Out of Place: A Memoir (27 page)

As I look back over those years, I can see the real anxiety induced in me by my mother’s withdrawal, where the need to reconnect with her was kept alive paradoxically by the obstacles she placed before me. She had become a taskmaster whose injunctions I had to fulfill. Yet the emptiness into which I fell during and after my errands when she gave little warmth or thanks genuinely bewildered me. The intelligence of our relationship was temporarily gone, in Dhour replaced by the series of drills set for me to keep me out of everyone’s way. Years later she would tell stories of my capacity for troublemaking as a child, and how she devised stupid, only occasionally useful, errands for me.

It must also have been part of my parents’ plan to get me out of Cairo’s putative (because never actually seen or experienced) fleshpots during the summer, and deposit me in a place where there weren’t and could never have been any temptations. The only girls from these early Dhour days were one or two of my sisters’ friends, none of whom took any notice of me. Toward the end of July 1946 my mother’s youngest brother showed up from Palestine, and being of a more adventurous nature than his sister, offered to take us all out one night to see a
numéro
, as cabaret acts were called in those days, at Café Nasr, one of two far-stretching places—the other being Café Hawie—opposite each other about a hundred yards beyond the
saha;
they were both family enterprises, Nasr run by Elias Nasr and his sister, an attractive middle-aged spinster with an enormous phlebitic leg, and Hawie’s by the brothers Iskandar and Nicola Hawie. The two establishments seemed engaged in mortal commercial combat.

Nasr had upped the stakes by bringing in what were advertised as “international” variety performers, mostly acrobats and dancers whose
main attraction, looking back on them now, was that the women wore skimpy costumes. That night we were crowded around a small table one back from the dance floor, and the main act was a pair of acrobats, George and Adele, whose last name seemed Hungarian. He was a short, muscular man in his mid-forties, and she was an only slightly younger blonde in a modified bikini that reminded me of Kalita, especially since she bent her body in similarly unnatural ways. Advertised as a nine p.m. “soirée,” the show didn’t start until a little past eleven, with lots of false starts and moments of fake urgency engineered by waiters who were obviously under strict orders to prod the customers into buying more food and drink “before we begin the
numéro
.” A tiresome wait for all of us, until a sustained snare drumroll brought out the two stars, complete with long silver cloaks, and flashy overly wide gold-toothed smiles. I remember being disappointed with how little beyond a few distinctly unadventurous poses they attempted—he lifts her over his head, she does a back bend, he swings her under his arms—until the final trick, which the Armenian bandmaster warned us was extremely dangerous and required absolute silence. A short pole was brought out, on which George hoisted Adele; then as he slowly twirled it around him Adele held on to one end, like a flag, and was gradually swung with her body at a ninety-degree angle to the pole, all this with what I recall was a superfluous commentary by the Armenian maestro on what was plainly taking place before our eyes. We trudged home at about midnight full of admiration for the intrepid duo’s last feat, though I recall that my mother was disapprovingly silent throughout. Bare flesh always caused her to frown and then “tsk” exasperatedly with unconcealed distaste.

I realize now that so innately trivial an episode as the battle of
“numéros”
between Hawie and Nasr, who competed with each other in weekly entertainments, seemed much more interesting than it was because of the total uneventfulness of our Dhour summers during the early years. I recall the indifference I felt when my mother would receive guests for morning coffee or afternoon tea, during which I would be summoned from my room for a perfunctory handshake, and then sent either back or on an errand. There was a ritualized formality to the whole business of these visits. Usually a messenger would be dispatched a day before to announce one of the occasions, although they could also occur without warning. The idea was that each family was
entitled to one such social call per summer from a family with which it had some connection—the dentist, a cousin’s cousin, local notables, the Protestant minister, and so on. The morning time was always around eleven, as they—no one ever came alone—trooped up the rocky path, then the single flight of stone stairs to our house, in a single file led by the man or men, the women following silently behind. Soon there would be coffee, followed by chocolate or, after my mother had learned the practice from Marie Nassar, a piece of Turkish Delight wedged between two plain biscuits. This was considered a special treat. A little later came glasses of tamarind or mulberry syrup in water and a box of cigarettes. An hour later the guests stood up ready to leave, though it was considered the polite thing to say, “So soon? It’s still quite early,” which my mother always did. Afternoon visitors came at four-thirty and were supplied with tea; on those occasions the men were commuters who had returned from Beirut after the workday.

