The Locust and the Bird

by Hanan al-Shaykh

  As I sang, I imagined myself as a heroine who embroidered while waiting for her beloved to return. He had been sent far away, because he was rich and she was poor:

  For love of you I have sacrificed my longing;

  Had I obeyed my heart,

  I would never have left you …

  Then I would begin another song because I couldn’t remember all the words of the first one:

  Oh thou rose of pure love,

  God bless the hands that have nourished you!

  I wonder, oh I wonder, oh I wonder.

  One day, a young relative of Fatme’s overheard me singing. He sat by the fountain in the garden, pretending to read, and waited until I appeared. I looked out of the window and saw a young man sitting by the edge of the fountain, as though a genie had conjured him out of the water and put him there. It looked like a scene from The White Rose, though this young man was not wearing a fez.

  I listened as he asked Fatme in a gentle whisper, ‘So where does this beautiful girl come from?’

  ‘From Nabatiyeh,’ Fatme replied.

  He didn’t look like any other young man I’d ever seen, either in Nabatiyeh or Beirut. Most of them had black curly hair and black eyes that were close together. They were either short or, if they were tall, then fat. The young man before me had straight brownish hair and eyes of a colour I could not name. And he was tall. He too had come from a village in the south, close to the sea. He went to school in Sidon. Fatme told me proudly that his family were what she called ‘high-life’.

  When it was obvious I had no idea what she meant, she added, ‘Not the way it was down there. His family were notables and emirs. His father has been village mayor for the past thirty years. They own two race horses.’

  I told her that my grandfather had owned a horse.

  ‘Your grandfather owned a mule,’ she replied with a smile. ‘A horse is completely different.’

  The word ‘high-life’ stuck in my mind. I was surrounded by people from the south who were struggling to make a living, while this young man’s family (his name was Muhammad) made their horses race and earned money from them. I realised exactly what Raoufa’s gambling husband had been up to: pawning everything they owned so he could bet on horses. I wondered whether that money had gone to Muhammad’s family, and though I wanted to ask Fatme, I decided it was probably better not to. Instead I listened as she proudly and happily told me how the young man slept at her house once a month when he came from Sidon to Beirut.

  From then on I waited for Muhammad to appear again in the garden with his book. When he appeared, I would watch as he gazed into the fountain and then at the house.

  When eventually we did exchange a few words, the first thing I asked him was if he’d seen The White Rose. I stared straight at his jacket and asked if he owned another.

  He hesitated a moment.

  ‘Of course I do!’ he replied. ‘Why do you ask?’

  I told him that I wanted to give Abdal-Wahhab a jacket, because in the film he sang, ‘No jacket, it makes me weep,’ with such passion.

  Muhammad burst out laughing and began to sing the words as they really are: ‘Ya ma shaakeit wa bakeit …[How long I wept and moaned. I witnessed joy and bliss and drank from the cup of desire].’

  He asked me how old I was and I told him I was thirteen. He told me he was seventeen. He asked why I was learning to sew; did I really like embroidering and cutting so much?

  ‘It’s better than doing nothing,’ I replied.

  ‘If you’d gone to school,’ he said, ‘you’d know what Abdal-Wahhab was singing!’

  I tried to hide my embarrassment.

  ‘He was singing in Egyptian,’ I hurriedly replied. ‘That’s why I didn’t understand.’

  ‘And how were you going to get the jacket to him?’ he asked with a laugh.

  Abdal-Wahhab must own a hundred jackets, he told me. I shouldn’t really believe the things I saw on screen, even though such films were supposed to hold a mirror up to our society. The White Rose was the first Arabic film to contain singing, but the most striking thing about it, he told me, was that it showed how the rich never married the poor, or even middle-class people. The film’s message was that this meant that love always suffered. He went on to tell me how Abdal-Wahhab’s brother had beaten him because he loved singing and music so much. I told him in turn how my brother Hasan wanted to play the lute professionally but instead had to work in a bakery. I told him how, just like Abdal-Wahhab, he was scared to play the lute in front of his younger brother Ibrahim, who didn’t approve of music. I also told him about Kamil and his lovely voice; that he wanted to become a singer but didn’t know how to go about it.

