Alexandrian Summer Read online

  “The summer in Alexandria is a nightmare!”

  “I don’t understand, why aren’t drivers forbidden from honking in urban areas? Don’t give me that look. In any civilized city in the world …”

  “What a cacophony! I’m about to lose my mind.”

  “If you think Cairo’s any better, my dear, you’re mistaken, ma chère. When you approach the Qasr-al-Nil Bridge, the honking can even wake up the Pharaohs in their tombs!”

  “Yes, but in Paris …”

  “And in London …”

  Those grownups! Living in Alexandria. Most of them born there. Arabic? God forbid! French, sometimes English. Looking askance with coquettish flirtation at the fashion hubs of Europe, making a commendable effort not to lag behind the dernier cri from Paris, London or New York. Especially the women, as they sit around playing rummy. Robby often eavesdrops on their conversations. He’s the youngest, much younger than his older siblings. Mostly solitary. No, not a tragic loneliness of the kind that gives birth to reclusive poets—nonsense, he has friends his age. But he can’t spend all day at their houses or have them over at his. In Alexandria, middle class children do not play in the street, heaven forbid.

  And so he invents all sorts of strange games.

  “Well, boys, is your mission clear? Whenever a car passes, you take down its license plate number. Look alive, boys, stay on your toes. If you notice any suspicious movement, report to headquarters immediately! Okay, at ease!” Perhaps these orders were spoken in some Hollywood film he saw in one of the theaters on Boulevard Ramleh? Or perhaps he just made up some sort of rationale for his bizarre obsession with taking down the license plate numbers of passing cars?

  “What are you writing-writing-writing down there in your notebook all-the-time-all-the-time, Robby?”

  “I’m, uh …”

  “And most importantly boys, maintain secrecy! Never reveal your mission.”

  “Uh, uh, I’m not writing, I-I-I’m … uh … drawing.”

  “Oh, Livia, you have to see Robby’s drawings, a real talent. When he grows up, he’ll be an architect. Robby, come show Madame Livia your drawings.”

  “Later … later … I’m, uh, busy right now.”

  “He’s busy. He’s busy. He’s busy!” They laugh among themselves. Not even ten yet, and he’s busy! Does he shop at the Hanneaux department stores, like us? No. Does he play cards, en-matinée, like us? No. Must he rebuke the servants from time to time, like us? No. Then what is he so busy with? “It’s your turn, Geena darling.”

  “Thank you.”

  Writing down and cataloging cars—that is a task for summer days. In winter: a raging wind, rain, hail, school. The balconies in Alexandria are open. No shutters and no blinds. The apartments are sprawling and no one is in need of an extra room, and so the balcony is a balcony, open to the gale that revolts in winter, and to the rays of sun, searing and burning in summer. They say you can bake a pita on the stones of the pyramids. But Alex is cool and temperate. Reminiscent of …

  “What are you talking about? Capri! Really! How can you even compare them?”

  “Who can afford to go to Capri or the Riviera every year?”

  “That’s why they all come surging here in the summer.” A 1940 Topolino. The screeching of the brakes. A belch, a hiccup, a moan, pulling up, right below the balcony. Robby doesn’t even get a chance to take its number down. Three cars pull up behind it. Three next to it. Another traffic jam! Curses in all the languages of the Mediterranean. No one can compete with the Greeks for a good swear word! And honking, honking in all scales.

  David Hamdi-Ali, tall as a toreador, blond as a Nordic cavalier, elegant like Rudolph Valentino, leaps with agility in his supple white leather shoes, subduing the drowsy virus whose journey through his body has finally run its course to conclude with a series of asthmatic coughs. David ignores the swearing and the cursing, and even responds to the threats with Olympian serenity. How can they know that, on top of everything else, he’s also a “dirty Jew?” He opens the car door for his mother, Emilie, with a light bow, expressing his love and adoration. From the moment her feet touch the sidewalk, he ignores the other passengers, his father Joseph and his brother Victor. The eleven-year-old boy filters out, looking around with suspicious, coveting eyes, fixing his gaze on all passing women, with no regard to age or race. Before he even knows which way is up, he receives a blow to the back of the neck, his brother hissing at him: “Stand up straight, moron!” This is simply the nature of things: David was born a prince, and he won’t tolerate his brother, with his infuriating habit of sticking out his neck and rolling his watery eyes, ruining the image of his family. Victor, just like his big brother, is wearing a white summer suit, but on him it looks like a tattered sack. It is strewn with wrinkles in back and filthy in the front, like the face of an old Arab woman from a forgotten village. David drove the Topolino for more than six hours in the blazing summer heat, yet he emerges from the car ironed and spotless. You’re born this way. Emilie adjusts the fluttery white net that slides down her wide-brimmed hat—an entirely superfluous gesture, seeing as how the net had already been sloping at a natural, graceful, elegant angle. You are either born a queen, or you are not born a queen. Joseph wears a wine-colored fez which seems too big for his head even though it is not. His clothes also seem to hang on his body. Some souls are at home in the world, while other souls … Joseph sighs and shakes his head, and the red fringe of the fez swings with each shake.

