The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit

by Lucette Lagnado

  “Let her say it,” someone shouted. “Go ahead,” said another. I began to read, nervously, haltingly. It was a long psalm, and to my horror, I kept stumbling over words. But my prayer companions were kind. They simply called out my mistakes as my dad would have done, and when I wanted to give up and let one of them take over the reading, they urged me to continue.

  As the afternoon waned, the pace intensified. We had to be done with the Book of Psalms before the Sabbath ended. Each time my turn came, I took a deep breath. Yet I found that I was getting better with each passage I read; I discovered an old ease and fluency with Hebrew. We neared the home stretch, yet we’d never achieved the requisite ten men. “Maybe we will count you as part of the minyan,” one of the men said smilingly.

  This mournful day, when I had gone from a memorial service for my mother, dead one month, to one for my father, dead one year, took on an oddly elating cast. I had received an unexpected gift. I began to think of my dad not as old and sick, but as young and vital, walking in his white sharkskin suit. I prayed for his soul to rise, and for my mother’s, too, but it was I who felt elevated.

  On my way out of the service, I passed clusters of people leaving the synagogue. They were holding branches of sweet-smelling green leaves, which they inhaled deeply. They chatted amiably in Arabic and French, the charming, easygoing ways of the Levant on display, the city momentarily become a congregation of love and friendship.

  EPILOGUE

  Cairo, Finally, and Again—

  SPRING 2005

  Seated aboard the Alitalia flight from Milan to Cairo, I felt suddenly as if my father were there next to me—as if he, too, were going back on this spring day in 2005, finally and again. I turned to face my husband, who had been in the seat beside mine, but I didn’t see him anymore.

  I was conscious only of a tall man with long legs, one of which he couldn’t bend comfortably. He was old and deeply frail, but his green eyes were shining and he was alert and every bit as excited as I was about the voyage. In my mind, my dad and I were returning together, as we had hoped.

  The cry that had pierced the years had at last been heard.

  Ragaouna Masr: Take us back to Cairo, please take us back.

  Neatly stashed under my seat was my lone, small suitcase. It wasn’t too dissimilar from the bag Dad had kept for so many years packed and ready to go in a corner of the living room on Sixty-fifth Street in Brooklyn—no bigger than a breadbox, as if he’d planned to take very little with him, and certainly not the mountains of clothes and supplies we’d brought along four decades earlier.

  The chatty Alitalia pilot kept interrupting the in-flight programming to point out the sights. Genoa, Naples, the Greek Islands, the port of Piraeus, and finally Alexandria harbor, only a few thousand feet below. It was if I were reversing the journey my father and I had undertaken so many years before, the voyage that we would always regret.

  We had signed papers declaring we were never coming back. The Egyptian government, hungry for Western currency and Western tourism and Western goodwill, had seemed anxious to reassure me that I was welcome to return and to stay as long as I wanted—even move back, if I wished. They spoke charmingly and with apparent sincerity, as if to suggest that our family’s flight in the spring of 1963 had been due to some absurd and terrible misunderstanding they were now eager to clear up, if only I’d let them.

  Fine, I thought, suddenly feeling crisp and efficient and utterly American. Let them roll out the welcome mat. I was silent throughout the entire plane ride, unwilling to share with my husband all I was feeling, more concerned with sustaining this sense that my father was next to me. I wanted to feel him at my side during this trip, to believe that he had left heaven to accompany me. And yet for him, heaven had always been here—wandering through the streets from morning to night, being greeted by friends and even by strangers in a city that enveloped you, devoured you, consumed you with its love.

  Stepping off the plane, I saw several people holding up white placards with my name. Representatives of the Egyptian government had come to welcome me back to Cairo. They all seemed puzzled, and perhaps also troubled, by my first request: Malaka Nazli—I wanted to drive immediately to Malaka Nazli.

  It was the first place he would have wanted to visit, and the last place he had wanted to leave.

  Why call the modern thoroughfare by a name that hadn’t been used in decades, they asked, frowning, the name of a long-dead queen? And why, of all the wondrous sights to see in Egypt—the Pyramids, the Sphinx—was I insisting on visiting a street famous only for its smog and maddening congestion?

