The Locust and the Bird (23 page)

I have nothing to give you more dear than the soul itself,
And my own soul is a pawn in your hands.

I asked him to recite the poem again. Then I recited it almost word for word back to him. He hugged me, crying and blaming himself for never having taught me to read and write. I dried his eyes but then began crying too.

‘A stick of wood with some lead in it; I’m through because of it!’ I shouted, and then I turned the words into a song: ‘Because of a stick of wood with some lead in it, I was
through. Every time I began to learn to read and write, my belly grew!’

Inside my belly was a fifth little girl. When she was born, she looked just like Kadsuma, the heroine in the film
Sayonara
, and so that was her name.

The 1958 Revolution Happened
Because of Me

I
HAD ALWAYS BELIEVED
that tension would regularly erupt between lovers, families and workmates, but would never escalate into situations beyond one’s control. And yet this was what happened in Lebanon in the spring of 1958.
²¹
In our neighbourhood armed gangs and revolutionaries made death threats against government employees, particularly if they worked for the police, the army or the Sécurité Générale. When Muhammad was told he’d be killed if he didn’t resign from his job, and the nearby residence of the Prime Minister was blown up by the insurgents while a crowd rejoiced as it burned, we knew it was time to escape to a Christian neighbourhood. I suggested to Muhammad that we take refuge at Ibrahim’s house – after all, I was blood kin. Following his older son’s return from America with an
aeronautical degree, Ibrahim had moved from the house he shared with the Haji and into a house in a Christian neighbourhood.

The next day I bade farewell to our neighbours. We were terrified that the Nasserites would appear at any moment. I cried as I left the key with Leila, our neighbour who had become a good friend. We had often discussed the films we’d seen, and she would tell me the plots of novels she read, as the reader that I could never be.

When the taxi scheduled to take us to our new home didn’t arrive, we felt sure the driver must be aligned with the revolutionaries planning to arrest Muhammad. So Muhammad decided to go downstairs and look for another taxi, rather than wait inside the house. Out on the street we found a taxi, but without its driver. I sat in the back with the four children, while Muhammad sat in the front. Was it all part of a plot? Had the driver betrayed us?

While Muhammad tried to figure out what to do next, the children and I became very anxious. The driver came out of Shorty’s falafel shop, carrying an enormous falafel sandwich. That shop was always crammed with people – some of them buying, others simply hoping to be entertained by the proprietor, a dwarf who wore high-heeled wooden clogs, and his tall wife. When they argued, Shorty would stand on a chair to slap her.

Eventually we managed to get through the road blocks without trouble. But instead of feeling relieved to be out of danger, I began to panic as we neared Ibrahim’s house. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen him and his family since I’d married Muhammad; we’d bumped into them quite by chance when we were all at Maryam’s house after she gave birth to her first child, and we had made peace with each other then.

When we finally arrived, Ibrahim and Khadija could not
have greeted us more warmly. The other big surprise was that we found Fatima and Hanan there too. The street fighting had prevented me from seeing my daughters for quite some time. They were on their way to Nabatiyeh to take refuge from the troubles, which had reached their neighbourhood.

Once my children were in bed, I pinched myself. Here I was in Ibrahim’s house – the man who had arranged my forced marriage, the one who’d fainted clean away when Hasan broached the topic of my divorce, the one who’d urged Abu-Hussein to go ahead and divorce me. ‘Muhammad is bound to leave her,’ he’d told the Haji. ‘He’ll never marry her. She’s already a wife and mother of two children.’ He had wanted to see me humiliated, but now he was opening his house to give us shelter. I knew perfectly well, of course, that my current husband’s sweet nature imposed its own kind of respect. And he also held a senior position in the Sécurité Générale. But I think that Ibrahim’s change of heart was also due to the fact that by now I’d produced four more children by Muhammad. I’d passed the test. I could enjoy genuine married status. I had returned to the family, honoured and respected.

Before I dropped off to sleep, I asked Muhammad if dire circumstances make people more hard-hearted. It seemed as though success softened people’s hard edges and made them more tolerant. Suddenly I admired Ibrahim, snatched from school and thrown straight into life’s struggles. In spite of everything, he’d fought for his own children to have a good education by saving money, little by little. And now here he was, the owner of a house; or, more precisely, a villa.

