Goat Mountain. Habib Selmi

      Goat Mountain is first published in English

      translation by Banipal Books, London 2020

      Arabic Copyright © 2020 Habib Selmi

      Translation Copyright © 2020 Charis Olszok

      First published in Arabic as

      The moral rights of Habib Selmi to be identified as the author of these works and of Charis Olszok to be identified as the translator of this work have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

      No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher

      Cover photo: a Tunisian desert village

      A CIP record for Goat Mountain is available in the British Library

      ISBN 978-1-913043-04-9

      E-book: ISBN: 978-1-913043-05-6

      Banipal Books

      1 Gough Square, LONDON EC4A 3DE, UK

      www.banipal.co.uk/banipalbooks/

      Banipal Books is an imprint of Banipal Publishing

      Set in Bembo

      Goat Mountain

      JAMES KIRKUP

      The intense, glacial fantasy that is Goat Mountain

      This brief, stark and finally terrifying tale begins at home, on the eve of a son’s first departure for an obscure teaching post in a remote country school – a favourite theme in modern French literature also. It is a departure made with his father’s prayers and blessings and a mother’s joyful pride in her son’s first appointment, mingled with their sadness at the prospect of a long parting.

      The journey begins, like so many African journeys, in a dilapidated old bus that takes four hours to reach Al-’Ala, from where the young man takes a long ride on mule back, accompanied by a mysterious older man who is to play an important part in the young man’s new life. As they proceed along desert tracks under a broiling sun, the youth begins to feel the first vague apprehensions about his silent companion. They make a brief halt at a solitary carob tree, where the man tells him seven men, including his own grandfather, had been murdered on the orders of the Pasha for taking part in an uprising against taxes. The young man begins to feel not just fear, but also an indefinable hatred for this “man about whom I knew nothing, except that he was the grandson of a rebel slaughtered in an obscure, mysterious land”. Thus the whole atmosphere of brooding horror and senseless violence is perfectly evoked in this first chapter, written like all the others in a spare, plain, factual yet strangely haunting style, with a secret poetic undercurrent that once or twice reminds us of Camus at his best. We remember the author’s epigraph from Pessóa’s Book of Disquiet: “We all live anonymously and apart from one another; in disguise, we suffer yet remain unknown . . .”

      They finally arrive at Jabal al-’Anz – Goat Mountain – a forlorn, dusty desert village. The school is a single room. The youth passes the first night in the house of his uncommunicative guide, whose name is Ismail. The house is surprisingly well kept, with a large shelf of books: history, literature, Islamic law and Qur’anic exegesis. Next morning, they return to the school, where Ismail shows the young man his living quarters, a small room behind the class. Ismail tells him: “If you need anything, please inform me. I am the government’s representative in Goat Mountain.”

      It is the beginning of a very strange sort of love-hate relationship between the two men – not exactly friends, but not yet enemies, either. Their association is composed of both elements, of which the sense of enmity begins to be the stronger. An increasingly unbearable tension develops between them, which is reflected in the life of the village. The young man grows more uneasy and depressed as Ismail becomes ever more powerful until, with a new truck and his own private army, he dominates village life and casts a menacing shadow over the young man until the latter reaches the verge of paranoia and madness.

      This intense, glacial fantasy is the work of a literary master. At a subliminal level, it can be read as the intellectual’s despairing and suicidal attack on inhuman political power. It reminded me of the writings of two Africans I have translated: Camara Laye and Tierno Monénembo. From the latter’s brave novel Les Crapauds-brousse we learn the nickname taxis-brousse, given to all forms of primitive local long-distance transport, usually open trucks, or at best buses, like the one in Habib Selmi’s story.

      Reproduced from

      Banipal No 6, Autumn 1999

      1

      In all honesty, I was not as thrilled as I had expected to be. A slight tremor ran through me but nothing more. Then again, I have always been that way. I become feverishly engrossed, my entire being absorbed. But soon I lose interest and end up feeling hollow and empty. The truth is that I combine many such contradictions imperceptible to all but me: headstrong but ambivalent, level-headed but flighty. Do I deliberately conceal them? Perhaps. I have a capacity for dissimulation which sometimes takes even me by surprise. That day, I read my letter of appointment twice: first when I received it and later when I withdrew to the solitude of my room.

      That evening my brother played quietly and happily, and as my father performed the sunset prayer I felt that he was, for the first time, reciting the fatiha at ease, relishing every word. The scent of grass drifted through the open windows, accompanied by the gentle croak of frogs and a trill in the distance, echoing like a woman’s mournful wail. Goat Mountain. I do not deny that it was the name itself that had intrigued me, and, without giving a thought to the actual place, a mammoth-like goat, with long, thick legs and a great udder swollen with milk enough to nourish the entire village had materialised before my eyes. What other reason could there be for that name?

      ***

      Bleached animal bones lay at the bottom of steep slopes. The bus was pungent with the scent of juniper and the wheels rumbled as it laboured up the sharp rises. Stretching out to east and west were endless expanses of tall dry grass and pine forests. In a fleeting dream, I saw myself sinking slowly but surely into a coffee-coloured land, oozing mud.

      My fellow passengers kept to themselves, seated as far from one another as possible. They had the mournful, reticent look of contagious invalids on their way to quarantine. Leaning back, I glimpsed the pallid features of my own face reflected in the spattered window pane.

      After four hours, the bus pulled into a marketplace lined with wooden stalls. The engine grew silent.

      “Al-‘Ala!” the driver called, preparing to descend.

      The passengers surged towards the door and disappeared into the darkness while other men, who I later learned were merchants, surrounded the bus, electric torches in hands. Others still, barefoot and girded with leather belts, clambered on board and began unloading wares amidst the clamour and the cries.

      The following morning, Al-‘Ala village appeared larger than it had done the previous night. I was escorted by the bus driver to one of the shopkeepers who greeted me warmly and instructed me to follow him. We crossed the square at the far side of which stood a dusty tree, encircled by an iron railing. At the end of the row of stalls, we found ourselves surrounded by several houses with low doors. In a corner, a pair of goats stood tied to a metal ring and beside them mules were grazing on straw. I remained motionless, completely absorbed by the sight of the goats, one of which was endowed with a startlingly large udder. The merchant, who had gone into one of the houses, emerged with a smile on his face.

      “Stay here,” he ordered me.

      As I watched him disappear,