was something in me that resisted religious dogmatization and brainwashing. My attitude towards my asatza [teachers] during the Sunday School was less the attitude of a student towards his teachers and more the attitude of a hostage to his kidnappers. I still remember how that vermin Edward used to scare us, a bunch of helpless eight-year-olds, by telling us that the Devil is prowling around like a lion, looking for someone to devour. Yet I thought that God was actually the roaring lion and I remember having momentarily resorted to the Devil seeking asylum from this wrathful God… for I realized that existence must have gifted the Devil with some light and warmth, seeing that it equally didn’t spare God from a lofty sum of cruelty and ignorance.”
He loved St. George’s picture and placed a huge one in his living room, as we are told by the few courageous men who dared to enter his apartment after his death. The explanation for that love is not absent from the book. In a paragraph in the second chapter he narrates how he used to rejoice at the picture since he was a suckling infant. “Poor mother, she thought that I was pleased to see St. George, with his manly moustache, noble armory, and white horse. Had she only known that it was the Gothic dragon that lay under his feet, with this glorious aura that suggested the perfection of forbidden knowledge, that had always mesmerized me… later on I even unearthed more depth in the picture… to me it signified how superficial monotheists were, trying to identify with light as opposed to darkness. If only they could perceive the complementary nature of the opposites and learn how to celebrate their cosmic dance of totality!”
It was only after 1974 that Abdul Masseih started speaking out against the church. I know for sure that Mervat El Masry (to whom he alluded in his work with the overly-significant name of Regine Olsen (11)) was the reason. One must exercise caution while approaching this very detail of his life, for it is as nebulous as it is crucial to unlocking his mystery. What we know for sure is that he had loved her more than anything, more than himself, more than his mother, and more than the most blasphemous of heresies. Some claim that she never returned his love; others assert that she initially showed him some attraction before suddenly withdrawing and blaming her brother’s tragic death in the Yom Kippur War on her willingness to associate with a man of questionable orthodoxy. After paying attention to one paragraph in his book, I started to believe that Mervat somehow figured out that Wahid was not the sincerest orthodox. “… for trained orthodox eyes have learned to distinguish the pneumatics and capture the light of the mark of Cain that shines from underneath the skin of their foreheads.” From that time on, Abdul Masseih closed his pharmacy, locked himself up in his home and dedicated his life to disestablishing the tenets of the Coptic Church.
The last Coptic service that he attended was the Vigil of Christmas on the 6th of January 1974 [Copts celebrate Christmas on the 7th of January] when he sat on a remote bench, his eyes fixed on the ground and his face frowning sternly, a pathological twitch possessing his lower lip and his right index finger. In the middle of the sermon, while the abouna was explaining how God was wholly good and how the expression “God curse you” was a blasphemous contradiction, Abdul Masseih immediately jumped off his seat, barked at thae abouna with the seventh verse of the forty-fifth chapter of the Book of Isaiah and left the church.
His mother suffered in silence. She was paralyzed in 1975 and died near the end of January 1976, one week short of her son’s twenty-seventh birthday. Thousands of the poor to whom she dedicated her life blocked Al Teram Street and crowded Saint George’s Church, a rare scene that was to be repeated three years later when the soft-spoken Father Bishoy Kamel died of cancer. Abdul Masseih was not there; some claim that he was present somewhere in the crowd, disguised as a veiled woman.
Wahid’s eccentric character and ghostly appearance made him a perfect candidate for projection and a body of legends was woven around his life. Some claimed that he was a magician who sold his soul to the Devil or went mad when he was able to see him. Others asserted that he was a guilt-ridden homosexual who locked himself up in his house as all good monsters do. The tragic death of El Masry in her bathroom three mere days before her wedding to a wealthy merchant from Upper Egypt solidified Abdul Masseih’s reputation as a devil-manipulating monster. An old grave keeper from Al Shatbi claims that Wahid used to make regular nocturnal visits to his mother’s grave where he’d spend long dark hours staring at the bone-concealing mud with silence just to burst out in disturbing laughter that drove away the creatures of the dark. (I wonder if he was tempted to replicate Carl Tanzler’s perpetration and steal the corpse to keep it at home, after reconstructing it with wax and glass eyes.)
