The Penguin's Song

by Hassan Daoud

  But even while saying this, my mother did not truly mean that my father should go on looking for a new shop. And no one was saying that I would need to find work either. The watchmakers had scattered after leaving their old workshops. It was no longer possible for my father to imagine me sitting in one of those dark shops, bringing a watch up to my eyes, perched on a chair behind a table in a place he would know well, where the surroundings would be so utterly familiar. In fact, now, none of us could really imagine any real change to our situation, now that we were so accustomed to ordering our life around the few matters we could still arrange in our reduced circumstances: a spare amount of food and as part of that ration, a portion of meat that was far too minimal. Cut it into smaller pieces! my father demands of my mother, leaning forward to peer even more closely at the knife she wields, his pointing finger accusing the meat. It’s the right thing to do, he feels, since after all, the damage meat causes is greater than the benefit it brings. Cut it smaller, he tells her, meaning the meat, and then he will tell her, as she is beginning to cook it, that the fat causes more harm than good. These little things that we find ourselves doing every day as if they are necessary, like getting up to go off to bed the moment my father starts closing and locking windows and doors, like living and moving about in the apartment exactly as we have always done. My mother restores order to the modest chaos we cause by sitting on the balcony. She returns the cushions to their official positions, as if by doing so she can bring the chairs back to a pristine state untouched by our use.

  By the same token, he no longer asks me if I would like him to buy me a magazine to read. As for the books—well, I have a lot of them already, he thinks. Ever since our move, the question he has directed at me will take on another meaning in his eyes whenever he looks at the books: Will you really be able to read all of them? He believes the time has come for these books I bought but still have not read, even now. I have a lot of them, he thinks, and as he watches me heading into the room after breakfast, he believes I will spend valuable time in there, with those books of mine, and yet it will not cost us anything. There’s no doubt in my mind, in fact, that he thinks books are more lasting than other objects. After all, they’re amenable to storage and preservation. Aging does not detract from their worth.

  After breakfast each of us withdraws into our own work. My mother hoists a mass of greens into the sink. My father stands just behind or next to her as if on guard duty. They seem to find it reassuring that I’m sitting in the room reading. When the two of them, or even just one of them, walks down the hallway that runs up to its door, they are wary of the sound their feet make, lest it annoy me or distract me from my reading. They act as if I am the only one in this house whose activities should oblige others to limit the noise they make, weighing every movement and every word according to my needs. As they see it, I am the one who is working. Or I am the one who is preparing himself for work, as though I’m a student finally on the verge of mastering his chosen specialization. My father lifts his index finger to his lips, sealing them although they are already closed, so that my mother will realize that whatever she is doing is producing loud sounds. When he crosses over to the hallway I can all but see him lift his foot fully off the floor so that he can put it down slowly and precisely, as if to detach its transit from the movement of his other foot, which he will raise just like the first one but not until the first one is firmly on the floor. He believes it is possible to derive some hope from all of this time that I spend sitting and reading. It must amount to something, even if he does not know what it is, or what signs to look for that will announce this something when it does actually begin.

  You read as much in one day as students read in a month! he exclaims when he sees me finally emerge from the room. This is his way of encouraging me and making me feel I’m almost at the finish line, and that when I’m there I’ll be the winner. This does not please my mother, though. She still believes that my frail body will not be strong enough in the end to endure all of this reading. You’re making him ill! she snaps at my father, who—with a dismissive wave of his hand—quiets her before he swings his whole body and face in my direction. He is ready for action. He asks me whether there is anything I would like him to do for me.

