As Though She Were Sleeping (29 page)

I wish life were like this, she said to her husband.

Like this – meaning what?

Meaning, like I dream it to be. Like, something comes into my head that I want to take with me into the dream, and there it is.

She told him about the dream of the cane that saved her from falling on the pathways of the night and gave her the ability to endure a cramped and anxiety-ridden existence – for life did not reopen its doors to her until Mansour and the blue woman appeared on her horizon.

I wish we could go back to our time at the Hotel Massabki, she said.

Why?

Because then your brother would not have died, and we would not have to go to Jaffa.

Mansour got her to understand that the decision about Jaffa was irrevocable. He could not alter it, he said. All his life he had fled from the reality of things; his brother had faced it alone. Now he has died, said Mansour, and I must do what has to be done.

And then? What will happen then?

And then – it’s impossible for it to happen, he said. The Jews want to throw us out of our own country. Can you believe that?

It’s unbelievable, she said. But what can we do about it?

We can fight.

And if we fight, can we really change anything? Because it’s . . .

Because it’s what? he asked her. Don’t tell me you dreamed the Jews took the country and threw us out!

No, I didn’t dream it, she said, and was silent.

Milia did not want to leave Nazareth. She had tried and tried to win over Mansour but it was no longer possible to talk with him. He put an end to words by slipping into his brother’s skin. And the end of words meant the end of everything. Logic said he could not abandon the foundry; that the mother could not run it on her own. But an opposing logic said Mansour could not work with his mother because she was so domineering and also because his brother had kept the entire business to himself without clueing Mansour in. Milia could not say that Mansour had been a coward or had claimed to flee Jaffa out of fear. He told her that he had preferred to get away from the atmosphere there, to avoid headaches, but those headaches had pursued him all the way to their home in Nazareth.

Yet Amin’s story remained obscure for Milia. Well, not exactly: she
had
dreamed something that night but told no one her dream. She was afraid; she believed the figure she had seen might be Musa. Her eyes were swollen and sore when she awoke. She had dreamed herself crying, she said. She did not get up to make coffee. She told Mansour she did not feel well and was tired. She pretended to sleep until he left the house and only then she got up. She rinsed her puffy eyes and did not leave the house. She was too afraid of encountering that elderly man and bursting into tears once again. She had cried seeing Tanyous lying full length on the ground, his belly inflated and flies swarming around his body. She tried to stop people on the incline that led to the Church of Our Lady of the Tremblings to tell them that the man had died and must be carried to the cemetery. No one paid any
attention to the stiff and motionless little girl with the huge wide-open eyes that suggested she was waiting hopelessly for her mother. Men filled the narrow street, marching shoulder to shoulder; no one stopped. Then suddenly out stretched a hand holding a pair of scissors and clutched a handful of her short hair. Blackness began to rain into her eyes and she no longer saw anything, then she began to cry.

That morning Mansour came back at noon to say that they had to go to Jaffa immediately. There was bad news. She did not ask what the news was. She dressed and said she was ready. He asked her to pack their suitcase because they would be staying for about a week, and his brother . . . and Mansour began to cry, his flooding tears tinting his face darkly. Ever since that moment, this new dark color had not left the man’s face. Musa’s face disappeared. Milia didn’t know what had happened to the resemblance between the two men that had stayed resolutely in her memory. Mansour became a Jaffawi, his skin dark and his gaze coming through the glinting eyes of his brother, as he worked to conceal his weeping behind loud and prolonged yawns.

She smelled the fragrance of oranges. This was not Beirut’s particular aroma, though, that blend of seductively swaying pines (and the perfume of pine nuts) with acacia blossoms. Jaffa was another story: the scent of lemon trees, of spacious houses, of fear. When she visited Jaffa for the first time – a month after her wedding – she told Mansour she would never go there again because she saw fear carved into the thick fragrance of orange trees. She was no longer fond of oranges, she said. The smell of oranges would send her into a fear she could not pinpoint, but it spread throughout her body all the way to her toes and fingertips and paralyzed her. She could not face the smell of oranges, she said. She must cover her face.

It’s the cravings of pregnancy, or it’s morning sickness, said her mother-in-law. Just be patient.