  Stretching their bones. Six hours in that Topolino … It’s a wonder it didn’t break down in the middle of the desert. David drives it as if it were nothing less than a Rolls-Royce, but one has to admit it’s slightly less comfortable than that. Ahhhh … what a wonderful breeze from the sea! This is Alexandria! There, that’s the apartment, on the second floor, you see, Victor? Victor, stand up straight, you idiot! That kid over there, that’s Robby. You’ll be friends! Waving. Yes, Robby answers with a wave and disappears from the balcony, running to announce to his parents: “The Hamdi-Alis are here! The Hamdi-Alis are here!”

  Salem, the servant, is sent down to help carry their luggage. Robby trails behind him. The notebook remains on the wall of the balcony. The wind flips through the pages, not understanding the meaning of all these numbers, numbers and more numbers.

  4. SERVANTS

  Surrounded by water. Water, water, water. In the north, her full breasts dip in the water of the Mediterranean. In the south, the waves of Lake Mariout cool her behind with arousing caresses. In the east, her fingers flutter through the Nile as it runs its brown water with limp sleepiness. In the west, the sea of sand that is the Libyan Desert sends waves of hot breath onto Alexandria’s burning back, feverish with desire. Alexandria. Alex. Sea. Delta. Desert.

  “I haaaaate the desert!”

  “It’s stifling, and it’s so local. Oh, a picnic on the snowy Alps, in the dense forests of Europe … Oh, Christmas in Paris!”

  “When have you ever been to France, Annette?”

  “I haven’t, but I went to school at the Lycée français.”

  City dwellers. Wild nature? Only in Hollywood movies. The Nile? Too filthy, swarming with Arabs. Sunrise in the desert? Leave that to Lawrence of Arabia, he likes that kind of thing, poor devil. The pyramids? Yes, they’re all right. At any rate, they’re close to Cairo. You can visit them in the morning and then arrange a game of rummy with some friends in Heliopolis. And all the American tourists are crazy about the pyramids, which is saying something, isn’t it? But going all the way to Luxor? Just to see some stones? With all due respect to the temples of Karnak, spending the night there, at the end of the world, among the Arabs, away from civilization? Please.

  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!

  5. EMILIE

  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!”

  A real scoop. General shock. Gaping eyes and mouths. Heads nodding and shaking in agreement, in denial, in disbelief. She must soften her target: “They say he converted to Judaism just for Emilie, because her father, Davidshon, wouldn’t give her to a Muslim!” Madame Marika is certain this discovery will eliminate whatever remained of Emilie Hamdi-Ali’s reputation.

  But Grandma spoils it all, saying in her conniving innocence: “How lovely! He gave up his faith and converted for her. Oh, love, love. Nothing in the world can stand in its path. Not religion, not parents … nothing!”

  A dire thought passes through Madame Marika’s mind: Vita, her husband, would not have sacrificed so much for her. Love! Ha! With rage and pain she remembers the businesslike efficiency that characterized her marriage. Love? What’s love? Nonsense. She expects support from the other women, someone to
speak ill of Emilie, to find fault in her marriage to a proselyte, but her wish slams against a fortified wall of dreamy eyes. They are all giving in to their own reminiscing.

  And as if to make matters worse, Grandma sighs, “He calls her ‘la bella donna.’”

  Blood pounds against Madame Marika’s temples, and she orders them to carry on with the game. Go on, shuffle … shuffle the cards!

  “Her older son, David, is also quite a man,” Grandma starts, but her friend Marika’s angry look paralyzes her tongue and she focuses on her cards with the gravity worthy of a game of rummy among matrons, in the early afternoon of a sunny summer’s day in Alexandria.

  6. DAVID

  David Hamdi-Ali, Joseph Hamdi-Ali’s eldest son, is one of the stars of the racetrack in Egypt. His rating on the jockey exchange, “the slave market,” as he calls it jokingly, is one of the highest. He maintains a strict regime, stubbornly fighting against the tendency to gain weight that he inherited from his mother, which might put his career in jeopardy. His diet gives him a film star’s figure. He is thin, tall and elegant, adored by all girls. It seems he need do nothing more than stretch out an agile, muscular arm and pluck from the garden: Rose, Marguerite, Hortense, Lilly … But Hamdi-Ali the son looks to Robby’s sister, of all girls, and she is one of an insignificant minority who does not fantasize about the racing cavalier. Here we have a seeming background for a tragedy, or at least for a melodrama of unrequited love. But no. Though we can surely say that his love for her is genuine, we cannot say it is wild beyond all common sense, and certainly not as strong as death. Moreover, though we can certainly say that in her heart of hearts she feels completely indifferent toward him, she hasn’t bothered to shake him off with a clear-cut rejection. And so this lukewarm romance continues to provide fodder for thought and gossip for Grandma’s card club friends.