ترجمات أدبية

by Ali Al-Kasimi

Translated by Hassane Darir

(Professor of Translation and Terminology, Cadi Ayyad University, Marrakech) and revised by W Richard Oakes Jr. (PhD-University of Edinburgh, Independent Scholar)

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Last night, I decided to set the date of my death, to hold my own funeral, to arrange my own burial ceremony, and to write the false words of my lament by myself. An incident occurred yesterday afternoon that made me firmly resolved to do all this.

I decided that my death should be accompanied by no less noise than the noise that accompanied my birth, a sound like the firing of a hunting rifle, for example. In my estimation, death is not less significant than birth, and the end is no less important than the beginning.

They told me when I was a child that my screams at birth were louder than my mother's cries during her labor, and that I continued to cry, weep, and wail, in such a loud voice that many professional singers would envy me for forty days, day and night, as if I was observing an official period of mourning, because of my descent into this strange turbulent world and my separation from the safe and quiet world of the womb.

I admit that I haven't always made such noise throughout my life. Since my retirement almost a decade ago, I have been living in complete silence and solitude, closer to inactivity, in this small, wretched apartment situated at the entrance of this old, damp, and dirty building, without getting to know its residents, and without them getting to know me. I have been living here for more than a decade, without the neighbors hearing my voice even once.

My solitude mourns within me without anyone hearing it, and my wounds groan between my ribs without any creature knowing about it. I do not confide in anyone about what is going on inside me, nor do I talk to the neighbors about my affairs or theirs. Rarely do they see me, because I seldom leave my apartment.

If I happen to go to the market to buy some necessary food, my timing does not coincide with their departures to work in the morning nor their return to their homes in the evening, so I do not meet them, and they do not meet me. In fact, I do not know any of them, and I doubt if any of them could recognize my face or appearance.

I do not go out for walks in the streets, nor do I visit cafes. There is nothing that encourages me to do so. People's faces have been bathed in the river of sadness and gloom, and their eyes show nothing but unabashed misery, without a trace of a smile on their dry and sealed lips. They rush in their movements in a way that irritates my nerves, as if a stormy wind propels them from behind or a predator chases them. They do not exchange words among themselves. Each one rushes alone in the valleys of silence, groaning under the burden of worries and anxiety.

I kill my time by watching television and reading the newspapers that I pick up after their owners have thrown them away. I use earphones when watching television, so no sound can be heard by anyone but me, even if they are in the same room.

Thus, the apartment remains silent and still, like the silence of graves. However, I find nothing new in what I read or hear. The news revolves around the same sad, repeated events, the only difference lies in place or time, but the topic is one:the strong people eat the weak, just as savage foxes devour the young animals in the forest. The rich grow richer in wealth and prosperity, while the poor sink deeper into poverty and misery.

I can't understand what's on TV, or enjoy it as I would like to. Advertisements for washing powders and cleaning products interrupt programs over and over again, constantly reminding us of the dirtiness and filth of the world we live in. Furthermore, I am often overtaken by bouts of drowsiness while sitting on my chair in front of the television.

There is nothing new under the sun nor above the earth. Each day is a dull and pale replica of the one before it. I eat the same meals that do not require cooking or preparation. I have never learned to cook.

My frail body has little appetite, and it knows no greed in eating and drinking. A piece of bread dipped in butter with a glass of milk is more than enough for me. Thus, my meager pension covers my expenses, and I can even save a little from it.

There is nothing new in my life at all, if you can call my existence “life”. Nothing new at all, except that I notice that time is taking away what has been given to me. I feel a decline in my physical strength, and a weakness in my memory. I no longer remember what I did a day or two ago, perhaps because it no longer matters to me. But I also began to forget where I placed my belongings in the small apartment, so I search for them everywhere. With the gradual degeneration of my memory, I no longer have the means to face aging. My memories are fading away little by little, and there is no longer anything connecting me to myself or to this world, its past, present, or future.

