“So, Are we or aren’t we?” boasted my great-uncle Vili. “Siamo o non siamo?”

It was never entirely clear what one was or was not, but to everyone in my family, including those who today no longer speak a word of Italian, this elliptical phrase still captures the strutting, daredevil, cocksure, soldier-braggart who had pulled himself out of a trench during the Great War and then, hidden between rows of trees with his rifle strapped tightly to his back, would have mowed down the entire Austro-Hungarian empire had he not run out of bullets. The phrase expressed the hectoring self-confidence of a drill sergeant surrounded by sissies in need of a daily jostling: Are we man enough, or aren’t we? Are we going ahead with it, or not? Are we worth our salt, or what? It was his way of whistling in the dark, of shrugging off defeat, of picking up the pieces and declaring victory. It was his way of barging in on fate, of holding out for more—of taking credit for everything, including the unforeseen brilliance of his most hapless schemes. He had pluck. He knew it, and he flaunted it.

Uncle Vili also knew how to convey that intangible though unmistakable feeling that he had lineage—a provenance so ancient and so distinguished that it transcended such petty distinctions as birthplace, nationality, or religion. And with the suggestion of lineage came the suggestion of wealth—if always with the vague hint that this wealth was inconveniently tied up elsewhere, in land, for example, something no one in the family ever had much of except when it came in clay flower pots. But lineage earned him credit. And this is what mattered to him most, for it was how he and all the men in the family made, borrowed, lost, and married into fortunes: on credit.

Lineage came naturally to Vili, not because he had it, or because he mimicked it, or even because he aspired to it. In his case, it was simply the conviction that he was born better. He had the imposing bearing of the wealthy, the reluctant smile which immediately sweetens in the company of equals. He was more intolerant of poor posture than of bad taste, of bad taste than of cruelty, and of bad table manners than of bad eating habits. Above all, he detested what he called the “atavisms” by which Jews gave themselves away, especially when impersonating goyim. He derided all in-laws and acquaintances who looked “typically Jewish,” not because he—Constantinople-born—did not look so himself, or because he hated Jews, but because he knew how much others did. It is because of Jews like them that they hate Jews like us. When snubbed by an observant Jew proud of his heritage, Vili’s answer trickled down his tongue like the pit of a fruit he had been twiddling about in his mouth for forty years: “Proud of what? Are we or aren’t we all peddlers in the end?”

And peddle is what he knew and did best. He even peddled Fascism in Egypt and later, on behalf of the Italians, in Europe as well. Then, when the British began threatening to round up all adult Italian males living in Alexandria, Uncle Vili rummaged through his closets and began hawking old certificates from the rabbinate of Constantinople to remind his friends at the British Consulate that, as a Jew, he could never be considered a threat to British interests. Would he like them to spy on the Italians instead? The British could not have asked for better.

He performed so brilliantly that after the war he was rewarded with a Georgian estate in Surrey, where he lived in lordly penury for the remainder of his days under the assumed name of Dr. H.M. Spingarn. Herbert Michael Spingarn was an Englishman whom Vili had met as a child in Constantinople and who had stirred in him two lifelong passions: the Levantine desire to emulate anything British and the Ottoman contempt for British anything. Uncle Vili, who had given up his distinctly Jewish name for an Anglo-Saxon one, cringed with concealed embarrassment when informed that this fellow Spingarn was himself a Jew. “Yes, I recall something like that,” he said vaguely. “We’re everywhere, then. Scratch the surface, and you’ll find everyone’s a Jew.”

So jeered this octogenarian Turco-Italian-Anglophile-gentrified-Fascist Jew who had started his professional life peddling Turkish fezzes in Vienna and Berlin and was to end it as the sole auctioneer of the deposed King Farouk’s property. “The Sotheby’s of Egypt; but a peddler nonetheless,” he said as we sat one summer afternoon in his English garden overlooking the murky, stagnant waters of what must have once been a splendid lake. “Still, a great people, these Jews,” he would say in broken English, affecting a tone of detached condescension so purposefully shallow and so clearly aware of its own fatuousness as to suggest that, when it came to his co-religionists, he always meant the opposite of what he said. “After all, Einstein, Schnabel, Proust, Disraeli,” he would declaim with a glint in his eyes and a half-suppressed smile, “Were they or weren’t they?”

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He had left Egypt—to which the family had moved from Constantinople in 1910—as a young volunteer with fire in his guts and quicksilver in his eyes. He returned, long after his discharge from the army, a polished rake whose insolent good looks betrayed a history of shady deals and ruthless sieges in the battle of the sexes. Impressed by his conquests, his sisters judged him decidedly masculine, what with the roguish tilt of his fedora, the impatient come, come now in his voice, and that patronizing swagger in his way of doing things—never overbearing, but just enough to signal there was more. He had fought in all sorts of battles, on all sorts of sides, with all sorts of weapons. He was a consummate marksman, a remarkable athlete, a shrewd businessman, a relentless womanizer—and yes, decidedly masculine.

