As Though She Were Sleeping (26 page)

The story goes that Maryam died suddenly, the heirs of Khawaja Efthymios put the house up for sale, and in the end they settled on Salim Shahin, who bought the house for cash. It was perhaps as much as a year after her move to the new house that Hasiba became aware of the double life her husband had been living. But the only tactic she had at her disposal was to blend her scream with the gas she needed to burn her body after
that dog son of a bitch had burned her heart
. And then she submitted herself to God. To her passion for walking alone at night she added a passion for cats. The garden rapidly became a refuge for stray cats from all over town. From among them she would choose her favorite, bringing it into the house and insisting that her son and husband treat it exactly like a member of the family.

The pain thrashed Milia in her lower belly until she could barely suppress her screams. She cried out Mansour’s name. She knew he was not at
home but there was no one else to whom she could resort. It was at this moment that she heard her grandmother’s voice, a voice she had not heard before; and here was the cat, and then suddenly she saw her grandfather Salim standing in the garden and tossing a pebble upward toward the window to tell his Egyptian lover that he was here. He would crouch beneath the eucalyptus, waiting for the woman to appear, her shadow already etched behind the window, half hidden by the thick interlacing of jasmine tree leaves. She could see it all and, seeing it, she was mortally afraid. No, this was not a dream. That cat was a dream – the cat that had nipped at her feet and whose meowing had lacerated her heart. All the rest consisted of circles rippling out from the dream, spherical waves of memories, images of all of the deceased who visited Milia in her dreams. She seemed always to be witnessing a story that was not hers, as if she was reading a book or as if the lid on the ancient chest her grandmother had given her was opening and instead of removing books and papers and letters of the alphabet she was taking out a man and a woman and their only son. In the distance stood the mistress, the lover waiting under the window while Khawaja Sergios Efthymios stood motionless in a corner, in his red tarbush and his carefully pressed European suit, the rasp of his coughing unmistakable.

Milia knows that Mansour is not here. For three months now he has been disappearing for days at a time and when he returns, his face is governed by a sadness that shows especially mournfully in his eyes.

Where has the poetry gone? she asks him.

She knows well that poetry’s greatest enemy is death. Poetry cannot conquer death, contrary to what Mansour would argue. Poetry’s greatest function is to help us accept death, and to make our peace with it, to the point perhaps where we are able to believe it has been victorious over death when in truth poetry is the mere progeny of death: its secret voice.

When Mansour’s brother, Amin, died, the world was turned upside
down. Though she would never have believed it could happen, immediately Milia saw another man born inside of her husband. The man she knew – and about whom she knew everything, she was certain – simply had disappeared. That open book she had known so well was no longer. As the childbirth pangs squeezed her and wrung her out, now, she would say that, yes, she had loved him, on that night when they had finally reached the hotel. She had fallen in love with the man who entered her sleep and her wakefulness, who could fill up her silence with words and who awed and bewildered her with the poetry he declaimed. He was a man whose love of life – and the particular route it had taken – revealed itself in his insatiable adoration of the food his wife prepared and the myriad of excuses he found, a new one every day, to drink arak. Good food demands arak.
Haraam!
that a man would eat this stunningly delicious food without drinking arak! he would exclaim. He would plunge into Milia’s various ragouts and float on the bliss of her
laban immuh
, then laugh and say that the ancient Arabs composed odes on sweets. He would remember Ibn el-Rumi and his relationship with that sweet of sweets,
zalabiya
. Sweet pastries are gold, woman, he’d declare. Listen!

But no one ever wrote in praise of stews and other ordinary dishes, alas! And then, what about this food to end all foods,
laban immuh
with rice?

That is not its true name, interjected Milia. Yes, Beirut folks call it that, but it is from Syria and there it is called
shakiriyya
.

It doesn’t matter! What does matter is – God forgive us – its very name is a bit of a fierce warning. Listen to what’s written in the Torah: Do not
eat the calf in its own mother’s milk. Our cousins the Jews do not eat meat cooked in butter, and that’s why.

