As Though She Were Sleeping (36 page)

I don’t know about that, she said.

Thirdly, you know, you don’t know – whatever. All I know is that my brother died and I cannot leave my mother on her own.

Can you see yourself? Do you realize how like your mother you are, in the way your hands move and the twist of your mouth and the things you say? You yawn like her and you suck your lips when you are angry, just like her, and you stuff the pillow under your head when you sleep, even that’s like her, too.
Ya Latif
, God of grace, why have you changed like this!

I’ve always been like this.

Fine, perhaps you were. Perhaps – but I didn’t see it. You really are your mother’s son. I don’t know how I didn’t see that from the start.

Of course I’m her son but I’m not so much like her as you say, I’m only doing my duty toward my mother and toward my brother’s children and his wife.

Let’s thank God that you are not a Muslim, maybe you would have married your brother’s wife and bestowed on me a co-wife! Especially since you’ve discovered that she’s so beautiful.

. . .

Don’t get upset, I was joking, and besides, how would I know about these things!

She said
how would I know
so that she wouldn’t have to tell him that she
had seen him in a dream with that woman. It looked like Najib, but nevertheless it was Mansour.

Never, not even once, had her dreams confused her husband with the image of the man who had dropped out of her life as if he had never existed. Usually, Mansour’s image blended into that of Musa. Seeing Musa in her dreams, Milia would realize that the message concerned Mansour but came by means of someone else. Mansour never entered her dreams; not until the very final dream, when this dreamer would discover that the endings of all things are so very like their beginnings.

This dream takes place in a space that resembles the garden of the old house but that’s not situated in Beirut. No, it is Jaffa. The smell of the sea mingles with the aroma of oranges. Najib peels an orange as he stands next to a woman of medium height whose figure is full but not fat. Are you really Najib? the girl wants to ask this man. And who is the woman? Yes – why is Asma here?

Milia hides behind a jasmine bush whose proliferating trunks entwine, thin and fierce. She does not sense the fragrance of jasmine, though. Oranges, sea salt, damp: these assault the pores of her skin. The man who looks like Najib tosses the orange from hand to hand before his right hand goes to the woman’s chest and grasps another orange. The woman moans.

The knife shows in his right hand. Najib sends his left hand to the woman’s breasts, extracts an orange and begins to peel it. The woman cries in pain and the man swallows the orange. He has tossed aside the knife. He comes closer to Asma, or to this woman who looks like Asma, and presses his lips to her chest, now only half an orange, and he begins to kiss her there.

What are you doing here, Najib? Didn’t I tell you that I don’t want to see you anymore? This is what the little girl says, emerging from behind the bushy jasmine, knife in hand.

Who are you? the man asks, his features changing sharply, suddenly.

. . .

No, sorry, you cannot be Milia. Where are Milia’s green eyes?

How did this man who looked so much like Najib know the color of her eyes?

Go back to your own land, girl, and leave me alone.

Again the man bent over that woman’s chest and an orange liquid dripped from his mouth. At that moment, the two of them disappeared. Milia did not know where the man had taken the woman. She lay down on the grass, and saw that man as Mansour.

The woman was crying as if this man who carried a knife in his hand was assaulting her. She heard the woman begging him for something but she could not make out those low-pitched words – or perhaps, she thought, the woman spoke a language she did not know. Was she speaking German? but no, German doesn’t sound like this. But I don’t know German, thought Milia. In Lebanon they taught us French at school. No, not German, it sounds like Arabic but I don’t understand a single word. Arabic that’s clear as mud.

Yesterday you were speaking Hebrew – how come you know Hebrew?

Me?!

Yes, you – who else?

Where?

Doesn’t matter where, but I’d like to know why.

No, I don’t speak Hebrew. Well, I know two or three words. My brother knew it.

Hmmm, maybe it was your brother, then.

What about my brother, God have mercy on him!

Nothing, forget it.

What matters right now is for you to get some rest. And start packing. The plan is that we’ll move to Jaffa immediately after you have the baby.

No, we are going to baptize the boy here and then we’ll go if you wish.

Bless your heart! Right, forty days after – that’s why we need to start getting ourselves ready now.

Doesn’t matter, she said.

The woman cried. She disappeared into Najib’s arms, or into the arms of this person who looked so much like him, submerged in her own tears. Concealing herself behind the jasmine, Milia saw and yet did not see. Trying to remember this dream, she managed only an indistinct image of a man with disheveled hair carrying an orange and a knife, and a woman petrified and sobbing. Then that second woman appeared. Shears in hand, Mansour’s mother began to trim the jasmine. Milia, a little girl hiding behind the blossoms, under the tree, began to tremble as the shears came nearer and nearer to her hair.

She did not tell this dream to Mansour because she couldn’t find the words for it. What had brought Asma to the old house in Beirut? What did Najib want now, after all of this time? Long ago the book had closed on that story and the hollowness that had engulfed her after Najib’s flight and his marriage was gone. The rupture in her life had mended slowly with time’s passing. Mansour had been the messenger of its final disappearance; why, then, was he cracking open a new abyss deep inside of her, leaving her incapable of distinguishing between the move to Jaffa and her profound fear of the specter of loss that Najib had planted in her heart? What did her mother-in-law mean with the scissors? They want to kill me, Milia screamed, and started up from the bed to find Mansour sitting next to her, lighting a cigarette, his face screwed up in pain.

She said no to Mansour’s proposal that they settle into the family’s home in the Ajami quarter of the city.

This is the home of your father and your grandfather, Mansour’s mother had reminded her son. There are only two of us here, two women, plus the
two children. Where else would you want to go, anyway, and what would you do with us? You and your wife will come and live here. It is a big house and there’s no problem at all. And once you are here you can take care of your brother’s children as you ought to. You are the man of the family, after all.

