The carpet-weaving workshop was my secret. The wooden loom, the master preparing the yarn—the warp and the weft—and the pictures the yarn would later form. Sometimes I left the images midway and would return the next day to find a full carpet, as if a sorcerer had finished them. There was a stark contrast between, on the one hand, the vertical and horizontal strands, the gloom of the workshop, and the rough hands that arranged the yarn, and on the other the lovely images on the carpet. I couldn’t believe that these delightful figures were the product of that tedious, daylong process. I wouldn’t believe it until I’d seen the picture take shape.
My mother wouldn’t let me stay, not even once, to see the picture come to completion. The unfinished images kept me awake. They made me rush through the collection errand so I could get back to the weaving workshop.
So I created my own myth. I thought that invisible creatures lived in the workshop. At night, after the doors were locked, they would awaken and start to draw and color, putting magical touches on linens and carpets. They would give the color red its warmth and to birds their abrupt movements in flight, making them more beautiful than the birds that would suddenly take flight from the top of the dome of the railway station.
That was my secret, and I lived it, which probably baffles you. My problem became how to stay longer. How could I hide in the workshop to see the creatures awaken and do their work?
One day I hid behind a door. They locked up the workshop and the association, and darkness fell. My heart beat violently. The silence had an energy that touched my soul and whetted my imagination. I saw transparent creatures like a fog come out of their hiding places and move on tiptoe. The windows were high up, a faint light penetrating them, and I felt the yarn move. I was afraid and screamed. I screamed and screamed, until a worker at the orphanage came and let me out, by then nearly comatose. After that I saw my mother crying, her eyes red, and I knew she’d looked everywhere for me.
I was ill for a long time. Fear is an illness I still haven’t recovered from. During the fever, I heard the recitation of incantations and the voices of priests, and I felt the fog of church courtyards and my mother carrying me on her shoulder. I’d hear snippets of conversation about Yusuf, who’d been possessed by a species of jinn. Yusuf had been possessed. Imagine! They were right. I’ve been possessed ever since.
I didn’t completely recover. After I regained consciousness, I started thinking about how to set up a loom in the house. After numerous attempts, it became clear that it was difficult. I couldn’t bear the failure and cried for a whole night. My infatuation with the pictures on the carpets and kilims produced by the association’s workshop persisted. They weren’t pictures of saints or monks. They were pictures of birds, animals, and small thickets of vegetation, but the feeling that enveloped them was indescribable. The magic of the colors imbued the images with joy, and the joy safeguarded the secret.
I don’t know when those images took shape as a secret. When did the trips to collect the contributions and the images from the carpet-weaving workshop become an interior light? You won’t believe me if I tell you that the sunlight that I see with the old clarity gives me strength; it illuminates a patch in my depths. What led me to lock it up, like a lamp that would be extinguished if I spoke of its existence? And here I am now, speaking of it, so it can be snuffed out. I’m tired of its interior light, tired of keeping it inside me. I should let it light up a place broader than that darkness. Maybe in the open space it will shine more brightly.
When I was fourteen, I started collecting the monthly contributions in my mother’s stead. People had come to know me. Their respect for her was imprinted in the way they treated me. They’d always ask about her kindly and say they’d drop by to visit. She left a sweet feeling behind, and love. I remember her whisper, as if she were talking to herself, when we’d approach a clinic or a home. This is Doctor Munir Girgis—his father was a goldsmith and he’s a good man. Once he donated enough bolts of fabric to wrap a skyscraper. That’s the shop of Foreman Farid—he spent his youth in Alexandria and came back with a large fortune. Small tales that looked for the bright side in people.
Yusuf Tadrus says:
Mary Labib, the art teacher, was my first love. I hope you’re not shocked by love stories. Your brother Yusuf loved and was loved everywhere he landed. It’s my fate. Mary looked like the movie star Maryam Fakhr al-Din. Her hair fell on her shoulders with a slight flip at the end. I was young. Even so, I declared my love to her and asked her to marry me. At my uncle Subhi’s apartment, in the old house, they all laughed. I was serious, crying.
“Yusuf’s really in love,” my mother said, puzzled. “His eyes are red.”
The word red appealed to me. I headed to the bathroom mirror and looked at my face. My eyes weren’t red, but they were dull. That person looked at me angrily in the tilted mirror and told me something inscrutable. I immediately understood that I had to guard my secrets. I knew matters of love and emotion had to be guarded like jewels. A simple moment in front of the mirror, but it was a brief insight from the questioning voices I hear at times to this day.
One day Mary gave me a sketchbook and a box of crayons. Mary Labib Dimyan. I’ll never forget her name. I’ll keep remembering the full name, its edges fringed by a clear scent, the primary-school balcony, the sun illuminating the sand-covered schoolyard, Mary exiting the art room, trailing a scent I’ll never be able to pinpoint. She’ll remain a living portrait: a translucent smile, a striped dress fitted at the waist, butter-colored shoes with stiletto heels, a click on the tiles whose melody I’d never mistake, not even once. She’ll remain alive in my depths, saying, “Paint what you wish. Don’t be afraid, paint.”
Maybe I’ve associated painting with a lack of fear ever since. Over the years, the phrase was translated into “painting delivers you from fear.” I’ll keep painting whenever I’m afraid. I’ll keep painting as long as I live to rid myself of fear, which gets thicker and darker the older I get. Even after the worries began to lift—after Michel went to America and Fadi went to work in the jewelers’ district, and it was just me and Janette, face to face, after a tempestuous journey—the fear was there flickering behind the scenes, unshakable, like the lining of the human heart.
Painting does not rid a person of fear, but it makes fears trivial, tolerable. From the moment Mary said “Paint what you wish. Don’t be afraid,” painting has been the good thing in my life. Even though I’ve abandoned it for long spells, I never for a moment stopped thinking about it, as if Mary’s words were secretly guiding me. How can a child’s love for his teacher stay alive all these years? Humans are as wondrous as life.
I’ll never stop contemplating the sight of her. Of course, I won’t paint it—if I paint her, she’ll die. I only paint fears so they’ll die. But Mary—her, I will not paint. If I did, she would fade into a picture. I’ll leave her there, alive in my consciousness, like a candle in the window of Our Lady the Virgin. I’ll keep her alive as long as I am.
I was sitting on a chair next to the window, drawing. A teacher named Talla Farag passed by and looked at the paper.
“What’s this, Mary?” she said, pointing to the figure I’d drawn. “Is all of that a person?”
“Shush. Be quiet,” Mary said. Smiling at me, she said, “Go on, finish it.” She lowered her face kindly, with an understanding smile. I’ve looked for this feeling everywhere—a friendly smile that tells you to keep going; whatever happens, finish what’s in your hand. There are no standards there. There’s nothing but finishing. Finish what’s in your hand and you’ll make it.
Mary knew. Those coal-black, keen, encouraging eyes look down on me whenever I sit down to paint. From behind they encourage me: Keep going, don’t be afraid. I’ll never voluntarily paint her. However great my longing for her, I won’t paint her.
In middle school, I hated drawing because of a supercilious teacher who used to curse our families. He made us clean up the art room and line up the paints and colors, everything brought to meticulous order. At the end of school,