  VI

  AMONG THOSE SINGING AND DANCING on the bus, that young fellow who went off alone with her on the walk, returning at the last possible minute, monopolized her not only during the excursion but later on, too. In the long file of students winding from the recreation area to the classrooms, I saw her standing in front of the door to her classroom, waiting, and I could see the look she gave him even though there were seven or eight students between us. It was a look that did not dissolve quickly; she concluded it slowly by lowering her eyelids. She closed her eyes as though she had been met with resistance or aversion and was determined to respond, but not too quickly, by showing the same reaction. There, at the door to her classroom, she kept her eyes closed for about as long as it took for two or three students to shuffle by. When she opened them again, she seemed—in her silence—to have traveled miles away from the normal pursuits of students. She had disengaged from the others, or perhaps she had suddenly matured, and it was as if she had introduced into the school a whiff of what happens between adults, outside.

  This look that, giving it, then impeded her and impelled her to respond with like resistance. . . . In the time that separated the excursion’s end from her standing like this at her classroom door, many things must have happened between them, since they did not appear—judging from that exchanged look—to be simply completing what they had begun during the jaunt. They had already completed it, surely, in that short time, and then had stepped back, abandoning it, or one of them had, and then they resumed it, to carry it to completion once again. Many things had happened between them. And she—having closed her eyes for the time it took for two or three students to walk by—did not care what she might make plain in front of the students. And then she, when she opened her eyes, did not really see the students who passed by after him, one by one in file. She did not see me. I knew that before I drew even with her, yet still I hurried on so that I could quickly disappear. Even if her mind were elsewhere, engrossed in thoughts of him, I did not want to parade by her, walking in that queue in which I stood out, having to hop and scurry, thrusting my chest upward like one of those shore birds that hop on their little feet, since the smallness of their wings keeps them from flying.

  When I said to my father that I would not go back to school, he thought immediately that the students had gone back to teasing and upsetting me by imitating my walk and the way I moved my hands. Indeed he seemed completely confident in his suspicions, which were based on things I used to say when I was a small boy. Tomorrow, I would declare, I am not going back to school. And then I would go quiet, waiting for him to ask me which children had harassed me. This time, though, he had to keep himself from being overly hasty, because it did occur to him that boys of this age had other ways to trouble and upset someone like me. You won’t go back to school? he asked me, as if to give himself more time to comprehend, on his own, what they might be doing to me. While I waited for him, silent, I knew that he would begin his guessing from the very same starting point. Does it tire you out to carry your schoolbag when you walk to school? Does it bother you to sit so long in class? When you’re sitting there does something start hurting?

  So let him leave school, said my mother: I can still see her saying it. Let him stop going, she said as she poked her needles into the wool and added a stitch to the rose-pink pullover she was making for herself. School tires him out, she added without lifting her eyes from the row she was working. Before she could add anything more in that way she has of appearing not to really care, or not to be paying attention, my father told her she did not know what school means because she had never studied at one.

  What will you do instead? he asked me after satisfying himself that he had squelched her interference in matters she d
id not understand. Will you work or will you sit at home?

  He spoke to me without implying in the slightest that someone like me can only work at the kind of tasks that are taught in school. That eased my mind, because it meant he was offering me a broader range of things I might do rather than suddenly restricting my choices with his words. But his irritation surfaced as soon as my mother remarked that I could study at home. A look of anger on his face, he wheeled round to face her squarely, to make her comprehend—to warn her, even—that she must stop talking about things she simply did not understand. Now I could sense his exasperation, even though when he turned to me, he merely asked me the same question he had posed a moment before. Will you work or will you sit at home?

  In his fury he looked as though he wanted to hear a single answer with a single meaning. As though he wanted me to answer, for example, that I would work, but only so that he could then come back with a second question to which, also, he wanted a single and anticipated answer. And what work will you do? His face maintained an expression that was both insistent and closed. Will you work or will you sit in the house? he asked me a third time, as if to get me to understand that he would not let up until he heard that single clear answer, with no hesitation, and no stumbling over my words.

