Every time Ibrahim or Mother asked me where I was going, I thought of the Umar al-Zooni song:
Where are we off to by night and day?
You see the cinema next to the bar.
You see the people in droves,
Every type, every complexion,
This way and that,
In and out of view.
They’re all off to the cinema,
This way and that,
All of them off to the cinema.
16 The splendid white steed on which the Prophet Muhammad rode into the seven heavens.
Love’s First Signs
JUST AS MARYAM had feared, a torrent of feelings for Muhammad swept me away. The time came when I really was with him: on a street corner; in a restaurant near al-Rawche, the famous rock on Beirut’s seafront from which jilted lovers leapt to their deaths; or in a park outside Beirut, where we’d gone by taxi. We held hands, afraid we’d be separated. When we met and strolled together, I wasn’t afraid; I would convince myself that Ibrahim and Abu-Hussein were at work. In any case, neither of them knew of the out-of-the-way places where we spent time. But the moment I stepped back across the threshold of the house, I’d be overcome with fear. Was Ibrahim angrier than usual? Was he spying on me? Did he know I was meeting Muhammad – were my brother and my husband planning to catch me out?
However great these fears, they didn’t stop me from seeing Muhammad. My happiest moments occurred when I was with him. I wanted nothing more. It was again as if Muhammad were the teacher and I the pupil. He took a piece of paper out of his pocket and held my hand, reading what he had written while he was waiting for me:
As she came close to me, her face appeared through her flimsy veil like the face of the very moon shrouded in a squadron of clouds. My heart pounded as she came towards me with measured steps, walking with all the grace of an antelope. On her lovely face was an innocent smile, repeated on exquisite pink lips crafted to perfection by the Lord of All. Her pearly teeth, perfectly set, gave due glory to their Creator – how wonderful they were! I took in the rays from her languid eyes that were so filled with sweet delight and temptation. My beloved did not speak. Instead two tears fluttered on her cheeks and fell into my heart like a thunderbolt, two little tears of gold rolling down over the purest silver. With my voice a tissue of sobs and shudders, I asked her, ‘How is it that my beloved is in tears, while my own heart cries too?’
I was amazed to find I understood every single word of his classical Arabic and fought back the urge to cry. Could I possibly be so important, someone who engendered such feelings in Muhammad? I found myself agreeing to meet him in his room.
The very next day, I entered the front door to the house that he shared with his family and took a few steps towards his bedroom. The room contained only a table, his bed, papers and books. I stood there, hand to my heart. I didn’t want to sit on his bed. He came over to me and touched my hand. I was happy just to look at him. I listened as his whispers grew louder, but could hear nothing he said. I glanced at his face and then threw myself into his arms. He hugged me as hard as he could, just like we were in one of the films I loved, and said my name over and over: ‘Kamila, Kamila, Kamila.’
‘Muhammad, Muhammad, Muhammad,’ I replied. How I loved his name – the Prophet’s own! In that name, my love found its blessing – though inside, I had to suppress a laugh since Muhammad was also my husband’s name.17
I began to meet him almost every day, as soon as he returned from work at about one o’clock. I came to love his tiny room; there was nowhere else I wanted to be. It was like being in the cinema, far removed from the sounds of our house – from the voices of the old, the young and even babies, from chatter about rancid oil and weevils in the rice sack.
Each day, after we’d eaten, Muhammad would kiss me. Gradually I surrendered to his kisses. He would embrace me and try to touch my breasts, but I would push him away. I wanted to keep our love unconsummated. But soon I relaxed, surrendering my lips to him and releasing my hands from my chest. I’d never told him how the events of my wedding night made me dislike the sight of my body and how, even though I was utterly devoted to my baby daughter, I still couldn’t believe I’d actually carried her inside me or experienced the contractions to deliver her. I remembered the pain of the birth with utter horror.
Then Muhammad had to leave Beirut for several weeks because of his job. He sent me a letter via his sister Miskiah, which a friend read aloud:
The further apart we are, the more I feel my life is an arid desert. Just two days ago we were living so close to each other, almost inseparable. Now you are so far away. What are you doing? I’ve started counting the minutes that keep us apart, the ones already passed and the ones that remain.
