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  • The Swifts of Fez
  • Ihab Hassan (bio)

Dyers, how do you say in English, tanners? You want to buy cloths, skins?

In vats and basins, fluids steamed in strident colors; on glistening mastaba, small, spindly figures like lizards, their arms and legs running with dyes, laid out pelts and cloth, while their taskmasters moved among them with looks blacker than coal. Holding her handkerchief tightly against her nose, horror on her face, she said:

Can we please move on?

The guide raised his staff again, happy in his mischief:

Please follow. Moroccan carpets next?

When they returned to their hotel, they showered without exchanging a word. Then they leaned out of the window again, standing apart, looking for the souk in the jumble of shapes. But the souk was lost to their foreign gaze; all they could see was alleys, courtyards, walls—and tiny black angels in the sky. Were they the souls of unborn children, she wondered? The fetor of tanneries followed them into the room, lacing the fragrance of rosewater and eucalyptus. With latent ferocity, she asked:

What was that man up to?

Dealing. And rubbing our noses into the misery.

Her anger broke out in a scream:

Not his misery. Those creatures in the pits were children!

And where are our children, then?

With a sharp intake of breath, she spun away from her husband, but before words could escape her mouth, began to sob. The white nape of her neck seemed to him unbearably vulnerable. For a long time, they stood alone on the balcony while the swifts of Fez wheeled and dove, skimming for midges at dusk. [End Page 9]

Ihab Hassan

Ihab Hassan had received two Guggenheim and three Fulbright Fellowships, and two honorary doctorates from the Universities of Uppsala and Giessen. He was the author of fifteen books of essays and memoirs, and over 25 short stories, published in such journals as New England_ Review, Antioch Review, AGNI, New Ohio Review, Redux, Witness, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Review, Confrontation, Fiction International, Nimrod, Pleiades, Wasafiri (London), Flash (Chester, UK), Quartet (Tokyo), etc. He had just completed a novelette and stories with Egyptian backgrounds, The Changeling and Other Stories shortly before his passing on September 10, 2015

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