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Alamein and, in the fall of 1942, finally mounted a decisive attack upon the Afrika Korps. The battle lasted twelve days. At night, everyone in the family would stand for hours on the balcony, as if waiting for holiday fireworks, straining their eyes west of the city to catch a glimpse of the historic battle that was to decide their fates. Some smoked, others chatted among themselves or
with neighbors upstairs or downstairs, likewise perched on their balconies, waving at one another, grimacing hope and resignation, while, from emptied rooms, came an incessant crackle of shortwave bulletins announcing the most recent developments in North Africa. A distant, half-inch halo hovered over the western horizon, swaying in the blackout, suddenly beaming like an approaching vehicle coming uphill, only to fade again, a pale amber moon on a misty night. All they heard was a distant, muffled drone, like the whir of fans on quiet summer evenings or the sound of the large refrigerator humming in the pantry. People went to sleep to the faraway rumble of battle.
    â€œSee? All your fears of being taken away have come to nothing. Didn’t I tell you?” said Vili to his sister Marta when it became clear that the British had scored a decisive victory.
    Everyone was readying to leave the old mother’s home. Yet the preparations were slow, uncertain, even dilatory, partly because everyone had grown accustomed to the refugee lifestyle and was reluctant to abandon its solidarity, but also because no one wanted to tempt providence by proclaiming all danger averted. “What’s the hurry?” said my great-grandmother. “There are still many pigeons and chickens left. Besides, one never knows with the Germans. They could be back in a matter of weeks.” Packing, however, continued.
    As a going-away gift, the old mother decided to give each of her sons and daughters a crystal goblet bearing golden fleurs-de-lis. They had been manufactured in their father’s glass factory in Turkey.
    â€œThis is the last time this apartment will ever house so many,” the old woman explained.
    â€œThe way the world is going, I wouldn’t be so sure,” said Esther.
    Esther was right. The family would seek refuge in the old
matriarch’s home on three subsequent occasions: once during the Suez War, in 1956; then a decade later; and once, earlier, in 1948, after Vili was hunted down by Zionist agents who beat him severely for spying for the British and then threatened to do the same to other men in the family. Two months later Vili got wind they were on his tracks again and that this time they meant to kill him. He took cover in his mother’s home. One day, he took out his good-luck pendulum and on the table placed a cyanide pill he had been keeping ever since the days of El Alamein. The pendulum said no.
    Vili was spirited away to Italy, then to England, where he changed names, converted to Christianity, and forswore all previous nationalities. But it was only about four years later that he resurfaced in Egypt for what proved to be the most spectacular business deal in his career as spy, soldier, and swindler: the auctioning of the deposed king’s property.

    â€œIt was the end of the end,” he explained many years later in his garden in Surrey. “The end of an era, the end of a world. Everything fell apart after that.”
    By now he was in his middle eighties, he liked horses, candies, and dirty jokes, using a fist at the end of a stiffened forearm to illustrate the ribald tales which he liked to tell in the old style: with bawdy gestures and exaggerated pantomime. Wearing old tweeds, Clark boots, an ascot, and a stained cashmere cardigan, he looked the part he had been rehearsing all his life: a Victorian gentleman who couldn’t care less what his inferiors thought of either him or his clothes. What made his aristocratic bearing especially convincing was that, on looking at him, one immediately