Out of Place: A Memoir, Page 25

  My own class was divided into several cliques and subgroups. A leader was George Kardouche, a small, wiry fellow with formidable athletic skills and a sharp tongue. He was liked by everyone, and, though he, Mostapha Hamdollah, Nabil Abdel Malik, and I were in the same group, Kardouche floated in and out of several smaller cliques by virtue of his quickness and his easy, mature way with older students. He and I sat next to each other in the back row, with Hamdollah and one or two others directly in front of us. A shadow line was crossed in early December when, during one of Mr. Gatley’s insufferably monotonous classes, Kardouche accidentally set fire to a small pile of damp papers in his left-hand desk compartment while putting out a cigarette. In a moment, large billowing clouds of ugly gray smoke enveloped him and me, as he tried first with his hands then with his satchel to put out the flames. Droning on in the front, the turgid Gatley seemed all of a sudden to smell something untoward and uncharacteristically lifted his eyes off the book, there to see the amazing spectacle of a smoking desk. “Kardouche,” thundered Gatley in his most intimidating voice, “what is that smoke? Stop it at once, boy!” With great presence of mind, the mightily beset offender, his arms banging away at the smoke and at the same time coughing, gasping, choking, and shielding his eyes, responded: “Smoke, sir? What smoke?” At which the whole class took up the chorus “What smoke? What smoke? We see no smoke!” Intimidated and taken aback, Gatley thought better of pursuing the matter any further and returned to reading aloud with some of the better-behaved boys near the front. Since Kardouche and I sat near the door, we were able to put out the fire, after an enormous amount of loud scuffling (moving desks, piercingly uttered cries of coordination, and the like, all of it deliberately ignored by Gatley) and bringing in sand from outside.

  The class also contained a group of francophone boys, many of whom were Jews and were among the most intelligent members of the class: André Shalom, André Salama, Roger Sciutto, Joseph Mani, with whom I shared a great interest in Walter Scott, and Claude Salama, who lived in the Immobilia building in the heart of smart, downtown Cairo. Then there was a group of mainly Arabic-speaking, mostly un-Westernized Egyptians—Malawani, A. A. Zaki, Nabil Ayad, Shukry, Usama Abdul Haq, and a few others. What intrigued and still entrances me about these social groupings is that none was exclusive, or watertight, which produced a dancelike maze of personalities, modes of speech, backgrounds, religions, and nationalities.

  For a time an Indian boy, Vashi Pohomool, whose family owned a grand jewelry shop in or near Shepheard’s Hotel, was one of us. Then, partway through the year, we were joined by Gilbert Khoury, a Lebanese boy; and the half-American Ali Halim, whose father was of Albanian stock and was King Farouk’s cousin; Bulent Mardin, a Turkish boy from Maadi; Arthur Davidson, who had a Canadian father and an Egyptian mother; and Samir Yousef, with a Coptic father and Dutch mother. They made a motley but dazzlingly exciting class, almost totally oblivious to the academic-English side of things, though that was why we were there in the first place.

  There were house football teams, but I was a lackluster member of ours; I did better at what was called “athletics”—track and field. There, under Mr. Hinds’s uncharitable eye, I developed into a decent, though never brilliant, 100- and 200-meter man. I recall eagerly asking him for assurance that I might do well at the upcoming school games. “I will be surprised if you win the two hundred, but I won’t be surprised if you win the one hundred,” he said. Of course I won neither one. My sorriest moment occurred during the 100-meter race when, a moment after I had left the starting line in my handsome black spikes and my new, too-large white shorts—which my mother insisted were the right size—I felt them slipping down. Pulling at them frantically, my legs churning valiantly if futilely away, I heard Hinds calling out, “Never mind your shorts, Said, just run.” And run I did for another yard or two, only to land on my face a second later, the wretched shorts wrapped around my ankles and a jubilant gaggle of Cromer boys jeering rudely at me.

