by Diana Athill
So I went there one weekend for lunch, and from the way Dolly took my hands in both of hers I knew at once that we would kiss when we parted. She had cooked an elaborate and exquisite meal and her mastery surprised me because at home she must have had servants, however reduced her fortune.
‘Does your aunt cook when she’s at home?’ I asked Didi when she was out of the room.
‘Good God, no, I don’t think she ever goes into the kitchen.’
I asked her when she came back how she did it. ‘It’s atavistique, my dear, atavistique. My mother—you remember, habibi?—kept such a wonderful table, she always knew exactly how everything should be done. It is only a question of knowing how it should be.’
She was charming, with her slightly haggard face, her well-cut hair and pretty figure, wearing a tweed skirt and cashmere jersey which exactly matched. And she had a way of lighting up at the mention of a name: ‘I adore her—so much charm, such a wonderful nature!’ I recognized this manner. I have seen it in Englishwomen of good family and much money. It doesn’t preclude shrewd assessments or spiteful judgments; it is a matter of ‘good taste,’ perhaps stemming from the same period as the nicknames. What it chiefly means is ‘we can afford to be as gracious and charming in our reactions to people as we are in everything else.’ It is a scattering of largesse.
Gracious and charming Dolly certainly was. There was nothing to say but ‘I love your aunt.’ And her hospitality went beyond the gushing manner. She would share her bedroom, or even her bed, so that Mémé and Didi could have friends to stay, and it was impossible to get near the washing-up. Her image of herself as generous and loving was not without reality, although as I learnt later there were times when she could lapse from the ideal it expressed.
Many of her English friends were grand. She truly believed that she loved them because of how kind, how good, how witty, how generous they were; but these qualities would have been celebrated more perfunctorily if they had been less rich and well-bred. She enjoyed their grandness in itself, and particularly it comforted her. That was how people ought to be, and they were still her friends even in these terrible days when ‘it is impossible, you know, we have nothing left. We can’t get a penny out of the fellaheen any more.’ That last remark slipped out when she was entertaining people of her own sort to drinks. She looked round guiltily to confirm that neither her son nor her nephew had heard, knowing that they would have been disgusted by it.
Dolly spoke English fluently, but French was more natural to her. All the women of the family were educated at French pensionnats, all the men at English schools. They broke into Arabic sometimes for family jokes or squabbles, but they told me they spoke it badly.
There were passages of Arabic when we were planning to cheat the insurance company. Didi owned a small and ancient Volkswagen. Soon after he arrived someone ran into it and it had to be repaired, a matter of three weeks’ work. Fortunately the insurance was paid up, so it was not too bad a disaster—indeed, it might be a windfall. They were short of money. Didi had scraped together the bare minimum for his trip, and whatever Dolly had managed to bring out of Egypt (the export of currency was narrowly restricted), she was overspending it recklessly—they made tragi-comedy of their financial plight almost as often as they spoke of love. It didn’t take them a moment to see the next move. Didi needed a car, the accident would force him to hire one, and for this the insurance company would have to pay. So where was a friend owning a car who would be prepared to say that he had hired it to Didi and would give him a receipt to show the company for…how much? £30? Nonsense, for three weeks it would be more than that, what about £50? Yes, but what was the rate for car-hire nowadays? It wouldn’t do to claim a sum which looked improbable. ‘You see, if Didi really did hire a car, the insurance would have to pay,’ explained Dolly in parentheses, suddenly nervous of my Englishness. Which was true, or the company would not so calmly have accepted as genuine the receipt which I composed and typed out.
I liked the part of Dolly which could so immediately appreciate this scheme: ‘saltiness,’ it is called in Egypt, the tough, sly quality of the underdog rejoicing in scoring off the top dog, so bred into the bones of a colonized people that a streak of it persists even in that people’s aristocracy. It can hardly be called a virtue (except that it contributes to endurance), but it is amusing and I found it sympathetic; that, and the conviction with which she believed in any emotion which she might be expressing. She couldn’t be disliked, and this remained true even after I had become shocked by the way in which her generous protestations of love could be let down by her actions.
