College of Fine Arts sparked long discussions. Khawaga Tadrus didn’t get involved in them, leaving the conflict between the two women to work itself out.
Futna would reel off the costs of residency, living expenses, clothes, and college needs: that was a lot for an old man whose sight had gone. My mother would minimize things, saying she’d help with expenses from the stipend she got from the Holy Bible Association. She was fervent, and the conflict was settled.
On the eve of my travel to Alexandria my fears began. Rida had gone before me to take care of some business, and when I reached the Sidi Gaber station at night, the expanse of the square scared me. I’d visited Alexandria several times with my mother, and now I was standing at the station gate, feeling so small in that sweeping place. I took the tram and reached the apartment, and then I spent the night walking along the Corniche, unable to sleep. For the first time in my life, I was far away from the bosom, from the alley, from my father’s throat-clearing and my mother’s mumbled prayers. I was a child being weaned. Is that how to understand the pain of that year? Maybe there was something else I didn’t realize. Maybe I didn’t want that spaciousness and freedom.
In the first days at college, the fear grew. I had to push through the days.
“What is it, Yusuf? Are you made of wood?” Rida would tease.
But he misspoke—I was made of clay. The cause of my yearning for light was my earthy nature. I was from the alley, and I loved to play in that muddy water. I stayed up at night practicing painting fingers, faces, and feet. I’d study the anatomy of the skull, the shape of the eye, the details of neck muscles. Sometimes I’d long to paint something cheerful. I’d set up the easel and prepare the oils and start painting an ashtray on a small table.
I couldn’t paint anything properly. The proportions escaped me, as if my training had been poured into a void. When trying to place mass in a space, an essential skill for anyone who wants to be a painter, I felt like a blind man.
Rida Boulos liked some of the paintings and said I’d be an artist. Sometimes he’d set up his own easel and paint a teapot or chair with me, or an empty bottle. One day we painted three onions against the lead-gray wall of the room. I was worked up that day. I painted the three onions on a green tablecloth against a fire-red background. The painting captured the details faithfully but had a surrealist feel to it. Rida looked at it.
“I’m giving up painting, Yusuf,” he said.
And from that day, or maybe a little afterward, he no longer painted, like he’d made a decision. Despite his encouragement, I couldn’t continue. I saw the flaws more than my abilities.
Rida helped me my whole life. At that early stage of our acquaintance, he was bewildered by my nature and my neuroses. He’d say I needed to smash everything and paint whatever I wanted, whatever gave me pleasure, whatever I gravitated toward. I thought he was naïve—Bilal had equipped me with the proper geometric calculations for every good painting, and we’d often applied them to the work of the great artists, from the classical arts down to Egyptian artists. I was miserable because I couldn’t free myself of the manual I had brought with me from Tanta—of the special formula for evaluating artistic paintings—and I started to believe I wouldn’t be able to paint as long as I was incapable of creating the equilibrium and correct proportions that Bilal al-Sheikh had prescribed.
With time, I discovered that Alexandria was vaster than I’d imagined. Every day it expanded more and I grew smaller, until I imagined I’d vanish. Midyear, the problems between my mother and sister started because of my school expenses. The college was far beyond my family’s capacity, and my own psychological capacity. You need living expenses and clothes and other things. Rida Boulos’s sympathy confused me and made me feel indebted and paralyzed. I couldn’t bear it any more, and the situation became more difficult when I discovered Lamiya’s attraction to me.
One day Fatin sent a message with Rida. He seemed embarrassed when he gave it to me. He was prepared to help me in any way, but he was duty bound to give me the message first. He said Fatin had visited him suddenly at home and had spoken to him about my family’s circumstances. She told him my father was blind and couldn’t shoulder this burden for five years. It would be better, she said, if Yusuf returned to Tanta and helped with the business. He could study at any college there and it wouldn’t cost so much.
That excuse was enough for me to perceive that I wouldn’t stay in Alexandria. Then the long winter days set in and I found myself blindly 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
