Read The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit Online
Authors: Lucette Lagnado
Even my father, who had resented the influence Alexandra wielded on Mom and the rest of us, found himself shaken by all the deathsâhis brother Raphael, his sister Rebekah, and now his ill-fated, troubled mother-in-law. Of all of us, Dad had wanted to go to Israel the most, yet he too was now wavering.
Her death plunged us into a kind of pathological indecision. We tried to stall both the Cojasor and HIAS, as we struggled to come to a decision. We went ahead with an application to settle in America, though it was by no means clear that was where we wanted to go. Discussions among my siblings tended to be intensely emotional or numbingly repetitive. I heard the same hopes and misgivings voiced again and again. Tensions would flare, there'd be yelling, and then calm would again descend, and a consensus seemed close.
Israel would have been a simpler choice than the United States, which entailed an arduous application process that could take months. It was also where most of our extended family had settled. Though Nonna Alexandra was dead, we had dozens of other relatives on my
father's side ready to welcome us. It seemed the ideal place to begin again and rebuild our lives, or so one argument went.
On the other hand, my brothers feared the mandatory military service, a near certainty if we opted for Israel, a country under constant threat of war. Plus, work was said to be tough to find, the pay meager, the possibilities for advancement limited.
To say nothing of the scorpions. We risked coming face-to-face with them, since we were bound to live in tents. I shuddered merely thinking about them.
Hope lay in America, César proclaimed, espousing the vision of the carefree, fun-loving culture he had glimpsed in Cairo movie theaters. My brother had watched, mesmerized, a clip of Chubby Checkers performing “The Twist,” and it was akin to a religious conversion. America beckoned, not because of its promise as the proverbial land of opportunity but because of its allure as the land of Chubby and Elvis, where everyone danced the Twist and swayed to rock and roll. In the spring of 1963, America seemed to hold so much of what we cravedâpeace, a home of our own, security, and the possibility of amassing wealth again and recapturing our lost life.
I kept hearing references to streets paved with gold. Naturally, I took them literally. I closed my eyes and tried to picture cars gliding over a shimmering New York City roadway, while I strolled along a golden sidewalk. What a lovely change from the slate gray streets of Paris.
My parents seemed helpless to stop the bickering. Neither wanted to risk losing a son to the draft, which was the defining drawback to Israel. America seemed to pose few such safety concerns. There was no talk, or none that reached our ears, of the growing conflagration in Vietnam. We had no inkling that within a year or two, there would also be a draft in America.
With the exception of weighing in on the scorpions, my mother was quiet. Still mourning the death of Alexandra, she had lost her main incentive for going to Israel, or anywhere else for that matter. Despite a husband and four children, she felt rootless and alone.
No one sought my opinion. If they had asked, I would have said without hesitation: Let's go back to Cairo, let's try to find Pouspous.
My father would have to make the final decision, but he, too, was torn. He was also in physical pain. The ache from his leg was at times
ferocious. Over the years, my father had continued to correspond with physicians across Europe who had urged him to come see them the instant he arrived. That's why my father carted around Paris the black old-fashioned X-rays he had brought with him from Cairo.
He took them along one day when we reported to the Cojasor. He informed Madame Dana, our social worker, that he was hoping to consult some specialists in Geneva, Milan, and London about his sore leg. Madame Dana looked genuinely startled.
Didn't he realize, she asked, that with our stateless status, we were under orders to remain strictly within the environs of Paris? His only optionâMadame Dana shruggedâwas to consult doctors here. She was being disingenuous, of course, while we were clearly in denial.
We had no money to see the great specialists of Parisâor Milan, London, or Geneva either.
A free clinic for the poor became our only portal to the world of Western medicine we had dreamed of entering for so long. I, too, needed medical attention: worrisome symptoms of Cat Scratch Fever returned to haunt me shortly after we arrivedâor perhaps we hadn't noticed them in those last, chaotic days in Cairo. The strange swelling on my left thigh that Egyptian doctors had blamed on Pouspous seemed especially pronounced, and I was frightened. What happened to the magical cure I had experienced at the hands of Maimonides? Was it vanishing now that we were so far from his holy shrine?
I sensed that my family was also worried. “Loulou est encore malade,” my mother sighed; Loulou is sick again. Both my parents wondered how on earth they were going to care for me in a dingy hotel room, in a city where they didn't have a dime and didn't know a soul.
