By Emile Habiby
Translation by Invisible Dragoman.
5.
The Blue Bead and Jubineh’s Return
On Mondays this winter, we are publishing installments of Emile Habiby’s The Six-Day Sextet, which is available in an open-access, non-commercial translation by Invisible Dragoman. You can find part one, part two, part three, and part four in our fiction section.
O Dweller of heavens Look down from on high
Keep your eye on us And on our lands
Bring our brothers and sisters and families back to us
We have houses and roofs And rooms upon rooms on high
Whose doors are open To the sun and Freedom
O Dweller above Look down from on high
Let doves fly To span the days
Give us rest In the hands of peace
—a song sung by Fairuz
One evening the young men returned from their usual outing. Darkness was falling as our car came upon the bonfires of our Galilean village. The smell of charcoal fires filled the air. Our guest cried out, “We’re here.” I honked the horn at these young men to warn them, not that they needed to be warned. In reality, I was honking to announce the arrival of our guest.
Here she is, returning to her village and to her elderly, disabled mother after an absence of more than twenty years. She had gone off with her husband and children to Lebanon. Now here she is returning, twenty years later, by way of the bridge over the holy Jordan River, carrying a two-week permit to visit her mother’s house.
She asks, “Is the spring still there?”
“It is still there—at the other end of the village. But it’s dried up!”
She laughed shyly, in a way you could hear but not see. “Jubineh has returned!”
Now it was my turn to laugh, but I could not do it.
Do you know the “Tale of Jubineh”? Or has it been buried in the ruins of al-Damun and Iqrit? It’s the story of a barren woman who used to make cheese in the village. She would pray to God, asking Him, the Dweller of heavens, to give her a daughter with a face as fair and round as the cheese in her hands. He did give her the likes of a girl who could say to the moon, “Sit down and let me take your place.”
Hugo named his heroine Esmeralda. But the village woman named hers Jubineh. She brought her up, pampering her, dressing her in embroidered silk, and tying a blue bead around her wrist. When Jubineh walked, her thick ankle bracelets rang like a sweet song, alerting the calves to her approach so that they could make way for her.
Then, to make a long story short, she, like Esmeralda, was kidnapped by gypsies. Her mother searched and searched for her, all the while lamenting her loss, until, finally, she collapsed and the light went out of her eyes. As for Jubineh, she was passed from one master to another until she wound up tending geese in the fields of a prince in a far away town. Seven seas and seven years now separated her from her mother and father.
As she drove the geese in front of her, she would sing in a sad voice,
O birds that fly
In the mountains high
Tell Mama and Papa
That Dear Jubineh
Now tends geese
And walks on thorns
In the mountains high
And weeps and weeps
Now, without going into too much detail, one day, the young prince heard her singing and was smitten by it. The next day, he returned there and fell head over heals in his heart. For seven days, he kept going back there, deeply in love and unable to sleep. After for seven long nights, he told his mother about it at which point Jubineh moved—as wife and princess—from field to palace.
A year passed. Princess Jubineh gave birth to a son, a youth as strong as a young bull. Another year went by and one day Princess Jubineh told her husband, “The country misses its people.”
He set her on a howdah full of perfumes, silks and gifts. When they got to the village, and the village’s spring, her child became thirsty. She watched as the women of the village argued with one another around the spring. She asked for water for her thirsty son.
One of the women answered, “There is no water in the spring. The spring went dry the the day Jubineh disappeared!”
Jubineh replied, “Go back to it and you shall find water in the spring.”
And so it was.
Now liberated, water began to gush from the depths of the broken-hearted land.
One of the women whispered to her sister, “Jubineh has returned!”
The news spread. Girls and boys ran through the village shouting, “Jubineh has returned!”
One boy rushed to Jubineh’s mother who was blind and invalid, as if she were under attack on all sides, which she was.
“Grandmother, Grandmother,” the boy shouted so she would hear him. Then gasping, eager to convince her, he said, “Jubineh’s back!”
But she did not believe him.
Disappointed, the boy returned to Jubineh’s howdah. Jubineh gave him the blue bead that she wore on her small wrist and said, “Tell Jubineh’s mother that this is from her.”
The boy placed it in the mother’s hands. She put it to her nose, inhaled and then wiped her eyes as tears gushed forth. The light had returned to them.
At last, they were reunited.
