Adel Esmat, born in the Gharbiya Governorate of Egypt in 1959, graduated in philosophy from the Faculty of Arts of Cairo’s Ain Shams University in 1984. He lives in Tanta, in the Nile Delta, and works as a library specialist in the Egyptian Ministry of Education.
Mandy McClure is the translator of Arab Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide (AUC Press, 2008) and co-translator of The Traditional Crafts of Egypt (AUC Press, 2016). She lives in Cairo.
Tales of Yusuf Tadrus
Adel Esmat
Translated by
Mandy McClure
This electronic edition published in 2018 by
Hoopoe
113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt
420 Fifth Avenue, New York, 10018
Hoopoe is an imprint of the American University in Cairo Press
Copyright © 2015 by Adel Esmat
First published in Arabic in 2015 as Hikayat Yusuf Tadrus by Kotob Khan
Protected under the Berne Convention
English translation copyright © 2018 by Mandy McClure
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 978 977 416 860 4
eISBN 978 161 797 874 6
Version 1
For Ibrahim Philips and Ashraf Michel
I said to the almond tree, “Speak to me of God.” And the almond tree blossomed—Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco
Yusuf Tadrus says:
Yesterday I dreamed of the resurrection rite.
The light was dim, coming from candles set in niches along the length of the wall. The silence was heavy, save for the faint sound of chants. There were about five of us. We were walking in a long line and wearing flowing gallabiyas, like the light ones farmers wear, made of coarse cotton. I was terrified. All I could think was: How had I gotten here and who brought me and there must be some mistake.
We entered a spacious, square room with no furnishings but a linen rug spread out on the floor. The abbot stood next to a small pulpit. We stood in front of him in a row, like in a morning roll call. He gestured for us to lie down on the rug. We obeyed as if hypnotized.
I was still baffled, thinking about how I’d gotten there. I knew it was too late and there was no going back. The sound of the chants grew louder and my thoughts deserted me. Only the fear remained. It was too late to turn back. I had to submit to my fate. Maybe my life here would be better.
We lay down, our backs to the ground and faces to the ceiling. I saw only darkness. I felt a sheet thrown over us, covering us from head to toe. I smelled the scent of linen and felt its roughness on my face. The chants grew louder. Funeral rites were performed, every step of them. I submitted to them. Then the voices gradually grew distant and a silence fell, so heavy you were afraid to breathe. Then the breath vanished and I no longer felt anything.
I don’t know how long I stayed in the darkness of the veil. There was no time there. Silence and darkness. The veil lifted in a blur. The light shone from two candles on a high shelf. I struggled to orient myself, and then I heard prayer chants, as if the sun were shining. The flame of the two candles was fixed in place, as if there were no air here.
We stood in a line again, and the abbot descended two stairs holding scissors. After pronouncing each of our names, he left a mark on our heads with the scissors. When he approached me, his face was stony, lifeless, except for an overwhelming radiance in his eyes. He impressed the mark on my head and pronounced my name: Girgis. We began walking in the same line into a dark corridor, met with candles flickering in niches in the far distance. I couldn’t look behind me. When I tried to remember my first name, I couldn’t. I tried to recall anything about my former life and found only emptiness, as if everything I’d lived before had been completely erased.
Yusuf Tadrus says:
My mother was a member of the Holy Bible Association. Every month she was tasked with collecting contributions from all over the city. That was in the mid-1960s—the city wasn’t like it is now. I still remember al-Nadi Street with a child’s eye: the open space carpeted in sunlight that lit up the asphalt and made the houses sparkle, flooding the dried flame trees, the white wall of the club, and the footpaths I could see through the iron bars of the wall. The silence was thick, like the neighborhood was encased in glass. We’d climb the stairs in a new building, cool, the apartments tucked away behind gleaming doors evoking an air of velvet, different from the earthy air of the alley where we lived. My mother would knock on the door. A slim man would greet us and welcome her, taking his receipt and giving her the monthly contribution. We’d stop by doctors’ clinics, law offices, shop owners, and merchants. Every month we’d make the rounds of the city.
I discovered my love of light on those trips. And I got my fill of the story of my birth. Every month, I’d listen to a life account my mother had told dozens of times. How she had dedicated herself to the Lord, but her father had insisted on marrying her off at the age of thirty. She had a hard time getting pregnant—the pregnancy wouldn’t fix itself in her womb—and she went to monasteries and churches. When the pregnancy finally came to term and she was on the verge of giving birth, she learned that pain is the Lord, and she loved her life and her pain, and gave birth to me.
This story left me with a vague restlessness; an uncomfortable feeling that my existence on the earth was a momentous happening, as if all those events and destinies that preceded it were staged for a certain purpose, so that this birth could take place. The story held a burden the thoughtless child did not wish to bear. There was something in it that weighed on my spirit. I tried to evade it all the time, but it dogged me. A ghost that inhabited my psyche and settled in. The story complicated my sense of self and left me with a nagging feeling that I was pledged to something I had to fulfill. It was as though I had to make some sort of sacrifice, as if my existence was not rightfully mine.
My mother’s tale was dreary and I didn’t like it. I distracted myself by observing light and shadow, and my love of light grew in the escape from the oppressive story of my birth.
My mother was a woman of considerable girth. When climbing the stairs, her joints ached, but she considered it a toll she had to pay. Suffering purifies; it rids people of sins they’d committed long ago. She would walk slowly, reciting in a low voice humanity’s journey since the first sin. This slowness and her hushed voice let me contemplate shapes. These images were impressed clearly on my mind, as if they were part of a novel I’d once read.
Her labor and perseverance as she climbed the stairs held an acceptance of pain and a desire for sacrifice, her tribute of suffering that gladdened her soul. She had toiled in her life and it took her five years to have children, a boy and a girl. The association was her place for sacrifice, which she had to do in penance for an old sin. Our salvation is dependent on every individual offering up his or her measure of suffering.
At the end of the day, we’d return to the association to turn in the money we’d collected. I’d leave my mother and head for the workshops connected to the association’s office. The place was an orphanage, and the donations were collected for the workshops: needlework for the girls and textile weaving for the boys. My infatuation began in that place. Every person has his own secret. It might not be a secret, but he carries it in his soul like a special