  She made him so angry. He did not ask me what had annoyed me at school, since he didn’t want to appear to be taking my side. This is what happened every time I said I would not return to school. She really did know how to upset him. He began staring into my face as if he could elicit my answer more quickly. The longer I took over it, the more I amplified his rage and his fury. His facility at giving little compliments to his customers and the breezy good humor he practiced in front of them did nothing to attenuate this force of his. It was a force only his anger could awaken. His fury manifested when he disagreed with someone else, but it always seemed more like he was fighting with himself. You want to sit in the house? he asked me, but this time not so he could await my response: rather, he said it to make me understand that if such an idea even came into my head, that meant I was only interested in becoming like women who sit alone all day in empty homes.

  But he would come back from wherever it was his anger had taken him as soon as my mother made one of her gestures signaling that her patience was at an end. Getting up from her chair with a muttered insult flung in my father’s direction, she went into another room. I pondered her fancy appearance, which I found laughable in the circumstances. Her careful chignon and her dress smocked like a child’s gown looked incongruous against her irritable mood, as though in this finery of hers she had been preening herself quietly for some secret but anticipated occasion but had been disappointed when something unexpected and contrary to her plans occurred. At least she put a stop to my father’s anger, for even as, in response to her insults, he shouted at her to get out, he noticed that I was at the end of my rope. He knew he’d been harsh to me in a way I could not endure, and now he was sympathy itself to me. Me, for whom such words falling onto my body—which had no defenses, as he saw it—were like so many hard slaps.

  From the kitchen where she had gone came the sharp and sullen thuds of pans moving around. I knew she was not planning to use them but merely banging them here and there to show that whatever insults she might be uttering or thinking, she was struggling to keep them confined to the kitchen. And my father did not need much time to come out of his anger. Returning to me, showing he was with me and always at my side, he asked me what had gone on at school. When he was in one of those calm states that always followed his bouts of anger, my father could concede to what he would not have accepted ordinarily, to the point where (apologetically and agreeably) he would position me—and himself along with me—to face precisely whatever it was that a few moments before had sparked his anger.

  Now, what will you do if you leave school? But this time he said it as if it were a real question. He said it as if he were saying to me, Come, let’s think together what would happen if we were to abandon school. This was the payment I would get for his anger. This was my reward, which, in this peacemaking state of his, he made as comprehensive as possible.

  Would you like to study a language, or a trade? he inquired. I knew that this repayment was meant to be full and genuine. He would accept my staying home and at the same time he would truly believe that it didn’t mean I was like the women.

  I said to him that I would study what was in the books. I would do it on my own. These books, I wanted to make him understand, were not schoolbooks; and so I exaggerated their thickness, spreading my hands apart as far as they would go. He knew the books I meant. After all, he was the one who’d brought them to me from the book market where—though it was near his shop—he knew no one. These are books that are put onto bookshelves, not into school bookbags. Before he had moved them into the small hallway—that tight narrow space between the doors—I had been collecting them in my wardrobe, putting them together, one beside the next.

  Lest he think that what was keeping me in the house was my laziness, I began each day exactly as I had the school day. I washed my face and got dressed, exactly as before, and sat down to read. I would start at eight o’clock, when school started. To be studying here as they were studying there. That was to placate him but also to reassure myself, because I still felt uneasy about being on my own and not at school. Like them, I would be beginning my studies at eight o’clock, and that lessened the distance I had put between myself and them. I would begin just as they did and at the very same time. And not in the room where I slept, nor on a sofa in the sitting room, but rather, in the hallway between the doors. Ever since moving into it, I had made this narrow passage into my own little classroom that had room enough to hold only me.

