Out of Place: A Memoir, Page 20

  In the early days, there was often a decrease in the number of cars as we climbed the dramatically hairpinned road to Bikfaya, the large town just below Dhour that I knew for its famous peaches and a fantastic red-and-tinsel-colored toy shop, “Kaiser Amer.” It was only later, in the 1970s, that I knew it as the family seat of the Gemayel family. Pierre Gemayel, impressed with the German brownshirts he saw at the 1936 Olympics, was the founder of the extreme-right Maronite party, the Phalanges Libanaises, and was father of two Lebanese presidents—Bashir, whose assassination in September 1982 unleashed the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps perpetuated by his pro-Israel henchmen, and Amin, who ran a regime drenched in corruption and incompetence. Bikfaya then acquired a sinister reputation as rabidly anti-Palestinian, and I have avoided it and Dhour for almost two decades.

  Above Bikfaya the road became steeper and more treacherous, with still fewer cars and the views were usually obscured by the great washes of afternoon fog sweeping across the peaks through which we chugged, the two heavily loaded cars struggling against the dramatically steep inclines. When we finally entered Dhour, through the little suburb of Douar, I would feel the combination of mournfulness and impending dread that the place always induced.

  For our summers we lived in an unfurnished rented Dhour house, since despite his wealth my father told me many times that he did not trust real estate, and consequently spent his life outside Palestine in rented residences. This was an important part of my parents’ plan for summer living and the houses were as plain, unadorned, and free of ornament or luxury as they could find. In 1944 a truckload of wooden furniture was being moved in just as we arrived that June. In stark contrast to the comfort and plushness of what we had left behind in Cairo, I saw a collection of rather rickety, splinter-filled, badly finished wooden cupboards, tables, and chairs that my father had ordered from Beirut. This ugly spartan furniture followed us around the various houses we rented in Dhour, until 1946, when we took the second floor of a big square house in an impressive terrace which would be our summer abode for the next twenty-four years. The seven beds had identical metal frames hastily painted in a white that never stopped peeling, as well as formidable springs that looked like something out of a medieval torture chamber. The living-room furniture was confected out of a couple of low daybeds that my mother covered with something she had brought from Cairo, in addition to a few cushions slung across the wall behind them. There were no pictures anywhere.

  The idea was that we would lead an austere, rustic, minimally comfortable existence stripped of any amenities that my father considered to be either too urban or too luxurious. We were not allowed to have a radio in the house until 1949. I vividly recall how on the cool August 1949 afternoon when I first had the little radio to myself I heard the BBC announce Richard Strauss’s death, then crackle and fade gently off the air, and how when we returned to Cairo I wrote in the date next to his name in my one-volume music encyclopedia. A telephone was allowed in around 1954, and a car in 1956. Except for our maids Ensaf and later her sister Souad, our cook Hassan (in the village he was always referred to demeaningly by the natives as al-bd, “black slave”) had to endure about five years of Dhour before my father allowed my mother some local help: an aged and wrinkled crone known as Um Najm who did the washing and bread baking, and a different younger woman each year for general housecleaning and kitchen help. The electricity and hot water were highly unreliable, and a bath required several hours of wood burning in the mammoth qazan, or stove. In 1953, at my mother’s importuning, a spinet piano was rented for me to play, but it was installed in my room for fear that it might create too civilized an impression in the main room. What books we had in the house were brought in strictly limited quantities from Cairo, since weight and space were important considerations. In Dhour, the only bookshop was a branch of Stematazky’s installed in an unrefurbished garage and staffed by an erudite-looking, vaguely clerical man in open sandals and massive black-rimmed spectacles who carried an extensive line of comics and movie magazines, plus a few paperback murder mysteries for which I never developed a taste. I would forage for books at the houses of my mother’s relatives, and was later able to purchase them in Beirut. Dhour drove me further into the world of print, which because I had so little time to read in Cairo became for me a precious respite from the abysmal vacancy of my life there.