“Are we or aren’t we?” he would brag after a conquest, or a killing on the stock market, or on suddenly recovering from a hopeless bout with malaria, or when he saw through a shrewd woman, or knocked down a street ruffian, or simply wanted to demonstrate that he was not easily hoodwinked. It meant, did I show them, or didn’t I? He would use the phrase after negotiating a difficult transaction: didn’t I promise they’d come begging for my price? Or when he had a blackmailer thrown in jail: didn’t I warn him not to take me for a pushover? Or when his beloved sister, Aunt Marta, came crying to him hysterically when she had been jilted by yet another fiancé, in which case the phrase meant, any man worthy of the name could have seen it coming! Didn’t I warn you? And then, to remind her she was made of stronger stuff than tears, he would sit her on his lap and, holding both her hands in his, would rock her ever so gently, swearing she’d get over her sorrow sooner than she thought, for such was the way with lovesickness, and besides, was she or wasn’t she?

Aunt Marta’s crises de mariage, as they were called, were known to last for hours. Her mother, her three sisters, her five brothers, her sisters- and brothers-in-law would take turns peeking in at her, carrying pieces of ice in a small bowl for her eyes while she lay in the dark with a compress of her own devising. “I’m suffering. If only you knew how I’m suffering,” she would groan, in exactly the same words I heard her whisper more than fifty years later in a hospital room in Paris as she lay dying of cancer. Outside, sitting with his other siblings in the crowded living room, Uncle Vili could no longer contain himself. “Enough is enough! What Marta really needs, we all know what it is.” “Don’t be vulgar now,” interrupted his sister Clara, unable to stifle a giggle as she stood at her easel, painting yet another version of Tolstoy’s grizzly features. “See? You may not like the truth, but everyone agrees with me,” continued Uncle Vili, increased exasperation in his voice. “All these years, and the poor girl still doesn’t know a man’s fore from his aft.”

Their older brother Isaac burst out laughing. “Can you really imagine her with anyone?”

“Enough is enough,” snapped their mother, a matriarch nearing her eighties. “We must find her a good Jewish man. Rich, poor, it doesn’t matter.” “But who, who, who, tell me who?” interrupted Aunt Marta, who just happened to overhear the tail end of the conversation on her way to the bathroom. “It’s hopeless. Hopeless. Why did you make me leave Constantinople and come to Egypt, why? It’s hot and muggy here, I’m always sweating, and the men are so dreadful.”

Uncle Vili stood up, put 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, whom do we know here?”

This was Vili’s long-awaited cue, and he rose to the occasion with the studied nonchalance of a man forced to use the very 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 very close friends with a fellow student named Fouad, later to become the king of Egypt. Both men spoke Turkish, Italian, German, and some Albanian, and between them had concocted a pidgin tongue, rich in obscenities and doubles-entendres, which they called Turkitalbanisch and which they would continue 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.

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Uncle Vili was fond of boasting that his brother—and, by implication, himself as well—“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 royal seal was permanently lodged. 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, slightly over forty at the time, was eventually married to this man, a rich Schwabian Jew whom everyone in the family called the Schwab—his real name was Aldo Kohn—and who did little but play golf all day, bridge at night, and in between smoke Turkish cigarettes on which his name and family crest had been meticulously inscribed in gilded filigree. He was a balding, corpulent man whom Marta had turned down years before but who was determined to pursue her 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 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 opera Marta. 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, “Don’t say no, don’t say no.” Arrangements were finally made, and soon enough everyone noticed an unusually serene and restful glow over Aunt Marta’s rosy features. “She’ll kill him at this rate,” snickered the brothers.

The Schwab was a very dapper but quiet man who had once studied classics and whose diffident manner made him the household butt. He seemed spoiled and stupid, a 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 his 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 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; borrowing Vili’s cherished little phrase which he spun about him like a bodkin to let Vili know that he, the Schwab, known to the rest of the world as Aldo Kohn, was no pushover, either. Uncle Vili was totally trumped. Not only was he pained—that was his word for it—by 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: another instance of Ashkenazi duplicity. Uncle Vili practically never spoke to him again.

An exception occurred in 1930, when it became obvious that the family had been cheated of its share in the prosperous 20’s. It was at about this time that Uncle Vili suggested they 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 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?” “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. Black gold. Not to mention advice to businessmen, hope to investors, and sand to the Arabs. And besides, what difference does it make?” asked an exasperated Vili, “Carpets, cars, gold, silver, sisters, it’s all the same. I can sell anything.”

