As Though She Were Sleeping (32 page)

Milia did know somehow that the time when she would find Mansour inside her dreaming had not yet arrived. When Tanyous told her that he was waiting for her newborn to arrive before he could pass on, and that he had come to love her very much and wanted to take her with him, she felt the soles of her feet turn icy with fear.

No, she said. She did not want to go with him. What she wanted to do,
she told him, was stay in Nazareth. After all, she was the daughter of a carpenter. She would open a shop for her son here so that he could learn the blessed Messiah’s craft. The old man smiled. Her son, he said, would live in a faraway place, and she was consecrated to see what no one before her had seen. And she would discover who Mansour was all at once. For time has no meaning except for those who have not been granted the blessing of vision.

But I do know him – he is my husband.

No, no. You will come to know things about him that even he does not know, Tanyous replied.

But those things don’t concern me, she said.

Everything in its time, the old monk answered her.

When she came to this town her first question had been about the location of the Messiah’s home. And then Mansour saw everything in this woman change. Her eyes clouded over and seemed encircled by little halos that were nothing like the shadowy circles around her eyes that he used to notice in Beirut. He cursed the hour in which he had decided to make this town his home.

Mansour sensed Milia slipping from his hands into unknown territories. But he did not know how to follow her or how to take hold of her and bring her back. Her wanderings among the town’s churches and her insistent search for the house in which the Messiah had lived frightened him.

No one knows the house, and anyway it might well be just a legend. Maybe he did not even live here. Or perhaps ancient Nazareth was not exactly where modern Nazareth is.

Since marrying, Mansour discovered, he had begun to loathe this land in which he lived. Can anyone truly live in a country saturated with legends and miracles and prophets? This is a country that drives anyone who lives here insane, he would think. A country means a country, and that should be that. A person cannot tread the same path as the saints; he will simply grow
more and more terrified, afraid even of his own shadow. This woman has put fear into my heart. These strange dealings aren’t for those of us here. They are for tourists and lunatic worshippers, the rest of us just live here as if there’s nothing at all out of the ordinary.

But there is a lot out of the ordinary here, said Tanyous when she made him listen to what her husband had said.

Who was Tanyous, anyway? And what was this Lebanese story she had heard from him?

When she told her husband that the people who founded the modern city of Nazareth were Lebanese sent by Emir Fakhreddin in the sixteenth century to work as sharecroppers in the lands belonging to the Franciscan monastery, and that those monks were the first to build anything here, over what was at the time merely some empty ground and ruins, he laughed at her.

Lebanese, hah! No one here was Lebanese, or non-Lebanese, for that matter.
Lebanese
didn’t exist. It was all the Syrian lands. God’s mercy on your soul, King Faisal! He reminded her of the portrait of the king’s slight figure in the Hotel Massabki. He began to describe the Battle of Maysalun and how Yusuf el-Azmeh the Syrian minister of defense had died hugging his rifle to his chest as he tried single-handedly to block the French army’s advance on Damascus. And . . . and . . . and . . .

But I’m not talking about politics, she said. I’m telling you that half the people of Nazareth are Lebanese – Maronites and Catholics, whom Emir Fakhreddin sent to work with the monks, and then a little later came the Greeks from the Houran region and the area around Ramallah Town. Everyone who came looked and looked for that house but they could not find anything. The only one who knows the location of the house is Brother Tanyous.

Who told you these silly tales?

Brother Tanyous.

Where does this brother come from, anyway? I’ve never seen him, not even once. No one in this town has seen him.

I’ve seen him.

When Mansour Hourani came to live in Nazareth it never occurred to him to think that he was coming to the city of the Messiah. The people of Nazareth had marked out their distinction – from very beginning of the holy narrative – by calling themselves
Nasrawiyyin
, Nazarenes, rather than by the plural noun
Nassara
by which the Qur’an would refer to all of the followers of Jesus the Nazarene. They were Nazareth natives, and they wanted that to be clear. Now where had this woman with her religious tall tales come from, making his life hell?

