The Locust and the Bird

by Hanan al-Shaykh

  I had to push through in order to reach Muhammad’s door. When I didn’t find him at home, I was worried that he’d been put on duty with the rest of the Lebanese guards. But as I turned for home again, he appeared and signalled to me to follow him inside. Not even bothering to kiss me, he told me we were seeing history in the making – independence for Lebanon, an end to the French mandate and a provisional government at Bashamun!

  I asked God to ensure the demonstrations continued, so I could use them as an excuse for being late home. But Muhammad told me I must leave immediately, because he wanted to check on relatives working as guards near the HQ of the British general.18 He’d heard rumours of people being wounded and wanted to go to Burj Square to see what was happening. I begged him to take me with him, but he refused. At that moment, I decided that he didn’t love me the way I loved him. I was distraught. I even considered agreeing to meet the boy next door in revenge, but I didn’t have the heart for it.

  18 General Spears, head of the mandate authority.

  How I Came to Call My

  Second Baby Hanan

  IT WASN’T THE nausea that made me refuse to sleep with Muhammad again. It was my fear that the baby would look half like Muhammad and half like my husband.

  I didn’t want to tell him I was pregnant. So I rejected being intimate with him – I kept saying I wasn’t feeling well, that there wasn’t enough time or that someone might hear us. Finally Muhammad lost patience and told me Ibn al-Mutazz would never have accepted my excuses. Nervously I asked who Ibn al-Mutazz was. A famous Arab poet, he replied, who wrote, ‘Enjoy your beloved every day, for you never know when distance will separate you.’

  When he recited this line, I felt as though my hand was being amputated! How could he possibly imagine we’d ever be separated?

  ‘But you don’t belong to me,’ he said. ‘Now or ever. You’re a married woman.’

  My heart collapsed. In my mind, I was on a ship taking me to a land called Muhammad, far away from fear and trouble, from Ibrahim and my husband. But now suddenly the ship had capsized and I was drowning.

  Muhammad tried to comfort me.

  Holding me tightly, he vowed, ‘Death before I’d ever abandon you.’

  He took a piece of paper out of his pocket and read what he’d written on it:

  I love the path you walk on and the bed you sleep in. I love the pillow, the sheets, the house, the roof and the walls. If only I could be an invisible breeze which entered your house through the window at dawn and played … I love the brilliant moon in the night sky because its light resembles you. I love the clear sky because it’s like your eyes.

  He began to caress me again, but I shoved him away. He dashed to the table drawer and took out a revolver, pointing it first at my head, then at his own. Terrified, I forced a smile, trying to lighten the mood, and then I told him I was pregnant. Muhammad hurled the revolver on to the bed, put his head between his hands and began to cry – he actually burst into floods of tears. I picked up the heavy revolver, and walked out of his bedroom, along the corridor to the kitchen, as if to announce to the occupants of the entire house that I was a human being, not a genie or a sprite. There was no one indoors, but his elder brother – who had not acknowledged me until this moment – was in the garden. I handed him the revolver without a word. He took it, also without speaking, shaking his head. I went back inside and held Muhammad’s head against me as we both wept. I assumed we cried for the same reason: I was going to give birth to a baby that was half his, in my husband’s house.

  But then he turned on me, shouting, ‘How on earth could you have let your husband have sex with you?’

  I explained about the half-baby and the reason I’d slept with Abu-Hussein. He stared at me in disbelief, suddenly calm. He had been very careful, he said, so I wouldn’t get pregnant. And now I’d managed to betray him with my own husband. Realising my obvious confusion, and though I was already pregnant with my second daughter, my lover told me the facts of life.

  * * *

  When it came time for me to deliver the baby and the contractions grew really bad, Maryam took me to the hospital. It was the same obstetrician as before.

  ‘You know, I remember you from last time,’ he exclaimed. ‘I gave a lecture later in which I told the students how I’d delivered a baby to a fifteen-year-old girl.’

  That doctor was extremely well known, one of the most famous in Lebanon. Muhammad told me he’d written books on childbirth and motherhood.

