Out of Place: A Memoir

  I asked them whether they knew if Farid’s wife and boys, after emigrating to Australia, had left behind any address or been in touch with their old friends. Both of them said no—sadly, as if to signify that the chapter had been closed when Farid died. Alice brought out a carefully preserved marriage portrait of the young couple—Farid sporting a smart suit; plump, pretty Ada in a white taffeta dress—so that we might together muse on the fleeting moment of connubial repose they had once enjoyed. Later I was given the photograph to keep in acknowledgment perhaps of my continuing interest in the cause, effectively buried for so many years. “He was taken directly to prison—I heard this—and stripped of his clothing, as were we all. Surrounded by a circle of guards, we were then beaten with clubs and canes. Everyone called this the welcoming ceremony. Farid was directly taken off for interrogation, though he had already been severely hurt and seemed stunned and very shaky; he was asked whether he was a Russian doctor—we were all leftists and members of various Communist groups; his and mine was Workers and Peasants—and he replied, ‘No, I am an Arab doctor.’ The officer cursed him and flailed at Farid’s head for about ten seconds, then it was over. Farid rolled over dead.”

  Only after we left the Abu Seifs did it occur to me to ask them whether they knew that Farid’s father was a Palestinian—but it was too late. I surmised that to them he was mainly a comrade, a member (like them) of a Christian minority; perhaps also they thought of him as a Shami. I also speculated that given the substantial Jewish membership in the Egyptian Communist movement, Farid never made much of his potentially divisive origins. That I had never been able to discuss the question of Palestine with Farid during his lifetime is another example of its suppression as a political issue in my early life.

  But where Palestine played an even more problematic, though equally mysterious, role by virtue of silence and, in my case, partial ignorance was in the slowly developing conflict between my father and his business partners—my cousins and my aunt Nabiha. George, her second son, and his wife, Huda, had come to Cairo just a few months before Palestine fell in mid-1948. When Yousif and his wife, Aida, came a short time afterward via Amman, there was considerable tension in the air between the two younger men and my father. As a family we were thrust together even more, now that there was no Jerusalem to return to. But the big question was, who was in charge, and that question rested on a narrative and its interpretation that differed strongly between their branch of the family and ours. For me, my mother played the role of chief historian and of course loyal interpreter. True, she said, Uncle Boulos (my father’s first cousin and his sister’s husband) founded the business in Jerusalem around 1910. But it was a small, mainly bookselling and stationery shop until Wadie came back from the United States around 1920. He put some money—no one knew exactly how much, since, my mother always said, he never kept records—into his cousin’s Palestine Educational Company and they soon became equal partners. According to my mother, Wadie brought in a lot of new American ideas, galvanizing the business into venturesome routes and unexpected prosperity.

  A few years later he went to Egypt, Palestine seeming to him to be too small and restricted a place, and in Cairo he established Standard Stationery, acquiring the agencies for companies like Royal typewriters, Sheaffer pens, Art Metal furniture, Monroe calculators, which were familiar to me from childhood. Soon Cairo outstripped Palestine in sales. During this period (1929–40), the claim was later made by my older cousins and, I gathered, Aunt Nabiha, that Boulos was always in charge. They had preserved hundreds of pages of Boulos’s handwritten letters to my father in Cairo to prove it. I recall seeing only one of these letters, since my father, intent on his work, was oblivious of the need for keeping records, in contrast to his cousin’s almost Jesuitical mania for writing down and keeping everything in pitiless detail. My cousins evidently had the carbon copies of these long, haranguing letters, and with these in the overheated atmosphere of the post-1948 period the younger men were able to demonstrate to their satisfaction that my father had always been regarded as a second-rate manager, a partner who needed to be kept in check by an older, wiser executive who was really in charge and knew how to run a business properly, even from a great distance.

