As Though She Were Sleeping (43 page)

God’s will be done, Milia responded, and then looked her mother-in-law in the eye. A boy, Aunt, it is a boy in my womb, not a girl.

Even before her pregnancy, Milia was certain that her child would be a boy. For his sake she had endured this long voyage of hers. She tried her best to get Mansour to understand that her love for him was her love for the child inside. She tried to make him see that ultimately a woman lives a single love story in her life. Hers was her love for her child, she wanted him to know, because the secret and unfathomable bond that comes into being between a woman and her womb resembles no other tie.

But she sees him, standing in the shadow in the darkened passageway linking the dining room to the kitchen in the Jaffa house. He stands there, still, and Asma is pressed close to him as if he is embracing her. The short
dark full figure hangs on to Mansour’s neck as if she were scaling his body and Mansour bends down to meet her, burying his face in her neck. She walks toward them. She coughs to let them know she is here and that Mansour must stop. But he does not hear. She is right behind him now and she can see Asma’s small open eyes turned upward as if they are traveling to a faraway place. She sees herself float between them as though she were a ghost who could pass through doors and bodies. She turns and gazes toward her life and she dwindles away again, now, just as she did in the dream of Najib when she saw him holding the other woman and understood that this man would leave her.

This was shameful, she told the two of them. The fellow has been dead only a month, aren’t you ashamed of yourselves?

They did not hear her or see her, as though they were immersed in a sea of pleasures and secrets. She circled around and stood directly behind Mansour. She put her hands on his shoulders and shook him. Then, in the distance emerged three boys, two as alike as a pair of facing mirrors and the third darker with curly hair and greenish eyes. The three came up to the man embracing the woman and the pair disappeared among the four intertwined legs. Milia ran toward the dark child, who lay sprawled on the floor, blood trickling from his eyes.
Ya waylak min
Allah, she shrieked at Mansour. Don’t you see the boy? She leaned down to pick up her son, to flee with him, and then everything went black. She saw herself floating on gelatinous waters while the small child thrashed and panted as though he could not breathe. A tiny fish, its lead-gray skin made to glisten by water and salt, gasps as though it cannot get air it needs. It opens and shuts its eyes as if beseeching help. Milia cups the fish in her hands and swims amidst towering waves. Holding the fish while standing on the rocky shore trying to cover her tiny breasts with her small hands, she sees Mansour swimming. She shouts at her little brother to come. Don’t abandon him, brother! This is my
son whom I have named Issa, and I am alone, brother. Hurry, hurry before the boy’s lungs fill up! Musa has disappeared and the fish swims to Milia, still standing at the water’s edge. The fish’s skin turns reddish threaded by streaks of white. It rises to the surface and floats on the surface of the water.

Mansour advanced toward them. He took hold of the dead fish and threw it out into the sea. He turned toward Milia and ordered her to come home with him to Jaffa.

But our home is in Nazareth.

Our home is in Jaffa now. Pick up your belongings and follow me. Milia opened her eyes at the sound of the short nurse’s voice. The nurse stood facing her and Milia heard the other nurse’s voice behind her, saying that this birth was a difficult one and the doctor must do something.

Step back, said the doctor, and she heard a deep hoarse voice. Do not fear, my daughter, for I am here with you.

The nun appeared. Haajja Milana was old and blind now, and her black gown could not contain her body. In front of her knelt a woman of pure white in a long white robe, her white-blond hair a candle-lit halo. As the woman wept, the nun patted her head, and from her eyes sprinkled pearl drops like the tiny pearls strewn across the stone courtyard at the Church of Our Lady of the Tremblings.

Little Milia appears and stands behind the kneeling woman. She bends over the pearls and tries to pick them up but the pure white beads roll out of her tiny hands.

The nun’s voice is rough. Milia, my dear, where is the baby? You should be in the hospital. What are you doing here, girl?

I am in the hospital and you can see how much pain I am in – but what are you doing here and who is this woman kneeling on the floor?

This is the sinning woman who knelt and washed the feet of the Messiah in perfumed water. She is waiting for you, and for your son, too.

She is waiting for me?

The blond woman stands up and approaches Grandfather Salim and takes him into her arms. The nun disappears slowly as if her image is dissolving in the water. The grandfather whom Milia never saw in her life slips out from the arms of his lover and comes to the little girl and takes her in his arms.

Sister Milana is standing erect, and she stretches out her arms as if seeking the guidance of the open air. The white-blond woman draws a black shroud over her body as she steps toward Milia and begins to slap her. She clutches the little girl’s short kinky hair – and the hair grows long. Locks of hair fly and scatter across the ground. The girl is certain that the woman means to pull her entire head of hair out with her two bare hands.

Please, Haajja, I don’t want to die –

The nun stands impassively watching as little Milia begins to roll across the ground. She hears a raucous laugh issuing from the nun’s throat and she screams. Mama, please!

Open your eyes, said the doctor.

Milia opened her eyes to see Tanyous holding her hand, leading her to the wellspring.

Here is the Virgin’s Wellspring, he said. Here, drink.

Milia leaned down and drank. She drank deeply but the water did not stem her thirst. She lifted her head from her hands cupped around the water which ran through her fingers and said that she was still thirsty.

Drink, drink as much as you want, but you will still be thirsty. Maryam came here after they crucified her son. She stood where you are standing and wept. From her tears the spring welled up. She bent over it and drank from her tears but her thirst was not quenched. No one can quench their thirst with tears.

The short nurse said the woman was crying so hard that her tears covered her face.

She told Tanyous she was not crying. Why would I cry, when I am thirsty and I am drinking. But where does this thirst come from, Father?

It is the thirst of love. Love makes one thirsty. A woman is always thirsty because she can never satisfy her thirst in front of her son. At the cross Maryam the Virgin discovered thirst and for the rest of her life, no matter how much water she drank, her thirst remained. Her thirst was endless because she felt remorse.

