Hassan Daoud, born in Beirut in 1950, holds a master’s degree in Arabic literature and has taught creative writing at the Lebanese American University. He is the editorial director of al-Mudun news website and is on the editorial board of the quarterly magazine Kalamon. He is the author of three short story collections and ten novels.
No Road to Paradise was awarded the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2015.
Marilyn Booth has translated works by Hoda Barakat, Latifa al-Zayyat, Nawal El Saadawi, and many other Arab writers, and is the translator of Hassan Daoud’s The Penguin’s Song. She is Khalid bin Abdullah Al Saud Professor in the Study of the Contemporary Arab World in the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Oxford University.
No Road to Paradise
Hassan Daoud
Translated by
Marilyn Booth
This electronic edition published in 2017 by
Hoopoe
113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt
420 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018
Hoopoe is an imprint of the American University in Cairo Press
Copyright © 2013 by Hassan Daoud
First published in Arabic in 2013 as La tariq ila al-janna by Dar al-Saqi Protected under the Berne Convention
English translation copyright © 2017 by Marilyn Booth
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
ISBN 978 977 416 817 8
eISBN 978 1 61797 791 6
Version 1
Chapter One
On the day my doctor told me I was ill, my first and strongest reaction was that once again I must not let on how frightened I was. When he appeared in the doorway to my room I knew instantly what he was here to tell me. Still in his operating-room attire, he stood there frowning and silent for a moment before instructing my nephew—who had stayed close by for the whole of my hospital visit—to leave us alone. As soon as my nephew went out of the room the doctor came in, closed his fist around the doorknob, and pulled the door firmly shut. Whatever words he was about to say, I knew I was going to be informed that yes, I did have the illness that had long filled me with such dread. He didn’t call it by name. Not then. He told me, as I sat utterly still in the chair next to the bed, that the biopsy had revealed something in the tissue they’d removed from my body. I was instantly in terror. I began to sweat and felt a wave of fever mounting to my head, leaving me dizzy. I had kept my eyes lowered and I was still staring at the floor tiles when he added that what I had was not life-threatening. But that didn’t lessen the panic I felt. I didn’t look up from the floor. I didn’t look him in the eye and ask him to tell me something more, something—anything—that might reassure me. All I wanted at that moment was for him to be gone. If he left me alone perhaps I could at least rid myself of the terrible anxiety I felt about revealing my fear in his presence. If he left me alone I could creep into the bathroom and wipe away my sweat on the massive bath towel hanging there. Then I could go out onto the narrow little balcony off my room to let the breeze swab my face, though I knew there would be little air in that cramped space and what there was would be unpleasantly acrid.
Before he had come in I was already working on myself, hardening myself to hear his words. It wasn’t so much about preparing to hear him say that this illness of mine had indeed arrived but more about how to conceal, perhaps even suppress, my fear of having this disease. Months before this day—or if the truth be told, years before—I had sensed it coming. This disease precisely, and no other. I never experienced this kind of dreadful premonition about my heart, for instance, although I knew that heart disease was the second most-feared malady among people I knew. It was as though I had chosen it myself. Cancer. The first of the two. The lion rather than the tiger. Whenever anyone said that word in my presence, I broke out in a terrible sweat and began to shiver. Maybe, I thought, I had planted the seed myself. I had sown it somewhere inside of me. And then I had tended it as it grew month after month, maturing silently, and then choosing its moment to appear full-grown in my body.
He did not call it by name, this physician who didn’t stay with me long in that room. Reaching again for the doorknob he said that I should get ready to leave now. I should come to see him in his clinic tomorrow, or the day after. A day or two for me to rest and relax, as he saw it. He wanted to reassure me; that was obvious. He wanted to leave me with the impression that this disease was not moving so fast that a day or two would make my condition any worse.
My brother’s son Bilal, who was not slow to show up at the door to my room after the doctor left, seemed to know already what it was I had. A single swift glance that managed to combine scrutiny with alarm told me he knew. Then he dropped his eyes, seeking a refuge elsewhere by fixing his gaze on every object he could find. I forgot my need to go to the balcony although I was still holding the towel, fully open as though I were trying to dry it out now that it had absorbed my sweat and was still giving off the damp heat of it. Taking heart from Bilal’s presence, feeling fortified by our relationship—a paternal uncle speaking to his beloved nephew—I said we would have to come back to visit the doctor in a day or so. But even as I tried to draw encouragement from our bond my voice betrayed me. It came out thin and weak like the voice of a little boy. Even in front of him—this lad of no more than thirteen, and my own nephew—I found myself trying desperately to conceal my fear. At the back of my mind already was the realization that when I got home I would have to face up to the same thing all over again with my wife. She would already know anyway, since there was no doubt that she would have found someone who would phone the doctor to ask. My children too, the two boys first of all. They might be deaf, but it wouldn’t be long before they knew what I had. Then there were the people who, once they heard I was ill, would come to visit me, but only really to see how sick I was and how I conducted myself as an invalid. And then my father, who for once would extract himself from his usual stupor, his eyes no longer drowsy and absent. His stare would be strong enough to stop the movement of my hand bringing the next spoonful of food to his mouth.
Returning the towel to the bathroom, I asked Bilal to fetch my turban from the wardrobe. In the mirror my face looked different, as though the heavy sweat streaming down it had whittled new wrinkles and left the skin raw and reddened. When Bilal returned with my turban, carrying it bottom up with both hands, he reminded me that I couldn’t leave the room before I had their permission. Anyway I needed some time before going out into the long corridor where all the doors to the rooms, on either side, were wide open. I needed time because those people out there would not simply watch as I made my way down the corridor. They would greet me and I would have to respond. As-salaamu alaykum, greetings to our Shaykh. And as each of them turned to me and spoke I would have to respond, in a voice loud enough to be heard. Alaykum as-salaam, I would say, over and over. In a film I saw once, a doctor studied his own blackened lungs on the X-ray image and said to a colleague standing nearby, Here it is, my cancer. I don’t have much time left. He said it just like that, in such an ordinary way, as though the image he had put up against the lit screen was just another one of the many pictures he had to examine in the course of a routine workday. As if it didn’t make a difference—he was capable of examining his own lungs exactly as he would observe those of his patients. At the time when I watched that film, I believed that the older people get the more able they become to control their own reactions and the expressions on their faces, whatever it is they are thinking about at the time.
Although I have been putting on the abaya and turban of my shaykhly profession since