Egypt
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But then, wars are won not because one party is the more resourceful, but because the other is a touch more incompetent.
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Vili was unmoved. “There’s only one thing she understands, and all the men in this room know what it is.”
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In the maid Latifa’s room, which was Flora’s now, she had taken off her ring again and her earrings and, depositing her glass of cognac on a makeshift bedstand, had said, “Now you can kiss me.” But she kissed him first. “It means nothing,” she added as she looked away and lit the kerosene lamp, bringing down the wick till it glowed less than her cigarette. “As long as we’re clear that it means nothing,” she said almost enjoying the cruelty with which she foisted despair on everyone.
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“During the days of the war, in the days of 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 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.”
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“So she couldn’t see then,” he said. “She couldn’t see,” he repeated, as though trying to scan in the words and the syllables themselves some secret meaning, some revealed 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 the words until they finally bring tears to his eyes.
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Five minutes later, the two mazmazelles could be seen hobbling down the street toward the Camp de Cesar station, one with an unusually wide-rimmed hat, the other carrying a folded fan in one hand, her handbag and a white glove in the other, chattering away in the language that had brought them together and which, despite their repeated reminders to themselves and everyone else in the world that they had absolutely nothing else in common, despite their rivalry, their barbs, their petty distrust of one another, would always rescue a friendship that remained close until the very, very end.
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Since she was always scattered and vague in her speech, once the mood for complaining had set in, she would digress from one woe to another, weaving a never-ending yarn filled with subplots in which the principal villains were her ailments, heartaches, and humiliations, with herself cast in the role of the hapless victim fending off adversities as best she could, a medieval martyr tied to a post surrounded by advancing dragons …
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“She’s been the perfect wife for you: your cook, your maid, your nurse, your seamstress, your barber, your mother even. How many times has she saved you from certain ruin? She’s the most intelligent woman on Rue Memphis.” “I know. God gave her the biggest brain in the world. But he gave her nothing else. In her company even an iceberg would catch cold.”
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When he returned late that night, my father wrote in his diary that he had finally met her. He did not portray her as the woman of his dreams, nor as the most beautiful, nor did he describe any of her features. Superstitious as ever, he even avoided mentioning her name. She was simply and so clearly her that the need to capture her on paper or to probe the more elusive aspects of her personality proved too elaborate a task for the man who had merely written: I want to think of her. He did not write what he felt upon first setting eyes on her or what he thought of each time he caught his mind drifting toward her. He merely described her gray skirt and maroon cardigan and the way she crossed her legs when she sat behind her mother, the skin of her knee pressed against the edge of the card table as she kept her eyes glued to her mother’s cards. At one point she had smiled when she caught him looking at her, a kind, indulgent smile filled with languor and mild apology.
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“It’s such a wonderful evening,” she said. She was wearing a sleeveless white cotton dress, a thin necklace, and white shoes, her ruddy tanned skin glistening in the evening light. With a touch of makeup on, and her wet hair combed back, she looked older and more spirited than the shy neighbor’s daughter who all during her visit earlier that evening had kept her schoolgirl eyes riveted to her pleated skirt and her mother’s cards. There was even a suggestion of self-conscious elegance in the way she carried herself, holding her champagne glass with both hands, her elbows almost resting on her hips. Yet the absence of stockings and a handbag and the white outline of what must have been a missing man’s watch on her tanned wrist betrayed a hastily dressed or vaguely underdressed quality, as if after spending all day at the beach, with barely a few minutes to make it to the ball, she had put on the first thing that came her way without drying her hair or feet. Her toes were probably still lined with sand. Somewhere, he thought, watching the dimmed evening lights play off the liquid sheen of her white gabardine dress, was a wet bathing suit, hurriedly taken off and left crumpled on a wooden bench in a friend’s cabin.
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“The important thing is to eat well,” added the Princess. “But I’ve lost all my appetite. I eat so little.” “Then why do you keep putting on so much weight?” her husband interrupted. “Nerves, that’s why. You’ve been in this room two minutes and already I feel the pain starting.”
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After finishing the wash, Om Ramadan would sit in the kitchen and smoke a cigarette with Abdou. Then, with more tea in her system, she would return to the bathroom, load a large wicker basket with wet clothing, and carry the load on her head up the five flights of circular servants' stairs that led to the roof, taking slow, deliberate steps, stopping to catch her breath on the landing above ours, where another neighbor’s servant would hand her a glass of water. Then she would resume her climb, I alongside her, and the closer we got to the top, the brighter the stairwell grew, with more and more light shining against the walls of the sixth, seventh, and finally the eighth floor, where a sudden, blinding spell of heat and sunlight dazzled our senses. Not a sound on the terrace. Only the faraway whir of distant traffic below. Everything I touched was burning hot, and as I roamed about the empty terrace and looked over the tops of all the other buildings of Smouha, there it was, immense as always, that color blue lining the limitless horizon, quiet, serene, and forever beckoning: the sea. A gridwork of clotheslines awaited us. The sagging gray cords were frayed with use and, all along them, abandoned clusters of unused pins sat like little sparrows idling on electric wires.
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“No, the other wanted to die,” added Dr. Alcabes, our relative and family homeopath. “I told him we could save him,” he added as we were sitting at the third and last luncheon of the centennial. “But when he heard what the cure involved, he wanted no part of it. ‘Cover me that I may die,’ he said, quoting a Turkish proverb. So I told him, ‘Albert, this can lead to only one thing!’ Do you know what he said? ‘Well, that’s got to be better than letting you open me up, scrape me clean of my favorite organs, and leave me as hollow as a bell pepper. No thanks.’ ”
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“I don’t know what to make of it yet,” answered my uncle. Perhaps he was being evasive or, as he would say, diplomatic: say less than you think and mean more than you know.
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Madame Marie, a devout Greek Orthodox from Smyrna, stood up and sat down, dipped her foods in all the requisite dishes and sauces, ate everything she saw us eat, and repeated “Amen” after everyone else, though with the guarded look of a missionary forced to down a tribal brew. Her biggest fear in working for a Jewish family was to be inadvertently converted to Judaism.