by André Aciman
After walking out of our building, I automatically headed toward the coast road, known as the corniche of Alexandria, which used to be very poorly lit in those years, partly because not all streetlights worked, but also because President Nasser wished to foster a wartime atmosphere that kept his countrymen forever fearful of a sudden Israeli air raid. There was always, during those evenings in the mid-sixties, a suggestion of an unintended, bungled blackout, which, far from bolstering morale, simply betrayed Egypt’s rapid decline. People always stole streetlamps and pothole covers; seldom did anyone bother to replace them. The city simply grew darker and dingier.
But nighttime in Alexandria, during the month-long feast of Ramadan, when devout Muslims fast until sundown every day, is a feast for the senses, and as I walked past the throng and stalls along the scantly lighted street, I was, as all European-Egyptians of my generation will always remember, accosted by wonderful odors of sweetened foods that were not only begging me to grasp how much I was losing in losing Alexandria, but in their overpowering, primitive fragrance, also trailed with them a strange sense of exhilaration born from the presage that, finally, on leaving Egypt, I would never have to smell these earthy smells again, or be reminded that I had once been stranded in what seemed a blighted backdrop of Europe. I was, as always during those final days of 1965, at once apprehensive, eager, and reluctant to leave; I would much rather have been granted an eternal reprieve—staying indefinitely provided I knew I’d be leaving soon.
This, after all, was precisely how we “lived” in Egypt in those days, not just by anticipating a future in Europe that became ever more desirable the more we postponed it, but also by longing for a European Alexandria that no longer really existed in Egypt and whose passing we were every day desperately eager to avert.
Pascal says somewhere that virtues are sometimes seldom more than a balancing act between two totally opposing vices. Similarly, the present is an arbitrary fulcrum in time, a moment delicately poised between two infinities, where the longing to escape and the longing to return find themselves strangely reversed. What we ultimately remember is not the past but ourselves in the past imagining the future. And, frequently, what we look forward to is not the future but the past restored.
Similarly, it is not the things we long for that we love; it is longing itself—just as it is not what we remember but remembrance itself that we love. A good portion of my life at my computer in New York City today is spent dreaming of a life to come. What should my real memories be one day but of my computer screen and its tapestry of dreams? Europeans in Egypt spent so much time thirsting for happiness beyond Egypt that, in retrospect now, some of that longed-for happiness must have rubbed off on Egypt, casting a happy film over days we always knew we’d sooner die than be asked to relive. The Egypt I craved to return to was not the one I knew, or couldn’t wait to flee, but the one where I learned to invent being somewhere else, someone else.
* * *
Every reader of my memoir Out of Egypt comes face-to-face with a disturbing paradox when I reveal that my Passover night walk comes not in one, but in two versions—and that both, in fact, have been published. In the first version, which appeared in Commentary in May 1990, an Arab vendor sells me a falafel sandwich just as I reach the coast road; in the second, published in my memoir in 1995, the vendor hands me a Ramadan pastry and refuses to take any money for it.
In both versions, I stare out at the night sea and nurse the same thoughts vis-à-vis an Alexandria I’m already starting to miss. There is a significant difference, however, between the two versions. In the book, I stand alone. In the magazine, I am walking not by myself but in the company of my brother. Indeed, since I was a rather shy, indecisive boy, it was my younger brother, by far the more daring and enterprising of us two, who was more likely to have come up with the idea of taking such a walk on our last night in Egypt. The notion of eating leavened bread or sweet cakes on the first night of Passover could only have been his, never mine, though I was the atheist, not he.
My brother had a bold, impish side to him. People used to say that he loved things, and that he knew how to go after them. I didn’t even know what they meant when they said this. I was never sure I loved anything, much less how to go after it. I envied him.
He liked to get to the beach early enough so as not to miss the sun, the way he liked to eat food while it was still hot. The sun gave me migraines, and as for warm food, I preferred fruit, nuts, and cheeses. I squirreled my food; he delected in it. He liked meats and tangy sauces, dressings, stews, herbs, and spices. I knew of only one spice, oregano, because I would sprinkle it on my steaks to kill the taste of meat.
My brother would kneel before a basil bush and say he liked the smell of basil. I had never smelled basil until he pointed it out to me. Then I learned to like basil, the way I learned to like people only after he had befriended them first, or to mimic them after watching him ape their features, or to second-guess people by watching how he read their minds and said they were liars.
My brother liked to go out; I liked to stay in. On clear summer days, I liked nothing more than to sit on our balcony at the beach house and write or draw in the shade, watching him race along the sun-bleached dunes toward the beaches, never once turning back, going after life, as my father liked to call it.
