Eventually things changed for Mother. A sheikh who had graduated from Azhar University of Theology in Cairo – the oldest Islamic university in the world – came back to his birthplace in south Lebanon and opened a school. He rented two rooms in Mother’s house and moved in with his wife, a Turkish beauty called Hanim. As soon as she arrived in Nabatiyeh, women from all over the region came to get a glimpse of her lovely white complexion and luxuriant black hair, and to hear her Turkish accent. Soon the sheikh’s diminutive son arrived to run the school for his father. Before long he was flirting with Mother, drawn by her height, her bright eyes and jet-black hair. She was attracted to him because he was so different from any of the men she knew. He was literate and witty, and could improvise poetry and recite early Arabic odes. Although she was ten years older, she felt sure he would help her take care of her four children. He began to call her Khadija bint Khuwaylid.5
After they got married, Mother decided to bring her four children back to live with her. One night she went to the school in Sidon and shouted for them one by one, urging them to jump over the school wall and come home. But they found it impossible to accept Mother’s tiny new husband. What hope could there possibly be for them when she’d married a clown who wore a red fez in order to make himself appear taller? They grieved for their dead father and for the loss of their school. Soon each one left home again.
Easy-going Hasan, the elder son, left first to find work in Beirut. Serious Ibrahim lasted longer, helping Mother’s husband, who travelled the villages working as a cobbler in the summer when the school was closed. One night Mother’s husband decided to play a prank on him. He disguised himself in a cloak and jumped out at Ibrahim, yelling, ‘Give me everything you have or I’ll kill you!’ Ibrahim panicked, the memory of his father’s murder still fresh in his mind, and didn’t laugh when his stepfather revealed himself. Furious and upset, he followed Hasan to Beirut.
A few months later the two girls joined their brothers. They left the house in Nabatiyeh to Mother, her new husband and my brother Kamil. Three years later I was born.
Beirut, I thought, as we travelled in the car, must lie beyond that mountain, that valley, that blue line. I watched as everything disappeared behind me. I saw the blue sea for the first time and decided it was brother to the sky. I watched them merge and dissolve into the distance. The sea proceeded on its way and then stretched off into the horizon. I wondered if the wind that struck my hand outside the car window stayed the same or if it changed as the car sped towards Beirut.
Eventually we arrived. Beirut was larger than the market in Nabatiyeh; to me it seemed like the great wide world itself. But I didn’t see sacks spilling over with rice and sugar as I’d imagined; nor did I spy people helping themselves to treacle straight from the barrel. Instead they walked to and fro, not stopping to greet each other as they did in Nabatiyeh. Everything seemed strange to me, even the balconies. At first I didn’t realise they were connected to the rest of the house; I thought they were separate houses. How could people live in them, I wondered, when they had no roof? The houses themselves were roofed with red tiles, one on top of the other, just like pomegranate seeds. Large, tall apertures were referred to as windows, not doors of secrets, or bab-al-sirr, as we called them in the south. And Beirut’s trees weren’t like the ones at home, although it wasn’t long before I learned all their names: azedarach, date, mulberry and locust.
We went to the home of my half-sister Manifa and her husband, Abu-Hussein. We carried with us all that we possessed in Mother’s wooden box inlaid with velvet, brass and tin: our clothes, hyssop, flower blossoms and marjoram. We were soon joined by my half-brother Ibrahim and his wife, who emerged from a house that was separated from Manifa’s by a small garden.
Now that we were in Beirut, Mother no longer needed to go out at night to hunt for scraps of chard and endive with which to make our dinner; instead we sat on the floor around a tray containing a stew of potatoes and meat. Mother, Kamil and I were very tentative about helping ourselves, even though there was much more food than we’d ever had in the south.
My brother-in-law instructed us in our manners and showed us how to eat.
‘Lean your face over the tray. What a shame, such a little piece of bread!’ (I’d taken the tiniest possible morsel.)
I thought: What a peculiar accent, and I couldn’t help noticing that he was nearly as short as my father, although much thinner. My half-brother Hasan arrived and kissed Mother’s hand. He brought with him a long loaf of bread that looked just like a rolling pin and was called a French stick. Then my other half-sister, Raoufa, came in. When she saw Mother, she hugged her and began to cry. She told everybody about her husband, who was addicted to gambling and horse racing. Her children were starving and homeless. I couldn’t understand how such a thing could happen in Beirut.
