As Though She Were Sleeping (11 page)

She never told Mansour about leaving the house to walk through the town. In the morning, feeling stuffed full to the brim like a heavy ball, she would go out for a walk. But Mansour saw her. Nearing the Church of Our Lady of the Tremblings, where the Virgin Maryam had felt the sudden fright of a mother worrying that her son would be sent over the precipice into the deep wadi, Milia sat down on a white stone overlooking a grove of olive trees and let her gaze wander. Mansour saw her by coincidence. He had come out of his shop to smoke his morning narghile in Sulayman’s coffeehouse. He saw her shadow from behind and followed her. She was like a rolling ball, a shape impossible to mistake, and so he followed it. When she perched on the small white boulder he hid himself behind a wall. He did not come any closer and he did not speak to her. He stood motionless, hardly daring to breathe. She stood up and began to walk in the direction of home and he went to the café. In the evening he came home and found her asleep, as usual. He woke her up. She made his dinner and went back to sleep without any exchange of words between them.

The next morning as she was making his coffee he came to her wanting to kiss her but she stepped away. He spoke to her but she did not answer, simply giving him a look of rebuke. Mansour was absolutely certain that she had not seen him at the church. He was not prepared to believe her stories
about these dreams of hers. He felt sure she was feigning it all, giving herself the freedom to interpret matters however she liked. He asked her what the matter was but she did not answer. He felt smothered. He had gotten used to the silence, to living with a woman who was more like a ghost, but her disgruntlement and sadness were becoming too much to endure.

Tell me – what is the problem?!

You know.

No, I don’t know, so tell me.

It’s nothing, she said, and turned her back and left the kitchen for the sitting room. He followed her and put his hand on her shoulder. She turned around and said, Take your hand off me,
please
.

What is it – what did I do?

You were following me.

Me?

Yes, you! You stood behind the wall at the church. But I saw you anyway.

When was that? he asked.

I don’t know, maybe yesterday, or maybe a few days ago.

How did you see me?

I saw you through my back.

No one sees through their back!

Looking at Mansour, she saw him take the shape of Musa. She saw his lower lip tremble and the tears cling to the underside of his eyelashes. She leaned over, wiped his eyelids with her fingertips, and kissed him there. Don’t lie to me anymore. Promise me you won’t lie.
Yallah
, tell me.

I promise, Mansour said, penitent.

That was the day on which Mansour realized that he was afraid of this woman. He heard her call him Musa but he said nothing about it. A time or two before he had flared up, raising his voice at her when she called him by her brother’s name. My name is Mansour, he said. Why do you pin your brother’s name on me?

I don’t know, she said. Maybe it’s because I miss him.

Miss anyone you want, and yes, I know he’s your brother, but my name is Mansour.

Mansour, she said. Fine. You are Mansour.

But Musa did not disappear. One time he heard the name, or thought he heard it, when she was asleep. He was making his usual moves when he heard the name. He retreated and tried to go to sleep. But he couldn’t and so he went to her again and took her, deceiving himself into thinking he had heard the name wrongly. But he felt the utter strangeness of it all with a sense of alienation that he could not shake off. This woman was a stranger here. He no longer knew how to talk to her. Her low voice made him wary of voices in general, and her languid eyes seemed focused only on distant points. He had an uncomfortable sensation of never being able to reach them, wherever it was they went.

That morning when she leaned toward him and brushed her fingers along his eyebrows and kissed them, Mansour felt like a child. He had as much as admitted seeing her by chance and following her, and standing behind the wall looking at her as she sat on a rock in front of the church steps.

Now really, how did you see me?

She said she had seen him with her back because she could see everything in her dreaming. She told him how a person sees in all four directions when dreaming. She asked him about his dreams. He never saw dreams in his sleep, he said.

That can’t be, she said. You just don’t remember your dreams. She explained to him that a person has to train the memory. Dreams are an extension of a person’s life. We live as much by night as by day, she declared, and anyone who can’t remember his dreams is only living life by halves.

