The Penguin's Song

by Hassan Daoud

  I will not change my route. I will not change my work, even though I know this means I’ll go on with the very same tedium, replacing the pages I’ve checked with others I will check. But this resolution doesn’t mean that I’m lulled by my father’s assurance that tomorrow they will change my work. I’ll go on doing the same thing, and I know that. In their tiny office I will get the same treatment every time, sitting patiently with my bundle of paper. The man inside will do the same thing every time: riffle through pages to see whether I deserve to be given more pages. I will not have any other work. The books I have read—those books for which I chose the smallest, most cramped space so I could isolate myself with them—will be of no help to me now. They did not teach me to do anything else. I read only old books. That’s what the man sitting alone in the room where I had to wait for someone to leave before I could go in said to me. They were nothing but old books; one would lead me to yet another old book whose title I wrote down so that my father would bring it to me. Yes, they are old books, lined up in rows above where I sit. Gazing at them, my father seemed admiring and suspicious at the same time. He worried that something in the old pages or the dust seeping into them would surely sicken my body.

  Old books, that’s what they are, written by old people for people of old. I shouldn’t have been satisfied only with them, said the man sitting at the large table that was too big for his narrow office. Then he handed me the packet of pages to match up, and I was aware again that this was the lowest level work among the various jobs they handed out here. My book reading was of no particular use to do this job, except that I had practiced reading and gotten used to spending time sitting in front of pages and reading. That’s the only help my books gave me. When the man said that to me—about my old books—I suddenly could see them in my mind’s eye, a mass of useless, cast-off, secondhand items. It took me no time to believe him, because I had sensed the same thing myself. Not only about the books I read but also about the clothes I extracted from the wardrobe to wear at home where no one saw me except my mother and father. I felt old-fashioned, too, when I thought about our old shop and how I would sit silent and motionless among its goods. And also when it came to my body: I am sure I look like people who used to exist but who died before I could see or know them. I would not have believed that man, who said these things to me, if I hadn’t felt this within me already. He did not tell me anything I didn’t already know, but he did make me aware of knowing it. You haven’t read anything but very old books, he said. He must have seen that I was as close to ancient as the books I’d read. He did not add anything to my knowledge of myself, but he did get me right when he described my old books. I did not simply take in this conviction; rather, I began to see his words in everything I knew myself to be or to do. I am a person of old when I sit on the balcony with my father—a scene that is ancient, too. Every time I get up from the dining table, carrying my empty plate into the kitchen along with the pot that’s worn out from all the cooking it’s seen, I am from another time, a much older time. I am like that, too, when I go over to lean on the windowsill, tipping my body over the edge of it and hanging my head down. And I saw that in myself when she looked up and saw me hunched over, waiting at the window above her. I looked as though I had always been there, set down on a corner of the windowsill like a stuffed bird. It’s not that she happened to see me at the moment I appeared there, but rather, that I had not moved. She would have had many chances to see me before this. That is everything my eyes said when hers happened to meet them. But she seemed to interrupt them by straightening up and turning away from their field of vision. No muscle in my face moved, and I showed no sign of having seen anything. I offered only that steady, unchanging gaze, even after she moved back from the window and walked slowly inside.

  I was ancient, again, there at the window: she probably has no image of me except as a shadow that lurks at the angle of the window, hanging down and staring, whenever she has a passing thought about what is above her. The next evening I suddenly thought I should make sounds she could hear in her room. I should bang my window shut, and the sound would tell her that I was now behind the window and not tipping downward balancing on the windowsill. By closing the window—which means that later I will open it—I am creating a change of scene. I need to create sounds she will hear in her room. I need to close the window and then return to open it, to dispel what she saw when she craned her head to look above: a motionless shape, an image that doesn’t change. And if I close or I open the window, that creates a sound that’s close to her. It will reach her naturally, without any of those heavy echoes that sounds make when they come from rooms. It’s like that when I make sounds she hears—I am erasing this look of the ancient that my silence and lack of movement have only enhanced. So now I’m making a commotion that seems to bring me forward, where sounds travel far, preceding me. Maybe I’ll even give her a pleasant distraction, banishing the loneliness that permeates the outside world and from there invades her room, that space outside she’s wary of and enters only rarely.

  XXIV

  DESPITE THE PASSAGE OF SO many years—thirteen now—they have done nothing in the old city since removing its residents. They have not put up one single building in any of those old quarters; they have not even built a road that would actually go anywhere. What I mean by road is one of those straight and wide boulevards where, it’s said, they have finished the work underground—pipes and sewers and so forth—and have begun to work on the parts that will remain visible. I am talking about the sort of street that tells you from the way its route is cut what the city as a whole will look like. A thoroughfare that can be taken as a sign; seeing it, one would say: Here is the city center; there is the highway. But after all these years the only roads they have constructed are temporary ones, narrow and badly made, which will crack prematurely from rainwater and the weight of heavy trucks.

