The Locust and the Bird (2 page)

Back in Beirut, four years later, the voice helped me to control my feelings of suffocation and to see life differently: my home as free lodging, my stepmother simply as an unpleasant, childless employee, my loving father as a Sufi living in his own shrine. His tears were tears of love – he couldn’t bear to think of me rotting in hell because of my refusal to pray, cover my hair, or wear long sleeves.

As soon as I could afford it, I left home. I lived in a women’s hostel in a district by the sea. Mine was a fully independent life, away from family, from my neighbourhood, working long hours as a journalist and broadcaster. And the voice stayed with me until I turned twenty-three, fell in love, and decided to marry.

It was the voice, not my father, not my mother, that gave me away, at the moment when the man I loved asked about my parents and I answered, ‘Don’t worry about them,’ and held his hand.

Little did I know then that, many years later, my mother would convince me to reconsider that dismissive anger of
mine, to surrender fully to the past, to meet her as if for the first time in my life. On one of my yearly trips to Lebanon, I sat with my mother on her balcony overlooking Nourwairi Street. Taxis were beeping at pedestrians. Cars were beeping at taxis. Through loudspeakers small-truck vendors were announcing to the world, ‘Best onions. Best potatoes.’

On her balcony Mother had created a garden: potted plants were everywhere, alongside a frangipani apparently unchanged in forty years, still not fully grown. A family friend appeared, accompanied by a daughter who was about sixteen. My mother welcomed them as if she were surprised by their visit. Somehow I guessed this wasn’t the complete truth. My mother knew that I preferred to see her on her own, not in a sitting room filled with neighbours, relatives, friends and their friends.

The guest came straight to the point. Could I talk to his daughter, give her some advice about being a writer? She wanted to become one. He snatched the exercise book that she had been clutching, along with her sunglasses, and handed it to me, confident that his mission was virtually complete. He then joked with my mother, shook me by the hand and left. I winked at my mother. I understood her ploy. We both smiled.

I asked the girl when she had begun to write. She mumbled something and then, to my surprise, she asked me if I could remember the first thing I had written.

I laughed and said, ‘Yes, I can. I wrote about a fruit fly that flew up Muhammad’s nose and drove him crazy.’

Turning to my mother, I asked, ‘Do you remember, Mama, how as soon as he entered your father’s tent – wearing his beautiful suit even in the boiling heat – the fly went straight for Muhammad’s nostril. He sneezed and sneezed!’

My mother laughed. I laughed too.

She said, not unkindly, ‘A man like Muhammad, thinking of himself as so strong and mighty, so important, and then a
fly no bigger than a mustard seed manages to throw him off balance.’

I opened the girl’s exercise book. She had written the title of her story in red ink, the text in blue, and her signature at the end in a purple flourish. I couldn’t get past a few sentences. I turned the page and saw that she had copied someone’s drawing of the singer Madonna.

‘Do you also like drawing?’

The girl was pink with anxiety.

‘I like to write, draw, act, sing, dance, but writing is what I like best.’

I gave her exercise book back to her.

‘Writing will be your best friend.’

I knew that my mother would want me to praise the girl’s writing, but I couldn’t. My mother shifted her gaze, looking at me now.

‘Have you written about Muhammad and the fly in one of your books?’

‘Maybe somewhere … I forget.’

The girl stood up, kissed my mother and then me on both cheeks and left, clutching her exercise book.

Still standing, my mother looked intently at me again.

‘What about my life story? When are you going to write that?’

When I became a journalist, Mother would have family or friends read aloud what I had written. Illiterate, she couldn’t read for herself anything that I wrote. However, it was a series of articles about prominent women that got to her. The articles featured Lebanese society matriarchs and
grandes dames
who were politically active, both openly and behind the scenes. The articles had attracted a lot of attention and my mother was among the first to criticise them.

‘Those women were privileged. Maybe nobody encouraged them to do what they did, but at least they were not
oppressed. But what about the women who are treated as less than human because they are born female? You don’t need to go out looking for such women. Here I am, right in front of you! Why don’t you interview me? I could tell you how my father sold me for ten gold coins. I could tell you how I was forced into marriage at the age of fourteen, how I was promised to your father when I was only eleven years old.’

