Out of Place: A Memoir (25 page)

I was more done than ever that last spring at CSAC, which seemed less and less like a real institution and more like a one-room school-house fussily run by the ubiquitous and erratic Miss Breeze. All of the older students—Stan Henry, Dutch von Schilling and his sister, Bob Simha, Margaret Osborn, Jeanne Badeau—had left, as had many of the teachers except for obviously overage and unhirable creatures like Blow, as we called her.

At the same time, my moral and spiritual character was being attended to by weekly catechism classes at All Saints’ Cathedral on Sharia Maspero. The church itself was part of a grand compound facing the Nile a little to the north of the British Army’s Kasr el Nil barracks (now the site of the Nile Hilton). An impressive plaza with ceremonial driveway allowed cars entry to the cathedral’s main doors, the whole of the place communicating that sense of monumental power and absolute confidence which was so much the hallmark of the British presence in Egypt. On both sides of the cathedral stood annexes that housed offices and homes for the resident staff, which included a bishop, an archdeacon, and various padres, all of them British. All this completely disappeared in the late 1980s when a traffic flyover was constructed across the Nile.

But it was especially from Padre Fedden, whom my parents represented to me as a saintly man much envied by the others, and from Bishop Allen, who was nominally in charge, that I learned to love (and
have still managed to hold in my memory) both the Book of Common Prayer and the spirited parts of the Gospels, John in particular. Fedden seemed more approachable and human than the others, but I always felt the rift between white man and Arab as separating us in the end, maybe because he was in a position of authority and it was
his
language, not mine. I remember nothing of the weekly catechism classes in terms of what we discussed, none at all. But I do remember the earnestly sincere look on Fedden’s face when he intoned, “in the beginning was the Word,” for example, or when he explained the Apostles’ Creed, “On the third day he rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God, the Father Almighty,” or aspects of the Trinity. I still have my Book of Common Prayer from that time, even though I read it only as a way of regretting the pedestrianism of the New Standard Revised Edition, or whatever it is now called.

My fellow catechist was an American university student eight or nine years my senior, a bespectacled Copt called Jimmy Beshai, whose interest in psychology had somehow delivered him to seek the embrace of the Anglican church. Occasionally he and Fedden would engage contentiously on points that Beshai thought could be made more “experiential” (a word I did not know then but that he patiently explained to me one day as we left the class) and less dependent on either faith or vision, Fedden always and in the end impatiently holding out for mystery, drama, inexplicability. I admired Fedden’s belief without completely accepting it, since the whole business seemed to be important because my family was set on this confirmation ritual, not because God had moved me.

Bishop Allen’s rare appearances were somber and dispiriting. He had apparently been an Oxford don or religious figure of some estimable sort, and over time had risen in rank to become Archbishop Geoffrey Allen, head of the Egyptian, Sudanese, and one other I’ve missed here (perhaps Ethiopian), Diocese, a man of considerable power and administrative stature. He was always in at least some of his scarlet-robed uniforms whenever I saw him, communicating a sense of haughty distance, even indifference, together with a sense of powerful connections to the embassy and more worldly affairs. He had an intensely executive air totally at odds with Fedden’s enthusiasm for religious substance. When I saw the two of them together, it was clear that Allen regarded his
junior deacon as barely to be taken notice of; when he examined us (“Let’s take a look at the meaning of the sacraments,” he might begin) his eyes flitted impatiently and curiously while he busied himself with his tea, though it was evident he had the religious material down pat and could reel off concrete facts and features about James I and Hooker that Fedden’s expostulations did not contain. All this took place in a country whose own astonishingly long and dense history, from the Pharaohs to King Farouk, was simply never mentioned.

