As Though She Were Sleeping (27 page)

In the morning when Mansour stopped in, having just returned from
Jaffa, and woke her up, his face as pallid as ever since the assassination of his brother, Amin, she jumped out of bed barefoot to make his coffee and breakfast. She remembered the glass and felt something pricking the sole of her foot. She searched for her slippers beneath the bed and found them covered in white-blond feathers. She had no idea where the feathers had come from, but she brushed them off and put the slippers on her feet. She went to the kitchen and put the coffeepot on the flame. She reached toward the small wood cabinet to get coffee cups out and saw it there. Among the coffee cups, the goblet shone with light. Where had the wine goblet come from? In her house there were no wineglasses. Mansour drank arak exclusively and if she drank, it was to drink arak along with him.

She asked him where the wine goblet had come from. He was in the bathroom and did not hear her question. She picked up the goblet with two shaking hands and set it down on the table. She saw the gleaming flashes of light and scattered fragments of glass. When the coffee boiled over on the stove she did not notice. She saw Mansour hurry over to turn off the flame. Setting the coffeepot down on the table, he asked her why she was standing so still.

The goblet? she asked him.

What goblet?

On the table, she said.

This glass, he said, picking it up, and it slipped from his hand to fall to the floor, covering the kitchen tiles in splinters of glass.

You broke it! she shrieked.

It’s nothing. Broken glass, broken bad luck. We have plenty more glasses just like it.

O Lord, what am I going to do now? She squatted to pick up the bits of glass. The shards sank into her palms and blood appeared.

What are you doing! he yelled at her. Get the broom.

She did not change position. She picked up all the glass splinters, put them in a tray and washed her hands in the sink. The water swirled down the drain dark red.

Blood, she said, and staggered as if about to faint. Help me, please!

He seized hold of her and half carried her to bed. He brought some cotton and antiseptic ointment that he dabbed along her fingers. He told her to go to sleep.

I’ll be back at midday. Don’t be afraid. Don’t make lunch, I’ll bring something from the
souq
.

Later, when she got out of bed, she found no trace of the glass shards in the tray. She cried hard and bitterly, weighted with the sense that she had committed a grave sin.

Without any advance warning Milia’s world had turned upside down. The news came and she found herself in Jaffa. She said she did not want to live in this city on the coast. She said she hated the house in Ajami which the widow shared with her two sons and mother-in-law. She said she was afraid of the roar of the sea. She said when she left Beirut she left behind the sea and she did not want to return to it. She said many things but all to no avail.

There in the church Amin’s coffin was cloaked in a four-colored flag. Everywhere, laments, weeping, and expressions of anger prevailed. Milia had never seen anything like the place in which she now found herself: a city roiling in fury, and specters of fear and hatred etched on people’s faces everywhere. Milia saw faces contorted by grief and a city sliding into its own death. She was afraid for her womb, apprehensive about the effects this city would have on her baby, whom – she feared – would drop into the tumultuous froth of Jaffa’s waves and disappear forever. On the face of her mother-in-law Najiba she saw permanently carved lineaments of despair.

You killed him, said Najiba to her son Mansour. The mother did not mean what she said – or she didn’t mean to let these words slip out – but
she spoke as though for the moment she had appropriated the voice of the young widow, who did believe that Mansour was responsible for his brother’s death. Or she believed that his brother had died in his stead; not only had she lost everything but now she must live with the two young children and the old woman at the mercy of this Mansour who had fled Jaffa, leaving its death sentence for his brother.

There on the dust-swirled rise overlooking the sea Milia observed the change that had come over Mansour. Her husband stood motionless with the rest in the seaside cemetery where the Hourani family had buried their dead for a thousand years. When the coffin was lowered into the ground, a single sad ululation, a salute to the martyr, rose hoarse from the mother’s raw throat. In that moment Milia saw Mansour completely altered. The man seemed suddenly to shrink in size, his limbs contracting. Milia could not describe what she saw but it was as though she felt her husband’s joints congeal and collapse into an indistinguishable mass of flesh. And Mansour wept. From his insides erupted a peculiar howl as if the man were exploding, yielding a whole world of tears that poured from his eyes. Entering the home and seeing the women clustered around the corpse of his brother pierced by bullets, Mansour had not cried. His face had been contorted into a dreadful frown. Bending over his brother to kiss the dead man’s brow, he felt himself collapsing forward. His head met the pillow and he put his cheek next to his dead brother’s as the women’s sobbing and moaning grew louder and wilder. The mother said she saw tears rolling down the cheeks of the dead man. My Lord, he is still weeping for himself! she moaned. But these were Mansour’s tears, the widow said. And he must not cry these tears onto his brother’s cheeks – that’s taboo! she fretted. Milia recalled the tale of the poet Dik el-Jinn of Homs who killed his lover Ward. His tears welled across her cheeks as his poem soared.

Milia did not understand the story’s import. What was this love about? A poet from Homs has two loves: a Nazareth woman named Ward and a boy called Bakr. She was not convinced by what Mansour had said about the practices and morals of the Abbasid age: that there was no harm in a man loving another man on condition that he be too young to have yet grown a beard as well as being of a sweet and comely appearance. The poet married Ward and installed Bakr in the same dwelling. When the poet was told that Bakr had fallen in love with Ward, had flirted with her, and had even slept with her during one of the poet’s journeys away, Dik el-Jinn – “rooster of the demons” – went devilishly mad and killed them both at once, together.

But the story has not really begun yet, not with this, said Mansour. The story begins when the poet discovers that the story he was told was one lie piled upon another and that Ward had not betrayed him after all. He went directly to the grave and scooped up two handfuls of soil, one from where Ward lay and the other from Bakr’s grave. He stirred them into two goblets and began to drink from each, weeping for his two beloveds and composing poetry. That is when he uttered the line
And now my tears run o’er her cheek
. Meaning, yes, he had killed her, but equally he wept over her out of love. That is true passion, my darling. True love.

