The Locust and the Bird (29 page)

My bitterness towards my sons-in-law and my obsession with seeking revenge against them was compounded by my troubles with Muhammad Kamal. Recently, he had joined a group of hippies living in the neighbourhood. I started spying on him and his group day and night. Ahlam tried to stop me, but I couldn’t help myself. I needed to know he was all right. I found that I was really alone, far away from the world, cut off and helpless; while in Beirut, I could ask for help from the electric pole or the door or the wall.

Eventually Majida and Kadsuma returned to Kuwait, but all this family upheaval made me profoundly unhappy. I saw a doctor, who prescribed various pills. Whenever one of my children showed concern at the quantity of medication I was taking, I defended the little round capsules. I believed that the effort of the many people who had produced each pill could only mean that they were greatly beneficial to my health. Still, I continued to feel restless and lonely, especially when Toufic was at work. I tried to strike up conversations with people. I’d always imagined I could communicate with everyone, even a group of chimpanzees. But I failed in America. Aren’t these Americans my relatives? I asked myself. Aren’t we all descendants of the same father and mother, Adam and Eve? Why can’t they understand me? If I sigh, it means I’m unhappy. If I smile and say good morning, it means I’d like to chat.

Once, I approached a female neighbour. I smiled and held
up a coffee cup, gesturing that I could tell her fortune. All she did was smile back briefly and disappear inside her house. Such misunderstandings caused great amusement within my family, but they only added to my vexation. I couldn’t believe that language could form such a barrier, even with a dog. A huge dog managed to get into the house one day, and my daughter-in-law and I were terrified and hid. All day the dog simply slept on the sofa, until my son got home and shooed it out with the simple command, ‘Go!’

One day I saw the old man next door weeping as he talked to Muhammad Kamal’s girlfriend. I clutched my chest, terrified that something had happened to one of the children. But Muhammad Kamal’s girlfriend explained that the old man was only recalling how his wife had suffered from cancer and eventually died. I began crying with him, sharing his grief. The elderly man asked her why I was crying, as he was sure I hadn’t met his departed wife.

A few days later the news came of my own father’s death. I visited our neighbour and tried to let him know that my own father had died, hoping he’d shed some tears with me. But he hadn’t a clue what I was trying to tell him. I wept all the more, because I was so far away. Not even my children would weep along with me.

‘Come on now,’ I urged them. ‘Shed just a few tears. Feel a bit sad with me! After all, he was your grandfather. He was my father and now he’s dead.’

My children thought it strange that I could feel this way about Father, after he’d neglected me when I was little. As I’d grown older, I told them, things had changed. We’d started talking to each other again and I’d seen how I’d inherited some of his character. He loved me, and my love and loyalty meant a lot to him. I wouldn’t dwell on all the misfortunes buried in the past. Instead, I focused on the things I loved about him: his knowledge and the poems and proverbs he’d recite.

If Father had not so often recited to me a poem by Imam Ali, how would I have known about the five benefits of travel?

Leave your country in search of enlightenment.
Travel, for in travelling there are five benefits;
Dissipation of worry, the gaining of enlightenment,
Science, literature and the company of the honourable.

24
Ibn Battuta, a fourteenth-century Arab traveller and explorer.

The War Has Ended

I
TRAVELLED BETWEEN AMERICA
and Kuwait until the war ended. Then, after sixteen years in exile, I returned home. Whoever God allows to travel is indeed fortunate, I thought to myself. Here I was, alone in Beirut, while my seven children continued their lives abroad, exiled from their country and culture by war. The sixteen years of war had made me angry and remorseful. The people who finally ended it were the same people who had started it. And what had they achieved? I realised, with bitter irony, that I had arrived home with sixteen pieces of luggage.

I stored the suitcases in one corner of my sitting room. But seeing them there, unopened, made me terribly depressed. I hid them under a sheet. I think I felt horrified by the excess. A few days later, after my head had stopped spinning, I opened all the suitcases and scattered presents on the floor.

I took what I wanted, then called to my neighbours and some relatives and shouted, ‘Go ahead, help me get rid of everything.’

When only a few items were left, I went out on to my balcony and called to some young children playing below, ‘Hurry and come up and take whatever you want.’