  I insisted that nothing else mattered to me but Malaka Nazli. I repeated the name for emphasis: Malaka Nazli. I said it at every opportunity, like a child in love with a singsong.

  Ramses Street, as it was now called, was impossible at this time of day—or any time of day: we’d be stuck in traffic for hours, my driver wailed. Better go to the hotel and rest for a while, he counseled amiably. But then when could I see my street? I persisted.

  He huddled with his fellow drivers. Try after midnight, they said, laughing.

  What he was willing to do was to drive me downtown. He offered to take me to the Gates of Heaven, the temple where my parents had been married more than sixty years earlier. And Groppi’s, with the pebbled garden where all my childhood hopes had grown. Anywhere but to Malaka Nazli.

  I shrugged. “To the Gates of Heaven.”

  As we turned the corner on Adly Street, I spotted it immediately—the immense, hulking structure with its faded stonework, its wrought-iron gate, and the delicate carvings of palm trees along the front, symbol of the Jews of Egypt. In front of the synagogue stood a small army of security guards, brandishing an assortment of weapons, including guns and rifles they pointed menacingly our way. I wanted us to slow down so I could get a closer look, but that only prompted the officers to swarm around us and warn us to keep moving.

  My driver obligingly continued his tour of downtown. The streets where my father had once bought me exquisite outfits now featured cheap, hopelessly tacky merchandise. There was one discount store after another, as if Cairo had turned into an outsize version of Eighteenth Avenue, filled with merchants hawking bargain fare to customers who could barely afford them.

  On top of the storefronts I glimpsed once-grand apartment buildings that looked as if at any moment they could come tumbling down. Even here, in the heart of the business district, there were clotheslines, with shirts and socks and bedspreads and lingerie flapping in the breeze.

  Where was the elegance my parents had pined after? The fine boutiques and lavish, abundant department stores that carried such distinctive merchandise that we would later find ourselves disdaining the offerings of Paris or New York as inferior to what we had once known?

  No one could compete with the merchants of downtown Cairo and their dreamy wares—Benzion, where we bought yards of the softest white cotton, cut and ready to be hemmed into sheets and pillowcases; or Hannaux, so snobbish, featuring the most expensive bags and accessories. And Cicurel, above all, Cicurel, with its armies of overly deferential and overly educated salespeople, many of them Jewish, and floor after floor of French and Italian fashions—silk blouses, designer hats, leather bags, bolts of imported fabrics.

  My first winter coat from Cicurel with the lone gray button and matching gray wool scarf was the loveliest I had ever owned. I couldn’t bear to throw it away, even years later, when I had outgrown it and it was too tight and too short, so that my mother in her infinite compassion finally took it from me, folded it neatly, and placed it at the bottom of one of the twenty-six suitcases for storage.

  “Un de ces jours,” Edith would sigh; One of these days. It was her favorite saying, and it applied as much to the day we would retrieve her wedding gown as to when we would dig out my Cicurel coat as to when we would at last be able to return to Egypt.

  Cicurel, Benzion, Hannaux—gone except for the buildings they’d occupied, shadows o
f their former selves.

  They were like Cairo itself, haunted remnants of a city, both alive and dead.

  My driver continued the sentimental journey through downtown Cairo, and then I spotted it: Groppi’s—part patisserie and part paradise. I ran out of the car. It was at that moment, as I headed toward Groppi’s door, that the feeling from the plane returned, the sense that Dad was at my side. As I walked in, I sensed his halting footsteps and instinctively slowed down, aware he had trouble keeping up.

  It seemed, at first glance, exactly as we had left it. The stately structure with the delightful sign, “Groppi’s” in fanciful longhand, a child’s scrawl, still dominated Suleiman Pasha Square. Inside, the large room with tall ceilings and stately columns, pink walls and countless étagères, had once promised a palace of childhood—and adult—pleasures.

