Out of Place: A Memoir, Page 22

  What I wove and rewove in my mind took place between the trivial surface reality and a deeper level of awareness of another life of beautiful, interrelated parts—parts of ideas, passages of literature and music, history, personal memory, daily observation—nourished not by the “Edward” whose making my family, teachers, and mentors contributed to, but by my inner, far less compliant and private self, who could read, think, and even write independent of “Edward.” By “complexity” I mean a kind of reflection and self-reflection that had a coherence of its own, despite my inability for some years to articulate this process. It was something private and apart that gave me strength when “Edward” seemed to be failing. My mother would often speak about the Badr “coldness,” a sort of reserve and distance radiated by some of her cousins, uncles, and aunts. There was much talk of inherited traits (“You have the Badr hunchback,” she would say, or “Like my brothers, you’re not a good businessman, you’re not clever that way”). I connected this sense of distance, apartness in myself with the need to erect a kind of defense of that other non-Edward self. For most of my life I have in an ambivalent way cherished and disparaged this core of icy detachment that has seemed impervious to the tribulations of loss, sadness, instability, or failure I have lived through.

  One summer two new friends who fit the increasingly but unacknowledged sophistication of my inner life came into my existence at Dhour. John Racy, my mother’s classmate’s oldest son, like me was unusually fluent in English, liked music, and was a gifted game player and craftsman. The Racy family was spending the summer of 1947 in a house beyond the Medawar Hotel, off to the left of the main square, a good mile from our house. I was impressed with John’s deliberate, meticulously shaped English sentences (he must have been four or five years older than I) and his extraordinary self-possession. He used to talk to me about books, music—he introduced me to Beethoven’s E-flat Piano Sonata, “La Chasse,” played by Claudio Arrau—and about the finer points of chess, a game I neither mastered nor particularly enjoyed, except when Johnny talked about it and about Stefan Zweig’s The Royal Game. I don’t recall ever saying more than yes or no and asking Johnny questions to get him to say more, as I listened to him entranced. Years later his mother, Soumaya, would remind me of how after they stopped coming to Dhour—he had become a psychiatrist, had married an American nurse, lived first in Rochester (where I visited him at Strong Memorial Hospital in 1956), then in Arizona, after which I never saw him again—she would remind me that in 1949 or 1950 I had said to her plaintively, “But where is Johnny; I miss him.” Perhaps it was not quite a friendship because it was so one-sided, but he opened up a rich world to be found nowhere else in Dhour.

  My other friend, also from our early days in Dhour, was Ramzy Zeine, whose father, Zeine Zeine, professor of history at American University of Beirut, was a Bahai whom we would see not so much in Dhour but on his twice yearly visits to Cairo. A gifted storyteller, Professor Zeine went with me on my first museum visit, to Cairo’s Wax Museum, where in the funereally still, empty rooms framed by elaborate wax scenes from modern Egyptian history, Zeine would speak grippingly about Muhammad Ali, Bonaparte, Ismail Pasha, the Orabi rebellion, and the Denshawi incident. I rarely saw him after I was about sixteen but I know that during the Lebanese Civil War of 1975–90 he was outspokenly anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian, and during the 1980s refused to leave his house until his solitary death at the age of ninety.

  Ramzy was, like me, a lonely child, but his family had constructed a small rustic green wooden bungalow for him in a vineyard a few dozen meters from our heavy stone house. I had never seen such a place, but with his pet rabbits, his unerring little slingshot, which he had made himself out of an oak branch lying just outside his door, Ramzy struck me as what I might have liked to be, a child of nature, happy and at ease in Dhour’s arid environment. He provided an unwonted contemplative dimension to the place’s inhospitableness. Like Johnny, Ramzy’s Dhour presence was extremely brief and, as the summers wore on and I looked back on it wistfully, very precious. I did not sustain a relationship with either Johnny or Ramzy past my late childhood, and both disappeared from my life thereafter.