  I started looking forward to seeing Muhammad, especially after he said, ‘God preserve that lovely dimple of yours!’ He set me right on many things. When I told him how unfriendly my brother Ibrahim was to me, he said my brother was cross with Mother because she’d married my father and taken him out of school. His anger with her was channelled to me.

  Muhammad began to offer me advice of all kinds; he did it with the utmost delicacy, as if tiptoeing on eggshells. Once he noticed how I kept my money in a pouch hung around my neck, under my clothes. He suggested I get myself a small handbag. As the weeks went by, he grew bolder and suggested I needed to wear a bra; and in fact I’d already noticed the way passers-by stared at my chest when I ran. When he saw me rubbing my teeth with salt and water, he gave me a toothbrush and toothpaste.

  I watched as he did his homework, dipping his quill pen into the inkwell. I told him that the inkwell was just like a dark well and that the words looked like nails on the page. He nodded his head in amazement and asked where I’d heard the description. I told him I’d made it up and asked him to read what he’d written aloud. He read it aloud as if he was on the radio or was Abdal-Wahhab himself. I imagined he was the author of everything that he wrote, until he admitted that he copied things he liked from magazines.

  Oh life of the soul, oh soul of life.

  My heart is yours; is yours mine also?

  Tell me, I beg you, oh my life.

  I asked Muhammad why there were gaps between the sentences; were they where the person dictating the letter had paused? Muhammad explained how poetry worked by leaving spaces between the verses.

  I recited the song I’d thought up when I still lived in the south:

  Do not rejoice, oh long-haired wheat,

  Tomorrow comes the scythe

  To do a merry dance and tickle your stomach,

  To cut off those long tresses.

  The songs of the fields will fade when the locks are all gone.

  He made me swear the words I’d recited were my own. I could not understand why he wouldn’t believe me. He’d once handed me the pen in order to teach me how to write my name and I couldn’t even hold it properly. He was amazed that I composed things in my head when I could neither read nor write. He told me the image of the wheat stems being scythed down was beautiful. Describing it as an image when I hadn’t drawn it seemed odd, but I nodded my head as if I understood.

  The pieces of paper he kept hidden away in his pockets were not poems, but letters from his brothers, his family, and relatives in the village. I was desperate to know why they wrote to him. I thought that people only wrote letters when they’d emigrated to Brazil or Australia, not simply moved to Beirut. Why didn’t Father write to us, asking after my health or that of my brother Kamil? After all, he was someone who composed poems and verses in the improvised form they called zajal. Why were Muhammad’s family so concerned about each other, while those in my family only bothered about themselves? Why hadn’t we received letters of condolence when my two sisters died? But then I thought about my uncle, the cobbler in the Nabatiyeh market, and my aunt who believed she had swallowed from a water pitcher a tiny snake, which was now living inside her. Neither of them had ever laid eyes on a pen and paper.

  I asked Muhammad to read me some of his letters, so I could hear what hi
s family told each other. ‘Please,’ I begged him.

  He began to read me a letter from one of his brothers, and I concentrated on his mouth and eyes, as though I was observing a miracle.

  My dear Muhammad,

  How handsome you are and how beautiful your name! You are beautiful, and your body has been crowned with that wonderful name. You have become beauty personified, and now all men and women who set eyes on you are solemnly bound to love you. So don’t blame me for loving you so much!

  I rarely saw Muhammad without a book or magazine in his hand. They were seldom connected with his studies, but more likely to be poetry and stories. In our household the only books were school textbooks for my nephews, along with the Quran, of course, which occupied its special place on a small piece of furniture we called the washbasin because it had a slab of marble on the top. I questioned Muhammad about every book he was reading, and, in turn, he told me stories about the Caliph Harun al-Rashid,10 Baghdad and slave girls, and about people who had lived hundreds of years before us.

  When Fatme asked me what we’d been talking about, I repeated everything he’d told me.

  ‘So it’s a history lesson you’re getting, is it?’ she remarked.

