Free The Locust and the Bird by Hanan al-Shaykh Page B

hereby my witness,’ had meant. And it explained what the turbaned sheikh and all those men weredoing in our house. By this time Fatme was standing next to me, swaying from side to side, clucking in sympathy. I ran home to ask Mother whether it was true.
    ‘The engagement,’ Mother lied to me, ‘was nothing more than a mock marriage for religious purposes. We did it so that God would not punish you if your brother-in-law saw you without a headscarf.’
    I ran straight back to Fatme’s.
    ‘Too late!’ Fatme told me. Muhammad had already left for his school in Sidon, swearing he’d never return to Beirut.
    My heart sank, but Fatme hugged me and told me that Muhammad was deeply in love with me. She said he had simply melted in the face of my beauty and sense of fun; in fact, he had been in love with me ever since I asked him for his jacket to send to Abdal-Wahhab.
    Her words made me sob. Was it possible that I was loved? I wept even more because Muhammad had gone away and might never come back to hear what I had to tell him.
    He didn’t stick to his resolution, though, and the day came when I found him waiting for me by the fountain again. The sight of him – standing in the sunlight, watching the dragonflies playing on the water – made me realise how much I loved him. But I felt shy and afraid he’d reject me.
    ‘OK,’ I told him. ‘I did say the words, “You are hereby my witness,” but it was a mock marriage, so if Abu-Hussein saw my hair I wouldn’t enter hell. That’s it and not for tirrr .’
    Muhammad looked at me strangely and asked me what that last word was. I repeated it for him: ‘ Tirrr .’ When he asked what I meant by it, I hid my face, embarrassed, mortified, and unable to answer. I’d no idea where the word had come from, nor if it was a real word or I’d invented it to describe what happened between men and women. Was tirrr marriage? Kisses? Having babies?
10 The fifth Abbasid Caliph. He was a great patron of art and learning, and is best known for the unsurpassed splendour of his court in Baghdad. Some of the stories of The Thousand and One Nights were inspired by his opulent lifestyle, and King Shahryar (whose wife Scheherazade tells the tales) may have been based on Harun himself.

A Single Drop of Blood
    M UHAMMAD BECAME AS important to me as eating bread. When he gave me a bunch of violets, my mind went aflutter and my heart pounded. Was the bunch of violets really for me? I’d ask, and he’d reply that it was. I began to pirouette like a butterfly.
    Then the day arrived when a single drop of blood on my underwear sent me crying in a panic to Fatme, convinced I was about to die.
    It would seem that, when I spotted blood on my underwear and assumed it meant I was going to die, I was not too far off. It was as if that single drop of blood was an alarm bell, one that could cancel time – by days, months and years.
    My family tricked me into letting someone take my measurements, by pretending I was the same size as Khadija’s cousin, who couldn’t be there for a fitting. But then I found, quite by chance, a white wedding dress and realised I was about to be married. I burst into tears and began to tear at my hair, holding my hands up to Mother and Khadija to show them I really had pulled out a clump of it.
    ‘Don’t do this to me,’ I screamed, beating my chest. ‘God have pity, God have pity!’
    I ran to Fatme to tell her what was happening. She confessed that my brother-in-law had only let me learn how to sew so I could become a carbon copy of his former wife, Manifa.
    ‘Even you, Fatme,’ I sobbed. ‘Why didn’t you warn me, why didn’t you scream at my brother-in-law and shame him?’
    How on earth could I have believed that my family wanted me to learn to sew so I’d have a profession?
    ‘How could you do this to me?’ I asked Mother through my tears.
    She cried too and so did Khadija. But they had tricked me and now they were trying to talk me into the marriage.