the trees in lebanon
turning and turning in the widening gyre
the falcon cannot hear the falconer
(w.b. yeats, ‘the second coming’)
Some long-stretching years prior, Mme. Lebrun danced Giselle at the Palais Garnier. As she put it herself, she “spun like a mobile”, words ravished by critics and biographers alike, who all had rushed to tell her she had understood M. Adam’s composition more perfectly than any one of her illustrious predecessors. Following a string of heartbreaks, Mme. Lebrun was Giselle, even moreso after her recent engagement to a long-time admirer – she boasted to the press that this was the jewel in an already ostentatious crown. Night after night she would earn standing ovations and rushes of applause. Mme. Lebrun was Giselle. She was. Even the critics had said so.
Every evening, gazing into the mirror, she wondered at her own flatness – how easily her skin became a canvas upon which music would play itself into the audience, touching anyone who watched her body perform the story: the angle of her shoulder, neither too sharp nor too soft, the deftness of back and lightness of leg and other various wonders of the human body. She imagined herself as being just enough – just enough to be seen, but not enough to become bigger than her art. All it took was one smooth drag from her cigarette, and the threat of her ribcage made itself known. Smoke clouded around her face, obscuring it in a halo. Yes, she would think, just enough.
Now it is 1940, and around 24 years have passed. To her pride, Mme. Lebrun is still flat, but she no longer lives in Paris.
Lebanon, she puts it politely, is different to France, save the comfort of a common tongue and the occasional spray of cypresses (though even Lebanese cypresses look offensively feral to her in their sporadic growth and breadth). As a kind of balm, in her own back garden, she maintains those of the more manicured, more civilized variety, growing them proudly in a row – her soldiers standing to attention. They jut out from under the ground.
She is the same with her students: all six of them stood in fifth position, arms up, spines long, dwindling pathetically on their tip-toes. Only one manages to sustain en pointe, albeit waveringly.
“Girl, come here,” she calls to Zabian, though the other five stiffen at the order. Lebrun decided Zabian would become her protégée. She has the legs for it, most definitely. Most willowy. “Girl.” As she turns her head to face the Madame, her fifth position breaks elegantly. She emerges from pointe, retaining her posture, her arms falling to her sides as if already a prima ballerina. The little darling is aged only seven, but she outshines her elders, taking direction in class like a well-bred whippet.
She comes over shy, eyes cast down, but her toes are pointed and each arm swings in a perfect forty-five degree. A pity that Zabian is not so beautiful, covered in a downy pelt of hair, crowned at the eyes by a dense brow, which, when it furrowed, betrayed the bear-temper of her father brewing somewhere beneath. Mme. Lebrun calls to mind the day she caught the dear trampling on a brand-new dollhouse, and how she’d noted that would make a wonderful ballerina – if only she could prune and taper it all in.
“The rest of you can go.” she commands. Bellies suddenly snap back out, lungs distend, and backs cave over. Composure has broken, and Lebrun loses all interest in the other five, swaggering out in their cheap polyester pinks and periwinkles. As soon as they are out of the door, she zones out the sounds of their laughter.
“Look at me, girl. I’ve noticed something. En pointe.” Zabian meets her eye and holds a firm stare but says nothing; Lebrun likes that about her. Something of a kindred spirit, she thinks. Then, out of the blue, Madame stands from her chair, straightens her spine, claps, and barks: “Fouetté!”
Without hesitation, the girl pliés. Lifting her leg, she becomes a propeller, flaring her limbs in and out, her head snaps back into place. She bounces ever so slightly, moving like a fierce piece of fine machinery. But her foot is weak, her waist no longer fatless. Mid-spin, Lebrun takes one long arm and pushes it so hard into Zabian’s spine that the girl cries out and collapses, tangled and confused.
And, yes, that scowl is quite a fearsome display, an act well formulated, those little features are distorted with impish fury. But Lebrun is not scared – of course, what could there possibly be to fear from plumped cheeks?
“Your core is weak.” She says as she notes the same thing in her little book.
“Madame, I practise every day.” The girl replies, her hairs bristling.
“My girl, if you think practising every day is enough, you will never truly be enough.” The words are as calculated as footsteps. The girl grunts. Tries to pass it off as a cough. “Come here.” She gestures her pupil with one long finger, and they walk through the empty white studio into the kitchen to the back door.
Lebrun opens the door. It is the golden hour: beautiful yet cold. Lebrun’s trees and the girl all shiver together. She looks around apprehensively, taking in a sweeping vista, studying the shadows that dance on the ground, long black bars painted onto the floor by the setting sun. Lebrun wonders whether or not the girl even has a garden, but quickly pushes the thought out of her mind.
“You’re watching the cypress, no? You’ve seen one like this before?” She shakes her head in response. “You want to be like these. Look at how they stand – they are tall, noble, long, slender.” Around the edges of ‘slender’, her mouth bends wide. Zabian looks at her and tilts her head. “You are becoming big, my girl.”
