Out of Place: A Memoir (35 page)

In the late spring the long-awaited new school building was completed. Where the money came from I still do not know, but by the bedraggled, cramped, hand-me-down Shubra standards it turned out to be a lavish, superbly appointed new campus at the desert edge of Maadi, still an exclusive, mostly foreign and upper-class suburb, which I knew from both the club there and of course CSAC, nearer to Maadi’s placid center and the railway station. All of a sudden I realized that we were at the end of a whole era (not that I knew what exactly
that
meant), when sudden, surprising events could and certainly did occur, and when new requirements were expected of us all. I don’t recall thinking of myself very much in individual terms—it still impresses me that our
bonds as a school class, Middle Five One, were based not at all on family or class, which I do recall as positively counting for nothing—but on a collective, if narrowly defined, set of objects, phrases, words even, that circulated as if (for me, at least) in a comfortingly secure orbit. There was, to begin with, the dress code—caps, ties, blazers—which was slowly phased out in Shubra. Then the de rigueur pink-covered “assignment books,” the leather or wooden pencil cases, the various types of fountain pens (no ballpoints then), including a cheap Parker lookalike much used and sold on the streets by noisy vendors (it had “P.Arker” engraved on the clip; Japanese products in those days were the ultimate in derided, risible brands), VC blue copy books. Then at least a dozen English textbooks in subjects like physics, history, and math—books that were as colorless and impersonal as their American equivalents at CSAC had been chatty and narrativized (e.g., “Morton gives Shelley $12.23 in change as his share for the class picnic of 18 students. What if he thought that there were 15 students, and that each should pay a share equivalent to …?”), plus two or three literature books, a Shakespeare play set for that year, a twentieth-century English novel like C. S. Forester’s subliterary
The Commodore
, plus a “classic” nonfiction prose text (Macaulay’s essays), and a selection of what seemed to be dreary academic poetry (poems by Gray and Cowper). Much, if not all, of this was packed in a standard brown leather satchel with two clasps, with the family name (no first names) carefully scratched in by hand in black or blue capitals on the inside main flap.

More exciting were a whole range of swapping and play objects: marbles, including the much-prized agates, penknives (prized but outlawed), Ping-Pong racquets, wristbands, Dinky Toys (I still own the red Humber sedan I won in some preposterously lucky bet over the meaning of “Greenwich Mean Time,” often heard on the BBC and little understood in those days), pocket combs, little vials of locally produced Chabrawichi cologne, rubber bands and key chains, new pencils with shiny caps and clips over their points, sharpeners and rubbers (the English word for American “eraser,” which my father indefatigably admonished me to use), slingshots, little round wire- and paper-covered firework balls (also both prized and outlawed), various pornographic books, badly printed on the vilest, grimiest, most repellent-looking paper, written in a sub-English so graphic and vulgar as to actually
dampen excitement, though we feigned it loudly and obscenely, and grainy fuzzy photographs of men and women copulating with embarrassed smirks on their faces. “Did you get a couple of servants to do this for you, Davidson?” I recall one of us saying to the enterprising boy who, it turned out later, had bought them from a parking garage attendant.

Our collective intellectual world was not particularly competitive, despite the ceaseless official emphasis on grades and on passing and failing. My own performance was highly unmemorable—wayward, erratic, sometimes excellent, normally passable and little more. Years later, when I had become known as a literary critic, one classmate told another, who relayed the comment to me, “Is that the same Said? He was the way we all were; amazing that he turned out like that.” I am still surprised that the actual mental, or intellectual, world we lived in had so little to do with the mind in any serious or academic sense. Like the objects we carried around and traded, our collective language and thought were dominated by a small handful of perceptibly banal systems deriving from comics, film, serial fiction, advertising, and popular lore that was essentially at a street level, by no means influenced by home, religion, or education. The last edifying trace of sensibility and relatively “high” culture in us came, I remember clearly, from two religious films about saintly French women, Bernadette of Lourdes and Joan of Arc, in other words, Jennifer Jones and a crew-cut Ingrid Bergman. I saw the Bernadette film for some reason during its second or third run at the Diana Cinema, which was owned at the time by a Greek family, the Raissys. Its location on the less fashionable end of Emad el Din Street and its generally mediocre appointments made for nothing like the excitement of the Metro Cinema or the Rivoli Cinema, which alone in the Middle East sported the blazingly illuminated theater organ. The Diana’s main distinction was that it was both a drab theater where Om Kulthum delivered her interminably long performances and a place where benefits for good causes could be held (my aunt Nabiha, in her unending attempts to raise money for Palestinian refugees, once took it over for a charity screening of
The Little Colonel
, the first and only Shirley Temple film I ever saw and which I have always since detested for its smarmy good-natured faux-naïf wholesomeness and racism), in addition to showing not-quite-glamorous
Hollywood movies. Between them Joan and Bernadette
à l’americaine
imbued me with considerable but very vague enthusiasm for something ungraspable and sent me eagerly to literary and historical sources, mostly to be found on my parents’ ecumenical bookshelves. I read Franz Werfel’s
Song of Bernadette
and also his
Forty Days of Musa Dagh
, followed by people like Chesterton (or was it Hilaire Belloc?) and Harold Lamb on the Maid of Orleans.

