In this week’s Translation Tuesday, Mahmoud Saeed brings us a tale that transverses multiple nations and seemingly multiple visions of time. With the transitive nature of a fable and the striking imagery of reality, this story turns and dreams and lingers, much like the sweetness of remembered fruit.
I wasn’t merely delighted when I saw a mulberry tree in Chicago, I was so ecstatic that—as we say in Iraq—I felt I was flying. When we say this, we really feel we are aloft, even though none of us ever did fly into the air whether from happiness or sorrow. The point is that I rushed over to it and stood beneath its branches, which were heavily laden with a crop of delectable fruit. Many mulberries had fallen and created a large, solid circle around it, turning the earth a deep blue-black color. I didn’t even know how long it had been since I tasted a mulberry! Perhaps it had been a quarter century, and that had been in Turkey, where I had eaten white mulberries that gleamed in the sunshine. Each of those mulberries had been almost as long as my thumb, but thicker, and that was the first time I had seen such large mulberries. Their taste was extremely delicious, and each one almost melted between my teeth, filling my mouth with its unique juice. Once this enters the stomach, it is a balm that cures almost all digestive complaints.
In America, there are a few types of mulberry, but none of them rivals the distinctive taste of the mulberry that grows back home in Iraq. The taste here is either sweet-sour or sweet in such a flavorless way that it doesn’t appeal to the taste buds. It may also be sweet but have a bitter aftertaste. In any case, in America I’ve never found a variety of mulberry I like without reservation. When I spotted this particular tree with its black mulberries, I decided to try them and put some in my mouth.
The tempting branches around me were laden with thick fruit, some within my reach, even though they weren’t the size of the Turkish ones. I discovered that these were endowed with delicious juice. I drove away feeling quite blissful as fragments of old songs leapt into my mind unprompted:
Where will I eat you, my mulberry?
Where will I eat you?
This song substituted “mulberry” for “duck” in the original Egyptian proverb. One memory evoked another as I imagined myself eating delicious mulberries.
A song by Farid al-Atrash overwhelmed all of existence:
Come together,
Come together,
Mulberry with us!
But stop! That’s enough daydreaming. There’s a difficult problem: most of the branches are high off the ground. Even if I stood on top of my car, I wouldn’t be able to reach them. What can I do? What? Use your brain. The tree is next to the parking lot of a supermarket where I shop all the time, because it’s about a mile from where I live. On my way home I had an excellent idea. I would park beneath the tree and place a chair on the car. Yes. “This is an excellent idea!” I encouraged myself. I merely needed to act on it. There was a suitable chair at home; it folds up and is easy to carry. The next day, in the afternoon, I brought that chair to the supermarket and set it on the car’s roof. When I stood on the chair then, branches heavily laden with sweet fruit were within arm’s reach. How happy I was! I laughed. “Where will I eat you, mulberry? Where?” The song echoed in my head as I carefully picked the tender mulberries so they would not be smushed and become nasty. I started filling a plastic bag I had brought.
I heard a child yell behind me but paid no attention to him. He started crying, but I could not turn around. His yelling grew louder. A woman’s laughing voice filled the air with Spanish words. At the same time I felt a gentle shaking of the chair I stood on. I was terrified. If this shaking continued, I would certainly fall. I turned and saw the little boy who was standing by the chair and shaking it and laughing because he saw it move, rocking me on top of it. He was blind to the danger threatening me if I fell to the ground and broke my head or landed on him. In the latter case, both of us would doubtless hit the ground. I asked his mother to move him away, but she didn’t respond. Perhaps she thought I was flirting with her. I realized that she might not know English. She was convulsed with laughter as she watched her child shake my chair delightedly and gleefully. She was rejoicing at his enjoyment of this novel game. She may also have been excited by his extraordinary genius in his childhood and his ingenious discoveries at such a tender age—oblivious to me and the dangers I faced. I was overwhelmed by an intense, genuine fear of falling and shouted angrily at her: “Stop him! I’m going to fall. I’ll be smashed.” But she didn’t even turn to look my way. I pleaded with her, “Please move him away. I’m coming down. I’ll give him all the mulberries I’ve picked.” I repeated this even louder but to no avail. All this time the child was shaking the chair and making it impossible for me to climb or move, because the chair wasn’t stable. All I could do was toss the sack on the trunk of the car. Then I leaned over and thought I would jump down instead of falling any old way and break a rib or a limb. But this was impossible, because the chair was still moving. The child chortled with delight, and his mother was enjoying laughing along with him.
At that moment I noticed an athletic-looking young man come out of the supermarket and head toward us. Looking his way, I called to him, hoping he would rescue me. His concern showed on his face, and he raced toward my car, but the child also saw him galloping our way and realized that the time for fun and games had ended. So, catching me off guard, he gave a strong push to the chair. That forced me to summon all my strength and leap. I assumed then that I would fall with disastrous results on my shoulder and smash it, but the young man ran toward me, caught me in his arms, and saved me. I offered him my heartfelt thanks while panting because I was so frightened that my spirit had virtually left my body. Privately I praised God.
