The Locust and the Bird (5 page)

They took the most rugged tracks through mountains and valleys, to avoid the normal Ottoman routes to Ma’an in Jordan. But before the family reached safety they were attacked by a gang, who stole the mule, along with the box containing the hidden gold. They didn’t complain to the authorities at once, and when they did my bashful mother could not bring herself to look at the men the authorities paraded before them; and her husband was unable to pick out a culprit.

Under the cover of night, one of the gang members came back and killed Mother’s husband. Any doubts about the man’s guilt were resolved, but it marked the start of a life of misery for Mother. With her children and the two remaining mules, she joined a caravan on its way back to Lebanon. She hurried to her husband’s family’s house to
collect her valuables, but the family shut the door in her face, claiming the valuables had been left as a guarantee for a debt owed by their now dead son. But Mother did not give up easily. She knocked on the door again and asked them to help her; she only abandoned hope when she was beaten and turned away.

She returned to her own house, cursing fate but grateful she and her children still had a refuge, only to discover that during her absence her home had been stripped of its furnishings. So she started work in the only way she knew: on the earth, in the fields with the crops. But however hard she struggled, she couldn’t provide for her family. She took to knocking on the doors of feudal families and politicians, telling them her story. One offered to get the children admitted to an American charitable boarding school in the interior city of Sidon.

Mother agreed. But only one visit a month was permitted and she had to walk for two or three hours to reach them. Mother would stand below the girls’ dormitory, shouting her daughters’ names. As soon as they appeared at the window, she would burst into tears. Then she’d go to the boys’ dormitory and call out the names of her sons. If they failed to appear, she would throw pebbles up to the balcony. The moment she saw the boys, there would be floods of tears.

Eventually things changed for Mother. A sheikh who had graduated from Azhar University of Theology in Cairo – the oldest Islamic university in the world – came back to his birthplace in south Lebanon and opened a school. He rented two rooms in Mother’s house and moved in with his wife, a Turkish beauty called Hanim. As soon as she arrived in Nabatiyeh, women from all over the region came to get a glimpse of her lovely white complexion and luxuriant black hair, and to hear her Turkish accent. Soon the sheikh’s
diminutive son arrived to run the school for his father. Before long he was flirting with Mother, drawn by her height, her bright eyes and jet-black hair. She was attracted to him because he was so different from any of the men she knew. He was literate and witty, and could improvise poetry and recite early Arabic odes. Although she was ten years older, she felt sure he would help her take care of her four children. He began to call her Khadija bint Khuwaylid.
⁵

After they got married, Mother decided to bring her four children back to live with her. One night she went to the school in Sidon and shouted for them one by one, urging them to jump over the school wall and come home. But they found it impossible to accept Mother’s tiny new husband. What hope could there possibly be for them when she’d married a clown who wore a red fez in order to make himself appear taller? They grieved for their dead father and for the loss of their school. Soon each one left home again.

Easy-going Hasan, the elder son, left first to find work in Beirut. Serious Ibrahim lasted longer, helping Mother’s husband, who travelled the villages working as a cobbler in the summer when the school was closed. One night Mother’s husband decided to play a prank on him. He disguised himself in a cloak and jumped out at Ibrahim, yelling, ‘Give me everything you have or I’ll kill you!’ Ibrahim panicked, the memory of his father’s murder still fresh in his mind, and didn’t laugh when his stepfather revealed himself. Furious and upset, he followed Hasan to Beirut.

A few months later the two girls joined their brothers. They left the house in Nabatiyeh to Mother, her new husband and my brother Kamil. Three years later I was born.

Beirut, I thought, as we travelled in the car, must lie beyond that mountain, that valley, that blue line. I watched
as everything disappeared behind me. I saw the blue sea for the first time and decided it was brother to the sky. I watched them merge and dissolve into the distance. The sea proceeded on its way and then stretched off into the horizon. I wondered if the wind that struck my hand outside the car window stayed the same or if it changed as the car sped towards Beirut.

