Out of Place: A Memoir (37 page)

The underlying motifs for me have been the emergence of a second self buried for a very long time beneath a surface of often expertly acquired and wielded social characteristics belonging to the self my parents tried to construct, the “Edward” I speak of intermittently, and how an extraordinarily increasing number of departures have unsettled my life from its earliest beginnings. To me, nothing more painful and paradoxically sought after characterizes my life than the many displacements from countries, cities, abodes, languages, environments that have kept me in motion all these years. Thirteen years ago I wrote in
After the Last Sky
that when I travel I always take too much with me, and that even a trip downtown requires the packing of a briefcase stocked with items disproportionately larger in size and number than the actual period of the trip. Analyzing this, I concluded that I had a secret but ineradicable fear of not returning. What I’ve since discovered is that despite this fear I fabricate occasions for departure, thus giving rise to the fear voluntarily. The two seem absolutely necessary to my rhythm of life and have intensified dramatically during the period I’ve been ill. I say to myself:
if you don’t take this trip, don’t prove your mobility and indulge your fear of being lost, don’t override the normal rhythms of domestic life now, you certainly will not be able to do it in the near future. I also experience the anxious moodiness of travel (
la mélancolie des paquebots
, as Flaubert calls it,
Bahnhofsstimmung
in German) along with envy for those who stay behind, whom I see on my return, their faces unshadowed by dislocation or what seems to be enforced mobility, happy with their families, draped in a comfortable suit and raincoat,
there
for all to see. Something about the invisibility of the departed, his being missing and perhaps missed, in addition to the intense, repetitious, and predictable sense of banishment that takes you away from all that you know and can take comfort in, makes you feel the need to leave because of some prior but self-created logic, and a sense of rapture. In all cases, though, the great fear is that departure is the state of being abandoned, even though it is you who leave.

In the summer of 1951 I left Egypt and spent two weeks in Lebanon, three weeks in Paris and London, and one week on the
Nieuw Amsterdam
from Southampton to New York, for the rest of my schooling in the United States. This included high school then undergraduate and graduate degrees, a total of eleven years, after which I remained until the present. There is no doubt that what made this whole protracted experience of separation and the return during the summers agonizing was my complicated relationship to my mother, who never ceased to remind me that my leaving her was the most unnatural (“Everyone else has their children next to them”) and yet tragically necessary of fates. Each year the late-summer return to the United States opened old wounds afresh and made me reexperience my separation from her as if for the first time—incurably sad, desperately backward-looking, disappointed and unhappy in the present. The only relief was our anguished yet chatty letters. I still find myself reliving aspects of the experience today, the sense that I’d rather be somewhere else—defined as closer to her, authorized by her, enveloped in her special maternal love, infinitely forgiving, sacrificing, giving—because being
here
was not being where I/we had wanted to be,
here
being defined as a place of exile, removal, unwilling dislocation. Yet as always there was something conditional about her wanting me with her, for not only was I to conform to her ideas about me, but I was to be
for
her while she might or might not, depending on her mood, be for me.

After I returned, anticlimactically, to Victoria College for the balance of the 1950–51 school year, I was, as Griffiths was immediately at pains to point out, to be on probation. In effect this seemed to mean that every master was alerted to my threatened status and regularly reminded me just as I was becoming restive that I “had better remember and behave.” In this uncomfortable situation I was constantly on tenterhooks, bullied, mocked, or shunned by some of my classmates; only Mostapha Hamdollah, Billy Abdel Malik, and Andy Sharon seemed to behave as before, which limited me to a tight orbit of familiars, isolated and ill at ease. During this period I found myself seeking out my mother even more than before, and she, with that preternatural way she had of sensing and indeed reading my mood, would show me the kind of tenderness and intimacy I desperately needed.

