Free The Locust and the Bird by Hanan al-Shaykh

nodded my head as if I understood.
    The pieces of paper he kept hidden away in his pockets were not poems, but letters from his brothers, his family, and relatives in the village. I was desperate to know why they wrote to him. I thought that people only wrote letters when they’d emigrated to Brazil or Australia, not simply moved to Beirut. Why didn’t Father write to us, asking after my health or that of my brother Kamil? After all, he was someone who composed poems and verses in the improvised form they called zajal . Why were Muhammad’s family so concerned about each other, while those in my family only bothered about themselves? Why hadn’t we received letters of condolence when my two sisters died? But then I thought about my uncle, the cobbler in the Nabatiyeh market, and my aunt who believed she had swallowed from a water pitcher a tiny snake, which was now living inside her. Neither of them had ever laid eyes on a pen and paper.
    I asked Muhammad to read me some of his letters, so I could hear what his family told each other. ‘Please,’ I begged him.
    He began to read me a letter from one of his brothers, and I concentrated on his mouth and eyes, as though I was observing a miracle.
My dear Muhammad,
How handsome you are and how beautiful your name! You are beautiful, and your body has been crowned with that wonderful name. You have become beauty personified, and now all men and women who set eyes on you are solemnly bound to love you. So don’t blame me for loving you so much!
    I rarely saw Muhammad without a book or magazine in his hand. They were seldom connected with his studies, but more likely to be poetry and stories. In our household the only books were school textbooks for my nephews, along with the Quran, of course, which occupied its special place on a small piece of furniture we called the washbasin because it had a slab of marble on the top. I questioned Muhammad about every book he was reading, and, in turn, he told me stories about the Caliph Harun al-Rashid, 10 Baghdad and slave girls, and about people who had lived hundreds of years before us.
    When Fatme asked me what we’d been talking about, I repeated everything he’d told me.
    ‘So it’s a history lesson you’re getting, is it?’ she remarked.
    When I was with Muhammad, I was like a cat wrapping itself around the feet of someone who’d given it a bit of meat or a slice of bread; or rubbing its body against a warm wall when it was cold.
    One day Muhammad asked me to go with him to see The White Rose . Even though I wanted to say yes, I found myself saying I couldn’t, because I would be late to pick up my two nephews from school. It didn’t occur to me that he was talking about going in the evening.
    ‘Do you want my brother to kill me?’ I asked in amazement.
    ‘Fatme will come with us,’ he said.
    ‘Listen,’ I told him, ‘even if Fatima, the Prophet’s own daughter, were to go with us, he’d still kill me!’
    Muhammad laughed and we agreed we’d go on Friday, the school holiday.
    And that is how it was. He gave Fatme a pack of cigarettes with the two tickets hidden inside. We went into the dark cinema and Fatme sat beside me. Muhammad arrived a few moments later and sat next to her. He leaned across to explain this or that scene to me while Fatme wiped her eyes and sighed. Once or twice she touched her hand to his head.
    Suddenly I found I could follow the Egyptian dialect; it was as though Raja, the film’s heroine, had lifted me out of my seat, put her dress on me, and taken me with her to see the gardens. I was with her as she picked the white rose; with her as the car drove into the countryside. I became her, my heart exulting as Abdal-Wahhab sang to me. What else could I do but sing along with him, whom I loved and who was mine?
    I longed for a gramophone and vases full of flowers. I wanted to wear a pleated skirt and a necklace. Why couldn’t I be like Raja in the film, someone who was loved and spoilt by