As Though She Were Sleeping (16 page)

The woman acted out what it was like to live inside the color black. She closed her eyes and repeated her stories. They kept her in the station because she declared herself terrified of returning to the house. The policemen arrested the two doctors and locked them up on the orders of the public prosecutor, who then freed them – it was said – when the French high commissioner intervened. It was rumored also, though, that the woman was not in her right mind, that she imagined things or made them up. No one knew the truth, people murmured.

And then? asked Milia.

How would I know
and then
– I just know that God was our salvation, my girl, and if it weren’t for God’s mercy, what would have happened to us? This woman, this Kati, came to them in the first place because she was ill, and then who knows what they made her drink, and then they married her, and then they ruined her life and destroyed her honor.

Saadeh stood up, put her handkerchief to her eyes, dabbed at her tears, and stumbled into the kitchen, coming back with a jug of water. She took a drink and handed the vessel to her daughter.

Kati stands before the policeman and informs on the pair of doctors. The woman with tousled hair lies down on the floor of the police station and demonstrates how the two men would have sex with her. Reclining on the patient’s chair, Kati flips between the two doctors as if she is a fish on the deck of a boat, just yanked from the water. She opens her mouth, tries to suck in a breath, and goes into a stunned stillness.

Milia told Musa the story was made up. The twelve-year-old boy didn’t understand any of this business. He took her hand and asked her to come with him to the sea.

Why don’t you ever come with us to the water anymore?

Ask Salim. Your big brother said the sea’s off limits because I’m a girl.

I want to become a girl too so I can stay with you in the house and not go to school.

Milia laughed at her brother’s naïve words. No, brother, we stay the way we’re created, you can’t become something else.

Would you like to become a boy so you could come with us to the water?

I’d like to be a boy not just because of the sea, but no . . . I don’t know, she said, and then said nothing more. Anyway, that’s the way the world is.

When Musa told her of Mansour’s wish to marry her and that she would go and live with him in his town, far away, in her brother’s eyes she saw that question for which there was no answer. Why did a woman have to follow a man to somewhere she didn’t even know the location of? Why was the world like this? After her experiences with Wadiie and Najib, things seemed even more cryptic. Wadiie had taught her that being a man meant carrying many faces around with you, while Najib had shown her the dilemma of a man who must search for something or somewhere to carry him. And a woman has to be the faces, and she has to be the places. She has to be everything – that is, she has to be nothing at all.

It’s Salim’s fault, said the mother.

No, it’s Najib’s fault, said Musa. Najib is a coward and he wants someone who’s going to carry him all the time because he can’t carry himself.

May God pardon him, Milia said, seeing before her how the little airborne bodies plunged to their deaths. This one she would call the dream of the blind little birds and she would never tell it to anyone. And she never did.

Ever since that encounter in the garden when she had stood close to Najib beneath the lilac tree, she had feared the blind bats who fly into the treetops and whose leavings splatter along the wall. Then the dream of the birds came and she was the first to know the truth.

She comes off the balcony and goes to bed, leaving Mansour on his own. He had asked her why she didn’t cook her favorite dish, the one he had come to love the most. There in Palestine, and in the Hourani family with their roots in Jabal el-Arab – as Mansour insisted on calling the Houran region of Syria – they called it
shakiriyya
, while in Lebanon they called it
labanimmuh-wa-ruz
. Mother’s milk with rice.

Milia took special pride in two dishes. She called them Beirut’s greatest culinary achievements, the city’s finest and proudest contributions to the cuisine of greater Syria:
laban immuh
and
kibbeh arnabiyyeh
. When Mansour ate
kibbeh arnabiyyeh
he felt in his gut that it was a true occasion in every sense of the word. One needed serious training to appreciate it fully. Tahini was cooked with seven different citrus fruits, onions were cut to resemble wings, the chick peas all but melted in the tahini mixture with its swirling colors from pale to brown, and finally there were the balls of finely ground meat and – on top of that! – the melt-in-your-mouth chunks of stewed meat. He was utterly bewitched by this dish, which Milia made the central festivity of her Nazarene life.

Mansour could not find his way into this world hedged round with secrets and dreams inside of which Milia lived. He had been lost outside of it ever since their time at the Hotel Massabki in Shtoura. There, dreaming became intertwined with sex, and the images conjured up by the blind flying creatures mingled for Milia with the fragrance of the lilac. All of this left her feeling confused and uncertain of how to behave. What could she do but abandon herself to a drowsiness that pulled her downward, into the deep waters of her spirit, prone, still, and silent?

On that interminable journey through the fog of Dahr el-Baydar Milia retrieved her dreaming and returned to herself. At first her recollection was dubious: the woman whom she saw in her first dream on the night of her wedding was her double. A young woman in her early twenties lying full length on the white expanse of the bed as the whiteness of her skin gave off a translucent glow. Mansour told her that her pale complexion was as clear as water. She was his life’s mirror, he told her.

I’ve begun now to understand Arabic poetry, he said, and I know how to appreciate its beauty. He explained to her that the ancient Arab poets who lived in the desert only wrote love poems to fair-skinned women, as if a woman’s pallor was a transparent window that the poets’ inner selves could open when they wanted access to the worlds of shadow, cool refuges, and sleep – and perhaps to themselves. A woman has to be pale white, still and somnolent, he said. She must be like an oasis. A woman shrouded in the mystery of half-shut lashes leads a man into the labyrinths of love, he said.

You are a real poet!