As the days passed I didn’t take much notice of my extended family. Instead I focused all my attention on sweets. I was totally absorbed by their variety, beauty, and their delightful names: white candyfloss, hazels, sesames. The vendor kept them in a glass-covered cart and went from street to street, calling, ‘Wonderful hazels for sale!’ I tried to get Mother to give me half a piastre; I went crying to Manifa; I rushed across to the vendor and stood before him in my wooden clogs, watching the boys and girls with shoes buying sweets and sucking on them with relish. I wore a pleading, hungry look on my face, my saliva flowing like a dog’s.
‘Why don’t you buy some?’ the vendor asked.
‘I’m just looking,’ I replied. But when he wouldn’t relent and give me anything, I told him, ‘No one will give me a piastre. I’m from the south and Father’s dead.’
The vendor stared at me as though I hadn’t spoken. I began to hate him. I tried to wheedle a coin from anyone who called at my sister’s, but the only answer I got was, ‘Oh, I wish I could. Tomorrow, perhaps. I wish I had something with me.’ The one person I didn’t dare ask was Ibrahim, whom I nicknamed Mr Gloomy. When he frowned, his eyebrows met like a black stick over his eyes. He didn’t talk much to Mother and when he did he seemed angry and abrupt. He kept a watchful eye on me and muttered under his breath if I reached out for anything, even a nut or a bunch of grapes. I sensed that he hated me and I could not understand why.
Lying in bed one night, with Mother asleep between us, I asked Kamil if he’d have preferred to stay in Nabatiyeh.
‘If we’d stayed there, you’d have died a thousand times over before you got to taste any treacle,’ he said.
I stayed quiet and didn’t ask if he’d noticed how Mother had changed. Although she still slept with us, I no longer felt her warmth. She’d begun to tell me off, something she’d never done before. She scolded me for walking too fast, for jumping, for saying I was hungry. I noticed how little she had to say apart from that; it was as though she’d become a table or a chair, one that could only sigh and moan and say, ‘Oh God!’ I decided that since we’d only left Nabatiyeh because there was no meat for us to eat, I should have been able to prevent our departure. I could have distracted the butcher, drawn out a knife and cut off a piece of the lamb hanging from his hook. Then we’d still be back there in our house in the south and Mother would still belong to us.
I watched other girls my own age and longed to play with them. There was one in particular who stared at me with contempt, perhaps because of my wooden clogs and my dress, which looked nothing like those the Beirut girls wore.
I tried to gain her sympathy.
‘I’m not from Beirut,’ I told her. ‘Father’s dead. Nobody will give me a piastre.’
‘Your family’s poor,’ she said, and she turned her back on me.
Everyone in the house was expected to work for their food. Mother helped Manifa raise the children and manage the household. Manifa herself spent all day bent over the sewing machine making clothes or embroidering birds’ feet on coloured headscarves for her husband to sell in the markets.
When my brother-in-law Abu-Hussein heard me beggin
g for piastres, he announced that it was time I began work too. I was to wander the nearby streets, selling rubber bibs for nursing babies. Kamil was already working for Abu-Hussein, helping at his haberdashery stall downtown.
Very reluctantly, I listened to my brother-in-law’s instructions after Mother made me feel guilty.
‘Your sister and her husband are not obliged to take care of us. It’s good of them to feed us and let us live with them,’ she said.
So I made the rounds of the neighbourhood. I climbed stairs and entered gardens. I knocked on front doors and offered my rubber bibs. I forced them on people, pleading poverty; I wouldn’t budge until they either bought one or shut the door in my face. I moved from house to house with a lump in my throat and, when I saw a pond with a fountain in the middle, it would remind me of how happy I used to be when I peed in the wilderness of Nabatiyeh, making patterns in the dust.
One day a woman opened her door and smiled. When I asked her to buy a bib, she was horrified.
