The Penguin's Song

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

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
t
here
. 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.