In Their Father's Country Page 7

  Shortly before noon, Iris came for a visit with a box full of her aunt’s favorite almond cookies. When shown the cookies, Letitia put on the ghost of a smile and reached for Iris’s hand.

  Told by Alexandre that his sister-in-law was sliding fast, Yussef Sahli called every hour, taking the opportunity just about every time to question the specialist’s competence. ‘A charlatan probably,’ he kept saying over the phone. That the specialist had come recommended by his son-in-law Aristote, was a big strike against the man as far as Yussef was concerned. Yussef Sahli had never quite swallowed his daughter Bella’s marriage to Aristote who did not care a wit about money and tended to be more amused than intimidated by his father-in-law.

  It was just about to get dark – that time of the evening when, if alone, Claire often felt unsettled and had vague longings. While keeping watch over her mother, she realized, for the first time in her life, the strangeness of having grown up, in a society in which connections and background meant everything, next to a loving and tender mother, whose identity was such a complete black hole; about whose past she knew virtually nothing. Considered by Gabrielle and the Sahlis as weak and fragile, her mother must have had a certain strength of character to have kept as silent as she had all those years.

  If her mother had been in better health, would Claire have mentioned her discovery at the consulate, she wondered? Should she be asking her now, ‘Mother, is there anything you wish to tell me?’ Might Letitia surprise her and answer? It seemed to Claire that asking her any such question now would be both cruel and futile. Her mother’s past no longer really mattered; little would change in her and Gabrielle’s life from knowledge of that past, however much such knowledge might explain her mother’s timidity, bouts of melancholy, and occasional odd behavior.

  Letitia died at daybreak, three days after the specialist’s visit, while her daughters were having coffee in the kitchen.

  Her funeral was held at the Roman Catholic Church of St. Joseph, in the heart of Cairo. All the Sahlis – with the exception of the one living in Paris – attended the funeral. So did Ali and Om Batta with her son Mahmud. Batta stayed at Claire’s place to look after Simone and Aida.

  Just before the ceremony, the priest, who barely knew Letitia – she was not much of a churchgoer – asked Claire and Gabrielle to tell him what sort of woman she was; he needed to know for the homily. ‘Devoted to her family,’ Gabrielle said laconically. Claire added, ‘She was very affected by our father’s death; she never really recovered from it.’ Claire saw Gabrielle wince as she said this.

  The only ones to cry during the ceremony were Iris, Constance and Om Batta.

  After Letitia’s burial in the Sahli crypt, Iris embraced Claire and whispered, ‘I am so sorry, I know how attached you were to her. She was like a reed, a fragile reed.’

  Claire whispered back, ‘In truth, Iris, I feel more grief thinking of her life than of her death.’

  When it was her turn to pay her respects, Om Batta took Claire to one side and said in a low voice, ‘I know that it’s very hard for a daughter to lose a mother, but it was time for her to go. I did not want to tell you the day I came for a visit, but I had a dream about her in which she was reunited with Selim Bey. That’s why I hurried to see her. I have known her for much of my life. She was like an older sister to me.’ Om Batta paused to wipe some tears, then went on, ‘It was time really. She was getting confused. When I sat with her, I tried to cheer her up by talking about Simone and Aida so I told her that Selim Bey would have been extremely proud of his granddaughters, and she said to me, “Yes, Roberto would have been proud.”’

  Claire asked softly, ‘She said “Roberto”?’

  ‘She was tired by then. I had tired her out. You know how I tend to go on and on. She is in peace now. I envy her. I hope it’s my turn next.’

  ‘Don’t say so!’ Claire said. ‘You’re far too young for that.’

  ‘I don’t feel it,’ Om Batta sighed and hugged Claire. She walked out of the cemetery, leaning against her son.

  After hugging his two nieces, Yussef Sahli said in a loud voice, ‘This specialist was really a bird of bad omen!’

  Neither at the funeral, nor after it, did anybody raise the question of an obituary notice – not even Gabrielle.

  Not quite three months after Letitia’s death, on an unseasonably cold early December morning, Claire and Iris arranged over the phone to meet at eleven o’clock in the morning at Groppi’s.

