The Locust and the Bird

by Hanan al-Shaykh

  Hanan recognised the woman at once.

  ‘What?’ Hanan exclaimed to her. ‘Don’t you know me?’

  ‘Come closer,’ said the woman. ‘Then I can give you a hug and kiss and smell you. I’ll recognise you!’

  ‘I’m the girl who used to drive you crazy!’

  The woman came over to Hanan and they embraced.

  ‘You’re Hanan!’ the woman cried, after gazing at her.

  They embraced again, a real hug this time. Then Hanan introduced me to Samira, one of Abu-Ghaleb’s daughters, but she corrected Hanan’s introduction.

  ‘Didn’t you know that I had reverted to my real name, Amina? I’m Hajja Amina now,’ she said. She explained that as a child she’d hated her name.

  By now Hajja Amina was almost seventy, a little younger than me. As we walked, she began to talk to me about how her mother had loved Hanan and Fatima, and how she always felt sorry for them.

  ‘“It’s a shame,” my mother used to say,’ Hajja Amina told me. ‘“Poor Hanan needs her mother and her home. Go and buy her some chocolate. Get her a drum and some bangles.” ’ Hajja Amina went on to tell me that she remembered how once Hanan had started to cry, wishing that she could go to Beirut. Hajja Amina’s eldest sister stood up and told her, ‘OK, go ahead. You can catch a ride on the pussy cat; she’ll take you to Beirut.’

  I left Hanan and Hajja Amina talking and walked in the back garden, smoking another cigarette. I felt as if my heart was torn in two, contracting all over again. Concerned, Hanan came to find me. I tried to make light of the pain I felt, but when she pressed me I told her that Hajja Amina had been speaking about her as if she had no mother.

  ‘Good heavens,’ I told her, ‘I don’t know what happened to you in 1958. I had no idea where you and your sister were then, I only saw you that one time at the house of your Uncle Ibrahim, when the troubles were just starting. I was stupid enough to imagine you were both all right. How did you manage to get by in life, all on your own? What happened when you had your first period? How did you manage to clean yourself and cope with the pain?’

  ‘There was no problem,’ Hanan responded. ‘I was happy when I got my period. What you should be asking is how I remembered to clean behind my ears or inside my navel!’ She gave me a big hug. ‘Stop it, Mama!’ she said. ‘You have to live in the present.’

  She raced back inside, eager to see the kitchen, the back yard and the tent where the family used to thread tobacco leaves on skewers. Hanan had mentioned to me in the car that she had used Abu-Ghaleb’s house and lands as a setting in her novel Beirut Blues.

  As she had done so often since I had come back into her life and she into mine, Hanan tried to ease my guilt and pain. I recalled how we had first been reunited, how I’d come to feel closer to her. Fifteen years earlier she’d asked me to have dinner at her hotel in Beirut, where she and her family were staying on a visit from London. I was sitting with her in a room overlooking a sandy shore. As we chatted, I began to understand why she’d wanted to see me alone. It was very rare for us to be alone together; usually when we met we’d make small talk, remain silent or eat, and that was it. This time she made me feel that I was her children’s grandmother and her husband’s mother-in-law, as she insisted that they come and sit with us. I wondered whether her delight at seeing me, and the love she was showing me, might sweep away all the sorrows buried in the past.

  As we sat together, Hanan kept looking at me. I knew that in me she saw herself. She came close and put her face next to mine, asking her daughter, who sat near by, if we looked alike. I got the impression that Hanan had made up her mind – that I was indeed her mother, who gave birth to her, contrary to what she used to say, that she had found herself on the surface of life with her father.

  We took Hajja Amina with us to look for our house. She turned down the driver’s offer of assistance, instead leaning on Hanan as she tried to get into the car.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Hanan asked her. ‘Is it because he’s a stranger that you don’t want him to help you?’

  ‘The Devil’s the only stranger,’ was her reply.

  Again we set off, and all at once there were the chinchona trees and the vines. I started shouting and almost tumbled out of the Range Rover window, determined not to miss the street again.