  That ended my track career, although I persisted at tennis, and outside school I swam and rode. Neither a winner nor a star, I sensed myself as at the threshold of a breakthrough, particularly in tennis, but routinely found myself held back by the doubts and uncertainties about my body inculcated in me by my father. Could it be, I often wondered to myself after a galling loss at tennis, that self-abuse was in fact undermining my health, and hence my performance? Added to this was the sense of myself as unusual because of my exceptionally complicated background, my (compared to my classmates’) large physical size and strength, my secret musical and literary proclivities.

  A peculiar example of my odd academic status during that Shubra year occurred during a physics class in the spring of 1950. Because the old Italian school was without labs for science instruction, our class was bused twice a week to the Coptic College in Fagallah, a shabby lower-middle-class area of the city near the Bab-el-Hadid Station. There we first had an hour’s chemistry class given by (as I reconstruct my impressions) a semimoronic middle-aged man whose name I have forgotten. He could barely speak English, and made many of his more important points by laying about himself with a long piece of test-tube rubber. Azmi Effendi, our physics teacher, was altogether suave and icily cold and led us systematically and calmly through mechanics, light, gravity, and the like, most of which I found myself absorbing with ease. The class ethos did not permit a manifest submission to the teacher’s will—Azmi being considered something of an Englishman in local disguise—so I deliberately held back whenever there was a question to be discussed or answered. On the day he returned our midterm exams, Azmi prefaced his handing back of the exam books neatly stacked under one of his hands with a scathing attack on the class’s miserable performance, overall incompetence, disgraceful inattention. “Only one student has any ideas of the principles of physics, and he produced a perfect exam. A very brilliant performance. Said,” he said after a brief pause, “come down here.” I recall being nudged by the boy sitting next to me, high up in the raked amphitheater’s gallery. “It’s you,” he said; a moment later I found myself stumbling down the stairs, going up to Azmi, receiving my “brilliant” exam, then trudging back up.

  The whole episode seems to have made no impression on my classmates or, for that matter, on me, so accustomed were we all to my status as a member of the troublemakers’ set. I am sure that my final physics grade was a respectable but hardly luminous B, and I continued to drift away from any position of intellectual distinction. Whatever cultural ability and knowledge I had were submerged in the complicated business of keeping out of the clutches of masters, prefects, and bullies, avoiding failure, and engineering my way through a murderous supplementary schedule at home and an extremely long day at school. I did enjoy a school performance of She Stoops to Conquer in which Michel Shalhoub (who became Omar Sharif) played Mrs. Hardcastle and Gilbert de Botton (later a well-known international financier) played Kate. Through Samir Yousef and Arthur Davidson I became acquainted with Egyptian popular culture and pornography, respectively. But despite the habit of hardened resistance to anything cultural or educational, I remained a fairly timid and sexually deprived adolescent.

  Arthur Davidson generally shared with us his pornographic books printed on execrable, lewd-looking paper, written in a nonstyle that suggested haste and an almost total absence of craft, but replete with the utmost in graphic, lurid descriptions. Later someone slipped us coarse, badly processed photographs of men and women copulating: they fairly reeked of illicit, raunchy sex, but since there were no girls on our horizons we embroidered these pitifully inadequate, sadistic writings and representations into what we took to be the talk of streetwise Lotharios. Expressions like “I want white flesh” or “She’s wet with desire” drew forth huge claps of laughter and jeers that left at least me with a subsequent feeling of sudden discontent and mortifying frustration. I found it possible as time wore on to write my own pornographic literature; with myself as omniscient and omnipotent narrator, I peopled th
e episodes with various older women, mostly family friends and even relatives. As if reinforcing my compromised, devalued life at home as someone sexually ill—or so I believed—I hid my writings in places like the woodpile on one of the balconies, or in an unused jacket, with a confused awareness that I might be compromising myself still further than before. My mother’s penchant for snooping around—“I saw this letter by mistake” or “While he was cleaning your room Ahmed discovered this paper” were weekly occurrences—strangely did not deter me from hiding the damning pages in different places; some I either forgot about altogether or, helpless to do anything about it, momentarily panicked over during class at school. I suppose I longed to be caught and confronted with my sins, in order to have real adventures in the real world without the parental hobbles that made any movement on that front extremely difficult. Yet the confrontation never occurred, though I dimly remember that on several occasions my parents hinted, or seemed to hint, that they had found me out, had read the incriminating prose. And that made me feel worse, more edgy, more hunted.