One culminating event at VC that spring brought us closer together. First there were the Furtwängler concerts, which my father, who averred that he only liked “concertos” (not offered by the Berlin Philharmonic), joined us for with restrained enthusiasm. I remember turning to or nudging my mother during a favorite passage in the slow movement of the Beethoven Fifth and later in the bridge to the last movement, feeling again that special blend of intimacy and comprehension that only she could give me, especially while I was in a threatening limbo at school as a semi-outcast. The day after the Sunday concert, during lunch break at school, a few of us gathered on the fringes of the main playing-field area to take turns heaving a shot put, marking off each try, soberly trying to arrive at a ranking of the six classmates taking part. As I reached down to take my turn, three of the senior Lower Six boys led by Gilbert Davidson, as noisy and bullyish as his younger brother Arthur was quiet and understated, demanded that he be allowed to throw the shot. “No,” I said firmly, “it’s my turn now. Wait till I’ve thrown it.” “You silly fucker, give it to me right away,” he replied, his ruddy face quite apoplectic with rage as he lurched at me trying to grab the heavy object in my left hand. Missing it entirely, Davidson’s hand locked into the front of my shirt, which in his violent sweeping gesture he ripped open, popping buttons, tearing fabric, and unbalancing me with the sudden angry violence of his intervention. Teetering, I dropped the shot, turning toward him at the moment he took a huge swing at my head and missed me entirely in his by now uncontrollable rage. With what I remember as the coolest
deliberation, I put all my strength behind a fist that landed on his nose, producing an alarmingly red stream of blood. Falling on his back, immediately surrounded and propped up by his mates, he threatened to kill me and my mother the moment he could get up. I was hurried away by my classmates, and was saved by the class bell.

Later that afternoon I was required to pay a visit to the infirmary for the purpose of a medical report on the incident written by the elderly Scottish nurse, whose sole comment to me after looking at my hand was “You have a fist like a lump of iron.” Davidson in the meantime was taken home, reappearing a week later with all sorts of ugly threats, which in my immense unease I took quite seriously. Griffiths said something disparaging and dismissive to me about being quite hopeless—“There’s always trouble where you are, Said, isn’t there?” No disciplinary action was taken. But for a month after the incident I confined myself to home and mother, so convinced was I that Davidson would either kill me himself or get some toughs to do it for him.

The memory of my mother’s tenderness during those last weeks in Cairo remains exceptionally strong, and was a source of solace during my first years in the United States. Through her I felt encouraged in what our Cairo environment had no conception of, namely books and music that took me way beyond both the inane prescriptions of school and the fluttery triviality of our social life. She had given me a few Russian novels to read and in them during my weeks of seclusion I discovered a turbulent but ultimately self-sufficient world, a bulwark against the anxieties of daily reality. As I read
The Brothers Karamazov
I felt I had found an elaboration of the family dispute between my father, his nephew, and my aunt, now entering its terminal phase of almost daily incidents, recriminations, shouting scenes, and disputes both with and about employees. I also became aware of how despite the cordiality of our friendships with the Shami circle into which we had grown, a gentle but noticeable mockery of my father crept into many of the comments made by them to and about him—his unrelenting use of English (my mother had become fluent in French and chatted up Emma Fahoum and Reine Diab famously in such phrases as
“ma chère,” “j’étais etonnée,”
and so forth), his unbending concentration on his business, his penchant for American foods like apple pie and pancakes, which they found too gross for words, his rather sporty dress, including on holidays old shirts and frayed trouser cuffs.

Thinking back to that last period in Cairo, I recall only the sense of comfort and pleasure I derived from my mother’s ministrations; she was obviously thinking of my impending departure, trying to make of those last days something very special for both of us, while I, not really imagining the terrible rupture that was to come, enjoyed the time as a liberation from the hectic schedule I had once followed. No more Tewfiq Effendi, no more Fouad Etayim, riding was dropped, piano lessons given up, exercises at Mourad’s gymnasium terminated. Coming back from school in the late afternoon I’d often find her sitting on the terrace overlooking the Fish Garden, and, inviting me to sit beside her with a glass of rosewater–flavored lemonade, she would encircle me with her arm and reminisce about the old days, how “Edwardo Bianco” had been such a remarkably precocious boy, and how I was what she lived for. We listened to the Beethoven symphonies, particularly the Ninth, which became the piece that meant the most to us. I remember being confused about the nature of her relationship to my father, but also being pacified that she always referred to him as “Daddy,” the two of us using the same name for husband and father. All this may have been her way of trying to win me back from America before I went, her way of reclaiming me from my father’s plans, which when he sent me to the United States she always disagreed with and rued. But these afternoons had the effect of creating an image of an inviolate union between us, which would have, on the whole, shattering results for my later life as a man trying to establish a relationship of developing, growing, maturing love with other women. It was not so much that my mother had usurped a place in my life to which she was not entitled, but that she managed to have access to it for the rest of her life and, I often feel, after it.

