Elias Khoury - As Though She Were Sleeping

Musa looked up at the picture hanging on the wall and tears began to roll down his cheeks.

Why are you crying, Musa, habibi ! called out Milia.

The woman lying on the birthing bed was moaning and crying. The two nurses stood by and the doctor was grumbling.

This is not going to go smoothly, the doctor said.

Nurse I said there was a problem. Nurse II said the woman’s face was turning blue.

The Italian doctor went over to the window, raised the sash, and gulped fresh air. The older nurse asked him what she should do, but instead of answering he turned to the second nurse and said in a low voice that he did not really understand what was happening. The young nurse bent toward him and asked him to repeat what he had said. Nothing, he replied.

The doctor was not Italian, as Mansour had thought. The name et-Talyani stuck to him because he had studied in Italy and had come back to Palestine bringing a very pretty Italian wife who stole the hearts of the Nazareth populace. Rita was considered the epitome of beauty in the small city bursting with monasteries, convents, churches, monks, and nuns. So Ghassan el-Hilw came to be called et-Talyani, after his eccentric wife, who carried a white parasol summer and winter, walking through the Nazareth alleys searching for the wondrous event, hoping to carry a baby. Four years went by without any sign of that longed-for pregnancy, and sometime in their fifth year living in Nazareth she traveled to her country of origin and never came back. But the doctor would not acknowledge the possibility that his wife would not return. He spoke of her as if she had gone on a short visit to her family and would be back in Nazareth next week. He went on expecting her and waiting for her, or so everyone thought. Months passed, and years, and the man went on repeating the same words he had always said whenever he was asked about his Italian wife — who, he said, was on a short visit to her mother, who was ill. The doctor began to walk through the city streets with his wife’s white parasol held firmly upright. He mixed Arabic with Italian and he went on practicing as the first gynecologist Nazareth had ever known.

The doctor bent over the young nurse whom Milia had named Wadiia II, his mouth giving off the smell of cigarettes. The nurse averted her face but turned back to the doctor and raised her fingers to her face to remind him that he must stop smoking. But hearing a moan, she bent over the pregnant woman, to hear her say something unclear about crying.

What’s the story, doctor? she asked.

Honestly I don’t know. It is very strange. Everything looks perfectly normal, but she reacts as though she’s afraid.

Yallah, my dear, the nurse said to the moaning woman. We’ve gotten through a lot of it already — there isn’t much more to do.

Milia’s eyelashes unraveled and a single tear came out from the corner of her left eye. She told Musa fiercely that he mustn’t cry.

Don’t cry, habibi . It’s a dream, that’s all. Just open your eyes and everything will go back to the way it was, and then you will see there’s nothing to be afraid of.

But Musa did not open his eyes. The little boy tossed and tossed in bed next to his sister, dreams fluttering and beating their wings around his eyes, never leaving him alone. She had seen him coming in the darkness. Little Musa dragged his bare feet across the tiles of the liwan and approached his sister’s bed. His green striped pajamas shivered and rippled beneath the silvery shadows of the moon creeping in from the window. He moved sluggishly toward his sister. Milia made a place for him next to her in bed, extending her arm so that he could drop his head onto it and fall asleep. But the boy simply climbed heavily into his sister’s bed, drew himself into a ball, and dropped immediately into a deep slumber. Milia pulled her arm back, turned onto her left side, closed her eyes, and saw herself stealing into her brother’s dream.

Musa sat in the garden exhaling his cigarette smoke and thinking about the story he did not know how to tell anyone. Since his return from Tiberias he no longer knew what he wanted out of this earthly life. His mother, Saadeh, was constantly in pain, or at least she moaned all the time, but after the marriage of her daughter and Milia’s move to Nazareth, their mother had had no choice but to take an interest in the house and to do the work necessary to keep a family. Salim had gone to Aleppo, taking Najib with him, staying there with the Aleppan carpenter who got rid of his two daughters in one fell swoop. Niqula and Abdallah had transformed the father’s shop into a small coffin-making factory. They had married the two Abu’l-Lamaa sisters and now were wont to act like a pair of fatuous emirs on the sole basis that they were in-laws of a family that had inherited the title of emir sometime in the bygone Ottoman era — even though that family lived in the genteel poverty of the eminent. Musa understood well that the invalid mother would be his lot since all of his brothers had left the house. Musa was convinced that the family had fallen apart because of Salim’s idiotic behavior and his mother’s underhanded ways. He did not understand that his mother was completely innocent when it came to Salim’s plot and its disastrous effect on his sister’s anticipated fortune in marriage, when he convinced Najib that their marriages to the two well-off Aleppan sisters was the solution to the problem of poverty that there seemed no escaping. When Niqula erupted and said he would kill his brother — that dog! — Musa looked at his mother as if he were accusing her. The mother protested that she had not known anything, but Musa was certain that she had blessed the step taken by her eldest son. In the end, after Musa wedded Adèle Niameh and they moved into the old house, their mother decided to move out, because Adèle could not endure the continuing charade of Saadeh’s illnesses, and because Saadeh knew she did not want to end as Hasiba had, breathing in an air of disgust and fear and loss of memory. Musa rented an apartment for his mother near the convent, where she lived alone but also in the company of the saint whose eyes the blue water of glaucoma had begun to consume so that eventually she was swimming in a world of blue incense that gave her to feel that the saints surrounded her on every side.

Saadeh wanted to take Milia’s photograph with her to her new home. Musa refused, though. Well, actually, he did not refuse. In resignation he said, Ya Mama, anything you wish, and then lifted the framed image down from its place on the wall and handed it to Saadeh. Stooping, she wrapped it in old newspapers. Musa paced in front of the sudden emptiness on the wall and sniffled. His mother stared at him in surprise. Tell me if you can’t stand letting go of the picture — sweetheart, I don’t want you crying. I don’t want the picture, no, no, I don’t want it now, not if you’re going to get upset like this. The mother bent over the well-wrapped photograph and undid every layer of newsprint. And then she climbed up on the bed to return it to its place.

Mama, come down! yelled Musa. Get down from there! Leave it on the bed.

Saadeh left the photograph lying on the bed and left for her new residence. Musa never told his mother that what made him cry had not been the removal of the photograph or seeing it wrapped in layers of newsprint. He had promised his two daughters that the liwan would be theirs. He knew that the two teenaged girls would cover all available wall space with photos of Abdelhalim Hafiz, Dalida, and other singers and actors who had captured wholesale the imaginations of the city’s youth who were encountering and embracing a sweep of new habits and understandings daily. As far as he was concerned, it made perfect sense now to remove Milia’s likeness from the wall, and when his mother asked to take the photograph with her he was content, even relieved. Taking it down and giving it to his mother was easy enough. But glancing back at the empty white space left by the photograph’s removal left him uneasy. He saw the shadow of an image — the image of an image — of his sister traced on the wall. Her almond-shaped eyes were outlined in the shadows of the light that still emanated from them. Her facial features, though, were now simply grayish strands and contours that inched and curled across the peeling wall.