Out of Place: A Memoir

  By comparison the Stokowski recording of Beethoven’s Ninth (the chorus sang Schiller’s “An die Freude” in English—“Joy, thou daughter of Elysium”) elated me in its explanation of freedom and the eerie mystery of the open fifths with which it began, and what I heard jealously as the orchestra’s routine ease in getting flawlessly through scales and difficult figurations, which I unconsciously tried to transpose to mental finger positions that my inexpert fingers denied me on the piano. I reveled in “Salomes Tanz,” as the brown record label advertised it, or in Paderewski’s recording of Beethoven’s F-sharp Nocturne and the C-sharp-minor Waltz, which I considered the ultimate in, and the opposite of, my miserably inadequate pianism.

  The greatest musical experiences of my adolescent Cairo years were visits in 1950 and 1951 by Clemens Krauss and Wilhelm Furtwängler with the Vienna and Berlin philharmonics, respectively. Although in both cases I was taken to the Sunday afternoon performances, stuffed in Krauss’s case with lollipops like the Donna Diana overture and Strauss’s Pizzicato Polka, I was liberated from every pedestrian consideration by the gorgeous sound, the authoritative presence on the podium, and even the magic of the German names (Wiener Philharmoniker, for instance). Never having heard anything on this scale of such direct opulent virtuosity before, I remember how exhilarated I felt and how I tried by every means available to prolong and extend the experience beyond the measly two hours I had been given at the Rivoli Cinema (I have never understood why the Rivoli, an extravagantly ornate movie palace, complete with a vibrato-rich, throbbingly sugary neon-lit theater organ and English organist—Gerald Peal, a pink-faced showman whose acrobatic leaps onto and off the majestically ascending and descending instrument amused me more than his endless Ketelby renditions and tame-Latin dance rhythms—was chosen for Krauss and Furtwängler over the more appropriately serious Ewart). Mostly this meant trying to keep the music in my ear, conducting an imaginary orchestra, looking unsuccessfully for records that were far too expensive for my means that featured the same pieces by the same orchestra and conductor. I was depressed, indeed, often quite sad, at how fast such rare pleasure came and went, and how I spent so much of my time later trying not only to reexperience them but also to confirm them by seeking out books, articles, people who would tell me about them, affirm their truth and pleasure, revive in me what seemed to be on the verge of total disappearance.

  A year after Krauss, Furtwängler also stood on the Rivoli podium on a Sunday afternoon. This was the overpowering musical performance of my first twenty-two years of life, approached only when in 1958 I heard the opening measures of Das Rheingold rising out of the black Bayreuth pit. I knew nothing at all about Furtwängler, except for his name as it appeared on the red HMV labels in his recording of Beethoven’s Fifth: for at least five years that recording was my favorite, the touchstone by which I judged all other musical performances, the summit of an indescribable force that seemed to travel out of our Stewart-Warner stand-up radio-gramophone to address me directly. At first it was Furtwängler’s name that was the source of that power: I repeated it often to myself (I had no knowledge of German) and imagined Furtwängler to be a wonderfully built, super-refined being for whom Beethoven’s music had been written expressly. I remember how with considerable impatience I once dismissed a cousin’s amateurish speculation that the Fifth’s motto was “Fate’s knocking at the door.” What I discerned in the piece, thanks to Furtwängler, was something I believed instinctively to be without any such concept. “Music is music,” I remember responding, partly out of impatience, partly out of my inability to articulate what it was about the music that moved me so specifically and wordlessly.

