As Though She Were Sleeping (12 page)

When Milia saw him for the first time she truly thought she was looking at her brother Musa and her conviction moved her to accept him as a husband.
Or that was what she would say to her brother. The truth was somewhat different. From a distance or in the dark Mansour did look very much like Musa. Even in this pale lamplight the resemblance was strong. But in full daylight the difference between the two men was plain for all to see. Musa’s features were gentler and more delicate. True, his eyebrows were thick but they did not descend so closely over his eyes nor did they shadow his eyelashes, across which Milia’s fingers had passed so many times. Musa was not overly tall but he had an athletic build and showed no trace of a belly. The contours of his arm muscles were visible, while there was a slackness to Mansour’s arms and a slight droop to his shoulders. No one would have noticed it on the thirty-seven-year-old but these omens of roundness would become the last and most definitive marker of his life, for he would come to be called the man with the bowed back. Musa’s face was round but the length of his jaw gave it a more rectangular look. His large nose was skewed slightly to the right as if the bone had been broken and not reset properly. His neck was long. Mansour’s face, though, was truly round, his nose large and a good match for his lips. But both men had thick black moustaches that were so startlingly, perfectly alike that people who knew both of them or saw them together would look twice.

Studying the two men, one would believe them to be brothers but then would discover gradually that Mansour was a slightly inflated copy of Musa, more or less. The two points of real resemblance, apart from their moustaches, were their voices and their backs. Musa’s voice was pleasant and deep and rich, and so was Mansour’s. Musa’s back was absolutely smooth and his buttocks flat. This was what had arrested Milia’s step and drawn her gaze when Mansour turned and left the garden. She saw the fluid plane of his back and told herself that this man was her brother’s twin. Milia took note of the points of resemblance, and also the differences, and agreed to the marriage without any hesitation at all.

The mother’s view of it was that the girl had suffered a lot already. After two experiences that had not worked out it was high time for her to marry. Musa agreed but only after some hesitation.

Nazareth is a long way from here, sister, he argued. Why would you want to go there? But Musa was convinced about Mansour because he was a right Adam, as he said. A good man.

Milia heard Sister Milana order her out of the room so that she could tend to Saadeh. It’s Satan! boomed the nun. I smell the Devil in here. She turned toward the girl who held fast to her mother’s hand in an attempt to still her fever-ridden body.

The nun stepped just into the
liwan
and the aroma of incense spread immediately. She held a small brass incense burner from which came a piercing smell surmounted by a white fog. The nun’s large body blocked the entire doorway as she carried the scent in. Around the room she stalked, pivoting right and left to reach every corner. She approached the invalid slowly. The sound of her breathing rose in the silent room. She turned to Milia and said, It’s the Devil, he’s in here. Leave the room, my girl.

Milia stared at her indifferently and said nothing.

Dr. Naqfour had paid a house call. After examining the patient, he called it bronchitis and prescribed medicine. But Saadeh refused to swallow the bitter stuff. The nun forced Saadeh to open her mouth and take the medicine but the sick woman spit it out and retched.

Be patient,
ya
Haajja, the woman’s sick, said Milia.

Yes, I know, I know, Niqula came and told me, and that’s why I’m here, but you go outside. I can’t handle the Devil when you’re in here.

What devil?

Ask yourself, ask those dreams of yours, ask those fellows who come looking to marry you and then run away. It’d be much better for you to repent and come into the convent.

Milia started out of her seat, dumbfounded. The nun bent over Saadeh, placed a wad of cotton dipped in oil in her mouth, and ordered her to swallow it.

She can’t swallow, said Milia. She doesn’t have the strength.

Quiet, you, and get out of here.

Milia said no more but she did not leave the room. She stayed beside her mother; and so it was that she saw how the woman swallowed the cotton, her eyes closed, and how her body settled to the rhythm of the nun’s low singsong incantations.

Was it true that her dreams were the work of the Devil?