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The Isotta-Fraschini affair started with everyone in the family rushing to invest in both the Middle Eastern and the Japanese distributorship. A Japanese tutor was hired and, on Monday and Thursday afternoons, all five brothers—from Abram, the oldest, who was fifty and not entirely convinced by the venture, to Vili, twenty years younger and its demonic propounder—would sit in the dining room with their notebooks filled with what looked like the most slovenly ink stains. “Poor boys,” whispered Aunt Clara to her sister Esther whenever she peeped into the dark, wood-paneled room where tea was being served to the class. “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 next must we endure?” 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 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 the expensive cars at a discount. The brothers jumped at the idea. It soon emerged that, besides the car given to each of the five brothers, the newly-established Isotta-Fraschini/ Asia-Africa Corporation had sold a total of two cars. Three years later, after the business collapsed and the demos were returned to Italy, the only persons in Egypt who could be seen riding Isotta-Fraschinis were the Schwab and King Fouad.

The Isotta-Fraschini debacle set the family back another decade. The clan continued to keep up appearances for a while, and its members were often observed Sundaying in the king’s gardens or arriving in chauffeured cars at the Sporting or Sailing 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. Even Albert, their other brother-in-law, who in earlier days as a prosperous cigarette manufacturer had supported the father they left behind in Turkey, was asked to contribute something toward family finances. He did so reluctantly and after terrible rows with Esther, his wife, who like her other sisters never doubted that blood was thicker than marriage vows.

Albert had other reasons for neither trusting nor wanting to help them. It was upon the brothers’ assurances that he had finally and recklessly liquidated his cigarette business in Turkey and moved to Egypt, hoping both to invest in his in-laws’ firm and to spare his eighteen-year-old son 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, the now-impoverished nicotine merchant had no choice but to take the life savings he had smuggled out of Turkey and become the proprietor of a small pool hall facing the coast road.

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 sultans. . . . Now, billiards,” he would mutter as he stood outside the kitchen door each morning, waiting for the assortment of cheese and spinach pastries which his wife baked every dawn. They sold well and were much liked by the pool players who enjoyed eating something while drinking their 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 outside Albert’s pool hall, alight, walk in, receive a wad of bills, and “warn” Albert that he would be back in a week or so. After about the fifth such loan, the humble proprietor of the pool hall walked outside, cue in hand, and rammed it through the car window, informing his brother-in-law who was skulking in the back seat that since he was on such good terms with royalty, he should tap the king for something to “tide him over”—Vili’s euphemism for desperate loans.

Esther was horrified when she heard of the confrontation between her brother and her husband. “But he’s never done anything like this before,” she protested, “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 a 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 husband. . .,” 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.”

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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 brother, he became a rice expert in one week. Then a sugar-cane examiner. In the space of three months he knew how to cure every conceivable disease afflicting cotton, Egypt’s prized agricultural product. In half a year’s time, he had not only toured every corner of Egypt, but had also visited every cotton magnate’s home rumored to house a promising young Jewish wife. He married one slightly over a year after returning from Europe.

Having become a respectable citizen now, Aaron reverted to what he liked best of all: married women. It is said that some of his mistresses were so severely shaken when he was done with them that they would show up at 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 turned up at the family’s residence with the picture of a man to whom she claimed she had been engaged in Berlin. When the misunderstanding was finally cleared up, and the woman had put her handkerchief back into her pocketbook, she was invited to stay for lunch with the family, most of whose members were due to arrive toward one o’clock. Aaron was the last to show, but as soon as he walked in she immediately 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 the strange name, but during lunch, when everyone had more or less regained composure, she explained that in 1913 he had looked so much like Emperor William in his new Prussian uniform that she could not resist nicknaming him Willy for short. From that day onward 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 afterward.

He protested. “I was really in love with her at the time. And besides, it happened long before I’d met Lola.”

“I wasn’t talking about women. Traitor you are, traitor you’ll always be.”

No one had the heart to ship the resurrected Lotte back to Belgium. So she was hired as a secretary by Uncle Abram, then as a sales assistant by Uncle Jacques, who eventually palmed her off on Uncle Isaac, who finally married her. In the family picture taken at their wedding, Tante Lotte is standing next to Uncle Isaac at the top of the stairway, with her right hand resting on Uncle Vili’s shoulder. Are we, squints Uncle Vili, or aren’t we, after all, men who share, men who exact the highest sacrifices, men whom women worship? Behind the assemblage, peeping furtively from the French windowpanes, are the faces of the maid Zeinab and the cook Ahmed. Zeinab, no older than nineteen at the time, and already in the family for a decade, is smiling mischievously. Ahmed, who was from Khartoum, bashfully attempts to avert his eyes from the photographer, covering his face with his right palm.

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While the family was trying to recover from the Isotta-Fraschini debacle, Uncle Vili was busily pursuing an altogether different career: that of a Fascist. He had become such an ardent supporter of the Duce that he made everyone in the family wear a black shirt and follow the Fascist health regimen by exercising daily. A punctilious observer of all changes inflicted on the Italian language by the Fascists, he tried to purge his acquired Anglicisms from his speech, tastes, and clothing; when Italy went to war against Ethiopia, he asked the family to surrender its gold jewelry to the government to help finance the Duce’s dream of an empire.

