Out of Egypt by André Aciman Page A

fingers through my hair.
    â€œI 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 office—sumptuous. Not bad for an Arab who is scarcely thirty years old. If he represents the new order here, well, chapeau to the new Egypt.”
    â€œJust 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.
    â€œI don’t care. This one is a true gentleman. I owe him my life. You’d be surprised, but ever since my operation, I’ve become quite philosophical. I thank God for everything He’s given me; what I don’t have, I don’t miss, and what I can’t get, I don’t want. We are not rich, but we are comfortable; I’ve never loved Egypt, but life has been good here; and almost everyone I love comes to see me at least once a day. Never was I happier I didn’t die.”

    â€œShe should have died right there and then,” said Aunt Flora thirty years later as she insisted on paying for our coffee somewhere near Ponte dell’Accademia. “For she died worse
than a dog’s death, and in such squalor, you’d swear there never was a God in heaven.”
    She collected the change but left the waiter no tip. “Because they’re impertinent fannulloni ,” she said. Then, as though to apologize for the restaurant, she added, “I know the food isn’t very good here, but it’s not bad, and I like to sit at this table in the shade and listen to the water and let my mind drift.” She finally put away the toothpick she had been twiddling. “Perhaps this is why I’ve chosen to live in Venice—because no matter where you turn there’s always water close by, and you can always smell the sea, even if it stinks; because there are mornings when I wake up and think the clock is turned back and I’m on the Corniche again.”
    Summers were long in Venice, she said, and there was nothing she liked more some days than to take the vaporetto and ride around the city, or head directly for the Lido and spend a morning on the beach by herself. She loved the sea. I loved it too, I said, reminding her that it was she who had taught me how to swim.
    I looked at her. At sixty-seven she had the same clear green eyes I remembered and the same tapered, nicotine-stained fingertips that could race across the keyboard when she played the opening bars of the Waldstein. I had not seen her in ten years, and for another five before that. We spoke about Rue Memphis again.
    â€œShe wasn’t a bad piano player at all. Her trouble was discipline. And memory. Memory especially. I, on the other hand, have plenty of discipline; as for memory, there isn’t a thing I’ve forgotten. I can still remember the names of all the tramway stops from Ramleh to Victoria.”
    I took a paper napkin, unfolded it, gave her my pen and asked her to write them down. She decided I might want those of the Ramleh–Bacos line as well, so she jotted them too.
    â€œMind you, I remember the old names, not those newfangled,
patriotic names which the new regime adopted: Independence Street, Freedom Square, Victory-this-and-that.”
    Our waiter, who had been scowling in our direction, turned his face elsewhere and was busily talking to a colleague from across a makeshift hedge separating our restaurant from another. When he sighted a hesitant tourist couple scanning our empty terrace, he went