The nun said that Satan steals into a woman because a female body is beautiful in its perfection. God created woman perfect and complete, she said, but women chose to be deficient. Look at Our Lady Maryam, peace be upon her. Did she need a man in order to fulfill her own existence? Of course not! She was made complete by the Holy Spirit – a perfection she had had from the dawn of her existence.

But not every woman is the Virgin Maryam, said Milia.

Milia! Tell me you haven’t noticed how bad you are becoming, how ugly?

Me?!

Yes, you, girl – why have you not come to church with your mama, so that we can fight the Devil and chase him out of your body?

What was she to say? That she was afraid of the church? And that when she found herself there with the congregation, beneath the Byzantine icons and inside the cloud-odor of incense, she felt the dread and fear she would feel in a burying ground? People bowed their heads to icon paintings of men and women who had died eons ago, speaking to them as if the distance between the living and the dead had been undone and they all moved now in the world of the dead. Milia feared this open interval between the living and the dead. On Good Friday she would go to church and join all of those
weeping for the crucified Messiah. But on all other days of the year she prayed alone at home and asked God to open the gates of life that thus far had remained closed to her.

No. The nun did not tell the truth. Her dreams were not the work of the Devil. How did the nun learn of her dreams, anyway? Saadeh was to blame. Since their father’s death Saadeh had become virtually a ring on the nun’s finger, there to be twisted and played with exactly as she wanted. All of the family’s tales were transmitted to the nun through the ear canal of confession: and in itself, this was an extraordinary tale with no precedent.

The sainted Milana did not stop at exercising control over the nuns of the Convent of the Archangel Mikhail. Her influence extended to the very priest, Father Boulos Saba, whose decision it had been to let her hear confession. The two had agreed that she would receive confession from the women and then would send the penitents to Father Boulos to receive his blessed forgiveness. The priest himself made penance to the nun, in an utter reversal of all the faith’s traditions. But the nun’s astounding powers and her ability to cure the ill allowed her to exceed the limits in every possible way.

Through the confessional all the stories and secrets of the Shahin clan became Haajja Milana’s property. And because of it, no longer could Milia endure the nun’s looks with their blend of pity and withering scorn. She realized that the stories she had lived with Najib and Wadiie were known to the nun in all their detail, that her secret lay bare alongside thousands of others filling the holy woman’s sainted head.

The mother grew quiet and her body began to perspire as the oil spread across her nightgown.

Once I have gone, said Sister Milana to Milia, rub her body with
spirtu
alcohol. The spell is over and she is fine now.

The nun turned to go out but paused at the door and her reedy voice called out to Milia.

Naam?
responded Milia politely.

The nun put her hand on the young woman’s shoulder, leaned over her ear, and whispered. The nun told her not to be afraid. The bridegroom will appear, she said. And I see traveling. But you must settle yourself down first. You must pray that God saves you from the worst. Forget Najib, and the second one too, what was his name? The real bridegroom will come, and he’ll come soon, don’t worry. But what is most important is that you stop this business of dreaming. A believer, my dear, does not dream. Or if he does, he does not remember. Or if by chance he remembers, he does not talk about it. Night is the journey of darkness. It is our practice for death. Only the prophets and the saints see things at night. Ordinary people are submerged in darkness when they sleep, and nothing interrupts it. All praise be to the Almighty who created sleep so that people could prepare themselves for death. The world of night and the world of day do not come together. God is light and the Devil is darkness. My girl, you must forget your dreams and then I am certain that Almighty God will open the gates to your countenance.

But I –

She did not let Milia complete her sentence. She coughed loudly and said that dreams are the Devil’s means to land human beings in sin. And anyway, she said, you’re a liar. Nobody can remember all their dreams. Every day, every morning, you make your mother tremble with fear listening to you. Every day and the next, hearing your dreams, and that’s why she is always coming to the convent.
Haraam
, what has your mother done to deserve this? It’s your brother Salim who’s to blame, who got that Najib going . . . Enough, Milia! You are like my own daughter. I pulled you out of your mama’s belly and I held you high to bring you nearer to God. Enough, now – stop this foolishness of yours!

