Elias Khoury - As Though She Were Sleeping

I’ve always been like this.

Fine, perhaps you were. Perhaps — but I didn’t see it. You really are your mother’s son. I don’t know how I didn’t see that from the start.

Of course I’m her son but I’m not so much like her as you say, I’m only doing my duty toward my mother and toward my brother’s children and his wife.

Let’s thank God that you are not a Muslim, maybe you would have married your brother’s wife and bestowed on me a co-wife! Especially since you’ve discovered that she’s so beautiful.

. .

Don’t get upset, I was joking, and besides, how would I know about these things!

She said how would I know so that she wouldn’t have to tell him that she had seen him in a dream with that woman. It looked like Najib, but nevertheless it was Mansour.

Never, not even once, had her dreams confused her husband with the image of the man who had dropped out of her life as if he had never existed. Usually, Mansour’s image blended into that of Musa. Seeing Musa in her dreams, Milia would realize that the message concerned Mansour but came by means of someone else. Mansour never entered her dreams; not until the very final dream, when this dreamer would discover that the endings of all things are so very like their beginnings.

This dream takes place in a space that resembles the garden of the old house but that’s not situated in Beirut. No, it is Jaffa. The smell of the sea mingles with the aroma of oranges. Najib peels an orange as he stands next to a woman of medium height whose figure is full but not fat. Are you really Najib? the girl wants to ask this man. And who is the woman? Yes — why is Asma here?

Milia hides behind a jasmine bush whose proliferating trunks entwine, thin and fierce. She does not sense the fragrance of jasmine, though. Oranges, sea salt, damp: these assault the pores of her skin. The man who looks like Najib tosses the orange from hand to hand before his right hand goes to the woman’s chest and grasps another orange. The woman moans.

The knife shows in his right hand. Najib sends his left hand to the woman’s breasts, extracts an orange and begins to peel it. The woman cries in pain and the man swallows the orange. He has tossed aside the knife. He comes closer to Asma, or to this woman who looks like Asma, and presses his lips to her chest, now only half an orange, and he begins to kiss her there.

What are you doing here, Najib? Didn’t I tell you that I don’t want to see you anymore? This is what the little girl says, emerging from behind the bushy jasmine, knife in hand.

Who are you? the man asks, his features changing sharply, suddenly.

. .

No, sorry, you cannot be Milia. Where are Milia’s green eyes?

How did this man who looked so much like Najib know the color of her eyes?

Go back to your own land, girl, and leave me alone.

Again the man bent over that woman’s chest and an orange liquid dripped from his mouth. At that moment, the two of them disappeared. Milia did not know where the man had taken the woman. She lay down on the grass, and saw that man as Mansour.

The woman was crying as if this man who carried a knife in his hand was assaulting her. She heard the woman begging him for something but she could not make out those low-pitched words — or perhaps, she thought, the woman spoke a language she did not know. Was she speaking German? but no, German doesn’t sound like this. But I don’t know German, thought Milia. In Lebanon they taught us French at school. No, not German, it sounds like Arabic but I don’t understand a single word. Arabic that’s clear as mud.

Yesterday you were speaking Hebrew — how come you know Hebrew?

Me?!

Yes, you — who else?

Where?

Doesn’t matter where, but I’d like to know why.

No, I don’t speak Hebrew. Well, I know two or three words. My brother knew it.

Hmmm, maybe it was your brother, then.

What about my brother, God have mercy on him!

Nothing, forget it.

What matters right now is for you to get some rest. And start packing. The plan is that we’ll move to Jaffa immediately after you have the baby.

No, we are going to baptize the boy here and then we’ll go if you wish.

Bless your heart! Right, forty days after — that’s why we need to start getting ourselves ready now.

Doesn’t matter, she said.

The woman cried. She disappeared into Najib’s arms, or into the arms of this person who looked so much like him, submerged in her own tears. Concealing herself behind the jasmine, Milia saw and yet did not see. Trying to remember this dream, she managed only an indistinct image of a man with disheveled hair carrying an orange and a knife, and a woman petrified and sobbing. Then that second woman appeared. Shears in hand, Mansour’s mother began to trim the jasmine. Milia, a little girl hiding behind the blossoms, under the tree, began to tremble as the shears came nearer and nearer to her hair.

She did not tell this dream to Mansour because she couldn’t find the words for it. What had brought Asma to the old house in Beirut? What did Najib want now, after all of this time? Long ago the book had closed on that story and the hollowness that had engulfed her after Najib’s flight and his marriage was gone. The rupture in her life had mended slowly with time’s passing. Mansour had been the messenger of its final disappearance; why, then, was he cracking open a new abyss deep inside of her, leaving her incapable of distinguishing between the move to Jaffa and her profound fear of the specter of loss that Najib had planted in her heart? What did her mother-in-law mean with the scissors? They want to kill me, Milia screamed, and started up from the bed to find Mansour sitting next to her, lighting a cigarette, his face screwed up in pain.

She said no to Mansour’s proposal that they settle into the family’s home in the Ajami quarter of the city.

This is the home of your father and your grandfather, Mansour’s mother had reminded her son. There are only two of us here, two women, plus the two children. Where else would you want to go, anyway, and what would you do with us? You and your wife will come and live here. It is a big house and there’s no problem at all. And once you are here you can take care of your brother’s children as you ought to. You are the man of the family, after all.

When he told Milia that he was the head of the family and he must act like a man, she gave him her look. This was the look that invariably flustered and silenced Mansour. She would let fall her eyelids and then that look would come, first from the tiny niches in her eyes formed by her large, honey-brown irises and mounting slowly to settle on Mansour’s eyes. In the very beginning, this was the look that had bewitched him, a magical blend of bashfulness that sent a pink tinge across the young woman’s cheeks mingled with a desire obliquely expressed. As the days and weeks passed, though, the meanings of things shifted, and Milia’s look now imprinted dread on the man’s heart.

He listened to what her gaze said. He took it in. This was just a temporary arrangement, he told her. Darling, it’s impossible for me to spend the rest of my life with three women — I have my hands full with one woman.

. .

Of course, of course, my dear, but we need a bit of time, and then once the business is up and running again and God grants us a measure of success, we can move, or we’ll figure something out. What I am planning on is that I’ll buy a house for my mother and the children. They’ll live there, on their own, and we will take over the family home.

. .

No, I don’t like the family home. Remember, I fled that home for Nazareth. All right, look, we can buy a house in the nicest part of town. You’ll pick it out and I’ll make good and certain that we get it. Just let’s move to Jaffa first, and once we’re there, nothing’s simpler. You’ll decide and I’ll be happy with whatever you choose.