  For my father the idea of Dhour was to be as far away as possible, in every sense, from his Cairo business world and all that it entailed: cars, employees, phones, business suits, papers, and the city. Rest, rest, rest. For him this meant hours and hours spent either at the bridge table at the Hotel Salwa in the morning or the Cirque Café in the afternoons, or playing backgammon on the terrace with a local friend or a visitor from Beirut, Jerusalem, or even Cairo. Had it not been for my mother’s insistence he would never have changed the green or maroon sport shirt, baggy beige trousers, scruffy brown shoes, hat, and cane that made up his uniform every day from earliest morning to bedtime. There were no morning newspapers to read, and so he began the day by sauntering off to town to visit Nicola Touma, an attractive and suave middle-aged fellow from Shweir whose clan was the largest one there. Touma’s grocery shop was amply stocked with everything from fruit and vegetables to toilet paper, soap, oil, and spices. Mysteriously to me, we never paid cash but said instead, “Put it on the account.” When the bill turned up in my mother’s hands every two weeks it would elicit cries of “What a rascal he is; I don’t remember any of these expenses.”

  To my father, normally a very hardbitten businessman, it did not matter what Nicola put on his bill; their relationship was engagingly social. Sitting at Nicola’s desk at the back of the shop, holding a cup of Turkish coffee in his hand, my father would nonchalantly survey the merchandise, ordering five kilos of this or that, two watermelons, five jars of jam, a kilo of figs (rarely available), and three pounds of cheese, which would be delivered by a slim boy on a tricycle who would have to push rather than ride the overladen vehicle up the very steep hill to the house. After his visit to Nicola my father would saunter down to Edmund Halabi’s ABC three doors down, and proceed to order masses of toilet articles needed by none of us. Next would be the butcher, then the coffee merchant, and then the pharmacy: for each of them, my father’s profligate orders must have been the sale of the day. Finally he would plant himself at a bridge table until it was time to amble home for lunch. In the meantime my mother, left with her children, without a phone or transport, would have to receive the seemingly endless succession of delivery boys, each one inducing greater cries of frustration and chagrin. Much of the merchandise would be sent back, and when my father finally turned up for his midday meal he would be greeted with a highly repetitious daily scolding delivered by my mother in a relentlessly querulous voice, his only occasionally raised in monosyllabic response as he ate his stringy chicken or tough grilled meat, apparently indifferent to her fury. After a siesta he would wander out again in search of more bridge, this time without the leisurely shopping stops, which would resume as inevitably as the sun rose the next morning.

  My father regarded Dhour as his opportunity to desert the strenuous post he held as parent, disciplinarian, and imperious master in Cairo. In Dhour my mother became my companion, with only very occasional breaks when I would strike up short-lived and temporary summer friendships with boys of my generation staying nearby. She was left the daily responsibility of running the house, which without the kind of help she had in Cairo was a stressful affair. The absence, in the beginning, of a telephone and a car with a driver isolated us and imposed a kind of powerlessness on her that she resented deeply. But knowing only how to comply with her designated role as head of household, she did not know how to protest and ask my father to improve her situation. My youngest sister, Grace, was born in March 1946, when Joyce was only two and a half years old, so she had two babies to care for in addition to her older children.

  The year 1946 was particularly t
rying for my mother. My father decided that his business required him to make his first American trip since he had left the States in 1920 to return to Palestine. Two weeks after we arrived in Dhour and quickly installed ourselves in the cavernous and inhospitable house, he took the laborious overland route back to Egypt, via Jerusalem, and embarked for the United States on the first direct commercial air service from Cairo to New York, TWA.