  Preying on Iris’s mind was Anastase’s growing conviction that they ought to leave Egypt. He had been saying for some time that there was no room for people like them in the country. Whenever he heard him express that view, Yussef Sahli would boil inside but try not to explode; he was on tense enough terms with his other son-in-law to antagonize Anastase, whom he considered saintly for putting up with Iris’s disabling asthma and unconventional character.

  Yet, at a recent family lunch attended by Claire, upon overhearing Anastase tell the person sitting next to him that the Syro-Lebanese in Egypt belonged only marginally more in the country than the Greeks and the Italians, Yussef Sahli had not managed to contain himself. Interrupting his son-in-law, he had asserted loudly that it was entirely Anastase’s problem if he felt that he did not belong in Egypt. Greeks were notorious for being insular, he said. In reality, Anastase did not feel Greek any more than he felt Egyptian. Unlike his brother-in-law Aristote, who was solidly anchored in Egypt’s Greek community, he wore his Greekness lightly and mixed in wide circles, perhaps in part because of the nature of the business he owned, a company that imported tobacco and manufactured cigarettes, for sale in Egypt and abroad.

  Anastase, an unflappable sort, had taken his father-in-law’s loud and aggressive expression of displeasure with a smile. Iris, however, never missed a chance to disagree with her father. So she argued with him, although she was not that fond of Anastase’s views.

  ‘Fundamentally, he does not like me, and I don’t like him either,’ she often told Claire, something she reiterated on the phone that morning. ‘He’s the kind of man I would have nothing to do with, if he were not my father. If for no other reason than to put a certain distance between the two of us, leaving Egypt might be a good thing, although I would hate to be far from you and from Mother.’

  At a quarter to eleven, on her way to Groppi’s, Claire stopped to buy a paper from the newspaper vendor at the corner of the midan and Suleiman Pasha Street. An icy wind was blowing. She turned up the velvet collar of her new black coat – a present from her Uncle Yussef.

  ‘Where is your wife today?’ she asked the newspaper vendor, who was by himself.

  ‘At home’, he said, ‘the baby has a bad cold. She thought that it would be better to keep him home.’

  ‘She’s right, I hope he gets better quickly,’ Claire said with real concern. Whenever she crossed the midan, she had grown accustomed to seeing the big and placid baby in his mother’s arms, on her lap, or at her breast.

  With its majestic pillars encased in marble, its terrazzo floors and its twenty-foot-high ceilings, Groppi Suleiman Pasha had been the subject of rapt descriptions for its opulent art deco style at the time of its inauguration in 1925. Still grand twenty-one years later, its main attraction for Claire and Iris was its vicinity to Claire’s apartment and the downtown bookstores.

  Iris was already at Groppi’s and seated by the time Claire arrived. Both from her expression and from the fact that she was on time, which was unprecedented, Claire guessed that something was amiss.

  The two cousins kissed.

  Without further ado, Iris announced, ‘I can barely stay! My father called me half an hour ago to say that he would be having lunch with Swiss friends of his who are in town, and I must join them because he might have to leave half-way through the lunch. The nerve that man has! He didn’t even ask me if I’m free – let alone interested. This man thinks he owns people. The only one he does not dare deal with in that fashion is Mother.’ Iris paused before saying
, in a sour tone that surprised Claire, ‘Mind you, he is careful with Bella too.’ She took a cigarette box out of her handbag, offered a cigarette to Claire, who declined, lit one for herself only to blow it out, explaining, with a giggle, ‘I’m trying to stop but I’m also trying to lose some weight.’ Relaxing somewhat, she went on, ‘You look wonderful, Claire. Really wonderful. You had me quite concerned three months ago. I had never seen you look tired before.’ Then she let out, ‘I miss Aunt Letitia, I do.’

  ‘You were her favorite niece,’ Claire said.

  ‘It’s good to hear that. I liked her a lot.’ Her voice now husky, Iris continued, ‘Well, will you be ordering hot chocolate or let yourself be tempted by an ice cream? How about Aunt Letitia’s favorite, sfogliatella?’ With a small laugh, again nervous-sounding, she admitted to having already ordered for herself a chocolate ice cream with a double portion of crème chantilly. ‘You know me; my dieting resolutions are never long-lived,’ she said self-deprecatingly.

