The Locust and the Bird (32 page)

‘Why did I laugh at my uncle the cobbler when I heard him moaning in pain, ‘I am hurt, I am hurt,’ the whole night through, even after I suggested he change his words or add something like ‘Oh God’ or ‘Please help me’?

‘Make sure you all give me a decent funeral in Muhammad’s village … How I regret all the lovely shoes I haven’t yet worn … Someone should water the plants on my balcony. I am going to miss them!

‘So that’s the way it is, Kamila. God help you, cancer’s got you. And all the time you thought it was your heart.’

During her illness, we, the five sisters and two brothers, would take turns visiting our mother from the four corners of the earth. The day Fatima appeared, my mother raised her head excitedly. She tried to speak, but couldn’t. Her eyes spoke and her mouth moved, but no sound came out. The doctor suggested that we bring her a pen and paper so she could write down whatever she needed to tell us. We stood mute, hesitating, none of us willing to tell the doctor that Mother couldn’t read or write.

After that day, she drifted in and out of consciousness. When Toufic and Muhammad Kamal, visiting from San Diego and Kuwait respectively, came and sat beside her, each
holding a hand, she opened her eyes and realised she was in the intensive-care unit. Then she kept staring at me, and at my hair, which I’d put up with a hairband because Beirut was so hot and humid.

I knew exactly what she wanted to say.

‘Your hairband’s great, it’s
dah
!’ That was how she’d described anything new or beautiful when she was a child in Nabatiyeh.

To our surprise, and to the surprise of the doctors, Mother would regain consciousness from time to time and engage with us, gesturing and smiling. Her curious eyes would follow us around the room. One afternoon, she registered the anger and disapproval on the faces of the nurses in intensive care as they gathered around the television set. All Mother could make out were explosions and collapsing buildings. With her hands, she asked a nurse what was going on. Ahlam told me later that the nurse was amazed that Mother could focus on the television in spite of her sedation. The nurse turned off the television, not wanting my mother to be upset, but she kept gesturing, demanding an answer, until the nurse finally explained.

‘Some planes have flown into buildings in New York,’ she said.

Mother relaxed, relieved that the catastrophe couldn’t have affected any of her children or grandchildren.

Her eyes closed. I watched her as she finally entered a sweet world of unconsciousness. I reflected on how she’d hugged herself in the hospital in the early days of her sickness, refusing to allow one of us to spend the night with her. Though people might sleep next to their loved ones, she told me, ultimately everyone is on their own once they fall asleep. Mother wanted to count the number of nights she’d slept since her birth. Ahlam worked it out for her – twenty-seven thousand, three hundred and seventy-five nights. She
did not know that people were still coming to visit her; we clustered in the room next to the intensive-care unit, her seven children gathered around her. Why hadn’t the seven of us gathered when she could still jump up and sing? Why was it only now, when she couldn’t be with us, that we were going out to restaurants together and warming ourselves with each other’s company? My sisters and I praised her snow-white body, and Ahlam complained to the nurses when they cut her hair without our permission and clipped the long fingernails that were my mother’s pride and joy.

When I saw my Uncle Kamil in the intensive-care unit I rushed to him, and hugged him tight as if he was still a child, pouring the lentils into his djellabah before he and Mother ran away from their father and stepmother. I felt a strange urge to shake Mother awake and plead with her to laugh with Kamil, to see Khadija, who came to visit even though she was very old, and listen to Fadila, as everyone else did, as she made her way from the hospital foyer to Mother’s bedside, saying, ‘Kamila, Kamila, let someone else die, not you!’

Fadila wept as she entered the room, but then she would dry her eyes and hurry to the bed.

‘In the name of God,’ she’d begin, ‘Kamila, listen to me. I’ve prayed two
rakaa
for you, the Prophet’s own family. Dear beloved friend, may they greet you one by one, especially Sitt Zaynab, and caress you!’ She would rub my mother’s face with her hands, as if sweeping up wheatgerm left to dry on the roof.

One day Fadila told us we must not lose hope, we must keep trying to save Kamila. She instructed us to copy the text of the Sura al-Waqia from the Quran ten times, boil the pages in water, sift them, and scatter the pieces in a plant pot. We should then bring the water containing the Quranic verses and give them to my mother to drink: this would cure
her. Fadila asked us to swear solemnly that we’d do it. But then Majida pointed out that Mother was no longer able to eat or drink, and was fed through a tube in her nose. Fadila suggested we feed the water through the tube. If the nurse was a Christian, we should tell her the verses came from the Bible.

