The Locust and the Bird

by Hanan al-Shaykh

  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.

  ‘Mother,’ I asked, ‘how did you know we would run away and come home?’

  ‘I’m your mother, aren’t I?’

  I lay there, listening to the cows mooing in the back yard. I reminded myself that they snorted whether or not I was home, without knowing what was going on. Their huge eyes stared into the darkness as they lay down for the night. I stared hard through the darkness too, anxious to reassure myself that I was with Mother in the house and not with Father and his wife. This house would always stay where it was; I could see the bureau, the mirror, the living room, and the window.

  I only felt sleepy when Mother finally lay down between me and my brother. The wind whistled and brushed the trees. The mooing soothed me to sleep, as if the cows were singing me a lullaby.

  1 A town in the inland part of southern Lebanon where a large percentage of Shiites live. It is divided into ‘Upper’ and ‘Lower’ districts.

  2 Cracked wheat.

  3 A popular Lebanese dish made of ground lamb, grated onion and cracked wheat.

  Door of Secrets

  WHEN I AWOKE in the morning, the first thing I noticed was the moulding on the window frame. I could see a branch of the fig tree, trying to climb in through the window from outside. In Nabatiyeh, windows were called bab al-sirr, doors of secrets – maybe because we never knew what went on behind them. Mother reached out and picked some figs, rolled them on some moistened bread crusts, and shook a few grains of sugar on them, before handing them to us to eat. She propped our mattress against the wall and then we headed out to the field by the eucalyptus trees.

  She told us to hurry.

  ‘Get on with it before anyone sees us!’ she said.

  Why must we sneak our way into the wheat field? I wondered. The wheat had been cut and the field was empty. Mother bent over the red soil and picked up the leftover grain that was scattered on the ground, after the reapers had done their work the previous afternoon. I copied her every move. Spreading my skirt, I collected grain from the ground. The wheat gleamed like tiny bits of gold. But I was scared of the snakes that lazed in the shade under the stalks.

  I asked Mother if the harvesters had left these bits for us, but she didn’t answer. It took a few days for me to realise why it was left. After the farmers had reaped the wheat ears and transported them to the silo in bulging sacks, they abandoned everything else as worthless.

  When we returned home, we were the same colour as the earth itself. We poured our caches of wheat grain on to a straw tray, which Mother had cleaned with both damp and dry cloths in case a lizard had slithered across it. She sent me outside to collect twigs from the thorn bushes. Mother used to say that my untamed curly hair looked like these bushes when I wouldn’t let her smear oil on it after it was washed. When I returned, Mother had mashed the wheat with a small grinder and kneaded it into little loaves. She used the thorn twigs as kindling, put the loaves on the fire and baked them. When they were cooked we gorged on them, one after another.

  Just before sunset she took us to another field to pick mushrooms that nestled between the wheat sheaves and the grass. We sang, ‘Come on, mushrooms, pile yourselves up, get into heaps!’ Mother fried them for us with some eggs.

  Months had passed since we’d run away from Father with his lentils. We hadn’t seen him since, but we heard village gossip. Mother assumed that he, in turn, must have heard how we lived on wheat left for the birds; and that we rarely visited the village shop, other than the time when I went in and burst into tears, begging for some treacle, and then returned home with most of it already licked off the aluminium plate. Mother remained determined to get the child-support payments she was due.

  One day she put Kamil into new navy-blue trousers and made me wear a clean dress, which my half-sister – my mother’s daughter with her late first husband – had sent from Beirut. We stood outside waiting, feeling proud and happy because we were off to market to get some meat, sugar, and treacle; and look for Father. When a peasant walked past with a tiny donkey as white as milk, Kamil latched on to it, grabbing its ears, and hugging it. The peasant told him he could have the donkey in exchange for his trousers. My brother accepted the deal on the spot. He took off his trousers, handed them over, and went back to hugging and kissing the donkey – as if the stray dog that now slept beside him under the covers wasn’t enough. Mother was angry, but she took us to the market all the same, my brother riding on the donkey in his underpants. By the time we reached the market in Nabatiyeh, it was not meat I had on my mind, but coloured plastic bracelets and scarves called birds’ feet, because they tapered into coloured threads that looked like the feet of hundreds of tiny birds.

  We searched everywhere for Father.

  A man praying on his rosary took pity on us.

  ‘The moment your husband saw you coming he took off,’ he told Mother. ‘He melted away like a cube of salt, as the saying goes.’

  ‘And I hope God melts him too,’ Mother muttered.

  It was my turn to ride the donkey as we headed home empty-handed. Each time someone stopped Mother to ask whether she’d managed to force Father to pay up, she’d reply, ‘Good heavens, no! His heart’s made of stone. I might as well think of him as dead and put my trust in God!’

