Out of Place: A Memoir (21 page)

After 1948 my aunt Nabiha, who had established herself in Zamalek about three blocks from where we lived, began her lonely, exasperating charity work on behalf of the Palestinian refugees in Egypt. She started by approaching the English-speaking charities and missions connected to the Protestant churches, which included the Church Mission Society (CMS) and the Anglican and Presbyterian missions. Children and medical problems were the most urgent issues for her; later, she tried to get the men, and in some cases the women, jobs in the homes or businesses of friends. My strongest memory of Aunt Nabiha is of her weary face and complainingly pathetic voice recounting the miseries of “her” refugees (as we all used to call them) and the even greater miseries of prying concessions out of the Egyptian government, which refused to grant residence permits for more than one month. This calculated harassment of defenseless, dispossessed, and usually very poor Palestinians became my aunt’s obsession; she narrated it endlessly, and wove into it heart-rending reports of malnutrition, childhood dysenteries and leukemias, families of ten living in one room, women separated from their men, children destitute and begging (which angered her beyond reason), men stricken with incurable hepatitis, bilharzia, liver, and lung disorders. She told us of all this week after week over a period of at least ten years.

My father, her brother, was her most intimate confidant and friend. Between her and my mother there was always civility if not love (“She was jealous of me when we were first married,” said my mother). The two women who played an essential role in my father’s life apparently made a pact after his marriage that allowed cooperation, hospitality, sharing, but not closeness. She and I had a special bond—she was also my godmother—which manifested itself in an almost embarrassing display of affection on her part, and on mine, in a feeling that seeing her, listening to her talk, watching her operate was an experience to be sought out and cherished.

It was through Aunt Nabiha that I first experienced Palestine as history and cause in the anger and consternation I felt over the suffering of the refugees, those Others, whom she brought into my life. It was also she who communicated to me the desolations of being without a country or a place to return to, of being unprotected by any national authority or institutions, of no longer being able to make sense of the past except as bitter, helpless regret nor of the present with its daily queuing, anxiety-filled searches for jobs, and poverty, hunger, and humiliations. I got a very vivid sense of all this from her conversation, and by observing her frenetic daily schedule. She was well-off enough to have a car and an exceptionally forbearing driver—Osta Ibrahim, smartly dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and somber tie, plus a red fez, the tarbush worn by respectable middle-class Egyptian men until the revolution of 1952 discouraged the practice—who began the day with her at eight, brought her home for lunch at two, picked her up again at four, and stayed with her until eight or nine. Homes, clinics, schools, government offices were her quotidian destinations.

On Fridays she would stay at home and receive people who had only heard about her as a source of help and sustenance. It was a powerful shock to me, when I visited her one Friday, that I could barely make it in the door. She lived on the second floor of an apartment house on Fuad al-Awwal Street at one of its most congested, noise-filled intersections; on one corner was a Shell station, and beneath her flat a well-known Greek grocer, Vasilakis, who occupied the whole ground floor. He was always crowded with customers whose waiting cars blocked traffic and produced an almost constant racket of angry, cacophonous honking, overlaid with the sounds of raucous yelling and expostulation. For some reason my aunt was not bothered by this
unholy din, and she conducted herself during rare free moments at home as if she were at a resort. “Like a casino,” she would say of the evening racket; for her a “casino” was not a gambling casino but, inexplicably, a hilltop café of the imagination where it was always calm and cool. Added to the deafening street noise as I tried to enter her building were the cries, even the wails, of dozens and dozens of Palestinians crowded onto the staircase all the way to her flat’s door, the elevator having been angrily switched off by her sulky, scandalized Sudanese doorman. There was the barest semblance of order in this pitching, heaving sea of people: she refused to let in more than one petitioner at a time, with the result that the crowd scarcely diminished in size or impatience in the course of a very long day.

When I finally entered her drawing room I found her calmly sitting on a straight-backed chair without a table or any sort of paper in evidence, listening to a middle-aged woman whose tear-streaked face told a miserable story of poverty and sickness which seemed to spur my aunt to greater efficiency and purpose. “I told you to stop taking those pills,” she said testily; “all they do is to make you drowsy. Do what I say, and I’ll get you another five pounds from the church, if you promise to keep off the pills and start to take in washing on a regular basis.” The woman began to remonstrate, but she was cut off imperiously. “That’s it. Go home and don’t forget to tell your husband to go see Dr. Haddad again this week. I’ll take care of what he prescribes. But tell him to do it.” The woman was waved out, and another one, with two children in tow, entered.