  We always sat in the same balcony seats—in those days the balcony seemed to be reserved for what my father called “a better class of people”—as for Krauss, who seemed in retrospect to be a stodgy businessmanlike figure. Besides, Furtwängler’s program, like his appearance, was more challenging: the Schubert “Unfinished,” the Mozart G-minor, Beethoven’s Fifth. On his other program, to which I was not taken, was Tchaikovsky’s Sixth, plus Bruckner’s Seventh: my parents had drawn the obvious conclusion that only Program 1 was suitable for me, and it may have been the unknown “Bruckner” that put them off. Furtwängler’s gaunt, angularly tall and ungainly figure crowned with a majestically bald pate made just the right impression on me: here was an ascetic other-worldly musician whose figure symbolized to me the transfiguration that music such as Beethoven’s necessarily required. I was struck that unlike the fluent Krauss, Furtwängler did not so much conduct (with an unusually small baton, as I remember) as actually move the music with his shoulders and awkwardly long arms. He did not use a score, and consequently there was no page turning and pedantic time beating à la Hans Hickman, the local classical orchestra leader. Instead I had the impression of music as unfolding with an inexorable, totally absorbing and fulfilling logic, unfolding before me as I had never before experienced, without any “mistakes” of the kind that crippled me with Cherry, without the need to pause for a record change, without any sound but that of Beethoven. I also sensed that this was better, and therefore rarer, than any experience a record might have produced, although of course I felt a kind of delicious regret after it was over and could never again be recovered except through the approximations available to me either mechanically or in flawed memory. When I played Furtwängler’s recording of the Fifth it gave me pleasure, but not the satisfaction I had enjoyed in the theater; the replica was displaced once and for all by the real thing. Yet I still cherished the work as a particularly favored item to be played and replayed.

  My later efforts to find out more about Furtwängler were utterly frustrated by the Cairo of my adolescence. There was no German circle in postwar Cairo to rival the cultural institutions of the triumphant British, French, or Americans. I ransacked the papers—the Ahram, Egyptian Gazette, Progrès Egyptien, as well as periodicals like Rose el Yousef and al-Hilal—for information on him, but there was none to be had. The city was beginning to be flooded with American movie-fan magazines like Photoplay and Silver Screen, and whereas you could find out all about Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, there was nothing comparable about the strange (to my friends) figures who interested me. The war was over, of course, but any documentation of what had happened inside Germany (where Furtwängler figured so prominently) was unavailable. On my fifteenth birthday, in 1950, my parents had given me Percy Scholes’s Oxford Companion to Music, which I still own, and which had a tiny entry for Furtwängler (“German conductor born in 1886; see ‘Germany and Austria’ ”) that elaborated upon a bit in a general but very oblique discussion of music under the Third Reich, and Furtwängler’s role in the Mathis der Maler case. This gave no sense of why he was so controversial a figure after the war, or that the question of morality and collaboration had so powerful a bearing on him.

  One of the main reasons for the relatively limited way in which I experienced Furtwängler was my sense of time as something essentially primitive and constricting. Time seemed forever against me, and except for a brief period in the morning when I sensed the day ahead as a possibility, I was boxed in by schedules, chores, assignments, with not a moment for leisurely enjoyment or reflection. I was given my first watch, an insipid-looking Tissot, at age eleven or twelve; for several days I spent hours staring at it obsessively, mystified by my inability to see its movement, constantly worried whether it had stopped or not. I suspected at first that it was not entirely new, since there seemed to be something suspiciously worn about it, but was assured by my parents that it was indeed new, and that its slightly yellowed (tinged with orange) face was characteristic of the model. There the discussion ended. But the watch obsessed me. I compared it first with what my CSAC schoolmates wore, which, except for the Mickey Mouse and Popeye models that symbolized the America I didn’t belong to, struck me as inferior to mine. There was an early period of experimenting with different ways of wearing it: the face turned inward; on the sleeve; underneath i
t; fastened tightly; fastened loosely; pushed forward onto my wrist; and on the right hand. I ended up with it on my left wrist, where for a long time it gave me the decidedly positive feeling of being dressed up.

