The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (12 page)

I
am always drawn to photographs that seem to foreshadow events—happy scenes that contain telltale signs of a tragedy still to come. Everyone is smiling, but somewhere on the edge of the frame is a dark smudge, a shadow, so that despite the joyful faces, it is clear that a terrible event is about to unfold.

No matter how often I've stared at the last photograph of my father in white sharkskin, I have found no such hints. There he is in the courtyard of Temple Hanan. The occasion is a bris, a circumcision, and several guests have gathered in a large semicircle in front of the graceful Italianate windows. They beam in their soft, flowing silk dresses and tailored suits. At the center, my cousin Edouard is by his wife and mother-in-law, who cradles the newborn in her arms. My dad, though off somewhat to the side, still stands out because of his tall, princely bearing, his confident, easy smile, the fact that he towers over everyone around him, and mostly, his breathtaking elegance.

All the men are wearing dark, conservative suits.

Leon alone is in white.

It is a blissful scene. I have always thought of it as the last happy
picture of the Jews of Egypt. Nothing portends of the events to come. There are no hints that within weeks or months it will all be over. The baby's parents—Edouard, my father's cousin, and his wife—will take their young son and depart almost immediately for America. The women in their finery will be dispersed to a dozen foreign lands. Temple Hanan will be abandoned, its courtyard empty and forlorn. And my father will never dress, or stand, or smile quite this way again.

The last happy picture of the Jews of Egypt. Temple Hanan, Cairo, 1958.

We didn't go to Alexandria in the summer of 1958, a break from our tradition of renting a house or apartment by the sea. Life had lost much of its luster after the mass exodus of our relatives. Our house felt forlorn, devoid of its usual visitors. My father fielded letters from Israel, asking when we would be joining the rest of the family.

But after the panic that followed the Suez crisis, there was the semblance of stability. Life seemed to resume its languorous Levantine pace—at least on the surface. Though Father kept reassuring our relatives we were planning to join them, there didn't appear to be quite the same urgency.

Even so, a lingering effect of the 1956 war was fear, a nagging sense that the Nasser regime was spying on us, that danger was around the corner. The maid, the porter, the street vendor—anyone could be spying for Nasser's henchmen. My mother would sometimes motion to my siblings to keep silent: “Les murs ont des oreilles,” she would say, The walls have ears, and point to the maid setting the table.

Many people we knew had lost their businesses to the government, but Leon had almost nothing the government could sequester or confiscate. And so, in a strange way, he was able to continue as he always did—working resolutely alone. He outwitted and outmaneuvered the regime so that it couldn't seize what was ours. Nasser himself couldn't have penetrated the layers of secrecy shrouding my father's myriad business interests.

My father's routine remained unchanged. He still woke up every day at sunrise to attend services. Afterward, he came home for a light breakfast, then left again to go downtown for meetings with clients. He'd stop to enjoy a glass of cold beer, wander over to the bourse and more business meetings.

He loved to walk across Cairo, and he was so vigorous that even now, nearing sixty, he didn't feel a need to slow down. Besides, he was energized by all his responsibilities at home, the fact that he had four small mouths to feed, including me, the new baby.

I was, from the start, his personal charge. When he was home, Edith left me in his care and together we went to play in the park across the street, on the campus of Sacré Coeur, or we'd simply stay in his room facing Malaka Nazli; as he worked or leafed through the morning papers, I sipped on milk fresh from the cow that still came to the back of our house each morning, exactly as it had in my grandmother Zarifa's day.

One morning, cousin Edouard walked by and spotted me in my father's arms, playing on the windowsill.

“Bonjour, Captain, ça va?” he called out; All's well?

“Dieu est grand.” My dad smiled.

Edouard was trying to mend fences with my father. Shortly after his son's bris, word spread he was planning to live in America, a move he'd tried to keep secret until the last minute. Though most of his friends approved, my dad was furious. Now he had to confront the Captain's full wrath. Edouard's father was sick, a patient at the old-age home in Heliopolis. How could he abandon him?

My father urged Edouard to stay calm and reconsider: there was no immediate need to leave Egypt now. But my cousin seemed panic-stricken. In his mind, he had no choice but to abandon his home, his job, and his life in Cairo. His wife was adamant; even if life was safer than after Suez, Egypt still held no lasting prospects for Jews.

Another morning, my dad summoned a photographer to come take a picture of the two of us outside Malaka Nazli. I toddled alongside him across the wide boulevard, over to the Convent of the Sacred Heart, whose grand, imposing building made such a perfect backdrop. Neighbors and passersby watched as the photographer set up his tripod and old-fashioned camera in the middle of the street.

My dad spotted a graceful old automobile, a Sheffield, parked in front of Sacred Heart. He picked me up and positioned me on top of the hood. He leaned over, pointing to the camera, hoping he could coax me to smile. He couldn't. I did obey him in one sense, by staring, wide-eyed and unblinking, directly toward the photographer, who promptly poked his head under the black curtain and cried out, “Parfait.”

In the resulting shot, Dad holds me in that tender, protective way that is uniquely his. Though I seem a bit befuddled, he smiles broadly enough for the two of us. He is dressed somewhat informally, in a shirt and tie, but no jacket; I wear a prim cotton dress and real leather shoes, not baby boots, and my hair is styled in a perfect pageboy. The camera captures it all—the joy he has in holding me, the sense of absolute safety I feel nestled in that favorite spot I've staked out in the nook of his shoulder,
au creux de son épaule.

