The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (23 page)

César in his blouson noir(black leather jacket), Paris, 1963.

But with his extreme literal-mindedness, my brother walked away from his work as a shill for the Folies Bergère only with a vague distaste for showgirls.

One night, as he stood with his friends eyeing the crowds gathering in front of the dance hall, he spotted a tall man in a dark luxuriant wool coat and top hat, walking out the door with a beautiful woman clinging to his arm. He recognized him at once. It was Maurice Chevalier, the movie star who was as much a symbol of Paris as the Folies Bergère. But unlike the showgirls, Maurice Chevalier didn't disappoint a bit. He cut a striking figure, as dapper and distinguished as in his movies. My brother and his friends could only stare as he flashed his famous smile their way, doffed his hat, and kept on walking. César had again the sensation of living in a dream city, and whenever he'd think about our time as refugees and how we had survived and what he had loved the most about Paris, he would conjure up the night he saw Maurice Chevalier.

My mother didn't care for any of this.

She was deeply disturbed that her eldest son was staying out all hours of the night and languishing on street corners like a hoodlum. She was the first to realize, even before my father, that she and Leon no longer exerted the same power over their children as before. In the world outside of Egypt, my siblings were either too alienated or too rebellious to heed what my parents had to say.

She turned to the social workers at the Cojasor for help, and they duly recorded her sense of desperation in Dossier #45,135. But Madame Dana and her colleagues confessed there was nothing much they could do. We were in a state of limbo. There were restrictions about working full-time, and it was impossible for César or Suzette to go to university because we could leave France any day. The social worker could only counsel patience.

Meanwhile, I discovered my favorite spot in all of Paris. It was a small doll factory a few steps up the passage, whose door was usually left ajar, so I could peek in every morning on my way to school and on my way back. The factory was heaven as defined by a seven-year-old girl—hundreds and hundreds of dolls, in various states of completion and undress, all lined up on shelves.

There were dolls without heads, and heads without dolls. There were dolls on racks with no clothes on, and dolls decked out in their full finery. There were dolls with long cascading hair and dolls that were bald. On a stand, miniature wigs were piled one on top of the other—blond curls, red tresses, dark sweeping chignons, sultry pageboys, all waiting for their turn to be placed on the head of some lucky doll and make her beautiful. In those restless final weeks in Paris, that became my favorite activity: marching obsessively past the factory's open door and staring at the dolls.

A breakthrough came in late October: my father was summoned to the rue Lota and asked by HIAS to sign a promissory note.

We were going to America. The document stipulated that we would have to repay any money advanced to us to cover the expense of traveling by ship to New York, including taxes and inland transportation. There was also the freight cost of moving our 1,510 pounds of luggage—a staggering amount of pajamas, lingerie, bedding, pots and pans, sardine cans, and one twenty-year-old wedding gown.

The HIAS loan was routine for the agency, which after all was in the business of sending destitute refugees to America and other countries. The agency would typically purchase tickets and advance families the money to cover travel expenses, expecting them to repay the agency years down the road, when they were back on their feet again.

No amount was specified on the promissory note Dad was asked to sign. We were agreeing to a loan for an unknown sum. My father signed it anyway, of course, though it was only months later, in New York, that we learned the extent of our indebtedness: $1,199.94.

We were finally on our way when I suddenly developed another of my mysterious maladies. I became violently ill with a fever, a rash, a stomachache, and an excruciatingly sore throat. My mother fretted as she bundled me up in bed under every blanket she could cull from the Violet Hotel's poorly stocked linen closet.

My father decided to summon the kindly Dr. Sananes, who had given him a glowing bill of health: he would pay for the house call using a week's allowance, if need be, but at least I would be seen by a proper physician, without having to trek to one of the public clinics, where we had found the care to be singularly unimpressive. In my case, all that our local
dispensaire
did was order more and more blood tests. Typically, I wasn't even seen by a doctor but by nurses. I longed for the distinguished men in white coats bending down to examine me in their private studies in Cairo. I even missed the Professor, of the white gloves and the cold and formidable manner.

Did the West really have a superior medical system to ours? Not in the Paris we had come to know.

When Dr. Sananes arrived, he glanced at our shambles of a hotel room, with suitcases piled one on top of the other, and shook his head. After examining me, looking at my throat, taking my temperature, and peering at the rash I had developed, he rendered his diagnosis.

I had
la scarlatine
—scarlet fever—a dangerous infection whose key symptom was the pink rash that seemed to be spreading. The disease often began as a simple sore throat, he explained, but could turn fatal. We shouldn't even think of traveling to America now—not for months. He offered to sign a note asserting that under no circumstances could we leave France.

My parents were stunned. How on earth had Loulou contracted scarlet fever? they asked each other.

News of my illness reached HIAS, the Cojasor, and every other agency handling our case. The officials reacted with alarm. The diagnosis was so dire, it threatened to unhinge their meticulous travel plans. HIAS had finally managed to book the family tickets aboard the
Queen Mary,
which was to sail from Cherbourg to New York in early November. Clearly, because of my scarlet fever, we weren't going to make the voyage.

Telegrams about my plight were dispatched to any number of overseas offices. “The youngest, a little auburn-haired girl, is sick,” read one cable. There was now an even bigger question mark. When would my family, which had already consumed an inordinate amount of resources, attention, and psychic energy from the local and international relief agencies, finally be able to leave France?

