The Locust and the Bird (6 page)

I knew that if I wanted to buy something I would have to steal some lira. So the following day, when my sister told me to go up to the attic and bring down five bibs to sell, I brought down ten bibs, keeping five of them hidden around my waist. I made my usual rounds, playing on people’s sympathies and
working hard. When I’d sold them all, I hurried to look for the sweet seller, handed over the extra money I’d collected, and bought hazels, gumdrops and candyfloss. Then I rushed over to the girl who had sneered at me, showed her what I had in my hand, and said I’d share them with her. I prayed with all my might to Imam Ali that she’d take some and become my friend. She took everything I’d bought and ate the lot. Then, regardless of my wooden clogs, she played with me for a little while before running off.

By this time I was sure that Mother no longer loved me. She did whatever Manifa, Abu-Hussein and Ibrahim told her to do and carried all the family problems on her shoulders. If my nephew became constipated, she’d fly into a panic; or, when Hasan failed to visit us for two days in a row, she imagined he’d been burned in the bakery where he worked. And as she became increasingly anxious, Ibrahim’s frown deepened.

All day I would long for the night, when I could get into bed with Mother and bask in her warmth and affection like I had back in Nabatiyeh. Only then was I free of my household responsibilities. Since my sister had given birth to a new baby boy, my workload had increased. Now I had to take my two nephews to their respective schools each day, before returning home to the bibs and scarves. Having made my rounds peddling the bibs, I then had to bring the boys their lunches. Back home again, I helped my sister – rock the cradle, wash the nappies, hang them on the line. Next I’d hurry back to the schools, collect the boys and bring them home, where they’d be given sweets. Because I was with them I got some too. Then we’d play ball near the house.

One day when we were playing, I picked up the ball and held it close to my chest, ignoring the boys who were yelling at me to throw it to them. I held on to it tight, hoping that the neighbourhood children would see me and assume my
parents had bought it for me – parents who lived, perhaps, in one of the huge houses with wide, wrought-iron balconies and windowpanes of coloured glass. I found myself waving up at a balcony, even though it was empty, until the shouts of my nephews brought me down to earth again.

As the Adha feast day
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drew near, I heard the local girls chattering about their new dresses. I asked Mother about my dress for the feast, but she told me to be patient: my brother-in-law and Ibrahim were discussing the matter. Ibrahim suggested they share the cost of a piece of cloth and my sister could make me a dress, but Abu-Hussein insisted they buy me a second-hand one, because my sister was too busy. But when I saw the dress – with brown patches under the arms and a yellow line round the neck – I burst into tears. They also bought me a pair of second-hand shoes with huge soles and steel tips. I screamed and cried and swore by the Prophet Muhammad and Imam Ali that I would boycott the feast altogether.

I took out all my anger and distress on Mother.

‘Tell them to buy me a new dress,’ I screamed as I pounded her with my fists. ‘Go on, tell them!’

Abu-Hussein began to scold me.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘every day is a feast day. Every day that God is not defied is a feast day.’

Then I had an idea. I remembered how Khadija, Ibrahim’s wife, had made me take their daughter, who was three at the time but hadn’t yet learned to walk, with me ‘begging’. She hoped that, if I begged from strangers, a miracle would occur and my niece would get to her feet and walk. I had been afraid that this custom was observed only in Nabatiyeh; it was quite normal in the south to visit seven houses asking for a
piece of bread to get rid of a sty. But to my utter amazement, no one in Beirut was surprised at my request. They gave my little niece food, fruit and sweets without fail.

If only I could find someone to push me from house to house in a pram, asking, ‘Please give this little girl a nice dress for the feast so she’ll start walking’; or, ‘Please give this late walker some shoes for the feast so she can stand up’; or, ‘Please give this deprived child some white stockings and a wicker purse for the feast’. But who would push me, and where would I get a pram big enough? I was defeated.

