The Locust and the Bird (7 page)

The other adults in the family urged me to help Mother take care of my three nephews, lest they begin to feel the loss of their mother – particularly the youngest, who was not yet one and a half. Khadija, Ibrahim’s wife, had been nursing and looking after him as though he were her own child.

Mother was overcome with grief, and she found it difficult to take care of the boys, although now that I was older I could see that she simply wasn’t much good at household chores. I often overheard adults remark that she wasn’t pulling her weight, or that she was lazy, like a closed book. They even told a joke about her: that one day when she’d bid farewell to her first husband as he got on his mule to go to work, she’d yelled out, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, I was just going to bake you some bread.’ But I was still only ten. My narrow shoulders could not bear the burden of the responsibility for the three boys and Mother.

Manifa’s tragic death was not the only cruel twist of fate Mother suffered. Just a year later, Raoufa, my other sister, caught a fever and died within days. This time the cause wasn’t a rat bite but a burst appendix. On her neighbours’ advice she hadn’t consulted a doctor, but instead had applied strips of boiled onion-peel and cumin to her abdomen. She left behind five children: two daughters and three sons, one of whom had survived polio and had a wooden leg.

A year after this second tragedy, Abu-Hussein and Ibrahim decided we should all live together, as Mother and I couldn’t cope with looking after my three nephews on our own. So we all moved to a house, or rather a large apartment, in Ra’s al-Nab, one of the more refined districts of Beirut – its name
meant ‘the source of a spring’. But there was no spring, only a tap gushing water outside a grocery shop.

Now we had my sister-in-law Khadija to help us and she was capable, intelligent and astute. She was also an energetic housekeeper. I loved her and she loved me. She combed out my curly hair – an act demanding patience and time – and came to my defence when Ibrahim yelled at me.

By this time Abu-Hussein’s business had improved considerably. He’d withdrawn from partnership with Ibrahim, who now worked full-time as a tram driver, and joined with a fellow merchant to become co-owner of a shop selling imported men’s clothing. This new business partner was very clever and my brother-in-law believed everything he said. They began to pay off Ibrahim’s share in instalments, which made Ibrahim even more gloomy and angry. He could only watch as yet another opportunity slipped from his grasp – a pattern that had begun when Mother took him out of school.

Our new home was high up. To get to it we climbed a staircase with a black wrought-iron railing woven into a pattern that looked like children holding hands. Inside was a huge apartment, so wide that anyone would have thought it was a separate house. The walls stretched up very high too, and in the middle, at the very top, there were some nice decorated-glass skylights, which added to the light flooding through the many windows. Entering by the big wooden front door, we came into a large room called the lounge; to the right was my brother-in-law’s room, which had a window overlooking the neighbouring garden. There were two other rooms, one bedroom shared by my nephews and Kamil, and another for Ibrahim’s family. Between these bedrooms there was a corner where Mother and I slept; I thought of this space as my own house and often played there on the big mattress we spread out on the floor at night. Other visitors to
Beirut from the south – relatives and friends – would share our corner with us. For by this time our house had become a staging post for anyone on a trip to the city.

My favourite spot was the roof. When we went up the stairs into the open air it was as though we were in a lofty garden overlooking the other buildings. From up there we could see the fountain in a garden below, and a few trees scattered about, especially the luxuriant azedarach.

The move and our new good fortune only made Mother more depressed. She lamented the fact that Manifa, who had supported her husband so loyally, and worked so hard in the early days of their marriage, wasn’t there to enjoy life now. Abu-Hussein’s name was on the tip of every tongue from the south, whether they were settled in Beirut or only visiting. All spoke of his probity and hard work; they were so proud of this orphan boy who had risen to owning a business in Souq Sursouq
⁹
itself. Abu-Hussein’s father abandoned his mother when he was just three years old. His stepmother tormented him and pulled his ears, and so he would run away and walk for hours to see his mother, who had remarried and moved to another village. When he was six, his father died. He had lost contact with his mother by then, and so a relative took him to the house of the most learned Shiite Muslim scholar in Nabatiyeh.

