The Penguin's Song Read online

  I have retired . . . I am worn out, he would announce to my mother, and I would think that what was tiring him out was the tedium of sitting at home. No more than three or four months had passed since he had lapsed into this state of inactivity. Back then his body had held so much excess energy that he’d had to channel it toward me, for needs I did not have. Stand up! he would say. Get up off the chair so we can make certain it’s sitting evenly. Or: Are you hungry? He would ask me the question just so he could go out and come back with something for me to eat. Or I would hear: Shall I buy you a magazine to read? Sitting at home irritated and wearied him. Or perhaps the weariness really was a result of all the hours he had spent in the shop, and as it accumulated he had kept it hidden inside, waiting to show itself. You—sit down, now. Sit down. And so I sat. I would not rise from that chair except to ask him if he needed my help or to simply make as if to ask him. Sit down, sit down there! and so I would sit down, to put him at rest. It contented him to feel that he was handling his work and taking care of me, all at the same time.

  II

  ONLY OUR BUILDING BROKE UP the sandy expanse that stretched beyond it, rippling out in tiny waves that looked like a landscape of miniature hills. And beyond the sand there was nothing; if we were to walk all the way to the end of it, it seemed, we would find that same kind of downward slope that we see from our balcony, separating us from the old city. Only our building interrupted the sandy way that continued on behind it in an accumulation of drifts. Solitary, it rose up in that emptiness like a squat tower. From where I was sitting, in the little room where I have my books, I could hear the sound of a spoon clattering to the floor on the level below us. Hearing every tinny reverberation it made, I guessed that nothing was happening in the building at that particular moment other than that spoon falling. Through the open window I could hear the movements of the man and the woman on the ground floor as they tended the plants just outside; I heard their every move so exactly that it was as if I was seeing them with my eyes.

  Through the window, too, I can rest my eyes—as my father had put it—by looking out at the sand and the stalks the sand yields, before it proceeds to dry them out and then finally to burn them. When we moved to this home of ours thirteen years ago, my father worked this particular window over and over, gripping the handle and opening and closing it repeatedly as if trying to ease its stiffness for my hands. He also wanted to make me understand that I would have to open and shut it like that to bring in the clean outside air—the sort of fresh air that had never reached as far as my cramped room in the old place. That room hadn’t been anything more than a short narrow hallway lined by three doors, one of which opened onto the toilet whose odor my mother was always worrying would poison me. The more cramped she saw the hallway becoming as I added more books to its shelves, the more insistently she would ask me why I didn’t move, along with my belongings, to the spacious room that remained empty. We won’t ask you for the rent, she would say to me teasingly, before adding in an affectionate tone that the room was mine; she and my father would not be having another child.

  You have a window here, my father said to me as he poked his head out to smell the pure outside air. He was delighted with that window on the day we moved in. Our first day here. Standing in the doorway to my room, about to leave, he shifted his gaze back and forth between that window and me; it seemed as if he wanted to reassure himself that the two of us—the window and I—would stay together here, remaining close neighbors, even clinging to each other. He figured that I would spend all of my time in the room, since we had no shop for me to go to, and no particular route to walk. He assumed the same about my mother and himself. As he shut the door to my room, it seemed to me that he was shutting the door to each room on the scene that ought to unfold within it, and closing the door would preserve the tableau. My mother, for instance, would have to be in the kitchen for him to close its door so contentedly. Likewise, she must be in the dining room for him to see it looking exactly as he wanted it, perfect and complete. In those first days of transition, freshly moved into our new home, we had to take on our final and definitive image, as if nothing in our life was henceforth to change. Closing the door on me, he saw what he was doing now as one of his very final gestures, to be completed by his closing the other doors and, afterwards, sitting in repose on the balcony and beginning the long, slow interval that was his life now.