  Lying in bed that night with the dog and Kamil snuggled next to me, happy to be home, I wondered whether the cows were aware there was a donkey with them and whether they minded. I grabbed the dog’s ear and began to sing the song I’d thought of when I saw the empty wheat field:

  Do not rejoice, oh long-haired wheat,

  Tomorrow comes the scythe

  To do a merry dance and tickle your stomach,

  To cut off those long tresses.

  The songs of the fields will fade when the locks are all gone.

  Eventually, we lost all hope that Father would help us. My mother did not have the heart to sell the cows so instead she found work picking oranges and lemons in the big citrus orchards. Mostly she took me with her an
d left my brother with a neighbour. On the way there we kept to the fields, crossing public roads and going down into the valleys. Time and again I would stop, so tired and my feet aching so much that I wanted to lie down to rest. But Mother would keep going and I knew I had to keep up. When we reached the field, Mother would find me a place under a tree, clear the ground of insects and anything damp, then spread out a sack for me to sit on. When she finished picking the fruit from the trees close by, she moved me along with her to keep me near. I had no sense of time; I kept singing, eating oranges, lounging about and listening to the songs of the workers and the gentle rustle of fruit being picked from the trees. I poked ants with a twig but left hornets alone.

  Sometimes, instead of going straight home, Mother would take me to the River Litani to bathe. We made our way through the hills and valleys till the river appeared amidst the curving lines of rock and sparse foliage. When we reached the oleander trees – each one candy pink in colour and looking almost like an entire house made up of branches – we would stop. I would dash to the river and stand on the bank among the rocks, while Mother searched for a pumice stone with which to scrub me. Then she would grab my hand and we would wade in, until the water was up to my knees. My skin was white against the rocks and trees. Mother was terrified I would slip and get swept away. Her fear was infectious. I’d stand, petrified, as she scrubbed her own tall body through an opening in her dress.

  Mother seldom smiled and I rarely heard her laugh. But on the last day that we visited the Litani, as she stood in the cool river, to my utter amazement she began to sing:

  Oh compassionate friend,

  Come and sing with me, and we’ll comfort one another.

  I remember how she poured water over me that day, saying, ‘In the name of God,’ and, ‘Thanks be to God,’ then smiled as she poured water over herself. Her black hair reached almost to her waist. And when she opened her eyes they were big and shining, as if the water had washed away her cares and the monstrous image of Father that hung over us. We came out of the river and walked along the bank collecting blades of lemon grass, folding them into bread with a little salt, and downing them hungrily. Once again Mother gave thanks to God.

  It was the last time I heard my mother thank God before we left our home, the cows, the dog, the donkey, the fields, the Litani, and my friend Apple; before we went to live in Beirut.

  For shortly after that last trip to the river she sat me and my brother down and said, ‘It’s time for us to leave the Litani behind. I’m taking you to Beirut. You can’t spend your whole life eating chard and endive! So say goodbye to everything, because we can’t take it with us.’

  I didn’t know what to think. I was curious to see Beirut, the place that made my mother cry, but at the same time I didn’t want to leave Nabatiyeh. But true to her word, there came the day when she sold the cows, though she cried as she bade them farewell; and she gave the donkey to our Bedouin neighbour Rabiha. Her name meant ‘winner’, which she assured us meant that she always managed to come out on top. The dog seemed to realise his time with us was up and found himself another home.

  It was time for me to say goodbye to my friend Apple, with whom I’d skipped and played jacks with sheep’s knucklebones. Sometimes we would beat on sticks that we’d put up our noses and yell, ‘Karkamah, Karkamah, Lord, let my blood flow.’ And blood would indeed flow as we’d get nosebleeds. This made us terribly happy, because God had responded to our prayers and we knew we’d go to heaven for sure. I told Apple I wouldn’t be away long, but she still began to cry.

  ‘OK,’ I said, ‘I’ll be away for as many days as I have teeth and not one day more,’ an expression I’d heard the old people use.

  I gave her everything dah, a word we used to describe pretty things: a red comb missing most of its teeth; a rattle and a baby’s dummy; and bits of broken dishes that I’d collected from the village for playing house.

  ‘Remember,’ I warned Apple, ‘the holy martyrs Imam Ali and Imam al-Hussein4 will be your enemies if you play with anyone else besides me!’

  ‘By God, I shall miss you so much, Kamila,’ she sobbed. ‘Make sure you never forget me!’

  ‘I’ll miss you too, Apple,’ I cried back. ‘Make sure nobody eats you before I’m back!’

