Sipping from the Nile: My Exodus from Egypt Page 2
The days of my early childhood seem pillowed in an abundance of time luminous with sunshine, time that nourished my consciousness with silence that was never silent, where birdsong and the hum of insects filled my senses and the grass winked white butterflies at the sky. In the garden that surrounded the majestic house that was home to me, I bent small legs to come even closer to the intricate maneuverings of ants and beetles finding their way among a forest of grasses. While Vera sat nearby, I wove tiny pink and white daisies that peppered the stubbly grass into patterns on the seat of a garden chair, near a trellised archway. That archway was like a secret cave, its sides thick with twigs and lush green leaves, smelling richly of humidity and earth. Fat, lazy bees buzzed and lumbered among flowers in dusty terra-cotta pots lining the gravel walkways.
Once, a black snake weaving its slithery way behind the pots caused grave consternation. The head gardener, his grubby white robe flapping as he ran, summoned the two chauffeurs from their somnolent stupor on chairs in front of the garage. His guttural alarm galvanized them, and suddenly there was a cacophony of voices, sticks beating a dull music on the baked earth pots, and finally, a shout of triumph as someone held up an incredibly long, ominous, flailing serpent. I, the small girl of the house, watched in horror, and was never to lose my fear of snakes. The black snake’s skin hung for a long time on a nail in the garage. I averted my eyes whenever I ran past, and gave the flowerpots lining the walkways a very wide berth. The pots, I now knew, hid danger, despite the bold allure of their brilliant flowers. The snake, invisible, unknown, unimagined, had nonetheless been in my paradise all along.
Violin practice on the bedroom terrace overlooking the Nile
Many years later, at some indeterminate moment in late childhood, I was practicing my violin in the mezzanine, the betwixt-and-between floor of the big house, when a stir outside caught my attention. Always happy for an excuse to stop practicing, I paused a moment and lowered my violin to gaze out of the window at the garden below. The reason lost in the mists of time, a snake catcher had been summoned to rid the house and garden of snakes. I watched, transfixed, as he seated himself cross-legged on the grass near the house, his white robe stark against the green. All I could see of his head was his thick white turban wound around a red embroidered skull cap as he began to play a thin pipe with a reedy sound. Suddenly, there they were, dozens of snakes slithering their way toward him from different directions, wriggling out of crevices in the wall, emerging from flower beds. Every now and then he would stop and insert them into one of several burlap sacks that lay beside him on the grass. The snakes were all different colors, large and small, and I wondered where this subterranean population had come from, and how I could have failed to know of their existence when they terrified me so. One of the house servants came out and paid the snake charmer his charge of so much per snake, and I found myself also wondering if his rich harvest could have been planted ahead of time, and whether the same assorted population of snakes would be let loose in the next household that called upon his services. I also wondered how many had not been seduced by his music and carried on their mysterious lives just out of my sight. I stepped carefully for a while after he came, and I never saw him again. The undulating burlap bags slung over his shoulders as he left returned in my nightmares in the years to come.
As the passing years added inches to my height and peeled open my consciousness of a larger world, I no longer wove my patterns of tiny daisies into the seats of the garden chairs. Instead, tasting new freedoms, I rode a bicycle under a long pavilion of vines, the house scattered through the holes in the green like pieces of a puzzle I had yet to put together. I followed my father’s eldest sister, Auntie Helen, and Aboudi the gardener through the narrow concentric circles of the rose garden, generous blooms perfuming the air, the heavy heads of the roses punctuating gray statuary with a brilliant display of reds, yellows, and pinks. The sight and scent of roses still sweeps me into the delight I felt then. Closer to the house, along massive stone walls, were beds of velvety purple and gold pansies, fragrant jasmine, and a turbulence of nasturtiums, luminescent orange in the bright sunlight. The roof of the garage, sloping gently up to the balustrade of the terrace outside the dining room, was sheer magnificence all summer. Tight matted profusions of deep-blue morning glory blossoms, tinged faintly with white at the borders of the petals, covered every inch. They paraded their beauty well into the afternoon and then closed up, leaving a sea of green to welcome the night.