21
Lebanon’s 1958 sectarian clashes were brief and involved relatively few casualties, but represented the most serious rift between the Muslim and Christian Maronite sects since independence in 1943. The immediate reason for the situation was each sect’s extreme sensitivity to competing regional interests. The Muslim and Druze communities were very keen to commit Lebanon to Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s request for Arab unity, while the Christian Maronites were resolutely pro-Western in their outlook. The US Sixth Fleet intervened to quell the disturbances, and the situation was defused by a deal that saw the departure of Maronite President Camille Chamoun, whose unconstitutional ambition for another six-year term was the trigger for the unrest, and the election of the supposedly reformist army general Fouad Chehab. But the confrontation exposed fundamental weaknesses in Lebanon’s consociational democracy.

Muhammad Kamal

T
HE 1958 REVOLUTION
ended. Lebanon didn’t unite with Egypt after all. The US Sixth Fleet intervened and General Fouad Chehab was elected President. I gave birth to another boy, the last in the litter. Muhammad insisted our son be named Muhammad Kamal, so I could call him Muhammad and he could call the boy Kamula. Our friends were troubled by our choice of name, since naming a child for his father with the father still alive seemed destined to bring us bad luck, especially since the baby had come after a number of miscarriages.

In fact Muhammad Kamal arrived at just the right moment, when our love had been flagging. I’d been constantly exhausted and plagued by feelings of jealousy. We were short of money. But the baby rekindled our love. Under President Chehab we began to enjoy the fruits of Muhammad’s success. He was appointed bureau chief for the entire Bekaa Valley and we moved away from Beirut. Muhammad rented us a large house not far from his work. Two local girls came to help me with the housework, the childcare, and the cooking. We travelled sometimes with the children, at other times without them. Some evenings we would sit on the wide balcony, looking out at the mountains and trees. On the festival of the Prophet Muhammad’s birth we celebrated with fireworks. The children whooped with delight as they watched the bright lights gleaming in the dark. One day Muhammad took them to a granary where they saw
wheat being threshed. Muhammad tipped the worker and the children got to sit on the thresher while the cow dragged them around in circles.

He brought them a small truck filled with melons, and another filled with sand so they could play on the balcony after a neighbour yelled at them for playing in builder’s sand left at the side of the house. I tried to calm myself, because I felt so optimistic amidst all this harmony and contentment. I’d never thought about death, in spite of all the bleeding and miscarriages I’d endured. Muhammad was never ill, but he feared death because he feared losing his good fortune.

One night he gathered all the children around him, holding Muhammad Kamal, not yet six months old, in his arms. He loaded his revolver and looked up at the sky.

‘If you’re really up there,’ he yelled, ‘then listen to me. Don’t ever take them away from me. If you decide to kill me off, then you don’t exist. Listen to me, I beg you: never take them away from me!’

With that he fired the revolver into the air, and all the doves and the other birds took off into the sky. Our neighbour came rushing out to see what was happening and all of a sudden the moon emerged from behind a cloud.

‘You see,’ said Muhammad, ‘the moon’s happy with me.’

The incident made me wonder whether his fear of death was somehow linked to the fact that he’d begun driving a car after only three weeks’ instruction. Or was it that he’d suddenly become aware of the phases of human existence: birth, youth, old age and death? But I was still only thirty-four years old, and Muhammad thirty-eight. Our parents were alive and well.

But despite Muhammad’s anxiety, I was the one who thought often about death. These thoughts were not due to four of the children crowding around me laughing, while Muhammad held the fifth. Rather, I kept coming back to
the image of the coat hook in our bedroom. It was not behind the door but on the wall next to our bed, so I could stretch out for my dress from bed each morning. For some reason, I kept imagining myself in an emergency, rising from the bed and pulling on the dress. I told Muhammad about my daydream and begged him to stop driving the car. It wasn’t that he didn’t try to be safe. Unlike other more experienced drivers I’d seen, who kept one hand on the steering wheel while the other held a cigarette, Muhammad kept both hands glued rigidly to the wheel. I worried just the same.

