Out of Place: A Memoir (45 page)

It is difficult now not to read back into our Dhour years elements of the wasteful desolation of the Lebanese Civil War, which began in 1975 and officially ended about seventeen years later. Insulated from the depth of the antithetical communal and political currents that had riven Lebanon for decades, we lived a pseudoidyllic life that teetered on the edge of a very deep precipice. Stranger yet was the sense my father had that Dhour was a refuge from the growing travails of business life in Nasser’s Egypt. In early 1971 when he was near death he told us that he wished to be buried in Dhour, but that was never possible, since no resident was willing to sell us land for a little plot on which to grant his wish. Even after his years of devotion to it, his many material contributions to its communal life, his love for its people and locale, he was still considered too much of a stranger in death to be allowed in. The idealized pastoral existence we thought we were enjoying had no real status in the town’s collective memory.

One of the enduring images of that eerily out-of-touch life we passed through for those twenty-seven years was of Emile Nassar sitting alone at night, writing at a table in the middle of his deserted living room. No matter how late his bridge game, no matter how many guests they had had for dinner, he indefatigably brought out his large, leather-covered notebooks and a stack of newspapers and proceeded to write. What he wrote exactly we did not know until my father once asked him directly whether he was writing his memoirs. “In a way, yes. What I do is to copy out passages from the day’s journalism, and thus keep a record of what happened,” replied Mr. Nassar. “But you add comments too, don’t you?” my father rejoindered. “Absolutely not. Just a faithful record of what happened.” With a slight note of exasperation inflecting his voice, ever the efficient manager, my father said: “But why don’t you just cut out the articles and paste them in your notebooks, instead of going through all that trouble?” Nassar seemed momentarily taken aback by the question, but quickly responded by saying that he was doing all that work for his sons’ sake, so they would have a lasting record of the times by him after his death. Not to be deterred, my father turned to Alfred, the middle boy, reclining on a nearby sofa. “Are you going to read these books after your father’s
death?”—to which, without the slightest hesitation Alfred responded, “No. No chance.”

I have retained this curious scene in my memory for all these years as a symbol of the triviality and impermanence of what so many of us lived out in Dhour, the unrepaid, unrequited attempt to belong to and somehow retain a place that in the end was set on its own course as part of a country more volatile, more fragmented, more bitterly divided than any of us suspected. We were out-of-touch strangers to the contests and feuds that gave Dhour its peculiar identity. Our house is still there, uninhabited, dotted with bullet scars and gaping holes in the walls where mortars and Katyusha rockets entered. In 1997, twenty-seven years after our last summer there, I went to Dhour to see what was left. Still a Syrian army stronghold with soldiers and officers billeted there, it is one of the few popular summer places that has not been rebuilt and filled with new residents flocking there after the civil war to escape Beirut’s noisy, frantic, and unzoned building boom. Most of Dhour’s houses from our time are still in ruins, the cafés and shops mostly closed or shrunk in size. My sister Jean and her husband and sons have bought and refurbished a house in Shweir, next door to where, forty-three years ago, I had my geography tutorials with Aziz Nasr. Their garden and carefully planned interiors with every modern convenience have nothing in common with the rough barrenness of our accommodation years ago. As I lay down for a brief rest in the afternoon, that juxtaposition filled me with melancholic recollections of the summer’s final days as we readied ourselves for the return trip to Cairo, with Dhour’s sunny harshness yielding to the cooling mists of approaching autumn.

I remembered the end-of-season days with considerable pleasure: most of the other summer residents had packed and got out before us, the town’s shopkeepers dressed in their shabby suit jackets, slowed down by a reduced clientele and the need, I suppose, to calculate their profits and plan for the next year’s. A routine subject of conversation around the
saha
was whether it had been a good season; I once overheard Mr. Affeish, the large lethargic pharmacist, and Bou Faris, the man who ran the bicycle rental service, discussing the past summer rather mournfully in terms of the number of houses that went unrented. “God willing, it’ll be more crowded next year,” they said simultaneously
to each other. Only Farfar of the taxi battalion remained in the
saha
through September, his battered Ford and raucous voice filling the still air with their lively cacophonous sound; his colleagues had left Dhour to ply their trade on Beirut’s streets. And on the final day at dawn, our bags packed, the breakfast things put away for the last time, we stood in the cold morning air as the drivers loaded the two oversize taxis and we coasted languidly to Beirut, and from there to Jerusalem and Cairo. After 1948 it was airplanes from Beirut.

