Out of Egypt Read Online Free Page B

Fascists, he managed to purchase rare antiques at a fraction of their cost in Italy only to sell them to Egyptian pashas for a fortune.
    He became very wealthy. With time, not only did there accrue to him the many privileges of an English gentleman spy, but his double life allowed him to enact all those elaborate rituals—from breakfast to nightcap—he had always secretly envied the English, while gratifying his undying Italian patriotism whenever he heard the Fascist anthem, or when the Italians—not without German help—finally scored a victory against the Greeks. “We’ve taken Greece,” he suddenly shouted one day, hanging up the telephone with what must also have been Turkish glee in his voice. “We’re finally in Athens”—whereupon everyone at home jumped up and down,
stirring up the Egyptian servants and maids, who would ululate at the slightest pretext for celebration, until someone inevitably sobered up the festivities by voicing concern for Greek Jewry.
    Vili’s voice had quivered with excitement at the news, as it did when a group of Italian frogmen stole into the harbor of Alexandria, causing serious damage to two British battleships. Vili was thrilled by the valiant frogmen, but totally disheartened when reminded that he had to condemn their mission. “Gone are the old days,” he would say, meaning the days when you always knew who you were and whose side you were on.
    Then something happened. Even he could not quite understand it. “Things aren’t going well,” Vili said. When pressed to explain, he would simply say, “Things.” Unnerved by his answers, his sister Esther would try coaxing him: “Is it that you don’t want to say or that you don’t know?” “No, I do know.” “Then tell us.” “It’s about Germany.” “Anyone could have said it was about Germany. What about Germany?” “They’ve been nosing around Libya too much. It just doesn’t bode well.”
    A few months later, my Great-aunt Elsa arrived with her German husband from Marseilles. “Very bad. Terrible,” she said. They would not give her an exit visa. Isaac, who had used his connections with French diplomats once to become a French citizen, had to use them again now to arrange for his sister’s immediate safe conduct. Given her complicated status as an Italian married to a German Jew in France, additional measures were needed, and Isaac obtained for her and her husband diplomatic passports bearing the king of Egypt’s seal. Aunt Elsa complained she had lost her shop of religious artifacts at Lourdes and had spent two years in extreme poverty. “That’s where I learned to be a miser,” she would say, as though this mitigated what all knew was a case of congenital avarice.

    Hardly a month later, the Schwab’s twenty-five-year-old half sister Flora appeared in the family living room. Marta immediately saw the writing on the wall. “If all these Ashkenazi Jews begin swarming in from Germany, it’s going to be the end for us. The city will be teeming with tailors, brokers, and more dentists than we know what to do with.”
    â€œWe couldn’t sell anything,” said Flora. “They took everything. We left with what we could,” she went on. Aunt Flora had come alone with her mother, Frau Kohn, an ailing, aging woman with clear blue eyes and white skin touched with pink, who spoke French poorly and who always seemed to wear a pleading, terrified look on her face. “They slapped her on the streets two months ago,” explained her daughter. “Then she was insulted by a local shopkeeper. Now she keeps to herself.”

    For several weeks early that summer, the streets were rife with rumors of an impending, perhaps decisive, battle with the Afrika Korps. Rommel’s forces had seized one stronghold after another, working their way along the Libyan