The Palm House

Tarek Eltayeb, Kareem James Abu-Zeid

Description

The new novel from the Sudanese author of Cities without Palms
After coming to Vienna from Sudan to win a better life for himself, Hamza struggles to escape from the margins of society and the stigma of the immigrant. Following several years of hardship, his fortunes begin to change when he meets Sandra, a young Austrian woman, who shows him the Palm House. In this famous Viennese greenhouse, the frost of Hamza's heart begins to thaw, and he slowly opens himself to Sandra, revealing his bitter yet beautiful past in Sudan and beyond. This masterful novel draws on the 1001 Nights as well as Sudanese folk traditions, and demonstrates the remarkable power of storytelling to overcome even the most dire circumstances. Critically acclaimed across the Arab world, this novel can be read on its own, or as a sequel to Eltayeb's first novel, Cities without Palms (AUC Press, 2009).

Sujets

• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: The American University in Cairo Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781617971617
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 5 Mo

Extrait

First published in 2012 by
The American University in Cairo Press
113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt
420 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018
www.aucpress.com
Copyright © 2006 by Tarek Eltayeb
First published in Arabic in 2006 by Al-Hadara Publishing as Bayt al-nakhil
Protected under the Berne Convention
English translation copyright © 2012 by Kareem James Abu-Zeid
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Dar el Kutub No. 24414/11
eISBN: 978 161 797 161 7
Dar el Kutub Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Eltayeb, Tarek
The Palm House / Tarek Eltayeb; translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid.—Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2012 p. cm.
eISBN: 978 161 797 161 7
1. English fiction I. Title
892.73
1 2 3 4 5 6 16 15 14 13 12
Designed by Adam el-Sehemy
Printed in Egypt
For Ursula, my Palm House in Vienna
1
P oor cities are more merciful to the poor and the destitute than wealthy ones. In poor cities, everyone is equally impoverished, and there are no contrasts to show the destitute just how far down life’s ladder they actually are. Wealthy cities, however, are excessive in their cruelty, for they allow the rich to flaunt the luxuries that others cannot afford. In these cities, you often hear sentences that begin with the words “we’ve got” or “you’ve got.” People like me, people who have so little warmth and so little joy in their lives, feel this cruelty, this great gap, even more intensely.
Vienna seems to be the cruelest city in the world, at least to me. The loneliness here is a cold death to the soul, and the bitter cold is a slow death to the body. I can feel a crack in my body and my mind: it runs through my days and nights, my memory, and no measure of oblivion can set it right.
I am here now in this lovely old city, this city that brutally kills the likes of me, the displaced, the marginalized. I never ask myself those naive questions any more, the ones so often repeated by the destitute: Why am I here? What am I doing in this city? Why don’t I go back? I’ve found myself asking the following instead: Is there a way out of this mess? Is there any way to cut my losses and leave the game? How can I survive this?
I am here now. I am here in Vienna.
It’s Saturday night. I’m up late reading a book on German grammar. I cannot sleep, despite the many light blankets and tattered covers on my bed, which somehow resembles a pharaoh’s sarcophagus. This long bare room of mine with its high walls and layers upon layers of wallpaper has always reminded me of an abandoned temple. I’ve added one last layer on top of all the others, something to lend a bit of warmth to the room and help ease my mind.
I live on the top floor of an old building that was saved from the destruction of the Second World War, but not from that of time. Its windows were never repaired, not a single pane. This city’s residents do not like the upper floors of these old buildings for several reasons, the most obvious of which are the lack of elevators, the narrowness of their spiral staircases, their dark entryways, and the dank and bitter cold that prevails in them. This is where the unemployed and the impoverished make their homes, those who live off welfare or meager wages. Foreigners and poorer Austrians are the only ones living here—another reason most well-to-do Austrians prefer to keep away.
No one piece of furniture in my apartment resembles another. It’s like I’m living in a flea market, or a junkyard. There’s an old brown wardrobe with one door that refuses to open and another that refuses to close. There’s a plastic chair that belongs in a cheap restaurant, and a metal chair that belongs in a hospital. There are two sofas: one with stripes like a zebra, and the other made of bright red leather, as if it were from a brothel. The uneven white plywood table from Ikea is riddled with cracks and cigarette burns, like a relic from a torture chamber, and the cheap linoleum floor covering has a deep burnt red color to it. I won’t talk about the kitchen or the cramped bedroom with the creaky bed. The apartment could almost pass for a nineteenth-century museum, were it not for the wallpaper I added, which takes me to a more pleasant place, a place I love.
