Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes (6 page)

To Mohamed, however, TV became a barometer for the increasingly volatile situation in Beirut. My brothers and sisters would also report on “incidents” at school or on the school bus, where tensions between older Muslim and Christian students sometimes made the ride home unbearable. You had to know where to sit on the bus—not too close to the Christians so that the Muslim children wouldn’t think you a sellout, but not with the Muslim children either, so Christians wouldn’t suspect you were shunning them.

My first experience of a bombing dated back to the time I was five, in 1969. A bomb detonated in the parking lot of the Yacoubian Building. Father was at work and I think Faiza must have been out. My mother grabbed me and we ran into the corridor that connected the two apartments, since it had no windows. My memory is a bit fuzzy on the details—who wanted to kill whom—but I do remember Safia asking my sister later in the afternoon to look after me while she stood in the street waiting for her children to come back from school. She wanted to break the news to them. My siblings don’t recall having seen policemen or national security agents. They must have come and gone during the day. If I remember correctly, it was business as usual for the rest of the afternoon: lunch, nap, homework. When my father came home, he and Safia retreated to their bedroom and had a long and sometimes loud argument. “Where will we go?” my father kept saying. “Anywhere, anywhere but here,” Safia said, over and over. I have a feeling my mother’s concern for our safety was mixed with her own discomfort about living in Beirut, which never felt like home to her. That argument played repeatedly in the following weeks and months. It was the first time we heard what would become my father’s mantra: There was no such thing as security in the Arab world. From here on, he’d say, we had to get used to the fact that security and stability were relative. Apart from a few years in Cairo in the 1970s and Sana’a in the 1980s, Mohamed’s words came to pass. If he were alive today, he wouldn’t be the least bit surprised by the spreading revolutions or the civil wars in Yemen and Libya. He strongly felt that volatility was the only constant in the Middle East.

We take such things as security and safety for granted in the West, even after 9/11 and the discovery of local terrorist rings. When you send your children to school, you don’t worry about them being threatened because of their religious affiliation, and when they come home, it’s not often that a parent has to explain what that burnt-out-car smell is all about, or what a bomb sounds like. But that was our experience of Beirut for at least one more year. The Palestinian refugees had in effect set up their own state in the southern parts of Lebanon from which they engaged in a resistance war against Israel. In 1968 Israel retaliated against an attack on one of its planes in Greece by bombing the Beirut airport, including, reports indicate, thirteen civil planes. The balance of power among Maronites, Druze, Shiites and Sunnis—maintained until then for more or less for two decades—was disturbed by the shifting alliances within the Muslim communities and the Palestinians. Checkpoints popped up in the middle of residential streets in Beirut. I just loved all these handsome Lebanese men in uniform who would stop us. Mohamed made a point of carrying his (British) passport with him at all times in case we got stopped on the way back from the movies or dinner.

This was supposed to be a safe haven from Aden?

To make life easier, my mother often dressed her three youngest boys in identical but differently sized shirts. I’m on the far left. This picture, taken at a studio in Beirut in 1969, was always one of my father’s favourites.

To make decisions even more difficult, the business in Beirut seemed to be taking off, finally. It even generated some income to relieve Mohamed temporarily from drawing on his savings back in the UK. But was it worth it? What if the next bomb detonated at the movie theatre we frequented, my mother asked him repeatedly, or on our school bus? After asking her to be patient for more than a year, Mohamed came to the same conclusion his wife had. This was a beautiful city, but too unstable to call home.

It was time to leave behind another business. Where to next was still an issue, even though Cairo made immediate sense. It was as familiar to the family as Beirut had become. The only problem was Egypt’s state of war with Israel. To my father, moving to a country at war hardly represented a step forward. Jordan, with its own Palestinian refugee population, had an equally troubling recent history. Morocco emerged as a contender, but the fact that we didn’t speak French would be a huge problem in finding schools and adjusting to a new life. There was always England, to which we would have been entitled to move as British subjects. But the tax rates for residents would have depleted Mohamed’s earnings. Also, by the 1970s, it was too late for my older siblings to start an all-English education. While my father sported a liberal social attitude (for an Arab), he also thought that the England of the Beatles and the sexual revolution would not be appropriate for his children or his own sensibilities, which remained locked in the immediate postwar era.

Cairo it had to be. When his mind was made up, Mohamed asked me to round up my brothers and sisters and bring them to his room. That our father had made
karart hamma
(important decisions) was the news he asked me to deliver. One of the most vivid memories I have of our time in Beirut is of me cycling around the apartment, waking up napping sisters and disrupting my brother Helmi’s algebra homework (which he didn’t seem to mind at all). All ten children lined up facing our parents, who sat on their separate beds, both dressed in traditional Yemeni clothing. We had been living in Beirut for several years, but at home my mother still wore the
der’a
, a full-length garment usually made of silk or chiffon. It often struck me as too see-through even to wear at home. My father, on the other hand, would abandon his signature suit and tie in favour of the skirt-like
fouta.
Mohamed said something about the difficulty of the decision. My mother held back tears as she grabbed me out of the bike and sat me on her lap. At six, I hardly comprehended what it all meant, but in discussing that evening with my sisters many years later, we all agreed that we were reluctant but relieved to be leaving Beirut. While most Lebanese people were warm and welcoming, a feeling of superiority among them meant that people from such
moutakalef
(backward) Arab countries like Yemen never received equal treatment. The civil war that tore Lebanon apart from 1975 to 1990 is easier to understand when you realize that it’s a country where each sect feels more entitled than the next. Beirut’s cosmopolitan life was—and still is—seductive, but it’s anchored in a feeling of cultural insecurity about its Arabic roots. Nothing describes the country’s identity crisis like a T-shirt you can buy in several clothing stores in Beirut nowadays: “Lebanese Identity: Copy and Paste.”

