The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit

by Lucette Lagnado

  I found myself obsessing over what lay beneath all the layers, and left the table to inspect them more closely. My parents and cousin were so deep in conversation, they seemed oblivious to my comings and goings: they were busy reminiscing about their years together at Malaka Nazli, Salomone and my father, along with my grandmother Zarifa, and at the end, the lovely young stranger who joined their household, my mother, Edith.

  But they also flashed forward to our family’s current plight and what we were going to do now. My cousin had tried to arrange for Suzette to live with him and his family. He had gone to see high-ranking government officials to obtain the proper papers, to no avail. The authorities wouldn’t allow my nineteen-year-old sister to remain in Italy. As far as the rest of our family, while Milan was appealing because of our bond with and love for Salomone, it simply wasn’t an option. There were many Egyptian Jews who had settled in Italy, but most were able to claim Italian citizenship, however tenuous. They wangled their way into Rome or Milan by stating they were “half-Italian,” brandishing a wife’s Italian passport, or a parent’s or grandparent’s. We were stateless, which meant our movements were severely limited.

  We only had permission to go to France, where we would be allowed to stay a few months until we found a permanent refuge.

  As I continued my tour of the café, eyeing the chocolate eggs, I looked up to see Salomone towering over me. He was, like my father, a man of few words. He asked me which one I wanted. The café, which had felt melancholy and dim, suddenly seemed flooded with light. I wasn’t sure what to do. I knew that I couldn’t point to the largest, most extravagant egg, but I didn’t think I had to settle for the smallest egg either. I stood there, incapable of making a decision.

  Salomone finally extended his long arm to the ceiling, plucked an egg from a top shelf, and handed it to me. It was elegant and massive, wrapped in silver.

  “Ça va?” he asked me.

  I nodded, dazed by his gesture, and returned to the table, brandishing my Easter egg like a trophy. When it was time to return to the boat, everyone rose, my father and my cousin embraced. Salomone lingered briefly by my mother, hugged her tenderly, waved to us, and climbed into his car and drove away.

  As we walked, I began to unwrap the egg. I had to peel off layers of foil, tissue paper, and bits of ribbon, until at last I saw the outline of an immense globe-shaped milk chocolate. I broke off a piece. The egg was hollow inside, and I realized there was a gift within the gift—that deep inside the Easter egg, a prize had been stashed away. My hands finally retrieved a cellophane pouch containing a pair of golden earrings, small and simple and beautiful.

  “Tu crois que c’est de l’or?” I asked my father; Do you think it is real gold? My brothers burst out laughing, but my father wouldn’t say yes or no. I stuffed the earrings in my pocket and continued walking. We could hear the Greek crew amiably shouting to everyone to hurry up and come aboard, lending passengers like my dad a hand walking the rickety gangplank.

  At last, the boat floated into Marseilles. Exhausted from the voyage, we had no means to check into a hotel but hurried, our twenty-six suitcases in tow, to catch an overnight train to Paris. César left us to explore the station. He wore his prized black leather jacket, a blouson noir, one of his last purchases from Egypt. It was to be his passport to the stylish world of the French.

  As he wandered aimlessly, he suddenly found himself flanked by two plainclothes officers. They pushed him against a wall and began to frisk him. They had noticed him roaming the station, dressed all in black, and had mistaken him for a “Blouson Noir,” one of the North African gang members who were terrorizing France and were involved in protest actions against the unpopular war in Algeria. Any young man who fit a certain physical and ethnic profile fell under immediate suspicion, and my oldest brother, with his classic Middle Eastern good looks—dark curly hair, brown eyes, fair skin, and black leather garb—could easily pass for an Algerian immigrant.

  Pointing to an unmarked car, the officers asked him to accompany them for questioning. His eyes widening, César shook his head no, no. He was certain that if he obeyed the men and followed them into the car, he would never see us again. Trying to gather his wits, my brother explained that he was indeed a refugee from North Africa—not Algeria but Egypt. He urged the officers to locate our parents, who were in another part of the station. “Mon père est là-bas, avec ma mère et ma famille,” he pleaded; My dad is over there, with my mom and the rest of my family. But the officers seemed uninterested in finding any of us, and César had no choice but to keep trying to talk his way out of his nightmare.