Outside the graceful ironwork of the garden gates, I remained only dimly aware that a turbulent city teemed and heaved as political tensions proliferated and allegiances shifted the balance of power to respond to conflagrations that shook the world. To a small child, there was only beauty, and the occasional shadow that slithered under the bright bloom of the day.
Nothing could have seemed more peaceful, more permanent, than that garden of my childhood, cushioned in its rich profusion of palms, lawns, arbors, lemon trees, roses, and mango trees. The delicate wrought-iron tracery at its perimeters nonetheless allowed the eye to roam beyond the garden, across the broad street, past the moored houseboats to the sluggish silvery splendor of the Nile itself. In the far distance rose the golden Mokattam hills, the filigree spires of the Citadel piercing the clear blue Egyptian skies.
The Citadel, Cairo
The Citadel, high above the city of Cairo, seemed like a delicate, magical castle, its elegant spires shimmering faintly in an early morning mist. Nonetheless its beauty hid a tale of merciless savagery. I learned later of the treachery of Prince Muhammed Ali, who overthrew the Mameluks in 1811. Power-hungry descendants of non-Arab slaves used as soldiers in the early Middle Ages, the Mameluks went on to dominate and rule Egypt as sultans for decades, vying for power with the Ottoman Turks and maintaining feudal power under Turkish rule even after their military defeat by Napoleonic forces. Muhammed Ali, however, put an end to that. Legend has it that he invited the most powerful Mameluks to a banquet in the Citadel in 1881 and then ambushed and slaughtered all of them but one. A Mameluk named Hasan is said to have leaped out of a window over the precipice on his horse and escaped to freedom. In the magical castle of my childhood imaginings, some one thousand Mameluks were killed that day, and in subsequent days some three thousand more were slaughtered in the streets, permanently putting an end to Mameluk dominance.
Unaware of any of this as a child, I dreamed my dreams and roamed around my garden, familiar with every one of the squat palms that punctuated its interior, their innocent flat fronds ending in wicked black needlepoints. I stretched my neck to gaze upward at the tall, gawky palms whose distant heads swayed gently with the breeze. I knew each of the big old mango trees that offered shade. Every year, at the time of the mango harvest, a white-robed Arab took up residence in the garden together with his black-robed wives and sisters and flocks of grubby barefoot children. They had bought the fruit of our trees, which they collected in large rope baskets, shimmying up the trees, a rope around their waists, working silently and fast until the trees were bare of the heavy, sweet-smelling fruit. I watched this intrusion into my ordered world with interest. I knew that my father loved mangoes, preferring the longer Hindis with their smooth dark skin and firm orange flesh to the stringy fruit with bright yellow flesh that grew in our garden. When mangoes were in season, he sliced and peeled one every day after lunch with concentrated precision, dipping his fingers in a silver fingerbowl where a single rose petal floated and offering pieces of the succulent fruit to my mother and to me.
Set in the center of the garden, the opaque waters of the river Nile visible from many of its windows and terraces, my grandfather’s house reflected the graciousness of generations of prosperity and security. Nonetheless his ancestors had seen their share of displacement and challenge. Expelled from their ancestral homes in just such a situation of stability, they had been prosperous merchants living lives of ease and influence in Toledo, Spain. That stability came to an abrupt end in 14
92, shattered and scattered by the infamous Spanish Inquisition. Some fled to the Ottoman Empire and others to Livorno, where they made use of their skills and contacts in the gentle Tuscan sunshine of a more welcoming Italy. Over time, they set about laboriously reconstructing their lives by trading across the Mediterranean to the ports and cities of the Middle East; one branch of the family, led by the first Nessim Mosseri that history has given us, decided to set up home in Cairo, Egypt, in 1750. Liking the climate and the country, he and his descendants took root there, swiftly becoming influential journalists, bankers, and financiers, leaders in the multilingual, multicultural, thriving Jewish community in Cairo.
