The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (6 page)

Upstairs, Dr. Grossi had to contain a laugh. His “cure” had worked beyond his wildest imaginings. He couldn't find a hint of pleurisy.

 

MALAKA NAZLI WAS BEGINNING
to feel too small to accommodate Leon, his young bride, the baby on the way, my grandmother, and Salomone. My cousin was twenty-two, no longer the skinny, nervous youth that he'd been when he joined the household seven years earlier. He had a good job, friends, even girlfriends, and he knew that he should think of living on his own. Yet even he was stunned when, not long after his recovery, and without even giving him notice, my father informed Salomone that he would have to move out immediately.

My cousin couldn't help wondering if his friendship with Edith was to blame. The two had grown close in the past year. Was Oncle Leon resentful or even jealous?

It was no secret that Edith adored her husband's urbane Milanese nephew, and considered him the only real friend she had in the house. She viewed her mother-in-law with a gimlet eye and found her judgmental and oppressive, despite her kindly airs and solicitous manners.

Edith assumed her life would change once she gave birth. Her husband, who took his familial duties so seriously, would surely recognize the need to stay close to home. She pinned her hopes on the child she was carrying, who would validate her worth, redeem her in the eyes of the mother-in-law who seemed to find her inadequate and the husband who didn't care enough to stay with her through the night.

Her more cynical side knew this was probably wishful thinking, as
elusive and intangible as the apricot season, which is so brief and fleeting as to seem illusory.

“Fil mesh-mesh,” goes a popular Arabic saying; When the apricot season comes.

What it really means is: Don't bet on it. It will never happen.

On March 6, 1944, the midwife was summoned to Malaka Nazli.

My father, Leon, planned a major celebration to mark the birth of his son. He set out early in the morning to the Congregation of Love and Friendship, bearing a double portion of coffee and sugar and other treats and delicacies.

“Une fille?” he said in disbelief when he returned and the midwife handed him the pretty dark-haired infant.

“Ce n'est pas possible.”

He was so disappointed that he left my mother and his newborn daughter and, hailing a taxi, went to the café where a year earlier he had fallen in love with Edith. Seated at his favorite table at the bar, he ordered an arak, and then another, and another. He stayed out all night, unable to hide his dismay, unwilling to face my grandmother, who had wanted a boy almost as much as he. It seemed not to matter that the infant was to be called Zarifa in her honor. That was the way of Old Aleppo, where a father has the privilege of choosing the name of his firstborn.

Years later, after my mother had told her the bitter story of her birth, my sister would steadfastly refuse to be known by that name. Though she was called Suzette from an early age, for that was the way of modern Cairo, where families conferred European names on their youngsters to help ease their way into colonial society, official documents still listed her as Zarifa. From the time she was a young girl, my sister demanded that all traces of her Arabic name be expunged from the records. As she raged and raged at my father, it was as if she were seeking a way to punish him for that original sin, for the fact that he'd had to drown his sorrows over the news of her birth.

I
n the mid-1940s, Salomone was enlisted to make a reunion possible between the man whose name he shared and Zarifa. My uncle Salomon, the priest, who had left home as a teenager in 1914, was now pleading to be allowed to visit Malaka Nazli and be reunited with his mother.

My grandmother wasn't well; the news from Italy, the possibility that she had lost another daughter, was almost more than she could bear. Alone in her kitchen, Zarifa was inconsolable.

Could he see her one last time, her son, the apostate, asked?

Père Jean-Marie, as my uncle now called himself, was living in a Benedictine monastery in Jerusalem. He had been in the Holy City since coming to Palestine in 1925, and had enjoyed little contact with the family since leaving home as a teenager, abandoning Zarifa and his nine brothers and sisters to embrace a very different set of Brothers and Sisters.

He knew, of course, that he was considered a pariah. But he still felt that he would be granted a final audience with his mother, especially
after the family had reached out to him, seeking help tracking the whereabouts of Salomone's parents and sister. He had received a letter from his namesake asking if the Vatican could find out what became of them after they boarded the cattle train from Milan to Auschwitz. My father himself had urged that the lines of communication be reopened, believing that his brother could use his Vatican connections to solve the mystery. “Il faut faire des enquêtes,” my dad would say over and over—One must make inquiries.

In the years since my uncle had left Cairo, a number of myths had proliferated around him and his career within the church. He was said to be high up in the Catholic hierarchy, a monsignor perhaps, even a cardinal—or on the road to becoming one. He was whispered to have close ties to the pope. There were even stories about his heroism during the war, rumors he had helped smuggle dozens of Jewish children who had fled Nazi-occupied Europe into Palestine.

