As Though She Were Sleeping (23 page)

Not once after his lovemaking did Milia go into the bathroom to wash herself. But in the morning she would get up looking fresh and bright and smelling of soap. When he reminded her of what had transpired during the
night her eyes would widen in an astonished stare as though this could not have been her. It could not have really happened.

When did she bathe, then? Did she wait him out, and then once he went to sleep hurry into the bathroom? Did she wake up very early and take a bath and then go back to sleep? Mansour got up at seven o’clock as his wife still slept. He made his coffee and sat at the kitchen table, lighting his first cigarette, and by this time he would see her coming. The few moments between his rising from bed and her arrival in the kitchen were not enough to dispel that fragrance of soap and laurel floating off her hair. She would come in glistening with water and he would ask her when she had bathed. She never answered.

I’ve thought about how much I’d like to watch you taking a bath.

She picked up the coffeepot from the table in front of him, added a touch of orange-blossom water, and put breakfast on the table: labneh, cheese, thyme paste, honey, and quince jelly.

What do you say – tonight before we go to sleep?

What do I say about what?

About taking a bath. About you bathing and me watching.

Watching!

He said he wanted to see her in the bath because of Abu Nuwas’s poem.

Yallah
, get yourself up and go to work! I have a lot of work to do today, too.

He didn’t ask her what she meant by
a lot of work
. He knew she took walks alone through town. Mansour was certain the fault was his. After two short excursions through the streets of Nazareth he had stopped going out with her. Even on Sundays he left her to go on her own to mass in the Church of the Annunciation while he would lounge about, alone in the house. He didn’t quite understand the meaning of this expression – lounge about – but he figured that it was probably a fair description of the way he frittered away
time on a Sunday morning at home, waiting for noon to arrive. When it finally came, he promptly poured himself a glass of arak and began grilling the meat in preparation for a vigorous drinking session that usually ended in an argument between husband and wife. It started with Mansour insisting on sex in full daylight and ended when Milia left the house, returning two hours later when Mansour would be asleep and she could clean and straighten up.

How did she bathe and when? Mansour imagined his wife as the silhouette of the bathing woman in Abu Nuwas’s poem. He saw her, a form as delicate as the water, like water falling softly onto water. He would bring his glass of arak to his lips, sip the cloudy whiteness, and launch into his performance.

Mansour interrupted himself. No, no! It doesn’t go exactly like that.

No, the line with
naddat
comes first – that means
she took off
, or something like it.

and then (said Mansour) comes the rest of it. And this is how it ends:

He cavorted among the lines, returning to the first one and then skidding all the way to the final line, skipping ahead, jumping back, rising above the water and plunging into it as if he were swimming. Poetry is water, he said, and a woman’s body is water. Love is water and God sits on a throne of water. And – Mansour would add – He made us from water, every living thing.

He would jump ahead to steal from the woman of the parted lips a kiss she was concealing or a word she was about to say. Suddenly he would find himself at the end of his forces. I am the bearer of passion, like in the poem, he would say. It’s exhausting to be a bearer of passion. At that point, Milia got up and went to the kitchen, where he followed her. This is arak, woman, real arak,
ya Latif
what arak does to a man! White upon white. Ten out of ten. That’s what arak is, ten out of ten.

Milia did not understand why her husband was so consumed by a single thought, leaving him oblivious to all else. Why could he not see how much of a stranger she felt herself to be here, and how alone she was? Sometimes, she felt truly afraid. . . but no, Mansour was not like that, he was not like certain other men. But fathers do kill their sons, she had always believed. Well, no, not always: she had believed it because her father told her so. Well, no, actually, her father did not tell her anything of the sort, perhaps he did
not tell her anything at all. But it was the family story, after all, and this story had not been buried along with her father at his death. For the image of Salim the Elder, the grandfather, lingered: indeed, it occupied center stage – even when their father grew to be so like his father. As Saadeh said to her children, though, the image of the victim never disappeared from Yusuf’s face, with its deep dark clefts and the half-closed eye.

Can the father really kill his son? she asked her grandmother.

No, my girl. He didn’t mean to kill him. He hit him with the rock because he didn’t recognize him.

How can that be? How can a father not know his son?

His father thought he was someone else. He thought it was a thief and so he threw a rock at him. It isn’t the fault of either the father or the son. It was the circumstances. Those days were tough ones, my dear, and most likely it was the woman’s fault. She created the problem and we inherited it after she died. Your grandfather Salim bought the house. That was the real problem – the house. Your papa tried first to sell it but he couldn’t. To sell it, he had to find someone to buy it, but in those days there was no money around. So Yusuf – and all of you with him – were stuck with the house. Your grandpapa didn’t intend to kill his son – that’s just chatter from that nun your mama follows around and repeats as if she’s a parrot. No, that sort of twaddle! Can’t possibly be right. Enough talk.

On the night when pregnancy filled her and she entered that sovereign realm of the dual, Milia decided to begin her life all over again. But then, all of a sudden, where had the specter of Najib come from, and why? Why had Mansour yanked it out of the cave of memory?

