Cry in a Long Night

And Four Other Stories

Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, William Tamplin

• Editorial: Darf Publishers
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781850773443
• Categoría: Letteratura
• Categoría: Classici

Jabra's debut novel, first published in 1955 and called by Edward Said "one of the principal successes of Arabic artistic prose and drama, " introduced stream of consciousness, flashback and interior monologue to the Arabic novel and set the stage for the outpouring of excellent modern Arabic prose in the decades that followed. In the first novel by the Palestinian author Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Amin Samaa walks the length of his native city on a portentous night. Amin is headed to the house of Inayat Yasser, an aristocratic heiress who has hired him to help her write a book on the history of her Ottoman family, now fallen on hard times. On his way there, Amin recalls his childhood in a nearby village and the city slum his family had to flee to after his father died. Old friends, thieves and madames attempt to waylay him. And the haunting atmosphere of the city gives rise to memories of Amin's wife Sumaya, whose sudden disappearance two years before has left him at a loss. Sumaya's sudden reappearance forces Amin into a decision that will change his life forever. In a novel written just two years before the 1948 Palestinian Nakba, the events and characters lead to a momentous conclusion. Jabra brought modernist techniques into modern Arabic literature: the reminiscences of D. H. Lawrence, the introspective wanderer of James Joyce, and the acerbic wit and country-house feel of early Aldous Huxley. This classic of Arabic literature is not to be missed.

Chapter One

The young woman raised her foot and said, ‘Look!’ So I looked. But nothing about her foot interested me, except maybe her big toe, its nail painted red and protruding from the end of her elegant shoe. ‘I’ll proceed to something more fit for a man,’ I told myself. And I headed towards the city.

On the way, I came across a rifle-toting policeman who stopped me to check my identity card. He turned out to be an old friend I’d once vacationed with on the mountain! His face looked exhausted, and his voice had lost its familiar vitality. ‘I really am fed up with this work,’ he said, as he patted me on the shoulder, leaving me perplexed, almost disappointed. I turned back towards him and called out, inviting him for a cup of coffee in the cafe nearby. But without looking back, he answered that he couldn’t because he was still on the damned beat.

In the cafe, I came across the owner, Abu Hamed, whose head drooped drowsily upon his chest among the chairs and tables. He awoke suddenly at the chair’s screech as I dragged it from a table. He came towards me, smiling and cheerful; he recognized me. He said that a lady from the Yasser family, whose name he couldn’t exactly remember, had left me a telephone message, saying she wanted to see me that night – if that wasn’t inconvenient for me – to discuss something, something Abu Hamed had forgotten.

I said to myself, ‘God bless you and keep you, Inayat Hanem, but why don’t you leave me alone?’ I thanked the old man – Abu Hamed was around seventy – for his message. Then he brought me the coffee, and I savored it in that deserted place. How could I summon the energy at that hour to go to Inayat Yasser’s palace, seeing as I’d just returned from a short vacation on the mountain, where I’d forgotten everything about her? I wasn’t in a mental state fit for working, and I felt nothing but hate towards the city whose length I’d have to cross before arriving at her house. But I hoped to find her sister Roxane there. Seeing her was all ease and joy.

I set out.

To collect my scattered resolution, I lit a cigarette and took two deep drags. Then I cast it from me and watched the sparks fly from it. Suddenly a man – a beggar, no doubt – jumped out of the folds of the darkness, picked it up, and presently stuck it between his lips. I grinned and thought about giving him an entire cigarette, but chided myself for such softness and continued walking. On the road there were cars from which you could sometimes hear the sound of laughter, reminding you that there still were people in this world who took pleasure in life. That reminded me of Inayat Hanem, when she said she knew how to enjoy life, and of her hoarse, restrained laugh that would ring in my ears like a wincing moan or the cry of a jackal. (A few months before, we had spent a night in the village, which lies twenty kilometers from the city, in an ancient house overlooking a valley where the sad cries of jackals persisted throughout the night. I was astonished that Inayat Hanem not only found them annoying but was so afraid that she couldn’t sleep.) She’s probably waiting for me right now, and God only knows what family papers she’s uncovered of late. Papers, papers, nothing but papers since I began working with her. Even though she paid me a good salary, I’d begun to tire of that kind of work. But work was work. I might also find Roxane there, and I liked talking to her. I found her affectionate towards me, too, and sometimes I suspected that she sought to catch me in her snares. But it would have been difficult for any woman to do so. When it came to women, I had put on the attitude of one who scorns them until I had actually come to scorn them. I’d failed in my marriage, and I was certain that the fate of any other relationship with any other woman could only end in failure..