The sheikh taught him the Quran and how to be a devout Muslim and in return Abu-Hussein looked after his horse. When he was twelve he decided to leave the sheikh and the south and try his luck in Beirut. He began as an errand boy to a Beiruti family, and then became a peddler and finally a merchant.

In our new home, Mother grew sadder, but I was seldom unhappy. The windows were always wide open and songs
and music from neighbourhood radios worked their way inside. I used to hum the tunes and sing along with them. I was beginning to understand them now, and their language was the language of books, unlike the crude words of the songs I’d learned from women and men in the fields of the south.

It’s not Mother or Father I need,
What I really desire is my olive-skinned lover.

8
The Day of Ashura is on the 10th day of Muharram in the Islamic calendar. It is commemorated by the Shia as a day of mourning for the martyrdom of Imam al-Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, at the Battle of Karbala on 10 Muharram in the year 61 AH (10 October 680 CE). During the battle, fought over the succession of the caliphate, al-Hussein fought with seventy-two men against a thousand.

9
A famous bazaar in downtown Beirut. Sursouq is named after a family that owned a number of nineteenth-century mansions.

‘You Are Hereby My Witness’

I
WAS UP ON
the roof one day when Mother and Khadija called to me to come. They told me I must go into the boys’ bedroom and say the words, ‘You are hereby my witness.’ Then I could go back to playing.

Khadija gave me a white headscarf to wear. I went into the room and found myself facing a group of men in red fezzes and another man in a turban shaped like a melon, just like the one worn by the sheikh whom Mother went to see about her child support in Nabatiyeh. I tried to say, ‘You are hereby my witness,’ so I could run out of the room, but I was nailed to the spot, unable to speak. The man in the turban stared at the floor and mouthed sentences. What I could understand sounded like prayers: ‘In the name of God,’ and, ‘May God pray for and bless the Prophet Muhammad and his family.’ When he said this, the men repeated it after him.

Suddenly the man in the turban asked my age and Ibrahim answered, ‘She’s eleven years old.’

Then the man recited something again and I heard my name and Abu-Hussein’s. Then he asked me to repeat after him, ‘You are hereby my witness.’

I mumbled the words and rushed to the door, opened it, and found Mother and Khadija standing right there as though they had been listening.

I was afraid they would change their minds and stop me going back up to the roof to play, so I said, ‘OK, it’s done.
I said it. “You are hereby my witness.” What more do you want?’ Then I ran back up to the roof.

I was surprised that the grown-ups had been wasting their time listening to me repeat what the man in the turban told me to say. I was equally surprised that they were letting me play, rather than making me sweep the floor, clean the dishes – or telling me off.

I forgot all about what had happened that day and the words I’d uttered until nearly two years later when I met a young man who looked like a film star at the home of Fatme the seamstress.

Abu-Hussein had sent me to Fatme’s to learn to cut and sew, because I’d been pestering them about school again. I was too old, they told me; the younger children at school would laugh at me. ‘Let them laugh,’ I said, but Mother replied that school lasted all day. Who would take the boys to school? Who would deliver my brother-in-law his lunch? Who would help with the washing? So instead I was taken to Fatme’s house. She welcomed me with a big smile and, as soon as my brother-in-law left, I could feel her opening her heart to me.

I adored her. She was different from any woman I’d ever met. She talked loudly with a Beiruti accent, cursing, swearing and laughing – her laughter went on and on, just like the cry of the hyenas. There was always a cigarette dangling from her lips, and she would blow smoke in my face when she exhaled through her long nose. She had big eyes that could be gentle and furious at the same time. She never cried. She turned up the volume on the radio and drank coffee all day, one cup after another. Her teeth were as brown as dates, and she smoked and swayed to the music while she bent over the sewing machine or sat on the ground in the courtyard, with fabric spread out over her heavy thighs. Once, she sent me out for a pack of cigarettes and I was amazed at the way
she pulled notes casually from her pocket. I told her that she was the only person I knew who did that; my brother and brother-in-law were so stingy that if they could they would’ve hidden their cash inside the crop of a chicken. She laughed, and told me to take off my headscarf, then grabbed my thick black hair. With the cigarette still dangling from her mouth, she told me how beautiful I was.

