Out of Place: A Memoir

  Perhaps the real issue was sex, or, rather, my parents’ defense against its onset in my life and, when it could no longer be staved off, its taming. Even when I left for the United States in 1951 at fifteen, my existence had been completely virginal, my acquaintance with girls nonexistent. Movies like The Outlaw, Duel in the Sun, even the Michèle Morgan costume drama Fabiola, which I desperately wanted to see, were forbidden as being “not for children”; such bans existed until I was fourteen. There were no visibly available sex magazines or pornographic videos in those days; the schools I went to in Egypt or the States until I was seventeen and a half infantilized and desexualized everything. This was also true of Princeton, which I attended until I was twenty-one. Sex was banned everywhere, including books, although there my inquisitiveness and the large number of volumes in our library made a complete prohibition impossible to enforce. The experience of lovemaking was described in convincing detail in the World War I memoirs of Wilfred de Saint-Mandé, a British officer of whom I never learned anything at all except that he went from battle to sexual encounter for well over six hundred pages. Saint-Mandé in effect became one of the silent, secret companions of my adolescence. As a rake, bloody-minded British soldier, and upper-class barbarian he was an appalling role model, but I did not care—I liked him all the more. So in my above-ground life I was steered carefully away from anything that might excite sexual interest, without really talking about it at all. It was my own powerful need to know and experience that broke through my parents’ restrictions, until an open confrontation took place whose memory, forty-six years later, still makes me shudder.

  One chilly Sunday afternoon in late November 1949, at three o’clock, a few weeks after I had turned fourteen, there was a loud knock on my bedroom door, followed immediately by a sternly authoritative wrenching of the handle. This was very far from a friendly parental visit. Performed with unimpeachable rectitude “for your own good,” it was the rigorous assault on my character that had been building to this climax for almost three years. My father stood near the door for a moment; in his right hand he clutched my pajama bottoms distastefully, which I despairingly remembered I had left in the bathroom that morning. I held out my hands to catch the offending article, expecting him as he had done once or twice before to scold me for leaving my things around (“Please put them away; don’t leave them for someone else to pick up”). The servants, he would add, were not for my personal comfort.

  Since he kept the garment in his hand I knew that this must be a more serious matter, and I sank back into the bed, anxiously awaiting the attack. When he was halfway into the room, just as he began to speak, I saw my mother’s drawn face framed in the doorway several feet behind him. She said nothing but was present to give emotional weight to his prosecution of the case. “Your mother and I have noticed”—here he waved the pajama—“that you haven’t had any wet dreams. That means you’re abusing yourself.” He had never said it accusingly before, although the dangers of “self-abuse” and the virtues of wet dreams had been the subject of several lectures and were first described to me on a walk around the deck of the Saturnia en route to New York in July of 1948.

  These lectures were the result of my asking my mother about a stout little pair of Italian opera singers, fellow passengers on the Saturnia. She wore very high heels, a tight white dress, heavily painted lips; he was in a shiny brown suit and elevated heels, with carefully slicked-back hair; both exuded a bountiful sexuality to which I could attach no specific practices. In an unguarded moment I had asked my mother confusedly and inarticulately how such people as those actually did “it.” I had no words for “it,” none for penis or vagina, and none for foreplay; all I could do was to enlist urination and defecation in my question, which, I had somehow gleaned, bore some pleasurable meaning as well. My mother’s look of alarm and disgust set me up for the “man-to-man” talk with my father. A great part of his massive authority, and his compelling power over me, was that strange combination of silence and the ritual repetition of clichés picked up from assorted places—Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the YMCA, courses in salesmanship, the Bible, evangelical sermons, Shakespeare, and so on.