No, that was not it. This was a feeling that crept into the bones and stayed there, there was no antidote for it. All she wanted was to cover her face, to put on the Jaffa niqab that she saw draped over the faces of the city’s women.

And now here she was, in the City of Perfume as Jaffa people called it. It was so sweet smelling, they claimed, because the scent of bitter orange permeated the air. They did not know that this perfume skirting the heavens would become the city’s shroud, the emblem of its death.

The woman who arrived from Nazareth carrying a seven-month-old baby in her belly would find herself lashed by a profound sorrow that bore no relation to the grief that spread across Ajami and pervaded the Hourani household after the tragic loss of their eldest son. The woman’s despair swelled because she saw what no one else could see. In the scent of Jaffa she smelled the sign of its demise. It was not because she had seen Amin dead. It was because of the scent, which had begun to turn yellow on people’s faces, transforming mourners into phantoms. A crowd came to the home to mourn the martyr who had left behind two children, the eldest seven years of age and the second one only five years old, and a young wife from near Beit Sahour, and had deposited a hoarse scream of revenge in the throats of the mourning crowd which turned Mansour utterly speechless. Amin’s killing took place as a fierce wave of explosions sliced through Jaffa in 1947, and it seemed that the young man’s talkative ways had led him to his death. Mansour was convinced that his brother died from telling people too much. A person who puts the shot into English guns and figures out how to turn ordinary automobiles into armored cars so that the Palestinians would possess some sort of heavy weapon with which to square off against the superior Zionist matériel does not talk about it. But Amin was a voluble man who enjoyed making a spectacle of himself, and this was the main reason behind the brothers’ rift and Mansour’s flight to Nazareth. Well,
no . . . the chief cause was their mother. The mother was not only partial to her eldest son but indeed completely wrapped up in her fondness for him. Since the father’s death she had treated her eldest as though she were his wife. She asked him to come and sleep in her room, in the dear departed’s bed, because she was afraid to sleep alone.

Amin was active in the ranks of the city’s Orthodox lay association and was a member of the League of National Action formed by the Arab Higher Committee. In the Grand Mufti he saw a savior, and he dreamed of traveling to Iraq to aid the revolution mounted there by Rashid Ali el-Gaylani against the English. It was whispered that he had undergone training in the use of weapons and that he kept an English gun at home.

His mother did not love him, Mansour said. He did not know why. Perhaps it was because he looked like her. Since his early childhood he knew the story firsthand and heard it repeatedly from his mother: she had expected God to give her a daughter. When a second son was bestowed upon her she treated her son as though he were a little girl. She grew his hair long and braided it, and added a feminine ending to his name. Amin played along, treating his brother in the same way. He even tried to carry the game into their school and Mansour found himself hearing his classmates calling him Mansoura as if he were truly a girl. He responded aggressively, acting out like any feisty boy and thus laying himself open to beatings at the hands of classmates on a daily basis. He often came home covered in blood, a taste he knew very well, he told Milia. He had gone through adolescence drinking the blood that poured from his nose; and when he grew a bit older he sensed the oddness of his family, run by an ironfisted mother who showed no mercy.

I am nothing like her, said Mansour. She is an overbearing, dominating woman who thinks of nothing but amassing money and property. So I left
her with everything. I don’t want to go back to Jaffa or to the smell of blood that runs across the city. Yes, resistance is a duty, but I just don’t know . . .

Seeing Mansour change before her eyes, Milia remembered snatches of this family story. Putting on his brother’s face, he would declare his intention to return to Jaffa. On their very first day back from Jaffa, after the funeral, he spoke to her of returning there to live. She replied that she could not do it, not right now. She must have the baby first. And she could not give birth in that city.

But my mother is there, he said. She will help you.

No, I don’t want your mother. And my mother isn’t well enough to come here. But I’m staying. You go if you want to.

He said he had considered sending her to Lebanon but it was not an easy matter because the roads were not secure. He said he was ready to agree to what she wanted on condition that they move to Jaffa a mere week after the baby’s arrival. He would have to sell off his Nazareth shop and his merchandise now, he said, because he must start spending most of his time in Jaffa, to put the foundry in order and resume his original line of work.

