As Though She Were Sleeping (19 page)

Everyone said Wadiie would marry Milia. But Wadiie said nothing. And after six months of daily visits, Saadeh asked him when his mother might honor them with a visit. Wadiie’s round pudgy face got very red and he cleared his throat before saying, Soon
inshallah
.

Then everything ended.

Milia told Musa firmly that she wasn’t angry at Wadiie. Never, not a single day, she declared, had she imagined herself as his wife. She told her mother that she had been horror-stricken when she visited Wadiie in his mother’s home. Umm Wadiie took her into the bedroom and jabbed her finger at a wide oak bed at the center of the room. This was my bed, she sighed. Mine and my late lamented husband’s. We may be the first newlyweds in Beirut who slept on one bed. That’ll be my gift to you and Wadiie when we celebrate the two of you.

You’d want us to sleep in one bed!

When Milia opened the door to the hotel room and saw one bed in the middle of the room, Umm Wadiie’s voice clanged in her ears and she smelled old oak. She was nonplussed; where should she sit down? Mansour did not notice her confusion and embarrassment, fully occupied as he was with opening the bottle of champagne. Milia went to sleep alone in the bed and did not sense her husband next to her except through what she would later call the marriage dream. She heard the bathroom door open and decided to go on sleeping. She fell into a rhythm of slow breathing and was soon immersed in the dream. This was a dream without images or words. It was composed only of colors, of intimations that the world was closing in and then opening out, circling and extending, rising and falling. Her face broadened and lengthened and inside her eyes she sensed eyes without end. She was swimming in a world of blue. And then suddenly the dream was broken, the coldness struck her between her thighs, and the man slipped
out. She jerked her legs up and curled around herself and felt an explosion of heat from her belly shooting through her body like circles of light; and she was in the car.

In their own bedroom Milia insisted on two beds. Mansour did not understand why she was so determined on this particular issue. But he had purchased twin beds already. In fact, it had not even occurred to him that he might sleep with his wife every night in one bed. The wife’s bed, he proclaimed, has to be wide enough to embrace the child who will come, because this is our way. Milia bowed her head in assent and saw a blue halo forming. That was how she saw herself, head bowed in assent. When she became pregnant and began spending a lot of her time among the eucalyptus trees dotted around the house, the blue halo was her constant companion. She did not see the halo reflected in her husband’s eyes, and so she knew that she alone saw the blue cloud that hovered over her bowed head and protected the forming baby and his mother. In the shadow of this halo Milia lived for nine full months. The color blue clothed her through the day and at night it became a soft carpet on which she slept and across which her dreams flowed incessantly.

Mansour poured himself a glass. It made his head spin but it also sent him into his poetic state. They were sitting on the balcony in Nazareth. Between sips, Mansour was reciting poetry but there were spaces of silence within and between the lines. Milia was yawning. He had drunk so much, she said, that his recitation destroyed the music of the poetry. Well, no . . . she said his drunkenness slowed the music of the poetry down until it was unrecognizable. Well, no, she didn’t say that, maybe she didn’t say any of it. Maybe she wanted to say it but said something else. She did tell him to stop drinking, because he was drunk.

Me, drunk!

She stayed silent.

You think I’ve gotten drunk on the arak but that isn’t true. Arak doesn’t make me drunk.

She said nothing.

Darling of mine, if I’m drunk, it isn’t the arak. It’s your eyes. Your eyes intoxicate me and I see a strange color.

You too? she said, and immediately bit her lower lip in regret. Apparently Mansour did not hear her, though. If he had, she would have had no choice but to tell the story of her photograph and the odd green film that Musa had noticed immediately.

One person must know, she muttered, standing in front of the Virgin’s image in the Church of the Annunciation. He will. She stared at her rounding belly and begged the Mother of Light to let the boy know the color of his mother’s eyes, even if it remained concealed to all others.

That evening Mansour, who did not know this secret, recited the most beautiful poetry Milia had ever heard. The lines he offered told her that only the prophets were privy to the secret cementing the relationship between night and day. He told her of the famous poet Abu el-Tayyib el-Mutanabbi. He was the only prophet whose prophecies emerged in poetry. Prophets before him had been either incapable of composing poetry or afraid of it, though they might make up stories and proverbs. But then came the poet who inscribed his prophethood in incomparable verse. Speakers of Arabic one thousand years ago were captivated by his magic and today they still were. Mutanabbi visited Tiberias, he told her, and even stayed in Palestine for a period of time. That’s where he was when he wrote lines describing the lion as no one before him had.

Did he walk on water like the Messiah? asked Milia.

No, he walked on words, Mansour answered.

