‘Mama,’ I began, ‘that story is about the little girl and her fascination with Elya because he manages to mend the chairs even though he can’t see.’ I stopped. I couldn’t continue. In my story the little girl trembled with burning rage when she spotted the lost Persian rug spread on the floor of her mother’s new house, when she visited her for the first time after her parents had divorced. Not only did she wish that she could throw off her mother’s arms from around her, she also wanted to sink her teeth into her mother’s white flesh. How could she have taken the rug and let the blame fall on the blind man?
My mother protested, ‘Isn’t it fair for the divorced mother to be attached to a little rug? Doesn’t the rug belong to her also?’
To myself I thought: Shouldn’t the question be why the divorced mother was not sufficiently attached to her two daughters? Didn’t they belong to her as well? Can my mother tell me why she didn’t try to fight for custody, even if she was sure it was hopeless?
I almost spoke, almost snapped, but instead offered her the cliché about fiction: that the instant we put characters on the page, even when they are based on people we know, they become fictional. Art.
My mother listened carefully. She lit a cigarette. She puffed and puffed as I imagined her lungs filling with smoke, ready to explode at any second.
‘But if characters become different, how come Muhammad and me, and you yourself, didn’t change at all in The Story of Zahra? It was obvious you copied episodes, incidents and places exactly. The only difference is that your Uncle Ibrahim took the character of your father. Let’s not talk about this book any more. I suffered enough when it was read to me. My heart felt like it was in a mincing machine.’
Before I could say anything my mother sighed, lifted her hand to shoo away an insect as it buzzed between her and me.
‘There’s nothing for you here,’ she told it. ‘Go to the kitchen. You will find all the crumbs you need.’
This made me laugh and sigh in great relief.
‘Mama, didn’t you throw cheese to the little mice in the attic?’
She giggled, and slapped her hand.
‘I stopped when I was told they would grow into fat rats.’
But then she said, ‘In The Story of Zahra, Muhammad and I made you weep. You wrote that you wept so loudly that the whole world heard your cries, and sobbed. Except us. Although we weren’t far away, you showed us as selfish and heartless. So much bitterness from my own daughter!’
I stood up, eager to leave, but then I registered my mother’s despair. I knew she would suffer, believing that she had upset me.
I sat down and she changed the subject to the girl who had shown her writing to me.
‘Did you notice her shoes, like lamp posts … huge and high?’
I hugged her.
‘You are so clever and witty.’
But she had started me thinking. Was that really what I had written? My question went into the void, into the noise and commotion of the street, to my mother, to the book itself. More than twenty years ago: Who was I then? What was I thinking? And wanting to say?
In the winter of 1976 I sat down in a small furnished flat in London and wrote the novel that became The Story of Zahra. With two suitcases and my two-year-old son, barely a toddler, and my six-month-old baby daughter, I had fled the war in Lebanon. My husband was in Saudi Arabia organising new work opportunities. And for two months I didn’t unpack, hoping we could all go home to Lebanon.
We did return – every evening for a few seconds, accompanied by the commentary on British television. I saw Beirut wrapped in a black cloud, transformed by balls of fire, overrun by fighters, the Lebanese people fleeing in terror, hiding in shelters, in corners, lying dead on roads, killed by snipers. They spouted everywhere, mysterious creatures that exhaled only when their human targets fell to the ground. I had been certain that I was going to be killed by one of them no matter where I hid. That, combined with my fear for my children, was reason enough for me to flee not only Beirut but also Lebanon.
In a new country, with a new culture and language, I began for the first time to think about where I had come from, about the culture in which I had been raised, about what I had left behind. To understand the violence and why Beirut had become a demon playground – a bleak name even for the Lebanese to utter – I needed to write. Yet, to my horror and bewilderment, each time I sat down to write I saw myself as a five-year-old, hiding in the dark behind a door with my mother, shaking with fear, my mother’s hand covering my mouth as a face spied on us. The image kept recurring.
