Out of Place: A Memoir, Page 4

  II

  EVEN THOUGH THEY LIVED IN CAIRO IN 1935, MY PARENTS made sure that I was born in Jerusalem, for reasons that were stated quite often during my childhood. Hilda had already given birth to a male child, to be called Gerald, in a Cairo hospital, where he developed an infection and died soon after birth. As a radical alternative to another hospital disaster, my parents traveled to Jerusalem during the summer, and on the first of November, I was delivered at home by a Jewish midwife, Madame Baer. She regularly visited us to see me as I was growing up: she was a big, bluff woman of German provenance who spoke no English but rather a heavily accented, comically incorrect Arabic. When she came there were lots of hugs and hearty pinches and slaps, but I remember little else of her.

  Until 1947 our off-and-on sojourns in Palestine were entirely familial in character—that is, we did nothing as a family alone but always with other members of the extended clan. In Egypt, it was exactly the opposite; there, because we were by ourselves in a setting to which we had no real connection, we developed a far greater sense of internal cohesion. My early memories of Palestine itself are casual and, considering my profound later immersion in Palestinian affairs, curiously unremarkable. It was a place I took for granted, the country I was from, where family and friends existed (it seems so retrospectively) with unreflecting ease. Our family home was in Talbiyah, a part of West Jerusalem that was sparsely inhabited but had been built and lived in exclusively by Palestinian Christians like us: the house was an imposing two-story stone villa with lots of rooms and a handsome garden in which my two youngest cousins, my sisters, and I would play. There was no neighborhood to speak of, although we knew everyone else in the as yet not clearly defined district. In front of the house lay an empty rectangular space where I rode my bike or played. There were no immediate neighbors, although about five hundred yards away sat a row of similar villas where my cousins’ friends lived. Today, the empty space has become a park, and the area around the house a lush, densely inhabited upper-class Jewish neighborhood.

  When we stayed with my widowed aunt Nabiha, my father’s sister, and her five grown children, I was routinely a straggler behind the twins, Robert and Albert, who were about seven years older than I; I had neither any independence nor a particular role to play, except that of the younger cousin, occasionally used either as an unthinking, blindly obedient loudspeaker to yell insults and nasty messages to their friends and enemies from atop a wall, or as an assenting audience to extremely tall tales. Albert, with his rakish air and sporty sense of fun, was the closest I came to having an older brother or good friend.

  We also went to Safad, where we stayed for weeklong visits with my maternal uncle Munir, a doctor, and his wife, Latifeh, who had two boys, and a girl roughly my age. Safad belonged to another, less-developed, world: the house had no electricity, the narrow, carless streets and steep climbs made for a wonderful playground, and my aunt’s cooking was exceptionally delicious. After the Second World War, our visits to Jerusalem and to a greater extent Safad provided an escape from the regimen already forming around me with cumulative daily reinforcement in Cairo. The Safad visits were mostly idyllic times for me, broken occasionally by school or a tutorial, but never for very long.

  As we increasingly spent time in Cairo, Palestine acquired a languid, almost dreamlike, aspect for me. There I did not as acutely feel the solitude I began to dread later, at eight or nine, and although I sensed the absence of closely organized space and time that made up my life in Egypt, I could not completely enjoy the relative freedom from it that I had in Jerusalem. I recall thinking that being in Jerusalem was pleasant but tantalizingly open, temporary, even transitory, as indeed it later was.

  The more significant and charged geography and atmosphere of Cairo were concentrated for us in Zamalek, an island in the Nile between the old city in the east and Giza in the west, inhabited by foreigners and wealthy locals. My parents moved there in 1937, when I was two. Unlike Talbiyah, whose residents were mainly a homogeneous group of well-to-do merchants and professionals, Zamalek was not a real community but a sort of colonial outpost whose tone was set by Europeans with whom we had little or no contact: we built our own world within it. Our house was a spacious fifth-floor apartment at 1 Sharia Aziz Osman that overlooked the so-called Fish Garden, a small, fence-encircled park with an artificial rock hill (gabalaya), a tiny pond, and a grotto; its little green lawns were interspersed with winding paths, great trees, and, in the gabalaya area, artificially made rock formations and sloping hillsides where you could run up and down without interruption. Except for Sundays and public holidays, the Garden, as we all called it, was where I spent all of my playtime, always supervised, within range of my mother’s voice, which was always lyrically audible to me and my sisters.

