The bombing started the next day. My grandfather came to visit us late that evening, to warn my parents not to send us children to school in the morning. I did not understand much of it. The Arabs and Israelis were at each other's throats again. The Israelis had attacked the Sinai and were heading for the Suez Canal. Gamal Abdel Nasser had nationalized it a while back and the chagrin of Gt. Britain and France was brutal and undisguised. Granddad said that an ultimatum had been issued by the two fading colonialists to the warring parties, demanding a withdrawal so many miles on each side of the canal to ensure its safe operation. Otherwise, they would intervene.
Gamal Abdel Nasser promptly sank a number of cement-laden cargo ships in it and blocked it anyway. War was imminent.
We loved the man. Our Granddaddy, that is. He came in with his hat and coat, scarf and gloves and a preoccupied look and smiled absent mindedly as we kissed him and fussed over him. Even at seventeen, I acted around him like a ten-year old.
Kissing him, playing with the loose, soft flesh beneath his chin, asking him for the liquorice sweets he was in the habit of bringing along on each visit. He probably took, as was his habit, a horse drawn carriage for the short drive to our house, paid his five piastre fare and enjoyed the clippety-clop of the mangy horse. He was not good looking. Quite ordinary in fact, with all the kindness of the world in his face, with a warm, subtle humour, devised, it seemed, dreamt up, especially for children. He kept us smiling and in good spirits all the while he was with us. And the news he brought that day, worrying but exciting. A day off from school, unexpectedly. We loved our school but a day off, was a day off. In any case, the next morning the school buses did not pass by to pick us up. And the sirens started wailing. The ultimatum had been ignored.
For the next three or four days, air raid alerts took place every few hours and while they lasted we could hear the bombing that took place at the outskirts of the city. No smart bombs in those days, just smart British pilots doing some state of the art precision bombing, destroying airports, airplanes and runways. Avoiding inhabited areas. All those lovely Egyptian Air Force Meteor and Vampire fighters, recently acquired, proudly flown a few months earlier, blown to smithereens. At night, blackouts whenever the sirens wailed. We would watch from our windows the shafts of light of the Air Defense Corps searching for a plane or two, very much in vain, and the cackling of anti-aircraft fire on some presumable target. In the morning, business much as usual, if a little subdued. The street traffic, sparse and less strident. Father went down to work and kept regular hours. Granddad visited us between air raids and broke the monotony of the days at home, which were becoming boring and burdensome. His visits brightened our blackouts.
I called my best friend Basil, on the phone, on the third day of the war and he told me his mother died of a heart attack. They lived in Heliopolis, a suburb, at the edge of the desert, right next to the Almaza military airport, which was thoroughly pounded. His mother was a thin, intense Englishwoman who had a heart condition and was unable to endure the deafening blasts of the bombs. I was dumbstruck. At 11
seventeen I was unfamiliar with the social niceties and I just said, I'm so sorry. I called my father at work and told him because through me he had been acquainted with Basil's dad, a former Egyptian Air Force Marshal and Air Chief-of-Staff, a pioneer of aviation and one of the very first British-trained Egyptian pilots. A tall, sociable, self-confident, unflappable, and extremely friendly human being. We sent off a telegram with our sympathies and the next day, as the air raids slackened, I went to his home for the day.
It was as if nothing had happened. Bas was just the same and later when his dad arrived I could not perceive the slightest hint of sadness. Even their servant, Awad, cracked the usual jokes and enjoyed his little laughs. A person was just missing from their house. I had met the mother two weeks earlier, on a Saturday. I had gone with Bas to the Gliding Club to become a member. He was already an accomplished glider pilot together with another friend, Tousson, and their enthusiasm for the sport had rubbed off on me. I wanted to give it a try. The club was a shack on a fenced-off stretch of hard level pebbly sand, with four or five rickety gliders, one or two spanking ones and a pickup truck which did the hauling of the gliders for takeoff by means of a very long steel cable.