  There weren’t many outlets for my pent-up appetites except the cinema and music-hall and cabaret numbers. It was on a sultry spring night in 1950 that Samir Yousef somehow got us a table at the outdoor Casino Badia, which sat on a little jetty just below what is today the Giza Sheraton Hotel. And for the first time in my life I thrilled to what was the most unmistakably erotic scene I had ever seen: Tahia Carioca, the greatest dancer of the day, performing with a seated male singer, Abdel Aziz Mahmoud, around whom she swirled, undulated, gyrated with perfect, controlled poise, her hips, legs, breasts more eloquent and sensually paradisiacal than anything I had dreamed of or imagined in my crude auto-erotic prose. I could see on Tahia’s face a smile of such fundamentally irreducible pleasure, her mouth open slightly with a look of ecstatic bliss tempered by irony and an almost prudish restraint. We were totally transfixed by this fetching contradiction, our legs soft with trembling passion, our hands gripping the chairs paralyzed with tension. She danced for about forty-five minutes, a long unbroken composition of mostly slow turns and passes, the music rising and falling homophonically, and given meaning not by the singer’s repetitions and banal lyrics but by her luminous, incredibly sensual performance.

  A similar, though less intense, experience of vicarious sex was available in musicals that featured above all Cyd Charisse, less so Vera Ellen, still less Ann Miller—Hollywood dancers inhabiting and emanating from a fantasy world that had no equivalent at all in prosaic Cairo. Many years later, Charisse said in a New York Times interview that musicals like Silk Stockings used dance as a method for introducing sex that had been forbidden by the censors of the period; that was exactly what I responded to with a violent passion as a sheltered, confused adolescent. My school friends and I spent stolen hours in the cinema watching Rita Hayworth, Jane Russell, and even the by-now fading Betty Grable—longing, without any success, to see a woman’s navel, as such inflammatory sights were forbidden by the Hays Code.

  No male actors impressed themselves upon our fantasy lives in the way male tennis stars did. Foreign players would appear in Cairo twice a year—Jaroslav Drobny, Eric Sturgess, Budge Patty, the incomparable Baron Gottfried von Cramm, Adrian Quist—and they soon became our class heroes. We imagined their rich, fun-filled lives of luxurious travel. Nicola Pietrangeli, Hoad and Rosewell, and Tony Mottram represented a world of elegance far removed from our everyday reality.

  At home our life was in a tiny way less monastic and claustrophic now that all five of us were past the age of infancy, and my parents’ social life expanded considerably. A new circle of friends grew around us, and remained in place into the early sixties, when age, politics, and economic upheavals disbanded the little group forever.

  Closest to us were the Dirliks, whom we used to see in Lebanon, but who now became intimates of my parents’: Renée, the mother, a witty, intelligent woman who was my mother’s closest friend, and her husband, Loris, a pharmacist by training who was an excellent rider and cook and a charming companion. Their two oldest children, André, roughly my age, and Claude, his younger sister, we saw less of because they were in French schools and had their own circle of friends. I still recall the Dirliks with extraordinary pleasure, and their visits to us as a treat, a total change from either the dour Palestinian grimness that otherwise existed around us, or the silent bridge-playing pals (like Messrs. Farajallah, Souky, Sabry, among others) whom my father frequented for long bouts of the (to me) increasingly maddening game. Reneé Dirlik, a former student of Auntie Melia’s, was the daughter of a Lebanese-Egyptian father and an Armenian mother; Loris was Armenian and Turkish; both were cosmopolitan—fluent in French and English, less so in Arabic—and dinners at their house or at ours, opera outings, occasional evenings at the Kursaal or Estoril restaurants, trips to Alexandria, remain among the pleasantest memories of my youth.

