Uncle Vili stood up, curled his hand around her hip, and said, “Calm yourself, Marta, and don't worry. We'll find you someone. I promise. Leave it to me.”
“But you always say that, always, and you don't ever mean it. And besides, who do we know here?”
This was Vili's long-awaited cue. And he rose to the occasion with the studied nonchalance of a man driven to use exactly the words he has been dying to say. In this instance, they meant: Can anyone really doubt that we are well connected?
This was an oblique reference to Uncle Isaac, who, while studying at the University of Turin, had managed to become a very close friend of a fellow student named Fouad, the future king of Egypt. Both men spoke Turkish, Italian, German, some Albanian, and, between them, had concocted a pidgin tongue, rich in obscenities and double entendres, that they called Turkitalbanisch and which they continued to speak into their old age. It was because Uncle Isaac staked all of his hopes on this undying friendship that he had eventually persuaded his parents and siblings to sell everything in Constantinople and move to Alexandria.
Uncle Vili was fond of boasting that his brotherâand, by implication, himself as wellâ“owned” the king. “He has the king in his breast pocket,” he would say, pointing to his own breast pocket, in which a silver cigarette case bearing the king's seal was permanently lodged. In the end, it was the king who introduced Isaac to the man who was to play such a significant role in his sister's life.
Aunt Marta, who was nearing forty at the time, was eventually married to this man, a rich Swabian Jew whom everyone in the family called “the Schwab”âhis real name was Aldo Kohnâand who did little else but play golf all day, bridge at night, and in between smoked Turkish cigarettes on which his name and family crest had been meticulously inscribed in gold filigree. He was a balding, corpulent man whom Marta had turned down ten years earlier but who was determined to pursue her again and, better yet, without demanding a dowry, which suited everyone. At one of the family gatherings, it was arranged to leave the would-be's alone for a while, and before Marta knew what the Schwab was about, or even had time to turn around and pull herself away, he had grabbed hold of her wrist and fastened around it a lavish bracelet on the back of which his jeweler had inscribed
M'appari,
after the famous aria from von Flotow's
Martha.
Aunt Marta was so flustered she did not realize she had broken into tears, which so moved the poor Schwab that he too started to weep, begging as he sobbed, “Don't say no, don't say no.” Arrangements were made, and soon enough everyone noticed an unusually serene and restful glow settle upon Aunt Marta's rosy features. “She'll kill him at this rate,” her brothers snickered.
The Schwab was a very dapper but quiet man who had once studied the classics and whose diffident manner made him the butt of household ridicule. He seemed spoiled and stupid, a sure sap, and probably
that way
as well. The brothers had their eyes on him. But the Schwab was no fool. Although he had never worked a day in his life, it was soon discovered that in the space of two years he had trebled his family's fortune on the sugar exchange. When Uncle Vili realized that this incompetent, sniveling, beer keg of a brother-in-law was a “player,” he immediately drew up a list of no-risk ventures for him. But the Schwab, who attributed his financial wizardry to luck more
than to skill, was reluctant to invest in stocks because he didn't understand a thing about the market. All he understood was sugar, and maybe horses. “Understand?” responded Uncle Vili. “Why should you understand the stock market? I'm here to do it for you.” After all, were they or weren't they all related to each other now?
For weeks the Schwab tolerated his brother-in-law's inducements until, one day, he finally exploded. And he did so in style: he borrowed Vili's cherished little phrase, spun it about him awhile like a bodkin to let Vili know that he, the Schwab, known to the rest of the world as Aldo Kohn, and more specifically as Kohn Pasha, was no pushover either. Uncle Vili was totally trumped. Not only was he
pained
âthat was his word for itâby his brother-in-law's mistrust, but there was something unbearably vexing in having been flayed with his own knife. It was a low, unsportsmanlike thing to do; it was just another instance of Ashkenazi duplicity. Uncle Vili rarely spoke to him again.
