In the Orchard, the Swallows by Peter Hobbs

Author:Peter Hobbs
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Contemporary
ISBN: 9780571279272
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2012-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

The Notebook

How I love this paper! Abbas gave me this notebook. He had bought several of them for Alifa to use at school. There was a pile of them at the end of one bookcase. He came in one day to find me holding one of the books, turning it over in my hands, running my fingers, their tips still scarred from burns, over the rough surface.

‘Do you read and write?’ he asked me.

‘A little,’ I said. I had not written since I was a child. The only text I had read was the Qur’an.

‘Did you go to school?’

‘No. I learned at the mosque. We had classes sometimes, after prayers.’

‘Show me,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you can help Alifa with her school work.’

And then later, after I had tried to make my broken hands control the pen, had struggled to form letters that once came easily: ‘Or perhaps Alifa can help you.’

I have had to learn again how to write. I had almost forgotten, and it was painful to grip the pen in my hand for any length of time. My thumb tingled with numbness, and my palm would freeze in agonising contortions so that I had to massage my grip free. But my two teachers, one old and one young, have been patient with me, and my long-ago lessons had not left me entirely. I was soon able to sit and write with Alifa. It is true that my hand still aches as I work, that I must pause often and stretch my fingers before I take up the pen again, to allow the cramps to fade, but the process of adding words to the page brings so much pleasure that I do not mind the discomfort that accompanies it. In the cold morning air it takes a minute before the ink in my pen flows, and I write with it against the skin of my arm until it comes, not wishing to deface the pages of the notebook until I can write on them cleanly.

And, yes, the notebook: its covering card is dyed violet, like the sky at dusk, at the last moment before darkness. Its paper is handmade, mulched together and pressed down then dried in the sun, before it was cut into sheets and folded into books. The pages bear the marks of their construction, and recorded in the texture of each page must be some evidence of the individual who made them. Within the paper are fine flecks of chipped wood, and threads run beneath the surface like the fossilised remains of creatures that we used to find in the rocks, in places along the roadside. The firm tip of my ballpoint pen travels pleasurably over them. Along the spine, three holes have been pierced with an awl, and the loose leaves are tied through them with rough string. The string is long, so that it may be wrapped around the book to bind it; it trails loose now, as I write in the opened leaves.

It

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