By Emile Habiby
Translation by Invisible Dragoman.
6.
Love in My Heart
This is the sixth and final installment of Emile Habiby’s The Six-Day Sextet, which has been made available in an open-access, non-commercial translation by Invisible Dragoman. You can find part one, part two, part three, part four, and part five in our fiction section.
What is this distress I am in?
Does relief follow close behind?
Will the frightened be sheltered, and the sufferer relieved?
Will the distant stranger return to his people?
— a song never sung by Fairuz
Fairuz may never have sung the words to this song, but she has sung its soul. The same with this story you find in your hands. I did not author it. But I did rewrite it once, and again, and then once again, until I masked the identities of the people it happened to so as not to upset them, even if it upset me. I managed to hide their profiles from their jailers, so as to not provoke them, even though this put me out.
If not for my fear that this story would betray me the rest of my days, I would have kept it folded away in notebooks until the situation changed. I would have let it go out into the world without adding the mascara of imagination to perfectly kohl-lined eyelids.
If not for my fear, also, that our situation will continue to stagnate as it is.
How difficult it is for fiction to be born in a story that lives. A burning pain sears in the breast of the writer for nine months—for nine years, for an entire lifetime—until, convulsed by labor pains, he gives birth to a story. If it breathes terrestrial air it may live. But if it comes to us from another planet—where they breathe another kind of air—it will choke, stillborn.
What is even more difficult than this is to give birth to truth in a story wrapped in a muffler to protect it from the sting of the cold.
Like the flash of lightning, you cannot hold it to your chest for a month. You cannot hold it even for a single moment.
Either it tears at the veil of darkness before you and you see what is in front of you and shout: It’s there, right in front of my eyes! Or it tears at your chest, and groaning with agony, you can see nothing anymore.
*
When I was in Leningrad this past summer, a flash of lightning split the clear sky.
The day was clear, the breaking of dawn glaring and sharp. Yet clouds filled our eyes as we visited spacious grounds there, which are teeming with roses and poppy anemones, and which give off the fragrance of basil and carnations and forget-me-nots. The grounds contain the graves of over six hundred thousand from the people of Leningrad, most of whom died of starvation during the siege that took place during the Second World War. It lasted nine hundred days, from September 1941 to February 1944.
Rising up before us in the heart of the grounds, a kilometer from where we entered, stood a dark granite statue of a giant, half-cloaked woman. Her arms were flung wide open in despair, a statue commemorating the agonies of the homeland. We walked among floral mass graves, great flower beds planted with basil, each grave holding thousands of victims. Month after month. Year after year. Martial strands played, filling the void in the sky and in our hearts.
The soul of this melancholic dirge brought thousands of people to this place, moving slowly like pilgrims. Men and women and children, teens with the elderly, soldiers and infants, all coming to lay bouquets of flowers on these bouquets of graves. They stand over these flower beds, watering them with tears. We noticed an old woman holding the hand of a little girl. The girl was rushing ahead, dragging her shuffling grandmother along with her. She carried a bouquet of red lilies and would stop at a section of graves, set down a lily, then drag her grandmother off to another where she would lay another. The grandmother quickened her shuffle as she followed behind. With the back of her fist, the old woman wiped a tear from one eye and a tear from the other. Perhaps one of these red lilies will find a buttonhole in the jacket she dressed her husband in when she laid him to rest twenty-five years ago. Perhaps his bright smile gleams at her bright, gleaming tears?
We put on dark sunglasses fearing that the Leningraders might notice that we’d trespassed on something that was not ours. Cigarettes burned between our fingers. We stubbed them out and jammed the butts in our pockets. When the heart burns with fire, a fire in the pocket is nothing.
We approached The Homeland’s Agonies and they translated for us the lines of poetry engraved at the base:
Here lie thousands gathered together…
Men and women, soldiers and infants…
Immortalized in granite…
We want you to know…
That we will never forget any one of them…
Ever
The granite is dead, lifeless. There is no life in this description either.
