Out of Place: A Memoir, Page 21

  I realize now that so innately trivial an episode as the battle of “numéros” between Hawie and Nasr, who competed with each other in weekly entertainments, seemed much more interesting than it was because of the total uneventfulness of our Dhour summers during the early years. I recall the indifference I felt when my mother would receive guests for morning coffee or afternoon tea, during which I would be summoned from my room for a perfunctory handshake, and then sent either back or on an errand. There was a ritualized formality to the whole business of these visits. Usually a messenger would be dispatched a day before to announce one of the occasions, although they could also occur without warning. The idea was that each family was entitled to one such social call per summer from a family with which it had some connection—the dentist, a cousin’s cousin, local notables, the Protestant minister, and so on. The morning time was always around eleven, as they—no one ever came alone—trooped up the rocky path, then the single flight of stone stairs to our house, in a single file led by the man or men, the women following silently behind. Soon there would be coffee, followed by chocolate or, after my mother had learned the practice from Marie Nassar, a piece of Turkish Delight wedged between two plain biscuits. This was considered a special treat. A little later came glasses of tamarind or mulberry syrup in water and a box of cigarettes. An hour later the guests stood up ready to leave, though it was considered the polite thing to say, “So soon? It’s still quite early,” which my mother always did. Afternoon visitors came at four-thirty and were supplied with tea; on those occasions the men were commuters who had returned from Beirut after the workday.

  There was something needlessly rigid about these visits, not just because it was understood that my mother should be at home to receive guests day in, day out, but also because she would have to make similar visits herself. One had the impression that a careful record was being kept somewhere, that Mrs. Haddad had not been visited, whereas we had had her visit. For all its bustle, our life in Cairo was a good deal more private in those years, though I did sense the stirrings in my mother of a sense of social obligation with regard to one or two families like the Dirliks and the Gindys. In Dhour, however, my mother seemed obsessed with what was done and not done, what “the people” said or might say, how things would look. As she grew older, these matters became more important, making it less possible to do what she liked and imperative that she conform to an outside standard, which in the case of Dhour she patently detested but doggedly held on to nonetheless.

  That summer she felt especially imprisoned, since when my father returned from his long trip it was only to play bridge. My mother’s distaste for his daytime bridge partners—who never made an appearance at our house and included taxi drivers, dry-cleaning clerks, and the like from the various cafés in town—spurred him a little to find respectable men for bridge evenings at home. Of this group, Emile Nassar and Faiz, his cousin, were regulars, in addition to new friends like Anis Nassif and Salim Kurban, Aunt Frida’s Beirut cousin. Occasionally the austere Anis Makdisi, a professor of Arabic at the American University of Beirut, would join; his house was just above ours on the hill, which is where I first met Samir, his youngest son and a contemporary of Alfred Nassar, who was later to marry my sister Jean. My mother made sporadic efforts to join in by learning canasta and even a card game called concain, but not until after my father’s death did she herself become a serious, if not entirely robust bridge player.

  The day of my father’s arrival from the United States at the end of August 1946 was an unpleasant one for the most trivial of reasons. He had written my mother to send him our measurements in inches so that he could buy us clothes from Best’s; in due course two gigantic trunks were dispatched to Cairo while he came overland from there to Beirut. My mother and I met him in the early afternoon at the Alamein terminal in central Beirut, and then we rode up to Dhour all together. His first words to me after he hugged me were “You’ve really gotten very fat, haven’t you?” When I expressed surprise, he added “Your waist is thirty-four inches. The people at Best’s were very surprised.” My mother’s tape measure was a metric one, and the conversion to inches had been at best an improvised one. When two months later the trunks were unpacked in Cairo I recall no less than six pairs of heavy brown wool shorts—unwearable in the Cairo heat—that my mother had to throw out because they were vastly too big for me; as it turned out most of what he had bought for us, evidently in the same way he ordered groceries and produce at Nicola’s without paying very close attention either to quantity or quality, also had to be jettisoned. “Is that one of the things I got you from Best’s?” he would ask me for the next year, and I would nod affirmatively, though of course I never wore what he had bought.

