The Locust and the Bird (18 page)

I hadn’t, like other desperate pregnant women who wanted to get rid of their babies, asked someone else to hit me on my back, nor had I been injected with quinine, two guaranteed methods of aborting. Instead, I jumped secretly from my bed to the floor until I nearly fainted, and yet still I didn’t stop. Then I drank some boiled parsley, all the while asking the baby inside me for forgiveness.

Finally one morning I was wrenched from sleep by agonising cramps and, drenched in blood, I saw Mustapha,
no bigger than my finger. I screamed and soon everybody came running to help me. I don’t know who put the foetus in a soup bowl full of water, but he was displayed for one day, pink and tiny with a slender thread trailing from him. All the children in our house and the neighbours had a peek before we buried him in the garden.

I prayed and asked for God’s forgiveness, believing that Mustapha had wanted to be aborted and I had simply helped him. What else could it be, when so many women tried to get rid of their pregnancy and failed? I was upset by this loss. But to my relief, in a few days I began to feel strong again, just like the
malu-malu
– the touch-me-not plant, which folds and droops its sensitive leaves when touched, but quickly revives itself. But I pretended that I was still raw and vulnerable so Ibrahim would leave me alone.

Muhammad was living in another reality: he was stressed and unhappy, and his family was putting even greater pressure on him to leave me. His older brother even wrote to me, sending the letter via his wife. I repeated it to Fatme, our neighbour, reciting, ‘“If you really love Muhammad, you should leave him. He’s ruining his chances in life for your sake. By concentrating on the here and now he’s neglecting his own future.” ’

I couldn’t understand what he meant. Muhammad worked for the government and, though he often complained about his miserable salary, he’d managed to buy himself a suit of the very finest material, costing 140 lira. His shirts were extremely elegant, as were his socks, shoes, handkerchiefs and ties. Everything about him was fashionable. He bought himself some sunglasses too. No one in my family had ever worn sunglasses; dark glasses were only for the blind. For the first time ever, I tried on a pair and saw the mountains and trees in a romantic orange glow. Muhammad also owned a
pair of binoculars to watch birds and eagles; he patronised restaurants and cafés and went to the movies. The only people I’d heard about who lived this way were film stars and the rich.

I decided that, for all their sophistication, his family were the same as Ibrahim and my husband: people who didn’t believe in love.

When I criticised his brother for writing to me, Muhammad defended him. I was flabbergasted. Suddenly he had become critical of me, just like my husband or Ibrahim. He started blaming me for the most trivial things, which left me feeling he couldn’t stand me any more.

I tried to ignore his depression, even when he began to curse his luck. But then he accused me of only being capable of flirting. It was true that I sang to him, but only as a way of showing my love for him. Gradually I realised that what he really wanted was a wife. I had noticed that, when he saw me taking his freshly washed and ironed clothes out of a small bag, his eyes would glisten and he’d sigh deeply. I asked him if this was what he really wanted, and he confessed that he was desperate for a wife who’d do those things for him.

‘But don’t I wash your laundry for you?’ I asked.

‘Well, not really,’ he answered.

I resolved to leave and not return till he started behaving as he used to, comforting myself with the proverb that said that every beginning must have its end. Testing the water, I asked him if his mother still disapproved of our relationship.

‘Yes, she wants me to marry and have children,’ he replied. ‘Poor Mother, I can’t go on upsetting her when her health’s the way it is.’

And so I suggested, pinching my thigh all the while, that we should separate.

He snapped back, ‘How can we? You follow me about like a shadow – how can I meet anyone else?’

I wanted to scream at him, but I swallowed my words, blaming him for not appreciating the danger I put myself in each time I visited him. I left, putting his keys on the table and swearing by the Prophet and all the Shia Imams that I’d never set foot in his room again – and comforting myself that it would be for my own sanity. I’d had enough of plots and lies and deceits, enough of dragging people with me as chaperones in order to meet him without being caught. I’d even used my own two daughters. I’d had enough of entering his room like a fugitive. Enough of racing home before Ibrahim and my husband returned from work.

Maryam did her best to console me, to help me understand Muhammad’s attitude, but I could only wait for the next day to dawn, to find out if he really wanted it to be over.

