Short Fiction in Translation: Azher Jirjees’s ‘The Reed Horse’

This short story appears in the 2017 edition of Azher Jirjees’s collection The Sweetmaker.

The Reed Horse

By Azher Jirjees

Translated by Sabine Jimenez-Williams

He was no longer able to speak, so he stopped translating and started sobbing like a child. It was the first time he had gone silent during an investigation. Before this, he had listened to thousands of stories and had translated them without becoming emotional, so that he had become accustomed to acting cold-hearted in some moments and thick-skulled in others. He didn’t care about the feelings of the immigrants as they told their stories. The interpreter was like a surgeon—he shut off his heart before stepping into the operating room. But the young man Nabeel Fawzi’s story was so miserable that it deeply pained the interpreter, and he could not hold back his tears.

Nabeel was wanted as payback for a crime he didn’t commit. His father had worked as a driver between the city and the countryside, and, one hot afternoon, he ran over a calf and drove away. The father was not able to pay off the tribe, so they decided that the life of the son would be the blood money for the spoiled calf. In simmering countries, calves were more valuable than the poor. Nabeel ran away on that terrible day, but the fates allowed him to walk into the hands of another tribe, who took him to an abandoned warehouse outside the city. For three days, he was shackled and starved. He tried to understand what was going on around him, but the guards were tight-lipped, and it was futile. Their boss, “Al Basha,” only arrived three days later. ِWhen he showed up, he was accompanied by a doctor.

“Doctor, get to work,” Al Basha said after he called for Nabeel. The doctor took out an anesthetic and coldly inserted the needle into Nabeel’s arm. Nabeel slept for almost two hours. When he woke, his right eye was blindfolded, and he had a splitting headache.

“Where is my eye? Where is my eye? Where is my eye, you sons of bitches?” Nabeel shouted, and no one responded. Al Basha had stolen his right eye and taken off. The poor man screamed, sobbed, and struck his legs in anger until he was exhausted. He would have to live the rest of his life with one eye. After he gave up hope that his eye might return, he told himself all right then, waited for Al Basha to order his release. However, Al Basha didn’t return for another ten days, and when he returned, he was not alone. He came back with the same doctor: “Doctor, get to work.”

This time, Nabeel tried to run away, but he was tied down, and it was futile. After many hours, he awoke from the anesthesia. He hallucinated, and then he cried from the pain he felt in his side. His left kidney was gone, and now he had to live the rest of his life with one kidney, after being left alone in that filthy warehouse.

Until this moment, the story had not touched the interpreter, and he hadn’t ’t stopped translating into German. He translated the speech, and then he chuckled to himself, “Hah, he’s lying through his teeth.” The employees in the immigration office usually believed that the immigrant was a liar until he proved otherwise. But Nabeel Fawzi’s story didn’t end there. He crawled out of the warehouse, determined to finish the journey at any cost. He crawled until he reached the main road. He flung himself onto the asphalt, hoping for rescue. Hours passed, and the street remained empty. The sun set, and night fell. The stitches loosened, the pain worsened, and he fainted. In the morning, he woke to find himself in the hospital. Someone had found him in the night and brought him there. When he regained consciousness, he filed a complaint with the police, and they chalked it up to “an unidentified perpetrator.” This unidentified perpetrator was the criminal with the biggest file in the police department. The investigators’ laziness made “an unidentified perpetrator” the most accused in the world.

At that moment, Nabeel believed that there was no place for him in a country that had stolen his eye and one of his kidneys, and that had brushed aside his rights. So, he sold all his belongings in order to cross the borders toward Europe. He headed for Turkey with a fake passport, and from there, he hoped to cross the sea towards Greece. But his bad luck continued, as a disagreement arose between him and the crooked smuggler, causing him to hold a grudge against Nabeel. When the journey began, the smuggler threw him from the boat, forcing him to swim back to the Turkish beach. The border patrol caught him there, returned him to prison, and then tossed him over the border, where he fell into the hands of Iraqi intelligence. He slept in one of the dark prisons for a year and a half, and there, they tried to break him. The worst of the torture was the many humiliating assaults.

