The Penguin's Song Read online

  The Penguin’s Song

  Hassan Daoud

  Translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth

  City Lights Books | San Francisco

  THE PENGUIN’S SONG

  Copyright © 1998, 2014 by Hassan Daoud

  English language translation copyright © 2014 by Marilyn Booth

  First published as Ghina’ al-Batriq in Beirut, Lebanon, by Dar al-Nahar lil-Nashr in 1998

  Cover photo by George Haddad

  First City Lights Books edition, 2014. All rights reserved

  This book is also available in an e-edition: 978-0-87286-654-6

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dawud, Hasan.

  [Ghina’ al-batriq. English]

  The penguin’s song / Hassan Daoud ; translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth. -- First City Lights Books edition

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-87286-623-2

  I. Booth, Marilyn, translator. II. Title.

  PJ7820.A8425G5513 2014

  892.7’36--dc23

  2014024970

  City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore

  261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133

  www.citylights.com

  I

  FROM OUR HOME ON THE building’s third and uppermost floor, from its balcony and through its windows, I can observe the entire breadth of the city below me. The others who live in our district—but in buildings that only begin to rise up where the unpaved sand track ends (or where it begins, if we’re heading toward where we live, at its very end)—cannot see the city as we do. Over there, the apartments face each other closely; and unlike ours, their buildings do not sit on a rise. The congestion that suddenly clogs the street where their buildings begin draws even the residents of the higher floors, who might be able to glimpse something of the city, to engross themselves instead with what is happening directly below them on the street. How dense the crowds are over there! We can see all of that commotion from our own bedroom windows, but the noise of it doesn’t reach us. When we’re walking on the sand track, coming back toward the building where we live, those sounds reverberate in our bodies, even as they fade away behind us with every step. By the time we’re getting close to our building all we can hear is the sound of the wind coming up from below. It’s as if all that separates us from those people over there is the unpaved distance we must walk on the sand; we are their hinterland, inhabiting a countryside they never enter, accessed by a path they never walk. They can’t even change its aspect over time, by building over here, for instance. That’s because of land inheritance issues. My father knows all about the reasons for that.

  So our old building stands alone here, a mere three floors rising on the knoll like a short, fat tower. From the kitchen window and the window in one of the bedrooms, and also from the roomy balcony off the sitting room, I can see the whole city at one glance, massed together in a single tight clump, as if ringed by an invisible band out there on that flat expanse. In the days after we first moved in, my father would sketch circles in the air with his finger, the first one enclosing nearly half the city and then each ring growing slightly smaller, one circle sketched within another, until finally at the end of this little exercise he could say that his shop was exactly there. There it is, that’s the one, right there! he would say to my mother as he pulled her closer to his rigidly outstretched arm, his index finger forming an extension, completing the straight line as he pointed precisely at his target. Come here, you, he would say to me when he saw her gaze straying to shift among objects she could not make out clearly. Look, son, he would say. Isn’t that our shop? You—you know our shop. . . .

  Yes, I know our shop. But I did not like being there, sitting in that shop as my father made me do. He would plant me in his chair, which sat in the only unoccupied space in the shop, a small and cramped bit of emptiness. I faced the street with my back to the huge jute sacks, open with their top edges rolled back to reveal the goods inside. My father thought I found it entertaining to watch the passersby making their slow and cautious way along the narrow street paved with ancient stone blocks, wary of slipping into the grimy, mucky gutter running down the middle of it. It would never have occurred to my father that they were entertaining themselves with me, but that’s the way I saw it. After all, they were the ones who, peering into the shop, could stare at me, at my body facing out from the storefront that opened directly onto the street.

  I didn’t like my father’s way of working in the shop, either. His sprightly movements and winning gestures seemed inappropriate for his age. To me, he always gave the impression of being caught up in a trade war, constantly trying to get an edge on some competitor who might steal away his profits. Whenever one of those customers who know their way around the shops came in, I would tell myself that perhaps now my father would at least show a little embarrassment at my having to see him act this way. Making a sale—he would say to me—means having to put on a show for the customer. It was as if he wanted to apologize for his spryness, for the charming insistence that infected both gestures and speech as he played up to these shoppers. He never asked me to help him. Sometimes I would give him an inquisitive look to show him that I was ready to join in, but he never accepted my assistance.

  After our move here, though, which was thirteen years ago, my father would leave home only to take his walk, which didn’t formally begin (as he saw it) until he had put the sand track behind him and reached those buildings. What seemed to direct his steps was the aim of finding out which shops were open, and to see whether he recognized them or knew their owners from back in the days when he had worked in his own shop. In that year when the old city was being emptied and all its shops closed, one after another of the merchants who had been there began to open up other shops in various quarters as replacements for their old establishments. In these new locations, though, the shops no longer formed a single, connected, impenetrable row, sitting practically on top of each other as they had in the old city. My father, as keen as he was to make a daily tally of their number, had to walk to the very end of each cluster of buildings to find them. Indeed, he had to regularly monitor buildings that he had already scouted on earlier excursions, since the shops changed hands often and the ways in which these spaces were used also seemed to be in constant flux.