  A tall woman, in her late twenties, with a healthy, somewhat ruddy complexion and ash-blond hair, Iris was on the heavy side. Perhaps because of her brusque gestures and heavy-footed gait, people tended to find her masculine, yet her face was soft, feminine. Extremely nearsighted, she wore thick glasses about which she was self-conscious. The glasses did detract from her looks as they concealed her best feature: expressive hazel eyes.

  ‘I’ll have a chocolate ice cream too,’ Claire said with unusual decisiveness as she summoned a waiter. ‘I was dying for a chocolate ice cream on my way here.’

  After Iris left, Claire looked through the paper. The news was mostly about the new government, the collapse of talks over British withdrawal, and the Sudan question. Egypt’s strong man, Sidqi, had failed. There had been a fresh outbreak of student demonstrations, in which streetcars had been overturned and set on fire, and English books burned. A couple of articles on Palestine caught Claire’s attention. She read them attentively.

  ‘I could easily eat another ice cream,’ Claire thought, blushing slightly. She seemed to be having a craving not unlike those she had when pregnant with Simone. Could it be?

  She did not know why but suddenly she wanted to read her mother’s file at the Italian consulate She looked at her watch. There was still time before the consulate closed for lunch.

  Letitia Graziano had a younger sister called Chiara and a younger brother called Massimo. When Letitia was six years old, her father, by then already a widower, took up residence in Massawa, in Eritrea, with his three children. In 1896, at the age of eighteen, Letitia married Roberto Goldoni, a resident of Massawa. He was originally from Volterra. Two years later, the couple separated and Letitia left Eritrea. In 1902 the couple reunited in Cairo. Their reconciliation was short-lived. Within a year, Letitia left her husband and vanished. That was what Roberto Goldoni stated at the Italian consulate in Cairo in 1912, when he went to report that his wife was missing. The consulate then embarked on a search. It first contacted her two siblings in Eritrea. They wrote back to say that they had no idea of her whereabouts, that she had never written to them since leaving Eritrea; after their father’s death in 1908, his estate had been divided between the two of them as no one knew if she was still alive. The consulate’s next step was to contact other Italian consulates – in France and Greece – to check whether they had any information about missing Letitia. The consulates reported nothing whatsoever on Letitia Graziano. In June 1940, the Italian consular tribunal in Cairo declared Letitia Graziano presumed dead. The declaration was officially recorded five years later in the journal of the mixed tribunals and took retroactive effect. Roberto Goldoni remarried in 1947. He died that same year, in Cairo’s Italian hospital.

  So Letitia had grown up in Eritrea, had married at eighteen, had left her husband, and made a new life for herself with another man – a new life within reach of that husband who claimed he had no idea where she was gone, and within walking distance of the consulate that declared her dead in 1940.

  As it turns out, Claire would learn none of this that cold December day in 1946. When she arrived at the consulate, it was packed. The cooperative young employee was away from his desk. The woman to whom she talked insisted that, without prior authorization from the consul, she could not show her the file.

  Years would pass before Claire finally read the file. When she did, it would be by chance.

  She was at the consulate in 1961 to inquire about getting an Italian passport when the employee she had dealt with in 1946, still working at the consulate and still a touch taken with her, mentioned the day she had sought out her mother’s file. That he should have remembered took her aback. As impulsively as she had that one time, she asked him if she could look at the file again – a request he joked about, saying, ‘By now, it’s become archival material, but I’ll see what I can do.’

  What would fifty-one-year-old Claire feel upon finally reading the file? To describe it as ‘archival material’ was actually quite appropriate, her present world bore so little resemblance to her past. She felt surprisingly disconnected from it.

  She would be left, however, with a sense of intellectual frustration as she was still unable to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Had Roberto Goldoni known, all along, where Letitia resided yet told the consulate that she had vanished simply to have his marriage dissolved and be free to remarry? Had her father and Goldoni known each other, or about each other? Had her father bought Goldoni’s silence and perhaps even plotted with him to gain Letitia’s freedom? Was her father’s duel related to her mother’s past? The main actors in the drama were dead. So were those –her uncles and her aunt – who might have had a peripheral role in it, except for her Uncle Yussef who was recovering from a slight cerebral attack so in no state to be quizzed about the subject.

