All this, and more, is still inscribed in the telephone number in the back of my Greek-English Lexicon. When I said to her, “Then let me have your number,” as though it were the most casual request in the world, the way she volunteered to write it down seemed so amused, so serene, and so propitious that even today it is difficult to read in the royal blue of her handwriting a hint of what was awaiting me at MacDougal and Bleecker.
Which is where I’m standing now. An hour has passed since I walked into Caffè Reggio. Against the glistening reflection of the streetlights and other signs of an evening already wearing into night, a setting sun has just broken through the clouds to cast a hazy orange glow—the last few minutes of an afternoon that almost never was. Dusk has barely even started, the day—as people leaving a matinee are always pleased to find—is still young, dinner with the person I love most is still hours away, and this tale I have remembered after so many years has, once again, been put behind me.
And yet, as I hurry on my way to the Peacock, I am grateful beyond words that I can remember, grateful even to know that, despite the far better things life has given me many years since, the one moment I’ll never be able to live down is when a girl, whispering from across a narrow table in her mother’s kitchen, offered me a blank check to life that I, almost without thinking, turned into a rain check. Perhaps I would do no differently today. And therein lies both comfort and sorrow. To measure time by how little we change is to find how little we’ve lived; but to measure time by how much we’ve lost is to wish we hadn’t changed at all. There are ledgers that stay open all life, there are scores we’ll never repay. Staring at them is like wandering into Prospero’s island, where strange spirits speak with a forked tongue when they aren’t lying to us, but where each truth about ourselves is a tongue-twister meant to trounce everything we know. For the tempest is not just what brings us to the island. The tempest is the island. It is the insoluble knot we can’t leave behind but bring with us wherever we go, it is who we are when we are alone and no one else is looking: it is our tussle with the one person we can never outgrow but fear we’ll never become. It is, in the end, how we make sense of our lives when we know there is no sense to be made.
Also by André Aciman
Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile and Memory
Out of Egypt: A Memoir
Praise for André Aciman’s False Papers
“Aciman’s refusal to be in only one place at a time is what makes him wholly present to us. If he is fully alive anywhere, it is on the page—as a writer, in his own pages, and also as a reader, in the pages of the writers he loves. You don’t need to have lost an Alexandria to understand what he does with place and time and memory. After all, we are all exiles in a way—from our own childhoods, our own pasts, if nothing else. It is that remembered aspect of ourselves, that shadowy other life, that André Aciman’s new book so piercingly addresses.”
—Wendy Lesser, The New York Times Book Review
“This new book shows a refined sensibility, and this author’s remarkable intellectual penetration and gift for language. It is a sequel to Out of Egypt with Mr Aciman dryly, wittily, urbanely examining the various meanings of a life lived in permanent exile, thoroughly cut off from the smells and colors of the past.”
—Richard Bernstein, The New York Times
“A carefully wrought collection of very personal pieces with universal themes—home, place, deracination. This is writing (and thinking) at its finest Aciman sees all, past and present, from a substantial distance Being from neither here nor there has its advantages.”
—Michael J Agovino, Time Out New York
“Aciman, a native of Alexandria, Egypt, is an exceptional literary stylist, and this compilation of his essays is linked by the themes with which he is most at home: memory, loss, and imagination at play in the mind of the exile.”
—Talk Magazine
“Aciman is merely reminding us of what we already know deep down: Memory, in the end, is an act of imagination. Sometimes the world meets our expectations, and sometimes—not often, but on a few special occasions—we receive more than we ever imagined.”
—Jon Tribble, Chicago Tribune
“This exile has made himself a home in our imagination by articulating the impossibility of ever finding a home. Through language, he masters his frailties and ambivalences, and his mastery makes it possible for us to live with ours, too.”
–Kim Bendheim, The Forward
“Memory trumps life and existence acquires the hue of old hand-tinted photographs in this collection. Aciman makes an art of indirection. He travels, he ruefully explains, ‘not so as to experience anything at the time of my tour, but to plot the itinerary of a possible return trip. This, it occurs to me, is also how I live’ Such insights illuminate the most shadowy corners of memory and motivation.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Aciman’s prose is often characterized by exquisitely rendered pangs of homesickness. [His] elegant pieces recall the leisurely, reflective essays of Walter Benjamin and Michel Butor evoking a world that has disappeared.”
— Kirkus Reviews
FALSE PAPERS Copyright © 2000 by André Aciman All rights reserved No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N Y 10010
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[email protected] First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
eISBN 9780374707705
First eBook Edition : March 2011
The essays in this collection have appeared in Commentary, Condé Nast Traveler, Contentville, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and The Yale Review
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Aciman, André
False papers / André Aciman
p cm
ISBN 0-312-42005-6
1 Aciman, André—Journeys—Egypt 2 Jews, Egyptian—New York (State)—
New York—Travel 3 Alexandria (Egypt)—Description and travel 4 Jews—
Egypt—Alexandria—Biography I Title
F128 9 J5 A353 2000
916 2’1—dc21
00-027766
CIP
First Picador September 2001
André Aciman, False Papers
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