  Whenever my mother remarked that he would be better off opening a shop and working rather than frittering away his time with walking, he would respond by saying, for instance, that Makkawi, who had made the tastiest stewed fuul beans in Maarad, in the old city’s center, had had to open his new eatery in a tiny niche tucked into the entryway of some building. Or that Uwayni, whose merchandise had filled three entire floors up to the ceilings, was now stuffed into a tiny, cramped, out-of-the-way refuge that had to hold not only all of his goods, but his employees as well.

  It’s all temporary, my mother would answer. Temporary! She didn’t have to wait very long to hear him bark that he would never work in a shop in some stairwell, whether it was temporary or forever. And when he finished by saying that he would rather stay as he was, keeping his dignity even if it meant not working, I would wonder if he wasn’t over­doing the respect he owed his old shop. After all, it had been a small, constricted space beneath a ceiling that bore down severely on the interior, hunching over it like a heavy, oversize ribbed vault; the entire breadth of the shop, moreover, was open to the narrow, grimy lane. In the hours I spent sitting there, on that chair among the huge sacks, I mostly stared at my surroundings wondering what someone else—someone my age but with a sound body—would make of my situation, of this place, of me sitting mutely on the chair as I always did
. I could not find anything pleasing about any of it—not my father nor the huge open sacks nor the floor permeated by a grime that had altered its original color before creeping across it to add a layer of filth. Sitting there, I would imagine myself keeping back that filth, scraping it off with one of those enormous old wooden-handled iron knives.

  It was an old place, with the kind of oldness about it that makes it seem automatically unclean. The sort of ancientness that means the ceiling and walls are so rough and thick and heavy that they appear strong when they are actually fragile to the point of crumbling, could actually collapse as you’re looking at them. Look . . . look there, look at it, my father says to me. He has given up on my mother and brings me close, his arm jutting out straight as an arrow, his rigid finger pointing. When I seem to be looking where he wants me to look, craning my head forward to comply, I don’t see the façade. What I see is the shop from the inside, emptied of its goods. But its smell remains, alive and pungent, filling the space even if no one is there to smell it.

  You know it . . . you do know where it is, over there, don’t you? He asks me this so that I can’t help but acknowledge that he remembers it. Here and now, from this apartment, he remembers it all, and he remembers being there. Insisting that we are actually seeing his shop, even when we are as far away as this, he can let himself believe that someone else sees the same picture. Someone else remembers along with him. He finds it hard to sustain that memory alone; he doesn’t feel entirely comfortable or certain about it. You could have read all those books of yours, he says to me, reminding me that he thinks I wasted a lot of good hours that I could have put to good use. If only I had spent all those hours sitting in his shop with a book in my hands. But with my miniature hands and arms, I would have had to stick them out in front of me as far as I possibly could to be able to read the words. And then those people walking down the lane and peering into the shop could entertain themselves even better, since they wouldn’t have to limit themselves to wondering why I sat there exposing myself to view with my tiny hands and arms. They would see my outstretched, straining hands first thing, and me behind my book looking like a little child conducting a train. As for my father’s regular customers, who had to find something to say, they would ask me in a joking tone whether I thought I was at home on the balcony going over my lessons.

  He never agreed to let me help him with his work. Stay where you are. . . . Sit, sit! he would say, smiling, as he shifted the chair so it sat firmly on the ground, believing his adjusments were making it easier for me to stay put there. So I sat, draping my hands over my belly as if to give them some rest, thinking that if only I could work, the customers might ignore me. If I were filling the little sacks from the big ones, or placing the weights on the tray of the balance scales, or even cleaning the spaces between the sacks, leaning down, stretching my body over their bulk in order to reach every nook and cranny: as long as I did not go back to my seat, where I composed a still-life image for all eyes to see, they might not notice me. Busy with the tasks of the shop and wearing stained, dusty work clothes, I would seem to be where I belonged. Work, and the clothes for it, and keeping busy not only amidst the sacks of goods for sale but also among the noisy stalls, whose vendors are always shouting out for customers—these were activities suited to malformed bodies. Then it would be like the way it is when you try to hide something under something else that looks very similar. Like using dirt to begrime a face whose skin has already darkened to the color of dust.

  There it is. It’s there inside the final circle that his pointing finger traces, inside that tight ring he makes, there at the very center, among the other shops he’s pointing out; it is inside his final and smallest circle, the smallest possible. He wants us—me and my mother both—to see what his finger points to, because he thinks the only reason he cannot see his shop is his own weak vision. Away, get out of the way! he says to her, peeved. You—come here, you. You know where it is! he says to me. He begins jerking his finger sideways as if to return himself to the point he lost a few seconds ago. It’s there, look, look—you can see it.

