Out of Place: A Memoir (32 page)

There was a great distortion underlying the Victoria College life, which I was unaware of at the time. The students were seen as paying members of some putative colonial elite that was being schooled in the ways of a British imperialism that had already expired, though we did
not fully know it. We learned about English life and letters, the monarchy and Parliament, India and Africa, habits and idioms that we could never use in Egypt or, for that matter, anywhere else. Being and speaking Arabic were delinquent activities at VC, and accordingly we were never given proper instruction in our own language, history, culture, and geography. We were tested as if we were English boys, trailing behind an ill-defined and always out-of-reach goal from class to class, year to year, with our parents worrying along with us. I knew in my heart that Victoria College had irreversibly severed my links with my old life, and that the screen devised by my parents, the pretense of being American, was over, and that we all felt that we were inferiors pitted against a wounded colonial power that was dangerous and capable of inflicting harm on us, even as we seemed compelled to study its language and its culture as the dominant one in Egypt.

The incarnation of declining colonial authority was the headmaster, Mr. J. G. E. Price, whose forest of initials symbolized an affectation of pedigree and self-importance I’ve always since associated with the British. I do not know where he and my father had become acquaintances, but that link had perhaps something to do with his initial cordiality toward me. A short, compactly built man with a black brush mustache and a mechanical stride as he took his black terrier for walks around the playing fields, Price was a remote figure, partly because so much authority was delegated to teachers, prefects, and house masters and partly because he seemed to grow dramatically weaker with ill health until, after remaining hidden in his study for many weeks, he finally resigned.

By the end of my first month at the school, I had risen to a kind of bad eminence as a rabble-rousing troublemaker, talking in class, hobnobbing with other ringleaders of rebellion and disrespect, perpetually ready with an ironic or noncommittal answer, an attitude I regarded as a form of resistance to the British. Paradoxically, though, I was also riven with all sorts of anxiety about failure, was insecure in my suddenly too-masculine body, sexually repressed, and above all in steady fear of exposure and failure. The school’s bustle was formidable; with classes from eight-thirty until five-thirty or six, broken only by a lunch break and sports. This was followed by a long evening’s homework, regulated by a small thick notebook, dutifully bought at the school’s bookshop as
a place to create a record of each day’s assignments. The curriculum, consisting of nine subjects—English, French, Arabic, math, history, geography, physics, chemistry, and biology—was enormously pressured. I was soon in a state of anxiety, feeling totally unprepared to meet all the deadlines and exam requirements.

One day early in the term I was caught throwing stones during the lunch break and immediately taken by a prefect with clammy hands to Price’s office for punishment. In a huge, indifferently furnished anteroom, Price’s secretary, a burly local whom we knew only as Mr. Lagnado, sat behind one of the desks busily typing away. The prefect whispered something to him, and I quickly found myself with him in front of Price’s oversize, empty desk in the next room. “What is it, Lagnado?” the ailing headmaster said sulkily, “what’s this boy doing here?” I was left in place as Lagnado walked around the desk while, like the prefect before him, he said something confidential in Price’s ear. “We can’t have that,” Price said firmly. “Come to the window, boy,” he said coldly to me. “Bend over. That’s it. All right, Lagnado.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw Price give his man a long bamboo cane and, with Price holding me by the neck I saw Lagnado raise the vicious-looking whip and skillfully administer six of the best to my rear end.

Too physically weak to do the honors himself, Price subcontracted out to a local, who in turn did what he was told with neutral efficiency, the silent headmaster standing to one side nodding his head with each stroke. “That’s all, Said,” I was told by Price. “Get out and don’t misbehave again” were his valedictory words, and as I left his inner sanctum I passed Lagnado, who had slipped out before me and was back at his desk, again typing as if nothing had happened. The pain was dreadful. Lagnado was a burly fellow, and—perhaps to please his master, perhaps to humiliate an “Arab” (I had once heard him say to an Armenian boy who was dipping his bread in his gravy,
“Ne mange pas comme les Arabes”
), Lagnado being a Europeanized Eastern Jew—the beating had been truly harsh. But I felt it as what was to be expected from a wartime situation. A ruthless fury took over as I vowed to make “their” lives miserable, without getting caught, without allowing myself ever to get close to any of them, taking from them what they had to offer entirely my own way.

