The Locust and the Bird (3 page)

Was I really there with my sister? Did I really hear my mother singing to that man ‘Oh sleepy love’? I held another photograph. In it my mother, my own family and the family of my uncle are gathered on the rooftop of our house, surrounding my cousin who was about to take the boat for America. I thought of rubbing my mother’s face out of the photograph, just as she had done to my sister and me. I didn’t, though. It wasn’t until much later that I understood what held me back. It was because, although she is looking at the camera, it is as if she cannot see it. It is as if she is already far away from us. In the midst of her family, she is gazing off at the future.

‘So,’ my mother persisted, ‘you haven’t answered my question. My life story – why don’t you write it? Perhaps you are not curious to know about my childhood, and why I left you?’

We were still sitting on her extremely noisy balcony. The ashtray cradled her many cigarette butts. No, I had never
wanted to hear her story. And whether from fear of pity or sadness, I didn’t want to intensify the past. It was gone and the distant years had faded away.

‘Listen, Hanan, listen to me,
habibti
[darling], I don’t think I can bear keeping my story to myself any more. I am warning you, if you are not going to listen to me, I will tell it to the walls – or maybe to that girl with the lamp posts on her feet.’

I wasn’t ready. I was afraid that she would seduce me, as powerfully as the ocean tempts someone to plunge into its cool on a hot day. I feared that she would weave her charm around me, creating a web made from sugar. I would succumb like so many before me: old, young, women and men. I would find myself believing every word, even when I should doubt her. I knew perfectly well why she wanted to tell me her story. She sought forgiveness. But how could I betray that first realisation of mine as a child that it was
places
that snatched away loved ones, that it was that fake doctor’s surgery that took away my mother?

How could I forget the times when I heard thunder – and wondered if my mother was also hearing it? Or when I saw lightning and wondered if she had seen it at the same moment I had? Or when I shouted, ‘He ha ho!’ and didn’t know whether the breeze carried my voice across the neighbourhood to where she lived? How could I hush her voice, when she had held my doll to her breast, crying and singing to it as though it were her own beloved child:

Go to bed my little doll
so the little bird can come
to wake you up at dawn …

And what about the moments when it was not I who wanted to bite my mother’s flesh, but my mother who was biting me, leaving a circle of teeth marks on my hand like a perfect
drawing – for in those days she was a child herself, and would bite in anger. Beatings were for older mothers.

But now, neither of us were children. My mother handed me a cigarette, knowing that I didn’t smoke, and in fact that I’d never given up pleading with her to stop.

I asked her if she wanted to go to a café by the sea.

Her answer was, ‘I was never so desperate to read and write as I am now, if for no other reason but to write my story. Let me tell you how it hurts when a piece of wood and a piece of lead defeat me.’

When I asked her what she meant, she said, ‘Isn’t a pencil made of wood and lead?’

I looked at my hand. No teeth marks.

My hand was ready to pick up a pen. For the first time I was ready to hold up our past against the light.

Finally I said it.

‘Let’s begin.’

In classical Arabic, as though she had memorised it over and over again, my mother offered her first words.

‘Wails and tales. My life story is one long revelation. Only the locust can capture the bird.’

KAMILA

1932: Ever Since I Can Remember

I
T ALL BEGAN
on the day that my brother Kamil and I chased after Father, with Mother’s curses ringing in our ears. I hoped and prayed God would take vengeance on him. He’d fallen in love with another woman, deserted us, and married her.

Mother had been to court in Nabatiyeh
¹
to seek child-support payments, but it did no good. Kamil and I were hunting for him so that he would buy us food. We ran over the rocky ground to the next village where he lived. We searched in the market at Nabatiyeh, asking people where we might find him. The sound of his voice and his loud laugh finally led us to him; he was too short to spot in a crowd, much shorter than Mother. Following her instructions, we asked him to buy us sugar and meat. He agreed immediately, telling us to follow him. We tagged along, our eyes glued to his back, terrified of losing him among the piled-up sacks of burghul
²
and lentils, camels, donkeys, sheep and chickens, hawkers and vendors peddling their wares. At times he disappeared and we’d panic, thinking we had lost him for ever; then he’d reappear and our spirits would soar. Finally he gave up trying to lose us. He told us that he had no money and could buy us nothing.
He described how to find our uncle’s cobbler’s stall near by and then he vanished.

Kamil yelled Father’s name as loudly as he could above the vendors’ cries and the bleating of the animals.

‘Listen, boy,’ said a man selling sheepskins. ‘That voice of yours is about as much use as a fart in a workshop full of metal beaters!’

We made our way back to Mother. She was waiting with her brother at his cobbler’s stall. When she saw we were empty-handed, she frowned and swore she’d go back to court. We arrived home with no meat, no rice, no sugar. Mother made us tomato
Kibbeh
³
without meat. She squeezed the tomatoes and the red juice oozed between her fingers. Did the tomato pips feel pain and try to escape, I wondered? Didn’t Mother say that Father had crushed her heart?

Mother kneaded the
Kibbeh
.

‘Look how red it is, and there’s burghul in it, just like real
Kibbeh
,’ she said brightly.

Like real
Kibbeh
? Who was she fooling? Where was the raw meat to be tenderised? Where was our wooden mortar and pestle, which I would recognise out of a thousand? Real
Kibbeh
? Then why wasn’t Mother extracting those white, sinew-like bits of thread and making a pile of them, leaving the meat looking like peeled figs?

The next day Mother took us to court and talked to a man called a sheikh, who wore a turban shaped like a melon.

‘My husband’s refusing to support them,’ she told him, pushing us forward. ‘How am I supposed to feed my children? By cutting off a piece of my own hand? How am I supposed to clothe them? By flaying my own skin?’

