The Locust and the Bird (10 page)

My chest heaved with sobs as I told Father how Mother and Ibrahim planned to marry me off to my brother-in-law. I pleaded with him to intervene and to let me live with him. Father didn’t insist I must get married, or argue with me. He didn’t even pat my shoulder or invite me inside and offer me something to eat. Instead he said absolutely nothing. He must still be angry, I told myself, because Kamil and I ran away and went back to Mother all those years ago. He left me outside, so I hung about on the porch between the house and the shed where his wife baked bread. When night fell, he still didn’t offer me a place to sleep. I huddled in the shed, shivering with fright at the distant baying of wolves and jackals. Would they smell my scent, burst into the shed, and rip me apart? It was the hyenas I feared most.

Next morning Father didn’t come looking for me, and no one offered me breakfast. I was too proud to go and ask for food. As soon as his wife finished her baking and spread out the loaves to cool, piling them up before going back inside the house, I lunged at the discarded burnt crusts. Then I scouted around the back of the house as Mother had done, searching for wild vegetables, endive, perhaps tomato shoots, maybe even some chickpeas or bean husks. But all I could find were thorns; and all I could feel was the sun beating down, and the occasional gust of wind.

On the second day I awoke to find that my period was with me again. I remembered that Mother had sometimes used an old piece of cloth. I had only my undershirt, which I tore into strips, burying the soiled pieces under the rocks in the field. I was worried the chickens might peck at them and become ill. One chicken had started to follow me whenever I went to the latrine to crouch; it waited for me, and then followed me back. Its companionship was a great source of comfort; it was almost as though it understood my condition. I swore a solemn oath never to eat chicken again.

Hunger reduced my energy but did nothing to weaken my resolve. I endured, remembering Mother’s favourite saying: ‘By God, I will be so patient, until patience itself understands just how patient I am!’ Every time I felt hungry and weak, walking around the pasture, in the shed, or camping out on the porch, I remembered those words. I was so relieved not to be in Beirut; for me the city had come to embody my brother-in-law.

I only realised how tired and hungry I was when, on the third day, a neighbour of Father’s spied me wandering aimlessly. She asked me why I was out on my own in the blistering sun.

I fell to me knees, crying.

‘I’m hungry,’ I kept repeating, ‘so hungry.’

The woman took me by the hand and led me to her house. I told her I had run away from Beirut because I was to be married. The woman didn’t cease cursing Father’s cruel heart until she had me seated at her table and was bringing me a plate of string beans cooked in oil and a huge loaf of bread. To this very day I remember how wonderful that food tasted.

Once my stomach was full I could take in what the woman was saying.

‘So this heartless clown was deliberately starving you. I’ll cut my arm if he hasn’t already agreed to your being married off to your brother-in-law. Shame on your stepmother, Hind
¹¹
the liver eater.’

After I left the kind woman’s home, I ran to find my aunt with the snake in her stomach. She was frying two eggs in the most expensive animal fat, so that the snake would smell the eggs when she opened her mouth wide and come out. I forgot my misery and sat down, desperate to eat the delicious eggs.

When nothing came out of my aunt’s mouth, she yelled, ‘Of course you don’t want to come out, you wretched snake! Why come out when you can eat and drink all you want inside my stomach? I am going to show you. I am going to starve you!’

Then we sat down and ate the eggs before I headed to my cousin Mira’s.

I hid at Mira’s house for a month. My father would come to the house and ask for me, trying to charm Mira’s helper into betraying me, but she would tell him over and over again that I had already left for Beirut, while I hid under Mira’s bed. But then one day, while Mira was in the bathroom, Father caught me in the garden on my own. He cornered
me and gave me a terrible beating when I tried to run away. Then he took me by the hand and didn’t let go until I was back in the sitting room in Beirut. Later, I discovered that Father had been promised ten gold coins if my marriage to Abu-Hussein took place.

I managed to sneak out of the house and run to Fatme, to ask her about Muhammad. She told me he was still studying for his government position with the Sécurité Générale, and couldn’t leave before he had graduated in three months’ time.

I asked her to send him a message, but she shrugged and said, ‘How can he help you now from so far away? It is impossible for him to leave his studies.’

