Under the glass on his desk were several newspaper clippings. A family obituary from Upper Egypt, relatives in Alexandria. He never cut his ties with his family. Every year he had to travel to Upper Egypt, the Said, to make deals for dates and seeds and he would revive the bond that should never die with time. Once he showed me an old photo under the desk glass.
“You know who that is?” he asked me.
The photo showed a foreign soldier in military uniform and a short, slim, bareheaded man standing next to him wearing a country-style gallabiya. When I remained silent, he said, “Your father, Tadrus Bushra.”
He told me that when people left Alexandria during the Great War, when the Germans were at Alamein—at the gates of Alexandria—he went there to make his fortune, which he used to open the exchange.
Every time he saw me drawing, he’d get angry and say that I had to learn to read and write. I had to study so I wouldn’t be a disappointment like my sister Futna’s kids. He thought reading and writing, not painting, were the light of life. Drawing was child’s play.
It was his experience talking. In Alexandria, during the Great War, he had realized that writing was important when he went looking for work at the English base.
“You’re no good for work with us unless you know how to read and write,” the soldier told him.
That same day he went to his cousin’s in Muharram Bey and spent three full days and nights without sleep trying to learn how to write. He failed. He went back to the base exhausted and told the English soldier what he’d done. Laughing at his naïveté, the man hired him, on condition that he keep up his studies. He hadn’t known that learning to read and write was so difficult. Since then, he had revered anyone who could read and write, especially scholars who read complicated books.
The soldier let him work selling scrap from the base, and a few small transactions allowed him to save some money, which at that time was a fortune. The war ended and he returned to Tanta feeling that he had truly become Khawaga Tadrus Bushra, known far and wide.
Sometimes he would fix his gaze on the photo and chew over “the days of youth,” thinking he’d accomplished what no one else had. In fact, he hadn’t gone to Alexandria by choice, as I later learned from Futna. He went to escape his grief after his son Michel drowned in the Nile during the mulid of the Virgin in Minya, followed soon after by the death of his first wife. A year later, he came to Tanta to live with his uncle, bringing seven-year-old Futna with him. He refused to take her with him to Alexandria. The world’s a dangerous place, and she had to stay with his uncle until things settled down. He returned a few years later, opened the shop, and bought a house with all its outlying rooms in the alley where we lived, near Ghayath al-Din Street. All grown up now, Futna became his companion and household manager. When it came time for her to marry, he cried like a child. He couldn’t imagine living alone between four walls.
He threw himself into his business and his travels to the countryside to buy crops, as if fleeing his solitude at home. That’s when Futna got the idea to marry him off. She knew how stubborn he was, but she knew his weak spot too.
Trying to convince him of the marriage, she told him, “One, she’s a light-skinned woman. Two, she’s God-fearing. And three, she knows how to read and write.”
He lifted his face. “She really knows how to read and write?” he said in a quiet voice. Then he was silent and shifted his gaze upward, and Futna knew he’d agreed.
Khawaga Tadrus married a second time at age forty-five. When I was born, his feelings were different from my mother’s. He didn’t come near me or speak to me. He treated me oddly. But I know now that his feelings toward me were driven by the fear of death. Futna told me that when he heard me crying at the moment of birth, his face clouded over, as if he were about to face the same pain yet again. He didn’t want to experience the infirmity of bone and the fragility of resolve caused by grief. He didn’t approach me or call me by name—“Boy,” he’d say—turning me over completely to the instruction of the Sitt, the Lady, Umm Yusuf, as he called my mother.
With me, he acted the opposite of what everyone expected. Futna would joke with him: “I told you God wouldn’t forget you. He’s made it up to you and gave you back His gift.”
“Stop with that worthless women’s talk,” he would respond angrily.
She’d laugh, knowing his quick temper. She was the only one who could claim that she saw into his heart, but because of his steeliness and his skillfulness at concealing his feelings, even she started to believe that he didn’t care about her younger brother. That piqued her self-regard: though he was given the son he’d wanted, she would remain the beloved, the daughter of the beloved.
He fortified himself against the tenderness of the heart—that should be left to women—but the anxiety never left him. It was like he knew the capriciousness of the world and didn’t believe its sparkle.
And then the day came when they told him, as he was standing at the door of the exchange, that Yusuf had been run over by a truck on al-Nahas Street. That was the day the fog descended over his eyes. The moment he’d feared for so long had come. He heard Sadiq, a worker in the shop, say, “Let’s go to the hospital, sir.” But he couldn’t walk. He sat down on the wooden bench next to the door and said in a voice that puzzled the worker and even himself: “Make sure Umm Yusuf is okay.”
The afternoon of that Friday metamorphosed into dusk. Needling him later, they would ask him about Yusuf’s boyhood accident—did it happen during the afternoon or at dusk? He would insist that it was dusk and they’d laugh, and he would curse them and say they were cattle who couldn’t tell broad daylight from dusk. He wasn’t joking. He had absolutely no doubt that the accident occurred at dusk, though it actually happened on a Friday afternoon. He would curse them, saying he saw better than they did, that they were the blind ones.
The fog that settled over my father’s eyes was, in his view, fleeting—a brief muddle that would resolve itself soon enough. He waited a long time for the fog to lift, for shapes to be revealed and some of their clarity to return. But it did not happen. To prove to himself and those around him that his eyesight was fine, he would leave the house every morning for the exchange, walking in the fog and stubbornly refusing to rely on anyone, convinced the fog would clear. But one day he felt unsettled. The streets seemed to be shaking and he realized he wouldn’t be able to make it alone.
“Stop me a carriage, Umm Yusuf, to take me to the exchange,” he said with unpracticed nonchalance.
From that day, Futna began leaving the chickpea stand next to al-Sayyid al-Badawi Mosque and coming to escort my father to the exchange. She’d carry dinner to him in the evening and chat with him about his hard work, telling him he should pack in the business and relax, and because he was nettlesome, he would hold his tongue and then say with a seriousness that would silence her, “Getting greedy, Fatin?”
When he said her given name, she’d know what kind of mood he was in and stop talking.
Yusuf Tadrus says:
That was a difficult day that can’t be passed over so easily. You won’t understand my tale unless I describe the accident to you. Listen, the human being is a web of threads. I often reflect on my life. I arrived bound to a boy drowned in the Nile years before my birth; to a father who felt inferior to those who read and write, took pride in himself, and locked up his feelings in his heart; to a mother who wanted to dedicate herself to the Lord. All of these unseen threads came together to form your brother Yusuf