Bas took the first go in a single-seat glider, wearing a lovely pair of gold-rimmed Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses. He was a handsome boy. Blond, tall, with curly short hair and a terrific body due to a bodybuilding regime he was following, he had much success with the girls at school. He was in the air for about ten minutes and then came in for a thrilling, quiet, wind-whispering landing. That was the usual length of the flight unless one managed to locate wide shafts of warm air rising from the ground, called thermals, which would lift the glider up, increasing its height as long as it stayed within the thermal, not always a simple matter. But experienced glider pilots can sometimes stay up for many hours and traverse long distances. Next, I went up with a trainer on a two-seater and the experience was exhilarating.
We went back home for lunch and I met Mrs. Mikaati. She was polite, friendly and reserved, all in one. We sat for a typical English lunch when the father arrived and it was all very decorous and silent. Basil was inexplicably sulky, concentrating on the roast beef with boiled potatoes and lots of gravy. The Air Marshal, now a successful businessman, with terrific connections in Egypt and abroad, was jovial but hungry. He was always extremely friendly and familiar with me, calling me, Guirgis, the Egyptian pronunciation of my name, laughing heartily when I described my flight and the worry that there was no propeller to back us up. Mrs. Mikaati kept up a sporadic exchange with me.
Did I enjoy the gliding?
Oh yes, very much.
Would I be joining the club?
I hope so, yes.
Do I like sports?
Yes, of course.
Anything in particular?
No. I enjoy all the games at school.
That's nice. An all-rounder. Did I excel in anything?
No.
What about my studies?
I'm OK. In the middle of the class.
Just like Basil.
Yes.
12
Awad was hovering in the background, serving the table, giving me mischievous smiles when our eyes met. My helping was too big and when I finished, a large boiled potato remained on my plate.
George, you have stalled, said Mrs. Mikaati.
I beg your pardon? I did not understand what she meant.
Do you know what stalled means?
Of course he does, said Basil.
It means when an airplane or a glider loses speed and takes a dive, I explained.
Exactly, said Mrs. Mikaati.
I still had a puzzled look.
You have stalled with your lunch. You took a dive; you did not complete the journey.
Oh! I smiled and went on to cut my potato.
Oh, it's quite all right. Let it go, she said smiling.
A friendly, cool, not particularly engaging person was gone. I did not feel pain. Perhaps they did. It did not show.
That day, we went out for a walk. We talked a lot. Basil wanted to leave for England to join his elder brother Ramsey who was studying engineering at Bristol. In any case, our school seemed to have shut for good. Ramsey was a few years older than us and was Head Boy in his last year at our English School. A terrific sportsman and athlete, dashing, handsome and English-looking, he was something of an idol and Basil told me all sorts of crazy stories about him. He had finished his degree in Engineering and was helping design the braking system of a new airliner that was being manufactured in England, the turboprop Bristol Britannia. He was having a ball at the same time. Girls were so easy, there. He told me, Ramsey used to go to coffee bars and when he found a girl to his liking would walk up to her, throw her a sidelong glance and ask her,
Wanna have a fuck, baby?
Apparently that was all it took. Presumably she either did, or didn't, but, it seems, the law of averages was unusually biased in his favour. Difficult to believe, but I did, at the time. As for Basil, he was circling around a girl from school, a year or two younger than us but with a reputation of sexual precocity. In the middle fifties, that was quite something. He wanted to bed her down. Madeleine's father, a Frenchman had died and she lived with her Greek mother. It has been my experience that girls without a male parent tend to experiment much earlier with sex than girls in normal families and Mado confirmed the rule. She lived near our flat, in town, and we were on the same school bus every day. She constantly threw herself at me but she was not pretty, still young and shapeless and rather frumpy. I was finicky and silly and kept clear of her. Often in my recollections, I regretted it. Too late, of course. I could have learnt a thing or two from her early on. Gained some confidence. Anyway, Basil did make love to her, all the easier in an empty flat without a mother and they were vigorously and energetically together for the couple months before he left for England. He was seventeen; she, all of fifteen. After he left, Mado, once again, turned her tentacles on me and we went to the cinema together. She kissed me and caressed my leg in the dark and told me in plain, explicit English, I want to sleep with you. But what do you expect? I was a shy and silly boy. I laughed it off and did not go out with her again.