Remorse? For what? asked Milia.

She felt remorse because with the death of Yusuf the Carpenter she had thought the difficult time, the time of necessary isolation, had passed and there was no longer any danger. Yusuf had lived on dreams and visions. He told her he was like Ibrahim, peace be upon him, and that he was going to found a new people. It was written in the Syriac gospel I inherited. The truth isn’t mine – it is in the Book. I must show you the Book. Tomorrow, come to me in the grotto and I will read it to you.

But I don’t know Syriac.

That does not matter, Tanyous answered. What matters is that the Book reads itself. That is how I could read everything that is there. When Yusuf died she rested from her anxieties but the poor woman did not know. At the end she knew, and what was to happen happened.

Milia didn’t believe Mansour when he told her the nuns had banished the Lebanese monk from the convent and the church. Look, does it make any sense, woman, for a monk to be living among nuns? After all, nuns never see men except outside the convent.

But he’s a saint.

Just like the nun you told me about, who destroyed your mama’s life. She is no saint, that one.

She is a holy woman but I do not like her. One isn’t forced to love all the saints. God left us free to choose.

The monk is standing next to the hospital birthing bed where a pale-white
woman has her legs raised, two nurses and a gray-haired doctor grouped around her. Little Milia stands beside the monk and asks him who this woman is and what is happening to her.

This is you, Milia. When you get to be older you will go to Nazareth and give birth to your only son in the Italian Hospital.

But they want to take me to Jaffa, and I don’t want to go.

You are not going to go, don’t worry.

And is my son going to stay with me?

May God protect your son!

She saw him. He walked beside his father through the lanes of Nazareth, a boy of twelve whose eyes were consumed by visions. He was trembling with fear as he listened to his father tell him the story of Ibrahim, peace be upon him, and his son Ishaq.

Yusuf the Carpenter explained that God wanted to test his servant Ibrahim, and when the servant obeyed, God rescued the son from death. And me, likewise – God willed that He would test me through you. I heard a voice telling me to kill you. You are not my son and so whose son are you? I wanted to take you to the mountain and offer you as a sacrifice unto God, and then came the dream telling me that the angel blew a divine soul into your mother.

On that day Yasu’ the Nazarene was certain he had been saved from the trial that Ishaq had undergone. When he heard the story of Ibrahim and his sacrificial son, the boy would grow weak and upset. He could not truly believe the story as told in the Torah. Deep inside himself he was certain that the father had taken his son to the mountain, bound him, and slaughtered him sacrificially to his god. The Jewish prophets, he felt sure, had rewritten the story to show the boy saved from his father.

Mansour always said that he did not like stories of the Messiah. It tires and bores me to hear the same story over and over again, he said. Look at
how different it is with poetry. You can repeat a single line until God knows when, and every time it will transport you into a state of ecstatic bliss. But you can’t listen to a story more than two, maybe three times before you are tired of it. For me, stories of Christ become very boring and irritating, but what can I do? I was born a Christian and that’s that. When I came to live in Nazareth I didn’t even think about it, but I’ve had enough. No one can live in God’s town, and we are going to Jaffa, the city where the Egyptian Prince of Poets, Ahmad Shawqi, came, installing himself in the Manshiyya quarter, where the city fathers flocked around him as he recited his poetry.

But, said Milia, every important ancient Arab poet had – along with his verse – a story that in itself gave him lasting fame. The poetry is not complete without the poet’s story, she said. Take Imru’l-Qays. It isn’t his poetry that tells us he was a king and son of a king, and that he died because he loved the daughter of the Caesar, and that they called him Abu’l-Quruh, He of the Ulcers. And so on, and so on!

Where do all of these stories come from? How do you know them?

She said she had studied Musa’s literature schoolbook so that she could tutor him since he was the family’s only hope. He had to succeed, she said. He had to get the baccalaureate so we could eat. Niqula and Abdallah married two sisters from an aristocratic family, the Abu’l-Lamaa, God preserve you from such things! So they had their hands full with these princesses, and there was no one left but Musa. I was with him all the time, memorizing with him, studying with him, until God was merciful and Musa got work in a hotel at Tiberias for a year before he found a real job with Shell in Beirut.

When she told him Musa had worked in Tiberias for an entire year, Mansour blew up. He felt newly deceived – why had Musa not told him about living in Palestine? he demanded to know.

I have no idea, said Milia. All I know is that the boy changed a lot during
the time he was working there. When he came back he was very strange. I don’t know what the matter with him was. I couldn’t even talk to him anymore. He was raging mad with my brother Salim and threatened to never speak to him again in his whole life.

Milia really didn’t know what had happened to her brother there. All she knew is that he worked as an account-keeper at the Seaside Inn on Lake Tiberias owned by a Lebanese from the Salhab family. She knew that soon after his return, Sister Milana came to the house to ask him whether he had tasted
musht
, for which Christ had fished with his disciples.

The nun talked about the flavor of
musht
, or Saint Peter’s fish as she called it, a fish she had never once tasted. She spoke of the pain of distance and exile lived by a young man of eighteen, and then suddenly she stood up and declared that she smelled the odor of sin. Come to me at the convent, my son, to make penance.

How did the nun know anything about the American girl with whom Musa had fallen in love? Musa said the whole story was invented by the nun. I didn’t fall in love with anything or anyone, not really. All it amounts to is that I am just like any other young man.

The story everyone believed was not the true story. Only Milia knew. Musa trusted her with his secret but she had to keep it, and she never did tell anyone. When she heard the story he had lived with Suzanne, the daughter of the priest Yaqub Jamous, she could feel how words become living beings trembling with desire and igniting the strongest emotions.