As Though She Were Sleeping (10 page)

The nun disappeared. Musa was stretching out his arms to catch her. Musa toppled into the water and the sea swallowed him. Milia stood on a rock amidst the waves, her shorts stained with sea grass and salt stinging her eyes. She searched desperately for her brother in the waves but she could not see him anywhere. A hand came out and pushed her into the waters. She was drowning – she knew it – and she felt her throat constrict. She opened her eyes. She licked the salt from her lips and saw only the darkness.

Milia sat on the edge of the bed and pressed her hand to her chest trying to quiet her loud rapid heartbeat. Her heart was erupting, spreading throughout her body. She felt it in her neck and temples and in the soles of her feet. Every part of her shook violently.

Why this fear? Of what was she afraid?

A phantom smile played on the woman’s lips in the gloom. The dream came back to her – that old dream which had abandoned her three years before when she met Najib Karam for the first time and sensed that this young man would swab the dreams from her eyes and help her into the world. But Najib had disappeared from her life and the dream of the sea and the wooden stairs had gone with him. And here she was now, sitting on the edge of the bed in Room Ten in the Hotel Massabki in Shtoura, asking questions, knowing the answers, filled with disquiet.

In my dream, I fell, Milia said to her mother, and now my foot hurts. She heard her mother bawl. Stop this foolishness! You’re as bad as your grandmama. Well, you’re a young woman now and it’s high time we find you a man.

The body of the fair-skinned woman shuddered awake. She got up, bent to the floor, picked up her nightgown and slipped it over her head, and sat down again on the edge of the bed. She heard her mother’s voice again, that dry raspy voice coming from deep in a throat lined with the smoke of the narghile. This voice would be at Milia’s side in Nazareth. It would be the
last voice she would hear before she saw that young man sitting beneath her picture trying to copy words written in tiny letters inside the heaviness of the inscription in large Arabic
naskh
script.

Why was the honeymoon chamber like this? The man had his back to her. She opened her eyes on a dream completely at odds with her usual dreams. Where did her old dream go?

Milia lived inside the rhythm of her dreaming. She got up in the morning, washed the dreams from her eyelids, and continued the story. She dreamed that Najib was sitting with another girl in the garden of Milia’s home. Standing at a distance, she watched how the man put his hand on the young woman’s hair before stooping slightly to plant a kiss on her neck, and how they disappeared beneath the grand fig tree. When he came to visit the next day, she refused to sit with Najib and would not say a word to him. Things returned to what they had been only when a new dream came to erase the previous one.

What was wrong with you yesterday? asked Najib.

She smiled and gave no answer.

I don’t understand. What happened?

Ask yourself, she responded, and then burst out laughing. It’s not you. I had a dream that wasn’t very nice and it put me in a bad mood. Just forget it.

Najib didn’t understand. He went on insisting, wanting to know what lay behind it. When he heard accusations of unfaithfulness, hints of the story of his relations with a golden-fleshed girl whose name Milia did not know, he went off in a high dudgeon.

As Najib disappeared from her life – and married that same fleshy woman – she dreamed that he told her he was fleeing from her dreams. How can anyone live with a woman like you? he asked.

What I dreamed turned out to be right. I saw you and I had to leave you so that you wouldn’t leave me. So yes, it’s my fault.

She saw him standing beside that big woman whose broad shoulders filled the garden. Her brother Salim stood with them.

I hate you, she said to Salim. You make yourself out to be such a good person, so fair, almost a saint – but what shame you should feel!
Ya Ayb ish-shoom aleek
.

She saw herself on the steps going into a somersault and crying out. Musa stood beneath, arms spread, waiting for her. She hit the ground hard and felt her bones turn to powder.

Wayn ruht ya
Musa? Where did you go and why did you leave me? You’re still angry over the money, aren’t you?

She had dreamed that Musa stole the few pennies she had hidden under her mattress. She woke up in the morning and didn’t find the money and when Musa came home from school she scolded him. The boy’s face went red and he tried to deny the accusation before crumbling in front of his sister and admitting his guilt. Milia planted a kiss on his eyelids and forgave him.

Milia played the dream game with herself. When she could not remember her dream she would keep her eyes closed on a pretext, as though she were sleeping; as though she knew she could anticipate seeing something to prop up her day. Her night began when she could sketch out her dreams before falling asleep. Well, no, it was not as clear and straightforward as that. But she did make decisions about where the dream would be located. Most often, her dreams occurred on the seashore or at the edge of the wadi, even if it was a dream set in midwinter. She would go to the seaside having wrapped herself in her bedcovering, closing her eyes to the blueness and suddenly finding herself in the water.

Every day in the summertime, the four brothers went swimming on the rocky Beirut shore. Sometimes she went with them, standing at the edge of the water to watch.

You’re a girl, and it’s shameful for girls to swim, said her older brother Salim. It would disgrace the family.

Why? Milia asked.

Because you’re a girl, Salim answered.

I’m not a girl, she said.

Why do you say that – do you have a
hamama
? asked little Musa innocently.

Shut up, you ass! Salim shrieked. And you, Milia, you stay right here and you just watch us swim.

One time she ordered Musa to take her to the sea. No one else was home. Their mother was at the convent licking the icons – Salim’s description of his mother’s constant visits there. Salim was at the Jesuit Fathers’, and she and Musa were in the house. She was twelve years old. She begged him, and then she ordered him, and off they went. She took off her clothes and pulled on the bathing trunks she had fished out of Salim’s wardrobe. She sensed Musa staring at her tiny breasts, which had just begun to round out. She was shivering, naked in front of the unending blue world. She stood there, preparing herself to wade into a small pool that stuck like a rocky tongue into the shore. She felt the sting of her brother’s eyes boring into her breasts, two tiny prickly pears planted on her otherwise smooth and unchanging chest. Never before had Milia been truly conscious of them, and she would try to forget them even after they grew into a pair of ripe apples with their tinges of violet, purple exploding across white, erect rosy nipples at the core.

