As Though She Were Sleeping (41 page)

Going into the kitchen, she did not put on the light because the night itself was bright. She put the little coffeepot on the flame and stood waiting but the water refused to heat up. Everything in the kitchen seemed out of the ordinary: the moonlight shooting through the window to encase the sink in its resplendent silver rays; the cicadas’ constant
hass-hass-hass
was almost deafening; the tracery of the tiles sparkling as if giving off their own light, and the
yansun
whose normal yellow had turned bluish. Milia was pressing her hands over her ears to block out the noise when she saw him,
a sudden apparition that seemed to enter from nowhere. It was Mansour standing at the window turning his back to her.

I’m making a glass of
yansun
. Would you like one?

Suddenly she saw his baldness and her knees went weak.

And you’ve changed enormously too, said Mansour.

Milia screamed.
In the name of the blessed cross!
And saw that she was lying in bed wrapped up in the coverlet and there was no light anywhere.

Bells ringing. Where were the bells and why didn’t those people take the dead boy down from the bell rope?

Mitri picked her up and carried her inside his photograph as it hung on the wall. He was tall and dark-complexioned and muscular. That is how she had always imagined him. That was what he looked like in the dream of the bamboo cane and the labneh sandwich. But he was not like that at all.

Describing her son, to whom she had not given birth, Malakeh said he was thin and pale-skinned. His red tarbush tipped forward and he was never without his bamboo cane. But here he was large and dark, a brown abaya over his white robe, his right hand grasping the bamboo cane while his left hand encircled the young woman’s waist.

Put me down, leave me alone, please, please! Look, I’ll bring you
arus el-labneh
, I don’t want to go into the picture – one photograph is enough for me.

She screamed, NO! and opened her eyes. She recognized the hospital smell immediately and saw Mansour standing next to her, trying to keep hold of her hand.

You are sweating a lot, he said. Please, please, just calm down, everything is fine. He picked up a small towel and pressed it to her forehead and hands to soak up the beads of sweat.

Milia smiled, seeing him engrossed in his arak and his poetry. It was midsummer and very hot.

How can anyone drink arak in this heat!

Listen, he said. This is the absolutely finest line of the straying king.

Not very beautiful, said Milia. Not very nice at all. I don’t like it when death is talked about this way, as if death is a word just like any other that you can toss around. That’s not what death is. It’s words – it’s talking that kills. We shouldn’t be so careless about it. And I’m not so fond anymore of these similes and metaphors. A poet imagines and then forgets. You recite the poetry with its proper rhythms and all, and then you go sleep like the dead.

But you’re forgetting something very important – before I go to sleep, I’m on fire for –

Isn’t there anything in your head except this business! I’m trying to talk about something serious. What I was starting to say is that when you go to sleep, you and these poets of yours forget whatever it is you’ve been saying and reciting. But I see these things in my dreams and they scare me. Just imagine if all of this poetry stuff became real. If people lived like they were in novels or poems, they would go mad, every one. See – no, it really is not beautiful, this poetry.

You’re the beautiful one, gorgeous!

He stood up and walked over to her, a handkerchief ready to wipe off the glistening beads of sweat running down from her bare underarm.

Do you remember? he asked her.

She said she remembered, to make him stop talking and to keep at bay the sea of memories from the days in Beirut when he fell in love and which she knew only through his words. She felt very odd and uncomfortable with
these memories of love that Mansour was so insistent on establishing at the heart of their marriage. She told him she believed his memories.

It’s like – how should I put this? – like when my mother would tell stories about me as a two-year-old, and she would tell them over and over. What pleased her most was to tell the same story again. Every time, she told the same story but as if she were telling it for the very first time, until in the end she made us believe it was all completely true and we learned to take these as our stories. And now, my dear, you are going to make me believe everything that you remember. When I hear you I feel like it is me who is remembering, not me who is listening.

She was sitting in the shade of the enormous fig tree. The October sun crept through the green leaves to plant splashes of light across her bare forearms. Suddenly Mansour appeared. At the time, Milia was living through the period of apprehension that precedes marriage. When she had been with Najib she had decided that marriage would be the moment when she encountered the truth and the reality of life. She would exit the house of woe – the house her mother had made – and would take herself away from the nun’s shadow and her family to begin a new story that had no connection to the world of saints. But now she found herself with a man she knew nothing about, really, except that he said he loved her. Was it enough to feel the vibrations of another person’s love to fall in love oneself? She loved Mansour’s love and she convinced herself that he was her fate. And then came the dream that decided the issue for good. Mansour would be her great dream and she would live her story with him as she had lived all of her earlier stories.

Suddenly Mansour was there. He stood still, watching her. He did not say a word. He was looking at a drop of sweat that was forming slowly on her underarm, its weight about to pull away from her skin.

When did you come? she asked him.

He was silent.

What’s the matter with you? Aren’t you going to answer?

. . .

She got up to go into the house and heard his voice begging her to stay there, exactly as she was, sitting on the little straw chair she had placed beneath the fig tree.

Allah
yikhalliik
, don’t get up. Please!

What is it? she asked.

Stay there, don’t move. I want to see where this water drop is going to land. He pointed to the pearl that was rolling slowly onto the underside of her arm.

She looked nervously at the sweat dripping from her underarm. She raised her other hand to wipe it away and heard his voice crying out, Don’t!

She stood up, wiped the sweat from her arm, and went toward the house. He followed her, telling her that she did not understand the meaning of love.

What is it, love? she asked.

