The Locust and the Bird Read Free

not mine. Take that story of yours, “The Persian Carpet”. The mother in it is depictedas a thief. She steals the carpet not caring that suspicion lands on Elya, the blind cane-chair repairer. I loved Elya! I used to give him food and sing to him. No, you don’t say anything about the mother having given up everything to get away from an ascetic more than twice her age, a man she was forced to marry. You don’t say that the husband sold all of his wife’s jewellery to save his shop …’
    ‘Mama,’ I began, ‘that story is about the little girl and her fascination with Elya because he manages to mend the chairs even though he can’t see.’ I stopped. I couldn’t continue. In my story the little girl trembled with burning rage when she spotted the lost Persian rug spread on the floor of her mother’s new house, when she visited her for the first time after her parents had divorced. Not only did she wish that she could throw off her mother’s arms from around her, she also wanted to sink her teeth into her mother’s white flesh. How could she have taken the rug and let the blame fall on the blind man?
    My mother protested, ‘Isn’t it fair for the divorced mother to be attached to a little rug? Doesn’t the rug belong to her also?’
    To myself I thought: Shouldn’t the question be why the divorced mother was not sufficiently attached to her two daughters? Didn’t they belong to her as well? Can my mother tell me why she didn’t try to fight for custody, even if she was sure it was hopeless?
    I almost spoke, almost snapped, but instead offered her the cliché about fiction: that the instant we put characters on the page, even when they are based on people we know, they become fictional. Art.
    My mother listened carefully. She lit a cigarette. She puffed and puffed as I imagined her lungs filling with smoke, ready to explode at any second.
    ‘But if characters become different, how come Muhammad and me, and you yourself, didn’t change at all in The Story of Zahra ? It was obvious you copied episodes, incidents and places exactly. The only difference is that your Uncle Ibrahim took the character of your father. Let’s not talk about this book any more. I suffered enough when it was read to me. My heart felt like it was in a mincing machine.’
    Before I could say anything my mother sighed, lifted her hand to shoo away an insect as it buzzed between her and me.
    ‘There’s nothing for you here,’ she told it. ‘Go to the kitchen. You will find all the crumbs you need.’
    This made me laugh and sigh in great relief.
    ‘Mama, didn’t you throw cheese to the little mice in the attic?’
    She giggled, and slapped her hand.
    ‘I stopped when I was told they would grow into fat rats.’
    But then she said, ‘In The Story of Zahra , Muhammad and I made you weep. You wrote that you wept so loudly that the whole world heard your cries, and sobbed. Except us. Although we weren’t far away, you showed us as selfish and heartless. So much bitterness from my own daughter!’
    I stood up, eager to leave, but then I registered my mother’s despair. I knew she would suffer, believing that she had upset me.
    I sat down and she changed the subject to the girl who had shown her writing to me.
    ‘Did you notice her shoes, like lamp posts … huge and high?’
    I hugged her.
    ‘You are so clever and witty.’
    But she had started me thinking. Was that really what I had written? My question went into the void, into the noise and commotion of the street, to my mother, to the book itself. More than twenty years ago: Who was I then? What was I thinking? And wanting to say?
    In the winter of 1976 I sat down in a small furnished flat in London and wrote the novel that became The Story of Zahra . With two suitcases and my two-year-old son, barely a toddler, and my six-month-old baby daughter, I had fled the war in Lebanon. My husband was in Saudi Arabia organising new work opportunities. And for two months I didn’t