The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (38 page)

Each month, posing as my father, the husband reported to the Ministry of
Communication to pay the charges. He even took care of some back bills we had incurred in the month
or two before we'd left. He was polite and pleasant, careful to pay on time and to the penny,
so that the disguise worked for years, until an astute bureaucrat realized what had happened, and
took ruthless and immediate measures. He dispatched his workers to the ground-floor apartment to
yank away the black phone and interrupt the service.

It would be years before the house had a phone again.

The Old Bride rose slowly from her chair, went to a drawer, and retrieved several
pieces of paper covered with Arabic writing. They were invoices as well as letters from the
Communications Ministry addressed to my father about “his” phone. Somehow, it
didn't surprise me that she had kept them, as if anticipating the day one of us would come to
settle all outstanding accounts—in the same way that she and her son hadn't seemed
particularly surprised to see me at their doorstep.

Although the apartment was dilapidated and neglected, almost as if its occupants
didn't care anymore, she graciously offered me a tour. Our first stop was the dining room,
with the little balcony overlooking Malaka Nazli where I had spent so much of my childhood. There
was a cactus plant to ward against the evil eye, and two small chairs placed on either side of the
balcony; I was sure they had been ours, but she smiled, and shook her head no, and repeated, so that
I had to believe her: only the phone and the bed had been left behind, nothing else. She loved to
sit in the sun with her husband, and she had bought the chairs herself. Since her husband's
death a year or so earlier, her son had begun to join her out on the balcony, and they'd
continued to relish the street life.

It was still possible to do that, I realized to my amazement, even though decades
had passed and Malaka Nazli itself had changed. Years back, Egyptian bureaucrats had decided to
build a highway parallel to it, ostensibly to improve traffic flow. Now, the ugly concrete structure
extended like a dark shadow across the once-serene avenue, traffic
flowed only
one way instead of two, and bottlenecks were worse than ever.

Loulou on the balcony at Malaka Nazli,
next to the protective cactus, Cairo, 2005.

In my father's old room, the window where he and I had spent hours laughing
and calling out to pretty girls and friendly passersby, chatting with anyone who would chat with us,
was all boarded up; it was now the son's room, and he preferred to keep the window closed.

I shuddered to think what my father would have done—no doubt, he would have
headed straight to the window and flung it open and let everyone, from the new owners to the
Egyptian government, know that it was his street and his window, and he was reclaiming both.

We continued our tour with a visit to the kitchen with its modern gas stove and the
refrigerator positioned a few feet away. Where was the Primus? I asked. What had they done with
Grandmother Zarifa's beloved Primus?

The Old Bride seemed puzzled. Then she burst out laughing. Even before moving in,
she had insisted on a brand-new kitchen. Out went the old-fashioned contraptions that had remained
unchanged since the 1940s, when Zarifa reigned—the gas and kerosene burners, the icebox that
masqueraded as a refrigerator, the corroded wooden shelves, and, yes, the Primus. Instead, the
kitchen was outfitted with a real stove, electric, new countertops and cabinets.

I looked at my beaming hostess, and praised her sparkling and modern forty-year-old
appliances.

And the bathroom, I wanted to know: Still no hot running water?

It was the son's turn to chuckle. For years after we'd left, his family
didn't have hot water either. The two of us shared memories of childhood baths using an oblong
metal container filled with boiling water our mothers would lug into the small bathroom. We'd
fill a large mug with the water and splash it all over our head and body, simulating a hot
shower.

“I'd cry out to my mother to heat more water because I kept running
out,” the Engineer recalled, and with those words, I suddenly remembered my ritual
Friday-night bath on Malaka Nazli and how safe and protected I felt in that cozy bathroom, with the
steam rising from the aluminum container, and my mother scrubbing and scrubbing my hair with Savon
Nabolsi, the large green medicinal soap, because shampoo was too luxurious an item to be squandered
on a little girl, and how
delighted I was when she tossed cup after cup of hot
water over my head and back.

Some years ago, the Engineer told me, the landlord had installed hot running water
on demand, and it was possible to take real showers now. But he didn't look nearly as excited
as he had moments earlier, when he'd recalled his little tantrums, his demands that his mother
deliver continuous amounts of steamy water.

The master bedroom was tucked away in the back. It was the room my mother had
briefly shared with my father after they wed, until he'd moved out and returned to his old
digs, the airy room in the front facing Malaka Nazli, and his old ways.

Despite its many windows, the bedroom struck me as dark and dreary. It was where my
mom had given birth to all of us, including Baby Alexandra. It was the only part of the house, the
only part of Cairo, where I didn't want to linger, which felt impossibly bleak.

At last, we came to my favorite room, the one overlooking the alleyway. It had once
been Zarifa's room, and years later, my father's office. I'd loved to play there,
amid the papers and files, or better yet, to stand on the balcony with Pouspous at my side, waving
and chatting with my friend across the alley, the pretty bride.

It was also where the vendors would station themselves each morning, balancing
baskets of fresh fish on their heads or pushing carts filled with the fruits and vegetables du
jour—zucchini, cucumbers, green beans, potatoes, apricots, or my favorite, the dark purple
baby eggplant. The balcony was so close to the ground that we could reach out and touch the baskets
on their heads. I could point to what I wanted, help myself to bunches of grape leaves that my
mother would stuff with ground meat and rice, and simmer in a lemony broth.

Who needed to go to the supermarket, anyway? Once upon a time, in Cairo, the
supermarket had come to us.