The same family members who professed horror at my uncle's embrace of Christianity were the ones who felt compelled to build up his accomplishments within the church, as if to say, If he had to be a priest, let him at least be a great priest.

In truth, Père Jean-Marie's standing within the Catholic Church was vastly exaggerated. My uncle enjoyed a perfectly respectable career, but he was hardly an intimate of popes and cardinals. He was at most a competent, respected, and—except for his background as a devout Jew—rather ordinary member of his Benedictine order.

But he had spent two years in Rome, so he certainly knew whom to ask about the fate of his own sister.

Was there any chance they had survived? Père Jean-Marie asked his friends and associates in Rome to trace the whereabouts of Bahia, his sister, her husband, Lelio, and their twenty-year-old daughter, Violetta.

The winter of 1945 was a season of wrenching questions and vague, desultory answers. Alas, the Vatican could only confirm what the Red Cross had already gleaned: that the family had been arrested and jailed, then placed on a transport to Auschwitz. After that, all traces of them had vanished. There were no records showing they had been exterminated—and no signs indicating they had survived.

Salomone(standing, right) next to his sister, Violetta, and his parents, his two brothers in the foreground; Italian Riviera, 1937. Violetta, along with his mother and his father, perished at Auschwitz.

Perhaps that was the true horror: there could never be a resolution, a definitive word on their fate, never a death certificate or a burial site.

But Père Jean-Marie had done what he could. Would the family now honor his request?

My father refused to budge. He wouldn't allow the priest to step foot in Malaka Nazli.

In his mind, his older brother had brought nothing but dishonor to a family that prized its good name above all. In the close-knit neighborhood of Ghamra, all the neighbors knew about his apostate brother, and as Leon walked to temple each morning, regal and dignified in his white suit, our neighbors would shake their heads in sorrow that
someone as devout as the Captain would be forced to endure such a tragedy.

My grandmother herself was torn. This deeply religious woman still spoke wistfully of the family-owned synagogue in Aleppo, and she had never recovered from the shock of Salomon's conversion. But she also missed him, and she wasn't well, and time was passing.

Would she really die without seeing her son once more?

A compromise was finally reached, brokered through intermediaries, as no one would admit to any direct contact with the priest. Zarifa would meet with my uncle at a prearranged time and location, not far from the house, if two conditions were met:

He would not wear his black priestly habit, and he wouldn't carry a cross.

The day of the reunion, a taxi was summoned to Malaka Nazli. My grandmother, holding on to Salomone, emerged from the house, wrapped in her shiny black
chabara.
Together, my tall, gangly cousin and my frail, petite grandmother made their way to a small house on the grounds of a nearby convent where Père Jean-Marie was waiting.

My uncle was in civilian clothes, as promised. Zarifa burst out crying. Once her most promising child, the one who had caught the eye of all his teachers at the Collège des Frères with his dazzling mind and his facility with most subjects, especially math, where he solved the most complex theorems and equations effortlessly, Salomon would be the one who would help the family recapture its lost greatness. He was destined to go far.

But “far” wasn't supposed to mean total estrangement from all that the family had held dear for hundreds of years. After he had left Cairo, the letters arrived from exotic destinations: Lanzo, Rome, Louvain, Issy, and, finally, Jerusalem. They went unanswered, of course. Still, how odd, Zarifa thought, that her son had ended up in the Holy Land, the place where Jews dream of settling.

Yet the corner of Jerusalem where my uncle lived had a unique history of wooing Jewish converts. The Benedictine monastery in Ratisbon had been founded in the nineteenth century by a French Jew and banking heir named Alphonse de Ratisbonne, who claimed that a
miraculous vision of the Virgin Mary had led him to embrace Christianity.

After establishing a Catholic mission in Jerusalem, he devoted his life to doing good works. Beloved by the Vatican, he created an order of nuns, the Sisters of Zion, as well as building the massive stone monastery where my uncle would settle years later.

Salomone watched silently as our uncle tried to comfort Zarifa—priests were supposed to be good at that. He failed, of course, because he couldn't make the one pronouncement that would have effectively wiped away her tears, the one that she and the rest of the family had been waiting for him to make since 1914: that it had all been a mistake, that he had never intended to stray so far, and that he was coming back to Malaka Nazli and returning to the faith of his ancestors.

