The maqama is a trickster tale genre from the classical Arabic tradition. In the Maqamat of Badi’ al-Zaman al-Hamadhani—from whose ‘Maqama of the Blind’ the verses at the end of this text are taken—the itinerant narrator reports from towns and cities across the Middle East and Central Asia, encountering the mysterious rogue Abu al-Fath in a different guise each time. The challenge of evoking this intertextuality and the stylistic specifics of the maqama (which is traditionally written in rhymed prose, a feature that El-Wardany gently plays with here, and like premodern Arabic writing more generally, is not punctuated) offered the opportunity to experiment with visual presentation and stylistic eclecticism in the English translation.
—Katharine Halls, translator
Having travelled a great distance we stopped for a break, took refuge in a petrol station where we filled up the tank and emptied our bladders and stretched our stiff muscles until, refreshed, we got back in the car, determined to cover what distance remained My wife took the wheel, it being her turn, and before she started the engine she said, Let us roll a spliff, which we did, but then as she turned the key to start the ignition a man appeared, I don’t know where from, bald and clean-shaven and wearing a jacket, and flagged us down, Are you going to Berlin? and we were, we said, so begging our kindness he asked for a lift I looked at my wife and my wife looked at me, and then, decided, we looked back, Jump in—as long as you’re not a highwayman, God forbid, so he fetched two huge bags from the verge, loaded up, and sat down beside them and then we set off.
The air in the car took a turn for the cagey, for here we were all of a sudden with a stranger We didn’t know who he was or where he was going, he just sat in the back seat not saying a word, and but for the eyes of the oncoming cars which flashed past like ghosts, it was silent and dark Then when I glanced across at my wife, I saw she was lighting the spliff we’d just rolled, and it surprised me to see she’d decided to impose this habit of ours on the car as a whole, but no sooner had we taken a puff or two than our bald companion leant forward and plucked it from our hands, saying Man! What a friend for the road.
The traveller was pleased at this turn of events and when one spliff was finished he rolled us another Now this man had a habit I found quite peculiar of heating the cigarette he was using to roll, which filled the car with an unusual scent that alarmed my wife and me so I said Mate, what are you doing? I toast the fag to dry the tobacco, it tastes much better this way, he answered He said it the way they speak in those parts with letters left off the ends of the words and he didn’t pronounce the umlauts at all After a pause he added Would you believe? Three rocks cost a good sixty euros round here. What d’you mean? What’s a rock? asked my wife A rock, around here, means a gram, he replied This one time, he said, I happened to get a ride with a guy who was driving a Hyundai Turned out he was running away from the police though of course I didn’t know that at the time The inevitable happened and they set up a roadblock, they stopped us, arrested him, and of course, just my luck, there was grass in my bag so they picked me up too, but they let me go cos it was personal use And what were you doing, my wife then enquired, at a petrol station at that time of night? By this point he’d finished rolling the spliff, and between tokes he told us he’d taken a lift with two men in a Golf who drove for an hour then pulled off the road and told him, Get out Did I do something wrong? our friend asked them gamely and the driver said No, we just don’t want company He asked them to drop him back where he started so he might have a chance of finding a ride but the driver said no so they swore at each other and the pair dumped him and his bags on the pavement.
The three of us passed round the spliff and I asked, What do you do for a living? He was a roofer, he said, a man who builds roofs He started off in Stuttgart but the pay wasn’t great, so he moved to Hamburg and that’s where he stayed till one day the world turned its back, did its worst, and his young daughter fell ill and then died, so he decided to make his way to Berlin, where perhaps fate would smile and there he fell in with a bad crowd, tradesmen of various sorts He shared a house with them and they sent jobs his way, but they stopped when they found out he wasn’t certified, and then, he said, I was soon out of work, so I moved on again, this time Heidelberg, where I went seeking knowledge and an Ausbildung diploma.
