The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (11 page)

The Jews of Egypt followed the swirl of events with a sense of profound foreboding. The charmed life they had known under Farouk and his late father, King Fouad—the sense of being one of the most cosseted and most privileged Jewish communities in the world—was coming to an end.

The repercussions were felt in every household, including mine. My siblings all attended French schools that found themselves suddenly bereft of much of their staff. At the Lycée Français de Bab-el-Louk, where my sister was a student, Suzette had taken gym classes where she learned to dance the quadrille, a graceful eighteenth-century French square dance. In the aftermath of Suez, the school instituted special military training courses for its girls to teach them to fight against the Western—and Jewish—invaders. My sister and her schoolmates were handed cumbersome old rifles, some dating back to World War I, and taught how to aim and shoot. At the Collège Français, my eleven-year-old brother César was mastering the same military skills, practicing on a rifle he could barely lift.

There was also a strong new emphasis on learning Arabic. In prior years, Egyptian girls, if they were members of the privileged class, disdained their native language and showed off their wealth and refinement by conversing only in French or English or Italian—any language but their own. But now at the lycée, Suzette found that she had a heavy Arabic courseload, in keeping with the ethos of the revolution.

My sister embraced the fitness program and learned to sing the new Egyptian national anthem with gusto. Contrarian to her innermost core, she sided with Nasser and told anyone who would listen, including my startled family, that the British and the French were wrong to have invaded and that the canal belonged to the Egyptians.

But even she wanted to leave: all the young people realized that they had no future in Egypt.

The grand synagogue on Adly Street became a hub of frenetic activity, the scene every day of hurried weddings. As families prepared to flee to any country that would have them, as they plotted their escape literally to the ends of the earth—Australia, Venezuela, Canada, South Africa, Brazil—young lovers chose to tie the knot lest they be separated forever. Engagements that would have lasted months were now barely
a couple of days, while weddings that usually took a whole evening were performed in an hour.

Rabbi Chaim Nahum Effendi, Egypt's venerable chief rabbi, found himself officiating at multiple ceremonies in a single day. These were assembly-line weddings, with little of the pomp and ceremony that had marked a traditional affair at the Gates of Heaven.

Young brides hugged their parents good-bye and took the first boat out.

There wasn't even time to cry—there was only a feeling that one had to get out at any cost.

Egypt had witnessed this kind of hysteria before, in 1948, during the first Arab-Israeli war, and then in January 1952, after the Day of the Four Hundred Fires. Somehow, the sense of hopelessness and finality seemed more intense in the aftermath of Suez.

It was no longer a question of whether to leave Egypt, but when.

 

MY FATHER URGED EACH
one of his brothers and sisters to go immediately to Israel, the one country that would take them, no questions asked.

But at home on Malaka Nazli, my father made no move to travel anywhere. “C'est à cause de Loulou,” he'd say if anyone asked. We would leave too, but for concerns about my welfare, he explained. After what happened to Baby Alexandra, he wasn't prepared to put his delicate infant daughter in a perilous situation, taking her on a long sea voyage she might not be able to survive, not to mention resettlement in a primitive country like Israel where it was whispered that new arrivals were put up in tents or metal barracks that were as hot as ovens when the sun shone. Still, he was committed to abandoning Egypt “quand Loulou est un peu plus grande”—when I was a bit older.

It would be only a matter of months, he vowed.

The patriarch had spoken. Members of my extended family prepared to embark on what was, in effect, a second Exodus. One by one, all my aunts and uncles—Marie and her six children, Oncle Raphael, his two beautiful daughters and lone son, Oncle Shalom, Tante Rebekah, her husband and one of her sons, were set to leave for the Promised Land.

“On va se revoir bientôt—Inshallah,” my dad vowed.

Then it was Alexandra's turn to leave.

Alexandra's support systems were vanishing one after the other, like the cigarettes she chain-smoked. The cousins and second cousins who had kept her out of abject poverty—or allowed her to survive in spite of it—were departing in droves. The
communauté juive,
with its chaotic but fairly generous charitable network, on whom she could count for the occasional handout or a meal, was also being dismantled. All the major donors, as well as the minor donors, were disappearing. The
Hôpital Israélite
was shut down in 1956, and it was all the community could do to ensure that the Jewish home for the aged in Heliopolis remained open, and to donate money to the Yellow Palace, the state insane asylum, so that Jewish patients would continue to receive care.

Alexandra's only real option seemed to be her son Félix in Israel, who sent word she could join him. But no one had any illusions about Oncle Félix, the charming huckster and ne'er-do-well who had stolen my mother's engagement ring and pawned the precious stones on the eve of her wedding, who had shown himself unable to keep a promise or commitment his entire life.