  When I was with Muhammad, I was like a cat wrapping itself around the feet of someone who’d given it a bit of meat or a slice of bread; or rubbing its body against a warm wall when it was cold.

  One day Muhammad asked me to go with him to see The White Rose. Even though I wanted to say yes, I found myself saying I couldn’t, because I would be late to pick up my two nephews from school. It didn’t occur to me that he was talking about going in the evening.

  ‘Do you want my brother to kill me?’ I asked in amazement.

  ‘Fatme will come with us,’ he said.

  ‘Listen,’ I told him, ‘even if Fatima, the Prophet’s own daughter, were to go with us, he’d still kill me!’

  Muhammad laughed and we agreed we’d go on Friday, the school holiday.

  And that is how it was. He gave Fatme a pack of cigarettes with the two tickets hidden inside. We went into the dark cinema and Fatme sat beside me. Muhammad arrived a few moments later and sat next to her. He leaned across to explain this or that scene to me while Fatme wiped her eyes and sighed. Once or twice she touched her hand to his head.

  Suddenly I found I could follow the Egyptian dialect; it was as though Raja, the film’s heroine, had lifted me out of my seat, put her dress on me, and taken me with her to see the gardens. I was with her as she picked the white rose; with her as the car drove into the countryside. I became her, my heart exulting as Abdal-Wahhab sang to me. What else could I do but sing along with him, whom I loved and who was mine?

  I longed for a gramophone and vases full of flowers. I wanted to wear a pleated skirt and a necklace. Why couldn’t I be like Raja in the film, someone who was loved and spoilt by everyone, instead of just a stone-bearing donkey? Why was it that, whenever I looked up at the stars, Mother told me off? She was afraid warts would grow on my face. But Abdal-Wahhab could stare at the heavens and sing, ‘I spent the long nights without sleep, without sleep as I counted the stars.’

  When the film finished, Fatme dragged me out of my seat. I didn’t want to leave, but we had to be out before the cinema lights came up, in case someone in the audience saw us with Muhammad.

  Talk became rife in Fatme’s household that Muhammad was sweet on me, but Fatme told me, ‘The so-and-so’s spreading a rumour that he’s in love with you, so no one will suspect it’s really me. Muhammad doesn’t want to ruin my reputation for nothing. Good God, just see what love can do!’

  I repeated to Fatme the very words used by Raja’s father when he refused to allow his daughter to marry the singer: ‘“I’m a father. How can I marry off my daughter to a mere singer? I leave it to your own conscience to decide. Just consider my role as a father. God help me!” ’ To which I added, ‘Yes, and Muhammad’s family will say, “How can you possibly marry a mere seamstress when we’re high-life people; we own horses and our father is village mayor?” ’

  ‘You sweet little scamp, you!’ said Fatme, laughing. ‘What a joker you are. Muhammad doesn’t have two pennies to rub together. He’s still at school. He can’t get married and rent a house of his own.’

  Then Muhammad stopped coming to visit Fatme. I decided that his family must have had something to do with it, although Fatme insisted he was just busy studying for his exams. Now I understood the true meaning of the word ‘longing’. It was the feeling I had when I passed the fountain and he wasn’t there; or when I saw his pen and inkwell on the bureau. I was bereft.

  Three whole weeks passed before he appeared at the fountain again. Overcome with joy, I ran to him. He greeted me coldly. Was it, I wondered, because my bra had snapped and I wasn’t wearing one? He ignored me and kept on reading the book in his hand.

  ‘Is it a historical tale?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he replied curtly. ‘It’s poetry.’

  ‘What’s it called?’

  ‘The Swinging of the Moon.’

  ‘So even the moon has a swing,’ I said with a laugh.

  He didn’t laugh back. His severe expression reminded me of Ibrahim. I turned to leave, utterly perplexed.

  ‘So you’re engaged.’ I turned back to him and he glared at me accusingly. ‘And you kept it from me!’

  The only thing I could think of was the vendor who had tried to get a kiss from me in return for some extra lard. Could I have become engaged to him without realising it?