It is a universe of two, created here on the streets of 1950s Cairo, and it will always be like this, my father and I taking on a vast and dif
ficult world together, with a swagger and a smile and an expensive car we don't even own. Nothing in the photograph suggests it will ever be any different, that the idyll will ever end.

Leon and Loulou.

It did, and only a couple of weeks later.

My father woke up at four in the morning as was his wont, determined to make the first service at Temple Hanan. He put on his lightest, whitest clothes because it was so brutally warm out, one of the hottest summers he could remember.

He began the familiar ten-minute sprint to synagogue, crossing the alleyway by the side of our house, then turning toward a main street which led to Midan Sakakini, the wide traffic circle anchored by the mansion of the fabled Sakakini family of pashas and beys, then back to the narrow dirt roads he knew so intimately that he could have walked them blindfolded. He had been taking the same familiar path every morning for more than twenty years, since he'd moved with Zarifa to the house on Malaka Nazli.

 

PERHAPS IT WAS A
manhole. Or a crack in the poorly paved road. A rock. A slippery patch of cement.

He would always ask himself, and he would never be sure.

Suddenly he found himself falling, falling.

He flew through the air and hit the pavement with such force he was sure that all his bones were broken and that he would die. That was the problem with being tall and well built—he collapsed with unearthly speed and an enormous thud. He couldn't move, he could only lie there moaning, while passersby swarmed around him.

In old Cairo, no one kept walking if you were hurt.

He was unconscious when the ambulance arrived. The crew rushed him to the Demerdash, one of the closest area hospitals. The Demerdash was a public institution that took care of Cairo's poorest citizens, the indigent, the fellahin. My father would always say that it was God's will that he was brought there.

At home, the call came later that morning. My mother screamed. She ran to the
ba-wab
to summon a taxi. She seemed so frail as the porter helped her into the cab, and she was trembling. In the background, my brother and sister were crying.

At the hospital my father fleetingly regained consciousness. He thought back to his life, to his all-consuming love for God, the fact that he had devoted himself to prayer and charity and acts of goodwill, and wondered why he was being punished in this way, why he of all people had to endure this excruciating pain.

When he cried, he asked for one person: Zarifa, my grandmother, dead for more than a dozen years.

Malaka Nazli alone absorbed the news coolly, impassively. She had been a house of tears before, and she was prepared to accept her fate again.

 

DR. AHMED KHATAB RUSHED
to my father's bedside. The surgeon shook his head in dismay as he delivered the news: my dad had smashed his leg and broken his hipbone—it was completely shattered because of the brutal impact of the fall. He had to operate immediately to try to repair the hip, though he wasn't overly optimistic.

The Demerdash was a little shack of a hospital where the poorest of the poor went for care. From the start my family agonized about whether my dad should stay there. Across the road was Dar-eh-Shefah, a sparkling private medical center that was said to house some of the finest doctors in all of Egypt. It had modern operating rooms and top experts in orthopedic surgery, and it made eminent sense for my dad to be transferred there at once.

He wouldn't hear of it.

If God had brought him to the Demerdash, he told my mother, that is where God wanted him to stay.

He was simply adamant, and there was nothing anyone could do. He certainly had the means to go to the finer hospital across the road, or anywhere else in Cairo. But there was no persuading him, though my mother tried and tried. Nor was she assertive enough to simply insist on it.

Dr. Khatab performed the operation, using the most modern techniques he could muster. To repair Dad's crushed hip, he inserted a hard metal pin known as a Smith-Petersen, which had been developed at Harvard by an eminent surgeon of the same name. My dad was under anesthesia, but for years, even decades, thereafter, he could recall with a shudder the pounding pounding pounding pounding of the hammer used to drive the Smith-Petersen nail into him.

Then there was the pain—the pain that was constant and unremitting.

Each day, my mom would take a tram or taxi to the hospital. She didn't know quite what to do with me, so she often left me with my sister, since Suzette didn't much care for going to the Demerdash, and at fourteen, her anger toward my dad was undiminished. When she and my mom spoke about the accident, it was to bemoan the fact Dad had insisted on getting up at these unearthly morning hours to go to synagogue, when other devout men didn't feel a need to do as much. “C'est simplement du fanatisme,” my sister said, and my mother sadly agreed. It was Dad's excessive, fanatic devotion to religion that had landed us all in this mess.

Occasionally, Mom took me with her, so that I got my first taste of hospitals when I was not yet two.

My father, who had always been so silent and stoic, now seemed agitated and perpetually distraught. He'd complain about relatively small matters, like the food, which forced us to come rushing over to the Demerdash with home-cooked fare in the little aluminum traveling caddy with pots containing his favorite dishes—a serving of stewed lamb, or stuffed grape leaves, white rice, and roasted potatoes.

He'd eat and momentarily calm down, but then fly off into a rage all over again, complaining about the nurses, the squalor of the hospital, the fact that the doctor didn't come as often as he wished, though he was fond of Dr. Khatab, who seemed devoted and stayed far longer than necessary by my dad's bedside trying to restore in him some sense of hope.