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on), war films, some Westerns. Sitting in the plush cinema seats, much more than in viewing the Hollywood films themselves—which struck me as a weird form of science fiction corresponding to nothing at all in my life—I luxuriated in the sanctioned freedom to see and not be seen. Later I developed an irrecusable attachment to Johnny Weissmuller’s whole Tarzan world, especially to the uxorial and, in
Tarzan and His Mate
at least, virginally sensual Jane cavorting in their cosy tree house, whose clever Wemmicklike comforts seemed like a pure, uncomplicated distillation of our life as a family alone in Egypt. Once “The End” appeared on the screen in
Tarzan Finds a Son
or
Tarzan’s Secret Treasure
, I began my ruminations on what happened afterward, on what the little family did in the tree house, on the “natives” they cultivated and befriended, on members of Jane’s family who might have visited, on the tricks that Tarzan taught Boy, and on and on. It was very odd, but it did not occur to me that the cinematic Aladdin, Ali Baba, and Sinbad, whose genies, Baghdad cronies, and sultans I completely possessed in the fantasies I counterpointed with my lessons, all had American accents, spoke no Arabic, and ate mysterious foods—perhaps “sweetmeats,” or was it more like stew, rice, lamb cutlets?—that I could never quite make out.
    One of the rare moments of complete satisfaction I enjoyed before I was eighteen occurred during my first year at Cairo’s School for American Children (I was ten and a half). I was standing on the first landing of a grand staircase, looking down at a roomful of faces, and masterfully reciting narratives, drawing out the stories of Jason and Perseus. I gloried in finicky, unending detail—the identity of the Argonauts, what the Golden Fleece was, the reasons for Medusa’s horrible affliction, the later story of Perseus and Andromeda—and experienced for the first time the joys of virtuosity and emancipation denied me by the French and English language and history classes I seemed so poor at. I had a fluency and concentration in the telling and thinking through of these stories that supplied me with a unique pleasure I could find nowhere else in Cairo. I was also beginning to enjoy classical musicquite seriously, but in my piano lessons, which began when I was six, my gifts of memory and melody ran aground on the need to practice scales and Czerny exercises, with my mother standing over or sitting next to me; the result was a feeling of being interrupted in developing a musical identity. Not until I was fifteen could I buy records and enjoy the operas I chose on my own. The Cairo musical season of operas and ballets was still out of bounds to me: I therefore relied on what the BBC and Egyptian State Broadcasting had to offer, my greatest pleasure being the BBC’s forty-five-minute Sunday afternoon program “Nights at the Opera.” Using Gustave Kobbé’s
Complete Opera Book
I discovered quite early on that I really disliked Verdi and Puccini but loved the little I knew of Strauss and Wagner, whose works I did not see in an opera house until I was in my late teens.

III
    SCHOOLTEACHERS WERE SUPPOSED TO BE ENGLISH, I THOUGHT . Students, if they were fortunate, might also be English or, as in my case, if they were not, not. I attended the Gezira Preparatory School (GPS) from the autumn of 1941 till we left Cairo in May 1942, then again from early 1943 till 1946, with one or two longer Palestinian interruptions in between. During that period I had no Egyptian teachers at all, nor was I conscious of any Arab Muslim presence in the school: the students were Armenians, Greeks, Egyptian Jews, and Copts, as well as a substantial number of English children, including many of the staff’s offspring. Our teachers were, to mention the two most prominent, Mrs. Bullen, headmistress, and Mrs. Wilson, the ubiquitous all-purpose general head teacher. The school itself was located in a large Zamalek