  I would be in the room behind its closed door as my father and mother sat down, separately, to survey this home’s order, each from their own point of view. Or they would be roaming through it, she wanting to satisfy herself that all was arranged correctly and he reassuring himself that everything was in its proper place. Or they would stand together in the kitchen, agreeing or differing on what my mother was preparing or cooking.

  In the days that followed our move she reminded him repeatedly that we would be returning to the city we had vacated when they finished the work they were doing there. With his lack of employment, she saw him becoming like those house husbands who spend their time observing and commenting on their wives’ every act. Tomorrow, soon, we’re going back, she would say to him, as if to divert him from his preoccupation with her food preparation. He wouldn’t answer, and indeed he appeared to have heard nothing at all, since he simply went on staring at whatever her knife was chopping, poised and waiting for the moment when he would whip his finger toward whatever it was he did not approve of.

  He would only pull himself away if he saw me entering the kitchen. He would open the refrigerator door as soon as he thought I was heading for it, and turn toward me, asking if I wanted water. Accompanying me to the door of my room, carrying the water bottle to spare me the task, he seemed no longer able to imagine me in any guise but that which I offered as I stood before him. He could no longer envision me anywhere else; he could not locate a place for me in which I would look any different than I did here before him. Ever since we had vacated our shop, he no longer knew how or where to position me in a future that would be mine. The watchmakers who had worked not far from us, and who he had thought would easily take me in, had gone away just as we had done, leaving behind their sturdy shops, fortified little spaces like empty vaults. He no longer knew where people went about doing whatever it was they meant to do. He stopped saying to me that the most suitable employment I could have would be watch-making, and that he would be happy—thrilled, even—to imagine me sitting at a table littered with tiny precision tools and parts. When he began making those rounds of his—which in any case soon began to leave him irritated—he was earnestly trying to keep himself entertained by observing his old acquaintances in their new circumstances. Houri is making the sandwiches for his customers himself now, he would exclaim to my mother, laughing as if at some private joke as he recalled the man wrapping bread around the sandwich filling. Or he would tell her that now Kilani was selling chirpy little birds and multicolored fish meant to liven up people’s sitting rooms. Better than him sitting at home, my mother retorted, knowing perfectly well that her words would accomplish one thing: they would immediately silence him, and then, a moment later, he would escape to the balcony where he could be alone, gazing down to the point where the building met the sand.

  When he began saying to her that he had gotten tired, that he had retired and grown old, he was blocking his own path to gradually returning, finding himself renting a new shop and buying new goods to stock it with. I am here, he would say to her, his palms flat and arms outstretched to encompass an open space, as if describing the borders of our home as the place where inevitably he would always, ever and only be. I am here, he would say, as a peremptory summing up (for her benefit) of his already concise, staccato sentence that he was tired retired and old. Then he would draw himself away from wherever they were standing or sitting together, staying in the apartment but putting between them a space he thought was ample enough to restore the state of silent feud between them.

  He would go with me as far as the door to my roo
m, where he would hand me the water bottle. After all, he had lifted it from my grasp not only to spare me the fatigue, but also to perform one of the functions that he thought demonstrated the importance of his presence in this house. Standing next to my mother and observing every chop of her knife was another one of those functions he fulfilled, as was making the rounds of the sitting room, between the small sofas, peering at them and at what was around them as he headed for the front entryway, to inspect it and to check the main door. His role was here: in the house, inside the house that he would continually monitor, taking care of it over and above my mother’s care for its cleanliness and arrangement. And in charge of its proper running, which meant he was permanently prepared for prompt action if the knife blade were to nick my mother’s hand. What this meant was that, from the second she said to him that the knife was making her hand shake, he would bark out, Right, yes, I’m coming, as though he were responding to an anticipated incident whose eventuality he had been clocking, moment by moment.

