As Though She Were Sleeping (15 page)

All you think about is this stuff.

When I saw you beneath the almond tree, a fellow with you –

You saw me?

Of course I saw you, and the almond blossoms looked like a crown circling your head. Like a white silk shawl, and you were standing with someone
who looks like me. I went a little closer but I couldn’t make out any words. I just saw your lips, how they moved.
Asal!
I said to myself. Honey. The sweet jolt of honey. I swallowed my saliva and said to myself, Tomorrow. And then and there I named you Umm Amr. My mother won’t like it a bit. She wants to name the boy after my father. Shukri. Mama, I said to her, look here. My brother named his oldest boy Shukri. So? she said. Then we’ll have two Shukris. See how her mind works? She’s not quite right up there. She didn’t love my father until after he was dead. Never mind – did you tell me you liked my mother? She adores you and she told me you’re an angel. She said to me, Son, you found an angel come down from the sky. I said, Yes, but, Mama, my angel is always asleep. Milia, do you hear me? Why are your eyes closed? We’re out here, we’re not in bed.

She pressed her palms over her eyes and felt that all the words were closed. She felt unable to speak. Words were like buttons closing a long wrap covering her body. She had to undo the buttons in order to be in the world and to speak its language. But she could not figure out how to work the buttons. She had an image of herself surrounded by buttons, and Georges Nashif sitting in his little shop yawning, and a cascade of buttons on every side. Holding a button in her hand Milia stands in the shop. The girl puts out her hand and the merchant takes the button, opens a drawer and takes out a handful of buttons, which he mounds on the counter in front of her. The shop is full of colors and the world rains buttons. The little girl stands alone under the pelting shower of buttons. Georges Nashif laughs. Hands come out to pluck away the colors and Milia is beneath those hands. She cannot breathe, she’s choking. She opens her eyes and discovers that the coverlet has come off and she is shivering with cold. She covers herself and goes to sleep. She sees the long flight of steps. She falls and her brother Niqula picks her up and carries her to the clinic of the two doctors. The close aroma of spices suffocates her as hot oil glides over her legs and feet.
She opens her eyes again and listens to the snoring of her little brother, Musa, asleep beside her.

Milia did not know how to tell this dream. She did not know how to live with it. She listened to her mother’s whispered insinuations, among the neighbor women, about the wickedness of the man, his persistent fishing for women, his generosity to those he found beautiful.

Why did the buttons usher in the story of the two doctors?

She wanted to say to Mansour that words are like the buttons closing a long robe and that she cannot undo them. And that is why she does not talk on and on as he wants her to. She had tried to memorize the poems her husband repeated to her but she would find the metrical patterns stumbling and finally breaking between her lips. It was as though she were walking across broken glass and the words wounded her feet.

Why don’t you talk? Mansour asked her.

The taste of blood lay under her tongue and the smell of it lingered in her nose. What do you want me to say? She gazed down at her rotund belly and felt herself dropping off to sleep in the chair so she stood up.

Are you going off to sleep? he asked her.

Sorry, leave everything where it is and tomorrow I will clear up. Right now I am too sleepy.

No, no sleep! Every evening I stay up and you’re asleep, and then when I come near you . . .

She went into the bedroom, wriggled into her long blue nightgown, lay down on the bed, and closed her eyes on the image of the buttons.

The shadow-profile of the two Armenian doctors chased Milia until her final moments. The girl never understood exactly what had happened but the story as her mother told it was engraved solidly in her memory and it shaped that memory in a way that was both obscure and familiar.

Was that how it had happened, really? Or had things gotten confused in Milia’s memory, assuming the form of a story issuing from the throat of
the sainted nun who cursed the two doctors? She said they had betrayed the sacred trust of medicine. They had met a just and well-deserved future in the shape of prison.

Milia sobbed and swore on all the saints that nothing at all had happened. The mother screamed and wailed while the four brothers sat down around Milia in a half circle and began interrogating her. Musa was afraid and confused and perhaps embarrassed. Salim glowered while the faces of Niqula and Abdallah were bleached as white as chalk.

Milia did not say that she did not remember anything, because she remembered everything but she did not know what or how to tell.

Nothing happened, she said. She described how the doctor had massaged her leg while his brother stood behind her, holding her shoulders still.

And then? asked the mother.

And then nothing, said Milia.

How to explain this to them? This
nothing
had so many forms, to which she could not give names because she did not know the words to fit around them.

The problem is that the words are not right, she said to her husband, and said no more. She could not tell him that for her, words were nothing but wraps that hid things. When she listened to people (she could not say to him), she did not understand their words. She would think of the sounds and shapes words made instead of thinking about their meanings. As if the bodies of the words veiled the meanings.

Fine then – listen, he said.

Do you love this poetry? Mansour asked. Why don’t you answer? She got up and went to bed. She closed her eyes and saw the two doctors, merging into one figure, one man with two heads; and the color white blanketed everything. Whiteness wrapped round the man with two heads as moans sounded through the parted lips of the girl seated under their hands and pain swelled from her leg to her spine.

When the family interrogations were over Musa sat down next to his sister on the sofa. Without a word he took her hand. Darkness spread through the large common
dar
. In the soft gloom the mother came, sat down beside her daughter, murmured words that Milia didn’t understand, ordered Musa to leave, and told the story.

It’s the nun’s fault, said Milia. She is the one who sent us to the doctor.

No, you are wrong, my girl. The nun warned me it could happen, and if it had not been for her, your brother Niqula would not have gone and saved you.

Saved me!

He certainly saved you. Death is preferable to scandal. What a scandal we could have been in!