I sat there silently for about two hours as the sad parade continued its relentless course. My aunt occasionally went to the kitchen for some water, but otherwise she sat, imperturbably passing from one desperate case to another dispensing money, medical, and bureaucratic advice, helping to find places for children in schools that she had managed to cajole into accepting these destitute, uncomprehending waifs, jobs for women as personal maids or office helpers, and for men as porters, messengers, nightwatchmen, factory workers, hospital orderlies. I was thirteen and a half at the time and still recall dozens of details, faces, pathetic little speeches, my aunt’s executive tones, but I do not recall ever clearly thinking that all this woeful spectacle was the direct result of a politics and a war that had also affected my aunt and my own family. It
was my first experience of trying to allay the travails of Palestinian identity as mediated by my aunt and informed by the misery and powerlessness of those Palestinian refugees whose situation demanded help, concern, money, and anger.

The overall impression I’ve retained of that time is of an ongoing state of medical emergency. With no visible office or institution to back her, my aunt’s presence to the people whom she voluntarily took on as her charges seemed to me nothing less than Hippocratic; she was a physician alone with her patients, equipped with amazing discipline and a moral mission to help the sick. And so many of these Palestinian refugees seemed to have lost their health along with their country. For them the new Egyptian environment, far from nurturing them, depleted them further, even as both the pre- and postrevolutionary governments proclaimed their support for Palestine, vowing to eliminate the Zionist enemy. I can still hear the radio broadcasts, see the defiant newspaper headlines in Arabic, French, and English declaiming these things to an essentially deaf populace. It was the detail, the lived unhappiness of unhealthy, disoriented people, that counted more to me then, and for that the only remedy was personal commitment and the kind of independence of thought that allowed a tiny middle-aged woman to battle through all sorts of obstacles without losing her will or her certainty. Whatever political ideas she may have had were hardly ever uttered in my presence: they did not seem necessary at the time. What was of central importance was the raw, almost brutal core of Palestinian suffering, which she made it her business to address every morning, noon, and night. She never preached or tried to convert others to her cause: she simply worked unaided and alone, out of her head and directly from her will. Three or four years after she had started her ministrations a shadowy young man appeared as a personal secretary, but he was soon dropped, and she was alone again. No one seemed able to keep up with her.

Her medical partners were Dr. Wadie Baz Haddad, our family doctor, a short, powerfully built, silver-haired man who was originally from Jerusalem but had lived in Shubra, one of Cairo’s poorest sections, ever since he got his medical degree in Beirut. Following his death in August 1948, his place was immediately taken by his son Farid. She also relied on Wadie’s younger brother, Kamil, who owned a pharmacy
across the street and seemed to be able to supply Aunt Nabiha’s Palestinian wards with a considerable amount of free or almost free medicine. Dr. Wadie has never been mentioned in any history of the period, but he played a remarkable role among Cairo’s poor for his astoundingly profound but unsung charitable mission and, according to my mother and Aunt Nabiha, his genius as a diagnostician. He had an affiliation with the CMS Hospital (it was then on the road to Maadi, just past Qasr al Aini, the great medical school and hospital complex operated by the state) and I gathered that through him my aunt was able to get patients admitted for little or no charge. I can still remember his no-nonsense manner as he boiled steel needles and glass hypodermics in a little metal box over a tiny collapsible spirit lamp he carried in his pocket; he always called on us at home when one of us was ill, always dispensed medicine and advice with great speed, leaving without taking even one sip of the coffee or lemonade that was offered him, and always, according to my father, refusing or “forgetting” to submit his bills for payment.