My father's fate and mine became enmeshed once more as we ventured to the free clinic in search of answersâonly to find there were none. Dad was getting worse; his steps were becoming more tentative, his movements more restricted. Only a couple of blocks from our hotel lay the majestic open-air boulevards of Montmartre and the Capucines, and beyond them, the even more sumptuous Opera and Haussmann, yet he couldn't enjoy them. Unable to reclaim his role of boulevardier in the city of boulevardiers, he stayed most of the time inside our hotel room and did nothing but pray.
I
t was in Paris that my birthday almost disappeared.
We had been there several months, stuck in the Violet Hotel. Fear for my brothers' safety finally clinched the decision: my father had chosen America. But that in no way guaranteed we would be able to go. Our application was winding its way through the mazelike bureaucracy of global refugee resettlement agencies, and we still hadn't unpacked.
My father now occasionally ventured to Montmartre, where an outdoor fair, complete with barkers and games of chance, restored his good humor. His passion for gambling found an improbable outlet amid the small kiosks where for less than a franc and the spin of a wheel of fortune, it was possible to vie for watches, dishes, pocketknives, transistor radios, even jewelry, which I eyed longingly, since all I possessed was the pair of earrings I'd found inside the chocolate Easter egg. The fair became Dad's daily destination, after morning prayers and before joining the sad sacks who gathered at noon at a nearby soup kitchen.
The Cojasor had set up an elaborate system of meals for the waves of immigrants from the Levant. A communal cafeteria on the rue Richer, a
block from our hotel, served hot, nutritious meals that adhered to the strictest Jewish dietary laws, all for a nominal fee. Once a day, around noon, elegant socialites from the sixteenth arrondissement descended on a mission to help feed the poor and destitute, which now included my family.
At Le Richer, as we called it, meals were freshly prepared and plentifulâalmost too plentiful. Every few minutes, bejeweled volunteers came to our table, offering to ladle more food on our plates from the large tureens they carted up and down the aisle. They seemed more than willing to offer us extra helpings of dishes that tasted foreign and deliciousâespecially the charcuterie they served once a week with bread and mustard. I'd never tasted cold cuts in Cairo, where the lone kosher purveyor had packed up and moved before my family left.
I found the thin slices of salami and turkey Le Richer offered us intensely exotic, unlike any food I'd ever eaten.
An elderly countessâat least, that is what César said she wasâgold bracelets dripping from her arms, precious stones adorning the fingers of each hand, would approach us and always ask the same question, in the high, squeaky aristocratic voice that my oldest brother loved to imitate: “Beaucoup ou un peu?”âA lot or a little?
If we shyly nodded
beaucoup,
she heaped our plates with mountainous portions of meat, rice, vegetables, and potatoes, and if we said “Un peu,” she still tried to fill our plates to the brim, so that it really didn't matter how we answered her. We were encouraged to take food home; among the few amenities of the Violet Hotel was a small kitchenette with a
rechaud,
an electric burner where it was possible to recycle leftovers and have them for our supper.
Though the volunteers behaved graciously and made sure no one went hungry, most of us still found Le Richer impossibly bleak. Dad yearned for his simple meals of pita bread and cheese. My sister couldn't get used to the noisy, impersonal cafeteria-style dining. I longed to be seated at our dining room table
,
sneaking bits and pieces from my plate to Pouspous.
Day after day, we had nothing much to do except report for lunch and rejoin the community of losers who shared our sense of aimlessness.
My reprieve from the world of exiles and lost souls came as a result of my mom's restlessness. After news of Alexandra's passing, she began to take long walks with me, clutching my hand and forcing me to wander with her for hours through Paris. We sprinted down the passage Violet and over to Montmartre and its bustling, low-budget stores, with their foraging and stampeding crowds of shoppers, and continued to walk for miles until the scenery changed, the stores became silent and spare, and the people we glimpsed within them seemed to glide rather than walk.
We crossed boulevards and avenues. We explored alleyways and peered into courtyards. We traversed bridges and islands. I knew only to hold her hand tightly and try to keep up. Her brisk intense pace was so different from my dad's labored shuffle.
