Out of Egypt (29 page)

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Authors: André Aciman

BOOK: Out of Egypt
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By then the class was beside itself, some of us falling from our seats with laughter. Even Miss Gilbertson, who never laughed and who had a malignant stare permanently riveted to her face, was smiling broadly, first giggling at each of Amr's failed attempts, and finally bursting out laughing herself, which gave the class license to break into an uproar, while Amr stood befuddled and crestfallen until it occurred to him that there was no reason why he shouldn't laugh with the others, which he did.
At recess, I ran into Amr and jokingly asked him to “Blease bass de bebber.” He knew I was making fun of him and called me “
Kalb al Arab
, dog of the Arabs.” This was too offensive, and I lunged at him, both of us tussling on the playing field until the headmistress, Miss Badawi, hurried over and separated us. “You should not be fighting,” she yelled. “But he insulted me,” I argued. “He called me ‘dog of the Arabs.'” She did not give me time to finish my complaint. “But you are the dog of the Arabs,” she replied in Arabic, smiling, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
Stunned, I was almost sure I had misconstrued her words. I was even about to protest again. But I said nothing and went to the bathroom, where Michel Cordahi, a native Frenchspeaker
who came from one of Egypt's wealthiest Christian families, helped run water over my scraped knee. I cleaned myself as best I could and arrived in Arabic class with my legs still red from the fall.
Before the recitation was to start, Miss Sharif briefly went over the poem and had the class name all of the Arab nations in the world. The poem itself was a long, high-minded, patriotic ode dedicated to the unity of the Arab world. It calumnized almost all the nations of Europe and, in its
envoi,
stirred all Arab boys and girls to free the last two Arab countries from the yoke of foreign dominion: Algeria and Palestine. France was suitably anathematized, as was England. Finally, by way of perorating her little speech, Miss Sharif inveighed against the
Yahud,
the Jews, throwing her fist in the air in an imitation salute, and sending the adrenaline rushing through my body each time she mentioned the word. The students responded to Miss Sharif's battle cries, asking questions and voicing their agreement, which only intensified the vehemence of their outrage. Handwritten posters in colored ink, which the students had brought in, hung along the walls of the classroom, decrying imperialism, Zionism, and the perfidy of the Jews.
Something ugly and dangerous prevailed in class whenever the
Yahud
were mentioned. All I could do was stiffen helplessly and wish that some unknown force might come and take me away, that the ceiling might fall on Miss Sharif, that a terrible beast might squirm its way out of the sea and yawn at our classroom door. Without budging from my seat, I would try to make myself scarce, stare into the void, and drift away.
While Miss Sharif was speaking to the class about Nasser's vision of a united, Pan-Arab nation, I waited for the inevitable. She had warned I'd be the first to recite the poem that day, and I already knew that at the end of her prefatory remarks
she would go to her desk, search for her glasses in her handbag, open her book, and, turning her gaze to the window, as if her thoughts had wandered a bit and were still hovering on VC's giant, green cricket field, would suddenly call my name. I waited to hear it any moment now. Quietly I tore out a very tiny corner of my notebook and drew a Star of David on it. It might bring me good luck. Not knowing what to do with the star, and not wishing to leave it lying about in my desk or in my pockets—which were always subject to summary inspection before the entire class—I put it in my mouth, moved it around a bit, and then let it stick to my palate, where it rested, untouched by my tongue or by my teeth, as Michel Cordahi had told me he did with the Host.
Once again I searched through my mind for the words of the first verse. They were still there, all of them, like children who haven't shifted a limb since being put to bed hours earlier. I contemplated them almost lovingly.
Then Miss Sharif called my name. A shot of adrenaline coursed through me, along with a cold, numbing spasm.
I went to the front of the class, cleared my throat, cleared it again. I would try to deliver the poem fast and be done with it. I spoke out the title, recited the first verse, which merely restated the title, and, rather pleased with myself, was already searching hard for the third line, when all of a sudden the poem disappeared.
