Out of Place: A Memoir

  Occasionally, however, a very few eccentric glimpses of our life escaped through my father’s unforgiving optical grid. There is one scene of loitering boys (including me) watching a rehearsal of bride and groom coming down the front stairs of our Jerusalem house in 1947. It is as if my father’s movie camera subverted the even more demanding rigor of Khalil Raad’s hooded tripod camera, always summoned by my aunt and her sons to an important family occasion. A slightly built white-haired man, Raad took a great deal of time as he arranged the large group of family and guests into acceptable order. At such moments, endlessly prolonged by the man’s finickiness and disregard for his subjects, standing still seemed by common agreement to be a required ordeal of these formal family occasions. No one then knew that Raad’s photos would become perhaps the richest archival resource for Palestinians’ lives until 1948—“before their diaspora,” in Walid Khalidi’s phrase. My father’s interest in movement, perhaps as a result of exasperation with Raad, is another, at the time inadvertent, part of that unofficial record.

  Then there are scenes he caught of my uncle Boulos, Aunt Nabiha’s husband (and first cousin), Ellen Badr Sabra, Uncle Munir and his wife, Latifeh, Albert my cousin: they pass through my father’s films smilingly, the premonition of death added retrospectively by the viewer, and in the blurred outlines of their forms they seem in effect to be moving sideways, away from the camera, as if walking to another rhythm, for another reason than the expected one.

  No one in the films seems informally or lightly dressed, perhaps because my father did his shooting in winter, never in the terrifying brightness of the Middle Eastern sun. The women wear heavy dark satins and wools, the men are always in dark suits, the children in sweaters, caps, long stockings. Only my mother appears for some reason in sleeveless, sometimes polka-dotted dresses, her round arms and dazzling smile occasionally expressing a smiling protest, which I remember clearly from my childhood as being gently voiced against my father’s attentions to her with his ever-continuing, whirring camera. My grandmother (“Teta”) never appears at all, rigidly in keeping with her strenuous wish that she should never be photographed. I do not know why she felt this way, or why she always made a point of not eating chocolate, or wouldn’t drink tea if the milk had not been poured into the cup first, or why each set of her personal belongings (hankies, notepaper, pajamas, pencils, playing cards, etc.) had to be housed (the word was hers) in a little cloth case, which she made and decorated with complicated petit point or embroidered patterns. But Teta felt very strongly about those things and resisted my father to the end of her life.

  Unlike my grandmother, I never resisted at all; how could I when I felt I was a failure, both physically and morally? Are parents supposed to provide role models, or at least some concrete idea of where all the pushing and kneading into shape would ultimately lead, and where or when it might stop? There was only one intriguing scene in the many, many hours of videotaped films that showed me another version of “Edward,” my childhood self. It was taken at the Maadi pool, probably on a late Sunday morning in June, and reveals a teeming, disorderly scene crisscrossed with bathers, divers, watching parents, all shooting past my father’s camera as he, clearly perplexed by the bustle before him, jerks the camera rapidly from figure to figure, up to the sky and down again, and churns the already considerable disorder of the pool into a confusing, dizzying patchwork of light, bodies, and meaningless space (pavement, wall, cloud), flouting the prerehearsed images of order we had become so used to in our runs toward the camera.

  Watching this maelstrom I suddenly detected myself, a little boy in a pair of dark swimming trunks with a white belt, slipping between a phalanx of much larger bodies, and diving into the pool with scarcely a splash. It was as if I had caught my father unaware; the camera followed quickly, having abruptly located me, but I seem to have swum out of shot. The camera returns to the general confusion, and then, from an unexpected angle, running toward him with my head down, arms outstretched, I appear, and almost immediately disappear into the pool. He had missed me entirely the second time, although of course I appeared in the camera for a split second.