Although I had abandoned all hope that my family would give up on the idea of marrying me off, I made a plan. I decided I would kill my brother-in-law and Ibrahim slowly and so I began to add salt to the cod liver oil they took each day. I was convinced that salt was a deadly poison; I’d seen slugs shrivel up and die when we put salt on their tails as they crawled between the kitchen and the back door. Day by day I increased the dose of salt and watched the two of them close their eyes and purse their lips to swallow the oil. I was certain that I was on the path to my final escape.

Meanwhile the dresses kept piling up on the table, tempting me to try them on. I kept telling myself not to do so. I contemplated stealing them and hiding them at Fatme’s house; that way, when I married Muhammad, they’d all be mine. In the end my resolve was broken when I heard a particular song I loved on the radio. I selected a loose-fitting silk dress and spun around, watching the dress move with me, just like a plant or a sunflower. I gazed at myself in the mirror and remembered my forced marriage. Suddenly I was in a scene from a film: I was gripping the black wrought iron on the window and shaking it as if trying to break open the
bars of a prison. I twisted and turned, shouting in a mix of classical Arabic and Egyptian dialect, ‘Save me, ye people, save me!’ And then quietly I pleaded, ‘Muhammad, where are you? I need you.’

Unfortunately the salt failed to have the same effect on the two men as it had on the slugs; they didn’t shrivel up and burst. One morning I awoke to find the white wedding dress with an artificial rose tiara laid out for me. I ran to our neighbour Umm Fawzi and begged her to keep me hidden in her attic and bring me food and drink. She wept along with me, well aware she could do nothing to help.

‘I feel so sorry for you,’ she kept saying. ‘You’re just like the fly running away from the spider, not knowing it’s already doomed.’

‘“I don’t want him. Please help me!” ’ These were Raja’s words to her father in
The White Rose
. They came rushing back to me: ‘“I don’t love him. Please help me. I don’t love him!” ’

In the film, Raja’s father says, ‘I made a promise, and that’s it.’ My brother Ibrahim’s only response was to beat me. I don’t know how many hands it took to get me into that white dress, which was made of Atlas material – soft, shiny satin – and yet it scratched like pins and needles. But I do remember how I managed to slip from the clutches of those hands, run to the kerosene primus and smear black soot all over my face. Next I got the saucepans and smeared even more soot over my neck, exactly as I’d seen a mother do in Nabatiyeh when she lost a child. I tore at the dress and wrenched it off. I hurled myself at a pile of sacking we used to wipe the floor and wrapped myself in a sack, screaming and weeping. I rolled around on the floor, and then leapt for the kitchen window, but they pulled me back. All I could do was scream and cry as Ibrahim dragged me towards the room where Abu-Hussein was waiting. I shook him off and
ran to Mother’s mattress, clinging to her and weeping. In a rage, Abu-Hussein gathered all my beautiful dresses and tried to set them on fire. I heard Mother and Khadija promising him, as they snatched the dresses back, that they would make me behave.

On the third night I capitulated. I stood still, like a tree, as they forced me into the repaired wedding dress. But as soon as they’d brought me back to the room and I set eyes on my brother-in-law, I began screaming and pushing him away.

‘Bring me some rose water!’ I yelled. ‘Bring me some rose water before I pass out!’

This time Ibrahim was waiting for me by the door as I tried to escape.

‘Cut it out,’ he said, ‘or people will be saying that cousin of the seamstress has been playing around with your mind, or has done something worse to you!’

I didn’t understand what he meant, but I was scared that he might know about my friendship with Muhammad, or have discovered that I kept his photograph in my bra; that I’d gone to the cinema with him; that he’d urged me not to get married; that he’d asked me to wait six months for him. I was terrified they might harm Muhammad in some way and so I went back into the room. When I saw Abu-Hussein sitting on the mattress in the middle of his bedroom, waiting for me, I let out a wail and tried to open the door again. But it was locked from the outside.

‘I beg you, bring me some rose water. I’m fainting.’

No one answered and the door remained locked. My brother-in-law stood up and walked towards me. I screamed as I shoved him away. I struck myself, I cursed him, and hit myself harder. Then I held my breath, clutching my dress, as, undeterred, he lifted it up.

I felt an intense pain in my throat and between my thighs at the same time. I sank my teeth into my arm so deep that I
struck bone. When it was over, I saw blood between my legs. I pushed Abu-Hussein away and rushed back to the door and began pounding on it. To my amazement it opened.