  George and Yousif, perhaps urged on in this deeply awful struggle by my aunt, who somehow managed to remain extremely close to her brother, seemed to provoke crisis after crisis in my father’s office. We were afforded only the merest glimpse of these through my mother’s often allusive and deliberately incomplete retellings. With his quasi-Baconian, quasi-evasive, quasi-inarticulate unwillingness to deal with the past as something to be recounted, analyzed, evaluated, my father was probably able to express his shocked, and very angry, reactions to his nephews’ provocations only to his wife. It seems he was regularly held accountable for such things as overextending the firm’s credit, for being too much of a “salesman”—the word taking on a nasty, demeaning aspect as it was applied to him—and for being unwilling to let the two younger men assume more responsibility. I remember my father’s asking me once, undoubtedly alluding to his executive-minded nephews’ denigration of salesmen, what the hell were we all about if not selling, using salesmen with salesmanship to get it done. Shortly after his arrival in Cairo, Yousif was given the Alexandria business to manage, but came back to the capital after a few unhappy months in what he considered to be the provinces. In the meantime, as a result of the whole family’s peculiar tight-lipped and formalistic social attitudes, we used to have regular family get-togethers, lunches, dinners, and picnics, at our house or under my father’s aegis without so much as the slightest trace of tension being apparent to us children.

  By the time I departed Cairo in 1951 for what I felt was my American banishment, the whole relationship between the Cairo and Jerusalem branches of our family was, from a business point of view, irreparably damaged. I felt then that the disappearance of Palestine itself was at the bottom of this, but neither I nor any other member of my family could say exactly how or why. There was a fundamental dissonance that we all experienced, as foreigners in Egypt without recourse to our real point of origin. The frequency of references to passports, residence or identity cards, citizenship, and nationality increased at the same rate as our vulnerability to the changing political situation in Egypt and the Arab world. During 1948, 1949, and 1950 the British presence in Egypt diminished, as did the power and prestige of the monarchy. In July 1952 the Free Officers’ Revolution occurred, directly threatening our interests as a well-off family of foreigners, with little support inside Egyptian society for our kind. I have the impression that my cousins—by virtue of their youth, better knowledge of Arabic, willingness (at first) to manage with the status quo—initially were not as alienated in Egypt as my father. This increased the tension considerably. My father told his own children almost literally nothing, but I was once informed by my mother that George—who had always seemed to me a benign, bespectacled, somewhat professorial type when he came for dinner and played Chopin’s E-flat Grande Valse Brilliante and the Schubert Marche Militaire on the piano—and my father had actually come to blows. This was tremendously exciting and I was torn between the satisfaction that someone else besides me had endured my father’s blows and the unrealistic hope that perhaps my father was at last the victim of a stronger antagonist.

  Always, the issue was the dispute over decision-making, which, because authority seemed not totally to derive from Jerusalem and the past (as Yousif’s did), made my father seem more and more embattled, at the same time that as a group (my aunt, her children, and the seven of us) with an anomalous national status we seemed to be thrust closer and closer. I was conscious how my father’s past, his money (since by now I was hopelessly tongue-tied by guilty shame and inhibition when it came to talking to him about money), Palestine, the simmering interfamilial disagreements were—like sex—off limits to me, a set of issues I couldn’t raise or in any way allude to.

  My mother spoke repeatedly of how regrett
able it was that “your father” or “Daddy” never replied to Boulos’s hectoring letters from Jerusalem, and that being so decent a man he never even kept the letters, so that it was always Yousif who would badger him with a text, leaving my father always at a loss, the atmosphere heavy with allusion and unspoken charges and countercharges, so much so that we were cautioned about what to say in front of my aunt, and not to accept lunch invitations. Then suddenly, in the late spring of 1948, with the family battles intensifying and the political situation worsening, my father announced to us that except for my two youngest sisters, Joyce, five, and Grace, two, we were going to America. I did not fully grasp the extraordinary step we were taking.

  That spring I had been thrown even more intensely together with American fellow students at the CSAC because of a musical play the school had put on in which I was, surprisingly, given a part (largely because of my swarthy appearance, I suspected). It was called Enchanted Isle, a heavily sentimental Americanization of Chopin’s sojourn on Mallorca with George Sand, a story whose love interest was highlighted by the presence of a Spanish family—I played Papa Gomez, and Margaret Osborn, a tenth-grader, played Mama Gomez—whose young daughter falls temporarily in love with the worldly and enviably brilliant Chopin, who was acted by Bob Fawcett, a pimply American with a pleasant tenor voice.

