Out of Place: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF

college. There were stories of her anemia and seasickness on the honeymoon voyage, all of them interspersed with comments on my father’s patience and kindness to her, the young, very vulnerable and naïve maiden-bride. She never spoke about sex without shuddering dislike and discomfort, although my father’s frequent remarks about the man being a skilled horseman, the woman a subdued mare, suggested to me a basically reluctant, if also exceptionally fruitful, sexual partnership that produced six (five surviving) children.
    But I also never doubted that at the time of her marriage to this silent and peculiarly strong middle-aged man she suffered a terrible blow. She was wrenched from a happy life in Beirut. She was given to a much older spouse—perhaps in return for some sort of payment to her mother—who promptly took her off to strange parts and then set her down in Cairo, a gigantic and confusing city in an unfamiliar Arab country with her maiden aunt, Emelia (“Melia”) Badr. Melia had come to Egypt early in the century and, as my mother was to do in her ownway, had hewn out a life in essentially foreign territory. Melia’s father (my great-grandfather), Yousif Badr, was the first native Evangelical minister in Lebanon, and through him perhaps, Melia had been hired by the American College for Girls in Cairo, an essentially missionary establishment, as local staff to teach Arabic.
    She was a tiny woman but had the strongest will of anyone I knew. She made the Americans call her
Miss
Badr (as opposed to a patronizing title reserved for the natives, Teacher Melia), and early on demonstrated her radical independence by boycotting the church services, an integral part of school and mission life. “Is there a god?” I asked her in 1956 a short while before her death. “I very much doubt it,” she said wearily and even dismissively, with that strange finality she switched on when she no longer wished to be exercised by the topic at hand.
    Melia’s presence in the Said family life, before and after my birth, was of central importance. We did not live next to or with our relatives. We were alone as a family in Cairo, except for Melia, and later in the forties her sister, my grandmother, Munira, who lived with us. Melia helped my mother understand the complicated Cairo social system, which was so tumultuously different from anything Hilda had ever experienced as a sheltered girl in Nazareth and Beirut. And Melia introduced the couple to various friends of hers, mostly Copts and Syrians (“Shawam,” plural of “Shami”) whose daughters were her students. Melia didn’t seem overly attentive to my sisters, but she doted on me, although she never really let herself go as was normally the case with female family members: no effusions, extended embraces, or exaggerated declarations of ritual concern. I was uniquely conceded the right to ask her questions like “Are you married to Saleh?” the driver who seemed to practically live with her, and occasionally I was even allowed to look through her complicated little handbag.
    Between the years of 1945 and 1950, I saw her in action several times at the college. Slight and barely five feet tall, she always dressed in black, her head covered with a black turban, and she never wore anything on her feet except for delicate black patent leather pumps. Her gestures were economical in the extreme, and she never raised her voice nor expressed the slightest hesitation or uncertainty. She had a distinct method for every social class and subclass, but underlying each was a sense of formality that could not be violated, as well as a carefullyand coldly sustained distance that allowed no one to pass beyond a point of familiarity that only she determined. She terrified maids and students; she forced even distinguished parents—including at least two prime ministers—to accept her strictures and judgments as unappealable and final; by her perseverance, longevity, and air of