I took for granted the majesty of my surroundings as much as I did the rich variety of people, generations, and languages that flowed about me in those early years. The house was my world, and the nursery rooms upstairs were my kingdom. Downstairs, spacious reception rooms leading around a large center hall were defined by wall-to-wall sliding doors most often left open, golden light filtering through filmy voile panels that shielded the furnishings from the violence of the Egyptian sun and billowed out from French doors leading to ample stone terraces. The front door was imposing, framed in wrought-iron tracery around panels of thick, opaque bubbled glass. A substantial lantern of iron curlicues hung from an iron chain, marking the center of the ceiling above the marble floor of the foyer, its etched glass panels throwing light against creamy walls.
To one side of the entrance foyer was the paneled library, where, from the vantage point of their portraits on the wall, my great-grandparents Nessim and Elena surveyed the leather-bound encyclopedias and gold-tooled volumes of the classical literature of many cultures clustered on the shelves below them, sheltered from dust by glass doors crisscrossed with metal. An ancient radio dominated a cabinet by the door.
A little girl accustomed to smiles and attention from the adults who surrounded me, I often sat on the sagging leather couch in the library and stared up at Elena’s portrait, wondering why she gazed back without the hint of a smile, knowing that her commanding presence in our house must have meaning for me, but unsure how to go about finding it. In her portrait, Elena stares out almost defiantly, dominating the cumbersome frame that surrounds her, her heavy face dark and stern, her iron-gray hair piled into a disciplined Victorian roll above her face. She sits there impatiently, certain of her validity in the time and place she inhabits, the fur of her fox stole luxuriant and silver, each hair separated and tipped by light. She is a woman of character, a woman of substance. She knows little of the struggles of her forebears and nothing of the upheavals that lie ahead for her descendants. Egypt is where she defines herself, and where she wields a regal hold on the cosmopolitan society that surrounds her. Devout, imperious, strong, and assured, she is widowed young, but she will send her sons to schools in distant England and on to university at Oxford and Cambridge, and marry her daughters to men of her choosing. From the center of the community she dominates, she will reach out to touch the world.
The two portraits of my great-grandparents were separated by two gigantic Chinese vases and surrounded by dim lighting reflecting against the polished wood of the library cabinets and walls. The wire-and-glass doors of the bookcases and rich gold-lettered spines of rows upon rows of well-thumbed leather-bound books alternated with the worn brown leather of the couch and armchairs. It was a room that seemed to hold the wisdom of the ages and to transcend time and place. Dark. Quiet. A room where I often sought refuge in childhood and as I was growing up.
An arresting painting hung at right angles to the portraits of Elena and Nessim, above the leather couch to the left of the library door. It was an oval oil painting by the nineteenth-century Italian painter Gioia of a woman sitting on a chair reading an open book, her face absorbed and meditative, light glinting on the ripples of her long, golden hair and delicate features. I loved that painting when I was a little girl. I loved to sit on the couch, twist my small self around, and gaze up at it, enthralled.
Across the foyer from the library, a door with mirrored panels on the outside opened into a traditional Arab sitting room. A spectacular Venetian glass chandelier glinting like a graceful waterfall of carved ice was the focus of its richly ornamented ceiling. Its walls were painted in classical Arab style with ornamental Arabic lettering and intricate geometric patterns in a mosaic of dark blue and burgundy. Low seating with striped upholstery and rare wood tables and cabinets inlaid with delicate patterns of ivory and mother-of-pearl completed the illusion of being transported to another time and place.
The Arab sitting room
Within the generous confines of the house, many languages mingled in my ear and in my consciousness from my earliest days, streaming into one flowing river of communication. My father and his mother and sisters were as comfortable conversing in any of three languages—Italian, English, or French—and switched without noticing from one to the other when the phrase they needed eluded them in the language they had initially used or when someone more comfortable in a different language joined the conversation. Vera, my nanny, and Marietta, my grandmother’s personal maid, communicated with each other in their native Yugoslav and spoke French or Italian to all of us. Although my Mosseri grandfather’s first language was Arabic, the Mosseri families had retained a powerful sense of identity with their Italo-Spanish roots and spoke mainly Italian among themselves until the advent of my father’s generation. By then, Arabic had receded to a language used mainly in the household, spoken to interact with the staff. My father’s cultured Egyptian friends and business acquaintances were as comfortably multilingual as he was, and indeed considered the English or French languages and cultures as profoundly theirs as their native tongue.
