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

he was targeted for an unpleasant fate. A whole wall in our house’s entrance room was covered with large maps of Asia, North Africa, and Europe. Every day my father moved red (for the Allies) and black (for the Axis) pins to reflect advances and retreats on the warring sides. For me, the maps were disquieting rather than informing, and though I occasionally asked my father to explain, it seemed hard for him to do so: he was distracted, bothered, distant. And then suddenly we left for Jerusalem on that difficult night ride. The day he decided to leave, he came home for lunch and told my mother simply to pack and get ready, and by five that afternoon we were off, driving slowly through Cairo’s half-deserted streets. A desolate, baffling time, my familiar world inexplicably being abandoned as we headed off into the cheerless dusk.
    The images of my father’s withdrawal and silence that followed during the long, perplexing and strange summer in Ramallah continued to haunt me for years. He sat on the balcony gazing off into the distance, smoking incessantly. “Don’t make noise, Edward,” my mother would say. “Can’t you see your father is trying to rest?” Then she and I would go out for a walk through the leafy and comfortable, largely Christian, town north of Jerusalem, with me clinging nervously to her. The Ramallah house was unattractive to me, but nevertheless a perfect setting for the stillness and bleakness of my father’s mysterious ordeal. A steep outdoor staircase went up diagonally from the garden, which was divided in the center by a stone path, on either side of which lay furrows of brown earth in which nothing but a few brambles grew. A pair of skinny quince trees stood close to the house by the first-floor balcony, where my father spent most of his time. The bottom floor was closed and empty. Having been forbidden to walk on the furrows, I was left with the ungenerous stony line going from gate to stairs as my playground.
    I had no idea what was wrong, but Ramallah was where I first heard the phrase “nervous breakdown.” Associated with that was the protectionof my father’s “peace of mind,” a phrase he got from a book of that name, which provided the topic of many conversations with his friends. The tiresome languor of our Ramallah summer was closed to scrutiny and explanation, both of which as a bright six-and-a-half-year-old I needed quite naturally. Was Daddy afraid of something, I wanted first of all to ask: Why does he sit there for so long, and say nothing? Either I was led off to some useful or punitive activity, or I was thrown a few enigmatic and generally incomplete hints for an answer. There was talk of extreme anxiety about his suddenly higher blood pressure. There was also reference to having sent off my cousins Abie (Ibrahim) and Charlie—Uncle Asaad’s boys—to Asmara, where, my father worried himself sick, they might be killed. A shady Cairo businessman was said to have tried unsuccessfully to tempt my father into some business scheme for war profiteering. (I understood that my father refused.) Were those events enough to cause a nervous breakdown?
    Whatever the reason, once we returned to Cairo a process of change in my life began as a result, and indeed I was encouraged by my mother in particular to believe that a happier, less problematic period had ended. I sank more and more into generalized truancy—“You’re very clever,” I’d be told over and over, “but you have no character, you’re lazy, you’re naughty,” etc.—and was also made aware of an earlier Edward, sometimes referred to as “Eduardo Bianco,” whose exploits, gifts, and accomplishments were recounted to me as signs of pre-1942 early promise betrayed. From her I learned that at the age of one and a half the former Edward had memorized thirty-eight songs and nursery rhymes, which he could sing and recite perfectly. Or that when cousin Abie, a fluent harmonica player, purposely introduced a wrong