Elias Khoury - As Though She Were Sleeping

How would I know? You’ll have to ask Musa. I think it might be poetry. Musa told me one of his friends brought this table from Syria as a gift.

Mansour stared at the table, trying to decipher the elaborate calligraphy. No, he said finally, this isn’t poetry. They are verses from the Qur’an.

He rubbed his hands together against the cold. Milia got up, put some wood in the stove, and sat down again. New warmth surged through the room and the words returned to Mansour’s throat. He brushed away his confusion with a wave of his hand, believing that this young woman could not have noticed his fear. He took her hand, kissed the turquoise ring on her finger, cleared his throat, and opened his mouth.

She toyed with her ring, a woman as fair

as a full bright moon in a night of stars

But whene’er I tried to slip that circlet

off her soft plump angelical finger

she cast it between her lips! See, I said,

she has hidden the ring in the signet

And he told her the tale of his love.

Night. Trees leaning into trees, and the winds of December dampen the windowpanes with rain. A man of thirty-seven years sits in the large room that the Shahin family calls the dar and rubs his hands together getting ready to declaim. It is a high-ceilinged room and the pleasant wood tones of the ceiling reflect the flames of the stove in the corner. Against the somber colors of four small blue sofas striped in black, a woman of twenty-three glows in her yellow dress. The milkiness of her skin flows all the way to the tips of her slender fingers. The man stares at the floor and imagines those white forearms bare to the shoulders. Out of the corners of his eyes he follows the flicker in the gas lamp hanging from the ceiling and speaks in a low voice. Looking at him seated on the couch, his body leaning forward slightly, one would not notice particularly the modest belly bulging slightly over his leather belt. But one would see his sloping shoulders, his eyes shaded by thick black brows in a dark round face and his black moustache.

When Milia saw him for the first time she truly thought she was looking at her brother Musa and her conviction moved her to accept him as a husband. Or that was what she would say to her brother. The truth was somewhat different. From a distance or in the dark Mansour did look very much like Musa. Even in this pale lamplight the resemblance was strong. But in full daylight the difference between the two men was plain for all to see. Musa’s features were gentler and more delicate. True, his eyebrows were thick but they did not descend so closely over his eyes nor did they shadow his eyelashes, across which Milia’s fingers had passed so many times. Musa was not overly tall but he had an athletic build and showed no trace of a belly. The contours of his arm muscles were visible, while there was a slackness to Mansour’s arms and a slight droop to his shoulders. No one would have noticed it on the thirty-seven-year-old but these omens of roundness would become the last and most definitive marker of his life, for he would come to be called the man with the bowed back. Musa’s face was round but the length of his jaw gave it a more rectangular look. His large nose was skewed slightly to the right as if the bone had been broken and not reset properly. His neck was long. Mansour’s face, though, was truly round, his nose large and a good match for his lips. But both men had thick black moustaches that were so startlingly, perfectly alike that people who knew both of them or saw them together would look twice.

Studying the two men, one would believe them to be brothers but then would discover gradually that Mansour was a slightly inflated copy of Musa, more or less. The two points of real resemblance, apart from their moustaches, were their voices and their backs. Musa’s voice was pleasant and deep and rich, and so was Mansour’s. Musa’s back was absolutely smooth and his buttocks flat. This was what had arrested Milia’s step and drawn her gaze when Mansour turned and left the garden. She saw the fluid plane of his back and told herself that this man was her brother’s twin. Milia took note of the points of resemblance, and also the differences, and agreed to the marriage without any hesitation at all.

The mother’s view of it was that the girl had suffered a lot already. After two experiences that had not worked out it was high time for her to marry. Musa agreed but only after some hesitation.

Nazareth is a long way from here, sister, he argued. Why would you want to go there? But Musa was convinced about Mansour because he was a right Adam, as he said. A good man.

Milia heard Sister Milana order her out of the room so that she could tend to Saadeh. It’s Satan! boomed the nun. I smell the Devil in here. She turned toward the girl who held fast to her mother’s hand in an attempt to still her fever-ridden body.

The nun stepped just into the liwan and the aroma of incense spread immediately. She held a small brass incense burner from which came a piercing smell surmounted by a white fog. The nun’s large body blocked the entire doorway as she carried the scent in. Around the room she stalked, pivoting right and left to reach every corner. She approached the invalid slowly. The sound of her breathing rose in the silent room. She turned to Milia and said, It’s the Devil, he’s in here. Leave the room, my girl.

Milia stared at her indifferently and said nothing.

Dr. Naqfour had paid a house call. After examining the patient, he called it bronchitis and prescribed medicine. But Saadeh refused to swallow the bitter stuff. The nun forced Saadeh to open her mouth and take the medicine but the sick woman spit it out and retched.

Be patient, ya Haajja, the woman’s sick, said Milia.

Yes, I know, I know, Niqula came and told me, and that’s why I’m here, but you go outside. I can’t handle the Devil when you’re in here.

What devil?

Ask yourself, ask those dreams of yours, ask those fellows who come looking to marry you and then run away. It’d be much better for you to repent and come into the convent.

Milia started out of her seat, dumbfounded. The nun bent over Saadeh, placed a wad of cotton dipped in oil in her mouth, and ordered her to swallow it.

She can’t swallow, said Milia. She doesn’t have the strength.

Quiet, you, and get out of here.

Milia said no more but she did not leave the room. She stayed beside her mother; and so it was that she saw how the woman swallowed the cotton, her eyes closed, and how her body settled to the rhythm of the nun’s low singsong incantations.

Was it true that her dreams were the work of the Devil?

The nun said that Satan steals into a woman because a female body is beautiful in its perfection. God created woman perfect and complete, she said, but women chose to be deficient. Look at Our Lady Maryam, peace be upon her. Did she need a man in order to fulfill her own existence? Of course not! She was made complete by the Holy Spirit — a perfection she had had from the dawn of her existence.

But not every woman is the Virgin Maryam, said Milia.

Milia! Tell me you haven’t noticed how bad you are becoming, how ugly?

Me?!

Yes, you, girl — why have you not come to church with your mama, so that we can fight the Devil and chase him out of your body?

What was she to say? That she was afraid of the church? And that when she found herself there with the congregation, beneath the Byzantine icons and inside the cloud-odor of incense, she felt the dread and fear she would feel in a burying ground? People bowed their heads to icon paintings of men and women who had died eons ago, speaking to them as if the distance between the living and the dead had been undone and they all moved now in the world of the dead. Milia feared this open interval between the living and the dead. On Good Friday she would go to church and join all of those weeping for the crucified Messiah. But on all other days of the year she prayed alone at home and asked God to open the gates of life that thus far had remained closed to her.