Out of Place: A Memoir (31 page)

Before school began I said to my mother that I was interested in becoming a doctor, to which she said that my father and she would be happy to buy me my first clinic. Both of us understood that the gift would be made in Cairo, although we both were also aware that Cairo couldn’t in the long run be our home for “the future” as we imagined it. Reports of mysterious assassinations and abductions, mostly of well-known prominent men who had good-looking wives, testified to the influence of a corpulent, libidinous king whose nocturnal rampages and long European holidays had dislocated the country as much as the scandals of the 1948 Palestine war, in which faulty arms, incompetent generals, and a formidable enemy had not only routed the Egyptian army
but brought the tottering, still not really independent Egyptian state to a new, low pass. The sudden prominence of the Muslim Brothers lent more anxious uncertainty to those of us Arabs who were neither Egyptian nor Muslim. A constant guerrilla struggle in the Suez Canal Zone, to which British forces had retreated, elevated the guerillas or
fedayin
(an Islamic epithet denoting warlike sacrifice) who fought the foreigners to the status of heroes, and also made our working relationships in Cairo with English doctors, nurses, teachers, bureaucrats far more tense than before.

I felt this the moment I set foot in Victoria College, later described to me by Mr. Hill, the geography master, as a school designed to be the Eton of the Middle East. Except for the teachers of Arabic and French, the faculty was entirely English, though unlike at GPS not a single English student was enrolled. My father drove me to school—located in temporary quarters at the former Italian School in Shubra, one of Cairo’s most densely populated semislum areas, not far from Dr. Haddad’s clinic—and on the first day left me at the front door with his usual cheery “Good luck, son” as he drove off with his driver. For the second time (after GPS) in my life I was dressed in a school blazer, gray trousers, blue-silver striped tie and cap: a uniform (bought at Avierino’s) proclaiming me a VC boy, engendering a feeling of miserable solitude and profound uncertainty as I edged my way into the bustling corridors about five minutes before the school bell went off at eight-thirty. The office I timidly looked into in search of directions to the Middle Five classroom was the headmaster’s, where an obliging servant (
farrash
) pointed me farther down the corridor and out into a teeming school yard, at one end of which stood a small two-roomed building. “That’s it,” he said. “Middle Five One is on the left.” As I threaded my way hesitantly through a football game, several wrestling matches, an intense game of marbles, and a small crowd of guffawing older boys, I felt myself assaulted and dislocated by the uninhibited strangeness of the place in which I alone seemed to be new and different.

When I found the right classroom there was one rather small boy writing busily at his desk, a large reference book at his side; two others sitting side by side, reading silently; and three more comparing assignments. I shyly asked the assiduous writer (he introduced himself by his last name, “Shukry”) what he was working at. “Reserve lines,” he
responded laconically. When I asked him what those were he explained that a standard punishment was to be made to copy out five hundred or a thousand lines from a particularly tedious book such as the telephone directory, dictionary, or encyclopedia; making some ready now and holding them in reserve would cut down on the burden later. I knew almost immediately that this school was a more serious place than any I had attended, the pressure greater, the teachers harsher, the students more competitive and sharp, the atmosphere bristling with challenges, punishments, bullies, and risks. Above all I felt that nothing from my home or family had prepared me for this: I was truly on my own, an unknown, strange quality about to be swallowed up in the minute workings of a dauntingly large place, ten times larger than any school I had ever been to before.

Each class in the Upper School was divided into a One and a Two section, the former for the relatively bright and hardworking types, the latter for slower, less-achieving boys generally regarded as Darwinian failures who deserved their lowly fate. The class divisions were in preparation for the Oxford and Cambridge School Certificate (high school diploma) or matriculation, undertaken by the boys of Lower Six; while the special young men of the Upper Sixth proceeded toward A levels, and university. These young men all seemed to me to be star athletes, prefects, geniuses, and were routinely addressed by us as “Captain,” a title given added credibility by the silver piping on their blazers and caps. The two head boys, Captains Didi Bassano and Michel Shalhoub, were at first exceedingly remote figures, but over time Shalhoub in particular became an unpleasantly familiar presence, notorious for his stylish brilliance and his equally stylish and inventive coercive dealings with the smaller boys.