WHEN I ARRIVED IN CAIRO AFTER GRADUATION, I SOON
saw that my memory of it during my exile in the United States as a place of stability was no longer accurate. There was a new uncertainty: the placid paradise for foreigners was beginning to lose its durability. In a few months Gamal Abdel Nasser was to replace General Mohammed Naguib as head of the government, and what had been “our” environment became “theirs,” “they” being Egyptians to whom politically we had paid less attention than to our inert stage set. I recognized this in the poetry of Cavafy some years later—the same indifference, the world taken for granted as privileged foreigners like us pursued our concerns and worried about our businesses without much consideration for the vast majority of the population. Ironically, during the fifties, separated from his nephews and former partners (who had gone into a variety of businesses, from building washing machines to exporting casings for sausages to dressmaking), my father’s fortunes soared and his influence as a businessman grew. In 1955–56 he opened an ill-fated branch in Beirut, which he kept pouring money into without any return at all. During the school and college summer holidays I was increasingly drawn into our Egyptian business, pressed into service as his deputy during the afternoons, without specific duties or responsibilities. It was his way of inviting me in, then shutting the door in my face by showing
me that there was no functional place for me. Putting me in a similar double bind, he and my mother kept insisting that as the man of the family I was responsible for my sisters, even though my four siblings were my equals in every respect. They gave me the duty without the privilege; on the contrary, I felt that my sisters were shown far greater consideration and I neither accepted the burden of responsibility nor agreed with it in principle. I felt that my father often favored my sisters over me as an act of chivalry, somehow of a piece with his amazing reconciliation with his nephews and sister after their protracted hostility toward him. Once on their own, they returned to being my father’s nephews in earnest, so much so that one of them later told me how remorseful he felt about what he had said to and done against my father during their business feud.

When I was a Princeton sophomore and my oldest sister came to attend college in the United States, I felt the difficulty of communicating and of relating to her acutely. But by then I had already realized that both my family and what used to be my native environments in Cairo and Lebanon were no longer available to me. My years in the United States were slowly weaning me away from Cairo habits—of thought, behavior, speech, and relationships. My accent and dress were slowly altering; my terms of reference in school and, later, college were different; my speaking and thinking were undergoing a radical change that took me far beyond the comfortable certainties of Cairo life. I regarded my sisters’ existence at the English School, for example, as utterly remote and alien.

After Mount Hermon I moved to Princeton in the autumn of 1953 entirely on my own. I was much more independent and resourceful than I had been only two years earlier and was surprised to find that I managed in a short time and unfamiliar place to purchase furniture, books, and clothes, and to install myself with three ill-assorted roommates in a shared room, which I deserted for a single one at Christmas. My first quintessential Princeton experience occurred on my second day there, when, while looking for the dining room in Holder (a sophomore redoubt), I was waylaid by a large, slightly tipsy young man in an orange and black polo shirt, pink bermuda shorts, straw hat, and blue tennis shoes carrying an immense moose head. “Hey,” he said to me in very exuberant tones, “I really hate to part with Sam here, but
he’ll look magnificent in your room.” I said something about it not fitting—with its great head of horns it was the size of a Volkswagen—but he persisted. “You give me only twenty dollars for Sam and I’ll get him into your room, even if I have to use a crane to pull him through your window.” I finally managed to convince him that Sam and I couldn’t live together, but it was my first encounter with a Princeton humor barely distinguishable from that of boarding school, except for the admixture at Princeton of beer and secular learning. Otherwise, the two institutions resembled each other.