Eventually we arrived. Beirut was larger than the market in Nabatiyeh; to me it seemed like the great wide world itself. But I didn’t see sacks spilling over with rice and sugar as I’d imagined; nor did I spy people helping themselves to treacle straight from the barrel. Instead they walked to and fro, not stopping to greet each other as they did in Nabatiyeh. Everything seemed strange to me, even the balconies. At first I didn’t realise they were connected to the rest of the house; I thought they were separate houses. How could people live in them, I wondered, when they had no roof? The houses themselves were roofed with red tiles, one on top of the other, just like pomegranate seeds. Large, tall apertures were referred to as windows, not doors of secrets, or
bab-al-sirr
, as we called them in the south. And Beirut’s trees weren’t like the ones at home, although it wasn’t long before I learned all their names: azedarach, date, mulberry and locust.

We went to the home of my half-sister Manifa and her husband, Abu-Hussein. We carried with us all that we possessed in Mother’s wooden box inlaid with velvet, brass and tin: our clothes, hyssop, flower blossoms and marjoram. We were soon joined by my half-brother Ibrahim and his wife, who emerged from a house that was separated from Manifa’s by a small garden.

Now that we were in Beirut, Mother no longer needed to go out at night to hunt for scraps of chard and endive with which to make our dinner; instead we sat on the floor around a tray containing a stew of potatoes and meat. Mother, Kamil
and I were very tentative about helping ourselves, even though there was much more food than we’d ever had in the south.

My brother-in-law instructed us in our manners and showed us how to eat.

‘Lean your face over the tray. What a shame, such a little piece of bread!’ (I’d taken the tiniest possible morsel.)

I thought: What a peculiar accent, and I couldn’t help noticing that he was nearly as short as my father, although much thinner. My half-brother Hasan arrived and kissed Mother’s hand. He brought with him a long loaf of bread that looked just like a rolling pin and was called a French stick. Then my other half-sister, Raoufa, came in. When she saw Mother, she hugged her and began to cry. She told everybody about her husband, who was addicted to gambling and horse racing. Her children were starving and homeless. I couldn’t understand how such a thing could happen in Beirut.

As the days passed I didn’t take much notice of my extended family. Instead I focused all my attention on sweets. I was totally absorbed by their variety, beauty, and their delightful names: white candyfloss, hazels, sesames. The vendor kept them in a glass-covered cart and went from street to street, calling, ‘Wonderful hazels for sale!’ I tried to get Mother to give me half a piastre; I went crying to Manifa; I rushed across to the vendor and stood before him in my wooden clogs, watching the boys and girls with shoes buying sweets and sucking on them with relish. I wore a pleading, hungry look on my face, my saliva flowing like a dog’s.

‘Why don’t you buy some?’ the vendor asked.

‘I’m just looking,’ I replied. But when he wouldn’t relent and give me anything, I told him, ‘No one will give me a piastre. I’m from the south and Father’s dead.’

The vendor stared at me as though I hadn’t spoken. I began to hate him. I tried to wheedle a coin from anyone who called
at my sister’s, but the only answer I got was, ‘Oh, I wish I could. Tomorrow, perhaps. I wish I had something with me.’ The one person I didn’t dare ask was Ibrahim, whom I nicknamed Mr Gloomy. When he frowned, his eyebrows met like a black stick over his eyes. He didn’t talk much to Mother and when he did he seemed angry and abrupt. He kept a watchful eye on me and muttered under his breath if I reached out for anything, even a nut or a bunch of grapes. I sensed that he hated me and I could not understand why.

Lying in bed one night, with Mother asleep between us, I asked Kamil if he’d have preferred to stay in Nabatiyeh.

‘If we’d stayed there, you’d have died a thousand times over before you got to taste any treacle,’ he said.

I stayed quiet and didn’t ask if he’d noticed how Mother had changed. Although she still slept with us, I no longer felt her warmth. She’d begun to tell me off, something she’d never done before. She scolded me for walking too fast, for jumping, for saying I was hungry. I noticed how little she had to say apart from that; it was as though she’d become a table or a chair, one that could only sigh and moan and say, ‘Oh God!’ I decided that since we’d only left Nabatiyeh because there was no meat for us to eat, I should have been able to prevent our departure. I could have distracted the butcher, drawn out a knife and cut off a piece of the lamb hanging from his hook. Then we’d still be back there in our house in the south and Mother would still belong to us.