I went to his room as usual, this time with my brother Kamil – who knew all about my relationship with Muhammad – bitterly regretting having dumped my keys the day before. I made a small heap of sand on the windowsill to signal I was there, but no response followed. Kamil left me and I wandered around the streets for some time before returning in the afternoon and piling more sand until there were veritable little pyramids of it along his windowsill. All to no effect.

That evening I thanked God for having created darkness, exhaustion, drowsiness and drooping eyelids. I fell asleep in bed between my daughters, thanking God once again for the two of them. But as soon as the clock showed one o’clock the next day, there I was again, hanging around outside Muhammad’s room. Yesterday’s pile of sand had disappeared, so I placed another on the windowsill. I returned an hour later to find it still there. Either he wasn’t at home, or he
didn’t want to see me. A little girl watching from a balcony across the street asked if I was building a house with the sand. I ignored her and then someone began calling to her. Without even turning round, I knew the looks I felt burning into my back were her mother’s. Then I heard a loud slap. The mother had hit the little girl because she was talking to me. I was, in her opinion, a fallen woman.

At that moment, Muhammad opened his door. Sheer delight overwhelmed me and, when I stepped inside, my anxieties gone, I joked that neither of us could stand being apart for even a single day. He didn’t laugh with me, and I sensed he was very low on energy. A strange feeling of sorrow came over me, because I was imposing myself on him yet again.

He broke the news that his name was on a list of people being sent by the government to the Bekaa Valley to eradicate hashish production. Once again my heart sank; he really was leaving me. I demanded to know where our love had gone.

Before he had the chance to reply, I spoke to him in classical Arabic, which I’d learnt from listening to the radio and from films so that I would sound literate.

‘The day of reckoning is at hand, that day when the lover loses patience; the day when the lover stands with open arms and says, “Either my beloved will come at this moment, take my arm and hug me to her as I hug her, or else I will uproot her from my life. She is that molar without which I cannot eat, but which causes me pain, day and night.” ’

Muhammad wept when he heard me use these words, because he could see how much I loved him. He pleaded with me to divorce my husband and marry him. But I blocked both my ears and my heart.

As I leaned over to kiss him, he pushed me away.

‘Kisses are a soothing balm for pain,’ he said, ‘but only for a little while. Their effect soon wears thin.’

I tried to tell him that we would be free to marry one day, because my husband would die. For just a moment, it was as if Muhammad had discovered the meaning of life. Why, he asked, had I never told him that my husband was suffering from a terminal illness? No, I said, he would die sometime because he was older than us. Muhammad let out a derisory laugh and so I told him instead that we could marry when my daughters were older.

‘And how long will that be?’ he asked.

‘Ten years,’ I replied.

He turned my face towards him, forcing me to look him straight in the eye. We were not acting out parts in a film, he insisted. Our love must lead to marriage; we must stop telling lies. Spending a couple of hours together here and there was no real life. I was deceiving myself, just as I’d done when I used a razor blade to scratch my two daughters out of the photograph of me and Muhammad under the walnut tree. Left in their places were two blank patches, like passing clouds, so no one would know I had taken them along with me.

Muhammad demanded an answer. Did I want to be his wife? If I said yes, he would seek a divorce from my husband. If I said no, he’d know I was wasting his time.

Divorce my husband and abandon my daughters? I could see Ibrahim nodding his head. He’d been correct all along about me: I was a flighty woman without dignity or scruples, and a liar completely lacking in character. All I could think of was Abu-Hussein, seemingly unaware of my deceit, complacent in his piety.

I remained silent, and so Muhammad answered for me.

‘I get it,’ he said. ‘You’re just frittering away time with me, no more, no less! Well, now I know.’

I went home on my own, without trying to find someone to chaperone me. As our house loomed in the distance, I felt as if it had two arms reaching out to grab me by the neck and strangle me. I could see only darkness ahead of me.

Ibrahim was waiting. I knew I was late, but I hadn’t realised how late. He slapped me hard, then shook me, demanding to know where I’d been. In the end my husband came to my rescue. In despair I hit my head on the wall with all my might and went to bed alone, while my two daughters clung to Maryam.

