The Locust and the Bird (24 page)

Amid all the weeping and wailing, I spotted Father. He
was stifling a laugh and muttering something as he watched Muhammad’s mother riding on a donkey. The donkey had stopped and was refusing to move, while Muhammad’s mother swayed to the left and right. I could understand how this sight had got the better of him.

When I fainted, Khadija and the other women tried to make me eat something. People said they saw a tear fall from Muhammad’s eye when they brought our elder son over to bid him farewell.

An old woman patted me gently on the shoulder.

‘Listen, sweetheart,’ she told me, ‘God gave him to you and now he’s taken him away. You can cry and beat your breast all you like, but crying won’t bring him back! Never mind, my dearie, some day you’ll be together again.’

I knew she was doing her best to lighten my misery.

She started to mourn for the dead in her own family, but then she stopped.

She said instead, ‘Come on, my sweet, get a grip on yourself, if only for your children’s sake. They’re still little. Come on, days and years will pass very quickly, and in the twinkling of an eye you and Muhammad will be back together.’

I didn’t like the way she was trying to rush time forward, especially since Muhammad Kamal was not yet six months old.

‘Preserve me from evil,’ I muttered.

Muhammad’s family home was crowded with wailing women. They kept pouring in. I heard one woman ask if my daughter Fatima, who was carrying Muhammad Kamal, was the dead man’s daughter. The women whispered that she was my daughter by my first husband. They started gossiping about my divorce as if I wasn’t there.

I had no idea where I was; maybe I was with Muhammad in his grave as odes rang in my ears. Khalil Roukoz – the
famous poet whose work Muhammad had always loved and who had written a poem for Muhammad when Toufic was born, among many other occasions – recited these lines in a choked voice:

You have departed, Oh Muhammad, from the life of this world,

When the burden of existence overpowered your eyes.

This world of ours is a stage for meetings and departures,
Not just for you, but for all of us, death awaits.

Yet in your case you have spoiled the departure with a fire,

While still a young man, a life of promise still on your cheeks.

The tears in your widow’s eyes fall two by two,
So how were you able to close your eyes to them and her?

Once again the old woman was at my side.

‘My sweet,’ she said, ‘only remember: we all want to be with our beloveds. Woman is meant for man, and man for woman. When you go up to heaven, it’ll be to paradise, God willing, because of all that you’re suffering and will suffer. You’ll cry out, “Muhammad, Muhammad, here I am!” and there he’ll be, looking at you like the moon.’

My heart sank as I remembered that Muhammad was also my first husband’s name, although nobody called him that. Was it conceivable that in heaven I would have to go back to the Haji? I decided I must talk to the oldest woman there, the one who was most religious and devout, and explain my fear that the husband I’d meet in heaven would be my first, not my beloved Muhammad.

She wiped my face with her hand, recited some verses from the Quran, and said, ‘In the name of God, calm yourself, my dear. You want to be reunited with the deceased
Muhammad, because he’s your real husband and your first husband has married someone else. Isn’t that it? Be sure you never forget to pray and fast!’

I felt happier. But I could not help but wonder how it could be that this old woman, who’d lost all her teeth, was still alive, while Muhammad, a tall young man whose muscular body filled out his clothes, was dead. The feeling stayed with me from the very first day of the funeral rites. Every time I saw anyone old, male or female, I’d say to them, ‘Here you are, old and haggard but still alive, and there’s Muhammad, dead in the prime of his life. Do you call that fair?’

I only stopped doing this when Miskiah seized me by the hand.

‘Unless you control yourself,’ she said, ‘people are going to think you’ve lost your mind.’

‘But I have, I have,’ I wanted to say. I still felt as if Muhammad was alive, but had gone away somewhere on government business. I was sure he’d be back.

His death had caused an earthquake that turned our lovely green field to a wasteland, then into a veritable desert. How were my five children going to live? Who would cut my fingernails and toenails?

