As Though She Were Sleeping (33 page)

Iskandar stumbled on an extraordinary journalistic coup. By coincidence he got to know an old woman who lived in the neighborhood of Furn el-Shabbak, adjacent to the Church of Mar Ilyas, and was treated with particular fondness by the priest Samir Abu Hanna. The young, twentyish aspiring journalist was always stopping by at the priest’s home, for he was in love with his only daughter, Futin, who would reject his love and turn his heart to ashes when she decided to follow her vocation as a nun. That is another story, though. This old woman, the young man discovered, was none other than Marika Spyridon, the mistress of the market, who spent her last days in prayer and repentance.

When the young man visited the elderly woman armed with information on her relationship with Bishop Gerasimos, given him by Monsieur Said el-Sabbagheh, he found himself confronting the story of his paternal aunt Milia. He heard interminable details he could not believe, about the nun’s miracle in rescuing Milia when she was at death’s door at the age of ten.

Marika was not stingy with details. She told the young man everything he wanted. Her relationship with the bishop, she said, was not like any relationship she had ever had with any other man.

I am a Greek, she said. We are a people who are everywhere. The Spyridon family is Greek through and through, with our origins in Istanbul. I did not choose my line of work – it is something I inherited. My mother was in the same profession, and so were my grandmother and my grandmother’s mother. In those days it was not a big issue. My mother married like any woman anywhere in the world would. I don’t know what’s gone wrong, why
people think the way they do, how
whores
have become outcasts. Son, if only you knew what I have been through and what I’ve done! If it were not for us, how would there be so many healthy families in the world? You must know that men are dogs, they cannot do anything to fight it – that’s how God created them, after all. Adam, peace be upon him, betrayed his wife, Eve, even though there were absolutely no other women in existence! Don’t ask me how he managed it or what he did. Ask His Eminence the Bishop, he’s the one who told me. Actually, who sent you to me, son?

He told her about Monsieur Said and she collapsed in a fit of laughter. Said! That’s Neama’s son. God be generous to him – such a bighearted man but he was a such a coward, too! I was something like forty-five years old when I took his virginity. You think it’s just women who are deflowered, as they say? No, honey! It’s young men just as much. God, how can I describe it so you’ll understand. First time and he went completely mad. When it’s a young fellow’s first time he only needs a little push and I gave him that – I was very fond of that boy! But he would finish too fast. I’d say, no – the first is for the Devil, come on, now, try again – and the second the same – too bad, he didn’t get it. Such a nice boy, from a good family I think, and the third time he did it like a man, and I said to him, you’re there, you know now – and come back anytime. I’ll tell you, I felt like I’d never felt before, maybe because he was so young and it was his first time. Why are you laughing? Yes, I can say
virgin
of a man. Ahh! It doesn’t usually happen to me. And yes, it was the same with His Eminence. God’s mercy upon him, he would exhaust me. He was old, at least sixty-five, long white beard – you know the sort. Maybe he was shy, I don’t know. He would never take off his clothes. I would always say fine, and take mine off and come to him, but he could never get it up, and he would blush to the ends of his white beard, as red as a tomato, and would say, It’s my medications. And I’d say, Forget those medications and your babbling, I’m Marika, sir – and I’d throw myself on
him, and I’d get his clothes off and I’d get to work. Don’t ask me what I did – I tried every trick in the book, and he started moving. I’d hear him shout, Hallelujah! I would tell him to lower his voice – Sir, we’re in a cell and there are people close by – but he didn’t care, and he began calling me Marika the Marvelous. No, I wasn’t in love with him but I had a lot of sympathy. And that’s one way to love. How love happens is a secret, and there are a million ways to get there. If someone tells you they know what love is, you can be certain they don’t know what they’re talking about. No one can know what happens between women and men – and between men and men, and women and women. When Sister Milana knelt down in front of me in the church and then I knelt down, I felt the strangeness of it! Oh God, Satan be cursed! I didn’t like it, but that woman was a true saint, son, I don’t want to make too much of it but I know what she did with your mama Milia, when she was little, and that was enough to convince me.

Milia was my aunt, she wasn’t my mama.