An exception occurred in 1930, when it became obvious that the family had been cheated of the prosperous twenties. It was at about this time that Uncle Vili suggested the family emigrate elsewhere. America? Too many Jews already. England? Too rigid. Australia? Too underdeveloped. Canada? Too cold. South Africa? Too far. It was finally decided that Japan offered ideal prospects for men whose claim to fortune was their exalted, millennial role as itinerant peddlers and master mountebanks.
The Japanese had three advantages: they were hardworking, they were eager to learn and compete, and they had probably never seen Jews before. The brothers picked a city they had never heard of but whose name sounded distantly, and reassuringly, Italian: Nagasaki. “Are you going to peddle baubles and mirrors too?” asked the Schwab. “No. Cars. Luxury cars.”
“Which cars?” he asked. “Isotta-Fraschini.” “Have you ever sold cars before?” He enjoyed ribbing the clannish brothers whenever he could. “No. Not cars. But we've sold everything else. Rugs. Stocks. Antiques. Gold. Not to mention hope to investors, sand to the Arabs. You name it. And besides, what difference does it make?” asked an exasperated Vili. “Carpets, cars, gold, silver, sisters, it's all the same thing. I can sell anything,” he bragged.
The Isotta-Fraschini affair started with everyone in the family rushing to invest in the Middle Eastern and Japanese distributorship for the cars. A Japanese tutor was hired, and on Monday and Thursday afternoons, all five brothersâfrom Nessim, the oldest, who was over fifty and not entirely convinced about the venture, to Vili, twenty years younger and the demonic propounder of the schemeâwould sit in the dining room, their notebooks filled with what looked like the most slovenly ink stains. “Poor boys,” Aunt Marta would whisper to her sister Esther whenever she peeped into the dark, wood-paneled room where tea was being served to the classroom. “They haven't even mastered Arabic yet, and now these confounded sounds.” Everyone was terror-struck. “Raw fish and all that rice every day! Death by constipation it's going to be. What must we endure next?” was Aunt Clara's only comment. There would be no more time for painting, she was warned. She would have to help in the family business. “Besides, all you've ever painted are portraits of Tolstoy. It's time to change,” commented Uncle Isaac.
Their mother was also worried. “We build on bad soil. Always have, always will. God keep us.”
Out of spite, no one in the family had ever asked the Schwab to invest a penny in the venture. His punishment would be to witness the clan grow tremendously rich, and finally realize, once and for all, who was and who wasn't.
Two years later, however, he was approached by his wife and asked to contribute something toward the immediate expenses of the firm. The Schwab, who, aside from gambling, hated to invest in intangibles, agreed to help by buying one of these expensive cars at a discount. It soon emerged that, aside from giving each of the five brothers a car, the newly established Isotta-Fraschini Asia-Africa Corporation had sold only two cars. Three years later, after the business collapsed and the demos were returned to Italy, only two persons in Egypt could be seen riding Isotta-Fraschinis: the Schwab and King Fouad.
The Isotta-Fraschini debacle set the family back by a decade. The clan continued to keep up appearances, and its members were often seen Sundaying in the king's gardens or arriving in chauffeured cars at the exclusive Sporting Club, but they were flat broke. Too vain to admit defeat, and too prudent to start baiting their creditors, they began tapping second-tier friends and relatives who could be relied on to keep their secret. Albert, their other brother-in-law, a once-prosperous cigarette manufacturer who had abandoned everything he owned in Turkey to move to Egypt, was asked to contribute something toward family finances. He did so reluctantly and after terrible rows with Esther, his wife, who, like her sister Marta, never doubted that blood was thicker than marriage vows.
Albert had ample reason for neither trusting nor wanting to help them. It was upon the clan's assurances that in 1932 he had finally and recklessly liquidated his cigarette business in Turkey and moved with his family to Egypt, hoping both to invest in his in-laws' firm and to spare his eighteen-year-old son, Henri, the horrors of Turkish barracks life. As soon as he arrived in Alexandria, however, the clan made it quite clear they were not about to let him into their Isotta-Fraschini schemes. Crestfallen, and not knowing what else to do in Alexandria,
the erstwhile nicotine merchant took the life savings he had smuggled out of Turkey and became the proprietor of a small pool hall called La Petite Corniche, which faced the six-mile coast road known to all Alexandrians as the Corniche.
