Out of Place: A Memoir, Page 37

  Because he literally made the business and came to be its exclusive owner, my father was, and in every sense acted the part of, the sole proprietor. As a result, nothing escaped his scrutiny, no detail was too small for him to know about, no corner of his office, showrooms, factories, workshops was exempt from critical examination. Business started at eight a.m., ended for lunch at one, reopened at four (in summer, in winter at three-thirty) and shut at seven-thirty; Saturday was half-day, and Sunday the weekly holiday. My father always appeared at nine-thirty, never in the afternoon. On feast days he always had the American flag hoisted, a habit that infuriated a visiting American Orientalist whom I knew from Princeton, who lectured me (I don’t think he was ever able to get past the various obstacles to actually see, much less meet, my father) on how inappropriate this was: “This is Egypt,” he said tautologically. “Flying that flag is an insult to Egyptians.” To his many Egyptian employees, however, my father seemed like a natural presence. He knew all his clients and in a pinch would appear and take over from a flagging salesman. But it was his powerfully impressive frame standing anywhere on the premises on Sharia Abdel Khalek Sarwat, or in his offices at Sharia Sherif, that communicated something I never ever possessed, a sense of deep, unchallengeable ownership.

  I was the outsider, the passing stranger. Of course, all the staff, even the most senior, referred to me as “Mister Edward,” but I always found the title both ludicrous and embarrassing. I could not refer to the SSCo with proprietary adjectives like “us” and “our,” and I was never given any specific thing to do there. I felt that my father wanted me to work with him as his son, but it is extraordinary that during that entire year I would drive my car alone to the place at eight, spend the whole day in the shop and office, be there alone in the afternoon, and do all this without any specific assignment to fill, no job to get done, no department or service to be responsible for. I’d ask him for something to do on a regular basis and he would always say, “It’s enough for me that you’re there.” Even my mother would once in a while remonstrate with this extraordinarily vague, even in a sense dismissive, idea of a mission—after all I did already have a Princeton B.A. and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa—but to no avail. “It’s enough for me that you’re there!”

  By Christmas I started coming in to “work” in the morning later and later. I would spend my afternoons alone in his office while he was playing bridge at the club; I would either read—I remember I spent a week reading all through Auden, another leafing through the Pléiade edition of Alain, still another puzzling through Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, yet another reading Freud—or I would write poetry (some of which I published in Beirut), music criticism, or letters to various friends. By late January I started to stay home to practice the piano. My father, however, remained serenely unperturbed. I was far too uncertain to challenge him, and for reasons I still have not fully come to terms with, I didn’t feel like the oldest, indeed the only, son, actually entitled to property from him. SSCo was never mine. He paid me what was then the considerable monthly salary of two hundred Egyptian pounds during that year and insisted that on the last day of each month I should stand in line with the other employees, sign the book (for tax purposes I was called “Edward Wadie”), and get my salary in cash. Invariably when I came home he would very courteously ask me for the money back, saying that it was a matter of “cash flow,” and that I could have whatever money I needed. “Just ask,” he said. And of course I dutifully did, ever in bondage to him.

  It was his money, after all, his business, his work. Those facts made such an impression on me that I could only feel like a useless appendage to him, “the son,” as I imagined his employees to be calling me. What came in and out of the business had nothing to do with me at all: I just happened to be there when I was, but the commerce continued as it had all along, without me. I was useful to him on occasion, most notably in the summer of 1960 when Nasser’s “Arab socialism” meant that foreign hard-currency transactions and the imports that they were intended for were forbidden, and my father had to resort to complicated triple or quadruple barter export agreements, involving, say, Egyptian peanuts sold to Rumania, which in turn bought locomotives from France, which in turn allowed the additional export of franking machines to my father in Egypt. I tried to follow these arrangements, but could not: my father could do all the figuring in his head (plus conversion rates, commissions, fluctuating dollar prices) while his favorite middleman, Albert Daniel, would sit across from him with a pocket calculator. They would make the deal, and I would just watch, wondering how legal all this was, since it was clearly designed to circumvent the inconvenience and obstacles placed in the way of importers like my father. He had already made the switch to locally produced steel office furniture, for instance, but still needed to get hold of the raw material from abroad: for this, even more complicated machinations were necessary, but he was up to the task, and the materials were soon to be had.

