-Books & Apples- Short Story Written By Khadija El Younoussi, Translated By Mohamed Said Raihani

“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




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.



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* 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 1968 in Ksar El Kébir. He published in Arabic "The Singularity Will " (Semiotic Study on First-names) 2001, "Waiting For the Morning" (Short stories) 2003, "Thus Spoke Santa Lugar-Verde" (Short stories) 2005, "The Season Of Migration to Anywhere" (Short stories) 2006. He is getting ready for printing:"Beyond Writing & Reading " (testimonies) and "Kais & Juliet" (An E-Love Novel).



* "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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