The Locust and the Bird

by Hanan al-Shaykh

  ‘Go ahead, Hanan,’ she said, ‘ask me why I’m full of energy and hope. I have never felt so light, so content, because I have dumped my life and strife on your shoulders and we have finally bonded. Oh! Telling you my life story was better than a hundred Prozac pills.’ She went on and on like this, finally throwing the last dice. ‘What I really need is a break from everyone in Beirut.’

  Fatima and I were critical of Mother for constantly receiving and entertaining friends, relatives and especially women neighbours, even one woman whom she disliked because she was aggressive and jealous. Whenever I dropped by I would sneak into the kitchen, so Mother and I could exchange a few words in private. The visitors would pour into the living room and occupy the sofas from early in the morning, still in their dressing gowns, to wait for the nurse whom Mother had befriended and showered with gifts so that she would come each day to check her pulse and blood pressure. I remember once visiting Mother in the morning to see that all of the women were lifting their sleeves, ready for the nurse, as soon as they heard her footsteps on the stairs. Over the years, Mother had changed the name of her Widows’ Club to Patients’ Club, and her café to clinic. She would offer her visitors – alongside tea, coffee and food – pills from her ‘pharmacy’ – a big plastic bag containing all sorts of medicines in packages and bottles – for cholesterol, headaches, diabetes, stomach ulcers, even Prozac. The women were free to take anything except the pills for her angina, or Orangina, as she called it.

  Mother went ahead with her plans and took the seventeen-hour flight to San Diego. As she landed safe and sound, she congratulated herself on meeting this great challenge. But an hour later, at Ahlam’s flat, she began to feel terrible.

  She described what was happening during a telephone conversation.

  ‘I feel as if I am a eucalyptus tree, shedding the smooth, light bark of my trunk to reveal dark layers like blood.’

  To add to her discomfort, she told me, Toufic’s wife, whom my mother had known since she was fourteen and to whom she had been both a friend and mother over the years, had stopped calling her Mama and become impatient, making her feel unwanted. I tried to tell her that all daughters-in-law become irritated with their mothers-in-law. I found myself suggesting that Mother give Toufic and his wife a break and visit Maryam, who now lived in Detroit.

  Mother snapped back, ‘Visit Maryam? Do you think I have the energy or heart to see her, a feather shaking in the winds of Detroit? After what her husband did to her? When he became ill and was dying of cancer, he wanted her to die with him, pointing his gun at her day and night, while the children tried to protect her. Eventually God was the one who protected her, by finishing him off.’

  Although Mother was taken to the doctor many times, it was only when she began to choke when she ate or drank that the doctor took her seriously. Then he stopped insisting that she was merely depressed and that her symptoms were psychosomatic. He carried out some tests, but Mother didn’t want to wait for the results. She decided she must return to Beirut, where she could take refuge in her home and be cared for by her own doctor.

  With Ahlam at her side, she clutched her heart for the entire seventeen hours she was on the plane, convinced that it was her heart that was making her choke.

  Back in Beirut, she was admitted to hospital and diagnosed with an inflammation of the thyroid. The doctor suggested making an incision in her throat to help her breathe, an idea she rejected. During one of our telephone calls, I tried to persuade her to listen to the doctor and let him go ahead with the operation.

  ‘So you want me to be like that man in our neighbourhood who had to press a button at his throat every time he needed to speak, his voice emerging from the pit of his stomach, as if from the cave of Ali Baba and the forty thieves? People would feel only pity for me.’

  I called the doctor in Beirut. He explained to me that Mother was suffering from thyroid cancer and had only a few months to live.

  ‘It is not fair,’ I found myself crying. ‘It is not fair.’

  Why had I drawn that flower in her telephone book? Why did I finally agree to write her life story? Why hadn’t I remembered that one of my friends had been struck down with cancer as soon as she finished writing her memoir?

  I took a flight to Beirut and went straight to the hospital. There I found my four sisters and two brothers. I tried to be normal and casual with Mother, and very strong. I sensed that she was like a hunter, trying to detect among us any tiny quiver or flutter, in our eyes or our voices. We all assured her that the radiotherapy she was having was simply a laser machine that would cure her thyroid infection, just like the laser that had cured her afflicted eyes a few years earlier.

