The Locust and the Bird

by Hanan al-Shaykh

  Mother hurried into the room, as if her spirit had been revived.

  ‘By God, Kamila,’ she said, ‘I can hear cows mooing in Beirut. Is it possible, do you think? Let’s go and find them!’

  She took the afterbirth away in a bucket covered with a cloth. Accompanied by Fatima and Hanan, she walked some distance till she came to a ditch. She dug a deep hole with her bare hands and with a scoop tipped it all in before covering it again. The three of them then stayed for an hour, watching over the afterbirth till the smell dissipated to make sure it didn’t attract cats or dogs.

  I had given birth at home aided by a professional midwife since we couldn’t spare the money for hospital fees any more, nor for gold jewellery, pretty dresses or shoes. Money ran through our fingers like water from a broken jug. I would stand at the door in the morning as Muhammad left for work, shouting to him in a voice loud enough for the women neighbours to hear, ‘Don’t forget to drop by the jeweller’s and get me some nice armlets. And ask him if he’s repaired the pair of earrings!’

  Mother stayed on with us to help me raise the children. Then, when Muhammad was promoted, he hired a servant girl. We were invited to his colleagues’ birthday parties and went out to restaurants with them. I’d talk to refined people, but all the while my thoughts would be on the children left at home with Mother, whose sight was getting worse. Once we returned home to find her sound asleep, and the children scattered like feral monkeys through the house.

  Mother and I suffered from the same disease of indolence, Muhammad remarked.

  ‘Fine,’ I replied, ‘just bring me a kilo of meat and watch how I spring up like fire. I’ll pound the meat and make some Kafta. Once I’ve eaten some of that, you’ll see how quickly I get my strength back.’

  But this was bravado talk. I was exhausted. I was bleeding constantly, and the babies, teething in succession, screamed. I tried to be like Khadija, picking up the children’s clothes from the floor with her toes as she carried her baby around on her hip. But before long I would collapse on the bed, too tired even to whisper words of adoration to Muhammad. I wanted to lie down to sleep rather than do housework or deal with the children. Muhammad did not believe I was exhausted – he believed I was lazy. Once, a bitter cold spell hit the capital when he was away for two days on official business. When he heard about it he took a taxi back to Beirut, arriving home at midnight and rushing straight to the children’s bedroom to make sure they were properly covered. He’d convinced himself I’d be sound asleep, warm and cosy, while the poor children shivered in their beds.

  Ra’s al-Naqurah

  MUHAMMAD’S JOB TOOK us to Ra’s al-Naqurah, a remote army outpost on the Lebanese–Israeli border. As soldiers helped us with our belongings and officers greeted us, I thanked God for this luxury at last. I saw the lush garden, climbed the staircase, entered our bedroom and gazed out at the blue sea stretching before me. The only time I’d seen its colour matched was in washing powder, to which you added a cube of Nile whitener.

  ‘Where are we?’ I asked Muhammad, singing as I twirled around, just like Layla Murad in the film. ‘Is it the Red Sea? Alexandria? Marsa Matruh?’

  When he began to bring me fish every day, small or big, silver or coloured, I knew for sure I’d gone up several rungs on the social ladder. When fishermen were caught using dynamite to fish, the soldiers would confiscate the fish and issue a fine. The fish would then be distributed to us and the other officials. When I was a little girl and stood in doorways selling bibs, I’d often smell fish cooking. Oh, how I’d longed to taste some! But the Haji would never buy fish. ‘What’s the point,’ he’d say, ‘when there are so many of us? I’d be happy to get some, but with so many people in the house, a whole shoal of fish wouldn’t be enough.’

  Our new house was large, with five bedrooms around a courtyard, two large reception rooms on the first floor, as well as a kitchen and other rooms on the ground floor. As we sipped coffee on the balcony of our home, Muhammad would point out the Lebanese–Israeli border. I came to understand the importance of his post at Ra’s al-Naqurah. He was responsible for such a vast area of land and sea. Looking along the shore at the rocks and the flat plains, I was reminded of Mufaddala, the daughter of my aunt who thought she had a snake in her stomach. Mufaddala had married a Palestinian and they’d moved to Palestine, but after 1948 and the creation of the State of Israel there’d been no more news of her. If only Mufaddala could be told I was now married to the director in charge of the frontier; if only I knew where she was so I could ask her to meet me and persuade Muhammad to let her cross the border back into Lebanon. If only that could happen, then my aunt would stop crying, and Mother too. They were so sad because Mufaddala seemed to be lost for ever.