  He didn’t belong to any gang, my sixteen-year-old brother assured them again and again. His outfit, his leather blouson, was simply a nice jacket he had picked up in Cairo. They still cast a cold eye on his professions of innocence. After peppering him with dozens more questions, they reluctantly let him go, and sped away in their unmarked car.

  My brother, still shivering under his blouson noir, joined us as we boarded the train to Paris. He didn’t breathe a word about what had happened.

  He had been in France exactly one hour.

  I fell asleep by my father’s side, clutching what was left of my Italian chocolate egg. Sometime in the middle of the night, somewhere in the middle of France, the train came to a sudden halt. The rail workers were on strike, we were told. We were caught in one of the country’s legendary union actions. There was no choice but to remain in the darkened locomotive.

  The Marseilles-to-Paris journey had turned into a frightening web of deserted open rail yards, long dreary waits, and trains that went nowhere. We were exhausted and cold, and we could only wonder at our first taste of life outside Cairo.

  AT LAST, THE ENDLESS night journey across France came to an end. We were in Paris and it was morning and there was light.

  From the station, my father telephoned a contact at the relief agency helping the flow of Jewish refugees from the Arab countries. We were listed as “stateless” on all our travel documents, and we didn’t know our final destination. Dad anxiously inquired what was in store for us now that we had left Egypt. He had an exhausted family on his hands, and he wasn’t well himself. There was also a six-year-old child, “une petite qui est très fragile,” he informed the agency official, his voice nearly breaking from tension and fatigue. We were told to report to our temporary lodgings in the tenth arrondissement, at the Violet Hotel.

  Leon’s identification papers, Paris, 1963. This nationality was “a déterminer”—to be determined.

  I liked the sound of it. I expected a building of lavender walls and lilac floors rising beneath a mauve-tinted sky. Instead, we found ourselves staring at a dingy and singularly charmless establishment that was all gray and discolored broken bricks and stone. Our rooms were situated on an alleyway known as the passage Violet, a narrow lane of fabric stores, fur workshops, and small factories that made buttons and dolls. I vainly scanned the little street for a speck of purple, but there was none that I could see.

  It was even worse inside.

  Home was now a couple of rooms containing six beds and the twenty-six assorted suitcases that had followed us from the station. Because of their bulk and size, they turned us into virtual prisoners of our hotel, taking up so much space we could barely walk without stubbing our toes or bumping into one another.

  Our rooms were on the second floor of an annex that was, if possible, even more decrepit than the main hotel building. We had to climb a rickety flight of stairs, a painful and awkward undertaking for my father.

  It was in Paris that Papa’s cane, packed as an afterthought when we left, made a surprise reappearance. I had rarely seen him use it in Cairo, where years in the care of top doctors had enabled my father to attain a fair degree of mobility and independence. But he now needed it to get upstairs, and then to get down again.

  We didn’t bother to open any luggage. It wasn’t clear if it was because we were too depressed, or because it would have been
pointless. The bags that my older sister had packed with so much excitement, cramming them with her new wardrobe, were now a source of exasperation. Why can’t we unpack? she kept asking my father. Why do we have to keep the suitcases locked as if we were about to flee again?

  He shrugged as if to say that at nineteen going on twenty, she was old enough to figure it out. Paris was only a stop on a long, as-yet-unfinished journey. When we arrived in France, at the end of March 1963, we were still in the same limbo status indicated on our luggage tags from Cairo, “Famille Lagnado,” but no discernible address.

  Around the corner was the rue du Faubourg Poissonière, a narrow, windy street that looked exactly like every other narrow, windy Parisian street, with one major difference. Poissonière and the area around it had catered to generations of Jewish refugees who had fled any number of countries that no longer wanted them.

  The cultural and historical landscape had changed over the years, but the story of exile and persecution was numbingly the same.