The irony behind Uncle Vili’s patriotic histrionics is that, all the while proclaiming his undying allegiance to the Fascio, he had already joined British intelligence. His induction as a spy provided him with the only career for which he was truly suited from birth. It also encouraged everyone else in the family to remain in Egypt, especially now that they were plugged into the affairs of not one but two empires.

Vili’s admission to His Majesty’s Secret Service coincided with another piece of good fortune for the family: Isaac’s flourishing friendship with King Farouk, Fouad’s son. It is not clear how Isaac obtained his appointment as director at the Ministry of Finance, but shortly after his wedding, he also found himself sitting on the boards of most major corporations in Egypt. Fraterism, which gives to brothers what nepotism gives to nephews and grandchildren, took care of the rest. Uncles Jacques and Cosimo were offered lucrative posts at two banks in a direct line with the Ministry of Finance. Vili’s auction business was thriving, the apartment overlooking the dazzling expanse of beach-water was given a much-needed sprucing up, twins were born to the Schwab and Marta, and Vili finally made up with his brother-in-law Albert.

At first, Uncle Vili tried to conceal the nature of his new career. Only Aunt Lola and his brother Isaac knew of it. But secrets of this kind he could never resist divulging, particularly since they stirred envy and admiration. It was the closest thing to being a soldier again. He carried a pistol wherever he went and, before sitting down to lunch with the rest of the family, could be seen fiddling with and loosening his holster. “What is he,” asked the Schwab, “a gangster now?” “Shh,” Aunt Marta would hiss, “no one is supposed to know.” “But it’s so obvious what he’s up to, he must be some sort of decoy. The British couldn’t possibly be that stupid.”

But then wars are won not because one party is more resourceful but because the other is more incompetent. The Italians never suspected that Vili had thrown in his lot with the British and continued to use his services in Egypt and elsewhere. Vili was now very often absent from Alexandria, either in Ethiopia with the Italian army, or in Italy, or serving in various Italian delegations to Germany. To become still more vital to Italian interests, he made a name for himself as a transportation expert and a specialist in fuel distribution for desert convoys. How and where he acquired even the most nodding acquaintance with these fields is beyond conjecture, but the Italians needed anyone they could get. They took advantage of his flourishing auction house to cover his frequent comings and goings between Rome and Alexandria. To allay British scrutiny, they encouraged him to import antique furniture, and thus with the help of the Fascists he managed to purchase priceless antiques in Italy at a fraction of their price only to sell them to Egyptian pashas for a fortune.

He became very wealthy. With time, not only did there accrue to him the many privileges of an English gentleman spy, but his double life allowed him to enact all those elaborate British rituals—from breakfast to nightcap—which he had always secretly envied while gratifying his undying Italian patriotism whenever he heard the Fascist anthem, or when, years later, the Italians—not without German help—finally scored a victory against the Greeks. “We’ve taken Greece,” he suddenly shouted one day, hanging up the telephone with what must also have been unsuspected Turkish glee in his voice. “We’re finally in Athens!” Whereupon everyone jumped up and down, stirring up the Egyptian servants and maids, who would ululate at the slightest pretext for celebration, until someone inevitably sobered up the festivities by voicing concern for Greek Jewry.

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Then something happened. Even he could not quite understand it. “Things aren’t going well,” Vili said. When pressed to explain, he would simply say, “Things.” Unnerved, his sister Esther would try coaxing him: “Is it that you don’t want to say or that you don’t know?” “No, I do know.” “Then tell us.” “It’s about Germany.” “Anyone could have said it was about Germany. What about Germany?” “They’ve been nosing around Libya too much. It just doesn’t bode well.”

A few months later, Aunt Elsa arrived with her husband from Marseilles. “Very bad. Terrible,” she said. They would not give her an exit visa. Isaac had had to arrange a diplomatic passport bearing the king’s seal.

Hardly a month later, the Schwab’s sister Flora appeared in the family living room. Clara, his sister-in-law, immediately saw the writing on the wall. “If all these Ashkenazi Jews begin swarming in from Germany, it’s going to be the end for us. We’ll be teeming with tailors and brokers all over the city.”

“We couldn’t sell anything,” said Flora. “They took everything. We left with what we could.” Flora, who was thirty-two at the time, had come alone with her mother, an ailing, aging woman with clear blue eyes and white skin touched with pink, who spoke French poorly and who seemed to wear a pleading, terrified look on her face. “They slapped her on the streets two months ago, then she got lost in her own neighborhood, now she keeps to herself.” For several weeks early that summer, the streets were rife with rumors of an impending, perhaps decisive, battle with the Afrika Korps. Rommel’s forces had seized one stronghold after another, working their way along the Libyan coastline. “There’s going to be a terrible battle. Then the Germans will invade.” Panic struck. The small resort town of Mersah-Metrouh on the coast near the Libyan border had fallen into German hands. “They hate us Jews more than they despise Arabs,” said Aunt Elsa, as though this were a most astonishing piece of news. Uncle Isaac, who had heard a lot about German anti-Semitism, had put together a terrifying account, made up of rumors, worst fears, and haunting reminders of the Armenian massacre of 1895, which he had witnessed. “They round them up. First they find out who is Jewish, then they send trucks at night and force all the men into them, and then they take you to distant factories, leaving women and children to starve by themselves.” “All you’re doing is scaring everyone, so stop it right now,” said Esther, who like most members of her family had witnessed at least two Armenian massacres in Turkey. “Yes, but the Armenians had been spying for the British for far too long,” protested Vili who, in this case, sympathized with the Turks, even though he had fought on the British side during the Great War, while Albert, who had fought with the Turks against the British, condemned the massacres as barbarous. “The Turks simply had to put a stop to it in the only way they knew how: with blood and more blood. But what have Jews ever done to the Germans?”

