As Though She Were Sleeping (45 page)

The hotel manager, Khawaja Salhab, told me he had decided to ban the man from coming to the restaurant because every Sunday now he was getting drunk and picking arguments with customers. It isn’t a pleasant scene – a man of religion and always drunk, I don’t want this fellow around, said Khawaja Salhab. But now, tell me – between you and me, what do American girls taste like?

Musa said no one believed his version. They all insisted that they believed him but he could read the envy in their eyes, as if he had indeed slept with the girl. In the end, even he believed the story and in fact he would retell it to his own son Iskandar, who worked as a reporter and editor at the
Ahrar
newspaper in Beirut. When Musa turned seventy, the son asked his father what the truth was about the relationship between Marika and the bishop. And somehow Musa ended up telling him the story of his year at Lake Tiberias, when he was eighteen. He related how he had put his arms around the American girl, who didn’t say a word, and then suddenly all he wanted was to run away. It wasn’t that he made a decision to leave the place, but he just suddenly left. That was the last thing I expected, he confided to his son. I saw myself – without even quite understanding what was happening – inside her and I was terrified. All I remember is how frightened I was and how alone I felt as I listened to her calling for help.

So, that story was true? asked his son.

I don’t know. I do know for certain that the clergyman did not tell the truth. I hadn’t yet discovered the way things work. I always refused to go with other young men to Tel Aviv. They said, There you can find bars and women. I didn’t go, not once. Later, in Beirut, I learned the way with a girl from Aleppo – I don’t remember her name. But that’s how the world was in our time. A fellow couldn’t do anything outside of the whores’
souq
. That’s
where we all learned. But the American girl in Tiberias – that really was a love story, and she crossed it off. Maybe it had nothing to do with her. Her father was crazy-mad and he made up the rape and all of that. But the real problem was the nun. The nun announced that she smelled sin. My mother, God have mercy on her, started pressuring me to go to church and confess, and I didn’t have anything to confess to. What was I going to say? Anyway, the truly important thing is that the only one who stood with me, and told my mother to leave me alone, was my dear sister, Milia.

Musa looked up at the picture hanging on the wall and tears began to roll down his cheeks.

Why are you crying, Musa,
habibi
! called out Milia.

The woman lying on the birthing bed was moaning and crying. The two nurses stood by and the doctor was grumbling.

This is not going to go smoothly, the doctor said.

Nurse I said there was a problem. Nurse II said the woman’s face was turning blue.

The Italian doctor went over to the window, raised the sash, and gulped fresh air. The older nurse asked him what she should do, but instead of answering he turned to the second nurse and said in a low voice that he did not really understand what was happening. The young nurse bent toward him and asked him to repeat what he had said. Nothing, he replied.

The doctor was not Italian, as Mansour had thought. The name et-Talyani stuck to him because he had studied in Italy and had come back to Palestine bringing a very pretty Italian wife who stole the hearts of the Nazareth populace. Rita was considered the epitome of beauty in the small city bursting with monasteries, convents, churches, monks, and nuns. So Ghassan el-Hilw came to be called et-Talyani, after his eccentric wife, who carried a white parasol summer and winter, walking through the Nazareth alleys searching for the wondrous event, hoping to carry a baby. Four years
went by without any sign of that longed-for pregnancy, and sometime in their fifth year living in Nazareth she traveled to her country of origin and never came back. But the doctor would not acknowledge the possibility that his wife would not return. He spoke of her as if she had gone on a short visit to her family and would be back in Nazareth next week. He went on expecting her and waiting for her, or so everyone thought. Months passed, and years, and the man went on repeating the same words he had always said whenever he was asked about his Italian wife – who, he said, was on a short visit to her mother, who was ill. The doctor began to walk through the city streets with his wife’s white parasol held firmly upright. He mixed Arabic with Italian and he went on practicing as the first gynecologist Nazareth had ever known.