  Mother had told me how, after 1948, each morning my aunt would run towards the border, calling, ‘Mufaddala, Mufaddala.’ She kept trying in vain to cut the barbed wire with a sickle or with stones, and would pound her head with rocks. She’d only stop when her face was covered in blood. Then she’d go again to the border at night, hoping that her cries of ‘Mufaddala, Mufaddala’ had raised an echo in Palestine–Israel that would bring her daughter back.

  While Muhammad was busy working, I spent my time taking the children on walks with the wives of other officials. I’d sing for them and tell them the stories of films I’d seen.

  ‘You’re not like a director’s wife,’ one said with a note of relief when they saw me picking endive, wild thyme and camomile. I smiled back and sighed. How would they react, I wondered, if I told them how I used to sneak into the wheat fields with Mother after the harvesters had left so we wouldn’t starve?

  Weeks went by, then months. Gradually we strayed further and further from the settlement on our walks. One day, we headed for a solitary palm tree I’d seen from our balcony. Suddenly a soldier began to shout and chase after us. We’d wandered into Israeli territory. The other wives began to tremble: one invoked the Virgin Mary, another Jesus and a third the Prophet Muhammad. I didn’t invoke anyone. All I cared about was seeing something other than waves, white foam, large smooth pebbles and green grass.

  I woke up one morning clutching my head.

  ‘The roar of the sea is boring into my skull!’ I complained to Muhammad. I had to block my ears to stop the noise of the crashing waves throbbing inside my brain.

  Muhammad noticed my change of mood; even my love of telling jokes seemed to have abandoned me. I stopped hanging around with the officials and their wives and trying to be that wonderful woman, the director’s wife. I no longer wanted to go to the beach with Muhammad and the children. The very sight of the sea made my heart pound. When the waves were rough, I wanted to grab hold of the children and run, in case the waves swallowed them up. When I stopped eating fish and could hardly stand, Muhammad called in a doctor who visited Ra’s al-Naqurah every month to check on the officials in that wilderness. When he asked me how I was feeling, I told him about the roar of the waves and my urge to cry if the sea changed colour. He told me I was suffering from a kind of depression that affected people in remote places. In tears I told him about my aunt’s daughter, and he nodded, confirming his diagnosis.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘worrying about this young woman only makes you feel worse.’

  As the sea roared on the beach below the house, I didn’t dare mention my two daughters in Beirut to the doctor. The fact was that I missed them terribly, and each heartbeat of the waves made me feel even further away.

  But I snapped back to my old self when Muhammad brought home a woman who’d been apprehended for trying to cross over into Israel. She swore she was Lebanese and had relatives there. Though she spoke Arabic, Muhammad couldn’t tell from her accent whether she was Lebanese or Palestinian. She began to cry, begging Muhammad to let her go, but he put her in a room on the ground floor and locked the door, saying that a detective would come next day to question her. I asked to speak with her. Muhammad refused. He wouldn’t even let me go downstairs with him when he
took her some food. I couldn’t stop thinking about this woman locked up on the ground floor. I started calling her ‘the prisoner’.

  I decided what to do. I waited until Muhammad was in bed and sound asleep before reaching under his pillow where he kept his keys. I tiptoed downstairs and unlocked the door. The woman was still crying. I tried to talk to her, but she kept on weeping. The only thing I could make out was that she was in some kind of trouble; why else would she have exposed herself to such danger? I started to cry too. Why hadn’t my cousin, Mufaddala, sneaked back across in this way?

  I brought her some food in a bag, took her hand, and opened the door for her.

  ‘Go on,’ I told her, ‘start running!’

  She leaned forward to kiss my hand, but I withdrew it.

  ‘Run quickly! Save yourself! Go on!’

