Translated by Phoebe Bay Carter.
He opened his eyes and stretched his arms wide, yawning. He felt at ease. He smiled with satisfaction, knowing he’d made it over the peak of pain and finally awoken from that nightmare which had felt like it might never end. A nightmare in which he’d watched himself turn into a monster, hairy and dwarfish like a demonic monkey. He inhaled, filling his mouth and nose, seeking the pleasure of resurfacing after drowning, but instead the putrid smell clobbered his senses. He opened his eyes all the way and raised his palms to find two hands that were not his own. So it wasn’t a nightmare that had come and settled on his chest in the night. No, it was the reality he woke up to in the morning.
He noticed the absolute silence that enveloped the house, and the phosphorescent green that shaded everything he looked at. He raised his eyes to the clock and saw that it was close to midnight. All the lights were out. He must have slept through a whole day and half the night. He thought. He must have been unconscious – almost dead. He remembered the vase that his father had hurled at his chest, and the glass shards, and the blood dripping from his body. He tilted his head and saw bloody shards on his lap, but his chest was free of glass. He felt it with his finger, then felt it a second time, and a third. His injuries had healed completely.
He cast his gaze and his consciousness around the apartment. He saw his sister asleep in her room, the gentle child beside her. He saw his father lying in bed, and next to him his mother, lying on her back and staring at the ceiling.
His chest tightened from his mother’s suffering. He rubbed his forehead, trying to remember the details of The Metamorphosis and the series of events that befell Gregor Samsa. After his father had shut him in his room, Gregor had surrendered to sleep. When he awoke in the morning, he found that his injuries had healed and he was better, and his sister had made him breakfast.
When he reached that point in the story, his sense of smell was roused. He focused in on the doorway to his room, where someone had left him food. It was no doubt his sister – could smell her scent beside the plates.
He leapt over on all fours to sniff the plates. He pushed the boiled vegetables away in disgust and lifted the plate of meat. He drank the broth with pleasure, then put down the plate and picked up the hunk of meat with his hands, mashing it between his fingers and stuffing it into his mouth. Grease and broth dripped down his chin and slid from his hands to his elbows. He chewed and chewed and chewed, then swallowed and let out a great belch, then went back to lick himself from fingertips to elbows. He grabbed the water jug and drank straight from it. His face turned blue and he regurgitated, spitting over and over until he’d gotten all the water he’d drunk out of his mouth. He screamed in anger, got up and opened the bedroom window to dump out the rest of the water. He ignored the curses rising up from the street from someone who’d been hit by the contents of the jug and retreated back inside. He headed for the corner of the room. He loosened his pajama bottoms and brought the jug below his abdomen. Several short cries of elation escaped his mouth and he let out a sigh of relief. He lifted his pajamas. He examined the yellow liquid now filling the jug to the brim, and gulped it down. He let out another tremendous belch and patted his belly in satisfaction.
He stood leaning against the window, delighting in the cool night breeze. He closed his eyes and honed his ear in on the conversations coming from the street and the neighboring apartments. The first thing that reached him was the dirty talk of a girl whispering into the telephone, and her boyfriend panting on the other end. His body trembled in extasy. Supporting himself on the window frame, he hoisted himself up to crouch on the ledge. He looked out at Tangier by night, like a devil on his throne surveying his kingdom. He turned his head to the left and smiled in satisfaction as he directed his gaze across Avenue Belgique, then down Rue du Mexique to where it turned into Avenue M’Sallah. He saw three burly figures armed with a long knife and two clubs blocking a couple’s path. They took the wife’s purse, the husband’s wallet, and the phones and watches of both. One still wanted a bit more, so he pulled the wife towards him, running his hands down her back. The husband tried to play the hero, which brought one of the clubs crashing down on his head over and over until it was pulp. One of them gagged the wife to silence her screams, and they carried her off with them as they fled the scene.
The monkey in the window clapped gleefully and scratched his armpit in delight. He looked to the right, toward the tourist hotel a few meters away. Behind the curtains of one of the windows, he saw the bed rocking. He rested his chin on his fist and closed his eyes to wait a few minutes until the moans and panting stopped. He opened his eyes and saw the moaner with the sagging belly get up and go to the bathroom. His companion got up abruptly and tucked her body into her short dress, then jumped over to the other side of the bed and pulled his fat wallet out of his pants’ pocket. She pulled out the bills and credit cards, tossing the passport aside after staring for a moment at the photo of him sporting a goatee and agal.[1] She balled up her underwear and stuffed it into her purse, picked up her high-heeled shoes and left barefoot.