The nun went out without waiting for any response from Milia. The
girl wanted to say that it wasn’t true. That she didn’t tell her dreams to her mother every day, and that her dreams belonged to her, and that they were not the Devil’s whisperings. If they were, how could their predictions always come true? She had told her mother the dream about Najib because she had truly felt humiliated and upset at the time and then afterward she wanted to let on that now the whole affair was a matter of indifference to her. Sister Milana having gone, Milia stood there feeling she had been stripped naked by the nun’s words. Suddenly she had discovered that her stories were no longer her own to possess. Her mother had given everything to the nun.

It was nighttime. Trees leaned against other trees in a darkness of their own making, and like whips the rain lashed the rooftops. Milia opened her eyes and wiped the dream from her eyelashes to find herself in water. The ceiling in the
liwan
was leaking and a shiver of cold ran along her arms. But instead of rising from bed to take up the rug and set pots beneath the holes in the ceiling, she closed her eyes again. After all, she did not believe her eyes. The dream returned just as it had appeared to her a few moments before. She saw herself, a little brown-skinned girl sitting on the rocky edge of a deep wadi, at her back a white churchlike building. She was alone and she didn’t know where she was. She listened to the rustlings coming out of the wadi and to the sounds made by the wild grasses. From there a woman came toward her, hair concealed beneath a long blue wrap, body encased in a long blue gown.

The blue woman came out of nowhere carrying a suckling babe wrapped in a shroud of white swaddling clothes. She set the child down in Milia’s arms and disappeared. Milia is alone, holding a tiny dark-skinned boy child who breathes deeply and soundly. The baby’s breath sighs against her neck. She lifts it to hug it close to her chest. She sees large round eyes that seem to take up the whole of his baby face. She watches herself enter the shadows of those pupils and finds herself in a space of vast depth and colossal height.
The child stares at her and takes her inside his eyes where water surrounds and embraces her. She tries to come away from the watery lakes of those eyes. She puts her hands out defensively, certain that she is drowning. She opens her eyes, sees the rain dripping from the ceiling and senses the chill along her arms. She closes her eyes and sinks into the eyes of the dark-skinned boy child. Never has Milia seen eyes like these: the whites so large, black pupils floating at their centers, each eye a black mirror inside of a white mirror. The child takes her to his eyes and the little girl is not strong enough to resist the pull of his pearl-drop tears, ringing the enormous black pupils.

Rousing herself at the sound of her mother crying at her to set pans beneath the holes in the ceiling – And hurry! her mother was shouting – Milia shivered uncontrollably with the sensations her dream had piqued. Cold sweat covered her breasts and thighs and desire swept over her like a terrible storm. It was a longing for which she could locate no equivalent; she had never felt the likes of its force. It bore no resemblance to the desire she had felt for Najib or for that other man called Wadiie, or for the doctor who had treated her broken leg. The three men were simply relics of her tongue and nose and memory. They were the love of storytelling, the love of fragrances, or the deliciousness of love postponed. But this was the desire of the heart.

Three times on a rainy night she saw him. She understood that she must go to him.

The story of the Armenian doctor exhausted that phase of utter exhaustion, her adolescence. A girl of sixteen breaks her right leg after falling from the swing suspended from the fig tree and finds herself in the hands of two Armenian doctors in Bourj Hammoud. Actually, Zaven Hovnanian and his brother Harout were not physicians but “bonesetters” – a
mujabbir arabi
, as were called practitioners of folk medicine learned from their family elders
or inherited through blood. Rather than setting broken bones, though, they simply applied a sort of spiritual massage therapy. In a darkened house of closely shut windows and drawn curtains, Milia smelled a strange odor and did not understand the shadowy sensations that infused her.