Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

A regular contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The New Republic, Andre Aciman was born in Alexandria; raised in Egypt, Italy, and France; and educated at Harvard. His New York Times bestselling books include the novels Call Me By Your Name and Find Me, as well as the nonfiction books Out of Egypt and Eight White Nights. Aciman teaches literature at Bard and lives in Manhattan.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

False Papers

Picador USA

Chapter One

Alexandria:

The Capital of Memory

* * *

To those who asked, I said I went back to touch and breathe thepast again, to walk in shoes I hadn't worn in years. This, after all,was what everyone said when they returned from Alexandria?thewalk down Memory Lane, the visit to the old house, the knockingat doors history had sealed off but might pry open again. The visitto the old temple, the visit to Uncle So-and-so's house, the oldschool, the old haunts, the smell of the dirty wooden banister ondays you almost glided downstairs on your way to a movie. Andthen, of course, the tears, the final reckoning, the big themes: thereturn of the native, the romance of the past, the redemption oftime. All of it followed by predictable letdowns: the streets alwaysmuch narrower than before, buildings grown smaller with time,everything in tatters, the city dirty, in ruins. There are no Europeansleft, and the Jews are all gone. Alexandria is Egyptian now.

    As I step onto the narrow balcony of my room at the Hotel Ceciland try to take in the endless string of evening lights speckling theeastern bay, I am thinking of Lawrence Durrell and of what hemight have felt standing in this very same hotel more than fiftyyears ago, surveying a magical, beguiling city?the "capital ofmemory," as he called it, with its "five races, five languages ... andmore than five sexes."

    That city no longer exists; perhaps it never did. Nor does theAlexandria I knew: the mock-reliquary of bygone splendor andcolonial opulence where my grandmother could still walk withan umbrella on sunny days and not realize she looked quite ridiculous,the way everyone in my family must have looked quiteridiculous, being the last European Jews in a city where anti-Westernnationalism and anti-Semitism had managed to reducethe Jewish population from at least fifty thousand to twenty-fivehundred by 1960 and put us at the very tail end of those whomhistory shrugs aside when it changes its mind.

    The Alexandria I knew, that part-Victorian, half-decayed, vestigialnerve center of the British Empire, exists in memory alone,the way Carthage and Rome and Constantinople exist as vanishedcities only?a city where the dominant languages were English andFrench, though everyone spoke in a medley of many more, becausethe principal languages were really Greek and Italian, and in myimmediate world Ladino (the Spanish of the Jews who fled theInquisition in the sixteenth century), with broken Arabic holdingeverything more or less together. The arrogance of the retiredbanker, the crafty know-it-all airs of the small shopkeeper, the waysof Greeks and of Jews, all of these were not necessarily compatible,but everyone knew who everyone else was, and on Sundays?at thetheater, in restaurants, at the beach, or in clubs?chances were yousat next to each other and had a good chat. My grandmother knewGreek well enough to correct native Greeks, she knew every prayerin Latin, and her written French, when she was vexed, would havemade the Duc de Saint-Simon quite nervous.

    This is the Alexandria I live with every day, the one I've takenwith me, written about, and ultimately superimposed on othercities, the way other cities were originally sketched over theAlexandrian landscape when European builders came, in the middleof the nineteenth century, and fashioned a new city modeledafter those they already loved. It was this Alexandria I came lookingfor?knowing I'd never find it. That did not bother me. For Ihad come not to recover memories, nor even to recognize those I'ddisfigured, nor to toy with the thought that I'd ever live here again;I had come to bury the whole thing, to get it out of my system, toforget, to hate even, the way we learn to hate those who wouldn'thave us.

    I am, it finally occurs to me, doing the most typical thing a Jewcould do. I've come back to Egypt the way only Jews yearn to goback to places they couldn't wait to flee. The Jewish rite of passage,as Passover never tells us, is also the passage back to Egypt, not justaway from it.

    Until the mid-1950s, Jews had done extremely well in Egypt.They had risen to prominence and dominated almost every profession,and they were among the major financiers who brokeredEgypt's passage from a European to a national economy, serving asimportant conduits for foreign investors. Jews managed a significantshare of Egypt's stock exchange and owned some of thebiggest banks and almost all the department stores; the countryboasted the greatest number of Jewish multimillionaires in theMiddle East. Jews, though very few in number, held seats in theEgyptian parliament.

    These were, for the most part, observant Jews, but in a cosmopolitancity like Alexandria, where overzealous piety was deridedand where friendship was almost never based on creed, many ofthese Jews were quite relaxed when it came to religion, particularlysince most of them, educated in Catholic schools, tended to knowmore about the religions of others than about their own. Seders, Iremember, were rushed affairs; no one wanted to inflict Passoveron Christians who happened to be visiting and had been induced tostay for dinner.

    Following the Israelis' 1948 defeat of the Arabs, anti-Semitismrose sharply in Egypt, and there were some deadly incidents in thewake of the war. Matters became worse after 1956, when Israeljoined forces with France and England in a tripartite attack onEgypt after Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. British and Frenchresidents of Alexandria were summarily expelled from Egypt, aswere many Jews; everyone had assets, businesses, and propertiesseized by the state. Aunts and uncles, friends, grandparents, someof whom hadn't been expelled, read the writing on the wall and leftwithin a few years of the 1956 war, abandoning everything theyowned. Most settled in Europe, others in America.

    Some, like us, simply waited, the way Jews did elsewhere whenit was already too late to hope for miracles. We saw the city changeand each year watched European shop names come down and bereplaced by Egyptian ones, and heard of streets being renamed,until?as is the case now?I didn't know a single one.

    The only street whose name hasn't changed is the waterfrontroad known as the Corniche, al-Corniche, a thick bottleneck massof tottering loud vehicles emitting overpowering gas fumes.

    I try to rest both arms on the balustrade outside my hotel room,as I'd envisioned doing on receiving the glossy brochure with theCecil's picture. But the small, Moorish/Venetian-style balcony isentirely taken over by a giant compressor unit; it's impossible tomaneuver around it. Bird droppings litter the floor.

    Two men are speaking in Arabic downstairs. One is telling theother about his very bad foot and his pain at night. The other says itmight go away. They don't know how surreal mundane talk canseem to someone who's been away for thirty years.

    On the main square facing the hotel stands the ungainly statueof the Egyptian patriot Sa'ad Zaghlul, one leg forward in the mannerof ancient Egyptian statues, except that this one wears a fez. Iused to pass by here every morning on...