The Locust and the Bird

by Hanan al-Shaykh

  21 Lebanon’s 1958 sectarian clashes were brief and involved relatively few casualties, but represented the most serious rift between the Muslim and Christian Maronite sects since independence in 1943. The immediate reason for the situation was each sect’s extreme sensitivity to competing regional interests. The Muslim and Druze communities were very keen to commit Lebanon to Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s request for Arab unity, while the Christian Maronites were resolutely pro-Western in their outlook. The US Sixth Fleet intervened to quell the disturbances, and the situation was defused by a deal that saw the departure of Maronite President Camille Chamoun, whose unconstitutional ambition for another six-year term was the trigger for the unrest, and the election of the supposedly reformist army general Fouad Chehab. But the confrontation exposed fundamental weaknesses in Lebanon’s consociational democracy.

  Muhammad Kamal

  THE 1958 REVOLUTION ended. Lebanon didn’t unite with Egypt after all. The US Sixth Fleet intervened and General Fouad Chehab was elected President. I gave birth to another boy, the last in the litter. Muhammad insisted our son be named Muhammad Kamal, so I could call him Muhammad and he could call the boy Kamula. Our friends were troubled by our choice of name, since naming a child for his father with the father still alive seemed destined to bring us bad luck, especially since the baby had come after a number of miscarriages.

  In fact Muhammad Kamal arrived at just the right moment, when our love had been flagging. I’d been constantly exhausted and plagued by feelings of jealousy. We were short of money. But the baby rekindled our love. Under President Chehab we began to enjoy the fruits of Muhammad’s success. He was appointed bureau chief for the entire Bekaa Valley and we moved away from Beirut. Muhammad rented us a large house not far from his work. Two local girls came to help me with the housework, the childcare, and the cooking. We travelled sometimes with the children, at other times without them. Some evenings we would sit on the wide balcony, looking out at the mountains and trees. On the festival of the Prophet Muhammad’s birth we celebrated with fireworks. The children whooped with delight as they watched the bright lights gleaming in the dark. One day Muhammad took them to a granary where they saw wheat being threshed. Muhammad tipped the worker and the children got to sit on the thresher while the cow dragged them around in circles.

  He brought them a small truck filled with melons, and another filled with sand so they could play on the balcony after a neighbour yelled at them for playing in builder’s sand left at the side of the house. I tried to calm myself, because I felt so optimistic amidst all this harmony and contentment. I’d never thought about death, in spite of all the bleeding and miscarriages I’d endured. Muhammad was never ill, but he feared death because he feared losing his good fortune.

  One night he gathered all the children around him, holding Muhammad Kamal, not yet six months old, in his arms. He loaded his revolver and looked up at the sky.

  ‘If you’re really up there,’ he yelled, ‘then listen to me. Don’t ever take them away from me. If you decide to kill me off, then you don’t exist. Listen to me, I beg you: never take them away from me!’

  With that he fired the revolver into the air, and all the doves and the other birds took off into the sky. Our neighbour came rushing out to see what was happening and all of a sudden the moon emerged from behind a cloud.

  ‘You see,’ said Muhammad, ‘the moon’s happy with me.’

  The incident made me wonder whether his fear of death was somehow linked to the fact that he’d begun driving a car after only three weeks’ instruction. Or was it that he’d suddenly become aware of the phases of human existence: birth, youth, old age and death? But I was still only thirty-four years old, and Muhammad thirty-eight. Our parents were alive and well.

  But despite Muhammad’s anxiety, I was the one who thought often about death. These thoughts were not due to four of the children crowding around me laughing, while Muhammad held the fifth. Rather, I kept coming back to the image of the coat hook in our bedroom. It was not behind the door but on the wall next to our bed, so I could stretch out for my dress from bed each morning. For some reason, I kept imagining myself in an emergency, rising from the bed and pulling on the dress. I told Muhammad about my daydream and begged him to stop driving the car. It wasn’t that he didn’t try to be safe. Unlike other more experienced drivers I’d seen, who kept one hand on the steering wheel while the other held a cigarette, Muhammad kept both hands glued rigidly to the wheel. I worried just the same.