The few words she exchanged with my father were to ask for a few coins each day. She would use them sparingly, conscious of how little we had, and treat me to an ice-cream cone or a bag of chips. It had to be one or the other, not both. Each day, I was forced to make what seemed an impossibly difficult decision, as tough in its own way as the choice that had been rankling my parents and siblings, namely, whether to settle in Israel or America.
I, too, couldn't make up my mind, couldn't decide between a cool refreshing vanilla ice cream or the crisp, salty potato chips I'd never tasted before France. I tried desperately to accept the limits placed on my once limitless needs and desires, the needs and desires of a pampered little Levantine girl, used to seeing the world from her charmed balcony facing Malaka Nazli.
Occasionally we walked with a purpose and destination. We ventured to the Prisunic, the French five-and-dime with its bins of bargain fare, or the Tuileries gardens, whose bucolic expanse was so restful. But nothing gave us more pleasure than going to Parc Monceau, the lush, rich children's playground nestled in the seventeenth arrondissement. It seemed miraculous that it was free and accessible to us because so much of Paris was out of boundsâthe lovely bistros and cafés, the theater, the opera or the Comédie Française, all cost money we didn't have.
As we prepared to walk through the wrought-iron gates with the
gold “PM” insignia, Mom reminded me this was Marcel Proust's playground, and she said it with so much feeling and intensity that I knew I was expected to absorb the magic that she suggested was in the air and the grass and the swings and the sandlots.
I noticed a change in Mom the minute we entered. It was as if we had reached a spot where the oxygen level was higher, and she could breathe again. There, amid the Japanese gardens and rolling brooks, in the shadow of simulacra of an Egyptian pyramid and a Roman ruin where toddlers played before the watchful eyes of their English nannies, my mother seemed to come to life again, and her beauty returned.
As Edith sat on a bench gazing at the elegant young mothers, feeling neither young nor elegant, but distinctly more hopeful, I ran in the grass, fed the ducks in the pond, climbed hills, and watched puppet shows alongside the other children whose outfits probably cost more than all my family now possessed.
The sandlot and the swings were great equalizers. I began to join in their games, strangely at ease with the privileged girls of the Parc Monceau. This most exclusive corner of Paris emerged as the most egalitarian.
Certainly, I felt more at home there than at my school. I attended the Ãcole Chabrol, around the corner from the hotel. Though it was a working-class public school, I felt wildly inferior to my classmates, who arrived each morning in stylish pink or blue nylon smocks over their street clothes. My parents couldn't afford to buy me either. In my unfashionable dark woolen slacks and sweater from Cairoâand no colorful smockâI felt awkward and out of place. I suffered in silence, not daring to complain.
I thought yearningly back to my gray-and-white jumper with the embroidered crest, the uniform of the Lycée Français de Bab-el-Louk. My first day of school, I'd walked round and round the courtyard with my friends, feeling terribly stylish and grown-up in my elegant cotton dress. My books were in a brown leather satchel my father purchased for me and which I carried in my arms,
comme les grandes filles
âlike the older girls.
On our last day on Malaka Nazli, as we pondered what remaining
items to stuff in our suitcases, I kept staring at my leather bag, lying there on the dining room table. I started to reach for it a dozen times, but then Pouspous wandered in and commanded all my attention, so that the bag stayed on the table as we walked out the door.
I found the French girls of the Ãcole Chabrol alien so that even French, my native language, began sounding oddly foreign to my ears. Come lunchtime, I'd join my family at the Richer, even as the other little girls bonded in the cafeteria. During afternoon recess, I stood by myself in a corner of the schoolyard, praying for the games to end.
I am not sure whether I was pleased or mortified when my teacher surprised me with a gift.
One morning, I came to class and found a box on my chair. Inside was a small beige canvas book bag with leather trim inscribed “Pour Loulou.” Had my kindly homeroom teacher noticed my discomfiture and sense of isolation? After months at the school, I hadn't made a single friend and barely spoke to anyone.
Somehow, I still managed to finish the year on a high note, collecting first prize at
la distribution des prix
held in the auditorium, where the mayor of Paris came to hand out the awards. I heard my name and stepped up to the stage, where stacks of books were lined up on a long table. Monsieur le Maire shook my hand as he gave me a set of books, tied together by a silk ribbon. Later that day, Mom and I trooped to the Cojasor to show off my bountyâthe collected works of Hans Christian Andersen, a history book, and a fat Larousse dictionary. My mother was in a surprisingly jaunty mood, and Madame Dana beamed, thrilled either with my performance in school or, more likely, with the fact that Edith at last was smiling.
