Out of Place: A Memoir

  The next day we convened as usual in the classroom. Miss Clark was already behind her desk and seemed as composed and as inscrutable as ever. “Let’s spend some time talking about yesterday’s field trip,” she began, then turned immediately to B.J., a short-haired girl whose clipped tone and businesslike manner quickly established her as the class touchstone. B.J. provided a detailed appreciation of the day’s events. “How about you, Ernst?” she asked Ernst Brandt, the class’s somewhat inarticulate but biggest and strongest boy. There was little more anyone could add to B.J.’s strenuous recital, and Ernst scarcely made the effort. “It was okay,” was all he said. I sat there slowly drifting off into some idle daydream, once again paying Miss Clark’s predatory instincts insufficient attention. “You were all very well behaved yesterday: I’m proud of you,” she said, and I thought she would then press on with our English assignment. “All except one person, that is. One person only paid no heed to Ibrahim Effendi’s very helpful and fascinating commentary. One person only always lagged behind the rest of the group. One person only fidgeted the entire time. One person only never looked at all the machines and vats. One person only bit his nails. One person alone disgraced the entire class.” She paused, even as I wondered who that person might be.

  “You, Edward. You behaved abominably. I have never seen anyone so unable to concentrate, so inconsiderate, so careless and sloppy. What you did yesterday made me very angry. I watched you every minute of the time, and there was nothing you did that could possibly redeem you. I am going to speak to Miss Willis [the headmistress] about you, and I shall ask her to call your parents in for a conference.” She stopped, looking at me with unconcealed distaste. “Had you been one of the good students in this class,” she began again, “I would have perhaps forgiven your conduct. Had you been someone like B.J., for instance. But since you are undoubtedly the worst student in this class, what you did yesterday is simply unforgivable.” The emphases were delivered with definitive italicized dispassion.

  Miss Clark had purposely, deliberately, even fastidiously, defined me, caught me, as it were, from within, had seen me as I could or would not see myself, and she had made her findings extremely public. I was riveted to my chair, blushing, trying to look both sorry and strong at the same time, hating the by now thoroughly concentrating class, each one of them, I felt, looking at me with justified dislike and curiosity. “Who is this person?” I imagined them saying, “a little Arab boy, and what is he doing in a school for American children? Where did he come from?” Meanwhile, Miss Clark was moving her books and pencils around on her desk. Then we returned to our recitation, as if nothing had happened. Although I glanced at her ten minutes later to see if there might have been a relenting look for me, she remained as unshaken and as imperviously unforgiving as ever.

  The power of what Miss Clark said about me was that it collected all the negative and critical comments that had loosely surrounded me at home and at GPS, and concentrated the whole lot into one unpleasant steel container, into which I was placed, like Jell-O poured into a mold. I felt as if I had no history to shield me from Miss Clark’s judgment or to resist my public disgrace. Even more than that passive exposure, I have always hated and feared the sudden delivery of bad news that allows me no chance to respond, to separate “Edward” in all his well-known infirmities and sins from the inner being I generally consider my real or best self (undefined, free, curious, quick, young, sensitive, even likable). Now I could no longer do this, being confronted with a single inescapable devalued and doomed self, not, no never quite right, and indeed very wrong and out of place.

  I came to detest this identity, but as yet I had no alternative for it. So objectionable had I become that of course I was compelled to go and see Miss Willis, a white-haired, unforceful, late-middle-aged Middle Western woman who seemed more puzzled than angry at my malfeasance. Miss Clark was not present at the interview, but there was no comparison at all between Miss Clark’s ontological condemnation of me and Miss Willis’s ramblingly vague lecture on the virtues of good citizenship, an unthinkable phrase in the British colonial context I had just left, where we were subjects at most, and obedient as well as unquestioning ones. My parents also came by in due course; they saw Miss Clark and Miss Willis. The former made an extremely pronounced impression on my mother, who heard in the woman’s penetrating accents a more well-sculpted and delivered account of her son’s weakness than had ever been given before. What exactly was said about me I never knew, but it resonated in my mother’s speeches to me for years and years. “Remember what Miss Clark said” was the refrain used to explain both my lack of proper focus and concentration and my chronic inability to do the right thing. So in effect Miss Clark’s awful opinion of me was prolonged and given additional reach by my mother. It never occurred to me to ask my mother why she allied herself so unskeptically with someone who seemed to be moved not by pedagogical but by sadistic, instinctual imperatives.

  I was supposed to be among my own kind at CSAC, but found it my lot to be even more the stranger than I had been at GPS. There was much bonhomie—“Good morning” ’s and “Hi” ’s were de rigueur among us, as they never were at GPS—and a good deal of emphasis was placed on who sat next to whom on the bus, in class, and at lunch. Yet there was a hidden but unanimously agreed-upon hierarchy of boys based not on seniority or position but on strength, will, and athletic prowess. The school leader was Stan Henry, a ninth-grader whose sister Paddy was a year behind me; they were the children of a senior Standard Oil executive. Stan was over six feet, radiated confidence and intelligence, and was a superb swimmer and all-round athlete. He had a horselike laugh that belied the keen competitive wit he used to dominate our frequent breaks in the garden. His only rival in size was Ernst Brandt, whom I once saw Stan humiliate by grabbing his hands and then squeezing him by the knuckles so as to force him to the ground. Ernst then stood up, and remained immobile with tears streaming down his face. Since Stan was also a “leader” (a word I learned at CSAC) it did not take very long for the rest of us to shake down around him, although that space remained a hotly contested one, with Stan unchallenged in his preeminence, the rest of us in constant flux.

