When my uncle said it was time to leave, Signor Ugo and his wife insisted we stay longer, which we didâfor another five minutesâafter which my uncle repeated that we really had to leave, though without standing up this time, knowing he would yield to their inducements once again. At his third reminder, however, they too stood up and gradually walked us to the back gate by way of their huge patio. On our way through a narrow corridor toward the French windows, I
caught sight of rows upon rows of empty Elmas cigarette boxes lining the entire wall. There must have been thousands of cigarette packages there. Signor Ugo saw me staring at them. “Sometimes an idea pops into my head. And I immediately jot it down on the back of my pack of cigarettes.” He claimed he still remembered exactly where to find each idea, which is why everyone in the house was under strict orders never to touch, move, or even think of dusting what, to most, must have looked like a cemetery of stray thoughts.
“The hooligans can take anything they please, but these, never.”
His empty packs were eventually confiscated and examined by the secret police, and never returned.
On our way out, seeing that Signora da Montefeltro had forgotten, I reminded her that she had promised me some chocolates.
“Oh, what an absentminded fool I am,” she said as she hurried back into the room.
“But that's appalling behavior,” my uncle scolded. “Whoever taught you manners, Arabs? I've never heard of such a thing, never. I'm never taking you anywhere.
“That was humiliating,” he kept repeating as we started to walk away from the Montefeltro house, the blessed pair waving at us with exaggerated, Old World, cruise-ship hand motions.
“Humiliating,” he repeated, stabbing his walking stick into the pavement each time he said the word. He sulked all the way downhill, while I clutched the small chocolates in my hand, not daring to open a single one until his mood had changed. Silently, my uncle and I turned as we had been advised to do by Signora da Montefeltro once we had reached the bottom of the hill. Uncle Isaac had wanted to visit another family, but on our way we ran into two Egyptian youths who sprung out in front of us. “Are you Jews?” one of them sneered,
holding a stone in his hand. My uncle, whose sister Elsa had been asked that same question during the Second World War by two policemen in Paris, remembered her reaction. He slapped one of the youths hard on the chest and asked him how dare he think he was Jewish. “Do I look Jewish?” he yelled.
“We thought you were dirty Jews.”
“Look for dirty Jews elsewhere, then.”
Uncle Isaac led me away in silence. “
Cammina,
keep walking,” he told me in Italian. “I don't want to turn around,” he said when we were about fifteen paces away, “but you turn, and tell me what they are doing.” I turned around. Both were standing still, as though beginning to doubt my uncle's words.
We took a shortcut through a back alley and headed to the tramway station as fast as we could. “Don't worry, we'll be safe,” said my uncle as we began to walk faster and faster. We sighted a carriage waiting and hailed it at the top of our lungs.
“Sharia Tiba,” said my uncle in Arabic once we sat down, Rue Thèbes. He haggled over the price; the coachman relented. He gave his horse a slight lash on the mane, and the carriage pulled off. As we began to circle back toward Sporting, passing villa after villa, passing even the Montefeltros' garden with its counterfeit caryatids and its broken fountain spout that had never worked, not a sound could be heard on the empty road except a faraway dog and the rickety squeaks of our carriage, whose horse, for some unknown reason, knew Brahms's horn trio well enough to let his leisurely footfalls stamp to the rhythm of the music.
Suddenly, far, far beyond Bulkley, from an angle I had never seen before, rose all of Sporting, with its distant polo fields and its endless row of palm trees studding the giant racetrack. The air was thick with the gathering rainstorm, and the buildings and churches lining the tramway tracks as far as the eye could see sat under a darkening sky flecked with scattered
orange stains. We heard the familiar gong of the Ambroise Rally church strike five o'clock in imitation Big Ben chimes.
“We'll be in time for tea,” Uncle Isaac said. Then rememberingâ“About these chocolates, are you going to hoard them all to yourself?”
I handed him one in a green wrapping. I didn't like pistachio.
When we arrived, tea was just about to be served.
Latifa had fainted again.
“Each time the siren sounds, she turns as white as aspirin. It scares her,” explained my grandmother.
“Scared of the alarm, scared of men, scared of anyone who raises his voice at her. What isn't she scared of?” grumbled Uncle Isaac.
My grandmother told how she had brought her to: a rag was placed on top of a flame long enough to stink of smoke and then was brought to her nostrils.
Everyone was gathered in the living room, while Abdou and Latifa brought tea and light pastries. “Latifa, I heard you broke the floor,” jeered Uncle Isaac when Latifa brought in a second round of pastries. Latifa smiled modestly and deposited a large platter on the tea table. My great-grandmother called Latifa back. She liked her ginger biscuits served on a separate dish. Our Abdou had mistakenly lumped them with other petits fours.
I noticed that the windowpanes in the entrance and the living room had been coated with a cobalt-blue dye. Abdou and Ibrahim and two other servants were in the process of lining the remaining shutters in the house with large strips of thick blue paper which they thumbtacked to the wooden sash frames. They had already painted everyone's headlight covers with the blue dye.
Aunt Elsa rang the buzzer and Latifa's rounded form appeared
behind the glass-paneled door. She walked in and softly began clearing the china. So tea was over, I thought, already missing the spell of that moment when my uncle and I had opened the door to find everyone already seated in the living room, the sun just barely set over the horizon, and everyone hurrying to make room for us. Sitting quietly next to my parents, my cousins, my aunts and uncles, everyone's thighs cozily glued to mine, I knew that even if I disliked almost everyone in this room, it was good to be with them, good to hear the ritual hubbub of tea, good to look and be looked at.
