The Locust and the Bird (28 page)

I had always known that Hanan resented me for divorcing her father and leaving her behind. Fatima had suffered too, yet she remained close. I saw less and less of Hanan, who had spent a number of years living in Cairo and was now back in Beirut, absorbed in her work as a journalist.

The third to marry was Fatima. She introduced me to her fiancé, making me feel respected and content, as a bride’s mother should. I was so relieved that both my daughters had found husbands – not because marriage, especially for women, would ever provide security, but because I had feared that having a divorced mother would stand in their way. Before her marriage, Fatima had been in love with another man. His parents came to meet her – and her family. They arrived at the door, expecting to be entertained by the mother of the
house, only to discover that I no longer lived there, and that there was a stepmother who also wasn’t home that day. Only Fatima and Hanan received them but, had their stepmother been home, the prospective in-laws wouldn’t have seen things in a better light. They left in disgust and convinced their son that he must not marry Fatima.

Finally, my daughter Ahlam, who was barely eighteen, married a Palestinian student who’d been living opposite us, exactly where the young man I’d admired once lived. Although she’d been so young, Muhammad’s death had affected Ahlam the most. Finding love was what she desired. She went to live with her husband in Kuwait. Meanwhile Toufic, my eldest son, decided to go to London to study computing. I had to sell our two apartments to fund his trip and college fees. Only then did I discover that my brother-in-law, our ‘guardian’, hadn’t paid taxes on either apartment since I’d bought them. I had to pay back taxes, which left very little profit from the sale.

So now it was just me and Majida, Kadsuma and Muhammad Kamal.

Five years after her marriage, Hanan gave birth to her first child, a boy. At the age of forty-eight I’d become a grandmother. Her private-hospital room faced the sea and, as I entered, I saw her lying in bed surrounded by bouquets of roses. I was overjoyed. Here was my daughter, living the way I’d always wanted to live – with scented flowers everywhere and her husband’s family gathered around her offering her boxes of chocolates and presents. I watched as Hanan chatted affectionately with her mother-in-law. For a few moments I felt jealous, but I pushed the feeling away. Hanan hardly knew me, nor I her. But I loved her dearly and knew that she loved me too, in her own way.

By the time Hanan gave birth to her second child, a girl,
two years later, we had grown much closer. She was keen for me to visit her; or she was until I started bringing a neighbour or friend with me to see the baby. I had to make myself ignore – superficially at least – her clear annoyance at these extra visitors. She didn’t like my friends – they weren’t as sophisticated as she’d have liked and I think they embarrassed her. In my heart I was critical of her too, because the only people from my world she wanted to see were her brothers and sisters. She didn’t understand my need to show my friends that my daughter had married up and lived in one of the best districts of Beirut.

She had never, not even for a second, put herself in my shoes. I came to her from a home bursting at the seams with neighbours, children and visitors, with brewing coffee and clamouring creditors. I lived in constant anxiety: that the electricity might be cut off because I couldn’t afford the monthly bill; that the gas cylinder would run empty; that the television would suddenly stop working and need to be repaired. Did she ever wonder, I thought, how I managed to pay the fare when I came to visit? Did it occur to her that I struggled to work out which button to press in the lift that took me to her floor?

Once, I visited Hanan in her apartment. There was a cage with singing canaries that could bathe in a little water tray. In another cage, a mouse Fatima had bought for Hanan’s little boy jumped on a wheel and started playing; then it went into its little house with sawdust on the floor. The little mouse stuffed its mouth with seeds until it looked as though it had the mumps.

Hanan was at her desk, writing.

‘I’d like to be that mouse!’ I told her.

‘It’s called a hamster!’ she said with a laugh.

‘OK, then,’ I replied, ‘I wish I could be that hamster. He plays and jumps, eats, drinks and sleeps, oblivious to everything going on around him.’

Hanan laughed even harder.

‘He’s lucky he has no debts,’ I said. ‘Or electricity and gas bills to pay!’

I thought she might get the hint and slip some cash into my handbag this time. But she only laughed some more, then went back to her own world, to her writing, to the canary and her two children. I don’t think it occurred to her that I was asking for help.