  Within seconds she was lost in the darkness.

  I went back to bed and put the keys under Muhammad’s pillow. I couldn’t sleep. My depression had left the house, running out into the night with the woman. I lay listening to the roar of the waves, wondering if she had managed to sneak into Palestine or hide out somewhere in Lebanese territory. When morning came Muhammad dressed quickly, took the keys and disappeared.

  Then he came back upstairs and into the bedroom and hugged me to him.

  ‘Now what exactly am I supposed to tell the detective?’ he whispered in my ear. ‘That my wife stole the keys and let the woman go? For all you know she could have been a dangerous spy!’

  Two Muhammads

  OUR TIME IN Ra’s al-Naqurah came to an end and we returned to the bustle and expense of Beirut. By now there were two Muhammads in my life. The first one wore houndstooth suits and crisply ironed shirts. He was the Muhammad with sleek brown hair, the one who was always reading a book with a piece of paper or a pen in his hand. He was forever reciting popular poetry he’d memorised, or verses composed by his friends. This was the Muhammad who made me feel insanely jealous as I watched him licking a lamb bone with relish. I was jealous because his wide hazel eyes showed his love for everything that was stylish and beautiful and I wanted him to love only me. This Muhammad was the one I thought about, recalling the smell of his body when he was away. He only had to look at me to gain complete control over my heart and soul.

  The second Muhammad ensured that I was constantly pregnant, having miscarriages or giving birth to one baby after another. I was exhausted all the time. It seemed that I only had to smell Muhammad or be hugged by him to get pregnant, and I tried very hard to abort each pregnancy. I managed to miscarry twins after jumping off tables and taking lots of aspirin. Ahlam saw me doing this, and threatened to tell her father; at this point, she was only six years old.

  My doctor never advised me about my pregnancies, the miscarriages or the bleeding I suffered when I was pregnant. Nor did Muhammad and I agree to stop producing children until my body could recover and our financial situation improved. Muhammad wanted another boy and as many children as possible regardless of our lack of money and my fatigue. He would say, ‘You go ahead and have the babies, I will look after them.’

  This second Muhammad helped me raise the children with boundless energy. If he had a headache, he’d put a band around his head to relieve the pain, and carry on. He fussed over the children and the house, and even borrowed money so we could spend a summer in Bhamdoun. There, I thought often of the first Muhammad. Together we visited the local village, the spring and the chinaberry trees; we found our names and the dates we’d met carved into the walnut tree. We sat under the tree, trying to relive those earlier times when I had sung ‘Oh sleepy love’. He asked me to sing to him again, and I did, though my stomach was distended with our fourth child and I felt so tired that I only wanted to sleep. I mustered up every flirtatious move I had left as I sang Shadiya’s song:

  I catch up with you and you run away from me;

  I go after you but you escape.

  Who has changed you so?

  Who has made you hate me so?

  Why won’t you tell me?

  In spite of my best efforts, Muhammad shook his head.

  ‘Your voice isn’t what it was,’ he said regretfully. ‘It’s almost as though it’s been strangled by a rope.’

  He meant that my love for him was diminishing because I couldn’t sing as passionately as I had before.

  His words made us both laugh. I said it was as though we each carried a thermometer, in order to test whether our love was still at its peak. The next morning I snuggled up to Muhammad as he opened the newspaper and read me the world’s events. In the evening I hurried to him again as he opened his notebook.

  On the day my identity card recorded as my birthday (we weren’t sure it was my exact birthday), he read me a poem:

  Birthday by Iliyya Abu Madi

  What am I to give you, my angel, on your birthday,

  When you already possess everything?

  Bracelet, armlet of purest gold?

  I do not like to see chains on your wrist.

  Wine? There does not exist on this earth a wine

  Like the one that pours from your glances.

  Roses? For me the most beauteous rose

  Is the one I have plucked from your cheeks.

  Or carnelian perhaps, blazing red like my very life blood,

  And the precious red carnelian in your luscious lips.

  I have nothing to give you more dear than the soul itself,

  And my own soul is a pawn in your hands.

