Out of Place: A Memoir by Edward W. Said Read Free Book Online Page A

Stationery Company (a gift to him from my father), and he took me there often. “Feed the boy,” he would announce to a sleepy-eyed counter clerk, and I would gorge myself on cheese sandwiches and turnip pickles. I first thought that “all ranks” meant that civvies like me were licensed to enter, but soon realized that I had no rank at all. Sauld’s and Uncle Al, as we called him, symbolized a momentary, all-too-brief, and, given the rigid dietary laws imposed by my mother, entirely fugitive moment of freedom.
    By 1943, my parents had begun to impose their disciplinary regime so fully that when I left Egypt for the United States in 1951, Uncle Al’s hearty “Feed the boy” had already taken on a nostalgically irrecoverable sweetness, stupid and happy at the same time. When Uncle Al died in Jaffa four years later, Sauld’s had also ceased to exist.
    During the first part of the war we spent more time than usual in Palestine. In 1942 we rented a summer house in Ramallah, north of Jerusalem, and did not return to Cairo until November. That summeraltered our family life dramatically, as a change occurred in our otherwise rather unpredictable and cumbersome movements between Cairo and Jerusalem. We usually traveled by train from Cairo to Lydda with at least two servants, a large amount of luggage, and a generally frenetic air; the return trip was always slightly easier and more subdued. In 1942, however, my mother, my two sisters, Rosemarie and Jean, my father, and I did not travel by train but by car. Instead of boarding the luxury Wagons-Lits train in Cairo’s Bab-el-Hadid Station for the twelve-hour overnight journey to Jerusalem, in May of that year we were on the run from the rapidly approaching German army, in my father’s black Plymouth, its headlights blued out, our quickly packed leather suitcases piled on the luggage rack and in the trunk. Driving to the Suez Canal Zone took many hours as we encountered numerous British convoys converging on Cairo: we would be pulled over and forced to wait as tanks, trucks, and personnel carriers trailed past us headed for what was to be an Allied defeat followed by the British counteroffensive that culminated in the battle of el-Alamein in November.
    We made the long drive in complete silence right through the night. My father negotiated the unmarked Sinai roads after having crossed the Suez Canal without ceremony or fuss at the Qantara bridge; the customs post there was deserted when we arrived at about midnight. It was at that point that we met up with the only civilian car going the same way, a convertible driven by a Jewish businessman from Cairo, with no passengers, and with only several bottles of iced water and a revolver for luggage. He recognized my father, and even suggested that he might relieve the Plymouth of some of its cargo—several large suitcases were duly transferred to him—but asked in return that he be allowed to follow in our tracks. I vividly remember the haggard, weary expression on my father’s face as he assented to this lopsided arrangement, and so we proceeded silently through the night, the second car following hard upon the first, with my father left on his own, both to excavate the sand-blown, meandering, narrow road in the blackest of black nights and also to endure the pressure of his little family inside the car, and outside the Egyptian Jewish businessman, convinced that he was running for his life, constantly bearing down upon us.
    Earlier that winter I had heard the sirens blaring “alarm” and “all clear.” Bundled in blankets and transported in my father’s arms to thegarage-shelter during a German night bombing raid, I felt a vague premonition that “we” were threatened. The political, to say nothing of the military, meaning of our situation, were beyond me at age six and a half. As an American in Egypt, where the Germans under Rommel were predicted to descend first on Alexandria then on Cairo, my father must have thought