I was scratching at old scars. Why, in London of all places, had the war inside me erupted? I had been confident that I had released my mother from that box inside my mind; and that marrying and having my own children had mended the rupture between us. And now I was being taken by my fountain pen from the cold of London to the haze of that room in Beirut where we had hidden behind the door. I felt again the confusion that bubbled inside me each time we took a different and unfamiliar route, rather than the one to the doctor’s, even though at home I had heard my mother announcing that she was off to get a calcium injection to help straighten my bow legs. Yet instead of seeing the rough wrought-iron grilles over the frosted-glass door of the surgery and coloured shadows behind the door, I saw a room engulfed in darkness, with brown furniture. And instead of the round, flat face of the doctor, his thin ginger hair combed like rows of vermicelli, I saw a tall man, with thick, brown, straight hair, wearing a black-and-white houndstooth tweed jacket, who handed me a hairless pink rubber doll, no bigger than my finger.
Eventually the time came when I realised that my mother wanted us to be inseparable, as close as the orange and its navel – but only when she was meeting the man with thick brown hair. I was sharing her secrets. I was to be witness to her lies and fabrications, but unaware that she meant me to confuse faces and places, and doctors with lovers.
Take the memory that begins under the walnut tree. In the background, I can see the desolate mountains, valleys, hills, red stones and thorny bramble bushes of Bhamdoun. I am tiny, running with my older sister, with my mother – not very much older than my sister and me – and with my cousin, Maryam. Then I see the tall man, with the brown straight hair, talking with my mother in Asfouri and I cannot understand a word. We call it the language of birds, so why are they speaking in words and not chirping and tweeting as canaries do? I see him lying with his head on my mother’s lap. His eyes are the colour of quince jam. They are half-open. Is he sleeping, or trying to sleep? I didn’t know then that eyes like his are called dreamy, passionate. My mother is singing to him, ‘Oh sleepy love’. I ask myself: Why is she lulling a grown-up man to sleep? Why did we have to run so fast to meet him? Couldn’t she wait to sing her song?
A photograph was taken that day. I saw it with other photos when my mother took them out of her bra to show them to Maryam, who lived with us. In the photo, my sister and I stand side by side looking at my mother and at the man who, that day, is wearing a white blazer. I am trying to understand the game. He is standing now and lifting her up in his arms as though she were a baby. Each of them takes turns being a baby. Years later I saw the photo again, this time with a stab of agony. The rocks, the walnut tree, the summer sky, my mother’s laughter, and her frail shoe almost falling off her foot – they were all there. But where my sister and I had once stood was a blank spot.
Was I really there with my sister? Did I really hear my mother singing to that man ‘Oh sleepy love’? I held another photograph. In it my mother, my own family and the family of my uncle are gathered on the rooftop of our house, surrounding my cousin who was about to take the boat for America. I thought of rubbing my mother’s face out of the photograph, just as she had done to my sister and me. I didn’t, though. It wasn’t until much later that I understood what held me back. It was because, although she is looking at the camera, it is as if she cannot see it. It is as if she is already far away from us. In the midst of her family,
she is gazing off at the future.
‘So,’ my mother persisted, ‘you haven’t answered my question. My life story – why don’t you write it? Perhaps you are not curious to know about my childhood, and why I left you?’
We were still sitting on her extremely noisy balcony. The ashtray cradled her many cigarette butts. No, I had never wanted to hear her story. And whether from fear of pity or sadness, I didn’t want to intensify the past. It was gone and the distant years had faded away.
‘Listen, Hanan, listen to me, habibti [darling], I don’t think I can bear keeping my story to myself any more. I am warning you, if you are not going to listen to me, I will tell it to the walls – or maybe to that girl with the lamp posts on her feet.’
I wasn’t ready. I was afraid that she would seduce me, as powerfully as the ocean tempts someone to plunge into its cool on a hot day. I feared that she would weave her charm around me, creating a web made from sugar. I would succumb like so many before me: old, young, women and men. I would find myself believing every word, even when I should doubt her. I knew perfectly well why she wanted to tell me her story. She sought forgiveness. But how could I betray that first realisation of mine as a child that it was places that snatched away loved ones, that it was that fake doctor’s surgery that took away my mother?