She then turned to Cousine, one of Ibrahim’s daughters.

‘I beg you,’ she said, seeking reassurance. ‘We must bring my dear, dear friend Kamila back. She’s been my friend since we were young girls. If she dies, then so do I.’ She struggled to get a ring off one of her fingers. ‘Please,’ she went on. ‘Take this ring. It’s worth over 100 lira. God wants you to have it. Only promise you’ll make those copies of the Sura al-Waqia!’

Fadila admitted that she couldn’t read or write; if she could, she’d have copied the verses herself.

‘You mean you’re just like Mother,’ said Majida. ‘No one taught you either?’

She started to sob.

‘If only I’d been able to make out one letter from another,’ she lamented, ‘I wouldn’t have been robbed of my property and land by one of my relatives who asked for my thumbprint on the ownership papers, pretending that he had found a way to exempt me from paying taxes.’

Majida hurried home and copied out the Sura al-Waqia ten times and took the bottle to the hospital, but she didn’t do anything with it, just tucked it away in her handbag. And that was the way we left Mother that evening, just as usual. We all dined together; then I went to my hotel room, leaving my clothes laid out as I did each evening, in case the hospital rang in the middle of the night. That night they did, and I was the first to arrive. Why did I draw a flower next to her phone number? Why did I agree to write her life story?

I went into her room.

‘Mama,’ I whispered, as I ran my hand over her coldness. By now she was as cold as ice, even though there was a light aimed straight at her and she was completely enveloped in blankets, coverlets and hot-water bottles.

‘You’re a white angel,’ I found myself telling her. ‘Now here come the other angels to take you away in your lovely gown and your new shoes. Now you can play with them – jacks, catch and skipping – and you can rub citrus fruit against the wall so you can put salt on it and eat it. Thank you for your tiny womb that was my home, for giving me my name and character. And thank you, because every time I think of you I find myself smiling and laughing.’

I uncovered her feet. They looked like pure white porcelain, as if she had never walked on anything but silk, as if she had never run barefoot in the wilderness of Nabatiyeh.

Life’s Journey

M
Y MOTHER LEFT
the hospital in an ambulance, surrounded by garlands and bouquets of roses and sweet basil. Muhammad Kamal rode with her in the back of the ambulance; there he sat, looking wan and feeling sick from the powerful scent of the flowers or the smell of death itself. How strange! As a child, he’d been her ally in all her schemes and secrets, and now here he was accompanying her on her final journey, the most secret of them all. Roads can always be closed off, but not this one; the road to death lies for ever open. Men stopped in the street and stood still out of respect as we passed; some drivers got out of their cars. The din of car horns ceased. As soon as the ambulance swung up the road towards the Ra’s al-Nab neighbourhood, to the old house where my mother lived with us before she left us and married Muhammad, Fatima and I could no longer control ourselves and burst into hysterical sobs.

How could it be that this young driver, who had no idea of my mother’s origins, had decided to give her a tour to bid farewell to her life? It was almost as if he’d put his ear to the inner wall of her being, and that of my sister and me, and decided to take us all to the places where we grew up. We passed the grocer’s shop where Muhammad had gone to send her messages and flowers through the boy who worked there. These were the very streets Fatima and I had sneaked through to visit Mother after she’d left. Here was what remained of our school where Mother would meet us after
our father forbade us to see her as often as we wanted. Here were the same trees; and the rough wrought-iron grilles over the frosted glass of the doctor’s surgery that I would look out for each time my mother took me to Muhammad’s room. Here was the Prime Minister’s house with its balcony, where Maryam had fallen in love, and the alley in which our old house stood. By now most of the cement had crumbled, leaving only the edge of the wall. I remembered how my mother and Maryam had once asked a boy to scramble up and get them a chunk of cement that had caught their eye because it was perfectly square, and then cracked it open with an adze. Inside the sandy stone we found a tiny piece cut out of the mosquito net we used when we slept on the roof. Years later my mother explained that this was the work of the mother of the boy next door, who had cast a spell to prevent her son from falling in love with my mother.