1975

I
N THE SPRING
of 1975, the Christian Phalangist militia killed some Palestinian refugees on a bus that passed through Christian neighbourhoods. Muslim–Christian disturbances rocked Beirut all over again. Like everyone else, I expected it all to blow over quickly, as it had in 1958.

I saw a photograph in the newspaper of the Prime Minister, Rashid Karami, wearing a polo-neck jumper.

‘The crisis must be over,’ I cried, ‘or he’d be wearing a black suit.’

I looked at pictures of Druze, Shia, Maronite and Sunni leaders, all smiling, and assumed everything would be OK. But the leaders became like blind men with swords, thrusting at everyone around them, as each formed a militia and took over different quarters of Beirut. There were dead and wounded, explosions and demonstrations all over the city. My women neighbours and I kept our ears glued to the radio, listening to the newsreader Sharif al-Akhawi, who became to us the only trustworthy Lebanese. He told his listeners which roads were safe to use. Life as we knew it ground to a halt, replaced by another kind of existence: standing in line at the bakery, at the street water tank, at the petrol station. It was as if I was nine years old again, and had just left the south for Beirut. One day, as I watched a mule pulling a kerosene tank amidst the noise of car horns, I was reminded of my years as the stone-bearing donkey.

Thoughts of that unhappy time also brought back memories of Muhammad. If Muhammad were still in the same job, I thought, he might have been bureau chief of all Lebanon by now. I tried to figure out how old he’d have been if he were still alive and with a sob I realised he’d be fifty-seven. But when I remembered the threats the Nasserites had made to him in 1958, I was glad he was no longer alive to face this new crisis.

My house was crammed with relatives and acquaintances whose homes lay on the border between warring neighbourhoods. They included my friend, Umm Bassam; Kamil and his family; and my nephew, Maryam’s brother with the wooden leg, who’d returned to be with his family after living on the streets. Our house became a hostel. We huddled on the porch, in the sitting room, kitchen and bedroom – even in the corridor outside the bathroom. There was a perpetual din of throat-clearing, laughter and coughing; farts echoed forth and secrets were revealed. Toufic, who had returned from London and was working for an international airline at Beirut airport, got up one night to record the snoring. When everyone was asleep, he played the tape at top volume. Someone awoke and prodded the person sleeping next to him, assuming he was the snorer. By the time everyone had prodded everyone else awake, they were all cracking up with laughter.

There were days when we didn’t dare walk in front of the window. We tried to keep laughing and joking, but our fears grew and grew. My fear was so intense that, when Toufic tried to sneak out of the house to meet his girlfriend one day, I pointed his hunting rifle at him.

‘Better for me to kill you,’ I told him, ‘than have someone else do it! At least I’ll be able to bury you and know where your grave is.’

The situation deteriorated to the point where people started calling the events outside the war. The streets were
deserted. I was forced to stop visiting Hanan and Fatima. If there was a lull in the fighting for a few days, people would make travel plans, desperate to leave. Hanan took her two children to London, followed soon after by Fatima and her husband. Toufic travelled to America to join his girlfriend and they decided to get married. Majida and Kadsuma went to Kuwait to stay with Ahlam. I remained in Beirut, worried sick that Muhammad Kamal, now sixteen years old, would decide to join the neighbourhood militia, a group made up of Palestinians, Sunnis, Shia and Druze. They regularly fought the Christians,
²³
like so many teenagers and young men in Beirut. Eventually I took him to Kuwait, hoping we would soon return home. But it was in vain, because the war only escalated.

In spite of this exodus, my house in Beirut was never empty. Friends and family stayed on, and the door remained open to anyone who needed shelter from the fighting. It became a place of refuge for many and dozens of people held the keys.

23
At that time there was no Hezbollah – i.e., no Shia militia.

Battuta’s Daughter
²⁴

I
T WAS FEAR
that made me leave Lebanon. I wanted to be with my children and to keep Muhammad Kamal safe. So I abandoned my friends, my street, my neighbourhood, carrying with me the secrets of those who’d stayed in my home. I was devastated that I had to leave, and full of anger at the way Muslims and Christians were fighting against one another.