When he told Milia that he was the head of the family and he must act like a man, she gave him her look. This was the look that invariably flustered and silenced Mansour. She would let fall her eyelids and then that look would come, first from the tiny niches in her eyes formed by her large, honey-brown irises and mounting slowly to settle on Mansour’s eyes. In the very beginning, this was the look that had bewitched him, a magical blend of bashfulness that sent a pink tinge across the young woman’s cheeks mingled with a desire obliquely expressed. As the days and weeks passed, though, the meanings of things shifted, and Milia’s look now imprinted dread on the man’s heart.

He listened to what her gaze said. He took it in. This was just a temporary arrangement, he told her. Darling, it’s impossible for me to spend the rest of my life with three women – I have my hands full with one woman.

. . .

Of course, of course, my dear, but we need a bit of time, and then once the business is up and running again and God grants us a measure of success, we can move, or we’ll figure something out. What I am planning on is that I’ll buy a house for my mother and the children. They’ll live there, on their own, and we will take over the family home.

. . .

No, I don’t like the family home. Remember, I fled that home for Nazareth. All right, look, we can buy a house in the nicest part of town. You’ll pick it out and I’ll make good and certain that we get it. Just let’s move to Jaffa first, and once we’re there, nothing’s simpler. You’ll decide and I’ll be happy with whatever you choose.

. . .

No, we need a little time, two years I think – what do you say to that?

. . .

All right, then, give me nine months. Let’s figure that the house won’t take any more time than the baby. And anyway, don’t worry, we’ll have our own life, and we’ll have no one telling us what to do. Look, in the beginning anyway you’ll have your hands full with the child. My mother and Asma will do the cooking and housework and you’ll be living like a queen. And then we’ll go to our own house. See, houses are a bit difficult in Jaffa. It’s a big city, like Beirut, and it isn’t easy to find a decent house. I mean, it takes a little patience, and then it will all be fine.

Ever since she had met the Lebanese monk everything had changed. Before, when irritation had gotten the better of her voice, she would hear her mother’s voice issuing from her throat and she couldn’t stand it. It was the voice of a young girl who had suddenly found herself responsible for an entire family made up of four men and a nun in lay clothing: their invalid mother, whom everyone was obliged to make their chief concern every moment of the day. When Milia snapped at her oldest brother, Salim, saying that she was not a servant and heard her mother’s voice coming out of her mouth, the words got caught at the back of her throat and threatened to choke her. Milia did not remember exactly what had happened that day. She did not even remember the cause of the argument with her brother or what precisely she was saying when she choked on her own voice and no longer could speak. Then and there she had decided – in her own mind – that never again would she imitate her mother’s voice or gestures. She truly did calm down and become more accepting. But when she had first come to live in Nazareth she began to listen to her mother’s voice as it welled up from her memory. The memory of voices, she thought, was very frightening. In dreams you do not listen to the voice of the speaker. Words come
without a voice; this is the secret of dreams, their bewitching nature. But when the voice of someone far away or dead erupts from your memory, and you listen to it with your own ears, it is bewildering and disorienting. Milia’s bafflement as she spoke to her mother and listened to her mother’s answers had congealed into fear.

Now this woman who embodied absence for her only daughter – and the awful sense of being left an orphan – revealed a presence that was wholly unexpected. In Nazareth her mother’s appearance did not create self-loathing. Milia found that even the absent mother was a linguistic necessity. You scream
Mama!
not because you are thinking of the woman who gave you life but because your lips need the sound of it, the letters blending warmly into each other. Milia, who in her moment of most intense pain in the Italian Hospital in Nazareth would scream out this magic word, before Mansour would hear the crying of the infant emerging from his mother’s body, did not then see her mother or feel her presence. What she saw was a world of white so total and profound that it had to be the brilliance of light.

Milia sensed how Mansour’s voice had lost itself inside the voice of his mother. She told him as much. He shrugged it off, saying he had been this way all his life, but he did begin attending more closely to his own gestures and avoided imitating his mother’s. He stopped yawning loudly with his mouth open, as his mother did with her repeated
Ya Allahs
.

But he did not notice his wife’s loss of voice, obscured by the Lebanese monk’s way of speaking. Now, whenever she spoke, she felt as though her voice was clothed in that of the strange man whom Mansour had tried to convince her did not exist except in her own mind.

On that day, when Milia had returned home exhausted, the pains of childbirth outlined on her face, Mansour sat alone in the large room with a handful of roasted chickpeas in front of him.

You must be hungry, she said, and hurried into the kitchen.

No, I’m not hungry. Come here and sit down next to me, let’s talk. That’s what I want.

She sat down beside him and he began talking – and relating the story of Tanyous the monk. He said he wanted to apologize to her, but at the same time he remained astounded that she had met the monk in the flesh. Apparently the man had been thrown out of the Franciscan monastery twenty years before and he lived in open country on his own. From time to time he was spotted in Marj Abu Amer. Only very rarely did he come to Nazareth, intending to pray in a grotto where he believed the holy family had lived. Whenever the monks saw him they chased him away with a shower of stones.

He had been afraid for her, he said, and had gone to the monastery in search of her. He knocked and knocked on the door before it was opened by an elderly monk who spoke Arabic with difficulty.

I asked him about you, explained Mansour. He was shocked, and said, Women do not come in here. He wanted to shut the door in my face but I begged him to listen to me. I asked him about the Lebanese monk; he was very reluctant to answer me. He crossed himself several times and asked if I was a relative, so I lied and said yes. He said he had thought so, from my Lebanese accent. I don’t know how he could have thought I speak like a Lebanese! It must be your influence, Mistress Milia. So now you can’t tell me anymore that I sound like my mother! Was he right, do I speak Lebanese?