André Aciman - Out of Egypt - A Memoir

“You sound like a typical parvenu juif ,” jeered his daughter.

“And what else are we if not des parvenus juifs? ”

After lunch he insisted we have coffee alone together, “ Lui et moi seuls ,” he told the others. “Come,” he said, pointing to the kitchen, where he proceeded to brew Turkish coffee. “You see, all you need is a little pot like this, preferably made of brass, but aluminum will do. I had this one made in Manchester. By a Greek. But do you think our antiques dealer is smart enough to figure out that’s all he had to do? Never! That’s why I go to him every once in a while. As long as he remains stupid and as long as I am lucid enough to know it, then things are well with me. Do you see?” he winked at me, complicity beaming in his eyes. I nodded but missed the point. It occurred to me that I would never have lasted a day in the world of his youth. “De l’audace, toujours de l’audace,” he replied. “You see, in life, it’s not only knowing what you want that matters. That’s easy. It’s knowing how to want.” I was not sure I understood this either, but again I nodded. “But I was lucky. I had a good life,” he went on. “Life gives us all a few trump cards when we’re born, and then that’s it. By the time I was twenty I had already wasted all of mine. Life gave them back to me many times. Not many can claim the same.”

When coffee was ready, he took out two demitasses and proceeded to pour, holding the pot precariously high above the cups and aiming the coffee into them, the way good Arab servants did, to allow the brew to cool somewhat as it was being poured. “May God rest his soul, but no one made coffee like your grandfather,” he said. “A snake, with a cleft tongue, who bubbled like milk when he lost his temper and then cut you to pieces, but still, the best brewer of coffee in the world. Come.” He indicated the drawing room as we passed through a different corridor. The room was filled with antiques and Persian rugs. On the glistening old parquet sat a band of afternoon sunlight in which an overfed cat had fallen asleep, its legs stretched out awkwardly.

“See this smoking jacket?” he said. “Feel it.” I leaned over to him and touched the fabric on the shawl collar. “At least forty years old,” he said, looking terribly amused. “Guess whose?” “Your father’s,” I said. “Don’t be stupid,” he snapped, practically losing his temper. “My father died eons ago.” “One of your brothers’?” “No, no, no.” “I don’t know then.” “I’ll give you a hint. Guess who made the cloth? Best fabric in the world.” It took me a while. “My father?” I asked. “Right. Woven in the basement of his factory in Ibrahimieh during the war. This jacket belonged to your grandfather Albert.”

“He gave it to you?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes.”

“On what occasion?”

“After he died. It was Esther who gave it to me. Where would you ever find such fine wool nowadays? It’s one of the few things I treasure,” he joked. “Here, feel again!” he ordered.

Ever the master salesman, I thought. “Let me explain,” he said, his face uncomfortably nearing mine. He looked around to see no one was listening.

“Do you remember Flora, la belle romaine, as we used to call her?”

It was Flora who had taught me all about the pianist Schnabel, I replied.

“That’s right. During the war, in the days of Alamein, we all stayed in your great-grandmother’s house. You have no idea how crowded it was. Well, one day, in walks this dark-haired, beautiful, but painfully beautiful woman who plays the piano every evening, who smokes all the time, who looks a trifle worn but sexier for it, and who flirts with all of us, though you’d swear she didn’t know it. In short, we were all madly in love with her. Madly.”

“What does that have to do with my grandfather?”

“Wait, let me finish !” He had almost lost his temper. “Well, the tension was such — you have to realize there were at least seven grown men in the house, not to mention younger men who were just as predatory — that every day we would start quarreling. Over nothing, and over everything. Your grandfather and I quarreled every day. Every day. Then we would make up and play backgammon. And then quarrel again. Do you play backgammon?”

“Poorly.”

“I thought so. At any rate, it becomes quite evident that Flora has singled me out. Of course, I make no passes, I have to behave — in my mother’s house and all that, and my wife snooping about, you understand. I have to move very slowly. So I finally say to your grandfather, ‘Albert, this woman wants me. What should I do?’ He says, ‘Do you want her?’ And I say, ‘Don’t you?’ He does not reply. So I say to him, ‘Albert, you’ve got to help me.’ That cunning wretch of your grandfather smiles awhile and finally says, ‘I’ll see.’ Everyone else knew — Frau Kohn, your grandmother, Isaac. Everyone, except me. I found out about them years later, when Flora came to visit us here and saw me wearing his smoking jacket. She recognized it immediately.”

“Yes?” I asked.

“Don’t you get it?”

I shook my head.

“She probably had it made for him as a present. I felt like a complete dolt. The only woman I wanted and never slept with. Being jealous like this after forty years, what a dolt!” A moment of silence elapsed. I was tempted to tell him it was not my grandfather but my father who had loved Flora on those summer nights of 1942, and that the jacket was his, not his father’s. My grandfather had simply “inherited” it from his son, the way he “inherited” everything my father stopped wearing. But I said nothing, for I wanted my grandfather to win one bout against Vili. “You should have seen us back then, though,” he went on, “everyone asking her to play the piano, everyone drinking more cognac than was usual, waiting for all the others to tire and go to sleep. Frankly, staying up so late was never my style.”

I watched him relish his revelation as he picked up both our emptied demitasses. “Come,” he finally said. And before I knew it, he had taken me to the garden, where his grandson and his wife were reading the local newspaper.

“Have you had your little chat?” asked his wife.

“We have indeed,” replied Vili.

A small incident occurred over dinner. A couple of Gypsies were observed through the dining room window roaming the grounds. Without hesitating, Vili went into the drawing room, got his shotgun, and fired two shots in the air, rousing the dogs and the horses. “Have you gone mad,” his daughter shouted, jumping up and trying to grab the gun from his hands. “They could kill you if they wanted to.”

“Let them try. Do you think I’m afraid of them? I’d go after every one of them—” And then it came, as a farewell present, as a memento of my visit to England, a final concession on his part to the visitor who had come to hear the words spoken from his own lips. “Me afraid of them? Me frightened? What do you think? Am I or aren’t I?”

That night, he came into my room to say farewell to me. “I insist on adieu,” he said, “because at my age one never knows.” He stared at my things, looked over my books, picked one up with something like mock scorn on his face. “Do people still read this?” “More than ever,” I replied. “Another Jew,” he said. “No, a half-Jew,” I said. “No. When your mother is Jewish you are never half-Jewish.”

Perhaps it was the subject, or maybe this was why he had come upstairs to my room, but he asked about his mother. I told him what I could remember. No, there had been no pain. Yes, she was lucid until the very end. Yes, she still laughed and still made those short, lapidary pronouncements that made one squirm like a trampled worm. Yes, she understood she was dying. And so on, until I told him that she couldn’t see well because she had developed cataracts, and that a light, yellowish film had veiled her eyes. I had said it in passing, not thinking that cataracts were a particularly serious impairment.