Out of Place: A Memoir (6 page)

During the first part of the war we spent more time than usual in Palestine. In 1942 we rented a summer house in Ramallah, north of Jerusalem, and did not return to Cairo until November. That summer
altered our family life dramatically, as a change occurred in our otherwise rather unpredictable and cumbersome movements between Cairo and Jerusalem. We usually traveled by train from Cairo to Lydda with at least two servants, a large amount of luggage, and a generally frenetic air; the return trip was always slightly easier and more subdued. In 1942, however, my mother, my two sisters, Rosemarie and Jean, my father, and I did not travel by train but by car. Instead of boarding the luxury Wagons-Lits train in Cairo’s Bab-el-Hadid Station for the twelve-hour overnight journey to Jerusalem, in May of that year we were on the run from the rapidly approaching German army, in my father’s black Plymouth, its headlights blued out, our quickly packed leather suitcases piled on the luggage rack and in the trunk. Driving to the Suez Canal Zone took many hours as we encountered numerous British convoys converging on Cairo: we would be pulled over and forced to wait as tanks, trucks, and personnel carriers trailed past us headed for what was to be an Allied defeat followed by the British counteroffensive that culminated in the battle of el-Alamein in November.

We made the long drive in complete silence right through the night. My father negotiated the unmarked Sinai roads after having crossed the Suez Canal without ceremony or fuss at the Qantara bridge; the customs post there was deserted when we arrived at about midnight. It was at that point that we met up with the only civilian car going the same way, a convertible driven by a Jewish businessman from Cairo, with no passengers, and with only several bottles of iced water and a revolver for luggage. He recognized my father, and even suggested that he might relieve the Plymouth of some of its cargo—several large suitcases were duly transferred to him—but asked in return that he be allowed to follow in our tracks. I vividly remember the haggard, weary expression on my father’s face as he assented to this lopsided arrangement, and so we proceeded silently through the night, the second car following hard upon the first, with my father left on his own, both to excavate the sand-blown, meandering, narrow road in the blackest of black nights and also to endure the pressure of his little family inside the car, and outside the Egyptian Jewish businessman, convinced that he was running for his life, constantly bearing down upon us.

Earlier that winter I had heard the sirens blaring “alarm” and “all clear.” Bundled in blankets and transported in my father’s arms to the
garage-shelter during a German night bombing raid, I felt a vague premonition that “we” were threatened. The political, to say nothing of the military, meaning of our situation, were beyond me at age six and a half. As an American in Egypt, where the Germans under Rommel were predicted to descend first on Alexandria then on Cairo, my father must have thought he was targeted for an unpleasant fate. A whole wall in our house’s entrance room was covered with large maps of Asia, North Africa, and Europe. Every day my father moved red (for the Allies) and black (for the Axis) pins to reflect advances and retreats on the warring sides. For me, the maps were disquieting rather than informing, and though I occasionally asked my father to explain, it seemed hard for him to do so: he was distracted, bothered, distant. And then suddenly we left for Jerusalem on that difficult night ride. The day he decided to leave, he came home for lunch and told my mother simply to pack and get ready, and by five that afternoon we were off, driving slowly through Cairo’s half-deserted streets. A desolate, baffling time, my familiar world inexplicably being abandoned as we headed off into the cheerless dusk.

The images of my father’s withdrawal and silence that followed during the long, perplexing and strange summer in Ramallah continued to haunt me for years. He sat on the balcony gazing off into the distance, smoking incessantly. “Don’t make noise, Edward,” my mother would say. “Can’t you see your father is trying to rest?” Then she and I would go out for a walk through the leafy and comfortable, largely Christian, town north of Jerusalem, with me clinging nervously to her. The Ramallah house was unattractive to me, but nevertheless a perfect setting for the stillness and bleakness of my father’s mysterious ordeal. A steep outdoor staircase went up diagonally from the garden, which was divided in the center by a stone path, on either side of which lay furrows of brown earth in which nothing but a few brambles grew. A pair of skinny quince trees stood close to the house by the first-floor balcony, where my father spent most of his time. The bottom floor was closed and empty. Having been forbidden to walk on the furrows, I was left with the ungenerous stony line going from gate to stairs as my playground.