“The way some Jews behave,” jumped in Aunt Clara, “I’d run them out of this world into the next. It’s because of Jews like them that they hate Jews like us,” she said, eyeing her brother Vili, one of whose favorite maxims she had just quoted. “Then they’re really going to take us away, you think?” interrupted Marta, her voice already quaking. “Don’t start now with the crying, please! We’re in the middle of a war,” said an exasperated Esther. “But it’s because we’re in the middle of a war that I’m crying,” insisted Aunt Marta, “don’t you see?” “No, I don’t see. If they take us away, then they’ll take us away, and that’ll be the end of that. . . .”

Weeks before the first battle of El Alamein, the matriarch decided to put into effect an old family expedient. She summoned everyone to stay in her apartment for as long as the situation warranted. None declined the offer; they arrived, like Noah’s beasts, in twos and fours, some from Cairo and Port Said, some from as far away as Khartoum. Mattresses were laid out side by side on the floors, extra leaves were added to the dining-room table, and two more cooks were hired, one of whom raised doves in case there was a shortage of food. A sheep and two ewes were secretly brought in under cover of night and tied upstairs in the terrace next to the makeshift coop.

Everyone was already settled in a week after the matriarch’s summons. During the day, family members would leave and tend to business. Then all would return for lunch, and during those long summer afternoons, some of the men would sit around the dining-room table naming their worst fears while the children napped and women mended and knitted things in other rooms. Warm clothing was particularly needed; European winters were harsh, they said. At the entrance to the apartment stood a row of very small suitcases neatly stacked in a corner, some dating back to their owners’ youth in Turkey and to school days abroad. Now, blotched and tattered by age, bearing yellowed stickers from Europe’s grand hotels, they waited meekly in the vestibule for that day when the Nazis would march into Alexandria and round up all Jewish men above eighteen, allowing each a small suitcase with bare necessaries.

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Later in the afternoon some members of the family would go out, and the women might stop at the Sporting Club. But by teatime most were already home. Dinner was usually light and quick, consisting of bread, jam, fruit, cheese, chocolate, and home-made yogurt, reflecting Aunt Elsa’s tight management of family finances, Uncle Vili’s Spartan dietary norms, as well as the family’s humble origins. After dinner, coffee would be brought in and everyone would crowd into the living room and listen to the radio for hours, some to the BBC, others to the Italian stations. The reports were always confusing.

“All I know is that the Germans need Suez. Therefore, they must attack,” Vili maintained.

“Yes, but can we stop them?”

“Only for the short term. Long-term, no. General Alexander may be a genius; but Rommel is Rommel.”

“Then what shall we do?” asked Aunt Marta, always ready to break into hysterics.

“There is nothing we can do.”

“What do you mean there is nothing we can do? We can escape.”

“Escape where?” asked Esther, turning red.

“Escape. I don’t know. Escape!”

“But where?” continued her sister. “To Greece? They’ve already taken Greece. To Turkey? We’ve just barely gotten out of there. To Italy? They’d run us into jail. To Libya? The Germans and Italians are there already. Don’t you see that once they take Suez, it’ll all be finished.”

“What do you mean ‘finished’? So you do think that they’ll win?”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” interjected Vili.

“Just come out and say it. They’ll win and then they’ll come and take us all away.”

Vili did not answer.

“How about Madagascar then?”

“Madagascar! Please, Marta, really!”

“Or South Africa. Or India. What’s wrong with just trying to gain time elsewhere. Just keeping one step ahead of them. Maybe they’ll lose.”

“They won’t lose this time,” said Abram who rarely spoke on these occasion. “They’ve learned much too well from their mistakes. No. I’d rather take my chances and see what happens.”

“It’s easy for you to say. You’re already old. But I’ve got children to think about, children,” Marta repeated, losing her temper.

“You are all such pessimists,” Vili finally said. “It’s not written that the Germans have to win, you know. They may lose. Their fuel supplies are terribly low and they have overextended themselves. Let them attack Egypt, let them venture as deep as they want. Sand always wins in the end—remember that,” he continued, advocating the strategic restraint of Hannibal’s foe, Quintus Fabius Maximus, known to history as Cunctator, the temporizer. “We’ve survived worse enemies before, we’ll outlive this one, too.”