At the time, I didn’t realise that the kindness and affection she showed me was because of her sympathy towards my plight. When I arrived late in the morning I would tell her what I’d been doing. ‘I understand,’ she’d say, ‘I understand. You’re like the stone-bearing donkey.’ I wanted to live with her.

She told everyone who visited about my nice house and my brother-in-law who owned a shop in Souq Sursouq. She made me feel proud, but I still giggled as I acted out how Abu-Hussein walked, with his head down in case he stumbled over something in his path. I told her how he poked his nose into everything, like an old fussing hen.

I loved to watch Fatme’s hands work their magic with the sewing machine. She taught me how to pleat, to gather, and to put on buttons. But the moment she left me to go into the kitchen and start cooking, I would sneak into her room, spread out her mother’s prayer mat and slide underneath the brass bed, which stood high up off the floor.

There I’d sleep contentedly until she came in and scolded me.

‘Come along you, get up. You’re too spoilt!’

I was eager to get to Fatme’s place every day. Needle in hand, I would sit there alone, far removed from the bustle of our house, from all the shouting and the demands for me to do this and not do that. Like the harvesters and farmers had in Nabatiyeh, I sang to myself as I worked, but not in the way I sang when I bathed at home. Then I had to sing quietly, so that Ibrahim or my brother-in-law would not hear me.

As I sang, I imagined myself as a heroine who embroidered while waiting for her beloved to return. He had been sent far away, because he was rich and she was poor:

For love of you I have sacrificed my longing;
Had I obeyed my heart,
I would never have left you …

Then I would begin another song because I couldn’t remember all the words of the first one:

Oh thou rose of pure love,
God bless the hands that have nourished you!
I wonder, oh I wonder, oh I wonder.

One day, a young relative of Fatme’s overheard me singing. He sat by the fountain in the garden, pretending to read, and waited until I appeared. I looked out of the window and saw a young man sitting by the edge of the fountain, as though a genie had conjured him out of the water and put him there. It looked like a scene from
The White Rose
, though this young man was not wearing a fez.

I listened as he asked Fatme in a gentle whisper, ‘So where does this beautiful girl come from?’

‘From Nabatiyeh,’ Fatme replied.

He didn’t look like any other young man I’d ever seen, either in Nabatiyeh or Beirut. Most of them had black curly hair and black eyes that were close together. They were either short or, if they were tall, then fat. The young man before me had straight brownish hair and eyes of a colour I could not name. And he was tall. He too had come from a village in the south, close to the sea. He went to school in Sidon. Fatme told me proudly that his family were what she called ‘high-life’.

When it was obvious I had no idea what she meant, she added, ‘Not the way it was down there. His family were notables and emirs. His father has been village mayor for the past thirty years. They own two race horses.’

I told her that my grandfather had owned a horse.

‘Your grandfather owned a mule,’ she replied with a smile. ‘A horse is completely different.’

The word ‘high-life’ stuck in my mind. I was surrounded by people from the south who were struggling to make a living, while this young man’s family (his name was Muhammad) made their horses race and earned money from them. I realised exactly what Raoufa’s gambling husband had been up to: pawning everything they owned so he could bet on horses. I wondered whether that money had gone to Muhammad’s family, and though I wanted to ask Fatme, I decided it was probably better not to. Instead I listened as she proudly and happily told me how the young man slept at her house once a month when he came from Sidon to Beirut.

From then on I waited for Muhammad to appear again in the garden with his book. When he appeared, I would watch as he gazed into the fountain and then at the house.

When eventually we did exchange a few words, the first thing I asked him was if he’d seen
The White Rose
. I stared straight at his jacket and asked if he owned another.