Out of Place: A Memoir (20 page)

As the autumn wore on in Jerusalem we were thrust more and more on our family, a narrow circle of cousins and uncles and aunts. We paid one visit to my uncle Munir Musa’s new house in Jaffa, where he had gone after Safad; it was on a bleak sandy street and had none of the charm and mystery of the cavernous Safad residence I had found so entertaining, and as recent arrivals he and his family seemed to have no friends nearby. In Jerusalem we saw a great deal of Uncle Shafeec Mansour, my father’s second cousin, and Auntie Lore, a handsome Stuttgartian who spoke an alarmingly fluent Arabic with a strong German inflection, together with their children, Nabeel and Erica Randa, roughly my age and Rosy’s. Shafeec was director of the YMCA’s Boys’ Department, and Lore worked as his assistant: he was always full of enthusiasm for what he did, for the Y, which was a few blocks from our house, and for his work running sports, handicraft, language, and home economics programs.

More than the church, which I really disliked for its somber and incomprehensible services, the Y represented the great social institution of my last years in Jerusalem. It had an indoor pool, tennis courts, and a magnificent carillon in the tower, all of which I unconsciously assumed belonged to “us.” Everyone in my family had had some connection with the Y, either as participants in its programs, users of its facilities (I can still see my cousin George playing tennis there one sunny afternoon), or members of its board. But the Y became part of Israeli Jerusalem and Uncle Shafeec and his family, who had gone to the States on a YMCA fellowship in early 1948, were never able to return.
They were marooned first in Chicago and then in rural Wisconsin in depressing circumstances. For a while the energetic, voluble head of the Boys’ Department worked as a coat-check attendant in the Chicago Y, then took to the road in northern Wisconsin as an organizer of Lions Clubs. His anger at what had taken place in Palestine and his early days in America scarcely diminished with the years, although more than any of my relatives he was able to derive some satisfaction and even joy from his later American years. Nevertheless he could never reconcile the two halves of his life.

There was one very colorful character in those early Jerusalem years who fascinated me, even though I had little idea until much later who he really was. My father’s unappeasable appetite for playing
tawlah
was often satisfied it seemed by an elderly, heavily mustachioed man who always wore a dark suit and tarbush, smoked cigarettes incessantly through an ivory holder, and with an alarming frequency coughed his way through the smoke that circled his head. He was Khalil Beidas, my father’s cousin, and the senior Arabic teacher at St. George’s; I never saw him at school, however, and did not know about his professional connection to it until four decades later, when my cousin Yousif told me that Beidas had been
his
Arabic instructor. The other fact that I later acquired about Beidas was that he was the father of Yousif Beidas, a man who had once worked for the Palestine Educational Company, had been my father’s best man, and after a short stint in the Arab Bank had come to Beirut as a refugee and in a matter of ten years or so had become Lebanon’s premier tycoon. He was the owner of the Intra Bank, which had enormous holdings in airlines, shipyards, commercial properties (including a building in Rockefeller Center), who exercised a powerful influence in Lebanon until he was ruined, and Intra collapsed in 1966. He died of cancer a few years later in Lucerne, destitute, nursed at the end by Aunt Nabiha, who had herself moved to Switzerland a short time earlier. Beidas’s astounding rise and fall was considered by some to presage the terrible Lebanese-Palestinian disputes of the seventies, but it seemed to me to symbolize the broken trajectory imposed on so many of us by the events of 1948.

Yet what I discovered much later about Khalil Beidas was that far from just being an Arabic teacher, he had been educated first in Jerusalem’s Russian Colony School (al-Mascowbia, now an Israeli interrogation and detention center mainly for Palestinians), then in Russia
itself as a ward of the Russian Orthodox church there. When he returned to Palestine early in the century he became a participant in the literary
nadwa
, or ongoing seminar, held in Nazareth at its al-Mascowbia, now
that
town’s Israeli police station. When he returned to Jerusalem, full of ideas from the nineteenth-century Russian Christian cultural nationalists, from Dostoyevsky to Berdayev, he began to achieve recognition and even fame as a novelist and literary critic. During the twenties and thirties, he contributed to the construction of a Palestinian national identity, particularly in its encounter with the incoming Zionist settlers. It is a sign of how overprotected and ignorant I was as a boy of our political situation that I hadn’t any comprehension of Beidas’s real stature in Palestine, that I only thought of him as a quaint old man with racking cigarette cough and—when he played
tawlah
with my father—a rollicking, very jovial manner, all of which, I discovered a few years later, did not survive the loss of his country. Unlike his children, he was spared the fate of refugee.

