The poster was as tall as a building.
‘That’s a movie,’ Kamil explained.
I was rooted to the spot, completely immobilised, enthralled by the woman’s beauty. She was smiling and her white teeth were dazzling. She was wearing proper lipstick, she hadn’t made do with rubbing a peeled walnut on her lips the way Apple and I used to, and her hair fell around her face. I took off the sheer white headscarf that Abu-Hussein insisted I wear, and tried to replicate her hairdo, till Kamil grew impatient, gave me a punch and dragged me down a side street. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the face on the billboard, especially the tears on her cheeks, which looked just like soap bubbles.
I hurried home to tell my sister, who was still busy sewing, about all I’d seen in Burj Square, especially the huge poster. Manifa told me that everyone was going crazy over the film, which was called The White Rose, in particular over the famous singer Abdal-Wahhab who starred in it. With every waking minute, every hour, every day that passed, I pestered Manifa to take me to see it. Eventually she gave in, as long as I promised not to tell a soul, not even Mother. When I heard her telling her husband that she was off to visit her sister Raoufa, and was taking me with her, I was astonished and relieved. Maybe I wouldn’t burn in hellfire after all for telling lies. Even my sister, who prayed and fasted regularly, lied to her husband.
It was dark in the cinema, but I managed to see the large space, with seats close together. When the music started I couldn’t tell where it came from – I couldn’t see a radio. Then suddenly there was a light on the wall with lines on it. I looked around but couldn’t make out how the lines were changing along with the light and music. Everything seemed to come from a narrow beam of light, accompanied by streams of dust, shining from a hole in the wall behind us. Then a woman, a cat and some people moving around appeared in front of me.
I whispered to my sister, ‘It’s just like a magic-lantern show, only these people are moving!’
The heroine, Raja, played with her cat and another woman scolded her. A man kissed Raja, his daughter, then kissed the woman who had been scolding her. A young man named Jalal (played by Abdal-Wahhab) arrived wearing a fez, and found Raja kneeling to pick up her broken necklace.
He knelt down beside her and began to sing, ‘No jacket, it makes me weep.’
After the film ended, the cinema remained dark. Manifa tried to hurry us out, but I wouldn’t budge. I wanted to stay in my seat. Why had the actors spoken with such a funny accent, I asked; I had understood little. They were talking in Egyptian dialect, Manifa said.
‘What is Egyptian?’ I asked.
‘There is a country called Egypt where all the films come from,’ she answered.
I wanted to tell her I’d like to get a jacket for Abdal-Wahhab, because he kept singing and crying, ‘No jacket, it makes me weep,’ but I was scared she wouldn’t let me. Could I steal Ibrahim’s tram driver’s jacket? I thought of its drab khaki colour and the sweat stains under the arms. Should I steal Abu-Hussein’s jacket? The sleeves would have been too short for Abdal-Wahhab and it wouldn’t even have reached his waist. Quite apart from these considerations, my brother-in-law prayed and read the Quran, whereas in the film Abdal-Wahhab actually spoke to a woman, sang to her, embraced her, then whistled as he hurried on his way. Such different men could never wear the same jacket.
That film, The White Rose, stayed with me. If I changed my name from Kamila, which means ‘perfect’, to Warda, which means ‘rose’, I told myself, I would be closer to the people in the film. I decided the movies were better than eating a whole tin of treacle, better even than talking to the Beirut girl or playing house in the vegetable patch with Apple.
After my trip to the cinema, I saw my easy-going brother Hasan in a new light. I nicknamed him the lute lover because he was obsessed with the lute. He loved to play it for Manifa and me when we visited him in his tiny room. I asked him in a whisper if he’d seen The White Rose and if he could sing like Abdal-Wahhab? He looked to left and right, then asked Manifa if her husband and brother Ibrahim were about. When she signalled no with a laugh, he began to hum and pretended to pluck a lute. Then he sang:
Oh thou rose of pure love,
God bless the hands that have nourished you!
I wonder, oh I wonder, oh I wonder.