I don’t know if you can take a photograph of lightning. Even if you can, you would not be able to capture its flash. Have you ever noticed when lightning flashes in front of your eyes, what you notice is not the lightning, but all the things that had been concealed in the darkness?
But that day we did see a photograph of lightning. Off to one side of the burial grounds, to the right of the entrance, stood a modest building that housed a collection of objects and possessions that once belonged to the victims, each one speaking about its owner and how he suffered.
We entered the building. There, staring into our eyes was a child in rags, withered and gaunt like a fig tree forgotten in one of the many stolen fields of our country. There he stood in a large photograph—five or six years old, in the middle of a public street, among ruins and rubble, smoke and death. His eyes were dull with shock. What is this? Why is this? Where should I go?
His eyes were the only thing about him that was open. Everything else—his mouth and skinny fists—was closed shut.
Under his mother’s care, this box of a boy would almost open up, knowing that if he called out for her she would caress his pains away with a tender hand.
Then this thing called war comes along, though the boy does not know its name. So he closes his mouth and stops calling for his mother. And she, now cruel, refuses to hear and refuses to answer. And in his chest sits a question, locked away there by his closed mouth: Why don’t you answer, Mama?
Sobbing, my wife rushed out of the building.
I followed her. “What is this?”
She said, “Doesn’t he look like our son?”
No, they do not look like anyone else. No one else has had to endure what they endured. What they still endure. What we still ask them to endure.
But our companions from Leningrad called us back. They said that we shouldn’t go without seeing the journal.
What journal?
We went back into the museum and saw the journal, which sits there conserved under a glass display. The notebook belonged to a girl from Leningrad who was seven years old when she began writing in it during the siege of Leningrad. The name of this child is Tanya Savicheva. On a battered school notebook she wrote her journal entries.
She wrote this?
You can imagine what a seven-year-old might jot down with a pen. One page might be filled with only three or four words, whose crooked letters appear face down.
They translated for us what was in these pages, but I did not dare to write it down. It was an awe-inspiring place that put a tremble in my hands. The entries of the journal went on and one, page by page, like this:
Grandma died today.
In the morning my little brother couldn’t wake up.
Today they took my friend away on a sled.
Today I found out that our neighbor has died.
Today they took my mother away while she was still sleeping. She hasn’t come back.
Today, I am the only one who remains.
They discovered this journal among the ruins with its author. They say that they also found the little girl, Tanya. They tried to save her from the effects of starvation, but she didn’t survive for very long after that.
I had completely lost my bearings until I heard myself telling them, “I am going to write about what I have witnessed here.”
*
But that night, regret gnawed at me and kept me from sleeping. I am going to write about what I have witnessed? My God—would that do any good? This pen of mine has been sharpened on the flint of newspaper and dulled by the prison house of everyday life. How could it bring back the light that had been extinguished from those thunderstruck eyes in the photograph? How could it reignite the glimmering flash in those damning lines of that journal?
*
Then I happened upon the journal-like letters from an eighteen-year-old girl from Jerusalem held at Ramleh Prison. She’d somehow managed to send them to her mother when no one was looking.
Somehow, when no one was looking, she’d managed to write these on cigarette papers. Prisoners are allowed to receive four cigarettes a day. I can’t give you any other details about that, so don’t ask me for any.
Here, imagination gets mixed with reality so you can’t tell truth from fiction. It’s like what happens to us sometime later in life, when we stop being able to distinguish what we did when we were young from what we dreamed of doing.
Picture the incident of the girls from Jerusalem—the three girls who were arrested either for smuggling weapons, or on charges of covering up weapons smuggling. Picture the uproar in the press over their arrest and torture. Picture what was published about how they were crammed into cells with disreputable women, how they were subjected to insults and abuse, how burning cigarettes were stubbed out on their tender skin.
I know something about the conditions of prisons. I can imagine them. I know how they yearn for freedom and human dignity. I know how they hunger for peace and friends and food and sunlight and compassion. I know how they worry about how their family is worrying about them.
