Out of Place: A Memoir, Page 23

  To her dying day my mother was a bilateralist; that is, she encouraged us to deal with each other through her. I was not conscious of either being in or trying to get entrance to her orbit, but I noticed that only one of us could be favored at a time. “Why can’t you be more diligent, like Rosy,” she might say; or, conversely, “None of your sisters has your musical talents.” Jean had a better humor than Rosy; Rosy was stronger than Jean; Edward didn’t behave around us. We lived in the element of my mother’s myths, playing the roles assigned to us. I am still not sure how many of the earnest, often plaintive feelings that I confided to her she actually guarded, how many she passed on to my father or sisters. I needed to open myself to her but I knew it would make me vulnerable to her manipulations later. I kept trying to get close to her and direct her fondness toward me. She never let go of me in Dhour, and finally, I think, I seem to have absorbed her worries, her tireless concern with details, her inability ever to be calm, her way of constantly interrupting herself, preventing a continuous flow of attention or concentration on anything. My mother possessed a powerful, sensitive intelligence, which I was attracted to, but she tended to hide it to make herself seem like a helpless, much put upon adjunct to my father’s strength. I remember admiring her fitful and incomplete efforts to complete her education in French and humanities as well as shorthand, but despite her years of grudging tolerance of my father’s cardplaying mania, only bridge did she study in earnest, becoming after his death a confirmed player too.

  At its worst I’d describe this as the Dhour syndrome, formed because my mother felt herself to be unfairly left to fend for herself, an unfinished person who had to try frantically but also unsuccessfully to deal with everything she saw before her, like the circus performer who has to keep too many whirling plates from falling off too many rods. But I never doubted that she really understood me, despite her limitless capacity for manipulating us all the time. Instinctively I found myself drawn to persons in our acquaintance about whom she knew relatively little; finding other lives, other narratives, became my way of unconsciously seeking alternatives to my mother’s dominance. Thus, Dr. Faiz Nassar and his second wife, Fina, a coquettish, lighthearted woman whom I found extremely engaging, soon became one of my favorite sources of exotic lore far removed from Dhour’s humdrum horizons. We had originally met Fina and her two children in Cairo early in the forties; she was then married to an Egyptian, who later died. A widowed Shami woman in Cairo, she then met and married Faiz, who later brought her and her two children to Beirut. He was introduced to us by Emile Nassar, his cousin and our downstairs neighbor; I forged a bond with Faiz when he began to appear regularly for bridge and backgammon games with my father.

  Like most of the Nassars, whose vast number by this time suggested to my puritanical Protestant gaze a great network of colorful and yet slightly louche tribe members consisting of divorcées and stepbrothers, Faiz was a small rather portly man with a neat brush mustache who moved and spoke with affecting gravity and slowness. We originally knew him as “Dr. Faiz,” but soon after he and my father became regular partners it emerged that he had been a colonel in the Egyptian army in the Sudan; thereafter my father somewhat jovially started calling him “the Colonel” and soon everyone called him that too. Despite his serious mien and because he never talked down to me he was the only older man I knew in Dhour whom I actually considered a friend. His studious silences, his reserve, fascinated me. And the Colonel was often happy to delay an evening bridge game at home with some biggame hunting stories described in a stately English dotted with colonial words and phrases like “my native bearers” and “the old tusker,” redolent of a mythological Africa that I had glimpsed in the Tarzan books and films I had always cherished. I think that as I grew older I speculated that some of his stories about “the big cats,” for instance, were concocted for my pleasure rather than from specific experiences of his own. But the solemnity never varied, and neither did his long, dignified pauses. During my younger years I had the impression that he told the stories with so many lapses and such deliberation in order to set up the tension of a real jungle chase, but as we both grew older I sadly realized that his memory and mind had been slowly failing him.

  Later, one of his relatives told me—perhaps only with malice in mind—that he had kept a black Sudanese woman as his own, and that he was also a famous martinet. Sternness was undoubtedly a part of his character, but for me it was part of his dignified mystery, which in a garrulous society such as ours was very rare.

