As Though She Were Sleeping (48 page)

I know what will happen, she said. They want to take you away from me, and then they will take away my son, and then I don’t know what will happen. I smell war and death there. Yesterday, I dreamed –

Please, I beg you – none of those dreams of yours.

He said
none of those dreams of yours
to force her to accompany him. What had happened to the man? She wanted to explain to him that death was not the problem. That the dead are merely sleeping and dreaming, and that their dreams never end. But he was no longer able to grasp what she meant. Had he ever understood any of it? Or did he simply want to swim with her in bed? When he used that word –
sibaha
– he was reciting the poetry of Imru’l-Qays and telling her that the straying king had slept with a woman who was nursing her baby. Tomorrow, he said, that’s what I want to do, just like the poet – it must have been something tremendous. She did not answer, and then he told her that when he slept with her he felt like he was swimming.

She went to Jaffa with him. She breathed in the fragrance of oranges. Everyone loved that scent and grew intoxicated on the smell of bitter-orange blossoms. Milia loved this velvety smell as much as they did, but here in Jaffa what she smelled was blood. She told him his city resembled Tripoli in the north of Lebanon.

Jaffa is Tripoli’s sister, he said.

She had gone once to Tripoli, she said. Her oldest brother, Salim, took her there when she was seven. She didn’t remember much. But she did smell the bitter-orange blossoms. She remembered that.

It’s as if I’m in Tripoli, she said. The clock tower square here is like Tell Square there. But she did not like this place, she told him, because she smelled a strange odor here. She saw how Tel Aviv had turned its back to the sea and opened its mouth wide to gobble up Jaffa.

She told Mansour that Jaffa would drown in the sea. They were sitting together on the seafront eating grilled meat. Mansour was drinking arak and Milia stared at the endless blue sky, and she told him that she had dreamed the previous night of the sea sweeping over the city. The Ajami quarter was filled with people speaking Iraqi Arabic, she said, and boats sailed down King Faisal Street. People were gathering in Rashid where seawater had risen in the streets.

Milia is lying back in a car that has come to a stop in the middle of the street while everyone streams by, jostling fiercely, to reach the seafront. Lord! Mansour told me he would not take me to Jaffa before I had the baby. Mansour, what are you doing on the roof of the house in Ajami?

The roar of bombs exploding is everywhere. Asma carries a still-nursing baby and Umm Amin pulls two small children along, as human waves descend toward the harbor. People push each other, rushing forward, peering ahead with eyes that see nothing, for a dense cloud of dust covers everything. Men shove their bodies in amidst the crowds of women and tear off their uniforms as they disappear into the chaos. Mansour crouches on the roof of the house holding an English rifle.

Why are they running away? asks Milia.

They’re the Iraqi volunteers. They’ve tossed away their weapons because their commander has been thrown out and they refuse to take orders from anyone but Hajj Mourad el-Yugoslavi.

I was asking about the children, she said.

Wearing his long heavy coat, Mansour sways and bends in the high winds buffeting the city. She sees him walking along the roof edge holding a lit candle whose flame the fog dulls, and she feels the cold penetrating. The two Wadiias sit beside her in the backseat of the American car. Milia wants to open her eyes but the sun burns everything and she is burning and Mansour is burning. She hears the ship’s horn. The Greek ship sitting motionless in
Jaffa harbor is getting ready to sail. Mansour stands beside an old man. The old man says that the Jaffa-Lod detachment has been decimated and the mujahideen who remained have all scattered around the harbor.

Where’s Michel Issa? Mansour asks.

A full pale-complexioned face, a black moustache so shaggy it covers his lips, and wet clothes – Michel Issa stood amidst the bombs hurtling down on the city from every direction and felt his voice disappear. When he and Mansour met on the Greek ship, he said he’d realized that he was no longer a general protecting his city once his voice refused to obey him. He knew that the battle was over. The two hundred men who marched here as a relief army to come to their rescue had dispersed among all the rest.

On the deck of the boat, wrapped tightly in his overcoat, Mansour listens to the final blast of the horn before the boat leaves for Beirut.