All of that is what gave me the idea about these letters and journals and notebooks.
Let us give the author of these letters the name Fairuz. Let us also change the names of the family members mentioned in the letters.
Why did we choose this name for her? Why not Tanya? Tanya was much younger and we believe that this girl will go on to live a long life. And also because Tanya, after all she went through, was more like a grownup than a girl.
We choose the name Fairuz for her because the name has an effect on us. Its calm vowels and lulling consonants simulate the effect of a mother steadily, steadily stroking a child’s aching head, caressing the child gently, gently, until the headache fades away.
I’m not going to show everything these letters contain. Instead, I’ll choose what I like from them—the things that stir my heart, and that might stir yours—until God lets bygones be bygones.
*
First Letter
Dear Mama,
To you and the family, my best wishes and dearest prayers. We shall meet again sometime, well and happy, relieved and renewed. Please, dear Mother, take care of your health and calm your nerves. We are adults now and I must shoulder my own problems by myself.
May God repay the hardship you have suffered on my behalf with happiness and good fortune. You have endured so so much for my sake. It is now time for me to take responsibility for my own joys and misfortunes.
I swear to you, Mother, that there is no reason for you to be anxious and that you can pray for us without worry.
Don’t worry about me. Don’t worry about my job—it’s secure. Please write to Hassan often. [E. Habibi: This is her fiancé. He is also a prisoner.]
And you—my dear Sister, write to Hassan and your husband. [E. Habibi: Her sister’s husband is also in prison.]
I am currently in a decent cell with the other Arab girls. We have fun together. Of course, you don’t know what it’s like, but don’t worry. Please send the following items with someone or with the attorney:
- Arabic and English magazines. You’ll find some under the table next to my bed.
- Hairbrush, plastic slippers, Nablus Soap, and toothpaste.
- Slips, blouses, a few good skirts. We must look nice for the Jews.
- Olive oil (in a small can, because glass is prohibited). Don’t worry, the officials here are not bad people.
- A small watermelon + two kilos of lemon + some of the good apples + bananas and peaches + red and white grapes + tomatoes and cucumbers + pickles from a clean restaurant + a bag of olives.
- A chicken or two with onions + kebab, how my sister makes it. I’ve been missing that a lot. A girl here wants you to send us a rooster!
Please, don’t forget anything. They let all these things through. And don’t think from this that we are going hungry. Don’t worry. We pass the time by singing, telling jokes and stories.
I write poetry often.
Another friend talks about how lovely the breeze is here. The breezes of Ramleh Prison are different from those in Natanya. Don’t worry. By the way, I taught all the Arab girls here how to pray. We pray for the lawyer a lot—he’s working very hard on our behalf.
Please send me Hassan’s letters so I can read them. We recite from the Quran and pray a lot here. I often pray for Father’s soul. Likewise, I pray for all of you.
I’d like to dedicate for you the song “As Long as I Have My Hopes, Love is in My Heart”
Until very soon,
Your daughter
*
Second Letter
Dear Mama,
Thank God you are in good health. I was very happy to hear from the lawyer that you would be visiting next week, bringing the wonderful foods that I requested. This means you received my letter and that this letter will also get there. God bless good people! My friend tells me that there are angels even in Hell. I want to tell you about this new friend, Mama.
She’s not from where we’re from. She’s from Haifa—an Arab from Israel. She’s been detained since the June war. Also without trial. The charge is “communicating with the enemy.” This week they transferred her to our cell. We took her in as if we had known each other since childhood. She’s from the Sari family, from Haifa. They used to live in Wadi al-Saleeb—where your family is from, Mama! She’s sure that her mom remembers your family.
She’s a poet like me—she also knows how to tell a joke. She sings with us, too. I love Abd al-Wahhab. But she loves Fairuz most of all, especially the song, “We’re Coming Back.”
We sit with her, gathered around her and are amazed at her ideas. One time I asked her, “Why do you like the song ‘We’re Coming Back’ so much? You weren’t displaced. You don’t have to return. You stayed in your homeland!”