  The Colonel’s friendship was a kind of antidote to the atmosphere created by my mother. There was order, knowledge, amusement in what he offered. Yet as the years wore on our household seemed to get busier and more populous, in part, I think, because more of my mother’s relatives got into the habit of taking houses in Dhour for the entire season. As the Colonel himself grew older he could be seen slowly inching his way forward along Dhour’s unpaved and skimpy sidewalks. His red tarbush, by then a complete anomaly, was never abandoned; neither was the little green rosette stuck decorously into his lapel buttonhole.

  The Colonel seemed slowly to disappear from our lives, his place taken for me not by anyone like him but by younger men, closer to me in age, with whom I found myself in company as Dhour itself grew and became more worldly. In my early teens, the old Cinema Florida right next to the Café Cirque, whose single projector required a pause every twenty minutes to change reels and whose films were full of cracks, hisses, and overexposed frames, was superseded by the sleeker and more comfortable City Cinema, which could actually project a relatively new film without breaks. Three of us might go to the cinema and meet a group of our cousins, or someone encountered that day on the tennis court, or perhaps one of the Nassar boys in the company of a friend from Beirut. The town began to change as one or two billiard halls, a new tennis court, a few rehabilitated shops selling sports equipment and shirts instead of fireworks and knitting wool, as well as more residents with cars, appeared to brighten up its usual gloom.

  But with every expansion in horizon came a chastening reminder of my being an outsider, of not being at home in Dhour, nor indeed in Lebanon. Thus one unusually bright afternoon Munir Nassar invited me to his place to meet a school friend of his from Beirut, Nicola Saab, the brightest boy in their class. (Ten years later, on the threshold of a brilliant medical career, he committed suicide.) Behind them were several years of close friendship and a kind of shared language full of deliberately arcane and precious phrases that excluded strangers such as me. I remember that the second time I met with the two of them we got into a heated discussion over the relative merits of Brahms, whom they both valued very highly, and Mozart, whom I preferred. I had just discovered Mozart’s “Linz” Symphony and thought that its clarity of line and clean elegance were the ultimate in expression. I made the case as best I could but was put off by the two older boys, who dismissed Mozart as “light” and lacking in thought. The word I distinctly remember hearing to dignify Brahms was “profound,” which I neither completely understood nor had ever used. Profound, deep, dark, troubling, stirring, significant: this was how the Brahms First Symphony was described, and when the record was played on the Nassar “pickup,” there was a lot of nodding, glances exchanged, excited handshaking. I had no response to any of this. Brahms was the approved insider choice; Mozart and I, the slightly disdained, not quite serious enough aliens. At the end, as if to make up for their concerted, indeed orchestrated, polyphony, Saab turned to me in conciliation, saying, “But, you know, Mozart is in fact impeccable.” Also an unusual word whose meaning I did not fully comprehend, “impeccable” made matters worse for me, as if being impeccable was a last resort of superficiality.

  When I was nearly fifteen I was allowed to go to Beirut with Munir Nassar. He took me to the cement-covered and rather austere university beach, where your feet burned just trying to reach the water, and introduced me to his classmates, who greeted me cordially, but thereafter jovially exchanged jokes and a
necdotes in an Arabic dialect that was clearly their language, and just as clearly not mine. It was one of the earliest moments when I experienced language as a barrier, even though I understood what was being said. Their accent was Lebanese, mine was Egyptian overlaying a thin remnant of Palestinian; their Beirut was mine only because I happened to be with Munir. I hung back as the others chatted busily with each other. When we went to a film matinee at the Cinema Capitol in central Beirut the cool darkness of the theater allowed me further invisibility as I asked myself whether I could ever be on the same level as the two young men sitting beside me. I later told my mother of my feelings of isolation as I overheard them chatting with each other. “Did you ask them what they were talking about, and why didn’t they include you?” she challenged me, simultaneously making me feel worse for my timidity, and better in that she had quickly come to my aid. Of course I hadn’t, and couldn’t imagine asking that sort of question.