She heard her grandmother’s husky voice explaining the importance of dreams in a person’s life.

I’m not like that, said Mansour. I never dream, never ever.

Everyone dreams, she said.

For three months now Milia had been growing rounder, with pregnancy and sleepiness and thirst. Her breasts were swelling and her face had grown radiant. He asked her why she walked by herself every day. Why didn’t she come with him? They could stroll together in the evenings after he had returned home from work. He asked her if it made her sad to live so far away from her family.

She regarded him without answering at first. Then she said she wanted to acquaint the little boy with the town.

Which little boy? asked Mansour. For us, I hope so! But my heart tells me it’s a girl. My mother says that if a pregnant woman gets more beautiful as she gets more pregnant, that means it will be a girl. And you are getting more beautiful all the time.

I said
boy
. He is a boy.

On the day she covered her tiny breasts with her crossed arms, it dawned on Milia that she was on her way to a remote place from which she would never be able to return. In that rocky pool embedded in the sea her bare breasts exposed her. Her breasts betrayed her and it was on that very evening that the lamb appeared to her in a dream that would recur so frequently that Milia would no longer be able to tell it. Waking up, she would simply recall it as if it had happened in fact. In her sleep it came like an anticipated monthly visitor: a small white lamb skipping across an expanse of green grass. Milia sleeps beneath a spreading fig tree, her eyes shut tightly and her small brown body curled into a half circle. The little lamb comes up to her and stands over her. He puts his cheek to hers. The little girl turns over to lie on her back. He steps back, hesitates, and then scampers toward her, leaps atop her, and puts his front legs on her chest. He pokes his head downward as though to eat the grass. The little girl who sleeps sees nothing but the
rays of the sun, piercing the lamb’s coat as they pour into her open eyes. The lamb’s little mouth wanders near her eyes so she closes them. She’s afraid he might think her green eyes are of a piece with the grass in the garden and swallow them up. She closes her eyes, feels the tiny lamb’s tongue on her neck, and breathes in the smell of the sun. The sun lamb quivers and gives off heat. There is a sharp pain at the pit of her belly, tangled somehow with the intense green all around her and with her closed eyes. Milia wakes up but she does not dare open her eyes. The heat encloses her and hot blood dribbles onto her thighs. She gets up and washes her thighs in cold water. She stuffs a towel between them and goes back to sleep.

Kharuf ish-shams
, she named him. The sun lamb. He arrived ringed by a blue halo that gave off a strong light but his appearance took on different aspects. Sometimes he ran over her little body, which expanded to become an unbounded pasture. Or he might perch on her chest and nuzzle her shoulders. Once he buried his head in her neck. She was constantly fearful for her eyes. When the lamb was there, contrary to habit, she would wake up but shut her eyes.

The little lamb vanished when the embryo began to form in her belly. He would not reappear until the end of December 1947 as Milia listened to the doctor’s voice telling her to push as she went into her long dreamsleep. That day the little lamb would reappear, leaving her with emotions of longing and fear so strong that they overpowered her caution: she forgot that she must keep her eyes closed to shield them from the lamb’s tiny mouth. And so she tried to open them, before the white wool covered them completely, tracing blue halos around them.

The man sleeping at her side was breathing deeply, the sound of it interrupted at intervals by a light whistling in his nose. She rubbed the traces of the journey through the heavy fog from her eyes and tried to collect her memories.

Milia did not know this man. Rather, she knew him but only as her future husband. The tale of passion Mansour lived had skimmed over her without leaving its impress. When, on the evening before the wedding, he related parts of the story to her, she felt she had missed the only story worth living.

He came the evening before the wedding when no one was expecting him. According to custom a bridegroom is not in evidence that day. He spends the evening with his pals at a goodbye-to-bachelorhood party, which is what they call the last sordid fling the groom allows himself before entering the straitjacket of marriage. But Mansour was not like that – not because he was an extraordinarily well-behaved fellow but because he had no such friends in Beirut. Mansour showed up at the Shahin family home on that cold December evening in order to make apologies for his family, who were not able to come to the wedding because of the accumulating troubles in Palestine. He expressed their wish that the bride’s family would not postpone the festivities. Musa was sitting in the
dar
with his mother and the unexpected guest while Milia stood in the kitchen making the coffee. Musa’s eyebrows knitted and the mother made no response. Bearing the coffee tray, Milia entered a profoundly silent room. She set the tray down on the table before the guest, poured the four cups from the little coffeepot, and said, as if continuing a sentence she had already begun, There’s no problem.

There’s no problem, repeated Musa.

Ala barakat
Allah, said Mansour, his voice quavering, and he stood up to take his leave. The mother yawned and stood up to wish him goodbye.

Sit down, all of you, said Milia. Let the man drink his coffee, she said to her mother, tugging her by the arm until she sat down again.

Mansour sat forward on the edge of the sofa as if keeping himself tensed to leap up at any moment. He took a swallow of coffee. Sitting opposite him, Milia gazed at him as if she expected him to begin telling a story.

You know . . . Mansour’s voice trailed off.

I know, Milia responded. Things are not going so well.

That’s not what I meant to say, said Mansour.

The silence hung on them, broken only by Musa leaving the room. The oil lamp flickered. Milia wore a yellow dress. She supported her chin in her hands waiting to hear what the man would say. The mother slipped out of the room and one kind of silence blended into another.

She wanted to say to him that he, too, had plans for a last-minute flight in his head but she did not say it. Her lips held the shadow of a melancholy smile as her hand brushed away specters of memories that had crept into her eyes. For the very first time she was sitting alone in a half-dark room with this man who – a few hours from now – would become her husband. She sensed his fear. How could she say to him that she had known he would visit this evening to tell her that his family would not be coming from Nazareth?

The route is blocked. It’s the English – their army shut the road three days ago, she said.

The cup of coffee shuddered in Mansour’s hand. He imagined something like shadows huddled over the lilac trees. He did not ask her how she knew about what was happening in Palestine, nor how, in the kitchen, she could have heard him say that his family could not come for the wedding. He put the coffee cup down on the little pedestal table. Around its rim were carved Kufic script letters, which he tried to read but could not.

What does it say?

How would I know? You’ll have to ask Musa. I think it might be poetry. Musa told me one of his friends brought this table from Syria as a gift.

Mansour stared at the table, trying to decipher the elaborate calligraphy. No, he said finally, this isn’t poetry. They are verses from the Qur’an.

He rubbed his hands together against the cold. Milia got up, put some wood in the stove, and sat down again. New warmth surged through the
room and the words returned to Mansour’s throat. He brushed away his confusion with a wave of his hand, believing that this young woman could not have noticed his fear. He took her hand, kissed the turquoise ring on her finger, cleared his throat, and opened his mouth.

And he told her the tale of his love.

Night. Trees leaning into trees, and the winds of December dampen the windowpanes with rain. A man of thirty-seven years sits in the large room that the Shahin family calls the
dar
and rubs his hands together getting ready to declaim. It is a high-ceilinged room and the pleasant wood tones of the ceiling reflect the flames of the stove in the corner. Against the somber colors of four small blue sofas striped in black, a woman of twenty-three glows in her yellow dress. The milkiness of her skin flows all the way to the tips of her slender fingers. The man stares at the floor and imagines those white forearms bare to the shoulders. Out of the corners of his eyes he follows the flicker in the gas lamp hanging from the ceiling and speaks in a low voice. Looking at him seated on the couch, his body leaning forward slightly, one would not notice particularly the modest belly bulging slightly over his leather belt. But one would see his sloping shoulders, his eyes shaded by thick black brows in a dark round face and his black moustache.