Free Out of Place: A Memoir by Edward W. Said Page A

main street into which Aziz Osman—our house sat at the bottom left-hand side—ran. Fuad al-Awwal was lined with shops and vegetable stands; it carried ahealthy flow of traffic as well as an extremely noisy tram line and occasional public buses. Not only was it distinctly urban and busy, but it welled up from the older parts of Cairo, crossed into Zamalek from Bulaq, traversed the quietly wealthy and smug Gezira island, where we lived, and then disappeared across the Nile into Imbaba, another teeming antithesis to Zamalek, with its quiet tree-lined streets, its foreigners, and its carefully plotted, shopless streets like Sharia Aziz Osman. The GPS’s “playground,” as it was called, constituted a frontier between the native urban world and the constructed colonial suburb we lived, studied, and played in. Before school began we would line up by class in the yard, and then again during recess, lunch, and dismissal. It is a sign of how lasting was the impression on me made by those exercises that I still remember
left
as the side nearest the school building,
right
as the Fuad al-Awwal side.
    We stood there supposedly to be counted and greeted or dismissed: “Good morning, children” or “Good-bye, children.” This seemed a polite ritual camouflaging the travails of being in line, where all sorts of unpleasant things took place. Forbidden to utter a word in class except in answer to the teacher’s questions, the line was simultaneously a bazaar, auction house, and court, where the most extravagant of offers and promises were exchanged, and where the younger children were verbally bullied by older boys who threatened the direst punishment. My particular bane was David Ades, a boy two or three years older than me. Dark and muscular, he was ruthlessly focused on my pens, my pencil box, my sandwiches and sweets, which he wanted for himself, and was fearsomely challenging to everything I was or did. He didn’t like my sweaters; he thought my socks were too short; he hated the look on my face; he disapproved of my way of talking. Coming to or leaving the school represented a daily challenge to me, of how to avoid getting caught or waylaid by David Ades, and for the years I was at GPS I was quite successful. But I could never escape him in the class lines, when despite the supervising teacher’s presence, pushy, ruffianlike behavior was tolerated and Ades would whisper and mutter his threats and general disapprobation across the row of fidgeting children that kept us mercifully apart.
    I have retained two phrases from Ades in my memory. One I parroted for years thereafter, “I promise you”; the other I haven’t forgotten, because it frightened me so much when he uttered it: “I’ll bashyour face after school.” Sometimes separately, often together, both were pronounced with fervent, not to say menacing, earnestness, even though it must have been at most a month after he first hurled them at me that I noticed how empty and unfulfilled they both were. Despite its soporific and sometimes repressive class atmosphere, the “school” that Ades promised to bash my face “after” protected me from him. His older brother Victor was a famous swimmer and diver who attended English Mission College (EMC) in Heliopolis; I admired his performances at meets around Cairo to which GPS took us, but I never liked the look of him any more than I ever warmed up to David, who would occasionally ask me to play a game of marbles with him.
    I tried out both phrases at home—“I promise you” on my sisters, “I’ll bash your face after school” in front of a mirror. (I was too timid to use it on a real person.) In the bickering squabbles I had with the two oldest of my younger sisters, “promising” meant trying to get something on loan (“I promise you I’ll give it back”) or working hard to convince them of some preposterous “fib” I was telling (“I promise you I saw the crazy poisoner with red hair today!”) But I was