As Though She Were Sleeping (25 page)

It was only then – during the time that witnessed the woman’s fierce sadnesses, her sobs and her sense of betrayal and shame – that Hasiba came to know the story of the rock that had nearly taken out her only son’s eye.
It was around this time that the family moved into the house Salim had bought from the heirs of Khawaja Efthymios after the Egyptian lover’s death. Hasiba was not so angry about a straying husband: she felt pity for the man – for all men, as she told her only son. But for things to reach the point where she would live in this hovel surrounded on every side by trees and infested with freely roaming snakes and spiders, for the sake of Salim’s fidelity to his Egyptian mistress – it was too much to bear, even for Hasiba.

No one asked Hasiba how she knew of her husband’s relationship with his Egyptian paramour. She learned of it after the story had become generally known. And stories that are known have no need of a storyteller: they are like smells that mount and expand and penetrate everything around them. The reek of this scandal rose and spread, and the woman wrapped herself in blackness once again.

What floored and upset her was his treachery. That gutless cringing son of a bitch! she called her husband. And that’s what he was. No man known to anyone ever feared his wife as the carpenter feared Black Hasiba. And then suddenly the woman discovers that behind this pusillanimous exterior hid a sneaky weasel bent on getting revenge.

But what would he avenge, someone in Salim’s condition? His predicament was not to be envied. After the birth of his son, Yusuf, Salim got a bad case of mumps. Normally it was children who came down with Abu Ku’Ayb’s Sickness, as it was called – a reference to swelling in the glands. When adult men got mumps it was far more serious: Abu Ku’Ayb could make a man sterile. If the disease sank all the way to the testicles, it was all over.

And that is what happened to Salim. The man had a bad case of it and he suffered long and hard from the malign disease. The physician who treated ailments according to old Arab practices came more than once. He prescribed various bitter herbs that Salim was to steep and drink. Once he was finally pronounced well, the doctor told him that all recompense is God’s
and he would not be able to sire any more children. He must be content with the one son who was God’s precious gift. The news affected Salim radically and events took a new turn: he was no longer capable of fulfilling his marital obligations, for suddenly everything in him went limp. He considered suicide. He consulted the doctor, who confirmed that the illness had destroyed his seed but would have no effect on his sexual prowess. The physician prescribed a strengthening medicine and advised him to breakfast on honey and pine nuts. But nothing could return the man to his masculine vigor. Nevertheless, pine nuts became an essential element in the family legacy. Yusuf had grown accustomed to eating them as a child, and the practice was passed on to his children. When Milia took over the kitchen, she made pine nuts into a staple, used in almost every dish she concocted. She added pine nuts to
burghul
, used them in stuffed vegetables, and garnished sweets with them. She even made her sweet pancakes with pine nuts, a practice unheard of in Beirut then and likely now. Only the “Milia Clan” ate this, a family extended through the brothers’ marriages and their success in convincing their wives to prepare the sweet in this fashion.

Though for the Lebanese,
sunuubar
was practically a synonym for Beirut, in truth pine nuts were an Egyptian accomplishment. It was Ibrahim Pasha – subjugator of Lebanon and Syria in the nineteenth century – who planted the pine-nut forest in Beirut, or perhaps replanted it, God alone knows. Salim breakfasted and dined on Ibrahim Pasha’s pine nuts dipped in honey but with no obvious outcome. Whenever he approached his wife at night, feeling life stirring within him, without warning he would collapse. Hasiba never said a word about it. She felt the heaviness of his chest above her as he tried, and then pulled back to turn away, claiming he was tired and needed to go to sleep. Salim tasted bricks of pure dirt and mud, as the Egyptians say, and nothing could save him: nothing except the Egyptian woman. Surely that was where he had dug up this expression, and how he found himself
through a new dialect, in which he began to converse with his only son, relying on the lingo spoken by the grandsons of pharaohs. She said her name was Maryam and Salim was never able to verify the truth of it. She hailed from the unacknowledged childbirth bulges that Ibrahim Pasha’s military campaigns along the Syrian coastline had left behind. Now came the question that stymied young Yusuf. Who was this woman, really, and how had she entered the life of the family? The question cost him his right eye and implanted a sentiment that dogged Yusuf all his life, and that he passed on to his children: it was the uneasy feeling that a father could kill his son. When what had remained hidden and sheltered from view was revealed finally, Salim explained that he had believed Yusuf to be a thief who had stolen into the ancient house. The man threw a stone at the intruder, it never entering his mind that it might be his only son, trying only to steal puzzled glances at his father’s activities. The rock struck the boy in his eye and left it half closed for the rest of his life. Salim turned and strode back into his Egyptian lover’s home full of swagger.