Then he mimed holding a rose in his hand and gazing at the flower.
I asked if he understood the Egyptian dialect, because I hadn’t. Who had taken me to the film? Hasan asked, amazed. I lied and told him that I hadn’t seen it, but our sister laughed and admitted she’d taken me. From this I understood that she was not afraid of Hasan; unlike her husband or our gloomy brother Ibrahim. In fact, she joked with Hasan and laughed in his presence.
Some time later, when my memories of the film had faded, Mother took me to visit my poor sister Raoufa, whose husband beat her whenever she criticised him or asked about the money he lost on betting on horses. I was astonished when Raoufa broke down to Mother.
‘He’s left us here on the mat and betted away everything. Dear God, I’ve actually thought about going out on the street and begging,’ she said.
Despite Raoufa’s distress, Mother never offered to seek help from Manifa’s husband, nor from Ibrahim or Hasan, who had no money but might have brought her some bread from the bakery. I was so upset that I decided I should run away and live with the actors from the movie, in a place where people spoke to each other kindly and were concerned for each other’s welfare. I knew for sure that they were cut from a different cloth than me, because they had all been to school.
7 Peasant’s baggy trousers.
Stone-Bearing Donkeys
IN THE SPACE of a night and a day, our house turned into a home of weeping and wailing. Manifa died very suddenly of fever. She was bitten by a rabid rat that was hiding in the pile of wood we used to heat the boiler.
Mother blamed herself for my sister’s death. Coming to Beirut and staying at her house had brought bad luck, she said. She gnawed on her fingers, wishing it had been she who’d gone to collect wood that evening, not Manifa. She blamed the doctor too, for not connecting the bite with her fever; and for not realising till too late that Manifa had rabies.
My brother-in-law hugged his children and cried. It was the first time I’d seen a man crying, simply dissolving into tears, except for the men playing Imam al-Hussein in Nabatiyeh Square during the Ashura8 commemoration. They would wail when Imam al-Hussein held his baby son and bade him farewell, knowing the end was near, as the enemies’ arrow had struck the baby in the chest.
After Manifa’s death I became a stone-bearing donkey. I was just like those beasts of burden that carried stones between the villages, with bleeding sores on their sides. Back in Nabatiyeh, Apple’s mother had given barley to them. ‘You donkeys have to heave stones all day,’ she would say to them, ‘so here’s something to soothe your weary legs and backs.’ The donkeys would stop their braying and devour the barley. So what was my reward to be, I wondered?
The other adults in the family urged me to help Mother take care of my three nephews, lest they begin to feel the loss of their mother – particularly the youngest, who was not yet one and a half. Khadija, Ibrahim’s wife, had been nursing and looking after him as though he were her own child.
Mother was overcome with grief, and she found it difficult to take care of the boys, although now that I was older I could see that she simply wasn’t much good at household chores. I often overheard adults remark that she wasn’t pulling her weight, or that she was lazy, like a closed book. They even told a joke about her: that one day when she’d bid farewell to her first husband as he got on his mule to go to work, she’d yelled out, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, I was just going to bake you some bread.’ But I was still only ten. My narrow shoulders could not bear the burden of the responsibility for the three boys and Mother.
Manifa’s tragic death was not the only cruel twist of fate Mother suffered. Just a year later, Raoufa, my other sis
ter, caught a fever and died within days. This time the cause wasn’t a rat bite but a burst appendix. On her neighbours’ advice she hadn’t consulted a doctor, but instead had applied strips of boiled onion-peel and cumin to her abdomen. She left behind five children: two daughters and three sons, one of whom had survived polio and had a wooden leg.
A year after this second tragedy, Abu-Hussein and Ibrahim decided we should all live together, as Mother and I couldn’t cope with looking after my three nephews on our own. So we all moved to a house, or rather a large apartment, in Ra’s al-Nab, one of the more refined districts of Beirut – its name meant ‘the source of a spring’. But there was no spring, only a tap gushing water outside a grocery shop.