  “Go play in the forest,” I remember my parents telling me, as if the scraggly pines and thorn-filled bushes were a natural playground full of delightful and even instructive amusements. The landscape struck me as an inhospitable and hot wasteland, swarming with giant horseflies and menacing bumblebees. The overwhelming natural fact about Dhour and its bosky environs was the total absence of water: the dryness without a pond, lake, stream, or even swimming pool to relieve it meant that the place gave off a pungent sense of discomfort that the occasionally cool mountain air and the absence of urban pollution did little to offset.

  There was but one break in the dryness of the summer. A blissfully long day, on which we would escape to Beirut and the sea on our annual late July excursion, which always began with an hour’s taxi ride to Saint-Simon and Saint-Michel, two adjacent sandy beaches just south of the city, where we swam all morning in a surfy but rather shallow sea, and were occasionally permitted a ride on a rented périssoire—a kind of elongated surf board with a hull and a kayak paddle—which always overturned in the exciting, churning water. I always felt I could not get enough of the Mediterranean, whose sheer abundance and cool drenching effervescence would have to last in my memory for the rest of the year. Neither of my parents swam, but they seemed content to spend the day under the thatched awning of the beach café, where we had our lunch. Occasionally our Cairo friends the Dirliks would be prevailed upon by telegram to join us from Bhamdoun, their summer town, for the day, so at least my parents had company till the early afternoon. During one lunch at Saint-Simon, my father suddenly leapt up from his chair as if he were about to assault a young man sitting at a nearby table. “No Wadie, please no,” wailed my mother as she held on to her husband’s powerful white shirtsleeved arms, preventing him from going after the man who had provoked him. “I’ll tear your eyes out,” my father called to the man as he sat down. Then, turning to me he added, “I won’t let anyone look at your sister that way.” Finding this illogical I remarked that “there’s nothing wrong with looking,” to which Loris Dirlik sagely rejoindered, “There are ways and ways of looking,” since clearly to everyone but me the person in question had crossed an imaginary line.

  My sister Jean, the source of this turmoil, appeared oblivious, but I certainly felt at the time that I could not emulate my father’s possessiveness: I was far too reticent to start a fight, too ill equipped in vocabulary and sentiments of outraged honor to carry through any such action, and, finally, too indifferent to anybody’s mere looking at my sister. The incident passed quickly enough but I remember thinking at the time that it afforded me more insight into my father’s powerful virility, from which I shrank in consternation. What if his eye turned on me—who knows what he might have found in my feelings about my mother or in my secret lasciviousness about one or another female relative. Without the insulation of school and Cairo’s daily routine there was nowhere for me to hide my vulnerability from this man who could erupt with such frightening volcanic force.

  At about three-thirty we would be showered and dressed, and on our way to Ras Beirut to visit a Badr cousin for tea and cakes; and then we made our final stop in town at the Patisserie Suisse, a small cake shop and café in Bab Edriss in the heart of the city, where we were allowed to gorge ourse
lves on chocolat mou and heaping plates of ice cream and whipped cream. Overexposed to the sun, overfed at lunch and tea and with afternoon sweets, tired out by the one rare day when we could leave Dhour’s confines and be exposed to the Mediterranean’s glamour and salty, surfy expansive blueness, we made our dreary way back to the village for several more weeks of uninterrupted vacancy. On very rare occasions, perhaps once or twice more per summer, my father would go to Beirut to change money (Dhour, in this service, being as ill endowed as with other modern amenities: the place did not even have a bank) and took me along on an excursion entirely restricted to the garish, sweaty, smelly, and noisily crowded downtown area, as far from the beaches as it was possible to be. Our destination was the Banque de Syrie et du Liban, and a strangely hairless, eunuchlike young man whose high-pitched female voice belied the drab gray trousers and white shirt he wore with studied nonchalance. These were the days of gigantically large letters of credit from which this clerk would clip several little boxes with scissors, make half a dozen trips to various desks for signatures, and return finally with a thick wad of Lebanese pounds, which he would first count with his rubber-coated thumb, then pass portentously under the steel window to my father, who would recount the whole pile to make sure he got the exact amount.