  But like us they were marked for extinction in the worldly Cairo environment that was already beginning to be undermined. We were all Shawam, amphibious Levantine creatures whose essential lostness was momentarily stayed by a kind of forgetfulness, a kind of daydream, that included elaborate catered dinner parties, outings to fashionable restaurants, the opera, ballet, and concerts. By the end of the forties we were no longer just Shawam but khawagat, the designated and respectful title for foreigners which, as used by Muslim Egyptians, has always carried a tinge of hostility. Despite the fact that I spoke—and I thought looked—like a native Egyptian, something seemed to give me away. I resented the implication that I was somehow a foreigner, even though deep down I knew that to them I was, despite being an Arab. The Dirliks were even less integrated into Cairo society, especially Loris and the children, who were European in demeanor and language, yet seemed to feel no consequent disability as a result. Indeed I envied André his worldliness and savoir faire—very débrouillard (resourceful), my mother used to say so as to encourage me to be more enterprising in my life, but that made me feel less so—which took him on long hitchhiking trips through Europe and Asia with very little money in his pocket, but with always something left over when he returned. He seemed to me to accept the khawaga designation, whereas I chafed at it, partly because my growing sense of Palestinian identity (thanks to Aunt Nabiha) refused the demeaning label, partly because my emerging consciousness of myself as something altogether more complex and authentic than a colonial mimic simply refused.

  Other friends in our circle included Kamal and Elsie Mirshak, he a second-generation Shami Egyptian, she of Palestinian descent, both younger than my father (as were all their circle), both more modern, more “with it” in terms of going out to nightclubs and restaurants. Despite the disparity in our ages, Kamal and I were rather chummy, particularly in that he sensed my sexual deprivation, and when I was seventeen or eighteen—I had already left for the United States but returned regularly for summer and sometimes even Christmas vacation—began to encourage me to consider affairs with married women, a notion that fired me up enormously but then for want of confidence and candidates was never even attempted. Then there were George and Emma (Kamal’s cousin) Fahoum. He was a strikingly athletic, swarthy, thin-lipped man of considerable elegance, a dramatically successful businessman in partnership with Emma’s father, Elias Mirshak, an unusually wealthy landowner who with George had gone into the import and sale of heavy machinery, mostly agricultural. During his 1930s college days in Beirut, George had been a star runner and field events man, holding records in sprints, middle distances, and long jump that stood into the sixties. He was an avid tennis player whose prowess and cocky assurance provoked my father into challenging him—on my behalf—to numerous matches. To my great humiliation George beat me with ease every time we played, always after a year of playing in school or college in the United States, during which time I told myself that I had improved enough to beat him. I resented my father doing this to me, but I also coveted the challenge and of course felt ashamed of myself after each match, which was alway
s played on Fahoum’s home court at the National Club, where in the course of our forty-five-minute encounter he would chat nonchalantly with ball boys and trainers, who always gathered to watch him win.

  Emma was then and remains an agreeable, sociable woman who despite her wealth gave herself no airs or phony sophistication. Her sisters, Reine, Yvette, and Odette, were married to Shawam of an altogether more worldly sort and like Emma and George produced large numbers of daughters, with some of whom, like Amira and Linda, I became friendly in a chaste but mildly flirtatious way: both were married young, which at the time left me with an aggravated sense of unfulfilled passion.

  A more recent addition to the group were the Ghorras, François and Madeleine, who had difficulty with anything other than French (all the others had been educated at British and American schools); Madeleine was very religious. I must say that I found the Ghorras strangely fascinating because they belonged to no world I had access to—in Madeleine’s case that of the Syro-Lebanese high bourgeoisie—but into which I got narrow glimpses when we went to them for visits. I recall meeting de Zogheibs and de Chedids there, recipients of papal titles, which about a decade later, during the high Nasser years, struck me as grotesquely inappropriate for their holders to hold on to from generation to generation. During those earlier days, however, such people represented a kind of Proustian romance for me, especially since none of them ever pretended to have much to do with Egypt or things Egyptian. I had never been to Paris myself, but the Ghorras and their friends gave me the grace of having been there vicariously, although they spoke the heavily accented French of the Levant with its rolled r‘s, unidiomatic constructions, and interlarded Arabic words and phrases like “yani” or “yala.”