  “Just think of a cup slowly filling up with liquid,” he began. “Then once it is full”—here he cupped one hand and with the other skimmed off the hypothetical excess—“it naturally flows over, and you have a wet dream.” He paused for a bit. Then he continued, again metaphorically. “Have you ever seen a horse win a race without being able to maintain a steady pace? Of course not. If the horse starts out too quickly, he gets tired and fades away. The same thing with you. If you abuse yourself your cup will not run over; you can’t win or even finish the race.” On a similar occasion later he added warnings about going bald and/or mad as a result of “self-abuse,” which only very rarely did he refer to as masturbation, a word pronounced with quite dreadful admonishment: “maaasturbation” (the a’s almost o’s).

  My father never spoke of making love, and certainly not of fucking. When I tried to bring up the question of how children were produced the answer was schematic. My mother’s frequent pregnancies, and especially her alarmingly protuberant stomach during them, never settled the question. Her line to me was always “We wrote a letter to Jesus and he sent us a baby!” What my father told me after his solemn shipboard warning about “self-abuse” was a few, almost dismissive words about how the man puts his “private parts” in the woman’s “private parts.” Nothing about orgasm or ejaculation or about what “private parts” were. Pleasure was never mentioned. As for kissing, he referred to it only once in all my years of being with and knowing him. “You must marry a woman,” he told me when I was in college, “who has never been kissed before you kiss her. Like your mother.” There was not even a mention of virginity, an abstruse concept that I had heard about in Sunday school and then through catechism and that acquired some concrete meaning for me only when I was about twenty.

  After we returned from the United States in the autumn of 1948, there were two and perhaps three occasions when we had man-to-man talks, each time with a growing sense on my part of encroachment and guilt. I once asked him how one would know that the wet dream had occurred. “You would know in the morning,” was his first answer. As with most things then, I was hesitant to ask more, but I did when he next brought it up, along with a still more embellished account of the evils of “self-abuse” (the man becoming “useless” and a “failure” as the degeneracy took final hold). “A wet dream is a nocturnal emission,” he said. The phrase sounded as if he were reading it off a page. “Is it like going to the bathroom?” I asked, using the euphemism we all used for urinating (“pee-pee” was the definitely riskier alternative, which my mother always admonished me against: I used it when trying to be “naughty,” along with “I can see your pants!” to one of my sisters, as a further act of insubordination and intransigence).

  “Yes, more or less, but it’s thicker and sticks to your pajamas,” he said then. So this was why the pajama was being clinically transported in his left hand as he stood a few feet away from my bed. “There’s nothing on these pajamas at all,” he said to me with a look of scowling disgust, “nothing. Haven’t I told you many times about the dangers of self-abuse? What’s the matter with you?” There was a pause, as I looked furtively past my father toward my mother. Although I knew in my heart that she sympathized with me most of the time, she rarely broke ranks with him. Now I couldn’t detect any support at all; just a shyly questioning look, as if to say: “Yes, Edward, what are you doing?” plus a little bit of “Why do you do nasty things to hurt us?”

  I was immediately seized with such terror, guilt, shame, and vulnerability that I have never forgotten this scene. The most important thing about these feelings is how they coalesced around my father, whose cold denunciation of me in my bed had me utterly silenced, defeated. There was nothing to confess to that he didn’t already know. I had no excuse: the wet dreams hadn’t in fact occurred, even though for a time d
uring the past year I did wake up anxiously, searching bed and night-clothes for evidence that they might have. I was already down the road to perdition, perhaps even baldness. (I was alarmed after a bath once to notice that my wet hair, normally quite thick, appeared to show a couple of patches of what appeared to be baldness. I also suspected that my father’s insistence on frequent haircuts was connected to deterring the premature effects of self-abuse. “Have your hair cut often and short, like your father,” he’d say, “and it’ll remain strong and full.”) My secret, such as it was, had been found out. All I could think of was that I had no place to go as the dreadful retribution was about to occur. Somehow, the vague, if also overpowering, anxiety I was experiencing held an extremely concrete sense of threat, and for a moment I felt as if I was clinging to “Edward” to save him from final extinction.

  “You have nothing to say, do you?” A quick breath, then the climax. He threw the pajama bottom at me with vehemence and what I thought was exasperated disgust. “All right then. Have a wet dream!” I was so taken aback by this peremptory order—could one, in fact, if one wanted, just have a wet dream?—that I shrank back even further into the bed. Then, just as I thought he was going to leave, he turned toward me again.

