The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (7 page)

When she was old enough to attend school, her parents enrolled her in a convent run by nuns. Devout Jews, they were also consummate snobs, and no schools enjoyed the cachet of Egypt's Catholic convents. Each morning, a maid would walk Alexandra to school, and then return in the afternoon to take her home.

The nuns were strict and prided themselves on a no-nonsense, disciplinarian brand of education. Alexandra seemed hopelessly weak and vain—someone who needed to be toughened up so she could face the world.

At noon, her parents sent over another servant with a tray and a hot meal, since Alexandra complained she couldn't eat the slop that was served in the common lunchroom, yet which the rest of her classmates seemed to enjoy.

But she couldn't eat what the maid had brought over either. She simply fasted day after day, and her
évanouissements
—fainting spells—made her the talk of the school. Mostly she felt self-conscious over being “different”—a Jew among Catholics, a rich girl among those who were merely well-to-do, a sensitive soul among ruffians. Her sense of isolation only increased, and she plotted to leave the convent at the first opportunity.

That opportunity came in the form of Isaac Matalon, a womanizer with a mysterious income visiting from Cairo. Charmed by the lovely teenager and no doubt finding her an easy mark, he persuaded Alexandra to abandon her parents, her home, her convent, and her city, and accompany him back to Cairo. They left together after a wedding cer
emony her parents didn't even attend, and moved into his dingy apartment in a deeply impoverished area of narrow, windy streets and alleyways that seemed worlds away from Alexandria.

The shabby residence helped illuminate the secret of Isaac Matalon's income: he had almost none. He survived through his wits and charm. The year was 1921, Alexandra was eighteen and, within a few months, pregnant. Isaac, a widower with grown children including Oncle Edouard, who would one day accompany Edith and Alexandra on their first visit to Malaka Nazli, was in his forties, possibly even older, since he was as unreliable about his age as about his louche activities.

Isaac was hopeful that Alexandra's parents would bless the union and help out the couple, if only for their daughter's sake. What he didn't foresee was that his in-laws, bitterly disappointed at Alexandra's choice of a husband, would cut her off completely.

The Cairo apartment was so unlike the spacious villa by the sea where she had been raised, and it felt even more cramped after she gave birth to a little girl, my mother, Edith, in 1922, and then, a couple of years later, to a boy, my uncle Félix.

Alexandra felt completely adrift without her maids and her beloved
gouvernante
to help her take care of the house and the children and herself. She didn't have a clue as to how to keep a room clean and tidy, or the faintest notion how to fix a meal for her husband and two infants, as she never learned to cook. She still couldn't even brush her own hair. Without her parents' help, she experienced abject poverty for the first time. There was nothing she could pawn for extra income. Her parents hadn't even allowed her to take her clothes or jewels.

They had relented on a single object—Alexandra's piano. There it stood, stately amid the squalor. Edith and Félix were left to their own devices, neglected and forlorn and, at times, ravenously hungry as Alexandra played and played.

It wasn't that my grandmother was uncaring, my mother would always insist. At her core intensely kind and loving, Alexandra was simply one of these people who couldn't cope on their own, who needed others to get through one day to the next. My grandmother had received a wonderful education in her years at the convent, knew how to converse fluently in Italian, and had a finely honed literary sensibility in addition
to her musical skills, but the nuns hadn't prepared her for a life as a wife and mother.

This wasn't what Isaac had bargained for in a wife. Their life together unraveled, and more and more, he left her alone with the children and took off for destinations unknown. Still, those times he was home, he managed to be affectionate to his son and daughter, and Edith, in particular, adored him. If he had harsh words to dispense, they were directed only at his wife. He had come to hate the very qualities that once drew him to Alexandra—her vulnerability, her delicate and intensely fragile nature.

Another child, a boy, came into the world even as my grandparents' marriage was dying. The bonnie baby had soft dark hair, blue eyes, and a gleeful, hopeful disposition. His Hebrew name, after all, was Eliezer, which means “God will help me, God will take care of me.” My mother, a little girl of seven or eight, watched over him while her parents sparred, more absorbed in their hatred of each other than in their love for their children. Fights at home grew more bitter, the scenes of recrimination became more frequent.

It all came to an end one morning.

Isaac announced he was taking the infant out for some fresh air. “Edith,
cherie,
could you please dress the baby?” he asked his daughter very sweetly. The child was only a few months old at the time, and couldn't walk or talk. She put him in a fresh cloth diaper—only a cotton diaper, my mother remembered, not even shorts or rompers—and
une flanelle,
a white cotton T-shirt.

