Out of Place: A Memoir (8 page)

As a rare escape I was sometimes allowed to go skating on Saturday mornings at a rink, the Rialto, near “B” Branch—a small shop maintained by my father mainly to sell pens and expensive leather gifts—on Fuad al-Awwal Street. The area was packed with bustling shops and department stores: Chemla and Cicurel across the street, Paul Favre, the large shoe shop next to “B” Branch, where, from a tired mustachioed middle-aged Armenian clerk in waistcoat and green eye-shade, we bought shoes for summer (sandals and light shoes) and winter (button- or lace-ups, black and dark brown). Tennis shoes and loafers were “bad,” and hence permanently disallowed.

School always began in the big hall with the singing of hymns—“All Things Bright and Beautiful” and “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains” were the two that recurred most frequently—accompanied at the piano by omnicompetent Mrs. Wilson and directed by Mrs. Bullen, whose daily homilies were simultaneously condescending and cloying, her bad British teeth and ungenerous lips shaping the words with unmistakable distaste for the mongrel-like collection of children who stood before her. Then we filed into our classes for a long morning’s lessons. My first teacher at GPS was Mrs. Whitfield, whom I suspected of being not really English, though she mimicked the part. Besides, I envied her her
name. Her son, Ronnie (Mrs. Wilson had a son, Dickie, and a daughter, Elizabeth; Mrs. Bullen had Anne, of course), like the Wilson children, was enrolled at GPS; all of them were older than I, and this added to their privileged remoteness and
hauteur
. Our lessons and books were mystifyingly English: we read about meadows, castles, and Kings John, Alfred, and Canute with the reverence that our teachers kept reminding us they deserved. Their world made little sense to me, except that I admired their creation of the language they used, which I, a little Arab boy, was learning something about. A disproportionate amount of attention was lavished on the Battle of Hastings along with lengthy explanations of Angles, Saxons, and Normans. Edward the Confessor has ever since remained in my mind as an elderly bearded gentleman in a white gown lying flat on his back, perhaps as a consequence of having confessed to something he shouldn’t have done. There was never to be any perceived connection between him and me, despite our identical first name.

These lessons in English glory were interspersed with repetitive exercises in writing, arithmetic, and recitation. My fingers were always dirty; then, as now, I was fatally attracted to writing with an ink pen that produced an ugly scrawl, plus numerous smudges and blots. I was made acutely conscious of my endless infractions by Mrs. Whitfield in particular. “Sit up straight and do your work properly”—“Don’t fidget,” she then added almost immediately. “Get on with your work.” “Don’t be lazy” was the habitual clincher. To my left Arlette was a model student; to my right it was the ever-obliging and successful Naki Rigopoulos. All around me were Greenvilles, and Coopers, and Pilleys: starchy little English boys and girls with enviably authentic names, blue eyes, and bright, definitive accents. I have no distinct recollection of how I sounded in those days, but I know that it was not English. The odd thing though was that we were all treated as if we should (or
really
wanted to) be English, an unexceptionable program for Dick, Ralph, and Derek, less so for locals like Micheline Lindell, David Ades, Nadia Gindy, and myself.

All our time outside class was spent in a little enclosed yard completely shut off from Fuad al-Awwal, the bustling main street into which Aziz Osman—our house sat at the bottom left-hand side—ran. Fuad al-Awwal was lined with shops and vegetable stands; it carried a
healthy flow of traffic as well as an extremely noisy tram line and occasional public buses. Not only was it distinctly urban and busy, but it welled up from the older parts of Cairo, crossed into Zamalek from Bulaq, traversed the quietly wealthy and smug Gezira island, where we lived, and then disappeared across the Nile into Imbaba, another teeming antithesis to Zamalek, with its quiet tree-lined streets, its foreigners, and its carefully plotted, shopless streets like Sharia Aziz Osman. The GPS’s “playground,” as it was called, constituted a frontier between the native urban world and the constructed colonial suburb we lived, studied, and played in. Before school began we would line up by class in the yard, and then again during recess, lunch, and dismissal. It is a sign of how lasting was the impression on me made by those exercises that I still remember
left
as the side nearest the school building,
right
as the Fuad al-Awwal side.