“Well said,” replied his sister Elsa, who loved positive thinking and who could never bring herself to believe that disaster could be as imminent as all that. “I knew you would come up with something in the end,” she said, eying her silent husband with that scornful look which all members of her family reserved for their respective spouses during family gatherings.

“As long as we have courage and stand together and don’t panic and don’t listen to idle rumors floating between seamstress this and hairdresser that, sisters,” Vili emphasized, “we’ll pull through this one as well.” He declaimed this in the only style he knew: by borrowing from Churchill and Mussolini.

“So we wait, in other words,” concluded Marta.

“So we wait.”

And there it was, unmistakably poised in mid-sentence, hovering in the wings like a pianist cracking his knuckles before making his long-awaited entrance, or an actor clearing his throat as he walks onto the stage. It was ushered in by the confident glint in his eye, the arching of his back, and that all-too-familiar quiver in his voice as it rose and reached the right pitch: “. . . We’ve waited things out before, we’ll wait this one out as well. After all, each of us here is a 4,000-year-old Jew. Are we or aren’t we?”

The mood in the room livened, and Vili, who had a touch of demagoguery in him, turned to Flora and asked her to play something by Goldberg or Brandenberg, he couldn’t remember which.

“You mean Bach,” said Flora walking up to the piano.

“Bach, Offenbach, c’est tout la même chose, it’s all the same. Todos Lechli, all of them Ashkenazi,” he muttered. Only Esther heard him say that. She immediately turned and uttered a severe shush: “She understands,” she hissed, indicating Flora. But Vili was unmoved. “There is only one thing she understands, and all the men in this room know what it is.”

Flora did not hear this exchange. She took off her ring, placed it next to the keyboard, and soon began playing something by Chopin. Everyone was overjoyed.

_____________

Then came the wonderful news. The British 8th Army had managed to halt Rommel’s advance at El Alamein, and in the fall of 1942, finally mounted a decisive attack upon the Afrika Korps. The battle lasted twelve days. At night, the family would stand for hours on the balcony as if for holiday fireworks, straining their eyes west of the city to catch a glimpse of the historic battle that was to decide their fate. Some smoked, others chatted among themselves or with neighbors, while from emptied rooms came the incessant crackle of short-wave bulletins. A distant, half-inch halo hovered over the western horizon, swaying in the blackout, suddenly beaming like an approaching vehicle only to fade again, a pale amber moon on a misty night. All they heard was a distant, muffled drone, like the whirr of fans on quiet summer evenings or the sound of a large refrigerator humming in the pantry. People went to sleep to the faraway rumble of battle.

“See? All your fears of being taken away have come to nothing. Didn’t I tell you?” said Vili to his sister Marta when it became clear that Britain had scored a decisive victory.

Everyone was readying to leave the old mother’s home. Yet the preparations were slow, uncertain, even dilatory, partly because everyone had grown accustomed to the refugee life and was reluctant to abandon its solidarity, but also because no one wanted to tempt fate by proclaiming the danger averted. “What’s the hurry? There are still many pigeons left. Besides, one never knows with the Germans. They could be back in a matter of weeks.” Packing, however, continued. As a going-away gift, the old mother decided to give each son and daughter a crystal goblet bearing golden fleurs-de-lis. They had been manufactured in their father’s glass factory in Turkey. “This is the last time this apartment will ever house so many,” explained the old woman.

“The way the world goes, I wouldn’t be so sure,” said Esther.

Esther was right. The family was to seek refuge in the old matriarch’s home on two subsequent occasions: once during the Suez War in 1956 and, before that, in 1948, after Vili had been hunted down by Zionist agents who severely beat him for spying for the British. Two months later he got wind they were on his tracks again and that this time they meant to kill him. He took cover in his mother’s home. One day, he took out his good-luck pendulum and on the table placed a cyanide pill he had been keeping ever since the days of El Alamein. The pendulum said no.

Vili was spirited away to Italy, then to England, changed names, converted to Christianity, forswore all previous nationalities. It was only about five years later that he was able to show his face in Egypt for what proved to be the most spectacular business deal in his life as spy, soldier, and swindler: the auctioning of King Farouk’s property.

_____________

“It was the end of the end,” he explained many years later when I paid him a two-day visit in England, “The end of an era, the end of a world. Everything fell apart after that.”

By now he was in his early nineties, he liked horses, candies, and dirty jokes, using a fist at the end of a stiffened forearm to illustrate the ribald tales which he liked to tell in the old style: with bawdy gestures and exaggerated pantomime. Wearing old tweeds, Clark boots, an ascot, and a stained cashmere cardigan, he looked the part he had rehearsed all life long: a Victorian gentleman who could not care less what his inferiors thought of either him or his clothes. What made his aristocratic bearing especially convincing was that, on looking at him, one immediately suspected poverty.

