False Papers by André Aciman

Author:André Aciman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-03-28T16:00:00+00:00

Becket’s Winter

For about a month or so in the winter of 1965, we spoke of little else but the movie Becket. Becket burst into our narrow little world the way all great dramas do when they suddenly take over a community, stirring new fantasies, latching on to old ones, giving our thoughts an edge and a wisdom we never knew we had, working its way deep into every crevice of our subconscious until we were no longer able to remember who or what we were before the play. I call it Becket’s winter, the way Shakespeare’s contemporaries might have called the 1600—1601 season the year of Hamlet, for after seeing Hamlet everyone is changed. Becket has become a marker, one of those time posts around which we situate events we would otherwise forget or lose track of. The play remembers them for us; over time, 1965, that ugly year that brought such terrible changes in our lives, has become a pale, lusterless satellite which periodically strays into the reflected light of the movie.

We had terrible worries that winter, and there were always rumors that the police would come to search our home or take my father away. And yet I doubt that I would have remembered these incidents as vividly as I do today had Becket not been laced into them. Not a day went by that winter without someone speaking of Becket or of the police. We spoke of Becket to forget the police, to forget the anonymous calls every night, to forget that we were among the last Jews of Alexandria. Perhaps we spoke of Becket because there was nothing else to speak about, because, in the end, all that was left in our culture-starved world was—movies. Movies held great sway in Alexandria, displacing everything, including our worst fears. Movies screened those fears. And yet it is thanks to that screen today that I remember our fears.

Everyone fell under their spell. My father, who had lost his business and had no notion what or where to turn to next; my mother, who was deaf and did not wish to face the truth about our abysmal prospects in Egypt; I, who always had my nose in books—or, as my grandmother said, my head in the clouds—down to my grandmother, a practical woman in her nineties whose feet were firmly planted not only on the ground but, as I liked to say, under it as well—all of us gave way to Becket. Even our cook, who, tired of hearing so much about the movie, decided to go one evening and, for the equivalent of about seven cents, had his fill of Jean Anouilh’s Becket, courtesy of Arabic subtitles. He, too, had caught the bug.

The only one who resisted was my great-aunt, who was almost blind and never went to the movies and who, for entertainment, would listen to quiz shows on Radio Monte-Carlo. She was a religious woman and perhaps did not like all this talk of church in a Jewish home.

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