He never forgave them this trick. “Come, we'll help you,” he would remind his wife, mimicking her brothers' repeated appeals to him. “We'll give you this, we'll give you that. Nothing! My ancestors were important enough to be assassinated by generations of sultansânow, billiards,” he would mutter as he stood outside the kitchen door each morning, waiting for the assortment of cheese and spinach pastries that his wife baked at dawn. They sold well and were much liked by the pool players, who enjoyed eating something while drinking anisette.
Not only had his own circumstances been drastically reduced, but Albert was still expected to help out his wife's family. And so Vili's driver, thoroughly convinced that he was picking up money owed to his employer, would stop the car outside La Petite Corniche, walk in, receive a wad of bills, and “remind” Albert that he would be back in a few weeks.
After about the fifth loan, the humble proprietor of the pool hall walked outside with his cue in hand and shattered one of the car windows, informing his brother-in-law, who was skulking in the backseat while the chauffeur ran his errands, that since he was on such good terms with royalty, he should also tap His Majesty for “something to tide him over”âVili's euphemism for desperate loans.
Esther was horrified when she heard of the confrontation between her husband and her brother. “But he's never done anything like this before,” she protested to Vili, “he's not violent at all.”
“He's a Turk, through and through.”
“And what are you then, Italian by any chance?”
“Italian or not Italian, I know better than to break someone's car window.”
“I'll speak to him,” she said.
“No, I don't ever want to see him again. He's a terribly ungrateful man. If he weren't your husband, Esther, if he weren't your husbandâ” started Vili.
“If he weren't my husband, he wouldn't have lent you a penny. And if you weren't my brother, we wouldn't be in the mess we are in now.”
Vili's given name was Aaron. When he returned to Alexandria in 1922, four years after the signing of the armistice, he had to make up for lost time. With the help of his four brothers, he became a rice expert in one week. Then a sugar-cane examiner. In the space of three months he learned how to cure any conceivable disease afflicting cotton, Egypt's prized export. In half a year's time, he had not only toured all corners of Egypt but had also visited every magnate's home rumored to hold the promise of a young Jewish wife. He married one a little less than a year after returning from Europe.
Having become a respectable citizen now, he reverted to what he liked best of all: married women. It is said that some of his mistresses were so distraught when he was done with them that they would show up on his wife's doorstep, pleading with her to intercede on their behalf, which poor Aunt Lola, whose heart was the biggest organ in her body, would sometimes do.
Seven years after the war, a woman named Lotte appeared at the family's residence with the picture of a man to whom she claimed she had been engaged in Berlin. When a consensus was finally reached on the man's identity, and the woman had put away her handkerchief, she was invited to stay for lunch
with the family, most of whose members were due to arrive toward one o'clock. Vili was the last to arrive, but as soon as he walked in, she recognized his footsteps in the vestibule, stood up, put down her glass of sherry, and ran out screaming, “Willy! Willy!” at the top of her lungs.
No one had any idea what the demented woman meant by calling their Aaron by that strange name, but during lunch, when everyone had more or less regained composure, she explained that in 1914 in his new Prussian uniform he had looked so much like Kaiser Wilhelm that she could not resist nicknaming him Willy. His wife found something so endearingly right about “Willy,” so stout yet so diminutive, that she too began to call him “Vili,” first with reproof, then with raillery, and finally by force of habit, until everyone, including his mother, called him Vili, which eventually acquired its diminutive Greco-Judeo-Spanish form: Vilico.
“Vilico traitor,” his mother said some time afterward.
He protested. “I was really in love with her at the time. And besides, it happened long before I'd met Lola.”