Read The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit Online
Authors: Lucette Lagnado
The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (19 page)
Most important were the sardine cans we were collecting to take with us, my father's passion.
One morning, my dad made it a point to leave the house earlier than usual; we skipped the Nile Hilton. Instead, the cab took us directly to a factory located on the outskirts of the city. He had with him a small pouch I had seen him place in his inside jacket pocket in the morning. He had shown my mother its contents before leaving the house.
At the factory, Leon made his way to the manager's office. This time, he had me come inside, though I was instructed not to say a word. After shutting the door, the two sat down together at the desk, and my father removed the pouch from his pocket, and emptied its contents on the table. The manager's eyes widened; what came tumbling out were a half dozen small gold ingots and one sapphire ring.
It was my mother's favorite, and it dated back to the early days of the marriage. Dad had surprised her by offering her this elegant and distinctive ring, which she wore in addition to her wedding band. Gold and studded with diamonds, its centerpiece was an enormous azure stone as blue as the Mediterranean, or the shade of Baby Alexandra's eyes.
My mother was heartbroken at having to part with it. My father had persuaded her that only by giving it up was there any hope of saving it.
My father and the factory owner exchanged a few words, sotto voce. I couldn't make out what they were saying, other than that Leon seemed more anxious than usual, and the man was trying to reassure him. Finally, the two rose, and my father motioned to me that it was time to leave. To my surprise, the owner scooped up the gold and the ring, put them back in their pouch, and promised Dad he would take care of the matter. As we left, he had us walk through the factory and pick out cans of our favorite preservesâorange, pear, guava, apricot, strawberry, fig, even rose petalâto take with us.
When we returned some days later, the manager was expecting us. He smiled broadly while pointing to half a dozen cans on his desk. My mother's ring had been hidden inside a tin of marmalade and sealed within the factory itself so that it was indistinguishable from any you would find at a grocer's. The gold ingots had been similarly stashed inside different cans of preserves. It seemed a perfect way for us to smuggle at least some of our wealth out of the country. My father scooped up the tins. We hailed a taxi and returned to Malaka Nazli, where he told my mom and siblings what he had done.
These were terrifying days, when my family worried that, any moment, authorities would be knocking at our door, prepared to stop us from leaving on some pretext or another, or worse still, ready to haul one or more of us to prison.
That is why my father agonized about his ploy. He would eye the cans containing the gold pieces and the ring, wonder if his scheme was as foolproof as he thought, and worry that there was terrible risk involved.
At last the twenty-six suitcases and duffel bags were sealed shut and loaded onto a van that was to precede us to Alexandria, the first leg of our journey.
On the eve of our departure, my father took the cans containing the gold and Mom's ring and told us quietly he couldn't go through with it. It was simply too risky, and the possibility the authorities would somehow find the ingots and jewelry posed an unacceptable danger to us all.
We had heard terrifying stories about the customs inspectors, and how thoroughly and ruthlessly they searched everyone who left, especially Jews. One woman, a seamstress, had hidden her engagement ring in a small iron she used to press hems. Then, in a touch of ingenuity, she had taken gold coins, covered them with cloth so that they looked like ordinary buttons, and affixed them to a dress. As she prepared to leave, an inspector had examined the iron and found the hidden ring. Minutes later, he had stripped the phony buttons off the dress. He proceeded to tear through nearly every item of clothing, even ripping the shoulder pads off her husband's fine, hand-tailored suits, in search of hidden jewels. Miraculously, she had still been allowed to leave, albeit with none of her valuables.
At the table, Dad opened a can of orange marmalade. There, precisely as the factory owner had vowed, was the sapphire ring. He opened another can and found two gold nuggets. The other cans yielded the rest of the cache. My mother took her ring and washed it under the sink, then dried it lovingly with a towel.
Leon told my mother he would have to take the ring back and dispose of it. Nothing was said of the ingots, but like the ring, they vanished, never to be seen again, and none of us were ever told exactly what our dad had done with the beautiful gold pieces.
