An obdurate middle-class idealist, Madame Tsotsou defined a successful graduate as one who befriended the hearing over the deaf, who felt less deaf than she truly was, and who experienced an instinctive revulsion toward those who knew no better than to speak with their hands, not their mouths. Her most cherished success stories were girls who had married the hearing; it was the romance of the servant girl marrying the landowner's son. But of the seven in my mother's class who married, only one had a successful marriage, and she was the only one to disappoint Madame Tsotsou by marrying a deaf boy.
A few times every week, four or five of these young women would be in for teaâto the revulsion of my grandmother, who, more than ever now, deplored the world in which I was growing up. She would sit and fidget, complaining she had to share her visits with survivors of malnutrition, amputation, and meningitis, not one of whom was worth the two cents she paid the coachman to drive her to her son's home after visiting with
her sisters. Even their conversation, when she was able to fathom it, was insufferable, since it usually devolved into slapstick, gossip, and recipes. Sometimes they began shouting and screaming at each other, made peace a few moments later, and resumed their confounded cackling with greater vigor yet, forcing her to conclude that of all the people she knew none spent more time talking than the deaf-mute.
Among my mother's friends was a young woman named Sophie who came from a patrician Greek family that had lost everything in Smyrna and now retained nothing but the vestiges of distinction in their obligatory afternoon tea where you tasted oversweetened Greek jams on a spoon. Sophie and my mother often recalled their dreadful boarding-school days when Madame Tsotsou locked them up in the dark whenever they forgot to turn off a water faucetâa frequent mishap among the deaf, who cannot hear the water running. “But look at what women I've made out of two spindly little girls who couldn't read or write, much less speak, when I got them,” Madame Tsotsou would say.
Sophie married a Greek auto mechanic, a hairy, cocksure sailor-type with greasy hair and dirty fingernails who roared about Alexandria on his motorcycle on Sundays, sporting gold bracelets, a tank-shirt, and the nymph Sophie on the backseat. Costa had the boisterous familiarity of Alexandrian Greeks and was a jack-of-all-trades dabbling in twenty more, a
sale débrouillardâ
“Impresario,” he would say with a tiny wink in his eyes, meaning a trader in stolen, black-market, and counterfeit goods.
The only person who took a liking to him was, of all people, the Princess.
“He's a true savage, but a heart of gold,” she would say. Unbeknownst to my mother, Costa would often visit my grandmother and bring her presents, ranging from caviar and
champagne to perfumes and foie gras hijacked from Beirut. In return, he asked nothing but the ear of an old woman who, he said, was like a mother to him and understood him far better than did his Sophie, who, during mating seasonâas he called itâcould think of nothing better than to squeeze the pimples on his forehead. “Can a man live that way, madame? Tell me, can he?” he would ask, exasperation bubbling in his voice.
“What can you do? These are unfortunate women.”
“But I can't anymore.” He would get worked up, choke a moment, and suddenly break down sobbing.
“Now, don't get angry like this, Costa,” my grandmother would say, pretending to mistake his weeping for anger so as not to embarrass him.
“Angry? These are not tears of anger. These are tears of shame, tears of stupidity, mine, hers, and everyone who watched this happen to us and said nothing.”
“Patience, Costa, patience,” my grandmother would urge.
“And what for?” he would shout, truly furious this time. “I am Costa, and Costa is a man, and Costa needs passion, fire, spices, madame, not thisâ” he said pointing to a pimple on his forehead. “I don't like speaking in front of children,” he went on, looking my way, “but she has shown me the passion of a tapewormâand Costa, madame, needs a tigress.”
My grandmother had met Costa one evening just as he was arriving to pick up his wife, Sophie. Since the two of them were the only hearing people in the room, they began to talk and soon discovered that both were born in Constantinople. The man showed all the requisite deference a sailor is expected to extend to a princess from Constantinople, and she found in the garrulous
palikar
âwarriorâa gentle soul yearning for kindness.
When she heard that he owned a motorcycle, and that he
ran errands in Ibrahimieh every morning, I saw my grandmother give a start and say “Achhh, Kyrio Costaâ” and beg him to bring the boy to her house every other morning. The man consented easily.