Princeton in the fifties was entirely male. Cars were forbidden, as were women, except for Saturdays until six p.m.; the great collective achievement of my class during its years there (1953–57) was that “sex after seven” on Saturdays was allowed as a result of student agitation. To see or date girls they either had to be invited down for weekends from places like Smith and Vassar, or one went to those places in hopes of finding a date that way. I was woefully unsuccessful at this for my first two years, during which my summer romance with Eva made up for what Princeton didn’t give me. I could neither persuade a girl to come down, nor make the requisite trip with even the slenderest possibility of meeting someone. The student population around me was largely homogeneous. There wasn’t a single black, and most of the foreign students were graduate students, among them a handful of Arabs whom I occasionally spent time with.

My classmates either were or tried to be cut from the same cloth. As at Mount Hermon, nearly everyone wore the same clothes (white bucks, chinos, button-down shirts, and tweed jackets), talked in much the same way, and did the same thing socially. We were all trapped in a hideous eating club system, so that after sophomore year we all had to become club members through an appalling system called Bicker or, in effect, we would perish. Socially, Bicker meant that for two weeks in the February of your second year you were shut up in your room for entire evenings awaiting delegations from each of the clubs. Gradually their number decreased as more and more candidates were weeded out (Jews, non-prep-school boys, badly dressed people), whereas in the case of athletes (jocks), St. Paul’s and Exeter graduates, or the children of famous parents (Batista, Firestone, DuPont) the visits of the now importuning clubs intensified. There was a hierarchy among the seventeen
functioning clubs: a big five (Ivy, Cottage, Cannon, Cap and Gown, Colonial), a middle group (Quadrangle, Tower, Campus, Dial, Elm, etc.), and finally a bottom group stocked essentially with members who today would be called nerds and outcasts but were in fact largely Jewish.

Terrible things happened during Bicker, all of them condoned and even encouraged by the administration. In 1955, my Bicker year, for example, the club presidents and the men who ran the university decided that every sophomore, no matter how socially unacceptable, would get a bid. Inevitably a group of twenty to thirty would be left unchosen at the end, and public meetings would be held apportioning the “100 percenters”—the students no one wanted, most of them Jews—among the various magnanimous heads of the clubs. The whole grotesque exercise was reported in juicy detail in the student newspaper. Equally gruesome was the sight of those students who knew that by virtue of race, background, or manner, they could not make the club of their choice as they set out to transform themselves into WASP paragons, usually with pathetic results. This was symbolized by the junior and senior vogue for blue button-down shirts with frayed collars; I remember watching in astonishment as two classmates in an adjoining suite applied sandpaper to a pair of new blue button-down shirts, trying in a matter of minutes to produce the effect of the worn-out aristocratic shirt that might get them into a better club.

I was surprised how obligingly our teachers took the fact that for those two Bicker weeks no one did any reading. But I could see from the first knock on the door that I was a puzzling anomaly to the wandering delegates, since the prep school I went to was hardly fashionable, my dress and accent barely traceable to any known source, and my name totally unplaceable to most of Princeton’s sophisticated upperclassmen from Darien and Shaker Heights. Because my parents had by chance befriended an elderly retired couple from Boca Raton and St. Croix over dinner and bridge on the
Andrea Doria
, the gentleman, an alumnus of Cap and Gown, got a delegation from that club to visit me a few times, but we were clearly not meant for each other. My then roommate, a gifted but, alas, socially undeveloped musician, drove nearly all the committees off, though three of the middle-level clubs kept coming back to see me; they would encircle me at one end of our
tiny living room and leave him sitting sadly alone at the other end. Finally, on the night when the entire class descended on Prospect Street to go to the clubs to pick up their bids, I was given three bids, my poor roommate none.

Then one of the clubs, through its spokesman, a fat young man who was also a champion golfer, offered to strike an unappealing bargain with me: join here and, as an extra inducement, he said, we’ll take your roommate too. As I was about to reject this offer and walk out of the place, I heard a heart-rending wail: “Oh Ed, please don’t leave me. Please accept. What’ll happen to me?” And so I accepted membership but I never enjoyed the club. I felt alienated and wronged by a publicly sanctioned university ritual that humiliated people in this way. From that moment on Princeton ceased to matter to me except as a place of study. I have lectured there several times, but a new faculty, the de-emphasis of the wretched clubs, and of course the presence of women and minorities have transformed it from the provincial, small-minded college I attended between 1953 and 1957 into a genuine university.