Out of Egypt (30 page)

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Authors: André Aciman

BOOK: Out of Egypt
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The Greeks of Mandara had by far the best kites and always won. These were boys from a local Greek orphanage whose two giant kites, named the
Paralus
and the
Salaminia,
reigned
over the skies each summer. As our kite bore toward them, the
Paralus
and
Salaminia
would at first refuse to engage, hissing it away like lazy cobras, ordering it back with a graceful, peremptory swerve and nod of their heads. But once it got close, without warning, first one and then the other came swooping down, tearing through it in two successive strikes without even getting tangled, until our stunned and helpless kite lurched awhile and then came plummeting down in a straight descent, crashing onto the sand as everyone scattered for fear of the blades. Two older Greeks would monitor the events from afar, yelling instructions as the fighting got rougher, while their boys chanted and clapped their hands, watching the
Paralus
and the
Salaminia
close in on their next target, this time without provocation.
In the back of my mind all through my scribal exercises were images of the
Salaminia
plunging from above as soon as it caught sight of our poor, unnamed victim and gashing it to pieces with its pointed rostrum. My mind would drift to other things as I kept copying, word after word after word. Then, all of a sudden, in the distance, I made out the victorious chant of the Greek orphans. The
Salaminia
had won again.
The boys were waiting on the dunes for me to finish copying my suras. Momo (Maurice-Shlomo) Carmona was crying. “They cheated,” he cursed. Someone was holding the skeletal remains of our fallen Icarus: scraps of sliced bamboo cane and torn white canvas made in my father's factory. Even our parents were sorry for us. “You are wasting too much time,” said my father.
The next year at VC was no better than the first. By the second month it became obvious I was failing every subject, including art.
One morning Madame Marie warned me that my father had received a telephone call from Miss Gilbertson expressing renewed concern over my work. My father wanted to speak to me, she said. I could hear his vigorous puffing as Monsieur Politi counted indefatigable one-and-two's in his thickly accented Judeo-Arab French. My mother had awakened earlier than usual and was wearing a green bathrobe; her jet-black hair, still wet from the shower, was hastily combed back. She was cutting my croissant into little slices, and was particularly solicitous of me during breakfast.
Abdou looked at me almost ruefully. “
Shid haylak
,” he whispered as my father walked into the room. “Courage.”
“Well?” asked my father.
I said nothing. I hated vague preambles to what was clearly going to escalate into a bitter scolding. Mother sat with her arms crossed, looking down, as though she herself was about to be chided. I stared at her, almost imploring her to smile, or at least return my gaze.
“Leave us,” said my father to Madame Marie. “You too,” he told my mother after Madame Marie stood up. Madame Marie waited at the door for my mother to join her.
“No, I'll stay,” she insisted, trying to contain her anger while dismissing Madame Marie.
“Always, always meddling,” he started. “It's between him and me, him and me.”
“And I'm his mother. And that shit of an Englishwoman could just as easily have called
me
instead of you,
me
instead of you!”
“And spoken through whom? Abdou?” asked my father, ironically. “And don't call her a shit in front of the boy.”
“Just get on with what you have to say to him. Can't you see you're upsetting him by keeping him waiting?”
“Then let me tell you what I've decided,” he said, turning
to me. “I've already spoken about it to Miss Gilbertson,” he continued, meaning to emphasize this fait accompli, “and she agrees it would be an excellent idea for you to move into her home and live with her as a boarder for a while.”
It came as the most terrifying threat in my life. I could think of nothing else for the rest of the day, for the rest of the week, the rest of the school year. The prospect haunted me like an evil spirit, insinuating itself everywhere, undoing every joy.
“I'm sorry, but this is crazy!” exclaimed my mother.
“Crazy yourself!”
“And you're a monster.”
