Out of Egypt: A Memoir Read online

  Hardly a month later, the Schwab’s twenty-five-year-old half sister Flora appeared in the family living room. Marta immediately saw the writing on the wall. “If all these Ashkenazi Jews begin swarming in from Germany, it’s going to be the end for us. The city will be teeming with tailors, brokers, and more dentists than we know what to do with.”

  “We couldn’t sell anything,” said Flora. “They took everything. We left with what we could,” she went on. Aunt Flora had come alone with her mother, Frau Kohn, an ailing, aging woman with clear blue eyes and white skin touched with pink, who spoke French poorly and who always seemed to wear a pleading, terrified look on her face. “They slapped her on the streets two months ago,” explained her daughter. “Then she was insulted by a local shopkeeper. Now she keeps to herself.”

  For several weeks early that summer, the streets were rife with rumors of an impending, perhaps decisive, battle with the Afrika Korps. Rommel’s forces had seized one stronghold after another, working their way along the Libyan coastline. “There’s going to be a terrible battle. Then the Germans will invade.” The British, Vili said, were totally demoralized, especially after Tobruk. Panic struck everyone. The small resort town of Mersah-Matrouh on the coast near the Libyan border had fallen into German hands. “They hate us Jews more than they despise Arabs,” said Aunt Marta, as though this were totally incomprehensible. Uncle Isaac, who had heard a lot about German anti-Semitism, had put together a terrifying account, made up of rumors and haunting reminders of the Armenian massacre of 1895, which he had witnessed. “First they find out who is Jewish, then they send trucks at night and force all the Jewish men into them, and then they take you to distant factories, leaving women and children to starve by themselves.”

  “All you’re doing is scaring everyone, so stop it right now,” said Esther, who, like other members of her family, had witnessed at least two Armenian massacres in Turkey.

  “Yes, but the Armenians had been spying for the British for far too long,” protested Vili, who, in this case, sympathized with the Turks, even though he had fought against them on the British and Italian side during the Great War, while Albert, his brother-in-law, who had fought with the Turks against the British, condemned the massacres as barbarous. “The Turks simply had to put a stop to it in the only way they knew how: with blood and more blood. But what have Jews ever done to the Germans?” asked Uncle Nessim. “The way some Jews behave,” Aunt Clara jumped in, “I’d run them out of this world into the next. It’s because of Jews like them that they hate Jews like us,” she said, eyeing her brother Vili, one of whose favorite maxims she had just quoted. “Then, they’re really going to take us away, you think,” interrupted Marta, her voice already quaking. “Don’t start now with the crying, please! We’re in the middle of a war,” said an exasperated Esther. “But it’s because we’re in the middle of a war that I’m crying,” Aunt Marta insisted, “don’t you see?” “No, I don’t see. If they take us away, then they’ll take us away, and that’ll be the end of that—”

  Weeks before the first battle of El Alamein, the matriarch decided to put into effect an old family expedient. She summoned all members of her family to stay in her large apartment for as long as the situation warranted. None declined the offer, and they came, like Noah’s beasts, in twos and fours, some from Cairo and Port Said, and some from as far as Khartoum, where they would have been safer than in Alexandria. Mattresses were laid out side by side on the floor, extra leaves were added to the dining room table, and two more cooks were hired, one of whom raised doves and chickens in the event of a food shortage. A sheep and two ewes were secretly brought in under cover of night and tied upstairs on the terrace next to the makeshift coop.

  During the day, family members would leave and tend to business. Then all would return for lunch, and during those long summer afternoons, some of the men would sit around the dining room table naming their worst fears while the children napped and the women mended and knitted things in other rooms. Warm clothing was particularly needed; winters in Germany were harsh, they said. At the entrance to the apartment stood a row of very small suitcases neatly stacked in a corner, some dating back to their owners’ youth in Turkey and to their school days abroad. Now, blotched and tattered by age, bearing yellowed stickers from Europe’s grand hotels, they waited meekly in the vestibule for that day when the Nazis would march into Alexandria and round up all Jewish males above eighteen, allowing each a small suitcase with bare necessaries.