  This tiny, quite trivial episode elates me half a century later as I try to render the outlines and important details of a story I was immersed in with my father’s plans and expectations, his drills and proverbs, shaping and directing me, my sisters, and my mother very much in the way his films record his unresting will to make us all move toward him, forward march, with all the unnecessary stuff clipped out. The great paradox is that he was such an immensely sustaining force in our lives—none of us ever had a day’s worry about anything material, the cupboards were always full of food, we had the best education, were well dressed, our houses were perfectly run and staffed, we always traveled first class—that I never thought of him as repressive at the time. He pressured me constantly in that lapidary way of his, and I saw it again in the oddly episodic, repetitive, and reductive quality of his films. But that I managed occasionally to escape his fearsome strength, as in the little sequence at the pool, tells me something I only realized years later, when I had gone my own way: that there was more to “Edward” than the delinquent yet compliant son, submitting to his father’s Victorian design.

  It was my mother who often supplied the justifying gloss on his unyielding and cold exterior. It was as if he were a marble statue and it was her job to put words into his mouth to make him articulate and fluent; she spoke my father to me, miming all the sentiments he never expressed, drawing him out so much that he became a loving, caring man so very different from the harshly unyielding person whose authority over me was practiced almost to his death. “You should hear him talk about ‘my son’ to his friends,” she said. “He’s so proud of you.” And yet, I could never directly engage, much less attract, his help. I was no more than four when he took me for a walk near the Fish Garden in Cairo (I do not think he ever entered the place, which seemed exclusively my mother’s domain). I scampered along behind him, while he pressed on with his hands behind his back at a resolute pace. When I stumbled and fell forward, scratching my hands and knees badly, I instinctively called out to him, “Daddy … please,” at which he stopped and turned around slowly toward me. He paused like that for a couple of seconds, then turned back, resuming his walk without a word. That was all. It was also how he died, turning his face to the wall, without a sound. Had he, I wonder, ever really wanted to say more than he actually did?

  V

  IT WAS AS AN AMERICAN BUSINESSMAN’S SON WHO HADN’T the slightest feeling of being American that I entered the Cairo School for American Children (CSAC) in the fall of 1946, the first day made easier by the fact that the Greek bus driver who picked me up very early on a sunny October morning in Zamalek and drove me with a lot of totally unfamiliar, loud, unself-conscious American children in gaily colored shirts, skirts, and shorts was a driver at my Auntie Melia’s college. He recognized me at once and always treated me—as no one else did—with deferential, if familiar, courtesy. I had never seen such an assortment, or concentration, of Americans before. Gone were the gray uniforms and subdued, conspiratorial whispers of the GPS’s English and mostly Levantine children; gone too were English names like Dickie, Derek, and Jeremy, as well as Franco-Arab names like Micheline, Nadia, or Vivette. Now there were Marlese, Marlene, Annekje, several Marjies, Nancy, Ernst, Chuck, and lots of Bobs. No one paid any attention to me.

  “Edward Sigheed” did pass muster, and I was soon able in some way to belong, but every morning when I stepped on the bus I felt a seething panic when I saw the colored T-shirts, striped socks, and loafers they all wore, while I was in my primly correct gray shorts, dress white shirt, and conventionally European lace-ups. For the class I’d settle my inner consternation into an efficient, albeit provisional, identity, that of bright, yet often wayward, pupil. Then at lunch, as they unwrapped the same neatly cut white-bread sandwiches of peanut butter and jelly—neither of which I had ever tasted—and I my more interesting ch
eese and prosciutto in Shami bread, I fell back into doubt and shame that I, an American child, ate a different food, which no one ever asked to taste, nor asked me to explain.

  One evening we were sitting on the veranda when my father reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a pair of striped socks. “An American flier gave them to me,” he said. “Why don’t you wear them?” It was like a sudden lifeline to better days. I wore them the next day and the day after with a noticeable lift in my spirits. Yet no one on the bus really noticed, and the socks had to be washed. With only one pair of socks to give my claim to being an American any credence, I felt let down brusquely. I tried explaining to my mother that it might be nice to have sandwiches cut into rectangles with jam and butter, but that got me a dismissive “We only use toast bread and jam for breakfast. I want you to be nourished. What’s wrong with our food anyway?”