Meaning, he wasn’t a real prophet.

Why not – did all the prophets walk on water?

How would I know?

Listen, Milia, Mansour began insistently, but then stopped, uncertain of how to go on. He wanted to tell her that words were that poet’s water and the music of his words the waves. Mutanabbi brought together wisdom and rhythm, and he balanced the two of them. His poetry flung open gates to emotion, and when he died he shut those gates behind him. For an entire thousand years no one could open them again, or at least not as widely.

But if he couldn’t walk on water, he wasn’t a prophet, she said. Listen!

Milia had only to hear the lines of poetry once and she had them memorized. But when reciting them, somehow she reversed the final hemistich and it became something else.

Milia was in her third month of pregnancy. As she grew rounder her beauty was almost too much to bear. Mansour did not know how to express the full measure of his love or the weight of his awe. She did not listen to him when he spoke of love. She lowered her head and the blue halo visible above it would veil her as she sank further and further into silence. He resorted to poetry, trying now this poem, now that one, all for her ears. Head still
bowed, her eyes sparkled as she listened intently. When he came to the end she remarked that poetry is like prayer.

She saw vapor rising over the table as though the words had turned themselves into incense. Her head spun with the fragrance of incense spreading across them and winding around the words that floated downward from this man’s lips.

She had dreamed the incense, she said. When she recounted her dreams to him, it often happened that she halted abruptly midstory and would not go on. She saw fear in his eyes. Only that one dream: she did tell that one to the end. Three months before she had told it, at the moment when Mansour saw his wife’s body inscribed with circles, curves upon curves and swirls upon swirls. It was morning then, and he stared, marveling at how her shoulders slipped roundly from the loose neckline of her blue nightgown. He was stunned by how beautiful they were. He followed her into the kitchen, where she had begun to make coffee and set out breakfast. He came up to her and from behind he hugged her tightly to his chest. There was no sound of the uneasy protest that invariably greeted his attempts to embrace her. His body pressed into hers and desire rippled from his pelvis to his shoulders. As he tried to lift her nightgown the dazzling whiteness of her seemed to explode before his eyes, the brilliance knocking him nearly blind. He closed his eyes, his hands pressing in at her hip bones, and he arched forward over her. Her body bending with his, she was soft and warm and her tenderness flowed over him.

Suddenly she cried out and whipped around. She pushed him away gently and told him she was pregnant.

What?!

I dreamed it. I’m pregnant.

He smiled and stepped toward her again but she pushed him back.

I’m pregnant.

Since when?

Since today.

She put the little coffee ewer down on the table and began to talk. She stood in the sunlight streaming through the window, her face growing rounder as he stared and her eyes getting larger. The man felt his legs weaken and he sat down. He let his eyelids drop and darkness swept over him.

Sitti . . .

She told him about her grandmother Malakeh. My grandmama Malakeh came and sat down next to me on the bed, here. I was sleeping. The bed seemed endless, as though I slept on a bed of water, it was everywhere, the water, and Sitti sat with me. She was a young woman –
Ya Latif
she looked so much like my mother! At first I thought she was my mother, and I said, Mama, what are you doing here? She said, I’m not your mama, your mother is in Beirut and I came here to tell you a story. I said, Sitti, is this the time for stories? Don’t you see where I am? How I’m living on my own now, and no one is here with me? She said she had come here to awaken me but first I must accept a gift from her. She put her hand into her cloak and took out a tiny icon of the Virgin. It has to stay with you always, she said, to keep you safe. I took the icon from her but I did not know where I should put it. Set it on your belly, she instructed. I laid it on my belly and felt myself sinking. I called to her. Sitti, I’m sinking, I’m going to drown, what should I do? Hold my hand, she replied. I held out my hand but I couldn’t reach anything. I tried to scream but my voice wouldn’t come. I was drowning. I was underwater and I couldn’t breathe. Suddenly a woman in a blue veil was there. She held me. I saw myself on shore. I saw a lot of fish. The fish were poking their heads out of the water, opening their mouths to breathe, and diving under again. The blue woman was beside me. She was whispering to me but I didn’t understand a word of it. She talked and talked in a soft
voice. I didn’t catch any of it except for one word: Tiberias. So then I knew I was at Lake Tiberias. The blue woman closed her eyes and I longed for sleep. If I went to sleep, though, nothing in the world could awaken me, I knew, and I was afraid. I remembered what my grandmama had said about sleep and death.
Khallaas
, I told myself. It’s all over for you, Milia. You are going to die in this water. But I was no longer fighting for breath. I was breathing underwater and seeing a rainbow of color. The blue woman was with me. She reached out and placed her hand on my stomach and I felt my belly start to swell and my body grow rounder. She took her hand away. I turned and saw my grandmama, here with me, but now she had no teeth. I used to be afraid of Sitti when she took out her teeth and put them in a glass of water. I didn’t understand why her set of teeth looked so strange. It wasn’t two sets of dentures, up and down, but four or five. The glass would become something frightful – water all around the dentures and the teeth looking as though they were trying to bite the glass. Why did you take out your teeth, Sitti? I asked. So I can talk with you better. No, no, Sitti, please, go back and put in your teeth so I can understand you. She said she could not, because in a dream one shouldn’t fiddle with one’s teeth. But you’re dead, Grandmama, I told her. It’s not important, I don’t matter, my dear – the important thing is you, she said. But you’ve been dead a long time, I protested. She laughed, that mouth of hers wide open, and she began saying things I didn’t understand. I caught only one word. She was talking in a very faint voice and I only understood a single word.
Sabiyy
. I said to her, What
sabiyy
? You’ll find out later on, she told me. But I’m afraid now, I told her, and I put my hand out to pull her dentures up and out of the glass. She slapped my hand and I started to cry. When my grandmama Malakeh died I cried a lot. Everyone thought I was crying so much because Sitti loved me so much. But that wasn’t true. Well, of course I cried because I loved her too, but the truth is that I cried especially because they didn’t put the teeth back
inside of her mouth where they belonged. I asked my mother where they were and then I ran into the kitchen. She followed me and said, Don’t be upset, dear, take it easy. I didn’t answer. I just started searching like I’d gone mad. I went under the table, looking everywhere, opening the cupboards. My mother said to me, Stop. They aren’t here, we got rid of them.