Later, Bas and I visited some friends from school that lived nearby and in the afternoon I took a bus and went home, downtown. The bombing had stopped. The neutralization of Egyptian forces accomplished though war was still raging in Port 13
Said where a popular resistance fought the British from house to house. It did not last long and it is a credit to the brave Egyptians who defended their homeland but it was hardly the Stalingrad it was claimed to be. De Lesseps's huge statue was toppled at the port. I really can't decide if that was justified, even under the circumstances. Perhaps it was. I am not sure.
That Saturday, two weeks earlier, when I met Mrs. Mikaati, we visited, our aunt, my mother's sister, in the evening, where my grandparents also lived and, there, I boasted to my younger cousin that I had gone gliding. He duly announced the fact at dinner and my father was furious. Uncharacteristically, he started shouting at me, in front of everyone, never again to indulge in that dangerous sport and that he would call the Mikaatis and give them a good piece of his mind for endangering my life. I was very upset because my father rarely treated me that way. Well, that put a full stop to my gliding grand designs.
The war ended after not much more than a week. The British forces occupied Port Said and the Canal Zone. Abdel Nasser became the whole of the Arab Nation's hero. The darling of the masses. Despite the rout of his armed forces, he had stood up to the West. Gave them a slap in the face. His fiery anti-imperialist diatribes caused deliriums of enthusiasm and when he broadcast a speech it was as if the whole of Cairo was a single, colossal, radio literally vibrating with that characteristic, dynamic, rhetorical voice. Diplomatic relations were severed with England and France and it was an amusing note, that after the British Ambassador and staff left the country, the caretakers took the opportunity to renew and redecorate the Embassy. They took a couple of weeks just to painstakingly repaint the outside walls. A snide way of telling us, “We'll soon be back.” But in truth, it was the end of Rule Britannia and French colonialism.
Well, eventually, the whole stupid and futile operation, the Suez Fiasco, was over. The idealistic and peace-loving Soviets, masters of the gulags, arch imperialists and oppressors of Eastern Europe, murderers of practically the entire army officer corps of Poland in the Katyn Forest after the Second World War and presumptive liberators of Egypt, demanded the withdrawal of the English, French, and Israeli forces. Together with their Chinese allies threatened to send "volunteers" to fight alongside their Egyptian brothers. In the hubbub, the concurrent Hungarian uprising was ignored by the international community and Russia drowned it in blood, oppression and the executions of Imre Nagy, the Prime Minister, Pal Maleter, the Army Chief and thousands of other Hungarian patriots and politicians. Eisenhower literally forced his allies to withdraw and the Revolution in Egypt resumed its march to socialism through nationalization of private property, land and industry. The rich were impoverished and the army officers grew rich, arrogant, soft and corrupt. Abdel Nasser became our Socialist Pharaoh. Our Father-Figure. Our Infallible God.
Our school was promptly sequestrated and became a sort of concentration camp for the British and French subjects that were rounded up. I do not know if the Headmaster and the all-English staff that ordinarily resided there were imprisoned as well but when a couple of friends and I visited our classmate Sotiris who lived just across the wide boulevard from school, we saw the detainees lounging on the balconies of our yellowish-brown, beloved school building, enjoying the lovely autumn sunshine, bare-chested, in khaki shorts, tanned, blond, foreign-looking.
We were getting restless. The prospects of our school reopening any time soon were remote and most of the students that had alternative solutions tried them out.