I recognized some of the phrases the boys in the front row kept whispering to me, but I was unable to put them together. Besides, knowing that Miss Sharif must also have heard their taunts and whispers, I didn't know whether to acknowledge them with a passing smile or merely stare into space, pretending I hadn't heard them.
“This is an important poem, the most important poem in the book,” she said. “Why didn't you study it?” I did not know
why I hadn't studied it. “I don't know what to do with you any longer,” she said, working herself into a temper. “I don't know, I just don't know—oh, my sister!” She exploded in a rage, ready to strike me any moment now. “Oh, my sister!” she yelled again, letting fly all the colored chalk with which she had drawn a map of the Arab world. “We shall have to go to see Miss Badawi.”
It was only on our way to Miss Badawi's office that it finally dawned on me, on this nippy, sunny morning, that she would almost certainly resort to the stick, maybe even the cane.
Much, much worse, however, was the fear that my father would come to know of my crime and be furious that evening. Once again he would tell me that in failing to remember the poem I was probably showing government informants that in my parents' home no one took Arab education very seriously. This was almost sure to ruin my parents.
To my surprise, I did not get the stick; instead, Miss Badawi called home and announced that I was suspended from school for the day. My mother and Madame Marie hopped into a cab and were there to pick me up in less than half an hour. With Madame Marie as her interpreter, my mother apologized to Miss Badawi and promised that from now on I would have an Arabic tutor every day.
Outside school grounds, when she asked me why I had not studied the poem, I broke down and cried.
“We're taking the tramway home,” she said.
We boarded the second-class car at the Victoria terminal and headed directly to the upper deck, all three of us crammed into a tiny space in the open-air porch to the right of the spiral staircase. Before boarding, my mother, a born and bred Alexandrian, remembered to buy heated peanuts for the ride. It was windy, and light gray patches hovered over what was sure to remain a bright, sunny day. From where we perched, I
could see the stuccoed school turret rising above the dining hall where, at this time, my classmates were queuing up for lunch. I thought of the food, always the same cheap, nauseating, doughy rice laced with bits of meat. Someone in school had composed a little rhyme in Arabic, which, unlike every other Arabic poem I ever heard, I shall never forget:
Captain Toz,
akal al-lahma,
wu sab al roz.
[
Captain Phooey
gobbled the meat
and left the rice
.]
I almost laughed out loud as I thought of these words. I told my mother the words, for she had seen me smile and wanted to know why. She also remembered bad food from her boarding days at Madame Tsotsou's and said she knew how cruel teachers could be. She laughed about Captain Toz, wondering how he managed to avoid the dread rice. At VC we had to eat everything on our plate. “Or else?” she asked. “They hit you very hard.” “We'll see,” she said, dipping her fingers into the paper cone of peanuts.
The tram began to rumble and squeak. Soon it cleared the curve at Victoria and began to pick up speed to the next station.
“We won't go home,” she said on impulse. “We'll go downtown.”
This was a miracle. We were going to travel from one end of the city to the other, and eventually, after lunch, would have forgotten all about Miss Sharif and Miss Badawi and the paean to Arab unity. “Stop worrying so much!” said my mother when I kept asking about what she thought Miss Badawi might tell
my father. She turned to her right and named the first station after Victoria, wearing that blithe, high-spirited, girlish smile that could infuriate my father when he was reporting gloomy news; then he'd call her the most irresponsible, selfish optimist he knew, because she refused to put on his frown and worry.
“This is Laurens,” she said, pointing to the next station, whose platform at that hour was silent and deserted. And before I knew it, she named all of the stations on the Victoria line, a litany of French, Greek, German, Arabic, and English names that are forever braided in my mind with the image of my mother riding up on the
impériale,
wearing sunglasses, her colored scarf and dark hair flying about her face against the backdrop of the sea, smoking a cigarette and trying as hard as she could to divert my mind from my worries at school. I would never forget their names: Sarwat, San Stefano, Zizinia, Mazloum, Glymenopoulo, Saba Pasha, Bulkley, Rouchdy, Moustafa Pasha, Sidi Gaber, Cleopatra, Sporting, Ibrahimieh, Camp de César, Chatby, Mazarita, Ramleh.
