As Though She Were Sleeping (37 page)

How would I know!

And you sound more like a Palestinian now, anyway. We speak the same way. Then the man told me the whole story. This monk was thrown out of the monastery because he claimed he had found a gospel written by a disciple of Yusuf the Carpenter. And that this gospel written in Syriac tells the story of the Messiah differently than the four Greek gospels do. Supposedly
it claims that Yusuf rejected the idea of the Messiah’s crucifixion, and wanted to do what Ibrahim did when God asked him to offer his only son as a sacrifice. It contains all sorts of heretical ideas, and if these were true, they would put Yusuf the Carpenter on the same footing as the Prophet Ilyas. The old monk called Tanyous a madman invaded by devils. That’s why they threw him out. He went back to his hometown in Lebanon. It’s said that he tried to preach his views in the holy valley where the Maronite monks live. He believed the Maronites have remained loyal to the faith’s covenant and its earliest days, because they use Syriac in their prayers and that is what the Messiah spoke. But it did not work: the monks in the Wadi Qadisha mocked him and even tried to drag him to Wadi el-Majanin – valley of the insane – where they put him in irons and threw him into a windowless grotto without water or food. He claimed that God sent him food dispatched on a huge eagle whose wings were so enormous that they veiled the skies. And that God sent him an angel in the guise of a lion who undid his chains. But it’s all lies – the man is crazy. The abbot explained to us that this sort of madness is very common in these lands that gave birth to all of the prophets. As he put it, this patch of ground witnesses a continuing struggle between God and the forces of Satan that is difficult for human beings to withstand. It becomes confusing, and some are unable to distinguish between the voice of God and the Devil’s voice. That Lebanese monk was the victim of his own lack of judgment; he could not tell one voice from the other and so he became Satan’s plaything.

And you believed all of this about him?

That’s not so important. What does matter is that I’m convinced where it concerns you. At first, I thought this monk was one of your hallucinations. Perhaps not, but, dearest, you need not believe him. This fellow is a devil, not a saint as you’ve been thinking.

How do I know, one way or the other?

The woman doesn’t know what to tell her husband about her first sighting of the Lebanese monk. Did she dream about him before meeting him or was it the other way around? The world of dreams flings all of its gates wide open only in that terrifying hour when the world disappears and everything melts into everything else, just as her grandmother had cried, repeating the words of Solomon the Wise,
Vanity of vanities!
And then, added Grandmama, everything enters the light. We see what no eye has seen. We meet again the people we know, and we meet those we don’t know, too.

Was the glass that the man set down on the windowsill a dream or did it really happen? How had she recognized this man when she saw him on the street at the Virgin’s Spring? He had come up to her and told her to follow him. I am asking you one thing, Marta, he said. Come, follow me. And she did.

She told Mansour now that she wanted to go to sleep because things were confused in her memory. Mansour had changed and so had she. A single year had been enough for her to see life unrolling ahead of her; to sense inside herself an implacable aging that left her fatigued – tired of life and the upsets and reversals of time.
For a thousand years in your sight, Lord, are but a yesterday now gone or like a mere watch of the night
.

When she catches sight of the photographs of her mother-in-law or those of Asma, she is left feeling wearily sad. How has the house filled up with portraits like this? When they were married the photographer was there in the house and at the church, looming up in front of the bride and groom to snap pictures and asking Milia – tears clinging to her eyelashes – to smile. The camera’s aperture and that black cloth behind which the photographer hid stayed in Milia’s memory. She was apprehensive lest the photographer steal the color of her eyes from her, as had the photographer from Zahleh whom Musa had brought to the house, and so she kept them closed. The photographer begged her to open them, at first with gentle phrases and then in growing irritation, to create some light in the photo.
When they passed through Beirut again on their way to Nazareth, Mansour refused to wait. The man had said, only two more days, no more, and the photographs would be ready. He asked Musa to send the photographs to Nazareth. But since the roads between Lebanon and Palestine had been closed, Milia had never seen her wedding photographs.

