Out of Place: A Memoir (43 page)

Munir Nassar was a resident in cardiology at the time, and one late afternoon, just after the local excision for biopsy and before the operation, he and I stood together next to our Dhour house, to one side of the blossoming cherry tree, as he solemnly explained the nature of melanoma and the likely sequence of events. I wanted confirmation of the diagnosis, which I was duly given, but I also wanted to know from Munir whether this was going to be my father’s end. I was then deep in the study of Conrad, Vico, and Heidegger, among other gloomy and severe writers who have since remained a strong presence in my intellectual work, but I found myself astonishingly vulnerable to the dire news of my father’s operation, radiation treatment, and the possible complications of all this. Propelled by the same morbid curiosity that I felt had its beginnings in the long hours spent as a ten-year-old peering into the glass cases at Cairo’s Agricultural Museum that showed detailed wax reproductions of disfiguring diseases like elephantiasis, bilharzia, and yaws, I finally asked Munir whether after all this my
father had a chance of survival. He didn’t answer. “But will he die?” I persisted, to which, his voice lowered and his face obscured by the quickly descending darkness, Munir answered very slowly, “Probably.”

In 1942 and 1948 I had been disquieted by but mercifully only half aware of the gravity of my father’s illnesses. I had no comprehension of the facts of death, nor even of prolonged, debilitating physical illness then. During both those earlier incidents I recalled watching my father as if from a protected distance, apprehensive but detached. Now I was able in a series of imagined flashes to see his body being taken over by a dreadful, creeping invasion of malignant cells, his organs slowly devoured, his brain, eyes, ears, and throat torn asunder by this dreadful, almost miasmic, affliction. It was as if the carefully constructed supports maintaining and nourishing my life were being suddenly knocked away, leaving me standing in a very dark void. What I felt more than anything else was that my direct physical connection to my father was in danger of complete rupture, leaving me unprotected and vulnerable, despite my dislike of the demanding and hectoring presence he so often embodied. What would happen to me without him? What would replace that amalgam of confident power and indestructible will to which I had become irrevocably attached, and on which I realized I had unconsciously been drawing?

Why at this moment, when it might have been possible to glimpse the potential for liberation, why did I see my father’s death as so terrible, so undesired a calamity? “But there is a chance that he will survive the operation and live for some time, isn’t there?” I nearly pleaded with Munir. After a considerable pause he said something like “I see what you mean: live past the operation for some time. Yes of course. But melanoma is very treacherous, the worst of cancers, so the long-term prognosis has to be”—he paused again—“has to be poor.” I quickly turned away from him and slowly mounted the stairs to our dark, deserted house, hoping that someone would soon turn up to alleviate my solitary despondency.

Later I realized that the cancer invasion was the first irreversible intervention in what I had thought, despite the hard time I had had in its midst, was my family’s inviolable privacy. My three older sisters responded similarly. “It’s the creeping horror of the disease,” Rosy once said to me with great anguish. On hearing, when she arrived at
the airport, that our father’s life was in danger, Joyce collapsed in a fit of shattering anxiety. Jean was the only one of us who seemed able to steel herself: during our father’s three months in hospital she stayed constantly by his side, showing an extraordinary strength, which I simply did not have.

His subsequent operation for the removal of lymph nodes and the rest of the melanoma was overshadowed in drama and suffering by what happened afterward. My father recovered from the operation slowly enough, and for a week seemed a little stronger each day. The bellwether of his progress was a cheery little barber who would show up at around ten each morning. If my father was doing well he would allow himself to be shaved; if not, the barber would bounce away without a word. As is the custom in the Arab world, when someone is in hospital members of the family are there from morning till night. The constant stream of visitors would come to show solidarity with the family, rarely to visit the patient, in return for which they would get a chocolate or biscuits. We were living in Dhour but would arrive at the hospital in Beirut at about nine every morning and stay till evening. Because his condition was so grave, my father required twenty-four-hour nursing care, all of it delivered by elderly Armenian spinsters, one of whom, Miss Arevian, became a close family friend until my father’s death ten years later.