My birthday on September 19 was fast approaching. It would all be different then, I was sure of that. It was, in part, a child's mystical belief in the power and transcendence of birthdays. But it was also Cairo, where my birthday was a day when the world seemed to come to a full stop and all efforts were expended on making it as pleasurable as possible. My father saw to that.
It always began with the doorbell ringing early in the morning.
“Loulou, c'est pour toi,” my father called out from his seat by the window facing Malaka Nazli. I'd run to the door to find Abdo, our por
ter, carrying an enormous white cardboard box bearing the distinctive name in blue letteringâMaison Groppi. Abdo would hand me the box, which was almost too heavy for me to carry. I didn't need to open it to know what was inside. The white box from Maison Groppi had been arriving on my birthday ever since I could remember.
To the end, my father had indulged my passion for Groppi's. Going there every afternoon was a ritual for the two of us, as it had been in former years for my siblings, and even my rebellious, wayward sister had happily accompanied Dad there and allowed him to treat her to one dessert after another.
Because we could never bear to leave, Dad and I would take a piece of Groppi's home with usâsome of its delectable
crème Chantilly.
The cream had such a rich consistency, the staff simply placed it in a compact white cardboard box and tied a string around it, and voilà : it would withstand the taxi ride back to Malaka Nazli.
The box that I carried from the door to the living room was bigger. I tore it open and found what looked like a wedding cake, large, white, with pink sugar lettering and frosted flowers and curlicues and other elaborate decorations made of cream. On it were the words “Bon Anniversaire,” in butter frosting. It was too early in the day to eat cake but no matterâit was also impossible to resist.
My father helped me cut large slices for members of my family, who gathered by the living room sofa. I was of course entitled to as much as I could possibly handle. I tried in vain to tempt Pouspous with some of my cake, holding it to her nose, but she seemed singularly unimpressed, the only resident of Malaka Nazliâpossibly in all of Cairoâwho had no use for Groppi's delicacies. My last birthday in Egypt was spent laughing, opening gifts, and hearing my family marvel at how Groppi's had outdone itself this year.
Paris seemed on the verge of obliterating all of that.
On September 19, I left school as usual to meet my family at the Richer for lunch. They were seated at their familiar table in the corner. The cafeteria was hot and more crowded on this autumn day, perhaps because of a new wave of refugees. The old countess came by and tried to pile extra portions on my plate. My family began eating as if it were any other day. I picked anxiously at my food.
It was when our aristocratic waitress returned to ask if I wanted more that I snapped. I took the plate heaped with hot food and hurled it across the floor, smashing it into dozens of small pieces that flew across the room, along with clumps of rice and meat and vegetables. My family sat, horrified at my uncharacteristic display of rage, aware that the entire dining room had turned to stare at us. Even the well-meaning countess was speechless, her gracious smile faded, and she looked as if she were about to cry.
I demanded to know where my cake wasâmy birthday cake from Groppi's:
“Mais où est-il?” I asked my bewildered parents and siblings. “Où est le gâteau d'anniversaire?”
My mother tried to level with me. It wasn't possible to get me a birthday cake this year, she said. It simply wasn't possible. Besides, I wasn't a child anymore. At seven, she said, I was old enough to understand how much our circumstances had changed: “Loulou, nous sommes à des milliers de kilomètres de chez Groppi”âLoulou, we are thousands of miles away from Groppi's.
My father rose slowlyâit was difficult for him to get up from a chair these days. He motioned to me to follow him.
Together, we walked out of the Richer. I could feel all eyes on us. We strolled silently up the streets near Poissonière, passing countless fur wholesalers featuring luxuriant mink and sable coats in their windowsâitems that no one in the neighborhood could afford, produced for an outside clientele we never saw, who didn't deign to venture on to our street.
We continued walking until we came to a small bakery, the size of a broom closet, with a simple display of baguettes in the window.
Inside, a glass case featured a modest selection of cakes. They couldn't have been more than a couple of inches wide, but they were delicate and elegant in the manner of all French pastries, decorated with waves of frosting, cherries, strawberries, and puffs of Chantilly cream.