I was confirmed and took my first Communion on a Sunday in early July 1949 with my godmother, Aunt Nabiha, standing next to me in the imposing transept of the cathedral. Fedden was there but was relegated to a minor role, while Bishop Allen presided over the ceremony with almost Oriental opulence—candles, intoned prayers, crosses, crooks, antiphonal choruses, the organ and choir, procession, recession, and several orders of lesser clergy—all for me and Jimmy Beshai. Having been received in Communion with the company both of saints and ordinary participants, I found myself trying to feel different, but only experienced a feeling of incongruence. My hope that I might gain insight into the nature of things or a better apprehension of the Anglican God proved fanciful. The hot and cloudless Cairo sky, my aunt Nabiha’s disproportionately large hat perched on her small head and body, the placidly flowing Nile immediately in front of us in its undisturbed immensity as we stood on the cathedral esplanade: all these were as I was, exactly the same. I suppose I had been vaguely looking for something to lift me out of the strange limbo into which I had fallen, with CSAC ending and Victoria College about to begin in October, but confirmation was not it.

I was now even more in a disconcerting orbit between my mother and my father (who seemed increasingly distant and demanding at the same time); Cairo in that period was full of reports of assassinations and disappearances, and as I neared my fifteenth birthday the following year, there was yet more apprehension in my mother’s voice as she warned me not to come home late, not to eat anything off the vendors’ carts, not to sit too close to people on the tram or bus—in short, to spend most of my time at home—whereas an awakened sexual hunger stimulated me to wilder and wilder dreams of what I wanted to do in Cairo. A kind of steady but receding motif in our lives was Aunt
Nabiha’s Palestinian work. Despite the tension between her sons and her brother (my father), she still came for Friday lunch, and her interest in my catechism continued, as symbolized by the gold ring inscribed “ES,” which she presented to me on that hot and cloudless day after the service and which I still wear.

BEGINNING IN 1943, THE SUMMER AFTER MY FATHER’S
nervous breakdown, and for the next twenty-seven summers, we would spend most of July, August, and September in the Lebanese mountain village of Dhour el Shweir (which means “on the outskirts of Shweir”), a village my father loved and my mother claimed to hate, even though her mother’s family, the Badrs, came from there. Dhour was a summer resort whose houses and hotels were strung along a narrow ascending road that meandered along the backs of three small mountains in central Lebanon. Shweir itself was a little town, strung along a steeply descending road, going in the opposite direction, that began in Dhour’s only significant public space, the main square, or
saha
, dipped sharply to the left next to the Greek Orthodox church, and wound its way down to the valley, to its very heart, “Ayn al Qassis, the “priest’s spring.” A totally Christian village, Shweir produced the shopkeepers and functionaries who serviced Dhour during the season. As a child I had assumed they simply sat home during the long, dark, and snowy winter. Except for my mother’s extremely aged great-uncle Faris Badr, a rosy-faced, heavily mustachioed gentleman who always wore dark glasses and a black suit and tie with a red tarbush, carried a very ancient black umbrella, and was resident there all year, my mother’s Lebanese relatives lived and worked in Beirut, only visiting Dhour in the summer season.

We spent our first summer of 1943 in Dhour’s only “grand” hotel, the Kassouf, which sat rather haughtily and pretentiously on a promontory near the end of the road leading due east for two miles out of the
saha
toward Bois de Boulogne, the next village; the Kassouf was clearly modeled after a château, its long sweeping staircase, balustrades, and massive stony assertiveness dominating the village and valley. I first learned about red wine and red vinegar in the Kassouf’s formal dining room, and I also caught my first glimpse of a roulette and baccarat room. The hotel seemed to be full of wealthy Syro-Lebanese tourists from Egypt (Shawam), people from our class, I suppose, for whom in comparison with Cairo’s oppressive summer heat, Dhour’s sunny and relatively dry warm days and cool, foggy afternoons and evenings were a bracing contrast. These people, like us, spent a good deal of time walking the Kassouf’s terraces, occasionally venturing onto the only road, which had no pavements and a steep fall on either side, at the risk of being run over by a speeding car or bus. There were no shops between the Kassouf and the
saha
, and the hotel was just far enough to make a casual stroll into town out of the question; so we stayed on the grounds with the other children, their nannies, and parents. My mother was pregnant that summer with Joyce and seemed to spend most of her time in the room, while my father—by now a confirmed bridge addict—stayed in one or another card room most of the morning, afternoon, and, at least three times a week, evening.

