The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (17 page)

The room felt less oppressive, and there was life and movement as people began to shuffle out. I saw a woman carrying her sick child, and a young girl helping an aged man, probably her father, perhaps even her grandfather, up the stairs. No one seemed to be moaning anymore.

Had there been a miracle?

The man who had given us the oil reappeared, this time with a small washbasin filled with water. My mother could help me rinse off the holy oil, he said, then we were free to leave. She smiled as she applied the cool water all over me, certain we had found a cure for my mysterious malady.

N
o one on Malaka Nazli clashed with Dad as frequently, or bitterly, or hopelessly, as my older sister. It was as if, even at eighteen, she was still seething over the initial injury, or perceived injury—the fact that he had named her Zarifa, and that even now he refused to use her pretty adopted moniker, Suzette.

The more his autocratic streak asserted itself, the more she bristled and rebelled. He loved religion, and embraced all the rituals and traditions of being Jewish. She hated Judaism and began breaking one by one with its tenets and traditions. He liked the old-world feel of our Ghamra neighborhood and our ground-floor apartment; she longed to flee Malaka Nazli for the swankier high-rises downtown. He hoped she'd settle down and get married. She despaired that her schooling was over, and still hoped to go to college. He wanted her to find a nice boy from one of the families we knew; she taunted him and all of us with her longing for “un blond aux yeux bleus.”

The city was teeming with foreigners, though not the British and French and Belgians of days gone by. Nasser made no secret of his
friendship with the Soviet Union, and ever since the Suez crisis, the bonds had intensified, so that there was a visible Russian and Communist presence throughout the Egyptian capital, along with representatives from Eastern Europe—East Germans, Czechs, and Yugoslavs.

Suzette's cinema club membership card.

Many were “blond aux yeux bleus.” Handsome, exotic, off-limits, they were the ones my sister fancied. Suzette flouted my dad's authority, at times outrageously. She stayed out later and later, as her circle of friends expanded. None were Jewish, of course, and that was the point.

Mom was caught in the middle, helpless to modulate her strong-willed husband or subdue her equally stubborn daughter. I watched, puzzled, unable to understand the velocity of the fights. I adored my dad, and my relationship with him was intensely peaceable. The bond that had been cemented in those months after his accident, when he and I were thrown together, a man in his late fifties caring for an infant, had only strengthened. Besides, we were like-minded, and our temperaments were similar. Whatever he loved, I loved—shul, Groppi's, Pouspous, the name Loulou, and of course Malaka Nazli.

They were heading toward an epic clash, and yet we were all unprepared when it happened.

The call came in the middle of the night. It was the police, and they were insisting on speaking to my father. “Your daughter is under arrest,” they said. “We suggest that you come at once to police headquarters.”

My teenage sister had been picked up and thrown in jail, but no one seemed to know why. The rumors were swirling.

Suzette had been partying with Russian spies. She had gone dancing with Norwegian sailors. She had joined Czech diplomats at a swank hotel, and the hotel had been raided by cops, vigilant under the new dictatorship.

Then there was the theory that my teenage sister was simply an innocent victim, a pawn in the growing political upheaval. In 1962 Cairo, arrests had become almost commonplace. The ruthless hand of the Nasser dictatorship was everywhere, and any illusions that the new regime would be more enlightened than the king's had disappeared.

Authorities were eager to strike fear in the hearts of all those derided as “foreigners,” any vestige of the old colonial crowd, Jews, anyone, in short, who had overstayed his welcome and was still in Egypt when he ought to have left.

We had all come to fear the knock on the door in the middle of the night.

“Why didn't we leave?” my mother asked my father that night, and every night thereafter. “We should have gone years ago.” She couldn't stop crying.

She offered to accompany my father to the police station. He shook his head no. Instead he contacted a friend of the family, a businessman named Monsieur Gattegno who lived down the street, and asked him to come with him. Though he tended to maintain a composed demeanor even during great crises, Dad appeared more agitated that night than I had ever seen him before.

He kept pounding his fist on the wall, and shouting that we were ruined.

He dressed slowly, as if he were having trouble moving. He was in his pajamas when the call came, and now, merely putting on a shirt and
trousers seemed to pose a challenge. He threw on an old jacket that he rarely wore, a faded tie, and a careworn straw hat, and then called out to our porter, who was fast asleep in the apartment he occupied in the basement, to go please find him a taxi. He grabbed the wooden cane propped near the door, which he almost never used anymore, and slammed the door behind him.

With each passing hour, my mother became more and more distraught. My brothers were stomping around, looking bewildered. Neither got along especially well with my sister, yet the unfolding drama seemed less her comeuppance than some apocalyptic event destined to engulf the entire family.

I couldn't sleep because of all the commotion. I'd wander from the bedroom to the living room, where everyone had gathered, waiting for news. I held Pouspous firmly in my arms—my mom was so distracted that she didn't even order me to put the cat down. My fever had abated since the night at Maimonides' temple, either because of the mystic's intervention or a new antibiotic that I'd been prescribed by the Professor.

Every few minutes the phone would ring, and I'd overhear snatches of conversation. My mother would grab the receiver away from my brothers, and she'd cry out in disbelief, verging on hysteria: “Des espions,” or “Un suédois.” As the night wore on, there were more phone calls, and I heard a tangle of references to Danes, East Germans, Cubans, Poles, Norwegians, as well as Russians. There were mentions of soldiers, sailors, diplomats, even senior government officials. With each new rumor and revelation, my mother would dissolve in tears, and I could only clutch Pouspous more tightly, as if my cat would protect me from the mayhem.

