

  I must have seemed frightened, because she promised she wouldn’t leave me, that she’d sit by my side—all night if need be. What was important, she said, was that I sleep. Maimonides wouldn’t come while I lay awake. He couldn’t perform his miracles if I watched.

  I still couldn’t close my eyes, so my mother resorted to what she had done with me at home on a thousand nights; she told me a bedtime story. Sitting on the edge of my hard mattress, she began with the familiar soothing refrain, “Il était une fois…”

  Once upon a time, there was a fabulously rich woman—a friend of the family—who had visited every doctor in Cairo because of her finger. It had become red and swollen and seriously infected and was now in danger of developing gangrene. All the doctors near fashionable rue Kasr-El-Nil insisted the finger needed to be removed at once. On the eve of surgery, the woman made the journey from her home in Maadi, the wealthiest neighborhood in all of Cairo, to the temple in the poorest neighborhood in all of Cairo. She came alone, without her usual retinue of servants, and lay down in an alcove exactly like mine, my mother said, with nothing but a thin blanket and a frayed old pillow.

  When she woke up the next morning, her finger was clear of infection. Maimonides had come and cured her so completely that she didn’t need an operation. And the same would happen to me, my mother vowed. By the morning light, I would be free of my Cat Scratch Fever.

  That night, I could hear people from other alcoves calling for the long-dead rabbi and healer to come save them. At last, I managed to close my eyes. Though my mom never left my side, I was still afraid—afraid of the cave, afraid of the moans all around me, afraid that I would be left here forever in the dark, afraid most of all of coming face-to-face with Maimonides.

  I wanted to be home with Pouspous in my arms, on Malaka Nazli Street.

  I must have drifted off, because when I woke up, it was already morning. Little bits of sunlight were shining through the small window, and I could see that my mother, true to her word, had stayed the entire night in her awkward position, neither comfortably seated nor lying down.

  The room felt less oppressive, and there was life and movement as people began to shuffle out. I saw a woman carrying her sick child, and a young girl helping an aged man, probably her father, perhaps even her grandfather, up the stairs. No one seemed to be moaning anymore.

  Had there been a miracle?

  The man who had given us the oil reappeared, this time with a small washba
sin filled with water. My mother could help me rinse off the holy oil, he said, then we were free to leave. She smiled as she applied the cool water all over me, certain we had found a cure for my mysterious malady.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Wayward Daughter

  No one on Malaka Nazli clashed with Dad as frequently, or bitterly, or hopelessly, as my older sister. It was as if, even at eighteen, she was still seething over the initial injury, or perceived injury—the fact that he had named her Zarifa, and that even now he refused to use her pretty adopted moniker, Suzette.

  The more his autocratic streak asserted itself, the more she bristled and rebelled. He loved religion, and embraced all the rituals and traditions of being Jewish. She hated Judaism and began breaking one by one with its tenets and traditions. He liked the old-world feel of our Ghamra neighborhood and our ground-floor apartment; she longed to flee Malaka Nazli for the swankier high-rises downtown. He hoped she’d settle down and get married. She despaired that her schooling was over, and still hoped to go to college. He wanted her to find a nice boy from one of the families we knew; she taunted him and all of us with her longing for “un blond aux yeux bleus.”

  The city was teeming with foreigners, though not the British and French and Belgians of days gone by. Nasser made no secret of his friendship with the Soviet Union, and ever since the Suez crisis, the bonds had intensified, so that there was a visible Russian and Communist presence throughout the Egyptian capital, along with representatives from Eastern Europe—East Germans, Czechs, and Yugoslavs.

  Suzette’s cinema club membership card.

  Many were “blond aux yeux bleus.” Handsome, exotic, off-limits, they were the ones my sister fancied. Suzette flouted my dad’s authority, at times outrageously. She stayed out later and later, as her circle of friends expanded. None were Jewish, of course, and that was the point.

  Mom was caught in the middle, helpless to modulate her strong-willed husband or subdue her equally stubborn daughter. I watched, puzzled, unable to understand the velocity of the fights. I adored my dad, and my relationship with him was intensely peaceable. The bond that had been cemented in those months after his accident, when he and I were thrown together, a man in his late fifties caring for an infant, had only strengthened. Besides, we were like-minded, and our temperaments were similar. Whatever he loved, I loved—shul, Groppi’s, Pouspous, the name Loulou, and of course Malaka Nazli.

  They were heading toward an epic clash, and yet we were all unprepared when it happened.

  The call came in the middle of the night. It was the police, and they were insisting on speaking to my father. “Your daughter is under arrest,” they said. “We suggest that you come at once to police headquarters.”

  My teenage sister had been picked up and thrown in jail, but no one seemed to know why. The rumors were swirling.

  Suzette had been partying with Russian spies. She had gone dancing with Norwegian sailors. She had joined Czech diplomats at a swank hotel, and the hotel had been raided by cops, vigilant under the new dictatorship.

  Then there was the theory that my teenage sister was simply an innocent victim, a pawn in the growing political upheaval. In 1962 Cairo, arrests had become almost commonplace. The ruthless hand of the Nasser dictatorship was everywhere, and any illusions that the new regime would be more enlightened than the king’s had disappeared.

  Authorities were eager to strike fear in the hearts of all those derided as “foreigners,” any vestige of the old colonial crowd, Jews, anyone, in short, who had overstayed his welcome and was still in Egypt when he ought to have left.