  ‘This is it,’ I finally cried out. ‘This is it! Ali, please stop. Stop here!’

  We all got out, but I struggled to find the right house. I began to feel like a swarm of bees that had lost touch with its queen and was buzzing about aimlessly. Hajja Amina pointed to a dilapidated house with a painted lintel over the door. No, our house hadn’t been at the top of the road, but more to the left, I told her. I took a few steps in that direction, and felt myself begin to remember the way my feet had moved in the old days, how I had to steady myself so as not to topple over in my wooden clogs.

  Standing in front of a house, I shouted, ‘This is the one! The gate put me off. There was no gate when we lived here.’

  Two women on the flat roof saw us talking and came down to open the door. Hajja Amina told them I was looking for the house where I’d been born. They welcomed us warmly and we went inside.

  ‘There’s the lintel,’ I exclaimed. ‘And the window!’

  ‘The proverb is right on the mark,’ Hajja Amina proclaimed. ‘“One stone takes you away, another brings you back”! Beirut took you away and now your old house has called you back.’

  ‘There were fig branches hanging outside that window,’ I cried out. ‘Mother would pick figs from exactly where I’m standing. What happened to the fig tree?’

  I turned to the two women, as if expecting them to answer, as if some sixty-six years hadn’t slipped by since I’d left. Hanan wandered over to the window ledge with its carved geometric patterns and two central columns.

  ‘Mama, I never realised you grew up in such a beautiful house with such lovely features,’ she said.

  ‘My son left the columns and window the way they are because they’re antique,’ one of the women explained.

  The two women insisted we sit with them on the balcony so we could look out over part of the back garden and road. Behind us was the garden where I’d once played. In front of me the stones of the wall remained jagged, as though someone had put mortar between the cracks.

  We drank coffee and I couldn’t stop myself saying, ‘My God, life is so wonderful down here! If only I’d stayed here to live, I’d never have had to take any medicine, let alone Prozac.’

  The women looked at each other and Hajja Amina looked at Hanan, not understanding what I’d meant.

  ‘Everyone loves Mama,’ said Hanan, trying to make light of what I’d let slip. ‘Every day she takes a pill so she can cope with all the people who come to see her.’

  Where was Mother now? I wondered. Where were the cows? Where was the donkey, my friend Apple and the other girls? How could the world have taken me away from this place, to Beirut, Ra’s al-Naqurah, Syria, Kuwait and America?

  We left the house and headed for the cemetery. I wanted to recite the Fatiha, the opening words of the Quran, in memory of Mother and my two sisters. We searched for their graves in the wild grass but couldn’t find them. Hajja Amina offered to read, or to teach us how to read, the Fatiha; it would make its way to the souls of Mother and my two sisters, she told us, even if we couldn’t find their graves. I wanted to ask Mother’s forgiveness for all the times when I’d refused to make her Kibbeh. I wanted to tell my elder sister that I’d been forced to marry her husband and had then divorced him. I wanted to tell my other sister that all her children were living in America, even the son with the wooden leg, who’d gone there to join the rest of his family.

  Hajja Amina recited the Fatiha, seizing each of us by the hand as she did so.

  ‘Now, my dears,’ she said. ‘Let me follow it with a supplication guaranteed to reach your dearly loved departed:

  Let their souls cleave the graves apart,

  And soar o’ertop t
he highest castles,

  And smell the sweet scent of ambergris and incense.

  Bring them to the garden of bliss,

  And free them from the fires of hell,

  Oh Lord of all Mankind,

  Lord of the Prophets,

  And best of trustees.

  ‘I dedicate this to your late mother and two sisters.’

  I was beginning to feel very fond of Hajja Amina and invited her to visit us in Beirut so she could have some fun with us.

  ‘God willing,’ she replied. ‘But you never know …’ With that she seized our hands again and recited a poem:

  If everyone knew themselves better

  And made themselves an object of study,

  There would be no fighting in this world

  Nor any idle chatter.

