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

answer, with no hesitation, and no stumbling over my words.
    She made him so angry. He did not ask me what had annoyed me at school, since he didn’t want to appear to be taking my side. This is what happened every time I said I would not return to school. She really did know how to upset him. He began staring into my face as if he could elicit my answer more quickly. The longer I took over it, the more I amplified his rage and his fury. His facility at giving little compliments to his customers and the breezy good humor he practiced in front of them did nothing to attenuate this force of his. It was a force only his anger could awaken. His fury manifested when he disagreed with someone else, but it always seemed more like he was fighting with himself. You want to sit in the house? he asked me, but this time not so he could await my response: rather, he said it to make me understand that if such an idea even came into my head, that meant I was only interested in becoming like women who sit alone all day in empty homes.
    But he would come back from wherever it was his anger had taken him as soon as my mother made one of her gestures signaling that her patience was at an end. Getting up from her chair with a muttered insult flung in my father’s direction, she went into another room. I pondered her fancy appearance, which I found laughable in the circumstances. Her careful chignon and her dress smocked like a child’s gown looked incongruous against her irritable mood, as though in this finery of hers she had been preening herself quietly for some secret but anticipated occasion but had been disappointed when something unexpected and contrary to her plans occurred. At least she put a stop to my father’s anger, for even as, in response to her insults, he shouted at her to get out, he noticed that I was at the end of my rope. He knew he’d been harsh to me in a way I could not endure, and now he was sympathy itself to me. Me, for whom such words falling onto my body—which had no defenses, as he saw it—were like so many hard slaps.
    From the kitchen where she had gone came the sharp and sullen thuds of pans moving around. I knew she was not planning to use them but merely banging them here and there to show that whatever insults she might be uttering or thinking, she was struggling to keep them confined to the kitchen. And my father did not need much time to come out of his anger. Returning to me, showing he was with me and always at my side, he asked me what had gone on at school. When he was in one of those calm states that always followed his bouts of anger, my father could concede to what he would not have accepted ordinarily, to the point where (apologetically and agreeably) he would position me—and himself along with me—to face precisely whatever it was that a few moments before had sparked his anger.
    Now, what will you do if you leave school? But this time he said it as if it were a real question. He said it as if he were saying to me, Come, let’s think together what would happen if we were to abandon school. This was the payment I would get for his anger. This was my reward, which, in this peacemaking state of his, he made as comprehensive as possible.
    Would you like to study a language, or a trade? he inquired. I knew that this repayment was meant to be full and genuine. He would accept my staying home and at the same time he would truly believe that it didn’t mean I was like the women.
    I said to him that I would study what was in the books. I would do it on my own. These books, I wanted to make him understand, were not schoolbooks; and so I exaggerated their thickness, spreading my hands apart as far as they would go. He knew the books I meant. After all, he was the one who’d brought them to me from the book market where—though it was near his shop—he knew no one. These are books that are put onto bookshelves, not into school bookbags. Before he had