*
I said to our guest: “Our mechanical howdah is now entering the village. Will water gush forth from the spring?”
Our guest gave a smile you could neither hear nor see. As we were entering the alleys of the village, I asked her to guide me to her mother’s house, if she could still remember the way. She did.
I drove up a narrow alley as she continued to guide our way. All of a sudden she shocked me when she said, “Beware of the hole on your left at the next alley.”
The hole was there, in the exact place where Jubineh thought it would be.
Noticing my surprise, Jubineh said, “No, not everything has remained the same. We’re old now and so are the years gone by, and the valley and the hills are filled with children who I do not know and who don’t know me. But I bet they know that my disabled mother has a girl who lives abroad.”
This was also true. We arrived in front of a shop under which was her mother’s house. A young man was closing up the shop and noticed the car of strangers delivering an unfamiliar woman wearing modern, city clothes, at such a late hour. He rushed towards us, and without me saying a word of who this woman was, he started to turn and call out to the neighbors: “Her daughter is back! Her daughter has returned!”
The women neighbors ran out to receive her. I saw the crippled old woman at the bottom of the stairs stand up on her own two feet. She was trying to hear, trying to see, and trying to understand. They were saying, “This is your mother.” It was pitch dark and men were shouting to their wives to bring out the gas lamps.
The old woman standing on her feet at the bottom of the stairs was smiling in a way I have never seen in my life. It was like the traces of a wave on a sandy beach when the tide goes out. Through the clamor, joyful trills and wedding cries could be heard, bringing everything to a halt, silencing every other sound.
The old woman was the one singing these joyful cries. We could not understand anything of the verses she sang. Perhaps the only part of her singing we heard was the rustling of her lips. But I saw on her lips the veil of the bride drawing back.
At last, they were reunited.
*
As we were helping the old mother get back into bed, she pushed us aside and sprang as a lioness towards an old wooden box. She opened the cover and rifled through its contents, and then brought out old clothes that belonged to a seven- or eight-year-old girl.
Her voice was hoarse as she whispered, “These are your clothes. I saved them for your daughter. Why didn’t you bring her with you?” Then she took out a blue bead on a gold necklace and said, “Your father, God rest his soul, always said if you’d held onto this bead, what happened would not have happened. Put it on and never take it off.”
Our guest has come back to her mother. When I said goodbye to her, she told me with some embarrassment, “The new Jubineh—she’s not the one who kept her blue bead.”
I replied, “The water spring is on the other side of the village. It’s on my way and I’ll be passing by it. Maybe water is gushing out of it now?”
When I went by the water spring, I saluted. No one saw me do it. What’s wrong if I salute the spring? As for stopping at the spring, and as for seeing whether life has returned to it or not, I decided to postpone those things for another day.
Part one: Masoud’s Cousin Makes Him Happy
Part two: At Last, the Almond Trees Blossom
An uncopyrighted translation of Emile Habiby’s Sudasiyyat al-ayyam al-sitta, originally published in Al-Jadid (Issues 4-9), 1968. This is an open-access, non-commercial translation by Invisible Dragoman.
Translators’ note:
This translation of Emile Habiby’s The Six-Day Sextet came about in the following way. In a 2017 seminar on Arabic novels, I had the pleasure of teaching a small group of talented students: Kevin Chao, Fouad Saleh, Molly Simio, Andrew Slater, and Uma Mencia Uranga. As a collective final project, each student chose one chapter from this work to translate. I took one for myself. We edited each other’s work for accuracy and style and I edited them again for continuity.
After securing translation rights from Habiby’s estate, we submitted this manuscript to various publishers. Initially, there was some interest but after months of conversation, nothing came of it.
Covid arrived and years passed. As our translation of this remarkable text gathered digital dust on a hard-drive, we learned that there were disputes concerning Habiby’s estate and that the permission we’d been granted was itself likely disputed.
As we faced the likelihood that our work would never be published, we decided to share it in a non-commercial form. Given the author’s political commitments, we imagine that he might approve of our decision, but God knows best.
The striking images, composed by Habiby’s artist friend, Abed Abdi, first appeared in the first Haifa edition: Sudasiyyat al-ayyam al-sitta wa-qisas ukhra Haifa: Matba‘at al-Ittihad al-Ta‘awuniyya, 1970). They are copyrighted and used with the artist’s permission.
This translation is open access. Please feel free to read, store, and distribute for your personal, non-commercial use.