Online: A House Made of Stone

Trinity Journal of Literary Translation | 119

Online: A House Made of Stone

trans. Emily Drumsta

(Variations on a Theme) (1)

From night to night, curtains wink and disappear into dust. The maid knocks on the door: “Two teas?” A brown knee, soft to the touch of hands and lips soothes every feeling, calms every memory, except the one no caress can smooth over: a house made of stone.

Geraniums sprouted every spring around its white stairs. (Is it still there on the hill, raising up its three arches? Or has it become a pile of rubble, a home for rats and spiders, stinging nettles crawling where geraniums once grew?) Start again! The hotel maid will knock on the door to discover two bare breasts. I will put on my coat and head out to the portico, the stairs, the pavement, to the barefoot vendors waving their lottery tickets: “Five thousand dinars! Five thousand dinars!”

At the onset of dusk, passing through markets and among brick houses, I see red flowers on the stairs of our distant house at the top of the hill and thousands of men in cafes, thousands of grave eyes and numb hands, thousands of lips declaring: “O God, when we have nothing grace us with blessings of plenitude! When we remember, inject us with a shot of forgetting. And when we hunger, rain down on us the fruits of fantasy.”

(2)

Seer, dear seer, what do you read on the palm of my hand? I see all your grief in a mulberry leaf your enemies die say inshallah…

In this skin worn dry from holding cups and axes?

Perils… travels… Libraries… fables…

Fortune-teller, don’t lie, what do you see in this deeply creased hand, these fleshy thick fingers?

Funerals and marriages… A dark-skinned woman loves you, and a blonde across the sea… Dinars… coins…

Over this cluster of calamities that rally and conspire angels hover in circles flies hover in swarms reducing love and death to concepts like a cackle in the trembling of Baghdad’s summer nights.

In the green hills there are houses of amber and ruby

And our house at the top of the hill?

Stone laid upon stone white in the light of the morning green in the light of the moon

And around the house?

Brambles and blood poison and thorns.

(3)

On the day death came to visit— we were three, night peered down from its summit, a moon so big it could have been carved from ice. Laying on our stomachs behind a boulder, we searched through the dirt for some grim horizon with rifles in our hands. The enemy fired a bullet, then another, another. They buzzed past, the valley returning their echo. Someone said: “There is no longer any truth in the world save this body, the wolves who will eat it, and the house that I see despite the mountains, standing tall amidst the trees where the enemy picks our pomegranates and figs.” Then he suddenly climbed the boulder, stood straight as a rail, and showered the enemy with bullets. We saw them falling, one, then another, another, their cries rending the light of the moon. We crawled, retreating ten meters on the land of stones, of grapes, of gold. But death had come to visit. We heard a gasp from the dirt, a stone-splintering cry.

The shower grew silent, bathed as it was in blood and the gasp and the cry were cut off at “our home—”

(4)

Our home at the top of the hill stone laid upon stone white in the light of the afternoon sun green in the light of the moon.

From night to night, all we can do is wait: O God, grace us grace us recompense for our waiting.

128 | Arabic

Online: Onward, onward, noble steed

Jabra Ibrahim Jabra