The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (13 page)

My father, who had defined himself all his life as a boulevardier, was despondent at the thought he would never walk again.

César was constantly at the hospital. He had taken up a new hobby, drawing, and to keep himself busy while visiting, he brought along his sketchpad and a set of charcoal crayons. One afternoon, as Dr. Khatab came to my dad's bedside, my brother began to draw the doctor. It was such a realistic portrait that Dr. Khatab offered to buy it then and there.

César sketched the nurses, the Arabic peasants floating down the hallways in their long, white galabias, a couple of the patients, and Dad. My oldest brother always had a quiet, soothing manner, but nothing he said seemed to calm my father, or reduce his existential anguish.

He knew, as we all did, that it wasn't only his leg that had been shattered that morning on the way to Temple Hanan, but his entire life. He had never been able to sit still, except, oddly, at temple, where he had such staying power he could remain seated in his favorite chair by the Holy Ark and pray longer and more fervently and with more focus than all the other men, even the rabbi.

At night, he was never tired enough or satiated enough to want to stay home. He'd head by taxi to his favorite nightspots—L'Auberge des Pyramides, the Mokhatam, the restaurant that doubled as a casino, or else one of the outdoor cafés where it was possible to have dinner and then go dancing, because he enjoyed dancing every bit as much now as when he was younger.

And now, it was over—a way of life he had loved so much that he had risked his marriage to sustain it.

He would never dance again, he was certain of that. He would never go into a nightclub and have a beautiful woman float into his arms and while the night away with him in a carefree rhumba or cha-cha-cha, an elegant waltz, or his favorite, an intense and passionate and carefully executed tango.

 

IT WAS LATE FALL
when my father came home. He promptly settled in his white brass bed. Every day, a nurse would come over to try to exercise him, and Dr. Khatab dropped by almost as often to examine him and check on how he was healing.

He wasn't. There was so much pressure on the pin that it broke, and the surgeon insisted he needed another operation to remove the pieces. My dad, haunted by the memory of the hammer pounding the nail inside his body, shook his head emphatically no, no, no, no.

“Dieu est grand,” he exclaimed, when the doctor asked him how he expected to get well without the needed surgery.

The Muslim surgeon nodded thoughtfully, respectfully—and resolved to try again. Failing to remove the broken nail could only lead to disaster.

Meanwhile, he prescribed a rigorous home regimen to stop the affected leg from shrinking. The idea was to keep it stretched, using a primitive homemade system of weights and metals, including the cumbersome heavy irons the maids used to press our sheets and linens, as a means to keep pulling on the leg.

The pressure meant that my dad was in a perpetual state of discomfort. In truth, everyone on Malaka Nazli was on edge. My mother was suddenly in the position of having to support and care for all six of us, and she had no idea how to go about it. My father had always been as secretive about his finances as about his work, and she knew nothing of bank accounts, stock certificates, ownership stakes, cash holdings. He had always paid all the bills, including the maids' salaries and my siblings' private school tuition, while giving my mom a small allowance for her personal needs.

In desperation, my mother confronted him. She had no money left, and could afford nothing, not even upkeep of the house.

“Je ne peux même pas payer le loyer,” she said; I can't pay the rent. It was a bit of an exaggeration, since our rent was pitifully low, only a few Egyptian pounds, about a dollar or two, and it hadn't changed much since my dad had moved into the house with Zarifa and my cousin Salomone in 1938.

My father finally relented, and directed her to the
sandara,
the small crawl space on top of the kitchen. Every Egyptian house had one, and typically it was used for storage—of canned goods, as well as odd pieces of furniture, knickknacks, books, even old cooking pots and ladles left over from my grandmother's day and that Mom had put away after Zarifa died. Buried deep inside the
sandara,
Dad said, was an old briefcase where she would find cash as well as stock certificates she could go and redeem.

My mother climbed a small ladder, retrieved the ancient leather attaché, and was amazed to find the key to my dad's finances—stock certificates, bank accounts, as well as Egyptian pound notes in large denominations. She had been married to my father nearly fifteen years and hadn't even known of the bag's existence. Without checking back with him, she took what she needed from the bundles of Egyptian pound bills, pulled out the necessary stock certificates that she planned to cash, placed the briefcase back in its hiding place, and returned to my father's side.