Her bony fingers press around the little one’s waist and squeeze – there is far more give in her flesh than she cares to appreciate. The poor dear looks afraid. “Like the trees. Look. You grow only upwards – we are creatures of pedigree. What has your mother been feeding you?”
“Galayet banadura. Fteeleh nayeh.” Zabian mumbles. Lebrun just about pictures the macerated tomatoes and crushed walnuts swimming in oil, and the piles of raw, red, freshly-slaughtered lamb being dipped into salt and pepper with their bread. Lebrun had sometimes eaten in these peoples’ homes; had quietly felt she understood them by way of indexing their foods in her mind. She pats the girl’s shoulders, back, legs, and arms, pulling them outwards and upwards.
“You will eat only fattoush for six weeks.” The girl scrunches her face. Sour and bitter: onions, parsley, mint. “Then you will be good enough. You can go to l’école in Beirut. Perhaps someday even Paris.”
Neither of them realises that the sun has slipped under. Zabian nods, looks at the cypress trees, and memorizes each detail of their conversation.
Fevers begin to simmer; factions begin to form.
Mama had been working for two days on their feast for Eid. Zabian does not eat. She watches her uncles and brothers all eating, savouring everything down to the morsels, licking the salt from their fingertips, unfurling batches of khobz like sails on ships or white flags. That soil-smell of oregano and the sesame in the za’atarperfumes the air. They take their sweet time, but the atmosphere is dense – one place at the table is left empty. The food goes cold by the time the men are finished.
Mama, her aunties, sisters and cousins, they wash the steel plates (she can imagine that taste, the tang of metal), reheat and divide what has been left for them, then finally sit to eat. They rip the bread, devour chillies, tear the kibbeh with their teeth, grind walnuts down to dust. Pomegranate molasses smeared around their mouths. Zabian watches as the maw in her stomach growls. Hungry is all she thinks these days. She can feel her body digesting itself. But her waist is fatless, she is growing tall. What she does put on her plate is just enough. Only plants.
“My, my, Zabian! You’ll disappear! There is no meat on you! We ought to plump you up, no?” Different pairs of hands go to feed her but she bats them away every time. “There is no fat on her, God forbid, Ayisha, have you not been feeding her?”
“Oh no, I make her all her favourites. In fact, I have been waking up especially early just to make her all her favourites. Still, she refuses to eat my food! Ungrateful child! What can I do? She has her father’s stubbornness.”
Zabian scowls. Mama ought not to speak ill of the dead.
“It’s that woman, that Madame.” One aunt’s voice slants with mockery. “Those French Madames all look like paper. Nothing on them.” Their words make Zabian want to cover up, disappear, become a shadow. The aunt’s daughter laughs in accord. Cousin inherits aunt’s body: round, robust, larger than life. They fill the whole room; leave no air for anyone else. There’s dimples in cheeks and chins, meaty elbows, and her cousin’s pregnant belly swells like a zeppelin. Zabian wonders if she could jab her little needle-finger in there; perhaps then it will Pop! the way balloons do. No, she thinks better of it. Restraint, control, womanish. She grows only upwards.
“She doesn’t see her anymore.” Mama says, quiet. There’s shame in her voice.
Mama’s body is vast. There is much to carry on the shoulders. She works every day for ten hours – the work of pushing the broom, of cooking over fires, of wringing water out of clothes and beating them dry. Breasts and hips. Fists and hands that were always a weltish pink and looked akin to rocks. All of them, the women, they sit on the floor around this table, and share their dinner.
Across the broad country of the family room, Mama has a grin which bears her teeth, draws sharp canines that resemble in just the right light, Zabian thinks, fangs.
Zabian casts her mind back, conjuring from her memory the day Madame visited Baba, when she saw them last. Mama refused to go with them, and instead had gone out to town, covering herself entirely, intent on meeting no one’s gaze. Nobody would get to look at her, “especially not that Madame”, she’d spat, leaving her daughter with her Baba.
Baba and Madame sat across the table from one another.
The woman had always been petite, but she was now near-translucent and Zabian feared she’d blow away with the wind. Her presence had withered and shrivelled. The skin sitting on her cheeks was papery, the blue veins beneath them raw, exposed, dully bruised. Her clavicles clanked against one another. Madame smiled at Zabian, much to her inward delight, but it was gummy, and her teeth looked brittle – she moved her mouth to say some words about kindred spirits. It made Zabian feel unwell.
After she had spent herself in winning a game of chase, Zabian crept back into the café and watched the two hiss at each other through pressed smiles.
“Now you be very, very careful,” Madame Lebrun said, whilst tapping a sharp nail on the table-top, “you ought to be very careful with that girl. You keep her occupied, you keep her under control, or she will grow up with one hand under your kitchen table without you even realising. And when she thinks she is big enough:” her hand moved to pass the salt, before toppling it over.