  Then the judge could close his prison.

  ‘Never forget, my dears: the tiniest drop of oil can solve even the biggest problems.’

  On our way back to Beirut, Hanan told me that Hajja Amina had taken her aside when I was smoking a cigarette.

  ‘Why does your mother bury her head in her hands?’ she’d asked. ‘Why is she so upset about that house? There are thousands of homes much nicer than that old heap.’

  I started to cry and Hanan held my hand. She asked if the night, descending about us as we drove, was making me weep and long for the past. Today was actually her birthday, she reminded me. She snuggled close to me, making me cry even harder. I moved away; I didn’t want her to smell cigarettes. Then I was afraid she’d think I didn’t want her to hug me.

  ‘I smell of cigarettes,’ I explained.

  ‘Mama,’ she replied. ‘I love you, so why are you crying?’

  I think she had realised that I was crying because I wasn’t sure she loved me.

  ‘Tell me honestly,’ I asked. ‘Do you love me still?’

  She gave me another hug.

  ‘Mama,’ she repeated. ‘I love you a lot, even more since we have begun to talk. I feel guilty that I waited so long.’

  ‘But how can you love me when I abandoned you as a little girl?’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. The important thing is that you had to leave Father. In any case, it’s ancient history by now. Think of the present, not the past!’

  But how was I supposed to make light of my pain after this trip south? Our encounter with Hajja Amina had made me see more clearly the enormous mistake I’d made in abandoning my two daughters.

  Hanan began listing the advantages she’d enjoyed because I’d left home when she was a child.

  ‘Mama,’ she said, ‘I let the other children feel sorry for me. I used to tell the teacher lies when I hadn’t done my homework. I’d say we’d had to go to court so the sheikh could ask us whether we wanted to live with our father or our mother.’

  Not even these white lies could make me laugh.

  ‘You and your sister are two little jewels,’ I said. ‘And I threw you in the dirt.’

  That made Hanan weep. I pulled myself together; I didn’t want to upset her. But then Hanan lifted her head and told me she was crying, not because I’d left her as a little girl, but because every time she heard me trying to speak classical Arabic, she was reminded of the fact that I’d never been given the opportunity to learn.

  ‘If only you knew how to read and write,’ she said. ‘You, not me, would be the writer!’

  Hanan had always told me what she was writing. I’d give her a proverb or simile to add: ‘When you’re full of gloom, visit a tomb’; or ‘Every time there’s a new moon, it reminds me how short my life is.’ She’d put these things in her stories and read them back to me. I was proud she was so fond of my ideas and images, but what I really wanted her to do was write my life story.

  Whenever Hanan talked, she revealed my own self to me. Without thinking about it, I knew that the present is the past. I almost felt as if I’d taken on her personality and become Hanan. Wasn’t that exactly what I’d been thinking about when I went with her to see the house where I was married, and gave birth to her? After the Haji died, we stood side by side, contemplating the old quarter and our neighbours. It was sad to see how the house had been demolished. The beautiful gardens had disappeared and in their place tall apartment blocks rose.

  ‘Here’s where I used to stand,’ I told Hanan, ‘to look out for the boy next door.’

  The staircase was still there and we looked at it together before I climbed it slowly, holding on to the black railing because my knees hurt.

  I entered my old room.

  ‘Here’s where I’d listen out for Muhammad’s footsteps; he’d leave me roses on that second windowsill,’ I told Hanan.

  We moved into the lounge, where I stopped in front of the hat stand (which we used to call boor shaboor, meaning porte-chapeaux) and the piece of art deco mahogany furniture that had been my pride and joy. I remembered how I’d always meant to put a light bulb under its glass shade, but had kept putting it off, and then I’d left the house for ever. I decided I would ask my nephew, Hussein the Ideologue, if I could have it; he’d been pardoned and had returned from Africa, where he had escaped after his attempt to assassinate a judge. I picked up the shell we’d used as an ashtray, which was still in the same place. I was amazed when Hanan put it to her ear, just as she always had, listening to the sound of the waves trapped inside. Then we spotted the photograph of the Haji, with my nephews and Fatima in the centre, still hanging in its usual place. Their hair and faces looked ragged where the photograph had been eaten by bugs. We laughed because my nephew Ali’s eyes seemed huge.