Now the ambulance came to Muhammad’s house and the window of the howdah room where Mother and I once hid behind the door, trembling, waiting for Muhammad to return. The window was wide open and I pictured Muhammad inside, waiting for Kamila.

Finally, we reached my mother’s house. As the whole neighbourhood rushed to the ambulance, our crying grew even louder, and so did that of Mother’s female neighbours, the wives of the shopkeepers and everyone she knew in the quarter. A little girl asked her mother if this was the funeral of the woman who had brought presents from America. Now the wailing began in earnest. The ambulance came to a halt. The shopkeepers had swept the street and sprinkled water on the ground; they’d lowered the awnings on their shops and turned the radio to a station broadcasting the Quran. Everybody waited until Mother had had her fill of the quarter and the house she would never see again. What about we daughters? Could we bear to look at her balcony,
knowing she wouldn’t be sitting there, watching passers-by or watering her plants? It was hard for us to move on. The traffic waited patiently.

My mother left her home for ever, and then unexpectedly we passed by the house where my grandmother, Mother and Kamil had first lived when they arrived in Beirut. Then we drove out of Beirut, the city where Muhammad and Mother had met by the side of a fountain one day, and we headed to Muhammad’s village, the place where she was to be buried under the verdant tree that looked out over the hills and valleys, next to Muhammad’s grave. There we would bring them together again, just like two love birds inside a single cage, in the cemetery where my mother used to clean Muhammad’s grave, leave flowers and recite the Fatiha, turning away from all the people who’d tried to separate her from the love of her life.

So, amid prayers and Quranic verses, she was buried by the men, as the custom dictated, while we women stayed in Majida’s summer house and wept for her from afar, feeling that she had been kidnapped and hidden beneath the earth. Out of concern for Kadsuma, who had a heart condition, my sisters begged the professional mourner to read only the Quran, not stirring religious homilies or the Ashura rituals. Despite the request, though, the professional mourner started keening the sad and tragic tale of the Battle of Karbala, while the women swayed and wept.

She went on to fan the flames of grief by reading with great passion, so much so that she became like Sukayna, al-Hussein’s daughter, when she first saw her father’s horse without him, and lamented, ‘Oh my father’s horse, tell me, did he find water, or did he die thirsty?’ This stirred all of us into a frenzy. We wailed and beat our chests. Then, although we tried to stop her, she ended the ceremony with political slogans praising the regime in Iran.

After that, the men joined the women. A sheep was sacrificed for the sake of Mother’s soul. No less than fifty cats also assembled from the village and its environs; they sat waiting patiently on the terraced land encircling the house. A beggar – who used to know the moment Mother set foot in the village – stood with a few loaves of bread, wanting to contribute something to the sad occasion. Soon a tent was erected around her grave so the Quran readers could be with her for three whole days and nights as custom dictates; and to keep a lantern burning so she wouldn’t feel lonely, especially during the darkness of the night.

Mother wasn’t the only person to be buried that day. Muhammad’s sister Miskiah, their emissary, had died the day before. We were told that years earlier Mother had asked Miskiah and other friends not to leave her to be buried alone. ‘I’d like a friend to die with me,’ she’d said, and they’d laughed.

At dawn the next morning we made our way to the cemetery, carrying incense and candles. Fadila sat by the Quran reader and asked him if my mother had been listening to his recital. Then she gave him some pastilles to suck so his voice would reach Kamila sweet and pleasant, not like that of the blind sheikh in Beirut whose voice made her and Mother close their ears and pinch their noses because of the foul smell.

I gathered around the freshly dug grave with my sisters and Muhammad Kamal. Toufic, who’d been flying across the ocean when Mother died, had been in touch. He was eager to get a picture of everything as it happened, moment by moment. His heart was racked with grief. We told him we had carved ‘Kamila’ on her gravestone above the phrase we knew she loved best: ‘Most beloved of women’. We had brought the frangipani from her balcony in Beirut and planted it next to the grave. Majida’s son placed a cigarette
on the grave and called his grandmother Beauty Queen of the Graveyard; I knew he was wishing he had a joint of hashish to make him high. The tree giving her shade from above oozed a sticky gum that stuck to our clothes and shoes. We all laughed. Mother was still not willing to let us go without her, even though she would now sleep for ever, amid fragrant flowers and chirping birds, looking out over mountains and valleys.