No one had any illusions, that is, except Alexandra. She would have loved to move in with us, of course, but she was so timid and unassuming she wouldn't have proposed it on her own, and my father wouldn't have stood for it, and my mother was too weak to insist on it, and my sister was too young and too frazzled, her anger too diffuse, to demand it, the way that she alone seemed capable of standing up to my father.

Alexandra gave up her small room and her favorite coffeepot and moved in with us while her papers were finalized.

Since all the beds were occupied, she was offered a trunk in a corner of the living room, cushioned with blankets and pillows. And there Alexandra slept in her final days with us, a small frightened woman on the eve of a journey she had no wish to undertake, lying on top of a large old-fashioned black trunk made up to look like a bed.

A few weeks later, she left for Alexandria, where she was met by relatives—the wealthy branch of the once-grand and noble
famille Dana.
They, too, were hurriedly planning their escapes, but in one final act of charity—for they were renowned as great benefactors of the city—they prepared a small suitcase for my grandmother, and stuffed it
with whatever they could gather: bits of clothing and lingerie, a couple of books she would never read because of her cataracts, several packs of cigarettes, biscuits, hard-boiled eggs and tins of cookies lest she go hungry on the boat.

My family went to see Alexandra as she prepared to depart. Suzette was shocked—my grandmother's shiny black hair had turned white. It had changed color in the time it had taken for her to travel from Cairo to the city she had abandoned in her youth. Alexandra was assured we'd be joining her any day.

Perhaps she believed it—perhaps we all did. It seemed unthinkable that we would never see each other again, that families would go off in a thousand different directions, like the ships setting off from the port of Alexandria.

The dock was impossibly crowded, as if all the remaining Jews of Egypt had chosen that moment to go. The thin old woman with the white hair tied neatly back in a bun was allowed on board without a fuss. Nobody offered to help her, or to carry her luggage. Chivalry, once an essential ingredient of life in Egypt, had also disappeared, as if it too were a relic of colonialism that had to be eradicated.

Alexandra of Alexandria was gone, an old woman, nearly blind, trying to hold on to her heavy valise on a crowded boat.

My sister, who would grow up to marry a man named Alex and would name her only child Alexander, was inconsolable. She left us and wandered off to a local cinema, where she bought a ticket for a couple of piasters. The theater was playing
Love Me Tender,
which starred the new American heartthrob Elvis Presley. Suzette cried from the first scene to the last. Seated alone in that cool darkened theater, as Alexandra had always done, my sister cried and cried watching Elvis and listened to him sing the lyrics to the song that she would forever associate with that awful day in the summer of 1957.

“Love me tender, love me dear, tell me you are mine. I'll be yours through all the years, till the end of time,”
Elvis sang, as my sister thought longingly of our grandmother, and wondered how she was faring on her choppy and hopelessly solitary journey.

O
nce in Israel, my relatives' worst fears were realized. Some were placed in rugged settlements in the middle of the desert or in remote agricultural areas where home was a tent, an armylike barrack, or a flimsy structure made of aluminum. Tante Marie, appalled by the squalor of their new life, wondered why on earth she had listened to my father. Even in their diminished circumstances and with the convulsive political situation, Egypt had been better than this.

And where was Leon? Why had he sent them to this wilderness?—which is what she considered Kibbutz Givat Brenner.

My dad's letters to them were both reassuring and noncommittal. My cousins were living in a primitive prefab dwelling made of aluminum siding; the rooms were unbearably hot. Their diet was spartan, the opulent dinners of chicken and meat they had enjoyed in Cairo a wistful memory.

The only solace came from the person my father most hated, my lost uncle, Salomon the priest. Shortly after arriving, there was Père Jean-Marie, come to comfort his family from his monastery in Jerusalem. He
was like a vision, striding through the fields in his long black priestly garb, and the residents of Kibbutz Givat Brenner could only watch with amazement as the stocky, well-built man with a full beard, a large cross around his neck, and one dangling at his waist, made his way through their commune.

The kibbutzniks were even more astonished when the object of his visit turned out to be the desperately poor family of refugees from Egypt, in particular, a small, pudgy woman who couldn't speak a word of Hebrew and who hadn't stopped crying from the moment she'd reached Givat Brenner.

For Tante Marie, who felt as if all hope had gone from her life since leaving Egypt, being reunited with her older brother was a miraculous event. She saw him as a saintly figure come to show them kindness and compassion amid the bewildering harshness of their new home.

