Out of Place: A Memoir (18 page)

I was once taken to the Ewart Hall (part of the American University of Cairo, the auditorium was the largest of its kind and was used then—as it still is now—for important concerts) to attend a concert given by the Musica Viva orchestra conducted by one Hans Hickman, a careful time beater who buried his head in the score as if in his pillow. The soloist in, I think, either the First or Second Beethoven Piano Concerto was Muriel Howard, wife of AUC’s dean, mother of Kathy, a schoolmate of mine at CSAC. My father was close to Dean Worth (a name whose solid ring for me had the power of the American continent) Howard, and insisted on taking me and my mother up to him and
his, I thought, strangely retiring wife who had just completed a breathlessly rapid rendering of the concerto. “Bravo,” said my father, and then immediately turned to my mother for back-up help. “Wonderful,” she added before turning brusquely to look at me admonishingly. I of course was totally tongue-tied and stood there looking, as well as feeling, deeply embarrassed. “You see,” my mother said triumphantly to me, although it was also Muriel that she was addressing, “you see how important it is to practice your scales, Edward. Scales and Hanon. Isn’t that so, Mrs. Howard?” She nodded agreement with a clear sense that practicing scales was the last thing she wished to talk about at that moment.

By comparison the Stokowski recording of Beethoven’s Ninth (the chorus sang Schiller’s
“An die Freude”
in English—“Joy, thou daughter of Elysium”) elated me in its explanation of freedom and the eerie mystery of the open fifths with which it began, and what I heard jealously as the orchestra’s routine ease in getting flawlessly through scales and difficult figurations, which I unconsciously tried to transpose to mental finger positions that my inexpert fingers denied me on the piano. I reveled in
“Salomes Tanz,”
as the brown record label advertised it, or in Paderewski’s recording of Beethoven’s F-sharp Nocturne and the C-sharp-minor Waltz, which I considered the ultimate in, and the opposite of, my miserably inadequate pianism.

The greatest musical experiences of my adolescent Cairo years were visits in 1950 and 1951 by Clemens Krauss and Wilhelm Furtwängler with the Vienna and Berlin philharmonics, respectively. Although in both cases I was taken to the Sunday afternoon performances, stuffed in Krauss’s case with lollipops like the
Donna Diana
overture and Strauss’s Pizzicato Polka, I was liberated from every pedestrian consideration by the gorgeous sound, the authoritative presence on the podium, and even the magic of the German names (Wiener Philharmoniker, for instance). Never having heard anything on this scale of such direct opulent virtuosity before, I remember how exhilarated I felt and how I tried by every means available to prolong and extend the experience beyond the measly two hours I had been given at the Rivoli Cinema (I have never understood why the Rivoli, an extravagantly ornate movie palace, complete with a vibrato-rich, throbbingly sugary neon-lit theater organ and English organist—Gerald Peal, a pink-faced showman whose acrobatic leaps onto and off the majestically ascending and
descending instrument amused me more than his endless Ketelby renditions and tame-Latin dance rhythms—was chosen for Krauss and Furtwängler over the more appropriately serious Ewart). Mostly this meant trying to keep the music in my ear, conducting an imaginary orchestra, looking unsuccessfully for records that were far too expensive for my means that featured the same pieces by the same orchestra and conductor. I was depressed, indeed, often quite sad, at how fast such rare pleasure came and went, and how I spent so much of my time later trying not only to reexperience them but also to confirm them by seeking out books, articles, people who would tell me about them, affirm their truth and pleasure, revive in me what seemed to be on the verge of total disappearance.