When it was time to leave Malaka Nazli Street, Pouspous was all I could think about. My father held the cat as I said good-bye. “Can't we take her with us?” I asked one member of my family after the other. No one seemed willing to level with me, to tell me plainly that we were leaving Pouspous and Malaka Nazli forever. But I knew, of course.
On the dining room table were odds and ends we had left till the last minute, uncertain what to do with them. In one corner was my leather
cartable,
my first schoolbag, which I'd carried so joyously to my classes at the Lycée de Bab-el-Louk, feeling so grown-up.
My father came to lead me out of the house. We always walked hand in hand; because of his limp, he walked so slowly that it was easy to keep pace, the way I couldn't with other adults. I went to stroke Pouspous one last time.
“She will be fine,” he reassured me, in that mild tone he used only for the most important subjects.
My father could be gruff and imperious on minor issues, but on all that really mattered, he was astonishingly gentle.
Pouspous preferred staying put, he told me. “Elle veut rester ici, elle aime le Caire”âShe wants to stay here, she loves Cairoâhe said again and again. He tried to soothe me by painting a picture of the cat lingering behind in our deserted apartment, a Cairene at heart, unwilling to give up her home. She would have every room to herself. She would be able to sun herself on the balcony, sleep in any corner of the house she pleased, eat the mountains of food we were leaving behind, and be the queen of her domain.
Pouspous had no desire to leave, no desire whatsoever, my father kept insisting.
But I couldn't stop crying. At last, my father said that he would have a talk with the cat and persuade her to come join us in Alexandria. She needed a few more days to get ready, that was all, and then she would meet us at the port. He offered me the large white handkerchief he always carried in his pocket to dry my tears. I decided to take him at his word.
Pouspous didn't even look up as we left. She had retreated to her favorite spot on the balcony, and sat curled up in her favorite position. As we all trudged out, she continued placidly watching the street life of Malaka Nazli.
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IN ALEXANDRIA, WE HEADED
for a small hotel where we had sometimes stayed over summer holidays. It was a simple guesthouse, close to the sea, with small rooms that felt even more cramped with our piles of luggage. I tended to associate Alexandria with carefree vacations and fun-filled days at the sea, so I felt confused. No one in my family spoke of going to the beach. No one said much at all.
I held my blue doll at all times, though I wasn't used to her hard edges, and didn't find her as huggable as Pouspous had been.
Suitcases and duffel bags took up the better part of one or two of the bedrooms. In addition to the letter tags that hung from the handle, my brothers had painted famille lagnado in white block letters across the top of each suitcase to avoid the possibility that some other family on the run would end up with my mom's old wedding gown, or my father's yellowing edition of the Talmud.
On our last night in Egypt, my father took me for a walk. Hand in hand, we made our way across the boardwalk, passing one beach after another. Every once in a while, he would stop and turn and face the sea. He didn't say a word. There were countless cafés, and even in March, we could see nighttime revelers relishing the breeze of an Alexandria evening, smoking and drinking beer or arak, the liqueur whose smell I loved, but which was so strong I couldn't touch a drop. My father settled on the very last café.
It was almost deserted, and to my surprise, we sat indoors, which was dimly lit and quiet, almost like the Dark Bar. My father motioned toward the waiter and ordered a beer. The waiter, who seemed to know Dad well, returned with a tall mug of cold beer and a special treat for meâa tall dark red drink. It was a strawberry soda, and it was on the house, he announced as he plunked the glass in front of me. “C'est pour la petite,” he told my father amiably. His cheer contrasted with our bleak mood.
The deliciously sweet, syrupy drink almost made up for the sadness of the night, and I felt comforted as I took small sips. We resumed our walk on the Corniche and returned to the hotel. Dad kept looking at the sea, and he never let go of my hand.
In the morning we made our way to the dock, where our ship was expected to sail around noon. The waiting area was surprisingly
crowded. Though it was a hot day, my mother had bundled me up in several layers of clothingâa dress, two flannel undershirts, a sweater, and then another sweater.