They’re right, said Milia, and she announced then and there that she would stop cooking calf in its own mother’s milk. Because it’s a savage thing to do, she said.

Not savage, not silly! This
laban immuh
is the mother of all foods and we will all be cooking it come Judgment Day!

He sipped his arak and then took a taste of
laban
, and enjoyed saying that no one had ever quite approached it like this before. Milk and milk; lion’s milk (arak’s other name, Mansour told her) and cow’s milk. We’re mixing milk and milk. A man can be a child nursing at the breasts of heaven.

Such a moment would spur Mansour to begin reciting poetry. From where had his memory gathered in so many stored-up poetic treasures that his stock never seemed to run dry? Where did it all come from, this daily infusion of a new fund of poetry to add to his never-ending verbal effervescence? She loved him. She had fallen in love with his words and with his love for her. She began to grow accustomed to the triadic life she lived here in Nazareth: the house, the street, and her dreams in her sleep. Then came the news that shook her life to the core and forced her into a relationship with a completely different person. She had to make an entirely new attempt to love him, at a time when she was no longer prepared for such a trial.

Her husband suggested she go to Beirut to have her mother at her bedside for the birth. Even before hearing his wife’s thoughts on the matter, though, he withdrew the idea. Everything is ransomed to its own time, he said, and the security situation is very unsettled. He did not want to expose her life or that of the baby to danger and so he proposed instead that she invite her mother to come to Nazareth. But Milia rejected both suggestions. She would not go to Beirut because she had come to Nazareth to give birth here, and she would not summon her mother for the mother was chronically
ill. Such a visit would impose an added burden on Milia, who would have to take care of her.

From the start – that is, ever since the girl’s memory had taken form – she had seen herself as a mother to her own mother and had thought of herself as an orphan. No indeed, she did not want Beirut and she did not want her mother. She wanted to have the baby here because that was what the child wanted. All she wanted from the world now was fulfillment of a single and singular desire: to meet this child whom she saw in her dreams, his immense eyes open so wide that they seemed to have no eyelashes, staring at her from within the waters in which he floated, and telling her the story that no one had ever heard.

Then that news came and everything changed. She recognized finally and fully that if Mansour had once fled from his brother to her, now Amin had succeeded in regaining his brother, and she had no power to change any of it. In the end, there was no choice but to go to Jaffa.

Jaffa is not Beirut. Nor was Manshiyya the Bourj Square she knew so well. The rough humidity here was not like that of Beirut with its scent of gently rotting trees. She went to Jaffa to attend the brother’s funeral and there she saw the country called Palestine. In Beirut she had not sensed herself as part of a country despite living through the headiness of independence from the French Mandate. She had remained mostly oblivious. She had not heard about Faisal I and the story of the kingdom he had founded in Damascus, which was to extend all the way to Beirut, until her husband told her about it in the Hotel Massabki, when he called her to stand beneath the image of a man with distracted eyes who was said to be king of the Syrian lands.

In Nazareth she lived outside of time. The city was boiling over but she did not really notice anything out of the ordinary. The only person in town with whom she had spent any time was Mansour’s aunt Malvina Surouji, whose only topic of conversation was the man who had married her daughter,
Nadiya. People had comforted her with the words that he would be a reasonable substitute for Mansour, she said. Ahh, my poor girl, you were meant to marry your cousin Mansour, but what can we do with Fate? The bride from Beirut had to show her sympathetic solidarity with this woman who still dreamed of Mansour as the rightful husband for her daughter.

Then there appeared that aged man who claimed descent from that eminent Lebanese warrior of another age, the Emir Fakhr el-Din el-Ma’ani II. At first the man frightened her, but she grew accustomed to him soon enough. She asked Aunt Malvina about him. He was called Mad Tanyous and he had left Nazareth long ago. But he was not really mad. Milia did not know how one might accurately describe this odd man who wore the black vestments of a priest but with a felt skullcap in the way of the peasants of Jabal Lubnan, wrapping his middle with a white and black striped Palestinian Kaffiyeh. I am all alone, he said to Milia in his Palestinian accent, skewing some of the letters and sounds in an attempt to give it a Lebanese twist. Appearing before her window by night only to vanish, he would reappear in the mornings to shadow her through the streets of the city.