The diaper wouldn't stay up, so Isaac offered one of his ties as a makeshift belt. It was wide and red and silk, so incongruously long that it went around the baby twice, at least. Edith gently combed his soft hair and rubbed the popular eau de cologne Arlette on his arms and legs; babies were known to love the refreshing scent.

The baby was gurgling and smiling, clapping his chubby hands. He seemed delighted at all the attention; he played with the tie, trying to undo it.

“On va faire une promenade,” Isaac announced, placing the infant in the carriage—We are going for a stroll. My mother kept fussing and fussing over her little brother, not quite willing to let him go, maybe
because he was especially sweet and loving that morning. Alexandra kissed the baby as she had done a hundred times, a bit distractedly, absorbed by a novel she was reading.

Isaac returned later without the child or his stroller, and informed his wife what he had done. He had sold their blue-eyed baby boy at the souk, the Arab marketplace.

They simply couldn't afford another mouth to feed. There was no way she could handle another child. It was for Alexandra's own good, he said. Then he turned around and left, never to be part of the household again.

That is when Alexandra began screaming. She screamed so loud that her cries reverberated across the neighborhood. Her sobs were heard in the
kuttabs,
the small, homelike synagogues where men gathered to pray at any hour of the day or night, and echoed across the dusty alleyways and shabby streets, and were heard in the communal baths, where women came to wash away their impurities.

Egypt was a country where professional mourners were often heard crying in the streets. “Someone must have died,” strangers thought as they continued walking.

With nothing to fall back on, Alexandra sank into a kind of madness. Edith recalled how day after day, she'd watch her mother from the window as she walked to and from their home, an increasingly thin and haggard figure, old before her time, proud yet desperate, pleading for bits of donations from the Jewish charities that were active in the community.

Whatever money she collected went to care and feed Edith and Félix. She kept almost nothing for herself, and survived on cigarettes and cup after cup of the exceedingly strong
café Turque
that she was constantly preparing in the kitchen. What had happened to her beautiful blue-eyed child? Was God indeed watching over him?

Every few weeks, Alexandra would take Edith to visit some wealthy relative in Cairo—a niece, a cousin, a beneficent uncle—who knew of her financial ordeal and had agreed to help her, however modestly, to pay the rent and buy food for the children. My mother and grandmother would arrive at gated mansions, yet before even going in, Alexandra would remind Mom never to betray how needy they were.

Once inside, maids in uniforms would approach them, offering small sandwiches and petits fours and other delicacies on large silver trays, but my mom, suffering from hunger pangs, would smile and shake her head,
non, merci,
because she was obeying Alexandra, and that meant not letting her relatives know she hadn't had breakfast or lunch. Trays would come and go and Edith, always the model daughter, would follow my grandmother's cue and help herself to one small biscuit, nothing more.

If the visit went well, Alexandra emerged with enough cash to enable them to live a few more weeks, and she'd rave about her wonderful relatives.

With change left over, Alexandra would purchase a ticket at the local movie house. Almost every afternoon, my mother and Félix were left alone in the house while Alexandra, a pack of cigarettes in hand, walked to the movie theater. After the movie was over, she still didn't come home—sometimes not for hours. Instead, Alexandra combed the streets and alleyways, the boulevards and the stalls of the souk in search of traces of my lost uncle.

When she finally returned, she seemed strangely calm, but wouldn't speak to Edith or Félix: her thoughts were only on the child she had lost. She sat at the piano and played. When she was happy and when she was sad, Alexandra played. She played beautifully, my mother insisted, like the great artist she could have been if only she hadn't rushed into marriage with my grandfather Isaac.

Alexandra's search went on for years. She could never stop staring at the infants, the ones in strollers, the ones in cotton diapers who were out enjoying a sunny morning in the company of their parents; she'd examine them too closely. In a corner of my grandmother's anguished mind, her son looked the same as he did the morning he vanished.

Alexandra never forgave her husband. My grandfather finally resurfaced, living in the neighborhood of Daher, minutes away from the family he had left. It was the 1920s; Old Cairo had no tradition of alimony payments or child support. Once they separated—and it is not even clear they were ever legally divorced—Alexandra was on her own, left to fend for herself. The only saving grace was the children he'd produced from his first marriage, Rosée and Edouard. Both were
genuinely decent human beings, who felt a kinship and a bond with this woman their father had married and then discarded. Because they were much older than Edith and Félix, they became like parents to them, and for that matter, to Alexandra, since she was so much like a child.