  As if to make up for his absence, my father, when he returned from the United States in mid-summer 1946, organized a series of family trips throughout Lebanon. He had made the acquaintance of Jamil Yared, who owned a pink seven-seater taxi; and with this very long eyecatching car we went to the Hamana waterfalls, the heights of Suneen, the rather disappointing cedar forest in the north, to Ein Zhalta, Kasrwan, the Qadisha cave, Beiteddine. Certainly these trips offered a welcome opportunity to leave Dhour for the day, but spending anywhere from three to six hours each way on the road, arriving and having lunch in a restaurant picked by Yared, then returning to Dhour scarcely qualified as a real picnic. My six-year-old sister Jean was discovered to be very prone to car sickness, so her discomfort managed to overtake and somewhat spoil the journey for us all, except for my father, who maintained his composed indifference. The food was almost always the same, with local variations providing entertaining relief: in Ein Zhalta, the springwater was so cold it would burst open a watermelon. In Bsherye, where we went on a desultory fifteen-minute tour of Khalil Gibran’s house “as he left it,” with the bed unmade and the waste baskets unemptied, the local restaurant specialized in grilled chicken. What I took for granted as we traveled about was that no one consulted a map, and in fact there seemed to be no maps available; most of the time Jamil steered by his nose, which often occasioned numerous stops for information. Lebanon then had no advertisements, road signs, or tourist services; arriving in Raifoon was like suddenly entering a new country where the people stared at us, and tried to make sense of my father’s quixotic mixture of Egyptian and Palestinian dialects, my mother gently mocking his linguistic clumsiness from the back seat: “Why does he think these people understand words like halqait [“now” in Palestinian] or badri [“early” in Egyptian]?” As we unloaded ourselves out of the long pink car we must have seemed like a family of odd bedraggled strangers from across the oceans, so exaggeratedly guarded and reserved were the reactions to us. It was from those excursions that I have derived, and later nurtured, the habit of always being dressed differently from the natives, any natives.

  I still find myself surprised at not only the assiduous frequency of these journeys, but at how little we learned about Lebanon generally or the places we visited in particular. A great deal depended on our driver, whose knowledge, as far as it went, was spotty and essentially folkloric and gastronomic: “The grapes here are exceptionally good” or “You really ought to order their green walnuts here.” There seemed to be little history to impart to us, and we were content with geographical “facts” such as that Ein Zhalta isn’t as high in its elevation as Dhour. Very occasionally I would glean from something that passed between my parents and a waiter or maître d’hôtel that a particular village was Maronite or Orthodox or Druse; but the inflamed sectarian sentiment about Lebanon that I would first become aware of in the mid-fifties was still submerged.

  The particular status attached to my mother’s Protestant relatives, the Badrs, came to seem a very distinctive one, but the strange later affiliations with Roman Catholicism became fully apparent only over the course of the latter part of the fifties through the seventies. Originally from Khinshara, a mid-size town in the northeast, the Badrs had migrated to Shweir about two hundred years earlier; my great-grandfather Yusef Badr was the Protestant Evangelical minister, first in Marjeyoun, in the south (now under Israeli occupation), later in Beirut. In the American missionary Henry Jessup’s memoir, Fifty-three Years in Syria, he is described as the first “native” Protestant minister of Lebanon, in 1880 or thereabouts. With their Protestant counterparts in Palestine, the Badrs continued their affiliation with the American Protestant mission in Lebanon but also had an embattled, even belligerent, sense of what it meant to be Christian in a Muslim part of the world. My mother’s first cousins and her uncles w
ere educated at the American University (formerly the Syrian Protestant College), and all had been or were still avidly religious, and further developed these affiliations through frequent trips to the United States and graduate studies there, plus, in my later view, too close an identification with American views on Islam as a depraved and unregenerate religion.

