Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes (7 page)

But if the now-unemployed diehard capitalist preferred to monitor commercial activities, he had no shortage of ventures around him. He could walk up and down Tahrir Street, where restaurants, bookshops, and grocery, clothing and corner stores occupied every storefront. Which he did. As did my mother. Although our stretch of Dokki could hardly be called an intimate neighbourhood, my parents got to know local shop owners well within our first year. Why wouldn’t they? When you’re shopping for food, clothes and supplies for nine school- and university-age children, you have to spread your wealth and eventually hit most if not all the shops. Saeed, the owner of the news kiosk across the street, made his living off us as he delivered three Arabic newspapers daily and an English one weekly, not to mention the score of magazines to which we subscribed. Every third Friday, Wahbi, Khairy and I—the three youngest children—would sit in the barbershop on the street level of our building and have our hair cut.

My mother bought everything for the household in bulk, especially clothes for the younger children. Twice a year (at the start and end of the school year), she and my father would take the three young male children in a cab to downtown Cairo for our new wardrobe. If Safia liked a shirt, she’d get it in three different sizes and, occasionally, varying colours. I hated that. It made us look like orphans from an old Egyptian film melodrama. While Khairy and Wahbi generally liked whatever my mother selected, I put up fights. Even at that young age, I had a more flamboyant taste. I remember insisting on a pair of burgundy shoes (they looked more like red in Cairo’s bright sun) in the winter of 1972, which were incredibly uncomfortable but looked great to my eyes. I hated the wool sweaters Safia particularly liked because she thought Cairo’s winters were colder than Aden’s (though warmer than Beirut’s). It’s strange how I have no recollection of ever being cold—or of winter as a different time of year—in all my years in Egypt. Because we didn’t have as much money as before, Safia had to ensure that the clothes she bought would last more than one season. She knew where to go to make sure that was the case.

My mother’s favourite was a haberdashery shop called Basti, where somehow she spent a small fortune every week on buttons, thread, sewing needles, knitting patterns and a host of other things that strike me now—I who take my shirts to the dry cleaner to replace missing buttons—as artefacts of some ancient art. This was the pre-disposable age of fashion, when you mended your torn shirt instead of buying a new one. The store owner and a young salesman would fuss over my mother, their Big Spender. Whenever she took me with her, I’d get some of the attention. My main memory, however, is not of the merchandise but the fact that the store blasted its air conditioning in the summer—a very unusual practice even in sweltering Cairo. After a few minutes I’d get chilly and start hurrying my mother. She’d swear never to bring me back again. I realize now, of course, that I was intruding on her escape time. In Beirut her worry about not reading or writing Arabic got the better of her, but in Cairo shopkeepers made her feel like the lady of the house she once had been in Aden. They spoke Arabic that was free of English or French idioms, that sounded like all those Egyptian movies and TV dramas she loved to watch—although I was never clear when she found the time to sit in front of the TV and relax. I can’t think of Safia without thinking of the kitchen.

After making sure her husband and youngest four children looked their best, my mother sent us out for drinks and ice cream at Kasr el Nil Casino to celebrate Eid, the Muslim feast, in 1972.

I’d rush Safia from Basti in part to take me to my favourite spot—a book and stationery store called Ghomhuria (Republic), down at the heart of the fruit and vegetable market of Suleiman Gohar in Dokki. It sold my favourite comic books, the Adventures of Tintin, in Arabic, and
Mickey
, a weekly Arabic version of the classic Disney characters. The store was still in business when I last visited Cairo in 2010. Like everything else in Dokki, it looks worn out, falling apart. It’s that distinct look of faded glory that so many familiar places from my childhood in Cairo now wear—not always well, but with resilience. I didn’t have the heart to go in. I tried several times to force myself but felt terrified. This space was once my refuge, and now it looked so alien to me it might as well have been in a country I’d never set foot in. Did I really live here? Was I ever one of the young men I saw hanging out at street corners almost everywhere in the city?

Safia seemed to spend her mornings almost every other day in the market, buying meat, vegetables and lots of bread. I don’t understand how we didn’t get fat and bloated given how much wheat we ate daily. I don’t ever recall being out of bread in Cairo. Safia’s typical day would start at six thirty. To ensure hot water for our morning ablutions, she had to manually start the gas-fuelled hot-water heater. We lived in that apartment for ten years and I don’t think she ever taught any of us how to light it for fear of burns or gas leaks. Only she could turn it on in the morning and off at night. And because she never left the house for more than a few hours, we never had any worries about having no hot water.

With nine children in school or university by the early 1970s, the family’s bathroom routine was a military operation. Two half-bathrooms for bodily functions and one large one for showering and brushing our teeth. No one was allowed more than ten minutes in any of them, and all had to clear up the big bathroom for my father, who would get up before nine every morning and read his favourite Egyptian newspaper,
Al-Ahram
, in the bathroom for almost an hour before taking a shower and going back to his bedroom to pretend to keep up with his business interests. He would type many letters of introduction in English to solicit business from British companies. Almost always he received a standard response to the effect that the company had no plans to expand to Cairo at the moment but that they’d keep his letter for future reference. Mohamed tested my English proficiency as a teenager by having me read his letters and the replies he received. I had a difficult time pronouncing some words: “venture” and “remittance” among them. He’d enunciate with as clear a British accent as he could and correct any hint of American English he detected in me from watching TV shows.

He shared that room with my mother, but they slept in separate beds. Whenever I was sick—and I was a sickly child who missed weeks of school every year—I’d sneak into my mother’s bed. It’s not the illnesses that I remember but the coded conversations between my parents in the middle of the night.