  Unbelievably, the dreadful day arrived. I reached for my pink dress with white circles that hung on that hook, wailing as I took it down. The four children, waiting for their father to come home, began bawling with me. The baby Muhammad Kamal clung to me for dear life. It was a holiday, but Muhammad had gone to the office for a couple of hours, as they’d managed to catch a notorious smuggler. He’d said he wouldn’t need to stay long and asked me to make sure the children were ready so he could take them for a ride when he returned. But his car had skidded on the wet road on his way home. He was taken to the hospital.

  Muhammad was unconscious for a while, but then he came round.

  ‘I skidded,’ he said when he saw me. ‘Thank God the children weren’t with me!’

  The doctors did their very best for him. I kept thinking that death had already snatched away my sisters Manifa and Raoufa, and Umm Fawzi. I begged God to forgive Muhammad for firing his revolver into the sky that recent night, when he’d gathered his children around him. I begged him to forgive me for trying to poison my ex-husband and Ibrahim with salt. I begged his forgiveness for telling Muhammad to wait until my husband died for us to marry; I reminded him how I’d got to know and love Muhammad before I’d found out I was to be married to my brother-in-law.

  For hours I sat beside Muhammad’s bed. He was in pain, drifting in and out of consciousness. His bed was enveloped in tubes. Blood from his kidneys and heart showed up in his urine. I meditated, begged God’s forgiveness, asked for his mercy, prayed and wept. I asked God not to respond to Mother’s old prayers, asking for revenge on Muhammad for stealing me away. Once again I reminded God that I already knew and loved Muhammad before I was married to my brother-in-law. If I were to say, ‘It’s in accordance with your will,’ I asked myself, would he forgive everything and make him better? It was God’s will that the dew should fall, but this time it had fallen not on roses and sweet basil but on asphalt. And so Muhammad had skidded in his car, then pressed the accelerator pedal rather than the brake.

  When Muhammad awoke, he began to ramble. He held my hand, telling me there was 700 lira hidden in the desk drawer in his office. Seeing that Fatima never left my side, Muhammad asked me once why Hanan had never come to see him. I smiled at him and said, fibbing, that Hanan was visiting a friend in the north, and that she was planning to come to see him soon.

  ‘Tell her to take an aspirin tablet to calm her down and to come see me,’ he said. Though he must have felt that Hanan, as always, had seldom visited us. Then he told me not to forget about the 700 lira in the desk drawer; he told me I should go and get it before anyone else found it.

  I sat with him. I blamed myself for not forbidding him to drive the car, in spite of my terrible premonition. I blamed myself for praying that he’d die whenever we fought; for wasting so much time; for making him wait so long before I got my divorce; for interrogating him whenever he returned from work; and for preferring to sleep, rather than stay up with him. Though Muhammad was conscious, he was delirious. He seized my hand and kissed it and asked me to run away with him through the window …

  One of his sisters began to wail.

  ‘The Angel of Death is here to take him away!’ she screamed.

  Muhammad tried to escape the Angel’s clutches … but then he was taken from me.

  I was still wearing my slippers as a throng of people gathered for his burial. The funeral ceremony turned into a kind of wedding feast, with crowds from all the villages in the south, sacri
ficed sheep, the Quran blaring from loudspeakers, and memorial speeches. Through it all I could hear Muhammad’s own words whenever we argued and I wished him dead. ‘If I die you’ll want to weep blood all over me,’ he would say. The mourners wore glossy shoes, chic tailored suits and expensive jackets with silk handkerchiefs in the breast pockets. In their fingers they carried prayer beads made of precious stones. They drove flashy cars, without crashing them on wet roads. Everyone came to bid farewell to my husband. There I stood among them, still wearing the slippers I’d put on when I’d heard about the accident.

  Could it really be true that everything had ground to a halt, and Muhammad had become nothing more than a pile of bones? What of his ideas, feelings, plans, pain, memories, desires? His love of poetry? His sleepy ways and his laughter? How could all this come to an end just because his heart had stopped beating? How could he disappear without trace? Where was his longing for me? Where were the two feet that would leap from the bus as soon as he heard the word ‘Bhamdoun’, just so he could see me for an hour before returning happy to Beirut?