I had been coached to be on my best behavior with the inspectors, to smile and introduce myself.
When my turn came, I saw a tall man motion to me with his finger to approach. “Loulouâmoi je m'appelle Loulou,” I told the man in uniform, trying not to sound frightened. I felt lost under my pile of clothing. I wasn't even sure he could see me clearly. The man smiled and waved me through, sweaters and all.
There were many other families like us, sitting in small chairs, surrounded by mountains of suitcases. They spoke a dozen different languages, Arabic and French, of course, the two most common languages, but also English, Greek, Italian, and Spanish. But that was Egypt, of course. Or it had been. Suddenly, “foreigners” weren't welcome in the very place where most of them had felt so profoundly at home.
A woman seated across from us was carrying a small portable cage. I saw that it contained a cat. She would occasionally open the cage door and stroke the meowing cat and mumble a few words to persuade it to calm down.
But where was Pouspous?
I kept looking around to see if she were coming, as my father had promised. I was distraught. “We could have taken her with us like that woman,” I told my family reproachfully, and started to cry all over again. My mother ruefully agreed that putting Pouspous in a cage and carting her out of Egypt would have been a good idea.
“Elle ne voulait pas laisser le Caire,” my father told me; She didn't want to abandon Cairo. He had adopted his mild tone of voice again. He made it sound as if he'd had a rational conversation with my cat, and she had clearly conveyed her wishes to stay exactly where she was.
As we boarded the boat, an inspector made us sign one last official document.
It was known as “un Aller sans Retour”âwe were promising to leave and never come back.
W
e had barely drifted out of Alexandria's harbor when I heard my father cry, “Ragaouna Masr”âTake us back to Cairo.
It became his personal refrain, his anthem aboard the old converted cargo ship that rocked so violently as it crossed the Mediterranean that we couldn't bear to stay even for a moment in our inexpensive lower berths, but would slip upstairs to the relative comfort of the upper deck. There, seated on high-backed canvas chairs aligned in straight rows, we'd spend our days and nights, unable to sleep or eat or do much more than try to look back at what we had left behind, or ahead to what awaited us.
Both suddenly seemed blurry.
Past and future looked as vague and out of focus as the lone photograph that survives of my father and me aboard the
Massalia.
There we are, huddled on the upper deck, while behind us, dozens of people sit silently watching the sea. It is like a scene from a cruise ship ad gone awry: none of the passengers seem happy, least of all my father. In his dark felt hat, jacket, and tie, he is dressed far too formally for a sea
crossing. He stares straight ahead at the camera, looking sullen and worn and, for the first time, old. I share his melancholy. My head is lowered, my eyes are downcast, and if it is possible for a six-year-old girl to feel defeated, then I look as if I, too, have lost my purpose. Perched against his shoulder, I am holding on to him, in need of his protection even now that he may be incapable of giving it.
Leon and Loulou on the Massalia.
It was my brother who snapped the smudgy image in March 1963, using a cheap portable camera.
My father talked obsessively of Malaka Nazli, as if expecting me to grasp all we had lost. After months of frenzied activity, there was nothing left to do. Nothing except to sit back on our deck chairs, and gauge how it had all come to thisâdecades in the life of a family, reduced to two dank cabins situated too close to the roaring engines of a small unsteady boat, along with the twenty-six suitcases that contained all their worldly belongings.
“Ragaouna Masr,” my father kept shouting. He had lost all inhibitions, and for a man whose life had exemplified elegance and propriety, any sense of decorum seemed gone. He would cry out when he sat alone, and he'd cry in front of other passengers, when we were with him and when we weren't, inside the privacy of our lower berths and out in the open air. Oddly, no one seemed to mindâor even to find it strangeâthe sight of this irate old man, at times yelling, at times softly moaning, Take us back to Cairo. He was only saying what they felt in their hearts.
