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

for whom I wait, standing motionless, in expectation of her departure for school or her return from it. I might not hear anything of what they say; it will be only a guess, thinking about what my mother will do when she stands there ready to meet her just coming out of her room, and then when she looks hard at her, wanting to really see her, right there in front of her, so very close.

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    THE OFFICES OF THE MAGAZINES that my father bought me when we were still in the old city are no longer where they’re supposed to be either, at the addresses written inside each issue. The editors left, just like the shopkeepers my father knew. Sitting here in our home, I think about them. They must have moved to offices in the new parts of town, I think, offices of no more than one room or perhaps two. Not all of them moved, since the displacement of an entire city has to mean that many things are overlooked, and then abandoned. The magazines in my library—magazines that haven’t been updated with a new issue since our move here—I think of as uniformly old, as if I bought them all in the same moment. When I hoist these bundles from the shelves to carry them over to the table, I see that they’ve aged the books sitting next to them: these books that have not had a single volume added to their number either, ever since our move. When we first moved, when I could have bought books because we were still living off what my father called the expense account , I felt I already had enough of them. Some were still new then. Or they were new in my library, since for us a book is deemed new according to the moment we possess it and not the date it was written. When we moved I said I would read from what I already had around me, echoing the condition of the prisoner who—every time I think of sitting down to read—I find myself longing to impersonate: both in the cramped, narrow space he inhabits and in his careful hoarding of his belongings, among them books that he has no choice but to read there in his tiny prison cell, word by word, over and over.
    But now I know (so long after our move) that the books aging on our shelves are a burden to read. Every time I get to that point—the moment of actually starting to read one of them—it’s as if it’s already a question of rereading it, even though the most I’ve ever done is to leaf through a few pages. I thought that in order to begin doing work I would know how to do (as I suggested to my father and mother on the balcony late in the afternoon), I must get to know something new I could bring to it, something new I would only get from books in bookshops and not from those in my library. Or I had to see what the magazines were doing now, after I had been cut off from them for all these years. This time, though, I am the one who must go out. Not my father, who, since ceasing his reconnaissance tours around the neighborhoods, goes only to the very nearest shops, those that are no distance at all from the top of the sand track.
    My father, returning tired and sometimes completely exhausted from these tours of his, would tell my mother that he found it amazing to see how people were getting on with their lives as if nothing had befallen them and none of their circumstances had changed. Like an ant, he would say, squeezing two fingers together as if to pick up a tiny ant and move it from one spot where it had been creeping along to another. Like an ant, he would say to my mother, an ant who starts crawling immediately and in the very same direction the minute we put it back on the ground. By this time he and my mother had reached a point where they were beginning to sense that we had waited too long to open a new business out there in one of the city quarters where my father took his long walks. That’s why my mother did not comment but only gave him that silent gaze meaning she had already warned him that he must work, and it must happen soon. Then he