Out of Egypt: A Memoir

  “I played the Schubert on those nights because I knew that, for me, the war, terrible as it was, was no more than a pretext to avoid facing I’d botched up my life.

  “I’ll play it now the way Schnabel played it, because this is the way your grandfather, and then your father, heard me play it, and this is how my son, had I a son, would have heard me play it tonight. Sit here.”

  I did not take the vaporetto at Zattere that night. Instead, I walked across the Dorsoduro to the Accademia. As soon as I reached the ill-lit floating platform, a beggar, the only soul in sight, told me that I had missed the vaporetto to the Lido. “Bisognerà aspettare, you’ll have to wait,” she said.

  With a good forty minutes left, I decided to cross the wooden bridge back to Campo Morosini. The bridge too was empty, and, from where I stood, the adjoining Campo San Vidal, which led up to the church of Santo Stefano, was both dark and deserted. I sighted a rat slinking by on a sunken marble step along the canal, his grayish hair matted to his back, something deft and purposeful in the speed with which he waded through the shallow water and nosed his way through a crack.

  “So she played her Schubert for you as well,” they would say, the men snickering, though everyone would be pleased. And I thought for a moment of the crowded apartment in Grand Sporting when the Germans stood outside Alexandria, and of all my uncles and aunts huddled there for protection and solidarity, listening to Flora’s Schubert every evening after the BBC. “Stay after the others,” she had told my father. “There is something I want to say to you.”

  I looked across to the station platform and saw the old beggar shuffle away.

  I thought of Aunt Flora again, and of how she had come to Venice years ago, and why she had stayed here all by herself, her life thrown away because she never learned to bounce back, not after Germany, not after Egypt. And I thought of her during the war years in Alexandria, riding the tram with my father in the evening, giving small concerts in the city, and how they would walk back home along the Corniche at night, looking out into the dark sea, wondering why, with death so close, it was still so difficult to speak. And I thought of what they might say tonight, walking arm in arm after so many years along these dark and haunted alleys in Venice, where she would show him her favorite café at night, her favorite ice cream vendor, her favorite spot along the Dorsoduro from which to survey the city’s starlit canal and watch one water-city summon up another, silent as they always were together, working their way through strands of time like captured shades on the Bridge of Sighs. Why had she bared her soul to me tonight?

  As I walked ahead, the slate-blue pavement of Campo Morosini glistened in the dark night. Scirocco weather, I remembered. Nearing the piazza, I made out the fading lights of a trattoria about to close. A waiter with his collar open and necktie undone was rolling up a striped awning with a long pole crank; another was stacking chairs and taking them inside. Farther away, the two sidewalk cafés we had passed earlier in the afternoon were now crowded with tourists. Tall Senegalese peddlers, carrying large duffel bags, were busy winding up toy birds, which they sent flying above the piazza in full view of the tourists.

  I left the piazza and returned to the station and for the first time that day made out the hollow sound of water lapping against the city. Soon after, an almost empty vaporetto arrived. Once inside, I made for the stern deck and sat on the rounded wooden bench along the fantail. Then the engine gave a churn, and a boatman released the knot. As soon as we began moving, I put both legs up on my bench, the way schoolboys ride the open-air deck on trams in Alexandria, staring at that vast expanse of night around me and at the gleaming silver-jade sweeps trailing in our wake in the middle of the Canal Grande as we cut our way deeper into the night, gliding quietly along the walls of the ancient arsenal like a spy boat that had turned off its engines or pulled in its oars. Up ahead, scattered light posts studding the lagoon tipped their heads above sea level, while the moonless city drifted behind me as I caught the fading outline of Punta della Dogana and further off the dimmed tower of San Marco looming in the late night haze. Roused by the searching beam of our vaporetto, splendid Venetian palaces suddenly rose from their slumber, one by one, lifting themselves out of the night like shades in Dante’s hell eager to converse with the living, displaying their gleaming arches and arabesques and their glazed brocade of casements for a few glowing instants, only then to slip back into darkness and resume their owl-like stupor once our boat had passed.