  But there were early signs of this hostility toward Islam, which I caught glimpses of beneath the merry atmosphere of familial gatherings in Dhour. They seemed to emerge as expressions of unquestioning enthusiasm for Christianity, unusual even within Jerusalem’s pious confines. As “Edward Said,” I found myself counted as a Christian in Lebanon, though even today after years of internecine civil conflict there I must confess I am unable to feel any identification at all with Christianity as threatened by Islam. But when Eva and Lily, my mother’s first cousins, who were close friends and former classmates of hers, seemed slightly skeptical of the Arabs collectively and Arabism as a creed I was nonplussed because their language, culture, and education, their love of the music, their closeness to family tradition, their way of doing things struck me as much more unequivocally Arab than ours. Later I thought this aggressively Christian ideology was very paradoxical and difficult to accept, so little did I, or anyone in my immediate family, have any sense of primarily religious hostility toward Muslims.

  And yet in the 1940s and early ’50s there was a nice conviviality about our relationships with my mother’s Lebanese relatives. Uncle Habib, Teta Munira’s and Aunt Melia’s brother, was a mild-mannered, ever so lightly ironic gentleman who had spent several years with his wife and children working as a member of the British civil bureaucracy in Sudan; his wife, Hannah, was a supremely capable and quick woman who, like her husband, was much admired and liked. Their only son, Fouad, my mother’s first cousin, was our family common favorite. Fouad was much too old really to be my friend, but he and I had a close relationship nevertheless: we played doubles together in the 1950s, and I was always impressed by his dashing manner, his chivalry with women, his friendliness, and his wry, self-deprecating humor. The three other Badr children of my mother’s generation we would see intermittently as summer residents in Dhour: Lily and her husband, Albert (also a cousin of my mother’s); Ellen, the youngest, and her husband, Fouad Sabra, Wadad’s brother and our friend from the Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital experience; then Eva, the eldest, and her husband, the philosopher and diplomat Charles Malik, who was to play quite an important role in my life and the development of my ideas in Dhour.

  The easy and friendly association we enjoyed with the Badrs in Lebanon was soon to be eroded by illnesses, deaths, voyages, disagreements, and long gaps, but while it lasted, in the forties and fifties, it lightened the austerity and general barrenness of our daily life in Dhour. An occasional visit to my aging great-uncle Habib meant a chocolate and a glass of lemonade, plus an interesting account of life in Khartoum just after World War I. And when some of them came to us for lunch or dinner, the table would be spread with delicious grown-up food, and a kind of festive abundance and sense of barriers being let down that gave vitality to the summer’s lifeless atmosphere. In 1947, when my mother, having undergone a biopsy to determine the possible presence of breast cancer, discovered she did not have the disease, the good news was celebrated at a lavish family lunch put on by my father at Ain al Naas, a famous spring with an excellent restaurant situated near Bikfaya. All the Badrs young and old were invited. This was perhaps the last harmonious family occasion of its kind before 1948 and the various subsequent Lebanese eruptions. Everyone drank arak, a few smoked argeelas (water pipes), and my father was able to get up a table of bridge in the corner. For us the swings in the Naas garden were particularly thrilling, with longer hanging chains, deeper seats to sit in, greater heights to achieve than anything we had in Dhour.

  That very year, I believe, my father decided to take up bird hunting because someone at the bridge table had said what a salutary effect it would have on him. He came home one evening from bridge with a slim black French rifle in his hand, a box of cartridges and a belt in the other. “They said it would be relaxing,” I recall his saying with considerable enthusiasm. Right after our very early breakfast the next morning he slung the 9-millimeter rifle over his shoulder, strapped his belt on, and marched out of the house: he was headed for a fig-tree orchard a few hundred yards from where we lived, in search of a particularly large and fleshy bird that frequented such places and that was supposed to be wonderful to eat. He came back empty-handed an hour or two later, changed his bedraggled clothes for another equally shabby set, and went off to the saha to resume his normal routine: “One of the gardeners told me that I had to do two things. The first is to come at about six; the other was not to walk around looking for the birds, but to sit quietly under a tree and wait there.” He left early the next morning with one of my mother’s orange-colored living-room cushions and a book, since there was no use being uncomfortable or remaining idle during his vigil. He did this, I think, for about a week, always returning without birds, having fired his rifle quite rarely; for the first two or three days he would spend a few minutes cleaning the gun barrel with a long green-tufted brush dipped in gas, but stopped doing so when it appeared that infrequent firing scarcely demanded such an effort. Finally he came home ten days later carrying about six plump little birds and was summarily interrupted by my mother, whose scarcely concealed disgust seemed to propel her with the dead things into the kitchen faster than usual. We had them for lunch—tiny, tough creatures that were the size of a frog. My sisters, mother, and I then surrounded my father as if he were a hero, so elated were we all by his astonishing, albeit very sudden, success. As we pressed him for details of where and how he had accomplished this amazing feat his answers got shorter, he seemed befuddled by the insistence of our queries, and finally shook us all off by disappearing into his room. Later he admitted to my mother that he had bought the birds off a young hunter who had more use for some ready cash than for his six dead birds.