We had enough to live on till he was well again.

 

MY MOTHER WAS NOW
in charge. She made all the decisions, dispensed all the money, paid all the bills. But instead of empowering her, the surfeit of responsibility seemed to make her more and more anxious and abrasive. It was as if, stripped of her traditional role as subservient wife, she couldn't handle the pressure and became much like that tough, domineering man she had bristled at all these years.

Oddly, it was twelve-year-old César, the model son, the favorite, who bore the brunt of her rage. He was still too young to assume the role that would come so naturally to him in later years, when he would be
the de facto head of the household. Now, he simply retreated to his drawings. He drew anyone who floated into Malaka Nazli—the maid, the porter, friends of my father from the different synagogues he attended, my dad in his sickbed, Dr. Khatab paying us a house call. Seated by the window of my father's room, he also sketched landscapes from memory—iconic images of Egypt like the Great Pyramid at Ghiza, or the Sphinx, or feluccas drifting down the Nile.

His portfolio grew so thick that in the months of my dad's accident and excruciating convalescence, he had several dozen finished portraits etched in black and white.

It was a way to forget, to escape the cries that now routinely filled the house.

One day, as my brother was sitting in the large back bedroom, quietly drawing, my mom came in. She was cross, as she often was, these days. César decided it was prudent to ignore her, but she would not be ignored. She asked him why his bed was so messy. Why was he drawing when he still had homework to do? Didn't he realize how much she was paying to keep him enrolled at the Collège Français?

César still didn't answer her, and kept his head down, focused on his drawing.

It all happened so fast, like my father's fall.

My mother suddenly grabbed the portfolio and began tearing it up. It didn't matter that he kept crying to her to stop. She wouldn't listen. One by one, she destroyed every single drawing that he had worked on so painstakingly—the charcoal portrait of Dr. Khatab, the bucolic scenes of the Nile and the Pyramids, the sketches of the maid and the washwoman and the porter, and the cat, and of Dad looking longingly from his bed toward Malaka Nazli.

 

LITTLE BY LITTLE MY
father began to walk again. He would take small, unsteady steps around his room, then shuffle through the rest of the house, but it was a year or more before he went outside, and then only very tentatively and for the shortest of distances.

His first destination when he could move around by himself was the synagogue. That had not changed.

What had changed was how much we now worried.

Each time he went out, César would position himself on the balcony, waiting for our father to return. He watched him walk down the alley till he was out of sight, then remained in place to see him safely return. My brother had a nagging fear Dad wouldn't come back, that he would fall down again. He seemed so precarious and fragile with his wooden cane. The confident bearing was gone. He seemed less tall, perhaps because he now stooped as he leaned on the cane. Overnight, it was as if he had aged by years. He didn't go out very much, and only by day; when he did, he came back early and went to lie down in bed. There were no more casinos, or nightclubs, or friendly games of poker, or women.

Somehow, having my father home all the time didn't seem to make Mom any happier than when he'd rarely been around. Still, even frail and infirm, he made the perfect babysitter. My mother realized she could leave me with him and go about her day and run errands and see friends at Groppi's, and shop and consult
la couturière
about a new dress, without worrying about either of us.

Watching over me was also a distraction for my father. He had always been partial to very young children, so that he didn't view taking care of me as a burden but rather as a pleasure. From the start, we were entirely compatible. It was as if even as a toddler, I could sense his anguish, and tried to be on my best behavior.

I was, by nature, a quiet, placid child. I had no interest in playing with other children; I was content merely to sit by his side day after day. When he was strong enough to move from the bed to a chair by the window, I followed him, sat on his lap or on a pillow on top of the windowsill, and Malaka Nazli became our personal theater, a source of constant diversion. If Dad didn't succumb to despair, it was surely because of the curative powers of the street, its life and energy.