He showed me his orchard where nothing good ever grew, the huge lake in need of sprucing up—“But who cares”—the stables with more horses than there was room for, and beyond these, the woods where we could take long walks in the afternoon, a sort of Jane Austen world gone completely wild. “I don’t know,” he answered when I asked what his woods abutted. “I suppose a neighbor. But then, these English lords, whoever really knows them?”

It was not true. He knew them quite well. In fact, he knew everyone. At the local post office, at the bank, at the pub where he offered me a beer, everyone knew Dr. Spingarn. “Well, hello” and “Cheerio” slipped from his tongue as though he had spoken English from the day he was born. In town one morning, Vili decided to pay a visit to the local antique dealer.

“Good morning, Dr. Spingarn,” said the dealer.

“Greetings,” he replied and introduced me. “Have you found my Turkish coffee pot yet?”

“Still looking, still looking,” chanted the dealer, dusting an old clock.

“It’s been nine years,” chuckled Vili. “I’m afraid I’ll die before you find it.”

“No fearing that, Dr. Spingarn. You’ll outlive us all, sir.”

“They’re slower than Arabs and twice as stupid. How on earth did they ever manage to have an empire?” he said as soon as we stepped outside the shop.

Back at home his wife and daughter and married grandson and great-grandchildren were waiting for us. “See this table?” He palmed the huge antique oak dining table on which food was being served. “I paid five pounds for it. And see these chairs?” There were twelve of them. “Seven pounds the lot, with eight more in the attic. And this huge clock here? Guess how much?” “One pound,” I guessed. “Wrong! I paid nothing at all for it. It came with the chairs.” He burst out laughing as he spread a thick piece of butter on a slice of bread.

“You sound like a typical parvenu juif,” jeered his daughter.

“And what else are we if not des parvenus juifs?”

After lunch he insisted we have coffee alone together. “Lui et moi seuls,” he told the others. “Come,” he said, pointing to the kitchen where he proceeded to brew Turkish coffee. “You see, all you need is a little pot like this, preferably made of brass, but aluminum will do. I had this one made in Manchester. By a Greek. But do you think our antique dealer is smart enough to figure that out? Never! That’s why I go to him every once in a while. As long as he remains stupid and as long as I am lucid enough to know it, then things are well with me. Do you see?” he winked at me, complicity beaming in his eyes. I nodded but missed the point. It occurred to me that I would never have lasted a day in the world of his youth. “De l’audace, toujours de l’audace,” he resumed. “You see, in life, it’s not only knowing what you want that matters. That’s easy. It’s knowing how to want.” I was not sure I understood this, either, but again I nodded. “But I was lucky. I had a good life. Life gives us all a few trump cards when we’re born, and then that’s it. By the time I was twenty I had already wasted all of mine. Life gave them back to me many times. Not many can claim the same.”

_____________

When the coffee was ready he took out two demitasses and proceeded to pour, holding the pot precariously high above the saucers and aiming the coffee into them the way good Arab servants did, to allow the brew to cool somewhat as it was being poured. “May God rest his soul, no one made coffee like your grandfather,” he said. “A snake, with a cleft tongue, who bubbled like milk when he lost his temper and then cut you to pieces, but still the best brewer of coffee in the world. Come,” he indicated the drawing room, as we proceeded through a different passageway. The room was filled with antiques and Persian rugs. On the glistening old parquet sat a band of afternoon sunlight where an overfed cat had fallen asleep, its legs stretched out awkwardly.

“See this smoking jacket?” he said, “Feel it.” I leaned over and touched the fabric on the shawl collar. “At least forty years old,” he said, looking terribly amused. “Guess whose?” “Your father’s,” I said. “Don’t be stupid,” he snapped, practically losing his temper. “My father died eons ago.” “One of your brothers’?” “No, no, no.” “I don’t know then.” “I’ll give you a hint. Guess who made the cloth? Best fabric in the world.” It took me a while. “My father?” I asked. “Right. Woven in the basement of his factory in Ibrahimieh. This jacket belonged to your grandfather Albert.”

“He gave it to you?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes.”

“On what occasion?”

“After he died, it was Esther gave it to me. Where would you ever find such fine wool nowadays? Feel!” he ordered.

Ever the master salesman, I thought. “Let me explain,” he said, his face uncomfortably nearing mine. He looked around to see no one was listening.

“Do you remember Tante Flora la belle romaine, as we used to call her?”

It was Flora who had taught me all about the pianist Schnabel, I replied.

“That’s right, she studied with Schnabel before the war. During the war, in the days of El Alamein, we all stayed in your great-grandmother’s house. You have no idea how crowded it was. Well, one day, in walks this dark-haired, beautiful, but painfully beautiful woman who plays the piano every evening, who smokes cigarettes all the time, who looks a trifle worn but sexier for it, and who flirts with all of us, though you’d swear she didn’t know it. In short, we were all madly in love with her. Madly.”

