Out of Egypt (17 page)

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Authors: André Aciman

BOOK: Out of Egypt
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Uncle Vili came walking quickly, muttering “Ay, ay, ay” to himself, knowing that such a visit could only mean trouble. “Come into the kitchen—no, in here,” he told Monsieur Costa, pointing to a junk-filled room next to the kitchen that sometimes doubled as the maid Latifa's. “You, out,” said Vili pointing at me. “I want to come in,” I insisted, promising not to utter a word. I was on the verge of crying. “Come in, but not a sound or I'll kill you.”
“They caught my brother,” said Monsieur Costa in one breath.
“That was a risk. Everyone knew that,” replied Vili.
“Well, yes. They have the money of course. But they also know the numbers of the bank accounts in Switzerland. And they have a list of names.”
“You mean the fool carried a list of names on him?”
“Apparently.”
“But it's all over, then.”
Monsieur Costa did not say a word but kept his arms crossed with a look of helpless consternation, as though trying to avert a blow by looking prematurely mortified.
“I am in as much trouble as you, Your Excellency,” he said in the end. “There is a ship leaving tonight. It's a Greek merchant vessel, I can guarantee passage on it. I will be on it as well. Now, if Your Excellency will permit me, there are a few other people I must warn as well.” Monsieur Costa took the service entrance and was never heard from again, not even by his wife.
“Call Nessim and Isaac now—and don't look so worried, for God's sake.”
This was my first secret mission, and I waited for the right moment to tell each of my uncles that they were urgently needed in the
chambre des karakibs
—which in Arabic meant bric-a-brac. Once I escorted both, I was told to stay outside.
I tried to listen at the door, but all I heard were exclamations of distress. They opened the door and asked me to bring in my grandmother only. She must have sensed something was amiss, and by the look on Monsieur Costa's face she knew it concerned the police. Uncle Isaac was advising Vili against taking the ship. Costa could no longer be trusted. Instead, he would arrange for a car to drive him directly to the Cairo airport
that same night, from where he could catch a dawn flight to Rome without anyone asking too many questions.
None of this caught Uncle Vili by surprise. For years he had been liquidating his assets in Egypt and smuggling money to Switzerland in defiance of the Egyptian government's ban on all shipment of currency abroad. The punishment for the crime was imprisonment and eventual expulsion. Those holdings still in his name in Egypt were kept for appearances' sake and could easily be sacrificed. He had even managed to ship his clothes as well as his antique furniture to Europe. All he was leaving behind of value was a poorly kept villa filled with junk, rugs, and a Treccani encyclopedia set, given to him by, and bearing the signature of, none other than Il Duce himself. Many years later, that coveted set fell into my hands, only to be sold to a dealer for less than a dollar when we left Egypt.
Presently, I saw my grandmother come out of the junk room tucking her handkerchief into her left sleeve, shutting the door immediately behind her.
“What is it?” asked my father.
“We've decided to start the waltz now,” she replied.
At that moment, the quintet sounded a few notes and everyone cleared the space in the middle of the room to watch Vili, the youngest son, dance a Verdi waltz with his mother on the occasion of her hundredth birthday. Together they took a few rehearsed turns around the room, pretended to stop a moment, and then resumed the dancing, everyone applauding as the couple spun in the light of the hundred candles, until Vili brought her back to where she had been sitting and where my mother waited to help the old lady regain her seat. Without asking, Vili reached out for my mother as he let go of his own, took her into his arms, and suddenly accelerated the pace of the waltz, taking dizzying swirls around the room, the exinfantryman
from the battles of Val Maggio and Sant'Osvaldo wheeling the wheel merchant's daughter from Ibrahimieh, showing the world that a sixty-year-old rake could still ignite the heart of a thirty-year-old belle.
When the waltz was over, everyone applauded. Vili returned my mother to my father and said, “I owe your wife many apologies. I should have married her myself.” He took my mother's hand in his and brought it close to his lips and, still holding it there, whispered, “I won't see you for many, many years. Goodbye.” My mother blushed and, unsure of what he had just said, smiled and said, “Thank you.”
Vili rushed to the kitchen, where his brother's chauffeur had been waiting for him with his brother's raincoat, his brother's suit, and a battered suitcase wrenched out of the junk room which his sisters had filled with old clothes so he would not arrive at the airport looking suspicious. The service door was opened, and from the landing outside, an unmistakable smell of zibala, refuse, wafted into the kitchen.
There, so as not to arouse suspicion among the guests, who had no notion of what was taking place at the other end of the apartment, his sisters had come one by one to bid their most cherished brother farewell. Each wept, washed her face, put on a smile, and went to mingle with the guests while another took her place, exhorting her youngest brother, as each had probably done before both world wars, to behave, be good, and be careful. My grandmother, his senior by almost fifteen years, was the last to say goodbye. “You won't start now,” she said, “because if you do I will.” “I won't, I won't,” he promised. They hugged and kissed, after which Vili asked, “Esther, bless me.” Unable to hold back her tears now, she began weeping aloud, placing a shaking palm upon his head, sobbing the Hebrew words out loud until she had said “Amen.”
“Come, enough of this,” she said as she kept caressing the
lapel of his jacket. “Promise to write. Don't just disappear.” Unable to speak, he nodded.
The chauffeur picked up the suitcase and proceeded down the winding service stairway. Vili followed him, but he had not taken two steps before he suddenly collapsed against the banister. My grandmother exclaimed
“Santa Madonna!”
A second later, seated on one of the grimy metal treads of the stairway, Vili exploded in a loud sob.
