Out of Place: A Memoir (16 page)

Claude Brancart and I were rivals—but for what, I have no idea—always ready for a spat, or a spitting or throwing contest, or a boasting spree in which our fathers, eminently unqualified in real life for such matters, were pitted against each other in imaginary tennis, wrestling, or rowing contests. At one point when Claude and I had reached a peak of enmity, this warranted an all-out fight, and we went at it on the dusty field, pulling, punching, and then, finally locked in a hugging embrace, we crashed to the ground together. He managed to get on top of me, fought vigorously to pin me back, and finally to make me say “I give up.”

One of the onlookers, Jean-Pierre Sabet, a non-American Maadi resident who was enrolled at CSAC by some unintelligible dispensation, at that point matter-of-factly said of me, “He’s straining. Can’t you see he’s straining? It isn’t over.” He was right: I felt I had been defeated in a sense because “Edward” had given up, he had let go and was now dominated by someone who should have dominated him. Strangely, though, there was another self beginning to surge inside me, just as “Edward” had passed and was now a prisoner of Claude Brancart, so this new self came from some region inside myself that I knew existed but could only rarely have access to. My body, instead of remaining supine and abject underneath Braucart, began to push up against him, first disengaging my arms, then pounding his chest and head until he was forced to defend himself, loose his grip on me, and finally roll over sideways as I got up and continued pummeling him. In a minute Mr. Wannick had appeared, pulled us apart, and with a disdainful “What is the matter with you two?” sent us back into the school building.

A year earlier I had had a similar experience of defeat and regeneration, and it is only now that they strike me as examples of the same unpredictable will to go on past rules and deadlines that had already been accepted by “Edward.” I had met Guy Mosseri, a small, slim boy who lived in Maadi but who also went to GPS, at the Maadi swimming
pool one weekend. We started a game of catch—I was to dive in and swim, then pull myself out of the pool, then dive in and swim some more, until, if he could, he caught me. I began exuberantly, threading my way through all the other swimmers, Guy in close pursuit. But soon I began to flag, whereas to my consternation Mosseri simply kept coming after me, inexorably, expressionlessly. The chase became even grimmer, blown out of proportion by my feeling of crushing failure. As he closed in I started to slow down, a sign that “Edward” had given up, only to discover that some new energy was propelling my legs and arms farther and farther away from Mosseri, who was perplexed by the sudden change in the relationship between hunter and hunted. A few minutes later he simply stopped and could not go on.

Such episodes were rare. CSAC forced me to take “Edward” more seriously as a flawed, frightened, uncertain construction than I ever had before. The overall sensation I had was of my troublesome identity as an American inside whom lurked another Arab identity from which I derived no strength, only embarrassment and discomfort. I saw in Stan Henry and Alex Miller the much more enviable, rocklike hardness of an identity at one with the reality. Jean-Pierre Sabet, Malak Abu-el-Ezz, even Albert Coronel—who, though obviously Egyptian and Jewish, carried a Spanish passport—all could be themselves, they had nothing to hide, had no American part to play. Once during my second year there, when a new older boy, Bob Simha, appeared, I thought I might have found a companion when my parents explained to me that the name Simha was Arab and Jewish. I tried to discover a hidden affinity between us, but he seemed mystified by my questions about relatives he might have had in Aleppo or Baghdad. “Nah,” he told me with dismissive impatience, “I’m from New Rochelle.” It was from him that I learned the expression “Your father’s mustache.”

Daily at school I felt the disparity between my life as “Edward,” a false, even ideological, identity, and my home life, where my father’s prosperity as an American businessman flourished after the war. After 1946, he and my mother began their at least twice-yearly European, later also Asian and American, travels, and because I was the only son, and my father never stopped being the owner and promoter of his far-flung business interests, I was expected to take an interest in his enterprises. A long series of companies, whose representative (“agent”
was the word used then) he was, entered our lives, the house, and our daily speech; nearly all of their products found their way into number 1 Sharia Aziz Osman, apartment 20, fifth floor: Sheaffer pens and Scripp ink, Art Metal steel furniture, Sebel chairs and tables, Chubb safes, Royal typewriters, Monroe calculators, Solingen stainless-steel scissors and knives, Ellam’s and A. B. Dick duplicators and spirit machines, Maruzen office supplies, Letts diaries, 3M tapes, copiers, and paints, Dictaphone recording and transcribing machines, plus English franking machines, a Swedish adding machine, a Chicago Automatic Typewriter, and the Weber-Costello globe company’s more recent additions.