A year after Krauss, Furtwängler also stood on the Rivoli podium on a Sunday afternoon. This was
the
overpowering musical performance of my first twenty-two years of life, approached only when in 1958 I heard the opening measures of
Das Rheingold
rising out of the black Bayreuth pit. I knew nothing at all about Furtwängler, except for his name as it appeared on the red HMV labels in his recording of Beethoven’s Fifth: for at least five years that recording was my favorite, the touchstone by which I judged all other musical performances, the summit of an indescribable force that seemed to travel out of our Stewart-Warner stand-up radio-gramophone to address me directly. At first it was Furtwängler’s name that was the source of that power: I repeated it often to myself (I had no knowledge of German) and imagined Furtwängler to be a wonderfully built, super-refined being for whom Beethoven’s music had been written expressly. I remember how with considerable impatience I once dismissed a cousin’s amateurish speculation that the Fifth’s motto was “Fate’s knocking at the door.” What I discerned in the piece, thanks to Furtwängler, was something I believed instinctively to be without any such concept. “Music is music,” I remember responding, partly out of impatience, partly out of my inability to articulate what it was about the music that moved me so specifically and wordlessly.

We always sat in the same balcony seats—in those days the balcony seemed to be reserved for what my father called “a better class of people”—as for Krauss, who seemed in retrospect to be a stodgy businessmanlike figure. Besides, Furtwängler’s program, like his appearance,
was more challenging: the Schubert “Unfinished,” the Mozart G-minor, Beethoven’s Fifth. On his other program, to which I was not taken, was Tchaikovsky’s Sixth, plus Bruckner’s Seventh: my parents had drawn the obvious conclusion that only Program 1 was suitable for me, and it may have been the unknown “Bruckner” that put them off. Furtwängler’s gaunt, angularly tall and ungainly figure crowned with a majestically bald pate made just the right impression on me: here was an ascetic other-worldly musician whose figure symbolized to me the transfiguration that music such as Beethoven’s necessarily required. I was struck that unlike the fluent Krauss, Furtwängler did not so much conduct (with an unusually small baton, as I remember) as actually move the music with his shoulders and awkwardly long arms. He did not use a score, and consequently there was no page turning and pedantic time beating à la Hans Hickman, the local classical orchestra leader. Instead I had the impression of music as unfolding with an inexorable, totally absorbing and fulfilling logic, unfolding before me as I had never before experienced, without any “mistakes” of the kind that crippled me with Cherry, without the need to pause for a record change, without any sound but that of Beethoven. I also sensed that this was better, and therefore rarer, than any experience a record might have produced, although of course I felt a kind of delicious regret after it was over and could never again be recovered except through the approximations available to me either mechanically or in flawed memory. When I played Furtwängler’s recording of the Fifth it gave me pleasure, but not the satisfaction I had enjoyed in the theater; the replica was displaced once and for all by the real thing. Yet I still cherished the work as a particularly favored item to be played and replayed.

My later efforts to find out more about Furtwängler were utterly frustrated by the Cairo of my adolescence. There was no German circle in postwar Cairo to rival the cultural institutions of the triumphant British, French, or Americans. I ransacked the papers—the
Ahram, Egyptian Gazette, Progrès Egyptien
, as well as periodicals like
Rose el Yousef
and
al-Hilal
—for information on him, but there was none to be had. The city was beginning to be flooded with American movie-fan magazines like
Photoplay
and
Silver Screen
, and whereas you could find out all about Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, there was nothing comparable about the strange (to my friends) figures who interested me. The
war was over, of course, but any documentation of what had happened
inside
Germany (where Furtwängler figured so prominently) was unavailable. On my fifteenth birthday, in 1950, my parents had given me Percy Scholes’s
Oxford Companion to Music
, which I still own, and which had a tiny entry for Furtwängler (“German conductor born in 1886; see ‘Germany and Austria’ ”) that elaborated upon a bit in a general but very oblique discussion of music under the Third Reich, and Furtwängler’s role in the
Mathis der Maler
case. This gave no sense of why he was so controversial a figure after the war, or that the question of morality and collaboration had so powerful a bearing on him.

