The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (10 page)

“Ce garçon est très bien élevé,” the rabbi told my mother, who loved when someone noticed César's perfect manners.

“Votre fils est très beau,” he told my father—Your son is very handsome. Dad nodded, pleased at hearing yet again that he had produced a beautiful son.

With these two deft compliments, the holy man managed to place my brother on center stage—precisely where he wanted him to be.

In Cairo of the 1950s, there were no high-powered divorce lawyers or marriage therapists, the weapons of choice in America for a feuding couple. If problems erupted, members of the extended family—aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws—would immediately swarm around the troubled household, prepared to say and do what was necessary to keep a couple together.

But when that failed, or if it worked only for a time, the rabbis were summoned.

The
hachamim
enjoyed extraordinary cachet in a community that was both devout and worldly. Men and women, rich and poor, the educated classes who lived
en ville
and the impoverished, at times illiterate Jews of the Old Ghetto, and all those in between, were taught at an early age to revere their rabbis, and, most importantly, to defer to their judgments.

Called in to mediate when all else was failing, they were on the front lines in the battle to hold relationships together in the face of hostility, infidelity, abuse, violence, or simply a waning of love and desire—issues that in modern Western societies would lead to a rapid dissolution of the marital contract.

But not in Cairo.

Divorce was extremely rare, and the rabbis, in particular, exerted such a formidable influence on the mores and lives of Egyptian Jewry that they usually prevailed, so that in the unlikely occasion a couple separated, it was the talk of the community for years to come. And while it was certainly easier for members of the wealthier classes to divorce, it was still taboo. It invariably cost one side of the family a fortune—typically, the wife's parents, because in a religious divorce under Jewish law, the husband had all the power. It was up to him to grant his wife a formal writ of separation, a document known as a
get.
If he balked—as many men did, or else made impossible demands for cash, assets, and more—the woman found herself unable to remarry, unable to resume
any kind of normal life. She could be rich, lovely, devout—she was still untouchable by other men, a pariah in the community.

It was easier in Zamalek, but deceptively so. The woman who left her husband to return to her parents' villa didn't starve, as my grandmother Alexandra had, but she was still socially ruined. My cousin Marcelle, married off at fourteen to a man in his fifties, begged and pleaded for a divorce from the man she hated, to no avail. She left him anyway. While she was young and extraordinarily beautiful at the time of her separation, no Jewish man would go near her, and she found herself at eighteen facing a life of spinsterhood. Her only options were to marry a Christian or a Muslim. Marcelle opted for a wealthy Muslim and converted to Islam. Her sixteen-year-old sister, Yvonne, fared no better when she left her philandering husband. Her father was able to pay a king's ransom for a religious divorce, but even that wasn't enough. To obtain the
get,
she was forced to give up her baby daughter to her husband, in a deal negotiated by the chief rabbi of Egypt.

Only then would her unfaithful husband agree to free her.

It was no accident that César found himself dragged to this 1950s equivalent of a mediation session. The rabbis' most potent weapons were the children, and they weren't shy about enlisting them as allies, as a reminder to the couple of the high stakes. It was excruciating and even traumatic for the child, but necessary if the family was going to stay together.

That morning, both my parents were offered the opportunity to have their say, but to their astonishment, the rabbi kept turning to my brother.

Who would he prefer to live with in the event of a separation, Mom or Dad? Which parent did he love more?

Because César couldn't possibly have answered, because the entire journey, from the endless taxi ride to the session with this holy man, had the feel of a nightmare, because he wanted to cry, or leave the room, the rabbi was able to make his point: that it was wrong, or worse,
haram
—a sin—to make a child suffer because of a marital dispute, and forcing him to choose between his mother and father was an abomination.

Years later, César would find he had forgotten many of the detailed exchanges that had taken place, but what he could never, ever banish
was the sense of hopelessness he'd felt seated in between my parents in the backseat of the cab, and then in the rabbi's office, the sense of being a captive, a prisoner, forced to go along on a journey that could only end disastrously.

