No, it won’t be today, then. I am not having the baby today. The doctor said it would come during the night of the twenty-fourth.
Mansour dragged a small case into the room and asked his aunt to help in packing Milia’s things. Milia stared at herself in the mirror. Her entire face was puffy and her usually pale cheeks were almost saffron. She saw black circles under her eyes. The stomach pains came again and she moaned. Mansour hurried over to her and helped her sit down on the edge of the bed. Yallah, we must go! he said, turning to his aunt, who seemed lost among drawerfuls of clothes. Aunt, we’re not putting together a trousseau. Just a nightgown and two sets of things, that’s enough. I can bring more if we need it.
Milia found herself in the car. Mansour sat next to the driver and she sat in the backseat next to his aunt. Passing through a narrow, choked street, the car turned right and began to climb the hill toward the Italian Hospital. A flash of light lit the sky and heavy rain began to fall. Shivering, Milia complained of the cold. The aunt removed her coat and covered Milia with it. The car seemed unable to mount the steep incline. It bellowed as if calling desperately for help and the tires spun, unable to gain purchase on the asphalt.
It’s the tires, said the driver. Not catching the road.
The driver pulled up on the hand brake and put the car into low gear. He pressed the accelerator pedal to the floor and the car emitted a strange sound as though it were a wounded animal groaning. It started to climb, juddering violently.
What is it? asked Milia.
Nothing, said the driver.
When the car reached the top of the slope and began to slither over the puddles, the motor died and all they could hear was the patter of rain.
What do we do now? asked Mansour.
We can’t do anything, said the driver.
Mansour opened the door and heard Milia scream, No, don’t get out! He closed the car door and began to plead with the driver to do something. The woman will have her baby right here! Please, get us moving somehow. Both front doors opened and Mansour and the driver got out simultaneously. Milia saw the two men disappear behind the car trunk, which was now open. She turned to the aunt sitting next to her but the aunt was not there. She closed her eyes on the first streaks of darkness that were creeping in between the splashes of rain. She heard her father saying, Snow. It’s starting to snow.
Where did you go, Mansour? she screamed. Mansour is not here and she is alone in the car wrapped in a brown overcoat, shivering with cold.
The two men returned to the car. The aunt’s hand went to her brow as if she needed to check her body temperature. Mansour twisted around in his seat and asked her to hold herself together. She said she did not feel the pain anymore but she was afraid, seeing the thickness of the fog.
There’s no fog, he said. But she saw fog and she saw the snow coming down hard and she saw a man in the distance carrying a tiny girl, running with her beneath the falling snow. What had brought her father here, into this storm? Why was he carrying her and running through the driving snow? Cradling his daughter, Yusuf was running to Dr. Naqfour’s clinic. He had snatched her out of bed while the nun recited prayers over her and swung incense across her body. The nun told her to open her mouth and swallow the oil-imbued cotton. Yusuf snatched his daughter from the nun, wrapped her in their brown woolen blanket, and ran to the doctor’s clinic. That year the snow came down hard in Beirut. Milia did not remember the snow, but she remembered the woolen blanket and her father’s hard breathing. The girl was four years old. She remembered hearing crying around her bed and having the sensation of floating above her fiery body. Did she hear the word death? She did not know. No, perhaps not then, perhaps only later, when her grandmother told her the story and she sensed how close death had passed, in the form of a fever that consumed her tiny body for ten days. Malakeh said she was reassured when she awoke the feverish girl to ask what she was dreaming and Milia’s reddened eyes opened to answer her grandmother that she wasn’t dreaming. Malakeh was relieved because — as she said — death requires a long, long dream. She told her daughter Saadeh not to worry, and she went home.
No, Papa, I don’t want to! shouted Milia trying to wriggle out of her father’s grip. She waved her hands about and the blanket slipped down, snowflakes wetting her skin and causing her to shout as if the falling snow were stinging her. Papa, let’s go back home! But Yusuf paid no attention. He ran on and on, tears streaming from his eyes. You are my darling, ya habibti, he babbled. He ran beneath the pounding snow until they reached an enormous black door. At his rapping the door opened. The snow stopped falling and darkness covered the girl’s eyes. At that point memories snapped out like a light.
The driver lit a cigarette and began puffing nervously. No smoking, please! said Mansour. Can’t you see the woman is pregnant and having difficulties? The driver opened the car window to toss the cigarette outside and the cold wind hurtling in flapped open the aunt’s overcoat covering Milia. She whimpered, feeling the baby shiver in her belly. Sacred Virgin! she cried out. She heard the sound of the car engine starting up and found herself at the hospital entrance.
The Italian doctor who examined Milia said, No, nothing today, perhaps tomorrow. He asked Mansour to take his wife home and observe her condition. When the pains in her belly come one right after another, he said, and the pain is getting stronger, bring her back to the hospital. There’s no need for her to be here right now.
Yes, that’s right, she said, and stood up immediately. Yallah, home, she said to her husband, who could not believe his eyes, seeing how the thread of pain slid away from her eyes as if the doctor’s words were a magic remedy that wiped the contractions from her pale face so that the black lines ringing her eyes vanished and the milky limpidity of her cheeks returned.
Yallah, home, she said, and walked out. The rain had stopped. Rays of sun cut through the gray cloud cover dusting the city.
Where’re you going? Wait, I will call the driver.
No, I want to walk, she said, and walked on.
Is it all right for her to walk, doctor? asked Mansour. But the doctor had disappeared and there remained in the room only two nurses who looked exactly alike except that one was young and the other old, the first one lighter and the second one darker. Mansour assumed the paler one was Italian, so he tried to ask her the question in English. The nurse smiled and gestured to indicate that she did not understand anything that was being said. He turned to the dark one and asked her in Arabic. She smiled too, as if she too didn’t understand, and raised her eyebrows to suggest that he would find an answer only upstairs. Mansour left the hospital to find that Milia was not outside. He stood in front of the Italian Hospital like a man lost before the city’s many alleyways and twists, not knowing which way to turn in order to find his wife. He saw his aunt and the driver waiting for him in front of the American car. He got into the front passenger seat and asked his aunt to get into the back.
We want to go home, he said to the driver.
What about Milia? asked his aunt.
Later, said Mansour.
Milia walked on, as if the pain and the scene of her father carrying her in his arms as she begged him to put her down because she wanted to walk had generated in her a desire to find him now, to tell him she had reached the end of the road and was preparing to depart for a distant city.
Milia said she remembered the very first time she had walked. Her father was carrying her in his arms, she said, and she was crying. I started pulling and wriggling to get down but my papa didn’t understand what I wanted. I heard my mama tell him to put me down. I didn’t know how to speak but I did understand and I watched myself being lowered to the floor, on my belly. He thought I wanted to crawl but I grabbed on to a chair leg and pulled myself up, and began walking. Everything began turning around me and I heard my mother saying, The girl is walking! and she started ululating to let everyone know the happy news. And from that moment I never stopped walking. I was always walking round the house as if I had just discovered the world. It looks so different from above!