Out of Place: A Memoir, Page 26

  Outside school our lives were of an inordinate and untoward luxury and peculiarity. The families close to us all had their own staff of drivers, gardeners, maids, washerwomen, and an ironing man, some of whom were familiar to all. “Our” Ahmed, the Dirliks’ Hassan, the Fahoums’ Mohammed, were almost talismanic in their presence; they turned up in our conversations as staples of our quotidian diet, like the garden or the house, and it felt as if they were our possessions, much like old family retainers in Tolstoy. We were brought up not to be too familiar with the servants, which meant not talking to and joking with them, but I found this was an irresistible rule to break. I remember wrestling with Ahmed, conversing about the deeper meaning of life and religion with Hassan, talking cars and drivers with Aziz, much to my parents’ disapproval. I felt that I was like the servants in the controlled energy that had no license to appear during the many hours of service, but talking to them gave me a sense of freedom and release—illusory, of course—that made me happy for the time spent in such encounters.

  Our families shopped for food at Groppi’s, talking with the plainly Greek or Egyptian employees who staffed the elegant tearoom’s delicatessen in jaw-shattering French, when it was perfectly clear that we all could have done better in Arabic. I was proud of my mother for conversing in Arabic, since she alone of the entire social group to which we belonged knew the language well, was literate in it, and seemed to feel no social disadvantage about using it, even though the prevailing atmosphere was such that using French gave one a higher (perhaps even the highest) status. I had picked up spoken French early from GPS and Victoria College, and of course the club, but never felt confident enough to use it as an everyday language, even though I understood it perfectly. So although English had become my main language, French classes at VC being scarcely more edifying than the Arabic ones, I found myself in the odd situation of not having any natural, or national, position from which to use it. The three languages became a pointedly sensitive issue for me at the age of about fourteen. Arabic was forbidden and “wog”; French was always “theirs,” not mine; English was authorized, but unacceptable as the language of the hated British.

  Ever since then I have been inordinately fascinated by the sheer mechanism of languages, as I automatically shift in my mind among three possibilities. While speaking English, I hear and often articulate the Arabic or French equivalent, and while speaking Arabic I reach out for French and English analogues, strapping them onto my words like luggage on an overhead rack, there but somehow inert and encumbering. Only now that I’m over sixty can I feel more comfortable, not translating but speaking or writing directly in those languages, almost but never quite with the fluency of a native. Only now can I overcome my alienation from Arabic caused by education and exile and take pleasure in it.

  Both Victoria College and the Tewfiqya Club, which my father joined late in 1949, expanded my opportunities to use French. Tewfiqya’s membership was extraordinarily varied, a bewildering Levantine melange of Greek, French, Italian, Muslim, Armenian, Lebanese, Circassian, and Jewish members, in contrast to the Englishness of the Gezira Club, jammed together in a relatively small place in Embaba, a working-class industrial zone of the city just east and across the river from Zamalek. No polo, no horse racing, football, cricket, bowling greens, or squash, as at Gezira, but about twenty tennis courts, a decent-sized swimming pool, and of course bridge. Several of my VC friends—Claude and André Salama, the Settons, Mohammed Azab, Albert Coronel, Staffy Salem—were members there, and since the only Arabic spoken was to the harassed and overworked servants, I recall an endless babble of expostulation and cliché in French that for years furnished me with a rudimentary arsenal of ready-made phrases for every occasion, salutary and obscene, sometimes mixed with scraps of Arabic and English. Figure-toi. Fermé ta gueule. Je rentre en ville. Va te faire pendre. Crétin. Je suis esquinté. Je crève. But I also had the feeling that beneath the surface of bonhomie and rowdy fun where men and women in short shorts and very abbreviated bathing suits mixed easily there was an undercurrent of foreign unrest at what Egypt was becoming—a place no longer hospitable to foreigners, and particularly to privileged enclaves like Tewfiqya, where an extroverted non-Arab, non-Muslim life that was not quite European, because tied to Oriental luxury, service, and sensuality, could take place with relative freedom from outside interference. The only Arabic I ever heard there was in the form of orders barked at Nubian suffragis, perspiring in their heavy white galabiyas, bringing pitchers of shandy and orders of riz financière (I pleaded with my mother to let us have that at home, but she refused) to wonderfully tanned swimmers like Coco Hakim and his friends, who danced and played Ping-Pong near the crowded piscine, as even I began to call it.

