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

villa, once intended for living on a grand scale, its main floor now converted into several classrooms, all of which were entered from an enormous central hall with a platform at one end and an imposing entrance portal at the other. The hall was two floors high with a glass ceiling; a balustrade surrounded another set of rooms located directly above our classrooms. I only ventured there once, and not very happily at that. These struck me as secret places where mysterious English meetings took place and where the redoubtable Mr. Bullen, a large red-faced man only rarely glimpsed on the lower floor, might be found.
    I had no way of knowing then that Mrs. Bullen, the headmistress, whose daughter Anne was in the class immediately senior to mine, was in Egypt as a school concessionaire who held a franchise to run for the GPS British Council, not as an educator. After the 1952 Free Officers’ Revolution the school slowly lost its European cachet and by the 1956 Suez crisis had become something else altogether. Today it is a career language training school for young adults, without a trace of its English past. Mrs. Bullen and her daughter later appeared in Beirut as principals of another English-type school, but they seem to have been even less successful than they were in Cairo, where they were dismissed for inefficiency and Mr. Bullen’s drinking habits.
    GPS conveniently sat at the end of Sharia Aziz Osman, our relatively short Zamalek street, a walk of exactly three blocks. The time I took to get there or to come home was always an issue with my teachers and parents, associated forever in my mind with two words, “loitering” and “fibbing,” whose meaning I learned in connection with my meandering, fantasy-filled traversal of that short distance. Part of the delay was to put off my arrival at either end. The other part was sheer fascination with the people I might encounter, or with glimpses of life revealed as a door opened here, a car went by there, or a scene was played out briefly on a balcony. As my day began at seven-thirty, what I witnessed was invariably stamped with night’s end and day’s beginning—the black-suited
ghaffeers
, or evening watchmen, slowly divesting themselves of blankets and heavy coats, sleepy-eyed
suffragis
shuffling off to market for bread and milk, drivers getting the family car ready. There were rarely any other grown-ups about at that hour, although once in a while I’d see a parent marching along with a GPS child, dressed in our uniform of cap, trousers, and blazer, all in gray with light-blue piping. What I cherished in those dawdling walks was the opportunity to elaborate on the scanty material offered me. A redheaded woman I saw one afternoon seemed—just by walking by—to have persuaded me that she was a poisoner and (I had without specific comprehension heard the word recently) a divorcee. A pair of men sauntering about one morning were detectives. I imagined that a couple standing on a balcony overhead spoke French and had just had a leisurely breakfast with champagne.
    Fantasizing about other lives and especially other people’s houseswas stimulated by my quite rigid confinement in our own. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I actually set foot in a classmate’s apartment or house as I was growing up. And I cannot remember any occasion at all when one of my friends—“friend” is probably too strong a word to describe the children of my own age with whom I had contact—from either school or the club came to my house. One of my earliest and most long-lasting passions therefore has been an almost overpowering desire to imagine what other people’s houses were like. Did their rooms resemble ours? Did their kitchens work the way ours did? What did their cupboards contain, and how were those contents organized? And so on, down to the smallest details—night tables, radios, lamps, bookshelves, rugs, etc. Until I left Egypt in 1951 I assumed that my