  All my father needed to do to make himself comfortable, as he would say, was to hand over the little chest into my keeping. The money it held now was scant, and I saw as he held it out to me with both hands that perhaps he no longer liked to count it—were he even able to do so—since that would mean having to tell me something about what a bad state we were in. Or he would at least have to appear embarrassed as he gave it over to me, there in his room with the door closed because he was so extremely cautious. But instead, he almost sprang up from the edge of the bed after depositing it in my hands. He began dusting off his hands and clapping them together to signal that a heavy burden that had exhausted him was now lifted. Or—and it was this that the days to come would confirm for me—he meant to say that now he had completed his last remaining duty by handing over the chest to me, and now he would be like a guest here among us for all the days that remained to him. My mother had already gotten there: in the rare moments she still spent in the house she did not go out onto the balcony to see him, even though she’d be close by as she passed the doors of the kitchen and dining room that looked directly out on him where he sat. During the day she now spent all her time down there, coming up only to prepare some item she needed—she and the woman—for whatever it was they were doing. It got to the point where, coming in the front door that she left open, she wouldn’t even glance over toward where my father sat, fully visible to her through the open doors to the balcony. As for him, most of the time he did not even know that she would have come in just now, or that she was in the apartment; when I sat with him he did not ask me whether she had come in or what she might be doing down there all day long, she and the woman. When she went out in the morning he never asked what she had cooked for us. He no longer took any interest in knowing what he was eating. At the table, as he sat staring at his empty plate, he did not know what dish would be set in front of him. In any case it wouldn’t be anything much different from whatever we had eaten yesterday or on the days before that, for my mother had begun to cook every meal from the last one. She would add an eggplant to yesterday’s leftovers or enhance them
with a fried onion to alter the taste, along with the oil in which she had fried it. Once the food was on his plate my father hardly looked at it, only one brief inspection suggesting that he was more interested in testing the strength of his vision than in actually seeing the food. He wouldn’t like it very much anyway, but he would not rise from it until he’d emptied his plate. It was a small portion my mother had cooked for us—for my father and me—adding something to what remained from yesterday’s cooking. Despite that we would leave most of it in the pan, and we knew it would be part of tomorrow’s meal. She cooks it for us, for my father and me, and shuts off the flame before hurrying downstairs, down there. My father does not ask me what she does all day long below, nor does he remark, in wonderment, that she is eating their food, which no doubt they cook together, she and the woman. He does not ask me anything about her or make any comment. When I begin to think he must be responding to her actions by feigning ignorance and staying silent, I watch him furtively to see whether he might be turning his head slightly toward where he thinks she is standing, or attempting a quick sly glance that might not tell him anything anyway. Or I keep a very close eye on him when I hear the sound of the door shutting behind her, to see whether her entrance jogs anything in him. When I see that the sound does not bring his head around, or that he gives no sign of the quick jerk of the head a person makes when they’re surprised by something they were waiting for, I have the sense that he spends his time simply preparing himself to remain exactly as he is right now. I imagine that what gives him the ability to do that is his hatred of her, which no doubt consoles and entertains and stimulates him through all these daytime hours of sitting.

  His hatred of her is what he needs most to give his body the strength to sit unmoving all day long every day. It’s what he needs to focus his attention, which otherwise might be smothered by the periods of oblivion brought on by the breezes coming from below. It is what he needs to strengthen his eyes under the dense film that covers them. With the loathing that braces and protects his body, his eyes put up a resistance to the thick pale film, and their blackness shines from beneath it like the face of a drowned person that floats just beneath the water’s surface. I almost want to say to him: It’s her over there. Hate her. She is there at the door; she has put out her hand to open it. She is there even though she won’t give you even a single glance, as if you are not even here. . . .

  I am almost ready to tell him to hate her in order to rid him of his fatigue and the restless irritation of afternoon. Then, sitting across from him, I see that his eyes have already grown weaker and I know when he raises them toward me that he sees me as if through a layer of muddy water. It must tire him, I think. It would be better for him to close his eyes and summon the clean and sharply outlined images that no doubt his memory has preserved. It would be better for me, too, since I would no longer be suffocating under the weight of imagining things the way his eyes convey them to him. In that state of fatigue, in the weariness of afternoon, his eyes look as though they’ve brought him nearer to his end. His eyes are how I have measured the strength remaining in him. His eyes have become the distinguishing mark of his body, its barometer, now that he no longer walks or even moves. In the afternoon hours their blackness—which gave him whatever vision he had—has paled to a wan gray: the blackness and not the film over it. At those times I see him as very close to his end. Perhaps he knows that, I will think, and no longer cares whether I’m sitting across from him. He gives me no sign, no indication of interest, when I look as if I’m about to get up. He knows it, he sees it in himself, in these stretches of restlessness and fatigue when he asks me the question that I know he’s pulling up from somewhere other than the place where his cache of everyday phrases resides. Where have they gotten to now, down there? he asks and cranes his head forward. When I respond by saying that they are still working to level the ground where I can see nothing rising, he inclines his head to me as if to say something that he realizes instantly there’s no point in saying.

