Elias Khoury - As Though She Were Sleeping

She saw herself flying without wings. She was on a rocky incline leading down steeply to a crevice-like valley filled with dry brush, brambles, and squat shrubs. She could see the man below, holding the baby before tossing him into the wadi. The child stretched out his arms like wings to become like a bird, but bird feathers did not sprout. Where are his feathers? screamed Milia.

She stands at the summit. The heat stifles her and the smell of fires whirls around her. She wants to hold on to something and, seeing a rope, grabs it, but it turns out to be nothing more than a dessicated woody stem and it crumbles in her hand. She sees herself pitch forward into the very pit of the ravine and she sees the child open his crushed splintered arms as if he is awaiting her. She screams.

At that instant Milia opened her eyes to see the nun embracing her and patting her dessicated hair gently and requesting the mother who hovered there to bring a glass of water for her daughter.

The girl is cured, with God’s leave, the nun said. To the women who stood there, stunned, she said, Bring her a glass of water and make her some lemonade. Keep her on liquids for three days and you’ll see her back to normal.

The nun’s miracle, as she stretched out her arms and rescued Milia from falling into the valley, was the last thing the nun did for the girl’s sake. I saw her, the nun would say later. She was falling. I interrupted my prayers and ran to you at home and if it were not for God’s mercy, I might not have gotten there in time. I reached for her, and as I held her she opened her eyes and was pulled from death. It is the second time. The first was when she came into the world. I ran to you and I pulled her from the womb. The womb stands in for the grave. When one is born, one is simply practicing for rebirth; when one is baptized, submerged in water from head to heels, it is a watery burial which allows the old person to die so that the new one may rise. I heard the voice of Mar Ilyas the Ever-Living. I was standing and praying and suddenly I heard a voice coming out of the icon. It was Mar Ilyas perched in a chariot of fire circling in the sky. He said to me, Run, Milana, run to the home of Saadeh and pick up the girl before she falls into the valley! And tell her mother that this is the last time. For when the third time comes, you will not be here nor will she. There will be no one to intercede for her except the son.

Had the nun said these words? Did she say them after hearing Saadeh relate her daughter’s dream?

The nun is a liar, said Milia to her mother. I don’t believe a word of this. She was just sitting next to me and she heard me say, I am falling! And then I woke up because it was my heart that fell. When you fall, your heart falls first of all. I told her it was my heart that fell because I was falling in the valley, and then she made up the whole thing. Anyway, who said the womb is a tomb? This is unbelief. Heresy. Your friend the nun hates me. Mama, didn’t she say that my dreams come from Satan? And that I must come to church with you and pray until I could forget my dreams?

Milia did not forget her dreams. But she did forget the nun’s warning that there would be no intercessor for her but this baby son. And now today here was this man who had become her husband cursing the monk who had recounted Nazareth’s stories and had led her to the ruins at the Church of the Annunciation, getting her to bow almost to the ground before entering because that man of pure goodness had lived with his mother and father in this secret place that no human foot had trod. Here he learned how to walk and here happened the vision that announced him as God’s only son.

He led her toward the dry dead trunk of an ancient olive tree. It had dried up, he told her, after the Romans had imprisoned Yusuf the Carpenter. It seems the man disappeared and was killed before his son was crucified — perhaps a decade before. Had he remained alive, surely he would never have allowed the crucifixion of his son.

Here beneath this tree, at the age of twelve, that vision came to the Messiah telling him he was God’s only son. How could a child take in the meaning of the angel’s words, heard in a dream? Lying beneath this tree he heard a fluttering of wings and saw a six-winged angel whose blinding whiteness drove his sight from him. He heard a voice saying he was the awaited Messiah and that since the beginning of time God had chosen him as a son to bestow upon him the throne of his ancestor David and to make him eternal king.

The child awoke in a state of fear and thirst; for three days he remained utterly without speech. He seemed completely aghast and confused, drinking water obsessively without assuaging his thirst. His mother suspected that a vision had overpowered her son. She remembered how Zakariya had gone dumb when the angel told him the news of his wife’s pregnancy; but to her husband she said nothing. For, ever since the journey to Egypt, and indeed ever since her pregnancy and her repeated attempts to tell her husband the truth, she had lived with this man in silence. Whenever she opened her mouth to tell him, he would stop her with a wave of his hand and a shake of his head as if to say that there was no need for words, for he knew everything already. When he returned home from the olive tree with his son, she tried to talk with him but he averted his face. She went to her son to ask what had transpired there but all he would say to her was, Get away from me, woman! The Gospels erred, saying that he upbraided his mother at the wedding at Qana in Galilee, the site of his first miracle, when he turned the water into wine. To the contrary, in Qana he kissed his mother’s hand and embraced her before embarking on the miracle, for he knew that the hour to make himself known had arrived. But coming home from the olive tree in fear, he did not relish speaking to this woman who had suppressed the secret of her son from that son himself.

He had accompanied Yusuf the Carpenter to the olive tree and there he had told him of the vision that came to him in his sleep. The aged father cried like a child, took his son in his arms and kissed him, and told him that only now could he walk with his head held high. Only now did he know that his dreams had not been mere delusions, and that God had put him through a trial that none of the prophets had experienced. God tested his dignity as a man and for twelve years he had waited steadfastly for this blessed moment. Yusuf prostrated himself and asked his son to kneel beside him. Blessed be the beast You sent, O God, he murmured. For You have allowed me to avoid the trial of Ibrahim, prepared to slay his son for the sake of Your holy name. Blessed be You, O God of Ibrahim and Ishaq and Yaqub, for this is my son who will become king in Your eyes, and will bear Your name and will be holy for ever and ever. Blessed are you, God of all creatures, for You have made me Your partner in the fathering of this child. From this moment I am the brother of the Lord and I will sit in the embrace of Ibrahim, Your faithful friend and dear companion.

The old monk told Milia that his priestly grandfather had owned a secret manuscript filched from the Italian Abbot Bougi, Father Superior of the Franciscan monastery, which told the full story of Yusuf the Carpenter. He told her of the existence of an underground sect that sanctified this man whom they considered the avatar of the Prophet Ilyas the Ever-Living. God had elevated Yusuf to His holy presence ten years before his son died on the cross.

Yusuf the Carpenter, asserted the old monk, had been erased from the story because the Apostle Paul, who had written it down, did not understand the relationship between father and son, and did not understand Yusuf’s weeping as he was borne heavenward, for he saw with his own eyes what would happen to his only son.