  We had all come to fear the knock on the door in the middle of the night.

  “Why didn’t we leave?” my mother asked my father that night, and every night thereafter. “We should have gone years ago.” She couldn’t stop crying.

  She offered to accompany my father to the police station. He shook his head no. Instead he contacted a friend of the family, a businessman named Monsieur Gattegno who lived down the street, and asked him to come with him. Though he tended to maintain a composed demeanor even during great crises, Dad appeared more agitated that night than I had ever seen him before.

  He kept pounding his fist on the wall, and shouting that we were ruined.

  He dressed slowly, as if he were having trouble moving. He was in his pajamas when the call came, and now, merely putting on a shirt and trousers seemed to pose a challenge. He threw on an old jacket that he rarely wore, a faded tie, and a careworn straw hat, and then called out to our porter, who was fast asleep in the apartment he occupied in the basement, to go please find him a taxi. He grabbed the wooden cane propped near the door, which he almost never used anymore, and slammed the door behind him.

  With each passing hour, my mother became more and more distraught. My brothers were stomping around, looking bewildered. Neither got along especially well with my sister, yet the unfolding drama seemed less her comeuppance than some apocalyptic event destined to engulf the entire family.

  I couldn’t sleep because of all the commotion. I’d wander from the bedroom to the living room, where everyone had gathered, waiting for news. I held Pouspous firmly in my arms—my mom was so distracted that she didn’t even order me to put the cat down. My fever had abated since the night at Maimonides’ temple, either because of the mystic’s intervention or a new antibiotic that I’d been prescribed by the Professor.

  Every few minutes the phone would ring, and I’d overhear snatches of conversation. My mother would grab the receiver away from my brothers, and she’d cry out in disbelief, verging on hysteria: “Des espions,” or “Un suédois.” As the night wore on, there were more phone calls, and I heard a tangle of references to Danes, East Germans, Cubans, Poles, Norwegians, as well as Russians. There were mentions of soldiers, sailors, diplomats, even senior government officials. With each new rumor and revelation, my mother would dissolve in tears, and I could only clutch Pouspous more tightly, as if my cat would protect me from the mayhem.

  Downtown at the police station, my father affected a remarkable transformation that had begun with his taking the cane. The proud and haughty would-be British officer known as the Captain was gone. Instead, what the policemen and militia members saw was a stooped, mild-mannered older gentleman with teary green eyes, leaning heavily on his brown wooden walking stick, in the company of another dignified elderly gentleman. He bowed to the officers and asked them for help in securing his daughter’s release. As each gendarme disclosed a few more facts about the events of the previous night, my father deftly slipped them notes from his wallet. As the hours passed, so that dawn was almost breaking, my father continued to go from one officer to another.

  Each time, he reached into his pocket and pulled out several flavorful bonbons—the same he routinely offered me or the neighborhood children or an attractive woman. The officers seemed delighted to accept the candy. He continued discreetly handing out the notes and candy, up the chain of command.

  At last, the police captain came out. He was from the old school, a veteran. As he and my father talked, they found that they had a great deal in common, including the sense that modern youth was hopelessly lost, and that keeping a daughter in line could be trying for the most diligent of fathers. It was so much easier to raise a son, the chief sighed, and my father sighed along with him.

  My father walked a tightrope—admitting Suzette had strayed, even as he tried to downplay the incident as the action of a naive young girl who, like so many of her peers in this new and faithless generation, had lost her way and gotten in over her head. He offered the chief a cigarette from the silver holder that was, as usual, filled with Lucky Strikes. The cop accepted an American cigarette, and as he lit up, he nodded thoughtfully that the incident had likely been an unfortunate mistake.

  That was when my father began to cry. There, in the early-morning hours, in the middle of Cairo’s main police station, as tears streamed down his cheeks, he had to be helped to a chair to steady himse
lf, while the chief offered his own white cotton handkerchief to Monsieur Leon and tried to comfort him over his wayward daughter.

  Inside, my sister and her friend Doris, a teacher at the lycée, were distraught about their night in jail. They still didn’t understand why they had been arrested and, even more urgently, why their parents hadn’t yet come to rescue them. They were tired, hungry, and bewildered. Their privileged upbringings hadn’t prepared them for this stint with Cairo’s underworld, the small-time prostitutes and female petty criminals with whom they shared a cell.

  At last, my sister and her friend were released. Suzette was confronted by a torrent of insults from my father, who was both genuinely furious and anxious to show the police that he in no way condoned his daughter’s conduct. Enough cash had been distributed, enough words of contrition uttered, that my sister was free to go.

  She had been in jail the entire night.

  The two finally came home; they walked in together, the patriarch and his eldest, wayward daughter.

  It was striking how much they resembled each other. Unlike my mother, who was petite and fine-boned, my sister was tall and striking, a female version of my dad. She had his aquiline nose and full mouth, and even the shape of their eyes was similar, though his were a vivid shade of green and hers were coffee brown.

  Most of all, she shared his strong-mindedness. Though she never would have admitted it, she was every bit as imperious and domineering as he, as much a creature of Aleppo, though she’d been born and bred in Cairo and modeled herself after the Europeans. She looked strangely defiant as she walked in; there was even a slight smile on her face.