Out of Egypt Read Online Free

export. In half a year’s time, he had not only toured all corners of Egypt but had also visited every magnate’s home rumored to hold the promise of a young Jewish wife. He married one a little less than a year after returning from Europe.
    Having become a respectable citizen now, he reverted to what he liked best of all: married women. It is said that some of his mistresses were so distraught when he was done with them that they would show up on his wife’s doorstep, pleading with her to intercede on their behalf, which poor Aunt Lola, whose heart was the biggest organ in her body, would sometimes do.
    Seven years after the war, a woman named Lotte appeared at the family’s residence with the picture of a man to whom she claimed she had been engaged in Berlin. When a consensus was finally reached on the man’s identity, and the woman had put away her handkerchief, she was invited to stay for lunch
with the family, most of whose members were due to arrive toward one o’clock. Vili was the last to arrive, but as soon as he walked in, she recognized his footsteps in the vestibule, stood up, put down her glass of sherry, and ran out screaming, “Willy! Willy!” at the top of her lungs.
    No one had any idea what the demented woman meant by calling their Aaron by that strange name, but during lunch, when everyone had more or less regained composure, she explained that in 1914 in his new Prussian uniform he had looked so much like Kaiser Wilhelm that she could not resist nicknaming him Willy. His wife found something so endearingly right about “Willy,” so stout yet so diminutive, that she too began to call him “Vili,” first with reproof, then with raillery, and finally by force of habit, until everyone, including his mother, called him Vili, which eventually acquired its diminutive Greco-Judeo-Spanish form: Vilico.
    â€œVilico traitor,” his mother said some time afterward.
    He protested. “I was really in love with her at the time. And besides, it happened long before I’d met Lola.”
    â€œI wasn’t talking about women. Judas you are, Judas you’ll always be.”
    No one had the heart to ship the resurrected Lotte back to Belgium. So Lotte became Uncle Nessim’s secretary, served as a temporary model in Aunt Clara’s art class, then as a sales assistant for Uncle Cosimo, who eventually palmed her off on Uncle Isaac, who finally married her. In the family picture taken at their wedding in 1926 in the matriarch’s sumptuous apartment in Grand Sporting overlooking the sunny Mediterranean, Tante Lotte is standing next to Uncle Isaac on the veranda, her right hand resting on Uncle Vili’s shoulder. Are we, squints Uncle Vili, or aren’t we men who share, men who exact the highest sacrifices, men whom women worship.
    In the picture, Isaac is already a haggard fifty-year-old trying
to cover up a bald spot, and Nessim, then close to retirement, looks older than his mother, whose forced good cheer on the day of her son’s nuptials failed to conceal her worries.
    â€œHe’s a prince, and she’s a peasant,” she said. “Look how she walks. You can still hear the clatter of Batavian clogs in her steps.”
    â€œAnd on his head you can still see traces of an invisible skullcap. So they’re even. Leave them alone,” her daughter Esther chided. “All his life with mistresses, and never a wife. It’s about time he married.”
    â€œYes, but not a Christian.”
    â€œChristian, Jewish, Belgium, Egypt, these are modern times,” said Vili, “the twentieth century.”
    But his mother was not convinced. And in the picture she wears the distrustful gaze of a Hecuba welcoming Helen into her fold.
    In back of the assemblage, peeping ever so furtively from behind the veranda’s French windows, are the faces of three Egyptians. The maid, Zeinab, no older than twenty and already in the family