Abdul Masseih stood no chance of having his hideous manuscript published, were it not for a Lebanese publisher, of unknown religious and political background, called Fares Ayyash. Nobody knows why the wealthy Lebanese businessman came to Egypt or why he agreed to publish this encyclopedia of futility. All that is certain is that two hundred unrevised copies of Abdul Masseih’s book were printed in Beirut, while the civil war was at its height, and distributed to a number of Egyptian libraries. A few superstitious locals claim that Abdul Masseih sealed a pact with Ayyash where he would resurrect his bomb-shattered son in return for his favor.
The book debuted silently on the Egyptian shelves. There it remained virtually unnoticed. Few copies were sold; the one that is on my desk at this moment was bought by the grandfather of a dear friend of mine who has gladly lent it to me. Most copies were sold as scrap paper after failing to sell for years. One copy caught the attention of a monk who reported it to his mentor, Father Matta El Meskeen, the controversial father of St. Macarius Monastery. When the monk was on his way from Cairo to the monastery, the car crashed, killing him instantaneously and consuming the copy in the fire. Father Matta thought the incident as an omen and decided to never read a book that may have augmented, or mitigated, the heated conflict between him and Pope Shenouda.
Wahid's book infatuated me. I got used to reading daily portions of it. It nurtured my soul, was my daily bread. As I neared its end I felt threatened and abandoned. The book was my life. It was inconceivable that it would come to an end. I grew desperate to find any other publication by Wahid. My quest was wholly futile; Wahid hated publishing books. His Greek neighbor told me that he was working on a novel that never seemed to end. He tried to convince him to publish it but Wahid declined, stating that "to publish a novel is to abort it. A novel is the reflection of the soul, always evolving, deepening, and expanding. It can never be complete. It matures with its author just as the universe matures with God."
Of the three men who were courageous (or foolish) enough to venture into Wahid’s apartment after his death, two had to consult psychiatrists. The elder Greek recalled the testimony of one of them. “When I entered his apartment I felt as if I had stepped into a thicker medium of an arcane time, as if I was stepping from air to water. The first thing that caught my attention were nude white mannequins that were thrown everywhere and at times fused together in masses of plastic orgy. I remember having heard a clock that ticked blindly, unknowing that it could now spare its effort without risking lamentation. An impersonal feeling of peril and cruelty pervaded the place. Two bright eyes glowed in the darkness and I knew that they weren’t the eyes of another mannequin when they started to move. It was Wahid’s black cat. I shall never forget its sharp teeth and long, spider-like legs. The air was so heavy; taking a breath was a painful act of necessity that asphyxiated my lungs and brought an ache to my heart. Everything, the dusty blankets, the inarticulate furniture, the scattered clove-flavored cigarettes, the wax-bathed mannequins, and the sun-denying curtains were staring at me with inexplicable malice.”
Numerous paintings, no less disturbing than the Black Paintings of Goya which were discovered in the Quinta del Sordo, were scattered on the walls of his house, hung in between his mother’s Coptic icons which he oddly never removed. One of them looked like a hybrid between the Gnostic Abraxas and the Baphomet that welcomes
the reader to the second volume of Eliphas Levi’s Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie(1855) except that the monstrous being was seated on the globe and the Latin ‘Princeps Mundi’ was engraved underneath. Water was dripping in the kitchen. Half burnt black candles were scattered on the dining table and an exotic piece of lingerie challenged the conventional belief that Wahid died as a virgin. Paper scraps were ubiquitous. One of which, whose authenticity didn’t escape my skepticism, suggested that Abdul Masseih believed that certain arrangements of human and animal body parts could cause immense archetypal fear. The simplest of these, and least effective, was a floating hand with an eye embedded in its palm.
Demolished a couple of years after his death, the sole memory of the crumbling building that once stood at Memphis Street in Camp Cesar is a picture of the empty apartment where the Copt lived. It shows a divan on which many volumes, embellished with dust, were piled. Two pictures were hung on the wall. One of them was that of Schopenhauer (to whom lengthy paragraphs were unsurprisingly devoted in