Day after day, I feel stiffness in my limbs. My body has lost its flexibility and become rigid. It has become like the trunk of an old tree that has been hit by a storm and severed from its roots. Day after day, I sense a dwindling in my linguistic abilities. Perhaps because I rarely use them. Yes, I talk to myself sometimes to feel that I am still in pain. But I can no longer find the words to express my purpose. Meanings fly away from my mind, and words dry up on my lips. Words used to tie me to this world like the ropes of a ship's sail, but now they keep breaking one after the other. My sails will tear apart at the first gust of wind, and my ship will inevitably sink.

I have become accustomed to seeing the narrow, wretched walls of my apartment and its worn-out furniture, day after day, month after month, and year after year. I have become so accustomed to them that I no longer see them. The bed, which has no head or tail is the same, the empty mattress is the same, and the only dirty pillow is the same. The few pictures I framed and hung on the walls decades ago, featuring some of my relatives who passed away a long time ago, no longer mean anything to me. Those are pictures of people who have fallen into nothingness, so they are, in fact, empty, representing no living people, but rather the nothingness that has no image. Thus, even if my eyes fall upon them, I do not see anything. I see nothing in them. They are mere empty frames, devoid of any content.

I have decided to bury myself with my own hands because I am alone, with no family or relatives, near or far. I am, as the Arabic idiom goes, cut off from a tree. I have never been married. I did not want to be responsible for the misery of a woman or the suffering of a child in this world. Enough of my boredom and misery. My mother became a widow before my birth, and before I went to elementary school, my mother joined my father in the world of the deceased. The neighbors took on the burden of burying her and sending me to an orphans' school. For this reason, I don't want my neighbors to bear the burden of burying me. I will take care of my funeral myself.

Starting while I was still in high school, I spent nearly forty years in a semi-dark room they called the “Incoming and Outgoing Records Office” in the basement of the company that employed me. I used to put serial numbers on the letters that were sent to and issued by the company. I used the same numbers in all correspondences. One number does not differ from another except in the arrangement of its digits. The same numbers from the hollow zero to the unlucky nine. And when I return to my wretched apartment at the end of the day, I found no difference between its walls and the walls of the office I left a little while ago.

I decided to take care of my own burial and not leave it to anyone else, as the Arabic saying goes, "Nothing rubs your skin like your fingernails" ("You know your own skin better than anyone else."), especially when the issue here is not just about skin, but rather the whole body. I will shortly contact the funeral company (mortuary) and arrange all the details. I will personally choose the Qur'an reciters and specify their seating positions around the corpse in this wretched apartment. I will ask them in advance to recite for me the Qur'anic verses and prayers they will read over the coffin before carrying it to the cemetery. I will even choose the shroud that will cover my body. I will break free from the traditionally white shroud. I am going to deviate a little from the ordinary, because the usual has killed me with boredom throughout my life. I will choose a pink-colored shroud and a light green-colored coffin. I will take revenge on the colors black and white, for every day I used to wear a white shirt and a black suit at work.

I will take care of my own burial. This idea, which fascinated me, flashed through my mind like a lightning bolt on a dark night after the neighboring building's guard knocked on my door yesterday. She looked over my shoulder into my apartment as if she were looking for something she had lost and informed me that Mr. Mohammed Al-Sarrah had breathed his last the previous night. She discovered it by sheer chance. I don't know how she found my place.

- "Why did you come to me specifically, madam?" I asked.

One day she saw him standing at the door of my apartment. He was just a colleague of mine at work who retired before me. He only came to me once. He came to borrow some money. And because he couldn't repay the debt, he never came back.

- "What can I do for him, madam?"

She replied, while looking back, as if she was waiting for the arrival of someone dear to her, that I am the only one who knows him, and he must be buried.