“Loulou, never marry a Syrian,” my mother would tell me over and over. And with that warning, she offered me a window into her own universe of sorrow, the anger that she still harbored over her years as the prisoner of Malaka Nazli, long after she had been set free from our pretty house with the multiple balconies, and my father was too old and frail and infirm to be an especially fearsome warden.

What drove my mother as she repeated those words to me over and over, as if hoping to hypnotize me, was the profound sense of regret she still felt at having stayed, the fact that she hadn't broken out of 281-Malaka Nazli when she still could, hadn't ignored the tender, solicitous advice of Tante Rebekah, Tante Marie, and Tante Leila, hadn't walked out on my father and the rabbi of Abbassiyah.

Y
our name is your destiny. Change your name, the mystics say, and you will avert even the most terrible fate.

When I was born, nearly four years after the death of Baby Alexandra, my family felt an overwhelming sense of relief followed by a rush of panic. Simcha Allegra, the midwife who delivered me in the back bedroom of Malaka Nazli, and whose Hebrew and Italian names both meant “joy,” stepped into the parlor to tell my father the good news. He had a new baby girl, the midwife announced, and both mother and daughter were well. She spoke crisply and with authority, as befits a woman who has delivered hundreds of infants.

It was one of those rare times in this vast Syrian clan obsessed with producing sons that a baby girl found herself
wanted.
My birth was seen as a sign that the family's luck was changing. The all-merciful God who had taken away one little girl from Malaka Nazli had now shown his infinite compassion by giving back a little girl to Malaka Nazli.

But with the elation came fear that turned into paralysis. Everyone
seemed stumped as to what to name me. Names were critically important in determining a person's fortunes, yet because of the shadow cast by the death of my sister, deciding what to call me turned into a high-stakes game of chance. No one wanted to play.

My mom secretly thought of naming me Alexandra. She was so happy to have given birth to a little girl, maybe even that girl, minus the blue eyes, she thought to herself, because she was superstitious and believed in the return of the dead. If I were really Baby Alexandra, come back from the other world, then wouldn't it make sense to give me her name? It was so tempting, so human, to want to try again—to break the spell and defy the odds and give life to a human being who would have that name yet would thrive and prosper and not fall prey to the evil eye. My mom was convinced that anyone who was too beautiful or too good risked being destroyed
par le mauvais oeil.

But who would impose such a burden on a newborn? The name was surely cursed. Look what had happened to her daughter. Look what had happened to her mother—abandoned and bereft as a wife, a beggar living off the alms relatives deigned to give her, reduced to smoking cigarette after cigarette, and running off each day to the Cinema Rialto to escape her woes.

My grandmother would wander into our house on Malaka Nazli every afternoon as was her wont, the mane of soft dark hair that a governess had once lovingly brushed and tied back with satin ribbons now gathered carelessly in a chignon at the back of her neck. Her fine chiseled features and smooth skin, golden brown from constant walks under the hot sun of Cairo, made her face look years younger than she was, although her posture, the fact that she had become almost hunchbacked, made her appear many years older.

She was such a loving creature,
la Nonna,
so tender despite her hard life, so giving despite the fact she had nothing to give.

Though penniless, Alexandra would come laden with gifts. Typically, these were stacks of books and discarded issues of French magazines she received from the phalanx of relatives who looked after her.

After I was born, she arrived with packages of impossible splendor. Alexandra regarded my birth as almost a religious occurrence. She had adored the blue-eyed girl who had briefly borne her name, had mourned
her passing with nearly the same intensity as my mom, and had been plunged into the same boundless despair. But it was her own child she missed, of course, and was still mourning so many years later. For Alexandra, every pathway led back to the lost boy of the souk.

My siblings and I were the beneficiaries of her thwarted love. In my case, she prevailed on some wealthy cousins—members of the Dana clan who lived in Cairo—to give her the baby wear their own children had outgrown. She proceeded to lavish me with blankets and hand-embroidered bibs and soft towels and impossibly delicate white voile dresses fit for a child princess so that even my father, a connoisseur of fine fabrics, was impressed. My grandmother saw to it that I was covered with all the lace and linens and soft cottons a fretful infant could want.

