‘The Interpreter’ is the English version of Arabic novel ‘Al Tarjuman’, authored by Ashraf Aboul Yazid, an eminent writer and poet of Egypt

“In the cold, we will taste the bitterness of exile for the first time. And in exile, we will taste the cold for the first time.”

Here you are, alive before me once again, my greatest dream. I saw you in your daughter, “Najma.” Her voice carries the same tone as yours, her smile reminds me of the radiance of your smile, her wide eyes, delicate lips, and her deep, dark hair—everything about her is a reflection of you. It’s as though you’ve returned, young again, before me, at the age of my son, Shadi.

When I waited for her at Toronto airport, I was searching for you, and I found you. True, I had written her name on a sign, but I didn’t need anything to identify her; I read your features in her face.

“Najma Mohsen Helmy.” Oh, my dream. Oh, my greatest dream.

My home was far from the airport, so she talked a lot on the way, and I watched her… I watched you. When I climbed with her to my small apartment on the seventh floor, I felt as if I were ascending with you to the seventh heaven. I didn’t speak as much as she did, as though history were repeating itself. I listened to her as I used to listen to you, the daughter to her father, and the father who enchanted me when I met him in Damascus over 13 years ago.

The repeated questions were born again. Was what brought us together our similar circumstances? You were struggling in your marriage, and I was struggling even more. You had “Najma,” and I had “Shadi.” True, I was two years older than you, but I felt you were older than me, perhaps because of the wisdom you showed when you said to me:

“A person in the context of travel is not the same as when they are settled. We must test our feelings. You’re a translator, and I’m a translator. We won’t have time for anything except greetings in the gaps between opening and closing the dictionaries. So let’s talk before we exchange kisses.”

I didn’t reject your response, but I didn’t push you away when you gave me your first kiss. We exchanged thirsty glances in silent confusion. A hug. Nibbles on ears. I helped you take off your shirt. You helped me remove mine. You were staying at your friend’s apartment in Damascus, what they called the “embassy sleeping place,” because many nationalities had slept there. We even joked that Ibn Battuta must have passed through.

You looked at your watch and said firmly:

“We have half an hour before our friend arrives.”

I left you for a few minutes in the bathroom. I knew the apartment well. How many times had I met with prominent people from the East and West here when your friend hosted visitors from Damascus in the embassy sleeping place? Its small space expanded to accommodate hearts from all over the world. I returned to you with overwhelming longing. I had been reserved, but when you rebelled against that reservation, you turned into someone else. You weren’t the translator people knew anymore, but the translator of all desires.

A shiver of memory overwhelms me as I recall moments when saliva mixed with saliva, sweat with sweat, fingers intertwined with limbs and folds, tongues swirling around each other. I laughed when I remembered you telling me—in the heat of passion—that you were a graduate of the Faculty of Languages. You pulled your hot tongue out of its hairy lair, and I rubbed it as I chewed it between my lips. When the heat reached its peak, your fountain poured, quenching my longing, my lust for your body. I nestled into your arms as you covered us with a light blanket, as though you were covering fresh bread straight from the oven.

That day, to save time, we bathed together, even though the bathroom was small. We clung to each other under the hot water. Due to the busy nature of the place and your busyness, it was hard for us to repeat what we had done in the days left to you. But we climbed together to Qasioun. On a spacious balcony overlooking the parking lot, the rabab player stood playing. And there, you wrote your poem:

“No one sings for me,

The old rabab player on the mountain,

But for his wife, whom he left alone,

Tending his stories and his goats.

And when he sold me his rabab,

He gave me all his sorrows,

And the memory of his smile.”

It was as though, my dream, you foresaw our end, and you gave me your departure, even until today.

I started telling you about “Joseph,” my Shadi’s father. He was the pride of the neighborhood youth. I saw him flirting with every girl, and I knew all of them aspired to him. But he asked me to marry him, and I didn’t hesitate. After a short honeymoon, I discovered that he lied about everything. He married me to find someone to support him. I accepted and endured, but even his time no longer belonged to me. He took without asking, leaving me to stay up with the men, only to return in the morning to sleep.

A year passed, we had our child, and I hoped that the boy would change, that God would guide him. But things worsened when they dismissed me from work due to my absences and many vacations after giving birth to Shadi. “Joseph” didn’t have enough money for me… that’s when the insults began, followed by the beatings.

Your silences were long.

Were you thinking about our shared future, or were you blaming yourself for the mess you had gotten into? The important thing is that you left, leaving me hanging. Perhaps you wanted to keep a warm station for yourself in Damascus. I know that. But you might come to light a fire for days and leave the firewood for months.

I realized I couldn’t go on…

Migration requests were in fashion back then. When you’d ask a young man or woman, “What do you do?” they would say, “I’ve applied for immigration.” I don’t know how “Joseph’s” life was the cause of my misery, but—oh, the wonders of fate—his death opened a wide door for me and my son.