But, Mama, they didn’t do anything. I told you what happened – nothing happened.

They didn’t because they couldn’t. My God, the story has come out and now they’re locked up for it. May the Almighty save us! This is a sign from the other world, my dear. If I didn’t have five children to worry about, I would have left this world for good by now and I would be long gone into the convent.

You’re always there, always at the convent, you practically live there already! I don’t know what you do over there, anyway. Anyway.
Ala ayyi hal
.

Milia went quiet though she did continue muttering under her breath.
Ala ayyi hal
– what does that mean – anyway? Hah, it doesn’t mean a thing.
As if I didn’t tell my mother anything, as if she doesn’t ever talk to me. The story she told me about the doctor – fine, I heard it, and so what, I just said,
Ala ayyi hal
, and I shut my mouth. So that’s what life means: we just keep quiet, and we don’t understand anything –
ala ayyi hal
– but we act as if we do. So why even talk. So how am I supposed to believe what I hear.

How am I supposed to believe what I hear? she demanded in a louder voice. Her mother turned and asked her what she had said.

Nothing, Mama. Nothing at all. In any case.
Ala ayyi hal
.

When had this conversation taken place?

Was it after the family investigation had ended, when Saadeh sat down next to her daughter on the sofa? And told her the story of the two doctors? Or was it after that surprise that dropped out of the sky onto Milia and poisoned her spirit – when she learned that Najib was going to marry another woman?

It’s better this way. I knew that. Anyway, if he hadn’t left me I would have left him, she said, and reentered her dream. That day she summoned her dream promptly. She needed to see the birds die in the garden.

The smell of the two doctors hangs in her nose, following her all the way to this faraway town. She closes her eyes and sees her mother sitting next to her, telling her the story in a faint voice. Saadeh is yellow, reflecting the color of the curtains over the windows. The story is an amalgam of interwoven images.

Milia opened her eyes and sat up on the edge of the bed. Mansour was on the balcony, she felt vaguely sick. She did not want to see (even in her mind) the face of the man who massaged her leg, the sweat dripping from him as the sound of his panting rose.

The story goes that her leg slid beneath two bare hands thick with glistening black hairs. The oil was as transparent as water; the sweat beading along the doctor’s brow and over his face and neck spumed a strange odor
into the room. The hand of the other man, the one who stood behind her, slid along her neck and crept to her cheeks.

Had that happened? Or had the scene planted itself in her memory because that was what her mother had told her? What had her mother told her? And was it true that the two men were all but married to the same woman? And that the police had arrested them because they gave their female patients drugs to put them to sleep and then violated them? What was this talk?

The story sticking in Milia’s memory is hazy and uncertain. It was said that the two doctors shared one house – and shared it with that woman. The short and somewhat weak-minded one was not really a doctor but rather served as a doctor’s aide to his taller and more robust brother. It was said that the real doctor had studied at the Université Saint-Joseph, specializing in bone surgery, but he refused to follow the European medical procedures and techniques that he had studied at the university. He preferred the traditional ways, and he treated his patients with olive oil plus various other oils that he extracted from wild plants. He rejected the use of plaster casts for setting fractures. He treated broken bones with his hands and with oil, binding them in heavy fabric. He argued that this was much to be preferred, because gypsum eroded the skin and could become worm-infested. He became the most famous bone doctor in Beirut, or this is what Sister Milana believed, anyway. No one raised questions about his perennial bachelorhood or his relationship with his brother’s wife until the two brothers were arrested on the heels of the Sayyida Marta incident. She was the wife of Khawaja Nazih Shamaat.

The story goes that Sayyida Marta visited the clinic of the two doctors for a shoulder fracture. She detected something odd about the practices there and then realized that the herbal tea the doctor’s wife had offered her in the waiting room tasted strange. She grew suspicious. When no one was there
to see, she poured the hot liquid into a flowerpot. She entered the small close room of the piercing odors where the two doctors treated patients. She sat down and feigned sleep. When the massage began to take more circuitous paths, she cried scandal – and that was that. Once the word got out, people began to circulate endless tales about the two doctors and their common wife. No one questioned the validity of Sayyida Marta’s accusation. She was a respectable woman. Her husband, Nazih Shamaat, had a successful silk-export business in one of the small streets clustered around Beirut harbor. He was a city father and a member of the Greek Orthodox community council. Her word was not to be doubted.

Stories began to spread about the short woman named Kati. People said her slight husband treated her brutally, forcing her to have sex with the taller brother.

Haraam!
breathed the nun.

Did anyone actually hear this story from the woman herself? asked Niqula.

God preserve us! moaned the nun.

Niqula said the two men had fled to Damascus seeking refuge from the stories careening around Beirut. But Saadeh insisted on her version, which was that the wife herself exposed the two brothers and only then was Madame Marta Shamaat summoned as a witness. Kati went to the police station, stood there in front of the officer in charge, and said she had been married off to two men. She could no longer bear this life. She reenacted what had happened. (This was what you had to do in criminal cases, Saadeh explained.) The woman with the unkempt hair stood as tall as she could and represented how her husband’s brother slept with her. She said the business would happen on the orders of the husband – before his eyes, in fact. God save her, she could not do it anymore and she wanted to die. She said her husband ruled out having children. It was the tall one who kept me
from it, I don’t know what he did, Efendi, but now I can’t have children, and I don’t know anymore whose wife I am, or who I am. He beats me, too. And they’re so stingy they won’t turn the lights on. I’ve never seen anyone stingier. Once the patients have gone, it’s completely dark in there. They just keep one candle lit and they live like the blind. Everything is black and trembly and ghostlike.