The Locust and the Bird (19 page)

Silk Valley

S
OON I LEARNED
from Miskiah, Muhammad’s sister, that he was engaged. The films I’d seen helped me understand his reason for marrying: he had given up hope that I would ever become his wife, and was eager now to build his own future, to have children. This logic calmed me briefly; then anger and jealousy took hold and I became determined to see his fiancée. Miskiah told me a time when I might glimpse her walking past Muhammad’s house. As soon as I saw her, I prayed silently, ‘Thank you, God, for helping me in my struggle!’ The fiancée was nowhere near as pretty or fashionable as me. I could tell that she never went to films, wouldn’t sing and certainly never flirted. Another thought occurred to me: Muhammad didn’t deserve me. If he did, how could he possibly contemplate having such a woman as his wife?

Before he left to take up his new post in Silk Valley, a remote region close to the Syrian border full of smugglers, Muhammad and I met one final time. He handed me five addressed envelopes with postage stamps stuck on them. I had to promise to send him letters so he’d know how I was. I was to put them in the letter box in the street opposite our house where an army commandant lived; that way, the letters would be sure to reach him quickly. When he gave me those envelopes I knew that he wanted to keep in contact with me.

Yet again, we regretted not having been more serious about his promise to teach me to read and write. We shared the blame for squandering our time together.

Less than a week after he’d gone, I dictated my first letter to Fatme. I told him I thought of him every time I saw damask roses in bloom or passed his house. How I longed to see his window half-open so I could rush in to him! I closed with the words of the song, ‘You’re on my mind, and I can’t stand being apart from you.’

A letter came back from Muhammad via Miskiah, and Fatme read it to me. He’d written out Umm Kulthum’s song ‘Write to me, write to me’:

Write to me and explain to me
About a heart and its fixations,
About your absence; for how long?

Enough of suffering, the result of your being
Far distant, and of your own choice.
Write to me of a time when we may meet,
Write to me morning and evening.

I asked what the other words were on the page, and Fatme read, ‘Lyrics by Bayram al-Tunisi and music by Zakariyya Ahmad.’ I was more touched by that than by the song itself: he was treating me as his peer, someone who would want to know a literary source.

I had noticed how much Fatme enjoyed reading out Muhammad’s letters. She relished the atmosphere of conspiracy, as we drank coffee and took surreptitious puffs on cigarettes. Tears would well in her eyes as she read.

‘I’m telling you this without the slightest bit of jealousy,’ she once said, tapping the wooden table for good luck. ‘If you travelled the entire inhabited globe in quest of another man, you’d never find one like him.’ I expected her to add, ‘A person who worships you the way he does.’ But instead she said, ‘Someone who’s a decent person, not a thug or a womaniser.’

I knew what she meant. I was married with two daughters, and married women inevitably attracted men who wanted to spend time with them for only one reason. All of that was utterly different from the love that Muhammad and I felt for each other.

Fatme couldn’t write back to Muhammad for me on that particular day. It had grown dark, and she was scared that her brother, who was visiting her from the south, would arrive home and find her writing a love letter. I had to resort to taking my own daughter Fatima into the bathroom with me, with paper and pencil hidden in my dress pocket. I sat Fatima down and dictated the letter, watching her sound out the words as the pencil moved under her childish fingers.

Kamila, what are you doing, asking your eight-year-old daughter to write your lover a letter? I asked myself.

But Fatima adored Muhammad. She would watch for him to appear at the top of the alley, where he’d wait for me, and when he saw her he’d give her a little pink rubber doll or a wooden figurine of a gazelle. She was used to seeing Muhammad around in the neighbourhood or at Bhamdoun. When we went for strolls, Fatima listened as we sang songs to each other. She was well aware that he was the ‘big secret’. She kept it to herself, out of her love for me, though she was also devoted to her father. As Fatima wrote my letter, I was aware of her pride and sense of achievement at being able to do such a thing. Once it was done, I folded it and put it in my bra.