  He was here, truly at home, where he wanted me—like him—to be. Inside. He no longer said to me that working as a watchmaker would suit me very well. The way he saw it, my being here, in the house, inside, was better for me. It would make me better, more relaxed, more comfortable. And anyway, the watchmakers had not gone back to work: in his rounds, he had not seen a single watchmaker’s shop. So that we would believe him—my mother and I—he would add that perhaps they did have shops but he had certainly not seen any of them. Then he would observe that the streets where all of these buildings were going up were so many that a body could hardly believe that the people who packed them now had actually all fit into the old city. My mother knew very well that these statements of his were of a piece with his declarations that he would not ever return to work. So she would respond that the old city had fallen into ruin because there were so many people and its streets were not spacious enough to hold them. He wouldn’t answer; perhaps he didn’t even hear her, or perhaps he heard but paid no attention to the sense of her words because he was so fixed on her face and its expressions as she spoke. No, he no longer spoke of my perfect future as a watchmaker. Ever since the watchmakers had vacated their shops, he had begun to find it too hard to imagine me sitting and working, or standing in the doorway of the shop where I worked, looking out at a landscape that he would not know.

  When he had said to me that working as a watchmaker would suit me perfectly, it had required only a little imagination. Just like that, he could shove aside one of those watchmakers whom he knew and seat me in his place, at his very table. It would be simple enough for us, he thought, to arrive at our respective workplaces, walking together, with the same distance to cover, the same length of a walk that had long been habitual, ever since those days when we left the house together to go to his shop. We would have to arrive at my shop first, though, not his, so that he could unlock the place and go with me as far as the door where he would say goodbye, exactly as he does here every time he hands me the water bottle that he has carried for me before shutting the door and returning alone to the kitchen.

  He is here, at home. He gets up in the morning exactly as he did when he went to work, hurrying to begin his activities right away. He looks at my mother first, as he stands still for a moment next to his bed to reassure himself that she is still there asleep on her bed. Then he walks to my room to find out, from behind the firmly shut door, whether I have awoken yet or I’m still sleeping. Then to the front doorway to see if it is still locked as he shut and locked it yesterday. Then to the pair of windows over there, opening their wooden shutters to give the house daylight. Then to the kitchen, running his eyes across it, like so, as if he forgot what condition he had left it in yesterday before going to bed. Then to the big balcony to cast his eyes, which will not do anything for him, over the old city. From the minute he wakes up, he begins this work of his, so aptly named by my mother household guard duty. From the inside, not from the outside, she says, in contrast to the government’s night sentries. She calls it the same thing when he stands next to her in the kitchen staring at what her hands are cleaning or chopping before she puts it in its pot or container. Look, he’s decided it is time we sleep, she says to me when he gets up from where we’re sitting on the balcony to go in and close windows and doors. Hey, it’s the wee hours already, she says to me. She may be joking but she means that my father does not just keep watch over the house but sets its hours too.

  And he triumphs. Once he begins shutting the doors and windows, it isn’t long before my mother begins to yawn. We have gotten sleepy, she says, regaining her breath, which her yawning had momentarily overwhelmed. She stands up, but before heading for bed she spends an entire minute looking at us without saying a word, to gauge what we will look like, out here, as she falls asleep on her pillow.

  Tonight, sleep in your bedroom, she says to me, noticing me getting to my feet just as she has done. I have some pages to read, I respond immediately, getting my words in before my father makes the very same request, but in the form of a question: Why don’t you sleep in your bedroom tonight? That’s exactly how he speaks to me, as he closes the heavy double doors, one over the other, careful to keep them from making anything more than the very faintest sound of metal on metal. It makes nothing stronger than a light takka followed by the sound of the bolt, a light sound too, but one that emphatically closes and locks our entire home.