Now we had my sister-in-law Khadija to help us and she was capable, intelligent and astute. She was also an energetic housekeeper. I loved her and she loved me. She combed out my curly hair – an act demanding patience and time – and came to my defence when Ibrahim yelled at me.
By this time Abu-Hussein’s business had improved considerably. He’d withdrawn from partnership with Ibrahim, who now worked full-time as a tram driver, and joined with a fellow merchant to become co-owner of a shop selling imported men’s clothing. This new business partner was very clever and my brother-in-law believed everything he said. They began to pay off Ibrahim’s share in instalments, which made Ibrahim even more gloomy and angry. He could only watch as yet another opportunity slipped from his grasp – a pattern that had begun when Mother took him out of school.
Our new home was high up. To get to it we climbed a staircase with a black wrought-iron railing woven into a pattern that looked like children holding hands. Inside was a huge apartment, so wide that anyone would have thought it was a separate house. The walls stretched up very high too, and in the middle, at the very top, there were some nice decorated-glass skylights, which added to the light flooding through the many windows. Entering by the big wooden front door, we came into a large room called the lounge; to the right was my brother-in-law’s room, which had a window overlooking the neighbouring garden. There were two other rooms, one bedroom shared by my nephews and Kamil, and another for Ibrahim’s family. Between these bedrooms there was a corner where Mother and I slept; I thought of this space as my own house and often played there on the big mattress we spread out on the floor at night. Other visitors to Beirut from the south – relatives and friends – would share our corner with us. For by this time our house had become a staging post for anyone on a trip to the city.
My favourite spot was the roof. When we went up the stairs into the open air it was as though we were in a lofty garden overlooking the other buildings. From up there we could see the fountain in a garden below, and a few trees scattered about, especially the luxuriant azedarach.
The move and our new good fortune only made Mother more depressed. She lamented the fact that Manifa, who had supported her husband so loyally, and worked so hard in the early days of their marriage, wasn’t there to enjoy life now. Abu-Hussein’s name was on the tip of every tongue from the south, whether they were settled in Beirut or only visiting. All spoke of his probity and hard work; they were so proud of this orphan boy who had risen to owning a business in Souq Sursouq9 itself. Abu-Hussein’s father abandoned his mother when he was just three years old. His stepmother tormented him and pulled his ears, and so he would run away and walk for hours to see his mother, who had remarried and moved to another village. When he was six, his father died. He had lost contact with his mother by then, and so a relative took him to the house of the most learned Shiite Muslim scholar in Nabatiyeh.
The sheikh taught him the Quran and how to be a devout Muslim and in return Abu-Hussein looked after his horse. When he was twelve he decided to leave the sheikh and the south and try his luck in Beirut. He began as an errand boy to a Beiruti family, and then became a peddler and finally a merchant.
In our new home, Mother grew sadder, but I was seldom unhappy. The windows were always wide open and songs and music from neighbourhood radios worked their way inside. I used to hum the tunes and sing along with them. I was beginning to understand them now, and their language was the language of books, unlike the crude words of the songs I’d learned from women and men in the fields of the south.
It’s not Mother or Father I need,
What I really desire is my olive-skinned lover.
8 The Day of Ashura is on the 10th day of Muharram in the Islamic calendar. It is commemorated by the Shia as a day of mourning for the martyrdom of Imam al-Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, at the Battle of Karbala on 10 Muharram in the year 61 AH (10 October 680 CE). During the battle, fought over the succession of the caliphate, al-Hussein fought with seventy-two men against a thousand.
9 A famous bazaar in downtown Beirut. Sursouq is named after a family that owned a number of nineteenth-century mansions.
‘You Are Hereby My Witness’
I WAS UP ON the roof one day when Mother and Khadija called to me to come. They told me I must go into the boys’ bedroom and say the words, ‘You are hereby my witness.’ Then I could go back to playing.
