his curiosity and intelligence, his sense of adventure. It occurred to me he might have friends who were fundamentalists, maybe members of the Muslim Brotherhood. If so, I wanted to meet them. Because I didn’t care to put him in danger, I didn’t mention that I actually wanted to interview a terrorist. Why travel all this distance and not meet the Beast everybody raved about?
“I know a few hard-core believers,” Michael said. “Let me ask around and get back to you.”
After dinner, he strolled with me toward the hotel. Actually, “strolled” is the wrong verb. We “vaulted” ditches. “Traversed” construction sites. “Clambered” up and down slag heaps. “Tiptoed” over a sidewalk inexplicably flooded with water. “Dodged” cars and trolleys. “Picked” our way past café tables where men smoked sheesha and played dominoes in the glaring light that splashed from open doors. And “swam” against the tide of pedestrians until we achieved the relative sanctuary of the Corniche.
Young couples perched on the seawall. The daring held hands. The brazen embraced and kissed. Not unnaturally, we wound up talking about women and love, but since we were both bookish guys, we thrashed out the subject through literature. Michael asked what I thought of Durrell’s Justine. Not the novel but the sexually predatory title character, the inscrutable beauty who leaves half the men of Alexandria panting in her fragrant wake.
World-weary and wise, I observed that I accepted Justine’s assessment of herself as “a tiresome hysterical Jewess.” But at his age Michael was alive to the mysteries of sexual allure. What impressed me, though, was the allure he exercised over young Egyptian girls, who gave him sidelong glances as they glided by.
Michael whispered, “The girls behind us are talking about us. They wonder whether you’re my father.”
This flattered me. I was closer to his grandfather’s age.
Arms linked, a trio of girls speeded up and pulled level with us. They wore tight jeans and tight sweaters, and although they had on headscarves, they didn’t hide their smiles. Surging ahead, they darted kohl-rimmed eyes over their shoulders at Michael, flirting outrageously.
Hands in pockets, wind tousling his hair, he called out to them in Arabic. I expected that to send them scampering. But the girls didn’t suddenly go silly and goosey. They stopped, and one of them, the cutest, told him in English, “You are very handsome.”
“Shukran,” he replied.
The three young buds showed no interest in me. So much for the respect Egyptians supposedly accord their elders. With eyes and ears for Michael alone, they were willing to linger there in the parade of pedestrians as long as he stayed too.
They were university students, they said. The prettiest one majored in geography and was about to take her end-of-term exams. She had finished cramming and needed a break tonight. What was Michael doing, she asked. Why was he in Alexandria? Did he like Egypt? Where did he learn Arabic?
It looked to me like Michael was about to get very lucky. All he needed to do was take his choice of Charlie’s Angels—or, what the hell, invite the three of them to a café. But a minute later, he blew them off. He did it suavely, with flourishes of Arabic as decorative as the fretwork on a harem screen. Still, there was no mistaking that he had sent them packing.
“What was that?” I asked.
“It happens to me all the time,” he said.
“Bullshit.”
“No, seriously, it does. Because I’m blond.”
“You’re not blond. You have brown hair.”
“Well, by comparison to an Arab I’m fair.”
“Why didn’t you ask them to have something to eat or drink? At least, ask for a phone number.”
He shook his head at my ignorance. “That’s not done here.”
“It looked to me like they were up for anything.”
“Ready for a marriage proposal, maybe,” Michael said. “But not a date. They were wearing hijabs. That’s what gave them away.”
“Gave what away? They couldn’t have come on any stronger.”
Slightly pedantic, yet never condescending, Michael attempted to educate me in the complexities and paradoxes of the headscarf. According to him, the University of Alexandria had almost eighty thousand female students, most of them enrolled in the College of Arts, which was disparaged as the College of High Heels. Girls were reputed to enroll there to pick up a degree and, at the same time, an educated husband with good job prospects.
“What’s that got to do with headscarves?” I broke in.
“I’m getting to that. For a lot of girls the hijab is a badge that says they don’t want to be bothered by boys. But it’s also a license to flirt because it’s clear they don’t intend to do anything.”
If I found this confusing, it was no fault of Michael’s. And no failure of my grey matter. Throughout the Mediterranean basin the issue of hijabs had provoked debate, anger, violence, even killing. In France, which had seven million Muslim immigrants, the controversy raged from schoolyards all the way to the Elysée Palace. Turkey had banned headscarves for decades to preserve itself as a secular society, yet it was confronted by a segment of the female population that persisted in wearing them. Nobel Prize-winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk’s finest novel, Snow, centered on the question of whether a headscarf is a symbol of liberation or repression. Of resistance to the government and its masculine hegemony? Or of submission to Islam and its masculine hegemony? In the end, the hijab seemed to mean whatever the individual woman said it did.
During the Cosmopolitan Era many Jewish families in Alexandria were wealthy, and in a city thronged with expatriates and displaced persons, they held positions of social prominence. Yet they had reason to feel insecure. In Out of Egypt, his beautifully evocative memoir about Jewish life, Andre Aciman looks back from exile in America and recalls a household of eccentric relatives who longed to escape Alex’s provinciality, then regretted it once they’d been banished by President Nasser. Although they viewed themselves as citizens of the world, they were attached to local customs. Like their Egyptian neighbors, they ate foul, a refried bean paste, for breakfast, and along with the rest of the privileged classes, they migrated with the seasons, moving to beach houses in summer. To Aciman’s shame, he discovered that his elderly grandmother treated the home bathroom as Muslims do, planting her feet on the porcelain bowl and squatting down. Aciman’s picaresque Uncle Vili complained, “It’s because of Jews like them that they hate Jews like us.”
But when Nasser confiscated their property, it was less from racial or religious prejudice than political expediency. Nasser needed an enemy, and he found one ready-made.
Now the synagogue in Alexandria didn’t even have ten men to make a minyan, the minimum number required by Jewish law to conduct a communal religious service. Constructed more than a century ago on Nabi Daniel Street, and renovated after the Germans bombed it during World War II, it stood forlornly behind locked gates guarded by Egyptian soldiers. With curt hand gestures, they directed me to a side entrance. It was difficult to guess whom they were protecting or guarding against. Terrorists? Tourists? Jews?
By telephone I had spoken earlier to Ben Yusuf Guon and arranged a tour of the synagogue. I pictured