I learn poetry by heart but I don’t want to be a poet. My love, when you are a child of this language borne on odes that balance ecstasy with wisdom, and that dance to the essential union of still and moving letters, the tempo created by a flux of syllables, then it’s more than enough to recite poetry composed by others, to play with it as you like, to immerse yourself joyfully in its rhythms and cadences at whatever moment suits you. But these poor miserable poets have always stumbled under the weight of the poets who came before them. They cannot figure out how to escape the burdens imposed by crystalline poems composed and recited in earlier eras. So the later poets grow careless, or they shrug off the weight of it, or they imitate, or they kill themselves. Listen, my love, listen!

That day Mansour was saying goodbye to his Beiruti beloved for the last time. He would go to Galilee’s capital and make final arrangements about
the house to which they would come as a married couple. He would bring his mother to Beirut for the wedding, he said then. But the mother did not come, as it happened, because of the revolt flaring up in Palestine. Mansour would marry without any family members to witness it. And when the family gathering on that stormy night in December broke up, he turned to his beloved and recited his lines on paleness and poetry. He wanted to recite the entire poem but he could only remember its opening lines.

Do you know how el-A’sha finishes the poem? he asked her, but he did not wait for an answer. I swear it’s as if he’s talking about you, Milia!

About me?

Just about. I want you to feel this poetry as if he composed for you. Listen!

See, Milia, you are the vigilant one, pale and wary. No, she’s not wary, she just walks as if she is wary. Paleness, a chiseled neck and face – these aren’t meant as similes, they’re descriptions of a real person. But a wary gait, that’s just a simile. Pale and
looking
wary. So, not really wary.

What’s the difference between looking and being wary?

The difference is the poetry. The resemblance. The simile. Like, one thing makes you think of another, and so on.

I don’t understand, she said. And then, what’s the difference between description and similarity? If someone says
abyad
, white, yes, I get that – it means, his color is white. A noun, isn’t it?

No, Milia, sweetheart, it’s not a noun. It’s a kind of adjective made from a verb, it’s called an elative, a form used for comparisons, you know – well, anyway, I swear I don’t know why, I just read poetry and then I feel like I’m going to soar into the sky. You fly with the meaning, it’s intoxicating, it makes shivers run up and down your spine it’s so beautiful. So, I mean, how could I possibly come up with my own poetry?

And he, the poet – what was his name?

El-A’sha. He was half blind and that’s why they named him el-A’sha.

Blind, and he could see the beauty of a woman?

He saw with his heart, not with his eyes. He would go all confused and flustered in front of women, just like I am with you!

Milia didn’t ask him why he didn’t write poetry, because she was afraid. Being afraid was no simile in this case; it was a real adjective. She had made her decision and there was the end of it. It had not really been her decision, though. Najib had decided. He had gone with her brother Salim. The dream told her that her future would be written in a faraway town and she understood that she must let her pallor melt and flow in the hands of this strange man of whom she knew nothing except that he resembled her brother Musa. Milia perceived the swarthiness of this man’s skin tinting her own body, penetrating it. She knew instinctively that she must peel off her words as she peeled off her clothes. A woman strips herself naked when she tells things while a man clothes himself in his words. That is how she
imagined herself in bed: he would be putting things on while she was taking things off. But she could not find the right words and so she decided not to speak. Not to take anything off. Well, no, she did not decide, after all; her mother had told her in no uncertain terms that she must obey him in bed. Men were of different kinds, her mother lectured her. Some of them, especially these days, demanded that a woman be naked in bed, so she’d be like soft warm dough in a man’s hands.

That’s the way they like it, and you must do as your husband wants.

What did my father do? asked Milia.

What do you want with your father, God have mercy on his soul? It’s wrong to talk about the dead. But no, your papa did not take my clothes off. He took off all of his clothes, but I was too embarrassed. I mean, how are you supposed to take your clothes off when the little ones are right there in the house, sleeping? He didn’t care one way or the other. He would get under the sheet and take off everything and say to me, Whatever you want, just stay however you want.

And then?

One of these days soon you’ll know how it goes.

The mother explained to her daughter that in bed she must swallow her own pleasure, keeping it to herself and not allowing it to get the better of her. It all must stay inside, she said. You must be absolutely sure of that, my girl. It scares a man to hear a woman breathing heavily or to see her pleasure rising with his. It happened to me, and I learned my lesson right quickly – but why am I telling you all of this? Well, these sorts of things aren’t talked about, but . . . there isn’t a better man than your papa, God rest his soul, but I couldn’t stand it any longer. We had our children, enough is enough. I began to feel I couldn’t do it anymore, and I smelled the stink of sin – but maybe I wasn’t good enough to him, bless his soul.

It’s the nun’s fault, she put these ideas in your head.

Don’t bring the nun into it, she’s a saint! May God permit us to drink of her blessings.

Milia understood things differently. She saw the tiny airborne bodies and went silent. Najib had disappeared from her life and a black curtain had come down over his story. Everyone whispered the news, back and forth it went but quietly, quietly, in the belief that she didn’t know. But she knew everything. She saw the truth sketched on Najib’s eyeballs when the birds fell dead from the sky. It was not easy for her to recall the dream of the birds. To find it she had to plunge into the darkness and when she did, she was rendered incapable of saying anything about it. She had learned to classify her dreams. They were of three sorts.

The first sort of dream was the one that took place on the surface of things and arrived in the early morning. The shallow dream’s role was to motivate her to wake up. These were simple dreams crafted out of the details of daily life. They helped one’s eyes stay closed for a while longer but also to face the light of morning. This sort of dream did not concern Milia because the moment she got up it would have already vanished from her mind. Indeed, she could stop its march by opening her eyes and when it faded she would close them again to go to a place that was deeper, wanting to regain her real dream, which had hidden itself away somewhere beneath her eyelids.