I watched other girls my own age and longed to play with them. There was one in particular who stared at me with contempt, perhaps because of my wooden clogs and my dress, which looked nothing like those the Beirut girls wore.

I tried to gain her sympathy.

‘I’m not from Beirut,’ I told her. ‘Father’s dead. Nobody will give me a piastre.’

‘Your family’s poor,’ she said, and she turned her back on me.

Everyone in the house was expected to work for their food. Mother helped Manifa raise the children and manage the household. Manifa herself spent all day bent over the sewing machine making clothes or embroidering birds’ feet on coloured headscarves for her husband to sell in the markets.

When my brother-in-law Abu-Hussein heard me begging for piastres, he announced that it was time I began work too. I was to wander the nearby streets, selling rubber bibs for nursing babies. Kamil was already working for Abu-Hussein, helping at his haberdashery stall downtown.

Very reluctantly, I listened to my brother-in-law’s instructions after Mother made me feel guilty.

‘Your sister and her husband are not obliged to take care of us. It’s good of them to feed us and let us live with them,’ she said.

So I made the rounds of the neighbourhood. I climbed stairs and entered gardens. I knocked on front doors and offered my rubber bibs. I forced them on people, pleading poverty; I wouldn’t budge until they either bought one or shut the door in my face. I moved from house to house with a lump in my throat and, when I saw a pond with a fountain in the middle, it would remind me of how happy I used to be when I peed in the wilderness of Nabatiyeh, making patterns in the dust.

One day a woman opened her door and smiled. When I asked her to buy a bib, she was horrified.

‘Who sent you?’ she asked. When I told her, she clasped her hands to her head. ‘Yay, yay!’ she said in an accent I’d never heard before. ‘I don’t believe it! Aren’t your family scared to death for you? Such a pretty girl! And how old are you?’

‘Nine years old,’ I answered.

She called out to another woman and told her my story. She clasped her head again.

‘Yay, yay,’ she said again. ‘I can’t believe it. Good God, show mercy on your servants! I’ve never in my life seen girls going around houses selling things! What kind of family must she come from? Don’t you want to go to school?’

With that she purchased everything I had to sell, and gently pinched my cheek, and told me to take care of myself.

‘Listen, my pretty girl,’ she said. ‘Look after yourself, do you understand? Don’t let anyone fool around with you. If a man opens the door to you, run off quickly.’

I hurried home and told Mother what the woman had said. I asked her why no one had told me to watch out for myself or explained that I was to run off if a man opened the door. I said I wanted to go to school. But all Mother could do was sigh.

I began to cry and moan and beat my chest like an adult.

‘I want to go to school; I want to go to school!’ I shouted.

But Mother and Manifa only bustled round, hushing me to be quiet.

‘Watch out,’ they said, warning me against Abu-Hussein. ‘Or he’ll get you!’

It was just the kind of thing we used to say in Nabatiyeh to scare each other: watch out or else gremlins, hyenas, or the Devil himself will catch you.

5
The first wife of the Prophet Muhammad, who was older than her husband.

Even Pigeons Go to School

I
t’s
THE HONEST
truth, by God, the Prophet, and Imam Ali,’ I told Mother. ‘In Beirut even pigeons go to school.’ Ever since we’d arrived in Beirut I had been watching the flocks of pigeons circling in the skies, splitting up, gathering together, diving then soaring up and down, and all in response to the orders of their owner, who cracked his whip on the concrete, blew his whistles, and gestured to the birds with a black cloth tied to a stick. This trainer, known as the pigeon-fancier, was a relative of the girl who had treated me with such contempt. When she finally deigned to talk to me, she said she’d be my friend only if I wore shoes instead of wooden clogs.

How I longed to wear proper shoes and dresses and be a pupil at school, sitting in a class with other girls my age, with real pens and notebooks! I begged my oldest brother Hasan to intercede on my behalf and get my family to send me to school, but he didn’t want to get involved. He said he wished he was making a quarter of what Ibrahim and Abu-Hussein did, so he could pay for me to go. I realised that, although I was still young, the only way I could survive was to depend upon myself.