When she returned to Egypt Didi went to the station to see her off, and came to my flat afterwards, shaken. I could see at once that something had gone wrong, but it was some time before I could get it out of him. Then it emerged that Dolly had promised to leave some money with him, knowing that he had none left, not even his fare back to Germany, but at the very last moment, on the platform, had told him that she had spent it all. If he hadn’t been counting on it he wouldn’t be, as he was now, flat broke. What was he going to do, and how could she, after all her loving talk, have put him in this pickle? There had been a ‘terrible scene’—and as he described the recriminations and tears and wailings of ‘Now you won’t love me any more’ which had gone on, Didi, for all his dejection, began to laugh.
‘Dolly’s love!’ he said. ‘But the funny thing is, you know, she does love me.’
I believed him. She was not the sort of person who could believe in no longer having money…and there was something else (acknowledged or unacknowledged?): she knew that Didi wasn’t really stranded because I would come to his rescue. After all, I hadn’t been deprived of my birthright; I must be earning plenty of money in my job; I ‘loved’ the boy; it wouldn’t hurt me.
Before her marriage Dolly brought Didi up. ‘I had him from when he was a tiny baby, he is like a son to me.’ She looked after him because his mother, her younger sister, wouldn’t. His mother was the beautiful one of the family—they all three told me that—and was married in her teens to a man much older than herself, whom, they said, she didn’t love. She was too young to want a child, and to make matters worse her husband died soon after Didi was born. ‘My mother didn’t have much time for me,’ he said. He speaks warmly of his childhood with Dolly in his grandparents’ house; he likes to draw an idyllic picture of his childhood and tell how he was his grandmother’s favourite and how she always kept him at her side, laughing over grown-up gossip with him even when he was little more than a baby. He likes to tell how beautiful and gay Dolly and his mother—he always includes his mother in this—were when they came to kiss him goodnight before going out to a party. But Mémé told me: ‘His mother was horrible to him, you know, but the funny thing is he adored her, he still does.’ Didi himself denied this: ‘I enjoy being with her—or I did when I last saw her which was years ago—because she’s very charming and amusing, I like her as a woman. But I don’t love her.’ I have noticed, however, that he always goes out of his way to let me know if any of his few clothes—a cheap shirt or two, and some pyjamas—have been sent by her as a present, and he has told me repeatedly that she gave him the most precious of all his possessions, his little car.
It was not he, but Mémé, who told me the following story. ‘When Didi was about eight or ten he came back from school one evening and there was no one at home—’ he had left his grandparents’ house for his mother’s when she remarried. ‘He rang and rang, and no one answered. So he went away and walked round looking at shops and things, and then he came back and rang again, and still no one was there. So he went away, and came back, and went away, and came back, and it wasn’t until about eleven o’clock that a servant from the flat above came down and said “Oh there you are, your mother and her husband have gone away for a week. They asked me to tell you and give you this.” And he gave him one piastre—one piastre—so he could find a telephone and ask someone for a place to sleep. She was a
lways doing things like that. When he won a prize at school and she’d promised to come to the prize-giving, she didn’t, and when he cried and asked her why she hadn’t come, all she said was why wouldn’t he stop being such a nuisance.’
No one could know Didi at all well without understanding that his capacity for loving is deep and candid, and no one could be in a room with him for fifteen minutes without realizing that his pride is supersensitive. His mother was unable to accept his love, or to return it fully, and the rest of the family trampled on his pride. Most of them were rich—some of them very rich—but Didi was a poor relation. ‘He was always poor,’ said Mémé, ‘and my family is so horrible. They talk so much about loving people, but if there was a party, say, and all the cousins were coming, they wouldn’t ask Didi. They’d say “Well, he hasn’t the right clothes, it would embarrass him.” And they got all his money, you know—all the money he had from his father. They made lawsuits and got it all.’
‘What was he like when he was a child?’ I asked.
