The Locust and the Bird Read Online Free PDF Page A

asked Mother if the harvesters had left these bits for us, but she didn’t answer. It took a few days for me to realise why it was left. After the farmers had reaped the wheat ears and transported them to the silo in bulging sacks, they abandoned everything else as worthless.
    When we returned home, we were the same colour as the earth itself. We poured our caches of wheat grain on to a straw tray, which Mother had cleaned with both damp and dry cloths in case a lizard had slithered across it. She sent me outside to collect twigs from the thorn bushes. Mother used to say that my untamed curly hair looked like these bushes when I wouldn’t let her smear oil on it after it was washed. When I returned, Mother had mashed the wheat with a small grinder and kneaded it into little loaves. She used the thorn twigs as kindling, put the loaves on the fire and baked them. When they were cooked we gorged on them, one after another.
    Just before sunset she took us to another field to pick mushrooms that nestled between the wheat sheaves and the grass. We sang, ‘Come on, mushrooms, pile yourselves up, get into heaps!’ Mother fried them for us with some eggs.
    Months had passed since we’d run away from Father with his lentils. We hadn’t seen him since, but we heard village gossip. Mother assumed that he, in turn, must have heard how we lived on wheat left for the birds; and that we rarely visited the village shop, other than the time when I went in and burst into tears, begging for some treacle, and then returned home with most of it already licked off the aluminium plate. Mother remained determined to get the child-support payments she was due.
    One day she put Kamil into new navy-blue trousers and made me wear a clean dress, which my half-sister – my mother’s daughter with her late first husband – had sent from Beirut. We stood outside waiting, feeling proud and happy because we were off to market to get some meat, sugar, and treacle; and look for Father. When a peasant walked past with a tiny donkey as white as milk, Kamil latched on to it, grabbing its ears, and hugging it. The peasant told himhe could have the donkey in exchange for his trousers. My brother accepted the deal on the spot. He took off his trousers, handed them over, and went back to hugging and kissing the donkey – as if the stray dog that now slept beside him under the covers wasn’t enough. Mother was angry, but she took us to the market all the same, my brother riding on the donkey in his underpants. By the time we reached the market in Nabatiyeh, it was not meat I had on my mind, but coloured plastic bracelets and scarves called birds’ feet, because they tapered into coloured threads that looked like the feet of hundreds of tiny birds.
    We searched everywhere for Father.
    A man praying on his rosary took pity on us.
    ‘The moment your husband saw you coming he took off,’ he told Mother. ‘He melted away like a cube of salt, as the saying goes.’
    ‘And I hope God melts him too,’ Mother muttered.
    It was my turn to ride the donkey as we headed home empty-handed. Each time someone stopped Mother to ask whether she’d managed to force Father to pay up, she’d reply, ‘Good heavens, no! His heart’s made of stone. I might as well think of him as dead and put my trust in God!’
    Lying in bed that night with the dog and Kamil snuggled next to me, happy to be home, I wondered whether the cows were aware there was a donkey with them and whether they minded. I grabbed the dog’s ear and began to sing the song I’d thought of when I saw the empty wheat field:
Do not rejoice, oh long-haired wheat,
Tomorrow comes the scythe
To do a merry dance and tickle your stomach,
To cut off those long tresses.
The songs of the fields will fade when the locks are all gone.
    Eventually, we lost all hope that Father would help us. My mother did not have the heart to sell the cows so instead she found work picking oranges and lemons in the big citrus