Out of Place: A Memoir (7 page)

My parents’ early disciplinary practices I associate first with the long vacations, when extended intervals of leisure might have allowed my inquiring and radically naughty self to go where it might be risky to trespass. But they soon extended to my Cairo life as well. I had an amazingly resourceful curiosity about people and things. I was frequently upbraided for reading books I shouldn’t have, and more damningly I was often found looking in the autograph books, notepads, pamphlets and comics, scribbled messages, and notes of my sisters, schoolmates, and parents. “Curiosity killed the cat” was the frequent verdict on me, but I wanted to get beyond the various cages in which I found myself placed, and which made me feel so dissatisfied, and even distasteful to myself. Having to do my schoolwork, to play games like soccer at which I was manifestly unsuccessful, to be a dutiful, church-going son and brother, I soon began to take secret delight in doing and saying things that broke the rules or took me beyond the boundaries set by my parents. I always looked around doors that were ajar; I read books to find out what propriety kept hidden from me; I peered into drawers, cupboards, bookshelves, envelopes, scraps of paper, to glean from them what I could about characters whose sinful wantonness corresponded to my desires.

I soon began to cherish the act of discovery that reading provided. About half our family business in Palestine—the Palestine Educational Company—was bookselling, and a small amount was publishing; in Egypt, however, my father ran a company (in partnership with his cousin Boulos and his children) entirely devoted to office equipment and stationery, some of which we also sold in Jerusalem and Haifa.
Whenever some member of our Jerusalem family visited I would get presents of suitable books taken off the shelf with their price tags and inventory labels still in them. These suitable books seemed to fall into two general categories: children’s books in the A. A. Milne and Enid Blyton mold, and useful books of information like the
Collins Junior Book of Knowledge
, which was given to me when I was between nine and ten. It entertained me for long hours as I tried to grasp the mysteries of one Kalita, the girl fakir who performed miracles of strength and self-punishment at the Bertram Mills Circus. I had not yet even been to a circus—the Circo Togni was not to appear in Cairo until four years later—nor, apart from the anodyne suggestions provided in Blyton’s Mr. Galliano’s Circus books, did I have any conception of what life in a European circus was all about. It was enough for me that Kalita was of mysterious origin; in the tiny, grainy, and blurred photographs provided in the text, she wore what appeared to be a two-piece costume such as I had never seen, and she was able to do amazing, unimaginable things with her body.

All of this defied the positive laws of respectability and decency under which I chafed. Her contortions were also at odds with nature, but that increased their excitement. She was described as lying on her back supporting a gigantic stone slab on her bare stomach; a large half-naked man in a turban stood over her with an enormous sledgehammer, which he brought down on the stone. A picture of the whole scene, with utensil caught in mid-descent, confirmed this feat. Kalita was also capable of walking in her bare feet on broken glass, lying on nails, and, for her major adventure, being buried underground for many minutes. Another photograph represented her in her bathing suit with a discernible smile of almost sensual satisfaction on her face and carrying a large and extremely fearsome-looking crocodile.

I read and reread the three grittily printed pages on Kalita and I examined and reexamined the two photographs that drew me in every time I opened the book. But it was their very insufficiencies—their minuscule size, the impossibility of actually being able to see the woman’s body, the alienating distance between them and me—that paradoxically compelled, indeed enthralled, me for weeks and weeks. I dreamed of knowing her, being taken into her “caravan,” being shown some more horrible feats (for example, her imperviousness to, perhaps
even enjoyment of, other forms of extreme pain and unknown types of pleasure, her disdain for domestic life, her capacity for diving to unusual depths, eating live animals and disgusting fruits) and hearing from her about her freedom from the ordinary talk and responsibilities of everyday life. It was from my experiences of Kalita that I developed the habit of mentally extending the story presented in a book, pushing the limits to include myself; gradually I realized that I could become the author of my own pleasures, particularly those that took me as far away as possible from the choking impingements of family and school. My ability to appear to be studying, reading, or practicing the piano and at the same time to be thinking about something completely different and completely mine, like Kalita, was one of the features of my life that irritated teachers and parents but impressed me.

