This excerpt first appeared in the WINTER 2020 DREAMS issue of ArabLit Quarterly.
From ‘The Taste of Sleep’
By Tareq Imam
Translated by Katherine Van de Vate
Tareq Emam’s 2019 novel The Taste of Sleep takes the author’s unique style of magical realism to a new place. Inspired by Yasunari Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties (1969) and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004), Emam’s novel also draws on the great narrative tradition of Alf Layla wa-Layla, and opens with a quotation from it:
“He asked: Who are you? And I said I am a gift, and I wish you to fulfil your promise to me, for I have now gone thirty days without savoring the taste of sleep.”
The Taste of Sleep is narrated by a nameless young woman living in Alexandria who decides, after reading the works of Kawabata and Marquez, to write her own novel, which blends her reflections on the writings of these two men with her personal story. She composes the entire novel asleep in a brothel where impotent old men pay to lie beside her for the night. The novel opens with the following chapter, narrated by Scheherazade, the young woman’s mother. In contrast to the Scheherazade of the 1001 Nights, who tells stories to postpone her death, this Scheherazade tells stories just before killing old men.
Scheherazade thrusts the deadly needle into the old man’s vein and feels the solace of death approach, as if the lethal liquid were coursing not through his veins, but hers.
She is well aware that he is ablaze with longing to hear her story, that enthralling tale she has promised to tell him once she has administered his final injection. During the previous— non-lethal—ones, she had refused.
He finally dares ask, like someone inquiring into a personal secret: “Ah, weren’t you going to tell me a story? Didn’t you say this was my final dose?”
He doesn’t ask, but rather begs, child-like. If he could manage it, he would throw himself at her feet, lifting two clasped, wrinkled palms up toward the naked goddess, who is even weaker than he, as he thinks: “Goddesses are always older than us.”
But the old man lies on his back, sick, unable even to leave his dreams.
She snaps her fingers, like someone who has forgotten something but then remembers it, or, more precisely, like someone who has remembered it just in the nick of time. She snaps them with a force and agility incongruous with the frail and gaunt old man lying there, and says:
“It’s good you asked. That is, I’m glad you remembered to ask me again. You might have forgotten, and, in that case, I wouldn’t have allowed myself to…
“Look, sidi, I have a daughter, or should I say I had a daughter? I don’t know which is more accurate. She’s not here any longer, but when she was alive and here with us, she would do something very strange. She couldn’t sleep in her own bed. She was unable to fall asleep or even close her eyes except in strange houses—houses whose owners she didn’t know, houses she’d entered for the first time in order to sleep in their beds, and thus the first time was always the last, because she was incapable of sleeping in the same bed twice. All she wanted each night was to be enclosed by four walls under a roof where she had not dreamt before. Otherwise, she could not close her eyes or savor the taste of sleep.”
Here, Scheherazade sighs. “And when she was little, we used to bring her back from somewhere different every night. No matter how we locked her in or tied her up, she had an uncanny knack for untying herself from her bed and finding another to sleep in. We fetched her back from flats and hotels and hospitals and mosques—all of Alexandria heard about the girl whose mother brought her back every night from a different bed. And you, too. You might have heard of her.”
She looks at him. He watches her, as if to say, “I won’t die until you’ve finished the story,” as if death were not merely a reward, but a choice.
She goes on: “And when she grew older, she started coming to a place like this one to sleep. It was like a house, but not just any house; they say it had more rooms than you could count, and beds that went on forever. She would go there only to sleep—you could say her sole mission was to sleep. And even there, in that place, she had to change her room and bed every night. But once…”
With these words, she looks at the old man’s face as though to reassure herself he’s still listening, or to take advantage of the seconds she’s gained by pausing to arouse his curiosity even more—to kill him.
The man’s face is rigid, his eyes are fixed and bulging. His arms hang down in surrender, as if the injection he got from the story is what’s killed him, not the toxic liquid in the syringe the nurse has just plunged into his vein.
She gets up with indifference and goes over to the old man, closing his eyes as if lowering a delicate curtain, in search of total darkness. Then she pulls up the sheet to cover his lifeless face. She picks up the needle and empty syringe. She heads for a chair in the corner of the room, where she opens her purse, stuffs the needle and vial into a side compartment, and closes the zipper. At that moment, as if it’s someone else seeing her, she discovers she is totally naked, because with each utterance, she had taken off a piece of her clothing. She takes the white medical coat from beneath her bag, and from under the coat, she pulls her underwear. Putting her clothes on in the opposite order she took them off, she picks up a bunch of keys she’s flung on the small table beside the stretched-out corpse.
Taking a key from the bunch, she reaches into her purse and pulls out an old-fashioned circular keyring, like the ones burglars use in the movies. As she adds the key to the metal ring, the other keys slide down to admit the newcomer, which jerks into its place like the hand of a clock. She fingers the keys, as if counting them, then twirls the keyring around and around her finger like a juggler until it’s impossible to tell the new key from the others, as if its features have been erased.
“All the keys are the same—it’s only the doors that are different.”
That’s what she used to tell herself and the old people she killed, as if imparting her final words of wisdom.
Now that a new brother has joined the tarnished family, she puts the jangling keyring back into her purse and turns toward the door to leave the apartment, thinking about the moment when she will tell the entire story, the moment when—with obscure but total certainty—she will bring an end to her own life.
Tareq Imam is an Egyptian writer and critic. He is the author of ten novels and short story collections, including The Second Life of Constantine Cavafy and The City with No Walls. Imam has twice received Egypt’s prestigious Sawiris Prize. He has also been awarded the Supreme Council of Culture’s State Incentive Award, the Ministry of Culture’s literature prize, the Su’ad Sabah Prize, and the Spanish Museo de la Palabra’s prize for flash fiction. The Taste of Sleep, his fifth novel, will be published in Spanish translation in 2021.