  Later in the afternoon some members of the family would go out, and the women might stop at the Sporting Club. But by teatime most were already home. Dinner was usually light and quick, consisting of bread, jam, fruit, cheese, chocolate, and homemade yogurt, reflecting Aunt Elsa’s tight management of family finances, Uncle Vili’s spartan dietary norms, and my great-grandmother’s humble origins. After dinner, coffee would be brought out and everyone would crowd into the living room to listen to the radio. Sometimes they listened to the BBC, other times to the Italian stations; the reports were always confusing.

  “All I know is that the Germans need Suez. Therefore, they must attack,” Vili maintained.

  “Yes, but can we stop them?”

  “Only for the short term. Long term, who knows? General Montgomery may be a genius, but Rommel is Rommel,” Uncle Vili decreed.

  “Then what shall we do?” asked Aunt Marta, always ready to break into hysterics.

  “Do? There is nothing we can do.”

  “What do you mean there is nothing we can do? We can escape.”

  “Escape where?” asked Esther turning red.

  “Escape. I don’t know. Escape!”

  “But where?” continued her sister. “To Greece? They’ve already taken Greece. To Turkey? We’ve just barely gotten out of there. To Italy? They’d throw us into jail. To Libya? The Germans are there already. Don’t you see that once they take Suez, it’ll all be finished?”

  “What do you mean, ‘finished’? So you do think that they’ll win?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Vili sighed.

  “Just come out and say it. They’ll win and then they’ll come and take us all away.”

  Vili did not answer.

  “How about going to Madagascar, then?” offered Aunt Marta.

  “Madagascar! Please, Marta, do me a favor!” interjected Uncle Isaac.

  “Or South Africa. Or India. What’s wrong with just keeping one step ahead of them. Maybe they’ll lose.”

  There was a moment’s pause.

  “They won’t lose,” said Aunt Flora finally.

  “Since you’re so quick to talk, Flora, why haven’t you already left, then,” asked Marta, almost seething with contempt. “Why are you still here?”

  “You forget that I’ve already left one place.”

  Aunt Flora drew deeply on her cigarette, thought awhile, and then exhaled with a dreamy, wistful air, leaning toward the tea table from the corner of the sofa where she was sitting, and stubbed out her cigarette. Everyone had turned to her, the women and the men always wondering why she habitually wore black when green was what matched her eyes best. “I don’t know,” she added, still gazing at her hand, which continued slow, stubbing motions long after she had put out her cigarette. “I don’t know,” she hesitated. “There’s nowhere to go. I’m tired of running. I’m even more tired of worrying where to run. The world isn’t big enough. And there’s not enough time. I’m sorry,” she said, turning to her brother, “I don’t want to go anywhere. I don’t even want to travel.” Silence filled the living room. “The truth is, if I believed we had a chance, I’d hide in the desert. But I don’t believe it.”

  “Such pessimism, and at so young an age,” Vili broke in, assuming the condescending smile of a man who knew all there was to know about frightened women and how to placate them. “It’s not written that the Germans have to win, you know. They may lose. Their fuel supplies are terribly low, and they have overextended themselves. Let them attack Egypt, let them
venture as deeply into Egypt as they want. Sand always wins in the end—remember that,” he continued, advocating the strategic restraint of Hannibal’s foe, Quintus Fabius Maximus, known to history as Cunctator, the temporizer.

  “‘Sand always wins in the end.’ Really, Vili,” Aunt Flora said mockingly and walked out to the balcony, where she lit another cigarette. “Whatever does he mean?” she scoffed out loud, turning to Esther’s son, who was also smoking on the balcony.

  “Sand always wins,” repeated Vili with surprised emphasis, as if it should have made perfect sense the first time. “Their invasion plans may be flawless, but we are better armed, better supplied, and we have more men. You’ll see what damage a few months of desert sand can do to Rommel’s armored cars. So, let’s not abandon hope. We’ll find a way. We’ve survived worse enemies before, we’ll outlive this one too.”

  “Well said,” replied Esther, who, for all her grim realism, loved positive thinking and could never bring herself to believe that disaster was as imminent as all that. “I knew you would come up with something in the end,” she said, eyeing her silent husband with that scornful, doubtful look that all members of her family reserved for their spouses during family gatherings.