  Unrest: temporary, short-lived, impermanent, and somehow hostile to Egypt, a place that had once been the welcoming, open, luxurious, and voluptuous paradise for foreigners who reveled in its weather, unparalleled creature comforts, and, most important, the subservience of its natives. During the middle fifties, while I was at Princeton, the Times reported on the Israeli plot to blow up Cairo cinemas and libraries that had American connections, like the Metro and the USIA center, where our friend Leila Abu Fadil (daughter of Halim, my father’s old tennis partner) worked, a plan designed to sour relations between Nasser’s new government and the Americans. This was the Lavon Affair, and it was carried out by members of the local Jewish community, some of whom I remembered from poolside at the Tewfiqya. Perhaps that has influenced my recollections of the time, but I am certain that the sense of foreboding I had then was real, that the beginning of the end for our community of Shawam, Jews, Armenians, and the others hung in the heavy but somehow pleasurable air of the Tewfiqya. Slowly, members of this community began to disappear—some to Israel, to Europe, and a tiny number to the United States. The lamentable unfolding, or rather dismembering, of Cairo’s Levantine communities began as some left in anticipation of what was to come; later, others were forced to leave penniless because of the Suez and 1967 wars.

  Victoria College and our circle of family friends were totally non-political. The vocabulary of Arab nationalism, Nasserism, and Marxism was to come five or six years later, while we still lived deep in the illusions of hedonism, British education, and luxurious culture. Cairo was never more cosmopolitan. In my parents’ box at the opera house we took in the Italian opera season, the Ballet des Champs-Elysées, the Comédie Française; Krauss and Furtwängler at the Rivoli; Kempff and Cortot at Ewart Hall. At school, we lived a parallel life to the unreal British syllabus through a regular exchange of Tarzan, Conan Doyle, and Dumas serials. At the same time that Gatley was taking us solemnly through Micah Clarke, my friend Hamdollah and I were reveling in the Holmes stories, taking turns at being Mycroft, Lestrade, Moriarty. Later we discovered Wodehouse and Jeeves, but it was the vocabulary of the Tarzan novels that opened up a rich universe for us. “Your skin is as smooth as Histah the snake,” one of us would say, to which the other would reply, “Better that than Tantor’s bulk.” With Arthur Davidson I had many long and learned discussions about the world of Captain Marvel. Would Mary Marvel prove a sexy person to meet or not? No, he said definitively, her pussy would surely be made of iron (kussaha hadid); Wonderwoman would be much more enjoyable. We talked about the Marvels, their assorted progeny and kin far more than we ever even mentioned our own families, which I now assume we were all quite happy to escape, wishing they were more like the comic strip. British comics like “Boys Own,” “Billy Bunter,” “George Formby,” and “Sexton Blake” gave us great pleasure. Between Bunter’s chaotic and sadistic school and the upright and fearless Australian “cobbers” who dotted “Boys Own” I imagined an idyllic realm far removed from Victoria College.

  Every so often I would come up against the school’s entrenched authoritarianism in the form of the head boy, Shalhoub. When our class was dragooned into watching a school football game but allowed to wear our own clothes, our bedraggled and scruffy appearance brought for
th the scorn of the nattily attired Upper Six boys still in their official school finery. Shalhoub walked by just inside the lines, a sort of monarch inspecting a disappointingly ratty-looking honor guard, his face barely concealing the disgust and indifference that his swaggering gait radiated. With a huge white carnation in his buttonhole, smartly polished black shoes, and glisteningly striped tie, he was the very model of the supercilious head boy. Then Hamdollah crowed rather loudly, “My, what a handsome figure you cut, Captain Shalhoub,” at which the outraged Shalhoub stopped and beckoned to Hamdollah and me to step out of the line and follow him. An act of lèse-majesté had been committed.