During the summer of 1961 he seemed to have died about half a dozen times. On those occasions we would leave him at about eight at night and be awakened in Dhour by a phone call at three the next morning: “Come immediately,” a voice would say, “he’s very near the end.” We would bundle ourselves in a taxi and arrive at the hospital near dawn to find him in shock or in a coma. He seemed to have attracted every complication imaginable. First it was a murderous urinary tract infection; then he would miraculously recover, only to fall to a massive stomach hemorrhage. Then two days later he’d be sitting up being shaved by the little barber, and chatting away. On these occasions an enormous sense of freedom would allow me to go off to the beach, or even a movie, before saying good night to him and returning to Dhour. Two days later, another four o’clock phone call, and this time when I arrived I’d hear a doctor say that for four minutes my father had been clinically dead—his heart had simply stopped beating. A young
intern, Alex Zacharia, happened to be near his room, rushed in, and quickly revived him, but the damage to his system had been grave; for a week he lingered between extinction and a restless, half-conscious state.

Two days more of this and once again he’d be being shaved as if nothing had happened. His autocratic manner returned. “You must go to that lunch given by Wadia Makdisi,” he said sharply to me one day. “You’ll be my representative,” he added by way of justification. I didn’t go, and having found out about my absence from my mother, he coldshouldered me for a day from his bed: for at least two weeks he kept returning to the subject, dwelling on my infraction as if I had misbehaved or defied him, me a twenty-five-year-old child, he a stern parent. He had developed an insistent way of coming back repeatedly to a subject, reiterating exactly the same questions and comments, until, a mysterious limit having been reached, he stopped as if satisfied that he (or the situation) had persisted as long as was necessary.
“Khalas,”
that’s it; it’s over, he would say, convinced that he had taken care of the problem to his satisfaction. Later during his illness when one of my sisters developed symptoms of acute psychological depression, he kept asking, “But why does she do this? Haven’t we been good parents to her?” He would rephrase such questions over and over for five years as she went through one crisis after another, one institution after another, with little improvement. My father’s chronic—and by now legendary—difficulty with unfamiliar words (“feeta beta” for Phi Beta Kappa, “Rutjers” for Rutgers, etc.) foundered spectacularly on the word “psychiatrist,” which emerged as “psypsy” or “psspss” or “qiatrist” or “something-trist,” but his questions suddenly stopped when he considered her case settled and she seemed to be better:
“Khalas,”
he said to me,
“irtahna,”
we were able to rest.

The complications of his illness continued through August. More stomach problems, more urinary tract infections, more consternation on the floor, more postmidnight calls, more shock, more hanging on by our collective fingernails. A date with my draft board for a physical examination had been postponed three times since the Berlin Wall crisis of 1960, and they now became unexpectedly obdurate, granting me no more extensions. So I dutifully prepared to leave at the end of August. Miraculously, my father seemed clear of most of his problems,
though still weak from his ordeals of the past eight weeks. I remember returning to Dhour on the evening before my very early morning departure, packing my bags, collecting a few items of dried fruit and nuts from the town, and going to bed at around eleven, after an evening spent with the Nassars. Dr. Faiz, the Colonel, was there, and when I said something about being assured enough of my father’s stable condition to travel, he said touchingly, with a tremor in his very halting voice, “When he was all alone, in shock, last week, I went into his room for a moment, prostrated myself on the floor like this”—he lifted his arms very slowly above his head and then brought them down slowly—“praying to the Almighty to save Wadie. I think my prayers were answered,” he concluded, sinking back into the glacial silence of his last years.

At three on the morning of my departure, having once again been woken by a call summoning us to the hospital, we rushed to Beirut. I remember standing in front of my open suitcase, stupefied and exhausted by the ups and downs of my father’s illness, unable to do more than stare at the bag on the floor, uncertain whether to leave or stay. Leila, Munir Nassar’s wife and a trained nurse, came to my rescue, prodding me into finishing my preparations for travel, helping me load my books and suitcase into the car, urging me to stop by the hospital only as a brief interim visit on my way to the airport. It was an exceptionally brilliant, cool night, the sky ablaze with thousands of distant pinpricks of light, the dark Dhour setting indifferent to our problems and quandaries. We all experienced a sort of anesthetized silence; there seemed no end to this appalling series of crises assaulting us and rendering us impotent except to rush to and from the hospital, in whose dreaded “Tapline” unit (named for the Trans Arabia Pipeline company that had endowed and air-conditioned that small number of rooms) my father fought, succumbed for a time, then fought back again. He was semicomatose and did not recognize me when I entered. Several of his doctors—he had become a celebrated case for the sheer, bewildering number of his rarely encountered complications—had been by to see him: “Your father will certainly make the literature,” one of them told me with esteem.

