Beirut Blues (19 page)

“Is that how they talk to high school girls?” you answered scornfully. “What sort of logic is that?”

When Zemzem declared that I must tie my hair back while I was eating, you scolded her again and added reflectively
that man was about to land on the moon and so far no one had managed to wipe out head lice. Once you had said that, I no longer felt embarrassed about having them and went and sat in front of you while you rummaged about in my hair. There was a period of silence, broken by occasional mumbling. “This little lady’s strolling along as if she fancies herself. She doesn’t stray from your parting. She’s keeping to her route like a soldier on the march.”

Zemzem hurried to examine my head. “Yes, it’s true! God forbid!” she exclaimed.

“If you could see it, Asmahan,” you continued. “It’s lost in the waves of your hair now. Enjoying the shade, the softness, and the perfume of mastic.”

I noticed how very cheerful you seemed, although I couldn’t understand why. Then you started trying to pick out the eggs. I squirmed irritably. “I have to get them out before they hatch,” you said, “or you’ll have a whole army of lice there and they’ll march you off wherever they want to.”

“Is that true, Granny?”

“You know it’s not, but it might be. Who knows?” Then you went on, “Praise the Lord! How did He manage to invent lice? Creatures that live on someone’s head, lay eggs, feed off the scalp, and thrive in its heat; and then when they’ve had enough, off they jump onto someone else’s head. I believe in you, Lord!”

When I thought about what you said, my head felt like a forest full of creatures living together and multiplying.

“You forgot the kerosene,” began Zemzem.

“I’d rather cut off my hand than pour kerosene over her head,” you shouted.

“Because of the smell?” I asked.

“That’s right,” you said, clicking the bones in your neck. “Because of the smell, and the soft skin on your head. It’s not like a sponge that’d just soak it up. The smell might make you sick and addle your brain.”

I sat on the bathroom table as usual, only this time I covered my lower half because of the little hairs starting to grow there. I knew you studied my body and knew it by heart, and felt proud whenever there was a change in it as if you were the one responsible for stretching it up and out. You lifted me off the table and told me to squat down in the washbowl. I couldn’t see what this had to do with the lice, but you fixed a spray on the tap and sprayed my head as I crouched in the bowl. “There’s one! And another!” you cried as you spotted something black on my back or floating in the water and caught it on your fingertips and wiped it on the edge of the bowl. “Out you come. We’re trying to give Miss Asmahan a bath.”

I examined the lice and counted them. Nineteen. You were still muttering. “Come on. Got you!”

You didn’t stop until you’d finally given up hope of finding any more. I couldn’t see your face but I could imagine it concentrating, concerned, like a shepherd with his sheep.

“That’s the end of them!” Then you peered at the comb and sang gaily, “O eggs, you’re stuck in the teeth of the comb! All you’ll give birth to is devils’ dandruff!”

I entered your house as Asmahan who didn’t talk
straight. My tongue seemed disconnected from the rest of my body; I spoke in jerky, uneasy sentences, and told lies, because I was used to having to justify myself, or cover up for my mother and sometimes even for our maid, Isaf.

You understood this and tried to return my tongue to my mouth and make it subordinate to my ears, eyes, and mind. You made me speak more easily and fluently.

I was pleased and annoyed in equal measure by the attention heaped on me. I felt like an unfamiliar metal which had to be tested with various substances before it would reveal its true nature. Sometimes I just wanted to turn out the lights and take refuge in sleep. When you hurled yourself over the porch wall at the sound of me, Naima and Zemzem shrieking because I had fallen out of the fig tree, you were overreacting. But another time I remember you stopped me going to the bathroom when I was ill and brought a white chamber pot to my room instead. I asked if you were afraid of me being exposed to the air, since you had a fixation about the air, as well as the sun. But you waited until I’d finished and then examined the contents of the vessel with a twig you’d brought for the purpose, to determine how ill I was and whether you should call the doctor or wait a day. Then you raised my eyelids and counted the veins in the whites of my eyes, examined my tongue, and told me to spit so that you could gauge my state of health. I didn’t mind that at all.