  Amid all the weeping and wailing, I spotted Father. He was stifling a laugh and muttering something as he watched Muhammad’s mother riding on a donkey. The donkey had stopped and was refusing to move, while Muhammad’s mother swayed to the left and right. I could understand how this sight had got the better of him.

  When I fainted, Khadija and the other women tried to make me eat something. People said they saw a tear fall from Muhammad’s eye when they brought our elder son over to bid him farewell.

  An old woman patted me gently on the shoulder.

  ‘Listen, sweetheart,’ she told me, ‘God gave him to you and now he’s taken him away. You can cry and beat your breast all you like, but crying won’t bring him back! Never mind, my dearie, some day you’ll be together again.’

  I knew she was doing her best to lighten my misery.

  She started to mourn for the dead in her own family, but then she stopped.

  She said instead, ‘Come on, my sweet, get a grip on yourself, if only for your children’s sake. They’re still little. Come on, days and years will pass very quickly, and in the twinkling of an eye you and Muhammad will be back together.’

  I didn’t like the way she was trying to rush time forward, especially since Muhammad Kamal was not yet six months old.

  ‘Preserve me from evil,’ I muttered.

  Muhammad’s family home was crowded with wailing women. They kept pouring in. I heard one woman ask if my daughter Fatima, who was carrying Muhammad Kamal, was the dead man’s daughter. The women whispered that she was my daughter by my first husband. They started gossiping about my divorce as if I wasn’t there.

  I had no idea where I was; maybe I was with Muhammad in his grave as odes rang in my ears. Khalil Roukoz – the famous poet whose work Muhammad had always loved and who had written a poem for Muhammad when Toufic was born, among many other occasions – recited these lines in a choked voice:

  You have departed, Oh Muhammad, from the life of this world,

  When the burden of existence overpowered your eyes.

  This world of ours is a stage for meetings and departures,

  Not just for you, but for all of us, death awaits.

  Yet in your case you have spoiled the departure with a fire,

  While still a young man, a life of promise still on your cheeks.

  The tears in your widow’s eyes fall two by two,

  So how were you able to close your eyes to them and her?

  Once again the old woman was at my side.

  ‘My sweet,’ she said, ‘only remember: we all want to be with our beloveds. Woman is meant for man, and man for woman. When you go up to heaven, it’ll be to paradise, God willing, because of all that you’re suffering and will suffer. You’ll cry out, “Muhammad, Muhammad, here I am!” and there he’ll be, looking at you like the moon.’

  My heart sank as I remembered that Muhammad was also my first husband’s name, although nobody called him that. Was it conceivable that in heaven I would have to go back to the Haji? I decided I must talk to the oldest woman there, the one who was most religious and devout, and explain my fear that the husband I’d meet in heaven would be my first, not my beloved Muhammad.

  She wiped my face with her hand, recited some verses from the Quran, and said, ‘In the name of God, calm yourself, my dear. You want to be reunited with the deceased Muhammad, because he’s your real husband and your first husband has married someone else. Isn’t that it? Be sure you never forget to pray and fast!’

  I felt happier. But I could not help but wonder how it could be that this old woman, who’d lost all her teeth, was still alive, while Muhammad, a tall young man whose muscular body filled out his clothes, was dead. The feeling stayed with me from the very first day of the funeral rites. Every time I saw anyone old, male or female, I’d say to them, ‘Here you are, old and haggard but still alive, and there’s Muhammad, dead in the prime of his life. Do you call that fair?’

  I only stopped doing this when Miskiah seized me by the hand.

  ‘Unless you control yourself,’ she said, ‘people are going to think you’ve lost your mind.’

  ‘But I have, I have,’ I wanted to say. I still felt as if Muhammad was alive, but had gone away somewhere on government business. I was sure he’d be back.

  His death had caused an earthquake that turned our lovely green field to a wasteland, then into a veritable desert. How were my five children going to live? Who would cut my fingernails and toenails?

  ‘You Must Have the Wrong House’

  TWO MONTHS AFTER Muhammad’s death, my house in Beirut was no longer a home, but more like a mosque. Every day a Quran reader came to recite verses in memory of Muhammad. All kinds of people arrived as well: important people like politicians and civil servants, as well as the local doctor and teacher, relatives, friends and friends of friends. I felt the front door wide open. My five children, now aged eight months to eight years, spent their time making a racket, eating, crying and fighting. The littlest one cried and shouted constantly. ‘Baba, Baba!’ he called out. Muhammad had been both father and mother to him, bathing him, feeding him, and making him laugh. He would only go to sleep if Muhammad held him in his arms.

