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André Aciman

Out of Egypt: A Memoir

1.  Soldier, Salesman, Swindler, Spy

“So, are we or aren’t we, siamo o non siamo,” boasted my Great-uncle Vili when the two of us finally sat down late that summer afternoon in a garden overlooking his sprawling estate in Surrey.

“Just look at this,” he pointed to a vast expanse of green. “Isn’t it splendid?” he asked, as if he had invented the very notion of an afternoon stroll in the English countryside. “Just before sundown and minutes after tea, it always comes: a sense of plenitude, of bliss almost. You know — everything I wanted, I got. Not bad for a man in his eighties. ” Arrogant self-satisfaction beamed on his features.

I tried to speak to him of Alexandria, of time lost and lost worlds, of the end when the end came, of Monsieur Costa and Montefeltro and Aldo Kohn, of Lotte and Aunt Flora and lives so faraway now. He cut me short and made a disparaging motion with his hand, as if to dismiss a bad odor. “That was rubbish. I live in the present,” he said almost vexed by my nostalgia. “Siamo o non siamo?” he asked, standing up to stretch his muscles, then pointing to the first owl of the evening.

It was never exactly clear what one was or wasn’t, but to everyone in the family, including those who don’t speak a word of Italian today, this elliptical phrase still captures the strutting, daredevil, cocksure, soldier-braggart who had pulled himself out of an Italian trench during the Great War and then, hidden between rows of trees with his rifle held tightly in both hands, would have mowed down the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire had he not run out of bullets. The phrase expressed the hectoring self-confidence of a drill sergeant surrounded by sissies in need of daily jostling. “Are we man enough or aren’t we?” he seemed to say. “Are we going ahead with it or aren’t we?” “Are we worth our salt or what?” It was his way of whistling in the dark, of shrugging off defeat, of picking up the pieces and calling it a victory. This, after all, was how he barged in on the affairs of fate and held out for more, taking credit for everything, down to the unforeseen brilliance of his most hapless schemes. He mistook overdrawn luck for foresight, just as he misread courage for what was little more than the gumption of a street urchin. He had pluck. He knew it, and he flaunted it.

Impervious to the humiliating Italian defeat at the Battle of Caporetto in 1917, Uncle Vili remained forever proud of his service to the Italian army, flaunting that as well, with the spirited Florentine lilt he had picked up in Italian Jesuit schools in Constantinople. Like most young Jewish men born in Turkey toward the end of the century, Vili disparaged anything having to do with Ottoman culture and thirsted for the West, finally becoming “Italian” the way most Jews in Turkey did: by claiming ancestral ties with Leghorn, a port city near Pisa where escaped Jews from Spain had settled in the sixteenth century. A very distant Italian relative bearing the Spanish name of Pardo-Roques was conveniently dug up in Leghorn — Vili was half Pardo-Roques himself — whereupon all living “cousins” in Turkey immediately became Italian. They were all, of course, staunch nationalists, monarchists.