The Penguin's Song by Hassan Daoud, Translated by Marilyn Booth Read Free Book Online

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 did 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