As an old man, my grandfather Isaac succumbed to a massive stroke that left him completely paralyzed, in effect, a quadriplegic. Rosée, his daughter, though struggling to care for several children, took him into her house, forced her sons to share a room with him, and cared for him through his illness. My grandmother and Rosée had remained friends, and Alexandra often stopped by for coffee. Yet she never once went in to check on Isaac, lying helpless in a bedroom in the back. She simply sipped her
café Turque,
chatted a bit with her stepdaughter, then left.

Even decades later, Alexandra's search for my lost uncle continued. Her anguished quest never ended, not even when she was old and bent, and Edith was settled and married with children of her own that would have allowed Alexandra to ease into the far more peaceful role of grandmother.

Her nervous walks through Cairo simply became more purposeful. She now had a destination after years of having none: Malaka Nazli. She wooed my siblings with her Italian lullabies, and lavished them with all the love and attention she would have bestowed on her stolen child.

My mother's stories about Alexandra always finished with the same refrain. “You, Loulou, are exactly like your grandmother,” she would say to me, and she sounded strangely admiring.

As a child, I wondered whether I should take her literally. I pictured myself sitting at a large piano, chain-smoking cigarettes, watching as my house disintegrated, and my husband began to loathe me, and my children wept from hunger and neglect and wandered about in rags. Why, I asked myself, did my mother think I had so much in common with this tormented and demon-ridden grandmother I had never even known?

It was as if she were trying to preserve a piece of Alexandra at any cost, even by remaking me, her daughter, in the image of this woman.

T
here is a photograph of the family taken in Alexandria in the early 1950s. My mother is seated at a café table, her hair wavy and lustrous, her legs alluringly crossed. She is the classic Levantine wife—dark, mysterious, slightly melancholy. My father looks smugly toward the camera in his tarboosh, the red fez hat he adores that is the symbol of Egyptian aristocracy. In between them are my sister and my two brothers, César and Isaac, whose births had almost erased the sadness that had settled in Malaka Nazli after the war. My siblings are dressed impeccably, and they are all the very picture of a prosperous Jewish family in Egypt in the early 1950s.

Yet any sense of security was illusory. Life in Egypt had changed drastically since the heady aftermath of El Alamein. The British—bitterly resented by the Arabs for decades—had been barely tolerated during the war, but after the Axis defeat in 1945, there were intensified efforts to force them out of Egypt. As for King Farouk, he had become a symbol of hopeless corruption. The once slender, handsome young monarch, whose reign had begun with such promise,
was now widely reviled for his dissolute lifestyle and grotesque appearance.

The family before I was born (left to right): Edith, Suzette, César, Isaac, and Leon in Alexandria circa 1952

Perhaps the greatest irritant of all was the creation of Israel in 1947. The war of 1948 Egypt fought and lost against the new Jewish state continued to rankle. King Farouk was personally blamed for leading his country to defeat, including by the military officers who were actively plotting his demise. And perhaps some of these officers also resented the fact that the king remained close to the Jews of Egypt, who were now seen as the enemy in the same way that Israel was the enemy.

At home, my father tried to hang on to his old ways, but by 1952, that was no longer possible.

Suddenly, Cairo was in flames.

One Saturday afternoon in January, angry crowds rushed through the streets of fashionable downtown, torching all the symbols of luxury
and foreign excess—the cinema houses and banks, the private clubs and department stores, the airline offices and outdoor cafés and cabarets that made Cairo one of the most enticing cities on earth, “the Paris of Africa.”

Alas, they'd also made the average Cairene feel like a stranger in his own land, because for those who were neither foreign nor rich nor Jewish, much of the city—even a patisserie like Groppi's—was off-limits, and they never felt welcome and most couldn't afford it. Which is perhaps why it, too, became a target of the revolutionary fervor.

As nearly every major establishment associated with the British, the French, or the Jews burned down, Groppi's was also set ablaze. The royal seal was ripped off the front of the restaurant, though not before several of the rabble-rousers escorted the staff, including the chef, the baker, and the Chantilly cream maker, outside to safety. And so the only real victims of the fire were the baking supplies, including several dozen sacks of fine flour and sugar that were carried by the frenzied mob and torched, as if a revolution could be ignited merely by stopping production of scrumptious European pastries and cakes. That night, witnesses would recall, the Cairo air was filled with the heady, troubling scent of burning sugar.