Some enrolled at the American University in Cairo, others moved to different schools and those who could afford to move abroad started getting ready relocate. Basil was 14
heading to England, so was Andy and Moataz. Sotiris and Pipsy were heading for the States. Tousson entered the Cairo University. I was stranded with no clear idea of what to do and just waited for school to reopen. I tried to amuse myself as best I could and usually gravitated, by bus, to Heliopolis where the school was and where most of my friends lived. We gathered in various permutations and combinations and whiled the time away, sometimes constructively but mostly, not.
At Sotiris, that day, we really drove the boy and his mother to distraction with our pranks and boisterous behaviour. He brought out his powerful air rifle and started shooting pellets at the English detainees. I doubted it that they would ever reach across the wide street but he swore that at times when he lifted the gun up high, the pellets nicked the men and startled them. I took the gun and started firing at his calendar which was thick, the kind you remove a leaf every day. The more upset he became, the more we laughed and searched for alternate targets. I rounded up all his pocketbooks which I considered trashy and we killed them all. On and on until we left and went to a shop for some tasty and filling foul medammes sandwiches with the local round thin-leafed bread.
The English were evacuated soon enough and the school was reorganized by the Egyptian Ministry of Education. Under the English, it was undoubtedly one of the finest schools in the Middle East. One cannot doubt the talent of the English as educators. Their cool, reserved, dispassionate bearing, their passion for fair play and even their presumed superiority managed to finely balance the relationship with their students. Not much intimacy, not too much familiarity, the complete absence of favouritism, an even temper at all times, even when they bestowed you with „six of the best‟ with a cane on your backside. The Egyptians tried hard to outdo the talent.
They fielded in a number of PhD's for the science subjects but could not possibly match the English in the arts. The Headmaster was an uninspiring Ministry official who spoke passable if laboured English and the school was run by a few busybodies who were your buddies when in a good mood and nasty when their nerves were on edge. They were emotional and exasperating and one never knew where one stood with them.
When school started a couple of months after the war, I went back for my final year and my only other classmate to return, was a Saudi boy named Enver Murad. He was a brilliant student and was coddled by the PhD's while I was ignored. He was literally having private lessons. I am not complaining. I was too depressed to give a damn. Almost immediately, I started skipping school. I used to leave home for school with the school bus, with my two younger sisters, attend the morning assembly and leave just after, by a side entrance. On to Andy's house which was nearby, where we would plan our day. I would return just in time to catch the school buses for the return journey home. It was some indication of the disorganization of the system that no one bothered to ask about me.
Andy was getting ready to leave for England but the preparations took a couple of months and though we had been friends for years, the proximity of his house made him my constant companion during that time. He was of Greek-Cypriot stock, a tall, lanky boy, pleasant looking, good humoured and intelligent. A top student, he was adept both in the arts and sciences and his companionship was always enriching, stimulating and open minded. Besides the boyish pranks and high spirits, we had many serious conversations on books and life and sex and his points of view were always well thought out and refreshing. Our relationship was more intellectual than that of my other friends. In a way, he taught me how to think beyond the stock ideas and clichés of our age group. He had a darling mother who liked me very much 15
and was worried by the fact that every day I was at their house instead of being at school. We would spend some time talking, in the mornings, and then plan our day.
The family did not have a telephone, which was not unusual in those days and if we wanted to contact our friends we would have to get to them, physically, by public transport, never being sure we would find them at home. By and by, Andy told me that his father had stopped using their ancient Rover, which was now standing idle at the garage, dusty and unused, its battery as flat as a thin sheet of paper. His old man used the Metro, which dropped him door to door to his downtown shop.
At seventeen, I was a skillful driver. One day, three years earlier, as we were driving with my father, I told him I would like to try driving the car. Right there, in the middle of the city he stopped the car at the curb and told me to go ahead. I was bewildered but I took over and despite the series of jolts at the start managed to drive and change gears well enough to reach our destination unscathed. Of course, the traffic in those days was different. So, we got hold of the keys of the Rover and after a cursory dusting out we started pushing it and shoving it to life. Lo and behold, it suddenly started up and a whole new horizon opened up for us. We chipped in for the petrol and with the driving, the battery was charged and every day we would gather all friends who were available and have boisterous drives all around Heliopolis, stopping to have sandwiches and juices, gate-crashing into clubs in which we had no membership to have a look at the "dames", driving in the desert for picnics, trying to teach the rest of the gang to drive. It was a miracle that we were never stopped, never asked for a driving license or any sort of legal document, which we had not, never had a serious accident though we went through some frightening scrapes.
