our summers in Dhour el Shweir, he would play bridge in the morning at a café, then again in the afternoon, and finally at night he would preside over a game at our house or at a friend’s. The distance between us grew even greater as I, and alas he, discovered that I had no talent for or even interest in bridge. He seemed to have a phenomenal capacity for all indoor games, none of which I ever mastered. He tried to teach me backgammon, or
tawlah
, with, to me, appalling results. After watching me as I counted spaces laboriously, he would impatiently snatch the counter from under my finger and move it rapidly to the correct space: “Why are you counting like that”—here he would mimic my counting by affixing a crude moronic contortion to his face, as if I were a cretin trying hopelessly to go from three to four—“when
this
is the way it should be done?” Later he would ask me to play again but would end up playing the entire game for me. “It’s faster this way!” I was there just to sit opposite him and do nothing: he played both parts.
There wasn’t a card game he didn’t know, or a casino ritual he didn’t unsuccessfully try to teach me. Having had them explained thirty times has not after all enabled me to play either poker or baccarat. During the summer of 1953, after a year of learning how to play pool at my American boarding school, I thought I managed slyly to cajole him into a game of 8-ball at a little café in Dhour across from the Cirque Café. I attributed his initial reluctance to apprehension that he might be beaten, but it was a trick. I realized later that he feigned reluctance, and even a little admiration, just to get me going. “This is the way we playit in the States,” I crowed to him, as professional to novice. “If you hit the ball on the side, it’s called English.” I put in two balls, then missed the third. Taking up the cue, my father seemed suddenly transformed from humbly nodding apprentice into fearsome pro. It was no contest at all, not even after we moved to the adjoining 3-ball billiard table, where I thought I might have a chance. I was reduced to a state of complete confusion, and a kind of babbling helplessness as I blamed the cue, the mocking waiter, the absence of practice. “So it’s called English,” he said caustically on the way home, and this from a player who seemed to have every spin and twist at his command.
Games did not require him to say very much nor make more than a minimal emotional investment, and perhaps for this reason cardplaying became an obsessional and apparently life-sustaining habit. It was a way of sublimating his anxieties in an area of life in which the rules were set, and a routine order prevailed; an escape from any kind of confrontation with people, business, or problems.
Bridge, and card games generally, were part of his regeneration from the ravages of 1942. “It’s a relaxation,” he said once or twice over the years, describing a pastime that occupied at least twelve hours a day during the summer holidays and up to four hours during his periods of work. I remember nothing with quite the same dispiriting blankness as those times when as a young boy I was compelled to watch him play. While I sat by his side, every card flipped onto the table, every bid, every laconic postmortem after the hand was played out signified my mental and moral subordination and increased my sense of his authority over me. He would not speak to me at all, nor point out what in a given hand might have been interesting; there was just the unending monotony of the card game, and his express desire to be in it for reasons I could never fully understand.
Standing or sitting next to him during the first few years after 1942 was my punishment for misbehaving, and it constituted my parents’ primitive idea for keeping me out of trouble at times when I wasn’t at school and, worse, when we summered in Lebanon. Being forced to watch him playing bridge
tawlah
, with, to me, appalling results. After watching me as I counted spaces laboriously, he would impatiently snatch the counter from under my finger and move it rapidly to the correct space: “Why are you counting like that”—here he would mimic my counting by affixing a crude moronic contortion to his face, as if I were a cretin trying hopelessly to go from three to four—“when
this
is the way it should be done?” Later he would ask me to play again but would end up playing the entire game for me. “It’s faster this way!” I was there just to sit opposite him and do nothing: he played both parts.
There wasn’t a card game he didn’t know, or a casino ritual he didn’t unsuccessfully try to teach me. Having had them explained thirty times has not after all enabled me to play either poker or baccarat. During the summer of 1953, after a year of learning how to play pool at my American boarding school, I thought I managed slyly to cajole him into a game of 8-ball at a little café in Dhour across from the Cirque Café. I attributed his initial reluctance to apprehension that he might be beaten, but it was a trick. I realized later that he feigned reluctance, and even a little admiration, just to get me going. “This is the way we playit in the States,” I crowed to him, as professional to novice. “If you hit the ball on the side, it’s called English.” I put in two balls, then missed the third. Taking up the cue, my father seemed suddenly transformed from humbly nodding apprentice into fearsome pro. It was no contest at all, not even after we moved to the adjoining 3-ball billiard table, where I thought I might have a chance. I was reduced to a state of complete confusion, and a kind of babbling helplessness as I blamed the cue, the mocking waiter, the absence of practice. “So it’s called English,” he said caustically on the way home, and this from a player who seemed to have every spin and twist at his command.
Games did not require him to say very much nor make more than a minimal emotional investment, and perhaps for this reason cardplaying became an obsessional and apparently life-sustaining habit. It was a way of sublimating his anxieties in an area of life in which the rules were set, and a routine order prevailed; an escape from any kind of confrontation with people, business, or problems.
Bridge, and card games generally, were part of his regeneration from the ravages of 1942. “It’s a relaxation,” he said once or twice over the years, describing a pastime that occupied at least twelve hours a day during the summer holidays and up to four hours during his periods of work. I remember nothing with quite the same dispiriting blankness as those times when as a young boy I was compelled to watch him play. While I sat by his side, every card flipped onto the table, every bid, every laconic postmortem after the hand was played out signified my mental and moral subordination and increased my sense of his authority over me. He would not speak to me at all, nor point out what in a given hand might have been interesting; there was just the unending monotony of the card game, and his express desire to be in it for reasons I could never fully understand.
Standing or sitting next to him during the first few years after 1942 was my punishment for misbehaving, and it constituted my parents’ primitive idea for keeping me out of trouble at times when I wasn’t at school and, worse, when we summered in Lebanon. Being forced to watch him playing bridge
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