In the fall of 1950, the bus came to pick us up earlier than usual, for Maadi, which lay in the heart of Cairo, was twice as far away as Shubra. Our first distant sight of the new school, still in the process of construction, filled all of us with considerable hope. Three large buildings were complete and ready for us that October. They were Modernist rectangular structures, all of them on struts with, in the case of our class building, two long rows of windows, one above the other. Across the way was a dining hall and gymnasium, with a building for boarders, an infirmary, and masters’ quarters at right angles to it; attached to the class building was a square-shaped annex that housed the administration. The grounds were vast, with several playing and track fields, tennis courts, and, because the school abutted on the desert, a well-appointed stable with grooms and a riding ring. All in all it was by far the handsomest school I or it seemed anyone else had been in. We disembarked from the bus feeling that we were at a new beginning.

It took us no more than five minutes to realize that the new school might not be an improvement after all. Beady-eyed, bow-tied, and bald Mr. Griffiths was now both our “additional maths” teacher in trigonometry, calculus, and solid geometry, as well as acting headmaster. He was to be my bête noire whose dogged condemnation stayed with me long after I left VC.

The new place both was grandiose and seemed to be making a pompous, rather disdainful statement as a British institution, and this increased our sense of collective alienation and hostility. There were other changes. Without the catalyzing force of George Kardouche, who had disappeared to the English School in Heliopolis, we tended to dissolve into divisive cliques.

Our new form and English teacher, Mr. Lowe, was a blustering, weak, and incompetent teacher. The new classrooms had a little storeroom behind the blackboard, where he kept his chalk, exercise books,
and other supplies. The door, to the blackboard’s left, had a lock on it, and just underneath the blackboard a small sliding window gave on to the classroom. It was my idea to trap him inside, inscribe “Take a look, 5 piasters” on the blackboard above the window, and let the students stand by to watch our hapless Englishman in captivity, “in his natural state,” I put it as I barked the show. A prefect lured in by Lowe’s bellowing and our raised voices quickly put an end to the escapade. I was duly reported to Griffiths, who glowered at me in math class with a distinctly unpleasant gleam in his eye. “A lot of disturbance here yesterday,” he said, looking at me but addressing the class as a whole. Weeks later Griffiths was to tell my parents with some regret, not to say bitterness, that my intelligence always inhibited him from sacking me. Ironic that a teacher should feel that a bright student was an impediment to his authority.

The compactness of the Shubra grounds, which kept us in touch with other classes, had been replaced with the vastness of our new grounds. Masters took to patrolling the corridors, something impossible to do in Shubra with its decentralized disorder, and it gradually came to appear to me that the new campus was designed more for controlled surveillance than for utility or education. It took only about a month at the new school for me to feel constantly uneasy: the older boys encroached on us in the corridor, attacking, insulting, pushing. One, an immense tub of flesh weighing at least three hundred pounds, Billy Fawzi, took a great irrational dislike to me, and I spent my time dodging him. But there was no avoiding him completely, as he could block an entire corridor with his great bulk. Once he took hold of my neck in one of his huge hands and said in Arabic, “Said, I’ve been watching you. Be careful. Don’t try to be clever with me. And [in English] don’t be cheeky,” cleverness and cheekiness being among the most lethal sins with which not only masters but older (and bigger) boys charged us.

Captain Billy was only the worst of the older boys who threatened and tormented me; most of the others were not even names to me, but they were dreaded forces, blotchy-skinned, overweight, and entirely Arabic-speaking. For some reason I was singled out by this group, which had replaced the departed Shalhoub as the school’s unofficial disciplinarians, with the masters’ obvious complaisance. I was known to be quick-witted, generally in trouble, and a decent student, so during
school exams I routinely found myself surrounded by some of these Brobdingnagian creatures, who would then hand me their English papers to write for them while I was frantically trying to do my own. The carrot was “Said, be a decent fellow”; the much more effective cudgel was “Do it or I’ll fuck your mother.” So I always did their exams. Cowardice and compliance were a way of life in this case.