A man walked towards me and smiled, for he thought he recognized me. He approached me warmly – and I started! – and he went to shake my right hand, saying, ‘Where’ve you been…?’ When I didn’t respond to his warmth, he faltered and stuttered from embarrassment, realizing that he had mistaken me for someone else. He began repeating, ‘Pardon me, pardon me. I thought you were…’ But I didn’t linger to hear the rest of his explanation, and it struck me that I must resemble another man. ‘It was the darkness, of course,’ I told myself. I lit another cigarette. After I passed the street lamp, I examined my long shadow, which exaggerated the swing of my arm and betrayed a certain swagger in my gait. I rather liked the shape of my head as a shadow as it crept on ahead of me. But soon the shadow lengthened and lost its proportions, and I took no pleasure in studying it. I asked myself, ‘Would I welcome an actual stranger if he struck up a conversation with me right now?’

The path was long and tortuous. My thoughts had overcome me, swarming about me like dozens of birds ever since I’d spent the last few days alone on vacation on the mountain, walking from place to place like a hermit with no companion but his staff. It seemed like those thoughts still followed me even in the streets of the city.

At a bend in the road, I saw a sign creaking gently in the wind with ‘Shanoub Brothers – Branch Warehouse’ written on it. I remembered how once I had gone there to meet Suleiman Shanoub, the first man who ever wanted to hire me. He was a stout man who wore thick, horn-rimmed glasses that magnified his small, piercing eyes. He greeted me with a smile that, as much as he tried, he couldn’t make appear natural. While rubbing his smooth bald pate, he said, ‘When you prove your worth, I’ll promote you to clerk. But don’t hurry. You have to be patient.’ That day he made me open no fewer than fifty large boxes of toothpaste and scented soap in the warehouse basement. When I recalled that experience, I almost shuddered, imagining my fate had I returned to the warehouse the following morning. The strangest part was that I later married Suleiman Shanoub’s own daughter. But our marriage didn’t even last two years. The sign shook gently in the wind, and in its creaking I heard a laughing, a gloating derision I was powerless to respond to.

So I continued walking and approached the center of the city.

I told myself that Inayat Yasser was probably sitting in her library, sorting through the family letters, papers, documents, and the old memoirs whose pages had yellowed, whose ink had faded. When I arrived, she would press her cold, gaunt hand into mine in greeting, then present me with what she called ‘a whole heap of new suggestions’ and request that I ‘study them’ for a day or two. She had a ludicrous faith in the soundness of my judgment. Whenever her old clock struck midnight (and the last two strikes of the clock would always tarry such that I could laugh, if not for Inayat Hanem’s adherence to extreme politeness), she would say in her familiar way, ‘The day has come to an end, and the time for rest has arrived. Isn’t that so, Mr. Amin?’

How I wished I could have asked her, ‘And how is one to find rest, if you please?’ But I refrained, for I knew she would think I was mocking her with my question. Afterwards I would almost always return to my house on foot. I usually wouldn’t get home before one o’clock in the morning, and then I’d throw myself on my bed, my powers exhausted, and perhaps sleep. If I woke up early in the morning, I’d stay in bed reading, or work on my latest novel. Then I’d go to the newspaper’s editorial office, where I would spend most of the day writing articles. I was used to churning them out because, after many long years of such work, I knew exactly what the readers wanted.

As for my novel, I sought in it a way to revive my straightened spirits. So I made it a means of expressing what I wanted to say, and divided myself into many characters, each one of whom represented a different part of this soul, so full of contradictions. I constructed the novel upon my love for Sumaya, the business owner’s daughter – that love which failed to bear good fruit. But one doesn’t always judge things by their fruit, or at least I didn’t. Perhaps I hadn’t been discerning enough in my approach: I used to insist upon the importance of experiencing life itself, heedless of the consequences.