  I stand close to him, pressed against his arm and hand, but stubbornly I keep my head held rigidly away and my eyes fixed elsewhere, resisting his attempt to drag me, as he does every time, into looking at something I know I will not really be able to see. When he gets annoyed with me for standing there stiff and motionless, refusing to look where he wants me to look, he steps away from me, and then he turns away from my mother and me altogether to face an empty part of the apartment. Even he doesn’t know where he wants us to look, she says to me, soothingly. Trying to placate me, she wants to ease me out of the rigid stance that she thinks I must find painful, but which I maintain even after he has stepped away.

  He doesn’t know where he wants us to look, my mother says. Sometimes she illustrates her words with gestures, sticking out her finger, mimicking his movements, looking far into the distance through narrowed eye slits in imitation of the blind. When she grips my hand as if to dig me out of the predicament into which I have fallen, I know it won’t last. I know that she will slip from my grasp the moment we’re inside. It’s not yet close enough to our next mealtime for her to seat me at the table, both hands guiding me there and holding my chair. But neither will she usher me over to one of the little sofas in the sitting room and sit down across from me—for what would we talk about, sitting there like that? And she doesn’t like it when I sit alone reading in the tiny room filled with books, so she certainly won’t lead me—my hand gripped tightly in hers—to its door.

  He does not know where he wants me to look. He divides the city into circles or sections in order to finally arrive at his shop, which in fact nobody can see unless they’re standing immediately in front of it. When they started tearing down the buildings, raising masses of dust and smoke that we could see from our home, he would declare, There’s the place, the shop’s in there. Just like that, he’d say it, as he pointed his fingers vaguely in several directions.

  Yesterday, it was over there, my mother would retort. She gestured in the one direction he was not pointing to, where no dust and smoke rose. Anyway, she observed, it wouldn’t take all of this to topple it. All it would need is a bulldozer to ram into it, once from this side and once from the other, she says with one finger on each hand rapping sharply against what she imagines as the shop walls.

  As for the nearby vegetable market, which had spilled out across the paved alleyway, they would have only to knock down a single stand for the whole thing to collapse into itself, domino-like, as if the structures were lightweight tents leaning against each other. Dynamite is only for the tall buildings, my mother said to him before she began counting off the names of buildings she knew: The Hijaziyya Building, the Pharaon Building, the Maqasid Building, the . . .

  I have retired! he would bark, breaking in to interrupt the stream of names. I have retired, and I’m too old to work, he would say peevishly. Now it was her, he thought. She herself was delivering the blows to his shop, causing it to collapse under the weight of the big names that flattened it, name after name, blow upon blow, hammering it into the ground that soon enough would erase almost all trace of it.

  I’m worn out, he would say with finality, bringing the feud to a halt before it could drive her to say, as she did every time, that we were eating up the pennies that were meant to be our last resort, and that surely my father was no better than the other merchants who had moved their shops to new locations.

  Or perhaps he wanted to cut the quarrel short before he would have to repeat those curt, tired phrases of his. I have retired . . . I’m worn out . . . I am old now. For I am quite certain that all of them were directed wholly at me, who had never yet worked and who was not worn out. I was twenty-three at the time—the year we moved—and I had not taken a single step toward working at anything. All I knew about work was what my father did, moving among his customers and his huge open sacks, and maybe also what the vegetable-stand vendors were d
oing, as their voices reached our shop. In there, whenever I stood up he would say to me, Sit down, sit! as he fiddled with the chair, repositioning it carefully so that its four legs sat evenly and firmly. He was not even willing for me to make the rounds of the restaurant owners, his customers, to collect the day’s accumulated debts. Wait for me here, he would tell me as he tugged on his trousers, pulling them up in preparation for a brisk walk. And so I would have to wait for him, sitting on the chair and laying my hands over my stomach as if to give them some needed rest. He thought my hands and arms would tire even from occupations that did not require their repeated use; after all, with the restaurateurs, all I had to do was to collect these small amounts of money and stuff them into my pocket. You stay right here, he would say. Just wait for me here. I was invariably too sluggish to respond that I really must do something, that what tired me out was all of this sitting on his chair. But I had no familiarity with any kind of work beyond his comings and goings and those of the vendors close by. In the shop, after a customer walked out onto the street, purchases in hand, he would talk to me as a father ought to talk to his son about his future. You should be a watchmaker, he would say. That’s the sort of thing that would suit you well. He was thinking that my extraordinarily small hands would be comfortable working with such small objects, and deft with them, too. Merely saying it gave him some comfort, since it meant my future would be a natural and ordinary one. My work might even be an improvement on his, something better than the labor of the man who was my father. You were made for that, he would say to me, imagining me sitting at a table covered with tiny instruments, a watch between my hands that was so small I seemed to repair it by simply by training my eyes on it. That’s where you belong, down there, he would say to me as he pointed toward the watchmakers’ shops, which were not very far from ours. Those unsoiled shops whose proprietors, inside them, were also clean and neat and orderly, just as I was whenever I left the house, wearing the clothes that my mother had washed and ironed.