Out of Place: A Memoir, Page 27

  Our collective intellectual world was not particularly competitive, despite the ceaseless official emphasis on grades and on passing and failing. My own performance was highly unmemorable—wayward, erratic, sometimes excellent, normally passable and little more. Years later, when I had become known as a literary critic, one classmate told another, who relayed the comment to me, “Is that the same Said? He was the way we all were; amazing that he turned out like that.” I am still surprised that the actual mental, or intellectual, world we lived in had so little to do with the mind in any serious or academic sense. Like the objects we carried around and traded, our collective language and thought were dominated by a small handful of perceptibly banal systems deriving from comics, film, serial fiction, advertising, and popular lore that was essentially at a street level, by no means influenced by home, religion, or education. The last edifying trace of sensibility and relatively “high” culture in us came, I remember clearly, from two religious films about saintly French women, Bernadette of Lourdes and Joan of Arc, in other words, Jennifer Jones and a crew-cut Ingrid Bergman. I saw the Bernadette film for some reason during its second or third run at the Diana Cinema, which was owned at the time by a Greek family, the Raissys. Its location on the less fashionable end of Emad el Din Street and its generally mediocre appointments made for nothing like the excitement of the Metro Cinema or the Rivoli Cinema, which alone in the Middle East sported the blazingly illuminated theater organ. The Diana’s main distinction was that it was both a drab theater where Om Kulthum delivered her interminably long performances and a place where benefits for good causes could be held (my aunt Nabiha, in her unending attempts to raise money for Palestinian refugees, once took it over for a charity screening of The Little Colonel, the first and only Shirley Temple film I ever saw and which I have always since detested for its smarmy good-natured faux-naïf wholesomeness and racism), in addition to showing not-quite-glamorous Hollywood movies. Between them Joan and Bernadette à l’americaine imbued me with considerable but very vague enthusiasm for something ungraspable and sent me eagerly to literary and historical sources, mostly to be found on my parents’ ecumenical bookshelves. I read Franz Werfel’s Song of Bernadette and also his Forty Days of Musa Dagh, followed by people like Chesterton (or was it Hilaire Belloc?) and Harold Lamb on the Maid of Orleans.

  In the fall of 1950, the bus came to pick us up earlier than usual, for Maadi, which lay in the heart of Cairo, was twice as far away as Shubra. Our first distant sight of the new school, still in the process of construction, filled all of us with considerable hope. Three large buildings were complete and ready for us that October. They were Modernist rectangular structures, all of them on struts with, in the case of our class building, two long rows of windows, one above the other. Across the way was a dining hall and gymnasium, with a building for boarders, an infirmary, and masters’ quarters at right angles to it; attached to the class building was a square-shaped annex that housed the administration. The grounds were vast, with several playing and track fields, tennis courts, and, because the school abutted on the desert, a well-appointed stable with grooms and a riding ring. All in all it was by far the handsomest school I or it seemed anyone else had been in. We disembarked from the bus feeling that we were at a new beginning.

  It took us no more than five minutes to realize that the new school might not be an improvement after all. Beady-eyed, bow-tied, and bald Mr. Griffiths was now both our “additional maths” teacher in trigonometry, calculus, and solid geometry, as well as acting headmaster. He was to be my bête noire whose dogged condemnation stayed with me long after I left VC.

  The new place both was grandiose and seemed to be making a pompous, rather disdainful statement as a British institution, and this increased our sense of collective alienation and hostility. There were other changes. Without the catalyzing force of George Kardouche, who had disappeared to the English School in Heliopolis, we tended to dissolve into divisive cliques.