Although I now had a virtual schoolful of accomplices and allies, my parents’ rules and regimen still exercised their power. In part because of what was believed to be the salutary Dhour el Shweir experience of being tutored by Aziz Nasr in geometry the summer before, my parents decided that one way of getting me better adjusted to Victoria College’s stiff academic routine was to increase the number and kind of tutorials (“extra lessons,” we used to call them). Even though I did have a decent head for math and science, I was tutored in both math and physics, partly because my arithmetical skills were so far behind my father’s and my oldest sister’s. Huda Said, my older cousin George Said’s stunningly beautiful wife, volunteered for math; and for physics, my father dragooned a bright young Palestinian refugee studying at the American University of Cairo, Fouad Etayim. Huda and I got on famously, mainly talking about music, doing very little in the way of algebra, which I understood rather quickly. Fouad was a journalism major, companion-in-arms of my cousin Robert (also at AUC), and he seemed to be learning the material more or less concurrently with me. I recall many drab hours struggling over the uses of British Thermal Units (BTUs) in calculations of heat, but for me the interest of the hours spent with Fouad were in discussing with him the villainous state of Arab journalism, listening to his caustic wit deconstructing the empty rhetoric and bankrupt ideology of writers for the newspapers
Ahram
and
Akhbar
.

It was to Auntie Melia that I finally confided my rising tide of woes, my sense of lostness and confusion at school, the overwhelming language and other requirements, the punishing atmosphere, the discordant uses of tutorials, sports, piano lessons that kept me fruitlessly, aridly busy from morning to night, seven days a week, in dramatic contrast to the illicit pleasures of delinquency. It was all too much for me, but Auntie Melia rose wonderfully to the occasion. “If you think of everything you must do as present before you, to be done all at once, you’ll cripple yourself. Time obliges you to do them in sequence, one at a time, and this,” she continued with the assurance of someone who had won the battle herself, “dissolves the burden almost entirely. You’re very clever and you will manage.” Her calm, almost affectless but somehow caring words have remained with me, surprisingly useful in times of sudden crisis and impending, albeit projected, disaster, as deadlines of all kinds have loomed before me. Her calmness and her authority
had a positive effect, but unfortunately this was the last time that she and I talked together in confidence: her retirement from the American College was imminent, and after she left for her final move to Lebanon she was never again the same person.

It came only as a slight surprise that Auntie Melia was right, almost too much so. In a matter of two months I not only looked forward to school as an escape into a more manageable, less onerously demanding reality than the odd playacting at home (after I had been discovered as an illicit self-abuser, my parents’ gaze became even more suspicious, and my behavior and time still more subject to surveillance and chores). Middle Five One was by far the most complex social and, of course, academic situation I had ever negotiated, and in most respects I quite enjoyed its challenges. Academics were of little interest: there were no teachers of distinction or of obvious talent, although one, Mr. Whitman, a rather fastidious older man who taught Lower Five One, seemed uncommonly interested in classical music and persuaded me (and I then persuaded my parents) to lend him our recording of Strauss’s “Dance of the Seven Veils” for the classical music club, of which I was a very occasional member. Aside from that I existed in a state of alert consciousness, my former fears and anxieties lifting like an early-morning fog to reveal a landscape requiring the utmost attention to social and, in a primitive state, political details.

My own class was divided into several cliques and subgroups. A leader was George Kardouche, a small, wiry fellow with formidable athletic skills and a sharp tongue. He was liked by everyone, and, though he, Mostapha Hamdollah, Nabil Abdel Malik, and I were in the same group, Kardouche floated in and out of several smaller cliques by virtue of his quickness and his easy, mature way with older students. He and I sat next to each other in the back row, with Hamdollah and one or two others directly in front of us. A shadow line was crossed in early December when, during one of Mr. Gatley’s insufferably monotonous classes, Kardouche accidentally set fire to a small pile of damp papers in his left-hand desk compartment while putting out a cigarette. In a moment, large billowing clouds of ugly gray smoke enveloped him and me, as he tried first with his hands then with his satchel to put out the flames. Droning on in the front, the turgid Gatley seemed all of a sudden to smell something untoward and uncharacteristically lifted his eyes off the book, there to see the amazing spectacle of a smoking desk.
“Kardouche,” thundered Gatley in his most intimidating voice, “what is that smoke? Stop it at once, boy!” With great presence of mind, the mightily beset offender, his arms banging away at the smoke and at the same time coughing, gasping, choking, and shielding his eyes, responded: “Smoke, sir? What smoke?” At which the whole class took up the chorus “What smoke? What smoke? We see no smoke!” Intimidated and taken aback, Gatley thought better of pursuing the matter any further and returned to reading aloud with some of the better-behaved boys near the front. Since Kardouche and I sat near the door, we were able to put out the fire, after an enormous amount of loud scuffling (moving desks, piercingly uttered cries of coordination, and the like, all of it deliberately ignored by Gatley) and bringing in sand from outside.

