HOW TRUE TO LIfE IS BIOGRAPHY?
39
In
all this, I realize, as Nietzsche says, that I have been giving you the
moral before telling
YOll
the tale. So let me give you a very brief tale.
In
a sentence from
Out of
EgY/Jt
I describe the sound of my deaf
mother's shriek, saying that it reminded me of the screech of tires com–
ing to a sudden halt. Big tires. Bus tires.
This, Imy fatherl would find out one day, was the howl of the deaf,
when the deaf are in pain, when the deaf quarrel, when they
scream, when words fail them and nothing comes out but this sput–
ter of shrieks that sounded more like a fleet of busses screeching
to
a halt on a quiet beachday Sunday than like the voice of the woman
he had married.
The part I would like to focus on for a second is not the yell itself but
the "quiet beachday Sunday" with which it is contrasted. Translators
never get it right because it is untranslatable, because in principle it
doesn't even exist or make sense: what is a "q uiet beachday Sunda y"?
And yet if those quiet beachday Sundays mean anything
to
me today
and if, as so many Alexandrians who've written to me after reading
Ollt
of
Egypt,
the idea of a quiet moment on Sundays just before crowds
begin
to
head out
to
the beaches captures the very essence of life in
Alexandria in vcry late spring or early Slimmer, when summer beaches
have not quite become the congested bedlam they invariably turn into
by July but still retain the promise of magic
to
come in the weeks ahead,
if all this means anything to me today, it is because it has far less to do
with Alexandria than it does with how I've imposed Egypt on my pre–
sent life in America. ror this impression of a quiet beachday Sunday was
born, not in Egypt, but in America one morning when I was walking
with my father on Riverside Drive during our first year here and, seeing
a group of twenty-year-olds sunbathing on a grassy incline off 98th
Street, turned to him and said, "This is a beachday, isn't it?"
I devoted about twenty pages of
Ollt
of
Egypt
to the description of
an early Sunday morning at the beach. Then I closed that segment by
relating how I frequently remembered these beach mornings with a
friend in graduate school in Cambridge many years later. This memory,
however, was born in New York City, was then shipped
to
Cambridge,
then brought back to New York, where, many years later still, I eventu–
ally wrote
Ollt
of
Egypt
and, by so doing, finally dispatched this entire
clltasSCIJ/(!llt
of cities
to
an imagined Alexandria.
Cooks do this when they Cllt a hard-boiled egg in half, remove the
yoke, blend it with paprika, and then carefully spread the yellow paste
