Out of Place: A Memoir (36 page)

Not having been entrusted with my own set of keys, I had to ring our doorbell. Uncharacteristically, since the task was reserved for servants, my mother opened the door. “Edward,” she said in a tone of surprise that quickly gave way to alarm. “What are you doing here? Is something wrong? Are you ill?” Speechless and disoriented, I was ushered in by her to be met by my father, his face glowering with concern and anger. Without my saying a word, he took me into their room for a preliminary whipping with his riding crop.

Not a word passed between us. I went to my room and exploded in tears, my physical pain compounded by a sense of fundamental desolation and abandonment. For two weeks I remained at home like a forlorn shadow, denied books, music, friends, and any kind of pleasure by two mystified and outraged parents who were content to await Griffiths’s pleasure before he would consent to see them. When they returned from their appointment it was my mother who did all the talking, most of it essentially endorsing Griffiths’s poor opinion of me as a “good-for-nothing,” although he seems to have regretfully added the novel complaint that I was “too clever” to be sacked definitively, much as he would have liked to have done so. My mother seems, like Griffiths, to have regarded my intelligence, which was soon becoming my only certainty about myself, resentfully, as a sign of my incorrigibility and inveterately malign or at least unteachable nature. In her eyes, my intelligence got in the way of my being a good student, but it was enough this time to earn me an unenthusiastic reprieve from expulsion. I could return, Griffiths said, but no further misbehavior would be tolerated.

Griffiths had also clearly implied that my future as a student-scholar within the English system was uncertain; he would have to give me an equivocal recommendation should I stay on and get my GCE (the high school diploma awarded to all graduates of British-run schools) and
then apply to Oxford or Cambridge (his university). My father was undoubtedly planning my departure for the United States even as I returned to VC in ignorance of this fact. What I was told as the official story was that I would have to leave Egypt because an obscure U.S. immigration law decreed that although I had inherited citizenship from my father, in order to become a citizen I would be required to spend at least five years in the United States before I was twenty-one, as I had not been born there. Since in November 1951 I’d be turning sixteen, the move was imperative.

I suppose he thought that by sending me away to such demanding and all-male institutions as Mount Hermon and later Princeton, he was protecting me not only from self-abuse, but also from the heaving, overabundant emotional luxury represented by my mother with its paralyzing uncertainties and comforts.

Just as I was being shaped by my father’s plan for me to go to the United States in the spring of 1951, we suddenly received a postcard from his long-lost younger brother, David, who had been shipped out of Egypt by my father for unregenerate philandering in 1929, exiled to Brazil, and had then vanished. Written in a gigantic, childish scrawl, David’s card came from Lourdes and announced, “I am cured. I am coming to see you,” followed a week later by a telegram giving his flight number and date of arrival in Cairo. He was a darker, more animated, and more compact Latin-mustachioed version of my father, a sort of cross between Wadie’s alter ego and his parody. David’s amorous powers were supposed to be irresistible, especially to married women, who were the immediate cause of his original banishment. He spoke a bizarre combination of windswept and tattered old Arabic, with a few dozen American phrases (“Gee Bill, you should see how much money I made one evening in Bahia”) and some incomprehensible Portuguese. We were all drawn to his uncomplicated, effusive presence: his brother Wadie and sister Nabiha, their various children, and my mother, at whom he charmingly made a few awkward but gallant passes. Staying at our house, he spent a month in Cairo doing very little except successfully persuading my father to take time off from work so that the three siblings could sit around together and chatter about the old Jerusalem childhood that they had once long ago shared. The Dostoyevskian depths that I intimated in my father (but never saw) were fully in evidence in David—melancholy, volubility, extremes of mood
from elation to the darkest depression—and were framed by but never really contained in his relationships with his sober brother and sister.

