André Aciman - Out of Egypt - A Memoir

“So she couldn’t see then,” he said. “She couldn’t see,” he repeated, as though trying to scan in the words and the syllables themselves some secret meaning, some revealed purpose behind the cruelty of fate and the vulnerability of old age. “So she couldn’t see,” he said like someone gripped by a sorrow so powerful that all he can do is repeat the words until they finally bring tears to his eyes.

“You won’t understand this,” he said, “but I think of her sometimes. Old, lonely, everyone gone, and, now that you mention it, blind, dying practically all by herself in Egypt. And I think of how I could have made things better for her had I not misspent my life trying out all these flimsy schemes of mine. But then, that is how life is. Now that I have the house, I haven’t got the mother. And yet I wanted this house for her. Sometimes, I think of her simply as mother, the way children do when they need something only mothers have. You would think because I’m old enough to be a great-grandfather that I couldn’t possibly think of my mother in those terms. Well, I still do. Strange, isn’t it?” He smiled, placed the volume back on my nightstand, and, perhaps meaning to surprise me, began quoting in French the long, sinuous prose of the first few sentences.

“Good night, Herr Doktor ,” he said abruptly.

“Good night, Dr. Spingarn,” I replied, resigned never to ask how he had come to know this passage by Proust.

Half an hour later, on my way to the shower, I was stopped by my cousin and his wife. “If you’re quiet you won’t regret this.” They explained that every evening, between ten and eleven o’clock, Vili would listen to the French-language shortwave broadcast from Israel. I expressed surprise. “It’s always the last thing he does. Then he turns off the lights and goes to sleep.” “So?” I asked. “So, you’ll see.” For a while we waited outside his door. “It’s the same thing every night,” she whispered. Were they going to knock and ask to be admitted, or were they simply going to barge in on him? “You’ll see.” Finally, we heard the Israeli national anthem. It was followed by various signing-off signals. “It’s about over now,” my cousin warned. Something gave a click in his room. Vili had just turned off his radio. Then we heard the sound of bedsprings yielding under his weight, followed by a rustle of sheets, and suddenly the band of light went out from under the door. All was quiet for a second. And then I thought I heard it, a faint, reedy, muted buzzing, emanating from within the small room like a vapor of sound working its way out the keyhole, under the door, through the cracks in the lintel, filling the dark silence where we three stood now like incense and premonition; an eerie garble of familiar words murmured to a cadence I too had learned long ago, whispered as if in stealth and shame.

“He’ll deny it if you ask him,” said my cousin.

To the two ladies who were to become my grandmothers one day and who met for the first time in ’44 in a small marketplace in Alexandria eyeing a suspiciously old catch of red mullet, this was indeed a very small, very strange world. Past their first, shy, tentative remarks spoken from behind thick lipstick and respectable hat-veils, something like intense sunshine erupted on their speech and suddenly the two strangers, who had known each other by sight for more than a decade without ever daring to utter a word to the other, began to twitter away with the heady good cheer of old classmates picking up exactly where they left off fifty years earlier. Each was accompanied by a boy servant whom neither trusted or talked to but whose job it was to trail behind his wise old mazmazelle —all European ladies of a certain age and station were called mademoiselle or signora in Egypt — and watch her pick out the good from bad fruit, hear her haggle in the most incomprehensible Arabic, intervene if things got out of hand, and finally ferry the load from one food vendor to the next until he was sent home to start cooking lunch. Mazmazelles would not think twice of touching raw liver with their bare hands, or of fingering the gills of red mullet to prove the fish wasn’t at all fresh that day; but they never took anything from the loutish food vendor’s hand. That was the boy servant’s task. Mazmazelles were then free to do as they pleased until about one o’clock, when their husbands came home to eat and sleep.

“No mullet then,” concluded one to the other. “Such a shame, though. To think that all these years I’ve been buying bad fish and didn’t even know it,” she said sadly.

“It’s in the gills. Not the eyes. Gills must be bright red. Otherwise, don’t buy.”

“Such a shame,” repeated the meeker of the two as they made their way home. “All these years living exactly across the street from each other, and not so much as a peep for a greeting.”

“But why didn’t you ever speak to me?” insisted the one who knew everything about fish.

“I used to think you were French,” replied her meeker neighbor, implying high-society French.

“French? And whatever made you think I was French? Je suis italienne, madame ,” she added, as if that were a far greater distinction.

“As am I!”

“Yes? Are you? But we are from Leghorn.”

“But so are we! What a marvelous coincidence.” A small world indeed, they said in Ladino (which each insisted on calling Spanish), a language each found out the other spoke because, at the fish vendor’s stand, as one tried to explain why the mullet were not good that day, it suddenly occurred to both that of the six to seven languages each spoke fluently neither knew the name for mullet except in Ladino.

When it was time to say goodbye, both agreed to meet and shop together early the next day.

“She is so distinguished,” reported the meeker of the two to her husband that day. “Distinguished my eye,” he had snickered. “Her husband owns a billiard hall.” “Why, is your bicycle shop much better?” she retorted. “A hundred thousand times better.” He had even raised his voice.

Heedless of her husband’s pronouncements, she was determined to refer to her neighbor as une vraie princesse, while the other, who must have had more or less the same conversation with her husband, concluded that although her neighbor may not have been très high-class , she was nothing short of une sainte .

The Saint was a gentle, melancholy grandmother who sometimes spoke to herself and who often lost and forgot things. She forgot where she hid them or whom she was hiding them from. She lost keys and gloves, forgot names, dates, debts, and quarrels. She would lose the thread of her story and, drawing a blank in her mind, grope about for ideas, stringing idle words together, hoping to convey a semblance of continuity if she spoke fast enough, not realizing that her rapid succession of non sequiturs was precisely what betrayed her lapses most. Sometimes, feeling totally disoriented, she would own defeat. “It’s nothing, it happens to everyone,” she would say, taking a deep breath, trying to suppress a surge of anxiety. “I’ll remember later,” she would promise, knowing that, in the Italo-Byzantine world she came from, if a sneeze in mid-sentence confirmed the truth of what one was saying, forgetfulness was a sign of deceit. She tried to allay this suspicion by punctuating those sudden pauses in her speech with little oaths, such as On my daughter’s eyes or On my mother’s tombstone , but, by dint of swearing so often, she herself began to doubt her own tales, thinking, as happens so often among the elderly, that perhaps she was exaggerating more than she was forgetting.