After the Suez War in 1956, Victoria College was nationalized and was renamed Victory College. I had no further connection with it until 1989, when on a lecturing visit to Egypt with my family I thought it might be fun to show them the school that had once expelled me. We went up to Maadi on a Friday morning in mid-March and drove to the school following the old bus route. I was discontented to discover that what had been a sort of boundary between the school and the desert, beyond which the empty sand stretched for miles, had become a vast expanse of tenements, crowded with people, hanging laundry, cars, buses, and animals. The school itself was closed for the Friday holiday, but I persuaded the gatekeeper to let us in anyway. As we stood in my old classroom, which seemed a good deal smaller than I remembered, I pointed out my desk, the teacher’s platform from which Griffiths had expelled me, and the little room where we had imprisoned poor old Mr. Lowe.
At that moment a very angry-looking woman wearing a head covering and Islamic-style dress swept into the room demanding to know what we were doing. I tried to explain the circumstances (“Use your charm,” said my daughter, Najla) but to no avail. We were trespassers, and as school director she was demanding that we leave immediately. She refused my extended hand, staring at us with a surfeit of nationalist hostility and unbending zeal as we shuffled out, rather cowed by her evident outrage. The British Eton in Egypt had now become a new kind of privileged Islamic sanctuary from which thirty-eight years later I was once again being expelled.
IX
IN EARLY SEPTEMBER 1991, EXACTLY FORTY YEARS AFTER I left the middle east for the United States, I was in London for a seminar I had convened of Palestinian intellectuals and activists on the eve of the Madrid Peace Conference. After the Gulf War and the Palestinian leadership’s fatal stand alongside Saddam Hussein we were in a very weak negotiating position. The idea of the conference was to try to articulate a common set of themes that would enhance the course of our progress toward self-determination as a people. We came from all over the dispersed Palestinian world—the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinian diaspora in various Arab countries, Europe and North America. What transpired during the seminar was a terrible disappointment: the endless repetition of well-known arguments, our inability to fix on a collective goal, the apparent desire to listen only to ourselves. In short, nothing came of it except an eerie premonition of the Palestinian failure at Oslo.
Midway through the debate, during one of the scheduled breaks, I phoned Mariam, my wife, in New York to ask her if the results of the blood test I had taken for my annual physical had been satisfactory. Cholesterol was what had concerned me, and no, she said, everything was fine on that front, but she added with some hesitation, “Charles Hazzi [our family doctor and friend] would like to speak to you when you get back.” Something in her voice suggested to me that all was not well, so I immediately rang Charles at his office. “Nothing to get excited about,” he said, “we’ll talk in New York.” His repeated refusals to tell me what was wrong finally provoked me to impatience. “You must tell me, Charles. I’m not a child, and I have a right to know.” With a whole set of demurrals—it’s not serious, a hematologist can very easily take care of you, it’s chronic after all—he told me that I had chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), although it took me a week to fully absorb the initial impact of the diagnosis. I was asymptomatic but needed the sophisticated diagnostic techniques available at a big New York cancer center to confirm the original finding. It took me another month to understand how thoroughly I was shaken by this “sword of Damocles,” as one volubly callous doctor called it, hanging over me, and a further six months to find the extraordinary doctor, Kanti Rai, under whose care I have been since June 1992.
A month after I was diagnosed I discovered myself in the middle of a letter I was writing my mother, who had been dead for a year and a half. Ever since I left Cairo in 1951 it was a habit we had kept up: somehow the urge to communicate with her overcame the factual reality of her death, which in mid-sentence stopped my fanciful urge, leaving me slightly disoriented, even embarrassed. A vague narrative impulse seemed to be stirring inside me, but I was too caught up in the anxieties and nervousness of my life with CLL to pay it much notice. During that period in 1993 I contemplated several changes in my life, which I realized without any perceptible fear would be shorter and more difficult now. I thought about moving to Boston to return to a place I had lived in and enjoyed when I was a student, but I soon admitted to myself that because it was a quiet town, compared to New York, I had been thinking regressively about finding a place to die in. I gave up the idea.