Oncle Raphael was in even worse straits. His health began to fail. Without my father, his trading partner in sardines, jams, and olive oil, to comfort him, still heartbroken by the events in Egypt, Oncle Raphael suffered a heart attack and died. He had been in Israel only six months.

Shortly after arriving in Israel, Tante Rebekah also became ill. She was diagnosed with lung cancer, though she had never smoked a cigarette in her life. Her son David, an enlisted soldier in the Israeli Army, came home to help care for her. Her husband knelt by her bed as she lay dying.

And then there was Alexandra.

My grandmother had landed in the middle of the orange groves of Ganeh Tikvah, an agricultural settlement. It could have been the end of the earth, this desolate patch of nothingness (but lots of oranges) miles from the nearest town. But it was where her son, Oncle Félix, lived, working when he could as a journalist, and it was supposed to be her new home.

In fact, she felt more like an alien from a distant planet. She didn't know a soul, couldn't speak the language, and seemed incapable of finding her way around, though even if she had, it wouldn't have mattered because there was nothing to find.

Home was a narrow bed in the wooden prefab dwelling where my
uncle and his wife, Aimee, lived. They were at war, trading barb after barb, accusation after accusation, with my grandmother as a witness.

Alexandra did what she'd always done to escape a painful situation—she went for walks. She left her son's wooden house and wandered up and down the narrow gravel walkways that were the closest approximation to streets in this godforsaken village, where all one could see for miles and miles were orange groves.

She walked so much, and her manner was so distracted—mumbling to herself, holding on to a cigarette butt—that she attracted the attention of this immigrant community, made up mostly of refugees from distant corners of the Levant—Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, Casablanca.

They were sure that she was mad, this hunchbacked old woman who was always muttering to herself as she paced up and down on the same narrow road, and who would occasionally stop and address them in a language they couldn't understand. She seemed to be pleading for help but didn't know how in Hebrew or Arabic.

Alexandra became a figure of pity, or worse, derision. Children made fun of her and laughed in her face, and their parents weren't much better. In the hardened society that was Israel of the 1950s, Alexandra's fellow Jews showed her far less kindness, less of that wondrous quality the Egyptians call
rahma
—mercy, compassion—than she had encountered in Cairo at the hands of Arabs who'd see her wandering around Malaka Nazli.

No one had laughed at Alexandra in Egypt. On the contrary, strangers, moved by her air of distress and helplessness, would often stop and ask her if she needed help. That was the difference between a society that was primarily Middle Eastern, despite its long colonial history, and one that was primarily Western, despite its geography, and longed to be even more so.

My grandmother wasn't crazy—she was simply lonely and feeling horribly unwanted and unloved. When were Edith and the children coming? she wondered. When would Leon make good on his promise and move the family here, so they would all be together again?

Though she lived with family, she was, for all intents and purposes, alone. She didn't have a dime, and her son didn't either. Oncle Félix hadn't changed a bit between Cairo and Ganeh Tikvah. Though
good-natured, he was still undependable. Almost from the moment my grandmother arrived, he'd announce he was going away, and off he'd vanish—to the other end of Africa, or merely to the other end of town.

Back in Egypt, Alexandra's future had seemed settled, if not exactly ideal. Oncle Félix was said to be waiting for her in Israel in a house set amid farms and bucolic fields. But despite its rich soil and delicious outsize fruit, Ganeh Tikvah was a wasteland as far as Alexandra was concerned, a village with no shops, no theaters, no life—only one small grocery store. It wasn't a kibbutz, so there weren't even communal activities that could have lessened her sense of solitude. She couldn't speak the language, she didn't know the area, and she didn't have any pocket money.

And she hated oranges.

How different from Cairo, when even at her lowest ebb, Alexandra could step out of her rented room and find companionship and cheer wandering amid the maze of boutiques and stalls and cafés and restaurants and cinema houses—above all the cinema houses. Not simply the Rialto, her own small haven where even the ticket clerks were her friends, but also the sumptuous
cinémas en plein air,
outdoor theaters like the Rex and the St. James where it was possible to sit on a wicker chair and feel the cool breeze from the Nile while enjoying a double feature.

She had been enthralled with the new generation of stars of the 1950s—Van Johnson, Deborah Kerr, Rock Hudson, Grace Kelly, and Elizabeth Taylor, always Elizabeth Taylor. How she endeared herself to Suzette by comparing her to Elizabeth Taylor. How she'd loved going to Malaka Nazli and telling Edith's children the plotlines of the latest films she'd seen—embellishing them, of course, but only a little bit.