‘You Must Have the Wrong House’

T
WO MONTHS AFTER
Muhammad’s death, my house in Beirut was no longer a home, but more like a mosque. Every day a Quran reader came to recite verses in memory of Muhammad. All kinds of people arrived as well: important people like politicians and civil servants, as well as the local doctor and teacher, relatives, friends and friends of friends. I felt the front door wide open. My five children, now aged eight months to eight years, spent their time making a racket, eating, crying and fighting. The littlest one cried and shouted constantly. ‘Baba, Baba!’ he called out. Muhammad had been both father and mother to him, bathing him, feeding him, and making him laugh. He would only go to sleep if Muhammad held him in his arms.

All my energy evaporated. As I sat there, collapsed, people poured into the house. They chanted Quranic verses that battled with the noise of the children. Soon I was desperate to close the door in the face of the Quran reader, but I hadn’t the strength to ask him to stop coming, so I let him go on chanting while I lay prostrate on the bed. One afternoon, Ahlam rushed in to tell me that the blind Quran reader was asking after me.

I yelled out from my bedroom, ‘Oh, I was just going to prepare you some herbal tea, but since you’re leaving, I’ll do it tomorrow.’

The day came when I did close the door in his face.

‘Yes,’ I asked when he arrived one morning, ‘what do you want?’

‘I’m the sheikh who’s come to read the Quran,’ he replied.

‘Who?’ I asked him again.

He hesitated a moment.

‘The sheikh,’ he said. ‘The one who comes each day to read the Quran for the soul of your husband.’

‘You must have the wrong house,’ I replied. ‘No one here has died. What are you trying to do, bring us bad luck?’

He kept on insisting, and so did I. Eventually he made his way back down the stairs, pounding his stick angrily.

I gathered up Muhammad’s clothes and shoes, put them in boxes, and shoved them in the attic. I collected all his papers and diaries, put them in a bag, and stored them away in the cupboard. I found an empty cigarette packet among his things. Inside were 10 piastres, along with a scrap of one of my dresses with a pattern of gold circles. I couldn’t remember a thing about the money; in fact the very sight of the coins and the little scrap of material saddened me so much it hurt.

The early rains arrived and I prepared the children for school. I felt as if I’d been sleeping in a garden with Muhammad’s arm as a pillow. Now I had awoken to find him gone. Before me were five children, all clinging to my skirts. Four of them were yelling and screaming, asking me to write their names on notepads and books, to read their teachers’ comments or help them with their homework. The fifth one wanted my milk day and night. I felt myself becoming the sixth child. Who would read me the letters from the bank requesting my signature? Who would explain money and contracts? Muhammad had taught me to sign my name, one letter at a time, but the veil that hung over a page of writing terrified me. Should I really be signing my name to all these pieces of paper? Now that Muhammad was dead, should I sign the inheritance document? I remembered how Muhammad had
written a will bequeathing me the lands he owned in his village. But then we argued and he tore it up; only to tell me he’d rewritten it once we were reconciled. I never knew why, but I didn’t believe him at the time. I’d looked closely at the document, searching for my name. I found it, but I couldn’t find the word ‘land’. Then I looked for the name of his village, but couldn’t find that either. When I asked him about it, he just hugged me tight.

It was as though the letters on the page were fighting one another, each one like an annoying fly that buzzed in my eye. Everything I’d ever learned, the small amount that Muhammad had taught me, simply flew away. I was at a total loss, surrounded by the swarming flies. Years ago, I’d compared the letters to nails on the page; now they were all confused in my mind, piling up, one on top of the other.

I hesitated before I signed my name. The civil servant handling Muhammad’s estate paused. I’d already scribbled on three forms, but I couldn’t pluck up the courage to admit I’d forgotten how to sign my own name. I felt so ashamed that I drew a rose, the same way I’d done for Muhammad, and then a bird. The man stared at me in disbelief and asked me to sign my name on another piece of paper, then another. When I drew the bird and the rose on every single sheet he told me it wouldn’t do and suggested that I make my thumbprint instead. Suddenly I was back in the Nabatiyeh market, watching the blacksmith lift the horse’s hoof to hammer the horseshoe in place. I remembered the wife of Shorty the falafel seller back in our old neighbourhood in Beirut: every time she was given a bill, she put her thumbprint on it, as though she’d been born with a jet-black thumb. I would never use my thumbprint. From that day, I told the man, my signature would be a rose and a bird, since I wouldn’t forget how to do it. And so the civil servant took the forms and stamped the seal on them.

