Egypt

Egypt enters the story at opposite ends of Rabo Karabekian’s family and personal history. His parents reach Cairo as refugees after surviving the Armenian massacre and fleeing across the border into Persia; years later, Dan Gregory and Fred Jones die in Egypt while serving with the Italian forces. In Rabo’s recollections, the country is both a waypoint toward a new life and the site where an earlier artistic world is extinguished by war.

Refuge and Passage

After escaping the massacre, Rabo’s mother and father crossed into Persia separately from the village where the killing had taken place. Persian Armenians took them in, and they decided to travel together to Egypt. His father did most of the talking because his mother had a mouthful of jewels she had gathered from the ground near the dead. At the Persian Gulf, she sold some of them to buy passage on a small freighter bound for Cairo via the Red Sea.

Cairo was not a final refuge. There, the couple encountered Vartan Mamigonian, an Armenian survivor of an earlier massacre who had made money manufacturing military boots for the British and German armies. Rabo’s parents told him about the jewels and their plan to marry and go to Paris, trusting a fellow Armenian survivor. Mamigonian instead offered them low-paid, dirty work. His presence makes Egypt a vulnerable threshold in the family’s journey: after the violence of the massacre and the risks of escape, survival still depended on whom displaced people encountered and what they chose to disclose.

The route also carries the parents’ unequal memories of the massacre into their future. Rabo’s mother had survived by pretending to be dead among the victims; his father had hidden in a schoolhouse privy and remembered the emptied village afterward. His mother could put the massacre behind her enough to imagine a family future in the United States, while his father never did. Egypt belongs to the crossing between that traumatic past and the life they would build elsewhere, rather than to a settled home or a completed recovery.

Gregory and Jones in Wartime Egypt

Egypt reappears decades later in the fate of Dan Gregory and Fred Jones. After leaving New York, Gregory, Marilee Kemp, and Jones went to Italy to take part in Benito Mussolini’s political experiment. Gregory and Jones, both already in their fifties, received Mussolini’s permission to wear Italian infantry officers’ uniforms without rank or unit insignia and to paint the Italian Army in action.

Around December 7, 1940, at Sidi Barrani in Egypt, British forces overwhelmed the Italians. Rabo recounts the disparity as thirty thousand British troops against eighty thousand Italians, with forty thousand Italians captured and four hundred guns taken. He clarifies that the captured guns were large weapons, then names the Matilda tanks, Stens, Brens, and Enfield rifles with fixed bayonets that defeated Gregory and Jones. Their deaths occurred almost exactly a year before the United States entered the war, when Italy and Britain were not yet, in Rabo’s account, respectively an American enemy and ally.

Gregory was killed while wearing an Italian uniform, as was Jones. Rabo later recalls that the two men died as civilians, despite their uniforms, and received respectful American obituaries while the United States remained neutral. Gregory was remembered as possibly the best-known American artist in history; Jones was described as a First World War ace and aviation pioneer, though Rabo says he had not been an ace. The public notices confer distinction on both men even as their deaths arise from the unlikely convergence of art, military spectacle, and a foreign war.

The News Reaches Rabo

When Rabo learned of Gregory’s and Jones’s deaths, he was a master sergeant at Fort Belvoir. The news offered no account of Marilee, and he wondered what had happened to her. He imagined that she was still young and beautiful and might find a wealthier man to care for her, while recognizing that his own military pay left him in no position to make her his wife. The deaths therefore arrive not simply as a report from a battlefield but as the end of Rabo’s former association with Gregory and an uncertain separation from Marilee.

By the time the United States entered the war, Rabo had been commissioned a lieutenant. He served in North Africa, Sicily, England, and France, and was ultimately forced to fight at the German border, where he was wounded and captured without having fired a shot. Egypt’s battle is thus one episode in the widening war that later reaches Rabo himself, though his own capture occurs elsewhere. His retrospective account connects the two experiences without confusing their different outcomes: Gregory and Jones die in Egypt, while Rabo survives his European capture.

A Geography of Repeated Loss

The novel gives Egypt two sharply distinct functions. Cairo is a temporary station in the migration of Rabo’s parents, who move onward after meeting Mamigonian; Sidi Barrani is the battlefield where Gregory and Jones’s Italian venture ends. One place receives people trying to escape mass violence, while the other becomes the setting for the deaths of men who had chosen to insert themselves into a military cause and paint its army.

Rabo’s account also makes Egypt a hinge in the book’s time-shifting narration. He speaks of the deaths as something he can locate retrospectively through dates, military details, and later knowledge, while also recalling the immediate uncertainty he felt about Marilee. The country gathers these layers without resolving them into a single story of progress: flight can lead to another precarious encounter, and artistic ambition can end in a battle whose weapons and alliances belong to a changing political moment.