‘Who sent you?’ she asked. When I told her, she clasped her hands to her head. ‘Yay, yay!’ she said in an accent I’d never heard before. ‘I don’t believe it! Aren’t your family scared to death for you? Such a pretty girl! And how old are you?’
‘Nine years old,’ I answered.
She called out to another woman and told her my story. She clasped her head again.
‘Yay, yay,’ she said again. ‘I can’t believe it. Good God, show mercy on your servants! I’ve never in my life seen girls going around houses selling things! What kind of family must she come from? Don’t you want to go to school?’
With that she purchased everything I had to sell, and gently pinched my cheek, and told me to take care of myself.
‘Listen, my pretty girl,’ she said. ‘Look after yourself, do you understand? Don’t let anyone fool around with you. If a man opens the door to you, run off quickly.’
I hurried home and told Mother what the woman had said. I asked her why no one had told me to watch out for myself or explained that I was to run off if a man opened the door. I said I wanted to go to school. But all Mother could do was sigh.
I began to cry and moan and beat my chest like an adult.
‘I want to go to school; I want to go to school!’ I shouted.
But Mother and Manifa only bustled round, hushing me to be quiet.
‘Watch out,’ they said, warning me against Abu-Hussein. ‘Or he’ll get you!’
It was just the kind of thing we used to say in Nabatiyeh to scare each other: watch out or else gremlins, hyenas, or the Devil himself will catch you.
5 The first wife of the Prophet Muhammad, who was older than her husband.
Even Pigeons Go to School
It’s THE HONEST truth, by God, the Prophet, and Imam Ali,’ I told Mother. ‘In Beirut even pigeons go to school.’ Ever since we’d arrived in Beirut I had been watching the flocks of pigeons circling in the skies, splitting up, gathering together, diving then soaring up and down, and all in response to the orders of their owner, who cracked his whip on the concrete, blew his whistles, and gestured to the birds with a black cloth tied to a stick. This trainer, known as the pigeon-fancier, was a relative of the girl who had treated me with such contempt. When she finally deigned to talk to me, she said she’d be my friend only if I wore shoes instead of wooden clogs.
How I longed to wear proper shoes and dresses and be a pupil at school, sitting in a class with other girls my age, with real pens and notebooks! I begged my oldest brother Hasan to intercede on my behalf and get my family to send me to school, but he didn’t want to get involved. He said he wished he was making a quarter of what Ibrahim and Abu-Hussein did, so he could pay for me to go. I realised that, although I was still young, the only way I could survive was to depend upon myself.
I knew that if I wanted to buy something I would have to steal some lira. So the following day, when my sister told me to go up to the attic and bring down five bibs to sell, I brought down ten bibs, keeping five of them hidden around my waist. I made my usual rounds, playing on people’s sympathies and working hard. When I’d sold them all, I hurried to look for the sweet seller, handed over the extra money I’d collected, and bought hazels, gumdrops and candyfloss. Then I rushed over to the girl who had sneered at me, showed her what I had in my hand, and said I’d share them with her. I prayed with all my might to Imam Ali that she’d take some and become my friend. She took everything I’d bought and ate the lot. Then, regardless of my wooden clogs, she played with me for a little while before running off.
By this time I was sure that Mother no longer loved me. She did whatever Manifa, Abu-Hussein and Ibrahim told her to do and carried all the family problems on her shoulders. If my nephew became constipated, she’d fly into a panic; or, when Hasan failed to visit us for two days in a row, she imagined he’d been burned in the bakery where he worked. And as she became increasingly anxious, Ibrahim’s frown deepened.
All day I would long for the night, when I could get into bed with Mother and bask in her warmth and affection like I had back in Nabatiyeh. Only then was I free of my household responsibilities. Since my sister had given birth to a new baby boy, my workload had increased. Now I had to take my two nephews to their respective schools each day, before returning home to the bibs and scarves. Having made my rounds peddling the bibs, I then had to bring the boys their lunches. Back home again, I helped my sister – rock the cradle, wash the nappies, hang them on the line. Next I’d hurry back to the schools, collect the boys and bring them home, where they’d be given sweets. Because I was with them I got some too. Then we’d play ball near the house.
