Elias Khoury - As Though She Were Sleeping

He walks on, stooping low. Yasua the Nazarene stoops under the heaviness of the cross. He walks through the city’s narrow lanes, his body weak with fatigue. This thirty-year-old man has never felt such weariness. In his father’s shop he lifted thick tree trunks and never felt this sort of exhaustion. The slim boy with the greenish eyes and the curly black hair and the broad high forehead walked as though his feet did not touch the ground. He worked as though it was not work, as though a strange power nested inside his ribs; and when he tried to tell his story to his father, Yusuf didn’t allow him to finish it. No sooner would he start to relate his peculiar dream than his father would snatch the words from his mouth.

The same thing had happened with the fishermen at the Sea of Galilee. No sooner had he walked across the surface of the water and ordered the storm to die down, and then wanted to speak, than the fishermen began to talk, saying they understood the message.

And when he stood on the Mount of Olives addressing them they did not listen to him. They were bewitched by the light that came from his eyes and turned the earth into a never-ending orchard of olive trees.

When he told the people to leave the woman alone as she washed his feet in perfumed water and dried them with her black hair that was long enough to cover her back, they bent over his feet and did not allow him to tell them it was a question of love and the woman’s loose hair was the world’s pillow.

When he told his mother he was going to Jerusalem and she must not come with him, she did not let him finish what he had to say. She placed her hand on his head and said she was coming because she knew that he was the king.

When they tried him and he found himself alone and in the hands of the executioners, and he wanted to tell them his story, they slapped him with questions that were nothing more than answers.

He smiled at Maryam the Majdaliyya when she asked him why he did not talk. He was the Word, he told her. She asked for an answer to her question.

In truth I tell you that speech is like the grain of wheat in the field. No one owns the word for it is the mere echo of the Word carved into the cross.

He felt the terrible heaviness of the cross they forced him to bear and he was afraid. No, he was not afraid but he was confounded. It was as though his strength had gone, leaving him weak and fragile.

He fasted for forty days and when he called his disciples to supper and gave them the finest of Palestine’s wines he took only a single bite of bread. He wanted no food; his longings were for his father.

Amidst weakness and a sense of defeat, whipping, and humiliation, he remembered the lamb and smiled.

Why all of this light? Please, put out the light.

Pain through the eye sockets, and suffering. Why is Hasiba here and why has the clock stopped? White locks of hair are strewn across the pillow. The old woman tries to lift her head but she cannot. Little Milia stands at her grandmother’s side. Grandmama says that all the clocks in the house have stopped. She tries to lift her hand from the pillow but it falls before it is even lifted. Milia stands next to her and doesn’t know what to do.

The girl runs through the house. The house has turned into a sort of spiral and the girl whirls round and round. All the clocks in the house say that it is three o’clock in the morning.

Wind the clock, Musa, dear.

Musa comes at a run, his clothes covered in mud and blood oozing from his scraped knees.

Why this blood, habibi ? I told you, the blood dream is no good. Why do you always force me to dream of you covered in blood? I have come from there to Beirut, yes, I traveled even with all of these difficulties. I told my son to wait, to stay in my womb. I told him it would be only a matter of a few hours. I must go to Beirut, I said, your uncle Musa is dreaming and it is a bad dream. I must go to him, and so now I have come to you. And you are here and are covered in blood. Enough blood, God save us from all of this blood! Isn’t this what the nun was always calling when she prayed? Remember, how she made us stand in front of the icon, Maryam holding her son, and she called, Almighty God, deliver us from the blood. O God of my salvation, deliver us, that my lips may sing your justice. She ordered us to repeat the prayers after her and we always did. Where is Haajja Milana? Why does she sit all alone with no one to answer when she calls? She said she always sees everything as black, and at the very heart of it was incense. She said she could no longer see human bodies but that she lived with their souls. Why is the nun all alone, and why can she not get out of bed, and where does the smell come from? Is it possible to leave the saint like this, no one taking care of her, no one cleaning and grooming her? Where are you, Saadeh, where are you, Mama?

Saadeh stands next to a metal bed in a darkened room. She puts on a light and the saint orders her to put it out. The light hurts my eyes and I can’t see, she moans. Saadeh does not extinguish the light though. She has come to this faraway convent to bathe the nun, she says, and she cannot do it without light. The vapor rises from a copper vessel filled with hot water and the nun shrieks because she does not want a bath. You have come to kill me just as you killed your daughter, Milana screams. Get out, turn out the light and get out!

Shh , Haajja, I’ve come to bathe you, that’s all. Why did they leave you in this state? Why don’t you perform a miracle and get up? What’s this smell? Yallah , let me take off your clothes, I’ll just give you a bath and rub your body with cologne and you’ll see how much better you are.

Saadeh came close to the nun to help her to remove her clothes. The nun covered her eyes with her hands and began to moan. She sat up straight in bed and screamed that she could smell Satan’s stench. You’ve sent Satan to me, Saadeh! As soon as you came in the smell of incense disappeared. Where is the incense? It runs away from light, and that’s why you turned on the light. What do you want with me, I know you’ve come to kill me! You killed your daughter. I saw her, I saw her — haraam , I saw how her whole body went green as if grass had sprouted on it, Lord God, saints preserve us, Lord God! She was sleeping, and dreaming, when the doctor shouted at her to open her eyes. She tried to open them but the light. . she told them to put out the light but no one heard her. Her body began to shake, like mine is shaking now, and she saw everything. She saw you, Saadeh, and she saw the Devil sitting up there on your right shoulder. Get out — I don’t want to die!

Milia tried to open her eyes and she saw him. He was sitting directly beneath her image in the liwan , studying the half-erased face and filling the emptinesses in and slipping in words between words in a miniaturistic hand. He was young, his face dark and hair short and curly, and he sat in the red-orange patch of sunlight beaming in from the window. He was writing intensely. She wanted to ask him who he was and why he was sitting beneath her picture. Wearing the longish brown dress that covered her knees and looking up at the high brass bed, she approached him. The little girl gazed at that boy who couldn’t have been any more than fourteen years old, as he leaned nearer to the image hanging on the wall and studied an inscription set inside a black frame just beneath it. The inscription, penned in an elegant calligraphic script, was composed of two lines of equal length, between them a white space that the young man sought to fill in with his pen.

She is not dead

but is sleeping

The young woman in the picture has her eyes closed and the boy sitting below her hears the voice of his father summoning him to the table. Musa enters the room, his head entirely gray-white and his eyes shaded by thick white brows. He sits down next to the boy who resembles him. He points to the words written beneath the picture and reads them in a quiet voice. Milia comes nearer and listens to his words but cannot hear them. She tries to read the story the boy is writing between the lines and the curves of the fancy naskh script. She cannot read them. She decides that she will open her eyes and leave this dream alone. She will return to the bed in the Italian Hospital where her son awaits her. She reaches down and her hand collides with another hand, this one cupped with water. An unfamiliar hand takes Milia’s and raises it, and a voice like that of the nurse says something she does not hear.