We stood there supposedly to be counted and greeted or dismissed: “Good morning, children” or “Good-bye, children.” This seemed a polite ritual camouflaging the travails of being in line, where all sorts of unpleasant things took place. Forbidden to utter a word in class except in answer to the teacher’s questions, the line was simultaneously a bazaar, auction house, and court, where the most extravagant of offers and promises were exchanged, and where the younger children were verbally bullied by older boys who threatened the direst punishment. My particular bane was David Ades, a boy two or three years older than me. Dark and muscular, he was ruthlessly focused on my pens, my pencil box, my sandwiches and sweets, which he wanted for himself, and was fearsomely challenging to everything I was or did. He didn’t like my sweaters; he thought my socks were too short; he hated the look on my face; he disapproved of my way of talking. Coming to or leaving the school represented a daily challenge to me, of how to avoid getting caught or waylaid by David Ades, and for the years I was at GPS I was quite successful. But I could never escape him in the class lines, when despite the supervising teacher’s presence, pushy, ruffianlike behavior was tolerated and Ades would whisper and mutter his threats and general disapprobation across the row of fidgeting children that kept us mercifully apart.

I have retained two phrases from Ades in my memory. One I parroted for years thereafter, “I promise you”; the other I haven’t forgotten, because it frightened me so much when he uttered it: “I’ll bash
your face after school.” Sometimes separately, often together, both were pronounced with fervent, not to say menacing, earnestness, even though it must have been at most a month after he first hurled them at me that I noticed how empty and unfulfilled they both were. Despite its soporific and sometimes repressive class atmosphere, the “school” that Ades promised to bash my face “after” protected me from him. His older brother Victor was a famous swimmer and diver who attended English Mission College (EMC) in Heliopolis; I admired his performances at meets around Cairo to which GPS took us, but I never liked the look of him any more than I ever warmed up to David, who would occasionally ask me to play a game of marbles with him.

I tried out both phrases at home—“I promise you” on my sisters, “I’ll bash your face after school” in front of a mirror. (I was too timid to use it on a real person.) In the bickering squabbles I had with the two oldest of my younger sisters, “promising” meant trying to get something on loan (“I promise you I’ll give it back”) or working hard to convince them of some preposterous “fib” I was telling (“I promise you I saw the crazy poisoner with red hair today!”) But I was prevented from pronouncing it as much as I wanted by Auntie Melia, who said I should vary its idiotic insincerity and monotony by saying “I assure you” instead.

For some infraction in class when I was eight I was sent out of the room by one of the women teachers (there weren’t any males) who never used physical punishment except for a few polite taps of a ruler on our knuckles. The teacher left me outside the door, then summoned Mrs. Bullen, who with a dour expression on her face jostled me along to a staircase leading up from the main hall. “Come along now Edward. You’ve got to see Mr. Bullen upstairs!” She went up ahead of me. At the top of the stairs she stopped, placed her hand on my left shoulder, and steered me toward a closed door. “Wait here,” she said, and then entered. A moment later she was back, signaling for me to go in; she then closed the door behind me, and I was, for the first and last time in my life, in the presence of Mr. Bullen.

I was instantly frightened of this large, red-faced, sandy-haired and silent Englishman who beckoned me toward him. Not a word passed between us as I approached him slowly where he stood near the window. I remember a blue vest and a white shirt, suede shoes, and a long flexible bamboo stick, something between a riding crop and a cane. I
was apprehensive, but I was also aware that having reached this nadir of awfulness I must not break down or cry. He pulled me forward by the back of my neck, which he then forced down away from him so that I was half bent over. With his other hand he raised the stick and whacked me three times on the behind; there was a whistle as the stick cut the air, followed by a muffled pop as it hit me. The pain I felt was less than the anger that flushed through me with every one of Bullen’s silently administered strokes. Who was this ugly brute to beat me so humiliatingly? And why did I allow myself to be so powerless, so “weak”—the word was beginning to acquire considerable resonance in my life—as to let him assault me with such impunity?

That five-minute experience was my sole encounter with Bullen; I knew neither his first name nor anything else about him except that he embodied my first public experience of an impersonal “discipline.” When the incident was brought to my parents’ notice by one of the teachers, my father said to me, “You see, you see how naughty you’re becoming. When will you learn?” and there was not in their tone the slightest objection to the indecency of the punishment. Father: “We pay a lot of money for you to go to the finest schools; why do you waste the opportunity so?” as if overlooking how he had in fact paid the Bullens to treat me in this way. Mother: “Edward, why do you always get yourself into trouble like that?”