Actually, no one had seen those photographs. In a fit of anger the photographer tore them up. When Musa came to his little studio he told him he had ripped the pictures to shreds because they would not uphold his reputation. The bride did not open her eyes, he said, not even once! As though she were sleeping.

Saadeh was angry. Then she asked her son to write to his sister and to tell her to bring her wedding dress with her when she next visited Beirut with her husband. They can be photographed again, Saadeh said. What difference would it make? Everyone has to have a wedding photo.

Milia had no idea what had happened to her wedding photos. Mansour never asked about them. He put mirrors throughout the house, a big one in the sitting room and smaller ones in the dining room and bedroom. Milia did not object until he tried to put a mirror in the kitchen. She said no to that. It doesn’t make any sense! she fumed. Have you ever heard of anyone putting a mirror in the kitchen?

Mansour said he wanted the house to fill with a single image that he could see everywhere. I want to see you, my love, that’s all. He made an obsessive project out of convincing Milia to stand in front of the mirror, first thing in the morning, so that he could prove to her that nothing radiates a woman’s beauty like love.

See how beautiful you’ve gotten? That’s from love. You were asleep, and you were as warm as bread out of the oven – you were gorgeous this time! I turned you over on your back . . . it was so-o-o sweet. The most beautiful it’s ever been.

Stop talking like that!

So, you don’t agree with me? That this was the best ever?

Mansour made up for pictures with mirrors. Otherwise he left the walls entirely bare. One time when his mother had upbraided him for not hanging a portrait of his late father in the sitting room – after all, that is what everyone does – he told her he hated photographs. Those pictures freeze people! he said. They look dead. I would rather keep the image of my father that I have in my head.

But your father is dead and gone, his mother said.

Dismissing her words with a brush of his hand, Mansour said, No, a person does not die – but we kill him when we hang his likeness on the wall. In his memory, his father lived on, he wanted her to understand. And he did not want to assassinate that papa who lived in his mind by hanging a photo on the wall.

Why did you kill her, Musa?

Suddenly the house was crowded with pictures. First, Mansour hung an enormous photograph of his brother swathed in black. Then he added one of his father, and then portraits of his brother’s children. Finally, he brought a picture of his mother and along with it a photo of the widow in her wedding dress, standing next to her husband. He even stuck photographs into the mirror frames that were now nearly everywhere in the house. Little photos, enlargements – Mansour even came back from Jaffa one day with a long-faded photograph. He said he would search for a portraitist who could reapply the oils because it was a rare picture of the late lamented with his mujahideen companions.

Why did you kill her, Musa?

Milia felt no jealousy at all. Me?? I don’t think I’ve ever been jealous, not even with Najib. No, I never felt any jealousy.

You’d be right to feel some. Tomorrow the photographer is coming to take a picture of you so we can put it in here.

I don’t want my picture taken!

I want a picture like the one in your family’s home.

Why did you kill her, Musa?

Little Milia stands alone amidst the mirrors, looking at herself in the descending early evening. She sees the lane outside in the large mirror in the
dar
, and then, in the mirror, she sees Musa striding into the house hoisting a large black-and-white photograph of a woman on a yellowing background. Seeing her brother, she hurries to hide under the sofa, waiting for him to come in search of her as he invariably does. But the swarthy young man in a white shirt does not turn toward his sister. He fishes in a small toolbox and takes out a hammer and a few nails, and begins pounding the picture onto the large mirror that his image has just passed across. Milia puts her hands over her ears so that she will not have to hear the mirror shatter beneath the heavy nails, which transform the light beaming from the mirror into splinters.