It was at that moment, as the
Massalia
bobbed up and down on waters as green as my father's eyes, that I realized how different he looked. I had first noticed the change, a resignation in the way that he drank his beer, ever so slowly, at the café in Alexandria. The jauntiness and self-confidence that were such an intrinsic part of his persona were gone.
It was all so disorienting, as if the man I called my father was an impostorâa desperate stranger I had never met before.
My father wasn't fifty-five, as his exit papers said; he was sixty-two or sixty-three and looked and felt even older as our ship set sail. He wondered, as he experienced the rush of pain that came and went, came and went, in his hip and thigh, how he was going to begin anew, find work, and support a wife and four children, including a little girl who clung to him for dear life.
As the
Massalia
chugged along the Mediterranean, stopping first in Greece, then Italy, I had virtually no dealings with Suzette. My sister kept to herself, unwilling to wallow in the collective despair. Unlike my father, she felt nothing but relief as the boat edged out of Alexandria. Egypt had been a nightmare, even before her arrest and the furor over her conduct. The country that my father already missed so much, that he cried to be allowed to enter again, didn't exist anymore as far as my sister was concerned, and hadn't for years.
Free at last, she relished the idea of a future in the West without the restrictions and stifling mores of the Levant.
Meanwhile, my oldest brother, César, constantly seasick, found he couldn't think clearly. He didn't share my sister's boundless optimismâor my father's boundless despairâbut remained suspended somewhere
between the two. He kept running upstairs for fresh air, unable to stand the claustrophobia of our lower cabins and the constant thud-thud-thud-thud of the engines, and the waves crashing against the porthole. I never seemed to see Isaac or my mom.
César on the deck of the Massalia.
Late one evening, we drifted into Genoa, the last port of call before France. There at the docks, waiting for us, was Salomone, the glamorous cousin from Milan I had heard so much about. As tall as my father, elegant and exquisitely dressed, he was an imposing figure. Everyone in my familyâmy mother in particularâseemed thrilled to see him.
It was their first reunion since Salomone had left Egypt fourteen years earlier, in 1949. Married and a father of three, he was presiding over a growing import-export concern, and his business stretched from Europe to Africa. Yet his home base was still Milan, the city of his youth and memories. Ghosts of his parents and little sister lurked in every
corner. Salomone lived in an apartment close to the Duomo, where the family had lived shortly after he was born, and not far from the square where Mussolini had founded the Fascist Party. This was the school Violetta had attended and where she'd written her first poems, and over here was the prison where she and his parents had been held. And there, of course, the station where they had boarded the train to Auschwitz at dawn, never to return.
We followed Salomone to a nearby café, popular with sailors. The only bit of cheer within the stark, poorly lit interior was the overabundance of Easter decorations. All around the eatery, I could see displays of Easter eggs. They hung alluringly from ceilings or were stacked side by side along high shelves, dazzling in their gold and silver foil casings, and artfully tied with large satin ribbons. The eggs were made entirely of chocolate, and several were at least a foot tall.
I found myself obsessing over what lay beneath all the layers, and left the table to inspect them more closely. My parents and cousin were so deep in conversation, they seemed oblivious to my comings and goings: they were busy reminiscing about their years together at Malaka Nazli, Salomone and my father, along with my grandmother Zarifa, and at the end, the lovely young stranger who joined their household, my mother, Edith.
But they also flashed forward to our family's current plight and what we were going to do now. My cousin had tried to arrange for Suzette to live with him and his family. He had gone to see high-ranking government officials to obtain the proper papers, to no avail. The authorities wouldn't allow my nineteen-year-old sister to remain in Italy. As far as the rest of our family, while Milan was appealing because of our bond with and love for Salomone, it simply wasn't an option. There were many Egyptian Jews who had settled in Italy, but most were able to claim Italian citizenship, however tenuous. They wangled their way into Rome or Milan by stating they were “half-Italian,” brandishing a wife's Italian passport, or a parent's or grandparent's. We were stateless, which meant our movements were severely limited.
We only had permission to go to France, where we would be allowed to stay a few months until we found a permanent refuge.