Your aunt, your mama, whatever. Where were we? Yes, we were with the bishop. So with a lot of hard work he got to be a man, and like men he would pounce on me with his hallelujahs something fearful. No, he really frightened me. He called me his
dinner table
and he devoured me. What can I tell you, he smelled like incense and a little honey and he thought he was God. That’s how he acted, and anyway he was a big man and I was like you see me now, thin, but when I’d undress he would stagger back and ask me where I could hide all of this? My thighs are full but that doesn’t show under my dress. Maybe it was because I was afraid of him. No, I wasn’t – I was afraid for him and maybe that is why I felt so good with him. I went to him to confess; I knelt on the ground. He covered my head. I talked. I had never gone to give confession before. At Easter I went to church, but I was there with everyone; the priest would raise his hand and just bless us all at once. I don’t know what came over me on this day; I went very early,
at dawn. I went straight to the bishop’s seat. He put his hand out thinking perhaps that I wanted to kiss it as worshippers do. I took his hand and kissed it. And then I came right to him and whispered that I wanted to confess. He gave me a very strange and full look, and I understood. I heard how his voice trembled as he said, You! He asked me to kneel to the left of the altar – and, well, then it went from there.

Iskandar Shahin wrote down everything Marika said about the bishop and Said el-Sabbagheh (with a judicious change of names, of course) and about the sainted nun who cured diseases, and how Marika had become infatuated with the nun and the bishop had gone over the edge and ordered Milana’s banishment to a remote convent away in Koura. And there in a half-savage place the nun had transformed herself into the patroness saint of the village of Bkeftayn. At first she had lived alone; and then three nuns from the Convent of the Archangel Mikhail joined her so that they could serve her needs. There the nun lost her sight and her miraculous powers began to show themselves. When she prayed the vapor of incense came from her mouth. She no longer had any need for cotton dipped in blessed oil to cure the sick, for the touch of her hand was enough to conjure the oil’s healing aroma and expel the demons from the invalids, as much as those devils shrieked in anger. In her final days, her miracles doubled. Though nearly paralyzed, she would move from one corner to another in the convent without need of anyone’s help. Three days before her death she agreed to accept the repentance of Bishop Gerasimos, who came to her in tears, seeking forgiveness and asking her to absolve him of his sins.

Marika told the young man that his grandmother Saadeh had gone faithfully to visit the nun in the Convent of Mar Yuhanna the Baptist in the village of Bkeftayn in the Koura region on a regular basis until her death. These visits were Saadeh’s sole consolation as she faced the calamity that had befallen the family.

Iskandar was stunned when Monsieur Said el-Sabbagheh took his article, slid it into a desk drawer, and said to the young journalist that he respected the immense effort he had made in writing his fine piece but that he would not be able to publish it since that would sully the memory of the bishop and thus might encourage sectarian rifts in a country like Lebanon. When Iskandar asked later to have the manuscript back he found out that that Monsieur Said had lost it – or that is what the editor claimed. So all that remained of Marika’s story was the echo of her name in people’s memories, whipping up desires and pleasant images of the past, especially in the bewitching relationship the memory of her created between the letters
kaf
and
alif
at the end of her name, so far apart in the alphabet but collapsing into each other when written together. Between them they could gesture to desires repressed inside and offer through their linguistic embrace a stark and lovely image of how disconnected forms might intertwine to love one another.

When the young man asked his father, Musa, about his aunt Milia and the stories of the nun and the bishop, tears sprang from the elderly father’s eyes. The dark-skinned old man, whose head was covered in the whiteness of old age, did not utter a word. Perhaps he had not heard his son’s question? But no – for his tears poured silently and his voice choked when he heard his sister’s name.

Saadeh gripped the hem of the nun’s robe as the saint prayed to the evening light. O Mother of God, Saadeh shrieked, deliver us! It’s Milia, O Mother of Light, please! Milia is dying.

The nun turned toward the source of the voice. She yanked the hem of her garment from Saadeh’s clutch and told her to go home. Milia’s time has not come yet, she declared. Woe is you, Saadeh, when the hour does come. Go home and I will come soon, and
inshallah
there is no cause for worry.