Dr. Haddad was peripatetic and ubiquitous. He could rarely be reached by telephone but, like my aunt, was known to be at home two or three afternoons a week, and since home and clinic were basically one, dozens of people—all of them poor Egyptians—would gather outside his door without appointments, waiting to see him. A rather taciturn man, he never engaged in small talk and made sure that he was never in a place long enough for this to be necessary. His wife, Ida, a gaunt Swedish-German woman, was an early avatar of today’s Jesus freaks, and would use the presence of her husband’s mostly indigent patients as they anxiously waited for their turn inside, as an opportunity to try to talk to them about Mary and Joseph, and their infant son. Frida Kurban, an elderly Lebanese expatriate known to everyone either as Auntie or Miss Frida, who worked as a girl’s matron at a local school, knew Mrs. Haddad quite well, and never tired of telling us about the dotty old Swede’s attempt to convert a lot of poor Shubra (entirely Muslim) residents. She had invited them off the street into the living room, turned out all the lights, and regaled them with a slide show, droning on and on about the Holy Family, salvation, and Christian virtue. Meanwhile the bored and puzzled strangers, grasping the fact that the elderly foreigner was oblivious to them, each lifted a piece of
movable furniture—a vase, a rug, a box—and exited Dr. Haddad’s modest living room. In about an hour, the room was stripped while the good doctor was on his rounds and his wife was giving an inspired sermon.

We were on our first visit to the United States in the late summer of 1948 when my father received a cable informing him of the kind doctor’s death, and asking for money to have him buried. He had left his family totally penniless, Ida was of course ravingly incompetent, and Farid, the eldest son, was in jail at the time for being a Communist. He had just completed medical school when he was picked up, although he was released a few months later. The moment he was able to he became my aunt’s medical adjutant, living in the same unself-consciously committed way as his father, caring not a whit for money or advancement—except that, unlike his father, he was, and remained till his death in prison in late 1959, a profoundly political man. His affinity with my aunt was perfect. She referred Palestinians to him, he treated them without charge, and seemed unshaken and indeed strengthened by the daily sorrow he confronted. Forty years later I discovered that even his Communist party friends considered him to be a saint, as much for his extraordinary service as for his unfailingly even, kind temperament.

During the last of my college years in the mid-1950s I saw quite a lot of Farid (like me a graduate of British colonial schools), but he was aggravatingly parsimonious in speaking about either his politics or his extramedical activities. Palestine never came up in all our conversations over at least a decade. He was perhaps twelve to fifteen years older than I, and had married Ada at a young age, had had two (or perhaps three) sons, and somehow managed to divide his life between domesticity in Heliopolis, where he established his family and a middle-class clinic; his charitable work in the old clinic in Shubra and the CMS Hospital; and his increasingly clandestine politics. When I was about eighteen and a Princeton freshman, oddly combining the appearance of a crew-cut American undergraduate and an upper-bourgeois colonial Arab interested in the Palestinian poor, I recall his pleasant smile when I tried to question him about what his work and political life “meant.” “We must have a cup of coffee together to discuss that,” he said as he headed for the door. We never did meet socially, although as I educated myself gradually in Arab history and politics I constructed a rationale for what
happened to him as a casualty of the prevailing unrest and roiling nationalism of the early Nasser years. He was an activist, committed Communist party man, a doctor carrying on his father’s work, and a partisan for a social and national cause he and I weren’t able to discuss or, except for the facts of our birth, even pronounce.

I had no idea that in 1958, he was increasingly under pressure from his family and mine to give up the Party, which was applying equal pressure on him to do more for the cause, no matter the personal consequences. I was away at graduate school on that late December day in 1959 when he was summoned from his Heliopolis flat for questioning at State Security. Two weeks later, his wife, Ada—disheveled and barely dressed—came screaming into the Heliopolis Anglican Church, breaking up the weekly Arabic service. “They came to the door and told me to pick up Farid at the local police station. I thought they were letting him out, but when I got to the place a man at the desk said that I should come back with three or four men. When I asked why he only said that I needed the men to carry Farid’s coffin.” Too distraught to say more, she was escorted home by a parishioner, while my cousin Yousif, along with three companions, drove to the police station. From there they were led to a desolate graveyard in Abassiya where they were met by an officer with two shirtsleeved soldiers in attendance guarding an open hole with a crude wooden box perched at one end. “You can put the coffin in the ground, but one of you must sign a receipt first. You aren’t allowed to open the box or to ask any questions.” Farid’s bewildered, grieving Palestinian friends did as they were told, whereupon the soldiers quickly shoveled some earth into the hole. “Now you must leave,” the officer curtly said, expressly denying them again the right to open their friend’s coffin.