‘I was much younger than him, of course,’ said Mémé, ‘so I didn’t know him properly in those days, but what I can remember about him when he was a boy is that he was always very angry, and shouting.’
That boy is now rarely glimpsed in Didi. He has a strong sense of what he calls ‘aristocracy,’ by which he means the essentials of good-breeding whether inherited or ‘natural,’ and against all the odds he makes an art of elegance. It is easy for him to look well dressed. He owns two suits, one dark blue, one grey with a subdued check, both conservative in cut. Once he told me that his mother sent them to him, and another time that he had bought them in Germany when he received his advance from his book (the truth, I suspect). He preserves these suits with meticulous care and always wears them with a white shirt and a dark tie of knitted silk. He also owns one pair of slacks with worn-out pockets and two or three pullovers. He had no top-coat until I sent him a cheap duffle for Christmas. Whether he is dressed up in one of his suits or not, he manages to look right. His gestures and bearing are naturally elegant, and his manners go with his appearance: a grave, formal courtesy, sometimes a shade elaborate but exceptionally winning, or a natural and responsive gaiety. It is as though he wanted to prove himself more ‘the real thing’ than any of ‘them,’ however little money or status in the family he has; that he rather than ‘they’ preserves the essence of his beloved grandparents.
Many Egyptians of Didi’s background think wistfully of living abroad but stay at home because if they left they would lose their passports, and they can take no money out. They resent the regime because they are to its right. Didi is forced to live abroad because he is to its left. He was in opposition first (like all his contemporaries) to the British, the foreign people he most loves and admires; then to the Revolution because it didn’t go far enough. And had neither of these two things existed to oppose, he would have found something else: the impulse to take a stand against authority was bred, surely, by his family.
Although none of them apart from Dolly gave him love, and although they humiliated him, they did for him what they considered proper. They sent him to a ‘good’ school and later to a university and abroad, to study medicine. A ‘good’ school meant an English-type school run by an English headmaster, but perhaps an Egyptian English school is not so English as Egyptians suppose.
‘I shall never forget,’ said Didi, ‘the first day X came to school. He was very big, much older than the rest of us, a real peasant. He could hardly speak any English then, and he looked so strange among all those other little boys. And halfway through the morning he suddenly said “Well, it feels to me like time for lunch,” and he opened his satchel and brought out a little stove, and a bottle of oil, and a lemon, and garlic, and foul [black beans], and calmly began to cook his lunch. All the boys stared at him. He looked round and saw me sitting to one side—I was always sitting rather to one side—watching him [he still sits to one side and watches]. So he said “Hey, you! You look all right. Why don’t you come over here.” And after that we always did everything together. He was wonderful. You know how I always say what I love best about Egypt is the jokes? Well, making marvellously witty jokes was as natural to X as breathing.’
It may have been this friend who first made Didi feel that his family were not properly ‘Egyptians,’ and that he wanted to identify with the ‘proper Egyptians’ against them, which landed him with the poor and the oppressed. His political awareness, nourished by avid if haphazard reading, soon went beyond the nationalistic sport of ‘Away with the British!’
When the Revolution came he was happy because it would sweep away what his family represented, but its sweeping was far from thorough and then, in its turn, it began to oppress. It oppressed Jews and it oppressed Communists. Didi began to be drawn to Jewish girls, and he became a Communist.
This, of course, is oversimplification. He also had good rational grounds for criticizing the Revolution. The Arab-Israel conflict is likely to be ruinous to the Middle East, so that in writing schoolboy-ish articles attacking Nasser for cherishing that conflict and spending the country’s resources on building up an army for it, Didi was talking sense. That, it seems, was the immediate cause of his exile. He doesn’t only imagine that he feels passionately about these things: his intelligence and the generosity of his nature are genuinely outraged by them. But his intelligence also tells him that Nasser has much to his credit. When I said to him ‘If you really care so passionately about the fellaheen it would have made more sense to keep quiet and get on with doing what you could on the side of the good in the Revolution,’ he answered sadly ‘Do you think I haven’t told myself that a thousand times?’