I ran to Mother’s bed, where I found her sobbing. I huddled close to her, wrapping my dress around me, weeping and moaning as she wept and moaned with me. I made no effort to avoid staining her nightgown with blood. Nor did I say, ‘I want to kiss you before I die,’ the words I’d used once when I’d smashed a jar of quince jam, cutting my arm and causing Ibrahim to mutter under his breath that he wished I were dead. This time, when I emerged from Abu-Hussein’s room, I was truly slaughtered and the blood on the white dress was the proof.

11
Hind bint Ataba, who chewed upon the liver of the Prophet’s uncle, Hamza, to quench her anger at the death of her father and brother who were killed on the battlefield of Uhud.

How I Came to Be Married
to Mr Watch-out-or-else

A
ND THAT WAS
how I came to be married to Abu-Hussein, a man eighteen years older than me, who had criticised Mother for still nursing me when I was more than one year old. I used to think of him as Mr Watch-out-or-else. Every time I ran or jumped or burst into fits of laughter, the other adults would warn me. ‘Watch out or else,’ they’d say.

The man I married loved cleanliness and would repeat over and over, ‘Cleanliness is born out of faith.’ I would lift up the carpet and shove the dirt gathered by the broom underneath, rather than collecting it with the dustpan. He’d summon me and show me how to search for bedbugs in the mattress, squashing them between two fingers to demonstrate how it should be done. Seeing the blood oozing, I would defy him and turn away, holding my nose.

He searched for cockroaches in drawers and cupboards, in the kitchen or under the sink. He’d ferret out their brown-coloured eggs, which looked like bean kernels. Sometimes I thought of taking some and putting them in a box to see if a cockroach emerged with its body first or its moustache. I was convinced they knew he was their number one enemy and that they hid until they knew it was safe to come out. They concealed themselves from him everywhere, even in the pottery water pitcher. ‘Good grief!’ Mother screamed when the pitcher broke. The tiny baby cockroaches hadn’t even drowned; they simply scurried away and hid somewhere else.

I was married to a man who watched over me while I did the washing, demanding that I take extra care to scrub the three children’s clothing. He rubbed his fingers on the outside of the pots to make sure there was no trace of fat or oil left on them. Nor was he satisfied with that alone; no, he also had to put his nose to them and sniff them. But all that paled next to the way he would conduct an inspection of my feet before he went to sleep. I still shared a mattress on the floor with Mother, but he’d lift the coverlet, look at my feet, and spit on them if he thought they weren’t clean enough. ‘Ugh!’ I’d hear him say, after he spat. I neither moved nor tried to wipe off the spittle; instead I pretended to be asleep.

All his efforts to teach me how to clean and be a responsible housewife came to nothing. I would sweep the bedroom half-heartedly with one foot on the floor cloth, pushing it wherever was convenient. My husband would check whether I’d swept the floor under the chair, under the settee, and gone into all the corners. He soon realised that I never did, so he would move the furniture around piece by piece and watch as I swept. When I put the blanket and coverlet back on his bed, I didn’t bother to rearrange the sheets. If one of my dresses fell off its hanger, I left it lying at the bottom of the wardrobe. If I had to peel potatoes, I’d find myself peeling halfway to the centre. When I cooked, I’d burn the food. My husband could be under no illusion: I was cut from an entirely different bolt of cloth from the one that produced his first wife. I had none of her traits: patience, cleanliness, industriousness, composure and housekeeping skills. The reason I so lacked those virtues had nothing to do with my youth; it was because I was just like Father – at least, that was what everybody said. I’d inherited his comedian’s temperament – ‘A bird-brain, just like your father,’ my husband used to tell me. As for my capacity for stubbornness, my husband had seen nothing yet.

He got an inkling of my iron will after a relative from the south brought him a pail of yoghurt. When he caught me pouring out a glass of it, he scolded me and called me greedy. In fact it wasn’t simply greed that had made me want the yoghurt; it reminded me of Nabatiyeh, of our house, of the cows, of the fig trees and my friend Apple, whose mother had given me yoghurt to drink. Not content simply with scolding me in front of everyone, Abu-Hussein got up on a chair and put the pail of yoghurt on top of the cupboard.