by: Ibrahim Dargouthy
The Martyr
• Translation : Saleh Razzouk
Contribution : Thawra Razzouk
Behind the entrance of the graveyard I was confronted with a hole looks like a bleeding wound dated back to the dawn of the universe.
I went to the usher asking him who did it.
He said : important men came two days ago after the bones of the revolutionary martyrs to burry them in the independence graves.
I said : but this is the tomb of “ Al-Haraky “ who showed the French army where the revolutionaries meet, so as to attack them all in sudden and to kill the man who is still under earth, any way the others fled making use of the wings of dark.
He said : the entire mass of graves were alike to me, and it happened to show them this one.
Then he led me to the hole which conceived the man’s dead body, the one that guerrillas returned to slaughter , just after the departure of the French army.
And said : a lieutenant saluted him on closing the coffin where his remains rested in piece covered with the national flag.
I looked at the martyr’s tomb who slept like a stranger coward and swallowed my tongue.
****
The Detention
Translated by Munir Mezyed
At dawn, the guards came pounding the ground of the detention with their raucous boots. Before they opened the door, He had woken up and sat rubbing his eyes with his two hands which were almost frozen by coldness. The chief guard pointed at him to stand up and so he stood up. The military police walked while he followed them. When they reached the execution hall, he saw groups of prisoners. Their hands and legs were tied up and they were blind folded.
He said to himself, “there are so many of them in this rainy day.”
He did not add any thing as he got used to this kind of work. The chief guard handed to him the knife. He started to slaughter them one by one while murmuring the name of god with each head he cut
***
The Box
Translated by Munir Mezyed
Long queues standing in front of the gate since early morning, scrambling in the hallways; they are wrestling each other as if they were in the Day of Judgment. They enter one after the other the substantial hall fraught with very important people. They choose red, yellow, white, green, blue, orange, purple and rosy cards and pass by a transparent crystal box, place the cards in it and leave the hall, looking at the small lock that seals the rainbow box.
In the evening the box is lifted up on the shoulder like a bridegroom. They open it to count the cards. The strange thing is that, the important people, who are in charge of extracting the cards, do not get tired of this operation. Thus they do the whole procedure easily and fast as rainbow becomes one color, dull gray.
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