Didi has clear sight, but it often fails to govern his actions. Indeed it is often a burden to him because it makes him able to judge the actions which spring from factors beyond his control. He knows that a position of impotence as an exile in Germany is no place from which to champion the fellaheen—but there he is, stuck in Germany for so long as he can foresee. He knows that if he had completed his medical training he would be a more useful man and a more secure one, but he threw it over. He told me once that he did this because he wanted to write, but it was not convincing. He avoids speaking plainly about it. Was it just that ‘they’ wanted him to be a doctor, or did he get into some kind of trouble of which he is too ashamed to speak? He might well have wrecked his prospects by some folly because he has a strong impulse towards self-destruction.
Didi is a gambler (‘Of course!’ I thought when I learnt this, though I had seen little of him then). He does without it almost all the time, of necessity, not counting poker or belotte with friends. These are games; gambling is different—serious. If he suddenly received a lot of money I think he would first summon up his precise, orderly, ‘sensible’ side and allot so much of it to paying off his debts, so much to buying things he lacked, and then he would make for a casino. If the sum were too small to make an impression on his debts he would skip the first stage. When he last found a job after a long and hard period without one he ate and drank and smoked his first month’s pay, but used the next instalment for gambling and lost the lot. Whether he wins or loses is irrelevant, or rather his pleasure in the first or annoyance at the last is disconnected from his sensations about gambling in itself: it is the act which draws him.
‘Of course we aren’t going to play, how can we? We’ll just go in and have a look.’ He said that once to Mémé and me, but as Mémé noticed, ‘He wasn’t listening to anything we said, his eyes went glassy.’ We couldn’t play because we had no money beyond that for our hotel. I told myself that as Didi had recognized this we would be all right, but his eyes had gone glassy, and it soon became evident that he was capable of lying to get through that door, and that if we dragged him away he would sneak out and return after we had gone to bed.
I watched him at the table. It was a matter of ritual for him to appear relaxed. His face was impassive, his stance carefully nonchalant, one h
and in pocket; he placed his chips as though casually and while the wheel was spinning he turned away and looked out over the room. He was seeing nothing. He had withdrawn and gone still. I soon left him, feeling that the presence of someone to whom affection and politeness obliged him to pay attention was an irritation. I only saw him losing, but no doubt he would have won with exactly the same show of indifference.
That time he left the table at a point where he had broken even, drawn away from it not by commonsense but by kindness: Mémé, who was too young to be admitted, was waiting sadly outside. If Mémé had not been there he could, I felt sure, have lost his hotel money quite cheerfully and landed us in a pretty pickle. I have never known him gamble at any other time without losing everything he had on him.
He also drinks too much. He fancies himself as a civilized drinker and insists that he is safe from alcoholism because of this. It is true that he likes to decide carefully on the place, the company, the liquor, and that once the decision is made he will approach the occasion with ceremony; but when he has started he doesn’t stop until money, drink, the party or his capacity (which is large) comes to an end. And besides this greediness when he is drinking for pleasure, he will drink anything he can lay hands on, even if he has to steal it, when suffering becomes too much for him.
Since his Egyptian passport was withdrawn, Didi has often been penniless. Unable to get a permit to work in England, where he wanted to live, he had to make his way in Germany, without at first knowing the language and without any qualifications for earning a living. He has worked in the Hamburg docks, as a labourer, in factories and as a clerk. He is good at figures and with his hands—broad peasant hands which look incongruous because the rest of him is finely made. He can be methodical and orderly and he has never complained of the kind of work he has had to do. When people are sorry for him he becomes almost cross. Although he has never said so, he may feel that these are the kinds of job a Communist ought to do; or, on the other hand, a way of life so remote from the one his background makes natural to him may seem less humiliating, because more dramatic, than one only a few rungs down the ladder. Anyway, he makes no fuss about doing humble work, turns up in the morning even if still drunk, and although he has left jobs and has lost them through illness, being sacked doesn’t figure in his stories.