  Our new form and English teacher, Mr. Lowe, was a blustering, weak, and incompetent teacher. The new classrooms had a little storeroom behind the blackboard, where he kept his chalk, exercise books, and other supplies. The door, to the blackboard’s left, had a lock on it, and just underneath the blackboard a small sliding window gave on to the classroom. It was my idea to trap him inside, inscribe “Take a look, 5 piasters” on the blackboard above the window, and let the students stand by to watch our hapless Englishman in captivity, “in his natural state,” I put it as I barked the show. A prefect lured in by Lowe’s bellowing and our raised voices quickly put an end to the escapade. I was duly reported to Griffiths, who glowered at me in math class with a distinctly unpleasant gleam in his eye. “A lot of disturbance here yesterday,” he said, looking at me but addressing the class as a whole. Weeks later Griffiths was to tell my parents with some regret, not to say bitterness, that my intelligence always inhibited him from sacking me. Ironic that a teacher should feel that a bright student was an impediment to his authority.

  The compactness of the Shubra grounds, which kept us in touch with other classes, had been replaced with the vastness of our new grounds. Masters took to patrolling the corridors, something impossible to do in Shubra with its decentralized disorder, and it gradually came to appear to me that the new campus was designed more for controlled surveillance than for utility or education. It took only about a month at the new school for me to feel constantly uneasy: the older boys encroached on us in the corridor, attacking, insulting, pushing. One, an immense tub of flesh weighing at least three hundred pounds, Billy Fawzi, took a great irrational dislike to me, and I spent my time dodging him. But there was no avoiding him completely, as he could block an entire corridor with his great bulk. Once he took hold of my neck in one of his huge hands and said in Arabic, “Said, I’ve been watching you. Be careful. Don’t try to be clever with me. And [in English] don’t be cheeky,” cleverness and cheekiness being among the most lethal sins with which not only masters but older (and bigger) boys charged us.

  Captain Billy was only the worst of the older boys who threatened and tormented me; most of the others were not even names to me, but they were dreaded forces, blotchy-skinned, overweight, and entirely Arabic-speaking. For some reason I was singled out by this group, which had replaced the departed Shalhoub as the school’s unofficial disciplinarians, with the masters’ obvious complaisance. I was known to be quick-witted, generally in trouble, and a decent student, so during school exams I routinely found myself surrounded by some of these Brobdingnagian creatures, who would then hand me their English papers to write for them while I was frantically trying to do my own. The carrot was “Said, be a decent fellow”; the much more effective cudgel was “Do it or I’ll fuck your mother.” So I always did their exams. Cowardice and compliance were a way of life in this case.

  At Christmas that year it was decided that my mother and I should take the train together to Upper Egypt for a few days’ sightseeing in the Valley of the Kings, Karnak, and other sites, whose silence and awful brooding emptiness put me off ancient Egypt forever. Our four or five days were idyllic, a sort of languid respite from the hurly-burly of school and the great city, and it would be the last time I had an extended period of time alone with my mother. We read to each other, suspended without tension or argument in the long winter afternoons and evenings in the salons of the Cataract Hotel without schedules or deadlines or duties to fulfill. She was now beginning to be more aware of her social gifts, and the restful, nourishing, uncomplicated times I enjoyed with her were rather too often vitiated by her impulse to be gregarious, or at least to spend time with American acquaintances staying at the same hotel. I remember my irritation and jealousy but I also cherish the abstraction of those days as furnishing me with a lifetime memory—never equaled nor superseded—of sublime disengagement from the exertions of daily life at VC, which were soon to do me in and drive me away from home literally forever.

  Luxor and Aswan: the brief respite before an aw
ful tempest. On a Thursday afternoon early in February Mr. Lowe petitioned us to take out our Shakespeares. We set up a chorus of “Scott instead.” He decided to take a stand on Shakespeare and in unwonted aggressive pursuit of his aim he waded into the front row of desks, flailing at his resistant charges, petulantly asserting a will entirely disconnected from his supposed object, which was to get us to read Shakespeare sonnets. Surrounded on all sides by an aroused, insurrectionary class, Lowe was like Samson in the Philistine temple, beset by blows, unable to see whom he was hitting, how (if at all) he was progressing. Suddenly, he lurched forward, encircling the boy nearest him with his oversize arms. Suddenly I found myself trapped in his sweaty embrace, with rivulets of perspiration pouring down his reddened face, and his great obese body pulling me down so that he lay on top of me. “I have you now, Said,” he sputtered, “and I’m going to teach you a lesson.” He tried to straighten his arms to beat me but he was quickly set upon by three or four students who held on to him shouting frenzied Arab curses. “Stop it,” he yelled, “stop it and let go of me this instant.” My rescuers drew back, stunned by this astonishing assertion of his flawed authority. As I scrambled free he grabbed me again, marched me firmly to the door, and ejected me from the class, slamming the door shut.

