Out of Place: A Memoir (28 page)

In our terrace house we acquired neighbors, the Nassar family, who lived on the ground floor. The Nassars were everything we were not. The patriarch was Emile Nassar, also known behind his back as Lord Gresham because as the local representative of the London-based Gresham Assurance Company he spoke incessantly of the company he worked for, always trying to interest his bridge partners, or a fellow taxi passenger, or a visitor in purchasing a Gresham policy. He left for his Beirut office at the crack of dawn, returning home in midafternoon for a late lunch, siesta, and bridge; unlike my father he always wore a suit and furnished his house like a replica of his customary city residence. The Nassars had real furniture, a phone, a record player and radio (referred to as “a pickup”), curtains at the windows, rugs on the floor, and an extremely ornate heavy dining table covered with dishes of real cooked food twice a day, in contrast to our solitary evening meal on the floor above of “Protestant supper,” which was always cold, and somehow medicinal—cheeses, olives, tea, a few fruits and raw vegetables, and the dried cakes called
irshalleh
—much like the rest of the puritanical summer life instituted by my father. The Nassar life was more interestingly advanced.

The three Nassar boys, Raja, Alfred, and Munir, were about ten, six, and three years older, respectively, than I. Their “real” mother had died quite young, and their father had become remarried to a cheery francophone woman, Marie, whose relationship to the boys I could never fathom. This was the first broken, or at least divided, family I had ever had contact with. It had never occurred to me that a family could be unlike ours in terms of its basic structure, and divorce I had associated (as did my two older sisters) with glamour and crime (the “divorced
woman” we could see on our Cairo street being the perfect example, with her cigarette and red hair). Raja and Alfred referred to Marie as Tante, but for Munir, who was a very young child when his father remarried, she was Mama. In addition there was young Wadad, Marie’s child with Emile, who acted like and was treated by Munir as a younger sister, but by the two older boys as a niece.

Much as I liked and was drawn to them I never felt truly comfortable with the Nassars, partly because they were so different but also because of my parents’ nagging insistence that I should not spend so much time in the place for fear, my mother said, that I might become an unwelcome presence there. So I always felt that I was intruding, though they never gave any hint that I might have been a nuisance; only later did I recognize that such fearful parental injunctions were intended to keep us psychologically enclosed within our own tight family circle. The thrill I felt when Marie Nassar or Munir asked me to join them for a delicious dinner was always accompanied by a sense of unease and a feeling that I shouldn’t be there at all. A dinner might include lots of salads, bits of leftover cooking like kibbe or white bean stew, mountains of rice, lavish desserts, all of which I wolfed down with avid pleasure. My mother routinely put on a disapproving look when I mounted the stairs from the Nassars’ to our house after such an occasion. “It’s bad to eat such heavy food at night,” she might say, “you’ll have trouble sleeping.” And of course I did.

To my disappointment during the forties and early fifties Munir and his brothers were rarely there during the week, either because they had jobs or, in Munir’s case, because he was enjoying the freedom of Beirut and the family house with his parents away. They did give me generous access to their books, however. During my high school years I became more friendly with Munir Nassar, whose expansively positive feeling about his Beirut school and university was an emotion I never could have had as an outsider in my school. The elevated subjects proposed by Munir for our rather ponderous discussions—the meaning of life, art, and music, for example—rounded me intellectually but kept us away from any real intimacy. This suited us both, I think. What we spoke of together was self-consciously deliberate and serious, but at least, since he and his closest friend, Nicola Saab, were hard-working medical students, our discussions had the virtue of keeping me aware of
complexities that in almost every other way life in Dhour seemed designed to suppress. “Philosophy” was our main subject, of which I knew nothing, but Munir had been influenced by two Americans, Dick Yorkey and Richard Scott, both products not of missionary piety but of the secular liberal arts, and this opened new intellectual doors for me that I first reacted to defensively, then entered with surprising enthusiasm. I first learned about Kant, Hegel, and Plato during those discussions, and, as when I heard Furtwängler and then rushed to his recordings for confirmation, I started borrowing Munir’s book of extracts from the great Western philosophers.

