The Locust and the Bird

by Hanan al-Shaykh

  I followed the instructions of one of Muhammad’s brothers and used the government compensation we received for his death to buy an apartment that I could rent out. I deposited some of the money with Salsabil, a woman in the village who invested widows’ money and paid them back a year later with a good profit. I handed over more money to a shoe seller from Muhammad’s village who owned a shop in downtown Beirut, so he could invest the capital and pay me the interest. Finally, Muhammad’s brother-in-law was appointed our guardian, so he could collect the monthly stipend on my behalf and meet our household expenses.

  I couldn’t help thinking that Muhammad was still working for us, even though he was buried in the ground. At least we were eating, drinking and sleeping in our own home, unlike Mother’s experience after her first husband died, which left her penniless. The thought made me hug myself. I imagined I was hugging Muhammad and smiling at him. ‘Thank you, Lord,’ I said. But then I remembered that Mother was thirty-four years old when her husband died, widowed at the same age as me. The thought made me shudder.

  ‘I Am Abu al-Hinn, the Tiniest of Birds.

  What’s the Point of Shooting Me?’

  MY HOME BEGAN to attract all kinds of butterflies and bees, those who brought nectar and those who were in need of it: miserable wives, spinsters in search of youth, divorcees. They were like movie heroines calling at my home, their hearts filled with songs and merriment. I heard detailed anecdotes about their passions and secret rendezvous; discussed complaints about distance, separation and overwhelming love; and participated in fortune-telling sessions, all over endless cups of coffee. It was as if my house had become a heart hospital, a rest home or a convalescent centre. Through me these women sought refuge from their brothers, husbands or even mothers. Regularly this crowd included my two older daughters, Hanan, now fifteen, and especially Fatima, who was now nineteen. She spent most days happily in my house, away from her father and his shrewish wife.

  But I was still afraid. My fear spread to my five younger children, Mother, my friends and everyone who crossed my threshold. Muhammad’s family (the men, that is) sat in silence like fishermen, waiting for me to make the tiniest mistake to trap me in their nets. Muhammad’s three sisters were so upset by their brother’s death that one of them stopped visiting us and left our district altogether, while the other two never stopped weeping, beating their chests and clutching us to them.

  Muhammad’s brothers did their best to control our daily lives, as if we belonged to them. They weren’t happy that I’d managed to recover from the tragedy. They didn’t like that I’d pulled myself together; that I was relying on my own resolve to take care of myself and my children. I felt certain that, if we’d been in India, they’d have decided to burn me alive alongside Muhammad’s corpse. The brother who’d betrayed me to the Haji once slapped me. He was offended that, only forty days after Muhammad’s death, without waiting for the end of the six-month confinement typical for widows, I’d left the house with one of his sisters to present our condolences when a relative died.

  Another brother, Ali, fell in love with me. Amazed, I wondered how he could dare to come to the house every day reciting love poems, when not even a year had passed since Muhammad’s death. He decided he was the man of the house and kept a close watch on everyone who came to visit; he began spying, following me wherever I went.

  When I rebuffed him he replied, ‘I’m free, I can do what I want. This is my brother’s house!’

  ‘I am free, free to live the life I want!’ I shouted at him. ‘Do you understand?’

  Unlike Muhammad’s brothers, however, my ‘guardian’ brother-in-law avoided me. I had to stalk him like a cat after a mouse. When I asked him for money, he ran off as if I was seeking a loan. He insisted on knowing about every single purchase, big or small, even down to a box of matches. I felt certain he was following the instructions of Muhammad’s family: ‘Make her beg for every single penny!’

  Why was it that in-laws behaved like this, both in films and reality? The only way out of the situation was for me to go to court and receive an official order removing my brother-in-law’s guardianship and restraining Muhammad’s domineering brother Ali. But the ears of the official I saw were stuffed with stones. They reverberated with the sound of his own voice, as he pontificated on the law and what was permissible behaviour.

  This experience reminded me of the story of the bird called Abu al-Hinn, a tiny fledgling. Seeing a gun aimed at its heart, it begged the hunter not to shoot.

  ‘Dear hunter,’ it said, ‘I’m Abu al-Hinn, the tiniest of birds. What’s the point of shooting me? You’d be better off with a slice of bread and some onion!’

  These words softened the hunter’s heart and he left the little bird alone and went in search of other prey. The bird flapped its wings in sheer delight, and was so thrilled by its powers of persuasion that it got ahead of itself.

  Spotting another hunter, it rushed from its nest.

  ‘I’m Abu al-Hinn,’ it said again. ‘One of my thighs is enough to feed an entire household.’ With that the hunter shot it dead.

  When I went to the shariah court, I was just like the conceited bird. I was used to Muhammad’s love and status protecting me, so I had stepped into court assuming that justice would be on my side. Now the official’s rejection – his complete unwillingness to listen – had turned me back into Abu al-Hinn, the tiny bird that trembled as it entreated the hunter not to shoot it.

