Yusuf died when Milia was nine. Niqula and Abdallah took over their father’s shop while their elder brother, Salim, went on studying law in the Université Saint-Joseph, and the youngest, Musa, stayed on in the Mar Ilyas-Btina School.
Three days after her father died Milia had the dream of her own birth. Seeing Yusuf stretched out in death, the girl of nine lost her ability to speak. She heard the women’s fierce laments and listened to words that puzzled her deeply.
His beloved has come, one of the women cried.
The girl saw herself standing among the knot of women draped in black and waving their white handkerchiefs over the corpse of the man lying on the bed in the liwan. Milia knew instinctively that she was the beloved the woman had announced, but she did not know what a beloved was supposed to do in such circumstances. Suddenly her legs gave out and she saw herself in a heap on the floor. Too many times to count, this dream assailed her: legs collapsing, a little girl falling, and the nun rushing over to pick her up and hold her suspended against the wall. She saw herself wrapped in white swaddling and two cupped hands lifting her high, and then she plummeted.
Milia could not come near her father or look directly at his closed eyes. She could not get there, because she fell, and the taste of fire spread through her insides. The same thing happened when she watched herself approach the man sleeping beside her. She wanted to reach him, cover his body’s tremors with the bedsheet, pat him on the shoulder, and tell him not to be afraid. But she fell. She would open her eyes to banish the dream. And she would see the light creeping in through the slits in the yellow curtains over the window. She would turn her head and see Mansour sleeping on his back, his mouth slack and the sound of his snoring rising and falling. She would smile, reassured, and decide to go back to sleep.
Milia got up in the morning, put on her clothes, and sat on the edge of the bed waiting. She looked at her husband and saw Mansour scrunched into a ball. His knees were pulled upward, his legs bent; his left hand stretched beneath his head; he was breathing deeply and from time to time she could hear a sigh released from the depths of his sleep. He seemed a small child to her. She bent over him but then she stepped back and headed outside to the small hotel garden.
You wanted to kiss me, said Mansour.
Me? No, I just wanted to cover you.
All right, then, why don’t you let me –
Take your hand away. I want to go to sleep.
But I want to sleep with you.
Please! Don’t say those words! I’m so sleepy.
Mansour did not understand why his wife was in such a hurry to sleep. No sooner would she lay her head down on the pillow than she would nod off, her face completely relaxed. He grew accustomed to taking her as she slept. When he sensed her breathing growing louder and deeper, and he thought she had entered her nighttime world, he would come very close to her and begin stroking her. Little by little he would mount her and come into her. Her parted lips would moan but she would not open her eyes. As though she were dreaming. Body and soul, she seemed to float, and Mansour floated over her, as though when he entered her waters he was someone who swam through the dream.
Last night I slept with you, he told her.
What!
You don’t remember?
God preserve you! Don’t talk like this.
Mansour stood at the threshold about to go to work, holding a demitasse of Turkish coffee. He took a final swallow, set the cup down on the table, looked into Milia’s honey-brown eyes, in which played all the colors of the world, and asked her what she had seen as she dreamed.
Go and dream your dream again, he said. I want to see you happy and relaxed today. Sleep a little before I come home tonight, and dream again, and then everything will go well tonight, too.
Mansour believed Milia to be afraid and anxious because of the troubles across Palestine, even though Nazareth was remote from the waves of strikes and clashes that had broken out throughout the country, accompanying ongoing protests against the British Mandate and growing Jewish immigration. She never asked him about politics. And despite his political concerns — as modest as they might be — and his loud debates with friends at the café, and his fear of losing Palestine completely, Mansour did not speak to his wife about any of this more than occasionally and in passing. Worrying about the effect on her, he did not realize that the woman was not particularly taken up with such things, or even aware of their implications. She was living now inside her private experience of pregnancy and her personal bond with the city of Nazareth. The dream that had brought her here, convincing her to marry Mansour, recurred during her nights; the intimation that everything teetered in this city the Messiah had inhabited one thousand and nine hundred years before made her aware that everything in life is ephemeral. She preferred to give herself over to sleep, and so she lived inside a world walled in by the night.
She smiled at her husband when he asked her to dream her dream again, and she said she would do so. He told her that he was very fond of this dream of hers, even though she had not even told it to him, because she had been so sweet and gentle with him in the night. You were like sugar melting at the back of my mouth, he said. Milia remembered nothing, or so she claimed. Every night she dreamed, and redrew her image in the mirrors the darkness held up, that image of Milia as a child of seven: short black hair and wide greenish eyes and the impulse to believe that the night’s enticements spill into the daytime — so that, once awake, she would still be living inside her dream. She would intersperse the truth of daily events with the truth of her dreams. This sparked her husband’s worry. But the priest from Syria, Father Mikhail Muawwad, who shepherded the flock of the Church of Our Lady of the Tremblings right there in Nazareth, clarified that such things were among the indications of pregnancy and there was no need to work up his mind over it. Milia would emerge finally from this nocturnal existence after giving birth to her first child.
Milia came out of the hotel room into the bright sun of the petite garden. The snow sat in patches, looking like little white islets amidst the grayness that cloaked the trees. She felt a gust of cold air and saw the sun navigating the clouds scattered across the sky. She washed her dream in the light and the air and strolled in the garden sensing how the cavity inside her body had begun to take on a rounded shape. Every part was rounding out and growing warm. She sat on the edge of the tiny cavity at the center of the garden where the water pooled. She reached her right hand into the cold water and the heat in her fingers vanished. The shiver of the water spread all the way to her shoulders before falling to her breasts, where now she felt the pain of a new mother’s milk. She saw milk on those breasts, drops forming little pools and trickling across her skin, making circles, and tears escaped from her eyes, falling over the swollen breasts so that milk and tears mingled.
Milia was four when Hannah came to work as a servant in their home. But the girl did not remain with them for long. The story was that Sister Milana came to give Saadeh cotton immersed in holy oil, and stayed with her in the liwan three days and three nights altogether until she was cured. They said the mother was cured, but she was not. She’s become another woman, said Yusuf to the nun, who gave him a somber look, cleared her throat, and said, For shame, Mr. Yusuf! And, indeed, the shame sat visibly over the gray head of their father, like a halo that all of his children could see. The nun’s words formed into a ring that stuck to the hair of the man and remained there until its erasure at the moment of his death. When his sons bent over their dead father’s brow to give him a final kiss, Milia saw the halo fade. The man slept in peace during the last journey he ever made, to the land where his fellow carpenter dwelled.