Unbelievably, the dreadful day arrived. I reached for my pink dress with white circles that hung on that hook, wailing as I took it down. The four children, waiting for their father to come home, began bawling with me. The baby Muhammad Kamal clung to me for dear life. It was a holiday, but Muhammad had gone to the office for a couple of hours, as they’d managed to catch a notorious smuggler. He’d said he wouldn’t need to stay long and asked me to make sure the children were ready so he could take them for a ride when he returned. But his car had skidded on the wet road on his way home. He was taken to the hospital.

Muhammad was unconscious for a while, but then he came round.

‘I skidded,’ he said when he saw me. ‘Thank God the children weren’t with me!’

The doctors did their very best for him. I kept thinking that death had already snatched away my sisters Manifa and Raoufa, and Umm Fawzi. I begged God to forgive Muhammad for firing his revolver into the sky that recent night, when he’d gathered his children around him. I begged him to forgive me for trying to poison my ex-husband and Ibrahim with salt. I begged his forgiveness for telling Muhammad to wait until my husband died for us to marry; I reminded him how I’d got
to know and love Muhammad before I’d found out I was to be married to my brother-in-law.

For hours I sat beside Muhammad’s bed. He was in pain, drifting in and out of consciousness. His bed was enveloped in tubes. Blood from his kidneys and heart showed up in his urine. I meditated, begged God’s forgiveness, asked for his mercy, prayed and wept. I asked God not to respond to Mother’s old prayers, asking for revenge on Muhammad for stealing me away. Once again I reminded God that I already knew and loved Muhammad before I was married to my brother-in-law. If I were to say, ‘It’s in accordance with your will,’ I asked myself, would he forgive everything and make him better? It was God’s will that the dew should fall, but this time it had fallen not on roses and sweet basil but on asphalt. And so Muhammad had skidded in his car, then pressed the accelerator pedal rather than the brake.

When Muhammad awoke, he began to ramble. He held my hand, telling me there was 700 lira hidden in the desk drawer in his office. Seeing that Fatima never left my side, Muhammad asked me once why Hanan had never come to see him. I smiled at him and said, fibbing, that Hanan was visiting a friend in the north, and that she was planning to come to see him soon.

‘Tell her to take an aspirin tablet to calm her down and to come see me,’ he said. Though he must have felt that Hanan, as always, had seldom visited us. Then he told me not to forget about the 700 lira in the desk drawer; he told me I should go and get it before anyone else found it.

I sat with him. I blamed myself for not forbidding him to drive the car, in spite of my terrible premonition. I blamed myself for praying that he’d die whenever we fought; for wasting so much time; for making him wait so long before I got my divorce; for interrogating him whenever he returned from work; and for preferring to sleep, rather than stay
up with him. Though Muhammad was conscious, he was delirious. He seized my hand and kissed it and asked me to run away with him through the window …

One of his sisters began to wail.

‘The Angel of Death is here to take him away!’ she screamed.

Muhammad tried to escape the Angel’s clutches … but then he was taken from me.

I was still wearing my slippers as a throng of people gathered for his burial. The funeral ceremony turned into a kind of wedding feast, with crowds from all the villages in the south, sacrificed sheep, the Quran blaring from loudspeakers, and memorial speeches. Through it all I could hear Muhammad’s own words whenever we argued and I wished him dead. ‘If I die you’ll want to weep blood all over me,’ he would say. The mourners wore glossy shoes, chic tailored suits and expensive jackets with silk handkerchiefs in the breast pockets. In their fingers they carried prayer beads made of precious stones. They drove flashy cars, without crashing them on wet roads. Everyone came to bid farewell to my husband. There I stood among them, still wearing the slippers I’d put on when I’d heard about the accident.

Could it really be true that everything had ground to a halt, and Muhammad had become nothing more than a pile of bones? What of his ideas, feelings, plans, pain, memories, desires? His love of poetry? His sleepy ways and his laughter? How could all this come to an end just because his heart had stopped beating? How could he disappear without trace? Where was his longing for me? Where were the two feet that would leap from the bus as soon as he heard the word ‘Bhamdoun’, just so he could see me for an hour before returning happy to Beirut?