  By the mid-fifties, when we finally had a car and a telephone in Dhour, I was a Princeton undergraduate, and quite suddenly the sense of imprisonment and boredom so long associated with our summers there dropped away. Life in Dhour was no longer restricted to the saha and its environs but extended as far as the town of Brumana, ten kilometers below us to the south, and Mrouj, a few kilometers beyond the Hotel Kassouf.

  The social center of our new activity was the tennis court. First there was the Halaby tennis court, which was open to anyone willing to pay the small sum required; the court was poorly maintained, but it was there that I made the acquaintance of Sami Sawaya (a distant relative of our grocer) and Shawqi Dammous, a massively built man in his forties who was also the sports master at International College, the American University prep school.

  Sami was a tall, skinny young man about five years older than I who, because he spent what seemed to be all his time at the Halaby court and was naturally sociable and amiable, arranged a friendly set or two for me. Sami introduced me to the raucous atmosphere of the place, very far removed from the tedious loneliness I had been accustomed to. What I remember is the rowdiness of mornings spent at Halaby’s: there were numerous verbal battles, always mediated by the indefatigable, uncondescending Shawqi, whose majestically sized pate was covered with perspiration as he noisily adjudicated between different claimants to the court; there were sometimes exciting, usually chastening baseline duels between me and the steady Sami, and occasionally, a random doubles match with young girls whom I had met there for the first time; and then there were gala occasions when Dhour, often represented by my cousin Fouad Badr, a gallant crowd-pleaser, would battle an IPC (Iraqi Petroleum Company) team from Tripoli, or a Brumana team, for a series of several singles and one, perhaps two, doubles.

  Tennis finally gave me a life independent of my parents in Dhour, away from my mother’s controlling gaze. There was an enormous improvement in our social life in 1954 when a large Muslim family, the Tabbarahs, bought a handsome house and built a tennis court next to it, which they then turned into a club whose presiding influence was once again Shawqi Dammous. As the club was almost a kilometer past the Kassouf, a car was indispensable, though passing passenger taxis (called service) or buses could usually be persuaded to drop us off for an afternoon of tennis, Ping-Pong, and socializing.

  Soon after the Tabbarah Club came into being, I met the Emad sisters, Eva and Nelly, the youngest daughters of Naief Pasha Emad, originally from Ein al-Safsaf (a satellite town of Shweir) but now a notoriously wealthy soap manufacturer who lived and owned factories in the industrial city of Tanta, north of Cairo. The Emads lived across the road from the Tabbarah Club in an immense palacelike house with distinctive green shutters, encircled by a great stone wall. I never entered the house or met Emad Pasha, despite the closeness of my relationship with some of his children. Eva was slightly older than Nelly, and almost seven years older than I. Unmarried, wealthy, socially insulated from her surroundings, Eva was the first woman I really became close to, despite the fact that for a couple of summers we were never alone but part of the regular group that turned up in the mornings for tennis, went home for lunch, and reappeared in the afternoon for more tennis, noisy card playing, and Ping-Pong.

  VIII

  I HAD NO WAY OF KNOWING IT, BUT WHEN I ENTERED Victoria College in the autumn of 1949, aged almost fourteen, I was also nearing the last two years of my life in Cairo. For the first time I became “Said” exclusively, my first name either unknown or shortened to “E”; and as plain “Said” I entered a mongrel world made up of miscellaneous last names—Zaki, Salama, Mutevellian, Shalom—of very mixed provenance, all of them preceded by dangling, not to say irrelevant, first initials: Salama, C, and Salama, A, for instance, or Zaki, whose two first initials served as a mockingly reversed and cacophonous sobriquet for him, “Zaki A.A.” or “Zaki Ack Ack.”