  III

  I GET TO MY FEET, not to go and finish reading those remaining pages of my book but so that my father can conclude the closing-up chores with which he winds up the day. From my window the sand, made lustrous by the moonlight, looks silvery and close, as if its surface has risen toward me. The moonlight seems to carry the sand almost right to me. Or perhaps that light is simply strengthening my vision as I look at the sand, shining so brilliantly and so brazenly that soon it repels my gaze. Sitting on the balcony, we can catch the sound of the breeze as it approaches, winding up to us from below—that faraway below where the old city lies. The moonlight gives us the city, too, but as nothing more than skeletal outlines of buildings, ash-gray with age and remoteness. We send our gazes there, to perch at the margins of its ring-shaped expanse, to know that something of us remains there.

  I will complete the evening’s togetherness alone, sitting at the window. Opening that window, I seemed to be breaching the wall of our home or displaying its interior spaces to the outside world from which it has sealed itself off. But there is nothing out there but the glistening sand below me, which lies still and silent as if the light falling on it freezes it in place, fixing its image forever. I am waiting, though. I am expecting a light to come on in the room below. It’s the room exactly below mine—below me—on the floor directly beneath, and it will not be for more than a moment or two, that soft yellow light peculiar to homes, as it escapes the room and plunges across a stretch of sand. The instant I see it, I am up from my chair and at the window frame, doubling my body over the sill to dangle my head below. But all I can see is a row or two of tiles, bare and empty as if the people down there have removed all traces of furniture, shifting them to the room’s far end.

  Still, I can see her in my mind. I imagine her picking up whatever it was she came in to get and then (with her other hand, the one that’s not occupied) pressing the light switch to off. Her small hand is stained with ink in the way of schoolgirls, and the skin around her fingernails is crusty and flaky. It’s only an instant or two, and when the moment ends I am still hanging out over the windowsill, pressing my stomach against it as I stretch downward as far as I can go. As long as no one can see me, I am in no hurry to bring my feet back to meet the floor. Anyway, she might come back. She might come back to get something else she needs: a colored ribbon, a belt to encircle her waist, or something else of the sort.

  And I know, too, that their evening together—theirs, too—is over. I know this from the shadow that comes to meet the expanse of light and then advances fully halfway across the area of
sand lit up by the light in her room. I know it also from the pair of plump hands that reach for the wooden shutters to close them. She will be in bed and already well on her way to falling asleep when the voice of the woman—her mother’s voice—says a couple of words to hasten her sleep, and then when the woman’s fleshy hand turns out the light. I will not wait long before letting the light in my room run out over the sand. But my light will make only stripes, piercing the slatted wood of the shutters, which are already closed.

  I do not sit down to read the remaining pages of the book I have left open on the table. There is no activity that truly suits this time of evening. In the course of the day, I did not tire out my body so that it would demand the onset of night and claim the respite of sleep. And it’s also true that books we want to read in daylight contain occurrences and episodes and fierce words that don’t suit dwelling upon at night. There is nothing quite right for this time of night, and I can find nothing to do other than reading some passages in that book or lying down and waiting to drop off to sleep. Or I can do both at once by planting the book next to me in bed and leaving the light on. I can do both at once, reading and sleeping, since I have prepared myself as much for one as for the other, and because I keep them both right here beside me. I protect myself with my book, or perhaps I’m losing myself in it to keep away the loneliness into which my sleeplessness may well plunge me. But I do start off trying to conquer my wakefulness, closing my eyes to test how complete it is, finding it absolute. When I give up and open my eyes, I know without a doubt that I have been ousted from the house of sleep and I will have to get there by means of some ruse. I’ll have to get there by a back way or a side street and definitely not by going in through the front door. No, I did not wear out my body during the day that it might fall asleep on its own. I did not use it for anything or expose it to anything. After all, my father closed the doors and all of the windows with his own hands as if he wanted us to go to sleep like guests pampered by the finest service. By day he walks me from the kitchen to the door of my room, keeping watch over me and relieving me of even having to carry a bottle of water. Sit down, sit! he says to me, pulling the chair back from the dining room table so that I can sit down. Once I am seated he tells me to lift myself up slightly so that he can push the chair closer, for the sake (as he sees it) of bringing my hands near enough to reach the table.