The bald man didn’t talk much but he was a big smoker, and he kept rolling spliffs, one after another As he talked he often interrupted himself, and then without warning picked up somewhere else and in the rearview mirror his eyes were cold like glass I sat there considering the things that he’d said, Just who was this man? I thought as we sped through the darkness, my wife still steering us on From time to time I glanced at her eyes, because surely by now she’d begun to get tired, and when a burst of music swelled from the cassette we seized our chance and in a low voice I said What do you think? I can’t follow everything he’s saying, she replied, and it looks like he can’t really follow us either He might be a lunatic, she added with a shrug, but he’s probably thinking the same about us.
The journey dragged on so I imagined the car as a spaceship speeding away from the Earth, until it landed on the surface of the moon where we marvelled at a sight that so few had seen We opened the airlock and went out to play in a bright silver landscape of mountains and vales, then I remembered the bald man and with him my fears What if the Devil were to give him ideas? I wondered how I’d defend us if he tried to attack and by spliff number five inspiration had struck I turned round and asked him Why d’you have all this stuff when you don’t know if someone will give you a ride? At this he guffawed like an idiot and replied, I’ll be honest with you—I’m moving house You’re what? My wife and I asked in one breath Yep From Heidelberg back to Berlin, he said Because now I’ve finished my vocational diploma and a man I know said I could sleep on his sofa, and seeing as money’s quite tight at the moment, I go back to Heidelberg every weekend, fill these two bags up as full as I can then wait by the road till a car comes along One time a black Jaguar stopped, he continued, and scarcely had I opened the door when it hit me What’s that smell, boys? I asked the men in the car Does it bother you? They asked God forbid, I said, far from it! Now these two men, they were the kind that pluck their eyebrows and put kohl on their eyes We spent the whole journey smoking up It was sublime! Why don’t you come to Munich, they said, we have people there, and I couldn’t decline For a good three days I didn’t know where I was, I ate and I drank and I smoked like a king, until I had to get back on the road, because time ticks on and that’s just how it goes.
On the horizon the lights of the city appeared and we cheered up to think that soon we’d be there In honour of our arrival, the man lit one last spliff and we rolled down the windows to freshen the air Entering the city from the south we saw the Rotes Rathaus, the Olympic stadium and the Television Tower, and in the city centre we saw brightly lit shops and billboards that glowed, and we saw happiness printed on the faces of the people who were purchasing necessities or crossing the road, we saw green police vehicles and on the skyline, helicopters; we saw messages of welcome in lightning-bright neon and suburban trains shuttling over bridges above us.
My wife turned off the engine while I helped the bald traveller, and no sooner had he heaved his two bags to the ground and straightened up to wish us goodbye than I confronted him, I know who you are, you’re Abu al-Fath! I cried; I am not he, the man said, Then who are you? I asked, and to that he replied
I’m Abu Qalamun the chameleon
I wear every hue and shade
Take what profit’s close to hand
For we live in a sordid age
Time is a headstrong beast, my friend,
So shove fate out of your way!
Never tell a lie that makes any sense,
To be sensible is to be quite insane!
Translated from Arabic by Katharine Halls
Haytham El-Wardany was born in Giza, Egypt, and has lived in Berlin for twenty years. His first short story collection The Unfinished Literature Club received the 2003 Sawiris Award, and Waking Dream won the Cairo International Book Fair’s 2012 prize for best short story collection (both in Arabic). His experimental prose work The Book of Sleep (Seagull Books) appeared in English last year. He recently received a Berlin Senate stipend for Non-German literature.
Katharine Halls is an Arabic-to-English translator from Cardiff, Wales. She was awarded a 2021 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant to translate Haytham El-Wardany’s short story collection Things That Can’t Be Fixed. Her translation, with Adam Talib, of Raja Alem’s novel The Dove’s Necklace received the 2017 Sheikh Hamad Award and was shortlisted for the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize. Her translations for the stage have been performed at the Royal Court and the Edinburgh Festival.
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