Mostly, it was her voice that soothed me when I couldn't stop crying.

There was no piano for her to play anymore. The single room she occupied not far from Malaka Nazli had only a cot and a burner on which she kept the coffeepot where she prepared her ten and twelve cups of dark, sweet
café Turque,
never bothering to rinse it.

Without a piano, Alexandra's musical talents found an outlet in the continental melodies she sang to my siblings and now to me. They were songs from the war years—World War I as well as World War II—and she sang them in her lovely voice in both French and Italian, and the family was hypnotized by this music from a lost world.

My grandmother would shyly approach my crib and begin to sing, not lullabies but grown-up tunes about men who left and the women who pined after them, all set in picturesque lands where the houses were white and the gardens bloomed, the sea was blue and love was forever—“Plaisirs d'Amour,” “J'Attendrais,” “Santa Lucia,” and her most favorite of all, “Torna a Sorrento,” Come Back to Sorrento.

“Guarda, guarda questo giardino. Senti, senti questi fiori d'arancio,” Alexandra sang, a small angelic figure hovering over my crib—“Look, look at this garden, inhale, inhale the orange flowers.” She sang to me years before I would learn to appreciate Italian gardens, and the heady scent of orange flowers, and the Sea of Sorrento and my hopelessly romantic and ill-fated grandmother, winding her way through the streets of old Cairo.

 

I LINGERED FOR DAYS
—a child without a name.

Legend had it that hundreds of years back, my ancestor, Rabbi Laniado of Aleppo, stricken with a fatal malady, had glimpsed the Angel of Death lurking by his bedside. Since the doctors were powerless to save him, he took matters into his own hands—he changed his name and instructed his family to proclaim he was no longer Rabbi Laniado. The stratagem worked like a charm. He tricked the Angel of Death into leaving his room, and survived to a ripe old age.

Yes, a name could do that—it could quite literally mean the difference between life and death.

As they pondered and debated, my family passed on a host of perfectly fine choices. My sister's refusal to be known as Zarifa had put the fear of God into my parents about Arabic names. This meant that my legion of aunts and cousins, any of whose names could have been worthy choices—Bahia, Ensol, and my favorite, Leila, which meant “night”—weren't considered. My father, recalling the tearful scenes and wrenching arguments with my sister, who insisted on being called Suzette, didn't push any of them.

Yet tradition dictated that I be named after a relative. My sister was still identified as Zarifa on official documents. César was Ezra, after my paternal grandfather, who had died decades earlier. My other brother was named Isaac, after my maternal grandfather, who had betrayed and abandoned the family, yet was so beloved by my mom she chose to ignore the inherent risks.

Finally, César broke the impasse. He had a crush on a teacher at school, Mademoiselle Lucette, and when he told her of my birth, she embraced him and gave him a kiss. Flush from the show of affection, César ran home and told my startled family that I should be named after his pretty Parisian
institutrice.
My parents looked at each other, then at my sister and at Nonna Alexandra, lingering by my crib, softly crooning her Italian ballads.

My father nodded yes, and my mother lit up, and my sister offered no objections, and Alexandra continued singing, and that was that.

“Ça lui portera bonheur, Inshallah,” my mother remarked; It will bring her good luck.

 

BARELY A MONTH LATER,
the world seemed about to explode: on October 29, 1956, war broke out in Suez. I screamed when planes flew overhead and air-raid sirens warned of an imminent attack. My mother said that my cries were so shrill and piercing, they left everyone in the house feeling rattled and unsure about what to fear most, another incursion by the British, French, and Israelis, or another outburst from Loulou.

That was how I was known—Loulou. It was so much more than a nickname, it was also my persona, the youngest of several siblings, doted on and feted by all. My father deftly took my Parisian moniker and made it sound Arabic simply by emphasizing the first syllable—LOUlou, not LouLOU, as the French would have said it.

