Out of Egypt: A Memoir by André Aciman

Author:André Aciman [Aciman, André]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2007-01-22T16:00:00+00:00

When we arrived, tea was just about to be served.

Latifa had fainted again.

“Each time the siren sounds, she turns as white as aspirin. It scares her,” explained my grandmother.

“Scared of the alarm, scared of men, scared of anyone who raises his voice at her. What isn’t she scared of?” grumbled Uncle Isaac.

My grandmother told how she had brought her to: a rag was placed on top of a flame long enough to stink of smoke and then was brought to her nostrils.

Everyone was gathered in the living room, while Abdou and Latifa brought tea and light pastries. “Latifa, I heard you broke the floor,” jeered Uncle Isaac when Latifa brought in a second round of pastries. Latifa smiled modestly and deposited a large platter on the tea table. My great-grandmother called Latifa back. She liked her ginger biscuits served on a separate dish. Our Abdou had mistakenly lumped them with other petits fours.

I noticed that the windowpanes in the entrance and the living room had been coated with a cobalt-blue dye. Abdou and Ibrahim and two other servants were in the process of lining the remaining shutters in the house with large strips of thick blue paper which they thumbtacked to the wooden sash frames. They had already painted everyone’s headlight covers with the blue dye.

Aunt Elsa rang the buzzer and Latifa’s rounded form appeared behind the glass-paneled door. She walked in and softly began clearing the china. So tea was over, I thought, already missing the spell of that moment when my uncle and I had opened the door to find everyone already seated in the living room, the sun just barely set over the horizon, and everyone hurrying to make room for us. Sitting quietly next to my parents, my cousins, my aunts and uncles, everyone’s thighs cozily glued to mine, I knew that even if I disliked almost everyone in this room, it was good to be with them, good to hear the ritual hubbub of tea, good to look and be looked at.

And then, after everything had been cleared away, and Uncle Isaac had poured out the first scotch of the evening, while his sister Elsa, who held all the keys in the house, had opened the small Chinese cabinet in which peanuts were hidden away from the children, suddenly, punctually, as though this were why we were gathered in the living room all along, we heard it, rising above Sporting, over the city, wailing and warning, as voices immediately started downstairs—“Taffi al-nur! Taffi al-nur!”

Someone would stand up, walk over to the corner of the room, and peek through the curtain, while someone else, just as swiftly, would turn off the lights. A deep, premature night filled the room. When I looked out the window, I saw all the lights of Sporting go out one by one, accentuating the sudden darkness that had settled among us.

“What I don’t understand,” Aunt Marta would say in her shrill voice, “is that there hasn’t been a single bomb dropped on Alexandria.

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