The air of Ganeh Tikvah was heavy with the fragrance of orange flowers. Once upon a time, she had loved to sing, “Senti, senti questi fiori d'arancio”—Inhale, inhale the orange flowers; but now she felt she was suffocating, that she couldn't escape the trees with their immense fruit and the scent that was everywhere.

How she missed her old room and her
tanaka,
the little coffeepot that was her closest companion.

 

FINALLY, MY GRANDMOTHER MADE
a friend of sorts. Newly married, eighteen-year-old Josette also was feeling lost and homesick. She missed Cairo and its comforts, and her parents who had stayed behind. She thought of Alexandra as an emissary from civilization. At last, someone to share a
café Turque
and enjoy a pleasant chat in French with—no Hebrew or Arabic, please.

Josette lived with her husband in a small wooden cabin in Ganeh Tikvah that Alexandra frequently passed on her aimless wanderings. She was actually related to my grandmother and Oncle Félix through marriage. Her husband's grandfather was Isaac, the man who had wed, then abandoned, Alexandra, and his mother was Tante Rosée, my mom's half sister. It made sense that, once in Israel, Josette and her husband had reached out to Oncle Félix.

In spite of her abject poverty, Josette could tell that my grandmother had that indefinable quality that could only be called class. She had an aristocratic bearing and her French was so exquisite! She was also a natural raconteur, and much as she had once beguiled my siblings, she captivated the young woman. With her exquisite French, Alexandra brought to mind some of Josette's former schoolmates at the Lycée Français de Bab-el-Louk, the fabulously rich girls who arrived each morning in chauffeured Cadillacs from their mansions in Garden City and Zamalek and whose servants brought them lunch. What Josette couldn't have known was that once upon a time, Alexandra had been one of those girls.

She found the old woman endearing, the contradictions in her both haunting and fascinating.

On the one hand, she was so helpless, the most helpless person she had ever known. In Israel, even more than in Egypt, my grandmother didn't have a clue how to cope with the ordinary exigencies of life.

Alexandra was like a flower, Josette decided. But not any flower—the rare, delicate variety that grows on the side of a mountain, the edelweiss, white and lovely and excruciatingly fragile.

There was another quality she couldn't pinpoint, which was wrapped up in the secret sorrow of the woman. It was an aura of mystery, a sense that she was searching, searching as she walked up and down those nar
row pathways shaded by the orange trees, but for what, for what? “She is looking for her son,” the young woman concluded. She hated Félix and blamed him for Alexandra's unhappiness.

When Josette's own parents finally moved to Israel, they settled in an adjoining wooden cabin and instantly embraced my grandmother. Alexandra would wander over to their house during one of her endless walks to nowhere, the way that she had once stopped to see us at Malaka Nazli. Josette's parents were amiable people. They learned to recognize the shy knock on the door—four taps, and there was Alexandra, cigarette in hand, a slight smile on her anxious face.

She was so painfully thin by then. She was probably starving. There were ripe, delicious oranges literally at her feet. Pieces of fruit littered the grounds of Ganeh Tikvah, and on any one of her walks, Alexandra could simply have bent down and scooped them up. But she never did. She survived, if barely, on a diet of cigarettes, Turkish coffee, and the occasional hard-boiled egg that she ate every couple of days. Though she was delightful company, she seemed terribly distracted, unable to sit still for more than a few minutes, in a hurry to get to her next destination.

“Tu ne veux rien manger, chérie?” Josette or her mother would ask, Won't you have a bite?

Alexandra would shake her head no, and politely excuse herself. She left them to resume her walk, which was both frantic and aimless.

Josette would watch her from the window—a little girl lost in the guise of an old woman, oblivious to her surroundings.

La guigne
—bad luck, the evil eye. They had haunted my grandmother her entire life and had followed her here in God's country, the one place on earth where curses could be broken and destinies reinvented.

“Please, God, don't let me end up like that,” Josette prayed.

My grandmother was in fact intensely aware of her surroundings. She was also—as Josette had guessed—on the lookout for her son.

But not
that
son, not my uncle Félix. It was her other son, the blue-eyed child of the souk, that Alexandra hoped to find amid the orange groves. Surely her life couldn't end like this, in a desolate stretch of nothingness, penniless and unwanted and alone, without her even hav
ing solved the essential mystery that had haunted her these many years. In my grandmother's anguished solitude, being reunited with him had become her obsession once again.

He was all grown up now, but she was sure as only a mother can be that he had left Egypt too, and was somewhere close at hand.

She was persuaded that he too had found his way to the Promised Land.

Ganeh Tikvah, after all, meant the Garden of Hope, and Alexandra kept walking on the dark gravel roads, determined to remain hopeful.