  Before school began I said to my mother that I was interested in becoming a doctor, to which she said that my father and she would be happy to buy me my first clinic. Both of us understood that the gift would be made in Cairo, although we both were also aware that Cairo couldn’t in the long run be our home for “the future” as we imagined it. Reports of mysterious assassinations and abductions, mostly of well-known prominent men who had good-looking wives, testified to the influence of a corpulent, libidinous king whose nocturnal rampages and long European holidays had dislocated the country as much as the scandals of the 1948 Palestine war, in which faulty arms, incompetent generals, and a formidable enemy had not only routed the Egyptian army but brought the tottering, still not really independent Egyptian state to a new, low pass. The sudden prominence of the Muslim Brothers lent more anxious uncertainty to those of us Arabs who were neither Egyptian nor Muslim. A constant guerrilla struggle in the Suez Canal Zone, to which British forces had retreated, elevated the guerillas or fedayin (an Islamic epithet denoting warlike sacrifice) who fought the foreigners to the status of heroes, and also made our working relationships in Cairo with English doctors, nurses, teachers, bureaucrats far more tense than before.

  I felt this the moment I set foot in Victoria College, later described to me by Mr. Hill, the geography master, as a school designed to be the Eton of the Middle East. Except for the teachers of Arabic and French, the faculty was entirely English, though unlike at GPS not a single English student was enrolled. My father drove me to school—located in temporary quarters at the former Italian School in Shubra, one of Cairo’s most densely populated semislum areas, not far from Dr. Haddad’s clinic—and on the first day left me at the front door with his usual cheery “Good luck, son” as he drove off with his driver. For the second time (after GPS) in my life I was dressed in a school blazer, gray trousers, blue-silver striped tie and cap: a uniform (bought at Avierino’s) proclaiming me a VC boy, engendering a feeling of miserable solitude and profound uncertainty as I edged my way into the bustling corridors about five minutes before the school bell went off at eight-thirty. The office I timidly looked into in search of directions to the Middle Five classroom was the headmaster’s, where an obliging servant (farrash) pointed me farther down the corridor and out into a teeming school yard, at one end of which stood a small two-roomed building. “That’s it,” he said. “Middle Five One is on the left.” As I threaded my way hesitantly through a football game, several wrestling matches, an intense game of marbles, and a small crowd of guffawing older boys, I felt myself assaulted and dislocated by the uninhibited strangeness of the place in which I alone seemed to be new and different.

  When I found the right classroom there was one rather small boy writing busily at his desk, a large reference book at his side; two others sitting side by side, reading silently; and three more comparing assignments. I shyly asked the assiduous writer (he introduced himself by his last name, “Shukry”) what he was working at. “Reserve lines,” he responded laconically. When I asked him what those were he explained that a standard punishment was to be made to copy out five hundred or a thousand lines from a particularly tedious book such as
the telephone directory, dictionary, or encyclopedia; making some ready now and holding them in reserve would cut down on the burden later. I knew almost immediately that this school was a more serious place than any I had attended, the pressure greater, the teachers harsher, the students more competitive and sharp, the atmosphere bristling with challenges, punishments, bullies, and risks. Above all I felt that nothing from my home or family had prepared me for this: I was truly on my own, an unknown, strange quality about to be swallowed up in the minute workings of a dauntingly large place, ten times larger than any school I had ever been to before.

  Each class in the Upper School was divided into a One and a Two section, the former for the relatively bright and hardworking types, the latter for slower, less-achieving boys generally regarded as Darwinian failures who deserved their lowly fate. The class divisions were in preparation for the Oxford and Cambridge School Certificate (high school diploma) or matriculation, undertaken by the boys of Lower Six; while the special young men of the Upper Sixth proceeded toward A levels, and university. These young men all seemed to me to be star athletes, prefects, geniuses, and were routinely addressed by us as “Captain,” a title given added credibility by the silver piping on their blazers and caps. The two head boys, Captains Didi Bassano and Michel Shalhoub, were at first exceedingly remote figures, but over time Shalhoub in particular became an unpleasantly familiar presence, notorious for his stylish brilliance and his equally stylish and inventive coercive dealings with the smaller boys.