There was no talk anymore of leaving Egypt. Now, of course, he couldn't go even if he'd wanted to, not with his bad leg. Yet nothing had really changed. Jews were still streaming out, driven less by a sense of panic than a sense of fatalism.

Life as they had known it was over. Egypt—Jewish Egypt—was finished and would never be again.

 

BEFORE I TURNED FIVE,
Mom enrolled me in the Lycée Français de Bab-el-Louk. I lasted all of one day in kindergarten. My mother decided that the childish games and finger painting were a waste of time, that I was far too advanced for my age. During his convalescence, my father had taught me how to count to ten by using an object near and dear to his heart: a deck of cards. He would flash an image of two diamonds and I'd cry out, “Deux,” or four pretty red hearts, and I would instantly say, “Quatre.” Sometimes my sister came in to watch, because even she was amused by my father's unorthodox teaching methods.

My mother, citing my rudimentary knowledge of arithmetic, persuaded the lycée to have me skip kindergarten.

The lycée obligingly placed me in first grade, where a bilingual program of studies was already in place. Since the war, learning Arabic had become so important that even the youngest children were expected to master it. The problem was that I was hopeless at Arabic. I couldn't even manage to memorize the little Arabic folk songs that made up much of the curriculum.

Reports began filtering home from my teacher, who sent word that I wasn't grasping the most basic Arabic words, that my pronunciation was hopelessly flawed, and I couldn't deliver a simple greeting, or follow the rest of the class in singing.

My failure in first-grade Arabic threw the family for a loop.

Mom had done a splendid job teaching me French, using her skills from her days at the École Cattaoui. Though born in Cairo, I may as well have been one of those colonialists who were fleeing. My family dubbed me “Hawagaya,” the Foreigner, because I spoke Arabic in the stilted, lispy, hesitant manner of a girl from abroad.

My Arabic teacher was honestly at a loss. She told my family they'd have to take responsibility, or she'd give me a failing grade.

It was my first of several identity crises. In Egypt, I was called a foreigner because of my inability to speak Arabic. In France, where we'd briefly sojourn, and where I was completely fluent in the language, I was a foreigner, because I was from Egypt. And in America, I was still a foreigner, because I came from Cairo and Paris.

My destiny seemed preordained: I was to be the perennial outsider, a
hawagaya,
no matter where I lived in the world.

Of everyone in my family, my father was the most perturbed. Arabic was his first language; the notion that a daughter of his couldn't master it was unthinkable.

He decided to take matters into his own hands. Every day after school, he told me to report to his room for private tutoring. He was usually sitting up in bed, praying or reading the newspapers. I'd climb up and sit next to him, my back propped up, like his, against several big feather pillows. He'd start each lesson by having me introduce myself.

“Esmi Loulou,” I learned to say; My name is Loulou.

He would take my schoolbook in hand and begin the drill. I noticed that he held it as carefully and respectfully as his favorite red prayer book.

He'd point to certain words and have me read them out loud, then gently correct me when I was in error, and ask me to repeat after him.

He was the most mild-mannered of teachers, and the most focused. Unlike my mom, he never became angry or annoyed when I made a mistake. He seemed to have an infinite amount of patience. No matter how often I stumbled, he'd simply nod and have me go on. And I was always getting bonbons from the seemingly infinite stash he kept by his bedside.

My favorite times were when we put aside the book, and tried a more hands-on approach. Dad wanted me to learn the names of all the objects in his room, or even some that suddenly materialized, like Pouspous.

“Otah,” he'd say, pointing to the cat, who had wandered in no doubt expecting a treat, not a tutorial.

“Otah,” I'd repeat, lifting her up to the bed to join us. I wanted Pouspous to study Arabic, too; my father agreed that was a fine idea.

Only Pouspous seemed somewhat dubious, at first.

It was a cinch for me to learn the word for
cat,
and
pretty,
too. I learned to tell Pouspous that she was very pretty: “Otah helwah.” Dad offered her a piece of cheese, one of her favorite snacks. She reached
for it delicately with her paw, but before he let her have it, I had to show them both I'd mastered the word for
cheese.