“Kyrio Costa, your soul is blessed in heaven.”
He blushed.
“No, madame,” he said seriously, “Costa has done many bad things in this life, and for some, madame, you don't even know their name. Costa will pay.”
Thus every other morning, Monsieur Costa would arrive with the loudest motorcycle in the world. He would whistle with both fingers in his mouth, and as soon as I was saddled on his backseat, would order me to hold him tight by the waist and off we went, roaring through Sidi-Gaber, past Cleopatra, then Grand Sporting, racing with the tram, beating the tram, leaving the tram behind us, finally reaching Petit Sporting, and slowing down toward Ibrahimieh, all of it in a matter of minutes as he kept taking sharp and ever more intricate turns, veering left then rightâgrowling “Hold tight,
pedimou
”âand leaning the bike as low as he could, his boot grazing the asphalt, always congratulating himself with “What reflexes, Costa, what reflexes!” speeding all the way out to Camp de César, almost to Chatby, and then turning back again toward Ibrahimiehâ“for the fun of it”âand slowing the vehicle to the equivalent of a regal canter down Rue Memphis, finally depositing me in front of my grandmother's house, where she waited for me with a piece of fresh fruit already peeled and ready to be eaten as soon as I hopped off the motorcycle.
An hour into my visit, my grandmother would never fail to observe that I already looked much better. “Look, he's laughing,” she would tell her husband as we sat around a table in the garden. “Isn't it true that he only laughs when he's with me?”
“Come, we'll take a walk around the garden,” my grandfather
would say, always eager to be away from his wife, taking me into the arbor where birds sang and where the air was thick with the parched, dry, cloying scent of rosemary and sweet, overgrown rhododendron. Away from my grandmother's gaze, he would finally reach into his pocket and produce a present: a keychain, or a pen, or a penknifeâour secret, he'd say, for she always disapproved of the things he gave me, claiming they were dangerous or unseemly. “Soon I'll have to teach you billiards,” he said one day, producing three smooth ivory balls from his striped bathrobe pocket. Then, using his cane and a billiard cue, we would pluck guavas from one of the orchard trees.
At around half past ten, my grandmother and I would hire a carriage and ride all the way to Stanley Beach, where her siblings and her mother had a summer cabin. Sitting next to her in the carriage, I would make out the wholesome, soothing fragrance of Madame Anèle's almond creams, tea rose ointments, and cucumber lotionsâall three forever laced into the memory of those sunny mornings. Sometimes we took the tram at Ibrahimieh, stopped at Rouchdy, and only then hired a carriage. The carriage would struggle uphill along a quiet, tree-lined avenue, taking forever to reach the top, as my grandmother went on with her chilling tales of the Armenian massacre and of the Armenian priest whose hand was cut off as he struggled against three janissaries who then lopped off his head along with that of a grocer who had come to the old man's rescueâwhen, suddenly, without warning, greeted by the rising clamor coming from the beaches, we knew we had reached the top of the hill and there, shimmering right before us in a dazzling expanse of turquoise and aquamarine, was the sea, extending from as far back as Glymenopoulos to the mighty fortress of Kait Bey.
“Ah, but the water is wonderful today,” she would exclaim,
tapping my thigh with excitement, for until coming face-to-face with the sea, you never really knew whether the water was going to be rough or quiet.
The cabins at Stanley were located on three tiers of boardwalks; each had its own porch, or vestibule, resembling more an opera loge than a changing area, and was separated from adjacent porches by lateral cloth dividers, while overhead, a long white awning fastened to the parapet along the common boardwalk was always fluttering, so that on crowded, sunny days, all three boardwalks were almost entirely hidden from view, beaming white in the sunlight, squeaking and fluttering like sails on a Spanish galleon.
