As Though She Were Sleeping (40 page)

His mother’s son died of strangulation in the end. Samih Zurayq said that he came with his brothers to the churchyard to participate in ringing the bell, and that they had forgotten all about the fight after the apology that Nakhleh Shalhoub offered the Zurayq family on behalf of his son. But no sooner did Mitri see them – and he was already clinging on to the bell rope – than he began to soar upward. They did not understand how he could climb the rope like that, but he went up and up, while the bell pealed as no one had ever heard it ring before. Samih said they saw that boy fly and they did not take in what was happening until the sound of the bell began to deaden and grow faint. When they saw Mitri hanging by his neck and flopping around like a just-slaughtered bird, Samih said they grabbed on to the rope to rescue him but when they reached him it was too late because his neck had already stretched thinner than the rope, and the face at the end of it was bright blue. Nakhleh was not exactly convinced by what they said but there was nothing he could do about it. Starting a war with the sons of Zurayq would mean certain death for him, and revenge would not bring back the boy who had been sent back into his mother’s womb, just as they had predicted.

Do you mean that when people die they go back to their mother’s womb? Milia asked Grandmama Malakeh.

Girl, what are you talking about! Remember, like I told you, death is a
dream. A person stays where he is and journeys at the same time, and comes back only after traveling to the light.

But why did they kill him, Grandmama?

No one killed him, dear. Don’t believe what your grandpapa says. He went senile from crying so much. It was his grief that invented this story about the sons of Zurayq hanging the boy on the bell rope. No, the poor boy died of fright. Nothing brings death more than being afraid of death. Your grandpapa is old and feeble. When I married him he was twenty years older than me, and now, look, he seems forty years older, maybe even more, God give me patience with him! I told him not to tell this story to the children but when a person gets old he returns to what he was like as a child and he doesn’t know how to talk to anyone but children. Forget the story, my girl. The real story isn’t Mitri’s, it’s mine. I was the stupid one. I don’t know how I ever agreed to marry a widow.

Malakeh’s marriage was a great surprise: a girl of twenty marrying a widower who had already passed his fortieth birthday. Was it his wealth? True, the story that had imprinted itself in Milia’s memory took place when Nakhleh and his only son were working as porters in Beirut harbor. But Nakhleh was not originally a porter and he would not die in poverty. That was the barren patch, as he called that period of time, when the silkworms went as ugly as common worms. Lebanon in the last years of the nineteenth century saw the beginnings of the famine that would devour it during World War I, laying ruin to a third of its population while emigration swallowed up the rest and only those who had no way to leave remained.

Nakhleh had no way to leave and found himself unable to make a living. Sometime around 1890 the man decided to shut his silk goods shop in Abd el-Malik Street, roll up the sleeves of his
qumbaz,
and get to work. That was how he and his son ended up at the port of Beirut. The truth is that it was Mitri who was the porter; his father simply organized and oversaw his
son’s labor. But things improved. Nakhleh said it was Khawaja Efthymios who paid off his debts and thus he saw his way clear to reopening his little shop – but only after it was too late.

It was too late because Mitri died of hanging, and a lifetime was lost because the man did not dare to demand revenge for his slain son. From that moment – the instant of Mitri’s death and discovery – the household was turned completely upside down and Malakeh took over everything.

Why did Milia tell Mansour this story? Was she trying to convince him not to go to Jaffa or was she trying to find a relationship between her grandfather Salim and his Egyptian lover and the dream of her aunt that changed her life? Milia heard the name Efthymios one time only on the tongue of her grandmama. Malakeh was talking with her daughter Saadeh and said something about the moment of release when Efthymios paid Nakhleh. Saadeh asked, Efthymios the very same? Seems Mr. Sergios shows up wherever we are. That sentence stuck in the girl’s mind; and now here it was again intermingling with the sound of the bell.

She wanted to say, None of this has anything to do with me. She wanted to say that she was her own person: I am me; I am not my grandmama nor my great-great-grandmama, Lord, how different people become mixed up inside me. I don’t know who I am anymore.

