The Locust and the Bird

by Hanan al-Shaykh

  ‘You’re a white angel,’ I found myself telling her. ‘Now here come the other angels to take you away in your lovely gown and your new shoes. Now you can play with them – jacks, catch and skipping – and you can rub citrus fruit against the wall so you can put salt on it and eat it. Thank you for your tiny womb that was my home, for giving me my name and character. And thank you, because every time I think of you I find myself smiling and laughing.’

  I uncovered her feet. They looked like pure white porcelain, as if she had never walked on anything but silk, as if she had never run barefoot in the wilderness of Nabatiyeh.

  Life’s Journey

  MY MOTHER LEFT the hospital in an ambulance, surrounded by garlands and bouquets of roses and sweet basil. Muhammad Kamal rode with her in the back of the ambulance; there he sat, looking wan and feeling sick from the powerful scent of the flowers or the smell of death itself. How strange! As a child, he’d been her ally in all her schemes and secrets, and now here he was accompanying her on her final journey, the most secret of them all. Roads can always be closed off, but not this one; the road to death lies for ever open. Men stopped in the street and stood still out of respect as we passed; some drivers got out of their cars. The din of car horns ceased. As soon as the ambulance swung up the road towards the Ra’s al-Nab neighbourhood, to the old house where my mother lived with us before she left us and married Muhammad, Fatima and I could no longer control ourselves and burst into hysterical sobs.

  How could it be that this young driver, who had no idea of my mother’s origins, had decided to give her a tour to bid farewell to her life? It was almost as if he’d put his ear to the inner wall of her being, and that of my sister and me, and decided to take us all to the places where we grew up. We passed the grocer’s shop where Muhammad had gone to send her messages and flowers through the boy who worked there. These were the very streets Fatima and I had sneaked through to visit Mother after she’d left. Here was what remained of our school where Mother would meet us after our father forbade us to see her as often as we wanted. Here were the same trees; and the rough wrought-iron grilles over the frosted glass of the doctor’s surgery that I would look out for each time my mother took me to Muhammad’s room. Here was the Prime Minister’s house with its balcony, where Maryam had fallen in love, and the alley in which our old house stood. By now most of the cement had crumbled, leaving only the edge of the wall. I remembered how my mother and Maryam had once asked a boy to scramble up and get them a chunk of cement that had caught their eye because it was perfectly square, and then cracked it open with an adze. Inside the sandy stone we found a tiny piece cut out of the mosquito net we used when we slept on the roof. Years later my mother explained that this was the work of the mother of the boy next door, who had cast a spell to prevent her son from falling in love with my mother.

  Now the ambulance came to Muhammad’s house and the window of the howdah room where Mother and I once hid behind the door, trembling, waiting for Muhammad to return. The window was wide open and I pictured Muhammad inside, waiting for Kamila.

  Finally, we reached my mother’s house. As the whole neighbourhood rushed to the ambulance, our crying grew even louder, and so did that of Mother’s female neighbours, the wives of the shopkeepers and everyone she knew in the quarter. A little girl asked her mother if this was the funeral of the woman who had brought presents from America. Now the wailing began in earnest. The ambulance came to a halt. The shopkeepers had swept the street and sprinkled water on the ground; they’d lowered the awnings on their shops and turned the radio to a station broadcasting the Quran. Everybody waited until Mother had had her fill of the quarter and the house she would never see again. What about we daughters? Could we bear to look at her balcony, knowing she wouldn’t be sitting there, watching passers-by or watering her plants? It was hard for us to move on. The traffic waited patiently.

  My mother left her home for ever, and then unexpectedly we passed by the house where my grandmother, Mother and Kamil had first lived when they arrived in Beirut. Then we drove out of Beirut, the city where Muhammad and Mother had met by the side of a fountain one day, and we headed to Muhammad’s village, the place where she was to be buried under the verdant tree that looked out over the hills and valleys, next to Muhammad’s grave. There we would bring them together again, just like two love birds inside a single cage, in the cemetery where my mother used to clean Muhammad’s grave, leave flowers and recite the Fatiha, turning away from all the people who’d tried to separate her from the love of her life.

