The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit Read Free Page B

the novel he was reading to bid him good night, a tad enviously perhaps, and Zarifa would kiss both his cheeks lovingly but with some reproach in her magnificent blue eyes.
    My grandmother came from Aleppo, the ancient city in Syria whose culture was far more rigid and conservative than Cairo’s. She was troubled by her son’s nightly forays and the fact he was still unattached and showed no desire whatsoever to settle down. Even now, in his forties, his restlessness continued to get the better of him. Until Edith, henever brought a woman home to Malaka Nazli, as that would mean she was the chosen one, and he had no desire to choose.
    My father was a study in motion, taking long, brisk military strides early each morning to get from the house to his synagogue, then on to his business meetings, his cafés, and in the evening, his poker game and his dancing and his women. Because he tried to stay out of the house as much as possible, how convenient that his bedroom was at the front, facing Malaka Nazli, the wide, graceful boulevard named in honor of Queen Nazli, Farouk’s mother. Because his room was only a couple of feet away from the door, he could slip in and out as he pleased.
    Years later, I would hear that the lustrous lady of song, the devoutly Muslim Om Kalsoum, who was raised in a remote village where her dad had been the imam, had been my father’s mistress. It was one of the many stories that persisted about my dad’s prowess with women before and likely after he was married.
    What I heard not simply about his womanizing but about every sphere of his life had a mythic quality, so outsize as to seem apocryphal. There was the fanatical devotion to religion and the hedonistic streak that compelled him to venture out in search of all that Cairo had to offer. There was the passion for clothes and food and women that made him a fixture at the leading restaurants and patisseries by day, and the cabarets, dance halls, and cinémas en plein air by night. Even his height and larger-than-life physique were cause for comment, as he was muscular and fair in a land of small, swarthy men.
    The affair with Om Kalsoum had caused enough of a stir for word of it to spread in the family. It wasn’t simply that a singer worshipped by millions had become involved with my father, because his ease with women was legendary. It didn’t even seem incongruous that a star whose songs were all about the obsessive, indefinable aspects of love and desire would enter into a liaison with my obsessive, indefinable father.
    Rather, what took everyone aback was that a devout Jew, scion of hundreds of years and consecutive generations of noted rabbis and scholars, would become involved with an Arab woman who was also a very pious Muslim. And perhaps as surprising, that a connoisseur of female beauty who didn’t even deign to look at a woman unless she met his exacting standards would have a liaison with someone who, despiteher opulent wardrobe and finery, was rather a plain Jane. Her talent was the ultimate aphrodisiac.

    Om Kalsoum.
    My father’s nocturnal wanderings would typically begin a block or two away from home, at the Bet el Om—the House of the Mother. That is how Farida Sabagh’s home on nearby School Street was known. Tall and heavyset, Farida could no longer easily walk through her own doorway, which was always kept open. Yet her heart was as ample as her girth and she had an expansive, outgoing personality that made everyone want to come to the Bet el Om.
    When Leon would arrive at her building, the porter, a simple peasant from the south, leapt to his feet. “Captain,” he’d cry, raising hishand to his head in an awkward attempt at a military salute. Leon would smile, slip him a piaster, and continue on upstairs.
    Farida didn’t seem to mind the men who descended on her house night after night for rounds of poker. She liked to entertain her husband’s friends and would