And then, after everything had been cleared away, and Uncle Isaac had poured out the first scotch of the evening, while his sister Elsa, who held all the keys in the house, had opened the small Chinese cabinet in which peanuts were hidden away from the children, suddenly, punctually, as though this were why we were gathered in the living room all along, we heard it, rising above Sporting, over the city, wailing and warning, as voices immediately started downstairsâ
“Taffi al-nur! Taffi al-nur!”
Someone would stand up, walk over to the corner of the room, and peek through the curtain, while someone else, just as swiftly, would turn off the lights. A deep, premature night filled the room. When I looked out the window, I saw all the lights of Sporting go out one by one, accentuating the sudden darkness that had settled among us.
“What I don't understand,” Aunt Marta would say in her shrill voice, “is that there hasn't been a single bomb dropped on Alexandria.”
“And what I don't understand is that you keep repeating the same thing each time there's an air raid,” my grandmother would snap.
And thus, for almost an hour, as we sat together in the dark, occasionally interrupted by an irate
“Taffi al-nur!”
rising
from within the courtyard in our building, or by my great-grandmother asking what someone in the room had just said, or by Latifa who would tiptoe her way in to retrieve some cups ever so discreetly so as not to disturb those listening to the radio, someone would always remind us that our days in Egypt were numbered, that most of us would be spending New Year's somewhere else in the world, that we would never sit together in this same room again.
For the next day, and the days after that, I would go out with aunts and cousins, sensing that what gave our days their unusual luster was less the walks we took together, or the places we visited, or the peculiar, old-fashioned games we played, or even those improvised visits that made the Saint so happy, but the strangely comforting certainty of coming back to a stuffy room full of stuffy people bound together by the need to huddle in the dark.
One evening, ten days after the beginning of the war, the porter came upstairs with a man wearing a police uniform. Apparently, someone from our apartment had been sending Morse code signals to enemy ships at night. We explained that there must be a mistake; besides, no one in our home knew the Morse code. My grandmother had Uncles Isaac and Nessim swear on their honor.
Latifa's face was white. My grandmother asked her to sit down and began fanning her head.
“Are you going to faint?” she asked.
“I don't know, I think so, maybe,” said Latifa.
“She's fainted,” whispered an exasperated Aunt Elsa, while the policeman looked around one last time and said he was sorry to have disturbed us.
My grandmother immediately called Dr. Alcabès. Minutes
later, my mother, who performed injections for everyone in the family and who, when begged, would describe the shape and condition of anyone's buttocks, administered Latifa with an injection of a certain “revitalizer” of which my great-grandmother had a large supply, jealously guarded by Aunt Elsa. Years later I found out that it had belonged to Uncle Vili and was nothing more than a shady elixir used by nearimpotent men.
“But does she need it, or does she just want the evening off to go cackle with the maids upstairs?” asked my great-grandmother.
“Take a good look at her face and tell me if she doesn't need it,” snapped my mother.
“You're sure she's not exaggerating?” the old woman persisted.
“Old miser,” my mother muttered.
Latifa hated injections and begged not to be given a shot. My mother ignored her pleas and, seeing she was resisting her with erratic kicks, had Abdou and Ibrahim hold her down as she bared her bottom. Latifa let out a violent scream, in which she invoked her mother and all her sisters to come to her rescue.
“But what on earth are you afraid of?” asked Uncle Isaac losing his temper, stomping into the cluttered maid's room as though on the point of striking her. She was lying on a makeshift bed, surrounded by ancient
karakib.
“Do you have to faint each time you hear bad news?”
“It's the pain here,” she sighed, pointing to her stomach. “It's because I worry.”
“But what do you worry about?”
She did not say. Instead she told us how a midwife in the building had punctured a hole in the side of her belly and inserted a string which she then pulled out to expel the bad things from her body.
“Egyptian sorcery! What bad
things
?” asked my uncle.
“Do I know what bad things? Bad things,” she insisted.
She blessed my mother for giving her the injection. Allah had seen her kindness. Then she got up, saying she was feeling much better already.
While some had been attending to Latifa, the others went on speaking about the most recent turn of events. Someone was confirming rumors that the British were already pulling out of Port Said. The doorbell rang. We heard Abdou's slippers trail on the marble floor all the way from the kitchen to the entrance. I heard the door close. Was it going to be the police again? I heard Aunt Flora's voice greet Abdou.
Flora would stay for dinner. She too had heard rumors that the British and French might ultimately cower before the Russian ultimatum. Yes, she too would have to think of leaving, but where to, she didn't know. Probably France, though it still wasn't clear whether German Jews would be just nationalized or also expelled, as it was rumored would happen soon to other Jews.
Everyone in the living room was speaking of France that evening, with Cousin Arnaut advocating immediate migration. An argument broke out between him and Uncle Nessim. Uncle Nessim was for staying putâ“We've had a good life here.” “Then why not go back to Turkey? You used to have a good life there too,” said his nephew.
For dinner we had a huge poached fish in mulled wine and vegetables. Hassan, the chauffeur, who was a reservist in the Egyptian navy, had caught two bluefish while patrolling the Alexandrian coastline that night and at the end of his shift had shown up in his uniform with two very large fish wrapped in newspaper. There was such dissension among the sisters on how to cook the fish that my great-grandmother had to intervene, proclaiming that they had not had a good poached
palamita
in ages. The vegetables and the fish had also produced a delicious and very thick soup, which that evening my grandmother decorated with sprigs of fennel. Even Aunt Elsa, who despite her lean years in Lourdes had never lost the touch of the
bonne vivante,
decided the occasion merited opening the good wine.
After Latifa had removed the soup dishes, Hisham came in carrying a very large fish platter, which he deposited on the buffet. By common consent, he and Latifa had divided the dining room between them, with Latifa serving the elderly women and the children, and Hisham everyone else.