Alone, as always, I don’t enter through closed doors. My departure guides me and the moons in the nights that are made of copper hanging over the gates of Damascus. Damascus is the abyss of waiting and the walls of crystal…
Close to the scent of its women and the urine of its men, close to its last ruins, I crouch before its gates like a jackal, forgotten by loneliness and longing for the howling of wolves now. Now Damascus is splitting me: You are the son of echo.
My mother’s deranged voice comes to me from the end of the range, the range open to the possibilities of a miracle that evaporated between my mother’s naked dresses under the moonlight, and the king’s men catch fish and scatter their bullets on flocks of passing birds, which fall into the arms of the peasants spread out in the fields. Wild pigeons, partridges without beaks, without eyes and with only dark wings. The king’s men are looking for empty bullets, for my mother’s path and my navel, and they continue hunting, smoking, blasphemy, and ejaculation of semen into the waters of the river.
My mother’s voice, mixed with the creaking of the doors of Damascus that did not open for me, calls to me: Wait seven centuries.
Book information
- ISBN: 9786144695197
- Publisher:
- Alif (1993)
- Emissa (2006)
- Hachette Antoine – Nawfal (2020)
- Original title: Haris al-Khadi’a (حارس الخديعة)
- Original publication date: 1993 (Arabic)
- Order Arabic:
