My story is a long one

Description

Here is my story, written for me by my daughter Hanan… So that when I told it to her, I would stop blaming myself. We used to sit together without a recording device, scribbling in her small notebooks, which resembled diaries, to which she pasted pictures: one of me receiving a silver trophy when one of my daughters was crowned queen of dance, rushing to one of the judges and asking him to pretend to present the trophy to me. Another picture was of a topless woman, and another of women on a bicycle, wrapped in black abayas, driven by a young man. I would begin our conversations by saying, “My story is a long one; if it weren’t for the grasshopper, no bird would get caught.” Hanan never asked me what this meant, for she understood that a bird had chased a grasshopper and thus fallen into the trap. As soon as I fell ill, Hanan stopped writing my story. She hid all the papers in a bag, which she then placed in one of her closets. Then, two years after my death, she returned to my papers and continued my story.

Hanan tells her best friend about the book’s title, and her friend is surprised because she’s never asked me what it means. So her friend tells the story, beginning: “Tales of Weeping, a long explanation, if it weren’t for the grasshopper, the sparrow wouldn’t have caught its prey. It’s about a king who was strolling through his gardens when a grasshopper slipped into the sleeve of his flowing robe. A sparrow followed her inside the sleeve. The king sewed up the opening and sat on his throne, asking his subjects, ‘What’s in my sleeve?’ No one knew what was in the king’s sleeve until a man named Sparrow stood before him. He had been tormented by his love for a woman named Grasshopper, and his mind was consumed by thoughts of his beloved. He began his story by saying, ‘Tales of Weeping, a long explanation, if it weren’t for the grasshopper, the sparrow wouldn’t have caught its prey.'”