Asma stands in her black garb in the garden of the Jaffa house and screams to Mansour. Either take me to the Prophet Ruben’s festival or divorce me!

When did you marry her, Mansour?

Mansour had never taken anyone to the prophet’s festival, which he remembered from his childhood. He remembered the tents and the Sufi’s
dhikr
sessions and the white flag on which was written: There is no God but God and Ruben is God’s prophet. He remembered the joy erupting from the Great Mosque in the city center and sending its cloud of ecstasy all the way to Ajami. He remembered the women celebrating Ruben on the fifteenth of September but he did not know who this prophet was who had given his name to a small river south of Jaffa. He could not comprehend why the people of Jaffa would spend an entire month in Rubin’s tents preparing to welcome in the autumn.

Mansour told her that in the midst of war it was impossible, and he would take her to call out in celebration of Ruben the next year. But the short rotund woman did not understand. She wanted Ruben now.

You must not cry, said the Italian doctor. In a moment, give it another push and before you know it we will be done and everything will be fine.

The ship’s horn sounded and the ships of the Companie Gharghour left the harbor. The city was empty now. The sea had taken the people. Where were the people?

A tall man known as the Beiruti, Ataallah Beiruti, stands erect before the British general and an officer from the Haganah, proclaiming Jaffa an open city.

The ship sounds its horn and the Jews are ready to enter the city. The Mosque of Hasan Bey is in their hands. Ajami is in their hands. The city quarters stoop and bow, one against the next. The only sound is the wind knocking against the houses.

Don’t forget the key to the house, Milia shouts.

Mansour tosses away his rifle, hurries down from the roof, and runs toward the Greek packet anchored in the harbor. The smoke rises and thickens, the motor growls, and Mansour runs, waving his hands wildly and shouting at the captain to wait for him. He stumbles and falls, stops to shed the overcoat that is slowing his pace, throws it to the ground, and runs.

The ship is on the high sea. Mansour sits on the deck and Jaffa grows distant.

Why did you leave the city? a young Greek sailor asks.

Tents are everywhere.

What is this? asks Milia. Why did you put up the tents here?

They told her that the Prophet Ruben’s festival was approaching. They said that Jaffa erects its tents on the south bank of the river and everyone goes there.

Where is Ruben the prophet?

They said he would be sitting alone there, waiting for the people to
arrive. The people picked up their tents and went, and all that remained was the smell of blood.

Blood in the streets. Mansour stands before his workshop, which lies in ruins, the machinery soaked in blood and wet with severed limbs. A terrible, lonely silence makes him shiver to the core. Where are you, Milia? Mansour cries out. I am dying, Milia.

Don’t cry,
habibi
, I’m here, murmurs the woman lying on the hospital bed.

He walks on, stooping low. Yasua the Nazarene stoops under the heaviness of the cross. He walks through the city’s narrow lanes, his body weak with fatigue. This thirty-year-old man has never felt such weariness. In his father’s shop he lifted thick tree trunks and never felt this sort of exhaustion. The slim boy with the greenish eyes and the curly black hair and the broad high forehead walked as though his feet did not touch the ground. He worked as though it was not work, as though a strange power nested inside his ribs; and when he tried to tell his story to his father, Yusuf didn’t allow him to finish it. No sooner would he start to relate his peculiar dream than his father would snatch the words from his mouth.

The same thing had happened with the fishermen at the Sea of Galilee. No sooner had he walked across the surface of the water and ordered the storm to die down, and then wanted to speak, than the fishermen began to talk, saying they understood the message.

And when he stood on the Mount of Olives addressing them they did not listen to him. They were bewitched by the light that came from his eyes and turned the earth into a never-ending orchard of olive trees.

When he told the people to leave the woman alone as she washed his feet in perfumed water and dried them with her black hair that was long enough to cover her back, they bent over his feet and did not allow him to tell them it was a question of love and the woman’s loose hair was the world’s pillow.

When he told his mother he was going to Jerusalem and she must not come with him, she did not let him finish what he had to say. She placed her hand on his head and said she was coming because she knew that he was the king.

When they tried him and he found himself alone and in the hands of the executioners, and he wanted to tell them his story, they slapped him with questions that were nothing more than answers.