He was like that, too, said Tanyous the monk. As he went to the cross he did not feel that he was himself. He felt everyone becoming a part of him. He tried to keep his memories apart but he saw everything together. He became mother and father, the Sitt and the Sayyid, Lady and Lord and lamb. Because he was everything, he could say nothing. If he could have talked, what would he have said? And if he did have things to say, who would have understood him? And if he found someone who did understand, who would believe?

Milia was walking on the road that led down to the Virgin’s Wellspring
when she heard these words. She sensed the sky opening before her and she had an inkling that she was here to protect Mitri from death. She gave the boy the name Mitri in her mind. No, the truth was that the first name that came into her mind was Issa. She wanted to name the boy Issa, the Messiah’s name in Arabic. As a sign and a good omen, she wanted to be called Umm el-Nur, Mother of Light, as the Virgin had been called. But she did not dare announce that, even quietly to her husband. So she named him Mitri out of fear for him. She wanted to protect him from the bell and prevent the sons of Zurayq from slaying him. But her heart filled with fear because his father would take him to Jaffa, and there he would find only war and death waiting for him. She was not afraid of childbirth as her husband believed. She was certain she could lean against the trunk of a palm tree and give birth if need be; she would not even need Sister Milana there to raise the baby and imprint his image on the stark white hospital wall, as the nun had raised her high in the
liwan
of the old Beirut house.

Mansour said his name would be Amin. Suddenly the boy had a different name and Milia felt alone in the world. She was accustomed to talking with him, addressing him by one of his two names. There was the public one which, after a great deal of debate, had been settled on as Ilyas – for this would be auspicious, to name him after the Prophet Ilyas the Ever-Living whose secret Milia had come to know from her visit to him in Maarrat Sidnaya near Damascus where she slept in his grotto and felt the savor of eternity blending with the fragrance of the nectar of local wild figs that she had eaten. And there was his secret name, Mitri, for the sake of her only uncle, whom she had never met except in her dreams. The two names were felled in a single blow when Amin died in Jaffa. In her seventh month of pregnancy she had to get accustomed to a new name and a new child.

When Mansour informed her of the new name, she told him it was out of the question. No one changes a baby’s name, she said. It’s a very bad omen.
His name was Ilyas, she said, and cried. But Mansour paid no attention to her weeping.

What had happened, and how had this come to be? Normally, when he saw his wife cry, Mansour tried to move heaven and earth. He would beg her not to cry and would reassure her hastily, saying
whatever you want
or
as you like
. He would bend over her wet face and blot her tears one by one with his fingertips. He would calm her with the poetry that ran from his lips like water, putting balsam on her wounds. But Mansour had changed. He had become another man, a stranger. She wanted to tell him that she no longer knew him. But she didn’t. Or rather, she did tell him and then she regretted it.

That was the only occasion on which she was sorry to have had a particular dream. Usually she took dreams as they were, for a dream was like fate. Never had she debated her dreams, for they were her windows onto her deepest self: gateways to her spirit and to the souls of others. She dreamed and lived. That is the way she put it to him when he showed how astonishing he found her tendency to speak the language of dreams.

Don’t believe your dreams, he said to her.

If I don’t believe them, who will I believe?

Believe me.

You, yes of course – but the dreams tell me what will happen.

Dreams are just illusions.

And the poetry you’re always chanting to me – isn’t that a fistful of illusions?

Poetry is something real and true. The tempo of the words, the music of the meanings – they give sense to things. Do you remember how I spent my time traveling on your account? I would recall a line from one of Ibn Abd Rabbih’s poems and I would tell myself, This is me. Listen, Milia.

Poetry is a dream. I can’t imagine a poet except as someone who has a dream and then writes it.

Poetry, she said to him, drops onto poets like revelation because it comes from the same place as dreams. Think about the lives of the prophets and the saints, she said. God addresses Himself to people through dreams. That’s how He spoke to Yusuf the Carpenter. He said, Your wife is pregnant. The man was asleep at the time.

But no one came and talked to me like this. You just told me you were pregnant and that was that.