  For Claire, instead of providing answers, the file compounded the questions, although it did shed light on a small matter. As she was handing the file back, Claire suddenly remembered her mother’s riding outfit, the outfit that she and Gabrielle had discovered at the bottom of a trunk when they were little girls. This outfit made more sense now. The setting in which her mother had grown up – colonial Eritrea – was a natural setting for horse riding.

  The memory of that riding outfit would cause Claire to feel a surge of renewed compassion for her mother and sadness at how her life had unfolded. In the grip of that sadness, she would remember her mother’s penultimate utterance, ‘What a complicated life.’ And she would wonder, in hindsight, whether that statement might have been an invitation for questions to be asked – an invitation she had failed to recognize.

  1947: Yves

  The year 1947 saw no reduction in Egypt’s political agitation. Bombs exploded in Cairo and Alexandria. Committees of all sorts – of Muslim youth, of young Egyptians, of liberation, of women’s groups, of united workers – popped up. In a manifesto published by the press, the Muslim Brotherhood told the Egyptian people that, if they wanted the British to leave and real independence, they had no option but to fight, cautioning them though against rash action and snap uprisings. The message was thus ambiguous.

  In certain circles, rumors began circulating that the government was about to order the dissolution of the Muslim Brotherhood and ban its activities. On May 6, 1947, the anniversary of King Faruq’s accession to the throne, a bomb exploded in the Metro cinema in downtown Cairo, killing a spectator and injuring several others. A historian lamented that, rather than being its manifestation, the violence attested to the failure of the nationalist movement. He and others recalled with a nostalgia that was bound to color their judgement – as nostalgia always does – the spirit that had suffused the nationalist fervor of 1919, deeming it to have been infinitely more constructive than the prevailing mood. These were the days when the ideal of parliamentary democracy meant something, they now believed.

  For Claire, the year began on a radiant note. She was pregnant. Her desire to have as many children as possible – an almost all-consuming
desire after Guy’s death – had been granted a second time at not such a young age. She was thirty-seven years old.

  She had already picked a name: ‘Yves’ – a name she thought would suit a vivacious and quick little boy, as she hoped hers would be. Alexandre would likely want to name him Constantin, after his father. So, on paper, the baby – if a boy – would be either ‘Constantin Yves’ or ‘Yves Constantin,’ but she was sure that the family, Alexandre included, would call him ‘Yves.’

  The political situation concerned Claire. It both concerned her and confused her. She remembered the twenties as a time when just about everyone around her was touched by nationalist fervor. Now, in her circles, many of her friends and acquaintances were saying that the new generation of nationalists was becoming rudderless and uncontrollable. Was the current political agitation perceived in those circles as posing a fundamental threat to their existence? If so, it was not an issue that was put right on the table, not even by Anastase whose contention was not so much that privilege was about to come under attack, nor that Egypt’s partly Egyptianized minorities were suddenly vulnerable, but that these minorities were in a false situation in the country and had always been so. His was an existential malaise shared by Claire and heightened, in her case, by the feeling that the life that she had managed to stitch for herself was based on a precarious equilibrium and lacked legitimacy on several fronts. Besides feeling like an interloper in her country, she felt like one in her social set. With some of the trappings of privilege, her life lacked its basis, namely wealth, of which neither she nor Alexandre possessed the slightest amount. That this was no secret in the moneyed society she frequented and did not seem to be held against her did ease her sense of not quite belonging to it. Her singular grace, engaging manners and good looks always guaranteed her a warm reception in that set. Alexandre’s gradual withdrawal from it for lack of enough means made it, however, more and more difficult for her to hold on to her social life. Yet she did, finessing her marital situation with the dexterity of a tight-rope walker only to be gripped every now and then by the feeling that her life had a pretend quality that threatened to become its defining character. Knowledge of the mysterious nature of her parents’ union – even if it had not shaken her to the core – could not but contribute to that feeling.