Years later in New York, when I grew to love the sun, I did so like a tourist, never a native. I never knew whether I loved the sun for its own sake, as he did, or because it reminded me of my summer days in Egypt, where I had always avoided sunlight. I liked the sun from the shade, the way I like people, not by seeking them out, but as though I might any moment lose their friendship and should already learn to live without them. I enter into friendships by scoping out exit doors.
My brother understood people. All I understood were my impressions—which is to say my fictions—of people, as though they and I were alien species, and each had learned to pretend the other was not.
When, after Egypt, we began to take long walks together in Rome, he liked to change our itinerary, roam, get lost, explore; I liked to go on the same walks each time, for they led to any one of three to four English-language bookstores or to places that were already familiar or that had reminded me of something I had read in a book and that invariably harked back, when you searched deep and long enough and made all the appropriate transpositions, to something vaguely Alexandrian—as though, before feeling anything at all, I needed for it to pass through the customhouse not of the senses, but of memory. Walking through Rome without groping for inner signposts or without hoping to create new “stations” to which I might return at some later date was totally unthinkable. I wanted my brother to share my joy each time we repeated a familiar walk or each time it felt as though we were indeed somewhere more familiar than Rome. Understandably, in the end, my brother made fun of my nostalgic antics and, having tired of me, preferred to go out with friends instead.
And yet, though I learned to love my walks without him, I still owe him so many places I wouldn’t have discovered had it not been for him—just as, when I went back to Egypt in 1995, I needed to have him present with me all the time, to officiate my return, else I’d be numb to the experience. Petrarch’s walk up Mount Ventoux would mean nothing unless his brother were with him part of the way; Freud’s visit to the Acropolis would not cast the dark spell it did without his brother tagging along to remind him of their father; van Gogh’s steadfast Theo was always there to come to his brother’s rescue; Wordsworth needed his sister to accompany him on his return to Tintern Abbey. I needed my brother the same way.
When I told him in New York one day that I missed our summerhouse, he reminded me that as a child I was always the very last to head out to the beach because, as everyone knew, I used to hate the beach, Mediterranean or otherwise.
It was his sense of irony, especially the one he aimed at me for hesitating to eat the falafel sandwich on Passover night in the 1990 version of our late-night walk in Alexandria, that I
ended up sacrificing when I decided to kill him off in my memoir in 1995. Of course, he didn’t disappear entirely; he came in through a back door when I found myself borrowing my brother’s voice in the later version, and, with his voice, his love of life and of this earth and of pastries. Suddenly, I loved the sun though I’d always shied away from it. Suddenly, I was the one who loved the odor of stewed meats and the brush of summer heat; I loved people, I loved laughter, and I loved to lie in the sun and doze off with just a fisherman’s hat thrown over my face, the smell of the beach forever impressed upon my skin, until that smell became my smell as well, the way Alexandria become my own, though I’d never belonged to it, and never wished to. I had stolen his love because I couldn’t feel any of my own.
* * *
Was I lying then?
A novel, as the history of the genre from Madame de Lafayette through Defoe, Fielding, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky makes abundantly clear, wants to pass for something it is not; it claims to be a history and, as such, narrates events as though they did in fact happen. A memoir, on the other hand, narrates them to read like fiction, which is to say, as though they may never have happened at all. Each borrows the conventions of the other. One tells things as though they were facts, the other as though they were not. A bad memoir may turn out to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. A good novel, like life, sometimes does not.
The distinction between the two is far, far more disquieting than might appear. If writing a memoir is a way of purging the mind of mnemonic deadweight, can lying about these memories or inventing surrogate memories help at all? Does lying actually facilitate such a release, or does it, as should make sense, stand in the way? Or does writing open up a parallel universe into which, one by one, we try to move all our cherished belongings, the way immigrants, having settled in America, invite, one by one, each of their siblings?
Or is lying about one’s life precisely what memoirs are all about, a way of giving one’s life a shape and a logic, a coherence it wouldn’t have except on paper, a way of returning or of rehearsing such a return, the way some of us would like nothing better than to seek out an old flame, provided the reunion remain a fantasy? Is our life incomplete, incoherent, unless it is given an aesthetic finish? Does a literary sensibility foster the very homesickness that a memoir hopes to redeem? Or does being literary entail the possibility of lying, so that once our lies are embedded in the chronicle of our life, there is no way to remove them, the way it is impossible to remove alloy once a coin is minted or chewing gum once you’ve stepped enough times on it on pavement?
Friends and readers familiar with the 1990 version of our last Seder were stunned to find me taking this farewell night walk by myself in the 1995 version. What had happened to my brother, and why was he not with me on that walk? And, come to think of it, why was he entirely absent from the book? What kind of a memoir was this if you can remove one character, tamper with others, and—who knows—invent many others?
