The Penguin's Song by Hassan Daoud & Translated by Marilyn Booth

Author:Hassan Daoud & Translated by Marilyn Booth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
Published: 2014-11-18T16:00:00+00:00

XVI

EVER SINCE THAT EXPEDITION OF ours from which we returned tired and dispirited, my father had begun spending most of his time sitting on the balcony, even though out there he could no longer enjoy anything but the gusts of cool air coming from the deep emptiness below him. It had been a while now since he had begun to experience extreme eye fatigue and disease, and he could no longer see anything at any distance. The old city, remote and far below us, he could no longer see at all, for it was encased in the blackish fog that was now composed of everything his eyes could not distinguish clearly. He could see only nearby objects, and to do even that he had to bring them very close to his eyes if he wanted to see them as they really were. When he looks at me I assume that he sees me obscured and darkened, as if I’m covered by a dense and undulating smoky fog, just the way his eyes themselves seem covered. It’s become hard to imagine their smooth surface beneath that nylon skin that has grown into the thick and wrinkled crust that covers them entirely.

Out there on the balcony, flush against the wall so that he can support his elbow on it, he no longer leaves the chair with its ottoman and back cushion that my mother sewed to allow him to sit a bit higher and straighter. He no longer enjoys anything but the surging puffs of cool breeze reaching him. He no longer asks what has happened to the shop in the old city that his finger, jabbing the air, was always seeking when we moved here. The whole of the old city has become a single façade now, a single direction to which he points with his hand or his head, making a single gesture that takes in all of it. Afterward he asks me where they are now. By this time, I know that what he means by his question is whether they have finished demolishing all of it. I tell him they have only a little work still to do, and he says to me that many things were left there whose owners should have taken them out along with their furnishings and goods. Or they should have made sure to be there during the demolition to extract these things from amongst the stones as the walls were taken down. He’s remembering wardrobes and cupboards built to measure in the houses, and steel vaults in the shops of watchmakers and jewelers, which looked so solidly built and firmly attached that they seemed as if they had been constructed along with the walls themselves.

He enumerated many other things, among them the contents of the grand stores that did not have just a single owner who was always there along with his employees. They must have left all that marble where it was, he would say to me before adding that in the cinemas as well, they must have abandoned all those seats that were fixed in place, in rows.

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