Where? I asked. In the garbage. Why? Because, it’s
haraam
. False teeth mustn’t be buried with the dead. A dead person has to return to her Lord exactly as He created her.

In the garbage! I cried. And I went right to the garbage can and began to search. I didn’t find them, no. Not then. But yesterday, when I was drowning . . . no, maybe this is another dream, Lord how I’ve come to confuse things! It has gotten so I don’t know the whys and whens and hows anymore. The important thing is that I took the set of dentures and went to my grandmama but she had vanished. I didn’t know where she went. I didn’t know what I would do with her teeth. Women were sitting all around me, crying and crying some more. And then I fell. I don’t know how. I was hanging on to the akadoniya tree with my feet braced against some heavy branches, and I was eating a hard green fruit I had picked from it, and I was aware of myself only when I began to fall. When I hit the ground I broke my teeth. I put my hand up to my mouth and it’s as if they were my grandmama’s teeth. I don’t know. There was a lot of water, there were eyes and tears. The women’s tears were pouring onto the ground and I saw my grandmama drowning and I started crying. I put my hands out to grab my grandmama’s hand but I couldn’t reach her. I felt like I was drowning too. And then I don’t know, everything was blue and I was asleep in bed, and the mattress was like a lake and Sitti sat next to me. She put her hand on my belly and gave me the icon. And I saw the blue woman: it was as though she had risen right out of the icon. I said, Grandmama, this is the woman, it’s her, the one who put her hand on my tummy and it started growing. A
sabiyy
, she said. And she told
me we must name this boy Mikhail after Sister Milana’s convent, since the nun safeguards me, too, with her prayers. But I said to her, no, I’m going to name him Issa. His name is Issa, I’m naming him after the Messiah. Because that’s what the blue woman wants. I opened my eyes and got up and went into the bathroom. I washed my face, heated some water, and bathed. You were snoring away. Yesterday I tried to turn you over because the sound of it was so loud. But you were all curled up around yourself, like at the Hotel Massabki. God knows I was afraid for you there. No, not when you were in the bathroom and you weren’t answering me. That was easy enough to understand. At the time I felt . . . no, not right then, but later, seeing you asleep in bed, curled up as if you were a little baby boy in his mama’s belly, I felt what you wanted was a mother. Now don’t misunderstand me, and please, don’t interrupt me. I don’t like hearing this kind of talk. No, I don’t know what all you do and I don’t want to know. Did I ever ask you, even once? If I didn’t ask you, then why answer me? No, I don’t want to understand, these are matters only for you. You told me you don’t want to go to Jaffa, and anyhow I don’t like it there. What was I saying? Oh yes, I could feel my belly getting big and round, all of me becoming round, and I understood then what the woman had been saying to me, that woman who draped her hair in a blue shawl. I understood that I was pregnant. Me, Mr. Mansour – pregnant since last night. That’s what I wanted to tell you. That’s all.