Out of Egypt (14 page)

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Authors: André Aciman

BOOK: Out of Egypt
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To placate his mother, my father personally took me to his parents'the next morning. But to satisfy my mother, he decided perhaps we didn't have to go to the beach. Instead, he suggested that he, his father, and I go to buy shoes at a closeout sale. We drove along the Corniche on this clear summer day, parked the car near the Cecil Hotel, and walked toward Boulevard Saad Zaghloul. We stopped to take in the view and listen to the sound of the water licking the huge, ugly boulders lining the city's waterfront. And there we were, the three of us, before the parapet, looking over beyond the bay, beyond the seawall, past the fortress of Kait Bey, where the water was always rough and dark by the ruins of the fallen lighthouse. There was a pause in the conversation.
“You know,” said my grandfather, turning to my father, “I don't think I need new shoes.”
My father said nothing at first.
“But you know how difficult it is to find good English shoes nowadays. Do you mean to walk in worn down moccasins for the rest of your life?”
All this was said as both stared out into the shimmering morning sea.
“I don't know.” And as though he hadn't been paying attention to his son and was merely following his own train of thought, he added, “All this sky and all this water—what do you do with so much blue once you've seen it?”
Then, catching himself, he asked, “Don't you have plenty of shoes already?”
“Yes, but when I wear them out, can you see me wearing flimsy made-in-Egypt shoes?”
We proceeded to walk along the Corniche toward the Boulevard.
“Walk faster,” said my father to his father.
“But I'm walking fast.”
“No, you're walking sluggishly. You should walk briskly, energetically. Like this.” And suddenly my father began to outpace us. Seeing that he had walked far ahead, he came back at the same pace.
“See, it's good for you,” continued my father, saying something about Monsieur Politi, his gymnastics instructor who came every morning at six.
“Like this?” mimicked his father.
“Somewhat. Move your arms as well, and breathe deeply.”
“Like this?”
“Yes.”
“And by doing this, I'm to live how many more years? Enough to outlive your mother? Thank you for the demonstration. But I'll walk the way I've always walked.”
My father changed his mind about the shoes. “Perhaps we don't need ready-made shoes after all,” he said, implying that he was rich enough to afford custom-made ones. Instead, he suggested coffee at an establishment overlooking the bay. “I've had an excellent year. Things are going very well. I'm even building an annex to warehouse more goods. So I can afford a cup of coffee at La Côte.”
“I don't understand,” said my grandfather, as though talking to himself. “One day he's the impoverished son of a pool hall owner, and the next he's splurging on the best cars, best clothes, best this, best that. This can't go on. You're only doing well because all the other large textile manufacturers have sold their businesses and moved back to England. It doesn't bode well. You should be saving more,” added my grandfather.
“Both you and Gigi have only one thing in mind: save, save, save.”
Meanwhile, we had reached La Côte and my father opened the heavy glass door, letting both of us in ahead of him. The place was crowded but almost silent.
The waiter, who recognized my father immediately, knew that he liked a table next to the window.
“You shouldn't be spending your money so frivolously. I'm not the first to say it.” My grandfather was looking out the window. “The entire city knows. There are even rumors about other things as well, if you follow my drift.”
“Your drift sticks out a mile.”
My father picked up a cigarette, let it rest between his fingers as though trying to remember whether he hadn't already just smoked one, then, staring at it still, seemed to change his mind. “You were hardly any better yourself,” he added.
“It's easy to accuse me. But I was married to a witch.”
A waiter wearing a turban and traditional Egyptian garb poured coffee for the two men, while another, a Greek, brought me a large ice cream soda.
The old man sighed. He looked at the table next to ours, where two women were drinking tea.
“Look, don't think I don't know these things. We are all like that, us men, and I've known it about myself ever since the day I became a man, more than half a century ago.”
“But—” the son began to protest.
“Just promise me this,” added my grandfather. “As long as I'm alive, be good to her, and no more women.”
The son swore.
“And when you're gone?” he asked, trying to liven the mood.
“When I'm gone, I'll be gone, and what you do will be your business.”
The waiter brought two large glasses of water and a tiny slice of Turkish delight.
“You know you shouldn't eat sweets,” said my father. “My doctor—”
“
My doctor, my trainer, my walking, my breathing
—please!” interrupted his father. “Coffee, cigarettes, and sweets. I'm not even seventy, yet these are the two or three pleasures left me.” He sipped the coffee, holding his demitasse and saucer in the same hand. “There,” he interjected. He had already given me a piece of the Turkish delight and was already cutting me another.
My father, who was sitting across from us, had put down his demitasse and was staring at us in silence, as though not wishing to break the spell.
My grandfather cut me yet another piece and watched as I put it in my mouth, almost purposely avoiding his son's gaze.
“And what are you staring at?” he finally asked.
“I'm looking at you.”
“He's looking at me,” mused the older man, as though there were something terrifically moving about staring at one's own father—which I suddenly realized there was.
A few minutes later I caught sight of my mother, Aunt Flora, and my two grandmothers standing at the doorway of La Cote.
“What a surprise—and Flora as well!” exclaimed my father, as soon as the women were escorted to our table.
“Dr. Katz said she is perfectly healthy,” reported the Princess, who had run into the three women that morning at the
tramway station and, on impulse, had decided to join them. “The gallstones are far better, she's got the liver of an ox—”
My grandfather muttered something to his son.
A breeze fanned our faces as we ordered another round of coffee.