  So, amid prayers and Quranic verses, she was buried by the men, as the custom dictated, while we women stayed in Majida’s summer house and wept for her from afar, feeling that she had been kidnapped and hidden beneath the earth. Out of concern for Kadsuma, who had a heart condition, my sisters begged the professional mourner to read only the Quran, not stirring religious homilies or the Ashura rituals. Despite the request, though, the professional mourner started keening the sad and tragic tale of the Battle of Karbala, while the women swayed and wept.

  She went on to fan the flames of grief by reading with great passion, so much so that she became like Sukayna, al-Hussein’s daughter, when she first saw her father’s horse without him, and lamented, ‘Oh my father’s horse, tell me, did he find water, or did he die thirsty?’ This stirred all of us into a frenzy. We wailed and beat our chests. Then, although we tried to stop her, she ended the ceremony with political slogans praising the regime in Iran.

  After that, the men joined the women. A sheep was sacrificed for the sake of Mother’s soul. No less than fifty cats also assembled from the village and its environs; they sat waiting patiently on the terraced land encircling the house. A beggar – who used to know the moment Mother set foot in the village – stood with a few loaves of bread, wanting to contribute something to the sad occasion. Soon a tent was erected around her grave so the Quran readers could be with her for three whole days and nights as custom dictates; and to keep a lantern burning so she wouldn’t feel lonely, especially during the darkness of the night.

  Mother wasn’t the only person to be buried that day. Muhammad’s sister Miskiah, their emissary, had died the day before. We were told that years earlier Mother had asked Miskiah and other friends not to leave her to be buried alone. ‘I’d like a friend to die with me,’ she’d said, and they’d laughed.

  At dawn the next morning we made our way to the cemetery, carrying incense and candles. Fadila sat by the Quran reader and asked him if my mother had been listening to his recital. Then she gave him some pastilles to suck so his voice would reach Kamila sweet and pleasant, not like that of the blind sheikh in Beirut whose voice made her and Mother close their ears and pinch their noses because of the foul smell.

  I gathered around the freshly dug grave with my sisters and Muhammad Kamal. Toufic, who’d been flying across the ocean when Mother died, had been in touch. He was eager to get a picture of everything as it happened, moment by moment. His heart was racked with grief. We told him we had carved ‘Kamila’ on her gravestone above the phrase we knew she loved best: ‘Most beloved of women’. We had brought the frangipani from her balcony in Beirut and planted it next to the grave. Majida’s son placed a cigarette on the grave and called his grandmother Beauty Queen of the Graveyard; I knew he was wishing he had a joint of hashish to make him high. The tree giving her shade from above oozed a sticky gum that stuck to our clothes and shoes. We all laughed. Mother was still not willing to let us go without her, even though she would now sleep for ever, amid fragrant flowers and chirping birds, looking out over mountains and valleys.

  We said goodbye to her on the seventh day, in the hope of visiting her again during Eid. But she visits us all the time, whether we are awake or asleep, happy or sad. Each one of us has lived to regret something they once said, or didn’t say, to her. But Mother makes us laugh too, especially when we remember her friends arriving at her funeral adorned with generous presents from her, gifts originally given to
her by us: one friend with a gold ring; Fadila carrying a snakeskin purse; and Leila a Hermès scarf – because Mother never did like its pattern of horses.

  As I said goodbye to her, I thought of what she would have said if she were looking at her own grave.

  ‘We go up and down; we run hither and thither; we roam here and there and everywhere and we end up exactly where we began. And here I am, back in my place near Muhammad, to be with him for ever.’

  Epilogue

  MY DAUGHTER IS married, and I feel as if my mother is sitting with me in the limousine, sitting behind my eyes, absorbing the noisy hum of New York. In my mind, she’s wearing her blue-and-white suit, the one she wore whenever she wanted to look ‘chic’, as she used to say.