The doctor bent over the young nurse whom Milia had named Wadiia II, his mouth giving off the smell of cigarettes. The nurse averted her face but turned back to the doctor and raised her fingers to her face to remind him that he must stop smoking. But hearing a moan, she bent over the pregnant woman, to hear her say something unclear about crying.

What’s the story, doctor? she asked.

Honestly I don’t know. It is very strange. Everything looks perfectly normal, but she reacts as though she’s afraid.

Yallah,
my dear, the nurse said to the moaning woman. We’ve gotten through a lot of it already – there isn’t much more to do.

Milia’s eyelashes unraveled and a single tear came out from the corner of her left eye. She told Musa fiercely that he mustn’t cry.

Don’t cry,
habibi
. It’s a dream, that’s all. Just open your eyes and everything will go back to the way it was, and then you will see there’s nothing to be afraid of.

But Musa did not open his eyes. The little boy tossed and tossed in bed next to his sister, dreams fluttering and beating their wings around his eyes,
never leaving him alone. She had seen him coming in the darkness. Little Musa dragged his bare feet across the tiles of the
liwan
and approached his sister’s bed. His green striped pajamas shivered and rippled beneath the silvery shadows of the moon creeping in from the window. He moved sluggishly toward his sister. Milia made a place for him next to her in bed, extending her arm so that he could drop his head onto it and fall asleep. But the boy simply climbed heavily into his sister’s bed, drew himself into a ball, and dropped immediately into a deep slumber. Milia pulled her arm back, turned onto her left side, closed her eyes, and saw herself stealing into her brother’s dream.

Musa sat in the garden exhaling his cigarette smoke and thinking about the story he did not know how to tell anyone. Since his return from Tiberias he no longer knew what he wanted out of this earthly life. His mother, Saadeh, was constantly in pain, or at least she moaned all the time, but after the marriage of her daughter and Milia’s move to Nazareth, their mother had had no choice but to take an interest in the house and to do the work necessary to keep a family. Salim had gone to Aleppo, taking Najib with him, staying there with the Aleppan carpenter who got rid of his two daughters in one fell swoop. Niqula and Abdallah had transformed the father’s shop into a small coffin-making factory. They had married the two Abu’l-Lamaa sisters and now were wont to act like a pair of fatuous emirs on the sole basis that they were in-laws of a family that had inherited the title of emir sometime in the bygone Ottoman era – even though that family lived in the genteel poverty of the eminent. Musa understood well that the invalid mother would be his lot since all of his brothers had left the house. Musa was convinced that the family had fallen apart because of Salim’s idiotic behavior and his mother’s underhanded ways. He did not understand that his mother was completely innocent when it came to Salim’s plot and its disastrous effect on his sister’s anticipated fortune in marriage, when he
convinced Najib that their marriages to the two well-off Aleppan sisters was
the
solution to the problem of poverty that there seemed no escaping. When Niqula erupted and said he would kill his brother – that dog! – Musa looked at his mother as if he were accusing her. The mother protested that she had not known anything, but Musa was certain that she had blessed the step taken by her eldest son. In the end, after Musa wedded Adèle Niameh and they moved into the old house, their mother decided to move out, because Adèle could not endure the continuing charade of Saadeh’s illnesses, and because Saadeh knew she did not want to end as Hasiba had, breathing in an air of disgust and fear and loss of memory. Musa rented an apartment for his mother near the convent, where she lived alone but also in the company of the saint whose eyes the blue water of glaucoma had begun to consume so that eventually she was swimming in a world of blue incense that gave her to feel that the saints surrounded her on every side.

Saadeh wanted to take Milia’s photograph with her to her new home. Musa refused, though. Well, actually, he did not refuse. In resignation he said,
Ya
Mama, anything you wish, and then lifted the framed image down from its place on the wall and handed it to Saadeh. Stooping, she wrapped it in old newspapers. Musa paced in front of the sudden emptiness on the wall and sniffled. His mother stared at him in surprise. Tell me if you can’t stand letting go of the picture – sweetheart, I don’t want you crying. I don’t want the picture, no, no, I don’t want it now, not if you’re going to get upset like this. The mother bent over the well-wrapped photograph and undid every layer of newsprint. And then she climbed up on the bed to return it to its place.

