As Though She Were Sleeping (24 page)

Grandmother had given the cat the name Pasha because she said he looked like the Turkish pashas: light yellow hair, brown eyes, long whiskers, and a body as fat as a sheep’s. He was old and had an eye problem – glaucoma, most likely, for he was nearly blind. But Saadeh said his stumbling walk wasn’t because of his blindness. It was because he was senile and couldn’t tell the difference between one object and another. Instead of behaving with typical feline modesty, he did his business everywhere and
filled the house with the smell of shit. Saadeh wanted to throw him out but Yusuf felt sorry for his invalid mother and gave the cat his patriarchal protection, ordering that Pasha be allowed to stay in the house.

He pleaded with Saadeh. Mother is going mad, he said.

She’s already mad.

God be kind in your afterlife, woman, don’t say that! I’ll clean up after the cat.

And your mother – who cleans up after her?

Lower your voice! She’ll hear you.

Grandmother sat in bed listening to everything and saying nothing. She had already entered the desert of silence and would never find her way out. Milia did not know where the expression had originated; it must have been the nun’s. The saintly woman labeled Hasiba’s silence
the desert
. All saints chose the desert at the end, she said. And the only person who showed reverence and respect to Hasiba was Sister Milana. Arriving at the house, she would go directly to the old woman’s bed, sponge her brow with a cotton wad that had been immersed in blessed oil, give her a kiss on the top of her head, and refrain from showing any disgust at the smell coming out of the old woman’s cracked skin.

Was Sitti born paralyzed? asked Milia.

No, my dear. When she was born, your grandmother had nothing wrong with her. She slept on this bed right here, next to the one you were born on. But she didn’t sit at home much. She was always going about. When you were about five months old, one day they brought her in and said she had fallen, out on the road. She was never the same again, until she died.

And when she died, where was I sleeping?

You were with her, sleeping in the very same room, but we didn’t let you know anything, you and your brothers. Except Salim, who came into our room and said his grandmama was frozen. I ran to her – your father stayed
in bed, unable to move, until I screamed and he came after me. We sent all of you children to my mother and you didn’t come back home until after everything was over and we had buried the cat as well.

Milia did not remember her grandmother. Whatever images of the elderly woman did come to her came from the memory of words heard from her mother, fragments of stories gathered from a scattering of words to become images that had their place in her dreams.

I must let go of this dream, Milia said. She stood up, opened the door to her room, and begged the cat to come, but the cat ran and crouched under the bed and began to meow. Milia knelt down and made kissing sounds. The old cat lifted his head but his body shrank back as if he were getting ready to pounce. Her fear pushed little Milia into retreat. He was beneath her bed in the
liwan
. The grandmother watched, her head bowed forward onto pillows set on her thighs, her eyes open. The woman was bent almost double; she could not straighten her body.

Why does she sleep like that? Milia wondered. Now she could see only the old woman’s back, her pale cheek turned sideways on the pillow, white froth around her lips that were always shut, always silent. That is how she spent her final three years.

The story goes that Yusuf got up one morning to find his mother asleep in this odd position. His mother told him she had decided to sleep bent over to keep death at a distance. If I sleep on my back, she warned, the Angel of Death will come and steal my soul from inside me.

Hasiba believed she would likely die if she lay on her back. If she was curled up, she could face death. Death could not enter a circle, for life is round. That is what Yusuf said his mother said, but no one believed him. How could a senile woman whose ravings ranged far and wide and made no distinction among things speak in this wise, philosophical way?

When she died she was wooden and cold, a rigid back nearly snapped in
half, bent over itself, face supported on two raised pillows, feet twisted into an odd position, and a thread of dried blood that had trickled downward along one ear. Had Saadeh not been so quick to realize what this meant, and had she not gotten her husband to help her pull the old woman’s corpse into proper shape, it would have hardened to the point where they would have found it nearly impossible to fit it into the coffin.

Milia makes sucking noises at the cat, who tenses to pounce. But then, suddenly the cat walks out from under the bed, staggering crookedly, and dives into the slipper.

No! screams Milia. And sees Mansour standing by her bed. The clock shows that it is five o’clock in the afternoon, not yet dark. Milia had gone to bed because she felt an unusual weight in her belly. She thought she would lie down for a bit before making supper in anticipation of her husband’s return. The numbness which would take her to sleep swept over her and the pain came in one wave after another before fading away. The cat appeared in the guise of a slipper and she heard moaning.

She opens her eyes and waves to Mansour to leave her alone for a few minutes. Five minutes and I’ll be up, she says. Then everything goes and she is submerged in dusky light. Her stomach contracts. She folds double to lighten the pain and once again sinks into the story. She sees that the cat has died and hears her father sobbing as he carries the dead cat wrapped in brown paper outside, for burial in the garden. The cat had eaten poisoned food; without a sound it crept to the foot of the bed in which Hasiba had slept. It collapsed on the floor and died.

The cat – or Pasha – was the final chapter in the life of Hasiba, who had met her end crouching in a white metal bed, sitting because she was afraid of sleep; waking startled, eluding death in terror.

The elderly woman lived her final days in utter silence undisturbed by anything more than indistinct phantoms that crept into her room through
the window. She listened to strange voices and felt ringing in her ears. Ghosts assuming shapes like black smoke surrounded the woman in her bed and told her stories of a past that had not wholly disappeared but had turned into images coming in rapid sequence and all wrapped in a gray light, and into an interminable tolling of bells. Help, it’s the voices! she would cry out from time to time, but when Saadeh came running into the room the woman would have already returned to her desert of silence.

