Yusuf Tadrus says:
My mother would wake up at six a.m., before everyone, my father asleep in the interior room and my sister Nadia tossing in her bed, as if sensing her mother had left the house. I’d feel her opening the door and leaving. In that pleasant drowsiness in the winter months, the sound of the door was both calming and rousing. She was awake, anxious to meet the day, going to fetch the morning beans
and porridge, the al-Akhbar newspaper and Sabah al-kheir magazine.
I was devoted to Sabah al-kheir. I loved the elegant, delightful drawings by al-Labbad, Bahgoury, Bahgat, al-Leithi, and other illustrators. Of them all, I was especially devoted to George Bahgoury. I’d wait for his illustrations and spend a long time poring over them. I wanted to draw like them. One day I read a sentence that filled me with extraordinary vigor: “George Bahgoury paints from Paris.”
Look, this sentence—“paints from Paris”—put a spell on me. A warmth and luminosity pervaded life there, on the other side. What’s that? Oh, a painting drawn in Paris, filled with warmth and sun and frittering the days away.
Hope blossomed from that sentence. When would it be said “Yusuf Tadrus paints from Paris”? Would that day come? I had a lot of confidence in myself, and my sense that life would reward me was growing as I was, especially when I noticed that girls were attracted to me.
I started drawing again, imagining the Paris cafés that George drew. I drew the things he did as if I were him, as if I lived in Paris. A lesson in identification that would later help me understand things—understand the spirit of the chairs, tables, stones, and windows. I would have secret ties with things from that moment. I’d befriend the lamps, glasses, empty bottles, and small vases—what they call “still life” in English or “silent nature” in Arabic. Why do they say it’s silent? If you only knew how much I liked this expression when I first heard it. A speaking nature and a non-speaking nature. Of the two, I loved silent nature. You see, I’m painting my dreams after all these years. My paintings are dreams that flood my waking hours.
After drawing people at Paris cafés for a while, I drew George Bahgoury himself, and I mailed it to Sabah al-kheir. Two weeks later, I found my illustration published in the young artists’ section, my name below it. Magic and wonder flooded over me—I hadn’t expected this twist.
I called for my mother: “Come see my painting!” Her pale face beamed with joy and she kissed me, the tears springing to her eyes. This turn of events gave me more confidence and cemented my sense of specialness. The tears shining in my mother’s eyes unconsciously turned my thoughts to my responsibility.
I started looking for my own special subject. I started a fresh sketchbook and wrote on the first page: “Yusuf Tadrus draws from Ghayath al-Din Street.” Then I drew the upholsterer, the tinker, Amm Ads the bean seller, and everyone I met. Maybe one day I’d paint from Paris. The notion spurred me on, and the desire to draw seized me, as if I’d reach Paris tomorrow. A fresh sense of life pulsed in my fingers. The pictures didn’t look exactly like their subjects, but they were good-natured, with a playfulness and childlike sensibility that came from empathizing with the subjects.
On Ghayath Street, the door and window frames were made of plaster. When pieces fell off, it was material to make small figurines: girls and horses and knights, creatures in the vein of the mulid sugar dolls. I’d scavenge the plaster pieces like they were treasure and sculpt my figures with an old knife and a nail: primitive sculpting tools. I created my world of creatures. One day, I fashioned a small gun. My friends liked it and haggled with me for it. I made more, and they became our favorite toys.
Because of the sculpting and drawing, I had some standing among my childhood comrades in the alley and the nearby streets. They wouldn’t play until they’d first passed by my place. When we were in the third year of middle school, they’d stand at the entrance to the alley in the evenings and call for me to come study with them at Sayyid al-Bahiy’s house on the corner. We’d go in the back door, from the alley, not the main door on Ghayath al-Din, then cross the vast garden where the plants had shriveled up, and study in the small room in the garden. We’d stay up until the end of the last screening at the cinema and hear the clamor of people leaving, dispersing in the streets. We’d get bored with the room and go sit under the lamppost in the street, studying and talking. When the night began to leave and the morning broke in the distant sky with its pale-blue phantoms, someone would propose praying the dawn prayer at al-Sayyid al-Badawi Mosque.
The streets were still and voices rang out, a translucent fog confirming the coming of the dawn light. When we reached al-Sa‘a Square, I’d usually suggest walking in the silence of al-Bursa Street then taking a right on al-Athar Pass. Faint light coming from an open house that had left the entry lamp on; two-wheeled carts resting on the side of the road, their shafts leaning on the ground like weary sleepers; the wooden shop doors shuttered with a slanted iron bar, a brass lock gleaming in the middle; cats crisscrossing the street—the street appeared at odds with the clamor of daytime with the scent of spices and apothecaries and seed shops. By the time we reached the Ahmadi Mosque Square, a silvery glow permeated the light.
Joking, al-Sayyid al-Bahiy would say, “Come on and pray with us.”
“Say hi to the crocodile for me,” I’d say.
I would wait for them on the marble steps until they came out from the prayer.
At that time, I didn’t distinguish a difference in religion from a difference in features, families, and names. People couldn’t have the same name or features, and the same went for religion. On Fridays, when we’d climb the wall of Dr. Murqus’s house to pick mulberries and play until prayer time, I wanted to go to the Aziz Fahmi Mosque to pray with them. On one of those days, Sayyid al-Bahiy invented a story, the gist being that there was a large fountain in the mosque that held a big crocodile that recognized Christians by their smell and would gobble them up. Every time they went to pray, I’d wait for them, hoping I’d get a chance to see the fountain and the crocodile, just like I wanted to see the creatures that finished the carpets in the weaving workshop.
Yusuf Tadrus says:
My father’s a whole other story. He thought a lot of himself and would speak his name with pride: Khawaga Tadrus Bushra. But he was ashamed because he couldn’t read and write very well, so he took great pains to write his name with care and sophistication. He would sweep the tail of the a to encircle the entire name. Maybe because contracts are so important and a man’s signature at the bottom of documents is a grave thing, he poured his interest in the written language into signing his name. A name is man’s image on official paper, and he should be conscious of this fact. He’s got to pay attention. Yes, he would skim the newspapers, but the important thing was that he could write his name with the sophistication befitting a signature.
He was embarrassed by the idea of a stamp or a thumbprint, saying with some uncertainty, “True, my education is modest, but I’m not one of those people who signs with a thumbprint.”
When a discussion with his fellow dry bean and seed traders would grow heated, he would stand, leaning his arms on his desk, and say with pride, “Khawaga Tadrus Bushra is not a wrongdoer.” Saying that, he’d feel that his name alone was enough to place him beyond reproach for any fault. In those moments, he would pronounce it in dulcet tones, as if he were signing it and looping the tail of the a around it.
During the long periods he spent at the shop, he was careful to keep the newspaper spread out in front of him on the desk. He’d look at it, his eyes picking out a word here and there, and beam with self-importance when a trader would come in and find him with the paper open. Then he’d get up from his chair, adjust the collar of his Saidi gallabiya and his headgear—a wool