Mansour had married this young woman for love, and he tried to explain to her the meanings of love. He had believed she was as much a lover as he was but simply could not find the words to express her love. And so, he borrowed poetry and rolled it out like a lush carpet before her feet. He said
that far back in the eighth century Bashshar b. Burd described love when he wrote his body into his lines of poetry.

He was wolfing down the plate of eggs in the hotel dining room when she came over to him. She lifted the plate away from his hands and passed it to one of the Wadiias, saying it was bad for his health.

I’m fine now, and that’s all over and done with, he said.

No, you aren’t fine yet, she said.

Fine, but didn’t you see what a tiger I was last night?

Last night!

I hope you’re just pretending you don’t understand.

What I do understand is that you must pay attention to your health. We must go back to Beirut – where’s the chauffeur?

He told her he had paid the fare and the driver had eaten his breakfast and left for Beirut.

And us?

We’re going to stay another two nights and then we’ll make our way down to Beirut and from there to Nazareth.

No, we have to go today, it’s very cold.

She sat down across from him, ate a little cheese, drank a glass of tea, and saw how the man devoured everything on the table in front of him. Milia was hungry but she knew that faced with her husband’s exhaustive appetite she would eat only sparingly, satisfying herself by observing him as he exclaimed over her stunning cooking. A day would come when he would call
himself the first man in the world to prefer his wife’s cooking to his mother’s. Listening to him, she would wonder about her three brothers in the ancient house in Beirut who were having to get reaccustomed to their mother’s bland dishes. She would think of them, but the disturbances in Palestine had closed the roads and letters did not arrive. That is why she decided to talk with her brother Musa in her own special way. When Mansour left for work and the house was empty, she would call for Musa and he always came. She asked him questions and he always answered; she saw him there in front of her. She complained to him, too. She was so alone, she said, and so afraid, and she longed for the scent of the lilac trees in their family garden.

Milia spent three days with her husband in the empty hotel. The only people there were Khawaja Massabki and those two women of his. There was the tiny pond in the hotel garden, mounded with snow, and Mansour’s voice reciting poetry to her as he gripped her hand, pointing out certain photographs on the wall of the empty reception hall.

This one’s the king, and next to him is the prince of poets Ahmad Shawqi, said Mansour. The king fled when the French attacked Syria, and he set himself up as king over Iraq. What a joke – did you ever in your life hear of a king who betrayed his kingdom and got a second kingdom? But that’s us for you! Ahmad Shawqi stood weeping over Syria, which the French army had bombarded with heavy guns.

Milia lies between wakefulness and sleep. She feels fire in her bones. She goes out into the garden and thrusts her hand into the snow and brings it up to her mouth and swallows the soft white stuff. The snow melts against
her burning lips and thirst stalks her. She sleeps next to Mansour in one bed. The man takes her with his powerful hands. She dozes in fire, and dreams. But little Milia will not return until three months have passed. Her place is taken by a woman of twenty-four stretched out over the fog of Dahr el-Baydar, going into a shadowy world, led to its gates by a blue woman whom she does not know.

A
ND THERE WAS DARKNESS
.

Milia was in bed and in pain. The pain pincered her lower body and shot upward. She could not breathe. A fisted hand plunged into her lower parts and tugged. Her body seemed paralyzed and her head was heavy. She opened her eyes but saw nothing. The pain ebbed, as though diffusing and spreading along her belly before it melted away to leave behind an evanescent memory.

The nine months had passed. The time was come.

The pain returns. Her belly convulses and with that appears her grandmother Umm Yusuf. Why has this grandmother dropped from her memory? And why, today, does she return?

White hair in a tight bun clustered against the nape of the old woman’s neck. She reclines in bed, mute and paralyzed. An ancient cat hovers nearby but dares not jump up to snuggle next to her in bed. It is Umm Yusuf – by her premotherhood name, Hasiba Haddad – who died when Milia was three years old and was erased from the girl’s memory, or perhaps she never actually entered Milia’s memory in the first place. Why does she return today? And why the cat?

Milia awakened, her eyes flashing open to the morning rays. She swung
her feet out of bed, setting them down into her slippers as usual. The cat jumped between her legs and the slippers turned into a bounding cat. She chased after it, cornered it, crept toward it, and put her feet on it, hearing a meow that was more like a rattle. She saw her grandmother, Hasiba, whose name originally had been Habisa. Preferring not to be known as “Imprisoned One,” she had switched two letters around and called herself Hasiba. Much better to be thought of as one respected!

Saadeh did not understand why Abu Said had given this name, Habisa, to his daughter. Perhaps it had been the name of the daughter’s own grandmother, but then why had that grandmother gotten the name? In any case, the woman had changed her own name and everyone began calling her by the new one – everyone except her daughter-in-law. Even after Hasiba’s death Saadeh went on calling her by her original given name. Distressed by it, Yusuf would beg his wife in a shaking voice to stop, but Saadeh was Saadeh.

I want to call her Sitti Hasiba, Milia said to her mother.

Call her whatever you want, my dear, but her name is Habisa. God has released her, and released us, and released the cat, too, and in one fell swoop!

What was the story of the cat of whom it was rumored that Saadeh had poisoned twenty-four hours after the death of her mother-in-law? Milia did not remember her father’s tears but Saadeh did. He cried over that cat more than he did over his own mother, she said.