  I asked him to recite the poem again. Then I recited it almost word for word back to him. He hugged me, crying and blaming himself for never having taught me to read and write. I dried his eyes but then began crying too.

  ‘A stick of wood with some lead in it; I’m through because of it!’ I shouted, and then I turned the words into a song: ‘Because of a stick of wood with some lead in it, I was through. Every time I began to learn to read and write, my belly grew!’

  Inside my belly was a fifth little girl. When she was born, she looked just like Kadsuma, the heroine in the film Sayonara, and so that was her name.

  The 1958 Revolution Happened

  Because of Me

  I HAD ALWAYS BELIEVED that tension would regularly erupt between lovers, families and workmates, but would never escalate into situations beyond one’s control. And yet this was what happened in Lebanon in the spring of 1958.21 In our neighbourhood armed gangs and revolutionaries made death threats against government employees, particularly if they worked for the police, the army or the Sécurité Générale. When Muhammad was told he’d be killed if he didn’t resign from his job, and the nearby residence of the Prime Minister was blown up by the insurgents while a crowd rejoiced as it burned, we knew it was time to escape to a Christian neighbourhood. I suggested to Muhammad that we take refuge at Ibrahim’s house – after all, I was blood kin. Following his older son’s return from America with an aeronautical degree, Ibrahim had moved from the house he shared with the Haji and into a house in a Christian neighbourhood.

  The next day I bade farewell to our neighbours. We were terrified that the Nasserites would appear at any moment. I cried as I left the key with Leila, our neighbour who had become a good friend. We had often discussed the films we’d seen, and she would tell me the plots of novels she read, as the reader that I could never be.

  When the taxi scheduled to take us to our new home didn’t arrive, we felt sure the driver must be aligned with the revolutionaries planning to arrest Muhammad. So Muhammad decided to go downstairs and look for another taxi, rather than wait inside the house. Out on the street we found a taxi, but without its driver. I sat in the back with the four children, while Muhammad sat in the front. Was it all part of a plot? Had the driver betrayed us?

  While Muhammad tried to figure out what to do next, the children and I became very anxious. The driver came out of Shorty’s falafel shop, carrying an enormous falafel sandwich. That shop was always crammed with people – some of them buying, others
simply hoping to be entertained by the proprietor, a dwarf who wore high-heeled wooden clogs, and his tall wife. When they argued, Shorty would stand on a chair to slap her.

  Eventually we managed to get through the road blocks without trouble. But instead of feeling relieved to be out of danger, I began to panic as we neared Ibrahim’s house. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen him and his family since I’d married Muhammad; we’d bumped into them quite by chance when we were all at Maryam’s house after she gave birth to her first child, and we had made peace with each other then.

  When we finally arrived, Ibrahim and Khadija could not have greeted us more warmly. The other big surprise was that we found Fatima and Hanan there too. The street fighting had prevented me from seeing my daughters for quite some time. They were on their way to Nabatiyeh to take refuge from the troubles, which had reached their neighbourhood.

  Once my children were in bed, I pinched myself. Here I was in Ibrahim’s house – the man who had arranged my forced marriage, the one who’d fainted clean away when Hasan broached the topic of my divorce, the one who’d urged Abu-Hussein to go ahead and divorce me. ‘Muhammad is bound to leave her,’ he’d told the Haji. ‘He’ll never marry her. She’s already a wife and mother of two children.’ He had wanted to see me humiliated, but now he was opening his house to give us shelter. I knew perfectly well, of course, that my current husband’s sweet nature imposed its own kind of respect. And he also held a senior position in the Sécurité Générale. But I think that Ibrahim’s change of heart was also due to the fact that by now I’d produced four more children by Muhammad. I’d passed the test. I could enjoy genuine married status. I had returned to the family, honoured and respected.

  Before I dropped off to sleep, I asked Muhammad if dire circumstances make people more hard-hearted. It seemed as though success softened people’s hard edges and made them more tolerant. Suddenly I admired Ibrahim, snatched from school and thrown straight into life’s struggles. In spite of everything, he’d fought for his own children to have a good education by saving money, little by little. And now here he was, the owner of a house; or, more precisely, a villa.