As Though She Were Sleeping (31 page)

It’s the tires, said the driver. Not catching the road.

The driver pulled up on the hand brake and put the car into low gear. He pressed the accelerator pedal to the floor and the car emitted a strange sound as though it were a wounded animal groaning. It started to climb, juddering violently.

What is it? asked Milia.

Nothing, said the driver.

When the car reached the top of the slope and began to slither over the puddles, the motor died and all they could hear was the patter of rain.

What do we do now? asked Mansour.

We can’t do anything, said the driver.

Mansour opened the door and heard Milia scream, No, don’t get out! He closed the car door and began to plead with the driver to do something. The woman will have her baby right here! Please, get us moving somehow. Both
front doors opened and Mansour and the driver got out simultaneously. Milia saw the two men disappear behind the car trunk, which was now open. She turned to the aunt sitting next to her but the aunt was not there. She closed her eyes on the first streaks of darkness that were creeping in between the splashes of rain. She heard her father saying, Snow. It’s starting to snow.

Where did you go, Mansour? she screamed. Mansour is not here and she is alone in the car wrapped in a brown overcoat, shivering with cold.

The two men returned to the car. The aunt’s hand went to her brow as if she needed to check her body temperature. Mansour twisted around in his seat and asked her to hold herself together. She said she did not feel the pain anymore but she was afraid, seeing the thickness of the fog.

There’s no fog, he said. But she saw fog and she saw the snow coming down hard and she saw a man in the distance carrying a tiny girl, running with her beneath the falling snow. What had brought her father here, into this storm? Why was he carrying her and running through the driving snow? Cradling his daughter, Yusuf was running to Dr. Naqfour’s clinic. He had snatched her out of bed while the nun recited prayers over her and swung incense across her body. The nun told her to open her mouth and swallow the oil-imbued cotton. Yusuf snatched his daughter from the nun, wrapped her in their brown woolen blanket, and ran to the doctor’s clinic. That year the snow came down hard in Beirut. Milia did not remember the snow, but she remembered the woolen blanket and her father’s hard breathing. The girl was four years old. She remembered hearing crying around her bed and having the sensation of floating above her fiery body. Did she hear the word death? She did not know. No, perhaps not then, perhaps only later, when her grandmother told her the story and she sensed how close death had passed, in the form of a fever that consumed her tiny body for ten days. Malakeh said she was reassured when she awoke the feverish girl to ask what she was dreaming and Milia’s reddened eyes opened to answer her
grandmother that she wasn’t dreaming. Malakeh was relieved because – as she said – death requires a long, long dream. She told her daughter Saadeh not to worry, and she went home.

No, Papa, I don’t want to! shouted Milia trying to wriggle out of her father’s grip. She waved her hands about and the blanket slipped down, snowflakes wetting her skin and causing her to shout as if the falling snow were stinging her. Papa, let’s go back home! But Yusuf paid no attention. He ran on and on, tears streaming from his eyes. You are my darling,
ya habibti
, he babbled. He ran beneath the pounding snow until they reached an enormous black door. At his rapping the door opened. The snow stopped falling and darkness covered the girl’s eyes. At that point memories snapped out like a light.

The driver lit a cigarette and began puffing nervously. No smoking, please! said Mansour. Can’t you see the woman is pregnant and having difficulties? The driver opened the car window to toss the cigarette outside and the cold wind hurtling in flapped open the aunt’s overcoat covering Milia. She whimpered, feeling the baby shiver in her belly. Sacred Virgin! she cried out. She heard the sound of the car engine starting up and found herself at the hospital entrance.

The Italian doctor who examined Milia said, No, nothing today, perhaps tomorrow. He asked Mansour to take his wife home and observe her condition. When the pains in her belly come one right after another, he said, and the pain is getting stronger, bring her back to the hospital. There’s no need for her to be here right now.

Yes, that’s right, she said, and stood up immediately.
Yallah
, home, she said to her husband, who could not believe his eyes, seeing how the thread of pain slid away from her eyes as if the doctor’s words were a magic remedy that wiped the contractions from her pale face so that the black lines ringing her eyes vanished and the milky limpidity of her cheeks returned.

Yallah
, home, she said, and walked out. The rain had stopped. Rays of sun cut through the gray cloud cover dusting the city.

Where’re you going? Wait, I will call the driver.

No, I want to walk, she said, and walked on.

Is it all right for her to walk, doctor? asked Mansour. But the doctor had disappeared and there remained in the room only two nurses who looked exactly alike except that one was young and the other old, the first one lighter and the second one darker. Mansour assumed the paler one was Italian, so he tried to ask her the question in English. The nurse smiled and gestured to indicate that she did not understand anything that was being said. He turned to the dark one and asked her in Arabic. She smiled too, as if she too didn’t understand, and raised her eyebrows to suggest that he would find an answer only upstairs. Mansour left the hospital to find that Milia was not outside. He stood in front of the Italian Hospital like a man lost before the city’s many alleyways and twists, not knowing which way to turn in order to find his wife. He saw his aunt and the driver waiting for him in front of the American car. He got into the front passenger seat and asked his aunt to get into the back.

We want to go home, he said to the driver.

What about Milia? asked his aunt.

Later, said Mansour.

Milia walked on, as if the pain and the scene of her father carrying her in his arms as she begged him to put her down because she wanted to walk had generated in her a desire to find him now, to tell him she had reached the end of the road and was preparing to depart for a distant city.

Milia said she remembered the very first time she had walked. Her father was carrying her in his arms, she said, and she was crying. I started pulling and wriggling to get down but my papa didn’t understand what I wanted. I heard my mama tell him to put me down. I didn’t know how to speak but I
did understand and I watched myself being lowered to the floor, on my belly. He thought I wanted to crawl but I grabbed on to a chair leg and pulled myself up, and began walking. Everything began turning around me and I heard my mother saying, The girl is walking! and she started ululating to let everyone know the happy news. And from that moment I never stopped walking. I was always walking round the house as if I had just discovered the world. It looks so different from above!