Of course, Mansour had been introduced to the religious atmosphere governing the Shahin family home in Beirut, but he had not grasped its seriousness; indeed, he did not take it seriously at all. He attributed it to Saadeh’s hysteria, which he had heard about from Milia. He explained the mother’s religiosity and her almost childish dependence on the nun as a symptom of menopause, which always made women go a bit crazy when their menses ended and they had to endure the bouts of heat rising from the depths of their dessicated wombs. Saadeh’s state was better than his mother’s, he told Milia. Saadeh released her tensions by kissing icons and swallowing cotton balls dipped in holy oil. His mother vented hers in an increasingly demented state of tyranny over the foundry and her sons. Because she could see to repairing a few rusty guns, she believed herself to be more important than even Haajj Amin el-Husayni! But now what was happening? Why did he feel that the ghost of the saintly nun was living with him right here in this house? How had this man called Tanyous – who claimed to be of Lebanese origin and who had told Mansour’s wife that his ancestors came from the village of Beiteddin in the Shouf to work as farmers
with the French monks – managed to become such a haunting presence, hovering constantly over his wife’s existence and his own?

You want to flee from Nazareth, Milia said. But I want to stay here. I don’t know why you’re so determined. Your work is going well,
alhamdulillah
, and your mother can manage her own business. Didn’t you tell me that your mother prefers to run things herself? I get the feeling you are fleeing something and I don’t know what it is. Maybe you’re right, maybe it is some sort of vision. That was what Yusuf did, after all. He escaped, leaving here to go to Egypt, and he was right, too.

Yusuf who?

Yusuf the Carpenter.

So now this – where do you get this from?

This – he was the Messiah’s father.

You’re talking about Saint Yusuf as if he’s some friend of ours! I never did like Yusuf the Carpenter – he was just a man whose wife cheated on him and he put up with it. Anyway, all the prophets loved women, from Ibrahim to Nuh to Daoud and all the rest. Adam – now tell me why Adam was thrown out of paradise, wasn’t it because of the Tree of Knowledge? And what do you think
knowledge
is? It’s Eve – in other words, it is fu –

Don’t say that word!

Don’t act so clueless.

But Mar Yusuf wasn’t like you say he was. He saw the angel in his dream, and the dream told him everything.

So now we’re back with the dreams! Milia, my dearest love, I don’t have anything against Mar Yusuf, but tell me now, how could he have gone along with it?

Gone along with what?

Being told he was the father of the boy when he knew he was not, and no one knew who the true father was.

Because he was a saint. He was Mar Yusuf.

May God feed us saintliness!

You mean, you would not have accepted it?

Of course not! The boy would either be my son or he wouldn’t be. Stay away from these stories – they make one start thinking like a blasphemer.

How had the old man believed the story his young wife told him? Was it she who told him the story or did the angel come to him in the dream as the Gospels say? How could a person believe his dreams like that?

That’s the way of all prophets, said the saintly nun. But of course it could be the Devil, too. Saying this, Sister Milana began to mutter her prayers rapidly and Saadeh pressed little Milia’s brow with a handkerchief dipped in cold water. Milia did not remember the story but she had not forgotten the dream.

Whenever the mother told the story to her daughter Milia felt estranged from herself. She was ten when she came down with the fever for the second time. Everyone, including the nun, was convinced that the girl would die. The doctor came and said that the only hope he held out for her was in God. To Saadeh, God meant one thing, and that was the nun. Saadeh ran headlong to the Convent of the Archangel Mikhail and tugged at the hem of the nun’s long habit. But the nun did not turn to her, because she was praying.

