The Penguin's Song

by Hassan Daoud

  They’re still knocking down buildings, I would tell him. Or I would say that they were close to finishing in this district, since only a few buildings still remained for them to knock down.

  As I described what I saw he would begin to sketch outlines, plans for what they ought to do as they worked there. They will join up the Nouriyya souq and the Amir mosque, he would declare, since they’re destroying what’s left of the buildings between them. Or he would say that it would have been better for them to begin with the structures at the edge of the souq so they could clear a path for themselves from there to the sea. When this enthusiasm for giving advice and correcting errors and reworking plans got a firm hold on him, he would suddenly turn to me and remark of my mother (who was staring at the little stitches her needles made) that she was working with wool in the height of summer. She would hear him, but rather than answer she would look at me with a sly smile as if to remind me that we had a secret understanding, knowing to keep quiet about his tiresome drivel. That will put burns on your hands, he would announce as he turned to her, wanting to put a stop to the collusion he’d noticed between us, and to sweep it away altogether.

  It comforts her to work her hands by moving them in those tiny and regular movements. The routine diverts her. A little upward movement with one hand, ending in a knot that her other hand flies up to conceal. As her hand sweeps upward she senses herself in a light and cheery mood, the way little girls feel when they amuse themselves by chewing gum. In the years since our move, my mother grew used to having us stay at home and she began shifting from one mode to another throughout the long day. Sitting down in the late afternoon, hair and clothes patted into place, she had the air of having just returned from somewhere else. Or she looked as though she had been readying herself to receive guests whom she knew would not show up. My father thought that this daily ritual she had, of sitting like this in her good clothes, demonstrated that she was empty-headed. She just went on smiling for no apparent reason—since nothing called for a smile—and she seemed so like a child, humming to herself in a low and light voice or staring at the space between the needles as if to toy with the stitch that had slipped between them. He thought she was featherbrained and childish, sitting there just so in the late afternoon, but he didn’t say anything about it or even hint at it. It showed, though, in the way he looked at her and then turned away like someone who has seen something embarrassing. Or he would keep his gaze fixed on her face, looking at her silently as though reminding himself of something.

  But the way I saw it, of the three of us she was the only one who actually might be capable of receiving a guest who just might come to visit us. What did not please my father about her pose did please me. Or, it began to please me once I started to think that she must go down to their home—down there, just below us—to visit them. There, in their sitting room or on their balcony, she would look fresh and well put together. Down there, they would see her meaningless smile as a sign of how pleased she felt about them and how delighted she was to be among them.

  Something about the way we live here has to change, I said, standing up and leaning on the balcony railing. I wasn’t speaking to anyone in particular but my father looked at me, craning his head forward and even projecting his ears as though to make certain he missed none of the words he expected me to add to what he’d just heard. As for my mother, she raised her eyes to me but only so she could say that this life of ours was one that no one could bear. She went on looking at me—they were both staring at me—as if urging me on to complete what I had begun. I said to them that I must go to work, which doubled their astonishment.

  Now this was something for which neither of them could have any rejoinder. My mother went back to her needles, rescuing herself from any chance that she might say something she’d regret later. But I know she had been waiting. She’d been waiting not simply to hear me say this, but indeed for me to do it. We’re living off our savings and we’re eating them up, she’d frequently said to my father, for whom work was no longer possible. But time had passed since I had heard her say it. No doubt by now we had eaten up quite a lot of the savings that would have allowed my father to open a new shop.

  What work will you do? my father asked me, adopting an exaggeratedly serious look on his face. I’ll work at something I’m capable of doing, I responded, making him so uncomfortable that his face froze into that solemn expression.

  Something about the way we live here has to change, I said turning toward my mother. I had calculated that all she would need to take the first step was for someone to say something about it. She was gratified to find me singling her out rather than my father and was on the verge of saying so, were it not for the critical position in which she found herself, which she tried to hide by bringing the tiny stitches closer to her eyes and seeming to stare at them. All she needed was one little gesture to make her feel her distinction from the others who lived here, even though she seemed completely unaware of how to act appropriately for a woman of her age. She so loved to exhibit that femininity of hers. I supposed that she was imitating the emotions of girls who have not yet matured. That’s why she would smile to herself like that, in those moments in the late afternoon, and why she put her hair up in styles that were only suited for young girls.

  But she will know how to act when they open the doors to their home and find her there, expecting to visit them. Once inside, she’ll know how to behave when they ask her to sit down in what I imagine is their sitting room. It is directly below the large room my family had designated for me. They’ll be happy with her there, and she will not allow their time together to pass slowly and tediously. The way she sits with us, with me and my father, so well put together and smiling to herself, I think, is simply practice for the possibility that she will receive visitors who might come to our door, or that she might visit people who will welcome her into their homes. She will not annoy them there, in their sitting room above which rises the window I stand behind in order to watch the one for whom I wait, standing motionless, in expectation of her departure for school or her return from it. I might not hear anything of what they say; it will be only a guess, thinking about what my mother will do when she stands there ready to meet her just coming out of her room, and then when she looks hard at her, wanting to really see her, right there in front of her, so very close.