Do you really remember all of this? asked Mansour.

Of course I remember it all.

But a person doesn’t remember anything that happened before the age of three.

Well, I do.

Fine, fine, he said, and didn’t go on. Ever since the incident of the broken goblet, the expression
tayyib tayyib
had become his polite way of letting her know he believed she was lying. Listening to her stories, suddenly he would realize that his mind was incandescent with the thought that she was lying.

You’re lying to me, Milia, he would say, his voice sweeping the specters of her words from his eyes as he gave her a tight smile. She would never answer. Milia had long been accustomed to these words, which her mother used to say, and which the nun said, and which her brothers said. Only Musa believed her – and believed in her. Once he told her he believed in her. No, she said. A person must not believe in people. A person believes only in God.

But my mama believes in the nun.

I don’t like nuns at all.

But she is holy.

When had this conversation happened? Had Musa really said he believed in her, or was she confusing her dreams with what had truly happened?

She told Musa he didn’t know her. No, she hadn’t said that. She believed Musa had not really seen her, not the real Milia, not even once. How could he have seen her since he had not gone inside her dreams? He had never seen the tawny-skinned girl who ran through thorns and felt no pain. But on the day he brought the photograph home and hung it on the wall she felt afraid of the light that radiated outward from the eyes. He saw her then but did not really attend to the truth that the image on the wall revealed to him, without any effort on his part to seek it.

Why this photograph? she asked, stepping back. Take it away.

It’s so you’ll stay here with us, said Musa. When I miss you I know where to come to see you. When I’m longing for you I can say so to your face.

Milia walks alone, the baby nearly ready to emerge from her belly, sorrow encasing her, and fear. Nine months of fear, Milia told Tanyous. But whence had this strange obscure old man come, this figure who so resembled the prophets of old?

The goblet, Milia remembers. He had brought her a wineglass poured to the brim with a slightly yellowish liquid. No. . . he had not actually given her the glass. He left it on the windowsill. Milia had been alone in the house; Mansour was in Jaffa. She heard a knock at the window. She wrapped herself up hurriedly in the coverlet and told herself out loud that she would not open her eyes. Her fear of the dream mingled with her fear of the night. She squeezed her eyes even more tightly shut, turned onto her right side, and focused on the ringing in her ears. She went limp, acceding to the power of the ringing and her drowsiness. With that sound from outside she felt the baby churning in her womb, kicks battering her intestinal wall.

She opened the window to see him creeping among the trees. Amm Tanyous! she shouted. She wrapped her fingers around the glass set on the windowsill. The liquid inside was like gold. She brought the glass to her lips and drank a single drop, enough to send her into a floating reverie. She
set the goblet down on the table next to the bed and fell immediately into a deep sleep.

How did the white wine turn into red wine by morning? And why had Mansour not seen the wine? Why this blood-red stain tinting her fingertips, which she couldn’t remove with soap and water?

Tanyous was the sign. He was an old man: who knew how many years he had lived? He wore a black robe as monks did, and his beard was white and long and bushy. His eyes were sunk deeply into his face, sharp points of light, and his voice gurgled and rattled as if coming from deep in his belly.

He had never seen this man in his life, Mansour told her.

But he’s a monk, said Milia.

A monk would not be wandering around the streets like this, said Mansour. I’ve never seen him, not even once, and my aunt, who has lived in these parts for twenty years, has never heard anyone speak of him. Anyway, there’s no one from Beirut in this town. If Beirutis work around here, they’re in Tiberias or Haifa. Enough, woman. Tomorrow or the next day,
inshallah
, you’ll have your baby and that will be the end of these infernal dreams.

Mansour was convinced that the strange things his wife saw in her dreams were brought on by her pregnancy and her sense of loneliness. His mother had told him that when a woman gets pregnant she goes a bit eccentric. Some women even sleep all day long. Some eat dirt, and some . . . well, God help them! When she had been pregnant with him, his mother told Mansour, she couldn’t stop eating tiny pickled lemons even though they turned her insides into flames.

No need to worry, son, she comforted him. These are just the symptoms of pregnancy. Even though Mansour was persuaded by his mother’s view and held to his hope that after the birth Milia would stop her odd behaviors – no longer going out for her daily dreamlike wanderings through the town’s alleyways – Mansour was certain that the true problem was Nazareth. It’s
an insane place, he said to his wife. He had discovered this truth the very moment they set foot in the new house. Something had shifted in Milia’s gaze to the point where he could no longer read her feelings through the shadows hovering over her eyes. It’s what love means, he had told her, trying to explain how he would know her feelings. I read your eyes and I know. Only the lover can read eyes. It is the sign of love, and it means I love you.

But I don’t know how to read eyes, she answered. Does this mean you love me more than I love you?

Definitely, he said. Come on, now, look into my eyes and learn how to read them!

They were in the garden of the old house. Mansour put his hand out to take hers but she gave him no more than her fingertips, and her cheeks went red. She dropped her lashes. She said she was reading.

But your eyes are closed.

I read when they’re closed.

Milia was not lying to Mansour. She read other people with her eyes closed. What baffled her, though, after they married, was that she never saw Mansour in her dreams. It had worried her at first; it felt as though she was being unfaithful to the man she had married. She didn’t tell him this, although she felt guilty. Can a woman tell her husband she’s betraying him? Of course he would react with anger – but only until he knew what this peculiar betrayal consisted of, and then he would laugh and say he knew all about it and had no need to hear her confession.