He looked down as he explained how the investigator had ordered the guards to take off his clothes and rape him, and how the order was repeated dozens of times until he gave in and lifted his ass. When they brought him blindfolded from the cell to the interrogation room, the investigator would approach him to whisper in his ear: “Plead guilty, or I’ll ruin you.” He had no guilt to plead, and thus he was tortured for nights. The evenings’ stars were crooked guards. They mocked him, and after they hit him, they spit in his face and yelled: “Traitor…traitor…traitor…”

After every chapter of his story, Nabeel forlornly asked himself, “Who did I betray?” This upset the interpreter, who stopped translating and began to cry. So, the immigration agent ordered a short break. The interpreter joined Nabeel on the balcony and offered him a cigarette and a cup of coffee. He assured him that the decision would be in his favor, that Nabeel would obtain asylum in Germany.

“How did he get to Germany, then?” the immigration agent asked, as the interrogation began again. Nabeel’s response was brief: “The reed horse!” The immigration agent repeated his question: “How did you get to Germany?” He responded firmly, “I told you all: the reed horse.” The interpreter translated the answer literally and exchanged puzzled glances with the immigration agent. The interpreter then asked him to explain his answer, so Nabeel straightened in his seat and said:

“When I got out of prison, I returned to the village in secret. I bought reed and rope, and I secretly took over a space behind the house.  On a piece of paper, I drew a tall horse with two great wings, and then I began to execute the plan. After three days of continuous work, the reed horse was complete and stood before me. The next day, I set a raven trap, and, in one night, I caught sixty-six black ravens. I slaughtered them and dyed my horse with their blood. I then placed the bone of a hoopoe attached to a piece of leather in its mouth and slipped a chili pepper into its rear. I mounted him, clutching the reins. I whispered in his ear, and he flew.

The interpreter listened to the story in amazement, while the immigration agent busied himself typing it up. They both asked him to continue, so he raised and raised his hand haughtily and added, “Yes, yes, there is no reason for such surprise, respected detective, for I am a son of civilization. Bulls fly there, so why not a beautiful horse?! I rose on this reed horse high in the sky, until Iraq was the size of a palm tree! Even though I had been crushed like an ant, when that land left my sight, I was devastated and wept. I wiped away my tears and steered toward the West. I soared on my great horse for five full days until I saw Germany in three colors: black, red, and yellow. I said to the horse, let’s land, my friend, since one day I’d heard my father say that, in this land, a female saint drinks beer and burps chivalry. So, I lowered the reed horse and he burned.”

The immigration agent ended the session and ordered that the young man Nabeel Fawzi be transferred to a psychiatric hospital. There, he would sleep under the care of merciful angels who would scrub his mind of all that had happened to him. ِِIn the elevator on the way to the ground floor, the translator approached Nabeel and asked him about the words he’d whispered in the ear of the reed horse.

“Fly,” Nabeel said. “Or I’ll ruin you.”

Azher Jirjees is an Iraqi writer and novelist, born in Baghdad in 1973. From 2003, he worked as a journalist in Iraq and published a number of articles and stories in local and Arab newspapers and periodicals. In 2005, he wrote a satirical book about terrorist militias entitled The Earthly Hell, which resulted in an assassination attempt against him and he was forced to flee the country. He fled to Syria, then Morocco and finally to Norway, where he now lives permanently. His other works include two short story collections, Fouq bilad al-Sawad (Above the Country of Blackness, 2015) and Saani‘ al-Halwa (The Sweetmaker, 2017), and two novels. His first novel, At Rest in the Cherry Orchard (al-Nawm fī Haql al-Karaz, 2019), was longlisted for the 2020 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, and it is now available in Jonathan Wright’s English translation from Banipal Books. His second novel Hajar al-Sa‘ada (The Stone of Happiness) was shortlisted for the same prize in 2023, and his Wadi al-farashat (Valley of the Butterflies) was shortlisted in 2025. He works as a freelance translator between Arabic and Norwegian.

Sabine Jimenez-Williams is a rising senior at Brown University studying Comparative Literature and Middle East Studies. She has studied Arabic for five years in Jordan, Morocco, and at Brown.