Yitzhak Goren - Alexandrian Summer

He looks at his youngest son, at Robby, and says nothing. Wordlessly, Robby wraps his arms around his father’s neck and kisses the cologne on his cheek.

“Well then, it’s true!” Robby’s sister sticks the fork in the spongy flesh of a plump baba au rhum cake with a white crest of whipped cream. Her large, light-brown eyes fix David with an accusatory gaze. He turns away from her. They’ve just returned from a cruise on a rented sailboat, and David proudly proved that he could control not only a horse’s reins, but also the ropes of a vessel, all the while maintaining a smiling energy as Robby’s sister sat in the stern, staring at him with the ridiculing smile of the Sphinx.

She always makes me feel like an idiot! David says to himself as they sit in the café of the Nautical Club. For a moment, a hint of hatred flits through his heart. If she only said yes, simply, with a delicate smile and lowered eyes, with gratitude, with modesty …

“Well then, it’s true,” she repeats. She eats her baba au rhum lustily, as if to make him jealous. He cannot eat any, on account of his strict diet. Instead he sits there, watching the whipped cream disappear between her lips.

“You know that if you only say yes … if you only give me a sign …”

“Meaning, it’s true, Lilly Elhadeff, huh? You’ve made a laughingstock out of me!” she says, pushing away her empty plate. The fork scrapes the china in protest.

“I’ll make you a queen, if you only say yes. That’s all I ask!”

“How can I say yes while Lilly Elhadeff is waiting with bridesmaids and bouquets?” she asks with a half-smile. Simultaneously, she wonders: Will this cheapskate offer me another baba au rhum?

“Just give me a sign and I’ll tell Lilly Elhadeff to go to hell!”

“You don’t tell a girl to go to hell, my dear gentleman,” Robby’s sister admonishes. “And I won’t tell you what to do, David Hamdi-Ali!”

“I’m going crazy! Because of you I can’t even focus during races. Yesterday I nearly flew off the horse …”

“Soon you’ll blame me for all your failures, huh? What do you want from me? Go marry Lilly Elhadeff. Poor guy! I pity you, mon chouchou .”

“You’re suggesting that I marry her? You’re pushing me into her arms?”

“Look, if you don’t have anything better, even Lilly Elhadeff is something. Not the brightest, but she knows how to cook, which I don’t. She isn’t exactly Cleopatra, but her father has a big store in Heliopolis. My father is only a clerk at Ford. And if she isn’t a dream girl for someone like you, at least …”

“At least she isn’t capricious!” David finishes her sentence, his patience about to run out. “What do you want? What do you want? Tell me!”

“Thanks for asking, David. I want … I want … another baba au rhum. Will you get me one, please?”

Sunday, the day the racing season commences, is to be David Hamdi-Ali’s day to shine.

All day Saturday David was seen striking any and all athletic poses that a strong, agile body can show off. In shiny white shorts and a blinding undershirt that accentuated his muscular chest, he pranced around the house, hopping and leaping and inhaling and exhaling and massaging himself, his fair eyes turned inward in introspection, as if saying, “There could be no other.”

He was so preoccupied, he hadn’t even noticed Robby’s sister as she ran to the balcony in a thin batiste dress and waved down to the Coptic lawyer, Maître Habib Ramzi, who waited downstairs in a black Citroën. David didn’t seem to even notice her about to go out with his chubby competitor, his skin the shade of café-au-lait.

“I’ll be right down,” Robby’s sister called to the lawyer, leaning against the railing. But when she returned to the hall she looked distractedly at the boy shaking his limbs every which way, the boy who could be hers if she only gave him a sign. Perhaps she recalled his declaration, made only a week before, at the casino in the San Stefano neighborhood: “I’ll make you a queen. A queen!” That’s what he repeated at the nautical club. She might have even thought at that moment, “Why not?” Perhaps she expected something to happen, for him to wave his hand, bat his lashes, show her she was more important than the Sunday race. But whether because this wasn’t the case, or because he was distracted, or maybe even due to a vengeful cockiness, this small, tender, fluttering moment was missed. Another honk from the Citroën, a stroke of sunlight from the balcony, eliminating the dimness of the hall, and the moment was gone.

Robby’s sister turned to the door, smiling to herself. Walking down the stairs, she might have been thinking, “What a lucky break, that was a close one. I almost got myself into trouble.” With rollicking laughter, she walked out to the sidewalk. Maître Ramzi saw her mirth as a good sign and his face beamed. His features always reminded Robby of the Reclining Scribe, an ancient Egyptian sculpture of the pharaonic age.

From the balcony, Robby watched his white sister being swallowed up inside the black car. For a moment he wondered how she could go out with such a fat, ugly specimen, and a Christian to boot! He looked at the sky and recalled the iron cross pointing from the church tower in the Camp César neighborhood, and remembered his fanatical declaration, which shocked his parents: “One day I’ll climb to the top of that tower and break that cross!”

This didn’t stop him from loving the two Coptic sisters Thérèse and Juliette Murad, who, along with their mother, Angélique, rented the large room facing the sea. Thérèse with her white skin and black hair, and Juliette with her blond braids: on both chests — one round and the other boyish and flat — hung small golden crosses that pierced Robby’s flesh when the high school girls hugged him with motherly affection.

Suddenly he heard David’s tenor voice rumble from the cavernous hall, “Get out of here! Get out!”

Robby ran to the hall and saw a white figure in the dark: David Hamdi-Ali in his workout clothes. Slowly, from the darkness, rose two rows of white teeth, as big as a horse’s, a mane of mop-like blond hair and finally two watery eyes, groveling and rebelling at once, their lashes fluttering. Victor stood before his brother, as stiff as a martyr, only his protruding Adam’s apple bobbing, working to block the humiliation of oncoming tears. He stood there in his loose, slightly soiled underwear, a dry pee stain (Robby could not know at the time that it might have been something else) forming a strange halo around his crotch. For a moment, Robby’s heart was also filled with disdain toward the rebuked child. How different was this gangly, mean satyr from his virile, white Apollo of a brother. Without caring to find out the matter at hand, Robby immediately took the older brother’s side. He wanted to stomp the vermin, but his father had taught him never to intervene in others’ business, and especially not in familial feuds. Still, his presence seemed to encourage David, who stood up from his workout pose, walked over to his brother and muttered, “You’ll get out of here, or I’ll …”

But Victor stood his ground, and Robby was already expecting the whack of the slap. His friend’s pointless stand annoyed him, and he couldn’t wait to see him defeated. That moment, Emilie walked in and called out in a soft, fearful voice, “Why do you want to hit him, David?”

Her fragile voice seemed to have popped his balloon of aggression. David put his hands on his head and said in a childlike voice that Robby had never heard coming from the lips of a man, “Mama, he’s annoying me. He brings me bad luck. Mama, I’m going to lose the race tomorrow because of him! Mama …” He ran to her, perhaps to bury his head in her bosom, but then thought better of it and went into his room. Emilie looked at her two sons for a moment and seemed to understand nothing. To her, life was so simple!