Mama, come down! yelled Musa. Get down from there! Leave it on the bed.

Saadeh left the photograph lying on the bed and left for her new residence. Musa never told his mother that what made him cry had not been
the removal of the photograph or seeing it wrapped in layers of newsprint. He had promised his two daughters that the
liwan
would be theirs. He knew that the two teenaged girls would cover all available wall space with photos of Abdelhalim Hafiz, Dalida, and other singers and actors who had captured wholesale the imaginations of the city’s youth who were encountering and embracing a sweep of new habits and understandings daily. As far as he was concerned, it made perfect sense now to remove Milia’s likeness from the wall, and when his mother asked to take the photograph with her he was content, even relieved. Taking it down and giving it to his mother was easy enough. But glancing back at the empty white space left by the photograph’s removal left him uneasy. He saw the shadow of an image – the image of an image – of his sister traced on the wall. Her almond-shaped eyes were outlined in the shadows of the light that still emanated from them. Her facial features, though, were now simply grayish strands and contours that inched and curled across the peeling wall.

Her image has stayed on the wall, he wanted to say to his mother. But she would not see it; she did not want to see it. So what more could he say to her?

It’s your brother Salim’s fault, said Saadeh.

At that, Musa was ready to explode. He wanted to scream in the face of this woman who had transformed his and his wife’s lives into a living hell with her insupportable daily devotionals. But he did not scream. He did not argue that it was her fault, and that if it hadn’t been for the pressures and burdens she placed on Salim, none of this would have happened. The eldest son of the family was simply not courageous enough to have made the decision on his own; to have left permanently for Aleppo and to have abandoned his precious law studies at the Jesuit university. He would not have done it without his mother’s encouragement. Musa had long been absolutely convinced of it.

Ten years after he left the family hearth, Salim came to visit his mother. She declared it high time to forget the past, invoked God’s clemency, and summoned all of her children to an immense meal that she had prepared in honor of Salim and his extremely plump wife. Everyone wept as they hugged their elder brother, who had not become a lawyer after all but had returned to his father’s craft. All of them, except Niqula, forgave him. Even Musa forgave and asked forgiveness and cried. Only Niqula – red tarbush, respectably corpulent figure, bulging eyes – refused absolutely to kiss his brother in forgiveness.

This was the return of the Prodigal Son, announced their mother. Slaughter the fatted calf, boys, and come to the table of brotherly love.

Salim had not come to Beirut without cause. He was keen to investigate the possibility of returning to work with his brothers Niqula and Abdallah. Business was stagnant in Aleppo, he said, and he was hoping to return to work in his father’s carpentry workshop.

You mean, after all of these years you have come back to us to demand a share of what your father left?!
Ya Ayb issh-shom!
Niqula was apoplectic. You shameful man, you ran a knife through us and you destroyed your sister and now you’ve come to ask this. Get out of here!

Salim did not get out of there. It was Niqula who stood up and left the house. Before doing so, he turned to his mother and said, From the day Milia left we have not had a bite of supper we could swallow, Mama.

Musa was not following their argument over the family business and money matters. He was staring at his older brother, stunned. Salim’s features had lengthened and sunk; the white hair of old age had conquered his head, and his lips had lost their fullness. His eyes seemed lost in their sockets. He had become a carbon copy of his father. Anyone who saw him now would believe Yusuf had come back to life. Niqula put a decisive end to the conversation by refusing unconditionally to receive his brother in the
shop. Abdallah was confused, as if he did not understand what was unfolding before his eyes, while Musa pondered his eldest brother’s shocking transformation into their father’s double. But no one could ignore Salim’s gravelly voice when he said, It’s your fault, Mother – you told me, Go, don’t worry about your sister, God will find a solution for Milia.