  She scolds me, as I have not managed to buy a new dress for the wedding.

  I tell her, ‘How could I when I am mourning you still, with neither the energy nor the will to look my best? I only buried you a month ago.’ I tell her how much I miss her and ask for her forgiveness for not telling her I was getting married thirty-three years earlier, for not sending word to her when I was about to give birth to my children.

  She laughs with the bride and groom, and clutches the womb that gave birth to me.

  ‘Look what my descendants have achieved: from a village in southern Lebanon to New York.’

  I whisper to her, ‘Your brave genes are in my blood. You are the source of my strength and independence.’

  Two years after my mother died, I sat down to write her story. Majida had sent Muhammad’s diaries and letters to help me. When I wrote, faded sheets, some as yellow as wilted gardenias, were scattered about.

  Muhammad had written on school exercise books, pieces of cardboard, government paper and headed paper decorated with flowers and butterflies from a grand shop in Beirut, which I loved for its Venetian architecture. I felt a rush of nostalgia when I saw it. He wrote in pencil, black and dark-blue ink. Here I was, possessing the years from the thirties to 1960, the year Muhammad died, in his own hand; the lines, the colour of the ink and the pencil made me shiver. I saw my mother in her happiness and in her strife. I listened and heard Muhammad as he moaned, felt his despair, machismo and vanity.

  Muhammad wrote full pages, not leaving one inch empty, as if he was writing from prison and paper was scarce. He wrote different poems on each of the eight sides of a folded piece of paper. He wrote plays and stories, three pages’ worth of material on one page. It was as if he hadn’t stopped to take a breath. I listened to his voice, guessed his moods, took his pulse. Love was on Muhammad’s mind and on the mind of his friends and brothers. As I read their letters I saw that men also suffer because of love and betrayal. ‘My love is as strong as rock,’ Muhammad wrote. ‘I love you more than I love life.’ And after he married my mother, he always addressed her as ‘darling wife’.

  I found my name in one of his letters to my mother. A cup of coffee had scalded my face at the age of two; Muhammad was concerned, asking after me, wanting to see me. As I read this, I found myself touching my face, with no memory, or trace of a burn. Suddenly he managed to wipe away my jealousy, jealousy that was never stronger than when I once stood at their door after a quarrel with my stepmother. They were grilling kebabs and my mother tried in vain to persuade me to come in; Muhammad pleaded with me, but my feet were nailed to the tiles. I was jealous and felt awkward and clumsy. I wanted to be my baby sister in her pink pyjamas. I wanted to be included in that moment, but I didn’t know how.

  On a mangy page torn from a school exercise book I found a letter, addressed to Muhammad in a child’s hand. Had somebody steadied my mother’s hand and helped her to write this letter? As I read it my heart skipped a beat. It was the letter my sister Fatima wrote, as she and Mother hid in the bathroom. Reading it and observing the spelling mistakes and the hesitation of a child filled me with sorrow and regret. Did Fatima feel confused, or proud that she was able to write a letter for an adult?

  And then I found a small piece of pale-pink paper with writing in red ink across it. It was my mother’s will, written with Muhammad’s help, signed by her very carefully, letter by letter at the bottom, as if written by a child. She left twelve bracelets to be sold to pay for someone to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca on her behalf; her wedding ring for my sister Ahlam; two sets of earrings, one for me and the other for Fatima; one half of her clothes for me, the other half for Fatima. The sofa, carpet, couches and cupboard were all for Ahlam. The will had been written just two years after her divorce. Had she thought of dying? Was she thinking of ending her own life? I asked around, but no one could give me an answer.

  I found an official message from Jean Helio, French High Commissioner to the Lebanese people in 1934, telling them they were to vote to elect the first national assembly for an independent Lebanon, and assuring them that it would be an honest and fair election. On this address Muhammad had poured out his heart in a love letter:

  Not a moment passes without my thinking how lonely I am in this life, even though the world may seem to keep it full, and all because I am so far away from you.