Downtown at the police station, my father affected a remarkable transformation that had begun with his taking the cane. The proud and haughty would-be British officer known as the Captain was gone. Instead, what the policemen and militia members saw was a stooped, mild-mannered older gentleman with teary green eyes, leaning heavily on his brown wooden walking stick, in the company of another dignified elderly gentleman. He bowed to the officers and asked them for help in securing his daughter's release. As each gendarme disclosed a
few more facts about the events of the previous night, my father deftly slipped them notes from his wallet. As the hours passed, so that dawn was almost breaking, my father continued to go from one officer to another.

Each time, he reached into his pocket and pulled out several flavorful bonbons—the same he routinely offered me or the neighborhood children or an attractive woman. The officers seemed delighted to accept the candy. He continued discreetly handing out the notes and candy, up the chain of command.

At last, the police captain came out. He was from the old school, a veteran. As he and my father talked, they found that they had a great deal in common, including the sense that modern youth was hopelessly lost, and that keeping a daughter in line could be trying for the most diligent of fathers. It was so much easier to raise a son, the chief sighed, and my father sighed along with him.

My father walked a tightrope—admitting Suzette had strayed, even as he tried to downplay the incident as the action of a naive young girl who, like so many of her peers in this new and faithless generation, had lost her way and gotten in over her head. He offered the chief a cigarette from the silver holder that was, as usual, filled with Lucky Strikes. The cop accepted an American cigarette, and as he lit up, he nodded thoughtfully that the incident had likely been an unfortunate mistake.

That was when my father began to cry. There, in the early-morning hours, in the middle of Cairo's main police station, as tears streamed down his cheeks, he had to be helped to a chair to steady himself, while the chief offered his own white cotton handkerchief to Monsieur Leon and tried to comfort him over his wayward daughter.

Inside, my sister and her friend Doris, a teacher at the lycée, were distraught about their night in jail. They still didn't understand why they had been arrested and, even more urgently, why their parents hadn't yet come to rescue them. They were tired, hungry, and bewildered. Their privileged upbringings hadn't prepared them for this stint with Cairo's underworld, the small-time prostitutes and female petty criminals with whom they shared a cell.

At last, my sister and her friend were released. Suzette was confronted by a torrent of insults from my father, who was both genuinely
furious and anxious to show the police that he in no way condoned his daughter's conduct. Enough cash had been distributed, enough words of contrition uttered, that my sister was free to go.

She had been in jail the entire night.

The two finally came home; they walked in together, the patriarch and his eldest, wayward daughter.

It was striking how much they resembled each other. Unlike my mother, who was petite and fine-boned, my sister was tall and striking, a female version of my dad. She had his aquiline nose and full mouth, and even the shape of their eyes was similar, though his were a vivid shade of green and hers were coffee brown.

Most of all, she shared his strong-mindedness. Though she never would have admitted it, she was every bit as imperious and domineering as he, as much a creature of Aleppo, though she'd been born and bred in Cairo and modeled herself after the Europeans. She looked strangely defiant as she walked in; there was even a slight smile on her face.

My father hadn't said a word to her since springing her from prison.

But once inside the house, he exploded.

“You have ruined us,” he kept saying. My sister said nothing; she acted as if she were impervious to his words.

Then he slapped her. In the middle of the living room, in front of my mother and brothers, while I hid in a corner with Pouspous. My sister retreated to her room, hating him more than ever.

That evening, Dad left the house and made his way to the Kuttab. Prayer services were long over; no one was there, but it didn't matter. Seated in his favorite chair, at the front of the small sanctuary, my father began to pray. He stayed until dawn, unable, unwilling to come home.

In the days that followed, I picked up only a few frightening words—“spies,” “Russians.”

My sister had crossed an invisible Maginot Line in a city that was, despite its cosmopolitan image, increasingly reverting back to its Islamic roots. Additionally, at a time when the Nasser regime had made it clear it wanted all Jews out of the country, it was quite plausible the
government would have targeted a young Jewish woman from a good family, knowing that such a move would put pressure on her parents. My father was certainly attuned to the drastic changes that made the Jews of Egypt fearful and on edge. He grasped better than anyone the irrational, despotic nature of the new regime, so that he should have considered the fact that a couple of attractive young women who looked a bit too Western, who were behaving a bit too freely, made choice targets.

But in his anger and fear, that didn't matter. When it came to raising a daughter, he followed the ways of Old Aleppo, so that his moral code was as strict and unbending as that of his Muslim neighbors. He was furious that my sister had acted so imprudently, and could only ponder the shame of it all, and not that she may have been perfectly innocent by modern standards, or innocent enough. That would have made Suzette a double victim—of the strict, tyrannical Egyptian authorities, and of our strict, tyrannical father.

I tried several times to ask my sister directly what had happened, but she refused to say a word about it. It was as if she had made a vow never to revisit the incident.

Decades later, she would recall for me a balmy Egyptian evening. She and her friend Doris had gone downtown. As they strolled up and down the street in their prettiest dresses, sipping Coca-Cola and enjoying the weather, they had run into two dashing young men in uniform.

The men weren't Russian spies, my sister laughed.

They weren't even Russian.

They were actually Swedish, members of the United Nations peacekeeping delegation assigned to patrol the Middle East. They were handsome, friendly, and belonged to the Blue Berets, the official UN peacekeeping force.

“I can even remember their names.” Suzette giggled, sounding more like the eighteen-year-old she once had been than the sober sixty-year-old woman she was when we spoke. “They were called Lars and Sven, and they had on these darling pale blue berets.”

The four had gone off to a popular restaurant. “We were only having pizza,” my sister insisted, underscoring the innocence of the evening. Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, several policemen and militiamen had
swooped down and arrested her and Doris. They had let the UN representatives go, and taken only the two young girls. Handcuffed, forced to ride in the back of an open truck, they were taken to the city jail and placed behind bars.