Numbly I left for the airport: my only contribution to the slough of busy despond was to convince my mother to summon a distinguished
British surgeon, Sir Rodney Maingott, from London for emergency consultation. There was some resistance to the idea from a couple of the more hubristic local physicians (“He’ll come in a couple of days, your father as usual would have recovered, and once again the White Man will be credited over the native”), but my mother and I were unyielding. Later that morning, while I was flying over Europe, Maingott agreed to fly out; his fee was a flat one thousand guineas in cash plus all expenses. Just as had been expected, by the time he got to Beirut thirty-six hours later, my father had already recovered, and the great physician enjoyed a sunny weekend basking in the luxury of the fabled Hotel St. Georges. From Cambridge I followed my father’s almost total healing with an increasing fear that I too was infected with malignancies and that I too would suffer as he had. Various dermal excrescences and lumps were self-diagnosed symptoms that the Harvard Health Service doctors routinely dismissed with marked exasperation. The overpowering depth of the link I felt to my father mystified me.

Weakened, his limbs (especially his legs) extremely thin, his face somewhat shrunken, his balance quite shaky, my father decided that having battled through traumas he was not expected to survive, he would return to smoking cigarettes, cigars, and pipes, play even more bridge, and enjoy luxurious travel. I was eager for him to be well again so that we could return to the familiar terrain of dominance and subterranean resistance where “Edward” would be hectored and bullied, while my other diffuse and generally hidden self bided its time and sought avenues of its own over which my father’s commanding presence could cast no great shadow. Yet I also knew that, however unpleasant, his force and sheer presence had provided me with an internalized framework in a world of volatile change and turbulent upheaval, and that I could no longer rely directly on him for that sort of support. The gravity of his illness acted as an early announcement of my father’s and my own mortality and at the same time signaled to me that the Middle Eastern domain he had carved out for us as a home, a shelter, an abode of sorts, with its main points tied to Cairo, Dhour, and Palestine, was similarly threatened with discontinuity and evanescence. Twenty years after his death, when I found myself in the course of a psychoanalytic session concentrating on my complaints about my father’s attitude toward me, I experienced a kind of epiphany. I found
myself shedding tears of sorrow and regret for both of us, and for the years of smoldering conflict in which his domineering truculence and inability to articulate any feeling at all combined with my self-pity and defensiveness kept us so far apart. I was overcome with emotion because I could suddenly see how all those years he had struggled to express himself in a way that both by temperament and background he was not equipped to do. Perhaps, for oedipal reasons, I had blocked him, and perhaps my mother with her skill at manipulating ambivalence had undermined him. But whether this was true or not, the gap between my father and me was sealed with a longstanding silence, and it was this in my therapist’s office that I confronted with tears, allowing me a redemptive view of him for all his awkwardness and the rough but perceptible care that he had shown his only son.

My father’s long decline over the last ten years of his life marked the end of a period in our Lebanese experience as the seismic shifts rocking the Middle East began to register on our microcosm in Dhour, irrevocably altering the world we lived in. During the early period of the Egyptian revolution (July 1952) we were still resident in Cairo, but except for my father, who bided his time, we were all infected with the spirit and rhetoric of what Gamal Abdel Nasser said he was doing for his people. My mother especially became an ardent supporter of his nationalism; yet it was in Dhour, amid the humdrumly conventional visits she courted and paid, that she gave vent to her enthusiasm, with a flamboyance and fervor that alarmed her listeners. Unbeknownst to us, the political alignments in Lebanon—sectarian, byzantine, and often invisible—were beginning to respond to Nasser’s stature as Arab superperson, and although we did not realize it, to our little Christian circle in Dhour, he began to seem like an emanation from not Cairo but Mecca, a pan-Islamist with evil designs not only on Israeli Jews but on Christian Lebanese.