  But the watch never failed to impress me with its unimpeded forward movement, which in nearly every way added to my feeling of being behind and at odds with my duties and commitments. I do not recall ever being much of a sleeper, but I do remember the faultless punctuality of early-morning reveille and the immediate sense of anxious urgency I felt the moment I got out of bed. There was never any time to dawdle or loiter, though I was inclined to both. I began a lifelong habit then of simultaneously experiencing time as awasting, and of resisting it by subjectively trying to prolong the time I had by doing more and more (reading furtively, staring out the window, looking for a superfluous object like a penknife or yesterday’s shirt) in the few moments left to me before the inexorable deadline. My watch was sometimes of help, when it showed me that there was time left, but most often it guarded my life like a sentinel, on the side of an external order imposed by parents, teachers, and inflexible appointments.

  In my early adolescence I was completely in the grip, at once ambiguously pleasant and unpleasant, of time passing as a series of deadlines—an experience that has remained with me ever since. The day’s milestones were set relatively early in that period and have not varied. Six-thirty (or in cases of great pressure six; I still use the phrase “I’ll get up at six to finish this”) was time to get up; seven-thirty started the meter running, at which point I entered the strict regime of hours and half-hours governed by classes, church, private lessons, homework, piano practice, and sports, until bedtime. This sense of the day divided into periods of appointed labor has never left me, has indeed intensified. Eleven a.m. still imbues me with a guilty awareness that the morning has passed without enough being accomplished—it is eleven-twenty as I write these very words—and nine p.m. still represents “lateness,” that moment which connotes the end of the day, the hastening need to begin thinking about bed, the time beyond which to do work means to do it at the wrong time, fatigue and a sense of having failed all creeping up on one, time slowly getting past its proper period, lateness in fact in all the word’s senses.

  My watch furnished the basic motif underlying all this, a kind of impersonal discipline that somehow kept the system in order. Leisure was unavailable. I recall with stunning clarity my father’s early injunction against remaining in pajamas and dressing gown past the early-morning hours; slippers in particular were objects of contempt. I still cannot spend any time at all lounging in a dressing gown: the combined feeling of time-wasting guilt and lazy impropriety simply overwhelms me. As a way of getting around the discipline, illness (sometimes feigned, sometimes exaggerated) made life away from school positively acceptable. I became the family joke for being especially gratified by, even soliciting, an unnecessary bandage on my finger, knee, or arm. And now by some devilish irony I find myself with an intransigent, treacherous leukemia, which ostrichlike I try to banish from my mind entirely, attempting with reasonable success to live in my system of time, working, sensing lateness and deadlines and that feeling of insufficient accomplishment I learned fifty years ago and have so remarkably internalized. But, in another odd reversal, I secretly wonder to myself whether the system of duties and deadlines may now save me, although of course I know that my illness creeps invisibly on, more secretly and insidiously than the time announced by my first watch, which I carried with so little awareness then of how it numbered my mortality, divided it up into perfect, unchanging intervals of unfulfilled time forever and ever.

  VI

  ON NOVEMBER 1, 1947—MY TWELFTH BIRTHDAY—I RECALL the puzzling vehemence with which my oldest Jerusalem cousins, Yousif and George, bewailed the day, the eve of the Balfour Declaration, as “the blackest day in our history.” I had no idea what they were referring to but realized it must be something of overwhelming importance. Perhaps they and my parents, sitting around the table with my birthday cake, assumed that I shouldn’t be informed about something as complex as our conflict with the Zionists and the British.

  My parents, sisters, and I spent most of 1947 in Palestine, which we left for the very last time in December of that year. As a consequence I missed several months of CSAC and was enrolled at St. George’s School in Jerusalem.

  The signs of impending crisis were all round us. The city had been divided into zones maintained by British Army and police checkpoints, through which cars, pedestrians, and cyclists had to pass. The adults in my family all carried passes marked with the zone or zones for which they were valid. My father and Yousif had multizone passes (A, B, C, D); the rest were restricted to one or perhaps two zones. Until I turned twelve I did not need a pass and so had been allowed to wander about freely with my cousins Albert and Robert. Gray and sober Jerusalem was a city tense with the politics of the time as well as the religious competition between the various Christian communities, and between Christians, Jews, and Muslims. My aunt Nabiha once gave us a big scolding for going to the Regent, a Jewish cinema (“Why not stick to the Arabs? Isn’t the Rex good enough?” she asked rather shrilly. “After all, they don’t come to our cinemas!”), and even though we were sorely tempted to go back to the Regent we never did so again. Our daily conversation in school and home was uniformly in Arabic; unlike in Cairo, where English was encouraged, our family in Jerusalem “belonged” and our native language prevailed everywhere, even when talking about Hollywood films: Tarzan became “Tarazan” and Laurel and Hardy “al Buns wal ra” (“Fatso and the Thin Man”).

