As Though She Were Sleeping (13 page)

By this time Milia was well aware that her body had grown and changed quite a lot. Now she could grasp the ropes tightly, shoot her long legs straight forward into space, and climb high as the wind played with her light brown hair. And then, this time, she fell. She would not remember how the parallel ropes eluded her hands, nor how she came to be on the ground with a pain shooting through her right leg. She tried to stand up but she couldn’t. The pain mounted from her leg bone to her neck. She collapsed and screamed for Musa. But her brother did not come. She had to get up on her own and hop on her left foot all the way to the four steps that led from the garden up to the kitchen. She managed the steps on two hands and one leg.

Yes, she knew she had changed, but it was only when the swing let fly with her that Milia truly noticed how everything was transformed. In the four years between the day at the seaside when she had hidden her small breasts from the lads’ eyes and had dreamed of the lamb, and the day of the swing, Milia had not paid attention to how her chubby preadolescent body had stretched out and how her jaw had given definition to her face, freeing it from that babyish rotundity. Her legs had grown long and slim while her buttocks had filled out delicately. Her eyes were wider in proportion to her face and her neck had lengthened gracefully.

On the swing, as she stretched her legs forward and pulled hard with her arms to give her flight a higher arc, she became a woman. She saw her chestnut-brown hair drink in rich tones from the sun and her pale skin starkly white against the lush green leaves thick on the branches of the fig tree. The plump preadolescent girl whose brothers had made fun of her because she was as round as a ball was now a svelte and lovely silhouette,
full without being fat, her eyes honey-toned and large, the crown of her head streaming with luxurious chestnut hair in which surged waves of color mingling the deepest mahogany with red and blond. She did not tell the brown-skinned girl in the dream that today she had become beautiful, because she did not want to abandon the little girl. The little dream-girl who appeared and vanished at will was freer than the roly-poly preteen girl whose breasts had emerged with the salt of the sea under the probing, eager eyes of the boys. The dream-girl had slender legs and the slim straight body of an acrobat, and that body allowed her to claim that she was no different from the boys. She would go wherever she wanted, appear and disappear, viewing the world with her gray-dappled big green eyes.

When Milia fell from the swing the surprise struck her head-on. She discovered that the image of the past was wholly gone – the image that had made her loathe herself, made her refuse to stand in front of the mirror, made her feel disgusted by the tiny pockmarks across her cheeks.

She saw herself on the swing as if she were gazing into water-mirrors. The leaves that flew by her became watery green mirrors reflecting endless faces of a pretty young woman who had torn off childhood’s wraps and galloped from the nighttime of her old body to enter her new body. To cling fiercely to her new body. To become it.

Had she fallen from the swing because she had forgotten herself as she gazed into her new image? Or because she had closed her eyes to compare the image she had been with the long and slender image she saw now, pale legs extended forward, exposed by the breeze as the swing rose and fell? Or was it because she jutted her torso forward to halt the swing, ready now to go inside and stand before the mirror and give her new self a good look?

Milia flew and everything in her changed. That is how she would remember herself from this moment on. She would say she became a woman on the swing.

Her mother had told her of the lamb. No . . . her mother knew nothing
about the dream of the lamb, but seeing the traces of blood on her young daughter’s tubby thighs, she had told Milia that now she had become a woman and must prepare herself for marriage and motherhood. But Milia could not see herself as anything other than a mass of flesh and bone that had now been pierced and marred unkindly by an open wound. Aghast at learning that this monthly gash would be with her all of her life, she was mortified.

Do the boys – do my brothers, does anything like this happen to them? she asked her mother. Seeing her mother’s startled expression, she knew it was her injury and hers alone – a girl alone among four boys, living through what the saintly Sister Milana called
that monthly filth
. Swelling up, she had to listen to her brothers’ teasing as they called her Drum and Fatty. Only Musa defended her, once in the garden when he told her how pretty she was. She had started to cry after Salim had mounted a vicious party in the garden and had called her over: Hey Drum! Instead, Musa came over to her, seized her hand and told her not to pay any mind to what Salim had said, because she was the prettiest girl in the world. She did not believe him but she kissed him between the eyes anyway and gave him a smile.

Always she felt the blood before it came, and this made her anxious and irritated. The lamb would begin to visit her dreams nightly. But the little animal would never leap onto her chest before the final day when the pain in her lower left side intensified before spreading down her legs, announcing the hour when the anxiety-demon was to emerge from her body. But this day made it better. When Milia tumbled from the swing and broke her right leg, she discovered she was no longer that roly-poly Milia who hated looking at herself in the mirror.

She was perched between the two doctors. Zaven gripped her right foot and massaged the leg with hot oil. Harout stood behind her, holding her shoulders firmly so that they would remain still. Zaven asked her how she
had fallen but she did not know how to answer. Had her feet dangled to the ground as she swung her torso forward to stop the swing, causing her foot to catch and the swing propelling her forward so that she fell hard? Or had she fallen from midair, having slipped her hands off the ropes as she had done often before, and there she was on the ground, having been tossed to the right with the whole weight of her body on her right leg?

She tried to remember but the hand of Dr. Zaven, rubbing the oil into her, pulled her mind and spirit downward, giving her the feeling of slipping, before the sharp pain seemed to lift to her upper back, where the other doctor’s hands worked the flesh of her shoulders.

Where was her mother? Where was Musa?

She smelled the peculiar odor rising from around her and enveloping the pain washing from her bones. What was that smell called? And why – every time she recalled it – did she feel a mysterious mingling of unspeakable desire and pure disgust?