I had loved the call of the vendors as they approached Malaka Nazli—shrill,
intense, designed to make sure everyone heard them coming. Their high-pitched song had followed me
all the way to America, much as the scent of the roses had pursued my father.

My mother had tried to pull me away from the balcony. She'd worry when there
were funeral tents, and parades of mourners in the alley below: she didn't want me to know
death or sadness, no doubt trying to
stave off the day when I would know both
only too well. Yet I had rarely felt sad there, even when the mourners wept out loud. Only when my
friend the young bride died, and I didn't understand.

The Old Bride seemed troubled when I asked her about the apartment across the
alleyway. When she'd first arrived, there was a man, a solitary figure who lived there. He was
a military officer, often in his uniform, who occasionally made an appearance on the balcony. But he
never smiled, or acknowledged her greetings with more than a curt and somber nod. He was a widower,
she thought, and lonely, but no matter how she tried, he wouldn't respond to her attempts at
friendship. Perhaps he was only being proper, she decided. She was, after all, a newly married
woman.

Then one day he moved out, suddenly and without any notice. The bad-luck apartment
remained empty for years. Finally, after no one had moved in, an art-store owner took it over and
made it part of his gleaming new gallery.

“Do you remember a cat, a small cat of many colors, very sweet and
affectionate, who would have been here when you moved in?” I asked.

The Old Bride turned to her son, thoroughly bewildered. “Otah? Otah?”
she said, repeating the Arabic word for cat to make sure she understood. She was such a kindly
woman, deeply instinctive, and blessed with a good heart: Who else would have saved some
forty-year-old bills for a black phone? It seemed entirely plausible to me that she would have taken
Pouspous in, fed her cheese and sardines, exactly as my father had told me when we left.

But the woman kept asking, “Otah, otah?” She was incredulous; in her
mind, the conversation had taken a very strange turn.

Here someone had come all the way from America, and she was inquiring about some
long-forgotten cat.

The Old Bride shook her head decisively: No. There was no cat in the house when
she'd moved in, a few weeks after we'd left Egypt. There had been only the white bed and
the black phone.

I wandered over to my father's old room. I suddenly felt like crying. I
thought of all the stories I'd carried in my head these many years, stories he had told me
after we had left, when I was feeling so forlorn—about Pouspous doing well, enjoying herself
in the house we'd
left behind, sunning herself on the balcony and inviting
strangers to feed her. None of it had been true.

Both mother and son could tell I was distraught. I sat down as she hurried to serve
me a cool drink from her modern refrigerator. Then she excused herself and left.

“You know, of course, what happens when a cat must lose its owner?” the
Engineer asked me cryptically, in his labored English.

I shook my head, no.

“When a cat can no longer find its owner, it stops eating—it stops
eating completely,” he explained. “It is as if they are in mourning. That is how they
die,” he said gently. “They die after refusing to touch a single morsel.”

 

THERE WAS A NEIGHBOR
upstairs that I should
meet, the Old Bride told me when I returned the following day to Malaka Nazli.

She had lived in the building almost sixty years and had known everyone who had come
and gone, including my parents; now, she was very anxious to meet me, but she was too aged and
infirm to walk down even the lone flight of stairs. Would I mind going to the second floor to see
her?

Reluctantly I left the apartment.

My apartment.

As I marched up the stairs, I noticed how dusty and broken down and neglected they
were, the walls blackened and filthy, the floors looking as if they hadn't been swept in
years—perhaps in all the years since my family had left.

I'd played with Pouspous on this stairwell when it sparkled, chasing after her
as she ran to hide in the thousand nooks and corners only she knew. I'd often had no choice
but to enlist the aid of Abdo, our Sudanese porter, to find her. Abdo lived downstairs, in a dark,
mysterious basement apartment directly below ours. He seemed always there when we needed him to hail
a taxi for my father or run an errand for my mother, or help me hunt for Pouspous because he knew
the secrets of the stairwell.

“Abdo, Abdo,” we'd call out, and he would materialize out of the
darkness, smiling and gracious in his flowing white caftan, strangely
dignified.

Abdo was long gone and had never been replaced. Now, like so much of Cairo, the
building had been allowed to decay until little by little, it became dirty and unkempt and lost much
of the elegance and grace that had prompted my father to move in with Zarifa and Salamone in the
spring of 1938, and then bring his new bride, my mother, to live there five years later.

I knocked on the door and was greeted by a young woman in traditional Arab garb. She
welcomed me into the apartment, which was a simulacrum of our place downstairs—the same open
design, the same four bedrooms built around the central room, and off to the side, the narrow
kitchen.

Her mother sat in a velvet armchair, a frail, regal figure with her hair swept under
a white head covering. I went over to shake the old woman's hand, but she quickly reached out
to embrace me instead, her arms wrapping around me as she kissed both my cheeks, and brought me
close to her chest. She looked as if she could barely stand without an effort, yet her gaze was
focused and strong and not at all vague in the manner of the old.

I could feel her eyeing me closely, studying my eyes, my face and hair, examining my
clothes and my shoes, as if trying to remember, to remember.

I sat on the sofa directly across from her. She kept looking at me, not saying a
word, while her daughter kept up a light banter. Would I like a cold drink? A bit of dinner? There
was some nice okra stew cooking in the oven: could she offer me a plate? Was I enjoying my visit to
Cairo?

Suddenly, the old woman interrupted us and began to speak.

“You look exactly like your mother,” she declared in Arabic, for she
knew no other language. “You are the same as her.”