Removing my brother from the evening walk turned out to be embarrassingly easy—almost as though getting rid of him had been a lifelong fantasy. Some last-minute alterations had to be made to accommodate the late-night dialogue with my brother to a silent monologue without him. These changes turned out to be unforeseeably propitious, as happens so frequently when we lose a few pages and are forced to rewrite them from scratch only to find that we’ve managed to say things we would never have thought of saying, and may have been longing to say but couldn’t, precisely because the things we had the good fortune to lose had stood in the way. The long elegiac sentences at the very end of Out of Egypt, which reviewers quote, were, in fact, written with one purpose only: to smooth out the ridges left by my brother’s disappearance, to elegize him away.
And suddenly I knew, as I touched the damp, grainy surface of the seawall, that I would always remember this night, that in years to come I would remember sitting here, swept with confused longing as I listened to the water lapping the giant boulders beneath the promenade and watched the children head toward the shore in a winding, lambent procession. I wanted to come back tomorrow night, and the night after, and the one after that as well, sensing that what made leaving so fiercely painful was the knowledge that there would never be another night like this, that I would never buy soggy cakes along the coast road in the evening, not this year or any other year, nor feel the baffling, sudden beauty of that moment when, if only for an instant, I had caught myself longing for a city I never knew I loved.
This is not me speaking. It is my brother.
The last sentence, in its original form in Out of Egypt, voiced an altogether different sentiment. I had never loved Egypt. Nor had I loved Alexandria, not its odors, not its beaches or its people. In fact, as originally written, this sentence ended with the rather anticlimactic but far more paradoxical words: “I suddenly caught myself longing for a city I never knew I hated.” But, by another irony, this statement was not in keeping with the sunny and ebullient portrayal of Alexandria I had adopted throughout the book. My brother loved Alexandria; I hated it.
One of my very first readers immediately sensed this disparity between the word hate and the city I seemed to love so much, and asked me to … reconsider. In light of my affectionate, at times rapturous descriptions of Alexandrian life, wouldn’t, perhaps, the word love have made more sense?
No one could have been more right. Without a second’s doubt, I crossed out the verb “hate” and in its place put down the “love.” From hating Alexandria, I now loved it. Easy.
That I was able to settle the matter so blithely, almost by flipping a coin, and go from one extreme to the other, means either that I nursed ambivalent feelings for the city or that I could not decide who exactly the speaker was at that very instant: my brother or I. But even if it were my brother’s voice speaking through mine, my writing about Alexandria in such fond, sensual precision, and with such a yearning to recapture this or that moment, or to revisit this or that site, may have been an undisclosed desire on my part to be like him, to feel as he did, to stop being the person I was, and, if I could convince others that I had, come to believe it myself.
* * *
But there is another confession in store. The night walk on rue Delta on our last night in Egypt, with or without my brother, never did occur. Everyone stayed home that night, morose and worried as ever, saying farewell to the occasional guests who came by and who, despite our repeated pleas, showed up again on the following morning.
My last walk with my brother in Egypt was simply a fiction. As for the moment when, with or without him, I look out to the sea and promise to remember this very evening on its anniversary in the years to come, it too was a fiction. But this fiction grounded me in a way the truth could never have done. This, to use Aristotle’s word, is how I should have felt had I taken a last, momentous walk that night.
Indeed, one of the very, very first things I did when I returned to Egypt thirty years later was to head out to rue Delta to revisit my grandmother’s home. On rue Delta, it kept coming back to me that I hadn’t forgotten the slightest thing, which was disappointing but equally comforting. After so many years, I was unable to get lost. I had forgotten nothing. Nothing surprised me. Even the fact that nothing surprised me failed to surprise me. Indeed, I could have stayed home in New York and written about this visit the way I’d written my memoir: at my desk, in front of my computer screen on the Upper West Side. All I kept thinking on returning to Alexandria was: I’ve read Proust; I’ve studied, taught, and written about memory, written from memory; I know all the ins and outs of time and of pre-memory, post-memory, para-memory, of place visited, unvisited, revisited; and yet, as I look at these familiar buildings, this street, these people, and realize I am failing to feel anything but numbness, all I can think of is, they’re already in my book. Writing about them had made them so familiar, that it was as if I’d never been away. Writing about Alexandria, the “capital of memory,” had robbed memory of its luster.
On
rue Delta, the way to the sea seemed already paved for me. I began walking down a street that had not changed in thirty years. Even its odors, rising as they once did from street level to my bedroom three flights up, were not strange enough, while the odor of falafel brought to mind a falafel hole-in-the-wall on Broadway and 104th that had frequently made me think of the tiny summertime establishments in Alexandria, whose falafel now, ironically, smelled less authentic in Egypt than the falafel on Broadway.