  After San Zaccaria, the vaporetto took a wide, swooping turn and headed across the lagoon toward the Lido, the boat doubling its speed, chugging away loudly, with a cool wind fanning our faces, easing the thick scirocco weather, as I reclined and threw my head back. So we’ve seen Venice, I thought, mimicking my grandfather’s humor as I turned and watched the city sink into timeless night, thinking of Flora and of all the cities and all the beaches and all the summers I too had known in my life, and of all those who had loved summer long before I came, and of those I had loved and ceased to care for and forgot to mourn and now wished were here with me in one home, one street, one city, one world.

  Tomorrow, first thing, I would go to the beach.

  3

  A Centennial Ball

  At first, there would be a scuffle of words, someone shouting, another shouting back, then a moment of silence, the illusion of peace restored. And then it came.

  For years my father had heard that scream break upon the day and rise above Rue Memphis and the daily clamor of Ibrahimieh, tearing its way out of powerful lungs like an ancient, spellbinding, ululating wail.

  This, he would find out one day, was the howl of the deaf, when the deaf are in pain, when the deaf quarrel, when they scream, when words fail them and nothing comes out but this sputter of shrieks that sounded more like a fleet of buses screeching to a halt on a quiet beach-day Sunday than like the voice of the woman he had married.

  People in the street referred to her as al-tarsha, the deaf woman, and, among the Arabs in the marketplace, everyone and everything in her household was known in relation to the tarsha: the deaf woman’s father, the deaf woman’s home, her maid, her bicycle, her car, her husband. The motorcycle with which she had won an exhibition race on the Corniche in the early forties and which was later sold to a neighbor continued to be known as the tarsha’s mutusikl. When I was old enough to walk alone on the streets of Ibrahimieh, I discovered that I too was known as the tarsha’s son. My Arab barber in Ibrahimieh—once Aleco’s assistant, now the owner of Aleco’s—always asked after my mother, never my father. Sometimes, on seeing me, street vendors, shopkeepers, or those idling about the cafés would discreetly raise an index finger to their ear. They were talking about my mother. But they might just as easily have pointed at their temples, for many confused the deaf with the insane. She had screamed at nearly all of them, and everyone knew her temper.

  Some forgave and pitied her with the languid kindness of the Middle East. Others mocked the discordant, grating voice of the deaf, adding twisted faces to twisted hand signals, looking like gargoyles and village idiots. One day, in a crowded grocery shop, my mother caught a young Egyptian mimicking her speech. She could not tell what he was saying, but she recognized the derisive smile that crept over people’s faces when they made exaggerated movements with their mouths. It was his insolent gaze as he smirked at her, all the while looking over toward his friends, that must have annoyed her. She stopped whatever it was she was doing, told me to stay put by the cash register, and without giving the young man time to blink slapped him twice on the face, very hard, and then, before he could recover, grabbed him by the head, threw him to the ground, and proceeded to beat him up, first with her fist, then with anything that came her way.

  When she was finally pulled away from him, the young man’s shirt was torn, and he was bleeding from the mouth, weeping like a child.

  “Let’s go home now,” she said, as she turned and marched out of the store, not letting go of my arm.

  The
Princess, who heard of the incident, grumbled to my father that his wife behaved no better than the Arabs among whom she had grown up. “How will your son ever learn the right way to act if all he hears all day is her deaf yammering and constant brawling with Arabs?” Discharging a torrent now that she had spilled a few drops, she went on:

  “In less than two months we’ll be celebrating my mother’s centennial, and I want him to know how to behave there. I don’t want to introduce Madame Lord or Victoria Coutzeris to the son of a Jewish tarsha, understand?”

