AN ANTHOLOGY OF
MOROCCAN NEW SHORT STORY, VOLUME 1
Books &
Apples
-Short
Story-
Written by :Khadija El Younoussi
Translated
by Mohamed Saïd Raïhani
“Dreams?
They are mirrors which nothing but poetry and the remaining creative arts can
be compared to. They reflect the colour and rhetoric of the image more
sensitively than sheets of aluminium or mercury-painted glass or any
supersonic-ray detection apparatus can do. Transparent dreams may even detect
uneasiness, ideas, hallucinations, desires… and dreams themselves.”
Khadija El Younoussi
Moroccan
shortstory writer
Born in
In print:
"Sperm-Flies"
(Short Stories)
These accumulated books tantalize me, empty me and charge me up with
alphabetical astonishment. They take my senses away from me, fill them with new
forces before restoring them to me, making of me an amalgam of senses ready to
explode. Their long-tentacled titles stretch out towards me, taking away my
appetite to sharpen it, setting aflame my desire to devour them.
I take a novel from the shelf. I turn its pages over and over. I glance at
its price on the back cover. I count my small monthly thing that I spend on
sport-club expenses, light clothes for the coming summer, a pair of
sun-glasses, a rich-in-protection
vitamin and strawberry-flavoured lipstick, a skin-refreshing cream, taxi
and bus expenses, mobile-phone recharging cards and fat-free chocolate. Then,
what remains hardly enables me to get two cultural periodicals that I am very
much keen on reading, a newly-published collection of short stories and a copy
of Top Santé magazine.
I put the novel back in its place, on the shelf.
I make two steps forward to take another novel. Before opening it, I
notice a brown young man getting closer to ask me whether I work in this bookshop
for he is in need of help. I smile and inform him that I am a customer just
like him. He apologizes to me and tells me that he always sees me here, putting
down a novel and taking another.
I am just a butterfly who cannot afford for the price of the dew. Dear
foreigner, you sound to be another novel, for me.
When I enter this place, everybody goes out so that Earnest Hemingway
shoot himself straight in the front, that Mohamed Choukri sit on a Jewish
woman’s grave to write his autobiography and that Mahmoud Darwish press his
knee down on the knife edge to see if it really cuts and if the wound really
hurts.
This brown young man has such a warm voice that I feel tempted to go out
of this place loaded with fatal coldness.
I see the lady bookseller wrapping up for him a set of books in a white,
transparent wrapping-paper. She was also wrapping up her lips for him in a
smile. I see him holding the books with his right hand and getting ready to
join the passers-by in the street outside. The street is crowded. The evening
is flowing down viscously. People’s movements and paces are slow but the virile
arm holding books are strong.
He stops at the fruiterer’s where various species of coloured fruits are
carefully arranged.
The shopkeeper hands him a bag of reddish apples and he takes it with
his left hand. He carries on his way, slowly pacing away in the street,
drowning in the crowd.
My evening’s pillow is so smooth that I usually sleep gently under the
effect of the faint lights, the cool colours of my room, the flavour of the
night cosmetics coming out of my face, my lips, my fingers...
At dawn, my dream door opens. There is that brown young man whom I have
seen in the bookshop. He smiles and gives me the books.
Then, he goes to the kitchen refrigerator. I ask him to bring an apple.
I tears out the white transparent wrapping-paper, the wild titles fly
along to penetrate my pores, to burn my night until morning rises from my
alarm-clock, drawing my bed from under my body, throwing me in spaces where
hardly can I familiarize myself with the first when I was shifted to the
second.
The young man, who is no longer a foreigner, gives me the apple that I
am waiting for. Then, there appears the lady bookseller giggling. I turn her
back but her giggle remains ringing in my ears. I stretch out my hand and stop
the alarm-clock from ringing.
***********
* The writer, Khadija El Younoussi,
is a Moroccan short-story writer, born in 1976. Getting
ready for printing:" Sperm-Flies” (a
collection of short stories)
*The translator,
Mohamed
Saïd Raïhani,
is a Moroccan translator, scholar & short-story
writer, born on December 23rd
*
"Books and Apples"
is the tenth narrative text in the "The Moroccan
Dream", An
Anthology of Moroccan new short story directed by Mohamed Said Raihani.
***********
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