  I caught a glimpse of Griffiths staring at me from his office door thirty meters away, but he said and did nothing but look at me expressionlessly. At the start of the break during our math class the next morning, Griffiths told us to remain seated. “Now, Said,” he said casually to me in the second row, “I hear that you were misbehaving yesterday afternoon. That’s true, isn’t it?” Having seen me posted outside the class, he knew it was true. I said nothing. “WHY DON’T YOU ANSWER, BOY?” he suddenly screamed at me, losing control of himself for the first time in our presence. “Yes, sir,” I responded noncommittally. “Well, we can’t have any of that here. Can’t have it.” Again noncommittally: “No, sir.” To which, very matter-of-factly he said, “You’d better leave then.” Not knowing quite what he had in mind I said, “Leave, sir? Now, sir?” “Just leave, Said. I don’t care where you go. Just leave. Now.”

  I proceeded deliberately, with the precision of shocked surprise and shivering uncertainty, to pack my tattered satchel, while everyone sat in a frigid, immobilized silence. I looked sideways at my friend Hamdollah, who lowered his eyes in embarrassment. Isolated, pinpointed, transfixed, I had suddenly stepped outside every circle I had once inhabited. No longer welcome at school, frightened to go home, with no money in my pockets, no prospects for the immediate future except a rail ticket, I somehow managed to walk out of the class feeling strangely invisible, while Griffiths sat impassively at his desk waiting for me to be gone. I do not recollect much of my three-kilometer walk to the railway station, except for crossing the canals with extreme deliberation, idly tossing a pebble or two at their dark algae-colored surface, then moving on to the next canal to do much the same thing all over again. It took me till about one-thirty p.m. to get home, dawdling through Bab el Louk, around Midan Ismailiya, across the Kasr el Nil bridge, down past the Moorish Gardens and the Gezira Club’s racecourse, past the little Fish Garden, a five-kilometer trudge from the train station during which I found myself deliberately not thinking of what was about to happen. I experienced a floating, literally utopian sensation of not being there, of being disembodied, relieved of all my customary encumbrances, obligations, restraints. I had never felt quite so dangerously free and undirected as I did then; after years of timetables, chores, errands, assignments, I was simply walking in the direction of home, with no purpose except that at some point I knew I would have to end up there.

  Not having been entrusted with my own set of keys, I had to ring our doorbell. Uncharacteristically, since the task was reserved for servants, my mother opened the door. “Edward,” she said in a tone of surprise that quickly gave way to alarm. “What are you doing here? Is something wrong? Are you ill?” Speechless and disoriented, I was ushered in by her to be met by my father, his face glowering with concern and anger. Without my saying a word, he took me into their room for a preliminary whipping with his riding crop.

  Not a word passed between us. I went to my room and exploded in tears, my physical pain compounded by a sense of fundamental desolation and abandonment. For two weeks I remained at home like a forlorn shadow, denied books, music, friends, and any kind of pleasure by two mystified and outraged parents who were content to await Griffiths’s pleasure before he would consent to see them. When they returned from their appointment it was my mother who did all the talking, most of it essentially endorsing Griffiths’s poor opinion of me as a “good-for-nothing,” although he seems to have regretfully added the novel complaint that I was “too clever” to be sacked definitively, much as he would have liked to have done so. My mother seems, like Griffiths, to have regarded my intelligence, which was soon becoming my only certainty about myself, resentfully, as a sign of my incorrigibility and inveterately malign or at least unteachable nature. In her eyes, my intelligence got in the way of my being a good student, but it was enough this time to earn me an unenthusiastic reprieve from expulsion. I could return, Griffiths said, but no further misbehavior would be tolerated.