As she spoke to the young journalist I then was, her passionate words fell on me like drops of rain on to a waterproof coat, sliding away without trace.

I grew accustomed to my mother’s pleas, each time a new novel or even a major short story of mine came out. ‘Why don’t you write my life story?’ she’d say. ‘It might be more beautiful or more magical than whatever you have just had published.’

I was deaf. I believed I already knew everything about my mother. She was forced to marry my father, fell in love with another man, and left our home. That was it.

In 2001 the Arabic edition of my novel
Only in London
was published in Beirut. I invited my mother to the book launch. She asked me what the novel was about and when I began to describe to her the book’s theme of Arab women negotiating contemporary London and things not being as they seemed, she cut me short.

‘Why are you still nibbling from other people’s dishes?’

I rushed to my own defence.

‘Don’t I tell you often enough how you inspire me? Don’t I come to you to remember proverbs? Don’t I take your advice about the characters in my books?’

Again she cut me short.

‘I don’t want you to be inspired. It only means that you see things from your perspective, not mine. Take that story of yours, “The Persian Carpet”. The mother in it is depicted
as a thief. She steals the carpet not caring that suspicion lands on Elya, the blind cane-chair repairer. I loved Elya! I used to give him food and sing to him. No, you don’t say anything about the mother having given up everything to get away from an ascetic more than twice her age, a man she was forced to marry. You don’t say that the husband sold all of his wife’s jewellery to save his shop …’

‘Mama,’ I began, ‘that story is about the little girl and her fascination with Elya because he manages to mend the chairs even though he can’t see.’ I stopped. I couldn’t continue. In my story the little girl trembled with burning rage when she spotted the lost Persian rug spread on the floor of her mother’s new house, when she visited her for the first time after her parents had divorced. Not only did she wish that she could throw off her mother’s arms from around her, she also wanted to sink her teeth into her mother’s white flesh. How could she have taken the rug and let the blame fall on the blind man?

My mother protested, ‘Isn’t it fair for the divorced mother to be attached to a little rug? Doesn’t the rug belong to her also?’

To myself I thought: Shouldn’t the question be why the divorced mother was not sufficiently attached to her two daughters? Didn’t
they
belong to her as well? Can my mother tell me why she didn’t try to fight for custody, even if she was sure it was hopeless?

I almost spoke, almost snapped, but instead offered her the cliché about fiction: that the instant we put characters on the page, even when they are based on people we know, they become fictional. Art.

My mother listened carefully. She lit a cigarette. She puffed and puffed as I imagined her lungs filling with smoke, ready to explode at any second.

‘But if characters become different, how come Muhammad and me, and you yourself, didn’t change at all in
The Story
of Zahra
? It was obvious you copied episodes, incidents and places exactly. The only difference is that your Uncle Ibrahim took the character of your father. Let’s not talk about this book any more. I suffered enough when it was read to me. My heart felt like it was in a mincing machine.’

Before I could say anything my mother sighed, lifted her hand to shoo away an insect as it buzzed between her and me.

‘There’s nothing for you here,’ she told it. ‘Go to the kitchen. You will find all the crumbs you need.’

This made me laugh and sigh in great relief.

‘Mama, didn’t you throw cheese to the little mice in the attic?’

She giggled, and slapped her hand.

‘I stopped when I was told they would grow into fat rats.’

But then she said, ‘In
The Story of Zahra
, Muhammad and I made you weep. You wrote that you wept so loudly that the whole world heard your cries, and sobbed. Except us. Although we weren’t far away, you showed us as selfish and heartless. So much bitterness from my own daughter!’

I stood up, eager to leave, but then I registered my mother’s despair. I knew she would suffer, believing that she had upset me.

I sat down and she changed the subject to the girl who had shown her writing to me.

‘Did you notice her shoes, like lamp posts … huge and high?’

I hugged her.

‘You are so clever and witty.’

