Tales of Yusuf Tadros. Adel Esmat

drawn to Lamiya. You know Raphael’s paintings? Lamiya was one of Raphael’s women, an angel come down to earth. She would stay by my side from the moment I set foot in the college to the end of the day. She’d help me, with that ethereal quality of hers that was so unsuited to me. I’d grown up in an alley. I knew carnal desires. I’d come from a coarse world suffused with the intimation of sexuality, with flirtatious banter and caresses everywhere. I couldn’t handle such proximity to the sublime. And then she was from a very wealthy family. I know myself and I know my family—there was no way.

      I tired of that intolerable existence. I feared I’d lose my already precarious balance and find I’d done something disastrous. One day I’d found myself kissing her in the middle of the studio.

      I felt I was on the verge of disaster whenever we were alone anywhere, even in the college halls. One day I stayed late in the studio. I looked around and found myself alone with Lamiya. I made a hasty exit, leaving her there to ready her supplies with the same ethereal refinement with which she did everything else.

      Like I said, the place was bigger than me. I’d known it from the first moment, but hadn’t immediately recognized it. When I recall how I stood at the gate of the Sidi Gaber station on my first night in Alexandria, I know my feelings told me the truth. That night I saw myself small in that place. The cars seemed to pass farther in the distance than normal, the buildings were taller than normal, sizes bigger than they really were, and I was smaller than my true size. The cold air had an impersonal, salty smell. Even the blue tram swayed in a stately manner as it entered the station.

      Years later, I understood the meaning of my feelings. I was coming from the alley, and my size in the alley was right for my status. Things were close by, within arm’s reach, and I was virtually surrounded with attention. The alley was like a womb—I had an organic link to it. When I stood at the gate of the Sidi Gaber station, it was a birth I couldn’t bear, so I returned to the warmth of the womb.

      These explanations came after the fact as an attempt to silence the anxiety and my feeling that I’d made a mistake by wasting the chance to study at the College of Fine Arts.

      In April, I decided to return to Tanta. Rida Boulos was agitated that day.

      “You’re losing out,” he said, angry and serious. “Trust me, you’re losing out.”

      “I don’t know,” I told him. “Maybe it’s for the best.”

      We remained in contact and would meet whenever he returned from Alexandria, but he was sad. He seemed to honestly believe he was responsible for me.

      It was a victory for my sister. Two days after I arrived, my mother came down with a severe cold, then a high fever. I went to the pharmacy on Ghayath Street to buy medicine. I met Dr. Hani, an acquaintance of hers, and he asked about her. I described her condition.

      “It could be something other than a cold,” he said. “Let me take a look.”

      He came with me to the house. When he entered her room, she looked at me in reproach, because I’d brought in a stranger while she was sick. He didn’t examine her. He said hello and put his palm on her forehead.

      “Take her to the fever hospital quickly and I’ll catch up with you there,” he said.

      At the hospital, Dr. Hani found she had typhoid.

      “Your mother’s a good woman and you were about to lose her,” he said.

      In the ghostly air of the fever hospital, she looked at me with blame, asking silently why I’d returned from Alexandria. Her silence and melancholy settled in my depths—not because of my failure to complete an arts education, but mostly because of her defeat by my big sister.

      The time in the hospital deepened the private bond between us. We were alone in a long ward, among peasant women ailing from different kinds of fevers, surrounded by an unending solitude.

      Those three days stretched out in a dark area of my depths. We were alone in the universe, and her hopes that I would turn out to be something were lost. She grieved because I had been the equivalent of giving herself to the Lord; she had only abandoned that path to give birth to Yusuf. I hadn’t imagined my return from the arts college would have such a traumatic effect on her.

      She had an illuminated area of her soul that got her through those moments. A little later, she started explaining my return from Alexandria in a way that enabled her to preserve her image of me: Yusuf was sacrificing his future to put an end to my problems with his sister. He was helping me live. He only came back from Alexandria to stop the quarreling and humiliation over his expenses. Yusuf didn’t want to burden me beyond my capacity.

      That was how she construed it, and she began to accept my presence in the alley.

      But things didn’t stop there. The nagging set in: it’s not right for Yusuf to sit around idly in the alley watching the women all day. His father’s blind; he’s got to help with the work. My older sister set this poison loose in my father’s mind.

      He asked me to escort him to work every day, his hand grasping my shoulder, silent most of the time. A barrier grew up between him and me in that period, an invisible barrier that kept me from any sympathy for him. I’d stay by his side all day and sometimes I’d find I’d left the display line without a word and gone, walking in the streets aimlessly. I wouldn’t go home until after midnight.

      Those days were bland, tasteless and formless. My mother’s anxiety ballooned when they told her Yusuf had gone off his rocker and would spend a full day without saying a word.

      In this wilderness, she took action. She called her relatives and used her connections with someone to get me a job teaching art classes at a private school, as if she intuited the link between the creation of pictures and me. I worked at the school throughout my studies. The free time offered by the College of Humanities allowed me to work, and so I stopped going to the chickpea stand and left behind the world of my father and sister.

      At that time I was afflicted with self-loathing because I hadn’t been able to live in Alexandria, as if there were something ruined in me, a lack of some sort. How could I refuse the open life and smooth roads? Getting to know major artists? How could I so easily squander all that? How could I be an artist if I couldn’t bear life away from my family? I was utterly lost and didn’t know where life was taking me. Even my relationships with my pupils at school were bad. I was standoffish and viewed the children with hostility. Though I often thought of Mary Labib and her love, it wasn’t enough to improve my mood.

      My work at the school put me up close to the girls, to the intimacy and gaiety of their lives, their small tales, and their dreams of finding a husband. It also allowed me some dalliances, not all of which were innocent. Urges would suddenly erupt and you’d find yourself in a fervor you couldn’t easily escape. I was infatuated with Nabila with the dimples, Theresa with the budding chest, and Mary and Mona. Sometimes the joking would turn into a brief escapade in a courtyard or next to an apartment door. I wasn’t alarmed by the idea of sin like my colleagues at the school. I was drawn to happy-go-lucky girls unfazed by such lapses. They were engaging in a little trivial fun, and we agreed it wouldn’t transgress the rights of any future husband.