So I became delinquent, the “Edward” of punishable offenses, laziness, loitering, who was regularly expected to be caught in some specific unlicensed act and punished by being given detentions or, as I grew older, a violent slap by a teacher. GPS gave me my first experience of an organized system set up as a colonial business by the British. The atmosphere was one of unquestioning assent framed with hateful servility by teachers and students alike. The school was not interesting as a place of learning but it gave me my first extended contact with colonial authority in the sheer Englishness of its teachers and many of its students. I had no sustained contact with the English children outside the school; an invisible cordon kept them hidden in another world that was closed to me. I was perfectly aware of how their names were just
right
, and their clothes and accents and associations were totally different from my own. I cannot recall ever hearing any of them refer to “home,” but I associated the idea of it with them, and in the deepest sense “home” was something I was excluded from. Although I didn’t
like the English as teachers or moral examples, their presence at the end of the street where I lived was neither unusual or unsettling. It was simply an unremarkable feature of Cairo, a city I always liked yet in which I never felt I belonged. I discovered that our apartment was rented, and that although some of the GPS children thought we were Egyptian, there was something “off” and out of place about us (me in particular), but I didn’t yet quite know why.

Bullen remained fixed in my memory, as unchanged and undeveloped as an ogre in a child’s story. He was the one figure in my childhood whose sole function was to whip me, never becoming more complicated than that. Exactly fifty years later during a short visit to Cairo I was leafing through a book written by an Egyptian scholar about two hundred years of British cultural interest in Egypt, and Bullen’s name leapt up at me off the page. This time he was referred to as Keith Bullen, one of a group of minor British writers known as the
Salamander
poets who were resident in wartime Cairo.
Salamander
was a literary review whose name derived from Anatole France’s inane observation that “one must be a philosopher to see a SALAMANDER”; an obliging Cairo friend later sent me a photocopy of the March 1943 issue, which must have appeared just as Mr. Bullen was whipping me, or perhaps another boy. Having already ascertained that my Bullen was indeed the
Salamander
Keith Bullen, I read his free English translation of “Summer Hours” by one Albert Samain. The opening:

This is followed by:

How mannered, even precious, such verse is, with its fancy words and word order (“peach incarnadine,”) and its exaggerated, unrealistic, and bathetic sentiment (“aches with an ecstasy of pain”). For me the poem’s first line—“Bring me the cup of gold”—suggested a weird cartoon revision of my caning experience with Mr. Bullen: Could Keith have uttered those words to his wife as she opened the door to bring me in for the caning, “in perfumes violent … Our love may still unfold”? But no matter how much I try I still cannot reconcile the silent, terrorized submission I was physically forced into as he whipped me with the simpering poetaster who had disciplined me in the morning and who produced the appalling “Summer Hours” in the afternoon, and who doubtless was an admirable fellow who listened to Chaminade at night.

A short time after I was caned, I had an even more acute, and much more explicit, colonial encounter. Coming home at dusk across one of the vast outlying fields of the Gezira Club, I was accosted by a brown-suited Englishman with a pith helmet on his head and a small black briefcase hanging from his bicycle handlebars. This was Mr. Pilley, known to me in writing as “Hon. Sec’y” of the club, and also as the father of Ralph, a GPS contemporary of mine. “What are you doing here, boy?” he challenged me in a cold, reedy voice. “Going home,” I said, trying to be calm as he dismounted from the bicycle and walked toward me. “Don’t you know you’re not supposed to be here?” he asked reprovingly. I started to say something about being a member, but he cut me off pitilessly. “Don’t answer back, boy. Just get out, and do it quickly. Arabs aren’t allowed here, and you’re an Arab!” If I hadn’t thought of myself as an Arab before, I now directly grasped the significance of the designation as truly disabling. When I told my father what Mr. Pilley had said to me he was only mildly disquieted. “And he wouldn’t believe that we were members,” I pleaded. “I’ll speak to Pilley about this,” was the noncommittal answer. The subject was never discussed again: Pilley had gotten away with it.