  “Where did you learn how to abuse yourself?” As if by a miracle I was given an opening to save myself. I recalled in a flash that only a few weeks earlier, near the end of summer and just before school started, I had been loitering in the boys’ dressing room at the Maadi Club. Although it was at the time my father’s favorite club for golf and bridge, I knew relatively few people, and, with my usual shyness, would go into the dressing room to get into my bathing suit but would also take my time, hoping to strike up a friendship perhaps, or meet a stray acquaintance. My feeling of loneliness was unallayed. This time, however, a gaggle of older boys, wet from swimming, burst in. They were led by Ehab, a very tall and thin boy with a deep voice that exuded confidence. Rich, secure, at home, and in place. “Come on Ehab, do it,” he was urged by the others. I had seen him before but had not really met him: our fathers did not know each other and I was still dependent on this kind of parental introduction. Ehab lowered his trunks, stood on the bench, and while peering over the wall at the pool’s designated sunbathing area, began to masturbate. I heard myself blurt out, “Do it on Colette,” Colette being a voluptuous young woman in her twenties who always wore a black bathing suit and had graced my own private fantasies. No one heard me; I felt like an ass and blushed uncontrollably though no one seemed to notice. We were all watching Ehab as he rubbed his penis slowly until, at last, he ejaculated, also slowly, at which point he started to laugh smugly, displaying his sticky fingers as if he had just won a sports trophy.

  “It was at the club. Ehab did it,” I blurted out to my father, who had no idea who Ehab was or what it was I was trying to say. I realized that he was not asking me for anything concrete: it was only a rhetorical question. Of course I was guilty. Of course he now knew it. My sins had also been exposed to my mother, who never said a word, but showed signs of scarcely comprehending horror and even bereavement.

  My father did not seem particularly interested either in my explanation or in listening for a few seconds to my clumsy expressions of determined self-reform, my future action. He had found me out and found me wanting; he knew what harm I was doing myself, and he had judged me both weak and radically unreliable. That was all. He had told me about the cup and the race horse, about baldness and madness. He had repeated the homilies perhaps eight times, so all he could do now would be to repeat them yet again or, “wisely” (a word he liked to use), he could register the crime and move on, his authority and moral judgment remaining formidably intact. I was neither punished nor even reminded of my secret vice. But I didn’t think I had escaped lightly. This particular failure of mine, embodied in that exquisitely theatrical scene, added itself, like a new and extremely undermining fault line, to the already superficially incoherent and disorganized structure of “Edward.”

  During the many years we lived in Cairo my father practiced surveillance of a more public kind as the proud owner, and one of the very first in Egypt, of a Kodak 8-millimeter camera. Father was remarkably busy recording scene after repetitive scene of “Edward,” his mother, cousins, aunts, and uncles (never anyone outside of the family) at play or at rest, appearing to be happy, idyllic, and without any problems. I was fascinated with the flat rectangular machine that smelled of plastic, its complicated insides and its meandering passages for the film to pass through requiring patience in loading, threading, and unloading. Neither of my parents was particularly dexterous, a disability I seem to have inherited where practical things are concerned, but my father was positively clumsy. He bought films in tiny spools and put them in the camera so sloppily that they jammed, whereupon another would be fished out, the old one pulled angrily through the machine and then thrown away, the fresh one put in, and finally he could begin filming. Every couple of weeks he walked over to the Kodak shop on Adly Pasha Street to deliver a handful of films for developing; when I was eight I’d accompany him, as he collected them four or five to a large spool, a more convenient size that allowed thirty minutes of continuous running time on his projector.

