and vigilance, until Fatin would see him coming up Umar Saafan Street. Then she would run to meet him and chide him for not waiting for her to get him.
My father’s presence in the alley put a kind of brake on the open life. Even though the man couldn’t see well, his sitting in his chair for long periods led the women to seclude themselves a bit. Anyone who saw him like that, staring into space, wouldn’t believe he saw the world in shadows. He would sit silently in his place, moving his chair with the sun and recognizing people by voice and smell. His keen attentiveness made people doubt the blindness story. The young men would murmur that he could see but was faking it. He would fix his eyes on a person approaching as if he saw him or her.
In the alley my father became aware of details he hadn’t noticed before. He was shocked to learn that Umm Bisa kept company with the jinn and that the boy Tawfiq who lived on the corner was mad and beat his sisters. He smiled with understanding when he realized the appetites Zinat whetted in the neighborhood. He started following the goings-on around him, as if living among us for the first time. Salih al-Naggar took to sitting next to him and joking with him. They would kid around for a long time. Then the conversation gradually turned to religion. Salih imagined he could sway Khawaga Tadrus in matters of religion, until one day he silenced him, saying suddenly, “Salih, son of al-Naggar, you’re a charlatan!”
At night, the young guys would stand on the corner, talking and inventing various kinds of fun: who could drink a bottle of soda in one go, who could hit the lamppost with a brick at a certain distance. At that time, the bet involved catching the rats that had proliferated in the alley after the death of one of Zinat’s ducks. That was the moment my father’s mood soured. He wanted to be out of the house any way he could, for he feared nothing so much as rats.
In the evening, he’d hear Salih and the neighborhood guys hunting rats with a pellet gun. He gave a start with every shot. Their squeals scared him, and he was pleased with the small pops, hoping they’d be decimated. But he hid his feelings and cursed the youths. When he saw one, he’d damn him and his father for having no job and nothing to do.
“Each one of you is as big as an ox,” he’d say. “Go get a job. Why don’t you go to Port Said and buy some goods to sell?”
His dread of rats remained concealed, though it came out in his anxiety and his feeling that a rotten stench pervaded everything. He started bathing often and asking my mother to dab him with cologne. Then things came to a head.
One day he heard a knock on the door.
“Who is it?” he said quietly.
“Tadrus Bushra,” a rough voice said. “A summons from the court.”
He bolted off the couch for the door and reached for the lock, guided by habit. His dim eyes saw a huge rat swaying in the air. In a flash, his eyes comprehended the sight and transmitted the requisite terror to his consciousness. He smelled the rotten stench and nearly choked.
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