Seven-year-old Suzette was out walking with the maid when they noticed the smoke, thick black swirls of it, in the distance.

Grabbing Suzette by the hand, our
domestique
cried, “Run, run.” Together, they sprinted through the streets of Cairo, and for the first time in her life, my older sister felt danger. As they hurried home to Malaka Nazli, they kept turning their heads, unable to resist staring at the clouds of smoke.

Edith had already drawn the shutters. Every once in a while, she'd approach the windows, open them a crack, and scan the horizon. No one knew exactly what was happening—or who was behind it—other than that it was terrifying, and word on the street was that all Cairo was on fire.

Even the king was taken by surprise. Safely tucked away behind the gates of Abdeen Palace, he was enjoying a delicious banquet lunch with hundreds of VIP guests who had gathered to celebrate the birth of his son, Fouad, whose arrival seemed to promise a wonderful year.

The day of the fires, César, six, ventured to the window. Peering
through the slats, he could see mobs running down Malaka Nazli carrying lit torches.

“César, éloigne-toi de la fenêtre,” my mother said sternly, and tried to steer him away from the window, but he ignored her. My brother was almost in a trance, staring at the crowds running down the street. Would they try to set our neighborhood ablaze? Would they come find us in our home on Malaka Nazli?

It shaped his impression of what came to be known as Black Saturday, or, to the more fanciful, the Day of the Four Hundred Fires, because some four hundred separate buildings were set ablaze. They included one of my father's favorite old haunts, Shepheard's, the world-renowned nineteenth-century hotel that was the most sumptuous emblem of British colonial rule, and his favorite place to conduct business.

How Leon had loved to linger in its oak-paneled bar with the British officers when they owned Cairo and he owned it alongside them.

For days afterward, Jews stayed home, afraid to venture out into the streets, especially downtown. The violence hadn't been aimed at them, of course, not really. It was only the “foreigners” the mobs had targeted, the British in particular. And yet the Jewish community felt intensely vulnerable and feared the worst, wondering if in the eyes of their Arab neighbors, they, too, were now regarded as alien.

The brave hearts who finally wandered over to Suleiman Pasha and other popular areas witnessed scenes of unparalleled devastation that brought to mind Berlin after the war—landmark buildings reduced to ashes, establishments like the Jewish-owned Cicurel department store destroyed, and nearly every major cinema house, from the Metro to the Miami, in ruins. While the marauders had taken care to escort people out of most of the buildings before they set them aflame, there were still several victims. Nearly a dozen Englishmen had perished at the Turf Club, an elite private British club. A young Jewish girl visiting from Alexandria died in the fire at Shepheard's. Looters ransacked stores and banks, grabbing merchandise and cash. By the time the government finally regained control of the city—and Farouk imposed martial law—the devastation seemed less due to unruly mobs than to a strategical and coordinated attack by the king's most powerful enemies.

But it was never clear who these enemies were—there were so many. Fingers were pointed toward the Muslim Brotherhood and the
Communists, elements of the army and some Eastern European embassies and—in the most twisted and bizarre conspiracy theory of all—the British themselves. Who planned the uprising was a mystery that would remain unsolved years and multiple investigations later, though suspicion always fell on the brotherhood and some upstart military officers, or, most likely, a brief, unsavory marriage of the two.

Six months after Black Saturday, on July 26, 1952, King Farouk was forced to relinquish the throne, the victim of a military coup. A few days earlier, a group of a dozen young army officers took control, and while the king tried to call in his chits with various foreign powers, the most that they were willing to do was to make sure he left the country alive. Farouk abandoned Egypt, his palaces, automobiles, and casinos as well as the subjects who had looked to him for protection, like my own family. Fearing for his life, he set sail from Alexandria on the
Mahrousa.
Aboard his elegant yacht, the king was suddenly transformed into that most inelegant of creatures, an exile.

A cortege of crimson Rolls-Royces filed down Malaka Nazli. César watched the royal limousines from the window of my father's room as one after the other, they rolled slowly down the boulevard. They were instantly recognizable, painted in the monarchy's distinctive bloodred. The color red was banned for all other automobiles, even those belonging to pashas and beys. My brother had never seen so many red cars, though who or what they were carrying was unknown: Other members of the royal family? More of the king's vast store of possessions? In happier days, Farouk's Rolls-Royce Phantom had frequently been driven down Malaka Nazli, a main thoroughfare and the most direct route from the royal palace in Koubeh to downtown or Heliopolis. Traffic would invariably stop, as residents and passersby gathered on the sidewalk and stared because the royal convoy was always such a hypnotic sight.
“Ya eesh el malek,”
children would cry excitedly as would some adults; “Long live the king.” As he passed, they often caught a peek at him in his tarboosh. The old-timers sadly remembered Farouk in the early years after his coronation, how handsome he looked with his fair skin and gentle smile.

