The Locust and the Bird

by Hanan al-Shaykh

  As my debts grew more and more out of control, everyone gave me advice about how to economise. The first suggestion was that I stop smoking cigarettes, because they were so expensive, and smoke a hookah instead. So I started having an occasional puff, until one morning I awoke to the delicious smell of frying potatoes. Thinking it was coming from the restaurant next door, I got up to investigate. To my horror, I discovered that the smell was coming from the sitting room. A coal from the bottom of the pipe had flipped out and set fire to the edge of the Persian rug. I was so upset; Muhammad had bought that rug, and I had kept it in perfect condition for years. Now it was ruined.

  The second piece of advice I received was that I should marry again. Then someone would provide for us and I wouldn’t need to keep borrowing money. More than one man came to seek my hand, despite the five children crowding around me. But they all looked like characters from an Egyptian comedy. The sight of each one made me imagine Muhammad shaking his head in sorrow. How was it that these characters were so certain of my answer that they were prepared to propose? I managed to get rid of them quite easily, except for one. He was a man with such an enormous head that I had to bite my tongue to stop myself from asking if the barber ever complained he’d been paid too little after a haircut. He worked with associations and charities that dealt with orphans’ affairs. Before long we nicknamed him Marble Man, because on one visit he complimented Muhammad Kamal for not playing marbles.

  ‘I can’t stand children playing marbles,’ he remarked.

  Who do you think you are, holding forth like that? I thought to myself.

  The next time he came calling, there was a bag of marbles waiting for him. As soon as he sat on the sofa my son (prompted by me, of course) emptied the bag on to the carpet and began to play with them. ‘Tric-trac, tric-trac,’ he kept repeating, until the marbles were knocking against the man’s shoes. He even pushed the man’s feet apart to search for a marble that had gone under the sofa. I could see Marble Man getting more and more annoyed, but he tried desperately to keep calm.

  ‘Hey there, boy,’ he kept saying. ‘Take it easy!’

  Eventually, unable to bear it any more, he left and never came back.

  None of these suggestions eased my financial worries. To make matters worse, I was well aware of conversations amongst my family and Muhammad’s about me. ‘Kamila’s no good at managing things,’ they’d say. ‘She’s completely disorganised. All she thinks about is gossiping and drinking coffee.’ But once I’d finished cooking and washing dishes and clothes, what else was there to do in those long days and nights but welcome female friends, chat, sip coffee and smoke cigarettes? How else was I supposed to forget about love and Muhammad, other than by turning my home into a café?

  22 The site of the famous Roman temple to Jupiter, situated about eighty kilometres north-east of Beirut.

  ‘Baba’s Here, Baba’s Here!’

  ONE DAY, THE landlady from our house in the Bekaa Valley – where we’d lived during that fateful summer when Muhammad died – paid me a visit. Just the sight of her brought back feelings of overwhelming grief and loss. But I cheered up as I remembered those days, when I’d been revered as the wife of the bureau chief. She invited us to spend the summer with them again, free of charge. The thought of going back to that summer made me happy; it was as though Muhammad might return to me after a long absence. Also, to pass the summer in the Bekaa Valley would be far more affordable than remaining in Beirut.

  So, with the arrival of summer, my children and I got on the bus and headed for the Bekaa Valley. But, as soon as we travelled through the mountains and down into the valley, my head began to pound and I bitterly regretted my decision.

  ‘Where did Baba crash?’ my children kept asking. ‘Was it here?’

  Only Ahlam remained silent, closing her eyes to stop herself fainting. When I entered the house I expected Muhammad to appear from one of the rooms; or look down from the balcony; or emerge from behind the leaves of a tree in the garden. When I saw the hook on which I’d hung my dress, still there on the wall of our bedroom, I burst into tears.

  ‘Oh, Muhammad,’ I whispered. ‘Why did you have to die so young?’

  As the days passed, things became easier. I managed to convince myself that I’d turned the page on my life with Muhammad, that he was finally gone. How wrong I was!

  One day all five children came rushing in, yelling, ‘Baba’s here, Baba’s here!’ I ran out after them, my heart in my mouth. A car just like Muhammad’s Volkswagen drove up. Out of it stepped Hanan, followed by one of her male friends, who’d been driving the car. I was rubbing one hand against the other, chiding myself for thinking like a child.

