“Not Arpinée,” said the son.
“You're right. With her drooping, bloodshot eyes swimming like a pair of beets in white potato soupâyou're absolutely right. Ugly outside, ugly inside.”
“Whoever said I wanted to get married in the first place?”
“With the Saint's girl, you can only get married,” said the father.
“I did see her with others, you know.”
“They let her roam freely, but no one's fooled. They're miserly, bigoted, Arab-shantytown Jews imitating the fast-car, cocktail-lounge airs of Europeans. But they're Arabs through and through. He'll live in scrounging misery until the day of his daughter's wedding. Then he'll glow like a pair of patent leather shoes.”
“I know what I'm doing.”
“And suppose,” said the father as they watched the waves break against the beaches of Ibrahimieh, “suppose you want to speak to her in the dark. I don't mean âPass me the glass of water,' but other things.”
“She reads my mind better than anyone. I can't even lie to her.”
“A good quality in a mistress, or in a mother. But in a wife?”
The son did not reply. He remembered his mother's cruel words. “She's a gem of a girl, but cripples I don't want.”
The father took out his aging silver cigarette case, removed
a small penknife from his pocket, and sliced a cigarette in two. “To smoke less,” he explained. He was about to put the other half back into the case when he changed his mind and offered it to his son.
“And so,” he said as he took his first puff, pensive and remote, letting his unfinished sentence trail about him like the smoke from his cigarette.
“Does Flora know about the bicycle queen?” asked the father.
“Yes.”
“And what does she say?”
“What should she say?”
Flora had said almost nothing when he broke the news to her on their way home from her music school by tram one evening. “I should have known,” she had said. “How silly of me not to have seen it.” Then, with that note of smiling resignation with which she greeted joy in others' lives when there was so little of it in her own, she complimented him on his choice, and then, as if choking on her words, finally broke down: “Tell me one thing, though. I've played more music in your house than anywhere in the world, and I know how much it's meant to youâat least how much you claimed it did. And yet here you are with a woman who doesn't know what music is, who can't even hear it.” She paused a moment. “I swore to myself I would never say this to you.” He was about to mutter something in his defense when she broke in: “But why
her
?”
The temptation to blurt out something cruel or flippant was almost irresistible. Then he realized it was the question that had prompted his cruelty, not the woman asking it. “I don't know. I don't even think I know her well enough yet. But she knows me better than I know myself.”
When he began to explain what he meant, he had used the word
marriage
to avoid the more obvious word
love.
“Then it's worse than I expected,” said Flora, with thwarted anger quivering on her smile. “I knew I should never have asked. I've already heardâand saidâmore than I should. I hope you'll forgive me.”
As they approached the next station, she put the book she wasn't reading back into her bag and stood up. He looked surprised; this wasn't her station.
“I'm getting off here if you don't mind,” she said. “I'll walk the rest of the way. I need to get some air.”
She made her way down the crowded aisle, stepped down the tram stairs, and stood on the platform, looking meek and crestfallen, rummaging through her old purse for a match, while a man, wearing a
galabiya,
eyed her intently, clearly about to beg for a cigarette. A pang of sorrow raced through his mind, and he felt for her as he watched her looking at him with helpless submission in her eyes. Revenge always comes too late, he thought, and only after time, indifference, or forgiveness has evened the score.
“Then she was upset,” said his father. “She'll never forgive you.”
“When I wanted her, she wasn't sure; now that I'm taken, she wants me.”
“You'll never understand women!”
“I understand enough.”
“You understand nothing. You don't even understand men, for that matter, and certainly not yourself.”
He tossed his cigarette into the sea and finally said he was growing cold. He wanted to go home. Blown by the wind, an Arabic newspaper got caught between his feet. The old man struggled to disengage himself. “This dirty city and the dirty people who live in it,” he said, watching his son's cigarette spiral like a weak flare and disappear into the water. “From thieving Arabs to Jewish grubbery, it had to be the daughter
of a wheel merchant.” Then he chuckled to himself. “At any rate, when it comes to marriage, things always turn out for the worst.”
A few days later, and after several family rows on the other side of Rue Memphis as well, the Saint began to experience terrible pains in her side. Dr. Moreno came to see her and, on his orders, she was taken to the hospital, where they gave her the choice of having her entire gallbladder or some of its stones removed. In typical Levantine fashion, she deferred the decision to her husband. He was for removing the whole thing. “I want to return to my parents, that's all I want, Monsieur Albert,” she kept saying.
“I want to go away and be far from everyone and everything,” she said a few mornings later when neighbors flocked in one by one to her hospital room only to find that she might not be operated on after all. “See, even operating won't help,” she concluded. “Oh, let me put an end to a life that started on the wrong foot.”
“But all lives start on the wrong footâ” Albert remonstrated.
“Stop speaking nonsense, both of you,” said the Princess. “The important thing is to rest.”
“Yes. To rest, madame, to rest for a very long time, believe me,” replied the Saint.
The next day, when the Princess's husband went alone to see her early in the afternoon, she lay quietly in her room, the glaring afternoon sun blocked by a thick curtain someone had pulled across while she was sleeping.
“Am I disturbing you, Madame Adèle?” he whispered as he pushed open her door and stuck his head in.
“Who? You? Never,
mon cher
. Come in, and sit here.”