The woman lived her Nazareth story in walking its narrow streets and uncovering this place to which she had come. This town was in essence the solemn and dreadful anticipation that it inspired. That is what she came to understand about the Messiah’s town as she lived there. In these wanderings around town she would see him now and then, and she gave him a few pennies because she believed him to be a beggar. He took them without thanking her as though she were simply doing her duty. She began to bring him loaves of bread and other food. To be more accurate, several times she invited him to the house so that he could eat but she did not dare bring him inside. She brought the food to him in the garden and observed him as he ate, though he did not give the appearance of eating. He did not look at the food but simply swallowed it rapidly and perfunctorily as if he found it
beneath him, wiped his moustache and beard with his chapped palm, and melted away. She did not tell Mansour that she had invited him. She said he had shown up. She told a story that had not come to pass but she was certain that in some way or other it must have come to pass.

And where was I? asked Mansour.

You were asleep, here in the house, Milia said. I tried to wake you up but I couldn’t. I found him standing in front of the window. He said he was hungry. That is how he began coming here.

Milia was not speaking the exact truth. She heard a knock on the window. It was nighttime and Mansour was out. Everything had changed since Mansour had started going regularly to Jaffa and had decided to take up the hardware manufacturing business that his brother’s murder had left untended. Mansour was not there and Milia slept alone in the house. She was not afraid but she was uneasily aware of the dreadful solemnity of the night, of her solitude, and of the baby in her belly. She heard a knocking at the window. She got up and saw the dark outline of a man just disappearing behind the trees. She went back to bed, covered herself up, and waited. The next night the same scene occurred but the third night was different. It was about ten o’clock. Everything was silent in the Greek Orthodox quarter where Mansour had bought the newlyweds a home. This time she heard a violent knocking on the window. Going over to the window she saw the ghostly form of a man.

Who is it? she asked, her voice quavering with fright.

Me, answered the shape standing behind the window. Open it, I have brought you a gift.

She did not know where the strength to open the window came from – as though she were not herself, as though she were sleeping. As though someone gave orders and she obeyed. She opened the window and noticed a goblet of wine in the man’s hand. He gave it to her and said he would come back.

It is the water of life, he said, and disappeared.

She did not see him leave; she did not see the back of him. He had been facing her when a darkness fell suddenly and covered him. The little girl found herself standing alone with her swelling belly in front of the window holding a glass of red liquid near to overflowing. She brought it to her nose and smelled aged wine. She touched the glass to her lips but did not drink. She returned to the window to close it and saw that it was already closed. She shouted for Mansour but no one answered. She saw Musa coming toward her. She wanted to ask him what had brought him here. Musa took the glass from her hand and drained it. He held the empty glass out for his sister as a darkness fell over him and erased his form. The girl saw herself holding an empty glass and standing alone. She stepped back and was suddenly submerged in darkness pierced by a single bold light. She picked up the light in her hands. The goblet shone. Suddenly and without her realizing what was happening, the goblet slipped and shards of glass scattered everywhere. She bent over the glass slivers intermingled with points of light, wanting to pick them up, but every time she touched a shred of light it went out and blood dripped from her finger, as though she were replacing scraps of light with blood. But she had to pick up the fragments somehow. She waited for Mansour but he did not come. She was afraid he might step on the shreds of glass and hurt himself. She picked up the glass chips and saw their shine suddenly extinguished between her wounded fingers and saw how they were coated in dark, dark blood. She carried the bits of glass with her wounded fingers and slipped to the ground and saw the blood. She opened her eyes to find herself in her bed, her heart pounding so hard that she could feel it throughout her body. She made the sign of the cross and decided that she would forget this particular dream, and closed her eyes once again.