  When she was released from hospital for a few days, we all – children, relatives, neighbours and friends – celebrated her return home. But she wanted to go back in – she only felt safe in the hands of doctors and nurses, surrounded by medicines and machines, blood-pressure gauges and heart monitors. She felt peaceful there, removed from her house and the constant chatter of the neighbours and well-wishers, and the sound of the television. I don’t think she realised how far her health had deteriorated until one of her visiting neighbours got into a huge argument with her daughter, and the daughter threatened to throw herself off Mother’s balcony.

  ‘If you want to throw yourself off a balcony, then go home and get on with it!’ the mother yelled at her. ‘Can’t you see how ill Kamila is? She wouldn’t be able to deal with the police.’

  Was it conceivable that Kamila, doyenne of coffee cliques, head of the Widows’ Club and instigator of all kinds of fun and games, had become Kamila the invalid? Was it conceivable that she couldn’t come up with tricks to play on her own body, couldn’t force it any more to stand up, sleep, drink, eat, walk, think, laugh and sing songs? But it was as if she could instantly read my mind.

  She suddenly asked me, ‘Will I always be this way, or will the nightmare pass, so that I can go back to being the Kamila of old?’

  In many ways she remained that Kamila. As she lay in her bed, one doctor uncovered her, another turned her over. She drifted in and out of consciousness, but came to as a nurse was inserting a catheter. She broke into song:

  I hid you, I hid you,

  And we’ve kept you safe.

  Now everyone’s looking at you …

  Her fear of death made her refuse to keep flowers in her room, insisting that they be put out on the balcony. Flowers were only for the dead or dying.

  ‘What are they trying to tell me?’ she said.

  When Ahlam arrived wearing a black top one morning, Mother grabbed her by the hand and told her to take off her black clothes. It was too early, she said.

  One morning, as she and I were sitting on the balcony of her hospital room, she demanded an answer.

  ‘Why do I still choke every time I try to eat or drink? Why do I have to sit there, half-naked, shivering with cold underneath a huge machine while its rays work their way inside me? I insist that you tell me the truth. It’s not that, is it?’ Mother didn’t want to utter the word, so she said it in English: ‘Kinsir.’

  I busied myself arranging her sheets, pretending that I hadn’t understood what she was asking me. Trying to raise a smile, she asked me if the word ‘kinsir’ was derived from the Arabic word for eagle, nasr, or from the verb meaning to be broken, inkasar. I gathered my courage and spelt out the word in English, the first vowel being an ‘a’: ‘Cancer.’

  Clasping my hand, she asked me again if what she had was cancer.

  When I asked her why she wanted to know, she replied, ‘I need to know how I am going to live from now on.’

  I found myself confessing that yes, she had cancer, but I assured her she was getting better.

  ‘Just one more session,’ I said, ‘and it’ll all be gone. It’ll be like you’ve been through a long nightmare.’

  Immediately I regretted telling her. I sensed how her heart sank and saw her knees begin to shake.

  ‘No,
I don’t believe I have that illness,’ she said. ‘I want to run away from it, from that eagle so eager to pluck out my life spirit. Ever since I fell ill, I’ve been telling myself it might be cancer and all of you around me have denied it.’

  I hugged her as she moaned, ‘Heaven help you, Kamila.’ Then she took her head in both hands as she muttered to herself, ‘What has become of you?’

  By next morning she’d come to believe what I’d told her, that she was getting better – one more session of radiation and the cancer would be gone. I think she’d convinced herself that, if it hadn’t been the case, I’d never have dared tell her what the disease actually was.

  She made me promise not to tell anyone about her illness. She felt that it marked a weakness in her, as embarrassing as poverty itself, or leprosy; like someone with bad breath or head lice. She was afraid the news would give her enemies malicious satisfaction – especially the neighbour who so terrified her.