  X

  THE OFFICES OF THE MAGAZINES that my father bought me when we were still in the old city are no longer where they’re supposed to be either, at the addresses written inside each issue. The editors left, just like the shopkeepers my father knew. Sitting here in our home, I think about them. They must have moved to offices in the new parts of town, I think, offices of no more than one room or perhaps two. Not all of them moved, since the displacement of an entire city has to mean that many things are overlooked, and then abandoned. The magazines in my library—magazines that haven’t been updated with a new issue since our move here—I think of as uniformly old, as if I bought them all in the same moment. When I hoist these bundles from the shelves to carry them over to the table, I see that they’ve aged the books sitting next to them: these books that have not had a single volume added to their number either, ever since our move. When we first moved, when I could have bought books because we were still living off what my father called the expense account, I felt I already had enough of them. Some were still new then. Or they were new in my library, since for us a book is deemed new according to the moment we possess it and not the date it was written. When we moved I said I would read from what I already had around me, echoing the condition of the prisoner who—every time I think of sitting down to read—I find myself longing to impersonate: both in the cramped, narrow space he inhabits and in his careful hoarding of his belongings, among them books that he has no choice but to read there in his tiny prison cell, word by word, over and over.

  But now I know (so long after our move) that the books aging on our shelves are a burden to read. Every time I get to that
point—the moment of actually starting to read one of them—it’s as if it’s already a question of rereading it, even though the most I’ve ever done is to leaf through a few pages. I thought that in order to begin doing work I would know how to do (as I suggested to my father and mother on the balcony late in the afternoon), I must get to know something new I could bring to it, something new I would only get from books in bookshops and not from those in my library. Or I had to see what the magazines were doing now, after I had been cut off from them for all these years. This time, though, I am the one who must go out. Not my father, who, since ceasing his reconnaissance tours around the neighborhoods, goes only to the very nearest shops, those that are no distance at all from the top of the sand track.

  My father, returning tired and sometimes completely exhausted from these tours of his, would tell my mother that he found it amazing to see how people were getting on with their lives as if nothing had befallen them and none of their circumstances had changed. Like an ant, he would say, squeezing two fingers together as if to pick up a tiny ant and move it from one spot where it had been creeping along to another. Like an ant, he would say to my mother, an ant who starts crawling immediately and in the very same direction the minute we put it back on the ground. By this time he and my mother had reached a point where they were beginning to sense that we had waited too long to open a new business out there in one of the city quarters where my father took his long walks. That’s why my mother did not comment but only gave him that silent gaze meaning she had already warned him that he must work, and it must happen soon. Then he stopped going on those long walks of his through the new neighborhoods. The small makeshift shops erected hastily in building entryways or beneath staircases had become real shops now, even if they had only tiny storefronts or were set far back from the street. During his final walks through those neighborhoods and among those shops, my father began to view them as if, together with the structures surrounding and towering over them, they had filled in all the emptiness. They had not left the tiniest morsel of empty space for anyone.

  Like ants, they start again from where you set them down, my father would say before declaring that when he went out again he would not go any farther than was necessary to buy meat and vegetables for the household. In our daily life we no longer needed anything more than that, as long as we didn’t break anything that would require going out for a repair. He no longer went beyond the shops that started up just as he turned off onto the street at the top of the sand track. It was a matter of three or four shops among which he hovered as he collected the few things that we truly needed. He would return quickly, so that he could rapidly pull them out of the bags, one after another, as if revealing to my mother gifts she had not expected. His mission would not be truly complete until he had counted the items he had set down, announcing each one by name and finally asking himself whether he had forgotten anything. Only then was his errand finished: or his journey, for he would let out the deep groan of a person whose energy has been completely spent, and would begin looking around to see what he should do first to relieve his tired body in the restfulness of home.

  It would be my task now to go out, scrutinizing the shops and the signs above them as soon as my feet met the tar of the street. Despite my knowing that no other course of action would be of any use, I contemplated the idea of an interval between my decision to go out and actually going out. A short time I could convince myself I needed in order to get ready for the streets I would walk, to learn something about them before actually heading down into them. A time of rest before going out, or a time of waiting; it was nothing more, since I already knew (sitting and waiting there at home) that nothing would help guide me to the right thoroughfares or the small streets I needed. Yes, an interval of rest and of waiting; in any case, I could train my body or prepare it for walking along among all the others walking the streets—walking that my body had experienced before, movement that my body had known, long ago.

  XI

  FROM THE WINDOW OF MY room, and from the kitchen window and also the balcony if I choose to go out there, I can see her when she comes out to join the two of them where they’ve decided to sit down. They will not be far away, probably because they got tired of walking across the sand. Their feet will have sunk into it deep enough so that each time they tried to take a step that foot would feel trapped. Or perhaps they didn’t go far because they wanted to stay within reach of any voices that might call out from their homes in the building. As nearby as they were, though, it looked as if they had prepared themselves for a lengthy excursion. My mother had spread out a blanket over the sand. The other woman had carried out an enormous umbrella that she anchored in the ground. Then they sat down, resting from the walk to their chosen spot and exposing their faces to the breeze gently batting at them—the very same puffs of air that would have reached them on the balcony of either apartment.

