As Though She Were Sleeping (21 page)

No, that’s not necessary.

But eggs are good for newlyweds, Mr. Bridegroom, said Wadiia II, who was suddenly there, as if she had just walked out of the wall.

Whatever, that’s fine then, he said, and sat down.

Striding over to him, the bald-headed driver clapped him lightly across the shoulders. The two Wadiias brought coffee, milk, and fried eggs, which they set down on the table, straightening up to stand in wait obediently beside the driver. He said he wanted to return to Beirut immediately. Mansour took some money out of his pocket and held it out with a thank you.

Wallaah inta jada’,
said the driver admiringly. A real brave man you are! Look, when I think about how you walked through that fog with the snow pelting down, I can feel the cold seizing me from my head to the soles of my feet! Leaves me feeling terrified. How were you not afraid? A lion, not just any young fellow getting married, a true lion!

Mansour said nothing. He noticed the sarcastic smiles pulling at the lips
of the two hotel maids. He saw now that they were eerily identical. Yesterday Milia had remarked that they looked so alike it frightened her. That Wadiia II would be the exact image of Wadiia I if it weren’t for the sloping shoulders and bowed legs. Mansour hadn’t noticed anything yesterday evening. Everything in him had quaked with cold; his bones seemed to be coming apart and he needed a warm bed and the darkness of his closed eyes immediately.

Wadiia I came over to him and asked after the bride. Seconds later the same question echoed from Wadiia II. Same voice, same gesture.

Where is Khawaja George? asked Mansour. He did not know why all of a sudden he should be seeking the aid of the hotel proprietor in concealing his unease about this doubled female image before him.

The Khawaja is asleep. Waiting for you so long yesterday exhausted him, said the first.

The Khawaja is not well, said the second.

Mother and daughter, mused Mansour. Khawaja George Massabki had been very fortunate with these two women, because he had not had to alter anything in his life. The eternal single, as he always called himself. He had found the perfect solution in a woman whose daughter replicated her. It had all worked out so well. The woman was a servitor, which meant no demands, just silence and submission. And she was a widow, meaning she had no independent means of support. And she had a youngish daughter who was just like her, meaning that after he had supported the girl’s upbringing, now the two women were like twin rings on his finger and he could live well served and well loved. Now there’s a man, Mansour felt like saying, and he attacked the plate of fried eggs. He heard the padding of Milia’s feet on the floor. Lifting his eyes he saw her standing between the pair of Wadiias. She seemed taller than before as she spoke in a low voice with the two women. She sat down across from him. She raised her eyebrows and he sensed he ought to stop eating his eggs.

In the bathroom he had felt ashamed and humiliated. He had closed
the door and tried to summon his mother because he was certain he would die. Only death destroys bodily desire. When that desire vanishes, death is certainly not far behind.

Nothing makes you cling to life like that does, declared the old man. All Mansour remembered of him was his thick head of very white hair. The man had come to their modest foundry and had bought a heap of iron rods. He said they were for the mujahideen high in the rocky hills. He gazed at Mansour’s brother, Amin, and said, If only youth would return one day! He said he knew his hour was near, because that gizmo – and he pointed between his thighs – no longer wanted it. And when it has lost the desire for it, that means it is commanding you to follow it into death. All Mansour could remember of the story were these strands of words. He had arrived as the man was preparing to leave, and so nothing stuck in his mind except this sentence – and now here it was, coming back to him along with the vomiting as his legs turned into jelly and pain blasted his inner organs. Death, he said to himself. This is death, and he cried out for his mother. He saw his mother lying on the ground, her thighbone broken, wailing for her own mother, who was dead. As if life is but a closed circle of mothers and nothing remains but the relationship binding child to mother – that is, to the child’s own death. When you call out
Mama!
you are summoning the grave, even if that is not what you think you are doing. A person’s life unfolds between two graves: the mother’s womb and the soil. Both places shelter you in that stage of becoming, preparing for the enormous transformations that will see you through the tunnel to the next life.

Who told him the tale of the two graves?

Milia? But no – Milia was happy now, with her rounding belly. She slept soundly, drank glass after glass of water, and acted as if her life had only now begun. Sister Milana, then – but Mansour had met the saintly woman only once, when she came to the church for their wedding, and that day he had
not seen or heard anything. Had he seen the nun in a dream? But he did not dream. Or he did not remember his dreams.

Mansour would have liked to tell his wife about his experiences with women before getting married. But she did not want to hear. And then, why tell them, anyway? After all, his grand story had begun when his eyes fell on this woman and he attached himself to her without really knowing how. He had not understood what was happening to him or why every time he shut his eyes the curves of her lower body began to chase him. Milia bewitched him with the undulating line that ran from her waist downward. He saw her whiteness erupt beneath a white dress that flowered with a pattern of red cherries. He wanted to go up to her and say something but he did not dare. It took three long months for him to speak to her, when he noticed the dimple in her right cheek and her wide and langorous eyes.

What’s that you’re saying?

I’m saying poetry.

Why – are you a poet?

No. I just love poetry.

And what else?

So, he would dream her?

Of course – how else to love her?

You mean, you fell in love with me in a dream?

I already told you I’m not a poet.

She noticed immediately how like her brother Musa he looked. It made her heart pound. She smiled, and that was the beginning that brought him eventually to stand up in the Church of the Archangel Mikhail and to walk shrouded in fog on the Shtoura Road. And there in the cold bathroom at the hotel he called out desperately to his mother for he sensed that death was on its way.

