لقد كان والدي فلاحاً يحب الأرض كثيراً، ويطيل فيها البقاء مثل جذرٍ أبديٍّ.
لم تجد أمي حين تشتاق له طريقةً سوى أن تطشَّ على طول الطريق المؤدي إلى المنزل حباتِ قمحٍ، فيتتبَّعَها والدي مُنحنياً، حبةً حبةً، إلى أن يقع في فخ البيت، وهكذا كانت تمسكه.
لكن سنوات العجاف هجمت بأكياسها الفارغة، ولم يعد لدى أمي ما تُغري به زوجها، فعاد إلى منفاه الأخضر من جديد، هناك في المزرعة، حيث انسلخت لغته الآدمية، وصار يحاور الريح، ويفك طلاسم أجنحة الحمام، حتى استحال هو نفسه طيراً لا يطير.
هو فلاح وفيٌّ وعنيد، لم يعد يفهم شيئاً من كثرة مكوثه في الأرض غير لغة الطير؛ لذلك، حين دنت منه سكرة موته، كأن عصفوراً نزع روحه بحنوٍّ فائق.
My father was a farmer who loved the land very much, and he would stay there for long periods like an eternal root.
When my mother missed him, she found no way but to scatter grains of wheat along the road leading to the house, and my father would follow her, bent down, picking them up one by one, until he fell into the trap of home, and that’s how she would catch him.
But the years of drought came with their empty sacks, and my mother no longer had anything to entice her husband with, so he returned to his green exile once again, there in the farm, where his human language had shed away, and he began to converse with the wind and decipher the mysteries of the pigeons' wings, until he himself became a bird that does not fly.
He is a loyal and stubborn farmer, who no longer understood anything from his long stay in the land except the language of the birds; therefore, when the intoxication of his death approached him, it was as if a little bird gently took his soul away.