That’s love!

Of course it is.

You mean, something that you kill for?

Of course I would kill for it. There is not a lover in the world who is not ready to kill or at the very least would not want his beloved’s death if she deceived him in love.

You mean, you could kill me?

It’s just a story, my love! As we say, it is the story of Dik el-Jinn. Everyone must live his own story. Dik el-Jinn killed Ward because that is what his story demanded. After all, people are stories. What is life, my dear? We live a story whose author we do not know. That is why I am afraid to read novels. Every time I read a novel I have the uneasy feeling that the writer is a brute. To entertain their readers, authors put their heroes in tragic circumstances. I feel my whole self squeezed and pressed inside a telling that goes on and on, as though at any moment I am liable to fall headlong out of life, lose my foothold, and pitch forward into the midst of a book. No . . . poetry is better. Among the ancient Arabs poetry was the ultimate art because it is all description and no story. And to make stories attractive to listeners, storytellers used to insert a bit of poetry. Poetry was the sense and the story was the structure, and that’s the way it went.

You mean, you kill because the story says to kill?

Now your story begins, Mansour . . . whispered Milia to herself. You tell me that a story begins only with murder and death: We tend to believe that a person’s story begins at birth, Mansour said. But that is not the case, my dear. The story begins when we die or when we kill.

And so now Mansour enters his own story, beside the deathbed as a brother’s tears run across a brother’s cheeks.

Mansour did not cry. Milia does not know where the story of the tears on the brother’s cheeks came from. She was there and saw no tears. But there had to be some beginning to the story. She told him she was becoming afraid
of his story. She told him she had seen how everything in him had altered. Mansour had come to look like his brother: it was not so much that the man had changed but that he had stripped himself away and donned a wholly new image. The poetry disappeared. Erased as well was the giddy passion that had captured his eyes whenever he gazed at the soft pale angelic face that filled out with bashfulness and went pink with desire – that vision of which he never got his fill. But now, everything went dry. Even that thing of which Milia had never spoken, never in all her life, vanished; the flow of it dried up. He would sleep with her, and as usual she would not be awake, but still she did not sense the quiet eruption of waters from deep inside the earth that resided quietly inside of her. As though he were not himself.

When they returned from Jaffa she discovered that the man who had come to her in Beirut in flight from his own story had fallen into the story written for him by the hand of fate. The fisher of tales had triumphed in impaling him. His brother was dead and there remained no alternative before the trader in cloth who had dreamt of transforming himself into a silk merchant, because, as the proverb goes, If it’s a lover you are, the silk trade takes you far. The eternal lover who sips from the water of his beloved’s eyes day after day (as Mansour called himself) fled to cloth and to Beirut because he sensed there was no future for this miserable country where the prophets’ presences had led to so many disasters. He knew that his brother had done his utmost but that Jaffa could not sustain it. I know them, and I told Amin. We cannot do it, Mansour told his wife. But Amin said, simply, It is our homeland. Mansour knew that Amin had right on his side; he knew that the business the two of them had inherited from their father must be at the service of those defending the threatened city.

How can you say that? Amin had continued, challenging his brother. At least we make cartridges and repair rifles. Are you saying we should just let the Jews take the place and push us out?

This issue had provoked Mansour’s departure. No, I’m not a coward but I don’t like weapons. You and Mother are right about this – but personally, I can’t do it.

But then how are we to fight the English and the Jews? With words and stories, or by making things we can really use?

He told his brother he could not do it, and he went off to Beirut. There he fell in love with the Lebanese woman. The thought did pass through his head that staying in Beirut might mean an easier life. That proved impossible, though, and so he opened the little boutique in Nazareth. Traveling to Beirut to procure the new European fabrics became an essential part of his life, and that’s how it all unfolded. His heart fell into captivity at the Shahin family garden. This, he said, was the beginning.

But the true beginning awaited him in Nazareth. There – and as he contemplated the apple of life, which was the name he had given to his wife’s swollen belly – the news came that overturned everything, announcing the end of life in Nazareth and the imperative of moving the little family to Jaffa.

But – the dream, said Milia.

Instead of smiling at her dream as he had always done, Mansour’s face was all frowns. She did not understand the meaning of what was happening, he snapped.

But, the dream, it was the dream, she told him. She reminded him of the goblet he had broken. He said it had not been as she said. You were talking about a wine goblet, he said, but all I saw was an ordinary glass. It fell and broke. Now please, let’s get on with packing our bags and getting out of here – no more of these silly tales!

Milia persisted. Musa drank the wine, she told him, and the splinters from the shattered goblet, strewn across the floor, were shot through with light. But when she knelt down to –

Enough! Mansour barked. Milia froze. That word – Enough! – was more than enough for her; it rendered her speechless. She recognized immediately that henceforth she must reckon with a new and wholly unknown man.

A woman does not marry one man alone in her life, Hasiba had said. If anyone tells you she does, they’re lying. The Salim whom Hasiba had married was not the Salim who came down with the mumps. And then, Salim the invalid was still another man. Nor was he the Salim who recovered and then became obsessed with the problems in his “little brother,” which occupied his wandering eye. That Salim of the wandering eye was not the Salim who was the lover of Maryam. The lover of the Egyptian whore was not the man who bought the house and dragged the family there after the late lamented’s death. The latter Salim was not the same man who had intended to kill his son with a rock. And then, the supposed killer of his son was someone other than the man lying on the ground who was carried off somewhere unknown by the coma that felled him. I married a whole gang of men, she said, and every so often I’ve had to get used to a new one. I’m tired out. Son, let me die. That would be so much easier.