  The fact that the doctors and nurses paid so much attention further convinced my mother that she must be on the road to recovery. If she was heading for the grave, surely they wouldn’t have bothered so much with her? They had even tried, unsuccessfully, to stop her from smoking, something she could never give up. The fact that Mother still craved cigarettes gave me hope that she was still healthy. She used every trick she knew to get hold of them: flattery, bribery, anger. ‘OK, goggle eyes,’ she’d mutter under her breath when a nurse took away her packet of cigarettes. She even asked a hospital cleaner to sell her just one cigarette. He was sympathetic, agreeing with her that cigarette deprivation was worse than any illness, and he nicknamed her Madame Cigarette.

  She enjoyed smoking most of all from the balcony of her hospital room, watching the pigeons on the roof. Once, she saw the boy pigeon kiss the girl. Then the two of them took off and flew away, only to return and start all over again. She began singing Asmahan’s song, ‘Once I entered the garden …’ She sang it as if she was on her own, as if she was taking a walk in the gardens opposite. She sang for all she was worth, happy her shortness of breath had not yet cut off her voice.

  I rushed from the room as I heard her voice, still so young and melancholic. It took me back to the time when she was in love with Muhammad, and would sing to him as we played near by during one of their rendezvous. Her voice released the tears I’d been suppressing for more than two months; they ran with great force down my face, gushing down to my weeping heart. Only when I had managed to get hold of myself did I return to her room.

  I knew she could tell that I’d been crying, but she said nothing, only asked why I thought we’d finally made the visit to her childhood home in the south just six months earlier and didn’t find her mother and sisters’ graves. Had they been calling out to her? Why had I finally agreed to listen to her life story? Why was she suddenly so desperate for me to hear it? And why had Fadila burst into tears when she’d first visited her, saying, ‘I thought you’d died. They told me Kamila had died!’

  My mother gradually withdrew from the life going on around her, although once she roused herself to beg the husband of a patient who had entered her room by mistake to lift her up and carry her out to the balcony so she could smoke. She reflected at length on many seemingly unrelated subjects, but in fact they all had one thing in common: death.

  ‘How is it our body lets us down? How come in the Egyptian film Night of Life we sat there and admired Fatin Hamama’s dress as she lay sick and dying, listening to someone sing ‘Life’s pleasurable moments are few …’ to her?

  ‘Why did I laugh at my uncle the cobbler when I heard him moaning in pain, ‘I am hurt, I am hurt,’ the whole night through, even after I suggested he change his words or add something like ‘Oh God’ or ‘Please help me’?

  ‘Make sure you all give me a decent funeral in Muhammad’s village … How I regret all the lovely shoes I haven’t yet worn … Someone should water the plants on my balcony. I am going to miss them!

  ‘So that’s the way it is, Kamila. God help you, cancer’s got you. And all the time you thought it was your heart.’

  During her illness, we, the five sisters and two brothers, would take turns visiting our mother from the four corners of the earth. The day Fatima appeared, my mother raised her head excitedly. She tried to speak, but couldn’t. Her eyes spoke and her mouth moved, but no sound came out. The doctor suggested that we bring her a pen and paper so she could write down whatever she needed to tell us. We stood mute, hesitating, none of us willing to tell the doctor that Mother couldn’t read or write.

  After that day, she drifted in and out of consciousness. When Toufic and Muhammad Kamal, visiting from San Diego and Kuwait respectively, came and sat beside her, each holding a hand, she opened her eyes and realised she was in the intensive-care unit. Then she kept staring at me, and at my hair, which I’d put up with a hairband because Beirut was so hot and humid.

  I knew exactly what she wanted to say.

  ‘Your hairband’s great, it’s dah!’ That was how she’d described anything new or beautiful when she was a child in Nabatiyeh.

  To our surprise, and to the surprise of the doctors, Mother would regain consciousness from time to time and engage with us, gesturing and smiling. Her curious eyes would follow us around the room. One afternoon, she registered the anger and disapproval on the faces of the nurses in intensive care as they gathered around the television set. All Mother could make out were explosions and collapsing buildings. With her hands, she asked a nurse what was going on. Ahlam told me later that the nurse was amazed that Mother could focus on the television in spite of her sedation. The nurse turned off the television, not wanting my mother to be upset, but she kept gesturing, demanding an answer, until the nurse finally explained.

