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

moved them into the small hallway—that tight narrow space between the doors—I had been collecting them in my wardrobe, putting them together, one beside the next.
    Lest he think that what was keeping me in the house was my laziness, I began each day exactly as I had the school day. I washed my face and got dressed, exactly as before, and sat down to read. I would start at eight o’clock, when school started. To be studying here as they were studying there. That was to placate him but also to reassure myself, because I still felt uneasy about being on my own and not at school. Like them, I would be beginning my studies at eight o’clock, and that lessened the distance I had put between myself and them. I would begin just as they did and at the very same time. And not in the room where I slept, nor on a sofa in the sitting room, but rather, in the hallway between the doors. Ever since moving into it, I had made this narrow passage into my own little classroom that had room enough to hold only me.

VII
    NOW, WITH THE THIRTEENTH YEAR since our move coming to a close, I know that what forced us to vacate the city, leaving it completely empty, was simply that it no longer had space enough to hold them. By them I mean the boys on that school outing who, in the course of a single trip, managed to divide up and then redistribute the girls among themselves. Them : those who entertained themselves, on the bus, blending dancing with laughter, mingling jokes and song. It was as if there was too little time and so they tried to stretch it by cramming in more activities. We vacated the city only because it could no longer hold them. It was too cramped; its narrow confines pressed in on them. It was too old for them, and so they had carried themselves as if they were living in their families’ city and not in their own. It was like living in a house furnished by your grandfather. It pressed in on them, it was too old, and that is how they experienced it, as cramped and ancient. All the while, everything they said or did in their games served only to mark out the distance between themselves and everything around them, or to flaunt their sense of how ahead of everyone else they were, how new and modern. If the bus slowed to a crawl climbing the steep streets, they sang about it and let the jokes fly. Yes, that is exactly what they did, as if they were mocking the creaky backwardness of their own people and the slow pace of their folk’s buses. If they danced it was for the sake of imitating certain styles of dance or to mimic dancing bodies too old to be seemly but who danced nevertheless. It was the same idea when they called things out the windows to passersby they spotted on the road, to make them—for these young lads’ amusement—smile the dopey embarrassed smiles that were their response to greetings they could not understand.
    No matter what they were doing, they would mock the situation they were in. The city had become too small for them—it was a city they regarded as behind or beneath them. This is how they were in the bus, on the trip where their joking and dancing united them. In the years to follow, when they broke apart to go their separate ways, the city hemmed them in even more as their lives grew ever more crowded and various, proliferating beyond their old familiar low-hanging horizon. Because of them we left the city. As enormous and spread out as it appeared to me, the part of it that I actually inhabited was a tiny space indeed: that little bit of the city that had room enough only for me. That passage between the three doors (one of them the door to the toilet whose odor my mother constantly feared would poison me), that hallway so well fortified from all outside commotion by the rooms that surrounded it, seeming to put vast distances between me and the outside world.
    I chose to remain inside that narrow hallway while they tugged at their spaces, as if to lengthen and broaden