  ‘Come on, Kamila,’ Muhammad said, raising his voice. ‘Let’s cut out all the deceit and hypocrisy. You’re engaged to your dead sister’s husband and you’ve been hiding it from me.’

  ‘Me, engaged to that old man? By God’s own life, by the Prophet and Imam Ali, I am not engaged to anyone.’

  ‘Congratulations!’ he said.

  I began to cry. Here we were, the hero and heroine together, standing by the fountain. The hero was hurling accusations at the heroine, with her pale complexion and thick black hair. She fluttered around him in tears, protesting her innocence and trying to defend herself. I felt like throwing myself at his chest and weeping, ‘No, no, you must believe me. You have to believe me.’

  Muhammad called across the courtyard to Fatme’s uncle, who was busy repairing a primus stove. He walked over.

  ‘That family of yours are a load of criminals, by God! The same goes for the sheikh who drew up your engagement contract. I’ve heard the whole story from one of the witnesses. He didn’t want to witness the engagement of an eleven-year-old girl. But eventually he gave in.’

  I remembered the turbaned sheikh sitting in my nephews’ room two years earlier. It suddenly struck me what those fateful words, ‘You are hereby my witness,’ had meant. And it explained what the turbaned sheikh and all those men were doing in our house. By this time Fatme was standing next to me, swaying from side to side, clucking in sympathy. I ran home to ask Mother whether it was true.

  ‘The engagement,’ Mother lied to me, ‘was nothing more than a mock marriage for religious purposes. We did it so that God would not punish you if your brother-in-law saw you without a headscarf.’

  I ran straight back to Fatme’s.

  ‘Too late!’ Fatme told me. Muhammad had already left for his school in Sidon, swearing he’d never return to Beirut.

  My heart sank, but Fatme hugged me and told me that Muhammad was deeply in love with me. She said he had simply melted in the face of my beauty and sense of fun; in fact, he had been in love with me ever since I asked him for his jacket to send to Abdal-Wahhab.

  Her words made me sob. Was it possible that I was loved? I wept even more because Muhammad had gone away and might never come back to hear what I had to tell him.

  He didn’t stick to his resolution, though, and the day came when I found him waiting for me by the fountain again. The sight of him – standing in the sunlight, watching the dragonflies playing on the water – made me realise how
much I loved him. But I felt shy and afraid he’d reject me.

  ‘OK,’ I told him. ‘I did say the words, “You are hereby my witness,” but it was a mock marriage, so if Abu-Hussein saw my hair I wouldn’t enter hell. That’s it and not for tirrr.’

  Muhammad looked at me strangely and asked me what that last word was. I repeated it for him: ‘Tirrr.’ When he asked what I meant by it, I hid my face, embarrassed, mortified, and unable to answer. I’d no idea where the word had come from, nor if it was a real word or I’d invented it to describe what happened between men and women. Was tirrr marriage? Kisses? Having babies?

  10 The fifth Abbasid Caliph. He was a great patron of art and learning, and is best known for the unsurpassed splendour of his court in Baghdad. Some of the stories of The Thousand and One Nights were inspired by his opulent lifestyle, and King Shahryar (whose wife Scheherazade tells the tales) may have been based on Harun himself.

  A Single Drop of Blood

  MUHAMMAD BECAME AS important to me as eating bread. When he gave me a bunch of violets, my mind went aflutter and my heart pounded. Was the bunch of violets really for me? I’d ask, and he’d reply that it was. I began to pirouette like a butterfly.

  Then the day arrived when a single drop of blood on my underwear sent me crying in a panic to Fatme, convinced I was about to die.

  It would seem that, when I spotted blood on my underwear and assumed it meant I was going to die, I was not too far off. It was as if that single drop of blood was an alarm bell, one that could cancel time – by days, months and years.

  My family tricked me into letting someone take my measurements, by pretending I was the same size as Khadija’s cousin, who couldn’t be there for a fitting. But then I found, quite by chance, a white wedding dress and realised I was about to be married. I burst into tears and began to tear at my hair, holding my hands up to Mother and Khadija to show them I really had pulled out a clump of it.