One day when we were playing, I picked up the ball and held it close to my chest, ignoring the boys who were yelling at me to throw it to them. I held on to it tight, hoping that the neighbourhood children would see me and assume my parents had bought it for me – parents who lived, perhaps, in one of the huge houses with wide, wrought-iron balconies and windowpanes of coloured glass. I found myself waving up at a balcony, even though it was empty, until the shouts of my nephews brought me down to earth again.
As the Adha feast day6 drew near, I heard the local girls chattering about their new dresses. I asked Mother about my dress for the feast, but she told me to be patient: my brother-in-law and Ibrahim were discussing the matter. Ibrahim suggested they share the cost of a piece of cloth and my sister could make me a dress, but Abu-Hussein insisted they buy me a second-hand one, because my sister was too busy. But when I saw the dress – with brown patches under the arms and a yellow line round the neck – I burst into tears. They also bought me a pair of second-hand shoes with huge soles and steel tips. I screamed and cried and swore by the Prophet Muhammad and Imam Ali that I would boycott the feast altogether.
I took out all my anger and distress on Mother.
‘Tell them to buy me a new dress,’ I screamed as I pounded her with my fists. ‘Go on, tell them!’
Abu-Hussein began to scold me.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘every day is a feast day. Every day that God is not defied is a feast day.’
Then I had an idea. I remembered how Khadija, Ibrahim’s wife, had made me take their daughter, who was three at the time but hadn’t yet learned to walk, with me ‘begging’. She hoped that, if I begged from strangers, a miracle would occur and my niece would get to her feet and walk. I had been afraid that this custom was observed only in Nabatiyeh; it was quite normal in the south to visit seven houses asking for a piece of bread to get rid of a sty. But to my utter amazement, no one in Beirut was surprised at my request. They gave my little niece food, fruit and sweets without fail.
If only I could find someone to push me from house to house in a pram, asking, ‘Please give this little girl a nice dress for the feast so she’ll start walking’; or, ‘Please give this late walker some shoes for the feast so she can stand up’; or, ‘Please give this deprived child some white stockings and a wicker purse for the feast’. But who would push me, and
where would I get a pram big enough? I was defeated.
It was the custom for the adults to give children money on feast days. My mother and Manifa gave me a little money; Ibrahim and Abu-Hussein declined. So, on the day of the feast, I put my money in my pocket, grabbed my nephew Hussein and, pretending we were off to visit my brother Hasan, set out for the Beirut pine forest, where the children’s activities were being held. I knew I’d be in trouble if I got caught, because it was much too far away for me to walk. On the way there the girl who’d eaten all my sweets pointed a finger at me and began to sing, ‘We’re enemies now. If you talk to me, you’ll die.’
I didn’t want her to see me anyway, in that awful dress and those embarrassing shoes, so I walked behind her with Hussein, who was just five years old. We walked between the high trees, watching the world pass by. I grazed on pickled cucumber and parsnips and bought everything for us to share – even fresco, a sorbet made of crushed ice and syrup. I rode the swing with him at my side. As it soared up the children all yelled, ‘We’re the champions, yah, yah!’
Before we headed home, I cleaned our shoes lest the red earth give us away. Our trip to the pine forest must remain a secret, I warned Hussein, or I’d be punished.
6 Or Eid: religious festival for breaking the fast of the month of Ramadan.
The White Rose
IT WAS A while before I was allowed into the city centre, but finally one day Kamil took me to Burj Square, where he sold sewing materials from a stall alongside Abu-Hussein and Ibrahim’s haberdashery stall.
‘Hey, Kamil!’ I shouted. ‘This is the real Beirut; not like our neighbourhood. This is the one we always imagined!’
I took everything in: the tram that my brother Ibrahim drove in the mornings before going to work with Abu-Hussein at their stall, the cars with horns blaring, the horse-drawn carts, the liquorice-juice seller clanging his little cymbals, women without headscarves and men wearing sirwals,7 just as they did in the south. I didn’t know where to look next. I wanted to touch everything: cheeses of every sort and colour, chocolate, dresses, and shops selling gold. I was enchanted; it was as if I’d become a character in the huge billboard above the square, which showed a sad-eyed woman facing a man wearing a fez, with a white rose blossoming between them.
The Locust and the Bird Page 4