“Batkafee?”
(Will it be enough?) Safia would ask Mohamed when he’d tell her how much they could spend on groceries and other household items that week.
“Ya aleem?”
(Who knows?) he’d reply, hinting that it all depended on her spending habits. Perhaps fewer visits to Basti and not as much fruit and vegetables every day? They weren’t really bickering but simply trying to ensure that whatever cash my father could get out of his saving accounts in England without depleting them lasted us another year.

He already had to make some compromises and could no longer enrol us in the best schools, house us in the best neighbourhood or clothe us in the best style. Instead, everything had to be second best—a bourgeois lifestyle much more comfortable than the average Egyptian could pull off, but that, to his eyes, ranked much lower than his dreams for his family. In a bizarre sort of way, his tough decisions forced us into the shabbily genteel, intellectual and cultured segment of Cairo life—a world of books, newspapers, films and Arab nationalism. Islam was always part of that life, but its place remained in the background—more cultural expression than devotional or for that matter activist. Our friends and neighbours included Muslims and Christians, Egyptians, Syrians, Lebanese, Greeks, Armenians—and, naturally, other expatriate Yemeni families, since Cairo became the main destination for people from Aden to wait out the socialist craze that had taken over their homeland. It proved to be a long wait.

Although the early 1970s—any time after the defeat of Nasser in the Six Day War of 1967 and his death in 1970—are considered the beginning of the end of Cairo’s renaissance, I recall it as a lovely and safe place to be a child. The six youngest children—Hoda, Hanna, Raja’a, Wahbi, Khairy and I—were all enrolled in the same school in Dokki: Education Home. It was a private Arabic and English school, one of two that were owned and run back then by a classic Egyptian matriarch by the name of Nawal Al-Diggoui. She’d drop by every few weeks unexpectedly and put the fear of God into the score of teachers and rotating headmasters. She was always over-perfumed and wore too much makeup. Her imperious attitude marked my first introduction to Egyptian high society—a world of government officials, judiciary, business tycoons, movie stars and writers she befriended and whose children were automatically sent to her schools. You didn’t know snobbery and elitism until you met the Egyptian upper crust. They looked down at Arabs from Yemen or the Gulf states because they didn’t have the same faux French-style period furniture and gazed at Europe for inspiration in everything from culture to governance. All of that made my father love them more and try to ingratiate himself to them. Of course the skeleton in his closet was my mother, who couldn’t spell “France,” let alone find it on a map. She felt more at home with the middle class of Cairo and even its working class.

At the time, my sisters talked of my parents’ marriage as the last of the happy unions, but my mother’s illiteracy continued to be a source of great pain and embarrassment for Mohamed. She recognized Egyptian money by the sight of each bill, so every time the Egyptian treasury rolled out a new one, she had to stare at it to memorize the imagery and how much it was worth. She’d be shortchanged in the market every now and then, but often hid that fact from my father, whose anxiety about money started to reveal a nasty side in him. About once a year my parents would have a shouting match that almost always had something to do with Safia’s mishandling of the household finances. Mohamed would bring up my mother’s lack of education almost instantly. “I married beneath me. My mistake.” He would say it loudly enough for her to hear even after she had retreated to the kitchen. He would conveniently forget that he made something of his life only after he married her. But although he asked her to economize, he’d berate her if we ran out of, say, his favourite fruit.

I resented my father for putting down my mother, but in all honesty I shared some of his discomfort about Safia’s illiteracy, particularly around my schoolmates. Whenever my mother met us outside school to walk us home (and treat us to a fruit drink at a deli in Messaha Square) I’d dread running into friends who might see me or one of my sisters reading signs or price tags for her. My heart would sink when childhood friends showed my mother their monthly report cards. She’d always pretend there was no time or would ask one of us to read her “the highlights” as a way of getting around the issue. Of course, she couldn’t always fake her way through almost fifteen years in Cairo. Every now and then a neighbour or family friend would call her on it. Not in a condescending way, but as an incentive for her to take adult literacy classes, which she refused point-blank to do. When I was asked about it, I’d lie and say she was just too lazy to put on her reading glasses.

She didn’t care. She relied on her visual memory to get by. She’d only buy what she could see. Ditto for her favourite brand of cigarette, Cleopatra, which of course had the image of the Egyptian queen on all its white packaging. The competing brand, Nefertiti, featured a yellow label and a smaller picture of the queen’s head. That’s how Safia told them apart. Her main contact with the outside world came from the little black radio in her kitchen, which was set to the Sout Al-Arab (Voice of the Arabs) radio station or the General Program, both part of the government-run media. The latter would play her favourite show:
To Housewives.
Targeted at middle-class Egyptian wives and mothers, the show included everything from health advisories to new recipes to, in the early 1970s, strong and far-from-subliminal messages about socialist values of compassion and helping the less fortunate. My mother’s egalitarianism and strong will were reinforced by what she heard on the radio. To my father it was socialist nonsense; to Safia it provided comfort and a sense of belonging—reassurance that her contribution to family life transcended cooking and cleaning and was a political statement and spiritual duty. The Arabic term for “housewife” is
rabat al beit
(house goddess), and she liked the sound of that.

The Cairo of the early 1970s, however, still carried on with the legacy of Nasser’s pro-Soviet agenda, which, by necessity, played down—and probably suppressed—the role of religion in Egyptian culture. Our Cairo in the early days was secular. None of us prayed or went to mosques, except on the two high holidays of Eid, and even that was more of a social than a religious obligation for the men in the family. As my sisters approached their twenties, their main pursuit was marriage, and within our first full year in Cairo my second sister, Faiza, received a marriage proposal that she couldn’t turn down and that kept the family busy for weeks planning her wedding.