Impetuously I ripped a piece of paper out of my nephew’s notebook. With a pencil I drew a picture of two little birds perched on two flowers, inhaling the scent. I drew the leaves in heart shapes, then a sun and moon. Next I drew a nest for the two little birds. I kept my drawing and gave it to him when he returned.
He looked at it and gave me a passionate kiss. Then we seemed to rise and hover above the room. When we returned to his familiar small room, we both began to cry. We wept because I’d allowed another man to lie on top of me and rob me of my virginity. We cried because Muhammad, such a decent and honourable man, was in love with a married woman and I was betraying my husband. I sobbed because I found it unbearable that I must return to a house in which I felt I didn’t belong, to a man I didn’t care for.
Back at home, I watched my husband eat, bending over his plate so as not to let a single crumb fall on to the table. I wanted to scream, ‘Divorce me!’ When he opened the black box, I wanted to shout, ‘Divorce me!’ When I looked at Ibrahim, I wanted to scream, ‘What did I ever do to make you torture me so?’ And I wanted to yell at Mother too. ‘Why have you wronged me like this? Am I not your flesh and blood?’
Muhammad always calmed me down. He breathed gently on my face as if he was soothing a deep wound. And then one day I realised what we had done. I began to fear that I might be carrying Muhammad’s baby. A new baby with hair as smooth as Muhammad’s and honey-coloured eyes that were almost green.
That evening, when Abu-Hussein went to bed, I climbed into his bed and moved closer to him for the first time in three years. He couldn’t believe his luck. He clung to me for a few moments and, when I didn’t scream, he mounted me, while I bit my arm in an attempt to stay calm.
17 In the Arab world the father takes on the name of his eldest son, so Muhammad became Abu-(father of)Hussein after the birth of his firstborn.
‘You Cry So You Can Go to the Cinema,
and Then You Come Home Crying!’
I STEPPED OUT OF the cinema, totally devastated. Nawal, the heroine of Tears of Love, was dead. I was furious with her lover. After her husband died, she had gone back to him.
‘Forgive me!’ she had begged him. ‘Forgive me. Please accept my submission and forgive me.’
‘I forgive you,’ replied Abdal-Wahhab. ‘I forgive you!’
‘You’re my life,’ she told him. ‘I have no life other than with you.’
But then he accused her of hypocrisy and deceit as she used the very words she’d spoken to her husband on her wedding night. Abdal-Wahhab rejected her, so she ran out and threw herself into the canal.
I burst into tears. It was as though the floodgates had opened and the waters were flowing down my face.
Yet again a film had spoken to me. It felt like a reflection of my own life. Just like Nawal, I’d been forced into marriage. Like her, I’d found true love, but my hands were tied because of my marriage, my child and the new baby inside my womb.
On my way home I passed the studio of Narcissus, an Armenian photographer, and went inside.
‘I want you to take my photograph,’ I told him, before he could say a word.
He offered various backdrops: you could be pictured riding in a plane, sitting on a white wooden crescent
, standing next to a table decorated with a bouquet of flowers. He suggested I hold a rose as though I was smelling it.
‘I want a picture of my face,’ I told him, holding a black scarf, just as Nawal did in the film when she returned to her lover’s house.
‘What’s distressing you, madam?’ the photographer asked as he prepared his equipment. I told him I’d been to see the film Tears of Love and that I was in mourning because the heroine had thrown herself in the canal.
‘But it’s only a movie,’ he replied with a chuckle. ‘You don’t believe everything you see on the screen, do you?’
I explained what Nawal had endured, but he kept trying to make me laugh.
‘Come on, madam,’ he said, ‘smile! It was just a film! They only made it for the money!’
I leapt up in a fury.
‘Do you suppose for a single second,’ I shouted, ‘that the man who sings over his beloved’s grave, “Oh you who sleep eternally beneath the soil, I have come to weep over the passion of lovers. Ye clouds, ye stars, I am true to my love!” is thinking only of money?’
