By Way of a Prologue
Into the mists of time, the reveries come drifting and sifting back through consciousness enhanced by old, faded photographs and filtered through the decaying memories of a slight boy of two-years sitting with a girl of similar age in a pony cart at the Budapest zoo; of two older children at the Russian Embassy mocking him from their balcony as he bids goodbye to his “Maman”; of his mother driving her convertible into the back of a hay wagon; of a larger than life portrait of King Alexander of Yugoslavia on the second-floor landing of the Embassy; of a German governess named Bette caring for him; and it was 1939; of a descent into the cavernous Catacombs in Jerusalem, where his mother bought a tin icon with little doors that opened displaying a coin of Mary the Mother of Jesus; of a seaplane skimming the shiny, sun-lit surface of the Dead Sea as it lands on the placid waters; of the strange sensation of bathing in its briny element; and it was 1940; of living with both his parents for a short while at the Gabalaya House, a British military residence in Cairo; of the officers eating alone in the large dining hall while reading a book and silently spooning their soup; of a photograph of him sitting with his mother on a camel while his father held the reins with a pyramid and the Sphinx couchant framing the background; of his father in a military uniform at the Gezira Country Club with its luxurious swimming pools, racetrack, polo and cricket fields, tennis courts, and the seemingly endless myriads of Egyptian servants constantly milling about prepared to be of immediate service; of moving into an apartment in a very tall building with his mother; of his father’s absence for extended periods of time; of his mother’s anxiety and frequent migraines; of the shrill, angry sounds of sirens signaling nightly bombing raids that never materialized; of passengers hurriedly abandoning streetcars in the dark; of frightened scurrying figures running toward underground shelters; of clutching his teddy bear and crowding with his mother into an elevator and descending into the bowels of the building; of being jostled and pushed and reaching out in the darkness for his mother’s absent hand; of not understanding the language or gestures of other children or his cultural surroundings; and it was 1941; of the kindly Egyptian janitor who gifted him a child’s fez and a little prayer rug for his personal use; of attending a French school and being too shy and embarrassed to ask the teacher to be excused so he could go to the bathroom and later walking miserably home along the Nile with the soiled contents clinging to his short pants; of disjointed images and photographs of him and his parents on the deck of a large ship sailing on the Black Sea en route to Odessa; of picking fruit from a fig tree on a second-floor balcony in Beirut; of visiting the medieval citadel in Damascus where the Moslem defenders poured boiling oil on the Christian invaders as they
A dozen years later, as an undergraduate student at the University of Chicago, while rummaging aimlessly in Harper Library, he found a novel and became fascinated with its story about young Eugene Gant in Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. He was enrolled in an English composition course and doing rather poorly but the book suggested a unique theme—loneliness—and he composed the next week’s essay assignment along its outlines. At the end of the next class session, the teacher asked if he would see her for a moment before leaving and when the room was emptied of all its students, she asked him if he would consider seeing someone at Student Health.