How could I forget the times when I heard thunder – and wondered if my mother was also hearing it? Or when I saw lightning and wondered if she had seen it at the same moment I had? Or when I shouted, ‘He ha ho!’ and didn’t know whether the breeze carried my voice across the neighbourhood to where she lived? How could I hush her voice, when she had held my doll to her breast, crying and singing to it as though it were her own beloved child:
Go to bed my little doll
so the little bird can come
to wake you up at dawn …
And what about the moments when it was not I who wanted to bite my mother’s flesh, but my mother who was biting me, leaving a circle of teeth marks on my hand like a perfect drawing – for in those days she was a child herself, and would bite in anger. Beatings were for older mothers.
But now, neither of us were children. My mother handed me a cigarette, knowing that I didn’t smoke, and in fact that I’d never given up pleading with her to stop.
I asked her if she wanted to go to a café by the sea.
Her answer was, ‘I was never so desperate to read and write as I am now, if for no other reason but to write my story. Let me tell you how it hurts when a piece of wood and a piece of lead defeat me.’
When I asked her what she meant, she said, ‘Isn’t a pencil made of wood and lead?’
I looked at my hand. No teeth marks.
My hand was ready to pick up a pen. For the first time I was ready to hold up our past against the light.
Finally I said it.
‘Let’s begin.’
In classical Arabic, as though she had memorised it over and over again, my mother offered her first words.
‘Wails and tales. My life story is one long revelation. Only the locust can capture the bird.’
KAMILA
1932: Ever Since I Can Remember
IT ALL BEGAN on the day that my brother Kamil and I chased after Father, with Mother’s curses ringing in our ears. I hoped and prayed God would take vengeance on him. He’d fallen in love with another woman, deserted us, and married her.
Mother had been to court in Nabatiyeh1 to seek child-support payments, but it did no good. Kamil and I were hunting for him so that he would buy us food. We ran over the rocky ground to the next village where he lived. We searched in the market at Nabatiyeh, asking people where we might find him. The sound of his voice and his loud laugh finally led us to him; he was too short to spot in a crowd, much shorter than Mother. Following her instructions, we asked him to buy us sugar and meat. He agreed immediately, telling us to follow him. We tagged along, our eyes glued to his back, terrified of losing him among the piled-up sacks of burghul2 and lentils, camels, donkeys, sheep and chickens, hawkers and vendors peddling their wares. At times he disappeared and we’d panic, thinking we had lost him for ever; then he’d reappear and our spirits would soar. Finally he gave up trying to lose us. He told us that he had no money and could buy us nothing. He described how to find our uncle’s cobbler’s stall near by and then he vanished.
Kamil yelled Father’s name as loudly as he could above the vendors’ cries and the bleating of the animals.
‘Listen, boy,’ said a man selling sheepskins. ‘That voice of yours is about as much use as a fart in a workshop full of metal beaters!’
We made our way back to Mother. She was waiting with her brother at his cobbler’s stall. When she saw we were empty-handed, she frowned and swore she’d go back to court. We arrived home with no meat, no rice, no sugar. Mother made us tomato Kibbeh3 without meat. She squeezed the tomatoes and the red juice oozed between her fingers. Did the tomato pips feel pain and try to escape, I wondered? Didn’t Mother say that Father had crushed her heart?
Mother kneaded the Kibbeh.
‘Look how red it is, and there’s burghul in it, just like real Kibbeh,’ she said brightly.
Like real Kibbeh? Who was she fooling? Where was the raw meat to be tenderised? Where was our wooden mortar and pestle, which I would recognise out of a thousand? Real Kibbeh? Then why wasn’t Mother extracting those white, sinew-like bits of thread and making a pile of them, leaving the meat looking like peeled figs?
The next day Mother took us to court and talked to a man called a sheikh, who wore a turban shaped like a melon.