‘It’s all about money,’ he said, hiding his face under the camera cloth. Then he shouted, ‘Mona Lisa! That’s who you are. If she were in the next room she’d be following you with those eyes of hers!’
I’d no idea what he was talking about. I’d become Nawal. She was dead after suffering terribly; I was suffering every moment too. The very thought of returning home made me ill.
The photographer took my picture.
‘You are just like the Mona Lisa,’ he said. ‘Are you from Beirut?’
I told him I was from Nabatiyeh.
‘Good heavens,’ he replied. ‘A Mona Lisa from Nabatiyeh, not from Italy! You’re the first woman to come in here without her mother or father.’ He sounded impressed.
Of course, I realised, I was alone with the photographer. He might tilt my head this way and that, and then ask me to untie my hair or put on lipstick or kohl – all these intimacies with a stranger could not be allowed.
But I didn’t care that I was alone with him. I found myself opening my heart to him.
‘Photographs aren’t allowed in our house,’ I told him. ‘That’s why I want to have my picture taken.’
I removed my headscarf and asked him to take another picture without it.
He let out a whistle, just like a bird.
‘You’re so young!’ he said. ‘One day soon you’ll marry somebody very high up.’ Then he held up his hand.
I began to cry. I found myself telling him the story of my life, how cruel my family was to me.
‘I want to be rid of this life,’ I told him, ‘just like Nawal …’
The photographer interrupted me.
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Why do you want to be like Nawal? She’s crazy, committing suicide. She’s like a silver ring that’s tarnished. You have to rub your sorrows away, and then the silver will shine through like a diamond again.’
Back home, sobbing and weeping, I told the story of the film to Khadija, Mother and Maryam.
‘You cry so you can go to the cinema,’ Mother remarked, ‘and then you come home crying! And it costs a lot of money. Why don’t you just stay here?’
I went on crying. Why had Nawal committed suicide? Why hadn’t she pleaded with her beloved? Why hadn’t she raised hell? I imagined rubbing a tarnished ring until it shone with light. I promised myself I’d stay strong and not let despair get the better of me.
The Camel Howdah
I WAS PRACTICALLY LIVING with Muhammad. In my mind, it was as if his house and mine were one, despite the other buildings, shops, cars and pedestrians that stood between. I took his washing home and Maryam and I washed it in secret. Then she would iron his things so I could take them back the next day and put them in his wardrobe.
As I moved around his tiny room, I felt as if it were my own, as if I had not a care in the world, as if I didn’t need to hold my breath when passing his neighbours, or even the walls, in case they revealed my secret. His room looked out on to a side alley. I’d invented numerous ways of attracting his attention to let him know I was outside waiting for him. I would knock on his window or put a pile of sand or a matchstick on the sill.
Sometimes I called in on his sister when Muhammad was at work. When I got up to go, I’d beg her not to accompany me to the door. Then I’d sneak into his room and close the door behind me. Sometimes he left me alone inside his room when his work required him to go out for an hour. He would lock the door behind him and leave me with a jerrycan to pee in.
Once when he was gone I had a terrible need to poo. I hunted for newspapers and sheets of paper, piled them up and then crouched down with my eyes shut, praying that they weren’t important documents. I wrapped up the piles of paper, put them inside a paper bag, opened the window and looked out to make sure no one was in the side alley. Then I threw the bag outside and closed the window again, leaving the shutters ajar so I could keep an eye on the bag. The doctor’s son, who lived in the same building, spotted it and circled around it before deciding to open it up. Disgusted, he began to curse and swear, looking around for the malicious person who’d played this dirty trick on him. My heart pounded. Had anyone seen me open the window and throw out the bag?
I started to shiver with fear, terrified of a scandal. It was as if I was watching myself, calmly observing from a distance. It reminded me that I was married. My house was not this room – my home was where my husband and daughter, Ibrahim and Mother all lived, together with the rest of the extended family and all of the endless visitors. I raised my eyes to the ceiling and prayed to God to rescue me just this once. I promised that, whatever happened, I’d never set foot in this room again.