  Once more I resorted to trickery and cunning, with the little bird Abu al-Hinn as my guide. I decided to seek another appearance with the sheikh in the shariah court. I asked him to cancel my guardian’s power of attorney and make me responsible for my own children; and to put a stop to Muhammad’s domineering brother Ali’s amorous harassment. He replied that the guardian had been selected because of his love for my deceased husband and his fidelity to Muhammad’s memory. The behaviour of his brother Ali, the sheikh told me, was caused by the brother’s awareness of society’s failure to protect widows, for whom there was little sympathy, particularly if they were young. (He didn’t add ‘and pretty’.)

  I decided I needed a new tactic. I hurried to Kamil’s house to ask his beautiful green-eyed wife to help me by accompanying me the following week. At first the sheikh tried to repeat what he’d said on the previous occasion, but I told him again that I didn’t believe an outsider such as Muhammad’s brother-in-law was an appropriate guardian. I was my own person, in charge of myself, not the property of my dead husband’s family. I also complained again about the lewd advances of Muhammad’s brother Ali.

  As I wept before the sheikh, my sister-in-law was equally busy batting her eyelids at him. The sheikh promptly signed the papers, acknowledging I was the primary guardian of my children. At that point my friendship with Kamil’s wife – which stemmed from our own mothers’ friendship – was firmly cemented.

  Muhammad Betrays Me

  ONE OF MY husband’s female relatives told me her son had once been in a car with Muhammad when they stopped to pick up a woman, a foreign hitchhiker. I felt a stab of jealousy, as though Muhammad were still alive. I took off my shoe and threw it at his photograph, but missed. As soon as the relative left I stood in front of the picture, accusing him and demanding to know the truth. But his smile never changed. I banged on the picture. When neither frame nor glass broke, I moved it to face my own photograph, so that way he was looking at me and I could give him the cold shoulder.

  I couldn’t sleep that night. Could it be possible that the entire time I’d been exhausted, pregnant and raising my children, Muhammad was flirting with some foreign woman? Maybe they’d even had an affair! I told everyone who visited about Muhammad’s betrayal. Without fail they laughed at me and pointed out how funny I was, unable to believe that such an innocuous incident could make me so unhappy. But anger gnawed at me. I decided I had to know exactly what had happened between Muhammad and this foreign woman.

  A neighbour heard of my fury and told me abou
t a friend who’d confided in her that Muhammad had been unfaithful. This woman had asked him for help on an official matter and he’d invited her to have lunch with him. When she’d turned him down, he’d flirted with her and tried to persuade her to change her mind.

  I stormed out to see the woman, a schoolteacher, and demanded she tell me exactly what had happened between her and Muhammad.

  ‘I’ll show him!’ I yelled at her, as if Muhammad were alive. ‘I’ll show him!’

  She swore by the most solemn oath that she and the neighbour had made the whole thing up, as a way of getting me to take off my mourning clothes and begin to enjoy life again. It was now a year since Muhammad’s death. I didn’t believe her. Instead, I pictured Muhammad at his desk as the woman came in carrying her handbag, her chic outfit indicating that she didn’t have to spend her days at home, cooking, washing and cleaning. Not only that, she could actually read official documents. I imagined Muhammad noting how well educated she was, his intellectual equal. There she was enjoying life to the full while Kamila was stuck at home with the babies.

  I got out the bag in which I’d stored his papers, wondering whom I could get to read them to me. I needed a discreet friend, not someone who would take malicious pleasure from my situation. I remembered Leila, my neighbour who used to tell me the plots of the novels she read. Leila would understand.

  We sat down together over dozens, if not hundreds, of pieces of paper. I told her how Muhammad had betrayed me, repeating what the old woman in Muhammad’s village said whenever I visited my husband’s grave.

  I used her accent as I recited, ‘“Oh, how I burn with grief for you! Your husband was a king, with a pistol on each hip.” ’

  She would point to either side of her waist.

  ‘Listen to me: when my husband died, I wept and wept, even though I had to reproach him. “You left for Beirut,” I would say, “and rode on the trams. You left me behind to take care of the cattle. Now you’re gone, and I don’t give a damn.” Come, come, Kamila, it’s better to live through a funeral than see your husband marry another woman. After all, who can say? If my husband were still alive, maybe he’d have married someone else.’

  But as I looked at Muhammad’s writing, I fell in love with him all over again. I saw the letters I had made my daughter Fatima write to him. I saw the bird, the nest and the roses I’d drawn for him. I also saw notebooks divided into paragraphs separated by red ink. These were his diaries, Leila said, but what I wanted to find were the letters he’d received. Leila’s eye fell on the words, ‘Bonjour, mon ami!’ written in both French and Arabic. But this was part of a story about a love affair between two students. The boy took the girl, named K, on a picnic:

  We reached the hills to the east of Beirut. On this side the city bends like an old woman resting her back against a solid wall, or a child cradled by its mother.

  With summer, the boy’s beloved K went to Bhamdoun. Life became a burden and nothing seemed sweet any more. One day, he took a walk in the streets where they had strolled together, and spotted her at a tram stop, trying to cross the street. Hardly able to believe his eyes, he cried out to her in sheer delight. She turned and ran towards him. But the passing tram refused to wait till she’d crossed. Alas, her final view of him was from beneath the wheels of the tram, which crushed her and ended her life. The horror and grief stopped him in his tracks and he turned into a statue. There he stood for ever, his soul contemplating what had happened beneath those wheels.