  That episode effectively ended my father’s brief hunting career, and the gun was passed on to me. For the first year that I ventured out into the woods behind our house my main problem was that I could not close one eye; my grandmother devised a wrap made out of a handkerchief that I would slip over my left eye as I readied my shot; invariably, this was such a cumbersome procedure that the bird had flown off by the time I was able to fix it in my gunsight. I recall spending hours practicing first the donning of my eye patch, then the raising of my left cheek to close my eye. I remained at the same rudimentary level for the four or five years I did it with my mother’s grudging approval (she saw it as an extension of her time-consuming errands for me) and an occasional gesture of approbation from my father. I did not think of myself as a skilled hunter, although coming home with a couple of kills was a sign that I had done better than my father. I got to know the several patches of woods that were close to the house, but on the whole I found the experience unattractive and tedious. I was once able to persuade my sister Jean to come with me; she seemed to enjoy the foray more than I did.

  The first opportunity for intellectual instruction during the summer came in 1949, when I was required to take a sort of catch-up tutorial in geometry as preparation for entering Victoria College in the fall. One of my father’s bridge cronies was found for the job, and three mornings a week at nine I would hike to his house halfway down to “Ayn al-Qassis for a two-hour tutorial. Mr. Aziz Nasr was an amiable enough man, a retired engineer who had spent a long time working in Iraq before returning to his native village; he was, I think, a cousin of the café owner, which gave him appealing credentials for me. His precise little gestures fascinated me less for the soundness of the geometric logic they illustrated than for the incredible neatness of the diagrams and sketches he produced in the course of instructing me. My father had obtained a copy of the Oxford and Cambridge School Certificate geometry text—a thick gray book of appalling seriousness, unredeemed by any
of the amiable pictures I had been accustomed to in CSAC manuals—and Mr. Nasr proceeded to take me through it, page after dreadful page. He had an inexplicable penchant during the biweekly tests he set of assigning me not the ordinary problems and questions provided by the authors, but the so-called “riders,” those problems of exceptional difficulty that he presumed I should be able to figure out. I did so only very rarely. Most of the time I fumbled badly, waiting quietly as he went over my inadequate efforts, until, in a sudden gesture of impatience, he tore out the offending page from my exercise book and solved the problem, elegantly I thought, on a fresh one. He wrote a report of my erratic progress after about ten weeks of this, in which he stressed my intelligence but also my lack of concentration, unwillingness always to do my best, etc. This report (which, unfairly, did not mention the “riders” at all) earned me my father’s by now familiar chiding comment, “You never do your best, Edward.” My mother took a more dramatic and, I must say, apocalyptic view of my chances of success at the new, presumably more serious and demanding school I was about to enter. “What’s going to become of you, Edward? Are you always going to fail and do badly? Remember Miss Clark: she understood you so well. When are you going to improve?”

  During those summers in Dhour, I confess to some fairly obnoxious behavior, most of it the result of periods of enforced solitude in my cheerless little room after being told, “Take off your clothes and go straight to bed, and no reading.” I recall distinctly that during the hours of lying in bed I once covered the wall with gobs of spit, peppering the invitingly empty white space to my side with little well-aimed missiles. And of course, it only further enraged my mother. There were not so many moments of tenderness during the long summer. My relationship to my two older sisters, Jean and Rosy, was usually a prickly, adversarial one, and I felt we slowly lost the habit of intimacy and even of accommodation with each other.