That morning when she leaned toward him and brushed her fingers along his eyebrows and kissed them, Mansour felt like a child. He had as much as admitted seeing her by chance and following her, and standing behind the wall looking at her as she sat on a rock in front of the church steps.
Now really, how did you see me?
She said she had seen him with her back because she could see everything in her dreaming. She told him how a person sees in all four directions when dreaming. She asked him about his dreams. He never saw dreams in his sleep, he said.
That can’t be, she said. You just don’t remember your dreams. She explained to him that a person has to train the memory. Dreams are an extension of a person’s life. We live as much by night as by day, she declared, and anyone who can’t remember his dreams is only living life by halves.
She heard her grandmother’s husky voice explaining the importance of dreams in a person’s life.
I’m not like that, said Mansour. I never dream, never ever.
Everyone dreams, she said.
For three months now Milia had been growing rounder, with pregnancy and sleepiness and thirst. Her breasts were swelling and her face had grown radiant. He asked her why she walked by herself every day. Why didn’t she come with him? They could stroll together in the evenings after he had returned home from work. He asked her if it made her sad to live so far away from her family.
She regarded him without answering at first. Then she said she wanted to acquaint the little boy with the town.
Which little boy? asked Mansour. For us, I hope so! But my heart tells me it’s a girl. My mother says that if a pregnant woman gets more beautiful as she gets more pregnant, that means it will be a girl. And you are getting more beautiful all the time.
I said boy. He is a boy.
On the day she covered her tiny breasts with her crossed arms, it dawned on Milia that she was on her way to a remote place from which she would never be able to return. In that rocky pool embedded in the sea her bare breasts exposed her. Her breasts betrayed her and it was on that very evening that the lamb appeared to her in a dream that would recur so frequently that Milia would no longer be able to tell it. Waking up, she would simply recall it as if it had happened in fact. In her sleep it came like an anticipated monthly visitor: a small white lamb skipping across an expanse of green grass. Milia sleeps beneath a spreading fig tree, her eyes shut tightly and her small brown body curled into a half circle. The little lamb comes up to her and stands over her. He puts his cheek to hers. The little girl turns over to lie on her back. He steps back, hesitates, and then scampers toward her, leaps atop her, and puts his front legs on her chest. He pokes his head downward as though to eat the grass. The little girl who sleeps sees nothing but the rays of the sun, piercing the lamb’s coat as they pour into her open eyes. The lamb’s little mouth wanders near her eyes so she closes them. She’s afraid he might think her green eyes are of a piece with the grass in the garden and swallow them up. She closes her eyes, feels the tiny lamb’s tongue on her neck, and breathes in the smell of the sun. The sun lamb quivers and gives off heat. There is a sharp pain at the pit of her belly, tangled somehow with the intense green all around her and with her closed eyes. Milia wakes up but she does not dare open her eyes. The heat encloses her and hot blood dribbles onto her thighs. She gets up and washes her thighs in cold water. She stuffs a towel between them and goes back to sleep.
Kharuf ish-shams, she named him. The sun lamb. He arrived ringed by a blue halo that gave off a strong light but his appearance took on different aspects. Sometimes he ran over her little body, which expanded to become an unbounded pasture. Or he might perch on her chest and nuzzle her shoulders. Once he buried his head in her neck. She was constantly fearful for her eyes. When the lamb was there, contrary to habit, she would wake up but shut her eyes.
The little lamb vanished when the embryo began to form in her belly. He would not reappear until the end of December 1947 as Milia listened to the doctor’s voice telling her to push as she went into her long dreamsleep. That day the little lamb would reappear, leaving her with emotions of longing and fear so strong that they overpowered her caution: she forgot that she must keep her eyes closed to shield them from the lamb’s tiny mouth. And so she tried to open them, before the white wool covered them completely, tracing blue halos around them.
The man sleeping at her side was breathing deeply, the sound of it interrupted at intervals by a light whistling in his nose. She rubbed the traces of the journey through the heavy fog from her eyes and tried to collect her memories.
Milia did not know this man. Rather, she knew him but only as her future husband. The tale of passion Mansour lived had skimmed over her without leaving its impress. When, on the evening before the wedding, he related parts of the story to her, she felt she had missed the only story worth living.
He came the evening before the wedding when no one was expecting him. According to custom a bridegroom is not in evidence that day. He spends the evening with his pals at a goodbye-to-bachelorhood party, which is what they call the last sordid fling the groom allows himself before entering the straitjacket of marriage. But Mansour was not like that — not because he was an extraordinarily well-behaved fellow but because he had no such friends in Beirut. Mansour showed up at the Shahin family home on that cold December evening in order to make apologies for his family, who were not able to come to the wedding because of the accumulating troubles in Palestine. He expressed their wish that the bride’s family would not postpone the festivities. Musa was sitting in the dar with his mother and the unexpected guest while Milia stood in the kitchen making the coffee. Musa’s eyebrows knitted and the mother made no response. Bearing the coffee tray, Milia entered a profoundly silent room. She set the tray down on the table before the guest, poured the four cups from the little coffeepot, and said, as if continuing a sentence she had already begun, There’s no problem.
There’s no problem, repeated Musa.
Ala barakat Allah, said Mansour, his voice quavering, and he stood up to take his leave. The mother yawned and stood up to wish him goodbye.
Sit down, all of you, said Milia. Let the man drink his coffee, she said to her mother, tugging her by the arm until she sat down again.
Mansour sat forward on the edge of the sofa as if keeping himself tensed to leap up at any moment. He took a swallow of coffee. Sitting opposite him, Milia gazed at him as if she expected him to begin telling a story.
You know. . Mansour’s voice trailed off.
I know, Milia responded. Things are not going so well.
That’s not what I meant to say, said Mansour.
The silence hung on them, broken only by Musa leaving the room. The oil lamp flickered. Milia wore a yellow dress. She supported her chin in her hands waiting to hear what the man would say. The mother slipped out of the room and one kind of silence blended into another.
She wanted to say to him that he, too, had plans for a last-minute flight in his head but she did not say it. Her lips held the shadow of a melancholy smile as her hand brushed away specters of memories that had crept into her eyes. For the very first time she was sitting alone in a half-dark room with this man who — a few hours from now — would become her husband. She sensed his fear. How could she say to him that she had known he would visit this evening to tell her that his family would not be coming from Nazareth?