It was the custom for the adults to give children money on feast days. My mother and Manifa gave me a little money; Ibrahim and Abu-Hussein declined. So, on the day of the feast, I put my money in my pocket, grabbed my nephew Hussein and, pretending we were off to visit my brother Hasan, set out for the Beirut pine forest, where the children’s activities were being held. I knew I’d be in trouble if I got caught, because it was much too far away for me to walk. On the way there the girl who’d eaten all my sweets pointed a finger at me and began to sing, ‘We’re enemies now. If you talk to me, you’ll die.’

I didn’t want her to see me anyway, in that awful dress and those embarrassing shoes, so I walked behind her with Hussein, who was just five years old. We walked between the high trees, watching the world pass by. I grazed on pickled cucumber and parsnips and bought everything for us to share – even fresco, a sorbet made of crushed ice and syrup. I rode the swing with him at my side. As it soared up the children all yelled, ‘We’re the champions, yah, yah!’

Before we headed home, I cleaned our shoes lest the red earth give us away. Our trip to the pine forest must remain a secret, I warned Hussein, or I’d be punished.

6
Or Eid: religious festival for breaking the fast of the month of Ramadan.

The White Rose

I
T WAS A
while before I was allowed into the city centre, but finally one day Kamil took me to Burj Square, where he sold sewing materials from a stall alongside Abu-Hussein and Ibrahim’s haberdashery stall.

‘Hey, Kamil!’ I shouted. ‘This is the real Beirut; not like our neighbourhood. This is the one we always imagined!’

I took everything in: the tram that my brother Ibrahim drove in the mornings before going to work with Abu-Hussein at their stall, the cars with horns blaring, the horse-drawn carts, the liquorice-juice seller clanging his little cymbals, women without headscarves and men wearing sirwals,
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just as they did in the south. I didn’t know where to look next. I wanted to touch everything: cheeses of every sort and colour, chocolate, dresses, and shops selling gold. I was enchanted; it was as if I’d become a character in the huge billboard above the square, which showed a sad-eyed woman facing a man wearing a fez, with a white rose blossoming between them.

The poster was as tall as a building.

‘That’s a movie,’ Kamil explained.

I was rooted to the spot, completely immobilised, enthralled by the woman’s beauty. She was smiling and her white teeth were dazzling. She was wearing proper lipstick, she hadn’t made do with rubbing a peeled walnut on her lips
the way Apple and I used to, and her hair fell around her face. I took off the sheer white headscarf that Abu-Hussein insisted I wear, and tried to replicate her hairdo, till Kamil grew impatient, gave me a punch and dragged me down a side street. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the face on the billboard, especially the tears on her cheeks, which looked just like soap bubbles.

I hurried home to tell my sister, who was still busy sewing, about all I’d seen in Burj Square, especially the huge poster. Manifa told me that everyone was going crazy over the film, which was called
The White Rose
, in particular over the famous singer Abdal-Wahhab who starred in it. With every waking minute, every hour, every day that passed, I pestered Manifa to take me to see it. Eventually she gave in, as long as I promised not to tell a soul, not even Mother. When I heard her telling her husband that she was off to visit her sister Raoufa, and was taking me with her, I was astonished and relieved. Maybe I wouldn’t burn in hellfire after all for telling lies. Even my sister, who prayed and fasted regularly, lied to her husband.

It was dark in the cinema, but I managed to see the large space, with seats close together. When the music started I couldn’t tell where it came from – I couldn’t see a radio. Then suddenly there was a light on the wall with lines on it. I looked around but couldn’t make out how the lines were changing along with the light and music. Everything seemed to come from a narrow beam of light, accompanied by streams of dust, shining from a hole in the wall behind us. Then a woman, a cat and some people moving around appeared in front of me.

I whispered to my sister, ‘It’s just like a magic-lantern show, only these people are moving!’

The heroine, Raja, played with her cat and another woman scolded her. A man kissed Raja, his daughter, then
kissed the woman who had been scolding her. A young man named Jalal (played by Abdal-Wahhab) arrived wearing a fez, and found Raja kneeling to pick up her broken necklace.

He knelt down beside her and began to sing, ‘No jacket, it makes me weep.’

After the film ended, the cinema remained dark. Manifa tried to hurry us out, but I wouldn’t budge. I wanted to stay in my seat. Why had the actors spoken with such a funny accent, I asked; I had understood little. They were talking in Egyptian dialect, Manifa said.