I never found out what he did exactly. Diamond mines were spoken of, but so too was his skill at being a tour guide, like his father. He gambled and drank, womanized and dashed around the Brazilian countryside. He gave us a leather pouch full of semiprecious stones of small value, but in their gleaming cascading profusion and variety they contained the romance of an entire continent. He and I became great pals:
“ya dini”
(“my religion”) he used to call me, unidiomatically. Years later I realized that in his exotic, unbridled, and mysterious personality he was an avatar of Conrad for me—a Kurtz figure, a secret sharer, a Cunningham Graham to my father’s British squire. He disappeared again back to Brazil. In September 1967 I saw him for an hour in New York; he was on tour with the Brazilian national soccer team in some mysterious capacity. Just before her death in the spring of 1973, Aunt Nabiha, ravaged by cancer, went to see him, and discovered a “kind of” wife, Adela, and a handicapped teenage child, who may have been adopted. A Virgilian sadness pervaded Nabiha’s last days as she negotiated the ruins of her scattered family, her heroic past of no help to her in her disorganized, crumbling life in Amman, where she died in early April on the same day that Kamal Nasir was assassinated by the Israelis in Beirut. In David, Nabiha, and my father I saw a tangle of departures, exiles, and brief returns, and I understood my father’s attempt to combine an unpromising mix of hidden, unruly instinct and conscious Victorian determination in his efforts to make a good life for his family. What sustained my father’s faith was a simple pedagogical imperative he kept reverting to. “If it’s educational,” he used to tell me, “then do it.” I have been trying to grasp what “it” was ever since, and this book is my record of having tried. Only decades after his death can I see the two sides of his legacy to me bound together irrevocably in an absolute, unarguable paradox, repression and liberation opening on to each other in what is to me still a mystery that I am just beginning now to accept, if not fully to understand.

After the Suez War in 1956, Victoria College was nationalized and was renamed Victory College. I had no further connection with it until 1989, when on a lecturing visit to Egypt with my family I thought it might be fun to show them the school that had once expelled me. We
went up to Maadi on a Friday morning in mid-March and drove to the school following the old bus route. I was discontented to discover that what had been a sort of boundary between the school and the desert, beyond which the empty sand stretched for miles, had become a vast expanse of tenements, crowded with people, hanging laundry, cars, buses, and animals. The school itself was closed for the Friday holiday, but I persuaded the gatekeeper to let us in anyway. As we stood in my old classroom, which seemed a good deal smaller than I remembered, I pointed out my desk, the teacher’s platform from which Griffiths had expelled me, and the little room where we had imprisoned poor old Mr. Lowe.

At that moment a very angry-looking woman wearing a head covering and Islamic-style dress swept into the room demanding to know what we were doing. I tried to explain the circumstances (“Use your charm,” said my daughter, Najla) but to no avail. We were trespassers, and as school director she was demanding that we leave immediately. She refused my extended hand, staring at us with a surfeit of nationalist hostility and unbending zeal as we shuffled out, rather cowed by her evident outrage. The British Eton in Egypt had now become a new kind of privileged Islamic sanctuary from which thirty-eight years later I was once again being expelled.

IN EARLY SEPTEMBER 1991, EXACTLY FORTY YEARS AFTER I
left the middle east for the United States, I was in London for a seminar I had convened of Palestinian intellectuals and activists on the eve of the Madrid Peace Conference. After the Gulf War and the Palestinian leadership’s fatal stand alongside Saddam Hussein we were in a very weak negotiating position. The idea of the conference was to try to articulate a common set of themes that would enhance the course of our progress toward self-determination as a people. We came from all over the dispersed Palestinian world—the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinian diaspora in various Arab countries, Europe and North America. What transpired during the seminar was a terrible disappointment: the endless repetition of well-known arguments, our inability to fix on a collective goal, the apparent desire to listen only to ourselves. In short, nothing came of it except an eerie premonition of the Palestinian failure at Oslo.

Midway through the debate, during one of the scheduled breaks, I phoned Mariam, my wife, in New York to ask her if the results of the blood test I had taken for my annual physical had been satisfactory. Cholesterol was what had concerned me, and no, she said, everything was fine on that front, but she added with some hesitation, “Charles Hazzi [our family doctor and friend] would like to speak to you when
you get back.” Something in her voice suggested to me that all was not well, so I immediately rang Charles at his office. “Nothing to get excited about,” he said, “we’ll talk in New York.” His repeated refusals to tell me what was wrong finally provoked me to impatience. “You must tell me, Charles. I’m not a child, and I have a right to know.” With a whole set of demurrals—it’s not serious, a hematologist can very easily take care of you, it’s chronic after all—he told me that I had chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), although it took me a week to fully absorb the initial impact of the diagnosis. I was asymptomatic but needed the sophisticated diagnostic techniques available at a big New York cancer center to confirm the original finding. It took me another month to understand how thoroughly I was shaken by this “sword of Damocles,” as one volubly callous doctor called it, hanging over me, and a further six months to find the extraordinary doctor, Kanti Rai, under whose care I have been since June 1992.