What overcomes me now is the scale of dislocation our family and friends experienced and of which I was a scarcely conscious, essentially unknowing witness in 1948. As a boy of twelve and a half in Cairo, I often saw the sadness and destitution in the faces and lives of people I had formerly known as ordinary middle-class people in Palestine, but I couldn’t really comprehend the tragedy that had befallen them nor could I piece together all the different narrative fragments to understand what had really happened in Palestine. My cousin Evelyn, Yousif’s twin, once spoke passionately at our Cairo dinner table about her faith in Kawoukji, a name that meant nothing to me when I first heard it; “Kawoukji will come in and rout them,” she said with definitive force, although my father (to whom I had turned for information) described the man with some skepticism and even disrespect as “an Arab general.” Aunt Nabiha’s tone was often plaintive and scandalized as she described the horrors of events like Deir Yassin—“naked girls taken through
their
camps on the backs of trucks.” I assumed she was expressing the shame of women being exposed to male eyes, not only the horror of a horrendous cold-blooded massacre of innocent civilians. I did not, could not, at the time imagine whose eyes they were.

Later, in Cairo, a certain formality kept the extended family’s relationships as they had always been, but I remember detecting fault lines,
little inconsistencies and lapses that had not been there before. All of us seemed to have given up on Palestine as a place, never to be returned to, barely mentioned, missed silently and pathetically. I was old enough to notice that my father’s cousin Sbeer Shammas, a patriarchal figure of authority and prosperity in Jerusalem, now appeared in Cairo as a much older and frailer man, always wearing the same suit and green sweater, his bent cane bearing his large slow bulk as he lowered it painfully and slowly into the chair where he sat in silence. His two unmarried daughters, Alice and Tina, were attractive young women, one of whom worked as a secretary in the Suez Canal Zone, the other in Cairo. I liked his two loud and fractious sons, whose new insecurity expressed itself in blustery attacks on Egyptians, Britishers, Greeks, Jews, and Armenians. Their mother, Olga, became a tremendous complainer, her high-pitched voice shrill with the difficulties of paying bills, finding a decent house, and looking for work. We visited them in a many-storied, dingy Heliopolis apartment building, with peeling walls and no elevator. I remember being alarmed at the emptiness of the flat, and the air of forlornness it seemed to convey.

My mother never mentioned what had happened to all of them. I did not ask my father; I had no available vocabulary for the question, although I was able to sense that something was radically wrong. Only once in a typically sweeping way did my father elucidate the general Palestinian condition, when he remarked about Sbeer and his family that “they had lost everything”; a moment later he added, “We lost everything too.” When I expressed my confusion as to what he meant, since his business, the house, our style of life in Cairo, seemed to have remained the same, “Palestine” was all he said. It is true that he had never much liked the place, but this peculiarly rapid monosyllabic acknowledgment and equally quick burial of the past was idiosyncratic to him. “What is past is past and irrevocable; the wise man has enough to do with what is present and to come,” he often said, quickly adding “Lord Bacon” as an authoritative seal to close a subject he didn’t want to discuss. I never failed to be impressed by this unblinkingly stoic turning of his back on the past, even when its effects remained in the present. He never cried or showed the emotions he must have felt in extreme situations. I recall virtually imploring my mother to tell me whether he cried at his brother Asaad’s funeral in Jaffa. “No,” my
mother said implacably, “he put on his dark glasses, and his face looked very red. But he didn’t cry.” As weepiness was one of my failings, I saw this as an enviable strength.

Two of my mother’s brothers appeared in Egypt shortly after the middle of December 1947. Emile, the youngest one, worked in Tanta, the dusty but large provincial city in the Delta, employed at a glass factory owned by my grandmother’s distant relative Malvina Fares, who disconcerted us all with her black eye patch and semicrazed demeanor. Alif, the other brother, was a few years older than my mother and was married with four children. He was a gentle, somewhat passive soul who loved nothing more than doing gigantic jigsaw puzzles, cataloguing and recataloguing his little private library, and listening to music. In Nablus, he had been an Arab Bank employee, but in Cairo, and then Alexandria, he worked for UNESCO. After moving from Baghdad to Beirut, he now lives at the age of eighty-five in Seattle, a victim of 1948, the Iraqi and Egyptian revolutions, and the final blow, the Lebanese Civil War. In Cairo, Alif and Salwa, his wife, exuded a combination of paralyzed indignation and supplicatory passivity that I had never seen before.