There was something needlessly rigid about these visits, not just because it was understood that my mother should be at home to receive guests day in, day out, but also because she would have to make similar visits herself. One had the impression that a careful record was being kept somewhere, that Mrs. Haddad had
not
been visited, whereas we had had
her
visit. For all its bustle, our life in Cairo was a good deal more private in those years, though I did sense the stirrings in my mother of a sense of social obligation with regard to one or two families like the Dirliks and the Gindys. In Dhour, however, my mother seemed obsessed with what was done and not done, what “the people” said or might say, how things would look. As she grew older, these matters became more important, making it less possible to do what she liked and imperative that she conform to an outside standard, which in the case of Dhour she patently detested but doggedly held on to nonetheless.

That summer she felt especially imprisoned, since when my father returned from his long trip it was only to play bridge. My mother’s distaste for his daytime bridge partners—who never made an appearance at our house and included taxi drivers, dry-cleaning clerks, and the like from the various cafés in town—spurred him a little to find respectable men for bridge evenings at home. Of this group, Emile Nassar and Faiz, his cousin, were regulars, in addition to new friends like Anis Nassif and Salim Kurban, Aunt Frida’s Beirut cousin. Occasionally the austere Anis
Makdisi, a professor of Arabic at the American University of Beirut, would join; his house was just above ours on the hill, which is where I first met Samir, his youngest son and a contemporary of Alfred Nassar, who was later to marry my sister Jean. My mother made sporadic efforts to join in by learning canasta and even a card game called
concain
, but not until after my father’s death did she herself become a serious, if not entirely robust bridge player.

The day of my father’s arrival from the United States at the end of August 1946 was an unpleasant one for the most trivial of reasons. He had written my mother to send him our measurements in inches so that he could buy us clothes from Best’s; in due course two gigantic trunks were dispatched to Cairo while he came overland from there to Beirut. My mother and I met him in the early afternoon at the Alamein terminal in central Beirut, and then we rode up to Dhour all together. His first words to me after he hugged me were “You’ve really gotten very fat, haven’t you?” When I expressed surprise, he added “Your waist is thirty-four inches. The people at Best’s were very surprised.” My mother’s tape measure was a metric one, and the conversion to inches had been at best an improvised one. When two months later the trunks were unpacked in Cairo I recall no less than six pairs of heavy brown wool shorts—unwearable in the Cairo heat—that my mother had to throw out because they were vastly too big for me; as it turned out most of what he had bought for us, evidently in the same way he ordered groceries and produce at Nicola’s without paying very close attention either to quantity or quality, also had to be jettisoned. “Is that one of the things I got you from Best’s?” he would ask me for the next year, and I would nod affirmatively, though of course I never wore what he had bought.

“Go play in the forest,” I remember my parents telling me, as if the scraggly pines and thorn-filled bushes were a natural playground full of delightful and even instructive amusements. The landscape struck me as an inhospitable and hot wasteland, swarming with giant horseflies and menacing bumblebees. The overwhelming natural fact about Dhour and its bosky environs was the total absence of water: the dryness without a pond, lake, stream, or even swimming pool to relieve it meant that the place gave off a pungent sense of discomfort that the occasionally cool mountain air and the absence of urban pollution did little to offset.