  After an hour and a half of the bank the two of us would go shopping for heavy goods unobtainable in Dhour—wicker baskets, plates and cups, sheets and towels, 20-kilo bags of sugar and rice—and hire one of the numerous barefoot, sharwal-suited porters idling on the main tramline to carry them for us. Normally about 120 kilos of these goods were loaded carefully into the porter’s long basket, which he strapped to his padded back, with one of the bands going across his forehead; I was afraid it might split open from the pressure. We usually stopped at the Café Automatique, with its bustling seemingly all-male clientele, gaily colored tile floor teeming with shop clerks, shoppers, bank employees and the like, for me to have a quick ice-cream cone, my father a small cup of coffee, before we made our way, the porter slowly plodding at our side in his barefeet, to the Dhour el Shweir taxi stand at the bottom of Place des Canons for our ride back up to the mountains. I remember these occasions for the uncomfortable sticky heat of the day, the absence of air, and the stifling boredom punctuated by the small pleasures of the many hours at my father’s side, with nothing to do except to “be there” and only the most meager conversation to enliven the silence between us.

  In our terrace house we acquired neighbors, the Nassar family, who lived on the ground floor. The Nassars were everything we were not. The patriarch was Emile Nassar, also known behind his back as Lord Gresham because as the local representative of the London-based Gresham Assurance Company he spoke incessantly of the company he worked for, always trying to interest his bridge partners, or a fellow taxi passenger, or a visitor in purchasing a Gresham policy. He left for his Beirut office at the crack of dawn, returning home in midafternoon for a late lunch, siesta, and bridge; unlike my father he always wore a suit and furnished his house like a replica of his customary city residence. The Nassars had real furniture, a phone, a record player and radio (referred to as “a pickup”), curtains at the windows, rugs on the floor, and an extremely ornate heavy dining table covered with dishes of real cooked food twice a day, in contrast to our solitary evening meal on the floor above of “Protestant supper,” which was always cold, and somehow medicinal—cheeses, olives, tea, a few fruits and raw vegetables, and the dried cakes called irshalleh—much like the rest of the puritanical summer life instituted by my father. The Nassar life was more interestingly advanced.

  The three Nassar boys, Raja, Alfred, and Munir, were about ten, six, and three years older, respectively, than I. Their “real” mother had died quite young, and their father had become remarried to a cheery francophone woman, Marie, whose relationship to the boys I could never fathom. This was the first broken, or at least divided, family I had ever had contact with. It had never occurred to me that a family could be unlike ours in terms of its basic structure, and divorce I had associated (as did my two older sisters) with glamour and crime (the “divorced woman” we could see on our Cairo street being the perfect example, with her cigarette and red hair). Raja and Alfred referred to Marie as Tante, but for Munir, who was a very young child when his father remarried, she was Mama. In addition there was young Wadad, Marie’s child with Emile, who acted like and was treated by Munir as a younger sister, but by the two older boys as a niece.

  Much as I liked and was drawn to them I never felt truly comfortable with the Nassars, partly because they were so different but also because of my parents’ nagging insistence that I should not spend so much time in the place for fear, my mother said, that I might become an unwelcome presence there. So I always felt that I was intruding, though they never gave any hint that I might have been a nuisance; only later did I recognize that such fearful parental injunctions were intended to keep us psychologically enclosed within our own tight family circle. The thrill I felt when Marie Nassar or Munir asked me to join them for a delicious dinner was always accompanied by a sense of unease and a feeling that I shouldn’t be there at all. A dinner might include lots of salads, bits of leftover cooking like kibbe or white bean stew, mountains of rice, lavish desserts, all of which I wolfed down with avid pleasure. My mother routinely put on a disapproving look when I mounted the stairs from the Nassars’ to our house after such an occasion. “It’s bad to eat such heavy food at night,” she might say, “you’ll have trouble sleeping.” And of course I did.

