Читать книгу Tales of Yusuf Tadros - Adel Esmat - Страница 7

Yusuf Tadrus says:

My mother was a member of the Holy Bible Association. Every month she was tasked with collecting contributions from all over the city. That was in the mid-1960s—the city wasn’t like it is now. I still remember al-Nadi Street with a child’s eye: the open space carpeted in sunlight that lit up the asphalt and made the houses sparkle, flooding the dried flame trees, the white wall of the club, and the footpaths I could see through the iron bars of the wall. The silence was thick, like the neighborhood was encased in glass. We’d climb the stairs in a new building, cool, the apartments tucked away behind gleaming doors evoking an air of velvet, different from the earthy air of the alley where we lived. My mother would knock on the door. A slim man would greet us and welcome her, taking his receipt and giving her the monthly contribution. We’d stop by doctors’ clinics, law offices, shop owners, and merchants. Every month we’d make the rounds of the city.

I discovered my love of light on those trips. And I got my fill of the story of my birth. Every month, I’d listen to a life account my mother had told dozens of times. How she had dedicated herself to the Lord, but her father had insisted on marrying her off at the age of thirty. She had a hard time getting pregnant—the pregnancy wouldn’t fix itself in her womb—and she went to monasteries and churches. When the pregnancy finally came to term and she was on the verge of giving birth, she learned that pain is the Lord, and she loved her life and her pain, and gave birth to me.

This story left me with a vague restlessness; an uncomfortable feeling that my existence on the earth was a momentous happening, as if all those events and destinies that preceded it were staged for a certain purpose, so that this birth could take place. The story held a burden the thoughtless child did not wish to bear. There was something in it that weighed on my spirit. I tried to evade it all the time, but it dogged me. A ghost that inhabited my psyche and settled in. The story complicated my sense of self and left me with a nagging feeling that I was pledged to something I had to fulfill. It was as though I had to make some sort of sacrifice, as if my existence was not rightfully mine.

My mother’s tale was dreary and I didn’t like it. I distracted myself by observing light and shadow, and my love of light grew in the escape from the oppressive story of my birth.

My mother was a woman of considerable girth. When climbing the stairs, her joints ached, but she considered it a toll she had to pay. Suffering purifies; it rids people of sins they’d committed long ago. She would walk slowly, reciting in a low voice humanity’s journey since the first sin. This slowness and her hushed voice let me contemplate shapes. These images were impressed clearly on my mind, as if they were part of a novel I’d once read.

Her labor and perseverance as she climbed the stairs held an acceptance of pain and a desire for sacrifice, her tribute of suffering that gladdened her soul. She had toiled in her life and it took her five years to have children, a boy and a girl. The association was her place for sacrifice, which she had to do in penance for an old sin. Our salvation is dependent on every individual offering up his or her measure of suffering.

At the end of the day, we’d return to the association to turn in the money we’d collected. I’d leave my mother and head for the workshops connected to the association’s office. The place was an orphanage, and the donations were collected for the workshops: needlework for the girls and textile weaving for the boys. My infatuation began in that place. Every person has his own secret. It might not be a secret, but he carries it in his soul like a special jewel, a longing, compartments—I call them interior compartments. One feels all the time that this secret is what endows life with meaning. If he confesses it, he will have revealed his inner self. You won’t believe it, but I know that’s what makes you stand in front of the unfamiliar emotion in my paintings.

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.