  “As long as we have courage and stand together and don’t panic and don’t listen to idle rumors floating between seamstress this and hairdresser that, sisters,” he emphasized, “we’ll pull through this one as well.” He declaimed this exhortation in the only style he knew: by borrowing from Churchill and Mussolini.

  “So we wait, in other words,” concluded Marta.

  “So we wait.”

  And there it was, poised in midair, hovering in the wings like a pianist cracking his knuckles before making a long-awaited appearance, or like an actor clearing his throat as he walks onto the stage. It was ushered in by the confident glint in his eye, the arching of his back, and that all-too-familiar quiver in his voice as it rose and reached the perfect pitch: “We’ve waited things out before, we’ll wait this one out as well. After all, each of us here is a five-thousand-year-old Jew—are we or aren’t we?”

  The mood in the room livened, and Vili, who had a good touch of demagoguery in him, turned to Flora and asked her to play something by Goldberg or Brandenburg, he couldn’t remember which.

  “You mean Bach,” said Flora, walking up to the piano.

  “Bach, Offenbach, c’est tout la même chose, it’s all the same. Todos Lechli, all of them Ashkenazi,” he muttered. Only Esther heard him say that. She immediately turned and grimaced a severe shush, “She understands!” But Vili was unmoved. “There is only one thing she understands, and all the men in this room know what it is.”

  The Schwab’s half sister did not hear this exchange. She took off her ring, placed it next to the keys, and began playing something by Schubert. Everyone was overjoyed.

  And she played till very late that night, till one after the other, everyone had gone to sleep, and she played softly every night, ignoring the men who were growing tired of waiting up for her, deriding Esther’s son and his shallow Wertherisms when they ended up alone in the living room one night and she had stopped playing and he had tried to kiss away all that heartless talk of love in the time of war. In the maid Latifa’s room, which was Flora’s now, she had taken off her ring again and her earrings and, depositing her glass of cognac on a makeshift bedstand, had said, “Now you can kiss me.” But she kissed him first. “It means nothing,” she added as she looked away and lit the kerosene lamp, bringing down the wick till it glowed less than her cigarette. “As long as we’re clear that it means nothing,” she said almost enjoying the cruelty with which she foisted despair on everyone.

  Then came the wonderful news. The British Eighth Army had managed to halt Rommel’s advance at El Alamein and, in the fall of 1942, finally mounted a decisive attack upon the Afrika Korps. The battle lasted twelve days. At night, everyone in the family would stand for hours on the balcony, as if waiting for holiday fireworks, straining their eyes west of the city to catch a glimpse of the historic battle that was to decide their fates. Some smoked, others chatted among themselves or with neighbors upstairs or downstairs, likewise perched on their balconies, waving at one another, grimacing hope and resignation, while, from emptied rooms, came an incessant crackle of shortwave bulletins announcing the most recent developments in North Africa. A distant, half-inch halo hovered over the western horizon, swaying in the blackout, suddenly beaming like an approaching vehicle coming uphill, only to fade again, a pale amber moon on a misty night. All they heard was a distant, muffled drone, like the whir of fans on quiet summer evenings or the sound of the large refrigerator humming in the pantry. People went to sleep to the faraway rumble of battle.

  “See? All your fears of being taken away have come to nothing. Didn’t I tell you?” said Vili to his sister Marta when it became clear that the British had scored a decisive victory.

  Everyone was readying to leave the old mother’s home. Yet the preparations were slow, uncertain, even dilatory, partly because everyone had grown accustomed to the refugee lifestyle and was reluctant to abandon its solidarity, but also because no one wanted to tempt providence by proclaiming all danger averted. “What’s the hurry?” said my great-grandmother. “There are still many pigeons and chickens left. Besides, one never knows with the Germans. They could be back in a matter of weeks.” Packing, however, continued.

  As a going-away gift, the old mother decided to give each of her sons and daughters a crystal goblet bearing golden fleurs-de-lis. They had been manufactured in their father’s glass factory in Turkey.

  “This is the last time this apartment will ever house so many,” the old woman explained.