I followed the instructions of one of Muhammad’s brothers and used the government compensation we received for his death to buy an apartment that I could rent out. I deposited some of the money with Salsabil, a woman in the village who invested widows’ money and paid them back a year later with a good profit. I handed over more money to a shoe seller from Muhammad’s village who owned a shop in downtown Beirut, so he could invest the capital and pay me the interest. Finally, Muhammad’s brother-in-law was appointed our guardian, so he could collect the monthly stipend on my behalf and meet our household expenses.

I couldn’t help thinking that Muhammad was still working for us, even though he was buried in the ground. At least we were eating, drinking and sleeping in our own home, unlike Mother’s experience after her first husband died, which left her penniless. The thought made me hug myself. I imagined I was hugging Muhammad and smiling at him. ‘Thank you, Lord,’ I said. But then I remembered that Mother was thirty-four years old when her husband died, widowed at the same age as me. The thought made me shudder.

‘I Am Abu al-Hinn, the Tiniest of Birds.
What’s the Point of Shooting Me?’

M
Y HOME BEGAN
to attract all kinds of butterflies and bees, those who brought nectar and those who were in need of it: miserable wives, spinsters in search of youth, divorcees. They were like movie heroines calling at my home, their hearts filled with songs and merriment. I heard detailed anecdotes about their passions and secret rendezvous; discussed complaints about distance, separation and overwhelming love; and participated in fortune-telling sessions, all over endless cups of coffee. It was as if my house had become a heart hospital, a rest home or a convalescent centre. Through me these women sought refuge from their brothers, husbands or even mothers. Regularly this crowd included my two older daughters, Hanan, now fifteen, and especially Fatima, who was now nineteen. She spent most days happily in my house, away from her father and his shrewish wife.

But I was still afraid. My fear spread to my five younger children, Mother, my friends and everyone who crossed my threshold. Muhammad’s family (the men, that is) sat in silence like fishermen, waiting for me to make the tiniest mistake to trap me in their nets. Muhammad’s three sisters were so upset by their brother’s death that one of them stopped visiting us and left our district altogether, while the other two never stopped weeping, beating their chests and clutching us to them.

Muhammad’s brothers did their best to control our daily lives, as if we belonged to them. They weren’t happy that I’d managed to recover from the tragedy. They didn’t like that I’d pulled myself together; that I was relying on my own resolve to take care of myself and my children. I felt certain that, if we’d been in India, they’d have decided to burn me alive alongside Muhammad’s corpse. The brother who’d betrayed me to the Haji once slapped me. He was offended that, only forty days after Muhammad’s death, without waiting for the end of the six-month confinement typical for widows, I’d left the house with one of his sisters to present our condolences when a relative died.

Another brother, Ali, fell in love with me. Amazed, I wondered how he could dare to come to the house every day reciting love poems, when not even a year had passed since Muhammad’s death. He decided he was the man of the house and kept a close watch on everyone who came to visit; he began spying, following me wherever I went.

When I rebuffed him he replied, ‘I’m free, I can do what I want. This is my brother’s house!’

‘
I
am free,
free
to live the life I want!’ I shouted at him. ‘Do you understand?’

Unlike Muhammad’s brothers, however, my ‘guardian’ brother-in-law avoided me. I had to stalk him like a cat after a mouse. When I asked him for money, he ran off as if I was seeking a loan. He insisted on knowing about every single purchase, big or small, even down to a box of matches. I felt certain he was following the instructions of Muhammad’s family: ‘Make her beg for every single penny!’

Why was it that in-laws behaved like this, both in films and reality? The only way out of the situation was for me to go to court and receive an official order removing my brother-in-law’s guardianship and restraining Muhammad’s domineering brother Ali. But the ears of the official I saw
were stuffed with stones. They reverberated with the sound of his own voice, as he pontificated on the law and what was permissible behaviour.