The King, one senses, has lost everything he cared for and is now condemned to wander the icy, wintry palace rooms, learning, as he says, “to be alone again.”
One is not always left alone in life. But at some point or other, one will eventually be alone again. It’s the again that smarts. For it tells us that some things in life never change; they may go away for a while, but loneliness, the one we know so well and thought we had finally overcome, always comes back in the end.
I have heard Peter O’Toole say these words at least thirty times in my life. I do not remember each one, but I know that each viewing is indissolubly fused with the others, that each time I hear these words I have not only aged and added an annual ring to a heap of memories, but that with these words my youth, my past, Alexandria, those who have died, and those other parts of me that are probably dead are summarily evoked: the boy who went to see Becket with his parents the first time, then with his friends, and then for an entire, unforgettable week by himself, always trying to recapture the miracle of the first viewing, not just in Alexandria, but immediately after we left, in Italy, where I saw the film dubbed in Italian, and then in France, in England, and for so many years afterward on television in the States, in college, graduate school, trying to recapture the dour sense of foreboding and of unspoken warning laced in the King’s message to the young man I was then that I, too, one day would have to learn to be alone again, that in the end the work of memory is the work of loneliness.
The last time I saw Becket in Egypt was on a Sunday evening a week before we left. That afternoon I had taken my grandmother and my great-aunt to their club, where they said their goodbyes to their old friends. When we returned home, we were greeted by the strong smell of leather from all our packed suitcases, which were neatly stacked throughout the house. No one was home.
Once I was inside, my impulse was always to turn on the lights in the entry and rush down the dark, oppressive corridor to light up one room after the other: the pantry, the kitchen, the small living room, most of the bedrooms, hoping to rouse the entire house and give myself and the elderly sisters who stood disheartened in the foyer the illusion that others were in the house as well but were not quite ready to come out of their rooms, though they were pleased to hear our voices and would presently show their faces.
But even the lights did not help. Under my great-aunt’s thrifty management of household finances all the bulbs had been replaced with ones of such inferior wattage that my mother was tempted to compare the once-resplendent living-room chandelier to a dying man’s bedside lamp.
I opened the window to let in the city noise. It came, though distant and untouched, like the laughter of passersby who don’t know someone is dying upstairs. This lifeless, gloomy cloud would not disperse. The only way to shake it off was either to go out again, or see a movie, or read a book. The large radio had already been disassembled and packed in a large crate and was sitting somewhere on the docks. There was nothing to do. “It feels like a medieval crypt in here,” said my great-aunt. My grandmother shot me a quizzical glance; neither of us knew what had brought this on. It wasn’t like her to complain of the gloom.
After tea, my grandmother took out the needlepoint she had started two years earlier, a reduced replica of a kilim in the living room. My great-aunt, who had stopped reading altogether because of her eyes, had asked me to read aloud a novel in Italian.
After a short while, my grandmother removed her eyeglasses and rubbed her eyes, saying her eyes, too, were tired. Then she put the glasses back on again. Her sister wasn’t listening to my reading. She, too, removed her glasses and looked tired, bored.
“What was the name of that movie you were talking about the other day?” asked my great-aunt.
“Which movie?” I asked, knowing exactly which film she meant yet determined not to give in to her squeamish reluctance to come straight to the point and name contemporary works by their proper names.
“You know, the one about the English king who appoints an archbishop who then turns against him.”
I made as though I still did not understand.
“Becket,” I answered dryly in the end.
“Ah yes, Becket.” A moment of silence elapsed. “Becket?” she seemed to ask as though puzzled by the word.
“Look, he already told you it’s Becket,” interjected my grandmother, “and Becket it is! Why do you ask all these questions?”
“It was just that I was thinking, maybe, one day, we could go to the movies instead of staying all cooped up here like troglodytes.”
“To the movies?” wondered my grandmother, equally determined to make things difficult for her sister.
“I didn’t say we had to go to the movies. It was just a thought Never mind. Movies are bad for my eyes anyway.”
“Do you want to go, yes or no?” asked my grandmother.
Her sister hesitated. “If everyone else wants to, then, why not? It wouldn’t be so terrible.”
“If we want to go to the movies, we have to leave right away,” said my grandmother.
“Why, is it far?” she asked.
“It’s playing at the Strand,” I said.
“But that’s only a tram ride away,” she exclaimed, as though startled by the revelation. “It would be all right, wouldn’t it?”
“It’s fine, it’s fine,” grumbled my grandmother, finally lodging her needle in the canvas and putting the canvas away. “All this palaver to say let’s go to the movies.”
We rushed to the station. A tram came soon enough, and luckily, we found three seats together As usual, the sisters bickered as to who would sit next to the window to shield the other from the draft, which cut like a blade, they said Toward the end of the trip, my grandmother searched through her purse and gave me a five-pound note. Being a man, I was to pay for all three of us.
The lobby was already empty, and it occurred to me that there might be no seats left. I was wrong
From behind a very thick curtain one could already hear a month-old American newsreel. The cartoons would come next. Then the previews. I led the two old ladies into the theater. Then the usher helped me escort them in the dark. It took us a while until they removed their coats and sat down. When we were seated, my grandmother held my hand.
