André Aciman - Out of Egypt - A Memoir

Weeks before the first battle of El Alamein, the matriarch decided to put into effect an old family expedient. She summoned all members of her family to stay in her large apartment for as long as the situation warranted. None declined the offer, and they came, like Noah’s beasts, in twos and fours, some from Cairo and Port Said, and some from as far as Khartoum, where they would have been safer than in Alexandria. Mattresses were laid out side by side on the floor, extra leaves were added to the dining room table, and two more cooks were hired, one of whom raised doves and chickens in the event of a food shortage. A sheep and two ewes were secretly brought in under cover of night and tied upstairs on the terrace next to the makeshift coop.

During the day, family members would leave and tend to business. Then all would return for lunch, and during those long summer afternoons, some of the men would sit around the dining room table naming their worst fears while the children napped and the women mended and knitted things in other rooms. Warm clothing was particularly needed; winters in Germany were harsh, they said. At the entrance to the apartment stood a row of very small suitcases neatly stacked in a corner, some dating back to their owners’ youth in Turkey and to their school days abroad. Now, blotched and tattered by age, bearing yellowed stickers from Europe’s grand hotels, they waited meekly in the vestibule for that day when the Nazis would march into Alexandria and round up all Jewish males above eighteen, allowing each a small suitcase with bare necessaries.

Later in the afternoon some members of the family would go out, and the women might stop at the Sporting Club. But by teatime most were already home. Dinner was usually light and quick, consisting of bread, jam, fruit, cheese, chocolate, and homemade yogurt, reflecting Aunt Elsa’s tight management of family finances, Uncle Vili’s spartan dietary norms, and my great-grandmother’s humble origins. After dinner, coffee would be brought out and everyone would crowd into the living room to listen to the radio. Sometimes they listened to the BBC, other times to the Italian stations; the reports were always confusing.

“All I know is that the Germans need Suez. Therefore, they must attack,” Vili maintained.

“Yes, but can we stop them?”

“Only for the short term. Long term, who knows? General Montgomery may be a genius, but Rommel is Rommel,” Uncle Vili decreed.

“Then what shall we do?” asked Aunt Marta, always ready to break into hysterics.

“Do? There is nothing we can do.”

“What do you mean there is nothing we can do? We can escape.”

“Escape where?” asked Esther turning red.

“Escape. I don’t know. Escape!”

“But where?” continued her sister. “To Greece? They’ve already taken Greece. To Turkey? We’ve just barely gotten out of there. To Italy? They’d throw us into jail. To Libya? The Germans are there already. Don’t you see that once they take Suez, it’ll all be finished?”

“What do you mean, ‘finished’? So you do think that they’ll win?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Vili sighed.

“Just come out and say it. They’ll win and then they’ll come and take us all away.”

Vili did not answer.

“How about going to Madagascar, then?” offered Aunt Marta.

“Madagascar! Please, Marta, do me a favor!” interjected Uncle Isaac.

“Or South Africa. Or India. What’s wrong with just keeping one step ahead of them. Maybe they’ll lose.”

There was a moment’s pause.

“They won’t lose,” said Aunt Flora finally.

“Since you’re so quick to talk, Flora, why haven’t you already left, then,” asked Marta, almost seething with contempt. “Why are you still here?”

“You forget that I’ve already left one place.”

Aunt Flora drew deeply on her cigarette, thought awhile, and then exhaled with a dreamy, wistful air, leaning toward the tea table from the corner of the sofa where she was sitting, and stubbed out her cigarette. Everyone had turned to her, the women and the men always wondering why she habitually wore black when green was what matched her eyes best. “I don’t know,” she added, still gazing at her hand, which continued slow, stubbing motions long after she had put out her cigarette. “I don’t know,” she hesitated. “There’s nowhere to go. I’m tired of running. I’m even more tired of worrying where to run. The world isn’t big enough. And there’s not enough time. I’m sorry,” she said, turning to her brother, “I don’t want to go anywhere. I don’t even want to travel.” Silence filled the living room. “The truth is, if I believed we had a chance, I’d hide in the desert. But I don’t believe it.”

“Such pessimism, and at so young an age,” Vili broke in, assuming the condescending smile of a man who knew all there was to know about frightened women and how to placate them. “It’s not written that the Germans have to win, you know. They may lose. Their fuel supplies are terribly low, and they have overextended themselves. Let them attack Egypt, let them venture as deeply into Egypt as they want. Sand always wins in the end — remember that,” he continued, advocating the strategic restraint of Hannibal’s foe, Quintus Fabius Maximus, known to history as Cunctator, the temporizer.

“‘Sand always wins in the end.’ Really, Vili,” Aunt Flora said mockingly and walked out to the balcony, where she lit another cigarette. “Whatever does he mean?” she scoffed out loud, turning to Esther’s son, who was also smoking on the balcony.

“Sand always wins,” repeated Vili with surprised emphasis, as if it should have made perfect sense the first time. “Their invasion plans may be flawless, but we are better armed, better supplied, and we have more men. You’ll see what damage a few months of desert sand can do to Rommel’s armored cars. So, let’s not abandon hope. We’ll find a way. We’ve survived worse enemies before, we’ll outlive this one too.”

“Well said,” replied Esther, who, for all her grim realism, loved positive thinking and could never bring herself to believe that disaster was as imminent as all that. “I knew you would come up with something in the end,” she said, eyeing her silent husband with that scornful, doubtful look that all members of her family reserved for their spouses during family gatherings.

“As long as we have courage and stand together and don’t panic and don’t listen to idle rumors floating between seamstress this and hairdresser that, sisters ,” he emphasized, “we’ll pull through this one as well.” He declaimed this exhortation in the only style he knew: by borrowing from Churchill and Mussolini.

“So we wait, in other words,” concluded Marta.

“So we wait.”

And there it was, poised in midair, hovering in the wings like a pianist cracking his knuckles before making a long-awaited appearance, or like an actor clearing his throat as he walks onto the stage. It was ushered in by the confident glint in his eye, the arching of his back, and that all-too-familiar quiver in his voice as it rose and reached the perfect pitch: “We’ve waited things out before, we’ll wait this one out as well. After all, each of us here is a five-thousand-year-old Jew— are we or aren’t we? ”

The mood in the room livened, and Vili, who had a good touch of demagoguery in him, turned to Flora and asked her to play something by Goldberg or Brandenburg, he couldn’t remember which.

“You mean Bach,” said Flora, walking up to the piano.

“Bach, Offenbach, c’est tout la même chose, it’s all the same. Todos Lechli, all of them Ashkenazi,” he muttered. Only Esther heard him say that. She immediately turned and grimaced a severe shush, “She understands!” But Vili was unmoved. “There is only one thing she understands, and all the men in this room know what it is.”