Out of Place: A Memoir (19 page)

My parents, sisters, and I spent most of 1947 in Palestine, which we left for the very last time in December of that year. As a consequence I missed several months of CSAC and was enrolled at St. George’s School in Jerusalem.

The signs of impending crisis were all round us. The city had been divided into zones maintained by British Army and police checkpoints, through which cars, pedestrians, and cyclists had to pass. The adults in my family all carried passes marked with the zone or zones for which they were valid. My father and Yousif had multizone passes (A, B, C, D); the rest were restricted to one or perhaps two zones. Until I turned twelve I did not need a pass and so had been allowed to wander about freely with my cousins Albert and Robert. Gray and sober Jerusalem was a city tense with the politics of the time as well as the religious
competition between the various Christian communities, and between Christians, Jews, and Muslims. My aunt Nabiha once gave us a big scolding for going to the Regent, a Jewish cinema (“Why not stick to the Arabs? Isn’t the Rex good enough?” she asked rather shrilly. “After all, they don’t come to our cinemas!”), and even though we were sorely tempted to go back to the Regent we never did so again. Our daily conversation in school and home was uniformly in Arabic; unlike in Cairo, where English was encouraged, our family in Jerusalem “belonged” and our native language prevailed everywhere, even when talking about Hollywood films: Tarzan became “Tarazan” and Laurel and Hardy “
al Buns wal ra
” (“Fatso and the Thin Man”).

I went to St. George’s School each morning, usually with my twin cousins Robert and Albert. Always the leader, Albert was a captain and a star at the school, and a year ahead of Robert, who was not athletic, and gregariously one of the boys. I was a junior figure, enrolled in the seventh primary, part of the lower school, across the street from the more elevated senior place where my two cousins studied. St. George’s was the first all-male school I went to, and the first with which I had a deeper connection than with the ones in Cairo, where I was just a fees-paying stranger. My father and, I think, my grandfather had gone there, as had most male members of my family except Uncle Asaad (Al), who had been at Bishop Gobat’s. For a couple of days I felt that the absence of girls and women teachers gave the school a slightly harsher atmosphere, rougher, more physical, far less genteel than the establishments I had known in Cairo. But very quickly I felt totally at home; for the first and last time in my school life I was among boys who were like me. Nearly every member of my class was known to my family; for weeks after I started school my parents, aunts, and Yousif either asked me questions about “the Saffoury boy in your class” or made casual, well-informed comments about a Dajani or Jamal classmate whose 107 parents or uncles and aunts were their friends.

The teachers were mostly British, although I had two, Michel Marmoura, an older contemporary of Albert’s and son of the Anglican pastor, and Mr. Boyagian, a Jerusalem Armenian and a young boy during my father’s time, who weren’t. The one woman on the premises was Miss Fenton, who occasionally sat in for the regular English teacher. Black-haired, sandal-shod Miss Fenton, a slim figure in her white blouse and navy skirt, struck me as dashingly attractive. I had far too
little interaction with her, too little occasion for time away from the rough-and-tumble boys’ and masters’ world I inhabited. And so she remained a romantic figure, someone whose graceful presence gave me private pleasure as she floated through the primary school’s arcades, or as I glimpsed her through a window in the staff tearoom. Many years later, I discovered she was the aunt of the poet James Fenton. At the opposite extreme was Mr. Sugg, a seriously lame Englishman whose name when pronounced brought forth peals of sadistic laughter for his appearance and his stutter. One of the first British academic misfits I met, he was a man who seemed disconnected from the (perhaps too) complicated realities of the school he served and the students he tried on the whole unsuccessfully to teach. Neither the class nor I was attentive to, much less taken by, the droning lessons on geography that he offered; in his stiff collar and eternally beige suit, he was a creature from another world, full of Danubes, Thameses, Apennines, and Antarctic wastes, none of which made any impression on the indifferent and resolutely self-involved boys.

My class was divided equally between mainly Christians and Muslims, boarders and day students. Michel Marmoura, who taught mathematics, belonged to a world that was very soon to face dissolution and exile in the cataclysms of 1948. He was a gentle and acutely intelligent teacher who despite his nervousness at being a family friend of most of the students (and son of the cathedral dean who had baptized me) taught us the rudiments of fractions with considerable skill. I have seen him over the years in Madison, Wisconsin, and Princeton, and later in Toronto, where he now lives; the pathos of his shattered past has never left him. The rest of St. George’s academic offering made no mark on me: it combined indifferent teaching, a volatile atmosphere, and, as I look back on it fifty years later, a general sense of purposeless routine trying to maintain itself as the country’s identity was undergoing irrevocable change. Already too tall and developed to look my age, when I turned twelve and needed a pass just to go to school, nervous Tommies at the barbed-wire barricade peered into my satchel, and examined my zone pass suspiciously, their unfriendly foreign eyes looking me over as a possible source of trouble.