  I recall that he seemed to revel in the complexity of what he was doing, but his evident pleasure induced despondency and a considerable sense of inadequacy in me. I never had anything useful to add, since my father and Daniel were much too fast, too certain and deft in what they traded back and forth. Yet, one weekday afternoon my father made a rare call from the club; I was sitting in his office, reading a magazine, I think. “You’re going to get some papers—a contract—delivered to you this afternoon. I want you to sign them and send them back to Daniel with the messenger.” He explained that he had made me the principal because, he said, “After all, you’re an executive too.” It didn’t seem like anything of great interest to me: here was I “just being there” for him, only occasionally performing what appeared to be a useful task or two. The contracts he had told me about were duly signed an hour later; I recall clearly not giving the transaction any further thought. Yet for the next fifteen years I was unable to return to Egypt because that particular contract, and I as its unsuspecting signatory, were ruled to be in contravention of the exchange-control law. My father told me that police officers came to his offices looking for me, one of them once threatening to have me brought back in handcuffs from abroad. But there, too, I did not for a very long time feel that my father was to blame for this surprising lapse by which he put his son up to do something basically illegal. I always assumed that the Egyptian police were to blame, and that it was their zeal, not my father’s ostensible indifference to my fate, that had led to my being banned for fifteen years from the one city in the world in which I felt more or less at home.

  Thus, our Cairo world started to close menacingly in on us, actually to come apart, as the Nasserite assault not only on the privileged classes but also on left dissidents like Farid Haddad opened up in earnest. I realized by my second year of graduate school (1959–60) after Farid’s death and George Fahoum’s trial for “business corruption,” that our days as alien residents in Egypt were finally drawing to a close. A palpable air of anxiety and depression pervaded my family’s circle of friends, most of whom were making plans to leave (which most of them did) for Lebanon or Europe.

  MY FIVE YEARS (1958–63) AS A HARVARD GRADUATE STUDENT in literature were an intellectual continuation of Princeton so far as formal instruction was concerned. Conventional history and a wan formalism ruled the literary faculty, so in fulfilling my degree requirements there was no possibility of doing much beyond marching from period to period until the twentieth century. I recall hours, days, weeks, of voracious reading with no significant extension of that reading in what professors lectured on or what they expected from a largely passive student clientele. There was scarcely a ripple on the surface of student placidity, perhaps because, with no sense of intellectual example to animate our exertions, all of us were out of place, or uncomfortable in the institution. My own intellectual discoveries were made outside what the regimen required, alongside those of gifted originals who were also at Harvard, like Arthur Gold, Michael Fried, and Tom Carnicelli. The most momentous event
s for me, as the Middle East drifted further and further from my consciousness (after all, I did no reading in Arabic then, nor did I know any Arabs, except Ralph Nader, who was, unlike me, an American-born law student at Harvard, who helped me resist and finally evade the Selective Service draft at the time of the Berlin crisis in 1961), were such things as Vico’s New Science, Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness, Sartre, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, all of whom shaped my dissertation on Conrad, written under the benign supervision of Monroe Engel and Harry Levin. Twice I tried to study under the aging I. A. Richards, the most avant-garde figure then at Harvard, and twice he defected from his courses just after the midpoint, when his secretary would enter and say that the course had been unilaterally dissolved. He was a comic miniaturization of the once-adventurous thinker—vague, vain, rambling—and as I read it, his major work struck me as thin and unaccomplished, as unprovocative as Blackmur’s was stimulating and, despite its gnarled syntax, suggestive. There was occasional excitement from visitors, very few in those days, but I was stirred by Kenneth Burke’s lectures on “logology,” as he called it.