At the beach, my great-aunts were persuaded they still lived in fin-de-siècle Alexandria, far from the world of Smouha, of querulous maids and crippled manservants. The women never put on bathing suits but wore white or cream-colored short-sleeve linen or cotton voile dresses with plenty of lace, and large, ornate hats, which they held in place with their hands whenever a breeze came up. On the beach, all four sisters, their mother, friends, and Madame Victoria Coutzeris, whose villa overlooked the bay itself, would sit on multicolored, striped folding chairs, forever repeating how important it was to avoid the sun, their swollen feet crammed into tight shoes, and each heaving a happy sigh whenever the wind stirred the large, striped umbrella. Every morning, the lifeguards would put up their umbrella in their favorite spot some distance from the water. Some of these lifeguards knew how to fasten awnings particularly well and were highly regarded, with the sort of reverence the landed gentry will extend to an otherwise insignificant gatekeeper who happens to have a special talent for trapping rodents. Others, however, were not so skillful and were shooed away as soon as they offered to help.
I was never allowed to drink or eat anything, certainly not
Coca-Cola or those hazelnut biscuits sold by grubby vendors along the sand. My grandmother always insisted that nothing agreed with the sea more than fruit, and plenty of it, which is why she brought a thermos filled with lemonade. To my great joy, however, I found out that ice cream could be had simply by sneaking up one flight of stairs to the upper deck, where Aunt Flora had her cabin. There I would usually find her reading in her reclining beach chair, ask her for ice cream, and return, rather pleased with myself, to confront my angry grandmother, who stood waiting, like God after Adam had eaten the forbidden fruit.
Once, by chance, I found Aunt Flora sitting quietly next to another woman whom I did not immediately recognize, although she seemed quite interested in me. The surprise and sudden joy were such that I immediately forgot everything that had stood between us that dayâMonsieur Costa, my grandfather, the dizzying rides through the nameless side alleys of Alexandria, the Armenian massacre, the billiard balls, even my grandmother's joyful tap on my thigh as soon as we had sighted Stanley that dayâeverything vanished when I heard the woman's voice. Minutes later, she reminded me that my clothes were still downstairs in my great-grandmother's cabin and that we would have to tell them I was going home with her instead.
My mother waited for me to finish my ice cream, then took me by the hand, went downstairs to greet her in-laws, and, with a tone of voice that admitted no discussion, said she was taking me home.
“But I had planned to take him to visit Albert at the billiard hall. We always stop there, don't we?” the Princess asked, trying to enlist my help.
I nodded.
“No, he's coming with me,” said my mother.
I thanked my good fortune that my mother had spared me yet another confrontation. But when my grandmother was drying me off before dressing me in clean clothes, the silence between us was intolerable. I wished I had not been so visibly eager to leave her, for the old lady seemed on the verge of tears, and as she bent down to buckle my sandals, which must have been difficult for her, I knew that, given the chance to do it again, I would have forfeited the mango ice cream altogether and not run into my mother. I kissed her on the cheek, saying something I seldom said to her. I told her I loved her. But I said it in Arabic.
On our way home, my mother hailed a carriage along the Corniche, and Flora and I got in. “No, wait,” she told us, and with hand signals and her poor knowledge of Arabic asked the man how much he would charge to take us to Rue Memphis. “Too much, the man's a thief, come down,” she ordered, whereupon both Flora and I went through the motions of getting off. The man relented, which meant that the haggling was about to commence, and soon she was raising her voice. Then she began to shriek, which we knew would subdue him. People were looking in our direction. And suddenly I understood, as I watched her gesture the price she was not going to budge from, that she was yelling not because the driver was being too stubbornâeveryone knew he would relent in the endânor even because she was exploding with the rage she had had to suppress in seeing how her role as mother was being so cunningly undermined by my grandmother. She was screaming because she already knew that with a few oblique hints of outrage whispered in my father's ear later that day, my grandmother would succeed in painting her as spiteful and vindictive toward a benevolent old woman whose sole wish in life was to devote the few years left her to grooming the son of an overly suspicious Arab Jewish ingrate. She would never
be able to counter such allegationsâfor to do so she would have to crawl under and around her mother-in-law's verbal barbed wire. And this, Madame Tsotsou's old pupil had not been taught to do. She could sniff out guile with the cunning of a fox, but she could not avoid the snares of sophistry. Arguments turned against her, because she knew how to shout, not how to argue, because, in the kingdom of words, she would always remain a stranger. Hers was the frustration which an innocent man feels when confronted by a gifted prosecutor.