That was the dream, the fantasy none of us could ever relinquish—that my uncle would abandon the priesthood, beg his family to take him back. And it didn't change from year to year, or decade to decade, or generation to generation. The same hopeless longing of Zarifa was shared by her children, and then her children's children.

Yet there was a softening of attitudes. Marie, the youngest of the ten children, and perhaps the most tenderhearted, was the first to forgive him. My aunt decided to end the schism that had existed for so long. Against the advice of my father—and even her own husband—she opened her house to Père Jean-Marie and allowed him to come meet her own children and as many of the nieces and nephews as she could gather.

Tante Marie was a kindly soul, all softness and curves and compassion, the embodiment of femininity. But she could be every bit as authoritarian as the men in the family. Once she made her decision to receive the priest, no one could dissuade her, not even Leon, the sibling she loved and respected the most, and the only one she feared.

Tante Marie was convinced that the moniker Jean-Marie was a tribute to her. It didn't matter that everyone laughed at her for her foolish notion and said it was only a coincidence—the name Marie was extremely popular among Catholics to honor the Virgin Mary.

But to Tante Marie, it was a way her brother had found to maintain a link to the family when all links had been severed.

Père Jean-Marie arrived at her home dressed in flowing white. He carried beautifully wrapped packages he distributed to the children who gathered around him, delighted by the attention they were receiving from this stranger who looked so familiar, somehow, with his fair skin, aquiline nose, and intense green eyes. Only the beard was jarring; the men in the family tended to be clean-shaven. Still, he was jovial and charming, embracing his nieces and nephews one by one, their very own Jewish Santa Claus.

Reigning over the festivities was Tante Marie, who sat there beaming.

He was her older brother and she loved him and nothing, not even the Church of Rome, would be permitted to erase the bond between them.

 

MY PARENTS
'
MARRIAGE ENDURED
its first rocky year. The relationship survived both Leon's return to his restless ways and the arrival of a daughter instead of a son. Malaka Nazli was far from joyous. It was a house of tears, steeped in mourning in the wake of the news about Bahia. My mother was struggling to care for my infant sister as well as looking after Zarifa, who was increasingly frail. My grandmother was no longer able to stand for hours at her beloved Primus, and retired to her room.

Barely a year after my sister was born, Mom found herself pregnant again. In May 1946, she gave birth to the longed-for son, my brother César.

At the bris held in Malaka Nazli, Zarifa, summoning one last time her legendary strength, carefully handed the infant over to the mohel, the man who would perform the circumcision on a satin pillow. The mohel dipped his index finger in a cup of wine and gave César three drops, intended to numb the pain.

Several months later, my grandmother died, still grieving over the loss of her daughter but heartened that she had lived to see Leon settled, with a son and heir. His fretful bride and incessant wanderings were almost trivial, incidental details to this indomitable matriarch who had ruled with an iron hand, even when her hand was old and frail. To
the end, she had kept her focus on the essentials as defined by Aleppo: faith, honor, and family.

Edith holding Suzette, the oldest, and Leon holding César, his firstborn son and heir, Cairo, 1946.

One more tragedy cast a shadow over Malaka Nazli. My father's nephew, Siahou, Tante Leila's son, jumped out the window of his mother's house. His suicide was never talked about and never explained.

With Zarifa gone, my other grandmother, Alexandra, became a more frequent visitor to Malaka Nazli. She would arrive every day, and knock rapidly four times, tap tap tap tap. Once inside, she'd settle on a chair and, taking my sister and César in her arms, proceed to rock them and sing to them in Italian. Unlike Zarifa, who only spoke Arabic, Alexandra never spoke Arabic, and she only wandered to the kitchen to retrieve a small cup of steaming
café Turque.

Alexandra of Alexandria—even more than with Zarifa and her kings, there was an apocryphal quality to the stories about her and her gilded past.

In my mother's telling, Alexandra was a creature both fantastic and fatally flawed. She had lived a life of extraordinary indulgence. The daughter of doting, wealthy parents, Alexandra was lavished with the finest that money could buy. As a young girl, she'd had maids and nannies to attend to her every need.

“Why,” my mother, Edith, loved to recall, smiling, “Alexandra couldn't even comb her own hair.” Each morning, the governess took it upon herself to brush and braid the young girl's long dark strands of hair, and tie them back with satin ribbons. Perfectly coiffed and dressed, Alexandra would proceed to the parlor for her daily piano lessons. She had the finest instructors in all of Alexandria.