The nun’s words could be trusted. Milia crossed over the valley of death
borne on that strange dream carved into her heart. Milia forgot the days she passed through, so ill that her mother and the neighbor women gathered around her bed weeping for the girl who was dying. She forgot the delirious words and the body that vanished to nothing and seemed a mere apparition. But the dream by which death passed her by remained suspended in her memory as though she had dreamt it only yesterday or had seen it times without number. This was the dream that now rose before her eyes as she listened to Mansour talking about Yusuf the Carpenter. Perhaps Mansour was right. This hallowed man who gave the Messiah his royal lineage – the line of King Daoud – had been marginalized completely by the Catholic Church. He had no feast day of his own, no miracles ascribed to him, and even the date of his death remains unknown. Did he die before the Messiah was crucified, and if so, when? If he died after the crucifixion, then why was he not there with Maryam beneath the cross? It was as though he were a mere implement – and a marginal one, at that – of the divine will. He was not a prophet or a true saint, but all the same Milia loved him because he had fled with his son to Egypt when he sensed danger, and he refused to sacrifice his son as Ibrahim had done – may peace be upon that holy man’s name. Most likely, had Yusuf the Carpenter been alive, he would have prevented Jesus from entering Jerusalem on the back of a donkey and announcing himself king, in that escapade that led him to the cross.

She found herself in a place she did not know, and alone, lying on her back in a meadow of green grass. When she conjured up the memory of this dream she did not see her own image in it. Probably she did not recognize herself in that little girl’s shape, even though when she saw the little girl in her dreams, Milia did believe the figure was her. It was only in this odd dream that she saw everything else, but without seeing herself. Perhaps this was why she was so terrified, why she screamed and raved, causing the women clustered around her bed to believe that these were the girl’s death
agonies and that she was seeing the phantoms of the world of the dead, covered in soil. Milia screamed out that it was soil. She would not remember her scream or her fear; she remembered only that child covered in dirt who lay by her side. Her lips were cracked with thirst and the grass that had gone yellowish crept over her eyes. Grass began to grow all over her. The baby needed water, she cried. And suddenly here was that man. Who was this man wearing an overcoat, jumping over Milia to pick up the child and throw him into the flames?

Why did you kill him? she wanted to scream, but her voice wasn’t there. The fire swallowed the mother’s voice before it consumed the baby boy’s body.

She saw herself flying without wings. She was on a rocky incline leading down steeply to a crevice-like valley filled with dry brush, brambles, and squat shrubs. She could see the man below, holding the baby before tossing him into the wadi. The child stretched out his arms like wings to become like a bird, but bird feathers did not sprout. Where are his feathers? screamed Milia.

She stands at the summit. The heat stifles her and the smell of fires whirls around her. She wants to hold on to something and, seeing a rope, grabs it, but it turns out to be nothing more than a dessicated woody stem and it crumbles in her hand. She sees herself pitch forward into the very pit of the ravine and she sees the child open his crushed splintered arms as if he is awaiting her. She screams.

At that instant Milia opened her eyes to see the nun embracing her and patting her dessicated hair gently and requesting the mother who hovered there to bring a glass of water for her daughter.

The girl is cured, with God’s leave, the nun said. To the women who stood there, stunned, she said, Bring her a glass of water and make her some lemonade. Keep her on liquids for three days and you’ll see her back to normal.

The nun’s miracle, as she stretched out her arms and rescued Milia from falling into the valley, was the last thing the nun did for the girl’s sake. I saw her, the nun would say later. She was falling. I interrupted my prayers and ran to you at home and if it were not for God’s mercy, I might not have gotten there in time. I reached for her, and as I held her she opened her eyes and was pulled from death. It is the second time. The first was when she came into the world. I ran to you and I pulled her from the womb. The womb stands in for the grave. When one is born, one is simply practicing for rebirth; when one is baptized, submerged in water from head to heels, it is a watery burial which allows the old person to die so that the new one may rise. I heard the voice of Mar Ilyas the Ever-Living. I was standing and praying and suddenly I heard a voice coming out of the icon. It was Mar Ilyas perched in a chariot of fire circling in the sky. He said to me, Run, Milana, run to the home of Saadeh and pick up the girl before she falls into the valley! And tell her mother that this is the last time. For when the third time comes, you will not be here nor will she. There will be no one to intercede for her except the son.