Khadija gave me a white headscarf to wear. I went into the room and found myself facing a group of men in red fezzes and another man in a turban shaped like a melon, just like the one worn by the sheikh whom Mother went to see about her child support in Nabatiyeh. I tried to say, ‘You are hereby my witness,’ so I could run out of the room, but I was nailed to the spot, unable to speak. The man in the turban stared at the floor and mouthed sentences. What I could understand sounded like prayers: ‘In the name of God,’ and, ‘May God pray for and bless the Prophet Muhammad and his family.’ When he said this, the men repeated it after him.
Suddenly the man in the turban asked my age and Ibrahim answered, ‘She’s eleven years old.’
Then the man recited something again and I heard my name and Abu-Hussein’s. Then he asked me to repeat after him, ‘You are hereby my witness.’
I mumbled the words and rushed to the door, opened it, and found Mother and Khadija standing right there as though they had been listening.
I was afraid they would change their minds and stop me going back up to the roof to play, so I said, ‘OK, it’s done. I said it. “You are hereby my witness.” What more do you want?’ Then I ran back up to the roof.
I was surprised that the grown-ups had been wasting their time listening to me repeat what the man in the turban told me to say. I was equally surprised that they were letting me play, rather than making me sweep the floor, clean the dishes – or telling me off.
I forgot all about what had happened that day and the words I’d uttered until nearly two years later when I met a young man who looked like a film star at the home of Fatme the seamstress.
Abu-Hussein had sent me to Fatme’s to learn to cut and sew, because I’d been pestering them about school again. I was too old, they told me; the younger children at school would laugh at me. ‘Let them laugh,’ I said, but Mother replied that school lasted all day. Who would take the boys to school? Who would deliver my brother-in-law his lunch? Who would help with the washing? So instead I was taken to Fatme’s house. She welcomed me with a big smile and, as soon as my brother-in-law left, I could feel her opening her heart to me.
I adored her. She was different from any woman I’d ever met. She talked loudly with a Beiruti accent, cursing, swearing and laughing – her laughter went on and on, just like the cry of the hyenas. There was always a cigarette dangling from her lips, and she would blow smoke in my face when she exhaled through her long nose. She had big eyes that could be gentle and furious at the same time. She never cried. She turned up the volume on the radio and drank coffee all day, one cup after another. Her teeth were as brown as dates, and she smoked and swayed to the music while she bent over the sewing machine or sat on the ground in the courtyard, with fabric spread out over her heavy thighs. Once, she sent me out for a pack of cigarettes and I was amazed at the way she pulled notes casually from her p
ocket. I told her that she was the only person I knew who did that; my brother and brother-in-law were so stingy that if they could they would’ve hidden their cash inside the crop of a chicken. She laughed, and told me to take off my headscarf, then grabbed my thick black hair. With the cigarette still dangling from her mouth, she told me how beautiful I was.
At the time, I didn’t realise that the kindness and affection she showed me was because of her sympathy towards my plight. When I arrived late in the morning I would tell her what I’d been doing. ‘I understand,’ she’d say, ‘I understand. You’re like the stone-bearing donkey.’ I wanted to live with her.
She told everyone who visited about my nice house and my brother-in-law who owned a shop in Souq Sursouq. She made me feel proud, but I still giggled as I acted out how Abu-Hussein walked, with his head down in case he stumbled over something in his path. I told her how he poked his nose into everything, like an old fussing hen.
I loved to watch Fatme’s hands work their magic with the sewing machine. She taught me how to pleat, to gather, and to put on buttons. But the moment she left me to go into the kitchen and start cooking, I would sneak into her room, spread out her mother’s prayer mat and slide underneath the brass bed, which stood high up off the floor.
There I’d sleep contentedly until she came in and scolded me.
‘Come along you, get up. You’re too spoilt!’
I was eager to get to Fatme’s place every day. Needle in hand, I would sit there alone, far removed from the bustle of our house, from all the shouting and the demands for me to do this and not do that. Like the harvesters and farmers had in Nabatiyeh, I sang to myself as I worked, but not in the way I sang when I bathed at home. Then I had to sing quietly, so that Ibrahim or my brother-in-law would not hear me.
The Locust and the Bird Page 5