  I wondered if there’d be eucalyptus trees in Beirut like the ones I liked to cling to with one hand, while clutching my hair with the other, praying to God to make my hair as long as the tree and as soft and smooth as its leaves. I wondered too if I could pick damask roses in Beirut, just as the older girls did here. Like them I’d put the petals in a dish with some water and leave it outside the door overnight so the petals would catch the morning dew. Then I’d use the rose water to wipe my face, and stand before the mirror. ‘God,’ I would tell myself. ‘I’m so pretty!’

  On our last night I slunk out to our garden plot to see if the cows had returned. Earlier in the day, when I was hunting for the cows’ new home so I could say goodbye to them, Apple told me her mother had said that cows are like doves: they always return to where they came from. But they weren’t there.

  4 Ali, the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin, married the Prophet’s daughter, Fatima. After Ali, the fourth Caliph, had been assassinated in 40 AH (661 CE), his two sons, al-Hasan and al-Hussein, became the figureheads of the ‘Shiat Ali’ (Ali’s party), which was to become the Shia community within Islam. Al-Hussein was killed at the Battle of Karbala in 61 AH (680 CE).

  1934: Beirut

  WE HEADED FOR Beirut in a Ford, not on foot, the way Mother would go when she felt a yearning to see her other four children who lived in the city. For these journeys, she left us with her only sister in Nabatiyeh and then walked for four days to get there. When she came back, her feet would be covered in blisters; they’d burst like balloons, but without making a sound.

  I knew I had other siblings, two half-brothers and two half-sisters by Mother’s first husband, who had been killed. If someone mentioned the word ‘Beirut’, Mother would put her hands to her cheeks and sing, ‘Beirut, Beirut, you stole my children away from me!’

  This confused me and Kamil.

  ‘But nobody stole them. They all married there, didn’t they?’ Kamil would ask.

  I hadn’t met my half-brothers and half-sisters more than a few times, but I had a clear image of all four of them in my mind, with their olive-brown skin that was so different from mine and Kamil’s. Even my mother was a shade or two lighter. The few times I heard one of them call her ‘Mother’, my heart missed a beat. I couldn’t imagine Mother hugging anyone but Kamil and me. How could I accept that she had given birth to these others before us?

  Mother’s story came to me in bits and pieces. She had been married to a man from an illustrious family in Nabatiyeh that could trace its origins all the way back to the Crusaders, who once upon a time occupied southern Lebanon. The men in the family were renowned for their valour and for wearing golden gloves. By trade, Mother’s husband was a muleteer who travelled between southern villages and the city of Beirut transporting goods. Together they built a house and had four children. They all lived happily together till the First World War began. Then the Ottoman authorities cut off supplies, confiscated the harvest, and people began to starve. Locusts gobbled up anything green in the fields and on the trees. When Turkey introduced general conscription, every single man within its starving domains had to join the army. Mother and her husband decided to make their escape. Mother left her valuables with her husband’s family: an amber necklace and two hairgrips made of gold coins that she would twist in her braids. They hid their gold English ‘Ottoman’ guineas underneath their provisions in the bottom of the box strapped to one of their three mules, in case they were menaced by thieves and highwaymen on the remote paths.

  They took the most rugged tracks through mountains and valleys, to avoid the normal Ottoman routes to Ma’an in Jordan. But before the family reached safety they were attacked by a gang, who stole the mule, along with the box containing
the hidden gold. They didn’t complain to the authorities at once, and when they did my bashful mother could not bring herself to look at the men the authorities paraded before them; and her husband was unable to pick out a culprit.

  Under the cover of night, one of the gang members came back and killed Mother’s husband. Any doubts about the man’s guilt were resolved, but it marked the start of a life of misery for Mother. With her children and the two remaining mules, she joined a caravan on its way back to Lebanon. She hurried to her husband’s family’s house to collect her valuables, but the family shut the door in her face, claiming the valuables had been left as a guarantee for a debt owed by their now dead son. But Mother did not give up easily. She knocked on the door again and asked them to help her; she only abandoned hope when she was beaten and turned away.

  She returned to her own house, cursing fate but grateful she and her children still had a refuge, only to discover that during her absence her home had been stripped of its furnishings. So she started work in the only way she knew: on the earth, in the fields with the crops. But however hard she struggled, she couldn’t provide for her family. She took to knocking on the doors of feudal families and politicians, telling them her story. One offered to get the children admitted to an American charitable boarding school in the interior city of Sidon.

  Mother agreed. But only one visit a month was permitted and she had to walk for two or three hours to reach them. Mother would stand below the girls’ dormitory, shouting her daughters’ names. As soon as they appeared at the window, she would burst into tears. Then she’d go to the boys’ dormitory and call out the names of her sons. If they failed to appear, she would throw pebbles up to the balcony. The moment she saw the boys, there would be floods of tears.