  ‘I can understand why the children thought it was him,’ I told Hanan. ‘But what about me? How on earth could I rush out, believing Muhammad was back?’

  I began to rent the same house each summer, bringing my widowed friend, Umm Bassam, whom I’d met through another widow. She had become one of my very closest friends. We became a large extended family, both in Beirut and during summers in the Bekaa Valley, ferrying our children with us everywhere. Umm Bassam was my exact opposite: competent and good at keeping track of her money. She taught me how to play cards. To avoid gambling with money, we used packets of bread to lay stakes. No matter how hard I concentrated on the cards, she always won. It aggravated me so much that I once dreamed that I asked her to show me how to win, just once. ‘Wet your pants,’ she answered, ‘and I’ll let you win!’ It didn’t seem particularly strange in the dream. But the next morning when I awoke, I discovered I had indeed wet the bed.

  The Widows’ Club

  EACH MONTH, WHEN I went to collect my benefits, I was struck by the similarities between my complaints and those of the other widows. We all shared stories of how people took advantage of us, exploiting our situation and our loss. So I decided to found the Widows’ Club. It quickly grew to include divorcees, like my poor friend Fadila, who’d been married for just two months before her husband divorced her. We allowed unmarried women to join as well. It became a club for women who felt they were in the way of their married friends and a burden to their families. I was constantly astonished at how many widows and unmarried women there were in Beirut, and how many men there were seeking their affections!

  Unlike most of the others, I kept myself aloof from men. There was not a man alive worthy of taking Muhammad’s place in my heart. Each time I rejected the advances of a man who came asking for my hand, I’d think to myself that I’d successfully managed to build a barrier between myself and men. But I’d soon discover how wrong I had been. Wherever I went, male eyes watched me, flirting, like when I was married to the Haji. As a widow, I had the attraction of forbidden fruit; men also saw me as neglected and thirsty for attention. It would only have taken a broom to sweep away all the amorous glances, but I have to admit they made me proud that I was still attractive. I secretly welcomed them. I started to feel like a teenager again.

  The days rushed past and responsibilities for the house and children gradually grew less burdensome. There was a song by the singer Najat that went, ‘He lives close by, and I love him, I love him!’ It caught my imagination. A younger man had started paying me attention, and for once I felt interested; he lived in a nice building just a few yards away. I liked the fact that he lived so close and could hear our voices and see us from his apartment; I could hear him on the telephone, his television, even the sound of his refrigerator door opening. But then I saw that he was making eyes at our neighbour’s daughter as well. In a fit of vanity I took out my identity card. I added a tiny stroke to the number 2, changing my date of birth from 1925 to 1935. When I had to show my ID card to collect my pension, the altered date was spotted immediately. The matter was referred to an officer, who made a big deal out of it. I tried to explain, but the officer refused to listen to my excuses.

  ‘Madam,’ he kept insisting. ‘This is forgery, do you understand, forgery!’

  ‘Listen,’ I
said. ‘Someone wants to marry me. Don’t you see: I’ve got a fiancé! That’s why I’ve lowered my age. That one little stroke could change my entire life. Please understand how hard things are, with five children, responsibilities and high prices … One little stroke, what difference does it make?’

  That had him laughing.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘This time I’ll let you off, because you’ve made me laugh!’

  Going out with a younger, educated man proved difficult. When we went to the cinema, I had my eldest son come too. He read the Arabic subtitles out in a loud voice so I could follow the film. I didn’t want my friend discovering that I couldn’t read or write.

  A few days later I spotted him at it again, this time flirting with another neighbour’s daughter. In a fury I painted over the window so he couldn’t see us and we couldn’t see him. When I relented and scraped off the paint, I discovered he’d already moved, disappearing into the vast city of Beirut.

