The Locust and the Bird (14 page)

Then Ibrahim was suspended from driving the tram for two months after he hit a pedestrian. He ran away to the south, lest the family of the injured man retaliate. And suddenly, for two months, I was free. Free to appreciate how wide Burj Square actually was, and how beautiful! I noticed the shops and the lovely things on display by the doors and in the shop windows. Though I feared that the other tram
drivers were in league with Ibrahim, I began riding the tram in the middle of the day.

Of course Ibrahim’s desperately controlling behaviour towards the women in his family wasn’t unusual. Most of my friends were scared of every man in their family – even distant relatives – and this included the rich and the grand, like my glamorous cousin Mira. In my eyes Mira was as strong and beautiful as al-Buraq
¹⁶
– until her brother spotted us coming out of the cinema one afternoon. Very late that night, he knocked on our door and insisted on searching for her in the sleeping household. He dragged her into the kitchen to hit her, oblivious to the fact he’d managed to wake us all. I listened, incredulous, as she began to cry. It was then that I realised that, for all her money and the gold flashing from her neck and wrists, she was as powerless as me. It made no difference that she was a married woman and a mother, with a crocodile-skin handbag that opened with a click.

This put an end to Mira’s cinema visits for a time. I came up with one enticement after another, all to no avail – until
The Apple Seller
took Beirut by storm. Mira was desperate to see this film, about a simple apple seller and a rich young man who made a bet with his friend that he could transform her into an aristocratic girl. It was only towards the end, when she was attending a ball, that the girl discovered the young man was interested in her only because of a bet.

For this film Mira managed to overcome her fears. She devised a masterly scheme to get us all to the cinema: she invited my husband’s business partner and his wife to come with us, thereby putting Ibrahim and my husband on the spot. They couldn’t refuse, and so they agreed to come and to bring Khadija as well. We took our seats and were so entranced by the film that it wasn’t until the lights came up
that I realised that my husband was sound asleep. Ibrahim frowned as usual and said nothing about the film.

After that night I thought of myself as the apple seller, while Muhammad was the aristocrat who taught me to read and write. I longed to sit with him by the fountain at Fatme’s again and chat about films and film stars. I would tell him that the cinema had become my school, teaching me about life, history and geography. I learned about a continent called Europe and saw scenes from the war. The cinema taught me how to speak and dress. It took me inside splendid houses and hovels, and introduced me to the people who lived in them. I desperately wanted to live like some of them, but I also thanked God that my life was better than that of many others. On the screen I met people like me, others like Ibrahim, and still more like my husband.

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

J
UST 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.