Elias Khoury - As Though She Were Sleeping

Well, no — it was not the electricity that led to their difference. Milana found a solution to that problem when she ordered the nuns to close their eyes whenever the electricity came on. We will close our eyes and so will the angels, she assured them. Nothing will change.

The real issue was that woman of devilish beauty called Marika Spyridon.

Marika — here was the story that gave rise to so much gossip in Beirut in those days; it caused quite an uproar, in fact. Had she been the lover of the bishop as was whispered around? Or was she a modern version of Saint Maryam of Egypt, who had begun her life as a prostitute before repenting at the hands of the great Saint Anthony? She came to the church every Sunday morning in the company of three Greek women. They came for mass and then returned to the street of sin, which had come to be known as Mutanabbi Street, where they resumed their usual business.

What sent the nun’s ire soaring was not this fact which everyone knew — for God alone knows what is in our hearts and He is the Reckoner, as she would always remark whenever asked about the goddamned whore who followed Monsignor and donated regularly and frequently to the church and bought the most enormous chandelier in Beirut to give to the Church of Mar Girgis. The sainted nun did not allow anyone to use the word whore in her hearing. She preferred to use the term daughter of sin as she prayed to God to cast His protective veil over all of His servants. But now things had gone too far and she could endure no more. It was said (and God alone knows) that Monsignor had gotten the authorities to issue extraordinary permission for Marika and her girls to circulate freely in Beirut on Sundays, even though such had been prohibited ever since promulgation of the Ottoman decree prohibiting prostitutes to leave the vicinity of the main souq . It seems that the governor of Beirut (appointed by the French mandatory authorities, and a scion of the Greek Orthodox Boustrus family) granted this, perhaps being of the same mind as the bishop. Maybe he was a customer of the lady’s. In any case, the special dispensation made it possible for Marika to attend any of the churches where the bishop conducted mass on Sundays. It was true that His Eminence Gerasimos held mass most Sundays in the Cathedral of Mar Girgis, where Marika could go anyway since it abutted on the market area. But to fulfill his pastoral duties he also conducted mass in churches throughout the city, from Museitbah to Ashrafiyya, Mazraa and Ras Beirut. And now, on Sundays, no longer did Marika have to distance herself from the bishop. And that is why the saintly nun could not but see this woman of the Devil who caused Milana to lose her equilibrium and, in front of a whole crowd of people, to say the word she had barred everyone else from using.

Monsignor is coming and he’s bringing the whore with him! I will not attend mass today, she said to the nuns, stalking out of the church sanctuary and into her cell.

What exactly transpired, though, when the bishop entered that cell and ordered Milana to come down to church? No one knows. But plenty of people were there to witness as Marika knelt before the nun, and as the nun did the same, matching the Greek woman gesture for gesture, and as the nun wept loud enough for all to hear, throughout the entire mass.

The story would be told forty years later but no one dared to publish it in a newspaper. Iskandar Shahin, eldest son of Musa Shahin, afflicted with the wretched mania of literary ambition, got a job at the famous newspaper el-Ahrar , founded by a group of men led by Said el-Sabbagheh. They wanted to found a newspaper that would circulate the ideas of the Freemasons, who had instigated an active movement throughout the Syrian lands, including Lebanon, drawing adherents with their calls for secularism and lashing out with bitter humor at the region’s men of religion.

Iskandar stumbled on an extraordinary journalistic coup. By coincidence he got to know an old woman who lived in the neighborhood of Furn el-Shabbak, adjacent to the Church of Mar Ilyas, and was treated with particular fondness by the priest Samir Abu Hanna. The young, twentyish aspiring journalist was always stopping by at the priest’s home, for he was in love with his only daughter, Futin, who would reject his love and turn his heart to ashes when she decided to follow her vocation as a nun. That is another story, though. This old woman, the young man discovered, was none other than Marika Spyridon, the mistress of the market, who spent her last days in prayer and repentance.

When the young man visited the elderly woman armed with information on her relationship with Bishop Gerasimos, given him by Monsieur Said el-Sabbagheh, he found himself confronting the story of his paternal aunt Milia. He heard interminable details he could not believe, about the nun’s miracle in rescuing Milia when she was at death’s door at the age of ten.

Marika was not stingy with details. She told the young man everything he wanted. Her relationship with the bishop, she said, was not like any relationship she had ever had with any other man.

I am a Greek, she said. We are a people who are everywhere. The Spyridon family is Greek through and through, with our origins in Istanbul. I did not choose my line of work — it is something I inherited. My mother was in the same profession, and so were my grandmother and my grandmother’s mother. In those days it was not a big issue. My mother married like any woman anywhere in the world would. I don’t know what’s gone wrong, why people think the way they do, how whores have become outcasts. Son, if only you knew what I have been through and what I’ve done! If it were not for us, how would there be so many healthy families in the world? You must know that men are dogs, they cannot do anything to fight it — that’s how God created them, after all. Adam, peace be upon him, betrayed his wife, Eve, even though there were absolutely no other women in existence! Don’t ask me how he managed it or what he did. Ask His Eminence the Bishop, he’s the one who told me. Actually, who sent you to me, son?

He told her about Monsieur Said and she collapsed in a fit of laughter. Said! That’s Neama’s son. God be generous to him — such a bighearted man but he was a such a coward, too! I was something like forty-five years old when I took his virginity. You think it’s just women who are deflowered, as they say? No, honey! It’s young men just as much. God, how can I describe it so you’ll understand. First time and he went completely mad. When it’s a young fellow’s first time he only needs a little push and I gave him that — I was very fond of that boy! But he would finish too fast. I’d say, no — the first is for the Devil, come on, now, try again — and the second the same — too bad, he didn’t get it. Such a nice boy, from a good family I think, and the third time he did it like a man, and I said to him, you’re there, you know now — and come back anytime. I’ll tell you, I felt like I’d never felt before, maybe because he was so young and it was his first time. Why are you laughing? Yes, I can say virgin of a man. Ahh! It doesn’t usually happen to me. And yes, it was the same with His Eminence. God’s mercy upon him, he would exhaust me. He was old, at least sixty-five, long white beard — you know the sort. Maybe he was shy, I don’t know. He would never take off his clothes. I would always say fine, and take mine off and come to him, but he could never get it up, and he would blush to the ends of his white beard, as red as a tomato, and would say, It’s my medications. And I’d say, Forget those medications and your babbling, I’m Marika, sir — and I’d throw myself on him, and I’d get his clothes off and I’d get to work. Don’t ask me what I did — I tried every trick in the book, and he started moving. I’d hear him shout, Hallelujah! I would tell him to lower his voice — Sir, we’re in a cell and there are people close by — but he didn’t care, and he began calling me Marika the Marvelous. No, I wasn’t in love with him but I had a lot of sympathy. And that’s one way to love. How love happens is a secret, and there are a million ways to get there. If someone tells you they know what love is, you can be certain they don’t know what they’re talking about. No one can know what happens between women and men — and between men and men, and women and women. When Sister Milana knelt down in front of me in the church and then I knelt down, I felt the strangeness of it! Oh God, Satan be cursed! I didn’t like it, but that woman was a true saint, son, I don’t want to make too much of it but I know what she did with your mama Milia, when she was little, and that was enough to convince me.