Such relatively modest, even imperceptible breaks in the dullness and enforced monotony of our “relaxation” in Dhour provided me with a gradually emerging sense of complexity, complexity for its own sake, unresolved, unreconciled, perhaps finally unassimilated. One of the themes of my life as conceived by my parents was that everything should be pushed into the preordained molds favored by my father and embodied in his favorite adages: “Play cricket”; “Neither a borrower nor a lender be”; “Take care of your mother”; “Protect your sisters”; “Do your best.” All this was what “Edward” was supposed to be, although my mother held out some inducements for straying further beyond these boundaries, which with typical contradictoriness she herself never explicitly renounced. My father’s prescriptions may not have been her style, but she would often endorse them with phrases like “Your father and I think.” And yet there survived an unspoken compact between us that encouraged me in music, literature, art, and experience, despite the silly errands and reductive clichés. I recall talking to her about
The Idiot
when I was fifteen, after I had heard about the book from Munir and his friends: she had read it and was much taken with the blank goodness of Myshkin, and urged me to read
Crime and Punishment
, which I subsequently did—a book I also borrowed from Munir.

The sense of complexity beyond Dhour’s appalling limitations continued to grow in me after my departure to the United States in 1951; but the seeds had been planted paradoxically at a time of my greatest deprivation, while I wandered the summer resort’s bleak streets with only the heat and a generalized dissatisfaction to preoccupy me on the surface. Slowly I found ways to borrow books from various acquaintances,
and by my middle teens I was aware of myself making connections between disparate books and ideas with considerable ease, wondering about, for example, the role of the great city in Dostoyevsky and Balzac, drawing analogies between various characters (money lenders, criminals, students) that I encountered in books that I liked and comparing them with individuals I had met or known about in Dhour or Cairo. My greatest gift was memory, which allowed me to recall visually whole passages in books, to see them again on the page, and then to manipulate scenes, characters, giving them an imaginary life beyond the pages of the book. I would have moments of exultant recollection that enabled me to look out over a sea of details, spotting patterns, phrases, word clusters, which I imagined as stretching out interconnectedly without limit. I did not know as a teenager what the whole texture was or what it really meant, only that it was there and I could sense its complex workings and vividly grasp relationships between, say, Colonel Faiz Nassar and his nephew Hani, the Badr family and a certain kind of furniture, me and my sisters and our schools, teachers, friends, enemies, clothes, pencils, pens, papers, and books.

What I wove and rewove in my mind took place between the trivial surface reality and a deeper level of awareness of another life of beautiful, interrelated parts—parts of ideas, passages of literature and music, history, personal memory, daily observation—nourished not by the “Edward” whose making my family, teachers, and mentors contributed to, but by my inner, far less compliant and private self, who could read, think, and even write independent of “Edward.” By “complexity” I mean a kind of reflection and self-reflection that had a coherence of its own, despite my inability for some years to articulate this process. It was something private and apart that gave me strength when “Edward” seemed to be failing. My mother would often speak about the Badr “coldness,” a sort of reserve and distance radiated by some of her cousins, uncles, and aunts. There was much talk of inherited traits (“You have the Badr hunchback,” she would say, or “Like my brothers, you’re not a good businessman, you’re not clever that way”). I connected this sense of distance, apartness in myself with the need to erect a kind of defense of that other non-Edward self. For most of my life I have in an ambivalent way cherished and disparaged this core of icy
detachment that has seemed impervious to the tribulations of loss, sadness, instability, or failure I have lived through.