  The most important musical influence on my life, even while I was at Harvard, was Ignace Tiegerman, a minuscule (four foot ten) Polish pianist, conservatory director, and teacher resident in Cairo since the mid-1930s. Very few musicians to my knowledge have had his gifts as pianist, teacher, and musician. A student of Lechetitzky and Ignaz Friedman, he came to Egypt on a cruise, loved it, and simply stayed, perfectly aware what the advent of Nazism would mean to Jews like him in Poland. He was endemically lazy, and when I knew him he had already stopped practicing and giving concerts. But he had the whole of the piano literature from mid-Beethoven to early Prokofiev in his head and fingers, and could play pieces like Gaspard de la nuit or the Chopin études in thirds and sixths fabulously well and with the utmost polish. As for late Brahms pieces, or Chopin nocturnes, mazurkas, and above all the Fourth Ballade and the Impromptus and Polonaise Fantaisie, no one I have ever heard played them as Tiegerman did, with such perfection of tone and phrase, unfailingly “right” tempo, anagogies and all. He encouraged me more than I can adequately say, less by what he said directly to me than by what he did on the second piano, and by showing what in my playing (which he could mime perfectly) might be modified. Above all he was a musical companion—not a hectoring or admonishing authority—for whom music was literally a part of life in the sense that during our long conversations on hot Sunday evenings in Cairo, or later in his little summer dacha in Kitzbühl, we would drift naturally, meander, between periods of talk and periods at the piano.

  When it came to music, my interest in a professional career diminished as I found myself intellectually unsatisfied by the physical requirement of daily practice and very occasional performance. And, it must be said, I realized that my gifts, such as they were, could never be adequate to the kind of professional trajectory I imagined for myself. Paradoxically, it was Tiegerman’s example, living and acting inside me, that finally discouraged me from making of the piano anything more than sensuous pleasure, indulged in at a decent level of competence for the rest of my life; I felt that there was a shadow line of raw ability I could not cross separating the good amateur from the truly gifted executant, someone like Tiegerman or Glenn Gould, whose Boston recitals I attended between 1959 and 1962 with rapt admiration, for whom the ability to transpose or read at sight, a perfect memory, and the total coordination of hand and ear were effortless, whereas for me all that was truly difficult, requiring much effort and in the end only a precarious, uncertain achievement. Yet with my flamboyant friend, Afif (Alvarez) Bulos, a former Jerusalemite about fifteen years older than I who was studying for a degree in linguistics and who was, for those days, an unusually colorful and almost parodistically mannered gay, I gave concerts, he with his good baritone, I on the piano. He was one of the rare contemporaries from my Harvard days whom I continued to see in Beirut, where he taught until his appallingly lurid death by stabbing in the spring of 1982. It was a ghastly sign and premonition of the Israeli invasion three months later, and of the Lebanese civil war raging furiously all around where Afif lived in Ras Beirut.

  In Cambridge, Afif and I used to practice where I lived, in the house at the end of Francis Avenue of my gentle landlady Thais Carter, whose daughter had been a Bryn Mawr classmate of Rosy’s. Thais was a divorced, middle-aged woman who lived alone, except during the summer months, when her Florida-based father, Mr. Atwood, would come up to stay with her. She rented out two rooms on the top floor, one of which I lived in for three years, and where thanks to her understated wit, hospitality, and capacity for friendship, I was genuinely contented. Roughly my mother’s age, Thais was patient where my mother was impetuous, methodical where my mother delighted in surprising and upsetting any method, quietly worldly where my mother was a unique combination of naïvete and busy sophistication. She and my mother became good friends, although a more contrasting pair of opposites could not be imagined. Thais easily tolerated and had an amused affection for Afif’s flamboyant homosexuality, whereas Afif made my mother uncomfortable. I remember in 1959 telling her that Afif was homosexual and, to my astonishment, discovering that she had no idea what that meant, except that, like all mentions of sexuality, it made her shudder with apparent revulsion.