‘What is Egyptian?’ I asked.

‘There is a country called Egypt where all the films come from,’ she answered.

I wanted to tell her I’d like to get a jacket for Abdal-Wahhab, because he kept singing and crying, ‘No jacket, it makes me weep,’ but I was scared she wouldn’t let me. Could I steal Ibrahim’s tram driver’s jacket? I thought of its drab khaki colour and the sweat stains under the arms. Should I steal Abu-Hussein’s jacket? The sleeves would have been too short for Abdal-Wahhab and it wouldn’t even have reached his waist. Quite apart from these considerations, my brother-in-law prayed and read the Quran, whereas in the film Abdal-Wahhab actually spoke to a woman, sang to her, embraced her, then whistled as he hurried on his way. Such different men could never wear the same jacket.

That film,
The White Rose
, stayed with me. If I changed my name from Kamila, which means ‘perfect’, to Warda, which means ‘rose’, I told myself, I would be closer to the people in the film. I decided the movies were better than eating a whole tin of treacle, better even than talking to the Beirut girl or playing house in the vegetable patch with Apple.

After my trip to the cinema, I saw my easy-going brother Hasan in a new light. I nicknamed him the lute lover because he was obsessed with the lute. He loved to play it for Manifa and me when we visited him in his tiny room. I asked him in a whisper if he’d seen
The White Rose
and if he could sing like Abdal-Wahhab? He looked to left and right, then asked Manifa if her husband and brother Ibrahim were about. When she signalled no with a laugh, he began to hum and pretended to pluck a lute. Then he sang:

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

Then he mimed holding a rose in his hand and gazing at the flower.

I asked if he understood the Egyptian dialect, because I hadn’t. Who had taken me to the film? Hasan asked, amazed. I lied and told him that I hadn’t seen it, but our sister laughed and admitted she’d taken me. From this I understood that she was not afraid of Hasan; unlike her husband or our gloomy brother Ibrahim. In fact, she joked with Hasan and laughed in his presence.

Some time later, when my memories of the film had faded, Mother took me to visit my poor sister Raoufa, whose husband beat her whenever she criticised him or asked about the money he lost on betting on horses. I was astonished when Raoufa broke down to Mother.

‘He’s left us here on the mat and betted away everything. Dear God, I’ve actually thought about going out on the street and begging,’ she said.

Despite Raoufa’s distress, Mother never offered to seek help from Manifa’s husband, nor from Ibrahim or Hasan, who had no money but might have brought her some bread
from the bakery. I was so upset that I decided I should run away and live with the actors from the movie, in a place where people spoke to each other kindly and were concerned for each other’s welfare. I knew for sure that they were cut from a different cloth than me, because they had all been to school.

7
Peasant’s baggy trousers.

Stone-Bearing Donkeys

I
N THE SPACE
of a night and a day, our house turned into a home of weeping and wailing. Manifa died very suddenly of fever. She was bitten by a rabid rat that was hiding in the pile of wood we used to heat the boiler.

Mother blamed herself for my sister’s death. Coming to Beirut and staying at her house had brought bad luck, she said. She gnawed on her fingers, wishing it had been she who’d gone to collect wood that evening, not Manifa. She blamed the doctor too, for not connecting the bite with her fever; and for not realising till too late that Manifa had rabies.

My brother-in-law hugged his children and cried. It was the first time I’d seen a man crying, simply dissolving into tears, except for the men playing Imam al-Hussein in Nabatiyeh Square during the Ashura
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commemoration. They would wail when Imam al-Hussein held his baby son and bade him farewell, knowing the end was near, as the enemies’ arrow had struck the baby in the chest.

After Manifa’s death I became a stone-bearing donkey. I was just like those beasts of burden that carried stones between the villages, with bleeding sores on their sides. Back
in Nabatiyeh, Apple’s mother had given barley to them. ‘You donkeys have to heave stones all day,’ she would say to them, ‘so here’s something to soothe your weary legs and backs.’ The donkeys would stop their braying and devour the barley. So what was my reward to be, I wondered?