He smiled at Maryam the Majdaliyya when she asked him why he did not talk. He was the Word, he told her. She asked for an answer to her question.

In truth I tell you that speech is like the grain of wheat in the field. No one owns the word for it is the mere echo of the Word carved into the cross.

He felt the terrible heaviness of the cross they forced him to bear and he was afraid. No, he was not afraid but he was confounded. It was as though his strength had gone, leaving him weak and fragile.

He fasted for forty days and when he called his disciples to supper and gave them the finest of Palestine’s wines he took only a single bite of bread. He wanted no food; his longings were for his father.

Amidst weakness and a sense of defeat, whipping, and humiliation, he remembered the lamb and smiled.

Why all of this light? Please, put out the light.

Pain through the eye sockets, and suffering. Why is Hasiba here and why has the clock stopped? White locks of hair are strewn across the pillow. The old woman tries to lift her head but she cannot. Little Milia stands at her grandmother’s side. Grandmama says that all the clocks in the house have stopped. She tries to lift her hand from the pillow but it falls before it is even lifted. Milia stands next to her and doesn’t know what to do.

The girl runs through the house. The house has turned into a sort of spiral and the girl whirls round and round. All the clocks in the house say that it is three o’clock in the morning.

Wind the clock, Musa, dear.

Musa comes at a run, his clothes covered in mud and blood oozing from his scraped knees.

Why this blood,
habibi
? I told you, the blood dream is no good. Why do you always force me to dream of you covered in blood? I have come from there to Beirut, yes, I traveled even with all of these difficulties. I told my son to wait, to stay in my womb. I told him it would be only a matter of a few hours. I must go to Beirut, I said, your uncle Musa is dreaming and it is a bad dream. I must go to him, and so now I have come to you. And you are here and are covered in blood. Enough blood, God save us from all of this blood! Isn’t this what the nun was always calling when she prayed? Remember, how she made us stand in front of the icon, Maryam holding her son, and she called, Almighty God, deliver us from the blood. O God of my salvation, deliver us, that my lips may sing your justice. She ordered us to repeat the prayers after her and we always did. Where is Haajja Milana? Why does she sit all alone with no one to answer when she calls? She said she always sees everything as black, and at the very heart of it was incense. She said she could no longer see human bodies but that she lived with their souls. Why is the nun all alone, and why can she not get out of bed, and where does the smell come from? Is it possible to leave the saint like this, no one taking care of her, no one cleaning and grooming her? Where are you, Saadeh, where are you, Mama?

Saadeh stands next to a metal bed in a darkened room. She puts on a light and the saint orders her to put it out. The light hurts my eyes and I can’t see, she moans. Saadeh does not extinguish the light though. She has come to this faraway convent to bathe the nun, she says, and she cannot do it without light. The vapor rises from a copper vessel filled with hot water and the nun shrieks because she does not want a bath. You have come to kill
me just as you killed your daughter, Milana screams. Get out, turn out the light and get out!

Shh
, Haajja, I’ve come to bathe you, that’s all. Why did they leave you in this state? Why don’t you perform a miracle and get up? What’s this smell?
Yallah
, let me take off your clothes, I’ll just give you a bath and rub your body with cologne and you’ll see how much better you are.

Saadeh came close to the nun to help her to remove her clothes. The nun covered her eyes with her hands and began to moan. She sat up straight in bed and screamed that she could smell Satan’s stench. You’ve sent Satan to me, Saadeh! As soon as you came in the smell of incense disappeared. Where is the incense? It runs away from light, and that’s why you turned on the light. What do you want with me, I know you’ve come to kill me! You killed your daughter. I saw her, I saw her –
haraam
, I saw how her whole body went green as if grass had sprouted on it, Lord God, saints preserve us, Lord God! She was sleeping, and dreaming, when the doctor shouted at her to open her eyes. She tried to open them but the light . . . she told them to put out the light but no one heard her. Her body began to shake, like mine is shaking now, and she saw everything. She saw you, Saadeh, and she saw the Devil sitting up there on your right shoulder. Get out – I don’t want to die!