or
tawlah
for hours on end was a mind-numbing experience. These periods of enforced boredom were early avatars of a larger scheme to curtail my potential mischief-making: “Wadie, please take the boy with you,” my mother would say exasperatedly.“He’s causing a lot of trouble.” When Wadie’s services were not available, my mother would either send me on a long and pointless errand or pronounce the words “Take off your clothes and go
right
to bed.” Books, music, diversion of any kind were forbidden in bed, as were food and drink. I was forbidden to lock the bedroom door, allowing my mother unimpeded, extremely sudden, and unannounced entrances into the room to ascertain whether I was complying. The only benefit of this particularly deadening punishment was that having discovered three chessmen lying in the back of a drawer I practiced throwing them up and catching them until I had taught myself to juggle.
My parents’ early disciplinary practices I associate first with the long vacations, when extended intervals of leisure might have allowed my inquiring and radically naughty self to go where it might be risky to trespass. But they soon extended to my Cairo life as well. I had an amazingly resourceful curiosity about people and things. I was frequently upbraided for reading books I shouldn’t have, and more damningly I was often found looking in the autograph books, notepads, pamphlets and comics, scribbled messages, and notes of my sisters, schoolmates, and parents. “Curiosity killed the cat” was the frequent verdict on me, but I wanted to get beyond the various cages in which I found myself placed, and which made me feel so dissatisfied, and even distasteful to myself. Having to do my schoolwork, to play games like soccer at which I was manifestly unsuccessful, to be a dutiful, church-going son and brother, I soon began to take secret delight in doing and saying things that broke the rules or took me beyond the boundaries set by my parents. I always looked around doors that were ajar; I read books to find out what propriety kept hidden from me; I peered into drawers, cupboards, bookshelves, envelopes, scraps of paper, to glean from them what I could about characters whose sinful wantonness corresponded to my desires.
I soon began to cherish the act of discovery that reading provided. About half our family business in Palestine—the Palestine Educational Company—was bookselling, and a small amount was publishing; in Egypt, however, my father ran a company (in partnership with his cousin Boulos and his children) entirely devoted to office equipment and stationery, some of which we also sold in Jerusalem and Haifa.Whenever some member of our Jerusalem family visited I would get presents of suitable books taken off the shelf with their price tags and inventory labels still in them. These suitable books seemed to fall into two general categories: children’s books in the A. A. Milne and Enid Blyton mold, and useful books of information like the
Collins Junior Book of Knowledge
, which was given to me when I was between nine and ten. It entertained me for long hours as I tried to grasp the mysteries of one Kalita, the girl fakir who performed miracles of strength and self-punishment at the Bertram Mills Circus. I had not yet even been to a circus—the Circo Togni was not to appear in Cairo until four years later—nor, apart from the anodyne suggestions provided in Blyton’s Mr. Galliano’s Circus books, did I have any conception of what life in a European circus was all about. It was enough for me that Kalita was of mysterious origin; in the tiny, grainy, and blurred photographs provided in the text, she wore what appeared to be a two-piece costume such as I had never seen, and she was able to do amazing, unimaginable things with her body.
All of this defied the positive laws of respectability and decency under which I chafed. Her contortions were also at odds with nature, but that increased their
tawlah
for hours on end was a mind-numbing experience. These periods of enforced boredom were early avatars of a larger scheme to curtail my potential mischief-making: “Wadie, please take the boy with you,” my mother would say exasperatedly.“He’s causing a lot of trouble.” When Wadie’s services were not available, my mother would either send me on a long and pointless errand or pronounce the words “Take off your clothes and go
right
to bed.” Books, music, diversion of any kind were forbidden in bed, as were food and drink. I was forbidden to lock the bedroom door, allowing my mother unimpeded, extremely sudden, and unannounced entrances into the room to ascertain whether I was complying. The only benefit of this particularly deadening punishment was that having discovered three chessmen lying in the back of a drawer I practiced throwing them up and catching them until I had taught myself to juggle.
My parents’ early disciplinary practices I associate first with the long vacations, when extended intervals of leisure might have allowed my inquiring and radically naughty self to go where it might be risky to trespass. But they soon extended to my Cairo life as well. I had an amazingly resourceful curiosity about people and things. I was frequently upbraided for reading books I shouldn’t have, and more damningly I was often found looking in the autograph books, notepads, pamphlets and comics, scribbled messages, and notes of my sisters, schoolmates, and parents. “Curiosity killed the cat” was the frequent verdict on me, but I wanted to get beyond the various cages in which I found myself placed, and which made me feel so dissatisfied, and even distasteful to myself. Having to do my schoolwork, to play games like soccer at which I was manifestly unsuccessful, to be a dutiful, church-going son and brother, I soon began to take secret delight in doing and saying things that broke the rules or took me beyond the boundaries set by my parents. I always looked around doors that were ajar; I read books to find out what propriety kept hidden from me; I peered into drawers, cupboards, bookshelves, envelopes, scraps of paper, to glean from them what I could about characters whose sinful wantonness corresponded to my desires.
I soon began to cherish the act of discovery that reading provided. About half our family business in Palestine—the Palestine Educational Company—was bookselling, and a small amount was publishing; in Egypt, however, my father ran a company (in partnership with his cousin Boulos and his children) entirely devoted to office equipment and stationery, some of which we also sold in Jerusalem and Haifa.Whenever some member of our Jerusalem family visited I would get presents of suitable books taken off the shelf with their price tags and inventory labels still in them. These suitable books seemed to fall into two general categories: children’s books in the A. A. Milne and Enid Blyton mold, and useful books of information like the
Collins Junior Book of Knowledge
, which was given to me when I was between nine and ten. It entertained me for long hours as I tried to grasp the mysteries of one Kalita, the girl fakir who performed miracles of strength and self-punishment at the Bertram Mills Circus. I had not yet even been to a circus—the Circo Togni was not to appear in Cairo until four years later—nor, apart from the anodyne suggestions provided in Blyton’s Mr. Galliano’s Circus books, did I have any conception of what life in a European circus was all about. It was enough for me that Kalita was of mysterious origin; in the tiny, grainy, and blurred photographs provided in the text, she wore what appeared to be a two-piece costume such as I had never seen, and she was able to do amazing, unimaginable things with her body.
All of this defied the positive laws of respectability and decency under which I chafed. Her contortions were also at odds with nature, but that increased their
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