  There were no customers inside. The shelves, once laden with distinctive pastries, were nearly all barren. The area in the front that once housed a thriving take-out business had a forlorn, abandoned look to it. Someone was manning the old wooden cashier station, but there was nobody in line. Like Cairo—like my family after Cairo—the famed establishment was all about decline and faded splendor.

  I could almost feel my father frowning at the few trays of gaudy, thoroughly unappetizing pastries.

  Where were the famed buttery desserts so light and delicate they could rival those of a Parisian bakery? And what of the crowds who would line up to purchase them, or sit in the café—elegant Italian women and their British officer-lovers, or all the others, the Greeks, the Belgians, the French, the Jews, in all their finery, who had made Groppi’s the most cosmopolitan and decadent pastry shop in the world?

  There were no menus anymore, and not much to order in any event. An old sign with an arrow pointing upward that read “Restaurant” now led to nowhere. The swank second-floor eatery where my father had rung in countless New Years dancing the tango and the fox-trot as a full orchestra played was bolted shut.

  An Arab woman in a black chador that covered all but her eyes sat down at the table across from mine and ordered an espresso. I wondered how she would possibly be able to sip her coffee with the heavy black veil over her face. “Once upon a time, Arabs weren’t allowed into Groppi’s,” my chauffeur told me, when I returned to the car. “Only colonialists went inside.”

  He sounded vaguely angry and reproachful, and I shivered to think I had been a six-year-old colonialist usurper. The revolution had taken care of all of that. Anyone could walk into Groppi’s now. With the foreigners gone, every Egyptian could have their morning coffee there if they wished.

  Few did. It was now a museum to a bygone era.

  My driver, who had made me feel so guilty moments earlier, noted my dismay. He told me soothingly that I’d surely like the other Groppi’s much more, the one with the garden. We could go visit it another day, he offered. That was another quality unique to Cairo: if despair was all around you, even so, hope was around the corner.

  Despite its ruined state, Cairo was perpetually optimistic. It was like a genie’s lamp, and if you only rubbed hard enough and long enough, then—voilà—it would deliver all that you had wanted these many years, the house where you’d grown up, the synagogues where you’d prayed, the stores where your parents had shopped, even the flowers whose heady scent had followed you across oceans and time all the way to New York.

  ONCE IN MY HOTEL, I found that I couldn’t sit still.

  I rushed to the lobby and asked if I could hire a driver. I was introduced to Ahmed, a kindly Egyptian driver fluent in English. I repeated my request.

  He seemed to instantly understand. With my husband at my side, and my father, I prayed, hovering somewhere nearby, we entered his taxi for what turned into a short, twenty-minute ride.

  Suddenly, I was back, back on Malaka Nazli.

  I knocked on the large wooden door at number 280, and immediately a man answered. Incredibly, he didn’t seem at all surprised to see a complete stranger show up after all these years demanding access. He was an engineer, thoughtful and patient, and he greeted me as if I were a long-lost friend or relative. Welcome, he said very kindly. “My house is your house.”

  The marble tile floor where I’d sat with Pouspous and cried the day we left Egypt was the same, as was the large living room around which the house was structured, so that communication was flowing and constant and loneliness was unknown.

  I had left an Egyptian and returned as an American. With my American obsession with privacy—privacy over hospitality, privacy over love, privacy over friendship, privacy over familial bonds—I found myself frowning, puzzled as to how my mother had given birth to five children in a house where it wasn’t possible to shed a single tear alone.

  To my Western sensibility, Malaka Nazli was much too open. Was it possible to talk, work, study, make love, without everyone knowing your business? What was it like when Baby Alexandra died? Had there been even a small corner where my mom could mourn her in peace? Where my father could pray for her soul as it drifted out of Malaka Nazli?

  As I sat with the man, who, like me, was born in this house, his mother arrived. A soft-spoken woman in her sixties, with her gray hair in a neat bun, she had been a young bride when her uncle and father-in-law had negotiated the purchase of the apartment from my father in the spring of 1963, only weeks before we left.

