As Though She Were Sleeping (17 page)

The second kind of dream planted a cozy hedge around you. Milia took this sort of dream with her to sleep. Closing her eyes, she felt her head tingle and go numb, and she began to weave stories and images. Bedtime means a person plumps up a pillow on which to lay her head. Milia’s pillow was not made from cotton or wool or feathers but from stories. She would lay her head back on the long mound of pillow that also served as a backrest and ply her stories slowly. Images moved before her eyes and she selected those she wanted to use, arranging the elements according to her taste. Najib
the lawyer became Wadiie the baker, and Wadiie became the priest at the Church of the Archangel Mikhail, and then the priest was passionately in love with the saintly nun, and so forth . . .

There was another element she could not forget. Ever since her mother’s illness, cooking had begun to enter the warp and woof of her dreams. She would be mincing onions for
laban immuh
and suddenly Niqula and Abdallah would appear in front of her, Niqula in his jaunty tarbush and Abdallah wearing the sandals that he never took off, summer or winter. The two young men would be conversing about a visit they had made to the home of an Assyrian wizard called Dr. Shiha. He had come from Iraq and was calling people to a new religion that blended Islam with Christianity. Abdallah talked vividly about the new faith while Niqula made fun of it; the wings of onion turned into little birds; and Milia was fast asleep.

Milia knew that these two kinds of dreams were not particularly important. Even so, many a time she could not keep herself from taking them seriously. This led to her morning problem, which was a matter of persuading her body to acclimatize to moving through air rather than water. Dreams were akin to water; it was as though she swam the waters of her eyes. But she did not dare to tell this to anyone. Moreover, these two dream realms overlapped and ran into each other. An entry-dream that pervaded you with the first spreading numbness of sleep would come back to meet the end-dream that prefaced wakefulness, the door behind which one must shake off the waters of darkness and come out onto dry land. In her waking moment the two worlds fused into a single horizon clouded in fuzzy darkness. The prewaking dream picked up features from the entry-dream of the previous night such that Milia could no longer distinguish between the two. Getting out of bed, she would trace footsteps of the two dreams and behave in a way that those around her could not possibly comprehend.

What does one say to Najib? Should she have told him that she saw him
in her dream embracing a plump woman under the lilac tree, while the woman caressed him and flirted with him and rubbed her fleshiness against his chest? Najib told her she was crazy and she believed his innocence. She would stop attaching her dreams to her life, she decided then and there. And then the dead birds came and laid everything bare.

The third sort was the deep dream. In these dreams she saw the dead creatures and knew everything about that woman whom Najib had married. In the first two classes of dreams Milia never saw herself. She would see others, but it was only in the deep dream that she saw her own image reflected in the mirror of the night. This was a dream that did not float to the surface: she had to dive into the depths of herself in search of it. There she would encounter the brown-skinned girl with the greenish eyes who scampered down the alleys of the night and concealed her dreams in a dark and cryptic hollow. Milia became accustomed to not telling this sort of dream to anyone because it was not really in her possession. It belonged to that girl whose form she inhabited, and with whom she flew, traversing the arcs of the night, before everything faded and broke up into fragments.

The birds occupied the deep dream. There, inside a forest of stone pine that rose to the skies, Milia saw herself. The small brown girl stood beneath a towering pine that threw its shade across the scene, though under the hot sun the taste of copper burned her lips and tongue. Without warning she saw him. Najib wore the uniform of a French soldier and darted through the trees as if he were fleeing from her. She waved both hands at him to make him stop. He was running like a blind man, colliding into the trunks of trees. She stood there not daring to move. It was fear that paralyzed her. Flocks of birds filled the vacant sky and eventually blocked out the sun. They looked like sparrows but they flew with a peculiar swiftness, bumping into each other and dropping, folding their wings and falling dead. The earth filled with death. Najib vanished and little Milia stood alone beneath
a sun assailed by dark clouds, and the tiny feathered creatures were dying. The girl’s feet would not move; she saw herself spreading her arms and falling. She wanted to scream to Najib to come and save her but her voice choked in her throat and he was gone. The heart of the little bird who had folded his wings trembled but he did not plunge hard to the ground. The earth cracked open to make a series of valleys that moved apart, and the little bird was suspended in emptiness.