In Kuwait we stayed with Ahlam. The climate there – boiling hot, sandstorms, humidity – was so extreme that it crushed me. The only time I felt at all relaxed was in the evening, when the wind blew. Then I could open a window and breathe real air, rather than what came out of the air-conditioning vent. As the wind carried the scent of vines and figs to me, I tried to imagine I was at our summer home. But each morning, once again, I would feel as if I was choking, from the dust and sand stirred up by the wind. The dust covered us in a fine white layer. We looked like fish sprinkled with flour, ready to be thrown in the pan.

In Kuwait we never sat out on the balcony to watch the passers-by, and Ahlam’s lovely house felt like a prison. I took on the task of cooking, preparing elaborate dishes. At first my new role excited me. If only Muhammad could have been there to see me being an exemplary mother and grandmother! But before long the pressure of obligation
took away my initial enthusiasm. Once I roasted a chicken and, when I took it out of the oven, it was nicely browned and delicious-looking. But when my son-in-law started carving he revealed, to my mortification, that the small bag containing the giblets was still inside the bird.

I missed Beirut and the Widows’ Club terribly. To console myself I started watching a television soap opera called
The Head of Goliath
, about a Bedouin man who is on the run. I became utterly engrossed in his tribal world and began creating friendships with the characters. I got so involved that I even postponed my departure for Beirut for several months. (I would return periodically during a lull in the fighting.)

Meanwhile Majida and Kadsuma each fell in love with Lebanese men and decided to get married in Kuwait. Then Muhammad Kamal went to join Toufic in America. I felt that my responsibility to my children was coming to an end. After a while I followed him from Kuwait, intending only to be in the US for a short visit. On the plane, I asked myself how it was even conceivable that I, Kamila, a woman from Nabatiyeh who’d never even learned how to read and write, could really be going to America. My heart was in my boots as the plane winged its way across the sky. Terrified, I looked around and spied a man who seemed to be Arab.

‘Tampa?’ I asked him. ‘Tampa?’

A few hours later I asked him the question again.

‘Look, lady,’ he told me impatiently. ‘You’re in a plane. Suppose it was going to Brazil. Do you think we could make it change direction?’

Then I got angry too.

‘OK,’ I replied. ‘But remember that our ancestors travelled by donkey and camel, not by plane!’

When we arrived, I was desperate to conceal from the other passengers that I was illiterate. I pretended that I
couldn’t find my glasses and asked someone to fill out the immigration form for me.

The sheer size of America astounded me. Travelling in the car with my son, I couldn’t help wondering why the earth hadn’t split beneath the weight of the trucks, trains and skyscrapers. I was astonished by the goods on offer in the shopping malls. The shops and supermarkets were miniature cities in themselves. I felt like a voracious locust, eager to buy and buy. But, I reminded myself that, as the proverb went, while the eye may look it’s what’s in the hand that counts. I had to make do with purchasing reduced items, not worrying if the edge of an ashtray was chipped or if a blouse had red lipstick on it. America was one gigantic market; they even used parks to sell things.

What I liked to do best was to go to the fairground. It thrilled me to win a toy bear or a dog. I’d return home triumphant, clutching my trophy to me. I used my suitcase to store my collection. I called my bag the big whale, and in it I kept things like McDonald’s aluminium ashtrays shaped like leaves; and from the aquarium, a shell shaped like a star, though I was completely unaware it was still alive.

Before long, just as I had learned to pronounce Tampa, Toufic and Muhammad Kamal moved to San Diego, where Fatima lived. I went with them. When my other three daughters also moved there, I was delighted. San Diego reminded me of Beirut. It had nearly the same weather and nature. I loved the zoo. All the animals I’d heard of in stories I saw for the first time. I loved picnicking in the park with Fatima and her American husband. Once I found myself dancing to music I hadn’t heard before and I was told it came from Cuba. I danced a mixture of the charleston, belly dancing and
dabke
, the Lebanese folk dance.

But I soon realised that two of my daughters, Majida and Ahlam, were unhappy in their marriages. I was determined, though, that they would not consider divorce. I did not want
my grandchildren to suffer, even though to most people divorce now seemed no more significant than taking a sip of water. But their unhappiness tore at my heart. I could see that their husbands were never going to change. I tried hard not to do it, but I found myself interfering, blaming, cursing, fighting, and soon even encouraging my daughters to file for divorce. ‘You could always come back with your children and live with me, just like when you were children yourselves,’ I told each of them.