I am only now aware that those talks before we were to leave for the United States constituted a sort of leave-taking ceremony. “Let’s go to Groppi’s for tea for the last time,” or “Wouldn’t you like us to go to the Kursaal for dinner once more before you go?” she would ask. But much of it took place in some complicated labyrinth of her own making, which also involved the arrangements she was making for herself and my four sisters, whom she would be alone with after I left. There was something so terribly giving about her attitude in the last week before we packed the house for the first stage of our trip via Lebanon. As I later realized, she thought of that giving as motivated
entirely by unselfish love, whereas of course her sovereign ego played a major part in what she was up to, namely, struggling in a limiting domestic household to find a means of self-expression, self-articulation, self-elaboration. These I think were my mother’s deepest needs, though she never managed to say it explicitly. I was her only son, and shared her facility of communication, her passion for music and words, so I became her instrument for self-expression and self-elaboration as she struggled against my father’s unbending, mostly silent iron will. Her sudden withdrawal of affection, which I dreaded, were her way of responding to my absences. From 1951 until her death in 1990 my mother and I lived on different continents, yet she never stopped lamenting the fact that, alone of all her friends, she suffered the pangs of separation from her children, most particularly me. I felt guilt at having abandoned her, even though she had finally acquiesced in the first and most decisive of my many departures.

The sheer gravity of my coming to the United States in 1951 amazes me even today. I have only the most shadowy notion of what my life might have been had I not come to America. I do know that I was beginning again in the United States, unlearning to some extent what I had learned before, relearning things from scratch, improvising, self-inventing, trying and failing, experimenting, canceling, and restarting in surprising and frequently painful ways. To this day I still feel that I am away from home, ludicrous as that may sound, and though I believe I have no illusions about the “better” life I might have had, had I remained in the Arab world, or lived and studied in Europe, there is still some measure of regret. This memoir is on some level a reenactment of the experience of departure and separation as I feel the pressure of time hastening and running out. The fact that I live in New York with a sense of provisionality despite thirty-seven years of residence here accentuates the disorientation that has accrued to me, rather than the advantages.

We made our annual removal to Lebanon in late June 1951 and spent two weeks in Dhour. Then, on the fifteenth of July, my parents and I departed from Beirut Airport (Khaldé, as it was called then) by Pan-American Stratocruiser for Paris. From almost the moment we stepped off the plane in Paris until we left for London by night sleeper I was afflicted with a plague of styes in both my eyes, which, apart from
two small apertures, effectively closed them. This aggravated the sense of drifting and indeterminacy that followed my withdrawal from all aspects of my familiar world, the sense of not
really
knowing what I was doing or where I was going.

Within hours of arriving in London, where we stayed grandly in an imposingly grandiose suite at the Savoy, my cousin Albert was summoned from Birmingham, where he was doing a degree in chemical engineering, and was installed luxuriously with us at the hotel. He appeared to be unaware of the tensions between my father and his brothers, so jolly and admirably rakish did he seem while with us. I spent many hours eating my first fish and chips with Albert, visiting the new Battersea Fun Fair, and going to an unending number of pubs in search of girls and excitement, all the while trying to learn from him the arts of enjoying oneself without feeling either guilty or lonely. He was the one close relative whom for the first twenty years of my life I found myself hoping to emulate because he was everything I was not. He had an erect posture, was an excellent footballer and runner, seemed to be a successful ladies’ man, and was a natural leader as well as a brilliant student. London was certainly the most pleasurable interlude of our trip. The moment he left, his tonic effect dissipated, and I settled back into the anxious gloom of the trip.