  France had historically been a transit point for refugees, a role it was re-creating assiduously now with the flow of Jewish families like my own. In the 1930s and ’40s, Jews fleeing the Nazis converged on this small strip near our hotel, some opening ateliers and plying the fur trade. Later, in the 1950s and 1960s, Jews seeking to escape the violence and turmoil in the Middle East unleashed by the creation of Israel descended on the faubourg. The area attracted immigrants from Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and Libya who were housed in the shabby residential hotels that did a booming business. Joining them were another class of refugees, once-prosperous families such as mine, from Cairo and Alexandria, who went overnight from riches to rags, and were in a state of shock at the seaminess of their new lives.

  It was possible to walk around the rue du Faubourg Poissonière and hear a cacophony of languages—old furriers who still spoke German and Polish and Yiddish, refugees from the Maghreb who felt comfortable conversing in their native Arabic. That left French to the streetwalkers and transvestites who plied their trade not far away, by the boulevard St. Denis.

  Paris had a relatively efficient, coordinated system of social service and relief agencies dedicated to helping refugees like my family. Funded by private philanthropists such as the Rothschilds, as well as deep-pocketed American Jewish organizations, the French groups tried to lessen the trauma. Refugees were immediately given a free place to live—typically a room or two in an inexpensive hotel—along with subsidized meals. They were put in contact with officials who would help find them a permanent home somewhere in the world.

  The main agency helping us in Paris was the Cojasor, an organization that had once aided Holocaust victims. HIAS—the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society—was the other major group in charge of our fate. Headquartered in New York, but with satellite offices around Europe, HIAS’s mission was to help repatriate Jews forced to flee because of the tumult in the Arab world.

  From our first day in Paris, we trooped from one to the other, one to the other. Cojasor, which was helping us navigate life in France, assigned us our own social worker, kindly Madame Dana, to help us through the rough spots. HIAS was trying to look ahead and help us decide where we wanted to settle for good.

  The choices were clear: either Israel or America. Those early weeks, we leaned strongly toward Israel. My sister dreamed of finding Nonna Alexandra again, while for my father, there was the hope of joining his relatives, including his ailing brother Shalom and Marie, his little sister.

  Dad went regularly to the Cojasor to collect our allowance, which amounted to eighteen francs daily, or three francs a day for each of us. That austere budget was supposed to cover all our needs, from food and clothing to the occasional movie or treat. The money was handed directly to my father, who was tasked with deciding how to spread it among the six of us.

  We had arrived in France with exactly $212—the sum total that we’d been allowed to take with us out of Cairo—and much of it was gone.

  For Dad, who had spent a lifetime investing in the stock market and building a nest egg, what was most painful was finding himself destitute, dependent on charity for himself and his family to survive. My father was used to giving alms, not taking them.

  He had dreaded that moment but had been helpless to avoid it. We heard, of course, of families who had been able to smuggle their fortune out of Cairo by using trusted intermediaries or couriers to transport their cash and jewels, or by establishing secret Swiss bank accounts. But most of the Jewish refugees of the Levant found themselves in exactly the same straits: they saw their social status and wealth vanish overnight. They went from being solid members of the bourgeoisie to beggars.

  Now, Dad had to mediate between the demands of my siblings, who wanted pocket money to enjoy what they could of Paris, and the family’s basic needs.

  He spent almost nothing on himself. The boulevardier of Cairo now wandered around in a faded raincoat, which became increasingly battered. In spite of the shopping sprees in the months before we left, Dad had never thought practically about what he would really need in the world beyond Egypt. It almost never rained in Cairo, so raincoats were a rarity, and even an ordinary umbrella was an exotic object, almost impossible to find even at Cicurel or the other great department stores.

  He asked the Cojasor for help in purchasing a new raincoat. The agency refused, though his request was passed along in global telegrams to HIAS offices overseas. The answer was always no. Rebuffed and humiliated, he stayed inside our hotel room. He spoke up only to order my brothers to pray with all the authority he could still muster. He seemed anxious that they maintain the old rituals, while they seemed less and less interested in doing so.