That was a theory I had formed for my own peace of mind. After I suffered for a while, I tried to stake out a position towards life in which profit and loss, possession and poverty, would offset one another, and in which each opposed term would have a correspondent purpose and an equal value in the life of the individual. But I had to find the point at which the contradictions canceled each other out, and the manner in which the colors, in shades of both light and dark, could be arranged harmoniously. So I told myself I’d do that through writing. I would distribute bits and pieces of my experiences within the framework of a novel such that it would take, in the end, a form in which everything would fall into place and the parts would emphasize the beauty of the whole.

Inayat didn’t know anything about my life. She was too preoccupied with the lives of her ancestors and their biographies for anything else – the very same biographies she and I were trying to distill from their letters, their memoirs, documents, and expense lists. On many occasions, I was forced to stifle a gloating laugh in my throat, caused by the pomposity of those venerable ancestors as they flaunted their silken clothes and feathered turbans before the eyes of the rabble, only to withdraw to their homes and try to seduce one of the village girls in their employ. Inayat Hanem would record every observation with amazing seriousness, and I had to follow her example. So I would record the date of the event, its principal details, and what she called ‘the moral of the story.’

‘The moral of the story!’

I was turning at a bend in the road when I spied a domestic scene in a basement room with a window that gave onto the sidewalk. The window had no blinds, and an intense light poured from it, casting its iron bars’ long shadows onto the road. I couldn’t turn away from what was happening inside, for the sight captured my attention in spite of myself. I saw a man – a little over thirty – in his shirt, stuffing clothes into a suitcase lying open atop an iron bed frame. An old woman – perhaps his mother – was imploring him to stay (or so I gathered), while two other men stood in a corner of the room yelling at him to get the hell out. Shattered plates lay on the floor and a small black cat looked confusedly at the man packing. After I passed the window, their angry cries still filled the street, and an empty echo resounded among the large stone houses covered in darkness.

Such a sight wasn’t unfamiliar to me. I’d witnessed innumerable scenes of fights; scenes overflowing with curses and blows. Sometimes a mother would erupt in a fit of anger and with the ferocity of a wolf attacked her son with her shoes, or the neighbors would explode into a petty squabble that gathered sons and daughters alike in its grasp, the cause nothing but a squalid toilet blackened by cobwebs. I knew the city inside and out, but before I was delivered of the net of poverty that my family had suffered for centuries, I myself had participated in a large part of the city’s battles and had smelled a liberal share of its stench. I had also known its spontaneous joys and the rabble’s raucous laughs. But in the house of the business owner Shanoub, I’d had to plunge into a scene of repugnance and disgust the likes of which I hadn’t known in the poor quarters.

One day Sumaya came to me and insisted that I go to her father and ask him for her hand, as tradition required. Because the matter of our marrying had aroused a great deal of argument and aversion between father and daughter, I was wary of paying him a visit before being absolutely certain that it would lead to the realization of our desire to marry. Thus she came to inform me that she had won the battle after great difficulty, and I had only to go to her father to win her hand.

I ascended the wide staircase of her enormous house, and she greeted me at the door in a yellow blouse and a green skirt, for she knew that I loved those two colors on her. She pressed my hand and whispered that everything was fine. Then she led me to the living room and left me with the promise that she would return a minute later. I immediately noticed a number of dreadful oil paintings unworthy of their frames hanging on the walls. But I was delighted to see the beautiful Persian rug that covered the floor of the entire room, and the view of the city from the windows soothed the eye. The city looked as beautiful as it could have: large white houses embellishing a vast tapestry of trees and flowers.

Yet my nerves were on edge. I looked around furtively and inhaled the scent of wealth. I couldn’t ignore the fact that the air wasn’t totally pure; nevertheless, my presence in an enormous, multi-roomed house with an elegant marble staircase (how I wished there had been a statue at its top!) gave me the impression that the air was cold and pure. I searched my pockets for cigarettes, lit one, and sat smoking, guardedly, in a comfortable chair. Perhaps the smoke would calm my nerves.

Sumaya returned agitated. ‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘My father, he’s not reliable. Right now he’s in the bathroom shaving, and he’ll be here as soon as he’s done. He wasn’t pleased that I invited you over while my mother was out. Even though that was what he suggested.’

Then she approached me and gave me a quick kiss. When I offered her a cigarette, she refused it and sat ...