And the children gathered round, snatching things from each other. I saved a child’s white umbrella from Disneyland to give to Hanan’s daughter. When I finally did, on one of Hanan’s visits to Beirut, we laughed for a long time. Although I had seen Hanan and her family every couple of years
when they visited – in Kuwait and then in America – my granddaughter was much older and taller than I remembered.

In Beirut I reverted to my old routine: entertainment, laughter, and fortune telling. I was happy to be back among neighbours, relatives – my two brothers Hasan and Kamil – and friends. I was delighted to be back in the thick of things. During my period of exile, I’d ceased to believe I’d ever get to sleep in my own bed again, or that my house would be there waiting for me when I returned.

I converted part of my balcony into a miniature garden filled with potted plants, just as Mother had done in our garden plot at Nabatiyeh. I visited Father’s grave in the south and offered my condolences to his widow. I asked her about Father’s library of manuscripts, some of them handwritten, that he had bequeathed to Ahlam. Each time Father went back to the south after a visit, he’d take with him some books he found lying around in our house, unaware that most of them were actually Ahlam’s school textbooks. He’d loved reading Khalil Gibran, the author of
The Prophet
, and Mikhail Nuayma. His widow told me she’d given them all to the
husayniyya
.
²⁵

‘But why, if they were willed to Ahlam?’ I asked her, in great disappointment. I reminded her that Father had inherited his library from his father and grandfather.

‘I thought you were away and were never coming back,’ she answered.

I wondered whether the presiding sheikh had stumbled across some of the stories and notes Father slipped between the pages of his books – stories of love and erotic passion. His widow told me what Father said to the doctor in his last days.

‘So, Doctor, you see these four children standing before you? They’re all from his excellency’s factory and there is a
fifth one in America.’ Then he looked down and went on, ‘I could make a lot more too. If you let me get up, I’ll prove it to you!’

Gazing at his red fez, I couldn’t help chuckling as I imagined the scene.

After his death, I decided I must close the book on the distant past and the war. But it wasn’t easy. I felt like the monkey I’d seen on television, who would lift a stone and then faint at the sight of a snake cooling beneath it. As soon as he recovered from the shock he would hurry back to the stone, lift it, and faint again.

I no longer felt the pleasure I’d experienced when I first returned to Beirut, a pleasure that came from simply being at home, on the balcony, in my own bed. Now it was as though being back had reawakened the dormant past, rekindling feelings of guilt that lay buried, deep in my subconscious. I became exactly like Mother, unable to stop the buzzing. I focused on the pain I had caused Mother, Hanan and Fatima; and the insecurity and uncertainty that my five younger children had suffered after Muhammad’s death. And last but not least, I worried about my grandchildren and their troubles in America.

The more the doctors prescribed pills, the less I slept. It was as if the vividly coloured pills were a microscopic lens that projected bruised old stories and memories in the tiniest detail. In the end I sought peace, confronting Hanan at last with my past, asking her to write it down. Only then did I start to see its wrinkled layers gradually turn smooth, with each word I uttered, with every place I remembered.

25
A gathering place for the community next to the mosque in Shia neighbourhoods.

‘One Stone Takes You Away,
Another Brings You Back’

I
’D BEEN THINKING
a lot about Mother, my old home in Nabatiyeh, and my childhood there, so Hanan suggested we visit the south together. We travelled down to Nabatiyeh in a Range Rover. I told Hanan it made me feel like a contingent of army or police. Gradually I got used to travelling in that big car; it made me feel protected against car sickness, shortness of breath, and the heat. Hanan asked me not to joke around and embarrass Ali the driver. I tried hard to keep quiet, but my tongue got the better of me and I found myself singing a famous popular song, ‘Ali, Ali, the oil vendor!’ We all laughed.

‘Mama,’ Hanan said. ‘You’re really very funny!’

We were heading for the house in Upper Nabatiyeh where Mother had raised me with tender care. I’d once mentioned to Hanan that I’d like to see the house again; I hadn’t set eyes on it since we’d left for Beirut when I was just nine years old.

As we turned off the coastal road I exclaimed, ‘Good grief. How on earth did your grandmother – God have mercy on her soul! – manage to walk all the way from Nabatiyeh to Beirut to see her children, even if she did stop for one night in a hostel? It’s a long way. If only I had the strength and will to walk such a distance!’