Though this pass restricted me to the area where my school was located, my aunt’s family had a light-green Studebaker which Albert and Robert were allowed to drive, and so the three of us tooled around
Talbiyah, idly dropping in and out of their friends’ houses. On my own, I rode a bicycle around the little square just west of the house. Two blocks up the hill behind the house, a British army bugle corps would rehearse in the unyielding midday sun; on weekends I remember crouching behind the rocks to look at them, transfixed by their unintelligible shouted cries, their large black cleated boots pounding on the black asphalt, almost melting in the heat, and their weirdly savage bugle calls. Albert had a knack for English poetry, which he declaimed with a great deal of eye rolling, a caricature of both the English teacher and the actor in full flight: “ ‘Half a league, half a league, / Half a league onward, / All in the valley of death / Rode the six hundred,’ ” he would orate, his right hand slowly rising along with his voice. “ ‘Theirs not to make reply, / Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die. / Into the valley of death / Rode the six hundred.’ ” I took it that we too were supposed to be noble soldiers plunging forward, with no thought in mind but our duty. Albert’s voice rose still higher: “ ‘All the world wondered. / Honour the charge they made. / Honour the Light Brigade. / Noble six hundred.’ ” Until much later, I never knew anything about the Light Brigade, but gradually learned the poem, and as I declaimed it with my cousin I remember thinking that words could blot out all thought and feeling. “Theirs not to reason why” was an eerily apt forecast of an attitude I had not directly encountered but would recognize and be gripped by twenty years later as I watched the vast Egyptian crowds that cheered and clapped for Gamal Abdel Nasser in the Cairo heat.

My aunt Nabiha’s family would be driven out of Jerusalem in stages, so that by early spring of 1948, only my oldest cousin, Yousif, remained; he had abandoned the Talbiyah house because the whole quarter had fallen to the Hagganah, and moved to a small apartment in Upper Baqa
, an adjoining district in West Jerusalem. He left even that last foothold in March, also never to return. My distinct recollection of Talbiyah, Katamon, and Upper and Lower Baqa
from my earliest days there until my last was that they seemed to be populated exclusively by Palestinians, most of whom my family knew and whose names still ring familiarly in my ears—Salameh, Dajani, Awad, Khidr, Badour, David, Jamal, Baramki, Shammas, Tannous, Qobein—all of whom became refugees. I saw none of the newly resident Jewish immigrants except
elsewhere in West Jerusalem, so when I hear references today to West Jerusalem they always connote the Arab sections of my childhood haunts. It is still hard for me to accept the fact that the very quarters of the city in which I was born, lived, and felt at home were taken over by Polish, German, and American immigrants who conquered the city and have made it the unique symbol of their sovereignty, with no place for Palestinian life, which seems to have been confined to the eastern city, which I hardly knew. West Jerusalem has now become entirely Jewish, its former inhabitants expelled for all time by mid-1948.

The Jerusalem my family and I knew in those days was a good deal smaller, simpler, and superficially more orderly than Cairo. The British were the holders of the mandate, which they terminated suddenly in 1948 about six months after my own family had left Jerusalem for the last time. There were British soldiers everywhere—most of them had already disappeared from Cairo—and the general impression was of an extremely English place with neat houses, disciplined traffic, and a great deal of tea drinking, a place whose residents were, in the case of my family and its friends, English-educated Arabs; I had no idea what either the mandate or the Palestine government—whose name was featured on currency and stamps—really meant. Compared to Cairo, Jerusalem was a cooler place, without the grandeur and wealth—opulent houses, expensive shops, big cars, and large, noisy crowds—that surrounded us in Cairo. Jerusalem, moreover, seemed to have a more homogeneous population, made up mainly of Palestinians, although I do recall the briefest glimpses of Orthodox Jews and one visit to or very near Mea Sharim, where I felt a combination of curiosity and distance, without assimilating or understanding the startlingly different presence of the black-suited, -hatted, and -coated Orthodox Jews.

One boy in my class has remained clearly in my memory. I think David Ezra, whose father was a plumber, was the only Jew (there were several in the school) in Seventh Primary, and the thought of him still grips and puzzles me in light of the subsequent changes in my life and Palestine’s. He was strongly built, dark-haired, and spoke to me in English. He seemed to stand apart from the rest of the class, to be more self-sufficient, less transparent, less connected than anyone else: all that attracted me to him. Although he did not resemble the Levantine Jews I had known at GPS or at the club in Cairo, I also had very little idea
what his Jewishness meant for us, except that I recall distinctly not feeling anything peculiar about his presence among us. He was an excellent athlete who impressed me with his powerful shoulders and thighs, as well as his aggressive play. Ezra never joined us as we walked away together in small groups from school after classes were over in the afternoon, a way of traversing checkpoints in the security of numbers. The last time I saw Ezra, he was standing at the top of the road looking in my direction, while three or four of us ambled off together toward Talbiyah. When my family suddenly determined just before Christmas that we had better return to Cairo, my ruptured connection to Ezra soon came to symbolize both the unbridgeable gap, repressed for want of words or concepts to discuss it, between Palestinian Arabs and Jews, and the terrible silence forced on our joint history from that moment on.