  The whole idea of a play as a “school activity” was new to me; at GPS, which also put on theater pieces, most of the physical work was done by servants, the acting tightly controlled by one teacher, the students (even the gifted Micheline Lindell) treated as pawns by one overweening pedagogue-director. For Enchanted Isle even the younger children were given something to do, from being stagehands to acting as supernumeraries; there were student carpenters, and painters, and prompters, and chorus members. All of us were supervised (the word is a shade too strong) by Miss Ketchum, an energetic, toothy twenty-six-year old, who was an English teacher and all-purpose activities director. I recall with embarrassment once shattering the quiet of the “study hall” (a division of the schoolday unknown to English schools) by asking her in a rather loud voice what the word “rape” meant. Miss Ketchum—occasionally abetted by the older, extremely high-strung Miss Guille—guided us through the inanities of Enchanted Isle, in which my role as elderly father of the simpering Conchita was to redirect her attention away from Chopin to Juan, a semimoronic village boy who was deemed to be her equal. Every brief exchange between the characters was succeeded by a “number” based in (to me) annoyingly simplified, four-square and hymnlike adaptations of Chopin’s Berceuse, the “Military” Polonaise, the E-flat Valse Brilliante, and the D-flat melody from the Funeral March, which reemerged in Enchanted Isle as a spirited if somewhat bizarre love duet.

  I found the proceedings extremely discomfiting: as a twelve-and-a-half-year-old impersonating a late-middle-aged man, a father, husband, Spaniard, against a background of mutilated, jazzed-up Chopin, to say nothing of the American group feeling that left me even more alienated and improbable than I had been before Enchanted Isle. It was in the middle of all this that our impending trip was announced, and I in turn sheepishly reported it to my indifferent fellow-actors. There were to be two performances of the play, to the second of which my parents came, my father in particular being impressed with the fact, he said, that I already had acquired a wife. My mother hugged me with her characteristically enveloping warmth, whereas I felt both irritated and embarrassed by what my father said. We stood around with the other parents and actors, drinking punch, chatting amiably to various skittish teachers. Only the redoubtable Miss Clark maintained her ponderous gravity, smoking and drinking at a distance from the rest, her auburn hair done up in a threatening, top-heavy bun. My father spent much time vainly looking for “the American minister,” who was in charge of “the American legation,” a favorite subject of his lunchtime conversation (it had not yet become an embassy: the British were still the grander, albeit steadily diminishing, Cairo presence).

  All of this preceded our embarkation from Alexandria by one day. Rosemarie, Jean, and I were quickly shepherded by our mother onto the Italian liner Saturnia from a sun-baked, teeming Alexandria pier, where my father followed us handing out tips and tersely uttered commands to the small army of local porters who were carrying our many leather suitcases. Although I had heard about the Italian liners from school friends, I had never encountered something so foreign, so vast, so utterly unfamiliar. Everything about it, from the language to the shiny white uniforms of steward and officer alike to the shimmering table settings and the unlimited, non-Arabic food to the ingeniously arranged cabins with their neat little portholes and politely purring overhead fans, fascinated me. No sooner had we reemerged on deck to watch the ship’s majestically slow departure than my father (using the half-affectionate, half-mocking “Eddy boy” he used after I started at CSAC) announced to me that “your wife is on board.” There was mischief in his eyes as he told me the good news, knowing how embarrassed I’d be. Beyond the sort of standard companionship I witnessed between my parents, and also among their friends, I had no idea at all what a wife was, although I sensed an undercurrent of naughty behavior in the word, as it applied to me, a risible Papa Gomez whose stage wife, Margaret Osborn, happened also to be on the Saturnia.