We listened as the man in the turban talked to Mother. He used one phrase that stuck in my mind: ‘The payment due to you will be sitting right there, in the middle of your home.’ I thought he meant it would happen literally; I didn’t realise it was a figure of speech. The moment we got home I started pacing the floor, the way I’d seen older people measure things, even graves. When I’d calculated the exact middle of our home, I sat by the spot and waited for the lira to appear.

A neighbour came in to offer Mother advice.

‘Let him have the children,’ she said. ‘Stop torturing yourself!’

‘Get out of my sight!’ Mother yelled, and chased her to the door. ‘Before I throw you into the prickly pear bush!’

Needless to say, the money never appeared, not in the middle of the house or anywhere else. One day, Kamil and I were playing with some children at the front of the house. Mother was busy in the vegetable plot picking some of the beans she’d planted and hunting for wild endive and chard. Father arrived and asked us to go with him to the market so he could buy us clothes, meat, sugar, molasses and sweetmeats. We were so hungry and excited that we forgot to tell Mother. Without even putting on our shoes, we rushed to Father and ran along behind him.

As we walked he kept adding to his promises.

‘I want to buy you some new shoes as well. They’ll be so shiny you’ll see your faces in them!’ he said.

He took us along a path between rocks, thorns and a few trees. But we knew this wasn’t the way to the market; the path led to the neighbouring village, where he and his new wife lived.

‘So she thinks she’s smarter than me?’ he told his new wife when we arrived at their house. ‘They can live here. Then there’ll be no expense and no headaches either.’

It was a long night. We tossed and turned, yearning for Mother. I worried that she must be imagining a hyena had pissed on our legs, enchanting us and stealing us away to its lair, where it would tear the flesh from our bones. Or perhaps she thought that the earth had opened up and swallowed us. But my brother assured me that the children we’d been playing with would tell her that we’d gone with Father. We fell asleep clutching each other, listening to each other’s heartbeats, missing the sound of our cows in the night.

In the morning, I found I could not read Father’s wife’s expression. But at home, I had no trouble understanding Mother. I knew that I loved her. I also knew that, because Mother didn’t like Father’s wife, I wasn’t obliged to like her either. I stared at her eyes, trying to discover the secret of their green colour – they were the first eyes I’d seen that weren’t black. Did she put green kohl around them? Mother had black eyes – she ground black stones and used the grinds to line her eyes. We missed Mother so much that we couldn’t swallow our breakfast of molasses and sugar. We had to sip tea with each mouthful.

My brother and I sat close to each other, staring and yawning, waiting for evening. Time passed slowly. It was the summer holidays and Father wasn’t teaching in the second room of his house, so we didn’t even sit and watch the lessons. We had never asked if Mother could send us to a teacher in Nabatiyeh; we knew that she couldn’t afford it.

We made up our minds to run away just before sunset. There was no forethought; it was just the idea of another night in bed without Mother sleeping between us, a hand stretched out to touch each child, that made us leave. We waited on the porch until Father’s wife put down a dish of lentils by the stone bread-oven. As soon as she disappeared
inside to knead her dough, my brother grabbed the dish of lentils and poured the contents into his djellabah, gasping at the heat. Then we ran barefoot, back the way we’d come, over the brown and red stones, over the sparse vegetation, never stopping to worry about thorns or the scalding lentils. We kept running – not hand in hand as my mother used to instruct us. ‘Promise me, you won’t let anybody separate your hands, even angels,’ she would say. I didn’t even stop when I spotted, amid the rocks, a bush bearing a tomato the colour of anemones. Only when the fig trees and the big pond came into view did we slow down and begin to relax. When we spotted a grey rock called the camel (because it looked like one) we were certain we were on the way home. Thorns got inside my dress; they pricked my skin and hurt like hornet stings, but I wanted to see Mother and eat some of those lentils so badly that I ran even faster, as though I was swallowing the ground itself.

Darkness fell suddenly, as if the camel had blocked out the sun. We were terrified that Ali Atrash was going to jump out at us. Ali Atrash was the local madman; he walked with a wooden box tied so tightly against his chest that it seemed almost a part of him. When he breathed or cried out, the box jerked up and down. People said he’d once had a stash of gold coins, but awoke one morning to find them gone from the wooden box in which he hid them. When suspicion fell on his own brother, Ali Atrash went out of his mind. From that day on, he was scared of young children throwing stones at him. But they did it because they feared his madness. He would yell at them, nonsensical things like, ‘Gold from the earth, gold from the earth!’

I tried to reassure my brother, telling him that Ali Atrash wouldn’t harm us because he knew we were the children of a woman the locals called Little Miss Bashful. She had
always treated him kindly, taken his hand when she met him, brought him to her house, sat him down on the threshold, bent over his shoeless feet and pulled out the thorns with her eyebrow tweezers, and given him food and drink.

Could he see us in the dark, we wondered? We each held our breath until we saw our house in the distance and knew for sure we were home. But before our joy could be fulfilled, we spied a figure wandering back and forth. I was sure it was Ali Atrash, but instead it was Mother waiting for us. When she saw us, she cried out and burst into tears. We whooped with pleasure.

‘We’ve come home, Mother!’ yelled Kamil. ‘We’ve brought some lentils. I want you to have them.’

Mother began to sing, as if she was keening, and wrung her hands. She ran towards us, and we to her, until she wrapped us in her arms, weeping, kissing us and inhaling our scent.

‘The bastard kidnapped you,’ she kept saying. ‘May God snatch him away too!’

She took us inside, and my brother scooped the lentils on to a plate. Mother had prepared some green beans and we ate with gusto. Then the three of us settled on the mattress. Mother sat, blowing on my brother’s scalded thighs and my bleeding feet.