  As the doctor held up my second daughter, he smiled and said, ‘Well, I’ve brought you a lovely girl. Your husband’s going to think you can only produce girls. Maybe now he’ll leave you alone! What are you going to call her?’

  ‘My husband’s away on the pilgrimage to Mecca,’ I replied. ‘He instructed me before he left that, if I gave birth to a boy, I was to call him Mustapha, or if to a girl, Zaynab. I love Sitt Zaynab, of course, but I don’t want my daughter to have a religious name. It’s enough that he made me call my first daughter Fatima. This new baby’s as lovely as the moon! I want to call her Zulfa.’

  The doctor laughed, correcting my pronunciation. ‘It’s Zalfa, not Zulfa, which means a beautiful woman with a tiny nose! But listen, you should give her a name you can pronounce!’

  The nurse brought me a bouquet of roses that had just been delivered, saying they were from a relative who came by every day to ask how I was. Clutching the bouquet to my breast, I closed my eyes. Until then, no one had brought me a single rose, and I realised I’d had no visitors apart from Maryam.

  A couple of days after the birth, when I saw how kind the doctor was being, I asked if it would be possible for me to go to the cinema. I’d only be out a couple of hours to see the new film Hanan. When I went home, I told him, my family would insist on the custom of not letting me leave my bed for forty days. Then I wouldn’t get to see the film.

  The doctor laughed out loud.

  ‘Hanan! Call your daughter Hanan. It’s a pretty name.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I replied. ‘Hanan’s a wonderful name.’ And that was how I came to call my daughter Hanan.

  He didn’t say yes to the cinema, but he didn’t say no, although he did tell the nurses about our conversation. They started to tease me, especially after I told them I wanted to get my daughter’s name registered as soon as possible and confront my husband with a fait accompli. When they suggested he might object and give her another name – one he liked – I assured them he was so miserly that he’d never willingly pay the registration fee twice.

  In the end, I did indeed go out. I met Muhammad and we went to the film Hanan. I sat next to him, praying to God not to let my milk start flowing.

  But when Muhammad kissed my hand and said, ‘Thank God you are well!’ the milk began to drip from my breasts.

  As the film started, he pointed to the screen to show me the word ‘Hanan’, assuring me it was a lovely name that had many meanings. But unfortunately the film itself wasn’t very good; it was about betrayal between two business partners. I hardly remember it.

  Abu-Hussein did not return to Beirut with the rest of the pilgrims, but stayed on to perform even more prayers and get his fill of the holy Mecca. To outdo the other pilgrims, he slept by the noble Kaaba in Saudi Arabia, touched the Prophet’s tomb and visited the city of Medina. Two months later he arrived home without warning. I dashed to place my new baby girl next to Ibrahim’s new daughter, who’d also been born during his absence.

  ‘Which is your daughter?’ I asked, and he pointed to Hanan at once. She looked exactly like him. I smiled and treated him tenderly, fearful he might decide to change her name. I showed him all the respect he deserved as a haji, a returning pilgrim. Then I waited to see the things I’d asked him to bring me back from the pilgrimage: silk fabrics and pieces of turquoise and gold, as pilgrims usually do when they return from visiting the holy places. First he gave me some blessed water from the Zemzem well, some prayer mats from Mount Arafat and a string of bla
ck prayer beads. I ignored them and instead attacked a wrapped package. Excited and happy, I ripped the paper off, and found myself holding a piece of coarse white cloth. It was a blessed funeral shroud. I laughed as I wrapped myself in this shroud. I went out into the sitting room and lay down on the floor, dead, while everybody pinched me to make me giggle.

  We began calling my husband the Haji. When I felt like teasing him I’d say, ‘Hajuj!’ Everyone laughed. He’d been extremely religious before the pilgrimage, but now he was even more devout. He announced prayer times in a loud voice, just like a crier going around the villages announcing deaths and marriages. He encouraged everyone, old and young, to perform their ablutions and to pray; and he urged all the women, from Maryam and my nieces to our female neighbours, to keep their heads covered.