I had no idea what was wrong, but Ramallah was where I first heard the phrase “nervous breakdown.” Associated with that was the protection
of my father’s “peace of mind,” a phrase he got from a book of that name, which provided the topic of many conversations with his friends. The tiresome languor of our Ramallah summer was closed to scrutiny and explanation, both of which as a bright six-and-a-half-year-old I needed quite naturally. Was Daddy afraid of something, I wanted first of all to ask: Why does he sit there for so long, and say nothing? Either I was led off to some useful or punitive activity, or I was thrown a few enigmatic and generally incomplete hints for an answer. There was talk of extreme anxiety about his suddenly higher blood pressure. There was also reference to having sent off my cousins Abie (Ibrahim) and Charlie—Uncle Asaad’s boys—to Asmara, where, my father worried himself sick, they might be killed. A shady Cairo businessman was said to have tried unsuccessfully to tempt my father into some business scheme for war profiteering. (I understood that my father refused.) Were those events enough to cause a nervous breakdown?

Whatever the reason, once we returned to Cairo a process of change in my life began as a result, and indeed I was encouraged by my mother in particular to believe that a happier, less problematic period had ended. I sank more and more into generalized truancy—“You’re very clever,” I’d be told over and over, “but you have no character, you’re lazy, you’re naughty,” etc.—and was also made aware of an earlier Edward, sometimes referred to as “Eduardo Bianco,” whose exploits, gifts, and accomplishments were recounted to me as signs of pre-1942 early promise betrayed. From her I learned that at the age of one and a half the former Edward had memorized thirty-eight songs and nursery rhymes, which he could sing and recite perfectly. Or that when cousin Abie, a fluent harmonica player, purposely introduced a wrong note in his rendition of “John Peel,” Edward would clench his fists, close his eyes, and bawl out first his annoyance at the mistake and then the correct version. Or that except for the odd use of “you” for “me,” Edward spoke perfect sentences in English and Arabic by the age of fifteen months. Or that his ability to read simple prose was quite developed by the age of two and a half or three. Or that math and music were as natural to him aged three or four as they were to eight- and nine-year-olds. Cute, playful, preternaturally fast and smart, this early Edward enjoyed roistering play with his happy father. I recalled none of this myself, but my mother’s frequent rehearsal of it plus a couple of photo
albums from those years—including an idyllic summer in Alexandria—supported the claim.

None of this, except as regretted memory, was meant to survive the dark days of 1942. We returned to Cairo after the battle of el-Alamein in November, and I went back to GPS, to become a thoroughgoing problem boy for whom one unpleasant antidote after another was devised, until by the age of nine and right through my fifteenth birthday I was constantly engaged in private remedial therapies after school and on weekends: piano lessons, gymnastics, Sunday School, riding classes, boxing, plus the mind-deadening rigors of relentlessly regulated summers in Dhour el Shweir. After 1943 we started to spend every summer in this dreary Lebanese mountain village that my father seemed more attached to than any other place on earth. My parents were at the heart of the entire administered system that determined my time minute by minute and my father’s attitude toward me for the rest of his life, a system that allowed me only the smallest of spots of relief to enjoy and feel that I was out of its clutches.

He managed to combine harshness, unreadable silence, and odd affection laced with surprising generosity which somehow never gave me enough to count on, and which until very recently I could neither dismiss as no longer threatening nor fully understand. But as the core of the disciplinary structure devised for my life emerged out of the depredations of 1942, the danger of not keeping to its various prescriptions produced in me a fear of falling back into some horrible state of total disorder and being lost, and I still have it.

This dangerous state soon came to be embodied for me in the physical and moral temptations of Cairo, which lay just beyond the carefully plotted, rigidly administered routine of my life. I never went out with girls; I wasn’t ever allowed to visit, much less frequent, places of public entertainment or restaurants; and I was always warned by both my parents not to get close to people on the bus or tram, not to drink or eat anything from a shop or stand, and above all to regard our home and family as the only refuge in that vast sty of vices all around us.

Saving me from what was already happening: this was the paradox I lived. The only thing worse, I imagined, was total breakdown, perhaps of the kind my father experienced in the summer of 1942. After that my father began the serious task of reorganizing his business and his
leisure, with a new emphasis on the latter, as his fortunes increased considerably. By 1951, he had stopped going to his office at all after lunch. Instead he started to play bridge, which, seven days a week, every week in the year except when he traveled, became his obsession. He would come home for lunch at one-thirty, eat, then sleep until four, when he would be driven to the club to play until seven-thirty or eight. He might play again after dinner.

