Elias Khoury - As Though She Were Sleeping

The man turned and ran to the doctor’s home. He knocked on the door but no one opened it. He was in a panic. He did not know what to do, and the taste of blood lingered on his lips as his dizziness grew worse. Loss. That was what he felt. The sense of loss collapsed onto him, falling heavily from all directions, and his legs could no longer carry him. He sat down on the front steps to wait for the doctor. Then he remembered that his wife was dying and it was up to him to do something. He picked himself up and began to run beneath the burning sun, in the direction of the Convent of the Archangel Mikhail. Why the convent he did not know, for he had no love for Haajja Milana. He detested the magic she practiced on his wife. Many times he had cursed her and threatened to abandon the conjugal home if she continued resisting his desire to sleep with her. Repeatedly Saadeh had refused. Haajja Milana told me it is forbidden as long as I am fasting, she said. So he had to wait an entire fifty days: the duration of the sacred forty-day Lenten fast and then through the day of the Messiah’s resurrection just so he could lie with his own wife. On Easter morning he came to his wife and took her. She felt like a dried-out dead branch and he savored nothing. The fresh springs washing over him whenever he slept with her were gone. Now his moisture was sucked out without replenishment. He had not been watered; there was no pleasure. It was a sensation that would stay with him for the rest of his life. When Saadeh entered into the rituals of this eccentric nun she shattered his sex life. Now, whenever he approached her, intimations of discomfort and shame inhabited his wife’s eyes. She no longer allowed him to put his hands on her breasts and she fidgeted and balked if his mouth so much as came near her lips. Sleeping with her became merely a question of finishing and moving away. She would hurry immediately to the bathroom and wash as if to rid herself of the traces of sin.

It’s all the nun, he snarled at his wife, enduring the pain in his sex after their wooden intercourse. She’s the devil — she’s no saint. I hate that woman! I don’t want to see her ugly face around here ever again. Listen to me and listen well. From now on Haajja Milana is forbidden to set foot in this house.

Saadeh turned a deaf ear on Yusuf. She continued her daily visits to the convent and brought the nun home to sprinkle blessed oil over her children. She begged Sister Milana to intercede with God, entreating Him to forgive her husband the sin of failing to have any love for the saintly nun.

Now, and without knowing how it had come to pass, Yusuf found himself in front of the immense iron gate set into the convent wall. He saw his fist pounding on the gate and heard his voice shrieking. Open up, please Haajja Milana, open up!

As the nun opened the door and stepped out, she snapped, It’s Saadeh and her girl! Come, follow me to the house.

The shock of it tied Yusuf’s tongue. He wanted to remind her that he fathered only boys. But he found himself simply walking silently behind her, seeking shade in the enormous moving shadow that she made over the ground. The sun burned on the dirt lane that linked the Convent of the Archangel Mikhail to his home, and the odor of dry, cracked earth saturated the air. Yusuf breathed heavily. Sweat beaded on his back and rolled downward. His robe stuck to his body. This tall broad-shouldered nun’s massive rear waddled along swiftly in front of him in her long black habit. Yusuf kept himself inside the mammoth shadow that swayed and bounced over the unpaved track, broke against the rocks, shot upward to the garden of the Shabbua family, and dropped away to the olive grove below. The air he breathed in was burning the insides of his chest.

Yusuf felt the presence of death and he was afraid. He feared for Saadeh. He told himself he would accept whatever she demanded. He was ready to stop having sex with her if that was what she wanted — and if only she wouldn’t die.

He walked on in the nun’s shadow as the fear of death possessed him completely. He heard himself murmuring the prayer that his wife repeated every day.

O Lord, why have those who press upon my soul grown so numerous? Lord, many have stood against me. Many have tried to expel me from the salvation of Almighty God. But You, O Lord, You are my succor and my support. It is You who raises my head high. .

What is it you are saying? asked the nun.

Nothing, nothing at all, responded Yusuf hastily, watching the shadow of the nun swaying before him, her huge body facing the sun, and into his mind came the old-man features traced on her face. Dense eyebrows, bulging half-closed eyes, a broad forehead, thin lips beneath a prominent nose, and swarthy olive-toned skin. A face that seemed to hold nothing but the huge nose with the three hairs sticking out at the center as if this were a cock’s crest, and a thin purplish moustache looking as though they had been drawn in with an indelible pencil.

Yusuf told Saadeh that the nun was not a woman but rather a man in disguise, a man in the shape of a woman. He loathed her and found her disgusting, he said. After all, her enormous size was not in keeping with her holiness. Saints, be they men or women, have uniquely attenuated bodies. For the body melts away, that the soul may radiate its light. But this woman’s enormous body was extinguishing her meager soul. She was akin to a man with a woman’s voice.

In that July heat, though, Yusuf forgot it all. He thought only of death. He found himself walking in this black shadow like a small boy following his mother, sheltering closely in her shade.

When the nun reached their front entrance she turned and raised her eyebrows to signal that Yusuf should go in ahead of her. Yusuf ran up the five wooden stairs and walked through the stand of lilac trees. Opening the front door, he turned back and waved at her to come in. The nun walked quickly toward the sitting room. As she entered the yellow chamber her black shadow climbed over everything. The nun gave Nadra no chance to curse in her usual way. The midwife swallowed her imprecation when it was halfway out: Where is the doctor, that son of a b. . — as if the vast blackness of the nun’s habit swallowed the word before it could leave Nadra’s lips. The large room, blazing an excruciating yellow through the sheets hanging over the windows, suddenly lost its hue to the nun’s large black shape, as if the sun itself had vanished. Saadeh’s trembling body grew still as the blackness flowing from the nun’s garment washed over her.

Her color! Please, Haajja, look, the woman has turned green, and I don’t know what to do, I don’t know, we must fetch the doctor.

The doctor? For what?

Her color. The green!

Where’s the green? asked the nun. There’s no green here.

On Saadeh’s body the green aura had faded to be followed by a thin blue that dimmed in its turn. Saadeh’s flesh returned to the pure and bright white it had always been, a whiteness so milky it made one imagine a deep plush velvet covering the body so profoundly that it could conceal the light in its depths, yet one knew that the light was always there. This was the skin color Milia would inherit. It would be the hallmark of her beauty, the light that bewitched Mansour enough to bring him all the way from the Galilee just so his eyes could imbibe the whiteness that shone from the body of his Beiruti darling.

There’s no blue, and no green, said the nun. This woman’s body was near to gone, but now everything is fine.

Saadeh grew calm and stopped shaking. But never before had Yusuf seen such tears. Saadeh’s tears collected on her cheeks, fell heavily onto her nightgown, and soaked her nakedness below. Yusuf stared at that morsel of flesh that through the years he had seen only as a darkened point that he would touch in search of the pleasure that God in His generosity had bestowed on human beings. He was interrupted by Nadra’s voice ordering him to leave the room.