But Maryam was not Salim’s lover, not really; she was another man’s lover. The tale was like a mass of tangled threads. Grandfather Salim never told anyone of his abiding relationship with the Egyptian woman. In his final days, when asked about it he would wax eloquent over the beauty of the almond tree for the sake of which he had bought the house, a foolish little grin on his lips. The true and original lover, Khawaja Sergios Efthymios, was not a married man. He had been among the first Lebanese to pull off his abaya and tarbush and put on European-style garb. A confirmed bachelor, he had studied architecture in Paris and was one of the generation of Lebanese architects who introduced Italian columns to the spacious Beirut homes being commissioned by the city’s wealthy silk merchants. Why would a bachelor embark on a surreptitious relationship which he was fierce about keeping under wraps? It was one of the secrets that the wealthy
stratum of Beirut families harbored: families established only to collapse when men of the younger generation avoided marriage and honed a social tradition founded on the principle of a divided life – on the surface all piety and dedication to worship at church, while beneath the surface flourished illicit relationships with secret belles who could claim one of two genealogical strains. Either they were Egyptians, born out of Ibrahim Pasha’s military operations, and thus a much newer subspecies than the local Greeks. Or they were Greeks, a community said to have started with Alexander the Macedonian which was more recently embodied in a certain lady named Marika Spyridon – and that was another story.

Enough! said Hasiba. I’m not living for a single minute in this house of sin. But which of the two sins was she talking about? A husband striking up a relationship with a woman whose life was not exactly suspicion-free, or a father attempting to kill his son, precisely here in front of this house of sin, when he threw the rock and came into his lover’s chamber puffed up with pride?

What Hasiba did know was that she had returned to the state of a virgin exactly as she had been before giving birth to her only child, Yusuf. She hid behind her long black gown where the closed buttons down the front testified to her closed body. She was an unusually tall woman and her body was beautifully slender. Her striking eyes bulged slightly and her large nose commanded her face. She carried a dignity not to be resisted, crafted by the silence in which she lived and the black color that cloaked her to the outside world. Her son claimed that she could see in the dark; her gleaming eyes, he said, could pierce the very thickest gloom. He entreated his wife to act kindly toward his mother, who, frail and broken, now faced her end. He enumerated the woman’s virtues and reprised her sufferings. See how the pain is carved into her face? he exclaimed to his wife. This was her whole life, pain on top of pain. Be kind, Saadeh, please be kind!

But the stink! she would snap. Your mama won’t use a pot to do her business, and if she does, she doesn’t do anything there. The minute we go to bed the smell gets so bad I can’t bear it. Lord, what did I do to You to deserve this?

The odor of which Saadeh complained was the last thing one would have expected from a woman like Hasiba, who seemed evanescent with soap and exuded perfumes. Hasiba made her own scents. She steeped damask rose blossoms in water and blended them with jasmine and sweet basil. From this concoction she made the preparation she used to wash her face. Its fragrance would spill across the room to cascade over everyone. She was a woman enclosed in black garments who gave off nothing but perfumed scents, who behaved like a silent phantom and, when she moved among people, evoked sentiments of astonishment and fear. Even so, her husband’s behavior was enough to expose her to ridicule and disorder, and it passed on to her progeny when Salim bought the house after the death of Maryam the Egyptian. Milia knew the story because her mother recounted it to her, and her mother knew it from Yusuf her husband, and Yusuf knew it from the rock that had struck him in his right eye.