Next morning I got up and headed for al-Rawche, the suicide rock for jilted lovers. I thought of Umm Fawzi and finally understood how she could have ended her life three years ago without giving a thought to her daughters.

Umm Fawzi was the neighbour whom I had asked to hide me in the attic so I could avoid getting married; the one who had unwillingly conned the Haji into giving her money so I could buy stockings. She was my friend, but since she rarely left the house, I would visit her and tell her the stories of films I’d seen.

She was Abu-Fawzi’s second wife; his first wife had died and left him with a daughter. The girl lived with Abu-Fawzi and Umm Fawzi for a short while, but then Umm Fawzi’s brother fell in love with her and married her. Years went by. But the girl regularly fought with her mother-in-law – Umm Fawzi’s mother – and once, when her own husband lifted his arm to strike her, she doused herself with kerosene. Her husband tried to save her, but she died in the flames.

Abu-Fawzi blamed his son-in-law and his wife’s family for his daughter’s death.

‘By the right of the Prophet Muhammad,’ he cursed them,
‘may their daughters be consumed by fire in this world and the next!’

He had forgotten that his own wife was one of their daughters. From the moment he uttered that prayer, his wife began threatening to kill herself. It happened whenever they had an argument, however trivial. Her husband ignored her threats; after all, they liked each other and had three children together, all paragons of beauty and good manners.

I went into Umm Fawzi’s house just a few minutes before she doused herself in kerosene. Her door was wide open; nobody in our neighbourhood closed their door. I saw her stretched out on the sofa, her face turned to the wall. Assuming she was sound asleep, I crept back out. I was halfway up our stairs when I heard her screams. The neighbours tried to put out the flames with blankets, coverlets and water from the pond.

I stood there, in the middle of her sitting room, shrieking. I blamed myself.

‘God strike me down!’ I cried. ‘Why didn’t I speak to you? Burn me instead. Please, God, do it to me!’

How could Umm Fawzi do this to herself when she had three children, when she knew how much I loved her? How could she? For days afterwards she battled on with her painful burns.

It frightened me that her husband’s prayer had been granted, just one year after he’d uttered those dreadful words, ‘May their daughters be consumed by fire in this world and the next!’ Umm Fawzi lay dying, like shining tar on the ground. I collected the scattered remnants of her singed hair, weeping as I gathered the strands into a clump, vowing to take them to Sitt Zaynab’s shrine in Damascus.

Were people’s prayers really answered in this way? Was
someone out there praying that Muhammad would leave me, or that God would make me die?

Frustration and despair had taken control of me. They were my left foot and my right foot, giving me resolve, and providing me with the necessary logic and desire to kill myself. I left the road and walked until I reached a small cliff overlooking the sea. I would not self-immolate like Umm Fawzi and so many other women in Lebanon at that time. I did not want to die from my burns or, if I survived, live with the scars of my failure. My hope was that, through suicide, I’d cause a huge scandal, something to make people point their fingers at Ibrahim and hold him responsible. He’d slapped me, hadn’t he? I wanted to die so I’d be free. It would be a death that brought shame on my family. Therein lay the source of my strength, just as Umm Fawzi had taken revenge on her own husband by committing suicide.

And what of Muhammad? He’d realise I’d finally given up. All my energy had been exhausted: energy for living with or without him, with or without my daughters. The love I felt for him could never stagnate; it was like a tempest, a hurricane, something I couldn’t contain.

I looked down at the surging roar of the waves and stared hard into them. It was as if the sea was calling out to me. Just then a hand reached out and pulled me back. Still speechless, hearing only the roar of the sea, drowning in my sweat, I turned. A young man had been watching me. He pulled me away from the rocks and then insisted on accompanying me home, even though I told him I’d changed my mind and had no intention of killing myself. Despite my protestations, he remained unconvinced. I swore by God and the Prophet, but to no avail. Eventually I confessed to him that I was really more scared of my brother finding out I’d tried to commit suicide than I was of death
itself. Hurriedly I fixed my hair under its black scarf and checked my clothes. I started to run, as if I were shouting out, ‘Let me show you how beautiful life is.’ I raised my head to the skies. I thanked God that I was in Beirut, the city of Yagog and Magog, and that no one knew about my foolishness.