The monkey shook his head in amazement and blew her a kiss, then directed his gaze all the way to the right, to the end of the boulevard, where a sports car screeched to a sudden halt. The passenger door opened, and a young woman got out, wearing a mini skirt that barely covered the curve of her buttocks and a belly shirt that barely concealed the dark around her nipples. She slammed the door and cursed the driver, who got out and shouted that she was a whore. She stopped and turned back towards him in order to launch the insult back at his mother. He ducked into the car and came back out with a pistol. He aimed it at her chest. The woman froze. He looked terrified with the gun in his hand and seemed to be battling some external force that was controlling his movements. He tried to loosen his grip on the gun but instead, his finger pulled the trigger. Finally, his hand relaxed and the pistol fell. He got into his car and fled as though pursued by demons.
The shot pierced the night’s silence and a few lights flicked on in the windows and a few heads peered out, looking for the source of the strange noise. A few of them saw the prostitute’s body crumpled on the sidewalk, but couldn’t make out any details. They figured it was just a homeless person sleeping on the sidewalk, as was not uncommon in this city, or maybe some drunk who’d been kicked out of one of the nearby bars.
The lights shut their eyes once more and fell asleep under the wing of night, and the monkey began to slip down the windows of the building to the street, intent on a mission that our hero will know nothing of except that when he wakes up, he will find his hands stained with strange blood, and won’t know where it came from. A strange notion will occur to him later, when the police come to inform them of his wife’s murder, but he will immediately push the thought from his mind, for it is a diabolical notion – illogical, and utterly impossible.
Let us now leave the monkey to his mission, the teacher to his loss, the husband to his anger, and the brother to his betrayal, and come with me to see what the others are up to.
In order to make the storytelling easier for me, and easier for you to follow, I find myself obliged, at this juncture, to name the characters of our story. So, I will give our hero the name Jawad, generous as he is. The sister I’ll call Hind, the mother, Fatima, and, since hope comes with daughters, his little girl I’ll call Amal. There’s no need to name the wife, since she will be dying soon. No, better give her the name Sara, in case I need it. As for the father, he’ll be Mohammed, family name al-Idrisi.
[1] A black headband worn by men in the Arabian Peninsula. It is worn over a cloth headdress, called a ghutra or shmagh, to keep it in place.
Notes from the translator:
Dear Readers,
Thank you for your responses to my musings last week – you’ve given me a lot to chew on, and in this week’s chapter I’ve continued to encounter the question of how, and how much, to explain and contextualize.
As you see, I opted for a footnote this time, on “agal.” In general, I’m happy to leave food and clothing names without an explanation, as I did with jilbab in an earlier chapter, but in this case, the encoded information conveyed by the detail of the man’s headdress seems important. It signals that he is not Moroccan, and probably is from one of the wealthy countries of the Arabian Peninsula. This seemed like a detail relevant to the scene and the power dynamics at play between the man and the woman he’s just slept with. At the same time, I didn’t want to say too much in the footnote and overinterpret the scene for the reader.
I liked Paula Haydar’s suggestion in the comments last week about taking advantage of the online nature of our publication and using hyperlinks. If Substack offered the option of hover-over links, which would save readers both from opening an external page and from having to scroll all the way down to the footnote, I think this would be ideal. (Any Substack experts out there? Does this option in fact exist?) I considered linking to the Wikipedia article, but thought that, though it is fairly concise, it still would be a bit of an information overload in the midst of reading. In this case, I thought a concise note would be more reader-friendly. I also kind of liked the idea of linking straight to a photo (how about this “Portrait Of A Confident Arab Businessman Wearing UAE Emirati Traditional Dress” stock photo?) but didn’t find one that seemed quite right. For future notes, what format do you prefer?
Calvin Harrison’s comment last week was also quite timely to this chapter. He wrote:
“I always find myself looking up the names of specific locations in a book. I love to use literature as a way to explore a new city, so I'll go on Google Maps and try to find specific areas referenced. While it might not be relevant to this story, I wonder if including maps at the beginning/end of translated novels would be a helpful addition for readers.”
I, too, spent a while “wandering around” Tangier on Google Maps while translating this chapter, making sure I was getting the street names right and trying to visualize what the metamorphosized Jawad is seeing from the window. Here is his neighborhood, and more or less his sightline to the mugging.
And, to zoom out a bit, remember in Chapter One when he walks all the way to Malabata Beach? Now that we know where he lives, we can trace that route, too.
(I am also now noticing that, on this map, you can also trace my own itinerary in Tangier when I visited in early 2020. The café where Mohammed and I first met and he told me about the novel he had written, some of the bookstores we visited, and the clinic I paid a midnight visit to after spraining my ankle on the way to Café Hafa… But these are stories for another time.)
I’m enjoying this immensely—as a Kafka fan, an Arab lit fan, a literature teacher and occasional translator. I’ve always wanted to read a serialized novel (imagining it was the 19th century) so thank you for the text and your notes and discussion.