When you took me away from my old school and sent me to a lay school, you were peeling away the layers of skin until my core was revealed. I began to understand how to read and write for the first time. I carried my books and Ali took a cushion for me to sit on, in case the seats were too
hard for my bottom. He drove me in the car in my clean smock as if I were Cinderella going to the ball.

I wasn’t the only pupil brought to school in a private car. There were plenty of us, while in my old school there had only been one girl who didn’t come on foot: she was driven in a horse-drawn carriage by a soldier in a khaki uniform. At lunchtime I used to hurry home to eat; the food was not always ready and I had to listen to my mother and Isaf cursing and swearing. Here I began going to the school dining room. Zemzem would arrive with my food shortly before the bell went off and start heating it up on a Primus stove she had brought with her from the house. She would sit facing me to make sure I finished my plateful, then clear everything away into a leather satchel and push a bar of perfumed soap and a small towel at me. The other girls gathered around me in amazement. Coming to this school, having new shoes and a mother in America, seemed to put a gleam on my mind as if I had polished it with almond oil.

To return to the seeds, they seem to be different on our side, for they don’t always sprout like maize as they do in my grandfather’s case; sometimes they fall into a deep slumber. Take your mother: after your father had slept with her she hurried off, not to pump the Primus stove, boil water, and wash as is the custom, but to put the seeds in a glass jar and bury them in the darkness under the apple trees which surrounded the house. Your father was setting off on a long trip at dawn the following day, and if she found she was pregnant in his absence, she wanted to be able to exhume the proof of paternity.

I remember the rites which surrounded these seeds in our family. Everyone in the house knew that it was proper to wash straight after sex, but you used to wait in bed to give the seeds a chance. You called to Zemzem to boil water as soon as my grandfather went out of the door. I think you were showing off, letting everyone in the house know that he was constantly in your bed. Even Zemzem colluded with you and squatted down to pump the Primus energetically until it roared noisily as if to announce out loud why it was boiling water.

Many times I’ve wanted to get my grandfather away from Juhayna, but restrained myself out of love for you. This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed I have some things in common with my mother. I don’t mean those characteristics which are an exact copy of my mother’s. For example, her impatience: she poured oil straight into a bottle without a funnel so that half of it went down the sink and the other half on her clothes, threw out all her keys because she couldn’t be bothered with them, left drawers open, squirmed as if she were on the rack while Isaf or I did up the zip on her dress for her, pulled the buttons off her shirt if they didn’t come undone easily, tugged at my hair ribbon with her teeth and if it was obstinate took a knife to it, ignored the saltcellar and took handfuls of salt from the bag. I’ve suppressed this part of me and fought against it for your sake. Once I was laughing unrestrainedly in front of Zemzem. You took hold of my head, pressed it against you so that I was no longer aware of anything but the smell of your dress, and raised your face to the sky. “I am your obedient servant. The older one’s past
help and now here’s the little one. Open her mind, Lord, make her heart blind—tie the veins that make her want to laugh. Block her ears forever against her mother’s ideas and her grandfather’s jokes.”

When my grandmother married my grandfather and realized what he was like, she became very depressed. She thought people who laughed all the time and had gregarious natures were suffering from a chronic disability. She became convinced she could change him, but all her efforts failed. Then she blamed herself for marrying him. She should have been on her guard: when his grandmother was brought to his father’s funeral on a donkey, his mother had hidden her face in her hands and started to shake. The other women pulled her hands away, thinking she was convulsed with sorrow, and discovered she was laughing uncontrollably at the sight of her mother-in-law.