A month after I was diagnosed I discovered myself in the middle of a letter I was writing my mother, who had been dead for a year and a half. Ever since I left Cairo in 1951 it was a habit we had kept up: somehow the urge to communicate with her overcame the factual reality of her death, which in mid-sentence stopped my fanciful urge, leaving me slightly disoriented, even embarrassed. A vague narrative impulse seemed to be stirring inside me, but I was too caught up in the anxieties and nervousness of my life with CLL to pay it much notice. During that period in 1993 I contemplated several changes in my life, which I realized without any perceptible fear would be shorter and more difficult now. I thought about moving to Boston to return to a place I had lived in and enjoyed when I was a student, but I soon admitted to myself that because it was a quiet town, compared to New York, I had been thinking regressively about finding a place to die in. I gave up the idea.

So many returns, attempts to go back to bits of life, or people who were no longer there: these constituted a steady response to the increasing rigors of my illness. In 1992 I went with my wife and children to Palestine, for my first visit in forty-five years; it was their first visit ever. In July 1993 I went on my own to Cairo, making it a point in the middle of a journalistic mission to visit old haunts. All this time I was being monitored, without treatment, by Dr. Rai, who occasionally
reminded me that I would at some point require chemotherapy. By the time I began treatment in March 1994 I realized that I had at least entered, if not
the
final phase of my life, then the period—like Adam and Eve leaving the garden—from which there would be no return to my old life. In May 1994 I began work on this book.

These details are important as a way of explaining to myself and to my reader how the time of this book is intimately tied to the time, phases, ups and downs, variations in my illness. As I grew weaker, the number of infections and bouts of side effects increased, the more this book was my way of constructing something in prose while in my physical and emotional life I grappled with anxieties and pains of degeneration. Both tasks resolved themselves into details: to write is to get from word to word, to suffer illness is to go through the infinitesimal steps that take you through from one state to another. And whereas with other sorts of work that I did—essays, lectures, teaching, journalism—I was going across the illness, punctuating it almost forcibly with deadlines and cycles of beginning-middle-and-end, with this memoir I was borne along by the episodes of treatment, hospital stays, physical pain and mental anguish, letting those dictate how and when I could write, for how long and where. Periods of travel were often productive, since I carried my hand-written manuscript with me wherever I went and took advantage of every hotel room or friend’s house I stayed in. I was therefore rarely in a hurry to get a section done, though I had a precise idea of what I planned to put in it. Curiously, the writing of this memoir and the phases of my illness share exactly the same time, although most traces of the latter have been effaced in this story of my early life. This record of a life and ongoing course of a disease (for which I have known from the beginning no cure exists) are one and the same, it could be said, the same but deliberately different.

And the more this relationship developed, the more important it became to me, the more also my memory—unaided by anything except concentrated reflection on and archaeological prying into a very distant and essentially irrecoverable past—seemed hospitable and generous to my often importunate forays. Despite the travail of disease and the restrictions imposed on me by my having left the places of my youth, I can say with the poet, “nor in this bower, / This little lime-tree bower, have I not mark’d / Much that has soothed me.” There had been a time until the early sixties when I simply could not bear to think about my
past, especially Cairo and Jerusalem, which for two sets of different reasons were no longer accessible. The latter had been replaced by Israel; the former, by one of those cruel coincidences, was closed to me for legal reasons. Unable to visit Egypt for the fifteen years between 1960 and 1975, I rationed early memories of my life there (considerably chopped up, full of atmospherics that conveyed a sense of warmth and comfort by contrast with the harsh alienation I felt in my New York life) as a way of falling asleep, an activity that has grown more difficult with time, time that has also dissolved the aura of happiness around my early life and let it emerge as a more complicated and difficult period; to grasp it I realized I would have to be sharply alert, awake, avoiding dreamy somnolence. I’ve thought in fact that this book in some fundamental way is all about sleeplessness, all about the silence of wakefulness and, in my case, the need for conscious recollection and articulation that have been a substitute for sleep. Not just for sleep but for holidays and relaxation, all that passes for middle- and upper-class “leisure,” on which, about ten years ago, I unconsciously turned my back. As one of the main responses to my illness I found in this book a new kind of challenge—not just a new kind of wakefulness but a project about as far from my professional and political life as it was possible for me to go.