The whole village came out to watch the spectacle of Hawa’s flight—all but my mother, who had been called away a few hours earlier by a neighbor whose wife had gone into labor with her first child. Though the baby shouldn’t come until after sundown, my mother said, the woman was nervous, and her husband insisted she come.
For my part, I was thrilled. I rushed out to the edge of the village. A crowd had gathered, a circle with Hawa at its center. Her flying machine was an ungainly contraption with pedals and wheels and adjustable wings, little more than linen stretched over wooden broom handles. People whispered that it was a strange amalgamation of a bird and a bicycle. I was the only one who believed she could fly. To me, Hawa’s linen wings looked like God’s angels.
Hawa pedaled hard, gaining ground and speed. As her path diverged from the crowd, I lost sight of her. I ran along behind her until I escaped the crush of people. By the time I caught sight of her again, she had reached the crest of a small ridge, and then she was airborne. The crowd went silent and stopped their taunting. No one followed her. The village whispered prayers and murmured fearful things.
Only I followed. I tracked Hawa overhead, into the fields. When I looked back, the crowd and the village were far behind us, nearly out of sight. Hawa’s wings held; I held my breath. Her shadow rushed over me. She hadn’t gained much height, but she was in the air, and that, I thought, counted as a miracle.
Because of my faith in her, I was the only one to witness her death. It began with an upward gust of air. Her wings wobbled, then dipped. The linen tore and separated from the wood. She didn’t cry out as she fell, only angled her body toward the earth, smiling as though she were going to meet an old friend.
I rushed to her, but I didn’t have my mother’s skill at dressing wounds and setting bones. I cried out for help. We were too far for anyone to hear.
Before I could rise and run to get someone, Hawa gripped my wrist. “Allah calls to his daughter,” she told me, “and soon I must go to Him.” These are the only words of hers I can remember now. Time has reduced the rest to the mist of dreams. Hawa pressed my hand to her chest and related to me startling things, visions that had been revealed to her before she hit the earth, wonderful and monstrous events that were to come: dark clouds, rippling flocks of shadows, winged flashes of light.
“But madame,” I said, for what she had told me had disturbed me, and I was afraid, “are these visions of blessing, or a curse?”
Hawa did not answer. Above us, the gray kites drifted into the south. Hawa’s eyes fixed themselves on the sky. I closed them each with a finger.
I treasured up her words as I returned home. My mother met me along the way, coming from her delivery. She was early, but I kept my curiosity to myself. I told her Hawa’s flight had ended in tragedy, but kept quiet about the visions she’d related. I was sure she’d be sorely angry with me for following Hawa into the fields, but she said nothing. At first I was relieved that she was too tired to chastise me. But as the first shadows fell over our faces, the fading light caught my mother’s skirts, marred with blood. Then I began to fear her silence. I asked her, as I was accustomed after a delivery, whether the baby was a little boy or a little girl. My mother bit her lip.
“Ya ‘albi.” She called me “her heart” only when she was overjoyed or gravely sad, and I knew then without having to ask that neither mother nor baby had survived. “The night falls over all of us the same,” she said, “but also the light, praise God.”
* * *
When I was born, my mother named me Laila so I would not fear the night. “Allah, in His infinite wisdom,” she used to say, “has created the darkness to remind us that He has given us the light.”
But in truth, I have always been afraid of the night and the doubt it brings. When we arrived in Amrika and I picked up a paintbrush for the first time, I was sick with terror, and more than terror, guilt. Who was I to pick up a brush and freeze the soul of something, knowing the world was ever-changing and nothing would appear this way again? Even a piece of fruit ages and dies, and there I was, trying to capture a robin or a hummingbird, seizing time in one hand.
Months have passed since I wrote here about Hawa. I sketch more birds than I write these days, maybe because I’ve never been one to raise my voice or speak my mind. But if I fill this book with drawings and say nothing of myself, I fear I won’t recognize my own hand when the colors have dried. So as I set out with my paints and these pages, I will write down where I come from. And to keep the fear at bay, I will imagine you here again before me, little wing, and this time I will tell you everything.
Let me start over. I was born on a sunny day in early March of 1920, the day Emir Faysal declared Syria to be an independent Arab state, in a village not far from Homs. You never knew my birthday, did you? My mother tells me my grandmother took all the flour and oil and clarified butter in the pantry, went down to the butcher, and had a lamb slaughtered. She gathered all the women of the village together—for in the bilad my mother and her family knew everyone; my mother had delivered every last one of their children—and together they baked bread and kibbeh and prepared huge trays of kunafeh while the men drank ara’ and danced the dabke as though it were a wedding. All this celebration was for Syria, not for my birth, though my mother always says the rejoicing and zagharit went to my head.
The French saw to it that the young kingdom didn’t last six months. When the French army took Damascus in July of that same year after a ten-day siege, my father’s textile business took a sharp downward turn. My mother’s milk dried up. But I was the kind of child who struggles, and my mother had already birthed two other children, twins who would have been my older brothers. George had died of pneumonia in childhood, but God had spared my brother Issa. I grew up to be a skinny, scab-kneed girl with teeth too large for my mouth, and for years Issa would tease me that I had gnawed my way out of death’s grasp, until well into adolescence when my features had balanced themselves and I had gained some plumpness in my cheeks.
You knew my mother as a wise woman, the kind of woman who would listen to anyone with a problem, who always had coffee in the house to serve a grieving family who had lost a loved one in the night and enough flour and ghee to make a tray of bitlawah for the celebration of a birth. She was the keeper of life and death. Her face, creased by years and by the sun, was the first thing most people had ever seen—and the last. People recognized her at once, even children who met her for the first time. The elderly and ailing, those who had lost the ability to recognize even their own loved ones, still knew her. Perhaps it was this mystical power that set her apart from the other women; perhaps it was this that separated her from me. For as long as I have been her daughter, my mother has been the loneliest woman I have ever known.
My mother used to say her loneliness arrived with the locusts. She said they came as a dark storm from the heavens, descending upon the crops until they had eaten every fig to its stem, devoured the bark from every olive tree, and reduced the fields of wheat to dust and a fearful hum. This was during the Great War, before my parents met; you would not have been born yet, ya ayni. The Ottoman armies had begun conscripting Christian men in those days, stocking their ranks with my mother’s brother and father, with uncles and husbands and neighbors’ sons. Throughout the province of Syria, particularly in Mount Lebanon, people suffered from the taxes and from the famine that followed the locusts. In those days families had little, and what little they had stored up for hard times was quickly depleted. My grandfather, already ancient, stopped eating so that his remaining children would not go hungry.