  Each night he’d recite the shahada, a statement of faith, in case he died in his sleep, and he expected everyone else in the house to do the same. He was always bent double on his prayer mat. It aggravated me because he took up most of the floor space in our bedroom and he wouldn’t answer my questions when he was praying. There was always something I wanted to ask, and so I would only leave him to his devotions when he’d nodded or shaken his head to answer me.

  I don’t know why, but sometimes, when he was crouching before God like a tiny lamb, I had the urge to make him laugh. ‘I’m going to get the Sphinx to laugh,’ I’d say, ‘in spite of himself.’ Once I pinned a long strip of cloth to the back of his pyjama bottoms so that, each time he stood and then kneeled again and prostrated himself, it moved with him, like a tail. I began to laugh loudly, attracting the attention of the family. Fatima pointed to her father’s tail and laughed. Finally, he laughed too.

  The Lady and Ibrahim

  WAS IT GOD who came to rescue me and made Ibrahim fall in love? He became like all lovers, seeing and hearing nothing except his own beating heart. The lady next door – who lived by herself in a room overlooking the garden and shared a kitchen and bathroom with our neighbours – had started making eyes at him. I saw this as a blessing, even though I was very fond of his wife, Khadija. All I wanted was for him to mind his own business and ignore my various exploits and the obvious fact that I was in love.

  We called this neighbour the Lady, assuming she was a spinster and still a virgin. Later, when Ibrahim started seeing a lot of her, we changed her nickname to Two-rooms-sitting-room-and-kitchen, because she’d tell him repeatedly that she owned an apartment consisting of ‘two rooms: sitting room and kitchen’. I eavesdropped on the two of them, having never for a second imagined that Ibrahim, of all people, would resort to such a dalliance. I assumed their relationship would never progress beyond greetings and conversation. But then the day came when Khadija knocked at the Lady’s door.

  ‘Tell him his dinner’s ready,’ she said. ‘If he’s hungry, that is.’

  The Lady had never tried to hide from Khadija that Ibrahim had been calling a lot and she’d made it clear that she would have no objection to becoming his second wife.

  But Ibrahim was chastened. He returned to his home to eat dinner, and never visited the Lady again. Khadija, now pregnant with their seventh child, never broached the topic of the Lady. She just carried on with her household chores as though nothing had happened. Every woman in the neighbourhood saluted Khadija for her wit and cunning; she’d made it seem as though he was free to do what he wanted and that she was just a submissive wife who cared only about her husband’s well-being. But in reality, she had put an end to their love affair.

  We learned later that the Lady had once worked on the farm of a rich Beiruti who had bought up large tracts of land in the Bekaa Valley. The man – who was handsome, high class, and a smooth talker – visited the farm every so often and noticed the Lady. She pleased him and bore him a child. The delivery was helped along by the local midwife, who wrapped the screaming newborn boy in a towel and disappeared with him, only to return in tears to tell the woman the baby had died. The Lady believed her, trusting that God had taken pity on her and her child by ending its life.

  This did not stop her from becoming pregnant a second time, again by the rich man. She gave birth to a second son, and again the midwife took the baby away, only to return in tears, saying that this baby was dead too. ‘God alone knows,’ she said, ‘why your babies die.’ Then the rich man’s sister-in-law intervened and told the Lady she must prepare to leave the farm for good and go to Beirut to live. They’d bought her an apartment in the city consisting of ‘two rooms: sitting room and kitchen’. The Lady decided to let out this property and rent a small room instead. As time rolled on and she grew older, she began to search for her two children, certain that they hadn’t died, as she’d been told. But I don’t believe she ever found them.

  The Walnut Tree Knows Everything

  ONCE HIS VISITS to the Lady had stopped, Ibrahim began to watch me again. I came up with a brilliant solution: going with the family for the summer months to a resort. I couldn’t stand the suffocating heat of Beirut any longer, or the sky, which hurled down hot droplets of water that only increased the humidity. After insistent pleading, the Haji gave in and rented us a summer place in Bhamdoun, a well-known mountain resort. The fact that we could rent a place in the mountains was a clear sign of our new status as middle-class people. We were inundated with visitors – Bhamdoun was known as the bride of summer locations.