  ‘They’re bulging,’ Hanan said, ‘because he was staring straight at you, hoping to catch you out when you filched some cash from Father’s pocket!’

  It wasn’t, in fact, the first time I’d been back to the house since my divorce. I visited the Haji once, when he was bedridden. His wife was there too, though I’d never liked her because she’d sometimes been cruel to Fatima and Hanan. By then the Haji had gone blind, but hadn’t admitted it to anyone.

  ‘I’m the pest, tarred and feathered,’ I announced. ‘The woman who gave you nothing but grief and trouble! Do you remember me?’

  ‘You’re as beautiful as a moon,’ came his reply.

  A week later he was dead.

  Hanan and I went to visit my brother Kamil and his family; and my brother Hasan, who was very ill, but still managed to sing that song from The White Rose he’d sung to me all those years earlier. He sobbed as he sang:

  Oh thou rose of pure love,

  God bless the hands that have nourished you!

  I wonder, oh I wonder, oh I wonder.

  Finally we visited Ibrahim and Khadija. I was relieved that we had, because two weeks later, Ibrahim was gone too. Dead. Ibrahim kept asking Hanan who she was and he spoke to me in French, a language that neither he nor I had ever learned.

  I told him, ‘Oh brother of mine, how I wish you had conversed with me in French, instead of making my life hell.’

  Everyone laughed, except Ibrahim, lost and dejected, who continued to ramble.

  How is it, I wondered, that, as we grow older and our desire for life fades, we can reconcile ourselves to the past? How does it come about that our past and present lives blend and become a kind of ragged patchwork, like the clothes worn by my aunt with the snake in her stomach?

  We went home and Hanan took my address book to copy the pages. Each time she visited me in Beirut, she would comb the book to see what drawings and numbers I’d added. I’d long since devised a way of writing things with pictures: I’d draw a picture of a person alongside their telephone number. A man holding a pack of cigarettes was the man who sold us cheap tobacco; two fat balloons alongside the number of a friend were her two fat sons; a mouth wide open was Fadila singing; a plate with a banana and apple was the local restaurant; an aeroplane was drawn beside the number of a relative whose husband was a pilot; a water jug and washing machine depicted the repair company; car wheels represented the number of H
anan’s mother-in-law’s driver; a man surrounded by fire was the number for a woman friend whose son was a fireman.

  When Hanan came to the electrical-repair man, she paused, almost hitting herself as she laughed. She asked about the way I’d drawn his teeth. I said he had huge teeth like a shark, as well as a big mouth. Then Hanan spotted the dove I’d drawn next to her name – because she was always flying off somewhere. She smiled and drew a rose alongside my own name, which I’d written in my own hand, next to my telephone number.

  HANAN

  Kamila (back left) and Hanan (centre)

  with two of Ibrahim’s daughters

  ‘It’s Not That, Is It?’

  WHY DID I draw that flower next to my mother’s telephone number in her book? Why did I decide finally to write her life story?

  I kept asking myself these two questions, after Ahlam called me from San Diego to tell me that Mother was terribly ill, too ill to travel back to Lebanon on her own. Ahlam would accompany her.

  Two months earlier, during my last visit to Lebanon when we made the trip south together, Mother talked endlessly about visiting Ahlam, Toufic and Fatima in California. I tried to persuade her not to go, reminding her how unhappy she felt when she was in San Diego, witnessing Ahlam’s misfortune. Since her divorce, Ahlam’s life had deteriorated and it made Mother feel utterly helpless. But she was as stubborn as ever, my mother, and listed for me the reasons she should go. She was trying to convince me, or maybe herself, that this trip was a test of strength, now that she was an old woman, as to whether she was still fit and well enough to leave her sofa and her balcony in Beirut and hop on a plane.