But it was in my dream that I saw I was pregnant – Milia did not finish her sentence. She was afraid that Mansour would believe she was mad. How could she tell him the dream of the child? Even more, how could she say to him that she was absolutely certain that the birth of her child would not occur in Nazareth. No, her husband would be compelled somehow to take her to Bethlehem, exactly as Yusuf had taken his wife.

That night she halted her dream halfway through. Mansour was standing in the kitchen, looking out the window. She saw him from the back and what struck her – and worried her – was his baldness. Mansour’s hair had been very thick. There was no history of baldness in his family, he had told her. But now he looked exactly like the driver on the road to Shtoura. In fact, for a startled moment she thought the person she was looking at was the driver. She found herself standing on tiptoes to have a fuller look at his baldness, asking herself in bewilderment what could have brought him here. But then she heard the man’s voice and it was Mansour’s. He told her that she had changed enormously too. It’s as though I don’t know you, he said. As if you veil your face. Why?

She said nothing. She felt a shiver of cold run through her and decided to stop this dream. What could the disappearance of her husband’s hair mean but death? Anyone who dreams baldness must beg God’s protection immediately, because it means death, Grandmama Malakeh had said.

The night Mitri died, her grandmama explained, I dreamed that whole locks of my hair fell out. I was standing in front of the mirror combing my hair and it started falling out, lock by lock, and suddenly I was bald. I screamed and that was the boy’s death scream.

She opened her eyes and noticed that she was uncovered. She pulled the wool blanket over her body, told the dream to stop, and went back to sleep. But she saw him again. He was in the same spot. His bald head was scaly with dandruff and she heard his voice. It’s as though I don’t know you, he said. She reopened her eyes. She knew she must not go back to sleep, for any dream that came to her three times in succession would become reality. She decided to get up and go into the kitchen to make a glass of hot
yansun
. Since childhood she had loved aniseed tea. Every Sunday her father would steep sweetened hot
yansun
and let it go cold. At noon when the family gathered around the table for
kibbeh nayye
he poured himself a glass of arak and, for his children, what he called children’s arak, bringing it to them in small glasses filled to the brim with the sweet yellow liquid. They knocked their yellow glasses against his white one, and all took a sip. Much later, when the children discovered that the taste of arak was indeed very like the taste of
yansun
, they began drinking arak made from grape alcohol and aniseed in memory of their father. For the first few days of her marriage Milia tried to have a glass of cold aniseed as her husband drank his arak, but he would not play along. Hey – I drink and you just watch me? No, that’s not the way we do it! He was not persuaded of the virtues of
yansun
until after Milia became pregnant and the Italian doctor made certain she knew that alcohol would harm the fetus. Milia went back to children’s arak.

That night she went into the kitchen to make hot
yansun
, which was the only drink guaranteed to revive her. Here in Palestine she had learned to drink black tea as if it were coffee. But she still thought of tea as a remedy for chest colds and fever.

How can anyone decide to drink tea instead of Arab coffee? mused Mansour. But that’s the way we are. Mansour launched into an explanation of why tea was so popular locally. It was a direct result of British imperialism, he said, and it was the beginning of the end, a sign of inevitable defeat. So we replaced our coffee with their tea! Did you know, Milia, that long ago the Arabs called their wine
qahwa
, as if it were coffee, and then when coffee actually reached them and the habit took root they called it
khamr
, as if it were a kind of alcohol, because it had narcotic effects so they saw it as another kind of spirit. Here, though, we started drinking tea and we grew accustomed to it – so much so that it’s seen as a national drink. What a big lie official histories are! Now, arak – did you know that arak is Turkish originally, and not Arab at all? You think that arak is our national drink, across this entire region of Syria and Palestine and Lebanon. We all think that, but no – it isn’t even Arab. In all the famous ancient Arabic poetry celebrating
khamr
there’s not a single hemistich about arak.
Khamr
means wine or alcohol, but we’re so provincial and narrow-minded that we have forgotten this and we talk about arak as if it were our invention.