Elias Khoury - As Though She Were Sleeping

The woman was eccentric — that was true. She did not finish her sentences. Her speech was fragmented, jumping from one thought to another and one place to the next before coming back to alight on silence. But she gave him a sense of inner peace. His highly strung, ever-demanding mother, who ran the business after his father’s death, left him dreading work: going to the foundry seemed daily retribution for something he must have done. The father had died when Mansour was fifteen and Amin, sixteen. At the age of twelve Amin had left school to work alongside his father, and the elder son became his mother’s de facto business partner. They treated Mansour like a lowly employee. The younger son expected never to become a partner in the enterprise and decided to move to Nazareth where his aunt Warda lived. It was said that this widowed aunt of his — sister of his father — wanted him as a husband for her only daughter and so she enticed him to Nazareth. But the truth was that Mansour went of his own accord. He would not have ruled out marrying his cousin Samiha but she already had a young man, a scion of the Said family for whose sake she converted to Protestantism. Not wanting to return to Jaffa, Mansour hit upon the idea of opening a fabric shop catering to feminine tastes. It seemed that divine favor was on his side: after seeing some success, he began commuting to Beirut to acquire dry goods from the Souq Tawile, which during the French Mandate had become the premier souq for imported fabrics of a feminine sort. Soon the fates would lead him to visit the home of one of his acquaintances among the merchants there, Khawaja Emile Rahhal. It was from the garden of Khawaja Emile and his wife Sitt Sonia, in early spring, that Mansour’s eyes lit on the fair-skinned girl standing under the flowering almond tree. It was then and there that he fell a victim to passion. His first gift to his Beiruti fiancée would be an old book printed in Cairo with the title Masari’ el-‘ushshaq. Lovers’ Slayings would go into the chest that had belonged to Umm Yusuf and Milia would carry it with her to Nazareth alongside the volume of saints’ lives and the Thousand and One Nights .

In Nazareth, though, Milia did not open the chest to pull out and read her grandmother’s stories. Here she needed no reading, for all was written on the stones of the roads and alleys. She had only to walk out of the house to find herself among the lines of script in an enormous book that she read as she was living it.

In Beirut, reading had been her means of bridging the time between kitchen work and waiting for her brothers to return home. She devoured her brothers’ books. She solved their math problems and memorized the poems they were instructed to learn. She lived between her grandmother’s treasure chest of tales and her brother’s schoolbooks, and all the while she was becoming the undisputed queen of the kitchen. And so her brothers dreaded her early marriage. She would leave them prisoners of their mother’s food and her incurable illnesses.

But things had taken an unexpected turn. After a short liaison with Wadiie the bakery owner, Milia found herself alone, waiting for Najib, who would also disappear.

Milia did not know why this Wadiie character, this man whose body was dusted in the smell of flour, came to visit every day. The baker became part of the family’s evening ritual. This began at six o’clock sharp with the Ottoman-style coffee that gave off its special strong aroma of sugar and orange-blossom water. The evening reached its zenith at half past eight when Milia called everyone to the dinner table. Wadiie would hesitate and fidget and claim he had to return home. The smell of the food coming from the kitchen would gradually bewitch him and he responded to Salim’s insistence by clucking uncertainly that he was putting on weight because he was now having dinner twice, once here and then a second time at home so as not to anger his mother.

Milia knew she would not marry Wadiie. But he was real, and he was here, short and pudgy, his belly impossible to ignore. The masses of flesh straining beneath his shirt disgusted her and the smell of flour repelled her. Milia would not remember ever being addressed directly by Wadiie. He sat with her brothers, bringing them bread and petit fours from the bakery he had inherited from his father. In fact, he acted as though he were one of the brothers. Well, no, there was the one time when he followed her into the kitchen on the pretext that he was thirsty. He told her that her cooking was tayyib , it was very good, very sweet indeed, and he was waiting for the day when she would cook for him alone.

Everyone said Wadiie would marry Milia. But Wadiie said nothing. And after six months of daily visits, Saadeh asked him when his mother might honor them with a visit. Wadiie’s round pudgy face got very red and he cleared his throat before saying, Soon inshallah .

Then everything ended.

Milia told Musa firmly that she wasn’t angry at Wadiie. Never, not a single day, she declared, had she imagined herself as his wife. She told her mother that she had been horror-stricken when she visited Wadiie in his mother’s home. Umm Wadiie took her into the bedroom and jabbed her finger at a wide oak bed at the center of the room. This was my bed, she sighed. Mine and my late lamented husband’s. We may be the first newlyweds in Beirut who slept on one bed. That’ll be my gift to you and Wadiie when we celebrate the two of you.

You’d want us to sleep in one bed!

When Milia opened the door to the hotel room and saw one bed in the middle of the room, Umm Wadiie’s voice clanged in her ears and she smelled old oak. She was nonplussed; where should she sit down? Mansour did not notice her confusion and embarrassment, fully occupied as he was with opening the bottle of champagne. Milia went to sleep alone in the bed and did not sense her husband next to her except through what she would later call the marriage dream. She heard the bathroom door open and decided to go on sleeping. She fell into a rhythm of slow breathing and was soon immersed in the dream. This was a dream without images or words. It was composed only of colors, of intimations that the world was closing in and then opening out, circling and extending, rising and falling. Her face broadened and lengthened and inside her eyes she sensed eyes without end. She was swimming in a world of blue. And then suddenly the dream was broken, the coldness struck her between her thighs, and the man slipped out. She jerked her legs up and curled around herself and felt an explosion of heat from her belly shooting through her body like circles of light; and she was in the car.

In their own bedroom Milia insisted on two beds. Mansour did not understand why she was so determined on this particular issue. But he had purchased twin beds already. In fact, it had not even occurred to him that he might sleep with his wife every night in one bed. The wife’s bed, he proclaimed, has to be wide enough to embrace the child who will come, because this is our way. Milia bowed her head in assent and saw a blue halo forming. That was how she saw herself, head bowed in assent. When she became pregnant and began spending a lot of her time among the eucalyptus trees dotted around the house, the blue halo was her constant companion. She did not see the halo reflected in her husband’s eyes, and so she knew that she alone saw the blue cloud that hovered over her bowed head and protected the forming baby and his mother. In the shadow of this halo Milia lived for nine full months. The color blue clothed her through the day and at night it became a soft carpet on which she slept and across which her dreams flowed incessantly.

Mansour poured himself a glass. It made his head spin but it also sent him into his poetic state. They were sitting on the balcony in Nazareth. Between sips, Mansour was reciting poetry but there were spaces of silence within and between the lines. Milia was yawning. He had drunk so much, she said, that his recitation destroyed the music of the poetry. Well, no. . she said his drunkenness slowed the music of the poetry down until it was unrecognizable. Well, no, she didn’t say that, maybe she didn’t say any of it. Maybe she wanted to say it but said something else. She did tell him to stop drinking, because he was drunk.