As I continued my tour of the café, eyeing the chocolate eggs, I
looked up to see Salomone towering over me. He was, like my father, a man of few words. He asked me which one I wanted. The café, which had felt melancholy and dim, suddenly seemed flooded with light. I wasn't sure what to do. I knew that I couldn't point to the largest, most extravagant egg, but I didn't think I had to settle for the smallest egg either. I stood there, incapable of making a decision.
Salomone finally extended his long arm to the ceiling, plucked an egg from a top shelf, and handed it to me. It was elegant and massive, wrapped in silver.
“Ãa va?” he asked me.
I nodded, dazed by his gesture, and returned to the table, brandishing my Easter egg like a trophy. When it was time to return to the boat, everyone rose, my father and my cousin embraced. Salomone lingered briefly by my mother, hugged her tenderly, waved to us, and climbed into his car and drove away.
As we walked, I began to unwrap the egg. I had to peel off layers of foil, tissue paper, and bits of ribbon, until at last I saw the outline of an immense globe-shaped milk chocolate. I broke off a piece. The egg was hollow inside, and I realized there was a gift within the giftâthat deep inside the Easter egg, a prize had been stashed away. My hands finally retrieved a cellophane pouch containing a pair of golden earrings, small and simple and beautiful.
“Tu crois que c'est de l'or?” I asked my father; Do you think it is real gold? My brothers burst out laughing, but my father wouldn't say yes or no. I stuffed the earrings in my pocket and continued walking. We could hear the Greek crew amiably shouting to everyone to hurry up and come aboard, lending passengers like my dad a hand walking the rickety gangplank.
At last, the boat floated into Marseilles. Exhausted from the voyage, we had no means to check into a hotel but hurried, our twenty-six suitcases in tow, to catch an overnight train to Paris. César left us to explore the station. He wore his prized black leather jacket, a
blouson noir,
one of his last purchases from Egypt. It was to be his passport to the stylish world of the French.
As he wandered aimlessly, he suddenly found himself flanked by two plainclothes officers. They pushed him against a wall and began to
frisk him. They had noticed him roaming the station, dressed all in black, and had mistaken him for a “Blouson Noir,” one of the North African gang members who were terrorizing France and were involved in protest actions against the unpopular war in Algeria. Any young man who fit a certain physical and ethnic profile fell under immediate suspicion, and my oldest brother, with his classic Middle Eastern good looksâdark curly hair, brown eyes, fair skin, and black leather garbâcould easily pass for an Algerian immigrant.
Pointing to an unmarked car, the officers asked him to accompany them for questioning. His eyes widening, César shook his head no, no. He was certain that if he obeyed the men and followed them into the car, he would never see us again. Trying to gather his wits, my brother explained that he was indeed a refugee from North Africaânot Algeria but Egypt. He urged the officers to locate our parents, who were in another part of the station. “Mon père est là -bas, avec ma mère et ma famille,” he pleaded; My dad is over there, with my mom and the rest of my family. But the officers seemed uninterested in finding any of us, and César had no choice but to keep trying to talk his way out of his nightmare.
He didn't belong to any gang, my sixteen-year-old brother assured them again and again. His outfit, his leather
blouson,
was simply a nice jacket he had picked up in Cairo. They still cast a cold eye on his professions of innocence. After peppering him with dozens more questions, they reluctantly let him go, and sped away in their unmarked car.
My brother, still shivering under his
blouson noir,
joined us as we boarded the train to Paris. He didn't breathe a word about what had happened.
He had been in France exactly one hour.
I fell asleep by my father's side, clutching what was left of my Italian chocolate egg. Sometime in the middle of the night, somewhere in the middle of France, the train came to a sudden halt. The rail workers were on strike, we were told. We were caught in one of the country's legendary union actions. There was no choice but to remain in the darkened locomotive.
The Marseilles-to-Paris journey had turned into a frightening web
of deserted open rail yards, long dreary waits, and trains that went nowhere. We were exhausted and cold, and we could only wonder at our first taste of life outside Cairo.