There was but one break in the dryness of the summer. A blissfully long day, on which we would escape to Beirut and the sea on our annual late July excursion, which always began with an hour’s taxi ride to Saint-Simon and Saint-Michel, two adjacent sandy beaches just south of the city, where we swam all morning in a surfy but rather shallow sea, and were occasionally permitted a ride on a rented
périssoire—
a kind of elongated surf board with a hull and a kayak paddle—which always overturned in the exciting, churning water. I always felt I could not get enough of the Mediterranean, whose sheer abundance and cool drenching effervescence would have to last in my memory for the rest of the year. Neither of my parents swam, but they seemed content to spend the day under the thatched awning of the beach café, where we had our lunch. Occasionally our Cairo friends the Dirliks would be prevailed upon by telegram to join us from Bhamdoun, their summer town, for the day, so at least my parents had company till the early afternoon. During one lunch at Saint-Simon, my father suddenly leapt up from his chair as if he were about to assault a young man sitting at a nearby table. “No Wadie, please no,” wailed my mother as she held on to her husband’s powerful white shirtsleeved arms, preventing him from going after the man who had provoked him. “I’ll tear your eyes out,” my father called to the man as he sat down. Then, turning to me he added, “I won’t let anyone look at your sister that way.” Finding this illogical I remarked that “there’s nothing wrong with looking,” to which Loris Dirlik sagely rejoindered, “There are ways and ways of looking,” since clearly to everyone but me the person in question had crossed an imaginary line.

My sister Jean, the source of this turmoil, appeared oblivious, but I certainly felt at the time that I could not emulate my father’s possessiveness: I was far too reticent to start a fight, too ill equipped in vocabulary and sentiments of outraged honor to carry through any such action, and, finally, too indifferent to anybody’s mere looking at my sister. The incident passed quickly enough but I remember thinking at the time that it afforded me more insight into my father’s powerful virility, from which I shrank in consternation. What if his eye turned on me—who knows what he might have found in my feelings about my mother or in my secret lasciviousness about one or another female relative. Without the insulation of school and Cairo’s daily routine there was
nowhere for me to hide my vulnerability from this man who could erupt with such frightening volcanic force.

At about three-thirty we would be showered and dressed, and on our way to Ras Beirut to visit a Badr cousin for tea and cakes; and then we made our final stop in town at the Patisserie Suisse, a small cake shop and café in Bab Edriss in the heart of the city, where we were allowed to gorge ourselves on
chocolat mou
and heaping plates of ice cream and whipped cream. Overexposed to the sun, overfed at lunch and tea and with afternoon sweets, tired out by the one rare day when we could leave Dhour’s confines and be exposed to the Mediterranean’s glamour and salty, surfy expansive blueness, we made our dreary way back to the village for several more weeks of uninterrupted vacancy. On very rare occasions, perhaps once or twice more per summer, my father would go to Beirut to change money (Dhour, in this service, being as ill endowed as with other modern amenities: the place did not even have a bank) and took me along on an excursion entirely restricted to the garish, sweaty, smelly, and noisily crowded downtown area, as far from the beaches as it was possible to be. Our destination was the Banque de Syrie et du Liban, and a strangely hairless, eunuchlike young man whose high-pitched female voice belied the drab gray trousers and white shirt he wore with studied nonchalance. These were the days of gigantically large letters of credit from which this clerk would clip several little boxes with scissors, make half a dozen trips to various desks for signatures, and return finally with a thick wad of Lebanese pounds, which he would first count with his rubber-coated thumb, then pass portentously under the steel window to my father, who would recount the whole pile to make sure he got the exact amount.

After an hour and a half of the bank the two of us would go shopping for heavy goods unobtainable in Dhour—wicker baskets, plates and cups, sheets and towels, 20-kilo bags of sugar and rice—and hire one of the numerous barefoot,
sharwal
-suited porters idling on the main tramline to carry them for us. Normally about 120 kilos of these goods were loaded carefully into the porter’s long basket, which he strapped to his padded back, with one of the bands going across his forehead; I was afraid it might split open from the pressure. We usually stopped at the Café Automatique, with its bustling seemingly all-male clientele,
gaily colored tile floor teeming with shop clerks, shoppers, bank employees and the like, for me to have a quick ice-cream cone, my father a small cup of coffee, before we made our way, the porter slowly plodding at our side in his barefeet, to the Dhour el Shweir taxi stand at the bottom of Place des Canons for our ride back up to the mountains. I remember these occasions for the uncomfortable sticky heat of the day, the absence of air, and the stifling boredom punctuated by the small pleasures of the many hours at my father’s side, with nothing to do except to “be there” and only the most meager conversation to enliven the silence between us.