  His two-month absence—during which he sent occasional letters and (mainly) postcards—left my mother in a hyperenergized panic. The main purpose of her day seemed to be to get me out of the house and away from my volatile sisters for as long as possible. In order to do this my mother devised a continuous series of “errands,” as we both called them, which I, ten and a half years old, dreaded. At roughly eight-thirty I was sent off to Nicola’s, the butcher shop, and the bakery. There was nothing going on at that hour; even Abu Bahbouha, a grizzled, rough man missing several fingers who wore a filthy apron over his plaid shirt and sold hot peanuts off a little cart with a tiny smoky chimney, just outside the church, hadn’t appeared yet, and old Bou Fares, always wearing the darkest of dark glasses and his perdurable khakis, standing alongside the church, was just beginning to polish and then line up the ancient bicycles he rented out. It would be another year before I was allowed to rent one, though even then my father never thought it a “wise” practice anyway. The morning commuters to Beirut had already been to the saha to catch their taxis, so with the exception of Najib Farfar’s 1936 Ford, which still saw service as a local Dhour taxi, there were no cars about. Just a few shopkeepers, me, and clumps of buzzing flies and bees that went from the apricots in one store to the raw meat hanging in the doorway of another.

  A few loaves of bread were the only things I carried home about an hour later. Immediately after my arrival my mother would ask me to chase off after the tinker (sankary) and ask him to repair a leaking kitchen faucet. Then when the groceries had been delivered there were always two tomatoes, three eggplants, four lemons, and ten plums that had to be returned and replaced with better ones. “Your father has spoiled the man so much that he thinks he can get away with sending us his worst produce. Edward, tell him that I’m very angry!” It took me even longer for this third errand into town, mainly because I was extremely anxious about saying anything disapproving to the benevolent Nicola, who seemed to have reserved all his cordiality and good cheer for my father, his best client. When I deposited the offending stuff on his desk he barely looked up from one of his account books: “What’s the matter with these?” he would ask me coldly. I tried to pull the words out but would only sputter something incoherent that included the phrase “my mother,” to which he coldly replied: “Leave them there. I’ll look at them later,” meaning something that fell short of replacing them right away. I was faced either with the choice of returning home empty-handed and being sent back or facing down the sharp-eyed grocer myself, with little confidence in the demand. I settled on a complete evasion, which amazes me to this day for its unforeseen brilliance. “Could I have a cheese and pickle sandwich please?” I said firmly to Nicola, who languidly waved to one of his helpers to make the thing for me. “And put it on the account,” I added smartly as I wandered off with the delicious object in my hand.

  Later in the day Nicola would replace the offending items, and several additional errands were devised for me, until by sundown I was exhausted and incapable of much more than a tired slump with a novel before I went off to bed. The state of fatigue itself was not as unsettling as the alarming remoteness I felt in my mother. Our relationship of intimacy had soon been attached to one whose essence I now think was expressed in a scene I remember with unhappy clarity. One hot weekday morning she had sent me all the way to the Hotel Kassouf to take an electric iron wrapped in brown paper to a visiting friend from Cairo, Eugenie Farajallah. I returned home an hour and a half later, dead tired, thirsty, from the long walk through a most unappealing landscape. There were no side roads to consider, no shady spots, no springs, no other pedestrians, not a café or restaurant as I trudged along the endless narrow road heading east, all of it steep and barren. I remember also that this was the year my father had bought for me and insisted I wear a heavy khaki pith helmet; a salesman at Avierino’s, a men’s shop in Cairo’s Esbekiah district, had recommended it to him for me while my father was buying a handsome Panama for himself. The helmet’s inside band was disgustingly soggy with sweat as the ridiculous thing bore down on me, too cumbersome to take off and carry, hence fated to remain on me as I trudged along. As I wearily climbed the long dusty stairs that led from Dhour’s only road back to our house, I saw my mother standing on the balcony, dressed in a shapeless gray housedress, without makeup, her hair wrapped in the turban she wore in those years, waving to me with what I had hoped was a greeting on my return but in fact was a hail to attract my attention, to intercept me before I too securely began to climb the final set of stairs onto the terrace. In her right hand she was holding a black electrical cord: “Darling,” she said to me in English, not always a good sign, “I forgot to give you the cord for the iron. What must Eugenie be thinking? Please take this back up to the Kassouf right away.” A terrible feeling of fatigue and despondency overcame me.