  I played Robinson Crusoe and Tarzan there, and when she came with me, I played at eluding and then rejoining my mother. She usually went nearly everywhere with us, throughout our little world, one little island enclosed by another one. In the early years we went to school a few blocks away from the house—GPS, Gezira Preparatory School. For sports there was the Gezira Sporting Club and, on weekends, the Maadi Sporting Club, where I learned how to swim. For years, Sundays meant Sunday School; this senseless ordeal occurred between nine and ten in the morning at the GPS, followed by matins at All Saints’ Cathedral. Sunday evenings took us to the American Mission Church in Ezbekieh, and two Sundays out of three to Evensong at the cathedral. School, church, club, garden, house—a limited, carefully circumscribed segment of the great city—was my world until I was well into my teens. And as the timetable for my life grew more demanding, the occasional deviations from it were carefully sanctioned respites that strengthened its hold over me.

  One of the main recreational rituals of my Cairo years was what my father called “going for a drive,” as distinguished from his daily drive to work. For more than three decades, he owned a series of black American cars, each bigger than its predecessors: a Ford, then a deluxe Plymouth sedan, then in 1948 an enormous Chrysler limousine. He always employed drivers, two of whom, Faris and Aziz, I was allowed to chat with only when he was not there: he insisted on complete silence as he was being driven to and from his office. On the occasions I rode with him, he started the journey from home very much in a domestic mood, so to speak, relatively open to conversation, and would even vouchsafe me a smile, until we reached the Bulaq bridge that connected Zamalek to the mainland. Then he would gradually stiffen and grow silent, pulling out some papers from his briefcase and beginning to go over them. By the time we reached the Asa af and Mixed Courts intersection that bordered Cairo’s European business center, he was closed to me completely, and would not answer my questions or acknowledge my presence: he was transformed into the formidable boss of his business, a figure I came to dislike and fear because he seemed like a larger and more impersonal version of the man who supervised my life.

  At night and on holidays, without a driver he would take us on “the drives,” all chatter and jokes, all entertaining patriarchy, which I recognized half consciously as a liberation for him above all. Minus coat and tie, in summer shirtsleeves or winter sports jacket, he headed for one of a handful of designated fun destinations. On Sunday afternoons it was to Mena House for tea and a modest concert. Saturday afternoons it was the Barrages, a pocket-size British-constructed dam in the Delta. Surrounded by verdant parks crisscrossed by a simple trolley system whose mysterious purpose always stimulated my fantasies of escape (and the impossibility thereof), we might wander about where we wished, eating a sandwich here, an apple there, over a period of two and perhaps even three hours. On holidays we invariably trailed out past the Pyramids into the Western Desert, there to stop at an anonymous milepost, unfold our blankets, unpack an elaborate picnic lunch, throw stones at a target, skip rope, toss a ball. Just the five, six, or seven of us, as the family grew. Never, except for Mena House, at a public place like a café or restaurant. Never with anyone else. Never at any recognizable place
—just a spot off the Desert Road. Holiday evenings we toured the streets south of Bab el Louk where most of the government buildings were located. Lit up with thousands of sandy yellow bulbs and bright-green neon lights, the buildings constituted “the illuminations,” as my father called them, that we visited on the king’s birthday or the opening of Parliament.