My grandmother was afraid she would have a child like my grandfather, with a frivolous personality, and prayed God not to bless her. When several months went by and she wasn’t pregnant, she decided God had answered her prayers because He knew in advance that any baby she had with my grandfather would be laughing when the midwife pulled him out, instead of shrieking with the shock of the birth. She didn’t want to ask God for anything more and gave up opposing my grandfather and criticizing his temperament. She began to ignore the things which annoyed her about him until she no longer saw or heard them. When she eventually
became pregnant, she didn’t give a thought to the newborn baby laughing, because she was too busy thinking aloud how she would bring him up to be lord of all he surveyed, by ensuring that he was intelligent, well educated, and wore sober ties. She would teach him to walk and talk in the first few months and to count and recite the letters of the alphabet when he was one. She would take him to live in Beirut, because although there were highly educated people in the village, they lacked manners. Hasan, who had studied in Iraq and Najaf and even consulted the sheikhs of Al-Azhar in Cairo, wiped his nose on the sleeve of his jacket and swallowed his drink in one go.

My mother finally arrived, and my grandmother claimed that she had dreamed these dreams for her child irrespective of its sex. However, my mother showed signs of having a frivolous nature from early childhood. She hated learning and preferred to laugh and look at the world from under lowered eyelids and gossip with the girls who worked on the land. When she was fifteen, she wanted to marry a wholesaler who bought from my grandfather, because he looked like a well-known movie star. She used to escape from her room; my grandmother had given her a room of her own, something rare for those days, but my mother felt that she was a prisoner in it, cut off from the village girls and their laughter. My grandmother wanted her to sit and read biographies of famous women and the translation of
A Tale of Two Cities
, since she had given up trying to persuade her to stay on at school. She didn’t put pressure on her to read prayers and the traditions of the Prophet and the Qur’an with her,
for my grandmother was a realist; she had known what kind of child she had from the time my mother first walked and talked.

I don’t remember sitting and talking with my mother once I was grown up; on the other hand she used to tell me funny stories about herself or other people. She didn’t want to know anything about me. Her way of showing interest in me was to say, “Watch out for your pussy! It’s gold.”

Quite often she’d point right at it and say, “It’s lovely. God preserve it! It’s a gold mine!”

I don’t think I heard her talking seriously about anything to do with either of us, except once, although I didn’t believe what I was hearing at the time. I introduced her to Naser on one of her visits to Beirut. She was chewing gum like a teenager, which seemed out of place, given the glamorous dress she was wearing, her long painted nails, and her gold watch. Nevertheless, she spoke suddenly in a calm, measured tone, and it could have been my grandmother: “God guide Asmahan and set her on the right path. She won’t meet anyone like you, but let’s hope she’ll meet someone else. I know you’re going to make her happy sometimes, angry many times without meaning to, and force her to sleep in a different place every day. She’ll be frightened about what happens to her when you have to go, and frightened for you even when you’re still with her. She’s going to lose all her friends because they’ll be scared to visit you. The time will come when you have to run for your life and leave her behind.”

Naser gave me a look which I understood to mean that
my mother was not the person I’d talked to him about. Nor was she the person whose laughter I’d shared even before I understood what her stories meant. I had seen her slapping her thighs with mirth, putting her hand over her mouth, clapping Isaf on the shoulder, and laughing, laughing, laughing, until I was convinced laughter was something which accompanied all human activity: eating, praying, even grieving.

When my mother found out about me stealing from a family who lived in a neighboring street, she laughed. She turned my father’s prayer times into a comedy, fixing an improvised tail to the back of his pajamas. When he went on for too long, she hovered about him, asking questions which he steadfastly ignored. She even managed to give the Qur’an recitation for my father’s soul a farcical dimension. When she got bored, she interrupted the sheikh’s performance and offered him a glass of water. Then she pressed food on him and advised him to take a break. The moment he resumed she suggested he go to the mosque to recite in the company of other worshippers and gain every possible advantage for my father’s soul. He refused, and then she actually begged him to stop, claiming unblushingly that the memories were too painful. If there were no women visiting to offer condolences, she asked me to make a lot of noise to distract him while she took a nap, or else went to see Fadila. Before the mourning period was over she stopped opening the door to the sheikh, but made fun of him as he stood outside, telling him point-blank that he had never been to this house to recite the Qur’an for her dead husband. By shutting the door in his
face, she opened the way for the soul to return to our house, energetically setting about rearranging it until it no longer bore the slightest trace of my father’s memory.