There were two main sources of stories whose boundaries I could expand: books and films. Fairy tales and biblical stories were read to me by my mother and grandmother but I had also been given an illustrated book of the Greek myths as a birthday present when I was seven. It opened an entire world to me, not only the stories themselves but the wonderful connections that might be made between them. Jason and the Argonauts, Perseus and the Gorgon, Medusa, Hercules and his twelve adventures: they were my friends and partners, parents, cousins, uncles, and mentors (like Chiron). I lived with them and meticulously imagined their castles, chariots, and triremes. I thought about them when they were
not
killing lions or monsters. I released them for a life of easy grace free of obnoxious teachers and hectoring parents, Perseus talking with Jason on some airy patio about what it was like to see Medusa in his shield, Jason telling Perseus about the pleasures of Colchis, the two of them marveling at Hercules’ killing of the serpents in his cradle.

The second source was films, particularly those like the Arabian Nights adventures that regularly featured Jon Hall, Maria Montez, Turhan Bey, and Sabu, and the Johnny Weissmuller
Tarzan
series. When I was in good favor with my parents, the pleasures of Saturday included an afternoon cinema performance, fastidiously chosen for me by my mother. French and Italian films were taboo. Hollywood films were suitable only if declared “for children” by my mother. These were Laurel and Hardy, lots of Abbott and Costello, Betty Grable, Gene
Kelly, Loretta Young, many, many musicals and family comedies with Clifton Webb, Claudette Colbert, and Jennifer Jones (acceptable in
The Song of Bernadette
, forbidden in
Duel in the Sun
), Walt Disney fantasies and Arabian Nights films preferably with only Jon Hall and Sabu (Maria Montez was frowned on), war films, some Westerns. Sitting in the plush cinema seats, much more than in viewing the Hollywood films themselves—which struck me as a weird form of science fiction corresponding to nothing at all in my life—I luxuriated in the sanctioned freedom to see and not be seen. Later I developed an irrecusable attachment to Johnny Weissmuller’s whole Tarzan world, especially to the uxorial and, in
Tarzan and His Mate
at least, virginally sensual Jane cavorting in their cosy tree house, whose clever Wemmicklike comforts seemed like a pure, uncomplicated distillation of our life as a family alone in Egypt. Once “The End” appeared on the screen in
Tarzan Finds a Son
or
Tarzan’s Secret Treasure
, I began my ruminations on what happened afterward, on what the little family did in the tree house, on the “natives” they cultivated and befriended, on members of Jane’s family who might have visited, on the tricks that Tarzan taught Boy, and on and on. It was very odd, but it did not occur to me that the cinematic Aladdin, Ali Baba, and Sinbad, whose genies, Baghdad cronies, and sultans I completely possessed in the fantasies I counterpointed with my lessons, all had American accents, spoke no Arabic, and ate mysterious foods—perhaps “sweetmeats,” or was it more like stew, rice, lamb cutlets?—that I could never quite make out.

One of the rare moments of complete satisfaction I enjoyed before I was eighteen occurred during my first year at Cairo’s School for American Children (I was ten and a half). I was standing on the first landing of a grand staircase, looking down at a roomful of faces, and masterfully reciting narratives, drawing out the stories of Jason and Perseus. I gloried in finicky, unending detail—the identity of the Argonauts, what the Golden Fleece was, the reasons for Medusa’s horrible affliction, the later story of Perseus and Andromeda—and experienced for the first time the joys of virtuosity and emancipation denied me by the French and English language and history classes I seemed so poor at. I had a fluency and concentration in the telling and thinking through of these stories that supplied me with a unique pleasure I could find nowhere else in Cairo. I was also beginning to enjoy classical music
quite seriously, but in my piano lessons, which began when I was six, my gifts of memory and melody ran aground on the need to practice scales and Czerny exercises, with my mother standing over or sitting next to me; the result was a feeling of being interrupted in developing a musical identity. Not until I was fifteen could I buy records and enjoy the operas I chose on my own. The Cairo musical season of operas and ballets was still out of bounds to me: I therefore relied on what the BBC and Egyptian State Broadcasting had to offer, my greatest pleasure being the BBC’s forty-five-minute Sunday afternoon program “Nights at the Opera.” Using Gustave Kobbé’s
Complete Opera Book
I discovered quite early on that I really disliked Verdi and Puccini but loved the little I knew of Strauss and Wagner, whose works I did not see in an opera house until I was in my late teens.