  Founded after the war to accommodate the children of American oil company, business, and diplomatic personnel in Cairo’s newly expanded expatriate community, the Cairo School for American Children was housed at the outer western perimeter of Maadi, parallel to the train station and about a mile from the great river. Like GPS, which was only a primary school, the new school occupied a large villa, but with a two-acre garden, gardener’s shed, and, on the south side of the house, a dirt expanse half the size of a football field, half of which during my first year, 1946–47 (interrupted by a long spring sojourn in Jerusalem), was asphalted over and became a basketball court. Being a school for smaller children, GPS confined itself to netball, a gentle perfumed equivalent of basketball, intended mainly for girls—and, on festive occasions like the king’s birthday, to Maypole dancing, a pastime I found both curious (why so many ribbons, and what did they represent?) and idiotic (going round in a circle to Mrs. Wilson’s hand claps and an extremely shrill recording of English country music was for me a low point in the idea of disciplined physical movement). CSAC introduced me not only to basketball, but to softball, sports my father really knew nothing about. As honorary chairman of the Cairo YMCA, which mounted games between Cairo teams like the Armenian Houmentmen and the Jewish Maccabees, matched against an excellent visiting U.S. Army team, he would take us to games he had never played himself. Certainly softball interested me enough to turn me into a decent pitcher and batter; “rounders” was what my father persisted in calling it, but mercifully he took no serious interest in it, nor in ever seeing me hit the plump ball with a Louisville Slugger bat.

  Postwar Cairo gave me, for the first time, a sense of highly differentiated social strata. The major change was the replacement of British institutions and individuals by the victorious Americans, the old empire giving way to the new, while my father enjoyed even greater business success. At GPS ceremonies a fuss would be made over Lady Baden-Powell or Roy Chapman-Andrews, who were symbols of British authority requiring no Egyptian or Arab counterpart to offset their foreignness as they stood at the podium; Britannia ruled supreme, and all of us took it for granted. The appearance of Shafiq Ghorbal, a noted Egyptian historian and Ministry of Education executive, at the first CSAC ceremony that I remember marked the difference in imperial approach. We Americans were partners of the Egyptians, and what was more appropriate than to let them appear as speakers at functions like the opening of the Egyptian parliament, or King Farouk’s birthday, of which no notice was taken at GPS. “All things bright and beautiful” had meant bright and beautiful England, the distant lodestar of good for all of us: that was over, and the hymn disappeared from my repertory forever. I was struck by the fact that part of the American approach was to institute the teaching of Arabic for all children, and having pretended that “Sigheed” was an American name, I had some of my worst moments in Arabic class. Somehow I had to conceal my perfect command of what was my mother tongue in order to fit in better with the inane formulas given out to American youngsters for what passed for spoken (but was really kitchen) Arabic. I never volunteered, rarely spoke, often crouched near the back of the room. There were provocations, however, like the pretty young Arabic teacher who, while describing her adventures at the just-opened amusement park in Gezira, placed particular emphasis on an airplane ride called “Saida,” after the newly formed Egyptian airline company. In a tiny class of four people, she planted herself in front of me and proceeded to detail her excitement at “Saida,” which she repeated again and again, as if emphasizing the lurking Arab quality in my name, which I had laboriously tried to scale down to the prevailing norms of American pronunciation. “No, Edward,” she said emphatically, “you couldn’t have been on the best rides if you haven’t tried Saida. Do you know how many times I rode Saida? At least four. Saida is the ride. Saida’s just great.” In other words, stop pretending that you’re Sigheed: You’re Said, as in Saida. The connection was undeniable.

  I was assigned to the sixth grade in a second-floor classroom whose plants and window flower boxes gave it the atmosphere of a family room. The class was ruled by the first great martinet and sadist of my life, a Miss Clark, whose single-minded persecution of me crippled my already uncertain sense of self. Miss Clark’s demeanor was extremely restrained, quiet, and composed to the point of unpleasantness. She was in her mid-thirties and seemed, as I thought about her over the years, to be a WASP from the Northeast, very much a creature of that world’s fully paid up citizens—morally righteous, confident, generally patronizing. I never knew what it was about me that so gripped her, but it only took a week or ten days for her to declare herself my enemy in a class that contained no more than a dozen boys and girls.