  All my energy evaporated. As I sat there, collapsed, people poured into the house. They chanted Quranic verses that battled with the noise of the children. Soon I was desperate to close the door in the face of the Quran reader, but I hadn’t the strength to ask him to stop coming, so I let him go on chanting while I lay prostrate on the bed. One afternoon, Ahlam rushed in to tell me that the blind Quran reader was asking after me.

  I yelled out from my bedroom, ‘Oh, I was just going to prepare you some herbal tea, but since you’re leaving, I’ll do it tomorrow.’

  The day came when I did close the door in his face.

  ‘Yes,’ I asked when he arrived one morning, ‘what do you want?’

  ‘I’m the sheikh who’s come to read the Quran,’ he replied.

  ‘Who?’ I asked him again.

  He hesitated a moment.

  ‘The sheikh,’ he said. ‘The one who comes each day to read the Quran for the soul of your husband.’

  ‘You must have the wrong house,’ I replied. ‘No one here has died. What are you trying to do, bring us bad luck?’

  He kept on insisting, and so did I. Eventually he made his way back down the stairs, pounding his stick angrily.

  I gathered up Muhammad’s clothes and shoes, put them in boxes, and shoved them in the attic. I collected all his papers and diaries, put them in a bag, and stored them away in the cupboard. I found an empty cigarette packet among his things. Inside were 10 piastres, along with a scrap of one of my dresses with a pattern of gold circles. I couldn’t remember a thing about the money; in fact the very sight of the coins and the little scrap of material saddened me so much it hurt.

  The early rains arrived and I prepared the children for school. I felt as if
I’d been sleeping in a garden with Muhammad’s arm as a pillow. Now I had awoken to find him gone. Before me were five children, all clinging to my skirts. Four of them were yelling and screaming, asking me to write their names on notepads and books, to read their teachers’ comments or help them with their homework. The fifth one wanted my milk day and night. I felt myself becoming the sixth child. Who would read me the letters from the bank requesting my signature? Who would explain money and contracts? Muhammad had taught me to sign my name, one letter at a time, but the veil that hung over a page of writing terrified me. Should I really be signing my name to all these pieces of paper? Now that Muhammad was dead, should I sign the inheritance document? I remembered how Muhammad had written a will bequeathing me the lands he owned in his village. But then we argued and he tore it up; only to tell me he’d rewritten it once we were reconciled. I never knew why, but I didn’t believe him at the time. I’d looked closely at the document, searching for my name. I found it, but I couldn’t find the word ‘land’. Then I looked for the name of his village, but couldn’t find that either. When I asked him about it, he just hugged me tight.

  It was as though the letters on the page were fighting one another, each one like an annoying fly that buzzed in my eye. Everything I’d ever learned, the small amount that Muhammad had taught me, simply flew away. I was at a total loss, surrounded by the swarming flies. Years ago, I’d compared the letters to nails on the page; now they were all confused in my mind, piling up, one on top of the other.

  I hesitated before I signed my name. The civil servant handling Muhammad’s estate paused. I’d already scribbled on three forms, but I couldn’t pluck up the courage to admit I’d forgotten how to sign my own name. I felt so ashamed that I drew a rose, the same way I’d done for Muhammad, and then a bird. The man stared at me in disbelief and asked me to sign my name on another piece of paper, then another. When I drew the bird and the rose on every single sheet he told me it wouldn’t do and suggested that I make my thumbprint instead. Suddenly I was back in the Nabatiyeh market, watching the blacksmith lift the horse’s hoof to hammer the horseshoe in place. I remembered the wife of Shorty the falafel seller back in our old neighbourhood in Beirut: every time she was given a bill, she put her thumbprint on it, as though she’d been born with a jet-black thumb. I would never use my thumbprint. From that day, I told the man, my signature would be a rose and a bird, since I wouldn’t forget how to do it. And so the civil servant took the forms and stamped the seal on them.