  My sister, who had argued so vehemently for us to leave Cairo, was now complaining the loudest about France. Like Dad, she found our nouveau pauvre status almost impossible to bear. The Paris we were inhabiting had nothing to do with the Paris of her dreams and literary sensibility. Suzette had never imagined being penniless in a city whose boundless charms required sizable sums of money to enjoy them.

  She was in a perpetual funk about our reduced circumstances—the cramped hotel room where we were constantly on each other’s nerves; the drab neighborhood that didn’t interest her in the least; her inability to work or attend school because she didn’t have proper papers, and besides, we could be on the move again any day, so what was the point of going to university or getting a job?

  Our identity was reduced to a number, Dossier #45,135 of the Cojasor, filled with case notes by Madame Dana and one dismal word, stateless.

  Unable to stand our new digs, Suzette left the hotel early and wandered around Paris by foot; there was no money for the metro or a bus. She couldn’t shake the despair that had overtaken her, the sense that she was somehow responsible for getting us into this mess: if it weren’t for her arrest, we would still be in our sun-drenched homeland, living in a real house, with friends, and furniture, and money.

  A month after our arrival, my mother received a letter that would plunge us even deeper into darkness.

  Nonna Alexandra, of the hard luck and the tender soul, had died. The flower on the mountain—our edelweiss—had passed away weeks earlier, while we were still in Egypt. The very morning we heard about Nonna, Dad had gone to Cojasor to say we wanted to move to Israel, where we hoped to be reunited with family. Later that afternoon, he returned and told them apologetically that we had changed our minds. We didn’t know anymore where we wanted to go, he said truthfully.

  The devastating news had arrived in an airmail letter from Oncle Félix, who was now working in Geneva. He hadn’t told us what happened for some weeks, he conceded, to spare Mom. After all, there was “nothing left to be done,” and it seemed pointless to risk interrupting our plans to emigrate. He, of course, had been in Switzerland, hundreds of miles away from my grandmother, even as her health and hope were failing, and he hadn’t seen her in some years. It had taken his estranged wife, Aimee, to inform him that his mother had
been rushed to the hospital.

  He caught a plane home only to arrive—as always—too late.

  Alexandra of Alexandria, the old woman who was more like a child, the grandmother who needed such intense mothering of her own, had died alone and bewildered in an institution, as solitary and lonely a figure in her narrow sickbed as on those walks, six years earlier, among the orange groves of Ganeh Tikvah. “She is finally at peace, after an entire lifetime that was for her nothing but a lifetime of sacrifice and suffering and misery,” Félix said in his flowery two-page letter. None of this was especially comforting to my mom. My uncle didn’t bother to say precisely when Alexandra had died, what day, what month, from what, whether she had been ill a long time or had suffered a sudden decline. But there was one line in Félix’s letter that seemed genuinely aimed at providing comfort:

  “I have been told that she was asking about you and your children until her last moment on this earth.”

  The news rendered my mom almost mute with despair. Trapped in Cairo and now Paris with the five of us, separated from the one person whom she had loved utterly and completely, she hadn’t even been with Alexandra when she died. She hadn’t seen the body. She had missed the funeral.

  She would never see or speak to Nonna, or listen to her sing some cherished, long-forgotten Italian love song, she wouldn’t hold her fragile form or comb her silky hair, turned white from sorrow; and now, with neither the means nor the ability to travel, she wouldn’t even be able to pay her final respects at her grave.

  It was almost worse than when her other Alexandra had died.

  Madame Dana at the Cojasor was the first to notice the change. The social worker noted in her case files how broken down my mother seemed, how unkempt and neglected: it was clear she had lost interest in her appearance. Madame Dana was worried about my mom’s passivity, the fact that she seemed to agree with whatever was told to her. She had no will of her own anymore—no will to say yes, no will to say no, no will to demand, no will to object. What could a social worker do to help this soft-spoken, intensely sweet woman, old before her time, toothless before her years, who had once been beautiful but was no longer so?