It was not only their products but their travelers that we came to know, especially one Alex Kaldor, a heavily accented Hungarian (or Rumanian: his origins were obscure and the subject of much speculation), a bachelor of roughly my father’s generation, a Royal typewriter voyageur who lived first class all across the globe. He turned up at least twice a year in Cairo, routinely coming by for drinks and taking my parents and, when I got to be about fourteen, me out to dinner. Kaldor was the first hardbitten cynic and expense account free-loader I met, but I liked his way of appearing to have done everything (except perhaps marriage) and to have been impressed with nothing, not even my father, whom he treated with patronizing amusement. He was fat and seemed addicted to Melba toast. I think I found him fascinating because he sounded like Bela Lugosi, whose films I was not permitted to see (“not for children”) but got to know a little about through the “coming attractions” snippets that accompanied films for children in the local cinemas.

My father started traveling regularly after the war to the various offices and factories of his principals, suppliers, and associates. He always sought and obtained exclusive representations, so that he in turn could sell these products to other dealers and customers as the local principal. By the time I left Egypt his had become by far the largest office equipment and stationery business in the Middle East. And I also developed the same keenly competitive sense that he had for rival products, whom we treated as private enemies: Olivetti, Roneo, Parker, Gestetner, and Adler, among others, whose inferiority to “our lines,” as my father called them, we argued with considerable passion. By the same token,
the principal salesmen and directors of divisions in the “shop” were also familiar to us as not quite family, but certainly more than just employees. Most of them endured, looking back on it now, with remarkable longevity; only one, a Mr. Panikian, the accountant, whose wife had protruding teeth and on their annual visit to our house showed off her musical skills by playing the piano with oranges, left for Australia in 1946 with their two sons; and, according to his successor in my father’s office, a substantial amount of the firm’s money turned out to be missing.

The rest stayed for years and years, an odd assortment of Levantine minorities, Egyptian Muslims and Copts, and, after 1948, an increasing number of Palestinian refugees whom Auntie Nabiha pressed on my father to employ, which he unhesitatingly did. I later appreciated that what my father produced in the way of rational organization and incentives for each member of his ever-larger staff was unique not only to him, but to the Middle East: Lampas, a voluble Greek who was my father’s oldest employee, was shop manager; Peter, an Armenian, ran copiers and duplicating; Hagop and Nicola Slim, calculators; Leon Krisshevsky, typewriters; Sobhi, a Copt, furniture; Farid Tobgy, diaries and pens; Shimy was the storekeeper; Ahmad was the cashier. Each of them had a small battalion of assistants to command.

In his office across the street my father had one female personal secretary, and one male Arabic secretary, Mohammed Abu of, a short bespectacled man with incredible patience and the kind of fastidious anality that one associates with a ploddingly diligent, but not gifted, student who never graduated. During my childhood the female secretary was an alert, elegantly dressed Miss Anna Mandel, who would occasionally come to tea, then shortly after the battle at el-Alamein abruptly disappeared. She had started work for my father a year before his marriage in 1932, and I recall his conversation in my earliest years as dotted with frequent references to “Miss Mandel.” I later discovered that she had been made to leave my father’s employ by my mother, who, she told me quite calmly many years later, believed that Anna Mandel “had wanted to marry your father.” Did they have an affair? I asked. “She’d have liked that. No, of course not,” was the retort. I was never so sure. Most of the women (there were also a couple of men) who subsequently held the post with my mother’s
approval or acquiescence tended to be extremely young and clumsy, or else overweight and middle-aged, ponderous and slow—not at all like Miss Mandel, whom I dimly remember as a sleek, carefully put together woman.

