Backing away, he cried, “Papa, come quick, oh Papa!” Then he tripped and fell on his back.
Umm Samra came running when she heard the man’s shout, cursing Salih and the no-good kids. Entering the living room, she lifted my father to his feet and led him to the couch, smoothing out his clothes and saying, “It’s okay, brother, God’s name protects you.”
He later learned that Salih and the kids had devised a trick for him. They hung from a fishing line one of the rats they’d caught, and one of them had gone to the roof and dangled the rat in front of the door while another knocked. That night he regained his strength and went out with the gnarled cane, intending to crack open Salih’s gourd. When the neighbors intervened, he insisted that Salih leave the house. He had to pack up his things and go. The people’s sentence for Salih was that he not sleep at home for several days, until they could calm Khawaga down. A few days later, Salih returned with Hagg Ibrahim.
“I’ll kiss your hands and feet, Papa Tadrus. Please forgive me!” he said with true contrition.
That was enough for my father to bark, “Get out of my sight, I don’t want to see your face.”
Yusuf Tadrus says:
I learned to paint in the studio of Hazim al-Shirbini in the Palace of Culture on al-Bahr Street, the old building demolished in the late 1970s where the Gharbiya Bank now stands. On the first floor was a library, a little dark because the large windows were blocked by bookcases; the rest of the rooms were filled with employees. On the second floor there was a broad hall with a piano. Any time you’d enter you’d find Amm Farid, the music teacher, playing chess. The spacious painting studio was on the right, with a wooden floor and a balcony across from the door. Light flooded the place.
We sat in front of the easels for the first time to paint in oils, we three boys who had won the painting contest sponsored by the Palace of Culture: Karim al-Burai, Muhammad Tawfiq, and Yusuf Tadrus.
We started lessons in the summer, training in pencil, then doing charcoal sketches. I was the most nervous of them, maybe the most interested. Muhammad Tawfiq was the son of a civil servant in the tax authority who was preparing himself to be a painter. Karim al-Burai was from a merchant family. Slim, tall, and carefree, he liked to paint as a kind of entertainment, to test himself. As for me, it was like a window of light had opened. I’d finally left the alley and begun another journey.
It seems like it happened so long ago, like the world was new. It was quiet and the streets were so empty you could hear the clop of the hooves of horses pulling carriages. There weren’t many taxis—life hadn’t yet been drowned out by the racket. Sometimes I’m shocked by how my life took shape out of such a gelatinous mass. I remember us sitting there, doing charcoal sketches. The studio in the Palace of Culture created something precious: deliverance from the muck of the neighborhood and the preoccupations of the alley. My passions found their vessel.
The first day, Hazim al-Shirbini stood in the middle of the room. His long hair reached the wide, starched collar of his shirt, and the top buttons were open, showing some stray hairs. He talked about mass and space, perspective and lines in an interesting way, holding a piece of paper he’d use to quickly illustrate what he was saying. He spoke cheerfully and airily, like he was chatting up a girl. He’d recently graduated from the College of Arts in Cairo and had been appointed to the Palace of Culture, so he was excited about teaching painting. He actually helped to foster a different air in the city. A world of joy blossomed when I began drawing sketches under his tutelage. I was on the threshold of the dream.
The first time painting with oils was nerve-racking, maybe frightening. That day Hazim put a tablecloth and a brown bottle on a small table and asked us to paint them. The anticipation and excitement I experienced that day heightened my sense of light, summoning all my past observations of it and making the first attempt at oil painting more difficult. It was a summer afternoon, and the sun bathed the entire balcony.
At first I couldn’t concentrate, unsure about where to begin. I avoided it by contemplating the light on the balcony. I observed the shadows instead of the light—shadow is light from the other side. The light of the summer sun left heavy shadows of the balcony ironwork and exposed the roughness of the rust. I was afraid. How could I represent that? I put down the brush and went to stand on the balcony. I watched Hazim standing in the hall, talking amiably to a new employee while Amm Farid was lost in a chess match. I looked down from the balcony. There was a dried-up tree, its limbs twisting in every direction, making an intricate horizontal cross-section. Copper-colored fruit like dark seeds protruded from the sides of some limbs. I followed the limbs, their different thicknesses, their rising and falling, the bends and intersections. I was absorbed in observation until Hazim called me from the hall.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
I was unsettled as I faced serious painting for the first time. I returned to my place in front of the easel. Now I had to complete the picture however I could. Listen, I was worried about my self-image at that early date, scared I wouldn’t be up to the picture of myself I’d formed, or that the story of my birth had formed. Mary Labib was present and helped me.
“Paint,” she whispered. “Don’t be afraid, just paint.”
With Mary’s voice spurring me on, I painted with speed and force. I represented the bottle, the tablecloth, part of the wooden table, and part of the glass of the balcony door.
The painting was wanting in my view, although Hazim praised it above those of my peers. He said it showed a refined sense of light and shadow, but proficiency required long practice and a painstaking study of light and shadow. It was praise, but it underscored my sense of inferiority, and on my way home I started thinking again of the light.
I remember the scene as I walked amid the tumult of Saad al-Din Street that day. I observed the tremor in the light when a boy on a bike rushed past with a tray of bread on his head. I noted the contrast left by the light reflected on walls and the faces of peddlers. I saw the faint shadow on faces and said to myself: Could I paint that? Where would I get the patience to study and understand all these distinctions when I loved fun and girls and running after whatever caught my fancy?
I was despondent that day, even though my painting was the best one. See? I’ve had a complex since day one—the neurotic reveals himself at the outset. Instead of being happy that day because I’d painted in oils for the first time, I was thinking about what I lacked.
The studio at the Palace of Culture became a spot of light. I was in the first year of high school, at the beginning of adolescence, getting to know myself and the world. Every day I’d escape the alley and go to the Palace of Culture, regardless of the schedule Hazim had set for us. He was sympathetic, actually. He sensed my need to paint and never asked me why I came at unscheduled times. He left the oils for me to paint with, and I spent days determinedly painting the same bottle, as if it held something alien I needed to grasp. Under my constant scrutiny, it turned into a feminine body. Strips of light slipped into her and formed various shapes in her interior. Ironically, the painting became worse the more I stared at the bottle, until the day when Hazim said, “Enough, Yusuf. The bottle’s bewitched you; you’ll never paint it well. Paint something else, and go back to it later.”
I was sad he didn’t let me complete the experiment, but he knew better.
There was another minor incident in that period that had an important influence. Let me tell you about it. One day, I was going up to the second floor of the Palace of Culture and I heard the sound of the piano. It was the first time I’d seen Amm Farid get up from the chessboard and sit on the oval black seat and start to play. Hazim was standing at the studio door, and women employees at the palace were sitting scattered around the hall. Silence enveloped the place. I stood at the door, unable to enter. Amm Farid was playing a piece I thought I’d heard before, maybe in the score of an old film. I don’t know, but the feeling captivated me from the first instant. The melodies flowed and formed a feeling like light. I started listening to the music, giving full rein to my imagination. The slow melodies created a space in which dried leaves fell from a tree like the lone tree below the balcony, and the leaves drifted in the never-ending