  After the hierarchical and rigid English system, the American school was informal in every sense. In the classrooms chairs and tables were scattered about, whereas at GPS we had sat in military rows of cramped little desks and benches. Except for the French, Arabic, and art teachers, the instruction was by American women (heavily made up in loud, colored dresses, totally different from the scrubbed plain faces and sensible skirts affected by Mrs. Wilson and her cohorts) and one man, a Mark Wannick, who also doubled as softball and basketball coach. On one occasion he donned a bright yellow Ohio State basketball uniform to play with us: in the torrid Cairo afternoon, surrounded by brown fields with brown peasants in galabiyahs leading donkeys and water buffaloes round as they have done for millennia, Mr. Wannick cut a surrealistic sight in his overpoweringly colored uniform, hairy arms and legs, military crew cut, black sneakers, and delicate rimless glasses.

  I encountered American education as a regimen designed to be attractive, homey, and tailored down to the level of growing children. Books at GPS were uniformly in small print, without illustrations, unrelentingly dry in tone; history and literature, for instance, were presented as matter-of-factly as possible, making each page a challenging task just to read through. No concessions were made in arithmetic to the world of lived experience: we were given rows of figures to add, subtract, divide, and multiply, plus a large number of rules and tables (multiplication, weights and measures, distances, meters, yards, and inches) to memorize. The goal of all this was to do “sums,” a task whose difficulty for us was commensurate with its programmatic dullness. At CSAC we were all given “workbooks,” in marked contrast to the GPS’s “copybooks,” which were lined exercise books as anonymous as bus tickets; workbooks had charming, chatty questions, illustrations, pictures to be appreciated, enjoyed, and, when relevant, filled in. To write in one of our GPS textbooks was a serious misdemeanor; in American workbooks, the idea was to write in them.

  More attractive still were the textbooks handed out by Miss Clark at the beginning of each day. At the core of each subject there seemed to be a family to whom one was introduced at the outset: there was always a Sis, a Mom and a Dad, plus assorted family and household members, including a large black woman housekeeper with an extremely exaggerated expression of either sadness or delight on her face. Through the family one learned about adding and subtracting, or civics, or American history (literature was treated separately). The idea s
eemed to be to make learning a painless process, on a par with getting through the day on a farm or in a suburb of St. Louis or Los Angeles. References to the drugstore, the hardware or dime stores, mystified me completely but did not need explaining to my classmates, all of whom had actually lived in places like St. Louis or LA. For me, however, such locations corresponded to nothing in my experience, which was barren of soda fountains and soda jerks, the two items that intrigued me the most.

  I was meant to find this “fun,” and for a month I did. But I was never left alone by Miss Clark nor by the other children, with whom I quickly became quite antagonistic; after that first pleasurable month I found myself longing for the GPS, with its clear lines of authority, its cut and dried lessons, its very strict rules of deportment. Teachers at CSAC never used or threatened violence, but male students were extremely rough with each other, since the boys were quite big and were willing to use their strength against each other in contests of will and turf. By Christmastime, every day at the school was an ordeal in which I had to make my way through a gauntlet of flailing arms and fists on the bus, followed by the chilly put-downs and severe scoldings I received from Miss Clark in the classroom.

  The most humiliating moment in my first year came the day after the class had been on a field trip—for me the concept was an entirely novel one—to a large sugar refinery across the Nile from Maadi. I admit that after the first twenty minutes the excursion was simply too boring to warrant much of my attention, but I had no choice but to stick with the group, steered from boiling vat to storehouse to cutting room, to the accompaniment of our guide’s voluble enjoyment—thirty-minute explanations where only one minute would have been sufficient, an overabundance of technical language, an extraordinary air of self-satisfaction—to make matters even less compelling. He was a middle-aged gentleman wearing a tarbush who was seconded to us from one of the ministries expressly for this trip. Miss Clark was there of course. I paid very little attention to her, a great mistake. When she entered my field of vision I saw her nodding (was it agreement, or understanding, or satisfaction at the torrent of information about sugar cane, its history and structure, the chemistry of sugar, etc.?) but I gave her no other heed. The whole trip was so bizarrely unlike anything my English colonial schools were likely to mount that I had not even begun to dwell on the differences between the authoritarian Brits and the benevolent Americans, who were so much more eager to give the Egyptians a democratic chance to be themselves.