  Once or twice a month we performed the ritual of drawing the living-room shutters closed and setting up the elaborate, ever-shiny projector on the small modern coffee table and the tripod-borne screen; while the smell of polished, mechanical newness wafted through the air, we turned off the lights and settled snugly into the large overstuffed living-room chairs and sofas to watch ourselves at the zoo, on a Desert Road picnic, or at the pyramids. Six months after my mother died in 1990 a sizable batch of films, each one carefully encased in the white and blue boxes that my father had had made for them by his stationery and binding staff, were found at the bottom of one of her cupboards in Beirut. There must have been thirty-five of them, containing 120 of the individual films taken between 1939 and 1952, some of them marked in my father’s scrawl “Cairo 1944,” “Jerusalem 1946,” “Yousif’s wedding,” all of them still exuding the smells and even the feel of those projection evenings so long ago. I took them home to New York, where for a couple of years they sat in a nondescript brown cardboard box, provoking my curiosity every now and then as to what portion of our old life was preserved in them as they slowly sank into oblivion and final disuse.

  A coincidence made them available once again: a pair of young BBC directors, making a documentary on the writing of my book Culture and Imperialism, asked me for some old family pictures, and quite by some mysterious impulse I thought of the box of patiently waiting films. The films were taken back to London and transferred to videotape.

  It was not so much that I was disappointed at how badly they had been shot or how jerky and unsatisfying the sequences they contained were, or at how the print was either too light or too dark, but rather that the films exclude so much, seem contrived and rigid as they positively ban any trace of the effort and uncertainty of our lives. The smiles on everyone’s faces, the impossibly cheery and at times even sturdy presentation of my mother (whom I remember as more slender and moody), highlight the artificial quality of what we were, a family determined to make itself into a mock little European group despite the Egyptian and Arab surroundings that are only hinted at as an occasional camel, gardener, servant, palm tree, pyramid, or tarbushed chauffeur is briefly caught by the camera’s otherwise single-minded focus on the children and assorted relatives. The earliest films consist of scenes showing Rosy and me at play: I place her on one end of a seesaw, rush to the opposite side, pump up and down, abruptly stop, then dash back to her and kiss her curls. Then there was a whole sequence of films taken below our house on Gabalaya Street, at right angles to Aziz Osman, alongside the Fish Garden, whose fence has remained unchanged for over fifty years now. On an essentially deserted street, with scarcely a soul in sight—today, the same sidewalks are crowded with parked cars, and the street has become a permanent traffic j
am—we see Edward and Rosy, aged six and four, standing thirty yards from the camera, two tiny, excited little figures, jumping up and down as they await an unseen cue off camera, which catches their grotesquely enlarged faces covered in all kinds of theatrically engendered smiles.

  This same scene is reenacted dozens of times: in Zamalek, Jerusalem, at the zoo, in the desert, at the club, on other streets in Cairo. Always the eager run, the happy faces, the inconclusive conclusion. At first I thought, and indeed remembered, that this was an elementary way of demonstrating the difference between a still and a motion picture camera. There are a number of sequences showing Edward at age ten coaxing older cousins out of what appears to be a transfixed immobilized pose in front of the camera. In their seemingly limitless repetitiveness the films of course are, and for my father seem to have been, a kind of regulated prerehearsed scene, which we performed in front of him as he recorded indefatigably. My father wanted us always to appear face-front. There are no side views in the films, and consequently there was no risk of giving any of us the unwanted exposure of an unguarded look or unpredictable trajectory. The camera was always there when we left the house for a walk or drive. It must also have been my father’s way of capturing as well as confirming the ordered family domain he had created and now ruled.

  I remember that as I grew older—certainly by age eleven or twelve—I felt that the ritual of doing the same thing over and over in front of my father’s camera was becoming more and more disconcerting. This awareness coincided with my wish somehow to be disembodied. One of my recurrent fantasies, the subject of a school essay I wrote when I was twelve, was to be a book, whose fate I took to be happily free of unwelcome changes, distortions of its shape, criticism of its looks; print for me was made up of a rare combination of expression in its style and contents, absolute rigidity, and integrity in its looks. Passed from hand to hand, place to place, time to time, I could remain my own true self (as a book), despite being thrown out of a car and lost in a back drawer.