When Milana stands behind the open Triodion and begins to recite the prayers and invocations in the book, particularly at Vespers as she prays in the twilight, melancholy descends on all who are gathered in the church; they are overcome by a sense of humility and submission almost like a trance. The voice of the nun is like a rocker cradling the ears of the worshippers, like gentle hands drawing the listeners onto the twisting paths of the cosmos. They listen to strange voices and they see how the bodies of the saints are etched delicately on these Byzantine icons as though with a feather. Sister Milana does not permit the use of electricity in church. This
threw her into an ongoing, never-resolved argument with Father Gerasimos, who insisted that the nuns turn on the electric chandeliers when they performed their collective prayers. The saintly nun thought this heretical, for she believed that the angels do not like electricity and that their own light was more than sufficient. But our master the bishop insisted on his version of things. He made fun of the nun’s silly tales and mocked her claim to sanctity. He ridiculed her in front of the nuns and her throng of adherents.

Well, no – it was not the electricity that led to their difference. Milana found a solution to that problem when she ordered the nuns to close their eyes whenever the electricity came on. We will close our eyes and so will the angels, she assured them. Nothing will change.

The real issue was that woman of devilish beauty called Marika Spyridon.

Marika – here was the story that gave rise to so much gossip in Beirut in those days; it caused quite an uproar, in fact. Had she been the lover of the bishop as was whispered around? Or was she a modern version of Saint Maryam of Egypt, who had begun her life as a prostitute before repenting at the hands of the great Saint Anthony? She came to the church every Sunday morning in the company of three Greek women. They came for mass and then returned to the street of sin, which had come to be known as Mutanabbi Street, where they resumed their usual business.

What sent the nun’s ire soaring was not this fact which everyone knew – for God alone knows what is in our hearts and He is the Reckoner, as she would always remark whenever asked about the goddamned whore who followed Monsignor and donated regularly and frequently to the church and bought the most enormous chandelier in Beirut to give to the Church of Mar Girgis. The sainted nun did not allow anyone to use the word
whore
in her hearing. She preferred to use the term
daughter of sin
as she prayed to God to cast His protective veil over all of His servants. But now things had gone too far and she could endure no more. It was said (and God alone
knows) that Monsignor had gotten the authorities to issue extraordinary permission for Marika and her girls to circulate freely in Beirut on Sundays, even though such had been prohibited ever since promulgation of the Ottoman decree prohibiting prostitutes to leave the vicinity of the main
souq
. It seems that the governor of Beirut (appointed by the French mandatory authorities, and a scion of the Greek Orthodox Boustrus family) granted this, perhaps being of the same mind as the bishop. Maybe he was a customer of the lady’s. In any case, the special dispensation made it possible for Marika to attend any of the churches where the bishop conducted mass on Sundays. It was true that His Eminence Gerasimos held mass most Sundays in the Cathedral of Mar Girgis, where Marika could go anyway since it abutted on the market area. But to fulfill his pastoral duties he also conducted mass in churches throughout the city, from Museitbah to Ashrafiyya, Mazraa and Ras Beirut. And now, on Sundays, no longer did Marika have to distance herself from the bishop. And that is why the saintly nun could not but see this woman of the Devil who caused Milana to lose her equilibrium and, in front of a whole crowd of people, to say the word she had barred everyone else from using.

Monsignor is coming and he’s bringing the whore with him! I will not attend mass today, she said to the nuns, stalking out of the church sanctuary and into her cell.

What exactly transpired, though, when the bishop entered that cell and ordered Milana to come down to church? No one knows. But plenty of people were there to witness as Marika knelt before the nun, and as the nun did the same, matching the Greek woman gesture for gesture, and as the nun wept loud enough for all to hear, throughout the entire mass.

The story would be told forty years later but no one dared to publish it in a newspaper. Iskandar Shahin, eldest son of Musa Shahin, afflicted with the wretched mania of literary ambition, got a job at the famous newspaper
el-Ahrar
, founded by a group of men led by Said el-Sabbagheh. They wanted to found a newspaper that would circulate the ideas of the Freemasons, who had instigated an active movement throughout the Syrian lands, including Lebanon, drawing adherents with their calls for secularism and lashing out with bitter humor at the region’s men of religion.