Milia’s nights filled now with oranges that looked like bombs, the color red everywhere, covering faces and objects. Mansour was away for three days of every week and Milia began to spend her nights alone. The man was no longer able to pierce the veil of solitude behind which this woman lived. He no longer came near her at night. The poems vanished. Speech became a repetition of speech. Mansour became another man and Milia, another woman. Her dreams took on other shapes, new ones. Everything she saw was floundering, or drowning.

Milia’s nights were long and sorrowful. There in the hollows of her darkness she saw the short men with blue eyes gathering around the bier, hoisting it onto their shoulders, and marching to the seaside grave. On a hill
facing the sea where the waves swelled high, the coffin dipped precariously over hands attempting to hold on to it. The waves came up, the sea roared near, and like a blue animal with an unending body it leapt atop the rise and swept over it, pulling the coffin outward as it receded, and swallowing the men.

The little girl stands next to Mansour, terrified. She does not know how to escape the waves. She grips his hand but the hand slides out of hers. She runs but the waves gallop after her. She climbs and the waves mount behind her. She falls and finds herself in the water. All of them have disappeared. The waves have swallowed everyone and have taken them to a place she does not know and cannot find. The waves stalk people. The little girl is alone, her hands slipping, water all but swallowing her, water and her tears. The water slithers into her lungs; her chest swells and there is no air. Water and salt. Her throat is salt, her lips are cracked, her hand jerks back and forth along the horizon. The coffin lid is open. A blond man is holding his hands out to her. Where did this French officer come from? He was standing alone in the street at night as an autumn breeze swished raindrops through the sky. The woman who always wears black awaits him in the garden. But the man does not move. He stands at a distance as if spying on her, and then he comes forward, stumbling as if he is slightly dizzy. His body juts forward. He falls. Blood spins from holes high on his back. Blood fills up all the spaces. The street is flooded. Blood. The coffin floats on the red-black flow.

Milia knew she was the only one to know the story. She knew it because she saw the blond officer whom her grandmother had buried deep and invisible in her breast. She saw him more than once, even, walking and stumbling just before he fell, clutching at a cushion there on the ground, becoming like Hasiba was in her final days, a mass of skin and bones practically severed at the middle and unable to move, her cough keeping her from breathing and curlicues of dried orange and lemon peel hanging on the opposite window.
The woman preserved lemon and orange peel, spreading it over the line hanging in the garden until it dried and then used it for its fragrance. She let it glow in the oven and the house filled with the aroma of citrus. She put a flame to it and let it burn with the wood heating the bathwater, which turned the scent of orange. She would put it next to her pillow to breathe in the smell of life. When she became ill, all she wanted was dried fruit peel. She demanded it be hung on the iron bars of the window that faced her bed. After she lost speech, and after someone took down the peel from the window, three days passed and she began to moan and refused food until her son discovered the secret of her woe and returned the peel to the window.

Saadeh came to despise the smell of dried peel, especially in her mother-in-law’s final days when its aroma mingled with the odors of urine and feces. But she was helpless before her husband’s fierce wishes and Hasiba’s moans. In the end, burning all of the citrus peel she could find was not enough to satisfy Saadeh. From then on, having pickled lemons and the like in the house was a problem for her. No doubt that is why Milia perfected the art of cooking
kibbeh arnabiyyeh
– which required lots of pickled citrus – at the age of ten, transforming herself rather prematurely into mistress of the kitchen and doyenne of the sensual aromas of fine cuisine. She took her skills and her love of cooking with her to Nazareth only to find herself, ten months after marrying, forced to submit to the decision to leave. Milia was not granted the time necessary to become attached to Nazareth, the White City, or the Flower of Galilee as it was also called, with its three distinct parts all overlooking the fertile plains of Ibn Amir: the Greek Quarter, that of the Maronites, and the Latin Quarter. The entire town was perfumed with incense and poetry. No town, other than Beirut, was really known to Milia. Even in Beirut she knew only the area where they lived, the street where her grandmother Malakeh lived, the bakery that kneaded a tale of
transient love, and the sea which frightened her before ever it entered her dreams as a route to faraway worlds.