  To my disappointment during the forties and early fifties Munir and his brothers were rarely there during the week, either because they had jobs or, in Munir’s case, because he was enjoying the freedom of Beirut and the family house with his parents away. They did give me generous access to their books, however. During my high school years I became more friendly with Munir Nassar, whose expansively positive feeling about his Beirut school and university was an emotion I never could have had as an outsider in my school. The elevated subjects proposed by Munir for our rather ponderous discussions—the meaning of life, art, and music, for example—rounded me intellectually but kept us away from any real intimacy. This suited us both, I think. What we spoke of together was self-consciously deliberate and serious, but at least, since he and his closest friend, Nicola Saab, were hard-working medical students, our discussions had the virtue of keeping me aware of complexities that in almost every other way life in Dhour seemed designed to suppress. “Philosophy” was our main subject, of which I knew nothing, but Munir had been influenced by two Americans, Dick Yorkey and Richard Scott, both products not of missionary piety but of the secular liberal arts, and this opened new intellectual doors for me that I first reacted to defensively, then entered with surprising enthusiasm. I first learned about Kant, Hegel, and Plato during those discussions, and, as when I heard Furtwängler and then rushed to his recordings for confirmation, I started borrowing Munir’s book of extracts from the great Western philosophers.

  Such relatively modest, even imperceptible breaks in the dullness and enforced monotony of our “relaxation” in Dhour provided me with a gradually emerging sense of complexity, complexity for its own sake, unresolved, unreconciled, perhaps finally unassimilated. One of the themes of my life as conceived by my parents was that everything should be pushed into the preordained molds favored by my father and embodied in his favorite adages: “Play cricket”; “Neither a borrower nor a lender be”; “Take care of your mother”; “Protect your sisters”; “Do your best.” All this was what “Edward” was supposed to be, although my mother held out some inducements for straying further beyond these boundaries, which with typical contradictoriness she herself never explicitly renounced. My father’s prescriptions may not have been her style, but she would often endorse them with phrases like “Your father and I think.” And yet there survived an unspoken compact between us that encouraged me in music, literature, art, and experience, despite the silly errands and reductive
clichés. I recall talking to her about The Idiot when I was fifteen, after I had heard about the book from Munir and his friends: she had read it and was much taken with the blank goodness of Myshkin, and urged me to read Crime and Punishment, which I subsequently did—a book I also borrowed from Munir.

  The sense of complexity beyond Dhour’s appalling limitations continued to grow in me after my departure to the United States in 1951; but the seeds had been planted paradoxically at a time of my greatest deprivation, while I wandered the summer resort’s bleak streets with only the heat and a generalized dissatisfaction to preoccupy me on the surface. Slowly I found ways to borrow books from various acquaintances, and by my middle teens I was aware of myself making connections between disparate books and ideas with considerable ease, wondering about, for example, the role of the great city in Dostoyevsky and Balzac, drawing analogies between various characters (money lenders, criminals, students) that I encountered in books that I liked and comparing them with individuals I had met or known about in Dhour or Cairo. My greatest gift was memory, which allowed me to recall visually whole passages in books, to see them again on the page, and then to manipulate scenes, characters, giving them an imaginary life beyond the pages of the book. I would have moments of exultant recollection that enabled me to look out over a sea of details, spotting patterns, phrases, word clusters, which I imagined as stretching out interconnectedly without limit. I did not know as a teenager what the whole texture was or what it really meant, only that it was there and I could sense its complex workings and vividly grasp relationships between, say, Colonel Faiz Nassar and his nephew Hani, the Badr family and a certain kind of furniture, me and my sisters and our schools, teachers, friends, enemies, clothes, pencils, pens, papers, and books.