  Griffiths had also clearly implied that my future as a student-scholar within the English system was uncertain; he would have to give me an equivocal recommendation should I stay on and get my GCE (the high school diploma awarded to all graduates of British-run schools) and then apply to Oxford or Cambridge (his university). My father was undoubtedly planning my departure for the United States even as I returned to VC in ignorance of this fact. What I was told as the official story was that I would have to leave Egypt because an obscure U.S. immigration law decreed that although I had inherited citizenship from my father, in order to become a citizen I would be required to spend at least five years in the United States before I was twenty-one, as I had not been born there. Since in November 1951 I’d be turning sixteen, the move was imperative.

  I suppose he thought that by sending me away to such demanding and all-male institutions as Mount Hermon and later Princeton, he was protecting me not only from self-abuse, but also from the heaving, overabundant emotional luxury represented by my mother with its paralyzing uncertainties and comforts.

  Just as I was being shaped by my father’s plan for me to go to the United States in the spring of 1951, we suddenly received a postcard from his long-lost younger brother, David, who had been shipped out of Egypt by my father for unregenerate philandering in 1929, exiled to Brazil, and had then vanished. Written in a gigantic, childish scrawl, David’s card came from Lourdes and announced, “I am cured. I am coming to see you,” followed a week later by a telegram giving his flight number and date of arrival in Cairo. He was a darker, more animated, and more compact Latin-mustachioed version of my father, a sort of cross between Wadie’s alter ego and his parody. David’s amorous powers were supposed to be irresistible, especially to married women, who were the immediate cause of his original banishment. He spoke a bizarre combination of windswept and tattered old Arabic, with a few dozen American phrases (“Gee Bill, you should see how much money I made one evening in Bahia”) and some incomprehensible Portuguese. We were all drawn to his uncomplicated, effusive presence: his brother Wadie and sister Nabiha, their various children, and my mother, at whom he charmingly made a few awkward but gallant passes. Staying at our house, he spent a month in Cairo doing very little except successfully persuading my father to take time off from work so that the three siblings could sit around together and chatter about the old Jerusalem childhood that they had once long ago shared. The Dostoyevskian depths that I intimated in my father (but never saw) were fully in evidence in David—melancholy, volubility, extremes of mood from elation to the darkest depression—and were framed by but never really contained in his relationships with his sober brother and sister.

  I never found out what he did exactly. Diamond mines were spoken of, but so too was his skill a
t being a tour guide, like his father. He gambled and drank, womanized and dashed around the Brazilian countryside. He gave us a leather pouch full of semiprecious stones of small value, but in their gleaming cascading profusion and variety they contained the romance of an entire continent. He and I became great pals: “ya dini” (“my religion”) he used to call me, unidiomatically. Years later I realized that in his exotic, unbridled, and mysterious personality he was an avatar of Conrad for me—a Kurtz figure, a secret sharer, a Cunningham Graham to my father’s British squire. He disappeared again back to Brazil. In September 1967 I saw him for an hour in New York; he was on tour with the Brazilian national soccer team in some mysterious capacity. Just before her death in the spring of 1973, Aunt Nabiha, ravaged by cancer, went to see him, and discovered a “kind of” wife, Adela, and a handicapped teenage child, who may have been adopted. A Virgilian sadness pervaded Nabiha’s last days as she negotiated the ruins of her scattered family, her heroic past of no help to her in her disorganized, crumbling life in Amman, where she died in early April on the same day that Kamal Nasir was assassinated by the Israelis in Beirut. In David, Nabiha, and my father I saw a tangle of departures, exiles, and brief returns, and I understood my father’s attempt to combine an unpromising mix of hidden, unruly instinct and conscious Victorian determination in his efforts to make a good life for his family. What sustained my father’s faith was a simple pedagogical imperative he kept reverting to. “If it’s educational,” he used to tell me, “then do it.” I have been trying to grasp what “it” was ever since, and this book is my record of having tried. Only decades after his death can I see the two sides of his legacy to me bound together irrevocably in an absolute, unarguable paradox, repression and liberation opening on to each other in what is to me still a mystery that I am just beginning now to accept, if not fully to understand.