  He marched us to his study off the overheated indoor swimming pool, and after cuffing me twice began to twist poor Hamdollah’s arm up behind him. As the pressure and pain increased, the much younger student groaned plaintively, his arm at breaking point. “Why are you doing this, Captain?,” to which Shalhoub answered in his impeccably fluent English, “Because, frankly, I enjoy it.” Hamdollah’s arm didn’t break, and Shalhoub got bored with this tiresome pastime. “Back to the football game,” he commanded us, “and don’t let me hear a word from you.”

  I do not recall ever seeing him again except at a distance during the last day of school, when, with a small bevy of important British officials, including Roy Chapman-Andrews, a noted Foreign Office type whose evidently high office (and the tremendous deference accorded him) I never fully appreciated, we celebrated the end of term. In such situations it was always supposed that the natives would directly realize that an immensely elevated personage was gracing them with his presence, even though his exact function wasn’t given, or was supposed to be irrelevant to said natives. Shalhoub was on the platform to speak a few unctuous and, I thought, rather fawning words of “approbation” for our collective good fortune in having had such a wonderful English education and for Chapman-Andrews’s presence; there was a round of hip-hip-hoorays, led by Shalhoub of course (with Bassano, his coeval, standing decorously by him on the platform), and then we all shuffled out. The next I knew about Shalhoub was a decade later when he became Omar Sharif, Faten Hamama’s husband, and a movie star whose U.S. debut in 1962 was David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia.

  My parents seemed always to be agitated, not to say filled with foreboding, about my insouciance in school, my inability to do “well” for long, my carelessness and seat-of-the-pants attitude toward exams and promotions. It seemed funny, I once thought to myself as I played hooky from school in the early spring of 1950, that I had at one time been so anxious about my future that I lay awake unable to sleep.

  I began at that time to have a sense that my feelings toward families, my own and others, were not what they were supposed to be. Except for my general dependence on my parents, and my long, frustrated, even exacerbated love and solicitude for my mother, I caught myself by surprise, feeling little of the organic and sustained love and loyalty for my siblings and other members of the extended family—venerated both by my father as “one’s family” and also by my sisters, according to what they said—that I saw in others. There was another instance of the detachment and choosiness that I found in myself, which I have never been able to change or humanize. Despite what they said and did to my father, I still liked my cousins because I liked them, not because they were in favor or, when they quarreled with him, out of favor or because “family” dictated some particular set of sentiments. The same was true of my attitude toward my aunt Nabiha, who for a time angered my mother for her disloyalty to her brother Wadie.

  I seemed therefore to draw less and less sustenance from the family group; I presumed that I had had it before, but I had somehow lost it, and I never regained it, except in the tortured and yet nourishingly hypnotic dialectic I maintained with my mother and which both of us fed and left unresolved for the longest time. It was while I was at VC that I began to notice the almost absolute separation that existed between my surface life at school and the complicated but mostly inarticulate inner life I cherished and lived through the emotions and sensations I derived from music, books, and memories intertwined with fantasies. It was as if the integration and liberty I needed between my selves would have to be endlessly postponed, although I subliminally retained the belief that one day they would somehow be integrated. With George, Mostapha, Samir, Andy, Billy, Arthur, and Claude I formed a sort of scruffy rat pack, tormenting masters and scorning the curriculum. We hung out together only in school as we lived long distances apart, though we occasionally met at the cinema or at the Tewfiqya Club. We were a generation too early for café life, and hashish was a very infrequent and difficult-to-obtain pleasure, so we settled for the crude humor of tahshish, the mostly lewd one-liners supposedly traded by semicomatose habitués of the weed, almost all of these repartees expressing passive acceptance of one’s impotence and general stupidity.

  So we hung out at school—between classes, near the tuck shop, in the dining refectory, on the sidelines of some match or other. The school provided no moral or intellectual framework—or at least no perceptible one—for us to evaluate our development. I often felt that we had all been judged before we ever got to the place, judged as wanting, or in some fundamental way as debased human material, not English, not really gentlemen, not really teachable. For me this was strangely relaxing, since at last I could be as I was without trying hard to be better, or work harder. Effort was pointless. The result was a curiously weightless life, with no unconscious or moral principle lurking beneath the surface. During my years there I do not recall a single personal conversation with any teacher or older student. My personal life was annulled, except as a Middle Five boy, then as an Upper Five one. The rest was background.