To impose coherence on the thousand or so boys of VC, the authorities had divided us all into “houses,” which further inculcated and naturalized the ideology of empire. I was a member of Kitchener House; other houses were Cromer, Frobisher, and Drake. Cairo VC was an altogether less posh school than its Alexandria parent, which had been in existence for three decades and had a much more imposing roster of students (King Hussein of Jordan, among others) and masters, and a very handsome spread of buildings and playing fields in the great Mediterranean summer capital. Our Shubra campus was makeshift,
originally rented during the war years to accommodate an overflow of students from Alexandria, which was principally a boarding institution. Most of the boys were day students from Cairo, less upper class and I supposed less accomplished than those from Alexandria. The classrooms and assembly hall were dingy and cramped. A permanent cloud of dust seemed settled over the place, even though four tennis courts and several football fields gave us outdoor facilities of a lavishness I had not before encountered.

As I stood around waiting for the class to begin that first day, the desks gradually filled with chattering boys, each carrying an immense briefcase filled with books, pencils, and copybooks. As the only new boy I assumed I would be an outsider for months, so dense was the web of associations and habits binding my twenty-five classmates together, yet by the end of that first day I felt quite at home. Mr. Keith Gatley, our form teacher, was white-haired and portly, with an enormous scar traversing his entire face diagonally. Like the other Britishers there, Gatley was an Oxbridgean who either had been marooned in Egypt by the war or had come there after the war in the absence of decent employment at home. Most of the staff were celibate and rumored among the students to be depraved pederasts who were able to indulge their illicit appetites among the vast corp of servants and perhaps even the school’s younger boys. Gatley was referred to as
“al-Khawal,”
or “faggot,” his dreadful scar (it was rumored) being the result of a fight with a pimp whom (according to the same scurrilous report) Gatley had tried to cheat. Obviously there was no way of knowing if any of this was true.

I discovered most of this “background” during the first English class, which was devoted to
Twelfth Night
, a highly inappropriate play for coarse teenagers for whom “the music of love” conjured only the rhythmic sound of a masturbating hand. Gatley asked us to read aloud and explain various lines in the first scene but achieved only raucous laughter, incomprehensible gibberish, and horrendous Arabic obscenities presented as “classical” equivalents of what the Duke of Illyria was saying. All the scene’s “dying falls” and “entrances” and “abatement” were explicated with scarcely concealed lewdness, while Gatley, whose nearsighted gaze shielded him from most of the class’s gestures, nodded lethargic approval of and vague assent to what he thought he was hearing.

In a matter of hours, years of earnestly solemn education fell away from me as I joined in the ceaseless back and forth between the boys united in group solidarity as “wogs” confronting our variously comic and/or maimed teachers as cruel, impersonal, and authoritarian Englishmen. It was generally believed that most of the masters were war casualties who, in our totally unsympathetic view of them, deserved their twitches, limps, and spastic reactions. Near the end of the class Gatley suddenly stood up, his great belly protruding out from his tight shirt and stained baggy trousers and, awakened from his torpor, lurched toward two chattering students whose insouciance prevented them from seeing the disaster looming near them. I had never seen anything like it before: a wide-armed heavy-set man flailing wildly at two pocket-size boys, he landing an occasional blow while trying to keep from falling, they nimbly dancing out of his way screeching “No sir, don’t hit me sir” at the top of their voices, while the class gathered around the trouble zone, trying to divert his blows from the offending pair.

Gatley’s class was immediately followed by an hour of mathematics drummed into us by one Marcus Hinds, as wiry and nervous as Gatley was lumbering and phlegmatic. Mr. Hinds thought of himself as something of a wit, the evident sharpness of his mind given support by a caustic tongue that brooked no laziness or sloppy reasoning. At least algebra and geometry had a precision to them lacking in Gatley’s sentimental moonings about what to us was “foreign” poetry, so the class settled down to serious work in a matter of minutes. Yet Hinds’s silence turned out to be literally more punishing than Gatley’s lethargy. Equipped with a specially made extra-large blackboard eraser one of whose sides was lined with an inch-thick piece of wood, Hinds would descend on an offending student who may have been whispering to a neighbor or, an equally serious offense, was incapable of grasping an algebraic formula and start battering his head, shoulders, and hands with his painful weapon. It was my misfortune in the first class I had with Hinds to ask my neighbor George Kardouche which textbook of the three we carried we should be looking at: whereupon Hinds launched his eraser at me like a missile, a more efficient method than stalking to the back row and raining blows on me. My offense was relatively minor, and I was a new boy, hence the telegraphic punishment, which narrowly missed my left eye but raised an ugly purple welt on my
cheek. Since no one had reacted to Hinds’s abuse I choked back my response and simply rubbed my sore cheek. Thus were the lines drawn between us and them.

