Elias Khoury - As Though She Were Sleeping

Hasiba believed she would likely die if she lay on her back. If she was curled up, she could face death. Death could not enter a circle, for life is round. That is what Yusuf said his mother said, but no one believed him. How could a senile woman whose ravings ranged far and wide and made no distinction among things speak in this wise, philosophical way?

When she died she was wooden and cold, a rigid back nearly snapped in half, bent over itself, face supported on two raised pillows, feet twisted into an odd position, and a thread of dried blood that had trickled downward along one ear. Had Saadeh not been so quick to realize what this meant, and had she not gotten her husband to help her pull the old woman’s corpse into proper shape, it would have hardened to the point where they would have found it nearly impossible to fit it into the coffin.

Milia makes sucking noises at the cat, who tenses to pounce. But then, suddenly the cat walks out from under the bed, staggering crookedly, and dives into the slipper.

No! screams Milia. And sees Mansour standing by her bed. The clock shows that it is five o’clock in the afternoon, not yet dark. Milia had gone to bed because she felt an unusual weight in her belly. She thought she would lie down for a bit before making supper in anticipation of her husband’s return. The numbness which would take her to sleep swept over her and the pain came in one wave after another before fading away. The cat appeared in the guise of a slipper and she heard moaning.

She opens her eyes and waves to Mansour to leave her alone for a few minutes. Five minutes and I’ll be up, she says. Then everything goes and she is submerged in dusky light. Her stomach contracts. She folds double to lighten the pain and once again sinks into the story. She sees that the cat has died and hears her father sobbing as he carries the dead cat wrapped in brown paper outside, for burial in the garden. The cat had eaten poisoned food; without a sound it crept to the foot of the bed in which Hasiba had slept. It collapsed on the floor and died.

The cat — or Pasha — was the final chapter in the life of Hasiba, who had met her end crouching in a white metal bed, sitting because she was afraid of sleep; waking startled, eluding death in terror.

The elderly woman lived her final days in utter silence undisturbed by anything more than indistinct phantoms that crept into her room through the window. She listened to strange voices and felt ringing in her ears. Ghosts assuming shapes like black smoke surrounded the woman in her bed and told her stories of a past that had not wholly disappeared but had turned into images coming in rapid sequence and all wrapped in a gray light, and into an interminable tolling of bells. Help, it’s the voices! she would cry out from time to time, but when Saadeh came running into the room the woman would have already returned to her desert of silence.

Habisa was the second daughter of Nasif Haddad, who had fled the killing fields of Mount Lebanon in 1860 with his wife, four daughters, and one son. He abandoned the house and the silk loom inherited from his father, as well as the small plot of land where he planted vegetables in the growing season, to escape with his skin and not much more from the village of Kfar Qatra in the Shouf. In those savage days when blood ran down the slopes of Mount Lebanon, Nasif did manage to save his family, though twelve-year-old Said, his only son, was lost on the way. Nasif lived his entire life waiting for the return of a son who would never return. The father sat in the garden of his home in the Mousaitbeh quarter of Beirut. He would never go out to visit anyone because he was waiting. Every morning he told of smelling his son’s fragrance in his dream. The son never returned, the three other girls married, and the only one left at home was Habisa, who refused all suitors. Then — to the bewilderment of her father — she agreed to marry Salim Shahin the carpenter, who was a kashtabanji — a cardplayer of the wiliest sort, spending most of his time in the courtyard of the Church of the Archangel Mikhail, a fierce shuffler of those crucial three cards. Or he was drinking arak in a tiny tavern adjacent to the church.

Habisa surprised not only her father but everyone else when she agreed. By the age of twenty she had endured her father’s and sisters’ incredulous gazes for some time, as she rejected one prospective bridegroom after another. In their eyes she saw mirrored the threatening idea that she was on the dangerous threshold of spinsterhood. But this young woman who never wore anything but a long black gown with seven buttons down the bodice had continued to refuse marriage stubbornly and persistently and she protected herself with a silence that became her guardian veil. It was said that Habisa wore black for her brother, whose unexplained disappearance she could not accept, nor could she acquiesce in her father’s wishful view that the son had fled in disgust as the troubles in Lebanon worsened. He must have found a French steamer to take him to the New World — as their father speculated endlessly — and eventually he would return, surely. The father composed an elaborate story about his son’s emigration, which he believed fully and fiercely. His patience, as he waited on and on for his son, became legendary, and was universally respected. His wife had died only seven months after their descent from the Mount to Beirut, a victim of the exile fever that decimated the populace of nineteenth-century Lebanon, attendant upon unabated emigrations, massacres, and a general state of disaster. For three days she lay prone in a tiny hut that her husband had erected hastily on land belonging to the church. With her death, her daughters worried themselves sick over the possibility of their father’s remarriage, but he did not seem interested. Women in Beirut who had migrated from elsewhere and were available, he remarked, draped themselves on the backs of whomever they could find to carry them.

In a silk-weaving shop belonging to Abdallah Abd el-Nour, Nasif found work, plying an ancient loom which the Beiruti merchant had moved to a narrow passage giving on to the shop. Nasif returned to the work he knew and his life returned to him. He erased his natal village from his memory.

Habisa stayed on alone at home with her father. He would come home late at night, drunk, eat a bite that his daughter had prepared for him, and bury himself in sleep. Habisa remained awake in the black gown she never took off.

No one knew what the story really was. Saadeh would say she heard the old woman, as she descended into senility, speaking French with an imaginary man whose name was Ferdinand. Saadeh fired up her imagination with a story of Habisa’s love for a French officer who promised her marriage and then disappeared as all soldiers do. Was she wearing mourning for her lost love and her wasted virginity? Had the young man bewitched her with the white color of his skin and his blue eyes, and carried her off to the kingdom of fantasy dreams before he moved on?

Saadeh consulted the nun but Sister Milana simply scolded her, telling her not to interfere with what did not concern her. God alone knows the unknowable; God alone holds the secrets of hearts.

What was the story, then?

When Saadeh broached the story of Ferdinand with her husband, Yusuf’s thick eyebrows came together and he called his wife a liar. Woman, that is not my mother! he barked. Would you want me to talk that way about your mother?

That evening, though, Yusuf spoke to his mother, trying to elicit a response. But the woman remained silent. Staring into the distance, she appeared not even to listen as her son asked questions. Then suddenly she began to blurt out foreign-sounding words — the name Ferdinand among them. Thus was revealed a fragment of the momentous secret concealed within the ribs of the elderly woman who had entered the desert of oblivion.