  Each morning Abu-Hussein and Kamil (who was still living at home with us) went twenty kilometres down to work in Beirut and did not return until evening. I started to wander the open fields, just as I had in Nabatiyeh, feeling young and free once more. From the window, I looked out on valleys and houses with red-tiled roofs, instead of the prying eyes of the neighbours. I almost forgot Ibrahim existed, though I missed Khadija and her family. But Maryam was with us, and she and I spent all our time together.

  Muhammad began to take the bus to see me. Alighting in the centre of Bhamdoun with only a couple of hours to spare, he’d pray to God that he’d find me somewhere. First he’d do the rounds of the places Maryam and I frequented. If we weren’t at any of them, he’d stand opposite our house until one of us looked out of the window. (It was bound to happen, since we were always watching out for him.) Then I’d run outside, barefoot, to see him. We’d head for a walnut tree that had managed to grow, in defiance of nature, on its own rocky patch amid yellow fern and red-coloured stone. Muhammad carved on the tree the date our love began, with my name and his, just like in the film Tears of Love. Each time, he’d add another groove with the date of our latest meeting.

  Once we met at night, with Maryam as our chaperone as usual. I’d told everyone that I’d lost my gold bracelet among the vines, and that Maryam and I were going out with a lamp to search for it. We strolled through the vines.

  ‘You’re not one of the daughters of Eve,’ he told me.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘Is it because I’m too short?’

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘Eve was cunning and full of guile.’

  But hadn’t I been cunning too? I’d come up with a way of stealing out of the house to be with him. We walked in the moonlight amid the vines; they rose like giants that had fallen asleep standing up and been covered with foliage. It was silent, except for his voice and the sound of the wind, which scared me. A dog chased after us, barking. I clung tightly to Muhammad. As soon as the dog lost interest, I relaxed and asked the retreating animal if the Haji had sent it to follow us. The thought made the three of us laugh and then I asked Muhammad to place a hand on my heart, which was beating wildly.

  ‘Your heart cannot endure fear and love at the same time,’ he told me.

  Later he wrote about our night-time excursion and read it aloud to me:

  It’s as though I hear that heart, your heart, which holds me fast, pound fiercely. Ah, the joy of listening to its rhythm as the shivers of love pulse in my veins. If only this night would never end and this moon would never rise again so I could stay for ever at your side …

 
Here I was, living a pleasant life twice over, just as God had decreed for me: once when I met Muhammad in person, in flesh and blood; and then when he wrote about our encounters so that we could meet again, on paper. We started writing to each other – not from Cairo to Beirut, as in the film Tears of Love, but from Bhamdoun to Beirut. Gathering all my courage, I confided in our landlord’s daughter, who was my age. She agreed to write to him for me, and to read me his letters. Every time Maryam went down to Beirut for the day to see her family, she would return with a letter from Muhammad. In one of his first letters, he told me to check the walnut tree. So I would return to the walnut tree each day to look for a sign: a stone placed in a special way, an ivory bead, or a wilted rose. I’d picture him carefully leaving these things for me to find.

  As the summers passed, I grew more and more careless about hiding our outings in Bhamdoun. I was confident that no one would find out about my relationship with Muhammad. I even let Maryam take photos with Muhammad’s camera as he lifted me in his arms. In one picture I am trying to hold down my skirt for fear of exposing my thighs, and my slippers are falling off my feet. In another, we are shaking hands, as if an invisible third party is introducing us.

  I didn’t dare keep any of the pictures for myself, in case they fell into the wrong hands. Instead, I left them with Muhammad, although I would borrow them to show Fadila. The pictures did not hide how in love we were. I looked so happy in them, so unafraid, because our new home lay in the midst of nature. Its walls were trees and rocks. My two daughters were our cover. If native Bhamdounis came across us gazing lovingly at each other, they saw a mother and father still very much in love, their two daughters playing around them. Those photographs made me ask myself: Can our love be a reality if it exists only in secret?