SCHOOLTEACHERS WERE SUPPOSED TO BE ENGLISH, I THOUGHT
. Students, if they were fortunate, might also be English or, as in my case, if they were not, not. I attended the Gezira Preparatory School (GPS) from the autumn of 1941 till we left Cairo in May 1942, then again from early 1943 till 1946, with one or two longer Palestinian interruptions in between. During that period I had no Egyptian teachers at all, nor was I conscious of any Arab Muslim presence in the school: the students were Armenians, Greeks, Egyptian Jews, and Copts, as well as a substantial number of English children, including many of the staff’s offspring. Our teachers were, to mention the two most prominent, Mrs. Bullen, headmistress, and Mrs. Wilson, the ubiquitous all-purpose general head teacher. The school itself was located in a large Zamalek villa, once intended for living on a grand scale, its main floor now converted into several classrooms, all of which were entered from an enormous central hall with a platform at one end and an imposing entrance portal at the other. The hall was two floors high with a glass ceiling; a balustrade surrounded another set of rooms located directly above our classrooms. I only ventured there once, and not very happily at that. These struck me as secret places where mysterious English meetings took place and where the redoubtable Mr. Bullen, a large red-faced man only rarely glimpsed on the lower floor, might be found.

I had no way of knowing then that Mrs. Bullen, the headmistress, whose daughter Anne was in the class immediately senior to mine, was in Egypt as a school concessionaire who held a franchise to run for the GPS British Council, not as an educator. After the 1952 Free Officers’ Revolution the school slowly lost its European cachet and by the 1956 Suez crisis had become something else altogether. Today it is a career language training school for young adults, without a trace of its English past. Mrs. Bullen and her daughter later appeared in Beirut as principals of another English-type school, but they seem to have been even less successful than they were in Cairo, where they were dismissed for inefficiency and Mr. Bullen’s drinking habits.

GPS conveniently sat at the end of Sharia Aziz Osman, our relatively short Zamalek street, a walk of exactly three blocks. The time I took to get there or to come home was always an issue with my teachers and parents, associated forever in my mind with two words, “loitering” and “fibbing,” whose meaning I learned in connection with my meandering, fantasy-filled traversal of that short distance. Part of the delay was to put off my arrival at either end. The other part was sheer fascination with the people I might encounter, or with glimpses of life revealed as a door opened here, a car went by there, or a scene was played out briefly on a balcony. As my day began at seven-thirty, what I witnessed was invariably stamped with night’s end and day’s beginning—the black-suited
ghaffeers
, or evening watchmen, slowly divesting themselves of blankets and heavy coats, sleepy-eyed
suffragis
shuffling off to market for bread and milk, drivers getting the family car ready. There were rarely any other grown-ups about at that hour, although once in a while I’d see a parent marching along with a GPS child, dressed in our uniform of cap, trousers, and blazer, all in gray with light-blue piping. What I cherished in those dawdling walks was the opportunity to elaborate on the scanty material offered me. A redheaded woman I saw one afternoon seemed—just by walking by—to have persuaded me that she was a poisoner and (I had without specific comprehension heard the word recently) a divorcee. A pair of men sauntering about one morning were detectives. I imagined that a couple standing on a balcony overhead spoke French and had just had a leisurely breakfast with champagne.

Fantasizing about other lives and especially other people’s houses
was stimulated by my quite rigid confinement in our own. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I actually set foot in a classmate’s apartment or house as I was growing up. And I cannot remember any occasion at all when one of my friends—“friend” is probably too strong a word to describe the children of my own age with whom I had contact—from either school or the club came to my house. One of my earliest and most long-lasting passions therefore has been an almost overpowering desire to imagine what other people’s houses were like. Did their rooms resemble ours? Did their kitchens work the way ours did? What did their cupboards contain, and how were those contents organized? And so on, down to the smallest details—night tables, radios, lamps, bookshelves, rugs, etc. Until I left Egypt in 1951 I assumed that my sequestration was (in an extremely imprecise way) “good” for me. Only later did it occur to me that the kind of discipline my parents devised for me meant I was to regard our life and house as somehow the norm and not, as it most certainly was, fantastically isolated and almost experimental.