On one occasion we penetrated an army camp in the desert and were suddenly surrounded by machinegun-toting military police. It was a sweat getting out again.
Basil used his father's name and that miracle name saved us further complications. On another, Andy was learning to drive and was speeding a little recklessly. At a curve when the car seemed about to leave the road, Pipsy panicked and grabbed the wheel and in the ensuing struggle to control the vehicle, we nearly killed a bunch of workers who were repairing the road. We stopped just on time and they went after us with their pickaxes and shovels and we just managed to escape with our skin intact. On still another, I was sitting on the hood of the engine and Tousson took over the car and drove off picking up speed. Suddenly, he braked to frighten me but I slid clean off the front of the car. As I was rolling on the ground like a ball, I saw the car approach, about to crush me and the wheel just inches from my head. Luckily, Tousson slammed the breaks again and the car came to a screeching stop while I rolled on a little longer, suddenly finding myself on my feet, giving them the elaborate bow of a circus performer with a smile. A close call from death that ended with laughs and a flourish.
Oh, the stories I could tell! They go on and on. About the time we fired a race-starter pistol on our balcony in town as Abdel Nasser was about to pass by in the street below. The war had just ended and the people were edgy. The police arrived and bundled us off to the station in a pickup truck and locked us in a cage right there at the reception, on public view, until my father came and brought us some lunch. He was upset when he saw us in the cage but could not suppress a smile of amusement at the absurdity of the situation. He did not manage to get us released, however, and was unable to locate his lawyer. Later we were moved to State Security in handcuffs, three blond boys, Basil, Pipsy and I, nearly causing a riot on the street, being called dirty spies by the bystanders. To fill out pages and pages of idiotic questions in the verbal proceedings, such as, “How many shots did you fire?” “And you?” “And you?” And 16
all of them blanks! At nine in the evening, Air Marshall El Mikaati strode in and the whole preposterous business was cut short. I tried to get my gun back a few days later but the police officer refused to return it. It was a beautifully crafted, expensive toy with a loud bang. He probably gave it to his son.
Pipsy was Polish. How a Polish family found itself in Egypt, I never really inquired though it never ceased to puzzle me. Greeks, Italians, Armenians had sizeable communities. Even the British and French, to a lesser extent were present.
But Pipsy's family was the only Polish family I ever heard of in Cairo. Pipsy had yellow hair and some of his friends called him Tweety but I called him Pipsy, a distortion of his surname, Pohoski. His Christian name was Michael. He was a tall, handsome boy, a bodybuilder, like Basil, with huge arms and a huge appetite. His mother was a homely, gentle, blonde and, I imagined, typically Polish woman. His father short and hard, hard in his looks, in the glint of his eye. He was very polite with us but Pipsy was terrified of him. He was an employee in one of the foreign banks that existed before Nasser's nationalizations but our gang suspected that he was a CIA agent. I am certain not even Pipsy knew for sure. He confided in us, that during the air raids, his father used to pack a gun and slip out of the house, in the darkness, to return in the early hours of the morning. Well, perhaps he only visited a paramour. We were tender friends with Pipsy and we lost touch for forty years and found each other through the mind-boggling electronic revolution in computers and the Internet, now, exchanging nostalgia and memories and tales of health problems, not knowing if we shall ever see each other again.