  I was in perpetual combat with two boys in particular. Alex Miller (the son of embassy parents, I think) and Claude Brancart, a Belgian-American whose father represented Caltex in Egypt. Both had attractive older sisters—brunette Amaryllis and blonde Monique—who seemed to me more like women than sixteen- or seventeen-year-olds. Amaryllis occasionally sat next to me on the bus, was always amiable if not actually friendly, and stunned me when I saw her wearing a two-piece bathing suit at a school outing to the Maadi pool; this was the first time in my closeted life I had ever seen that much of the female body so exposed, but I felt paradoxically that it increased the distance between us. Monique had a vague, dreamy manner about her, and floated around the school very fetchingly. Both girls had little to do with their younger brothers, who were not involved with me as friends at all, but as opponents in a ceaseless round of wrestling and boasting sessions whose object seemed both obscure and undiscussed. I remember being impressed at how one time Alex traded blows with me on the bus, standing on the other side of a seat, patiently, methodically, even slowly, delivering punches at my head and stomach while I, ever the impetuous and relatively uncontrolled fighter, pummeled him with the crosses and roundhouse upper cuts—most of them off target—I had learned from my YMCA boxing instructor, Sayed. It is bizarre indeed how such a scene, both pointless and extremely energetic, stays in my memory for such a long time, like a series of Muybridge photographs: what was I all about then, I keep asking myself, and why was I so driven and so prone to such intense antagonisms?

  Unlike GPS, where there was no chance that a fight would last more than ten seconds before being broken up by several teachers, CSAC adopted a radically different philosophy, which was to provide a sanctioned space for fighting, and other boyish expenditures of excess energy. I can remember neither a single m
oment of peace during the lunch break, nor a pleasurable moment of camaraderie.

  Claude Brancart and I were rivals—but for what, I have no idea—always ready for a spat, or a spitting or throwing contest, or a boasting spree in which our fathers, eminently unqualified in real life for such matters, were pitted against each other in imaginary tennis, wrestling, or rowing contests. At one point when Claude and I had reached a peak of enmity, this warranted an all-out fight, and we went at it on the dusty field, pulling, punching, and then, finally locked in a hugging embrace, we crashed to the ground together. He managed to get on top of me, fought vigorously to pin me back, and finally to make me say “I give up.”

  One of the onlookers, Jean-Pierre Sabet, a non-American Maadi resident who was enrolled at CSAC by some unintelligible dispensation, at that point matter-of-factly said of me, “He’s straining. Can’t you see he’s straining? It isn’t over.” He was right: I felt I had been defeated in a sense because “Edward” had given up, he had let go and was now dominated by someone who should have dominated him. Strangely, though, there was another self beginning to surge inside me, just as “Edward” had passed and was now a prisoner of Claude Brancart, so this new self came from some region inside myself that I knew existed but could only rarely have access to. My body, instead of remaining supine and abject underneath Braucart, began to push up against him, first disengaging my arms, then pounding his chest and head until he was forced to defend himself, loose his grip on me, and finally roll over sideways as I got up and continued pummeling him. In a minute Mr. Wannick had appeared, pulled us apart, and with a disdainful “What is the matter with you two?” sent us back into the school building.

  A year earlier I had had a similar experience of defeat and regeneration, and it is only now that they strike me as examples of the same unpredictable will to go on past rules and deadlines that had already been accepted by “Edward.” I had met Guy Mosseri, a small, slim boy who lived in Maadi but who also went to GPS, at the Maadi swimming pool one weekend. We started a game of catch—I was to dive in and swim, then pull myself out of the pool, then dive in and swim some more, until, if he could, he caught me. I began exuberantly, threading my way through all the other swimmers, Guy in close pursuit. But soon I began to flag, whereas to my consternation Mosseri simply kept coming after me, inexorably, expressionlessly. The chase became even grimmer, blown out of proportion by my feeling of crushing failure. As he closed in I started to slow down, a sign that “Edward” had given up, only to discover that some new energy was propelling my legs and arms farther and farther away from Mosseri, who was perplexed by the sudden change in the relationship between hunter and hunted. A few minutes later he simply stopped and could not go on.

  Such episodes were rare. CSAC forced me to take “Edward” more seriously as a flawed, frightened, uncertain construction than I ever had before. The overall sensation I had was of my troublesome identity as an American inside whom lurked another Arab identity from which I derived no strength, only embarrassment and discomfort. I saw in Stan Henry and Alex Miller the much more enviable, rocklike hardness of an identity at one with the reality. Jean-Pierre Sabet, Malak Abu-el-Ezz, even Albert Coronel—who, though obviously Egyptian and Jewish, carried a Spanish passport—all could be themselves, they had nothing to hide, had no American part to play. Once during my second year there, when a new older boy, Bob Simha, appeared, I thought I might have found a companion when my parents explained to me that the name Simha was Arab and Jewish. I tried to discover a hidden affinity between us, but he seemed mystified by my questions about relatives he might have had in Aleppo or Baghdad. “Nah,” he told me with dismissive impatience, “I’m from New Rochelle.” It was from him that I learned the expression “Your father’s mustache.”