“A day meant for the beach,” said Flora with that joyful, expansive air her voice acquired whenever she spoke of the sea. “Why isn't the boy at the beach today?”
“It's about time he spent time with grown-up men,” explained my grandfather, offering her a cigarette from his cigarette case.
Flora, who hadn't seen my grandfather in a while, asked him how he was.
“I'm getting older,” he said. “I stay home a lot. I'm bored when I stay home, I'm bored when I go out. Voilà. And I sleep a lot,” he added, as though he had forgotten a significant detail. “When it'll be time for me to show my face above, I'll walk up to Saint Peter and say, ‘Excuse me, Holy Father, but I've slept so much these past few weeks that I couldn't possibly sleep any more. Perhaps I could come back in a few weeks.'”
Flora laughed heartily, repeating my grandfather's last words several times, indeed, never forgetting them.
“Ah, Flora, I'm so happy to see you.”
“And I'm glad to see you, because, frankly, I needed to smoke one of your cigarettes.”
“Ah, Flora, if all women were like you—if you only knew.”
“What's with him today?” asked Flora, turning to my father.
“I don't know,” answered my father. “He's been like this all morning.”
“Your grandfather is a wonderful man,” she said, “but he can be more
malheureux
than earthquake victims.”
Soon everyone decided it was time to break for lunch. My mother and Aunt Flora had planned to have lunch at the
Saint's. My father invited my grandfather for lunch. The Princess, not daring to say anything, just looked at me.
“Can you take him to lunch at Rue Thèbes today?” my mother asked, turning to the Princess. My mother explained she was busy that afternoon. First, the tailor was due to arrive to measure her for a dress for the centennial. And Aziza was going to “do” her
halawa.
“Stay with her,” whispered my mother, indicating the Princess.
My grandmother's face suddenly beamed like a sunny day in June.
My father knew it as soon as he picked up the receiver that same night and heard the flustered, officious tremor in the Saint's voice. She kept trying to convey the news obliquely, with a notion of dignity and fortitude. His mother, she said, was sitting right in front of her, crying. She was drinking a
fortifiant,
the Saint's euphemism for schnapps. Then, while trying to comfort my father—yet also hint at the forthcoming ball, to which she had still not been invited—she reminded him that not everyone was meant to live to be a hundred.
My father immediately woke me, not as he usually did, by sitting at the edge of my bed and whispering my name, but by tapping softly on my shoulder. A sense of cold, almost mechanical urgency seemed to govern each of his movements, as though he had been rehearsing this for months. He washed my face, dried it with swift, perfunctory dabbing motions, and, for the first time, it was he and not my mother who got me dressed. He was not talking. When we came out the front door to go to the garage, there was no one on the street. Only dogs. One came closer. My father picked up a stone and threw it, and the dog quickly scampered away. Inside the front lobby
of the building across from ours, someone had left the light on. It was still nighttime.
We drove in silence.
“You shouldn't have brought the boy,” said my grandmother, tucking her crumpled handkerchief inside the left cuff of her shirt.
“I want my father to see him, and I want him to see my father.”
Mother and son whispered.
It had happened after he came back from the pool hall.
“Who knows!” she said, biting the point of her diamond ring anxiously to keep herself from sobbing again. “I call it the pool hall in order not to call it other things. Do I know where he goes wandering late at night? He never tells me, I never ask.” She was silent an instant. “He doesn't want to move. Doesn't even want to take his clothes off.” When they finally took me in to see him, he was lying on his bed, still wearing his tie, jacket, and trousers. Only his shoes had been removed. His socks were too long for his feet and dangled past his toes.
As soon as he heard the door, he thought he was speaking to his wife:
“Don't come in.”
“It's me,” whispered my father.
The old man's voice immediately mellowed.
They spoke in Ladino. Then he spoke to me. “
Tu vois ça?
” he said, meaning, “Can you believe this? Do you see what's happening to me?” The Saint came in and took me away.
A few weeks later, Monsieur Costa deposited me at my grandmother's house as usual. She shut the gate behind him and, together, we watched his motorcycle roar toward Camp de
César. She then looked at the sky and with her usual enthusiasm said, “Just look at this blue! We'll have a beautiful day at the beach today.”
As I walked into the house, I felt an unusually cool draft running through the corridor. The voices of Greek merchants and Arab vendors on Rue Esnah crept into the house from the back windows in the kitchen, and the sun beamed starkly upon the kitchen tiles. Even the stuffy smell around the pantry seemed gone, and from the garden the scent of basil filled the house. Something had changed. “I'm going to put this on,” my grandmother said, displaying a light-blue linen and cotton dress with buttons running all the way to her ankles. Nothing had pleased her more than when I asked her in front of everyone at the beach not to wear black.
When I made to open my grandfather's door, she whispered he was sleeping, that I should not disturb him. “We should pick fresh fruit for the beach,” she said. But I had heard the faint crackle of my grandfather's old radio from behind his closed door, and I went to open it, knowing that he was not sleeping now but sitting at his little table listening to his news broadcast. Perhaps he had already heard me come in the house and was about to open the door to meet me. I pressed down the handle to push his door open and felt him pull at the same time.
I said good morning to him, and just the sound of his name spoken out loud in his room told me he was there. The room was unusually bright, with its windows wide open, overlooking a street I had never before seen or even suspected existed. From one of its shops came the loud sound of a radio I had mistaken for his. The wind had pulled open his door as soon as I had touched the door handle.

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