The Locust and the Bird Read Free Page B

standing now and lifting her up in his arms as though she were a baby. Each of them takes turns being a baby. Years later I saw the photo again, this time with a stab of agony. The rocks, the walnut tree, the summer sky, my mother’s laughter, and her frail shoe almost falling off her foot – they were all there. But where my sister and I had once stood was a blank spot.
    Was I really there with my sister? Did I really hear my mother singing to that man ‘Oh sleepy love’? I held another photograph. In it my mother, my own family and the family of my uncle are gathered on the rooftop of our house, surrounding my cousin who was about to take the boat for America. I thought of rubbing my mother’s face out of the photograph, just as she had done to my sister and me. I didn’t, though. It wasn’t until much later that I understood what held me back. It was because, although she is looking at the camera, it is as if she cannot see it. It is as if she is already far away from us. In the midst of her family, she is gazing off at the future.
    ‘So,’ my mother persisted, ‘you haven’t answered my question. My life story – why don’t you write it? Perhaps you are not curious to know about my childhood, and why I left you?’
    We were still sitting on her extremely noisy balcony. The ashtray cradled her many cigarette butts. No, I had neverwanted to hear her story. And whether from fear of pity or sadness, I didn’t want to intensify the past. It was gone and the distant years had faded away.
    ‘Listen, Hanan, listen to me, habibti [darling], I don’t think I can bear keeping my story to myself any more. I am warning you, if you are not going to listen to me, I will tell it to the walls – or maybe to that girl with the lamp posts on her feet.’
    I wasn’t ready. I was afraid that she would seduce me, as powerfully as the ocean tempts someone to plunge into its cool on a hot day. I feared that she would weave her charm around me, creating a web made from sugar. I would succumb like so many before me: old, young, women and men. I would find myself believing every word, even when I should doubt her. I knew perfectly well why she wanted to tell me her story. She sought forgiveness. But how could I betray that first realisation of mine as a child that it was places that snatched away loved ones, that it was that fake doctor’s surgery that took away my mother?
    How could I forget the times when I heard thunder – and wondered if my mother was also hearing it? Or when I saw lightning and wondered if she had seen it at the same moment I had? Or when I shouted, ‘He ha ho!’ and didn’t know whether the breeze carried my voice across the neighbourhood to where she lived? How could I hush her voice, when she had held my doll to her breast, crying and singing to it as though it were her own beloved child:
Go to bed my little doll
so the little bird can come
to wake you up at dawn …
    And what about the moments when it was not I who wanted to bite my mother’s flesh, but my mother who was biting me, leaving a circle of teeth marks on my hand like a perfectdrawing – for in those days she was a child herself, and would bite in anger. Beatings were for older mothers.
    But now, neither of us were children. My mother handed me a cigarette, knowing that I didn’t smoke, and in fact that I’d never given up pleading with her to stop.
    I asked her if she wanted to go to a café by the sea.
    Her answer was, ‘I was never so desperate to read and write as I am now, if for no other reason but to write my story. Let me tell you how it hurts when a piece of wood and a piece of lead defeat me.’
    When I asked her what she meant, she said, ‘Isn’t a pencil made of wood and lead?’
    I looked at my hand. No teeth marks.
    My hand was ready to pick up a pen. For the first time I was ready to hold up our past against the light.
    Finally I said it.
    ‘Let’s begin.’
    In classical Arabic, as though she had memorised it over