  But I know what he is keeping himself from asking: Can I see anything clearly at that distance, where they are? When I add that they have collected their bulldozers and trucks in one central spot, I’m answering the question he didn’t ask, while at the same time I’m leading him to hope that they are actually getting ready to erect something. But this doesn’t excite his curiosity, nor does it bring him up out of the weariness to which he has reverted. That’s because their lackadaisical pace in razing the old city will keep the bulldozers and trucks there where they are, waiting to begin, and nothing will begin. If it does, it will be for someone else and not for him; the film over his eyes will not slow down to give him time to see any of what they will have built in the end.

  The film over his eyes will not allow him the time to see for himself what they will build: not only his shop, which he stopped mentioning some time ago, but not even any of the roads or buildings he knows there. Here is our shop, look, it’s right over there, he would say in the days soon after our move, believing he would return to it after a bit more time had passed, and he would find that nothing had changed except that it looked newer now, after the work they had promised to do. In the years gone by since our move he has gone on believing that they would simply give new life to the city by razing it and rebuilding it as it was before; once again, he would be going from home to his shop, passing through streets and by shops he knew from before, except that they would all be newly rebuilt.

  The bulldozers and dump trucks clustered there in a near-central spot will be waiting a long time before they are put in motion. He will not be able to see anything rising above the places and things that he would recognize if only he could see them. Their long delays, this protracted period that seems so deliberate, will not give him enough time, just as the film over his eyes will not wait for him. Now I know, in this time we spend together, that the film over his eyes will not let him see any building high enough that to see all of it one must get a certain distance away.

  XXV

  I HAD ALWAYS SUPPORTED MYSELF by pressing my body against the wall just at the side of the window frame in order to best conceal myslf, but now I was able to stand leaning against the center of the window itself, gazing however I liked toward the window below me. I could even make a noise deliberately by flinging open the window panels so that they would knock against the wall before swinging out slightly again. That lets her know that I am here, so she’ll come nearer, but also so she will feel at home with the stretch of lonely sand beneath her rather than being frightened by it. Sometimes when she knows I am directly overhead she stands for a long time just below and raises her head once or twice to see if I am still there. Or she twists and arches her body to look up as she’s getting ready to head inside, away from her window. I am there when she looks; she sees me at the instant she twists, as if I have responded to her motions by stretching my head further toward her, looking at her as she does at me. But it’s only a fleeting instant, a brief glance ended by her equally swift withdrawal as she heads inside. An instant; it is not enough for my face to change expression, to move from that first gaze that had not even yet formed. But I know she did curve toward me, or at least toward my window, and not only to see that I was there but also so that I would see her—I, who stand there just as she does.

  In that fleeting glance all she sees of me is my face, which I imagine she already knows. She must know my body as well, which is hidden below the window now, because she must have seen me walking along the sand track with the canvas bag hanging from my shoulder. Or she might be present when they—the woman and my mother—talk about me. She knows about me, she must, but even so, she comes back to the window another time, knowing I am still there. And when she comes back she stands there for me, for my sake, as if she’s giving me extra time to look at her or lengthening the opportunity for which I have waited. She stops there; she stands for me, pressed against the windowsill so I can see her grave expression as she looks out on the sand that I k
now doesn’t fully occupy her attention. She is showing herself to me; and so the way she stands is the way she wants to be seen, her arm flung across the windowsill or her head lowered to tell me she is looking down.

  Or she does that for her own sake, and so as she exposes herself to me she’s responding to what it is that makes her stand naked before the wardrobe mirror or walk, naked as well, through the house whose rooms and passages have emptied out for her. She is bringing that to completion by standing here for me, by looking at me with that quick, passing glance she throws my way—this look that is to remain swift and glancing, this look that is all she needs to know that I am there waiting above her.

  This look of hers won’t change, and will only let her see that I am still there. Still, she must finish what she has begun. She will reveal something of her body, and then she will expand on that to reveal more. For her to begin and then to quicken her pace, I must get her out to the balcony once, and again and again, opening the shutters to their widest so that they bang against the wall to make the sound she hears, and toward which she will turn.

  I lie in wait above for the time to come in which she begins to reveal to me what she already reveals to herself. She will not stay here standing like this, her arm along the windowsill as if giving observers plenty of time to satisfy their desire to look. Here in front of the window, she will certainly do some of what she does in front of the mirror. She won’t be taking a chance that someone would see her from the other edge of the sand because the mounds of it do not end in anything. There at her open window she will be as hidden as if she’s in her room behind her wardrobe doors. No one but me will see her, and I will be like one of her mirrors, among which she moves whenever the house has emptied itself for her. A mirror I will be, one of her mirrors, and she will not be afraid, appearing to me, because she thinks that anyone like me is bound to remain silent and still in front of what he sees. I will make no sound; I will not move. Nothing more than standing there at the window, returning once again to the side of it, to watch secretly, to steal this which is offered to me, as if to be sure that no one knows of me.