I saw a few men in the street and a single woman in black; I thought of a certain type of black beetle that makes a tapping noise with her body all day and all night when she feels the need to mate.
I sat down on a seat in the airport lounge. Umar was carrying the canary around in its cage, blithely explaining everything to it. I sighed contentedly, feeling as if I’d left all my thoughts and tensions behind outside the airport building and was a normal person again, no longer split between Suha of the desert and Suha the city dweller. I sat with one leg crossed over the other, watching the people and waiting for the flight announcement. For the first time here I was dressed as I wanted to be, in clashing colours that suited my figure and face and personality. I wore a single long earring and a blouse without a bra under it, and my hair was loose on my shoulders.
Said was the one I was going to miss. Although I’d been on edge and unsmiling that morning, he’d been his normal self, assuring Umar that he’d see him again soon. Umar asked him innocently, ‘D’you want to come to Beirut? D’you know Granny’s house?’ Laughing and adjusting his head cloth, Said said, ‘Don’t worry, Umar. I’ll get off at Beirut airport and sniff you out like a dog. I’ll ask for the house where Umar and Madame Suha live and I’ll find you.’ Then he told us about the time he’d gone to Cairo and tried to find an Egyptian engineer who’d been a customer in the restaurant: ‘A very important engineer. A nice man. And he lived somewhere in Cairo.’ It was a long story: he’d asked a newspaper seller who’d directed him to the owner of a launderette whose son was working as a teacher in the desert. Said had gone off to the launderette and had eventually met up with the engineer who’d been delighted, unable to believe that he’d made his way through the millions of people in Cairo to find him. Proudly Said ended his tale: ‘He took me to the pyramids and the zoo and to see a lady and her sisters who were belly dancers and singers.’
I don’t know why I thought suddenly of Maaz’s wife, Fatima, and the way she used to smile as she stood holding the coffee jug, waiting to refill her husband’s cup and Suzanne’s.
I craned my neck, looking down. I could see the high walls around the town protecting it from the horrors of the sand. The desert came into view, looking as it had done the first time I saw it: sand and palm trees, a way of life that revolved around human beings without possessions or skills, who had to rely on their imaginations to contrive a way of making their hearts beat faster or even to keep them at a normal pace; to search unaided for a hidden gleam of light, and to live with two seasons a year instead of four.
About the Author
Hanan al-Shaykh is one of the contemporary Arab world’s most acclaimed writers. She was born in Lebanon and brought up in Beirut before going to Cairo to receive her education. She was a successful journalist in Cairo and in Beirut, then later lived in the Arabian Gulf before moving to London. She is the author of The Locust and the Bird, the collection I Sweep the Sun off Rooftops, and her novels include The Story of Zahra, Women of Sand and Myrrh, Beirut Blues, and Only in London, which was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. She lives in London.
About the Translator
Catherine Cobham, who teaches modern Arabic literature at the University of St. Andrews, has translated a number of contemporary Arab writers, including Yusuf Idris, Nawal El-Saadawi, and Liana Badr.
“It is an extraordinarily brave act for a writer to undertake to inhabit, fully and sympathetically, the life her mother lived.”
—J.M. Coetzee
HANAN AL-SHAYKH
The Locust and the Bird is both a tribute to a strong-willed and independent woman and a heartfelt critique of a mother whose decisions were unorthodox and often controversial.
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Women of Sand and Myrrh Page 29