I felt like slapping this reckless woman or at least spitting in her face, but I couldn’t since that would have been a misdemeanor offence the law would punish severely. I did shout at her, “You’re a numbskull!” She scowled and was on the verge of tears. Then a middle-aged man approached me; I don’t know where he came from or where he had been all this time. He was a full figured fellow, and his coal-black hair, which seemed to have been recently dyed, was carefully combed with Vaseline. He started screaming at me and shaking his fist threateningly. Speaking Spanish, he seemed ready for a fight. I kept still, because it would have been pointless to reply in English. We resembled the proverbial deaf man in a song-filled wedding procession; neither of us could understand the other. I noticed, though, that my rescuer—the young athlete—who had started to leave, had turned back. He approached this adult man and spoke to him in his same language, also rather shrilly. He pointed to his head scoldingly. Then he spread his palm and blew on it to indicate that someone lacked a brain. I realized he was referring to the woman. He laughed sarcastically and then pointed to me, the woman, and the child. So the other man, feeling defeated, fell silent.
I wanted to reward the young man by giving him half the mulberries I had collected, but by then he had disappeared. I had only collected twenty.
Two years later, I accepted a generous offer. A friend suggested that I join him in a small city in Andalusia. There I could enjoy a change of scene and finish a project. Before the airplane had left the runway, however, I received an unexpected email in which he apologized for dashing my hopes. While I was flying to Spain we would cross paths over the Atlantic, because he was on his way to Chicago, after leaving his key with the building’s agent. So I would be alone. I accepted the situation grudgingly. The city was Benalmádena, and it contains many statues of the physician Ibn al-Baytar wearing a turban and a cloak and looking Arab. These had been erected to honor his accomplishments and achievements. Various schools, gardens, and parks bear his name, since this was his hometown. Although Damascus has harbored his mortal remains for centuries, that city contains no memorial to him.
Two days after I arrived in Benalmádena, there was a knock on the door, and I opened to find three beautiful, elegant Spanish women. They immediately entered the apartment, even before I invited them in, and sat down. They began trilling in Spanish, filling the apartment with flirtation, music, and happiness. My morale was suddenly boosted, good will flooded all of existence, and I sensed that they knew the place well, because of an affectionate relationship with its absent tenant. When they asked for my friend, I shared with them his apologies for his sudden departure. The oldest of the women was about forty and spoke English fluently. She told me that our mutual friend Bilal had left us four pre-paid tickets for a boat trip to Gibraltar and showed me where he had left them. Then she took three of the tickets and returned the fourth to me.
Suddenly she spontaneously asked me: “Why don’t you come with us too—in his place?”
I was surprised by her suggestion, which reminded me of being struck with a rose by a lover who excels at dalliance. I glanced at the other two, younger beauties and found a positive response that I had not expected. So I welcomed this invitation, and we agreed on a place to meet in a few days at seven in the morning.
That day I did not eat any breakfast and did not even drink any tea or smoke a cigarette. I quickly donned the clothes I had set out the previous day in keeping with my 1960s Iraqi taste: a sparkling white shirt and carefully ironed black trousers with a sword-edge crease. The final touches were cologne and gray sunglasses. I also scoured my teeth with salt after polishing them with Kolynos toothpaste.
Calculating my departure so I would arrive only five minutes early, I set out. One street before the bus stop—just one street—I happened to turn, and then a row of black mulberry trees caught my eye—gleaming in the sunshine. These were model trees and not overly tall. I could pick all the fruit I wanted without needing a car or a chair. Suddenly I felt hungry. I decided to pluck a few mulberries before I met the beautiful women. Standing beneath a tree, I picked one. The branch, which was heavy with ripe fruit, shook then, and mulberries showered down on me like drops of rain. My splendid, shiny white shirt was stained in more than one place by blotches of mulberry juice, and these ranged in color from blue to the darkest red. I could have pounded my head with my fists. I screamed silently to myself: “What have you done?”
Translated from the Arabic by William M. Hutchins
Mahmoud Saeed, a prominent Iraqi novelist, has written more than twenty novels and short story collections. He was imprisoned several times and left Iraq in 1985 after the authorities banned the publication of some of his novels, including Zanka bin Baraka (1970), which won the Ministry of Information Award in 1993. His novels available in English include The World through the Eyes of Angels, Saddam City, and A Portal in Space. He lives in Chicago. In Fall 2014, he became the first writer-in-residence at the American University of Iraq in Sulaimani, Kurdistan.
William Maynard Hutchins, a professor at Appalachian State University, was awarded National Endowment for the Arts grants for literary translation in 2005-2006 and 2011-2012. He was co-winner of the 2013 Saif Ghobash/Banipal Prize for A Land without Jasmine by Wajdi al-Ahdal and won the American Literary Translators Association National Prose Translation Award in 2015 for Ibrahim al-Koni’s novel New Waw, which was published by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies of the University of Texas at Austin. In addition to New Waw, he also has published with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies of the University of Texas at Austin The Puppet, The Scarecrow, and The Fetishists by Ibrahim al-Koni as well as A Portal in Space by Mahmoud Saeed.
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