Trafika Europe 6 - Arabesque

najat el hachmi

than kneeling like that with my toes firmly gripping the floor. However, it’s not an invention of mine, that’s how I’ve always seen my mother make bread. And all the women over there, whether or not they had a table in their kitchen. As the coffeepot began to bubble up, mother’s voice suddenly scared me with her usual morning greeting. I quickly broke off my inner musing, so abruptly I was exhausted. We don’t greet each other with kisses, we don’t do that. When I remember her down there, in our village, waking up in the grandparents’ house and greeting every single woman with a few kisses on the cheek, or head if it’s grandmother, or hand if it’s grandfather, I can’t pretend these scenes didn’t feel uncomfortable. Especially as the other women kissed

me, although my mother never kissed me like that, all of a sudden, for no reason whatsoever, nor I her. She and I never kiss each other. We don’t kiss today either, naturally, today changes nothing. I’ve switched off the burner and poured the two hot liquids into the teapot for the coffee. Teapot is hardly the word, but neither is coffeepot. For a few seconds I dither over this translation: what should you call the teapot for coffee. Thaglasht, abarrad, so dramatically different in our-her language, and I am unable to find the right word. All of a sudden, this banal, insignificant lexical slippage reminds me how distant I am from her, from her world and from her way of seeing and understanding things. However hard I translate, however I try topour thewords

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