Milia opened her eyes. She was thirsty. She put out her hand for the glass of water next to her bed. It was empty. She took it to her lips and drank the thirst and the emptiness. She thought about getting up to fetch some water but she was afraid. Her feet were half paralyzed. She put her head down on the pillow and begged sleep to come. It came as waves of tingling and numbness and she saw the birds again. Najib was standing next to her holding her hand. Suddenly he let go of it and went into the tree. The trunk of an enormous sycamore tree split into two and swallowed him. The smell of graves and burials rose to spread across the scene. The little brown girl stood barefoot, pebbles digging painfully into the soles of her feet. The birds came. They spread their wings to fly and dropped, they were falling, and Milia grew smaller and smaller until she was no larger than a mote of dust.

She opened her eyes and heard herself panting with fear and understood that it was the end. Najib’s birds had died and it was over. When she heard the news from her mother she felt no surprise. Her almond eyes held a look of repose. It doesn’t matter, she said, and ran off to the kitchen to make the
kibbeh nayye
that the family ate every Sunday at midday.

That had happened one year before she met Mansour. It was a difficult year because repeatedly she had to chase away the little airborne bodies that floated surreptitiously from her deep dream into her shallow dream. She began seeing the birds in the morning, but without any trees. Before
the birds could retract their wings in anticipation of death, Milia would open her eyes and jump out of bed and head for the garden. She would put her mouth under the water tap in the little pond and drink and drink, getting her chest and nightgown wet. This morning ablution was her way of purifying herself from the filth of death, memories of the trees, and the disappearance of Najib.

How could she talk about these things? How could she strip away her dreams and tell the story to Mansour? How could she make him understand that a person must divest himself of words in order to be capable of divesting himself of clothes? And that dreams cannot be washed away except by water?

Milia’s story with marriage could be labeled many things. A lone girl lives with her widowed mother and her four brothers. The mother is afflicted with an obscure, nameless illness. The girl had to transform herself into mistress of a home when she was eleven. Saadeh did not go to the doctor. The sum total of medications she would resort to was a morsel of cotton soaked in the oil she carried home from the Church of the Archangel Mikhail. She would come home from the church and make the cotton into shapes that looked something like pills, which she would swallow after every meal. After Yusuf’s death, Saadeh became a nun in all but name – though a nun without a convent. She also timed her prayers to the tolling of the church bell – that never seemed to stop ringing, as it announced the nuns’ canonical prayers, which took up a goodly portion of the day. She rose at four o’clock for the morning prayers. She ate her breakfast and crawled back into bed as her illness took over. At eleven o’clock she reverted to prayer, performing that of the Sixth Hour, and when that was over she sat in her room waiting for the lunch Milia would have prepared. Her afternoon nap was over by five o’clock when she prayed Vespers before having her supper and saying her Soothoro prayers before she slept.

Saadeh’s favorite ritual, though, was lunch. Sitting in her room, she basked in the fragrance of the stew Milia was preparing, her mouth watering, waiting. When the plateful of food arrived she swallowed it almost at once. Saadeh had discovered the virtues of her daughter’s cooking. With exemplary speed the girl had learned to cook all sorts of dishes.

If it weren’t for your stomach, you would have become a saint, the nun remarked more than once. Saadeh’s appetite for prayer could be compared only to her appetite for food. Between these two desires she lived inside the pain that crawled through all parts of her body. In the end, the aches settled in her feet, which swelled until they could no longer carry her. So her life ended there within that small space, in her bed, praying and eating. She died on a day in July in the year 1960 after wolfing down an entire bowl of
kibbeh arnabiyyeh
that the wife of her son Musa had sent to her with her very young grandson Iskandar. Facing his grandmother’s appetite, the little boy stood stunned.
Sitti
, you’re going to die! he said to her when she told him she would finish the entire bowl in one sitting.

Then I’ll die on a full stomach, she said.

