André Aciman - Out of Egypt - A Memoir

Fearing the Princess’s resentment, the Saint resolved to conceal all of my visits from her neighbor across the street. Whenever she met the Princess, she never failed to ask after me, to let it seem she seldom saw me — all of it exquisitely Byzantine but quite pointless, as it would never have occurred to the Princess that she was not the more favored of the two.

Since the Princess was so punctilious in her daily schedule, it was never too difficult to hide my visits from her. At two in the afternoon, having had her lunch and being fully bedecked for a summer afternoon, the Princess would shut the door behind her and leave her house, slamming the green shutters tight one after the other from the outside. She would walk to the tramway station and there either hire a carriage or take the tram two stations up to Sporting where her mother lived and where the entire family was about to have coffee, before setting out for the Sporting Club.

These were the choicest hours of her life and she never let anything interfere with them — not her health, when it failed her, nor anyone else’s. It was then, just after lunch, that my mother would take me to her mother’s.

Often, a neighbor, friends, Aunt Flora, or others would sit on the balcony outside of the Saint’s dining room, and everyone would talk quietly under the delicate shade of a striped awning, hardly a breeze fluttering, with sunlight shifting so slowly that it could be hours before everyone would pick up their chairs and move to an adjacent balcony to resume conversations filled invariably with gossip, tears, venom, and self-pity. When one of the women was moved to cry, she would do so softly, quietly, her face folded into her chest, holding a crumpled handkerchief against her mouth, not because she was ashamed of crying in front of the others, but so as not to wake up Monsieur Jacques, who did not like having his naps interrupted by women whom he lumped together dismissively in the category of sales comediennes, sobbing or no sobbing.

Thus the summer hours would linger, and the Sudanese boy servant, who had taken forever to bring out the rainbow assortment of sherbets, seemed to take yet another eternity to come back to clear the sticky dishes from the balcony. And even then, there were still so many more of these afternoon hours before dusk set in that, in Aunt Flora’s words, Egypt had the longest hours in the world.

“How time passes,” my grandmother would say in one of her unworried moments, thinking that this is how she wanted to end her days, with her friends, her family, her home, her piano, whiling away the hours in the peaceful glow of the noonday sun. This is what she meant by preparing herself for a sound old age, une bonne vieillesse . In her case, une bonne vieillesse did not just mean healthy, vigorous old age, free of ailments and worldly cares, with plenty of time to put her things in order and never ask anyone for anything; it had also come to mean the sort of old age that allows one to be taken by a friendly hand and, preferably in mid-sleep, ferried across to the other side , having been spared both the shame and indignity of dying.

“There she is,” one of the four or five women on the balcony would finally interrupt as soon as they noticed the Princess turning the corner of Rue Memphis and heading home. “Already six o’clock!” someone would exclaim. Instinctively, the Saint would tell me to go inside. “How are you today, madame?” she would shout, her voice flying from her balcony, eager as she always was to be the first to greet anyone — a habit that invariably left you feeling remiss by comparison. For couched in the joy that lit up her face whenever she saw you on the street was the mild, unspoken reproof that your tardiness in seeing her either betrayed a desire to avoid speaking to her or that, if she always noticed you first, it was only because she thought of you more often than you did of her.

This time she greeted her neighbor with exceptional zeal, precisely because, with me in the house, she had every reason to avoid greeting her. She had stood up too swiftly, her flustered expression belying her nonchalant pose against the banister. “Ah, I didn’t see you, Madame Adèle,” said the Princess, stopping exactly under the balcony. From within the living room, through the space between the open French window frame and the door jamb, I spied her familiar handbag and folded fan, watched her raise an awkward hand to block out the sun from her face. “And what are you doing later?” asked the Princess. “Me? Nothing. I was thinking of buying some cloth — my tailor is coming in a few days — but with this heat, I doubt I’ll ever go now.” “If you wish, I can walk with you.” “I don’t know, perhaps another time.” They said goodbye.

“She always fights with her husband,” whispered the Saint to one of her guests. “You should hear the horrible things they say to each other at night.”

Then she would change her mind, and still confused and dazed in her thinking, would shout out to the Princess, “ Attendez , wait,” from the top of her balcony after the other had already crossed the street and was about to open the wrought-iron gate to her garden. “Maybe I will buy cloth after all. There are so many receptions this fall, and my clothes are so old, Madame Esther,” she would lament, hinting for the nth time that she had not yet been invited to the Princess’s mother’s centennial ball that was to take place early that autumn.

“Do you want me to come upstairs, then?”

“No, no, I’ll be down in a jiffy.” Then, turning to my mother, she would say, “Wait until we’re gone before leaving.”

Five minutes later, the two mazmazelles could be seen hobbling down the street toward the Camp de César station, one with an unusually wide-rimmed hat, the other carrying a folded fan in one hand, her handbag and a white glove in the other, chattering away in the language that had brought them together and which, despite their repeated reminders to themselves and everyone else in the world that they had absolutely nothing else in common, despite their rivalry, their barbs, their petty distrust of one another, would always rescue a friendship that remained close until the very, very end.

The Saint’s conversation was mostly plaintive, with a repertory of unflagging complaints: her health, her son, those daily reminders of unrest and turmoil in Egypt, the servants, who robbed her down to the last tablespoon of sugar, and her daughter, my mother, whose deafness had robbed her of the best years of her life. Since she was always scattered and vague in her speech, once the mood for complaining had set in, she would digress from one woe to another, weaving a never-ending yarn filled with subplots in which the principal villains were her ailments, heartaches, and humiliations, with herself cast in the role of the hapless victim fending off adversities as best she could, a medieval martyr tied to a post surrounded by advancing dragons — all of it leading up to the gallstones that would drive her out of bed at night with never a soul to complain to except the wind on her balcony, which was where she sat all night, staring at an emptied Rue Memphis, heeding the tick of the pendulum in the hallway with its occasional, subdued gong announcing, as she always feared it might, that it was still very early, and that the hours would crawl into dawn before she heard the quiet, welcome steps of Mohammed coming in through the service door. For now, there was just the stillness and the tireless caterwauling, rising and subsiding in waves, as glinting cats’ eyes flitted about in the dark, crossing Rue Memphis, turning toward her balcony with defiance and suspicion, followed by a limping chienne whom everyone feared. “My nights,” she called them.