At Christmas that year it was decided that my mother and I should take the train together to Upper Egypt for a few days’ sightseeing in the Valley of the Kings, Karnak, and other sites, whose silence and awful brooding emptiness put me off ancient Egypt forever. Our four or five days were idyllic, a sort of languid respite from the hurly-burly of school and the great city, and it would be the last time I had an extended period of time alone with my mother. We read to each other, suspended without tension or argument in the long winter afternoons and evenings in the salons of the Cataract Hotel without schedules or deadlines or duties to fulfill. She was now beginning to be more aware of her social gifts, and the restful, nourishing, uncomplicated times I enjoyed with her were rather too often vitiated by her impulse to be gregarious, or at least to spend time with American acquaintances staying at the same hotel. I remember my irritation and jealousy but I also cherish the abstraction of those days as furnishing me with a lifetime memory—never equaled nor superseded—of sublime disengagement from the exertions of daily life at VC, which were soon to do me in and drive me away from home literally forever.

Luxor and Aswan: the brief respite before an awful tempest. On a Thursday afternoon early in February Mr. Lowe petitioned us to take out our Shakespeares. We set up a chorus of “Scott instead.” He decided to take a stand on Shakespeare and in unwonted aggressive pursuit of his aim he waded into the front row of desks, flailing at his resistant charges, petulantly asserting a will entirely disconnected from his supposed object, which was to get us to read Shakespeare sonnets. Surrounded on all sides by an aroused, insurrectionary class, Lowe was like Samson in the Philistine temple, beset by blows, unable to see whom he was hitting, how (if at all) he was progressing. Suddenly, he lurched forward, encircling the boy nearest him with his oversize arms. Suddenly I found myself trapped in his sweaty embrace, with rivulets of perspiration pouring down his reddened face, and his great obese body pulling me down so that he lay on top of me. “I have you now, Said,”
he sputtered, “and I’m going to teach you a lesson.” He tried to straighten his arms to beat me but he was quickly set upon by three or four students who held on to him shouting frenzied Arab curses. “Stop it,” he yelled, “stop it and let go of me this instant.” My rescuers drew back, stunned by this astonishing assertion of his flawed authority. As I scrambled free he grabbed me again, marched me firmly to the door, and ejected me from the class, slamming the door shut.

I caught a glimpse of Griffiths staring at me from his office door thirty meters away, but he said and did nothing but look at me expressionlessly. At the start of the break during our math class the next morning, Griffiths told us to remain seated. “Now, Said,” he said casually to me in the second row, “I hear that you were misbehaving yesterday afternoon. That’s true, isn’t it?” Having seen me posted outside the class, he knew it was true. I said nothing. “WHY DON’T YOU ANSWER, BOY?” he suddenly screamed at me, losing control of himself for the first time in our presence. “Yes, sir,” I responded noncommittally. “Well, we can’t have any of that here. Can’t have it.” Again noncommittally: “No, sir.” To which, very matter-of-factly he said, “You’d better leave then.” Not knowing quite what he had in mind I said, “Leave, sir? Now, sir?” “Just leave, Said. I don’t care where you go. Just leave. Now.”

I proceeded deliberately, with the precision of shocked surprise and shivering uncertainty, to pack my tattered satchel, while everyone sat in a frigid, immobilized silence. I looked sideways at my friend Hamdollah, who lowered his eyes in embarrassment. Isolated, pinpointed, transfixed, I had suddenly stepped outside every circle I had once inhabited. No longer welcome at school, frightened to go home, with no money in my pockets, no prospects for the immediate future except a rail ticket, I somehow managed to walk out of the class feeling strangely invisible, while Griffiths sat impassively at his desk waiting for me to be gone. I do not recollect much of my three-kilometer walk to the railway station, except for crossing the canals with extreme deliberation, idly tossing a pebble or two at their dark algae-colored surface, then moving on to the next canal to do much the same thing all over again. It took me till about one-thirty p.m. to get home, dawdling through Bab el Louk, around Midan Ismailiya, across the Kasr el Nil bridge, down past the Moorish Gardens and the Gezira Club’s racecourse, past the little Fish Garden, a five-kilometer trudge from the
train station during which I found myself deliberately not thinking of what was about to happen. I experienced a floating, literally utopian sensation of not being there, of being disembodied, relieved of all my customary encumbrances, obligations, restraints. I had never felt quite so dangerously free and undirected as I did then; after years of timetables, chores, errands, assignments, I was simply walking in the direction of home, with no purpose except that at some point I knew I would have to end up there.