  What had been a sustaining intimacy with my mother, during our Shakespeare readings, for instance, seemed suddenly to grow into something else, though here and there during the Dhour months she would give me a sign that some of our former life remained. In addition to a tattered Arabic hymnbook the Dhour house contained something called A Family Songbook, a mostly English collection we must have brought with us from Jerusalem or Cairo. Since I could read music well enough to sing some of the songs, I would often softly either hum or sing “The Minstrel Boy” or “John Peel” from the book to myself; overhearing me from her room my mother would call out a sentence of loving approbation, which quickly lifted a humdrum or merely uninteresting day into momentary happiness. My room, the only one on the kitchen side of the immense high-ceilinged living room and its dining room, heightened my sense of unfruitful isolation and always remained for me a symbol of Dhour’s underlyingly negative aura, despite the small downstairs garden amenities of a Ping-Pong table, a croquet set, a creaky swing that my father reluctantly accepted as part of our rustication.

  As I look back over those years, I can see the real anxiety induced in me by my mother’s withdrawal, where the need to reconnect with her was kept alive paradoxically by the obstacles she placed before me. She had become a taskmaster whose injunctions I had to fulfill. Yet the emptiness into which I fell during and after my errands when she gave little warmth or thanks genuinely bewildered me. The intelligence of our relationship was temporarily gone, in Dhour replaced by the series of drills set for me to keep me out of everyone’s way. Years later she would tell stories of my capacity for troublemaking as a child, and how she devised stupid, only occasionally useful, errands for me.

  It must also have been part of my parents’ plan to get me out of Cairo’s putative (because never actually seen or experienced) fleshpots during the summer, and deposit me in a place where there weren’t and could never have been any temptations. The only girls from these early Dhour days were one or two of my sisters’ friends, none of whom took any notice of me. Toward the end of July 1946 my mother’s youngest brother showed up from Palestine, and being of a more adventurous nature than his sister, offered to take us all out one night to see a numéro, as cabaret acts were called in those days, at Café Nasr, one of two far-stretching places—the other being Café Hawie—opposite each other about a hundred yards beyond the saha; they were both family enterprises, Nasr run by Elias Nasr and his sister, an attractive middle-aged spinster with an enormous phlebitic leg, and Hawie’s by the brothers Iskandar and Nicola Hawie. The two establishments seemed engaged in mortal commercial combat.

  Nasr had upped the stakes by bringing in what were advertised as “international” variety performers, mostly acrobats and dancers whose main att
raction, looking back on them now, was that the women wore skimpy costumes. That night we were crowded around a small table one back from the dance floor, and the main act was a pair of acrobats, George and Adele, whose last name seemed Hungarian. He was a short, muscular man in his mid-forties, and she was an only slightly younger blonde in a modified bikini that reminded me of Kalita, especially since she bent her body in similarly unnatural ways. Advertised as a nine p.m. “soirée,” the show didn’t start until a little past eleven, with lots of false starts and moments of fake urgency engineered by waiters who were obviously under strict orders to prod the customers into buying more food and drink “before we begin the numéro.” A tiresome wait for all of us, until a sustained snare drumroll brought out the two stars, complete with long silver cloaks, and flashy overly wide gold-toothed smiles. I remember being disappointed with how little beyond a few distinctly unadventurous poses they attempted—he lifts her over his head, she does a back bend, he swings her under his arms—until the final trick, which the Armenian bandmaster warned us was extremely dangerous and required absolute silence. A short pole was brought out, on which George hoisted Adele; then as he slowly twirled it around him Adele held on to one end, like a flag, and was gradually swung with her body at a ninety-degree angle to the pole, all this with what I recall was a superfluous commentary by the Armenian maestro on what was plainly taking place before our eyes. We trudged home at about midnight full of admiration for the intrepid duo’s last feat, though I recall that my mother was disapprovingly silent throughout. Bare flesh always caused her to frown and then “tsk” exasperatedly with unconcealed distaste.