  When Leila finished reading, I was devastated. Had Muhammad really felt so utterly desperate when I married the Haji that he’d wanted such an end for me? Had he really wanted me to die so his torture could end and he could turn into a statue? Now he was the one buried underground and I was turning into a statue. It no longer mattered if I stumbled on evidence of his infidelity.

  Muhammad’s papers transfixed us. We were bewitched. Leila was eager to keep on reading. I left her for a moment and went into the kitchen. When I came back, she was still poring over the pages, shaking her head, clutching her heart or copying parts she’d found.

  ‘God sent him to you from above,’ she said, ‘so you could taste the sweet flavour of love. The vast majority of women are destined to live and die, but the only sensation of physical pleasure they will ever experience is when they pee, or in their dreams.’

  Leila started to read again, then stopped and covered her face in embarrassment. She was not yet married, though over twenty-five. She carried on reading till the end, crying out in her Beirut accent, ‘Good grief! What next?’

  Soraya’s Complaint

  Soraya complained about me to my parents,

  Saying, ‘Your boy has done me wrong.

  ‘He has quaffed wine till his passions took wing

  ‘And he has fondled my breasts.

  ‘He has tasted the savour of my mouth against my will;

  ‘He has encircled my neck and bitten my cheeks.

  ‘He has sucked at my honey and fondled my rose,

  ‘And his hands have toyed with my pomegranate.’

  Soraya kept exaggerating and weeping,

  And her cries caused my parents to weep as well.

  Father spoke to Mother about her boy

  And asked her why I persisted in such sin.

  She said, ‘He will sober up, and I shall offer him my counsel.

  ‘His only sin is to be on fire.

  ‘When he arrives, let me be alone with him in my tent.

  ‘I shall rub his cheeks between my hands,

  ‘And suck from his mouth the wine he has quaffed.

  ‘Gradually he will sober up from his drunkenness.’

  Soraya now said, ‘If that indeed is to be his cure,

  ‘Then leave him to me.

  ‘I am the most skilful at sucking what has been quaffed,

  ‘And my lips are the only ones to which his mouth is accustomed.’

  We had a good laugh at this risqué poem, which Muhammad must have copied from somewhere.

  Next Leila read a letter from a male relative of Muhammad’s, telling him that he’d find some really gorgeous French girls with stunning breasts, tiny waists and fantastic behinds at a cabaret in Beirut. ‘I work my way in among them like a bird under its mother’s wing,’ the writer said. ‘Oh, how I wish you could be right here at my side, since you’re the chief when it comes to this particular area of expertise!’

  From the letter’s date I could tell it was written when Muhammad had been transferred to the Silk Valley, at a time when our love was at its strongest. There was no reason to believe he had been unfaithful. This calmed me down a lot. I started putting all the papers back in the bag. By now I was convinced Muhammad had never betrayed me. I poured Leila a cup of coffee and lit a cigarette, something that from then on never left my hand.

  Six months later I took the papers out again so they could be read by a new friend. Two sentences from his diaries made me very upset: ‘My darling Kamila no longer keeps me warm.’ And: ‘After the four years I’ve spent with K, I’ve started to visit those girls, but they’re always out.’

  I’d known that, before I got my divorce, Muhammad had sometimes visited two sisters who had the reputation of being flirtatious. I remembered a dream I’d had after we were married, in which he went back and visited one of them. Muhammad was away on business for a week or two, and when he called I told him about my dream. He just laughed and then sent me a letter describing a dream one of his sisters had had after she ate some lentils too close to bedtime. In her dream the lentils grabbed her and dropped her in the saucepan.

  I put all the letters and other papers back in the bag and left them in the cupboard again. I decided I must put those two sentences right out of my mind. Instead, I concentrated on the dozens of words of beauty he’d used, words that had lifted me to the very heavens. I let all those women – the relative who told me about the hitchhiking foreign girl, Leila, and my new friend who read to me about the flirtatious sisters – believ
e that their strategy had worked. As they’d hoped, I shed my mourning clothes and took Fatima with me to buy a nice colourful sweater. Then we went to the hairdresser and I had my curly hair straightened. On the way home I took a detour through our old neighbourhood, hoping that I might run into the boy next door. Our old house no longer had its open roof; three apartments had been built on top of it. As I passed the boy’s balcony, I didn’t stop; I just smiled and continued on my way.

  I had found the will to live again, but Mother still aggravated my fears. She was afraid of Muhammad’s family and of our creditors. She was scared for my young children: afraid of them playing on the balcony or near the gas oven, afraid that they’d be hurt crossing the street, afraid that they might catch her eye disease. But all those worries paled compared to her concern over my youthful desires. If she saw me standing in front of the mirror, doing my hair, she would try to stop me. When I laughed, left the house, or sat on the balcony with a neighbour or female relative smoking a cigarette, she’d glare at me.

  ‘You’re drinking coffee as if it comes free from the spring! Your coffee is taken from the mouths of those orphaned children,’ she scolded all of our visitors.