your brother Yusuf Tadrus.
Like I said, I was as passionate about the manifesto as if I’d written it. The lovely poetry pervaded me, urging me to make my eyes a sun and my spirit a sun. Since it coincidentally used the metaphor of the sun, it touched the deepest part of my psyche. I began searching for ways to do it: practicing painting and listening to music, reading and deliberating, resisting the seductions that consume energy and time. See? The way of Sufis and monks. Elevating oneself above human life is complicated and baffling, but exciting for a youth of seventeen about to sit for the matriculation exams. One who wants a bit of an escape from the fully corporeal life in his neighborhood. A confused, frightened person who wants a whiff of the absolute.
When school started, it became hard to go to the Palace of Culture. I started the austere year of the matriculation exam, the first person in Khawaga Tadrus’s family to make it to the exam. Imagine, the fear of death that accompanied my life was cast outward as a great joy when I was studying that year.
“Yusuf’s prepping for the exam,” my mother would say from the threshold at Umm Bisa and Hassanein’s house. An innocent, ironic smile appeared on my father’s face, as if he’d outsmarted the Lord and Yusuf had lived despite the death of his brother and the car accident. When I’d go out on Thursday with my ironed shirt, bell-bottom pants, and platform shoes, my mother’s face would cloud over, as she worried that the Ankh Society nights would take me away from studying. The exam was the door that would lead Yusuf to another station. It would save him from the alley. But she knew that stopping me was impossible.
“Take care of yourself, brother,” she’d say, allaying her fears. She called me “brother,” maybe to revive the secret bond between us on our wanderings in the city to collect the contributions, the feeling underlying the story of my birth. Or maybe to surreptitiously bolster that greatness in my being. Forgive me: I’m trying to understand, but it’s hard. Retrieving life at a remove is a difficult thing.
Despite the strain of that period because of my family’s focus on the exam, the experience of painting the bottle on the tablecloth in the Palace of Culture abided. I’d escape studying by examining what the experience had left in me. I think the idea that light is the origin of things started then and put down roots. Light is the liquid spirit behind things, the intangible phantom essence. At root, anything can hold a slip of light, a secret spirit. Everything can turn into light.
Vague and distant, these thoughts loomed, naïve and unable to take shape in the mind of a seventeen-year-old boy awash in fears and confusion. It was a difficult task. I’d realized that painting meant you could capture the hidden spirit of the bottle, the vase, and the tablecloth, but how do you acquire the eye to perceive the liquid spirit of inanimate things? Fingers capable of conveying that spirit? How could you grasp a liquid thing like light coursing within everything? Difficult.
I started dodging my studies and spent nights practicing to perfect the lines of the bean pot, or a small plate, or the chair my father sat on, behind the door. I struggled hard and long, but the ideal was so high, beyond my capabilities. I was stubborn like my father.
The next day, I’d say I could paint the water jug in Umm Bisa’s window. I could paint my mother’s concentration as she chopped the mulukhiya. It was a senseless struggle, because my natural abilities were ordinary. But what can I say? The idea that I was destined for something big lurked beneath every action, deluding me that I could create this thing, that I could reach the liquid spirit underneath things.
The pace of the work I’d assigned myself picked up. I had to study, and I had to practice painting to get into the College of Fine Arts to study with Seif Wanli. The city attracted me and sparked a vague glimmer in my imagination like the glimmer of the phrase “George Bahgoury paints from Paris.”
I lived on the margins of my family’s life. My father would return at night and when he’d see me, he’d ask, “You still awake?”
“I’m studying,” I’d say nervously, hiding my drawing paper.
He’d nod like he understood and believed the lie. At the same time, his gestures and unexpected questions suggested he knew what I was doing.
“I want to see you at college so I can die happy,” he said one day.
It was a decisive night in March. I put away the drawings and focused on studying until the end of the year.
Yusuf Tadrus says:
I spent one year in Alexandria. My mother was nervous and happy and calling relatives who lived in Alexandria to tell them that Yusuf was coming to study at the College of Fine Arts. She introduced me to Rida Boulos, a scion of a family long in the leather trade. He was in his third year of studying architecture and lived in an apartment in Sidi Bishr. We agreed I’d live with him. I was anxious that summer, frightened of my mother’s overwhelming desire to get me away from the life of the alley.
My relationship with Rida Boulos eased the air somewhat and, perhaps for the first time, set the idealistic life of the Ankh Society against another way of living. Rida’s presence that summer gave me the vigor I needed. Despite his seriousness, he was preoccupied with girls like we were. We went out often, to weddings and parties. I’d boast about how girls were attracted to me, and he’d look at me with childish glee and say, “You lucky dog, Yusuf.” But I feared that attachment and avoided it. I tried to show it didn’t matter to me. We’d categorize the girls together: that one was like a princess, this one a saint. This other one was like the wicked witch, and that one might bring you to ruin and go through your pockets every night.
Rida was cheerful and outgoing, and wore his religion lightly. His heart wasn’t home to vague fears and anxious questions. He felt comfortable in the world and easily did things I thought required a slew of preparations. He’d pack a big suitcase and a tent and go to Sidi Abd al-Rahman alone to stay in the desert a few days. He’d do his share of work for his family. He’d travel to Upper Egypt. He went to Paris twice.
His way of acting and talking, his perpetual urgency, and his feeling that he shouldn’t waste one second stood in contrast to the lackadaisical life in the alley, which revolved around managing everyday affairs. And it was also obviously different from the philosophers of the Ankh Society. He’d laugh when I’d tell him about the society’s sessions every Thursday.
“They’re not living on this earth,” he’d say. “Life isn’t talk; it’s action, movement.”
He studied architecture and painted, and wanted to learn to play the lute. I introduced him to Amm Farid. I wondered how he could find the time amid his work to learn to play the lute.
He laughed. “I’ll keep at it until circumstances intrude and stop me,” he said. “At least I’ll have gotten something out of it to help me listen better.”
He had his own ideas, not formed from books but created from his own experiences and thoughts.
It was the first time the secretive salon and closed world of the Ankh Society was shaken. The contradiction added to my angst. I spoke with Bilal about it one day, and he said confidently that my friend was superficial, flaky, and didn’t live the authentic life—he lived by mainstream thought, not his own personal thought. The authentic life was something else. This idea of the “authentic” life preoccupied me. What was it and how could one live it? There was no manual. The plan they’d drawn up for it started to show cracks when confronted by the other worlds that opened before me.
That summer the covert war began between my mother and older sister. Futna was my father’s true mistress. She took care of everything, knew all the expenses, and amassed wealth she kept far from him
