 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 14 - 20 October 1999 Issue No. 451 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 14 - 20 October 1999 Issue No. 451
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Books Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Sweet as cherries
By Fayza Hassan
My earliest memories of the world I lived in were that it was second-rate. It was really a bit of bad luck to have been born in Egypt rather than in France or, more significantly, Switzerland, my mother and grandmother always seemed to imply. Partly because our paediatrician was Swiss, I assume, the Alps were presented to us as the land of milk and honey, where children enjoyed constant good health while gorging themselves on all the scrumptious foods that we were only allowed to read about.
I was in total agreement with their assessment of our environment. In those days, my dearest wish was to be Heidi, the little Swiss girl who featured in my favourite children's books. Did she not live in the mountains with her grandfather and his herd of goats? Did she not enjoy, on a daily basis, thick slices of brown bread piled high with home-made butter that she washed down with numerous glasses of creamy milk? The thought of all these unheard-of delicacies made my mouth water helplessly. Our own butter was mostly imported, never fresh enough to be digested by our delicate stomachs, and the only bread we were allowed to consume, in extremely scant quantities at that, was made of refined white flour and always thoroughly toasted to rid it of any offending germ.
Not only was our digestive system impaired by the unfortunate climate of the desert, known to have ruined many a foreigner's innards, but we also had to contend periodically with the disease-carrying khamasin, to say nothing of the endemic typhoid fever and the occasional bout of cholera.
During one such epidemic, right after the war, and egged on by the good doctor, who insisted that a change of climate was essential to protect our fragile health, we were taken for an extended stay at a mountain resort in Cyprus. From the very start, I discovered that this place too was below the standards to which my mother and grandmother had been accustomed, not the real thing (Gstaadt or St Moritz, according to the maternal side of my family). Still, it would have to do until it became completely safe to travel to Europe, where we would finally see what the real world looked like.
Aged eight, I had never been to the mountains. I began by being quite impressed. The quality of the air in particular was enthralling: cool, vivid and deep, with a briskness that invited physical exertion, to which I was normally completely adverse.
There were apple and cherry trees bordering the roads and we had a small plum tree that yielded a few real fruits in the garden of the house on the hill that we had rented. It was enough for me to feel a deep kinship to Heidi. Could we have a couple of goats and a dog? I asked my mother at once.
Soon, however, my perception changed and my happiness diminished, influenced by the whispered conversations of my parents. Probably slightly better than Lebanon (which they had never visited), Cyprus, after all, was only a rock, they told each other. It could not even, like normal Swiss mountain resorts, boast real snow in winter; it was dry and in fact quite primitive. Why, the butcher had looked extremely puzzled when my mother had asked him for a whole beef fillet and had not known which part of the animal she was referring to; as for the cherries -- which I was tasting for the first time and could not get enough of -- they were rather small and hard, their colour too light, their taste slightly acid. "Remember the fat black cherries we used to eat in Lausanne?" my grandmother murmured wistfully. The milk too was thin and watery and the butter rancid. Even the best hotel in town did not offer wild strawberries and cream on its menu. Only the mosfilo, a round yellowish berry with which the Cypriots made delicious jam was worthy of their consideration.
In September of that year, we went with a Cypriot friend to gather wild mushrooms. I was seeing a real forest for the first time in my life and felt elated. I was sure that Heidi, too, had gone in search of mushrooms in the fall, to supplement her diet of dairy products. Then I heard my mother explaining to Mr Mikhailides that in Switzerland, the pine trees were different and that the ground there was covered with lush vegetation, as opposed to the dusty, rocky terrain on which we were trekking. My joy vanished. I imagined that Heidi's mushrooms must have been bigger and certainly more palatable. I have no recollection of the taste of the ones we gathered that day, but I clearly remember my bitter disappointment the first time I visited Switzerland.