In the dark and in his wife’s eternal drowsiness Mansour would discover these breasts and take them. Apples are sweeter than pears, he would tell her.

What are you talking about?

I’m talking about your breasts. I like the shape of apples best. Pears are
fine, but apples are round and they fill my hands.
Ya ayni
, what beautiful apples you have!

Stop it, for God’s sake!

He would abandon her to her drowsiness when he despaired of convincing her that sex was not shameful or forbidden. The problem was that her refusals merely enflamed him. He would try to take her against her wishes but then, seeing her wet face, he would pull back. He came to fear her sadness, as she sat bent over on the edge of the bed, catching her tears on the hem of the white bedsheet.

Whenever he wanted her she took her time about responding. She warned him away from her bed. She turned over a few times, got out of bed and went to the bathroom, came back and turned out the light, and then asked him to put off that business until tomorrow. So he waited until she fell asleep. When her body was no longer moving at all and she seemed heavily asleep, he would take her. Her water would begin to spill out and spread, and he would drown. He could not stay hard: as if, taking him inside of her, she dissolved him in her world of darkness and closed eyes. Her body began to dwindle away in his hands. He extracted her breasts from her nightgown and began to kiss them, sucking in their taste, which mingled jasmine with the scent of apples. He heard her faint moan and began his journey, slipping inside of her only to dissolve in her waters. Spent, he would make up his mind to keep trying, but with a sharp cough she would expel him from her body, turn over onto her right side, and sink beneath the surface, deep in her universe of sleep.

In the morning he searched her face for any expression of what they had done but he never found a trace of it. Light poured off the pale features that were rounding out with her pregnancy. Had she waited for him to drop off to sleep so that she could go into the bathroom and wash herself, or had she truly been asleep, postponing her ablutions until early in the morning?

Only once did he commit a grievous error. They were sitting in the salon,
Mansour listening to the radio and Milia knitting a woolen jacket for the awaited child. He got up and came over to her. He put his hand on her left breast and bent over, kissing her blouse. When he slipped his hand inside she erupted.

Let me kiss it! he said.

As he lifted her breast from the folds of fabric and took the deep-pink nipple between his lips, the pain showed on her face. Mansour was far away, bathing in the fragrance of apples, when he heard her screech. Enough! The pained look fading, she gulped for a breath of air, repeated it in a mutter –
Enough!
– and stood up.

That evening Mansour did not dare to follow her into the bedroom. She wrapped herself up and slept. That night he did not come near her breasts but when he took her she was very warm and soft. The next morning she told him that his actions of the day before were not to happen again. Breasts are for the child, she said. He must understand that. But three nights later, fondling her breasts, he heard the same quiet moan as before. He let himself go in the sleepy pleasure of love. He would never try again to reveal her breasts to the light. It was enough for him, having the violet color of those breasts overcoming the darkness of the room and opening the gates for his stealthy entrance.

Milia veiled her breasts with her arms and threw herself into the sea. The taste of salt swept over her, a flavor that would return to her lips on that cold winter morning when she found herself in that bed in the room at the Hotel Massabki. She sucked at her lips and went back to sleep. But there she was on the rocky Beirut littoral, dipping her tiny breasts in the salt water and gazing at Musa as he pursued his water games. He dove underwater and she suddenly felt certain that he had drowned and would not return to the surface. But then abruptly he emerged on the other side of the vast open water. She waved to him but he was heading away from her, far away.

She closed her eyes and slipped her head into the water, and then opened
her eyes to the intense blue that was turning into a light-suffused green mingling with gray. The depths of the sea have eyes that are green, she thought. These rocks and these colors yielded the greenness that enveloped her night. She raised her head and a light wave of cold swept over her. She felt a pain behind her eyes. She screamed for Musa but he was far away, swimming, paddling with his hands, his head dipping into the water and bobbing through the waves.

When Musa came back he saw her standing motionless in the water, the look in her eyes anxious. He grabbed her by the hand to pull her out of the sea. She shook her hand away and stooped over, covering her breasts. She followed him. She put on her own clothes. She was hungry. A tremor of cold smacked her. The July sun broke hotly over the water but Milia’s body shivered beneath her short dress, pulled over the wet bathing trunks that she had not dared to take off. Musa bought a pastry brushed with thyme that he divided with his sister. He tore into his share. She watched him and nibbled at her half.

That night she dreamed of the lamb and felt its wet little kisses. And that night her menstrual blood came. She had become a woman now, her mother told her, and she must act as women do. Milia was afraid of this blood. She did not understand how the egg that had formed inside of her could erupt into this mess of blood. Does that mean the egg has died? she asked her mother. You mean, every month a baby dies inside of me?

Don’t talk such nonsense! It isn’t death, it’s nature, Saadeh told her.

And so Milia understood that nature meant death. Sensations formed inside of her and welled up as her monthly time approached. Her movements grew slower. She sensed something forming ball-like in her belly and it made her queasy. She would press her hands against her lower abdomen as if she were pregnant and wanted to protect the developing baby from slipping out. The blood never appeared until the little lamb did, and not
without considerable pain. This sudden panic about the embryo falling out followed her until she was with child. There in the remote little town she no longer saw the little lamb crouching above her. She began to walk daily through the alleys and streets until her feet hurt with exhaustion. Returning home, she would fall sleep immediately and dream of the blue woman coming toward her before disappearing into the wadi after laying the child in her arms. She would bring the baby boy to her breasts, letting him suck at her nipple as though it were an orange. It was ecstasy; her uterus muscles convulsed and water welled up from deep inside.