“Joseph” was killed in a fight with thugs over girls. That’s when I seized the opportunity and included his cause of death in the immigration application, explaining how both my child and I were in similar danger.

The political situation was complicated, but fortunately, my previous work certificate as a translator at the UNESCO office vouched for me. We traveled. But the real suffering began. I had no source of income except the aid provided to us in the first year. What came barely covered our food and housing. We’d sit in malls for hours just to stay warm, and then we’d return. At home, I would wrap Shadi in my arms as though I were reclaiming him as a fetus within me, once again. I had a room in shared housing, and our situation improved. After four years, I moved to the apartment where I welcomed your “Najma” just a few days ago.

Things moved on, but with hardship. In the cold, we will taste the bitterness of exile for the first time, and in exile, we will taste the cold for the first time. The cold here is not like the cold in Damascus; it is desolate and crushing. Here, blankets can’t bring warmth, and a gas heater doesn’t work outside its radius, but your words over the phone were the key.

I’d buy the card, dial the number, and your words would come, raising my body’s temperature. You’d tell me about your writings, “Najma,” and life, and I’d wait in vain for you to talk about me. I wished that one day you’d say you were coming. Were you waiting for either you or “Najma” to die in order to be free, as I was freed after “Joseph’s” death?

Now, “Najma” brings me back to the beginning, to the moment we first met, to the memory of our first and last love meeting, to our walks in Bab Touma and on top of Qasioun, to the Nofara Café, to the shepherd’s hot pie like your embrace, to the mango juice and cocktail from “Abu Shaker” in Salhiya, and to the noisy atmosphere at the journalists’ café.

One day, you told me you were going to meet “Hanna Mina” with a friend I knew. I shouted at you:

“I know Hanna Mina better than she does.”

I realized that I was wrong to show my jealousy. Why be jealous? Perhaps I was looking for an empty heart, and you didn’t have that heart. You were busy with your daughter more than you were with any woman. Maybe your wife made you hate all women, so why did you tell me that you love me?

Before I emigrated, I asked you to come live with me in Damascus. After I arrived in Toronto, I repeated my question, and you told me that you love Egypt and don’t want to leave it, that you’re connected to “Najma” and don’t wish to be away from her. And now, what about Kuwait, my teacher? Here you are, away from your Egypt, with your daughter by your side. Perhaps you didn’t want to get involved, and perhaps what was between us was a slip of the tongue, or a slip of love.

Your friends call you the translator, and your daughter told me that your secret name for her is “Memo Dad.” As for me, I chose your last name to call you by: “Hilmī,” because I believed you truly were my greatest dream. It’s true that you abandoned me—no matter how many other names I may choose, this is the truth—but your continuous messages to me, and your voice over the phone, are what kept me enduring the cold years.

Ten years after immigrating, I received a poem from you in my email. I printed it, and attached a flower you had given me after picking it from a garden near the end of Pakistan Street in Damascus.

I placed the poem and the flower in a plastic envelope, as if it were an Egyptian mummified relic, and it felt as though I was looking at it through a window into a beautiful past—one where love sparkled suddenly, and a friendship that would last forever:

“The fire will consume everything,

The curve of the shoulder,

The ashes that bury the plants of memory;

A sigh of regret,

The creeping ice that reaches the walls of the heart

And the years we eagerly wait to pass

So we can meet. The fire will consume everything

Only when we light it.”

Here you are, lighting the fire from the rays of “Najma,” and extinguishing it with your absence.

It was one of the most beautiful poems I’ve read from you across the distances. But, as usual, you didn’t leave a chance without talking to me about your translations. As if you were talking to yourself. As if you were showing me pictures from a world you left behind and I will never return to.

Your messages kept coming, and they took me further from the fleeting orchards of love to the fields of lasting friendship. I accepted this new cultivation. I too had gone through experiences here, as love is the third failure in exile. I met many, from Iraq, Palestine, and even Egypt. But this last Egyptian young man was a fraud, “poor and abundant.” He said he was publishing a newspaper for expatriates, and I helped him in hopes that we would be together, but after he took enough funding, he became ungrateful. He published a novel, a poetry collection, and a book on travel literature, but the grant money ran out, and he hadn’t sold a single copy.

You told me about “The Pillow Book,” which was recently published for you, and I read about the controversy that surrounded its release and the “nudity” with which you shattered the honor of Arab tribes. I remembered your words. You had anticipated this debate, because in the Arab East, they always boast about morality while being far from it. Your message about that society didn’t surprise me, as our experience in Damascus told us more about them than you know. They bought houses there, as they did in Lebanon, and we received their coins and hidden contracts together:

“Dear Madeline,

A bunch of flowers,

I am currently translating ‘The Pillow Book,’ and I remember our small pillow in our Damascus sleeping quarters, the one that was meant for one person but expanded to fit both of our heads. The publisher asked me to translate the book knowing that he wouldn’t be able to sell it to the public; no exhibition could approve it. But he will keep it as a secret item for a select few readers.