  I saw her only once as she bounced past me down a staircase, but we exchanged no greetings or even a gesture of recognition. My father often asked me about her, and this increased the distance between us. My sisters and I were barely conscious that our trip was really undertaken because my father was in need of medical attention; he never mentioned anything about any illness, although my mother, in her usual “this really isn’t something you ought to worry your little head with” manner, had made a mystifying allusion to some great American doctor whom they were planning to see. The reason for the journey was never brought up again on the Saturnia. My father played a great deal of bridge, joining us for dinner or lunch in the spacious first-class dining room, or much less frequently for consommé at eleven on the main deck. Once on board I alternated between moments of anxiety about my father’s health (which took me back to the troubling Ramallah days of the summer of 1942), compounded by his sudden jibes and lectures on the dangers of self-abuse, my worsening posture, and my habits as a spendthrift, and longer moments of self-forgetting delights in the luxury of shipboard life. I participated in shuffleboard, Ping-Pong, and almost nightly games of bingo, and allowed myself great long exploratory trips all over the generously endowed ship, which I experienced rather strangely as a welcoming, totally benign female presence.

  To my delight I discovered that I was impervious to the ravages of heavy weather. While everyone else in my family was miserable and confined to their quarters as we crossed the straits of Messina pitching and heaving mercilessly, I luxuriated in the solitude of the empty lounges, bars, recreation areas, and decks. There were plenty of American magazines, nightly films, a miniature dance band playing to deserted ballrooms, and dozens of white-suited Italian attendants whose anonymity, I thought, matched mine perfectly as they kept me amused and very well fed.

  The Saturnia made stops in Athens, Naples, Genoa, Marseilles, and Gibralter. Except for Gibralter, we were driven around each drab, war-ravaged city for a few hours, followed by a nondescript lunch at a local restaurant, before returning to the ship and our voyage. Naples alone felt like a treat, because after a hasty visit to Pompeii, where we were forbidden to look at the “not-for-children” mosaics, we had a spaghetti lunch near the harbor; there we could see and hear a boatman sing “Santa Lucia,” Caruso’s recording of which was one of my father’s favorites. But what I most remember about all our day trips was the sense of us as a self-enclosed little group, a sort of dirigible suspended above new strange places, making our way through foreign cities but remaining untouched by them.

  When we first arrived in New York the question of my mother’s status as a nonperson after the fall of Palestine once again became urgent. The main difficulty was that
in order for her to have a more durable U.S. passport she would have to reside there, and this she refused to do. Every government or lawyer’s office we visited in New York told her that residency was required. Both my parents were understandably opposed to this, and for the next seven or eight years the search for some device to circumvent the two-year residency requirement was carried on with undiminished zeal.

  The irony of my mother’s fruitless search for citizenship is that after 1956, through the intervention of the Lebanese ambassador in Egypt, she successfully applied for Lebanese citizenship, and until her death in 1990 traveled on a Lebanese passport, on which, mystifyingly, her birthplace was changed from Nazareth to Cairo. Even in the fifties, the seeds of the Lebanese Civil War having already been planted twenty years early, I speculated that it was apparently deemed less objectionable to be of Egyptian than of Palestinian origin. All was well until the late seventies, almost a decade after my father’s death, when being the holder of a Lebanese passport exposed her to great difficulties both in getting visas to Europe or the United States and in going through immigration lines: being Lebanese had suddenly become synonymous with having a potential for terrorism, and so, incongruously, my fastidiously proud mother felt herself to be re-stigmatized. Once again we made inquiries about citizenship—after all, as the widow of a First World War veteran and the mother of five citizens, she seemed roundly eligible for the honor—and once again she was told she had to reside in the United States. And again she refused, preferring the rigors of life in Beirut without phones, electricity, and water to the comforts of New York or Washington. Then she was stricken with a recurrence of her breast cancer, originally operated on in January 1983 by a Beirut surgeon. She knew perhaps that the end was near, even though she also refused chemotherapy, for fear, she said to me, of the side effects. She bought herself a condominium in Chevy Chase, Maryland, in 1987 and—with her visitor’s visa—stayed on for longer and longer periods of time, regularly seeing her doctor, whom she liked but whose counsel she stubbornly refused. One of those visas ran out as she lost consciousness in March 1990, and my sister Grace, who was living with and selflessly caring for her, found herself involved in deportation hearings as my mother approached her very last days. The case was ultimately thrown out of court by an irate judge who scolded the Immigration and Naturalization Service lawyer for trying to deport a comatose woman in her mid-seventies.