“What does that have to do my grandfather?”

“Wait, let me finish! Well, the tension was such—you have to realize that there were at least ten grown men in the house, not to mention the younger men who were just as predatory—that every day we would start quarreling. Over nothing, and over everything. Your grandfather and I quarreled every day. Every day. Then we would make up and play backgammon. And then quarrel again. Do you play backgammon?”

“Poorly.”

“I thought so. At any rate, it becomes quite evident that Flora has singled me out. Of course, I make no passes, I have to behave—in my mother’s house and all that, and my wife snooping about, you understand, I have to move very slowly. So I finally say to your grandfather: ‘Albert, this woman wants me. What should I do?’ He says, ‘Do you want her?’ And I say, ‘Don’t you?’ He does not reply. So I say to him: ‘Albert, you’ve got to help me.’ That cunning wretch of your grandfather smiles a while and finally says: ‘I’ll see.’ Everyone else knew—Frau Kohn, your grandmother, Isaac, everyone except me. I found out about them thirty-five years later when Flora came to visit us here and saw me wearing his smoking jacket. She recognized it immediately.”

“Yes?” I asked.

“Don’t you get it?”

I shook my head.

“It was their secret. She had the jacket made for him as a birthday present. I felt like a complete dolt. The only woman I wanted and never slept with. Being jealous like this after forty years, what a dolt!”

_____________

A small incident occurred over dinner. A couple of Gypsies were observed through the dining-room window roaming the grounds. Without hesitating, Vili went into the drawing room, got his gun, and fired two shots in the air, rousing the dogs and the horses. “Have you gone mad?” His daughter jumped up and tried to grab the rifle from his hands. “They could kill you if they wanted to.”

“Let them try. Do you think I’m afraid of them? I’d go after every one of them. . . .” And then it came, as a farewell present, a memento of my visit to Surrey, a final concession on his part to one who had come to hear the words spoken from his own lips. “Me afraid of them? Me frightened? What do you think? Am I or aren’t I?”

That night he came into my room to say farewell. “I insist on adieu, because at my age one never knows.” He stared at my things, looked over my books, picked one up with something like mock scorn on his face. “Do people still read him?” “More than ever,” I replied. “Another Jew,” he said. “No, a half-Jew,” I said. “No,” he said. “When your mother is Jewish you are never half-Jewish.”

Perhaps it was the subject, or maybe this was why he had come upstairs to my room, but he asked about his mother. I told him what I could remember. No, there had been no pain. Yes, She was lucid until the very end. Yes, she still laughed and still made those short, lapidary pronouncements that made one squirm like a trampled insect. Yes, she understood she was dying. And so on until I told him that she couldn’t see well because she had developed cataracts, and that a light, yellowish film would veil her eyes. I said it in passing, not thinking that cataracts were a particularly serious impairment.

“So she couldn’t see then,” he said. “She couldn’t see,” he repeated, trying to scan in the words and the syllables themselves some secret meaning, some purpose behind the cruelty of fate and the vulnerability of old age. “So she couldn’t see,” he said like someone gripped by a sorrow so powerful that all he can do is repeat words until they finally bring tears.

“You won’t understand this,” he said, “but I think of her sometimes. Old, lonely, everyone gone, and, now that I think of it, blind, dying practically all by herself in Egypt. And I think of how I could have made things better for her had I not misspent my life trying out all these flimsy schemes of mine. But then that is how life is. Now that I have the house, I haven’t got the mother. And yet I wanted this house for her. Sometimes, I think of her simply as mother, the way children do when they need something only mothers have. You would think because I’m old enough to be a great-grandfather that I couldn’t possibly think of my mother in those terms. Well, I still do. Strange, isn’t it?” He smiled, placed the volume back on my nightstand, and perhaps meaning to surprise me, began quoting in French the long, sinuous prose of the first few sentences.

“Goodnight Herr Doktor,” he said abruptly.

“Goodnight Dr. Spingarn,” I replied. I did not ask how he had come to know this passage from Proust.

_____________

Half an hour later, on my way to the shower, I was stopped by my cousin and his wife. “If you’re quiet you won’t regret this.” They explained that every evening, between ten and eleven o’clock, Vili would listen to the short-wave French-language broadcast from Israel. “It’s always the last thing he does. Then he turns off the lights and goes to sleep.” “So?” “So you’ll see.” We waited outside his door until we heard the Israeli national anthem, followed by various signing-off signals. The radio clicked off, then there was the sound of bedsprings yielding under weight, followed by a rustle of sheets, and the band of light went out from under the door. All was quiet for a second. And then I heard it, a faint, reedy, muted buzzing, emanating from within the small room like a vapor of sound working its way out the keyhole, under the door, through the cracks in the lintel, filling the dark silence where we three stood like incense and premonition: an eerie garble of familiar words, murmured to a cadence I too had learned long ago, now whispered as if in stealth and shame.

“He’ll deny it if you ask him,” said my cousin.