At some point during breakfast, once my father had collected himself, he managed to explain his plan with kindness and something verging on apology in his voice. My study habits, my command of English, my work in Arabic, my discipline, even my bearing—everything had degenerated. Something drastic was needed. Since going to a boarding school in England was precluded—Jews were allowed neither to send money abroad nor come back to Egypt once they had exited the country—the choice was either to hire a tutor or to send me to a local boarding school. We had already tried the first. As for boarding school, my father had his doubts; he imagined such places as being full of merrymaking pranksters and nighttime pillow fights, places where no one did any studying at all.
For a fee, however, I could live with Miss Gilbertson. After all, she was not so terrible. She would teach me what all English boys my age knew. She would civilize me out of Abdou's kitchen and out of my mother's tempestuous reach.
All I could think of when I imagined Miss Gilbertson's home was a small, dark bedroom, a pair of striped pajamas, my toothbrush standing next to hers in the bathroom, and old brown furniture in an old brown apartment where all one did
was read alone, eat alone, or sit alone at a long brown table in the evening under the scowling vigilance of old Britain. Miss Gilbertson would pry into my secret world and monitor my dreams, my most secret, shameful thoughts with the castigating gaze of a corrections officer and director of conscience. My mother said she would never let it happen, that I needn't worry. But my grandmother supported the project. Aunt Elsa thought, ‘Why not?' Madame Salama snickered and guaranteed it never hurt a boy my age to be left alone with a depraved spinster. Her lover, Abdel Hamid, opined that it might have the opposite effect, and Madame Nicole concluded that whatever parents did for their children always proved wrong in the end. Besides, she added, parents had the most deleterious influence on children, so why not separate them, since they were bound to be at war?
Then my father did what he always did in times of stress: he stalled. The idea itself was never abolished; it was simply remanded, suspended, and, like Dreyfus, I was never officially absolved. Even when it became clear that my father himself questioned the wisdom of his project and had more or less given it up, no one dared remind him that he had abandoned it, for fear of encouraging him to think about a matter which had been unofficially dismissed precisely because he believed it was still being thought about. Perhaps, in the end, my father simply tired of the idea.
Monsieur al-Malek, my new tutor, was the next best solution. An Arab Jew, Monsieur al-Malek spoke English, French, and Arabic fluently and was the current headmaster of the École de la Communauté Israelite. He would ring our bell every weekday evening at five, greet everyone in English, including Abdou, whose language he knew better than Abdou himself,
and would ask me whether I could kindly show him to my room. There he would open my briefcase, rummage for evidence of mischief or deceit on my part, invariably find it, upbraid me, and proceed to go over my Arabic and arithmetic assignments. “I won't tell your father,” he would say at some point in every tutorial, “but these hours are almost wasted. You're not applying yourself,” he would add, and, closing his book, would explain by means of examples taken from the lives of his two sons what applying oneself meant.
During tutorial it often happened that I would make out the happy signs that the living room was crowded with guests who had come for tea and drinks. Nothing was more welcome than the muted sound of the doorbell, followed by the rehearsed startled ecstasy of Abdou's exclamations as he opened the door to Mr. or Mrs. So-and-so and the tap of shoes on the hard wooden floor leading into the living room.
One evening, Monsieur al-Malek dawdled a bit longer than usual before leaving the foyer, and it was there that he ran into my mother who, more out of courtesy than inclination, asked him to join the guests for tea. He resisted, but on being urged once more, consented, and then took off his coat, which he had just put on, gave Aziza his hat, and stood at the entrance to the living room, rubbing his hands as though he had just walked in from the cold. There he was hailed by my father, who liked him even less than my mother did but had a lot of respect for a man who everyone said was a very learned teacher.
My father poured scotch into his glass, threw in a large ice cube, and then asked him whether he wanted it plain or with Vichy water. “Vichy, Vichy,” said Monsieur al-Malek as though he always drank scotch with Vichy water. He sipped it once and said it was excellent. “Johnnie Walker, naturally!” he added. “I can't stand this man,” whispered Aunt Flora, who was also there among the guests that evening and whose voice
was totally drowned out by the sound of traffic rising from the avenue. Mother had kept the balcony windows open that night, and scented drafts from the Smouha plantations and from the jasmine someone had brought blended in with the intimate, stale smell of cigarettes, giving our living room a sensual, luxuriant air.
