Yitzhak Goren - Alexandrian Summer

Yes, that is what they’re like, cosmopolitan to the bone. Speaking to one another in French, English, Spanish, Italian, Greek. They know only the Arabic they absolutely need. Most of the servants speak French, and they are the go-betweens connecting their masters to the locals.

Those who grew up in Israel of the 1950s, in the lap of progressive socialism, the brotherhood of man, the equality of races — at least in theory — must now be chuckling with patronizing contempt; they must find it difficult to understand how cultivated people accepted such backward colonial feudalism. True, Alexandria was rotten to the core, but its rot had roots, was saturated in history. Dig deep through the muck and you’ll find the remnants of a crumbling papyrus, or a lock of hair from the shrunken head of a mummy. Something is rotten, truly rotten, in the kingdom of Alexandria. That’s why I love her so much, Alexandria. A city that lets you live like a carefree lord without even being rich. Of course, you had to be European, or at least Jewish, and of minimal intelligence, and even that wasn’t always a staunch demand. Money? Money was meant to be wasted on pleasures and reveling. Only misers save up for a rainy day. Balls, trips, sailing, racing and card games. You earn between thirty and a hundred pounds per month. You pay four-and-a-half for rent and live in a castle, surrounded by servants, each living on two pounds per month. What a glorious gap! And in fact you are nothing more than a pathetic petit bourgeois. In Europe you would have tightened your purse strings just to get through the month debt-free. All day long, your wife would scrub the floors of the sorry little studio apartment you were able to afford in paradisaical Paris or legendary London. But here, in Alex, Monsieur No-Name easily keeps two slaves working for and worshipping him. You can’t be a nobody if you have two servants, male and female, living and toiling in your home twenty-four hours a day, six-and-a-half days a week (on their half-day off they go to their miserable villages to see their sick parents and their lice-infected little siblings) — all for four Egyptian pounds, two-and-a-half for the men, one-and-a-half for the women.

“They don’t deserve any more than that!”

“They’re so lazy!”

“The worst is when you have a pair of lovebirds on your hands. God help us!”

“He pesters her all day long, and who does she complain to? You, of course. Worse than children.”

“And the women aren’t sainte-ni-touche either.”

“And when they start eating for two — what a nightmare!”

“I had a Bedouin female servant once. Green eyes this big . Then we hired a Sudanese man, black as tar. One day they were cleaning the bathroom together. Don’t ask. Suddenly I heard cries like a woman giving birth. I ran over but the door was locked. I yelled for my husband, Isidore, and he went to get the doorman, and together we broke the door down. What did we find? Don’t ask! The two of them … I’m too embarrassed to even hint at the state we found them in. She, the poor thing, her clothes all torn, lying in the bathtub, almost passed out. And he, naked and black, beating her to death. She must have refused him …”

“Horrible!”

“And that’s nothing. You know my aunt Fortunée, right? My mother’s sister. Once she was alone at home and asked her servant, his name was Ahmed, if I’m not mistaken …”

“They’re all called Ahmed.”

“At any rate, she asked him to go down and pick up her husband’s suit from the cleaner’s. He said, ‘I won’t budge until you sleep with me!’”

“Nooooo!”

“What do you mean, no? She told me herself. But you know Fortunée, she doesn’t scare so easy …”

“I would have died right on the spot.”

“All calm and collected, she tells him: ‘Fine, why not? An attractive guy like you! Wait for me here, I’ll go prepare myself.’ The Don Juan was so confident of his conquest that he wasn’t even careful. She ran downstairs, to call the doorman. And meanwhile, he prepared himself …”—the first, hesitant purrs of laughter are sounded among the ladies—“and when they came upstairs, she and the doorman, they found him ready. Ha ha ha!” The solitary purrs join in to form a light, steady bellowing, still uneasy. But embarrassment slowly evaporates. Now the laughter is mischievous, envisioning. In a moment it will become enormous, wild, somewhat sick. Victorian society in Alex binds itself by the webs of convention, and so the slightest hint of lechery gives way to emotions and urges buried deep under the blanket of appearances. It’s hard to imagine that any of these respectable ladies went so far as to imagine the proud organ of the brash black man, but even that is not out of the question. And if we may, for a moment, part from the narrow and strict realm of facts and amuse ourselves with conjectures, I would suspect the elegant, snobbish, quasi-aristocratic Madame Livia (there are no real aristocrats in Alexandria). And how can we know what goes on in the minds of matrons in their forties, with their spotless reputations? In any case, she is the one now calling her friends to order, reminding them assertively that they did not convene here in order to gossip, but for a serious, respectable endeavor — the game of rummy. Please, Geena, it’s your turn to shuffle!

The small commotion raised by the royal family continues at the curb. With movements worthy of Nijinsky, calculated to the smallest detail and leaving luminous traces in the air, David twirls around the sleeping Beetle, pulling out another suitcase and another briefcase and another brown-paper package, like a magician pulling a rabbit from his hat. He piles everything on the sidewalk in a lovely mess, almost a work of art. His brother, Victor, sits down on one of the suitcases, urging it to gallop up the street with wild yelps, but a precise slap to the back of his shorn neck throws him right off his steed, and he almost crashes into Robby, who trails after Salem the servant and Abdu, the doorman’s son. They had come outside to carry the Hamdi-Alis’ luggage. The quickness of the two little Arabs and the ingratiating looks in their eyes insinuate great hopes of generous bakshish from the sidi ’s hands. All the while, Madame Emilie is busy touching up her makeup. The side mirror of the car reflects her full face, still preserving a smidgeon of its youthful blush.

“What are you talking about? Emilie Hamdi-Ali used to be a beauty!” Grandma says knowingly. “When she married Joseph Hamdi-Ali, everyone was shocked. Rich? No. Handsome? No. And no smarter than anyone else …”

“Perhaps neither smart nor handsome,” Renée Marika chimes in, “but rich, he was. And how! That’s why Emilie married him,” she added maliciously.

“No,” Grandma insists. “He only got rich later, when he started with the horse races. When they got married he was a mere stock market clerk. They barely made a living. I remember it as if it were yesterday. They lived next door to us, in Moharram Bey. One morning he got up and went to Cairo and came back a joker …”

All the women burst out laughing, and Grandma doesn’t understand what she did wrong. Her daughter comes to her aid: “Jockey, Mama, not joker!”

Madame Marika quickly concludes, “She wanted to say jockey, but she saw the joker winking at her between her cards.”

But Grandma denies such luck in her game: “The joker only goes to the young ones,” she whines.

Once the laughter dies down, Madame Marika adds secretively: “When I was in Cairo recently, there was a rumor going around in Heliopolis that Joseph Hamdi-Ali is actually …” she pauses for a moment, her gaze flitting over her friends’ faces, preparing to land and sting: “Turkish! And his real name is Yoossoof!”