During intermission, I brought three ices. A young Austrian couple, sitting across the aisle, came to greet us. I was busy unwrapping my cone and failed to stand up.
The sisters would not stop reprimanding me for my rudeness during our ride home by cab. I had almost ruined Becket for them, not standing up in front of Monsieur and Madame Horkheimer! “Plus,” added Grandmother, “I wish you would stop wearing these long blue trousers with copper snaps all over them.”
“What snaps?” I asked.
“The pants that cowboys wear.”
I did not answer. But a thought flared through my mind. I would pretend to get very annoyed with them, lose my temper, stop the cab, and walk back to the Strand and catch the nine o’clock show. A moment later, I heard myself asking the driver to let me out. I was going to walk home, I said.
“But don’t you have homework?” asked both sisters, who probably didn’t want to be left alone that evening. I didn’t answer. I shut the door of the cab and watched the car speed ahead.
Alone on the road that Sunday evening, I found my heart racing at the merest thought of going to a late-late show by myself for the first time. All the store lights were out, and up ahead, past the dark in the direction of the movie theater, I could make out two Greek cafés glowing in their yellow haze. If I could go to the nine o’clock show by myself, then other things were possible, too, I thought, as I lit a cigarette, roused by so much freedom earned with such great ease, realizing for the first time in all these weeks that, despite my love for the movie, Becket may have been an elaborate and wonderful excuse for staying out alone past midnight. I’d see Becket a second time tonight. Bold thoughts rushed through my mind and thrilled me beyond anything I had known in my life.
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As I headed toward the crowd, I began to hear something behind me. I pretended to ignore it and continued to walk. It came closer. “Where are you headed all by yourself at this time?” asked a voice. I let a few seconds pass Finally I turned around. It was my grandmother. She had rolled down the windows of the cab and was begging me to come in. I hesitated awhile, struggling not to tell her to go home and leave me alone. Then there was a pause, the cab stopped, and the door opened. “Come on,” she said. “Don’t be angry.”
Before I knew it, I had stepped into the car and taken my usual seat between the old ladies, feeling very much like a hapless King Henry surrendering once again to two chiding women whose meddling claims could snuffle the light of love, of joy, and desire, but who, in so doing, had also spared me from something unknown and dangerous which continued to thrill me, if only because it frightened me more than the shame of cowardice, more than regret, more than yielding and going home with two old ladies to be alone again. “There will be other times,” they said.
There never were. I never saw Becket again in Alexandria.
I was grateful, but I never forgave them.
I am still owed that one night. And when I go to see Becket now, I do so not only to remember-someone whose desire continues to haunt an empty sidewalk after many years, but to expiate an old wish, the way we go back to lost opportunities and airy might-have-beens, knowing that old scores can never be settled, that what is gone is lost indeed, that the play I see each time is a new play, not the play I never saw that night, that all we have in the end is ourself, our loneliness—not even our memories but how they’ve lied to us, not Becket but what we’ve done with it.
In a Double Exile
There comes the time at every Passover Seder when someone opens a door to let in the prophet Elijah. At that moment, something like a spell invariably descends over the celebrants, and everyone stares at the doorway, trying to make out the quiet movements of the prophet as he glides his way in and takes the empty seat among us.
But by then my mind has already drifted many, many times, and like all disbelievers who find themselves wondering why they are attending a Seder after last year’s resolution, I begin to think of how little this ritual means to me—recalling the ten plagues, the crossing of the Red Sea, manna from heaven. All of it keenly arranged to let every kind of Jew find something to celebrate.
For the religious, Passover is the grateful remembrance of a homeward journey after years of suffering.
For those who believe in the spirit more than in the letter of the occasion, the holiday celebrates survival and deliverance from all forms of tyranny—survival after Auschwitz, freedom from anti-Semitism in Russia, Ethiopia, and Syria.
For yet others, Passover is an occasion to gather around a table and link arms with Jews from everywhere and all times.
I don’t know Hebrew. Nor do I know any of the songs or prayers. I can’t even tell when the Seder is officially over. Often I suspect the whole ceremony has petered out or has been cut short for my benefit—or been drawn out to prove a point. I always attend with misgivings, which I communicate to others at the table, and try to atone for by reading aloud when my turn comes, only to resent having been asked to read.
And as I sit and stew, feeling ever more trapped among the observant, I too begin to think of Egypt, of this Egypt everyone will invoke at sundown tomorrow night and which symbolizes suffering, exile, and captivity, and suddenly appears in our dining room like a mummy whose sleep has been disturbed: unreal, mythic, faraway Egypt, which everyone calls by its Hebrew name, Mizrayim; in Arabic, it is Misr. The same words, but eons apart.
Then, as happens every year, I begin to think of another Egypt, the one I was born in and knew and got to love and would never have left had not a modern pharaoh named Gamal Abdel Nasser forced me out for being Jewish. This was an Egypt many of us would have stayed in, even as the last Jews of the land, which we nearly were, even if we had had to beg to stay, which indeed we did.