Emile’s disorderly life, his many moves, homes, and complaints about harsh work conditions, and difficulties jarred our Olympian detachment and seemingly stable and comfortable way of life. Emile seemed a somewhat forlorn bachelor trying to make his way in Egypt after the fall of Palestine. Many years later I learned that he had an Egyptian Muslim wife and two daughters, all kept hidden from us as we were growing up. The subject of Palestine was rarely talked about openly, although stray comments by my father suggested the catastrophic collapse of a society and a country’s disappearance. Once he said of the Shammases that they used to consume ten barrels of olive oil a year—“a sign of wealth in our country,” he said, since where there was ample oil there were olive trees and land. Now all that had gone.

Then there were the Halabys, Mira and Sami, neighbors in Zamalek whose tiny apartment and extremely straitened circumstances were discussed in stark contrast to their former wealth in Jaffa. I gathered that Mira was an especially favored child of prosperous, prominent parents; she spoke French (unusual in our circles, but a sign of privileged schooling and much travel in France) and had a natural dignity that impressed us all with its Job-like calm, even though my parents routinely
spoke of her now as miserable, distressed, under constant pressure. There were other families too, not least those whose fathers and mothers ended up working for us either at home or in my father’s business. Marika, a simple Christian refugee woman, was induced by my aunt to attend Arabic services at All Saints Cathedral, an extremely English establishment that we as Anglicans frequented. She became my mother’s personal maid.

But it was mainly my aunt Nabiha who would not let us forget the misery of Palestine. She would have lunch with us every Friday—her dynamic presence overshadowed the older and by now considerably diminished Auntie Melia—and describe the rigors of a week spent visiting refugee families in Shubra, badgering callous government authorities about work and residence permits for her refugee families, and tirelessly going from one charitable agency to another in search of funds.

It seems inexplicable to me now that having dominated our lives for generations, the problem of Palestine and its tragic loss, which affected virtually everyone we knew, deeply changing our world, should have been so relatively repressed, undiscussed, or even remarked on by my parents. Palestine was where they were born and grew up, even though their life in Egypt (and more frequently in Lebanon) provided a new setting for them. As children, my sisters and I were cloistered away from “bad people” as well as from anything that might disturb our “little heads,” as my mother frequently put it. But the repression of Palestine in our lives occurred as part of a larger depoliticization on the part of my parents, who hated and distrusted politics, feeling too precarious in Egypt for participation or even open discussion. Politics always seemed to involve other people, not us. When I began to be involved in politics twenty years later, both my parents strongly disapproved. “It will ruin you,” said my mother. “You’re a literature professor,” said my father: “stick to that.” His last words to me a few hours before his death were: “I’m worried about what the Zionists will do to you. Be careful.” My father and we children were all protected from the politics of Palestine by our talismanic U.S. passports, as we slipped by customs and immigration officials with what appeared to be risible ease compared to the difficulties faced by the less-privileged and fortunate in those war and postwar years. My mother, however, did not have a U.S. passport.

After the fall of Palestine my father set about in earnest—right until
the end of his life—to get my mother a U.S. document of some kind, but failed to do so. As his widow, she tried and also failed until the end of hers. Stuck with a Palestine passport that was soon replaced with a Laissez-Passer, my mother traveled with us as a gently comic embarrassment. My father would routinely tell the story (echoed by her) of how her document would be placed underneath our stack of smart green U.S. passports in the futile hope that the official would allow her through as one of us. That never happened. There was always a summoning of a higher-ranked official, who with grave looks and cautious accents drew my parents aside for explanations, short sermons, even warnings, while my sisters and I stood around, uncomprehending and bored. When we did finally pass through, the meaning of her anomalous existence as represented by an embarrassing document was never explained to me as being a consequence of a shattering collective experience of dispossession. And in a matter of hours, once inside Lebanon, or Greece, or the United States itself, the question of my mother’s nationality would be forgotten, and everyday life resumed.