Once again, the family would have to say goodbye to a place they called home and friends we had made—albeit this time with more notice. Mohamed waited until the summer vacation in order not to interrupt our education and to allow him time to sell his office furniture. My sisters Farida and Ferial visited the local hairdresser with tears in their eyes. He in turn gave them a copy of a single by an English band whose name I can’t remember, but I can still see the numeral 45 printed on its label in large font. We went for one last stroll at the Raouché promenade, or Corniche, and had our pictures taken in a nearby photography shop while Mohamed visited the travel agent to find a flight with thirteen seats, as our grandfather Abdullah was to join the family in Beirut and come with us for a few weeks in Cairo, in part to give Mohamed some support. “Your father is a strong man whom God is testing with this crisis,” my grandfather told us when he arrived from Aden. He must have been in his late seventies by then and hardly in good physical condition, but having him around offered some relief to my father, who’d been carrying the family weight on his shoulders for too many years.

There’s a reason I smile whenever children run amok on planes. As my grandfather would remind me even when he was in his nineties, I made quite a scene on that plane. It was the first time I had flown since I was three, and it all seemed like exciting fun and games for us younger children. But as Mohamed and Safia sat on that ninety-minute plane ride, they knew they had to start all over again: find a new home and new schools, cope with fresh conflicts and the same old money concerns. So many mouths to feed for one newly unemployed and stressed patriarch. Once again, my parents put on the brave faces they’d perfected in the last few years in Beirut and made a difficult transition look effortless. After all, we all had Cairo to look forward to.

CHAPTER THREE

CAIRO

Arrival

M
y family’s romance with Cairo goes back to the 1960s, but no Arab family could possibly claim that a move to Cairo required much cultural adjustment. As the centre of Egyptian music, film, theatre and publishing—think the London
and
New York of the Middle East—Cairo had always been a familiar place.

In one of those contradictions that even well-informed commentators struggle to explain, Egypt underwent a major intellectual renaissance under the leadership of Nasser, who more or less ran it like a police state. But to my teenage older siblings, Cairo meant sophistication and maturity. Its male movie stars—Roshdi Abaza, Shoukry Sarhan and, of course, Omar Sharif—were drool material for my sisters (and later for me). Records by its singers were never off the many turntables in our Aden and Beirut homes. Although I was too young to recall the last family holiday there in 1966, images and sounds of Cairo from the 1960s are as familiar to me today as they were to my siblings. I seek them out on YouTube and download them on iTunes. To an Arab man of my generation, Egyptian films from that era have the retro and sometimes camp appeal of, say, a Rock Hudson–Doris Day movie. Gender roles were clearly defined but deliciously subverted. The average plot of an Egyptian movie from the 1950s or ‘60s revolved around a young couple in love who had to face the old-fashioned and conservative views of their parents or neighbours. Love often triumphed—after six or seven song-and-dance numbers. Cairo always looked clean, inviting, and its buses empty. My earliest memories of Cairo are not all that different from the romantic images I still look for on my computer screen.

After a couple of short-term rentals in the affluent neighbourhoods of Garden City and Zamalek, our new life in Cairo started in 1971 in the more middle-class district of Dokki, an in-between destination that separates Giza and the pyramids from the downtown core of the now world-famous Tahrir Square. Dokki offered a middle place for our new middle-class lives. This time even my father realized that he couldn’t throw his money around and house us in the finest apartment building. Safia made sure that he didn’t. When it came to signing this lease, she brought along her two oldest daughters. They could talk sense into Mohamed if she couldn’t.

Dokki was lively but not too urban. A place where old and new money lived, with plenty of room for the more bohemian types as well. Think of, say, the Annex in Toronto, Islington in London or Greenwich Village in New York. Our new home was a two-level apartment in a 1960s six-storey building overlooking Tahrir Street, the main thoroughfare that runs through Cairo. Directly across from our building we could see the cultural centre for the Soviet Union, a neoclassical white palace that we passed by thousands of times but never ventured into, such was my father’s intense dislike of anything socialist or communist. “Propaganda” was his one-word assessment of the superpower’s activity across the street as he watched people coming in and out of the building from his favourite lower-level balcony.

My brother Khairy (left) and I pose for a photo on the main-floor balcony of our Dokki apartment in 1971. I still don’t know why I’m wearing shorts on what looks like, judging from Khairy’s clothes and my own sweater, a cold winter morning.