“I'll never see Mother again,” he began weeping, swaying like a drunkard, his face resting in both hands. “How can I go without saying goodbye, how can I do that to her, how?” I noticed that his lip was bleeding. “Blood!” I shouted. “It's nothing,” he said, brushing the blood away with his palm as he resumed crying. The chauffeur had left the suitcase on the floor below and had come back upstairs to help him. “No, leave me here a second.” My grandmother asked me to fetch a glass of whiskey. “Ask Elsa, she'll understand.” I asked Hisham instead, who immediately poured a glass for me. I walked back along the corridor with the huge glass. No one asked me anything. When I made it into the pantry, I stopped. There was no one. I hid behind a pillar and spat into the glass. Then I stirred the spit with my finger.
“What a dog's life,” Vili said after drinking the contents. “All these years, and now this.”
“
Adiós
,” he said.
His elder sister and I waved at him until the shape of his gray hat and of his hand disappeared all the way downstairs through the half-lit concentric turns of the winding banister.
“And now we must tell no one,” warned my grandmother.
We shut the door of the kitchen behind us, walked through the pantry, shut the pantry door, and suddenly we were back among the guests. “Where were you?” asked my father. “Don't ask,” gestured my grandmother. Then, seeing he was beginning
to look perplexed, she said, “Vili left.” “So soon?” he asked. “He left for good.
Understand?
”
The only one who did not know the truth for the next two days was my great-grandmother. She had been told a lie so the festivities would not be disrupted.
“He's in Cairo,” they said in the end. “The king wanted to see him.” No one had ever told the old lady that the king had been deposed a few years earlier.
Still, she knew something was amiss.
“He isn't dead, is he?”
“Dead? Who, Vili? He's as indestructible as Bismarck. Not like the other one.”
The “other one” was my grandfather.
“No, the other
wanted
to die,” added Dr. Alcabès, our relative and family homeopath. “I told him we could save him,” he added as we were sitting at the third and last luncheon of the centennial. “But when he heard what the cure involved, he wanted no part of it. ‘Cover me that I may die,' he said, quoting a Turkish proverb. So I told him, ‘Albert, this can lead to only one thing!' Do you know what he said? ‘Well, that's got to be better than letting you open me up, scrape me clean of my favorite organs, and leave me as hollow as a bell pepper. No thanks.'”
“He was a poor soul,” said my grandfather to my mother as we made our way through a narrow passage in between the graves on Yom Kippur a few weeks later. We had just been to lay flowers on his mother's grave and were now headed toward my grandfather's. The Saint had not come with us, perhaps because she feared to run into the Princess with whom she was still quite angry.
I knew the way to my grandfather's tomb from previous
visits to the cemetery with my father and sauntered ahead, avoiding the low slabs. When we arrived, I saw my father waiting for us at his father's tomb.
He was all alone. The Princess had not come either.
“The poor man,” said my grandfather after reflecting a moment. “We never got along, though God knows I never nursed any ill will toward him. But—” he said, meaning all that was water under the bridge.
“Can I recite a few words?” he asked his son-in-law, careful not to seem at all pushy when it came to religious matters.
“Yes,” said my father, with a look of forbearing irony that almost said “if you really must.”
My grandfather spoke the words softly, slowly, almost meekly, with diffidence and an air of mild apology one never expects from the faithful. He reminded me of my mother, who despite her anger, her fierceness, her blustering cry when she lost her patience, would always remain meek, uncertain, and kind.
When he was done, he gave his daughter a look and she immediately spoke two or three words of Hebrew, after which she said “Amen.”
“Voilà, Monsieur Albert,”
said my grandfather, staring at the stone. Then, with the timidity of a man who had never felt at ease with his son-in-law, he touched my father on the shoulder once, a gesture of hindered sympathy that he did not wish to prolong for fear of overstepping his bounds.
“I feel for you,” he said. “None of us is going to stay much longer in Egypt, and, frankly, it hurts when I think we'll have to leave our loved ones behind, me my mother, and you your father.
“They would have been happier to lie where they were born, with their loved ones. Your father had once asked me, ‘What did I come to Egypt for if everyone will be leaving soon, leaving
me stranded all by myself, twiddling my thumbs in my grave, the last Jew on this parched, half-baked strip of dust teeming with dirty feet?' He hated Egypt and he's buried in Egypt. ‘What could be worse than being buried in a cemetery where you know nobody, Monsieur Jacques?' he would ask.
“And I tell you what. Worse than dying is the thought that no one will ever come to your grave, that no one will come wash the letters of your name. Everyone remembers for a few months, a few years, on anniversaries, and then, a generation later, they forget you. And the earth might as well make dust of you, for you're as good as unborn—you never
were
born—even if you live to be a hundred.”
My father did not reply, though the allusion to the centennial did not escape him.
On our way out of the cemetery, the four of us greeted other Jewish families who had come to pray for their dead. My grandfather was going to synagogue and had asked whether we would join him for the service.
“Not today,” said my father.
“I'll come,” said my mother.
This pleased her father who, otherwise, would have had to go alone.
It was a typical Alexandrian autumn weekday morning. One could even have gone to the beach. My father said we would take a walk in the city; it was still too early to sit anywhere for a cup of coffee.
And then it must have hit him like an inspiration. “Come,” he said, and we walked faster along the Boulevard and after a few turns finally ended up on Rue Chérif, where we stopped at an antiques dealer. My father looked inside, hesitated, then opened the large glass door. We heard the sound of chimes as we walked into a store filled with objects that reminded me of my great-grandmother's home. Two saleswomen were
busily laying out velvet pads bearing coins in the shop window.
“May I help you?” asked one of them.
My father hesitated, then said, “Well, not really.”
The woman, who could not have been older than thirty, seemed baffled. My father was nervous.

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