For the first time in my life I was part of an unruly school group insofar as I was neither English nor from Egypt, and certainly was Arab. Between us and them, the pupils and teachers, existed an unbridgeable gulf. To the imported English staff we were viewed as either a distasteful job or as a group of delinquents to be punished anew each day.

A little pamphlet entitled
The School Handbook
immediately turned us into “natives.” Rule 1 stated categorically: “English is the language of the school. Anyone caught speaking other languages will be severely punished.” So Arabic became our haven, a criminalized discourse where we took refuge from the world of masters and complicit prefects and anglicized older boys who lorded it over us as enforcers of the hierarchy and its rules. Because of Rule 1 we spoke more, rather than less, Arabic, as an act of defiance against what seemed then, and seems even more so now, an arbitrary, ludicrously gratuitous symbol of their power. What I had formerly hidden at CSAC became a proud insurrectionary gesture, the power to speak Arabic and not be caught, or, more riskily, the use of Arabic words in class as a way of answering an academic question and attacking the teacher at the same time. Certain masters were especially vulnerable to this technique, preeminently a Mr. Maundrell, the unfortunate and bedraggled history teacher who may have been a victim of shell shock. A tremor animated his gnomic lethargy as he muttered facts about Tudor kings and Elizabethan customs before a basically unreceptive and callous group. In answer to one of his questions a student would begin by suavely mouthing an Arabic imprecation (“
koss omak
, sir”) immediately followed by a “loose” translation (“in other words, sir”) that had nothing to do with the foul phrase (“your mother’s c——t”). As the class roared their appreciation, Mr. Maundrell would jerk backward in fear and astonishment. We would also play
“akher kilma”
with him, repeating in unison the last word in every one of his sentences. “Elizabeth’s reign was notable for culture and exploration,” one of his typically torpid sentences, would draw a resounding chorus of the word “exploration” from us, which Maundrell would ignore for about six sentences, before exploding in a roar of shaking, spastic rage, which in turn drew delighted cheers from
us. By the middle of the term he had given up trying to communicate, sitting sulkily in his chair mumbling about the regicide and Cromwell’s revolution.

Teachers were therefore judged either as weak (Maundrell and Mr. Hill, the geography master) or strong (Hinds, and occasionally Gatley), never for their academic performance. A small staff of locals handled the Arabic classes, which were divided into advanced, medium, and beginners, but so far as I could determine all but one of these teachers were held in contempt by the students, as much, I think, because they were plainly second-class citizens within the school as because very few of us considered the study of Arabic poetry exemplified in dreadful patriotic encomia to King Farouk to be anything but the drivel it was. My teacher in the intermediate class was a Coptic gentleman known to us as Tewfik Effendi; his counterpart in the advanced group was Dab” Effendi, the one teacher whose profound commitment to the sanctity of the language earned him the respect, if not the love, of his class. Tewfik Effendi was a smarmy gentleman badly in need of extra cash; early on he determined somehow that I might be a candidate for “private lessons” and succeeded in insinuating himself into my mother’s good books, and thereby became a twice weekly visitor to our house as my tutor. After half a dozen inconsequential attempts to drill me in the complexities of grammar—resulting in more than twenty years of alienation from Arabic literature before I could return to it with some pleasure and enthusiasm—Tewfik Effendi and I spent our closeted hours chatting about, but never really studying, the books, the idea for him being to get his cash and his cup of coffee with biscuits served to him solemnly by Ahmed, our chief servant, and then leave for another doubtlessly as futile tutorial. Ahmed and I habitually made fun of Tewfik’s ritual demurral when the coffee and biscuits were served—“No, thank you, I’ve already had my afternoon coffee with my friends at Groppi’s,” the fashionable downtown café whose habitué he pretended unsuccessfully to be—and his then ritual acceptance of the goodies, which he slurped down and chomped with great gusto.