  With him gone, I reconnected with Beirut and its clamour; with the children, their schools and their friends. My friend Fadila took me with her when she went out with the man she was in love with, a spiritual healer. We’d go to restaurants or cafés, sometimes with a group of the healer’s friends. I loved it. It was clear to me now that I hadn’t been living a cinematic life, the life I’d imagined I’d had with Muhammad. In the end, what use had it been to me that Muhammad was acquainted with ministers and Members of Parliament, that he could recite love poetry by heart? What use had Muhammad’s huge office been to me, with assistants left and right? During our marriage, my endless pregnancies and exhaustion had left me isolated from friends and relatives. I’d seen the world through his eyes. After his death, it was as if I started out all over again. I had to learn how society was constructed and what went on in shops and offices by dealing with the humdrum business of everyday life.

  My favourite times were still the summer months, when we went to the same residence in the Bekaa Valley and I could look out over the hills, meadows and mountains. I also enjoyed the attention we received while we were there; the local men liked the fact that we were from Beirut. Once, when I was out walking with Umm Bassam, I saw a young man gesturing at me from a balcony. The Bekaa Valley was famous for strong summer winds and they were making his clean, loose-fitting white shirt billow. Overcome with delight, I tidied my hair and stared back at the young man. I whispered to my friend, gesturing towards the balcony and warning her not to move forward in case it made him even more eager. But Umm Bassam burst into laughter; she laughed and she laughed.

  ‘You’re blind as a bat!’ she said.

  The young man I had seen was only shirts and sheets hanging on a clothes line.

  The Marriage Season

  SOON AFTER HIS wife passed away, Father became the first in a series of people to marry. He sent me a proverb as a message: ‘Although he was old and wise, he had far from repented.’ From this I understood that he had married a much younger woman, and she was young indeed, even younger than me.

  The second marriage was Hanan’s. The joy of heaven descended on me when Fatima told me that Hanan had married. Hanan had never confided in me or told me what she was up to. But I consoled myself with the knowledge that she had taken after me and done what she wanted, defying the family and her society to marry a Lebanese Christian.

  I had always known that Hanan resented me for divorcing her father and leaving her behind. Fatima had suffered too, yet she remained close. I saw less and less of Hanan, who had spent a number of years living in Cairo and was now back in Beirut, absorbed in her work as a journalist.

  The third to marry was Fatima. She introduced me to her fiancé, making me feel respected and content, as a bride’s mother should. I was so relieved that both my daughters had found husbands – not because marriage, especially for women, would ever provide security, but because I had feared that having a divorced mother would stand in their way. Before her marriage, Fatima had been in love with another man. His parents came to meet her – and her family. They arrived at the door, expecting to be entertained by the mother of the house, only to discover that I no longer lived there, and that there was a stepmother who also wasn’t home that day. Only Fatima and Hanan received them but, had their stepmother been home, the prospective in-laws wouldn’t have seen things in a better light. They left in disgust and convinced their son that he must not marry Fatima.

  Finally, my daughter Ahlam, who was barely eighteen, married a Palestinian student who’d been living opposite us, exactly where the young man I’d admired once lived. Although she’d been so young, Muhammad’s death had affected Ahlam the most. Finding love was what she desired. She went to live with her husband in Kuwait. Meanwhile Toufic, my eldest son, decided to go to London to study computing. I had to sell our two apartments to fund his trip and college fees. Only then did I discover that my brother-in-law, our ‘guardian’, hadn’t paid taxes on either apartment since I’d bought them. I had to pay back taxes, which left very little profit from the sale.

  So now it was just me and Majida, Kadsuma and Muhammad Kamal.

  Five years after her marriage, Hanan gave birth to her first child, a boy. At the age of forty-eight I’d become a grandmother. Her private-hospital room faced the sea and, as I entered, I saw her lying in bed surrounded by bouquets of roses. I was overjoyed. Here was my daughter, living the way I’d always wanted to live – with scented flowers everywhere and her husband’s family gathered around her offering her boxes of chocolates and presents. I watched as Hanan chatted affectionately with her mother-in-law. For a few moments I felt jealous, but I pushed the feeling away. Hanan hardly knew me, nor I her. But I loved her dearly and knew that she loved me too, in her own way.