“Homeland?!” She answered. “I feel like a refugee in a foreign country. You dream of going back—and build your life on this dream. But me—where can I return?”
This friend from Haifa adores al-Mutanabbi and his poetry—just like you. When she talks about her lost paradise, and the homeland where she lives, but whose existence she does not feel, she repeats lines from Al-Mutanabbi’s poetry. She taught them to us and we sing them to the melodies of Umm Kulthum:
The songs of the people are the best of the songs
As good as the old Springtide.
Playgrounds of Paradise, they are
And Solomon walking as guide
Do you know it?
This friend from Haifa says the homeland feels real only at night, before going to sleep, when she is sitting at her mother’s side, and her mother is telling her about the old days, back when her six brothers still lived at home and they used to sleep on the floor, laughing and bickering and in the morning their mother would pack their lunches. One would go off to work, another to school. Now, her siblings are scattered across the world—one is in Kuwait, another in Saudi Arabia, one’s in Abu Dhabi, another in Beirut, and one is in the grave.
She likes to recite lines of from an old poet about being separated from her brothers. Here, she’s going to write them in this letter in her own hand:
The seventh of seven brothers, I remained
If anything can be said to last, O Duraim!
They took my heart when they quit me
After such darkness life is misery.
Doesn’t she seem even more eloquent than you! She beats everyone when we have poetry contests. Sometimes I freeze up and make up a line that fits—but then she says, “Broken meter. But we’ll let it go, since your mother is from Haifa.”
We once asked her, “Since you live here in this country, and since you know more than we do, how do you see the future?”
She replied, painfully, “Whenever I start to think about the future, it’s the past that shows itself to me. What can I tell you? The future I dream of is the past. Is that even possible?”
Mama: now I understand why you refused to visit Haifa. You were afraid of this feeling, weren’t you?
We had no idea about how our brethren felt, those who stayed behind. We had no idea of their misery. Was their misery greater than ours?
By the way, if you receive this letter before you visit us, please don’t fry the chicken, but roast it. This is the special request of our poet from Haifa. She says that when she is with us, even in this cell, she feels that she is in her homeland.
And Mama, don’t forget the chocolate, the Arab stuffed biscuits, and candy from Nablus in a nice plastic bag.
And please send us sesame cakes. Make it six of them. And put them in a plastic bag so they don’t get stale.
Please make sure that the fruit is not too ripe. It will last longer that way, especially the tomatoes. Most of the food here is stale. But don’t worry.
Ask Lamia to make me sweets with fenugreek. Send her kisses from me and my friend from Haifa.
Please send ten piasters’ worth of falafel from Abdo’s + pickles + black pepper. Send assorted nuts, including chickpeas. A kilo of pistachio baklava is also much needed. We miss food a lot. And sweets. But don’t be sad.
Let my uncle and my aunt know about visiting Hassan.
Say hello to everyone for me.
Did I dedicate a song to you in the previous letter? I’d like to dedicate the same song to you again, if that’s okay: “As long as I have my hopes, love is in my heart.”
This is what I’m trying to plant in the heart of my friend from Haifa.
Until very soon,
Your daughter
*
Third Letter
Dear Mama,
……..
……..
But you have already read this letter, just as I read it, in the press. They published it during the trial of the Jewish policewoman who was fired, then sentenced to a year of probation, when they discovered she was smuggling Fairuz’s letters to her mother. So angels really do exist—even in Hell.
However, I am sure that what they published is full of distortions. Everything that appeared in the press as part of this letter was presented—falsely—as evidence of a “conspiracy with the Haifa girl to organize a secret cell inside Israel.” But I am certain that these letters are nothing more than the record of an innocent friendship between two girls from one people, reunited after a long separation, under one roof—the roof of a jail cell.
Part one: Masoud’s Cousin Makes Him Happy
Part two: At Last, the Almond Trees Blossom
Part five: The Blue Bead and Jubineh’s Return
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.