  The Dirliks were frequently at our house, and I saw no reason not to be as relaxed as they were about having dinner or tea “out.” The Dirliks exuded fun and pleasure, rare in my family life, which remained dour and explicitly formal. André was already an adventurer, his legs scarred with wounds gotten in the Red Sea coral reefs; Loris was always well dressed and elegant (we all remarked how precisely, even surgically, he could strip a bony chicken of all its meat with fork and knife); and Renée was ever ready with a quip or a suggestion for a picnic or the open-air cinema. True, their exuberant lifestyle was compromised by rumors that the handsomely located family pharmacy on Kasr el Nil Street, left to Loris and his brother by their father, was losing money for lack of attention, but this never clouded our time together until the late 1950s, when Loris ended up working for the United Nations in the Congo, having lost the pharmacy to bankruptcy. He died there suddenly and alone in the summer of 1962, to everyone’s great sorrow.

  In the late spring the long-awaited new school building was completed. Where the money came from I still do not know, but by the bedraggled, cramped, hand-me-down Shubra standards it turned out to be a lavish, superbly appointed new campus at the desert edge of Maadi, still an exclusive, mostly foreign and upper-class suburb, which I knew from both the club there and of course CSAC, nearer to Maadi’s placid center and the railway station. All of a sudden I realized that we were at the end of a whole era (not that I knew what exactly that meant), when sudden, surprising events could and certainly did occur, and when new requirements were expected of us all. I don’t recall thinking of myself very much in individual terms—it still impresses me that our bonds as a school class, Middle Five One, were based not at all on family or class, which I do recall as positively counting for nothing—but on a collective, if narrowly defined, set of objects, phrases, words even, that circulated as if (for me, at least) in a comfortingly secure orbit. There was, to begin with, the dress code—caps, ties, blazers—which was slowly phased out in Shubra. Then the de rigueur pink-covered “assignment books,” the leather or wooden pencil cases, the various types of fountain pens (no ballpoints then), including a cheap Parker lookalike much used and sold on the streets by noisy vendors (it had “P.Arker” engraved on the clip; Japanese products in those days were the ultimate in derided
, risible brands), VC blue copy books. Then at least a dozen English textbooks in subjects like physics, history, and math—books that were as colorless and impersonal as their American equivalents at CSAC had been chatty and narrativized (e.g., “Morton gives Shelley $12.23 in change as his share for the class picnic of 18 students. What if he thought that there were 15 students, and that each should pay a share equivalent to …?”), plus two or three literature books, a Shakespeare play set for that year, a twentieth-century English novel like C. S. Forester’s subliterary The Commodore, plus a “classic” nonfiction prose text (Macaulay’s essays), and a selection of what seemed to be dreary academic poetry (poems by Gray and Cowper). Much, if not all, of this was packed in a standard brown leather satchel with two clasps, with the family name (no first names) carefully scratched in by hand in black or blue capitals on the inside main flap.

  More exciting were a whole range of swapping and play objects: marbles, including the much-prized agates, penknives (prized but outlawed), Ping-Pong racquets, wristbands, Dinky Toys (I still own the red Humber sedan I won in some preposterously lucky bet over the meaning of “Greenwich Mean Time,” often heard on the BBC and little understood in those days), pocket combs, little vials of locally produced Chabrawichi cologne, rubber bands and key chains, new pencils with shiny caps and clips over their points, sharpeners and rubbers (the English word for American “eraser,” which my father indefatigably admonished me to use), slingshots, little round wire- and paper-covered firework balls (also both prized and outlawed), various pornographic books, badly printed on the vilest, grimiest, most repellent-looking paper, written in a sub-English so graphic and vulgar as to actually dampen excitement, though we feigned it loudly and obscenely, and grainy fuzzy photographs of men and women copulating with embarrassed smirks on their faces. “Did you get a couple of servants to do this for you, Davidson?” I recall one of us saying to the enterprising boy who, it turned out later, had bought them from a parking garage attendant.