I considered my own life perfectly usual and ordinary, since it was usual and ordinary to me, but I did notice with some surprise that not everyone we knew had their own synagogue in the garden. Following a tradition begun by his father, my grandfather Joseph had built a small synagogue into the far left corner of our garden. My mother, father, aunt, grandmother, brother, sister, and I attended Sabbath services there every Saturday, walking through a vine-covered walkway at the back of the house. Up a narrow flight of stairs there was a tiny ladies’ balcony where I sat with the women of the family and the occasional neighbor who dropped by for services and later joined us at the house for the Sabbath meal. I liked having such a good overview of the proceedings and found my grandmother’s whispered Hebrew a mysterious and comforting incantation as she sounded out her prayers to herself reading from her tiny, worn, black prayer book.
There was never a shortage of men from the less affluent Jewish quarters to assemble weekly in our little synagogue for minyan. The early death of my father’s older brother Nessim at the age of thirty-three had precipitated my grandfather’s death, which came six months later, and had left my father with a household of women. So a motley group of men came out to Giza from the Haret El Yahud, otherwise known as the Quarter, to make up the required quorum for religious services.
Maurice, a small tubby fellow, officious and ubiquitous on the Sabbath and on holidays, stood out from the gaggle of assorted individuals he led for minyan, his dark European suit loose-fitting, a tarbush on his head. Others also wore the red conical fez with its swinging black tassel, a remnant of the Ottoman influence in Egypt. For years, as a child, I puzzled over how the Saturday minyan could be Jewish, as they muttered and prayed in an Arab-accented Hebrew, bowed, swayed, and shouted responses, some in flowing white robes and red tarbushes, the harsh sound of the guttural Arabic linking them to the outside world as they left after services in a flutter of white cloth and clamor.
The king had once wanted to name Grandpa Mosseri his finance minister. My grandfather refused. The title of Bey was conferred on him, nonetheless, and a street close to the house was named for him. But while the Mosseri family along with other prominent and influential Jewish families in Egypt steered their course among princes, they were also heavily invol
ved in the foundation and financing of Jewish schools, hospitals, old peoples’ homes, and orphanages. Auntie Helen worked and supervised in the hospitals and orphanages, giving freely of her love, intelligence, and organizational skills, while Auntie Mary worked with the elderly, a tradition that her daughters have continued with caring and compassion throughout their lives in other countries. Impoverished young women were taught fine embroidery skills in the Jewish schools, and beautifully handmade linens and lingerie were regularly purchased from them by the elite from all the various international communities, enabling them to bring some financial independence into their lives and their marriages. Brides from the Quarter were sometimes married in our little family synagogue, and I remember fine wedding banquets and wedding feasts prepared for them and served by the house staff on the lawn near the synagogue.
Skipping about the upstairs hall later in the day at the close of the Sabbath, playing hopscotch by myself on the white marble floor tiles that surrounded the carpeted area, I watched Maurice bringing my grandmother and my aunt the greens to smell for a “green” week ahead, as he bustled importantly through the huge, dark upstairs hall where they sat and drank tea, and where a stained-glass skylight shot ruby and emerald patterns of light onto the floor in the center.
The days streamed past with the leisurely flow of a mature river secure within its borders, thick, deep, and immutable. The punctuation of the weekly Sabbath and the drama of Jewish holidays braided seamlessly into the seasonal turning of the calendar. The fierce heat of summer encased everything in its fiery embrace, but the house always offered refuge. Wide white marble steps leading to the front terrace and the front door glittered and threw back the heat into small sandaled feet as I raced up the steps, past stone urns trailing flowers and vines, past the huge wrought-iron-and-glass front door, past the dark surprise of the entrance, to sink into the cool and the silence of the big house.