  Daily at school I felt the disparity between my life as “Edward,” a false, even ideological, identity, and my home life, where my father’s prosperity as an American businessman flourished after the war. After 1946, he and my mother began their at least twice-yearly European, later also Asian and American, travels, and because I was the only son, and my father never stopped being the owner and promoter of his far-flung business interests, I was expected to take an interest in his enterprises. A long series of companies, whose representative (“agent” was the word used then) he was, entered our lives, the house, and our daily speech; nearly all of their products found their way into number 1 Sharia Aziz Osman, apartment 20, fifth floor: Sheaffer pens and Scripp ink, Art Metal steel furniture, Sebel chairs and tables, Chubb safes, Royal typewriters, Monroe calculators, Solingen stainless-steel scissors and knives, Ellam’s and A. B. Dick duplicators and spirit machines, Maruzen office supplies, Letts diaries, 3M tapes, copiers, and paints, Dictaphone recording and transcribing machines, plus English franking machines, a Swedish adding machine, a Chicago Automatic Typewriter, and the Weber-Costello globe company’s more recent additions.

  It was not only their products but their travelers that we came to know, especially one Alex Kaldor, a heavily accented Hungarian (or Rumanian: his origins were obscure and the subject of much speculation), a bachelor of roughly my father’s generation, a Royal typewriter voyageur who lived first class all across the globe. He turned up at least twice a year in Cairo, routinely coming by for drinks and taking my parents and, when I got to be about fourteen, me out to dinner. Kaldor was the first hardbitten cynic and expense account free-loader I met, but I liked his way of appearing to have done everything (except perhaps marriage) and to have been impressed with nothing, not even my father, whom he treated with patronizing amusement. He was fat and seemed addicted to Melba toast. I think I found him fascinating because he sounded like Bela Lugosi, whose films I was not permitted to see (“not for children”) but got to know a little about through the “coming attractions” snippets that accompanied films for children in the local cinemas.

  My father started traveling regularly after the war to the various offices and factories of his principals, suppliers, and associates. He always sought and obtained exclusive representations, so that he in turn could sell these products to other dealers and customers as the local principal. By the time I left Egypt his had become by far the largest office equipment and stationery business in the Middle East. And I also developed the same keenly competitive sense that he had for rival products, whom we treated as private enemies: Olivetti, Roneo, Parker, Gestetner, and Adler, among others, whose inferiority to “our lines,” as my father called them, we argued with considerable passion. By the same token, the principal salesmen and directors of divisions in the “shop” were also familiar to us as not quite family, but certainly more than just employees. Most of them endured, looking back on it now, with remarkable longevity; only one, a Mr. Panikian, the accountant, whose wife had protruding teeth and on their annual visit to our house showed off her musical skills by playing the piano with oranges, left for Australia in 1946 with their two sons; and, according to his successor in my father’s office, a substantial amount of the firm’s money turned out to be missing.

  The rest stayed for years and years, an odd assortment of Levantine minorities, Egyptian Muslims and Copts, and, after 1948, an increasing number of Palestinian refugees whom Auntie Nabiha pressed on my father to employ, which he unhesitatingly did. I later appreciated that what my father produced in the way of rational organization and incentives for each member of his ever-larger staff was unique not only to him, but to the Middle East: Lampas, a voluble Greek who was my father’s oldest employee, was shop manager; Peter, an Armenian, ran copiers and duplicating; Hagop and Nicola Slim, calculators; Leon Krisshevsky, typewriters; Sobhi, a Copt, furniture; Farid Tobgy, diaries and pens; Shimy was the storekeeper; Ahmad was the cashier. Each of them had a small battalion of assistants to command.

  In his office across the street my father had one female personal secretary, and one male Arabic secretary, Mohammed Abu of, a short bespectacled man with incredible patience and the kind of fastidious anality that one associates with a
ploddingly diligent, but not gifted, student who never graduated. During my childhood the female secretary was an alert, elegantly dressed Miss Anna Mandel, who would occasionally come to tea, then shortly after the battle at el-Alamein abruptly disappeared. She had started work for my father a year before his marriage in 1932, and I recall his conversation in my earliest years as dotted with frequent references to “Miss Mandel.” I later discovered that she had been made to leave my father’s employ by my mother, who, she told me quite calmly many years later, believed that Anna Mandel “had wanted to marry your father.” Did they have an affair? I asked. “She’d have liked that. No, of course not,” was the retort. I was never so sure. Most of the women (there were also a couple of men) who subsequently held the post with my mother’s approval or acquiescence tended to be extremely young and clumsy, or else overweight and middle-aged, ponderous and slow—not at all like Miss Mandel, whom I dimly remember as a sleek, carefully put together woman.