  My grandmother was referring to another incident that had occurred a few days earlier. My mother had been haggling with a butcher when an argument eventually erupted between them. This was not the first time, and everyone in the butcher shop and surrounding stores put down what they were doing and came to watch, looking on as the deaf woman brought down meat prices and, once her price was met, changed her mind and bargained for a lower price still, the butcher screaming bloody murder, telling her never to come back, only in the end to lower his price again, muttering obscenities under his breath as he hacked at his choicest cuts of meat with the wrath of ten Achilles, hurling one steak after another onto the scale, finally wrapping it all up in the thick, gray paper, which she instructed him not to bloody with his dirty hands because her son, standing meekly nearby, liked to draw on it. The butcher, glad to see her leave, obliged with an extra piece of paper, as I slunk out next to my mother, fearing the worst once our backs were turned.

  All I was aware of during supper that evening was the echo of the butcher’s scream as he threatened to kill the Jewish bitch on the spot, followed by my mother’s furious, dizzying shriek as she dared him—if he was man enough—offering to hand him the cleaver from his table. And then, a moment later, the burst of laughter as everyone made up, everyone feeling sorry for everyone else, she putting down the cleaver that she had grabbed in theatrical self-defense, he pointing to his ears, implying that if he had not gone ahead with the murder, it was only because of the affliction God had already visited upon her, because she was a good, pitiful woman after all, a maskina. This was the man who would one day weep and embrace her, and rock her in his arms, dirty bloodied apron and all, when she told him we were leaving Egypt.

  But the sound of her shriek would not go away that night. It was an ugly, coarse, demented shriek, and no matter how I tried, no other thought, no conjured sound could quite muffle its persistent, frightful ring in my ears.

  How I envied other boys their mothers, their sweet, hearing mothers who answered the telephone, who opened the door to you and always said something pleasant about your clothes, or about the day, or about a film everyone had seen. Mothers who met your teachers and didn’t need an interpreter. Mothers who played the piano, who shook your hand and listened to what you said, and answered back in chiseled little sentences. Mothers who never brawled with servants, mothers who dismissed them instead, mothers who put you in your place with a few softly spoken words, darting, cutting words, not the yelp of a madwoman, mothers who expected to be apologized to, mothers who said “I love you” as though it were a compliment, not a claim, mothers you wanted to flaunt, not hide.

  Louder and higher than most, my mother’s voice would travel far, as when she shouted goodbye in the morning, looking out our window, while I boarded my school bus and stared the other way, pretending I hadn’t heard her; or when she spotted me coming back from the beach, and, leaning over the veranda rail, screamed out my nickname, while the boys I had just befriended looked puzzled, no one knowing she was my mother, no one suspecting it was my nickname they had just heard, for one had to get used to her speech. I would look up, and smiling at something someone might have said, would use that smile as a way of greeting someone farther away who understood exactly why my smile seemed so vague, who had already forgiven me for it, and who on those summer afternoons when we sat in the dining room eating fruit because it was too hot to eat anything else would let out words of love no one understood, for they weren’t even words, just sounds reaching far back into her childhood to a time when she couldn’t even speak—half—words which she sometimes yelled out in the water when we swam together, her voice muffled by the sound of waves, thinned of its coarseness, kind as a seagull’s.

  Not knowing how to explain her voice when I introduced her to my friends, I would avoid greeting them altogether. At the movie theater during intermission, I would try to put some distance between us or wrest my hand free of hers, or suddenly stop talking to her when I caught sight of a familiar face from school—which I almost always did, since everyone in Alexandria went to the movies on Friday. Because I lacked the courage to say she was my aunt, all I could do when I spotted a classmate coming toward us was simply freeze, put a vague and absent look on my face and pretend I hadn’t seen him.

  As soon as the film was over, I always wanted to rush out of the theater, far from the crowded lobby, where people were milling around trying to decide where to go next. But my parents, instead of hurrying, always dawdled near their seats talking about the film or insisting I put on my sweater now, not later, or continuing to look under their seats for something my mother claimed she had dropped, invariably waiting for the aisles to clear before leaving, telling me to stay put, when all I wanted was to vanish.

  Then the trembling started.

