The Locust and the Bird Read Free Page A

unpack, hoping we could all go home to Lebanon.
    We did return – every evening for a few seconds, accompanied by the commentary on British television. I saw Beirut wrapped in a black cloud, transformed by balls of fire, overrun by fighters, the Lebanese people fleeing in terror, hiding in shelters, in corners, lying dead on roads, killed by snipers. They spouted everywhere, mysterious creatures that exhaled only when their human targets fell to the ground. I had been certain that I was going to be killed by one of them no matter where I hid. That, combined with my fear for my children, was reason enough for me to flee not only Beirut but also Lebanon.
    In a new country, with a new culture and language, I began for the first time to think about where I had come from, about the culture in which I had been raised, about what I had left behind. To understand the violence and why Beirut had become a demon playground – a bleak name even for the Lebanese to utter – I needed to write. Yet, to my horror and bewilderment, each time I sat down to write I saw myself as a five-year-old, hiding in the dark behind a door with my mother, shaking with fear, my mother’s hand covering my mouth as a face spied on us. The image kept recurring.
    I was scratching at old scars. Why, in London of all places, had the war inside me erupted? I had been confident that I had released my mother from that box inside my mind; and that marrying and having my own children had mended the rupture between us. And now I was being taken by myfountain pen from the cold of London to the haze of that room in Beirut where we had hidden behind the door. I felt again the confusion that bubbled inside me each time we took a different and unfamiliar route, rather than the one to the doctor’s, even though at home I had heard my mother announcing that she was off to get a calcium injection to help straighten my bow legs. Yet instead of seeing the rough wrought-iron grilles over the frosted-glass door of the surgery and coloured shadows behind the door, I saw a room engulfed in darkness, with brown furniture. And instead of the round, flat face of the doctor, his thin ginger hair combed like rows of vermicelli, I saw a tall man, with thick, brown, straight hair, wearing a black-and-white houndstooth tweed jacket, who handed me a hairless pink rubber doll, no bigger than my finger.
    Eventually the time came when I realised that my mother wanted us to be inseparable, as close as the orange and its navel – but only when she was meeting the man with thick brown hair. I was sharing her secrets. I was to be witness to her lies and fabrications, but unaware that she meant me to confuse faces and places, and doctors with lovers.
    Take the memory that begins under the walnut tree. In the background, I can see the desolate mountains, valleys, hills, red stones and thorny bramble bushes of Bhamdoun. I am tiny, running with my older sister, with my mother – not very much older than my sister and me – and with my cousin, Maryam. Then I see the tall man, with the brown straight hair, talking with my mother in Asfouri and I cannot understand a word. We call it the language of birds, so why are they speaking in words and not chirping and tweeting as canaries do? I see him lying with his head on my mother’s lap. His eyes are the colour of quince jam. They are half-open. Is he sleeping, or trying to sleep? I didn’t know then that eyes like his are called dreamy, passionate. My motheris singing to him, ‘Oh sleepy love’. I ask myself: Why is she lulling a grown-up man to sleep? Why did we have to run so fast to meet him? Couldn’t she wait to sing her song?
    A photograph was taken that day. I saw it with other photos when my mother took them out of her bra to show them to Maryam, who lived with us. In the photo, my sister and I stand side by side looking at my mother and at the man who, that day, is wearing a white blazer. I am trying to understand the game. He is