  By the time Hanan gave birth to her second child, a girl, two years later, we had grown much closer. She was keen for me to visit her; or she was until I started bringing a neighbour or friend with me to see the baby. I had to make myself ignore – superficially at least – her clear annoyance at these extra visitors. She didn’t like my friends – they weren’t as sophisticated as she’d have liked and I think they embarrassed her. In my heart I was critical of her too, because the only people from my world she wanted to see were her brothers and sisters. She didn’t understand my need to show my friends that my daughter had married up and lived in one of the best districts of Beirut.

  She had never, not even for a second, put herself in my shoes. I came to her from a home bursting at the seams with neighbours, children and visitors, with brewing coffee and clamouring creditors. I lived in constant anxiety: that the electricity might be cut off because I couldn’t afford the monthly bill; that the gas cylinder would run empty; that the television would suddenly stop working and need to be repaired. Did she ever wonder, I thought, how I managed to pay the fare when I came to visit? Did it occur to her that I struggled to work out which button to press in the lift that took me to her floor?

  Once, I visited Hanan in her apartment. There was a cage with singing canaries that could bathe in a little water tray. In another cage, a mouse Fatima had bought for Hanan’s little boy jumped on a wheel and started playing; then it went into its little house with sawdust on the floor. The little mouse stuffed its mouth with seeds until it looked as though it had the mumps.

  Hanan was at her desk, writing.

  ‘I’d like to be that mouse!’ I told her.

  ‘It’s called a hamster!’ she said with a laugh.

  ‘OK, then,’ I replied, ‘I wish I could be that hamster. He plays and jumps, eats, drinks and sleeps, oblivious to everything going on around him.’

  Hanan laughed even harder.

  ‘He’s lucky he has no debts,’ I said. ‘Or electricity and gas bills to pay!’

  I thought she might get the hint and slip some cash into my handbag this time. But she only laughed some more, then went back to her own world, to her writing, to the canary and her two children. I don’t think it occurred to her that I was asking for help.

&
nbsp; 1975

  IN THE SPRING of 1975, the Christian Phalangist militia killed some Palestinian refugees on a bus that passed through Christian neighbourhoods. Muslim–Christian disturbances rocked Beirut all over again. Like everyone else, I expected it all to blow over quickly, as it had in 1958.

  I saw a photograph in the newspaper of the Prime Minister, Rashid Karami, wearing a polo-neck jumper.

  ‘The crisis must be over,’ I cried, ‘or he’d be wearing a black suit.’

  I looked at pictures of Druze, Shia, Maronite and Sunni leaders, all smiling, and assumed everything would be OK. But the leaders became like blind men with swords, thrusting at everyone around them, as each formed a militia and took over different quarters of Beirut. There were dead and wounded, explosions and demonstrations all over the city. My women neighbours and I kept our ears glued to the radio, listening to the newsreader Sharif al-Akhawi, who became to us the only trustworthy Lebanese. He told his listeners which roads were safe to use. Life as we knew it ground to a halt, replaced by another kind of existence: standing in line at the bakery, at the street water tank, at the petrol station. It was as if I was nine years old again, and had just left the south for Beirut. One day, as I watched a mule pulling a kerosene tank amidst the noise of car horns, I was reminded of my years as the stone-bearing donkey.

  Thoughts of that unhappy time also brought back memories of Muhammad. If Muhammad were still in the same job, I thought, he might have been bureau chief of all Lebanon by now. I tried to figure out how old he’d have been if he were still alive and with a sob I realised he’d be fifty-seven. But when I remembered the threats the Nasserites had made to him in 1958, I was glad he was no longer alive to face this new crisis.

  My house was crammed with relatives and acquaintances whose homes lay on the border between warring neighbourhoods. They included my friend, Umm Bassam; Kamil and his family; and my nephew, Maryam’s brother with the wooden leg, who’d returned to be with his family after living on the streets. Our house became a hostel. We huddled on the porch, in the sitting room, kitchen and bedroom – even in the corridor outside the bathroom. There was a perpetual din of throat-clearing, laughter and coughing; farts echoed forth and secrets were revealed. Toufic, who had returned from London and was working for an international airline at Beirut airport, got up one night to record the snoring. When everyone was asleep, he played the tape at top volume. Someone awoke and prodded the person sleeping next to him, assuming he was the snorer. By the time everyone had prodded everyone else awake, they were all cracking up with laughter.