  “The way the world is going, I wouldn’t be so sure,” said Esther.

  Esther was right. The family would seek refuge in the old matriarch’s home on three subsequent occasions: once during the Suez War, in 1956; then a decade later; and once, earlier, in 1948, after Vili was hunted down by Zionist agents who beat him severely for spying for the British and then threatened to do the same to other men in the family. Two months later Vili got wind they were on his tracks again and that this time they meant to kill him. He took cover in his mother’s home. One day, he took out his good-luck pendulum and on the table placed a cyanide pill he had been keeping ever since the days of El Alamein. The pendulum said no.

  Vili was spirited away to Italy, then to England, where he changed names, converted to Christianity, and forswore all previous nationalities. But it was only about four years later that he resurfaced in Egypt for what proved to be the most spectacular business deal in his career as spy, soldier, and swindler: the auctioning of the deposed king’s property.

  “It was the end of the end,” he explained many years later in his garden in Surrey. “The end of an era, the end of a world. Everything fell apart after that.”

  By now he was in his middle eighties, he liked horses, candies, and dirty jokes, using a fist at the end of a stiffened forearm to illustrate the ribald tales which he liked to tell in the old style: with bawdy gestures and exaggerated pantomime. Wearing old tweeds, Clark boots, an ascot, and a stained cashmere cardigan, he looked the part he had been rehearsing all his life: a Victorian gentleman who couldn’t care less what his inferiors thought of either him or his clothes. What made his aristocratic bearing especially convincing was that, on looking at him, one immediately suspected poverty.

  He had shown me his orchard where nothing good ever grew, the huge lake in need of sprucing up—“But who cares”—the stables with more horses than there was room for, and beyond these, the woods where no one dared take a walk, a sort of Jane Austen world gone feral. “I don’t know,” he answered when I asked what his woods abutted. “I suppose a neighbor. But then, these English lords, whoever really knows them?”

  It was not true. He knew them quite well. In fact, he knew everyone. At the local post office, at the bank, and at one of the pubs where he offered me a beer, everyon
e knew Dr. Spingarn. “Well, hello” and “Cheerio” slipped from his tongue as though he had spoken English from the day he was born. He knew everything there was to know about soccer. When a Mini Morris stopped us on our way to town one morning, I realized how thoroughly grafted he was onto his new homeland. This was Lady Something-or-other on her way to London, wanting to know whether there was anything he needed. “No trouble at all,” she said after he finally agreed to let her pick up a case of French wine at some merchant. “Sans façons,” she added, pleased to show off her French and promising to have Arthur, the lord himself, deliver it this evening. “Entendu,” we heard her say as she rolled up her window and began speeding up the quiet country road, headed toward the highway.

  “She’s as dry as a pitted prune, that one. Like all Englishwomen.”

  “I thought she was very nice,” I protested, reminding him that the lady had first gone to his home and, on being told he was out for a walk, had driven about looking for him. “Very nice, very nice,” he repeated, “all of them are very nice here. You don’t understand a thing.”

  In town, Vili waved at the local antiques dealer and decided to pay him a visit.

  “Good morning, Dr. Spingarn,” said the dealer.

  “Greetings,” he replied and introduced me. “Have you found my Turkish coffeepot yet?”

  “Still looking, still looking,” chanted the dealer, as he continued to dust an old clock.

  “It’s been nine years,” chuckled Vili. “I’m afraid I’ll die before you find it.”

  “No fearing that, Dr. Spingarn. You’ll outlive us all, sir.”

  “They’re slower than Arabs and twice as stupid. How on earth did they ever manage to have an empire once?” he said as soon as we stepped outside the shop.

  Back at home, his wife, daughter, and married grandson and great-grandchild were waiting for us. “See this table?” He palmed the huge antique oak dining table on which food was being served. “I paid five pounds for it. And see these chairs? There were twelve of them. Seven pounds the lot, with eight more in the attic. And this huge clock here? Guess how much.” “One pound,” I guessed. “Wrong! I paid nothing at all for it. It came with the chairs.” He burst out laughing as he spread a thick piece of butter on a slice of bread.