Out of Place: A Memoir (5 page)

This was awful for my mother, of course. To have her son, her mother (whom she always treated in my presence with an almost sneeringly cold dislike), and her brothers singled out for such a Darwinian fate turned her into an intolerable mix of defender-cum-agent of her original family, executor of my father’s injunctions in her new one, and prosecutor of, as well as defense lawyer for, me. Whatever she did fell into these three categories of judgment simultaneously, and ended up tangled inside her, with very disorienting consequences for me, her admired and yet unfortunately wayward son, the child who confirmed the worst of her lineage. Her love for me was both beautiful and withheld, and also endlessly patient.

I grew up sliding between being—in my estimation of my father’s attitude to me—a delinquent son and my uncles’ all-too-dutiful nephew. I called my father Daddy until his dying day, but I always sensed in the phrase how contingent it was, how potentially improper it was to think of myself as his son. I never asked him for anything without great apprehension or hours of desperate preparation. The most terrible thing he ever said to me—I was twelve then—was, “You will never inherit anything from me; you are
not
the son of a rich man,” though literally of course I was. When he died he left his entire estate to my mother. From the moment I became conscious of myself as a
child, I found it impossible to think of myself as not having both a discrediting past and an immoral future in store; my entire sense of self during my formative years was always experienced in the present tense, as I frantically worked to keep myself from falling back into an already established pattern, or from falling forward into certain perdition. Being myself meant not only never being quite right, but also never feeling at ease, always expecting to be interrupted or corrected, to have my privacy invaded and my unsure person set upon. Permanently out of place, the extreme and rigid regime of discipline and extracurricular education that my father would create and in which I became imprisoned from the age of nine left me no respite or sense of myself beyond its rules and patterns.

And thus I became “Edward,” a creation of my parents whose daily travails a quite different but quite dormant inner self was able to observe, though most of the time was powerless to help. “Edward” was principally the son, then the brother, then finally the boy who went to school and unsuccessfully tried to follow (or ignore and circumvent) all the rules. His creation was made necessary by the fact that his parents were themselves self-creations: two Palestinians with dramatically different backgrounds and temperaments living in colonial Cairo as members of a Christian minority within a large pond of minorities, with only each other for support, without any precedent for what they were doing except an odd combination of prewar Palestinian habit; American lore picked up at random in books and magazines and from my father’s decade in the United States (my mother did not even visit the United States until 1948); the missionaries’ influence; incompleted and hence eccentric schooling; British colonial attitudes that represented both the lords and the general run of “humankind” they ruled; and, finally, the style of life my parents perceived around them in Egypt and which they tried to adapt to their special circumstances. Could “Edward’s” position ever be anything but out of place?

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.