“And why would that be so terrible?” Baba had replied, cool, verging on cold as he gathered the spilt salt into his hand and chucked it behind his shoulder. “That would be so terrible because you would lose her. She’s my daughter. You’re smothering her. She’s dying. She will not come to your lessons anymore.” Madame Lebrun scoffed at him.
They smoked their cigarettes and drank their coffee in mutual distaste.
Her mother brought her home.
Baba did not come back that night. He was caught out after curfew, arrested, and three weeks later they received a letter:
Nous comprenons, en de circonstances non suspectes, M. Haddad a attrapé une pneumonie, et peu de temps après,
il est mort.
They sent a white sheet in the post (a short, formalised certification of his death). It accompanied his possessions: suit, wedding ring, lighter. His body was buried facing Mecca. Zabian does not go back to school, and she does not go back to her lessons. War breaks.
Womanhood is a heavy burden, even when you can’t feel it. One night, there are invaders in the house. They smother their identities under the cloak of the common tongue – French or German? German or Arab? Overwhelmingly huge, boxy, dark shadows in the house spitting from the grim fire in the alley. Djinn, one of them cries, djinn. So many hands. Zabian is tiny. All knuckles and nails. There is barely any fight left in her. She goes rigid, straight, tall. Snaps. Twig. Perhaps someday even Paris, the voice chants. Memory is one long howl. Perhaps someday even Paris.
Three years pass – they have moved away, and into the Kurdish hills. Zabian is ten now, and she eats only fattoush, since that is all they can afford. Looking out at the valley, she decides to practise on smooth, flat sandstone, the same place she does every day.
Plié, bien. Fouetté!
A whirling dervish, she casts her eyes up and imagines across the range: marches of cedars, undulating like the contortions of waves during a storm. Masses heaving themselves upon the slopes of the hills there, swirling and raging, a vortex of green lashings. Each individual seems to be drowning, heaped against each other, reaching towards the sky as if they were scrambling for breath, to be untangled from the web of their roots buried deep beneath. She envisions herself as the lone cypress at the top of the highest hill, jutting up straight and proud, stretching towards the sunshine a thousand miles away, stretching her branches further and further upwards, her arms breaking from her shoulders. They become wood, they are strong, they are lean, long, and wringing her as thin as possible, snapping spine, she spins as her vertebrae rip apart, craning neck, her ribcage beautiful and bare and fanned out, cracked, flat, perfect, just enough, just enough. Quick, she thinks, quick, spins faster and faster before her neighbour eventually outgrows her, choking her in the process, or some woodcutter cuts her thousand-years-history down in an hour and she, powerless, falls with only him to hear the sound, and all at once, turning and turning, there, she, a bomber-plane propeller. She stops spinning. Too weary to feel outraged, she spies a hawk carrying its still-twitching prey off into the distance. When she looks down, she half-expects branches for arms and thorns for fingers. Perfect, that would be perfect. No threat of womanhood anymore. Just sunlight, just water. Just enough.
They win Independence three months later, a victory not so much felt as known. When it’s safe enough, she visits Madame’s grave at her house, in her garden, underneath her cypress trees which were now gnarled and bowed by bomb-scars. The arms of the ones that survive grow outwards, fat, heavy. Somewhere in Paris she was sure they’d report Madame’s death. Perhaps a crackle on the radio, perhaps black marks in the paper – some lamentation. She was Giselle, she was.
She sits quietly beneath the scorched trees and imagines how it must feel to allow yourself to grow big, to grow fat, to grow heavy. Somewhere down there, Madame’s hair had grown outwards and filled her coffin – at least that’s what the old people had told her. Madame would be proud of her now; she was the edge of a leaf. Enough to be seen, but not enough to cast a shadow.
Everything is in pieces. No one lives here any longer. Just trees. She wonders about the trees in Paris. Pictures the Eiffel Tower, surrounded now by all those riflemen, and shivers. Metal is cold and brutal.
Instead, in a fleeting fantasy, she comes home from school to a smiling mother and father, both sat down to have dinner. They all eat, together, and when they are finished and full, she places one firm hand under the old kitchen table, now big and strong enough, and throws the damned thing over.
Studying her arm’s anatomy at work – long, lean – she observes the effect of every flinch, every twitch, imagines the flesh and bones and blood pumping beneath. Ever the good student, she pauses, folds a hand into a fist, and flexes. The promise of an angry muscle lurks under her skin, sliding up toward her shoulder, and then out of sight again, cat-like. No, not Paris. Not for her.
When Zabian gets back up and goes home, she celebrates by sitting with her mother in silence, and fills her stomach with the raw, red meat of a freshly-slaughtered lamb, sopping up the blood with thick white bread. The future is all upon them.
Written in an idle four hours mid-final exam season, but it felt more like throwing it up from my brain onto the laptop than really writing it.