That day they took the girl to Bourj Hammoud and there she lived something that she could tell no one. But it was always with her in her dreams. It came in the shape of blurred and darkish images cocooned in a mist rising from a vessel that someone had set down next to her. It made her feel dizzy. Only her brother Niqula noticed that she was afraid. Seeing the shadows of fright in his sister’s eyes, he accompanied her on her third and final visit to the doctors. He shattered the power of the smell that lingered in the girl’s nose, its traces impossible to dispel. On her wedding day, with the cold and the fog enveloping the American car which crept up the rise of Dahr el-Baydar, Mansour sitting in the front seat next to the driver, his body shaking with the chill, she had opened the car window only to hear the driver yell.

Shut the window!

It’s the smell, she said.

Smell or no smell, shut that window! We’ll die of the cold.

It’s the smell of
basturma
, she said, rolling up the window.

Do
you
smell pastrami, bridegroom, sir? asked the driver, guffawing.

Milia did not hear her husband’s response. She saw herself edging up the stairs on her arms and one leg. When she reached the kitchen door she shouted for her brother Musa. Just then her mother appeared from behind a large pot that sat steaming on the gas burner. The mother ran toward her daughter, who crouched outside on the steps, and even through the gloom of the kitchen she could see the blood oozing from Milia’s knee. She called Musa and ordered him to run to the convent and ask the nun to come.

Why the nun, Mama?

Saadeh bent over the wound and wiped it with a handkerchief she had dipped in water. Her hand probed the broken leg and Milia screamed at the pain of it.

Dakhiilak ya
Allah, the mother muttered. She stepped back and asked her daughter to stand up. Milia tried. Rapiers of pain stabbed her leg bone and tore through her all the way to her eyes. Her tears flowed as she collapsed against the wall and slid to the floor. Her voice broken, she told her mother that she could not get up. The nun came, carrying her incense burner. The saintly woman bent over the girl’s leg and her short, fat fingers jabbed at it. Broken, she pronounced. Take her to the Armenian, she added, turning her back on them to leave the house.

Saadeh pursued her outside to ask her for the doctor’s address. She sought Musa’s help in getting his sister up and standing on her one remaining sturdy leg. Milia stooped between her mother and her brother, leaning on the small boy’s shoulder, and they made their way to a taxi, which took them to an isolated house on a narrow street in Bourj Hammoud. A short woman whose face was partially covered by a lock of brown hair laced with white received them and asked them to wait.

There Milia breathed in a peculiar smell. She would say that she had
not taken in all that happened in that house, because she was in pain. She would say that in her second visit to the clinic she had realized that a strange sensation was sweeping over her, unexplained waves pulsing through her shoulders and chest, the smell of meat cooked with spices mingling with an odor that seemed to come from the bodies of the two men. The first one – tall and broad-shouldered – sat at her feet, probing the sole of her foot and then massaging her leg to the knee, a bar of soap in his hand. Milia felt the down at the tops of her thighs ripple as if awakening from a deep sleep, waiting for a hand that did not arrive. The shorter brother stood behind her, his hands gripping her shoulders, asking her to breathe deeply.

The first doctor had only to raise his eyebrows and stare for her mother and Musa to leave the room. They took seats in the sitting room, where the only light was given by whatever could filter in through the wooden shutters of a closed window. In the other room sat Milia, between two pairs of hands and the mingled odors that she found so strange. The meaning of that smell would remain mysterious to her until she fell in love with Najib Karam. It was his words she fell in love with – his manner of speaking, his ringing laugh, the way he mocked everything. With Najib in the garden, she breathed in that smell – and felt a pain shoot through her right leg. He had come close to her. The evening flung shadows about the garden and the voices of night creatures filled the air. Blind bats knocked into the trees and hovered over the frangipani at the center of the garden. Najib was telling her jokes that made her laugh. He said he would speak to her brother Salim.

This coming week, he said.

What do you mean?

I mean, getting you engaged to me, and then us getting married later on.

Me marrying you?

Of course, you marrying me – what, don’t you like me?

Of course, but –

But what?

But Salim might not agree to it.

Salim’s my friend, of course he’ll agree to it.

What do you mean?

I mean, I love you, he said, and he came very close. He put his hands out, caught her by the waist, and came even closer. At that moment, when Milia was in Najib’s arms, that smell assaulted her nose and she felt her right leg go numb. She stepped back to lean against the trunk of the lilac tree. Najib followed and pulled her to him. Her sharp intake of breath did not stop Najib. It simply made him more determined, as if something had caught fire within him. He yanked the girl to him and shoved his lips against her long pale neck. Milia froze, completely unable to move, because now the smell and the pain were twisted together, and because she felt dizzy, and because this youth who was teasing and fondling her began to shake as if he had suddenly contracted a fever. He staggered backward, carrying away the smell, and ran to the bathroom.

The two of them were alone in the house. Her mother was at church for sunset prayers with the nuns and her four brothers were out. When Najib came, she made him a glass of rosewater sherbet and they sat in the garden. He talked and she listened. She stood up to go inside and make him coffee, and that was when he was suddenly there very close to her. Immediately that odor that brought the pain back into her leg enveloped her. As soon as he took her in his arms he began to tremble and then he left her abruptly and loped to the bathroom.

He came back to see her leaning against the trunk of the towering lilac tree. Another embrace in mind, he came to her. She averted her face and said, That’s enough.

Do you love me? he asked her.

She said nothing.

Do you know what it means, us getting married?

She said nothing.

It means you want to take your clothes off and sleep next to me, it means I sleep with you.

She put out her hand to press his lips together. He seized the hand, kissed her palm and then her fingers one by one, sucking at them gently. When he licked them, a hot flame blazed through the girl and she thought she would topple over. She pulled her hand away, leaned heavily against the tree trunk, and said, her voice shaking, Please, go, you have to go. My mother will be coming back from church at any moment.