He sat next to her bed, and in silence they stared at each other awhile, resigned sorrow limned on their features.
“So there,” she sighed, crossing her hands.
“So there, indeed.”
“I'm waiting,” she sighed.
“You're waiting. Did they say how longâ” he asked.
“They won't talk, but things don't look good at all, worse than not good.”
“So this is it, then.”
“I'm afraid so. This is it. Frankly, Monsieur Albert, I don't at all feel like dying today.”
“Courage, ma chère, courage.”
“But, Monsieur Albert,” she exploded, “I hope you don't feel obliged to agree with everything I say simply because I say it.”
“No, no, believe me, I think things are very serious indeed. You don't look well at all. Even Esther said so yesterday.”
“You think so too, then? But, Monsieur Albert,” she protested after another pause, “I'm not ready to die.”
“Whoever is,
ma chère amie,
whoever is?” A moment of silence elapsed.
“Monsieur Albert, I don't want to die.”
“Do stop fussing like a child. There's nothing to fear. You'll die and you won't even know it.”
“Oh, Monsieur Albert, stop stoking death on me. I said I didn't want to die.”
“Well, don't die, then.”
“You don't understand. I want to die, but not just yet.”
“After the wedding, you mean.”
There was instant silence.
“How well you know me, Monsieur Albert.”
“All too well. You should have lived with me, I tell you,
instead of clawing your way through life like an old crustacean in a fish tank.”
The Saint giggled at the metaphor.
“Gallbladder, my eye,” grumbled her husband a few evenings later when he came to visit her after work only to find the hospital room turned into a regular salon. “All this pain, the moaning, and the sleepless nights, and the doctor, and the ambulance, and the hospital, and what does it all add up to: giggling.
Quelle comédienne!
Now, my poor mother, may she rest in peace, she really suffered from gallstones. She died of it, poor soul. And without so much as uttering a squeak. In those days they didn't have painkillers the way we do today âin those days you made a fist, clammed your mouth tight, and suffered in silence so as not to wake up the children.” “The important thing is to eat well,” added the Princess.
“But I've lost all my appetite. I eat so little.”
“Then why do you keep putting on so much weight?” her husband interrupted.
“Nerves, that's why. You've been in this room two minutes and already I feel the pain starting.”
She returned to that same hospital many times during the next ten years until 1958, the year she was to leave Egypt, each time dreading the operation she feared might be the end of her. And when, finally, she had her gallstones removed under emergency conditions, it was an Egyptian doctor at the Jewish hospital who performed the operation. Luckily, peritonitis was averted. Her longtime Jewish surgeon, into whose hands she had entrusted her entire life, had been arrested, had his license revoked, and, it was rumored, would be tried as an Israeli spy.
By then she was in her sixties and was already beginning to lose her memory. Her head was propped up by pillows, and
I remember her wearing a shabby flannel bathrobe, a pearl necklace, and her aluminum bracelet, which she claimed helped her rheumatism. Her hair had thinned quite a lot by then and was matted on her head like a lopsided wig. She struggled to smile each time she looked at me. “This is the end, Madame Esther,” she said when the Princess took me to visit her one spring morning.
“Not to worry. One more week and you'll be sitting with your daughter on your balcony, enjoying the sun as you always have and as you always will long after I and all of my siblings are gone.”
“No, madame, you're made of steel,” said the Saint, remembering how the Princess's husband had once complained that his wife's very skeleton was made of steel rods that clanked when she tossed in bed at night. “Besides, we all go when He wills us to go, no sooner, no later.” The Saint assumed that characteristic pinched and pious little air of hers whenever she meant to put people in their place.
As we stood up to leave, the Saint remained in bed, producing a lank rosy hand which she placed gently on the back of my neck muttering a string of words in Ladino. Then, full of love, she bit my arm and kissed it, while I threw my arms around her.
“Don't I get a hug now?” interrupted the Princess rubbing my hair. Before she had time to finish her request, I had already put both arms around her and was hugging her very tightly, pressing tighter still, because I wanted not only to reassure the Saint that I was finally complying with her wish to love the Princess more, but also to tease her into thinking that, during her sickness, I had done just that. I waited for the Princess to unstiffen and yield to my embrace as the Saint had done on so many occasions. I wanted to hear her own litany of endearments, the accent of her sorrow, of her love, of her
passionâand the less she responded, the more I stiffened my grasp. But she did not know this game and, in the end, all she did was utter a squeamish little cry, half giggle, half squeal.
“Look at all this love,” she exclaimed, beaming with joy. “It's not good to love so much,” added the Princess as she ran her fingers through my hair.
“I try to teach him this too, but he won't listen.”
As the Princess had predicted, two weeks later the Saint was once again sitting on her balcony with her usual visitors, enjoying the late afternoon sun waning into splendid summer evenings. She swore she felt much younger, now that her Egyptian doctor had worked a miracle. “A generation ago he would have been no better than the boy servant bringing us tea on this balcony,” she said. “Now he's brought me back to life. He speaks impeccable French. And you should see his officeâsumptuous. Not bad for an Arab who is scarcely thirty years old. If he represents the new order here, well,
chapeau
to the new Egypt.”
“Just wait until they're all in power. Then you'll see how the new Egypt will treat you, Madame Adèle,” broke in one of her Greek neighbors.