Why did Yusuf not say anything when his father bought the house? When Salim arrived to announce that he had purchased the house, Hasiba remained silent. The joy she had anticipated when the decision was made to move from the two small rooms with a toilet in the outer courtyard into a true house never arrived. Her husband summoned her to see the new house but she refused. He asked for her advice on buying suitable furnishings and she said it didn’t matter what he got. She spent her time making certain their belongings were secured and preparing to move. Everything happened in a perfectly ordinary way. The family moved into the new home. Husband and wife established themselves in the
liwan
overlooking the spacious central room while Yusuf’s mattress was placed in an out-of-the-way nook in the
dar
. Everything went very smoothly and naturally until she learned of it – and when she did, Hasiba exploded. Now all the silences that had been shut inside her closely done-up black garments spurted out and she poured her anger out and fully onto the head of her son, Yusuf. She would not forgive him for having hidden the house’s secret from her. How she learned of it and who told her were not issues of particular importance. No secrets are truly concealed, Saadeh said to her daughter. Everyone knew about Salim except his wife, and I didn’t really believe that she didn’t know. I think she knew from the beginning but acted as though she didn’t have a clue. But I wonder what took her over the edge? And anyway, what frightened her so much? Men! From the moment he picked up the disease, it was all over, but when she discovered that the house had been the Egyptian woman’s home, and that the bed had been hers, she began wailing and screaming and insisting she wanted to die. She poured kerosene over her robe and tried to light it. Yusuf threw himself on her burning body. He saved her and God kept the matter veiled from others.

But what happened to Salim after he found out he was impotent? That is the question for which there is no straightforward answer. He ate bricks of pure dirt and mud, as Maryam the Egyptian always said. He consulted every doctor he could find but without any luck. When his feet led him where they led him, though, the problem was resolved so perfectly and easily that it might as well never have existed. Khawaja Sergios Efthymios ordered an almond-wood bed frame from his workshop. Salim crafted it and delivered it to the house in person, with the help of his son, Yusuf. There he saw her; and his world became bright. The man had been living in total misery. Every night a desire he could not speak engulfed him but the moment he approached his wife, who was shrouded in the inevitable long nightgown, he was a block of ice. But now, standing before this short, deliciously plump and dark-skinned woman of forty or so, he felt simply and clearly that he
was a man and that was more than enough. He made up the bed in the
liwan
, acknowledging the woman’s presence with a nod. He had gripped his son’s hand, ready to leave, when he heard her lilting Egyptian dialect and felt a tremor through his spine.

We’d like to try out the bed, M’allim, please don’t rush off! She sat down on the bed, leaned back as if to stretch out fully, and – Allah! – proclaimed it wonderful. She arose to thank him with a handshake. She squeezed his large rough hand, he was certain of that; and he would claim that he heard her say, Let us see you, M’allim. He got the message. He would indeed return, he decided; she would see him again.

Much later, when he told her he had fathomed what she was letting him know with her hand and her words, she nearly collapsed laughing. No, she said, she had not said anything like that; he had made up the story; nothing like
that
had even occurred to her.

No . . . and in fact Milia invented this dialogue out of pure thin air. After all, no one knew, not even Yusuf, how it all had happened. Milia said she had dreamed of her grandfather running and skipping among grassy hillocks. He had become another man, she said, at least in her dreams. The fresh vigor of youth had come back; the old fierce grandpa they had known once had returned and his laugh rang out as it once had, no longer kept silent by the suffering he had endured. Apparently the man promised marriage to the Egyptian woman. Word was bandied about, even, that he considered embracing Islam, but the hand of God alone saved his wife from such an outrage. The Egyptian woman died suddenly and between a day and a night all that remained of the story was the house over which she would cast her shadow until Hasiba’s death.

When he broached the subject of marriage she said no, but she strung him along fleetingly with the teasing way she had. She could not help feeling ever so slightly, ever so dizzily, happy with the idea. It was the first time ever
that Maryam had heard such a proposal addressed to her. Khawaja Efthymios had treated her strictly as a mistress. He had picked her out, taken her off the street, and made her into a lady. He had built this fine house among the trees just for her. He visited once a month. But he never proposed marriage, and in any case it would never have occurred to her that he might do so. He was seventy-five years old. On the first Wednesday of every month he came to her, paid her what had somehow been agreed on as her monthly salary, and reminisced with her about love in the past tense. And then he would leave. The man stayed loyal to this woman with whom he had fallen in love when she was twenty and had rescued from a likely future imposed by Ottoman law. The Ottoman Turks had grown fiercely interested in regulating and organizing those who professed prostitution by compelling women of error to live in a sealed-off quarter that would come to be named after the great Arab poet el-Mutanabbi. Efthymios took Maryam under his protective wing and treated her like the respected mistress of a man of the Beiruti aristocracy.