  Beyond these boundaries of habit and minutely plotted excursions I felt that a whole world was held at bay, ready to tumble in, engulf us, perhaps even sweep us away, so protected and enclosed was I inside the little world my parents created. Cairo was a fairly crowded city in the early forties: during the World War II years thousands of Allied troops were stationed there, in addition to numerous expatriate communities of Italians, French, English, and the resident minorities of Jews, Armenians, Syro-Lebanese (the Shawam), and Greeks. Various unannounced parades and displays by the troops could be encountered by chance all over Cairo, and though my father talked occasionally of taking me to a jamboree—a scheduled parade—this never happened. In both Jerusalem and Cairo I saw British and ANZAC troops marching, their trumpets blaring and drums thumping inexorably, but I never understood why or for whom: I supposed that their purpose in life was much grander than mine, and therefore too significant for me to understand. I always noticed the facades of forbidden restaurants and cabarets decorated with signs like “All Ranks Welcome,” but did not understand their meaning, either. One such place, Sauld’s, in the Immobilia building downtown, happened to be near my uncle Asaad’s Arrow Stationery Company (a gift to him from my father), and he took me there often. “Feed the boy,” he would announce to a sleepy-eyed counter clerk, and I would gorge myself on cheese sandwiches and turnip pickles. I first thought that “all ranks” meant that civvies like me were licensed to enter, but soon realized that I had no rank at all. Sauld’s and Uncle Al, as we called him, symbolized a momentary, all-too-brief, and, given the rigid dietary laws imposed by my mother, entirely fugitive moment of freedom.

  By 1943, my parents had begun to impose their disciplinary regime so fully that when I left Egypt for the United States in 1951, Uncle Al’s hearty “Feed the boy” had already taken on a nostalgically irrecoverable sweetness, stupid and happy at the same time. When Uncle Al died in Jaffa four years later, Sauld’s had also ceased to exist.

  During the first part of the war we spent more time than usual in Palestine. In 1942 we rented a summer house in Ramallah, north of Jerusalem, and did not return to Cairo until November. That summer altered our family life dramatically, as a change occurred in our otherwise rather unpredictable and cumbersome movements between Cairo and Jerusalem. We usually traveled by train from Cairo to Lydda with at least two servants, a large amount of luggage, and a generally frenetic air; the return trip was always slightly easier and more subdued. In 1942, however, my mother, my two sisters, Rosemarie and Jean, my father, and I did not travel by train but by car. Instead of boarding the luxury Wagons-Lits train in Cairo’s Bab-el-Hadid Station for the twelve-hour overnight journey to Jerusalem, in May of that year we were on the run from the rapidly approaching German army, in my father’s black Plymouth, its headlights blued out, our quickly packed leather suitcases piled on the luggage rack and in the trunk. Driving to the Suez Canal Zone took many hours as we encountered numerous British convoys converging on Cairo: we would be pulled over and forced to wait as tanks, trucks, and personnel carriers trailed past us headed for what was to be an Allied defeat followed by the British counteroffensive that culminated in the battle of el-Alamein in November.

  We made the long drive in complete silence right through the night. My father negotiated the unmarked Sinai roads after having crossed the Suez Canal without ceremony or fuss at the Qantara bridge; the customs post there was deserted when we arrived at about midnight. It was at that point that we met up with the only civilian car going the same way, a convertible driven by a Jewish businessman from Cairo, with no passengers, and with only several bottles of iced water and a revolver for luggage. He recognized my father, and even suggested that he might relieve the Plymouth of some of its cargo—several large suitcases were duly transferred to him—but asked in return that he be allowed to follow in our tracks. I vividly remember the haggard, weary expression on my father’s face as he assented to this lopsided arrangement, and so we proceeded silently through the night, the second car following hard upon the first, with my father left on his own, both to excavate the sand-blown, meandering, narrow road in the blackest of black nights and also to endure the pressure of his little family inside the car, and outside the Egyptian Jewish businessman, convinced that he was running for his life, constantly bearing down upon us.