So many returns, attempts to go back to bits of life, or people who were no longer there: these constituted a steady response to the increasing rigors of my illness. In 1992 I went with my wife and children to Palestine, for my first visit in forty-five years; it was their first visit ever. In July 1993 I went on my own to Cairo, making it a point in the middle of a journalistic mission to visit old haunts. All this time I was being monitored, without treatment, by Dr. Rai, who occasionally reminded me that I would at some point require chemotherapy. By the time I began treatment in March 1994 I realized that I had at least entered, if not the final phase of my life, then the period—like Adam and Eve leaving the garden—from which there would be no return to my old life. In May 1994 I began work on this book.
These details are important as a way of explaining to myself and to my reader how the time of this book is intimately tied to the time, phases, ups and downs, variations in my illness. As I grew weaker, the number of infections and bouts of side effects increased, the more this book was my way of constructing something in prose while in my physical and emotional life I grappled with anxieties and pains of degeneration. Both tasks resolved themselves into details: to write is to get from word to word, to suffer illness is to go through the infinitesimal steps that take you through from one state to another. And whereas with other sorts of work that I did—essays, lectures, teaching, journalism—I was going across the illness, punctuating it almost forcibly with deadlines and cycles of beginning-middle-and-end, with this memoir I was borne along by the episodes of treatment, hospital stays, physical pain and mental anguish, letting those dictate how and when I could write, for how long and where. Periods of travel were often productive, since I carried my hand-written manuscript with me wherever I went and took advantage of every hotel room or friend’s house I stayed in. I was therefore rarely in a hurry to get a section done, though I had a precise idea of what I planned to put in it. Curiously, the writing of this memoir and the phases of my illness share exactly the same time, although most traces of the latter have been effaced in this story of my early life. This record of a life and ongoing course of a disease (for which I have known from the beginning no cure exists) are one and the same, it could be said, the same but deliberately different.
And the more this relationship developed, the more important it became to me, the more also my memory—unaided by anything except concentrated reflection on and archaeological prying into a very distant and essentially irrecoverable past—seemed hospitable and generous to my often importunate forays. Despite the travail of disease and the restrictions imposed on me by my having left the places of my youth, I can say with the poet, “nor in this bower, / This little lime-tree bower, have I not mark’d / Much that has soothed me.” There had been a time until the early sixties when I simply could not bear to think about my past, especially Cairo and Jerusalem, which for two sets of different reasons were no longer accessible. The latter had been replaced by Israel; the former, by one of those cruel coincidences, was closed to me for legal reasons. Unable to visit Egypt for the fifteen years between 1960 and 1975, I rationed early memories of my life there (considerably chopped up, full of atmospherics that conveyed a sense of warmth and comfort by contrast with the harsh alienation I felt in my New York life) as a way of falling asleep, an activity that has grown more difficult with time, time that has also dissolved the aura of happiness around my early
life and let it emerge as a more complicated and difficult period; to grasp it I realized I would have to be sharply alert, awake, avoiding dreamy somnolence. I’ve thought in fact that this book in some fundamental way is all about sleeplessness, all about the silence of wakefulness and, in my case, the need for conscious recollection and articulation that have been a substitute for sleep. Not just for sleep but for holidays and relaxation, all that passes for middle- and upper-class “leisure,” on which, about ten years ago, I unconsciously turned my back. As one of the main responses to my illness I found in this book a new kind of challenge—not just a new kind of wakefulness but a project about as far from my professional and political life as it was possible for me to go.