  I went to St. George’s School each morning, usually with my twin cousins Robert and Albert. Always the leader, Albert was a captain and a star at the school, and a year ahead of Robert, who was not athletic, and gregariously one of the boys. I was a junior figure, enrolled in the seventh primary, part of the lower school, across the street from the more elevated senior place where my two cousins studied. St. George’s was the first all-male school I went to, and the first with which I had a deeper connection than with the ones in Cairo, where I was just a fees-paying stranger. My father and, I think, my grandfather had gone there, as had most male members of my family except Uncle Asaad (Al), who had been at Bishop Gobat’s. For a couple of days I felt that the absence of girls and women teachers gave the school a slightly harsher atmosphere, rougher, more physical, far less genteel than the establishments I had known in Cairo. But very quickly I felt totally at home; for the first and last time in my school life I was among boys who were like me. Nearly every member of my class was known to my family; for weeks after I started school my parents, aunts, and Yousif either asked me questions about “the Saffoury boy in your class” or made casual, well-informed comments about a Dajani or Jamal classmate whose 107 parents or uncles and aunts were their friends.

  The teachers were mostly British, although I had two, Michel Marmoura, an older contemporary of Albert’s and son of the Anglican pastor, and Mr. Boyagian, a Jerusalem Armenian and a young boy during my father’s time, who weren’t. The one woman on the premises was Miss Fenton, who occasionally sat in for the regular English teacher. Black-haired, sandal-shod Miss Fenton, a slim figure in her white blouse and navy skirt, struck me as dashingly attractive. I had far too little interaction with her, too little occasion for time away from the rough-and-tumble boys’ and masters’ world I inhabited. And so she remained a romantic figure, someone whose graceful presence gave me private pleasure as she floated through the primary school’s arcades, or as I glimpsed her through a window in the staff tearoom. Many years later, I discovered she was the aunt of the poet James Fenton. At the opposite extreme was Mr. Sugg, a seriously lame Englishman whose name when pronounced brought forth peals of sadistic laughter for his appearance and his stutter. One of the first British academic misfits I met, he was a man who seemed disconnected from the (perhaps too) complicated realities of the school he served and the students he tried on the whole unsucces
sfully to teach. Neither the class nor I was attentive to, much less taken by, the droning lessons on geography that he offered; in his stiff collar and eternally beige suit, he was a creature from another world, full of Danubes, Thameses, Apennines, and Antarctic wastes, none of which made any impression on the indifferent and resolutely self-involved boys.

  My class was divided equally between mainly Christians and Muslims, boarders and day students. Michel Marmoura, who taught mathematics, belonged to a world that was very soon to face dissolution and exile in the cataclysms of 1948. He was a gentle and acutely intelligent teacher who despite his nervousness at being a family friend of most of the students (and son of the cathedral dean who had baptized me) taught us the rudiments of fractions with considerable skill. I have seen him over the years in Madison, Wisconsin, and Princeton, and later in Toronto, where he now lives; the pathos of his shattered past has never left him. The rest of St. George’s academic offering made no mark on me: it combined indifferent teaching, a volatile atmosphere, and, as I look back on it fifty years later, a general sense of purposeless routine trying to maintain itself as the country’s identity was undergoing irrevocable change. Already too tall and developed to look my age, when I turned twelve and needed a pass just to go to school, nervous Tommies at the barbed-wire barricade peered into my satchel, and examined my zone pass suspiciously, their unfriendly foreign eyes looking me over as a possible source of trouble.