Tousson, another tender friend, of Turkish descent from Kavala in northern Greece. A classmate, all through the school years, a letter correspondent all through our life, a friend as true and as rare, as disinterested as only one you grow up with can be. Like most of my Egyptian friends, he immigrated to the States, and I, the foreigner, stayed behind to forge a life in Egypt. Nevertheless we did manage to see each other every few years as he had roots and family in this country and returned to it every now and then. In those days, apart from an easy and enjoyable fellowship, we shared a love for motorcycles. To be precise, he was the enthusiast, I was the follower. We used to hire battered but powerful twin-cylinder Triumph monsters, go out on the desert roads and gun the machine to full power, top speed. We took turns at driving, one behind the other, and he must have been pretty brave because whereas he was an experienced rider, I was a novice and, well, if my father got worried about the glider he would have had a heart attack to learn of the motorbikes. We raced without helmets or goggles, tears streaming out of our eyes from the wind, obscuring our vision, the vibrations of the machine numbing our arms and grip, retarding our reflexes. What a peculiar relationship this, of the human being with speed!
Time was inexorably marching on. The times of departures of the boys, approaching. We kept up our happy-go-lucky good times. I sometimes try to remember if I ever felt the slightest guilt at my irresponsible behaviour. I do not think so. I had just a feeling of oppression at the thought I would soon be alone. We kept up our joyrides, our intrusions into private clubs, our small feasts in cheap restaurants on kebab and kofta with a bottle of Stella Beer. Sometimes, usually on a Friday night, I would stay late in Helio, with the permission of my parents, which was usually granted since the next day was a holiday and I would, supposedly, not need to do any homework, ha ha, and weather permitting, we would go to the Airlines Club where Basil would smuggle us in through a side entrance and we would take a late evening dip at the swimming pool. It was mid-autumn, the weather was cool and the water freezing, but we could not easily forego the challenge once it was suggested and the 17
swims at the deserted pool were raucous and tortured, noisy and short but the well-being we felt after the swim lingers on in my memory. At that same pool, a few weeks later, just before he left for England, Basil lost his right index finger. We were not there. He had gone for a daytime swim with some friends and at one moment he jumped in the pool but his finger was wedged in a metal support of the diving board and was torn off and stayed behind. Apparently, he got out of the pool in a daze and tried to fit it back on. It did not fit and until he left Egypt he was in bandages.
We crashed the car eventually. Oh, nothing serious. The lamppost that was in the way sustained most of the damage but the ignition system conked out and henceforth the engine would only start with a push and a run, which put us out not in the least. Often we would go by Metro to town to the morning sessions of the cinemas and I would later return to Heliopolis, ten miles away, to take the school bus back home to town. We loved films such as the Blackboard Jungle. We fell in love with James Dean in East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause. With Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront. With Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday. We witnessed the birth of Rock and Roll with Bill Hailey and the Comets. We loved the crazy singing and yelling of Little Richard and the wonderful voice and piano-playing of Fats Domino, Louis Armstrong‟s magic trumpet, his gruff voice and inimitable singing style, and Tousson, a Turk from Kavala, northern Greece, revelled at the Jazz sounds of Sydney Bichet, Dizzie Gillespie and their contemporaries.
Twice a week, my sister Nafsika and I would religiously listen to the one-hour radio program of „At Your Request‟ with the reciting of the long lists of names that requested each song. It was half the fun spotting our friends. The lists usually ended with….and Cornelio of Heliopolis. He was the champ, present on every list. How did he ever manage that? On Sunday night, the half-hour Hit Parade with songs by Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Nat King Cole, The Platters, Doris Day, our very own Dalida, former resident of Choubra, a third-class district of Cairo, and onetime girlfriend of my uncle Lello (or so he claimed), Frankie Lane, Domenico Modugno and Mario Lanza singing the songs of The Student Prince. That was our total, weekly musical intake. Not much but we loved it.
Sex was very much on our minds but things were not easy in the middle fifties. The school was coeducational and there were the little romances and liaisons but few and far apart. Plenty of parties took place where young people would meet for close dancing, a hurried stolen kiss in a dark corner and a squeezing of breasts over the clothing. At the more daring p