Nearing Rouchdy, I saw row upon row of ancient villas with large trees and gardens, some even with fountains. As the tram swerved and tilted to the left, I suddenly knew I had spotted the Montefeltro home. It, too, like so many others, had been converted into an Arab public school. Loud girls wearing khaki smocks swarmed about the garden. When I mentioned Signor Ugo to my mother, she said he had become a history teacher at the Lycée Saint Marc.
“We'll go to the movies,” she said.
After Ramadan that year, my father decided to hire an Arabic tutor: Sheikh Abdel Naguib. All I remember was his extraordinarily smelly feet and his calloused hand resting on my thigh when he corrected my pronunciation of the Koran. He taught
nothing but the Koran, and all he did each time was have me memorize one or two sections, or suras, though without ever bothering to explain them to me. My assignment was to copy suras many, many times every day.
Compared to Arabic class, nothing could have been more soothing than spending hours at my desk copying the same sura ten, twenty, thirty times while the April sun lingered on my notebook and cast a silent, peaceful spell in my room, gracing the wall, the books, my desk, my hand, and my copy of the Koran like a premonition of intense summer midday light, warm sea weather, and beach-house fellowship.
An old Matisse reproduction in my room beamed and beckoned in the morning light, and between the balusters lining the artist's balcony in Nice were patches of blue—as always, the sea.
From Abdou's kitchen came the scent of lime, melons, and overripe cucumber. Any day now, they'd pack everything, throw bedsheets over all the furniture, and off we'd go to our beach house at Mandara. “
Lazem bahr
,” Abdou had said, “we need the beach.” Ramadan always started one thinking of summer.
I worked away quietly, studiously, filled with the vacuous bliss of medieval scribes who put in a long day's work at their desk without ever reading or understanding a word of what they've copied all day.
But Sheikh Abdel Naguib was not pleased at all. I had missed an entire verse each of the thirty times I had copied the same sura. “But couldn't you tell the sura made no sense if you omitted this verse?” he asked, raising his voice, to which I would quietly, and respectfully, admit that I couldn't, because, as was clear to everyone who knew me, I was totally incapable of understanding anything I was reading in Arabic unless it was explained to me first.
Sheikh Abdel Naguib doubled my homework during summer vacation at Mandara by having me copy each sura sixty times. On average, this would take an hour, especially if I calculated the number of lines needed for each sura and began copying the first word sixty times, then next to it the second word sixty times, then the third word sixty times, and so on. Madame Marie, who didn't know whether my method for recopying the same sura was particularly edifying, would once in a while come into my room and observe my progress, and almost worry, “You're working very, very hard.”
In the distance, I could make out the drone of the old Bedouin bagpipe player who would appear at around three as he trundled barefoot on the burning sandy roads of Mandara. Everyone referred to him as “the poor devil,” because he continued to wear the shredded remnants of his old British band uniform. After him came the beggar-and-baboon show. And after that, the garbagewoman,
al zabbalah
—or, in pidgin French,
la zibalière
—carrying a huge, stinking burlap bag filled with food that had been rotting for days in the heat, knocking at our door every afternoon asking for a glass of water as she stood outside, almost panting from the heat, saying, “
Allah yisallimak, ya Abdou,
may God save you, Abdou.”
After her knock came the call of the bread-and-biscuit vendor, and the ice cream vendor after him, and then noises made by neighborhood boys who would start to gather not far from our house, saying things I did not quite catch, until, roused from my stupor and straining an ear again, I would realize they were my friends about to head into the sandy hinterland to engage in yet another kite fight. They were tying used razor blades onto the kite's head and tail.

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