It reminds me of an Iraqi publisher in Europe who used to print books from Arab heritage filled with obscene texts and terms, naming them provocatively—like ‘Abu Nawas on the Bed.’ When someone would pass by his booth at a book fair, he would open a page from Abu Nawas’ collection and read it aloud, whispering when he came to terms for male or female genitalia, as if he were selling a slave in a market of concubines.

The funny thing about ‘The Pillow Book’ is that it’s written in English with other languages representing its sources—Indian, Chinese, and Japanese. You’ve told me about your intimate Indian friend ‘Shoma.’ So, I will send you the Indian and English texts along with my Arabic translation for you to review. And no doubt, I will be happy when your name is linked with mine as a reviewer of the texts, even if it’s just a connection on paper.

In the introduction to the book, the author ‘Charles Fowkes’ explains how the cultures of China, Japan, Persia, and the Arabian Peninsula have a long history of sensual literature, evident in a long series of written texts starting from poetry to novels and stories, such as those from the Ming Dynasty in China or the most famous love instruction albums—like the Kama Sutra in India.

Why am I telling you this, Madeline? Not because I want a linguistic review of a translated text. That’s a practical side that doesn’t address what I want to talk about. I came to Kuwait a few months ago, as you know. Kuwait, like Saudi Arabia, is a conservative country where alcohol is legally prohibited, although mixing in public life is allowed here, and women can drive cars, unlike Saudi Arabia. But these phenomena do not hide the fact that society is starting to retreat backward.

Once, Kuwait was leading enlightenment in the Gulf, with its newspapers, theatrical and television productions, and its pioneering university. But time stopped, and it seemed that the country was teetering over a rug, pulled by two extreme religious forces: Saudi Arabia on one side and Iran on the other, Sunnis here, Shiites there. Between the sheikhs and the mullahs, the country’s renaissance got lost, and life, at least the apparent one, became stagnant like murky water in a dark pond.

What does all this have to do with what I am translating, and what we are talking about—the ‘Pillow Book’?

Of course, the reason for the overlap is not the forced sleep that the cultural movement here resorted to, on an empty pillow, which you can feel in everyone’s talk about a glowing past compared to a dark present. The difference is in the duplicity everyone lives. I see the headscarves the men wear; they resemble nothing but Zorro’s mask. They cover heads, pretending to be wise, in the daytime. But when men strip them off, in their very private gatherings, you find different heads. Forbidden drinks appear, and bodies break free from the constraints of society. Criticism starts from everything, and diminishment begins with anyone. Everyone has their family homes, but many now rent apartments for their whims and pillow talks.

Yesterday, I was a guest at my boss’s house, who everyone believes is a prominent intellectual figure leading a translation institution. But the truth is, the man can’t read two sentences of English together. This didn’t stop him from being a member of translation bodies in several countries, including Egypt. I wonder, what was his selection based on? Was he chosen because he masters something he can showcase at a conference, seminar, or book? Or did they choose his Kuwaiti passport, and the favor of the Kuwaiti institution he leads?

Don’t think this is ingratitude for the trust he gave me, but I contemplate and see that the duplicity we all live has made us fall behind. No one has the courage to do anything in the light. Everyone hides their other identity. They are all Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde here. Maybe I was engaged in freelance translation work in Egypt, which didn’t allow me to read the institutional situation in Egypt. But perhaps, if I reflected, I would have found it similar. I even began to feel that the story is linked to the formation of the Arab character: it wants to live its night on the pillow, while making speeches during the day pretending to be honorable.

I am not idealistic, but I couldn’t continue our journey that began in the diplomats’ dormitory ten years ago because I didn’t see myself capable of continuing deceiving. Do you remember that night I asked you to come to Cairo because I couldn’t leave it, and I couldn’t leave my daughter? You said, ‘And I can’t leave my son, nor can I take him from his father.’ We parted at the first road, and we could have parted halfway, but the wounds would perhaps have been deeper.”

That’s how you are. You carefully crafted your words to justify anything, my greatest dream. As if you didn’t know, my passionate translator, that love can’t be measured with a pen and ruler.

For mathematics is for life, and chaos is for love.

In a while, I’ll take ‘Najma’ to the market. She woke up and said she’s inviting me for lunch today. Perhaps we’ll find the hot shepherd’s pie there, who knows? I haven’t lost hope that one day, we’ll share it together somewhere.” (Continues) 

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Published under International Cooperation with "Sindh Courier"