Habisa was the second daughter of Nasif Haddad, who had fled the killing fields of Mount Lebanon in 1860 with his wife, four daughters, and one son. He abandoned the house and the silk loom inherited from his father, as well as the small plot of land where he planted vegetables in the growing season, to escape with his skin and not much more from the village of Kfar Qatra in the Shouf. In those savage days when blood ran down the slopes of Mount Lebanon, Nasif did manage to save his family, though twelve-year-old Said, his only son, was lost on the way. Nasif lived his entire life waiting for the return of a son who would never return. The father sat in the garden of his home in the Mousaitbeh quarter of Beirut. He would never go out to visit anyone because he was waiting. Every morning he told of smelling his son’s fragrance in his dream. The son never returned, the three other girls married, and the only one left at home was Habisa, who refused all suitors. Then – to the bewilderment of her father – she agreed to marry Salim Shahin the carpenter, who was a
kashtabanji
– a cardplayer of the wiliest sort, spending most of his time in the courtyard of the Church of the Archangel Mikhail, a fierce shuffler of those crucial three cards. Or he was drinking arak in a tiny tavern adjacent to the church.

Habisa surprised not only her father but everyone else when she agreed. By the age of twenty she had endured her father’s and sisters’ incredulous gazes for some time, as she rejected one prospective bridegroom after another. In their eyes she saw mirrored the threatening idea that she was
on the dangerous threshold of spinsterhood. But this young woman who never wore anything but a long black gown with seven buttons down the bodice had continued to refuse marriage stubbornly and persistently and she protected herself with a silence that became her guardian veil. It was said that Habisa wore black for her brother, whose unexplained disappearance she could not accept, nor could she acquiesce in her father’s wishful view that the son had fled in disgust as the troubles in Lebanon worsened. He must have found a French steamer to take him to the New World – as their father speculated endlessly – and eventually he would return, surely. The father composed an elaborate story about his son’s emigration, which he believed fully and fiercely. His patience, as he waited on and on for his son, became legendary, and was universally respected. His wife had died only seven months after their descent from the Mount to Beirut, a victim of the exile fever that decimated the populace of nineteenth-century Lebanon, attendant upon unabated emigrations, massacres, and a general state of disaster. For three days she lay prone in a tiny hut that her husband had erected hastily on land belonging to the church. With her death, her daughters worried themselves sick over the possibility of their father’s remarriage, but he did not seem interested. Women in Beirut who had migrated from elsewhere and were available, he remarked, draped themselves on the backs of whomever they could find to carry them.

In a silk-weaving shop belonging to Abdallah Abd el-Nour, Nasif found work, plying an ancient loom which the Beiruti merchant had moved to a narrow passage giving on to the shop. Nasif returned to the work he knew and his life returned to him. He erased his natal village from his memory.

Habisa stayed on alone at home with her father. He would come home late at night, drunk, eat a bite that his daughter had prepared for him, and bury himself in sleep. Habisa remained awake in the black gown she never took off.

No one knew what the story really was. Saadeh would say she heard the old woman, as she descended into senility, speaking French with an imaginary man whose name was Ferdinand. Saadeh fired up her imagination with a story of Habisa’s love for a French officer who promised her marriage and then disappeared as all soldiers do. Was she wearing mourning for her lost love and her wasted virginity? Had the young man bewitched her with the white color of his skin and his blue eyes, and carried her off to the kingdom of fantasy dreams before he moved on?

Saadeh consulted the nun but Sister Milana simply scolded her, telling her not to interfere with what did not concern her. God alone knows the unknowable; God alone holds the secrets of hearts.

What was the story, then?

When Saadeh broached the story of Ferdinand with her husband, Yusuf’s thick eyebrows came together and he called his wife a liar. Woman, that is not my mother! he barked. Would you want me to talk that way about your mother?

That evening, though, Yusuf spoke to his mother, trying to elicit a response. But the woman remained silent. Staring into the distance, she appeared not even to listen as her son asked questions. Then suddenly she began to blurt out foreign-sounding words – the name Ferdinand among them. Thus was revealed a fragment of the momentous secret concealed within the ribs of the elderly woman who had entered the desert of oblivion.

The story that Yusuf did know was the one about his parents’ nocturnal wedding. The girl had insisted on one thing only: that she would marry Salim Shahin after dark. She emerged from the house swathed in her long black gown, surrounded by her father, her three sisters, and their husbands. The nighttime gloom mantled the funereal bridal procession. At the church door Salim stood waiting, decked out in a gold-embroidered silk abaya and red tarbush. He waited alone as the bride had requested. They stood before
the candle-lit altar and Father Andraos blessed their marriage. They went to his house on foot, although the groom had arranged for a carriage pulled by four horses. The bride refused and said she preferred to walk. Her arm tucked into her husband’s arm, they disappeared silent into the surrounding night.

Did Salim learn the story of Ferdinand and plot revenge on his wife? Or was what Yusuf believed to be revenge simply Salim’s response when it became clear that he would not beget more than one child, after he contracted the mumps that descended as far as his testicles?

How can this story be? Milia asked her mother. Someone dawdles away his life waiting to get married and then as soon as he’s married, he starts feeling he has to look for something else?

That’s men for you, my girl – when a man has nothing left, nothing to fill his life, this is what happens. You see, a man who isn’t capable of giving life feels empty. He starts talking bull and he’s full of ridiculous mischief. May God protect us all!

From his wife Salim learned to turn the darkness into a curtain veiling his life. That was Hasiba for you. She never really woke up or got up except at night. She cooked to the flame of the oil lantern and when her husband left for his shop in the morning she snuffed out the light and went to sleep.

It was Yusuf who convinced her finally about the new house. Mama, open your mind up a little – it’s just a house like any other. When Hasiba discovered that her husband had bought the house that Khawaja Sergios Efthymios had built for his Egyptian lover, who had then become Salim’s mistress – which everyone more or less knew about – she went out of her mind, screaming and raving at her husband.