The Locust and the Bird (25 page)

This experience reminded me of the story of the bird called Abu al-Hinn, a tiny fledgling. Seeing a gun aimed at its heart, it begged the hunter not to shoot.

‘Dear hunter,’ it said, ‘I’m Abu al-Hinn, the tiniest of birds. What’s the point of shooting me? You’d be better off with a slice of bread and some onion!’

These words softened the hunter’s heart and he left the little bird alone and went in search of other prey. The bird flapped its wings in sheer delight, and was so thrilled by its powers of persuasion that it got ahead of itself.

Spotting another hunter, it rushed from its nest.

‘I’m Abu al-Hinn,’ it said again. ‘One of my thighs is enough to feed an entire household.’ With that the hunter shot it dead.

When I went to the shariah court, I was just like the conceited bird. I was used to Muhammad’s love and status protecting me, so I had stepped into court assuming that justice would be on my side. Now the official’s rejection – his complete unwillingness to listen – had turned me back into Abu al-Hinn, the tiny bird that trembled as it entreated the hunter not to shoot it.

Once more I resorted to trickery and cunning, with the little bird Abu al-Hinn as my guide. I decided to seek another appearance with the sheikh in the shariah court. I asked him to cancel my guardian’s power of attorney and make me responsible for my own children; and to put a stop to Muhammad’s domineering brother Ali’s amorous harassment. He replied that the guardian had been selected because of his love for my deceased husband and his fidelity to Muhammad’s memory. The behaviour of his brother Ali, the sheikh told me, was caused by the brother’s awareness of
society’s failure to protect widows, for whom there was little sympathy, particularly if they were young. (He didn’t add ‘and pretty’.)

I decided I needed a new tactic. I hurried to Kamil’s house to ask his beautiful green-eyed wife to help me by accompanying me the following week. At first the sheikh tried to repeat what he’d said on the previous occasion, but I told him again that I didn’t believe an outsider such as Muhammad’s brother-in-law was an appropriate guardian. I was my own person, in charge of myself, not the property of my dead husband’s family. I also complained again about the lewd advances of Muhammad’s brother Ali.

As I wept before the sheikh, my sister-in-law was equally busy batting her eyelids at him. The sheikh promptly signed the papers, acknowledging I was the primary guardian of my children. At that point my friendship with Kamil’s wife – which stemmed from our own mothers’ friendship – was firmly cemented.

Muhammad Betrays Me

O
NE OF MY
husband’s female relatives told me her son had once been in a car with Muhammad when they stopped to pick up a woman, a foreign hitchhiker. I felt a stab of jealousy, as though Muhammad were still alive. I took off my shoe and threw it at his photograph, but missed. As soon as the relative left I stood in front of the picture, accusing him and demanding to know the truth. But his smile never changed. I banged on the picture. When neither frame nor glass broke, I moved it to face my own photograph, so that way he was looking at me and I could give him the cold shoulder.

I couldn’t sleep that night. Could it be possible that the entire time I’d been exhausted, pregnant and raising my children, Muhammad was flirting with some foreign woman? Maybe they’d even had an affair! I told everyone who visited about Muhammad’s betrayal. Without fail they laughed at me and pointed out how funny I was, unable to believe that such an innocuous incident could make me so unhappy. But anger gnawed at me. I decided I had to know exactly what had happened between Muhammad and this foreign woman.

A neighbour heard of my fury and told me about a friend who’d confided in her that Muhammad had been unfaithful. This woman had asked him for help on an official matter and he’d invited her to have lunch with him. When she’d turned him down, he’d flirted with her and tried to persuade her to change her mind.

I stormed out to see the woman, a schoolteacher, and demanded she tell me exactly what had happened between her and Muhammad.

‘I’ll show him!’ I yelled at her, as if Muhammad were alive. ‘I’ll show him!’

She swore by the most solemn oath that she and the neighbour had made the whole thing up, as a way of getting me to take off my mourning clothes and begin to enjoy life again. It was now a year since Muhammad’s death. I didn’t believe her. Instead, I pictured Muhammad at his desk as the woman came in carrying her handbag, her chic outfit indicating that she didn’t have to spend her days at home, cooking, washing and cleaning. Not only that, she could actually read official documents. I imagined Muhammad noting how well educated she was, his intellectual equal. There she was enjoying life to the full while Kamila was stuck at home with the babies.