Well, no, that was not exactly the way it was. But this was how he told it to his wife three months into their marriage when he knew he wanted to open the file on that already buried story.

He did not say how intensely cold he had been in the bathroom, and yet he had not dared to return to the bedroom because he was afraid that to do so would only make things worse and harder to explain. As he sat on the toilet seat, the bathroom’s red tiles began to look and feel like blocks of ice burning his bare feet. Milia was knocking on the door and saying that she was going to call the doctor. No, Milia, no – I’m fine. Go to sleep, dear, it’s all fine, really.

He had no idea how his violently trembling lips actually produced the words but he heard her moving away from the door. His joints went completely limp and the shiver that his rib cage had kept imprisoned now leapt out and swept over him. Walking on tiptoe, he headed back to bed, his
whole body shaking and his mind in despair. He stopped to warm himself in front of the stove before feeling his way into bed, where he would curl up around himself like a snail.

Milia was already asleep. He lay down, careful to leave a space between them. He pulled the covers over his body and head and heat began to penetrate his joints. He dozed off and then suddenly his eyelids flew open as though in fright, and he thought, I am a bridegroom on my wedding night and a just-married man must not go to sleep before taking the bride who lies next to him into his arms.

He told her he had not been able to sleep. His desire was so implacable. The image of her waist as she stood beneath the almond tree . . . the curve of her abdomen and hips . . . With each touch, every kiss, he began to regain the flavor of things. He began to collect the straying fragments of his spirit, scattered in the cold and the fear.

Today he saw her growing round and she told him she was pregnant, as if she were being born anew; as if the child in her belly would give Milia her ultimate shape. Seeing the red lines on her neck he remembered the story they had not told him. He wanted to know.

As for her – she had not cared. Her fixedly downward gaze, which had suggested to Mansour that bashfulness was this young woman’s hallmark, seemed now to take on another meaning. The gazes of this woman traveled only inside the world of arcs and circles in which she existed. Looking down, she saw the circle complete. She was closed upon herself and she would go where no one else might follow her.

He felt jealous. No, it wasn’t jealousy exactly. Distance – as if, with these circles of hers, the woman encloses a space, draws a line between herself and him, and leaves him powerless to break through it.

She said she was going to sleep and stood up.

Sit down.

As you like. And fine, you name him. I don’t know why you’re acting like this, I thought you would be happy the way any man is when he knows his wife is pregnant.

No, it’s not the name, he said. What I’m concerned about is something else. And he asked her about Najib.

It was the first time in two years she had heard this man’s name. Everyone in the family had stopped mentioning his name. If they needed to refer to him they would say
that one there
. The pronoun replaced the man, and so Najib had become a mere jumble of letters empty of flesh or sense.

Najib had disappeared as had his image and his name. Now here he was suddenly coming back at the very moment Milia was freeing herself of her past, and of the memories of those days. She wanted to say to Mansour that she didn’t know. Or, she wanted to say: No, it isn’t that I don’t know, but the story died and has been buried, and there’s no call for reviving it.

It was her grandmama Malakeh above all who taught her how necessary it was to distinguish between stories. She would scold her daughter Saadeh whenever she mentioned the name of her husband’s father and the story of the house he had bought.

The story that goes rotten has to be buried, said Grandmama. Stories carry odors.

This grandfather, Saadeh’s father-in-law, had caused the women of the family deep and chronic pain. It was imperative to forget the story of the house. The woman who had lived there had to be buried along with the story. No one spoke now of the Egyptian woman, or of Khawaja Efthymios, or of the scandal that flared up when the grandfather bought the house after the death of his lover who had been the mistress of another man. So why, now, would Mansour want to resurrect a story that Milia had buried?

At least for Saadeh, finally the nightmarish business of the priesthood
and the monks seemed over. Wherever had that naughty boy gotten his ideas about the Jesuit monks and this Catholic business? He was the only one among his brothers to finish his education, saying he wanted to become a lawyer, but then he had started his interminable chant about joining the Jesuits, stirring up a veritable storm in the household.

His brother Haajj Niqula swore he would kill Salim after hearing the screaming match between mother and firstborn son. Niqula went into the
liwan
and returned to the
dar
wearing his father’s red tarbush. In a deep fierce voice he told his brother that he would kill him.

Does a brother kill his own brother? Salim shouted.

That’s how killing came into the world – brother killing brother. Cain killed Abel. Now Abel wants revenge. No one can mess around with me. These idiotic behaviors have no place in this house. It wouldn’t cost me anything more than a single bullet. And I can furnish the coffin easy, from my shop – with pleasure.

From that day on Niqula never, ever removed the tarbush from his brow. Through the tendons of the family ran shivers of fear. Saadeh did not know what to do. She went to her holy woman for advice. I have two boys, she said. The first wants to become a Jesuit monk and if he does, the second will be a criminal. What am I going to do?

A Jesuit! cried the nun. I take refuge in God from evil Satan! As though he is not even the grandson of Salim who first rang the bell of the Church of Mar Girgis in Beirut. That Salim was a true man! And now comes Salim the Younger who inherited his grandpapa’s name, but so what? He’s leaving the true faith – he’s leaving the Orthodox to go join the French! I spit on the Devil!

She made Saadeh spit on Satan, too, and then Saadeh asked what she ought to do to avoid this mess.