Suddenly, there was a ring at the door. Abdou was heard shutting the kitchen door leading to the main entrance, and before he had time to proclaim his pleasure, a loud voice thundered, with Abdou finally appearing at the living room door holding a gentleman's wide-brimmed hat in his hand. Behind him was the gentleman himself, trailed by his wife. “But it's Ughetto!” shouted my grandmother.
“And Ugo it is,” he said storming into our living room with strides that screamed “Make way.” “For you, for you, and for you. More I couldn't get,” he said as he distributed presents from his most recent trip abroad. He had brought ten prized Tobler chocolate bars, which the company—including Monsieur al-Malek, my grandmother, Madame Marie, and Abdou—devoured on the spot. Signor Ugo had also brought my mother an immense bottle of Crêpe de Chine, for me a child's
Plutarch's Lives
, for my father the latest edition of the Larousse dictionary—things one could no longer buy in Egypt. Our last Larousse dated back six years.
“Ugo, you're an angel,” said my grandmother as she unpacked and stared at the hand blender he had brought her from France. “This is a miracle.” Everyone sat and admired the small device with its tiny helical blades. They had never seen anything like it. “How does it work?” asked Madame Salama. “I'll show you right now,” said Signor Ugo's wife. Almost the entire living room marched to the kitchen to watch my grandmother whip up one-minute mayonnaise. A whir was heard in the kitchen, and sixty seconds later my grandmother,
followed by a retinue of exultant ladies, returned victorious, brandishing a large glass containing a yellowish paste which she held out in her right hand as the Statue of Liberty holds out her beacon. Everyone wanted to try.
As they filtered back into the living room, Signor Ugo called out to my grandmother in Italian. “Sit next to me, you old witch,” he said, “I want to feel young again.” Everyone started to laugh, including my grandmother, who had been very quiet that evening, because earlier on, while waiting downstairs for Abdou to help her into the elevator, she had run into Madame Sarpi, who had accidentally knocked her onto the marble floor, and then, to make matters worse, fallen on top of her. “Ugo, be quiet, my legs are killing me.”
“Amputate, darling, amputate!” Which inspired him to tell a bawdy joke about a very well-endowed idiot who, in order to sneak his way into a harem disguised as a eunuch, had said, “Amputate, amigo, amputate.”
His wife implored him not to tell the joke, but tell it he did, and with gusto, especially when the moment came for the punchline. “Ugo, you're disgusting,” she said, slapping him on the shoulder. “I burn for you, darling,” he replied, “
Ardo
,
ardo
,” he added, preparing to bite her.
“Ugo, wherever you go you bring joy,” said my grandmother. “Now tell us what to do. We're so worried about the boy. His Arabic teachers hit him all the time, and now he won't study for school at all.”
I pretended not to listen and continued speaking with Aunt Flora.
My mother was quiet. Abdel Hamid, Madame Salama's lover, immediately jumped in, insisting that discipline was all that a child should know. “Everyone exaggerates the feelings of children—but parents, too, have feelings,” he added. “Besides, teachers don't hit without a reason, you know.”
“He never studies,” chimed in Madame Marie.
“That's not the point, one must understand why,” interjected Monsieur al-Malek, who till then had remained silent to survey the situation before risking a comment. Monsieur Pharès, the painter, brought a bent index finger right next to his nose and, with repeated curved motions, meant to suggest a parrot's beak, made fun of my hooked nose. “No, that's not the reason, either,” added Monsieur al-Malek, passing a platter of cakes to Abdel Hamid. Abdel Hamid, who was diabetic, kept staring at the cakes, and then passed them on to Madame Nicole. “The problem is that we never try to get inside a child's head,” insisted Monsieur al-Malek. “One needs patience. And plenty of psychology.”

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