Milia wants to come out from beneath the sofa to prevent this man from shattering the mirror any more. In a dream, she knows well, shattered mirrors signal disastrous luck. She crawls farther under the sofa to find herself in open air. She is in the dark; she senses danger. She does not know where she is but she does know that the wadi is directly in front of her and that she dares not budge, fearing that the darkness will swallow her up. The pounding knocks an unbearable ache into her head. She wants to scream – Musa! She hears herself scream – Mansour! She covers her mouth with both hands, afraid that her husband, asleep next to her curled into a ball, will awaken.

Where are you, brother?

The girl’s voice goes astray in the darkness and she decides to open her eyes. She will not allow this dream to continue; she will not see the shattered mirror in her home. O Lord, is the meaning of this that Mansour will follow his brother into death? We will be two widows in this house, with the old biddy, and what will I do here alone, and then the little boy – perhaps
they will kill him, now that they have killed his papa. Isn’t that what they did to the Messiah? They killed his father Yusuf the Carpenter, or perhaps they just took him away – how would I know? And then they crucified
him
.

God save you, stop pounding those nails, brother!

She sees herself getting out of bed and walking barefoot into the
dar
. The gloom is barely touched by a pale nighttime glow that creeps into the house through the window. Little Milia walks across splinters of glass, and her blood makes butterfly shapes on the tiles.

But the mirror was there, hanging on the wall. She almost whispered
thank God
because the dream had not been able to break the mirror. But her heart fell sickeningly and she felt faint. She saw her portrait there, suspended inside of a swaying beam of light coming out of the mirror. The photograph Musa had hung on the wall of the
liwan
in the large house – precisely over the bed in which she had been born – was here. The white background blurred into the black. Only the open eyes escaped the black patches spreading across nose and lips and chin and brow. She did not see the long hair extending down this silhouette’s back like a river dyed in black and brown tints that curl round each other.

Where’s her hair? she asked, her voice low.

She looked around to find Musa sitting on the sofa beneath which the little girl had hidden herself. He had on his father’s tarbush and he held a black rosary.

Where did those beads come from, Papa?

That’s what she called him but she didn’t anticipate a response, for she knew well that this person sitting on the sofa gazing steadily at the picture in the mirror was not her father. It was her little brother, whose fear of the dark she had once dispelled with a touch of her fingers.

What brought you to Nazareth? she asked.

I’ve come to take the boy.

No, this is my son! No, you can’t do what your father did to you when you followed him to the Egyptian woman’s place and he threw a rock at you, trying to kill you.

Why, when she thinks of them, do people get confused with each other? This is not her father, she knows, because this man’s olive coloring is nothing like the pallor of Yusuf’s skin. But why did he come to take the boy who has not yet been born? Why does he pound nails into the mirror? She hears the pounding of that day at the cross. The Lebanese monk had told her that the greatest suffering the Messiah endured in his final moments was that of hearing the sounds of his own crucifixion. As they pounded the nails into his hands and feet the sounds grew louder and louder, unbearably loud, and his whole body seemed a pair of enormous ears transmitting the tiniest sound. Everything rang and pounded. Can you imagine what heartbeats sound like when they escape the rib cage? The crucifixion, my daughter, is the sound of this violent pounding which turns the body into nothing more than an echo. Stand above the wadi and shout and then listen. Imagine that your body is the valley and there are hundreds of pounding nails screaming into it.

Musa had become a little boy again. Milia had to stoop to wipe away his tears with her fingers; to raise him from childhood to manhood. But when she bent over and put her hand out to his eyes, he pushed her away roughly and stood stiffly silent before the photograph.

She looked where he was looking. She saw an image of Mansour reflected next to the image of Milia that was now fixed onto the mirror. Instead of calling her husband by his name she screamed. Why did you kill her, Musa?

On the day when she got up and walked out of the Italian Hospital, leaving her husband there with the Italian doctor and following whatever path her feet led her down, Milia searched through the streets and alleys for the Lebanese monk but she found no traces of him. She sat down on the stone edging at the Virgin’s Wellspring, closed her eyes, and saw.