Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes Read Online Free PDF Page B

that his days, like those of the Brits, were numbered? I still don’t know the answer to that question, which haunted my father until his death. “There was nothing I could have done,” he often told us, as if to apologize for the fact that as soon as the NLF took power they confiscated all his properties. Five apartment buildings, two houses and numerous storefronts were all now in the possession of the socialist government. There was one thing that my dad held on to for dear life for the next three decades: a leather briefcase that contained the deeds to every last property he once owned. With the reunification of the north and south of Yemen in 1990, a shotgun wedding to avoid bloodshed over newly discovered oil wells, my father lived to see most of his properties restored to him or received token compensation for ones that were literally beyond repair. “Now you see why I held on to those deeds,” he’d say triumphantly.
    But my father’s most frightening encounter with the NLF took place in November 1967, when a small masked group kidnapped him from his office, gangster-style, and held him hostage for thirty-six hours. My siblings and I grew up on several renditions of the kidnapping story. For years it was a story Mohamed would tell guests over dinner in Beirut and Cairo. It’s hard to reconcile the different details, but the broad strokes remained the same. “I was tied to a chair,”—that much he always kept consistent. “I asked for a cigarette.” I believed that one as well, as he was a compulsive smoker until he quit in 1972. “Their faces were the picture of envy,” he’d say of his kidnappers, who took off their masks as an act of defiance. He claimed not to have recognized any of them, although in all probability, my mother would say, some were former contactors who worked for him and resented his hubris. The ransom amount went up or down, depending on who was listening to the story, but it was a few thousand pounds.
    One thing was incontestable. Mohamed was given less than a day to leave Aden. Imagine having to find a new home in a new country for a large family (and other dependants) in less than a day. Imagine leaving everything you own and everyone you know and not knowing if you’ll ever see them again. I’ve always felt lucky to have been too young to understand what tearing a family away from their homeland meant. The financial loss was enormous, but the emotional one incalculable. In Beirut and later in Cairo, I grew up watching my father in the grip of what I now recognize as severe depression. By 1972 he was still so traumatized by his losses that he became too sick to see a psychiatrist. The family doctor would visit him in his room and the door would be locked for hours. The TV and radio sets got switched off and we all milled about quietly until that door opened again. Sometimes it was just the doctor asking for more tea or a glass of water, which one of my sisters hurriedly supplied, and further waiting would follow. At other times, Mohamed would sit on the balcony of our Cairo apartment overlooking Tahrir Street and watch the world going by without saying a word to any of us for hours. He’d break his silence only if we had guests.
    For my older sisters, the exile from Aden meant the end of their lives as young rich girls. It would be more of a social than a psychological adjustment, the first of many in their lives. It seemed that my father’s royal pretentions—manifested in naming four of his daughters in the style of the Egyptian monarchy—may have rubbed off on them. They had every right to think of themselves as princesses. Didn’t their father reign over Aden? They had their dresses made in Cairo and bought fine jewellery from the Indian and Jewish traders in Aden. Whether it was Arabic or Western music they listened to, they had the latest records on vinyl. Men competed for their affection and they turned down many suitors. (Well, my father turned them down, as they