Elias Khoury - As Though She Were Sleeping

By this time Milia was well aware that her body had grown and changed quite a lot. Now she could grasp the ropes tightly, shoot her long legs straight forward into space, and climb high as the wind played with her light brown hair. And then, this time, she fell. She would not remember how the parallel ropes eluded her hands, nor how she came to be on the ground with a pain shooting through her right leg. She tried to stand up but she couldn’t. The pain mounted from her leg bone to her neck. She collapsed and screamed for Musa. But her brother did not come. She had to get up on her own and hop on her left foot all the way to the four steps that led from the garden up to the kitchen. She managed the steps on two hands and one leg.

Yes, she knew she had changed, but it was only when the swing let fly with her that Milia truly noticed how everything was transformed. In the four years between the day at the seaside when she had hidden her small breasts from the lads’ eyes and had dreamed of the lamb, and the day of the swing, Milia had not paid attention to how her chubby preadolescent body had stretched out and how her jaw had given definition to her face, freeing it from that babyish rotundity. Her legs had grown long and slim while her buttocks had filled out delicately. Her eyes were wider in proportion to her face and her neck had lengthened gracefully.

On the swing, as she stretched her legs forward and pulled hard with her arms to give her flight a higher arc, she became a woman. She saw her chestnut-brown hair drink in rich tones from the sun and her pale skin starkly white against the lush green leaves thick on the branches of the fig tree. The plump preadolescent girl whose brothers had made fun of her because she was as round as a ball was now a svelte and lovely silhouette, full without being fat, her eyes honey-toned and large, the crown of her head streaming with luxurious chestnut hair in which surged waves of color mingling the deepest mahogany with red and blond. She did not tell the brown-skinned girl in the dream that today she had become beautiful, because she did not want to abandon the little girl. The little dream-girl who appeared and vanished at will was freer than the roly-poly preteen girl whose breasts had emerged with the salt of the sea under the probing, eager eyes of the boys. The dream-girl had slender legs and the slim straight body of an acrobat, and that body allowed her to claim that she was no different from the boys. She would go wherever she wanted, appear and disappear, viewing the world with her gray-dappled big green eyes.

When Milia fell from the swing the surprise struck her head-on. She discovered that the image of the past was wholly gone — the image that had made her loathe herself, made her refuse to stand in front of the mirror, made her feel disgusted by the tiny pockmarks across her cheeks.

She saw herself on the swing as if she were gazing into water-mirrors. The leaves that flew by her became watery green mirrors reflecting endless faces of a pretty young woman who had torn off childhood’s wraps and galloped from the nighttime of her old body to enter her new body. To cling fiercely to her new body. To become it.

Had she fallen from the swing because she had forgotten herself as she gazed into her new image? Or because she had closed her eyes to compare the image she had been with the long and slender image she saw now, pale legs extended forward, exposed by the breeze as the swing rose and fell? Or was it because she jutted her torso forward to halt the swing, ready now to go inside and stand before the mirror and give her new self a good look?

Milia flew and everything in her changed. That is how she would remember herself from this moment on. She would say she became a woman on the swing.

Her mother had told her of the lamb. No. . her mother knew nothing about the dream of the lamb, but seeing the traces of blood on her young daughter’s tubby thighs, she had told Milia that now she had become a woman and must prepare herself for marriage and motherhood. But Milia could not see herself as anything other than a mass of flesh and bone that had now been pierced and marred unkindly by an open wound. Aghast at learning that this monthly gash would be with her all of her life, she was mortified.

Do the boys — do my brothers, does anything like this happen to them? she asked her mother. Seeing her mother’s startled expression, she knew it was her injury and hers alone — a girl alone among four boys, living through what the saintly Sister Milana called that monthly filth . Swelling up, she had to listen to her brothers’ teasing as they called her Drum and Fatty. Only Musa defended her, once in the garden when he told her how pretty she was. She had started to cry after Salim had mounted a vicious party in the garden and had called her over: Hey Drum! Instead, Musa came over to her, seized her hand and told her not to pay any mind to what Salim had said, because she was the prettiest girl in the world. She did not believe him but she kissed him between the eyes anyway and gave him a smile.

Always she felt the blood before it came, and this made her anxious and irritated. The lamb would begin to visit her dreams nightly. But the little animal would never leap onto her chest before the final day when the pain in her lower left side intensified before spreading down her legs, announcing the hour when the anxiety-demon was to emerge from her body. But this day made it better. When Milia tumbled from the swing and broke her right leg, she discovered she was no longer that roly-poly Milia who hated looking at herself in the mirror.

She was perched between the two doctors. Zaven gripped her right foot and massaged the leg with hot oil. Harout stood behind her, holding her shoulders firmly so that they would remain still. Zaven asked her how she had fallen but she did not know how to answer. Had her feet dangled to the ground as she swung her torso forward to stop the swing, causing her foot to catch and the swing propelling her forward so that she fell hard? Or had she fallen from midair, having slipped her hands off the ropes as she had done often before, and there she was on the ground, having been tossed to the right with the whole weight of her body on her right leg?

She tried to remember but the hand of Dr. Zaven, rubbing the oil into her, pulled her mind and spirit downward, giving her the feeling of slipping, before the sharp pain seemed to lift to her upper back, where the other doctor’s hands worked the flesh of her shoulders.

Where was her mother? Where was Musa?

She smelled the peculiar odor rising from around her and enveloping the pain washing from her bones. What was that smell called? And why — every time she recalled it — did she feel a mysterious mingling of unspeakable desire and pure disgust?

That day they took the girl to Bourj Hammoud and there she lived something that she could tell no one. But it was always with her in her dreams. It came in the shape of blurred and darkish images cocooned in a mist rising from a vessel that someone had set down next to her. It made her feel dizzy. Only her brother Niqula noticed that she was afraid. Seeing the shadows of fright in his sister’s eyes, he accompanied her on her third and final visit to the doctors. He shattered the power of the smell that lingered in the girl’s nose, its traces impossible to dispel. On her wedding day, with the cold and the fog enveloping the American car which crept up the rise of Dahr el-Baydar, Mansour sitting in the front seat next to the driver, his body shaking with the chill, she had opened the car window only to hear the driver yell.

Shut the window!

It’s the smell, she said.

Smell or no smell, shut that window! We’ll die of the cold.

It’s the smell of basturma , she said, rolling up the window.