The underlying motifs for me have been the emergence of a second self buried for a very long time beneath a surface of often expertly acquired and wielded social characteristics belonging to the self my parents tried to construct, the “Edward” I speak of intermittently, and how an extraordinarily increasing number of departures have unsettled my life from its earliest beginnings. To me, nothing more painful and paradoxically sought after characterizes my life than the many displacements from countries, cities, abodes, languages, environments that have kept me in motion all these years. Thirteen years ago I wrote in After the Last Sky that when I travel I always take too much with me, and that even a trip downtown requires the packing of a briefcase stocked with items disproportionately larger in size and number than the actual period of the trip. Analyzing this, I concluded that I had a secret but ineradicable fear of not returning. What I’ve since discovered is that despite this fear I fabricate occasions for departure, thus giving rise to the fear voluntarily. The two seem absolutely necessary to my rhythm of life and have intensified dramatically during the period I’ve been ill. I say to myself: if you don’t take this trip, don’t prove your mobility and indulge your fear of being lost, don’t override the normal rhythms of domestic life now, you certainly will not be able to do it in the near future. I also experience the anxious moodiness of travel (la mélancolie des paquebots, as Flaubert calls it, Bahnhofsstimmung in German) along with envy for those who stay behind, whom I see on my return, their faces unshadowed by dislocation or what seems to be enforced mobility, happy with their families, draped in a comfortable suit and raincoat, there for all to see. Something about the invisibility of the departed, his being missing and perhaps missed, in addition to the intense, repetitious, and predictable sense of banishment that takes you away from all that you know and can take comfort in, makes you feel the need to leave because of some prior but self-created logic, and a sense of rapture. In all cases, though, the great fear is that departure is the state of being abandoned, even though it is you who leave.
In the summer of 1951 I left Egypt and spent two weeks in Lebanon, three weeks in Paris and London, and one week on the Nieuw Amsterdam from Southampton to New York, for the rest of my schooling in the United States. This included high school then undergraduate and graduate degrees, a total of eleven years, after which I remained until the present. There is no doubt that what made this whole protracted experience of separation and the return during the summers agonizing was my complicated relationship to my mother, who never ceased to remind me that my leaving her was the most unnatural (“Everyone else has their children next to them”) and yet tragically necessary of fates. Each year the late-summer return to the United States opened old wounds afresh and made me reexperience my separation from her as if for the first time—incurably sad, desperately backward-looking, disappointed and unhappy in the present. The only relief was our anguished yet chatty letters. I still find myself reliving aspects of the experience today, the sense that I’d rather be somewhere else—defined as closer to her, authorized by her, enveloped in her special maternal love, infinitely forgiving, sacrificing, giving—because being here was not being where I/we had wanted to be, here being defined as a place of exile, removal, unwilling dislocation. Yet as always there was something conditional about her wanting me with her, for not only was I to conform to her ideas about me, but I was to be for her while she might or might not, depending on her mood, be for me.
After I returned, anticlimactically, to Victoria College for the balance of the 1950–51 school year, I was, as Griffiths was immediately at pains to point out, to be on probation. In effect this seemed to mean that every master was alerted to my threatened status and regularly reminded me just as I was becoming restive that I “had better remember and behave.” In this uncomfortable situation I was constantly on tenterhooks, bullied, mocked, or shunned by some of my classmates; only Mostapha Hamdollah, Billy Abdel Malik, and Andy Sharon seemed to behave as before, which limited me to a tight orbit of familiars, isolated and ill at ease. During this period I found myself seeking out my mother even more than before, and she, with that preternatural way she had of sensing and indeed reading my mood, would show me the kind of tenderness and intimacy I desperately needed.
One culminating event at VC that spring brought us closer together. First there were the Furtwängler concerts, which my father, who averred that he only liked “concertos” (not offered by the Berlin Philharmonic), joined us for with restrained enthusiasm. I remember turning to or nudging my mother during a favorite passage in the slow movement of the Beethoven Fifth and later in the bridge to the last movement, feeling again that special blend of intimacy and comprehension that only she could give me, especially while I was in a threatening limbo at school as a semi-outcast. The day after the Sunday concert, during lunch break at school, a few of us gathered on the fringes of the main playing-field area to take turns heaving a shot put, marking off each try, soberly trying to arrive at a ranking of the six classmates taking part. As I reached down to take my turn, three of the senior Lower Six boys led by Gilbert Davidson, as noisy and bullyish as his younger brother Arthur was quiet and understated, demanded that he be allowed to throw the shot. “No,” I said firmly, “it’s my turn now. Wait till I’ve thrown it.” “You silly fucker, give it to me right away,” he replied, his ruddy face quite apoplectic with rage as he lurched at me trying to grab the heavy object in my left hand. Missing it entirely, Davidson’s hand locked into the front of my shirt, which in his violent sweeping gesture he ripped open, popping buttons, tearing fabric, and unbalancing me with the sudden angry violence of his intervention. Teetering, I dropped the shot, turning toward him at the moment he took a huge swing at my head and missed me entirely in his by now uncontrollable rage. With what I remember as the coolest deliberation, I put all my strength behind a fist that landed on his nose, producing an alarmingly red stream of blood. Falling on his back, immediately surrounded and propped up by his mates, he threatened to kill me and my mother the moment he could get up. I was hurried away by my classmates, and was saved by the class bell.