Between our inability to make decisions, our endless need for services, my siblings' unhappiness, and the clear signs of discord in our family, we had taxed these relief and support agencies to their limit, and they were anxious for us to be on our way.

Agency officials debated how it was possible for a seven-year-old girl in a Paris hotel to contract
la scarlatine.
Was this an elaborate plot to remain in France? They had certainly heard of refugees delaying their departure to linger in Paris, but inventing a deathly illness for a young child would be a first.

At last, agency officials thought of sending over a seasoned doctor to examine me and confirm the diagnosis. My mom was overjoyed. “Le bon docteur arrive,” she cried, once again praying for the mythical, all-knowing physician of her imagination.

For once, she wasn't disappointed. A distinguished French doctor holding a small black bag knocked on our door and made his way immediately to my bed. He seemed oblivious to the chaos in the room. After examining me thoroughly, he rendered his diagnosis: I only had a sore throat, maybe a severe sore throat, at most a strep.

What of the scarlet fever? my father asked.

“Absolument pas,” he declared. With his calm, commanding manner, he seemed to have stepped out of my mother's dream of
le bon docteur.
He scribbled a prescription for an antibiotic on a pad and or
dered me to stay in bed for another week. After that, he said, I was free to go to school—or even to America.

When my dad offered to pay him, the doctor said, “Non, merci,” shook hands, bowed, and left.

My father was so distraught at Dr. Sananes and his dire pronouncement that he called him. Why had he frightened us with his diagnosis of scarlet fever, he asked the young doctor, when all I had was a sore throat? The physician seemed puzzled. He had assumed we
wanted
to stay in Paris a while longer, that we needed more time to prepare for our journey. He had tried to do us a favor now by stressing the grave nature of my illness, knowing that a family with a sick child would be able to stretch out their stay in France.

Within a matter of days, HIAS announced they'd bought new tickets for us on the ship's next crossing, in early December. The ocean liner was to sail from Cherbourg, with a weeklong voyage that would get us into America shortly before Christmas. They were purchasing five and a half tickets for the family.

I was the half.

There were no elaborate preparations for our voyage this time, no major shopping expeditions. In one brief burst of anxiety, my mother insisted that my father take me at once to a shoe store. I had to have a pair of boots, she said: it was the only way to shield “pauvre Loulou” from a country likely to be even colder than France.

Hand in hand, Leon and I walked to Montmartre and its bargain-basement stores. There, in the window of a popular discount chain, were dozens of children's boots—boots with thick fur lining, suede boots, rubber boots, and boots entirely of leather. I had never owned a pair of boots, so the mere act of trying them on felt like an adventure.

I pounced on a pair of jaunty galoshes. My father agreed to buy them, though they were plastic and flimsy. But he also nudged me gently toward a practical pair of blue suede boots that reached past my ankles, with furry pile lining and thick yellow soles of caoutchouc—rubber. They looked like an Eskimo could happily have worn them. My father examined the lining with an expert eye and nodded his approval.

I felt tough and invincible as I stomped around the store in my arctic boots. I felt ready for America.

A couple of weeks before we were scheduled to leave, we heard a scream coming from the passage Violet.

“Ils ont assassiné votre président!” the porter was shouting toward our window—They have killed your president! My family looked at one another, thoroughly befuddled. Had Nasser been murdered in Egypt? Had they assassinated King Farouk in his Italian exile? Or was it General de Gaulle who had been killed here in Paris?

It took a few minutes before we realized that “our president” was the president of the United States. John F. Kennedy was dead. All day, my family huddled around the small table. The small leather-cased transistor radio we had purchased in Alexandria, and which had been our lifeline to the outside world since leaving Egypt, was blasting.

I caught only the same six words, “Le Président Kennedy a été assassiné,” repeated over and over again. My parents and siblings seemed shaken. They spoke in such low voices, I couldn't make out what they were saying.

Discussions about where we should go resumed with intensity, and were more agitated than ever. Should we really move to New York? What kind of country were we going to that murdered its own leader? Even Farouk, the victim of a military coup, had been permitted to leave safely and sail out of Egypt aboard the
Mahrousa,
the royal yacht.

Our decision appeared terribly flawed, though we felt helpless to change course. Of all of us, my sister reacted the most emotionally. Only when Alexandra died had I seen her cry so copiously. To Suzette, the murder of JFK underscored the inchoate fears and misgivings she'd felt all along about the family moving to America, the sense that it was fundamentally the wrong place for us.

A couple of weeks later, we boarded the train to Cherbourg, where the
Queen Mary
was waiting to take us to America. We were all glum. César, who had liked Paris more than any of us, felt as if he were waking up from a dream.

When we arrived in Cherbourg, my father and I broke off from the rest of the family and took a long walk. It was after sunset, and we always loved to walk together at night, though I noticed that his gait was more tentative in the dark, and I wondered if he was in pain.

Dad and I found ourselves standing in front of a massive ocean liner
shimmering in the still dark waters. It was the
Queen Mary,
so close we could almost touch it. Vast and imposing and stretching out for what seemed like a mile, it was like no ship we had ever seen before. In comparison, the
Massaglia
was a shabby little rowboat. Yet despite its majesty and heft, the
Queen Mary
offered us little comfort, and indeed, even heightened our sense of terror.

Or perhaps it was simply despair we felt at finding ourselves staring at another ship we would be boarding for yet another voyage into the unknown. I held my father's hand a little more tightly as we lingered, dazzled and scared at the same time.