After our summer in Ramallah a large number of Ely Culbertson books appeared all over the Cairo apartment, in addition to several solo bridge sets and a new green felt cover for use on the two folding card tables we had. On Tuesday evening my father would go to Philip Souky’s house near the Pyramids to play bridge. When we started to spend our summers in Dhour el Shweir, he would play bridge in the morning at a café, then again in the afternoon, and finally at night he would preside over a game at our house or at a friend’s. The distance between us grew even greater as I, and alas he, discovered that I had no talent for or even interest in bridge. He seemed to have a phenomenal capacity for all indoor games, none of which I ever mastered. He tried to teach me backgammon, or
tawlah
, with, to me, appalling results. After watching me as I counted spaces laboriously, he would impatiently snatch the counter from under my finger and move it rapidly to the correct space: “Why are you counting like that”—here he would mimic my counting by affixing a crude moronic contortion to his face, as if I were a cretin trying hopelessly to go from three to four—“when
this
is the way it should be done?” Later he would ask me to play again but would end up playing the entire game for me. “It’s faster this way!” I was there just to sit opposite him and do nothing: he played both parts.

There wasn’t a card game he didn’t know, or a casino ritual he didn’t unsuccessfully try to teach me. Having had them explained thirty times has not after all enabled me to play either poker or baccarat. During the summer of 1953, after a year of learning how to play pool at my American boarding school, I thought I managed slyly to cajole him into a game of 8-ball at a little café in Dhour across from the Cirque Café. I attributed his initial reluctance to apprehension that he might be beaten, but it was a trick. I realized later that he feigned reluctance, and even a little admiration, just to get me going. “This is the way we play
it in the States,” I crowed to him, as professional to novice. “If you hit the ball on the side, it’s called English.” I put in two balls, then missed the third. Taking up the cue, my father seemed suddenly transformed from humbly nodding apprentice into fearsome pro. It was no contest at all, not even after we moved to the adjoining 3-ball billiard table, where I thought I might have a chance. I was reduced to a state of complete confusion, and a kind of babbling helplessness as I blamed the cue, the mocking waiter, the absence of practice. “So it’s called English,” he said caustically on the way home, and this from a player who seemed to have every spin and twist at his command.

Games did not require him to say very much nor make more than a minimal emotional investment, and perhaps for this reason cardplaying became an obsessional and apparently life-sustaining habit. It was a way of sublimating his anxieties in an area of life in which the rules were set, and a routine order prevailed; an escape from any kind of confrontation with people, business, or problems.

Bridge, and card games generally, were part of his regeneration from the ravages of 1942. “It’s a relaxation,” he said once or twice over the years, describing a pastime that occupied at least twelve hours a day during the summer holidays and up to four hours during his periods of work. I remember nothing with quite the same dispiriting blankness as those times when as a young boy I was compelled to watch him play. While I sat by his side, every card flipped onto the table, every bid, every laconic postmortem after the hand was played out signified my mental and moral subordination and increased my sense of his authority over me. He would not speak to me at all, nor point out what in a given hand might have been interesting; there was just the unending monotony of the card game, and his express desire to be in it for reasons I could never fully understand.

Standing or sitting next to him during the first few years after 1942 was my punishment for misbehaving, and it constituted my parents’ primitive idea for keeping me out of trouble at times when I wasn’t at school and, worse, when we summered in Lebanon. Being forced to watch him playing bridge or
tawlah
for hours on end was a mind-numbing experience. These periods of enforced boredom were early avatars of a larger scheme to curtail my potential mischief-making: “Wadie, please take the boy with you,” my mother would say exasperatedly.
“He’s causing a lot of trouble.” When Wadie’s services were not available, my mother would either send me on a long and pointless errand or pronounce the words “Take off your clothes and go
right
to bed.” Books, music, diversion of any kind were forbidden in bed, as were food and drink. I was forbidden to lock the bedroom door, allowing my mother unimpeded, extremely sudden, and unannounced entrances into the room to ascertain whether I was complying. The only benefit of this particularly deadening punishment was that having discovered three chessmen lying in the back of a drawer I practiced throwing them up and catching them until I had taught myself to juggle.