  I still regarded her as my point of reference, mostly in ways that I neither fully apprehended nor concretely understood. In the summer of 1958, while driving in Switzerland, I had a horrendously bloody, head-on collision with a motorcyclist; he was killed and I was badly hurt. I can still recall with a jolt that awesomely loud and terrifyingly all-encompassing sound of the actual collision, which knocked me unconscious, and the very moment I awakened on the grass with a priest bending over me trying to administer the last rites. A moment later, after pushing away the intrusive cleric, with infallible instinct I knew I had to call my mother, who at that very moment was in Lebanon with the rest of my family. She was the first person to whom I needed to tell my story, which I did the moment the ambulance delivered me to the Fribourg hospital. That feeling I had of both beginning and ending with my mother, of her sustaining presence and, I imagined, infinite capacity for cherishing me, softly, imperceptibly, underwrote my life for years and years. At a time when I was myself going through radical change—intellectual, emotional, political—I felt that my mother’s idealized person, her voice, her enveloping maternal care and attention, were what I truly could depend on. When I divorced my first wife, the terrible confusion I felt was, I believed, best sorted out by my mother, despite her extraordinary ambivalence, which I either overlooked or overrode: “If things are so bad between you, then, yes, by all means you should divorce.” This was followed immediately by “On the other hand, for us [Christians] marriage is permanent, a sacrament, holy. Our church will never recognize divorce.” These were statements that often paralyzed me completely.

  Yet I managed for years to get past her irresolution, and reach the sustenance she gave me, especially after I lost Cairo, behind which I began to realize more and more was the continuing loss of Palestine in our lives and those of other relatives’. And 1967 brought more dislocations, whereas for me it seemed to embody the dislocation that subsumed all the other losses, the disappeared worlds of my youth and upbringing, the unpolitical years of my education, the assumption of disengaged teaching and scholarship at Columbia, and so on. I was no longer the same person after 1967; the shock of that war drove me back to where it had all started, the struggle over Palestine. I subsequently entered the newly transformed Middle Eastern landscape as a part of the Palestinian movement that emerged in Amman and then in Beirut in the late sixties through the seventies. This was an experience that drew on the agitated, largely hidden side of my prior life—the anti-authoritarianism, the need to break through an imposed and enforced silence, above all the need to draw back to a sort of original state of what was irreconcilable, thereby shattering and dispelling an unjust Establishment order. Some of my mother’
s frenetic restlessness was a reaction to my father’s loss, and to the many bewildering changes around her as the PLO grew in size and importance in Beirut along with the Lebanese civil war. She lived through the Israeli invasion of 1982, for instance, with admirable good humor and fortitude, taking care of a house in which my youngest sister, Grace, lived, plus two homeless friends, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod and Sohail Meari, whose apartment had been gutted by an Israeli rocket early in the war. It was an amazing display of bravery under fire. Yet when I tried to talk to her about politics, my dissenting politics in particular, or the complex political realities that caused the daily problems of her life since her marriage, she would upbraid me: go back to being a literary man; politics in the Arab world destroy honest and good people like you, and so on.

  It took years after the end of my formal education for me to realize how much she had, whether by design or instinct I shall never know, insinuated herself not just into our affairs as four sisters and a brother, but also between us. My sisters and I still live with the consequences of her redoubtable skills, all of them resulting in prickly barriers between us, fed, to be sure, by other sources as well, but first erected by her. Some of those barriers are immovable, which I regret. Perhaps they exist in all families. But I also realize now that our odd family cocoon back then was no model for future lives, nor was the world we lived in. I think my father must have sensed that, when at inordinate expense he did the totally unheard-of thing and sent four of us to the United States (my sisters for college only) for our education; the more I think about it, the more I believe he thought the only hope for me as a man was in fact to be cut off from my family. My search for freedom, for the self beneath or obscured by “Edward,” could only have begun because of that rupture, so I have come to think of it as fortunate, despite the loneliness and unhappiness I experienced for so long. Now it does not seem important or even desirable to be “right” and in place (right at home, for instance). Better to wander out of place, not to own a house, and not ever to feel too much at home anywhere, especially in a city like New York, where I shall be until I die.