Yesterday, either because of the virtue of dignity or because the building guard had intimidated me, I felt compelled to rent a cheap carriage, which was not intended for transporting the dead, to carry the body of my former colleague to the cemetery. I was the only mourner. The building guard accompanied me only to the door of the building. The rest of the residents were preoccupied with their affairs. They didn't have time to waste on a funeral for someone they didn't know. They had lost even their curiosity and did not peep from their windows, even though I was raising my hoarse voice with “Allahu Akbar” ("God is great”), “la ilaha illa Allah”... (“There is no god but Allah…”), as I was taking the wooden piece I called a coffin out of the building, with the driver of the transport vehicle assisting me as if he were carrying an old piece of furniture. Then I set out with him - I mean the driver - to the cemetery, as he buzzed down the road with a popular sentimental song that had nothing to do with death or life. Along the way, I did not recite any Qur’anic verses on the soul of the deceased, because I have never memorized anything significant from the Quran. What I memorized in school, I forgot a long time ago. There is no copy of the Quran in my apartment, nor of any other book. I did not have enough resources to spend on buying books that I wouldn't read.

I hired a gravedigger that I found at the desolate cemetery, which was void of any vegetation, outside the city. He performed his work silently and gloomily. His silence and melancholy were not sorrow for my colleague. There was no doubt about that. Perhaps his work bestowed upon him that gloom, and his profession imposed upon him that silence. In his occupation, he deals with rocks, stones, and the dead. He dug a narrow and shallow grave. He poured a little bit of soil on the dead, which did not fully cover him. He was not satisfied with the payment I gave him, and he collected it before beginning the work. Neither he nor I had a choice. He walked away without paying attention to my observation about the shallowness of the grave. Signs of discontent were visible on his face, and he muttered words I could not hear. Undoubtedly, those were curses that he poured upon me as well as the deceased. A surge of gallantry took hold of me, and I completed the work myself, properly covering the grave with soil. I feared that dogs might come at night and gnaw at the nearly naked corpse. But after I finished, with sweat dripping from my forehead and body, I wondered, "Does it matter if a sheep is skinned after it has been slaughtered?"

I returned to my apartment in the evening, weakened and depressed. I collapsed on the only couch. At that moment, I decided to take charge of arranging my own burial. I had saved enough money for a funeral that befitted me. If I could not live a decent life, then at least let me have a dignified death. After all, I have nobody for whom to leave my savings after my death.

This morning, I made a call from the public phone in the square to a reputable company that handles dignified burials. I had noticed one of their new cars before, painted in black, adorned with Qur’anic verses in Kufic script, along with the company's name and phone number in a larger font.

The company sent a representative to my apartment. We discussed all the details for two hours. We agreed on the transportation fee, the number of reciters, and their remuneration. I requested seven reciters, although I don't know why the number seven appeals to me. I've always been optimistic about it from a young age. The representative of the company informed me of the Qur’anic verses that the reciters would chant over my coffin before it would be taken out of the apartment and once it had been lowered into the grave. I cannot recall those verses verbatim, but they intrigued me. They were full of words about paradise, blissfulness, springs, the virgins of paradise, fruits, rivers of wine, and honey. We also agreed on the dimensions of the grave's length, width, and depth, and the height of the tombstone. He asked me about the birth and death dates to be written on the tombstone. I remembered that story about the city whose people only recorded on their graves only the number of happy days they had lived. So, I asked him to write on the tombstone: "This is the tomb of Jabr, from the womb of his mother to the tomb”. All of this was written in a pre-prepared contract, that is similar to the those contracts I used to sign with my former company, with a number and date. We both signed the contract, and it became fully valid. I handed over the agreed amount in cash in exchange for a receipt, and that was the end of everything.

- “It's not really all over,” the company representative told me. The contract is missing only one thing, which is the date of implementation. He looked at me inquiringly.

I looked into his eyes, a sarcastic smile surrounding my lips, and told him without hesitation:

- “That is incredibly simple. Tomorrow morning. Tomorrow. It's just another day like any other day. No difference. Let's say eight o'clock in the morning, your company's opening hour."

- “And the location?"

- "Here, in this apartment, right on this bed."

And I handed him the key to the apartment.

****

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 This short story is a translation of النهاية by Ali Al-Kasimi. It is the sixteenth in the short story collection Time to Leave (أوان الرحيل, under translation).