One of the main reasons for the relatively limited way in which I experienced Furtwängler was my sense of time as something essentially primitive and constricting. Time seemed forever against me, and except for a brief period in the morning when I sensed the day ahead as a possibility, I was boxed in by schedules, chores, assignments, with not a moment for leisurely enjoyment or reflection. I was given my first watch, an insipid-looking Tissot, at age eleven or twelve; for several days I spent hours staring at it obsessively, mystified by my inability to see its movement, constantly worried whether it had stopped or not. I suspected at first that it was not entirely new, since there seemed to be something suspiciously worn about it, but was assured by my parents that it was indeed new, and that its slightly yellowed (tinged with orange) face was characteristic of the model. There the discussion ended. But the watch obsessed me. I compared it first with what my CSAC schoolmates wore, which, except for the Mickey Mouse and Popeye models that symbolized the America I didn’t belong to, struck me as inferior to mine. There was an early period of experimenting with different ways of wearing it: the face turned inward; on the sleeve; underneath it; fastened tightly; fastened loosely; pushed forward onto my wrist; and on the right hand. I ended up with it on my left wrist, where for a long time it gave me the decidedly positive feeling of being dressed up.

But the watch never failed to impress me with its unimpeded forward movement, which in nearly every way added to my feeling of being behind and at odds with my duties and commitments. I do not recall ever being much of a sleeper, but I do remember the faultless punctuality of early-morning reveille and the immediate sense of anxious
urgency I felt the moment I got out of bed. There was never any time to dawdle or loiter, though I was inclined to both. I began a lifelong habit then of simultaneously experiencing time as awasting, and of resisting it by subjectively trying to prolong the time I had by doing more and more (reading furtively, staring out the window, looking for a superfluous object like a penknife or yesterday’s shirt) in the few moments left to me before the inexorable deadline. My watch was sometimes of help, when it showed me that there was time left, but most often it guarded my life like a sentinel, on the side of an external order imposed by parents, teachers, and inflexible appointments.

In my early adolescence I was completely in the grip, at once ambiguously pleasant and unpleasant, of time passing as a series of deadlines—an experience that has remained with me ever since. The day’s milestones were set relatively early in that period and have not varied. Six-thirty (or in cases of great pressure six; I still use the phrase “I’ll get up at six to finish this”) was time to get up; seven-thirty started the meter running, at which point I entered the strict regime of hours and half-hours governed by classes, church, private lessons, homework, piano practice, and sports, until bedtime. This sense of the day divided into periods of appointed labor has never left me, has indeed intensified. Eleven a.m. still imbues me with a guilty awareness that the morning has passed without enough being accomplished—it is eleven-twenty as I write these very words—and nine p.m. still represents “lateness,” that moment which connotes the end of the day, the hastening need to begin thinking about bed, the time beyond which to do work means to do it at the wrong time, fatigue and a sense of having failed all creeping up on one, time slowly getting past its proper period, lateness in fact in all the word’s senses.

My watch furnished the basic motif underlying all this, a kind of impersonal discipline that somehow kept the system in order. Leisure was unavailable. I recall with stunning clarity my father’s early injunction against remaining in pajamas and dressing gown past the early-morning hours; slippers in particular were objects of contempt. I still cannot spend any time at all lounging in a dressing gown: the combined feeling of time-wasting guilt and lazy impropriety simply overwhelms me. As a way of getting around the discipline, illness (sometimes feigned, sometimes exaggerated) made life away from school positively
acceptable. I became the family joke for being especially gratified by, even soliciting, an unnecessary bandage on my finger, knee, or arm. And now by some devilish irony I find myself with an intransigent, treacherous leukemia, which ostrichlike I try to banish from my mind entirely, attempting with reasonable success to live in my system of time, working, sensing lateness and deadlines and that feeling of insufficient accomplishment I learned fifty years ago and have so remarkably internalized. But, in another odd reversal, I secretly wonder to myself whether the system of duties and deadlines may now save me, although of course I know that my illness creeps invisibly on, more secretly and insidiously than the time announced by my first watch, which I carried with so little awareness then of how it numbered my mortality, divided it up into perfect, unchanging intervals of unfulfilled time forever and ever.

ON NOVEMBER 1, 1947—MY TWELFTH BIRTHDAY—I RECALL
the puzzling vehemence with which my oldest Jerusalem cousins, Yousif and George, bewailed the day, the eve of the Balfour Declaration, as “the blackest day in our history.” I had no idea what they were referring to but realized it must be something of overwhelming importance. Perhaps they and my parents, sitting around the table with my birthday cake, assumed that I shouldn’t be informed about something as complex as our conflict with the Zionists and the British.