This is what it said:

My dear Muhammad,

I love you so much! I shall follow you wherever you go. Love of my soul, all I want is to please you. I’m longing to see you and afraid for you. What am I to do with this love of mine? I want you here, close to me; it is torture when you’re so far away! Your kisses tell me you love me, so why did you leave me? When you are near, my dearly beloved, you can console me. Come back to me here! Oh letter, winging your way to him, promise me, by the Prophet himself, to say hello to him. Oh letter, how lucky you are, winging your way to him; soon you’ll be in my lover’s hands.

I grew very bored, especially during the middle of the day, when I would have been with Muhammad. But, determined not to make Ibrahim suspicious, I set off out when my various women chaperones came by as usual to get me. Since Muhammad had gone away I had nowhere to go, so I would walk around aimlessly before coming back home. I was tempted to get on a bus and visit Muhammad for the day, but I didn’t, because Ibrahim had given me lots of leeway recently and I didn’t want to test it.

The months sped by. Muhammad returned to Beirut for a holiday and confided in me that he planned to break off his engagement. His fiancée was protesting at the way he neglected her and had accused him of being in love with me. I had expected this to happen: engagement, marriage and children could be mere formalities with some people, but never for a man like Muhammad. I thanked God that our relationship was strong once more, and I promised that I would fast and pray twice as often to compensate for my lies and deceit.

There’s No More Money
in My Husband’s Drawer

F
IVE MONTHS HAD
passed since Muhammad’s return from Silk Valley. Separation had only strengthened our love.

One morning Ibrahim shook his head at me in sheer derision.

‘It’s as though you don’t begin to realise how bad things are,’ he said. ‘You sit there chewing gum and ask to go out!’

I’d heard from Khadija that Abu-Hussein’s shop had been losing money, but had paid little attention. After all, there’d been no changes at home. The Haji still provided meat, vegetables, rice and white bread. The house continued to teem with relatives and friends. In any case, when I asked the Haji about it, he wouldn’t confide in me. We were not like other married couples. We were simply two people who happened to live in the same house, each leading separate lives.

Before long the situation became clear. My husband’s business partner claimed that he had bought shares on the stock exchange with some of the profits from the business, but without telling the Haji. Then the share price dropped alarmingly. They’d invested in a lot of stock and could no longer meet the repayments and interest. The partner proposed selling some land to keep the business afloat, and wanted to know whether my husband had any land he could sell as well. The situation left my husband baffled: why wasn’t his partner speaking to him face to face, instead of
through a lawyer? Besides, he had no land to sell. Instead he agreed to sell most of our expensive Persian carpets, which he had bought not for their beauty but because they were very durable. He would keep only three rugs for himself. Then he had to sell our best furniture. In tears he asked me to give him my jewellery. I cried too as I handed it over. I wept for my armlets, each shaped like a snake; my bracelet which looked like
dababa
(army tank) tracks; and the bracelet hung with gold English sovereigns that we called ‘Ottoman’ lira. The entire family gathered round as I used soap to ease the ten bands off my wrists, as if they didn’t want to leave me. I sobbed even more when I heard their clinking in the distance.

Hadn’t I seen myself just like Nawal in the film
Tears of Love
? Now here I was, surrendering my jewels to my husband in the same way. The only difference was their use: while her husband took them to use at the gaming table and lost everything, mine needed them to keep his business afloat.

Whenever I’d seen my husband sitting behind the long wooden cutting table in his shop, holding a huge pair of scissors, it had struck me how unsuitable those shears were for someone with his tiny hands, beady eyes and slight stature. His was a figure that could virtually disappear inside the cavernous space of his storeroom, with its hundreds of bolts of English, French and Italian cloth. I’d see before me the orphan boy who’d arrived in Beirut, treading a straight and narrow path, just as he’d been taught to do by the religious scholar who’d raised him. He’d lived his life in the city, like a horse with blinkers, so shy that all he ever saw of Beirut was the ground beneath his feet.

My husband’s business partner was, in contrast, a larger man who laughed a lot and had a very loud voice, one joke following the next. In fact, when I saw his empty coffee
cups and the cigarette butts piled in his ashtray, I wished my husband could approach life with the same abandon.