Love is when I love everything about you, even these pearls.

Don’t say pearls – only tears are called that.

She doesn’t recall how the rest of that conversation went but now here he was, standing next to her and ready to snatch up the beads of sweat falling from her arm, puffy with pregnancy, repeating a story she has forgotten or perhaps it never happened.

He said, she had wanted to go inside then but he took hold of her forearm. She wriggled away from his hand but lost her balance and fell toward his arms and when he bent over to kiss her arm he could feel her trembling. You were like a little bird, he said.

Don’t say that, like a little bird! I told you, I don’t like similes, I don’t like comparing one thing with another because it’s never true. There’s nothing
that is enough like something else for it to work. That’s why I don’t understand you.

She remembered that he asked her what she was thinking about and she answered, Nothing. But he was insistent and so she had to tell him some story. Whenever she seemed preoccupied he asked her the same thing, and if she did not answer, he was irritated. So she always had to find something, anything, whatever came into her mind to say, to defuse his anxiety.

On that day, she told him about her visit to the grotto of Mar Ilyas. She said she had felt a sense of reassurance when the priest unlocked and opened the metal door protecting the grotto and she stooped double to go in and lie down in the position the Prophet Ilyas adopted as he slept, in flight from Jezebel and her husband, King Achab, after challenging them. There, in a tiny grotto which could hold only one person at a time, Milia came in and lay down while Sister Milana stood outside lighting incense and mumbling her prayers and invocations over and over.

Listening to the story, Mansour remarked that he did not understand any of it. I talk to you about love, he said, and you just go on thinking about saints! It makes no sense.

Why did she go to Maarrat Sidnaya near Damascus and pick her way down those endless stairs to find herself in a rocky hollow stretching all the way from the summit into the wadi, so enormous that it had to have been carved out of bare rock by the Divine hand?

The nun said that she must go there. I made a vow on the girl’s behalf, and she must go there. I will take her. Come, Saadeh, come with us.

But Milia’s mother was too ill to undertake the long trek to Syria. The nun decided to take Milia and go.

There, on the Damascus Road, Milia had her first sight of Dahr el-Baydar. The nun planned to take Milia to the grotto of Mar Ilyas on the nineteenth of July, the night initiating the feast day of this prophet who
mounted to the heavens in a chariot of fire – a day on which believers light fires to express their joy and eat little date cakes and celebrate all night long as a greeting to the greatest of the popular saints in the lands just to the east of the Mediterranean.

Milia was eleven at the time. She was very thin as a result of her long fever. She was very fearful of this prophet whom she would be visiting. The nun told her that Mar Ilyas had saved her life and her future was hostage to this visit. Listen carefully, my girl! When you get there you must talk with him. Your whole life, your entire future, depends on this visit. Mar Ilyas rescued you from death. That’s because he is the only saint who never did die. This saint does not like death. God sent him a chariot of fire and carried him up to the heavens and he is there, living with them. He is the only one who still lives.

Isn’t he afraid? asked Milia.

What would he be afraid of, girl?

Of the dead. Of living with the dead.

The nun couldn’t help but laugh at this clueless girl. She wanted to explain that the prophet lived with the cherubim and seraphim, but how could she make the silly girl understand that these two difficult words were types of angels or that God had let his prophet live for the Messiah’s sake so that he would find someone waiting for him at the second coming?

Don’t ask such questions, said the nun. These are matters we do not understand. It’s more important to believe than to understand. Just get to him and give your heart into his hands.

In Dahr el-Baydar Milia saw fog for the first time in her life, gauzy white clouds that spread across the heights and dipped to brush the earth. She would tell her brother Musa that the prophet’s soul made itself into a cloud that touched and surrounded her as she mounted the summit before going to him. When she set foot in Damascus and experienced its bewitching
aromas and heard from the nun the story of Paul the messenger who was guided here after his conversion, she yearned to stay. The seven rivers that together are called the Barada roll into the city from every direction, sustaining it like a ship that floats over the fragrance of jasmine. The young girl walked in the nun’s shadow and went to Sidnaya, entering the grotto, a chamber lit by candles where the icons seemed to stoop and embrace each other, where sacred images mingled closely with the shadows of the human beings kneeling in silence and darkness. The nun ordered her to prostrate herself and she did. She ordered her to kiss the ancient wooden icon of the Virgin, and she kissed it. The nun told her to recite the Lord’s Prayer and she recited in a barely audible voice. The nun gripped her hand tightly and led her out into the monastery courtyard and asked her if she had seen the Lord.

The girl had no idea what she was supposed to have seen. When she entered that low-ceilinged chamber covered in icons, she assumed she had arrived at the grotto of Mar Ilyas and had now fulfilled her vow and could go home. But the nun kept the girl’s hand in hers and made her understand that the journey had only begun.

She stood before the rocky slope extending from the summit to the wadi bottom and saw God. The sky was garlanded with beautiful strands of white that looked like bird feathers; the horizon was endless and magnificent, and the grotto awaited her. Milia would remember in sharp detail how she descended the two hundred stone steps, would remember how hard she breathed as she went down, her dizziness, how the
shaykh
with the long beard took her hand and told her to sleep and feel no fear. But she would not remember how she climbed the same number of steps afterward. The nun said she had had to carry Milia because she ran out of breath and began coughing heavily. Milia would not remember.

At the grotto, she watched as a man unlocked the door, saying to Sister
Milana that he would open the grotto only out of respect for her since Monsignor had issued an order that no one should be permitted to enter.

Go on in, said the nun.