I was a frost blossom, the infant daughter of a man in his late fifties. I came at a time in his life when he was feeling discouraged, and the
world seemed to have lost much of its promise and possibilities, so that he greeted my arrival in the way a patch of winter shrubbery embraces a small flower that manages to sprout in its midst. He was still shaken by my mother's demands for a divorce, her refusal to tolerate the freedom he found so necessary to survive, and befuddled by all the disputes at home, where Suzette, now twelve, kept sparring with him at every turn, challenging his authority and mocking his faith.

Loulou as an infant in Cairo.

What he did—perhaps by way of revenge—was to lavish on me all the tenderness and affection he was thought incapable of giving. And I, left in the care of the Captain, basked and reveled in his love, found his quiet smile more comforting than my mother's elegant phrases, and experienced none of the harshness and imperious manner that had so alienated my older siblings, in particular, my sister.

I was barely six weeks old when the British and the French and the Israelis pounded Egypt with their rockets. César was placed in charge of securing both the house and me. He made sure all the wooden shutters were bolted shut, and then carried the crib to the middle of the cool, dark bedroom at the back. Loud, jarring air-raid sirens were frequently sounded, a signal to turn out all the lights and lie low. The explosions were only a few kilometers away, yet we could still occasionally see planes in the sky, and César, from his perch by the window, watched the clouds of thick black smoke in the distance. The sirens were sounded again once a raid was over, and my family huddled for safety in the back room of Malaka Nazli.

I could not stop crying.

The turmoil in Egypt cast an enormous shadow over my arrival. A few months before my birth, Nasser defied the world by nationalizing the Suez Canal, an act that enraged the British and the French. Nasser's rhetoric against Israel grew ever more belligerent, and he sent fedayeen guerrillas to launch attacks inside the country. The Israelis, convinced he was planning to invade, decided to strike preemptively. They found a willing ally in Britain's prime minister, Sir Anthony Eden, who had compared Nasser to Mussolini and even Hitler, and was passionate about the need to overthrow him. In a secret meeting, Sir Anthony, the French prime minister, Guy Mollet, and Israel's David
Ben-Gurion agreed to send their armies into Egypt, take back the canal, and topple Nasser.

The world seemed to be coming to an end. Within a week of the assault on Egypt, Soviet troops moved into Hungary, using a massive show of tanks and soldiers to crush a revolt against Communist rule. Despite their own brutal invasion of another country, the Soviets deftly drew attention to the Western show of force in the Suez, loudly condemned it, and threatened to attack London and Paris. They were prepared to use “modern weapons of destruction” if there wasn't an immediate pullback.

President Eisenhower abandoned his traditional allies and joined the Soviets in demanding an immediate cease-fire in the Middle East.

Prime Minister Eden, shocked and profoundly humiliated, withdrew his troops within days, as did the French. But it was Eden's capitulation in Suez that had the most profound historical significance, for it meant both the end of the British prime minister and the end of the British Empire.

The Suez war, which ended on November 6, led to convulsive changes inside Egypt. Anyone holding British or French passports was given as little as forty-eight or seventy-two hours to leave the country. Families who had lived in Egypt for generations, whose children were born there and knew no other way of life, were escorted to the airport and, as squads of rifle-toting soldiers watched, put on planes bound for Europe.

Nasser's speeches brimmed with venom. He vowed to rid Egypt of all “foreigners,” to eliminate the Jewish state, and stamp out the last vestiges of colonialism and the monarchy. People lost their jobs and livelihood overnight when the regime sequestered a business, placing Nasser's officers and loyalists in charge, and insisting that most employees be Egyptian nationals. Entire industries were nationalized as Nasser moved closer and closer to the Soviets.

At the movies, during intermission, theaters showed reels of Nasser and Om Kalsoum toasting the defeat of the European and Israeli marauders. The singer was one relic of the Farouk monarchy who was thriving. Because of her overwhelming popularity with the Egyptian people, Nasser courted her and even professed to be among her biggest fans. These days, the woman my father had adored, and who was
said to have been his mistress, delivered fiery anti-Israel tirades and positioned herself as a true daughter of the revolution.