It’s the end of December, and the weather is as cold as can be. Last night, the heating oil I bought with my last shillings ran out. The apartment retained some warmth for most of Saturday, but by evening the temperature had dropped to just seven degrees. I cannot fall asleep. It’s as if I’m lying outside, my fingers and toes frozen to the sidewalk. There’s a crack in the bedroom window that’s wrecking me. Another crack, this one in the peephole of the apartment’s front door, has created a draft. I’ve tried to cover up the first crack with cardboard, but the wind prevails, and the cardboard tears apart and flaps against the window like a trapped bird. The cold wind and the irritating flapping ruin my night. I curse Frau Olga, the owner of the apartment. I wish she’d suffer through just one night in this awful museum of hers, this museum of ghosts.
After her husband’s death, Frau Olga began collecting shabby furniture—either for free or at very low prices—to fix up and then resell. She soon discovered that she could afford to buy some old apartments in run-down buildings and take advantage of bank loans that were being given out for repairs and renovations. She filled the apartments with old furniture and then rented them out to foreigners, immigrants, and other low-income people such as myself.
Frau Olga always comes by on the first day of every month to collect the rent without delay. It doesn’t matter to her if it’s a Saturday or a Sunday or even a national holiday: she still always comes running up the five flights of stairs so quickly that she can hardly breathe. She feigns politeness and good humor until she has the rent from me, then escapes as lightly as a bird. I know she’s worried about me complaining, and afraid that I might explode one day. I also know she’s making a lot of money from all the apartments she owns, and that it wouldn’t cost her much to repair these ruins. But she banks on my patience and my lack of alternatives. Each time she comes by, she promises to make all the necessary repairs. She even gets on the phone—though I’m not sure who she actually calls—to try to reassure me. But nothing is ever repaired, nothing at all. Every time I see her, I repeat my requests; and every time, she repeats her promises; to the point that these have become stock phrases to us, our own ritual way of saying hello and saying goodbye.
For someone who has lived his whole life in the places where the sun is relentless, where you can still feel its presence even at night, this cold is the cruelest of tortures and the heaviest of burdens. My one comfort is Hakima, who is breathing calmly in my arms, and whose warmth makes up for this great lack. She always stretches herself out when she sleeps, resting her head beneath my chin and her body on my chest.
I wake up early. That is to say: I’ve been awake all night. Hakima stretches her body, and I follow her lead. She yawns and seems to smile, so I do the same. I search for my slippers with the soles of my feet, and as they touch the ground the cold linoleum devours what’s left of my warmth. I get out of bed and head toward the communal bathroom outside in the hallway. Its upper glass window is broken, of course. As usual, the bathroom door is off-kilter, and I have to yank it upward to open it. It’s stiff from the cold, and grates and scrapes reluctantly against the ground, like a goat being dragged to the slaughter. I wipe off the plastic seat with some toilet paper and sit down. It feels like I’m sitting on a block of ice. Even the water in the toilet bowl is half frozen. My muscles are twitching from the cold. I hurry up and finish as quickly as possible, then head back to my apartment to wash my hands and face with freezing water. As usual, the water heater isn’t working: it splutters and sounds like it’s working, but the water passes through it unchanged. I make a cup of tea with milk, not realizing that the milk’s gone bad. I pour it out in the sink and make another one, drinking it plain this time. For a few moments, I can almost feel my body again. The tea courses through me, warming my lips, my mouth, my throat, and finally my stomach and even my hands. It’s an incredible feeling.
Last night’s battle with the wind has made me hungry. There’s a last can of sardines in the refrigerator, and a solitary egg. I heat up some oil in a pan to fry the egg, but as I crack it I realize that it too has gone bad: its odor fills the air, throwing my stomach into turmoil. I rush out of the apartment with it, opening the door with my elbow and hoping to throw it into the toilet. But the bathroom door won’t budge, and the egg begins to seep through my fingers and onto the ground in long sticky strands. I try to hurry, but the egg falls onto the ground with a smack, and the stench rises up, like that of a sick dog emptying its bowels. Before I can make it back to my apartment to find something to wipe up this disgusting mess with, I run into my neighbor, Herr Novak, who is over seventy years old, on his way to our communal