The class also contained a group of francophone boys, many of whom were Jews and were among the most intelligent members of the class: André Shalom, André Salama, Roger Sciutto, Joseph Mani, with whom I shared a great interest in Walter Scott, and Claude Salama, who lived in the Immobilia building in the heart of smart, downtown Cairo. Then there was a group of mainly Arabic-speaking, mostly un-Westernized Egyptians—Malawani, A. A. Zaki, Nabil Ayad, Shukry, Usama Abdul Haq, and a few others. What intrigued and still entrances me about these social groupings is that none was exclusive, or watertight, which produced a dancelike maze of personalities, modes of speech, backgrounds, religions, and nationalities.

For a time an Indian boy, Vashi Pohomool, whose family owned a grand jewelry shop in or near Shepheard’s Hotel, was one of us. Then, partway through the year, we were joined by Gilbert Khoury, a Lebanese boy; and the half-American Ali Halim, whose father was of Albanian stock and was King Farouk’s cousin; Bulent Mardin, a Turkish boy from Maadi; Arthur Davidson, who had a Canadian father and an Egyptian mother; and Samir Yousef, with a Coptic father and Dutch mother. They made a motley but dazzlingly exciting class, almost totally oblivious to the academic-English side of things, though that was why we were there in the first place.

There were house football teams, but I was a lackluster member of ours; I did better at what was called “athletics”—track and field. There, under Mr. Hinds’s uncharitable eye, I developed into a decent, though never brilliant, 100- and 200-meter man. I recall eagerly asking him for
assurance that I might do well at the upcoming school games. “I will be surprised if you win the two hundred, but I
won’t
be surprised if you win the one hundred,” he said. Of course I won neither one. My sorriest moment occurred during the 100-meter race when, a moment after I had left the starting line in my handsome black spikes and my new, too-large white shorts—which my mother insisted were the right size—I felt them slipping down. Pulling at them frantically, my legs churning valiantly if futilely away, I heard Hinds calling out, “Never mind your shorts, Said, just run.” And run I did for another yard or two, only to land on my face a second later, the wretched shorts wrapped around my ankles and a jubilant gaggle of Cromer boys jeering rudely at me.

That ended my track career, although I persisted at tennis, and outside school I swam and rode. Neither a winner nor a star, I sensed myself as at the threshold of a breakthrough, particularly in tennis, but routinely found myself held back by the doubts and uncertainties about my body inculcated in me by my father. Could it be, I often wondered to myself after a galling loss at tennis, that self-abuse was in fact undermining my health, and hence my performance? Added to this was the sense of myself as unusual because of my exceptionally complicated background, my (compared to my classmates’) large physical size and strength, my secret musical and literary proclivities.

A peculiar example of my odd academic status during that Shubra year occurred during a physics class in the spring of 1950. Because the old Italian school was without labs for science instruction, our class was bused twice a week to the Coptic College in Fagallah, a shabby lower-middle-class area of the city near the Bab-el-Hadid Station. There we first had an hour’s chemistry class given by (as I reconstruct my impressions) a semimoronic middle-aged man whose name I have forgotten. He could barely speak English, and made many of his more important points by laying about himself with a long piece of test-tube rubber. Azmi Effendi, our physics teacher, was altogether suave and icily cold and led us systematically and calmly through mechanics, light, gravity, and the like, most of which I found myself absorbing with ease. The class ethos did not permit a manifest submission to the teacher’s will—Azmi being considered something of an Englishman in local disguise—so I deliberately held back whenever there was a question to be discussed or answered. On the day he returned our midterm exams,
Azmi prefaced his handing back of the exam books neatly stacked under one of his hands with a scathing attack on the class’s miserable performance, overall incompetence, disgraceful inattention. “Only one student has any ideas of the principles of physics, and he produced a perfect exam. A very brilliant performance. Said,” he said after a brief pause, “come down here.” I recall being nudged by the boy sitting next to me, high up in the raked amphitheater’s gallery. “It’s you,” he said; a moment later I found myself stumbling down the stairs, going up to Azmi, receiving my “brilliant” exam, then trudging back up.