‘My husband’s refusing to support them,’ she told him, pushing us forward. ‘How am I supposed to feed my children? By cutting off a piece of my own hand? How am I supposed to clothe them? By flaying my own skin?’
We listened as the man in the turban talked to Mother. He used one phrase that stuck in my mind: ‘The payment due to you will be sitting right there, in the middle of your home.’ I thought he meant it would happen literally; I didn’t realise it was a figure of speech. The moment we got home I started pacing the floor, the way I’d seen older people measure things, even graves. When I’d calculated the exact middle of our home, I sat by the spot and waited for the lira to appear.
A neighbour came in to offer Mother advice.
‘Let him have the children,’ she said. ‘Stop torturing yourself!’
‘Get out of my sight!’ Mother yelled, and chased her to the door. ‘Before I throw you into the prickly pear bush!’
Needless to say, the money never appeared, not in the middle of the house or anywhere else. One day, Kamil and I were playing with some children at the front of the house. Mother was busy in the vegetable plot picking some of the beans she’d planted and hunting for wild endive and chard. Father arrived and asked us to go with him to the market so he could buy us clothes, meat, sugar, molasses and sweetmeats. We were so hungry and excited that we forgot to tell Mother. Without even putting on our shoes, we rushed to Father and ran along behind him.
As we walked he kept adding to his promises.
‘I want to buy you some new shoes as well. They’ll be so shiny you’ll see your faces in them!’ he said.
He took us along a path between rocks, thorns and a few trees. But we knew this wasn’t the way to the market; the path led to the neighbouring village, where he and his new wife lived.
‘So she thinks she’s smarter than me?’ he told his new wife when we arrived at their house. ‘They can live here. Then there’ll be no expense and no headaches either.’
It was a long night. We tossed and turned, yearning for Mother. I worried that she must be imagining a hyena had pissed on our legs, enchanting us and stealing us away to its lair, where it would tear the flesh from our bones. Or perhaps she thought that the earth had opened up and swallowed us. But my brother assured me that the children we’d been playing with would tell her that we’d gone with Father. We fell asleep clutching each other, listening to each other’s he
artbeats, missing the sound of our cows in the night.
In the morning, I found I could not read Father’s wife’s expression. But at home, I had no trouble understanding Mother. I knew that I loved her. I also knew that, because Mother didn’t like Father’s wife, I wasn’t obliged to like her either. I stared at her eyes, trying to discover the secret of their green colour – they were the first eyes I’d seen that weren’t black. Did she put green kohl around them? Mother had black eyes – she ground black stones and used the grinds to line her eyes. We missed Mother so much that we couldn’t swallow our breakfast of molasses and sugar. We had to sip tea with each mouthful.
My brother and I sat close to each other, staring and yawning, waiting for evening. Time passed slowly. It was the summer holidays and Father wasn’t teaching in the second room of his house, so we didn’t even sit and watch the lessons. We had never asked if Mother could send us to a teacher in Nabatiyeh; we knew that she couldn’t afford it.
We made up our minds to run away just before sunset. There was no forethought; it was just the idea of another night in bed without Mother sleeping between us, a hand stretched out to touch each child, that made us leave. We waited on the porch until Father’s wife put down a dish of lentils by the stone bread-oven. As soon as she disappeared inside to knead her dough, my brother grabbed the dish of lentils and poured the contents into his djellabah, gasping at the heat. Then we ran barefoot, back the way we’d come, over the brown and red stones, over the sparse vegetation, never stopping to worry about thorns or the scalding lentils. We kept running – not hand in hand as my mother used to instruct us. ‘Promise me, you won’t let anybody separate your hands, even angels,’ she would say. I didn’t even stop when I spotted, amid the rocks, a bush bearing a tomato the colour of anemones. Only when the fig trees and the big pond came into view did we slow down and begin to relax. When we spotted a grey rock called the camel (because it looked like one) we were certain we were on the way home. Thorns got inside my dress; they pricked my skin and hurt like hornet stings, but I wanted to see Mother and eat some of those lentils so badly that I ran even faster, as though I was swallowing the ground itself.
The Locust and the Bird Page 2