  VII

  NOW, WITH THE THIRTEENTH YEAR since our move coming to a close, I know that what forced us to vacate the city, leaving it completely empty, was simply that it no longer had space enough to hold them. By them I mean the boys on that school outing who, in the course of a single trip, managed to divide up and then redistribute the girls among themselves. Them: those who entertained themselves, on the bus, blending dancing with laughter, mingling jokes and song. It was as if there was too little time and so they tried to stretch it by cramming in more activities. We vacated the city only because it could no longer hold them. It was too cramped; its narrow confines pressed in on them. It was too old for them, and so they had carried themselves as if they were living in their families’ city and not in their own. It was like living in a house furnished by your grandfather. It pressed in on them, it was too old, and that is how they experienced it, as cramped and ancient. All the while, everything they said or did in their games served only to mark out the distance between themselves and everything around them, or to flaunt their sense of how ahead of everyone else they were, how new and modern. If the bus slowed to a crawl climbing the steep streets, they sang about it and let the jokes fly. Yes, that is exactly what they did, as if they were mocking the creaky backwardness of their own people and the slow pace of their folk’s buses. If they danced it was for the sake of imitating certain styles of dance or to mimic dancing bodies too old to be seemly but who danced nevertheless. It was the same idea when they called things out the windows to passersby they spotted on the road, to make them—for these young lads’ amusement—smile the dopey embarrassed smiles that were their response to greetings they could not understand.

  No matter what they were doing, they would mock the situation they were in. The city had become too small for them—it was a city they regarded as behind or beneath them. This is how they were in the bus, on the trip where their joking and dancing united them. In the years to follow, when they broke apart to go their separate ways, the city hemmed them in even more as their lives grew ever more crowded and various, proliferating beyond their old familiar low-hanging horizon. Because of them we left the city. As enormous and spread out as it appeared to me, the part of it that I actually inhabited was a tiny space indeed
: that little bit of the city that had room enough only for me. That passage between the three doors (one of them the door to the toilet whose odor my mother constantly feared would poison me), that hallway so well fortified from all outside commotion by the rooms that surrounded it, seeming to put vast distances between me and the outside world.

  I chose to remain inside that narrow hallway while they tugged at their spaces, as if to lengthen and broaden them by pulling on the corners. Whenever my mother began to feel certain that there were too many books around me, she would ask in a voice whose tone she could not modulate: In the whole wide world, who but me would abandon a spacious room overlooking the street to spend his days here! And every time I handed my father a piece of paper on which I had written the title of a book, or maybe two, she would comment, in that high querulous voice of hers, that at least I should get out of the house for a bit. Or she would observe: The humidity in there would wear down even the strongest body. She meant, of course, that my fragile body was far more in need than most—indeed, it was the neediest—of exposure to clean, fresh air. But my father would take the piece of paper from me, delighted that I remained so attached to reading books. He would even—if it was morning and he was still in a good mood—ask me if this book whose title I had written down was one of those fat books that no one, in his view, ever read except judges and scholars of religion.

  When my father brought me those books I always added them immediately to the ones already on the shelves as if the more books my library held, the surer I could be that eventually I would have lined the hallway walls with them, floor to ceiling. Now, after all these years have gone by, I know that what kept me shut in with my books was that they would take me back to the ancient times from which they hailed. I could read them and come to know those eras. In my mind I could even imagine myself to be living alongside the people of that time; it was easy, even without having actually experienced any of the events that occurred so long ago. As I read anecdotes, tales, vignettes of people’s lives, dialogues, poems, and poetic duels, I could decide whether these were words on a page or real events in which real lives unfolded. Either way, I could be at a distance. I could play listener when I wanted to regard what I read as words, or I could play observer or witness when I decided to take them as things that actually happened to people of old. Listener or witness: just as I was in school, or on the outing, and whether standing or sitting. But always between me and what I saw there was an empty space, an extra space I made sure to leave in place, just in case I needed it. After all, they might well spill out of their own space; they might need more room. It was an empty space I would leave between them and me so that no one’s arm would collide with me as its owner whipped around, suddenly making me a part of the circle even if only marginally so. It might put me inside the arena where their silly clowning created such a hubbub. I had to leave an empty space between them and me so that I could remain apart from their glee because I could not endure its intensity. Or I needed that space so that I would be able to flee at the point when I realized it would be better for me not to watch whatever was going on.