One summer two new friends who fit the increasingly but unacknowledged sophistication of my inner life came into my existence at Dhour. John Racy, my mother’s classmate’s oldest son, like me was unusually fluent in English, liked music, and was a gifted game player and craftsman. The Racy family was spending the summer of 1947 in a house beyond the Medawar Hotel, off to the left of the main square, a good mile from our house. I was impressed with John’s deliberate, meticulously shaped English sentences (he must have been four or five years older than I) and his extraordinary self-possession. He used to talk to me about books, music—he introduced me to Beethoven’s E-flat Piano Sonata, “La Chasse,” played by Claudio Arrau—and about the finer points of chess, a game I neither mastered nor particularly enjoyed, except when Johnny talked about it and about Stefan Zweig’s
The Royal Game
. I don’t recall ever saying more than yes or no and asking Johnny questions to get him to say more, as I listened to him entranced. Years later his mother, Soumaya, would remind me of how after they stopped coming to Dhour—he had become a psychiatrist, had married an American nurse, lived first in Rochester (where I visited him at Strong Memorial Hospital in 1956), then in Arizona, after which I never saw him again—she would remind me that in 1949 or 1950 I had said to her plaintively, “But where is Johnny; I miss him.” Perhaps it was not quite a friendship because it was so one-sided, but he opened up a rich world to be found nowhere else in Dhour.

My other friend, also from our early days in Dhour, was Ramzy Zeine, whose father, Zeine Zeine, professor of history at American University of Beirut, was a Bahai whom we would see not so much in Dhour but on his twice yearly visits to Cairo. A gifted storyteller, Professor Zeine went with me on my first museum visit, to Cairo’s Wax Museum, where in the funereally still, empty rooms framed by elaborate wax scenes from modern Egyptian history, Zeine would speak grippingly about Muhammad Ali, Bonaparte, Ismail Pasha, the Orabi rebellion, and the Denshawi incident. I rarely saw him after I was about sixteen but I know that during the Lebanese Civil War of 1975–90 he was outspokenly anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian, and during the 1980s refused to leave his house until his solitary death at the age of ninety.

Ramzy was, like me, a lonely child, but his family had constructed a small rustic green wooden bungalow for him in a vineyard a few dozen meters from our heavy stone house. I had never seen such a place, but with his pet rabbits, his unerring little slingshot, which he had made himself out of an oak branch lying just outside his door, Ramzy struck me as what I might have liked to be, a child of nature, happy and at ease in Dhour’s arid environment. He provided an unwonted contemplative dimension to the place’s inhospitableness. Like Johnny, Ramzy’s Dhour presence was extremely brief and, as the summers wore on and I looked back on it wistfully, very precious. I did not sustain a relationship with either Johnny or Ramzy past my late childhood, and both disappeared from my life thereafter.

As if to make up for his absence, my father, when he returned from the United States in mid-summer 1946, organized a series of family trips throughout Lebanon. He had made the acquaintance of Jamil Yared, who owned a pink seven-seater taxi; and with this very long eyecatching car we went to the Hamana waterfalls, the heights of Suneen, the rather disappointing cedar forest in the north, to Ein Zhalta, Kasrwan, the Qadisha cave, Beiteddine. Certainly these trips offered a welcome opportunity to leave Dhour for the day, but spending anywhere from three to six hours each way on the road, arriving and having lunch in a restaurant picked by Yared, then returning to Dhour scarcely qualified as a real picnic. My six-year-old sister Jean was discovered to be very prone to car sickness, so her discomfort managed to overtake and somewhat spoil the journey for us all, except for my father, who maintained his composed indifference. The food was almost always the same, with local variations providing entertaining relief: in Ein Zhalta, the springwater was so cold it would burst open a watermelon. In Bsherye, where we went on a desultory fifteen-minute tour of Khalil Gibran’s house “as he left it,” with the bed unmade and the waste baskets unemptied, the local restaurant specialized in grilled chicken. What I took for granted as we traveled about was that no one consulted a map, and in fact there seemed to be no maps available; most of the time Jamil steered by his nose, which often occasioned numerous stops for information. Lebanon then had no advertisements, road signs, or tourist services; arriving in Raifoon was like suddenly entering a new country where the people stared at us, and tried to make sense of my father’s quixotic mixture of Egyptian and Palestinian dialects, my mother gently
mocking his linguistic clumsiness from the back seat: “Why does he think these people understand words like
halqait
[“now” in Palestinian] or
badri
[“early” in Egyptian]?” As we unloaded ourselves out of the long pink car we must have seemed like a family of odd bedraggled strangers from across the oceans, so exaggeratedly guarded and reserved were the reactions to us. It was from those excursions that I have derived, and later nurtured, the habit of always being dressed differently from the natives, any natives.