  How thrilled she was to be moving to such an elegant building, located on a grand, lively boulevard. It made her feel hopeful about her new life, and the young man she had married, and the children she hoped to bear in this spacious, airy apartment.

  She remembered the day she arrived. There was nothing left in the house. It was devoid of all furniture and decorations and appliances, with the exception of two items—a black telephone and a white bed. Her first act was to get rid of the metal hospital bed, my father’s during the months of convalescence that had turned into years.

  She vividly recalled its owner: though she had met my father only once, when her in-laws concluded the deal, the tall, handsome older man had made a strong impression. His hands shook as he signed the agreement, severing any claim to the apartment he had occupied for thirty years, where he had seen his mother die and his children born.

  She could still see that—the tremor in Dad’s hand as he gave away Malaka Nazli.

  What she and her husband kept was the black dial-up phone. That was a true luxury in 1960s Egypt, when only the wealthy—or the well-connected—could reach enough important people and spread adequate amounts of baksheesh to inveigle a phone line in their homes. Together, the young couple hatched a plot. Devout Coptic Christians, with crosses all over the house, they prayed to God to forgive them for the small deception they were about to perpetrate.

  Each month, posing as my father, the husband reported to the Ministry of Communication to pay the charges. He even took care of some back bills we had incurred in the month or two before we’d left. He was polite and pleasant, careful to pay on time and to the penny, so that the disguise worked for years, until an astute bureaucrat realized what had happened, and took ruthless and immediate measures. He dispatched his workers to the ground-floor apartment to yank away the black phone and interrupt the service.

  It would be years before the house had a phone again.

  The Old Bride rose slowly from her chair, went to a drawer, and retrieved several pieces of paper covered with Arabic writing. They were invoices as well as letters from the Communications Ministry addressed to my father about “his” phone. Somehow, it didn’t surprise me that she had kept them, as if anticipating the day one of us would come to settle all outstanding accounts—in the same way that she and her son hadn’t seemed particularly surprised to see me at their doorstep.

  Although the apartment was dilapidated and neglected, almost as if its occupants didn’t care anymore, she graciously offered me a tour. Our first stop was the dining room, with the little balcony overlooking Malaka Nazli where I had spent so much of my childh
ood. There was a cactus plant to ward against the evil eye, and two small chairs placed on either side of the balcony; I was sure they had been ours, but she smiled, and shook her head no, and repeated, so that I had to believe her: only the phone and the bed had been left behind, nothing else. She loved to sit in the sun with her husband, and she had bought the chairs herself. Since her husband’s death a year or so earlier, her son had begun to join her out on the balcony, and they’d continued to relish the street life.

  It was still possible to do that, I realized to my amazement, even though decades had passed and Malaka Nazli itself had changed. Years back, Egyptian bureaucrats had decided to build a highway parallel to it, ostensibly to improve traffic flow. Now, the ugly concrete structure extended like a dark shadow across the once-serene avenue, traffic flowed only one way instead of two, and bottlenecks were worse than ever.

  Loulou on the balcony at Malaka Nazli, next to the protective cactus, Cairo, 2005.

  In my father’s old room, the window where he and I had spent hours laughing and calling out to pretty girls and friendly passersby, chatting with anyone who would chat with us, was all boarded up; it was now the son’s room, and he preferred to keep the window closed.

  I shuddered to think what my father would have done—no doubt, he would have headed straight to the window and flung it open and let everyone, from the new owners to the Egyptian government, know that it was his street and his window, and he was reclaiming both.

  We continued our tour with a visit to the kitchen with its modern gas stove and the refrigerator positioned a few feet away. Where was the Primus? I asked. What had they done with Grandmother Zarifa’s beloved Primus?

  The Old Bride seemed puzzled. Then she burst out laughing. Even before moving in, she had insisted on a brand-new kitchen. Out went the old-fashioned contraptions that had remained unchanged since the 1940s, when Zarifa reigned—the gas and kerosene burners, the icebox that masqueraded as a refrigerator, the corroded wooden shelves, and, yes, the Primus. Instead, the kitchen was outfitted with a real stove, electric, new countertops and cabinets.