I got out the bag in which I’d stored his papers, wondering whom I could get to read them to me. I needed a discreet friend, not someone who would take malicious pleasure from my situation. I remembered Leila, my neighbour who used to tell me the plots of the novels she read. Leila would understand.

We sat down together over dozens, if not hundreds, of pieces of paper. I told her how Muhammad had betrayed me, repeating what the old woman in Muhammad’s village said whenever I visited my husband’s grave.

I used her accent as I recited, ‘“Oh, how I burn with grief for you! Your husband was a king, with a pistol on each hip.” ’

She would point to either side of her waist.

‘Listen to me: when my husband died, I wept and wept, even though I had to reproach him. “You left for Beirut,” I would say, “and rode on the trams. You left me behind to
take care of the cattle. Now you’re gone, and I don’t give a damn.” Come, come, Kamila, it’s better to live through a funeral than see your husband marry another woman. After all, who can say? If my husband were still alive, maybe he’d have married someone else.’

But as I looked at Muhammad’s writing, I fell in love with him all over again. I saw the letters I had made my daughter Fatima write to him. I saw the bird, the nest and the roses I’d drawn for him. I also saw notebooks divided into paragraphs separated by red ink. These were his diaries, Leila said, but what I wanted to find were the letters he’d received. Leila’s eye fell on the words, ‘
Bonjour, mon ami
!’ written in both French and Arabic. But this was part of a story about a love affair between two students. The boy took the girl, named K, on a picnic:

We reached the hills to the east of Beirut. On this side the city bends like an old woman resting her back against a solid wall, or a child cradled by its mother.

With summer, the boy’s beloved K went to Bhamdoun. Life became a burden and nothing seemed sweet any more. One day, he took a walk in the streets where they had strolled together, and spotted her at a tram stop, trying to cross the street. Hardly able to believe his eyes, he cried out to her in sheer delight. She turned and ran towards him. But the passing tram refused to wait till she’d crossed. Alas, her final view of him was from beneath the wheels of the tram, which crushed her and ended her life. The horror and grief stopped him in his tracks and he turned into a statue. There he stood for ever, his soul contemplating what had happened beneath those wheels.

When Leila finished reading, I was devastated. Had Muhammad really felt so utterly desperate when I married the Haji that he’d wanted such an end for me? Had he really
wanted me to die so his torture could end and he could turn into a statue? Now he was the one buried underground and I was turning into a statue. It no longer mattered if I stumbled on evidence of his infidelity.

Muhammad’s papers transfixed us. We were bewitched. Leila was eager to keep on reading. I left her for a moment and went into the kitchen. When I came back, she was still poring over the pages, shaking her head, clutching her heart or copying parts she’d found.

‘God sent him to you from above,’ she said, ‘so you could taste the sweet flavour of love. The vast majority of women are destined to live and die, but the only sensation of physical pleasure they will ever experience is when they pee, or in their dreams.’

Leila started to read again, then stopped and covered her face in embarrassment. She was not yet married, though over twenty-five. She carried on reading till the end, crying out in her Beirut accent, ‘Good grief! What next?’

Soraya’s Complaint

Soraya complained about me to my parents,
Saying, ‘Your boy has done me wrong.

‘He has quaffed wine till his passions took wing
‘And he has fondled my breasts.

‘He has tasted the savour of my mouth against my will;
‘He has encircled my neck and bitten my cheeks.

‘He has sucked at my honey and fondled my rose,
‘And his hands have toyed with my pomegranate.’

Soraya kept exaggerating and weeping,
And her cries caused my parents to weep as well.

Father spoke to Mother about her boy
And asked her why I persisted in such sin.

She said, ‘He will sober up, and I shall offer him my counsel.

‘His only sin is to be on fire.

‘When he arrives, let me be alone with him in my tent.

‘I shall rub his cheeks between my hands,
‘And suck from his mouth the wine he has quaffed.