  And from either balcony they could have enjoyed the very same view they now sat facing. They had even chosen to turn their faces—together—to that vista rather than sit down facing each other so that whichever one was talking could see the other. It seemed that the preferred object of their stares was not the old city at the farthest point of the panorama that lay before them, but rather, the emptiness of the wide abyss that separated them from it.

  They loved to go out by themselves. They would not be expecting to see anyone but her; and anyway, they would have gone out before she could show up to join them, so that the first phase of the excursion would be entirely an outing of the older women on their own. The two of them could gab as they wished and sit exactly as they pleased, since they could be sure that no one would suddenly appear from the other direction where the sand rises in small dunes. The couple living on the ground floor would not appear from behind the shutters that they never opened except to water the greenery just below.

  Whatever the circumstances, the pair of them would be taking full advantage of their little excursion, stretching their legs out in front of them, calculating the likelihood that my eyes and my father’s eyes might be on them. Perhaps one of us would glance out through a window or from the balcony, not because either of us was curious but out of sheer boredom, as the women surely knew. My father, though, seemed absolutely delighted as he declared—after checking to make certain that they really were sitting together out there—that today the two of us would lunch alone. Already on his way to the kitchen and ready to manage lunch on his own, he would turn back to ask me what dish I was longing for, so that he could make it for me.

  In the past few days—ever since my mother had begun going down to their apartment—he had avoided looking at her except when he was trying to work out why her enthusiasm for making visits gave her such a juvenile demeanor. When she was down there with them he behaved as though he and I were living completely alone in the house. Shall I boil you some water for tea? he would ask; or he would announce, from the other side of my closed door, that he would be on the balcony and I must raise my voice if I wanted anything from him. What would you like to eat today? he would ask me, rubbing his hands together in preparation for putting them to work.

  She had not yet left the building. The two women sat alone, their legs extended toward the vast emptiness that held their gaze. I was always able to see her the moment she rounded the building toward the rear and stood exactly below me for a moment before setting out across the sand. Or I would catch a glimpse of her from the stairwell in the moment when she opened her front door and stepped out. At that moment she would suddenly be much closer to me, since this building, with its narrow passageways and half-walls that are meant to screen us from each other, protects her from knowledge of many things. But that very fact might mean she would be more sensitive to my presence, as I hid there, hunched over close by, with just the top of my head visible above the low wall around the stairs. When my mother returned from her first visit she said they knew more about us than we knew about them. Immediately she realized what I might be
thinking. She surmised that I might be suspicious that they had tried to learn more about me. Quickly she added that they knew the nature of my father’s work in the old city.

  Do they know where our shop was? my father asked her, elbowing himself into the conversation though he had clearly intended to appear uninterested, looking in every other direction but at her, studiously self absorbed.

  Outside, the pair of them sat there doing nothing more than resting their legs and staring at the broad emptiness in front of them. They gave no sign of precisely how they had planned to enjoy themselves in making an elaborate excursion out of the building. Everything they had carried out there was in exactly the same position where they had first set it all down. From the window of my room—through the slit I had left open—I could see them gazing fixedly, as if they were expecting someone to come and rescue them from the silence into which they had fallen soon after arranging themselves out there. The way toward them across the sand remained empty, though. They took turns scrutinizing it, but they had the air of looking for something that was increasingly unlikely to happen. She had not even opened the window to her room, nor had she appeared at the kitchen window that looked out on the two of them where they sat below. Turning to look, her mother found no one to wave to. Probably, I thought, she liked having the house all to herself and decided to stay inside. There among the rooms, doors flung wide, she could move around however she liked. She could be as free within those spacious, empty rooms as she would normally be in her bathroom. She could expose her naked body, fully revealed, to the many mirrors in the apartment and not merely to the one that hung on her wardrobe.

  And so she is not immediately below me; she is not in her own room. She is moving around. She roves through the apartment: through this home that has been emptied for her. Not even I can pinpoint where she might be right now, in what room she’s standing, which way she’ll move next. At the window of my room, cracked open slightly, I begin to think that like the two women I am also waiting for an event that will not take place. I stand here motionless as time runs on: but it only does so down there, below me, in a space that begins behind my back and spreads out to fill their home. No, time does not move on here. Not here at the window where I stand. Time has stopped here. The women, too: they are still sitting there, brooding. The path leading to them is still and silent too; and there is no sign that it expects anything to reverse its mute emptiness. I do not know what to do. It’s useless to leave my room hoping to track her footsteps through the spaces of her home. I will not hear the sound of her bare and slightly sticky feet slowly disengaging as she pads across the glinting tiles. Time no longer passes here, not at the window. The time I have come to wait for. I wait for time to start its passage again. I wait for my father’s light, cautious knock on my door and then his voice asking me, Shall I boil you some water for tea? Would you like a glass of water? Cold water?