  ‘Some planes have flown into buildings in New York,’ she said.

  Mother relaxed, relieved that the catastrophe couldn’t have affected any of her children or grandchildren.

  Her eyes closed. I watched her as she finally entered a sweet world of unconsciousness. I reflected on how she’d hugged herself in the hospital in the early days of her sickness, refusing to allow one of us to spend the night with her. Though people might sleep next to their loved ones, she told me, ultimately everyone is on their own once they fall asleep. Mother wanted to count the number of nights she’d slept since her birth. Ahlam worked it out for her – twenty-seven thousand, three hundred and seventy-five nights. She did not know that people were still coming to visit her; we clustered in the room next to the intensive-care unit, her seven children gathered around her. Why hadn’t the seven of us gathered when she could still jump up and sing? Why was it only now, when she couldn’t be with us, that we were going out to restaurants together and warming ourselves with each other’s company? My sisters and I praised her snow-white body, and Ahlam complained to the nurses when they cut her hair without our permission and clipped the long fingernails that were my mother’s pride and joy.

  When I saw my Uncle Kamil in the intensive-care unit I rushed to him, and hugged him tight as if he was still a child, pouring the lentils into his djellabah before he and Mother ran away from their father and stepmother. I felt a strange urge to shake Mother awake and plead with her to laugh with Kamil, to see Khadija, who came to visit even though she was very old, and listen to Fadila, as everyone else did, as she made her way from the hospital foyer to Mother’s bedside, saying, ‘Kamila, Kamila, let someone else die, not you!’

  Fadila wept as she entered the room, but then she would dry her eyes and hurry to the bed.

  ‘In the name of God,’ she’d begin, ‘Kamila, listen to me. I’ve prayed two rakaa for you, the Prophet’s own family. Dear beloved friend, may they greet you one by one, especially Sitt Zaynab, and caress you!’ She would rub my mother’s face with her hands, as if sweeping up wheatgerm left to dry on the roof.

  One day Fadila told us we must not lose hope, we must keep trying to save Kamila. She instructed us to copy the text of the Sura al-Waqia from th
e Quran ten times, boil the pages in water, sift them, and scatter the pieces in a plant pot. We should then bring the water containing the Quranic verses and give them to my mother to drink: this would cure her. Fadila asked us to swear solemnly that we’d do it. But then Majida pointed out that Mother was no longer able to eat or drink, and was fed through a tube in her nose. Fadila suggested we feed the water through the tube. If the nurse was a Christian, we should tell her the verses came from the Bible.

  She then turned to Cousine, one of Ibrahim’s daughters.

  ‘I beg you,’ she said, seeking reassurance. ‘We must bring my dear, dear friend Kamila back. She’s been my friend since we were young girls. If she dies, then so do I.’ She struggled to get a ring off one of her fingers. ‘Please,’ she went on. ‘Take this ring. It’s worth over 100 lira. God wants you to have it. Only promise you’ll make those copies of the Sura al-Waqia!’

  Fadila admitted that she couldn’t read or write; if she could, she’d have copied the verses herself.

  ‘You mean you’re just like Mother,’ said Majida. ‘No one taught you either?’

  She started to sob.

  ‘If only I’d been able to make out one letter from another,’ she lamented, ‘I wouldn’t have been robbed of my property and land by one of my relatives who asked for my thumbprint on the ownership papers, pretending that he had found a way to exempt me from paying taxes.’

  Majida hurried home and copied out the Sura al-Waqia ten times and took the bottle to the hospital, but she didn’t do anything with it, just tucked it away in her handbag. And that was the way we left Mother that evening, just as usual. We all dined together; then I went to my hotel room, leaving my clothes laid out as I did each evening, in case the hospital rang in the middle of the night. That night they did, and I was the first to arrive. Why did I draw a flower next to her phone number? Why did I agree to write her life story?

  I went into her room.

  ‘Mama,’ I whispered, as I ran my hand over her coldness. By now she was as cold as ice, even though there was a light aimed straight at her and she was completely enveloped in blankets, coverlets and hot-water bottles.