‘Gradually he will sober up from his drunkenness.’

Soraya now said, ‘If that indeed is to be his cure,
‘Then leave him to me.

‘I am the most skilful at sucking what has been quaffed,
‘And my lips are the only ones to which his mouth is accustomed.’

We had a good laugh at this risqué poem, which Muhammad must have copied from somewhere.

Next Leila read a letter from a male relative of Muhammad’s, telling him that he’d find some really gorgeous French girls with stunning breasts, tiny waists and fantastic behinds at a cabaret in Beirut. ‘I work my way in among them like a bird under its mother’s wing,’ the writer said. ‘Oh, how I wish you could be right here at my side, since you’re the chief when it comes to this particular area of expertise!’

From the letter’s date I could tell it was written when Muhammad had been transferred to the Silk Valley, at a time when our love was at its strongest. There was no reason to believe he had been unfaithful. This calmed me down a lot. I started putting all the papers back in the bag. By now I was convinced Muhammad had never betrayed me. I poured Leila a cup of coffee and lit a cigarette, something that from then on never left my hand.

Six months later I took the papers out again so they could be read by a new friend. Two sentences from his diaries made me very upset: ‘My darling Kamila no longer keeps
me warm.’ And: ‘After the four years I’ve spent with K, I’ve started to visit those girls, but they’re always out.’

I’d known that, before I got my divorce, Muhammad had sometimes visited two sisters who had the reputation of being flirtatious. I remembered a dream I’d had after we were married, in which he went back and visited one of them. Muhammad was away on business for a week or two, and when he called I told him about my dream. He just laughed and then sent me a letter describing a dream one of his sisters had had after she ate some lentils too close to bedtime. In her dream the lentils grabbed her and dropped her in the saucepan.

I put all the letters and other papers back in the bag and left them in the cupboard again. I decided I must put those two sentences right out of my mind. Instead, I concentrated on the dozens of words of beauty he’d used, words that had lifted me to the very heavens. I let all those women – the relative who told me about the hitchhiking foreign girl, Leila, and my new friend who read to me about the flirtatious sisters – believe that their strategy had worked. As they’d hoped, I shed my mourning clothes and took Fatima with me to buy a nice colourful sweater. Then we went to the hairdresser and I had my curly hair straightened. On the way home I took a detour through our old neighbourhood, hoping that I might run into the boy next door. Our old house no longer had its open roof; three apartments had been built on top of it. As I passed the boy’s balcony, I didn’t stop; I just smiled and continued on my way.

I had found the will to live again, but Mother still aggravated my fears. She was afraid of Muhammad’s family and of our creditors. She was scared for my young children: afraid of them playing on the balcony or near the gas oven, afraid that they’d be hurt crossing the street, afraid that they might catch her eye disease. But all those worries paled compared to her
concern over my youthful desires. If she saw me standing in front of the mirror, doing my hair, she would try to stop me. When I laughed, left the house, or sat on the balcony with a neighbour or female relative smoking a cigarette, she’d glare at me.

‘You’re drinking coffee as if it comes free from the spring! Your coffee is taken from the mouths of those orphaned children,’ she scolded all of our visitors.

When Muhammad’s brother Ali arrived, she expected me to retire to my room. And although she loved my children, she was forever arguing with my daughter Ahlam, trying to stop her from playing, skipping, or standing on the balcony. She wanted her to be like the girls from our village in the south, doing endless household duties and looking after her younger sisters and brothers.

Mother’s aggravation, annoyance and intense sadness were at their worst when Father came to visit. She made it clear that he was the one she hated and despised – not his wife, her rival and replacement. She sat there darkly as he told us funny stories about the women in his village, who constantly sought his help and advice. They’d complain to him about how badly they’d been wronged and he would sympathise with their plight. He described how he patted one woman on the shoulder or pinched the cheek of another. From this, we’d know that he’d been flirting. These women had never met a man like him before; he appeared so open and friendly that they’d find themselves telling him all manner of intimate and personal details. Often their problems involved sex with their husbands. Father gave them this piece of advice: ‘If your husband wants you and has sex with you, you can put it right out of your mind that he plans to take another woman as a
durrah
.’