Several weeks passed before the partner’s lawyer got in touch with the Haji again, telling him that his contribution to retain his half of the shop wasn’t enough. The lawyer claimed that the partner had saved the shop by selling all his land. Now he needed Abu-Hussein to sign the transfer papers. I asked my husband why he’d agreed to assign his shares to the partner if they weren’t giving back the furniture, the Persian carpets and my jewellery, but he wouldn’t talk to me about it. It was as if I had no right to ask.

The news hit the streets. As the vendors hawked their wares – ‘Now friends, we’ve got some fantastic perfume here,’ or, ‘How about some al-Sudan’s soap?’ – they’d add, ‘Have you heard the latest? The Haji al-Shaykh has been swallowed whole by the lion!’ (Lion was the family name of his partner.)

In fact the Haji had been swallowed gradually, without realising it. A couple of years earlier, my brother Kamil had discovered a stash of money hidden in the shop. Suspicious, he’d handed it immediately to the Haji. But instead of suspecting his partner, my husband just handed the cash over to him without question. This was my husband: habitually interfering in every single aspect of our lives, however trivial; and yet investing, without question, blind trust in his dishonest business partner.

A renowned lawyer approached my husband, offering his legal services, but the Haji turned him down.

‘God is the only lawyer,’ he asserted.

He sat on his prayer mat, praying and glorifying God. By the time he’d finished praying and weeping, his eyes had become red blobs, like tomatoes, and his forehead was a patchwork of deep trenches.

I wept for him too, but inside I seethed. Instead of accepting
the lawyer’s offer to defend him, he fell forward on to his prayer mat and did nothing.

I tried in vain to urge him to take action, going so far as to call him a chicken. And though I went on behaving as if I was still married to the owner of a shop in Souq Sursouq, the news of our downfall gradually spread through Beirut, to the families from the south, and finally to Muhammad.

He reproached me for having kept him in the dark about the situation. He took me in his arms and gave me a hug.

‘You realise, don’t you,’ he said, ‘that this is God’s way of ensuring you can get a divorce and we can marry.’

I couldn’t believe how opportunistic he was being and I told him so. But, he said, it was unfair to accuse him of thinking that way. Circumstances had suddenly turned in our favour, nothing more or less. I didn’t want to hear him tell me again how I’d been destroying his future hopes, that it felt as if the eleven years we’d spent together had just been a way of passing the hours and keeping ourselves amused. Instead, I asked him for more time to think the whole thing over.

A general aura of sorrow took over the house. My husband’s relatives who’d been living with us went their own ways. Apart from three prayer mats, the floors were bare. The dire situation tightened around us like a vice: thoughts of coffee mornings, gold bracelets clinking on my arm and summers at Bhamdoun vanished in a trice.

My nephews’ lives were transformed overnight. The Haji bought two small wooden stalls for them and they began selling thread and sewing materials in the market. If Hussein the Ideologue, at age eighteen, ever saw a pupil or friend from his school on the horizon, he’d abandon his stall and hide. By this time, he had joined the Popular Party of Greater Syria,
¹⁹
and hung the founder’s portrait and the party’s emblem in our home. Muhammad urged me to get him to resign his membership at once, since the government was opposed to its leader and what the party stood for.

The ex-partner returned and reopened the shop under a new name, in partnership with one of his brothers. The Haji asked for a job on a monthly salary to support us. I could not understand how the Haji could maintain his dignity and avoid humiliation. The ex-partner agreed, and my husband stuck with it until he could no longer stand the lack of respect with which the owner’s brother treated him. One day he snatched the tape measure from around his neck, threw it at the brother and left the shop for the last time.

He then purchased a stand only a few metres from his former shop. Each morning he would walk past the old premises, greeting his ex-partner as if nothing had happened, and praising God for everything. The stand was pitched right by the entrance to a large shop belonging to a merchant who was aware that my husband was honest and had been a successful businessman, and so he allowed the Haji to be there. The very sight of him attending his modest little stand – selling cotton underwear, socks and other items, with no tape measure around his neck and no large pair of scissors in his tiny hand – aroused sorrow and regret in the hearts of all his former acquaintances.