But as soon as the doctor’s son gave up on the mystery bag and went on his way, I found that I wasn’t putting on my shoes and going home. Instead, I looked around the room, imagining that it was an old-fashioned camel howdah like I’d seen in films: a tent that sat on top of a camel, concealing the women and protecting them from the raging sands. I remained there, waiting for Muhammad, as though I was too ill to move and awaited a doctor.
In a way, Muhammad did play the role of my doctor. He seemed to have antennae that allowed him to sense my most trivial thoughts, even before they were fully formed. Although he had little money, he would bring me luxurious food: things like pistachios, grilled chicken, or dried beef as tender as asparagus tips. I would hide his gifts under the bed at home and take them out only when the house was asleep. I’d share them with Maryam and we’d eat in the dark before settling down again. Muhammad really does love me, I would tell myself. He’s spending all his money, depriving himself of these things so I can enjoy them. Then I chided myself for being so greedy and tried to appreciate my lover’s true generosity.
When Muhammad returned, I told him his room was like a camel howdah. The simile delighted him. He promised he’d teach me how to read and write as soon as possible. As we sat together, he read me a letter he’d received from his brother. The language, more formal, was so different. His brother used expressions and words like ‘damask rose’, ‘jasmine’, or ‘Syrian apples’. He ended with a blessing: ‘Peace be with you along with the chirping of sparrows, the roar of waves, the cooing of doves, the ripple of waters, the rustle of leaves, the waft of scent and the flash of brilliance.’
Before long, without a thought, I felt that I’d become a part of Muhammad’s circle of family and friends, whose letters he read to me so often. I loved the way they wrote to each other. As he read, I would think of my own family and shudder.
We went to see another film called Dananir, starring the famous singer Umm Kulthum as a Bedouin girl named Dananir. One day the vizier Jafar – who came from the Barmakid family, known for its generosity – heard her singing and offered to take her to his palace to school her in the art of singing. Dananir was thrilled by the offer, which would enable her to live in Baghdad. But the Caliph, Harun al-Rashid, heard about her lovely voice a
nd asked Jafar for Dananir, so she could sing in his palace. Jafar turned down the Caliph’s request, because he had fallen in love with Dananir. The Caliph had Jafar killed, imagining that Dananir would then obey his wishes and sing for him, but she defied him and refused, even when he ordered her imprisonment. But eventually he took pity on her and released her. Dananir, free to sing for her dead beloved, promised to remain true to him till death.
I was so moved by the love scenes between Dananir and Jafar that I began to despair. It was the fifth film I’d seen in which the consequence of true love was death. The family always opposed the union and someone would cruelly expose their love.
The next day I visited Muhammad. He took my hand and read out what he had written that night when he’d been unable to sleep:
Weep for the Barmakid family, massacred at the hands of Caliph Harun al-Rashid! Woe for Jafar and his catastrophic love for Dananir, that woman whose loyalty and devotion was like the purest water poured into the heart. She kept her pledge to her beloved Jafar, when he was alive and after he’d been murdered. That was true loyalty. Oh God, please let our union last in life and death.
Gazing into my eyes, he asked if I’d be as loyal as Dananir. I couldn’t think why he asked such a question when he was my whole life. But he was insistent: had I been unfaithful to my husband with anyone but him? The question shocked me. I laughed it off, but inside I was nervous. Did Muhammad know about the boy next door, who had first noticed me when I ran screaming from the house at the sight of my white wedding dress? From that moment he’d watched me intently, indicating that he wanted to meet, though I kept things to an exchange of glances, flirting with him on my own terms.
When I left the house the following day, heading for Muhammad’s room, crowds blocked the entrance to our alleyway and the street beyond, stemming from the front of the Prime Minister’s home. Riyad al-Solh, who’d recently taken up residence, had caused much controversy. There had been demonstrations throughout Beirut, with several people killed or wounded. This violence followed the arrest, by the French mandate authorities, of the President of the Republic, Bishara al-Khoury, along with the Prime Minister and other ministers. It was the final stage of the struggle by the Lebanese national forces against the French before the country won total independence.
The Locust and the Bird Page 11