Later that afternoon I was required to pay a visit to the infirmary for the purpose of a medical report on the incident written by the elderly Scottish nurse, whose sole comment to me after looking at my hand was “You have a fist like a lump of iron.” Davidson in the meantime was taken home, reappearing a week later with all sorts of ugly threats, which in my immense unease I took quite seriously. Griffiths said something disparaging and dismissive to me about being quite hopeless—“There’s always trouble where you are, Said, isn’t there?” No disciplinary action was taken. But for a month after the incident I confined myself to home and mother, so convinced was I that Davidson would either kill me himself or get some toughs to do it for him.
The memory of my mother’s tenderness during those last weeks in Cairo remains exceptionally strong, and was a source of solace during my first years in the United States. Through her I felt encouraged in what our Cairo environment had no conception of, namely books and music that took me way beyond both the inane prescriptions of school and the fluttery triviality of our social life. She had given me a few Russian novels to read and in them during my weeks of seclusion I discovered a turbulent but ultimately self-sufficient wo
rld, a bulwark against the anxieties of daily reality. As I read The Brothers Karamazov I felt I had found an elaboration of the family dispute between my father, his nephew, and my aunt, now entering its terminal phase of almost daily incidents, recriminations, shouting scenes, and disputes both with and about employees. I also became aware of how despite the cordiality of our friendships with the Shami circle into which we had grown, a gentle but noticeable mockery of my father crept into many of the comments made by them to and about him—his unrelenting use of English (my mother had become fluent in French and chatted up Emma Fahoum and Reine Diab famously in such phrases as “ma chère,” “j’étais etonnée,” and so forth), his unbending concentration on his business, his penchant for American foods like apple pie and pancakes, which they found too gross for words, his rather sporty dress, including on holidays old shirts and frayed trouser cuffs.
Thinking back to that last period in Cairo, I recall only the sense of comfort and pleasure I derived from my mother’s ministrations; she was obviously thinking of my impending departure, trying to make of those last days something very special for both of us, while I, not really imagining the terrible rupture that was to come, enjoyed the time as a liberation from the hectic schedule I had once followed. No more Tewfiq Effendi, no more Fouad Etayim, riding was dropped, piano lessons given up, exercises at Mourad’s gymnasium terminated. Coming back from school in the late afternoon I’d often find her sitting on the terrace overlooking the Fish Garden, and, inviting me to sit beside her with a glass of rosewater–flavored lemonade, she would encircle me with her arm and reminisce about the old days, how “Edwardo Bianco” had been such a remarkably precocious boy, and how I was what she lived for. We listened to the Beethoven symphonies, particularly the Ninth, which became the piece that meant the most to us. I remember being confused about the nature of her relationship to my father, but also being pacified that she always referred to him as “Daddy,” the two of us using the same name for husband and father. All this may have been her way of trying to win me back from America before I went, her way of reclaiming me from my father’s plans, which when he sent me to the United States she always disagreed with and rued. But these afternoons had the effect of creating an image of an inviolate union between us, which would have, on the whole, shattering results for my later life as a man trying to establish a relationship of developing, growing, maturing love with other women. It was not so much that my mother had usurped a place in my life to which she was not entitled, but that she managed to have access to it for the rest of her life and, I often feel, after it.