Out of Egypt Read Free Page B

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 sultans—now, 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”—Vili’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.”
    â€œHe’s a Turk, through and through.”
    â€œAnd what are you then, Italian by any chance?”

    â€œItalian or not Italian, I know better than to break someone’s car window.”
    â€œI’ll speak to him,” she said.
    â€œNo, 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.
    â€œIf 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