  The minutes slip by so fast, as I sit here. My eyes sing them songs of emotion and tenderness, and they look at me as if to say, ‘What you see before you is but a version in miniature of what is in my heart, my beloved!’

  I have measured the days in terms of our two hearts, each of them filled with a violent passion. My beloved, whom I worship and adore, I have decided to set you apart for a long time, a time when my agony will be dire indeed.

  As much as love is poured out on these fragile sheets, death is ever present on the torn and disintegrating paper. The writers, all dead now, speak of dying almost as often as they do of love, but their idealism shines through. This was a generation that believed in politics, in pan-Arabism, in the homeland and independence. Luckily Muhammad was not alive to witness the strife that enveloped Lebanon and still continues; and the exile and disintegration of his beloved family, as his children became immigrants in all corners of the world.

  Muhammad touched me deeply as I read and understood how much his existence was tied to the written word. And yet he fell passionately in love with my illiterate mother, embracing with such ease that vividness of hers, which unnerved so many others. How I wished I was their messenger instead of the grocery boy, carrying Muhammad’s heart to her even when he wrote when I was barely one year old, ‘Shall I try to help you get a divorce or are you simply fooling about and passing time?’ And how powerful a thing to have these words left to me, particularly since my mother didn’t write.

  The last thing I read was a letter from my mother, dictated to Muhammad Kamal and addressed to me but never sent. It had been written during one of her lengthy visits to Kuwait, after she heard me being interviewed on Lebanese television when I published The Story of Zahra:

  Don’t measure things by a past that is gone. It was sweet indeed, because I challenged the executioner and the chains that bound my wrists. I regained my freedom from all those virgin maidens who were sold without a price. But fate was stronger than I was, and it crushed me. It took everything I had, absolutely everything. I turned into a tree that had been stripped of all its leaves, leaves that jumped from pavement to pavement in the company of their friends, the breeze and the howling wind. I became a ship with no shore in sight. When I saw your lovely picture and heard the sound of your sweet, melodious voice, I received back my own beauty from yours and my intelligence from yours as well. That stripped tree once again started to sprout gleaming leaves, and they will stay that way just as long as life and capacity stay with me.

  The minute I gathered all the papers of our conversations and sessions together, ready to work, my mother became alive, not in Beirut, or in the mountains, or in the south, but this time in my flat in London. She was living her life again for me. I saw her for the first time as a child, a teenager, a young woman, then middle-aged, and finally an old lady. I travelled into another world of emotions, stories, metaphors and anecdotes
, sometimes reduced to tears and sometimes roaring with laughter. I was humbled by her frankness, by her courage as she spilled out what was hidden, as if she had lifted the lid of a deep, deep well. When I became too distressed over a certain episode in her life and couldn’t go on, my mother’s photo, which I had stuck on one of the notebooks, would cheer me up. In it, she was accepting a silver cup from an official, after one of my sisters was crowned Queen of Dance at the summer resort party. My mother had rushed over to him and asked him to pretend to give her the cup instead.

  The day I started to write her memoir, I could hear protesters outside the nearby Canadian Embassy, demonstrating to save the seals. A tourist bus passed by. I could hear the guide’s words: ‘To your right is the memorial for 9/11, and to your left is the Italian Embassy.’

  I caught myself muttering, ‘And here is Hanan, writing about her mother, who loved and suffered, who ran away, who raised her fist against the rules and traditions of the world into which she was born, and who transformed her lies into a lifetime of naked honesty.’

  I opened my first chapter with the words, ‘I can see my mother and her brother, my Uncle Kamil, running after my grandfather,’ and then I stopped. Or was it my mother who stopped me? I heard her voice insisting that she wanted to tell her own story. She did not want my voice; she wanted the beat of her own heart, her anxieties and laughter, her dreams and nightmares. She wanted her own voice. She wanted to go back to the beginning. She was ecstatic that at long last she could tell her story. My mother wrote this book. She is the one who spread her wings. I just blew the wind that took her on her long journey back in time.