My mother and father stood at the balcony in the dining room, staring at the procession. Dad waved sadly, and both my parents wondered
what on earth it all meant, the departure of the red cars, the chauffeurs driving at a funereal pace, so that they seemed to be almost floating along the boulevard, as in a bad dream. Mostly they asked themselves what would happen without the king, who, for all his excesses and foibles and wantonness, had been a good friend to the Jews.

Why, after the birth of his son, Fouad II, a few months earlier, King Farouk had turned to a Jew, Simchon, who was the community's favorite mohel—a man specially trained in the delicate ritual of circumcision. Though there were Muslims equally skilled in the ancient ritual, Simchon was the only man the king would trust to handle the most eagerly awaited baby boy on earth. Egypt's Jews interpreted it as a sign of the monarchy's continued friendship. They had always enjoyed amicable relations with the king, as they had with his father, who'd had a Jewish mistress. The bond had been frayed, of course, after Israel's creation, when Farouk led the Arab countries to war. The exodus of Jews from Egypt had begun in earnest. Even so, the community had a sense of the king as a generally benign figure. For all the major Jewish holidays, he always sent emissaries from the royal court to attend services at the Gates of Heaven. They came in full regalia and sat at the front of the synagogue.

Alas, baby Fouad's birth hadn't reversed the king's fortunes. Perhaps it was because his second wife's name, Nariman, didn't begin with the requisite letter
F,
which was considered a good omen. Some were already whispering that the letter
N
was the culprit—witness the rise of Generals Naguib and Nasser, the two military officers who led the revolt and were poised to take power and overthrow the monarchy.

There was an unbearable sadness to the passing cars. They had led such charmed, self-indulgent lives until now. The king was a passionate collector, who owned dozens of automobiles of different makes and models—the Rolls Phantom, custom-built for him in England in 1940, along with the Ferraris, Bentleys, Alfa-Romeos, and Cadillacs. All were accorded royal treatment, their coats kept buffed and shiny and gleaming.

After the revolution ordinary people turned out in the streets to paint their cars in twenty shades of vermilion. There were suddenly plenty of fiery red automobiles tooling around the streets of Cairo and
Alexandria, as some of the wealthier families went out and bought newly imported cherry-red Packards or Fords of their own.

But the royal fleet, graceful and utterly distinctive, couldn't be copied merely with a coat of paint or a trip to a car dealer. They were unique, an emblem of an era, and my parents knew they would never glimpse them drifting along Malaka Nazli again.

Within days of Farouk's abdication, an edict came down eliminating royal titles. Pashas and beys were no more. The new military rulers wanted nothing even vaguely reminiscent of the royal family, even the red fez hats they loved to wear. They wanted to abolish all vestiges of the family's formidable powers. They proceeded systematically to eradicate any trace of the monarchy, and within a couple of years, even the street names that paid tribute to various royals would be changed.

Our own Malaka Nazli Street, whose name had already been changed when Farouk, in a fit of pique against his mother called it simply “the Street of the Queen,” removing any reference to Nazli, was stripped entirely of its name and became the “Street of the Rebirth of Egypt” (“Nahdet Masr”), and then, finally, Ramses Street. Stately Fouad Street, a tribute to the late King Fouad, was renamed “26th of July Street,” to commemorate the day the monarchy fell. Farouk Street, rather humble considering its namesake, where you went to buy clay pots and pans for the kitchen, went through different iterations when Nasser and Sadat were in power, and ultimately became “Shariah el-Geish,” the Street of the Army.

Any testament to heroes of old also had to be abolished—especially pashas. Glamorous Suleiman Pasha Square, which paid tribute to a French convert to Islam who had built the modern Egyptian army, was swiftly renamed “Talaat Harb,” after an industrialist who founded the first bank of Egypt. What was wrong with Suleiman Pasha? King Farouk was his great-great-grandson. Renaming streets had always been popular, but after the revolution it became an obsession. Never easy to navigate, Cairo became a confusing mess of official names and unofficial names, of old names and new names and newer names.