Two other office divisions rounded off the small army of people my father employed: one was Accounts, which was run by Asaad Kawkabani, taken in by my father from an English accounting firm and made in effect his second in command. This did not prevent my father from treating Asaad like the merest dunce when he couldn’t remember something, or when he misplaced or miscalculated bills. Asaad also ran a staff of his own, all of them following meticulous accounting procedures laid down by “Mr. Said,” as everyone called my father. Lastly, there was Repairs, headed by a contemporary of Lampas’s, a man called Hratch, an extremely taciturn Armenian whom I never saw without a leather apron; my father thought Hratch was a genius who could fix anything, including our toys, my mother’s kitchen appliances, and furniture. In repairs and later service my father was also a pioneer, inventing the scheme of a service contract for every machine he sold; this allowed him to underbid his competitors, and then make up the difference plus some by persuading customers to buy the contract for several years. Hratch presided over thirty mechanics, supplied with motorcycles or bicycles, who sped all over town servicing virtually everything that the Standard Stationery Company—SSCo, as we called it—had sold.

The business also employed a battalion of “servants,” as my father called them, or
farasheen
in Arabic, who worked as delivery boys, coffee makers, porters, cleaners; some of them also trundled about Cairo on tricycles and later in small delivery vans. Over this quite enormous, always expanding, domain, my father ruled as absolute monarch, a sort of Dickensian father figure, despotic when angered, benevolent when not. He knew more than anyone about the most minute aspects of his empire, remembered everything, would brook no back talk (he never engaged in personal discussion with anyone on the premises, as he called the place, not even with members of his family), and earned his staff’s respect, if not affection, by the virtuosity and sheer infallible competence of his managerial and overall business skills. One of his achievements was to have transformed the Egyptian government
bureaucracy by introducing typewriters, duplicators, copiers, and filing cabinets, replacing the haphazard methods of carbon paper, copying pencils, and papers stacked on window sills and table tops. With my mother’s help, he developed—“invented” would not be wrong—the Arabic typewriter with Royal, whose aristocratic American owners, the John Barry Ryans, he came to know quite well. He had two formidable, unfailing capacities possessed by no one else in my experience: the power to execute extremely complicated arithmetical procedures in his head at lightning speed, and a perfect memory for the date acquired and cost of every object (many thousands of them) involved in his business. It was intimidating to watch him behind his desk, surrounded by Asaad, numerous secretaries, department heads, all of them rummaging through files and papers, while he reproduced the whole purchasing and marketing history of, say, a particular flat file, a line of calculators, or every model of Sheaffer pen entirely from memory.

This did not make him a patient, or even considerate, boss, but I believe he was always correct and fair, as well as generous, in the process inventing the idea of Christmas or Eid al-Adha or Rosh Hashanah bonuses for everyone, to say nothing of health and retirement plans. None of this made any significant impression on me then: I was too busy being managed or feeling persecuted to appreciate his extraordinary business genius, developed on his own in a provincial Third World capital still mired in colonial economics, feudal landowning, and disorganized (albeit at times successful) large- as well as small-scale peddling. It is only now, as I survey his accomplishments, that I realize how astounding and, sadly, how unsung and unrecorded they were. He was basically a modern capitalist with an extraordinary capacity for thinking systematically and institutionally, never afraid to take risks or incur expenses for long-range profit, a brilliant exploiter of advertising and public relations, and most of all a sort of organizer and shaper of his clients’ business interests, providing them first with an articulation of their needs and goals, then with the necessary products and services to realize them.

One of his innovations was to produce an annual product catalogue of all his offerings, something literally no one in his business had ever done in Egypt. He once told me that his cousin and Jerusalem partner Boulos had scolded him for the expense involved. But as the business
expanded he discontinued the practice of his own volition and instead printed lists of “satisfied customers” for each of the major lines he carried; at relatively little cost these made his clients in a sense work with and for him. Thus his business grew and grew, despite often calamitous setbacks; in consequence he allowed his family in his own special way the full benefit of his expanded wealth and influence.