  Earlier that winter I had heard the sirens blaring “alarm” and “all clear.” Bundled in blankets and transported in my father’s arms to the garage-shelter during a German night bombing raid, I felt a vague premonition that “we” were threatened. The political, to say nothing of the military, meaning of our situation, were beyond me at age six and a half. As an American in Egypt, where the Germans under Rommel were predicted to descend first on Alexandria then on Cairo, my father must have thought he was targeted for an unpleasant fate. A whole wall in our house’s entrance room was covered with large maps of Asia, North Africa, and Europe. Every day my father moved red (for the Allies) and black (for the Axis) pins to reflect advances and retreats on the warring sides. For me, the maps were disquieting rather than informing, and though I occasionally asked my father to explain, it seemed hard for him to do so: he was distracted, bothered, distant. And then suddenly we left for Jerusalem on that difficult night ride. The day he decided to leave, he came home for lunch and told my mother simply to pack and get ready, and by five that afternoon we were off, driving slowly through Cairo’s half-deserted streets. A desolate, baffling time, my familiar world inexplicably being abandoned as we headed off into the cheerless dusk.

  The images of my father’s withdrawal and silence that followed during the long, perplexing and strange summer in Ramallah continued to haunt me for years. He sat on the balcony gazing off into the distance, smoking incessantly. “Don’t make noise, Edward,” my mother would say. “Can’t you see your father is trying to rest?” Then she and I would go out for a walk through the leafy and comfortable, largely Christian, town north of Jerusalem, with me clinging nervously to her. The Ramallah house was unattractive to me, but nevertheless a perfect setting for the stillness and bleakness of my father’s mysterious ordeal. A steep outdoor staircase went up diagonally from the garden, which was divided in the center by a stone path, on either side of which lay furrows of brown earth in which nothing but a few brambles grew. A pair of skinny quince trees stood close to the house by the first-floor balcony, where my father spent most of his time. The bottom floor was closed and empty. Having been forbidden to walk on the furrows, I was left with the ungenerous stony line going from gate to stairs as my playground.

  I had no idea what was wrong, but Ramallah was where I first heard the phrase “nervous breakdown.” Associated with that was the protection of my father’s “peace of mind,” a phrase he got from a book of that name, which provided the topic of many conversations with his friends. The tiresome languor of our Ramallah summer was closed to scrutiny and explanation, both of which as a bright six-and-a-half-year-old I needed quite naturally. Was Daddy afraid of something, I wanted first of all to ask: Why does he sit there for so long, and say nothing? Either I was led off to some useful or punitive activity, or I was thrown a few enigmatic and generally incomplete hints for an answer. There was talk of extreme anxiety about his suddenly higher blood pressure. There was also reference to having sent off my cousins Abie (Ibrahim) and Charlie—Uncle Asaad’s boys—to Asmara, where, my father worried himself sick, they might be killed. A shady Cairo businessman was said to have tried unsuccessfully to tempt my father into some business scheme for war profiteering. (I understood that my father refused.) Were those events enough to cause a nervous breakdown?

  Whatever the re
ason, once we returned to Cairo a process of change in my life began as a result, and indeed I was encouraged by my mother in particular to believe that a happier, less problematic period had ended. I sank more and more into generalized truancy—“You’re very clever,” I’d be told over and over, “but you have no character, you’re lazy, you’re naughty,” etc.—and was also made aware of an earlier Edward, sometimes referred to as “Eduardo Bianco,” whose exploits, gifts, and accomplishments were recounted to me as signs of pre-1942 early promise betrayed. From her I learned that at the age of one and a half the former Edward had memorized thirty-eight songs and nursery rhymes, which he could sing and recite perfectly. Or that when cousin Abie, a fluent harmonica player, purposely introduced a wrong note in his rendition of “John Peel,” Edward would clench his fists, close his eyes, and bawl out first his annoyance at the mistake and then the correct version. Or that except for the odd use of “you” for “me,” Edward spoke perfect sentences in English and Arabic by the age of fifteen months. Or that his ability to read simple prose was quite developed by the age of two and a half or three. Or that math and music were as natural to him aged three or four as they were to eight- and nine-year-olds. Cute, playful, preternaturally fast and smart, this early Edward enjoyed roistering play with his happy father. I recalled none of this myself, but my mother’s frequent rehearsal of it plus a couple of photo albums from those years—including an idyllic summer in Alexandria—supported the claim.