On the outskirts of Nabatiyeh, I got out of the car and tried to find the hostel where travellers stayed. I also looked for the market in the square: where we’d chased after Father, where
I had seen gold at a jeweller’s for the first time, and where my uncle the cobbler once worked. Hanan remembered the Nabatiyeh market too. She remembered being there on Ashura Remembrance Day, and seeing women spitting on the unfortunate actor playing the accursed Shimr – the man who delivered the fatal blow that killed al-Hussein the Prophet’s grandson.

The poor man was trying to defend himself.

‘Hold on!’ he yelled. ‘This is only a re-enactment. I’m not the killer Shimr, I’m Mustapha the baker!’

We drove on towards Upper Nabatiyeh, where there are still tobacco fields. Hanan looked for the house of Abu-Ghaleb, the Haji’s childhood friend, but she couldn’t find it. We stopped again when we saw a woman standing beneath an olive tree, shaking the branches so the green olives fell on to a coloured sheet she’d laid out on the ground. Hanan went over to the tree, but I hung back; I wanted to smoke a cigarette in the quiet serenity of the place, beneath the blue autumn sky.

Hanan recognised the woman at once.

‘What?’ Hanan exclaimed to her. ‘Don’t you know me?’

‘Come closer,’ said the woman. ‘Then I can give you a hug and kiss and smell you. I’ll recognise you!’

‘I’m the girl who used to drive you crazy!’

The woman came over to Hanan and they embraced.

‘You’re Hanan!’ the woman cried, after gazing at her.

They embraced again, a real hug this time. Then Hanan introduced me to Samira, one of Abu-Ghaleb’s daughters, but she corrected Hanan’s introduction.

‘Didn’t you know that I had reverted to my real name, Amina? I’m Hajja Amina now,’ she said. She explained that as a child she’d hated her name.

By now Hajja Amina was almost seventy, a little younger than me. As we walked, she began to talk to me about how
her mother had loved Hanan and Fatima, and how she always felt sorry for them.

‘“It’s a shame,” my mother used to say,’ Hajja Amina told me. ‘“Poor Hanan needs her mother and her home. Go and buy her some chocolate. Get her a drum and some bangles.” ’ Hajja Amina went on to tell me that she remembered how once Hanan had started to cry, wishing that she could go to Beirut. Hajja Amina’s eldest sister stood up and told her, ‘OK, go ahead. You can catch a ride on the pussy cat; she’ll take you to Beirut.’

I left Hanan and Hajja Amina talking and walked in the back garden, smoking another cigarette. I felt as if my heart was torn in two, contracting all over again. Concerned, Hanan came to find me. I tried to make light of the pain I felt, but when she pressed me I told her that Hajja Amina had been speaking about her as if she had no mother.

‘Good heavens,’ I told her, ‘I don’t know what happened to you in 1958. I had no idea where you and your sister were then, I only saw you that one time at the house of your Uncle Ibrahim, when the troubles were just starting. I was stupid enough to imagine you were both all right. How did you manage to get by in life, all on your own? What happened when you had your first period? How did you manage to clean yourself and cope with the pain?’

‘There was no problem,’ Hanan responded. ‘I was happy when I got my period. What you should be asking is how I remembered to clean behind my ears or inside my navel!’ She gave me a big hug. ‘Stop it, Mama!’ she said. ‘You have to live in the present.’

She raced back inside, eager to see the kitchen, the back yard and the tent where the family used to thread tobacco leaves on skewers. Hanan had mentioned to me in the car that she had used Abu-Ghaleb’s house and lands as a setting in her novel
Beirut Blues
.

As she had done so often since I had come back into her life and she into mine, Hanan tried to ease my guilt and pain. I recalled how we had first been reunited, how I’d come to feel closer to her. Fifteen years earlier she’d asked me to have dinner at her hotel in Beirut, where she and her family were staying on a visit from London. I was sitting with her in a room overlooking a sandy shore. As we chatted, I began to understand why she’d wanted to see me alone. It was very rare for us to be alone together; usually when we met we’d make small talk, remain silent or eat, and that was it. This time she made me feel that I was her children’s grandmother and her husband’s mother-in-law, as she insisted that they come and sit with us. I wondered whether her delight at seeing me, and the love she was showing me, might sweep away all the sorrows buried in the past.