The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit by Lucette Lagnado

portrait of Salomone’s mother surrounded by her four children when they were toddlers, smiling and exquisitely dressed, occupied a place of honor in the dining room for all visitors to see—a young woman so intrepid that when she became engaged to his father, a man twenty-five years her senior, she seemed undaunted by the prospect of leaving her family and comfortable life in Egypt to settle in Italy.
    After eight years in her house, Salomone had adopted many of my grandmother’s belief systems, especially concerning the importance of food. Salomone learned that apricots were the fruit of God, whilealmonds and other nuts had medicinal powers. For everyday ills, coffee was the all-purpose cure.
    That is why, when he woke up feverish and under the weather a day or two after celebrating the New Year, my cousin decided to head by trolley directly to À l’Américaine, the jaunty Groppi annex whose frothy cappuccino was the best in all of Cairo. But on this January morning, his teeth were chattering and he was sweating profusely, and even the comforting Italian coffee that reminded him of home failed to have its intended healing effect.
    He staggered out and hailed a taxi back to Malaka Nazli. He was greeted at the door by my father, who had chosen that afternoon to stay close to his bride, who was nearly eight months pregnant. When he saw his nephew, feverish and pale, wheezing, at times unable to breathe, Leon ordered him to go to bed immediately.
    The family doctor, who made house calls any hour of the day or night, came immediately, examined Salomone, and expressed alarm at his fever. But he was unable to make a diagnosis. My father summoned another doctor, and then another; none could say for sure what was the matter.
    It was time for Salomone to consult un spécialiste. In Cairo’s pantheon of professionals, doctors were revered but specialists occupied an exalted place at the top. Unlike their colleagues, they never made house calls but expected their patients to make their way to their private offices in the tonier sections of the city. None was more renowned than Dr. Grossi, an Italian pulmonologist who had made Cairo his home, and was considered the finest lung specialist in Egypt.
    My father bundled his nephew in a warm coat and ordered the porter to summon a taxi. With Leon’s arm around him, Salomone made the painful journey over to Emad-Eldin, the fashionable district where Dr. Grossi maintained his private practice.
    Calmly, methodically, Dr. Grossi examined my cousin. After administering multiple tests, including a crude chest X-ray, he was confident in his diagnosis: Salomone had la pleurésie, an inflammation of the heart that was sometimes fatal, he decreed. In this era before antibiotics were widely available, pleurisy was especially difficult to treat. Still, Dr. Grossi was certain that he could devise a course of treatment that would work.
    First and foremost, he ordered complete bed rest. Salomone had to stay in his room, as motionless as possible.
    The second aspect of the treatment involved food. My cousin was ordered to eat—to eat constantly, as much as he could handle. There were no medicines or potions Dr. Grossi could offer in a country that hadn’t even seen penicillin yet. If my cousin had any hope of surviving this deadly infection, he had to consume a high-calorie diet rich in calcium and minerals.
    Though they didn’t meet, Dr. Grossi managed to endear himself to my grandmother as few men of science ever would. He confirmed what Zarifa believed with every fiber of her being: that food was the weapon of choice in combating even the most complex ailments.
    â€œOnce you get home, don’t move,” Dr. Grossi reminded my cousin as he painfully sat up on the examining table.
    Zarifa was waiting for them in the living room, sipping a cup of Turkish coffee flavored with a hint of orange water. She stirred the cup anxiously, round and round, with her