Milia knew her mother would die of overeating and she took it as a fact of nature – simply one of many natural disasters. Milia never did understand her mother’s accursed illness. Truth be told, she believed her mother was not ill at all. She had feigned it, Milia was certain, and then had come to believe in her own lies.

Her husband had died suddenly at the age of forty-five. Saadeh felt lost, as the nun said. Saadeh had told the nun that she hated
that business
and could not stand the smell of the man, adhering to her body so obnoxiously whenever he approached her. Immediately after the weekly intercourse that she could not avoid or escape, she would take three baths, trying to rid herself of the feeling that she had sinned, of the fierce notion that she wanted to disappear from the face of the earth.

I wish,
ma soeur
, I wish I could just go through that wall and disappear and make the smell go away, she would moan.

My dear, what are you saying? You smell like bay laurel and soap, the nun would say.

But I can still smell it, said Saadeh.

You were created to be a nun and stay a virgin, Saadeh – if it weren’t for that stomach of yours. I’ve never seen a one who was as fond of the stomach as you are.

This exchange or something like it occurred two years after the death of Yusuf. Saadeh was complaining to the nun of her aches and whining about the smell of the man that still hung in her nose. She remembered Yusuf and cried, and said he had blackened her with the soot of misfortune, she and the children. But what were her tears for?

Shufi ya haraam – al-awlad!
The poor children, look what’s happened to them. They work from dawn to dusk, through the heat, and if God hadn’t opened the gates to my son Niqula and started him making coffins, we would’ve all dropped dead from hunger by now. Salim the oldest went with the Jesuits, says he’s studying law and is going to be a lawyer, and then there’s little Musa still in school – it was Niqula’s and Abdallah’s lot to work from the start and support us all. And then there’s Milia, I don’t know what demon got into that girl, but one month and she was cooking up a storm. That girl left school though she’s always got her nose in a book. She cleans house and does the washing and cooks and gets it all done in a couple of hours, too! When I used to spend the whole day in that kitchen and my cooking still came out
saayit
as the late mister used to say, but she’s a different case.

They were devouring a platter of stuffed eggplant cooked in oil. Saadeh couldn’t
not
eat with the saintly woman even though she had eaten already at home. This isn’t lunch, Saadeh, this is a trial and temptation! the nun
exclaimed without missing a bite. Don’t you bring any more of your daughter’s dishes over here. What an aroma – Lord preserve us from temptation!

Mansour would repeat the story of the aroma that was like making love. He had finished his dinner on the terrace at home in Nazareth. He was getting ready to refill his glass of arak when Milia snatched it from his hand and scurried into the kitchen.

Why are you doing that? he yelled after her.

Enough drink, it’s time for something sweet.

She came back from the kitchen carrying a platter of
qatayif
dipped in honey. The tiny sweet pancakes grilled over a very low fire until they were golden gave off the fragrance of pure Hama butter and glistened with pine nuts. Mansour took a bite and cried out at the sweetness of it.
Shuu ha’l-tiib hayda!
Milia explained that she had crushed the pine nuts with sugar and rosewater and orange-flower syrup. He took a second bite with his eyes closed and she heard something very like a moan of pleasure.

This isn’t dessert, darling, this is like love. Like I’m making love with you, not like I’m eating! Amazing! And he dove in, and the
qatayif
were gone.

You shouldn’t eat so many, you need to really appreciate the taste, she complained. She had invented this sweet by chance, she told him. Making
qatayif
, she discovered she didn’t have any almonds or walnuts in the old house, so she hit upon the idea of filling them with pine nuts. But pine nuts are tender and subtle and the taste isn’t there on the tip of your tongue right away. To get the flavor you have to wait, and I was afraid my brothers wouldn’t like them, especially Niqula, since he’s a bit rough and he likes his food that way too. But Musa – when Musa tasted the
qatayif
he closed his eyes and reacted just like you did, and then all of them loved it. Especially the nun. That one’s the patron saint of stomachs – I never in my life saw anyone eat the way she does, like her whole body is in a rapture, like the skin on her fingers and hands tastes it along with her mouth.