But she had started me thinking. Was that really what I had written? My question went into the void, into the noise and commotion of the street, to my mother, to the book itself. More than twenty years ago: Who was I then? What was I thinking? And wanting to say?

In the winter of 1976 I sat down in a small furnished flat in London and wrote the novel that became
The Story of Zahra
. With two suitcases and my two-year-old son, barely a toddler, and my six-month-old baby daughter, I had fled the war in Lebanon. My husband was in Saudi Arabia organising new work opportunities. And for two months I didn’t unpack, hoping we could all go home to Lebanon.

We did return – every evening for a few seconds, accompanied by the commentary on British television. I saw Beirut wrapped in a black cloud, transformed by balls of fire, overrun by fighters, the Lebanese people fleeing in terror, hiding in shelters, in corners, lying dead on roads, killed by snipers. They spouted everywhere, mysterious creatures that exhaled only when their human targets fell to the ground. I had been certain that I was going to be killed by one of them no matter where I hid. That, combined with my fear for my children, was reason enough for me to flee not only Beirut but also Lebanon.

In a new country, with a new culture and language, I began for the first time to think about where I had come from, about the culture in which I had been raised, about what I had left behind. To understand the violence and why Beirut had become a demon playground – a bleak name even for the Lebanese to utter – I needed to write. Yet, to my horror and bewilderment, each time I sat down to write I saw myself as a five-year-old, hiding in the dark behind a door with my mother, shaking with fear, my mother’s hand covering my mouth as a face spied on us. The image kept recurring.

I was scratching at old scars. Why, in London of all places, had the war inside me erupted? I had been confident that I had released my mother from that box inside my mind; and that marrying and having my own children had mended the rupture between us. And now I was being taken by my
fountain pen from the cold of London to the haze of that room in Beirut where we had hidden behind the door. I felt again the confusion that bubbled inside me each time we took a different and unfamiliar route, rather than the one to the doctor’s, even though at home I had heard my mother announcing that she was off to get a calcium injection to help straighten my bow legs. Yet instead of seeing the rough wrought-iron grilles over the frosted-glass door of the surgery and coloured shadows behind the door, I saw a room engulfed in darkness, with brown furniture. And instead of the round, flat face of the doctor, his thin ginger hair combed like rows of vermicelli, I saw a tall man, with thick, brown, straight hair, wearing a black-and-white houndstooth tweed jacket, who handed me a hairless pink rubber doll, no bigger than my finger.

Eventually the time came when I realised that my mother wanted us to be inseparable, as close as the orange and its navel – but only when she was meeting the man with thick brown hair. I was sharing her secrets. I was to be witness to her lies and fabrications, but unaware that she meant me to confuse faces and places, and doctors with lovers.

Take the memory that begins under the walnut tree. In the background, I can see the desolate mountains, valleys, hills, red stones and thorny bramble bushes of Bhamdoun. I am tiny, running with my older sister, with my mother – not very much older than my sister and me – and with my cousin, Maryam. Then I see the tall man, with the brown straight hair, talking with my mother in Asfouri and I cannot understand a word. We call it the language of birds, so why are they speaking in words and not chirping and tweeting as canaries do? I see him lying with his head on my mother’s lap. His eyes are the colour of quince jam. They are half-open. Is he sleeping, or trying to sleep? I didn’t know then that eyes like his are called dreamy, passionate. My mother
is singing to him, ‘Oh sleepy love’. I ask myself: Why is she lulling a grown-up man to sleep? Why did we have to run so fast to meet him? Couldn’t she wait to sing her song?

A photograph was taken that day. I saw it with other photos when my mother took them out of her bra to show them to Maryam, who lived with us. In the photo, my sister and I stand side by side looking at my mother and at the man who, that day, is wearing a white blazer. I am trying to understand the game. He is standing now and lifting her up in his arms as though she were a baby. Each of them takes turns being a baby. Years later I saw the photo again, this time with a stab of agony. The rocks, the walnut tree, the summer sky, my mother’s laughter, and her frail shoe almost falling off her foot – they were all there. But where my sister and I had once stood was a blank spot.