  “Just look at him, he’s shaking all over,” she would say to my father as she’d help me slip my arms into a sweater. I could feel my chin quiver and my elbows stiffen. “It must be someone from school. He’s seen someone from school again.” My mother always read my thoughts, my fears.

  My father would look on sternly, scanning the crowd for the face I was struggling to avoid. “You can’t carry on like this. No one’s going to bite you, you know.”

  “I know,” I mumbled.

  “Then what is it?”

  I did not know. But the worst thing he could do was speak to me in that tone while people from school were within earshot.

  “It’s me he’s ashamed of,” my mother would conclude as she buttoned up her cardigan. “I just know it.”

  “Rubbish, no one is ashamed of you,” my father would reply with a listless, exasperated look on his face, which was how he tried to defuse her anger each time, by affecting annoyance and fatigue.

  “What do you know? You’re ashamed of me too.”

  “Just lower your voice, will you please!”

  “‘Just lower your voice’—what do I have to do, be mute as well?”

  “Come,” she would say, grabbing hold of my hand. “At least he doesn’t know how to lie yet, which is more than I can say about you,” she said, throwing a knowing look in his direction. With that, she stormed through the crowd, reaching the exit long before my father, muttering things to herself as people watched her cut through the throng waiting outside the theater for the six-o’clock show.

  Everyone said I was her ears. Because she could not speak on the telephone, I had to make her calls. Sometimes, to avoid this task, I would lie, saying her friend’s line was busy. To tease her, I would swear someone was ringing our doorbell, though I knew she knew I was lying.

  My thoughts were her thoughts, just as her thoughts were my thoughts. When, frightened of the night, I touched her hand and woke her up, she knew what I was saying long before she had made out my lips in the dark. And I knew, by the way she laughed at a guest’s joke, that she had totally missed his point and was only laughing to be polite, though everyone present would swear she understood him in every detail. Sometimes in the evening, when the lights went out, it was she, and not Abdou, the cook, who would run to the fuse box. And as I heard her tinkering with the wires, pulling things out and putting them back in, answering my unasked questions with the plea that I not move lest we collide when she came down the ladder, all I could think of, as I hoped this darkness might last forever and be like a long night devoid of sleep, was that Mother had lied to me, that others had lied to me as well, that she was never as deaf as she made
herself out to be.

  Only then would it hit me, this truth about her ears, that she would always be deaf, never hear music, never hear laughter, never hear my voice. Only then did I realize what it meant to be alone in the world, and I would run to find her in this large house that became so quiet, so empty, and so very dark at night, because nighttime in our part of Alexandria was always somber and murky, especially with my father out so late every evening. We would turn the lights on everywhere in the house, not to ward off imaginary thieves, but to look out the window and see our reflected faces on the windowpane.

  From that darkness every evening came the ghoulish howl of the yogurt vendor repeating a long, hooting “Yaooooourt … yaooooourt” until he reached the end of the block and turned uphill toward the small barracks where antiaircraft guns were sometimes heard sputtering their practice shots. How grateful, then, when I heard my mother’s voice rise above the night as she shouted in the kitchen at Abdou, who was about to go home but was detained an hour more because he had forgotten to clean the oven.

  With my great-grandmother’s centennial ball fast approaching, the Princess finally decided I was spending far too much time with the deaf and with Arab servants at home. Though Smouha, where we lived, was only a fifteen-minute carriage ride from Ibrahimieh, to my grandmother it still remained the swamp it had once been, and its newly built homes and quiet vistas of fragrant plantations would always remain a bit too nouveau for her taste, not an acceptable address.

  One morning, she informed my mother that she wanted to take me under her wing, the pretext being that I had been caught mispronouncing far too many words under the influence of my mother’s deviant speech. Seeing that she had my mother nearly cowering before such an indictment, the Princess pressed ahead and asked her also to inform her deaf friends that they should curtail their visits somewhat, especially Aziza, a poor, young woman who also served as maid, cook’s helper, cleaning lady, and seamstress, and was guilty, in my grandmother’s eyes, of the twin crimes of being deaf and an “ignorant Arab.”