Not until 1944 did I begin very tentatively to make out the broad lines of my parents’ plan for each summer, which began after school finished in the early spring. By late May I could sense the impending departure date without being told. New shorts and sandals would have to be purchased, there would be an agonizingly long and maddeningly finicky family photo session with a pair of elderly spinster sisters, both of whom were totally dumb and therefore limited in communication to excited grunts and agitated nods, in their extremely hot third-floor studio around the corner from Shepheard’s Hotel. Dr. Haddad would call to give us our round of typhoid shots, and one day all the living room and smaller salons’ furniture would suddenly be draped in pink, white, or pale-green sheets. Until 1948 we would gather, on the appointed day, in the lobby of 1 Sharia Aziz Osman for a caravan of two or (later, as our number increased) three cars to take us, one or two maids, and
the cook, to Bab-el-Hadid Station, where we would board the wagon-lit bound for the Suez Canal towns of either Ismailia or al-Kantarah. From there we crossed into Sinai for the long overnight ride to Haifa, which we would reach at about noon the next day.

The train journey was indescribably romantic and pleasurable. I loved the polished wood walls, the handsome seat I could pull down and sit on by the window, the blue shaded lamps coming on at twilight, the Greek waiters and vaguely French conductor, who sat at the end of the corridor along which our three or four compartments lay and, after dinner, came by to pull down the upper beds and do up the lower ones. I used to look forward to going to the resplendently gaudy dining car, with its table silver and beady lampshades tinkling as the train lurched from side to side, making the white-robed
suffragis
and the tuxedo-clad Italian or Armenian maître d’hôtel do the same. The menu always contained a rice first course, followed by a second course of lamblike meat with gravy, and finally a small bowl of oversweet crème caramel, all of them foods banned from my parents’ rigorously healthy table of spinach, carrots, celery, and peas enlivened only slightly by broiled chicken or grilled veal and the bland pastas that seemed so important to what we called my father’s “regime.” When I crawled into the fresh sheets of my tightly made up upper-deck bed I would switch on my special reading light and extricate my book from the odd little net strung up along the wall where I could store my possessions with a rare sense of privacy, safe from sudden parental invasion. Sleep would come very late and the desert dawn very early. The melancholy of the half-lit desert wastes brought with them an additional sense of calm, and in the scene’s monotony, and my utter solitude as everyone else slept, I was relieved of pressure and the continual anxiety of not getting anything right.

In Haifa we would be met by two seven-seater taxis operated by the el-Alamein company, which took us either to Jerusalem for a week or, more frequently, along the northwest road out of Palestine via Acre to Naqura, the Lebanese border village, and from there a few more kilometers past Tyre to the fishing village of al-Sarafand. There we stopped at the waterside restaurant where it always seemed like hours before the fish was slowly grilled to my father’s satisfaction and duly eaten, and we were able to proceed north along deserted roads to Sidon. Bypassing
Beirut we would take the Dhour–Bikfaya road, which with a sudden hoist took us up above Antelias and the dark-blue Mediterranean spread out in all its shimmering mystery beneath us.

In the early days, there was often a decrease in the number of cars as we climbed the dramatically hairpinned road to Bikfaya, the large town just below Dhour that I knew for its famous peaches and a fantastic red-and-tinsel-colored toy shop, “Kaiser Amer.” It was only later, in the 1970s, that I knew it as the family seat of the Gemayel family. Pierre Gemayel, impressed with the German brownshirts he saw at the 1936 Olympics, was the founder of the extreme-right Maronite party, the Phalanges Libanaises, and was father of two Lebanese presidents—Bashir, whose assassination in September 1982 unleashed the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps perpetuated by his pro-Israel henchmen, and Amin, who ran a regime drenched in corruption and incompetence. Bikfaya then acquired a sinister reputation as rabidly anti-Palestinian, and I have avoided it and Dhour for almost two decades.

Above Bikfaya the road became steeper and more treacherous, with still fewer cars and the views were usually obscured by the great washes of afternoon fog sweeping across the peaks through which we chugged, the two heavily loaded cars struggling against the dramatically steep inclines. When we finally entered Dhour, through the little suburb of Douar, I would feel the combination of mournfulness and impending dread that the place always induced.