Often in those years in Alexandria, when I was growing up, Passover coincided with Easter and Ramadan. During Ramadan, we would be let out of school at about noon every day, because Muslims, who fasted all day, needed to rest in the afternoon before breaking their fast at sunset.
To those of us who did not have to nap, these were the most magical hours of the year. The city was always quiet then, there was hardly any homework, and summer was only a few weeks away.
At the Seder, the men in my family would spar, my father begging my uncle to speed it up, my uncle deferring to tradition instead, everyone more or less giggling, including the one or two Christians visiting that evening who were hauled in to a dinner that reminded them so much of the Last Supper, they said, everyone garbling everything in a blithe chorus of “Next year in Jerusalem” until we heard the cannon of Ramadan announce it was time for devout Muslims to eat.
It never occurred to us that a Seder in Egypt was a contradiction in terms.
Now, when everyone speaks of Pharaoh at Passover, I think back to my very last Seder in Egypt, on the eve of our departure for Italy in 1965—a long, mirthless, desultory affair, celebrated with weak lights and all the shutters drawn so that no one in the street might suspect what we were up to that night.
After almost three centuries of religious tolerance, we found ourselves celebrating Passover the way our Marrano ancestors had done under the Spanish Inquisition: in secret, verging on shame, without conviction, in great haste, and certainly without a clear notion of what we were celebrating. Was it the first exodus from Egypt? Or maybe the second from Spain? Or the third from Turkey? Or the fourth, when my family members fled Italy just before the Nazis took over? Or were we celebrating the many exoduses that went unrecorded but that every Jew knows he can remember if he tries hard enough, for each one of us is a dislodged citizen of a country that was never really his but that he has learned to long for and cannot forget. The fault lines of exile and diaspora always run deep, and we are always from elsewhere, and from elsewhere before that.
Everything in history happens twice, wrote Marx, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. He forgot to add that Jewish history is repetition, the history of repetition.
Caught in these loops and coils, my family forgot to remember the obvious—that Egypt was never our home, that we should never have come back after Moses, that we didn’t even know where our home was, much less which language was ours. We had borrowed everyone else’s. Some of us forgot we were Jews. Alexandria was our mirage—in the desert, we dreamed awhile longer.
In the end, Egyptian nationalism drove us all away. Today, religious intolerance wants to finish the job for everyone who remains, not just Jews. Copts—Christians who are thought to be among the most direct descendants of the ancient Egyptians—and Westernized Egyptians are watching the clouds darken around the country. Will Egypt drown again? In 1981, the assassination of President Anwar el-Sadat, in recent years the killings of tourists and Egyptian intellectuals, and in October 1995 the stabbing of the writer and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz—are these the new plagues? Must I worry and remember for Egypt as well now?
Passover is the night for it For on that night all Jews remember the night when Jewish memory began. That night each one of us thinks back to that private Egypt we each carry with us wherever we are. We may not always know what to remember, but we know we must remember.
In my case, I remember a city called Alexandria, a city as remote to me now as Egypt is to my American friends who will celebrate Passover, a city that was never mine, that no longer exists as I knew it, but that rushes into the room each time they open the door for Elijah to remind me that I will never say, Next year in Jerusalem, in Alexandria again.
A Late Lunch
My father comes fifteen minutes early. I arrive forty minutes late. He says he doesn’t mind waiting. He always has something to read. I can see him sitting quietly behind the large window inside the Museum of Modern Art’s lobby, seemingly unaware of
the crowd of tourists milling around the gift shop and the information desk. I rush out of the taxicab with my five-year-old son, Alex. It’s raining. I’ll blame the rain, I think.
We’re barely in time for a late lunch. We wait in line at the cafeteria and decide to share the same tray. My father likes the chili here; I order some, too; Alex doesn’t know what he wants, so we pick up a fruit platter and a handful of bread sticks. We argue over who is to pay. My father relents and offers to find a table while I wait in the cashier’s line. He reminds me not to forget his coffee. I nod and watch his small figure dart into the dining hall. He stops, scans the crowd once more, then scurries toward an empty table by the window at the far corner and proceeds to lay our raincoats down on the chairs.
He is pleased with himself. Our corner overlooks the gleaming wet patio, which on rainy days always reminds me of Alexandria. The storm patters on the large glass pane. It feels snug inside I look at him again and know he has thought of Alexandria, too.
And as I watch him slowly scoop up the first spoonful of chili, followed by a piece of bread, which he always butters with the scrupulous devotion of men who know the good things in life, I catch a fugitive look on his face that seems to ask, “What’s the matter, why aren’t you eating?” I shrug, as if alleging a stray thought. I look down at my food and look up again, realizing that I, too, am happy today—happy to be with him, to see him with my son, to know, as I catch him avoiding my eyes, that what matters to me now is not his love but his willingness to be loved, to come because I called.
We’re interrupted by the apparition of two women advancing slowly to a table nearby. He stares at them. “I like to come here …” he begins. I am reminded of how thoroughly and desperately he likes women! “There are days when every woman is beautiful,” he says, as though speaking of fruits that ripen everywhere on the same day. I know he wants to talk about women. As always, I steer the conversation away and ask about my mother instead. “What’s there to say?” he replies. “Your mother …”