Mansour no longer knew how to deal with this woman, for her habits had changed since his brother’s slaying. She no longer got up early. When he left for work she would still be asleep; when he returned home from work he would not find her at home. He learned not to search for her in the town’s streets because if he found her, she would be furious at him. She would accuse him of treating her like a little girl. His new routine was to come home from work and sit waiting for her, anxiety gnawing at him. When she came in she behaved as if nothing had happened. She would go to the kitchen and warm up his meal and as he ate she sat silently by, neither eating nor talking. Whenever he tried to ask her a question her eyes filled with tears and she would say she was worn out and needed to go to bed.
But where do you go every day, God be pleased with you, Milia! This is not good for the child. You are in your final month and the doctor ordered you to rest.
But I’m walking for the child’s sake.
How is that?
How can I make you understand, when it really is not your affair. I don’t want to go to Jaffa, I want to stay here.
But you know why we have to go.
I know and I don’t know, but I’m afraid for my son.
This is crazy talk. You must see a doctor who can talk some sense into you.
He lifted his glass and looked into her eyes and began to recite.
A regard that is drowsy, should it gaze,
or weak and ill and yet to awaken
Lashes line eyes holding nothing impure:
a beauty to cure all eyes forsaken
You are right, Milia, and I’m in the wrong. I have changed and you don’t bear any blame for that. But, look, we have walked a destined road, and what is destined to be, had to be where we strode. Let’s go back to the good old days. Where’s the laban immuh? I am longing to have it — tomorrow, make me laban immuh! We’ll have a glass and recite poetry like we used to do.
He put out his hand to feel for the baby in her belly and she jumped back. No — please, no, she said.
But I want to hear his voice with my hands, Mansour said.
Mansour did not understand her fear. Hearing her wail in the night that she wanted to go home, he promised to arrange to send her to Beirut. But she started, as if that frightened her even more, and said no. She did not want to go to Beirut. She had come to Nazareth to stay. And, she told him, she had begun to fear him because he was hearing her dreams, and when a person can listen to another’s dreams the listener can control the dreamer.
Since the death of his brother, their mother, Umm Amin, had become a different woman. Suddenly and without any advance warning she became terribly attached to Mansour. In him, she declared, she saw the image of his brother; she had never really paid attention to how alike they were; why, they were as alike as two tears from the same eye!
Is this exactly the way Umm Amin had put it? Most likely not, for this was Milia’s manner of speaking. In the morning, when Milia had just risen from sleep, her speech was soft and pliable. Speech was like dew, Milia told Mansour. Dew appears in the moment that connects nighttime to day; getting up, her mouth held the fresh aroma of this moment. He said he loved to kiss her in the morning because her lips tasted like fresh basil. When she spoke in the morning she used words that were sweet and fresh, words through which the breeze blew, words the like of which Mansour had never heard except in ancient Arabic poetry.
Why did Mansour mix up his mother’s speech with his wife’s? Was it because a man loves only one woman in his life — his mother — and then spends his entire life searching for her? Mansour was not any such man. He told Milia he despised his mother’s immoderate affection for his brother. He did not understand how the mother had been able to organize all of life to revolve around her, so that she was the pivot of the household and the engine behind the family business. Asma — Amin’s wife — was like a mere visitor in her own home. She could not do anything on her own, and if God had not made a woman’s breasts a fountain for the nourishment of children, then the woman would have found herself without anything to do at all.
With her beloved son dead, the older woman wandered aimlessly like a lost soul. The once-imperious eyes were broken and an uncharacteristic timidity came over her. The wife was another story, though. The woman who had kept to herself and had made her body and personality practically invisible, as if she were secluded from all eyes and veiled in bashfulness, became a new woman. The beauty of her black eyes was revealed and that beauty shone; and Lady Asma became the household’s presiding mistress. Between night and day roles were reversed. Mansour told Milia he had been taken completely unawares by Asma’s beauty. Where was all this loveliness hiding? he exclaimed. I mean, is it reasonable for a woman to become beautiful when her husband dies? They used to bury women with their husbands because a man’s death meant the end of her life, too. See how things have changed?
Now Mansour said to her firmly: I cannot leave my mother on her own.
So now it’s your love for your mother, is it? Fine, I don’t have anything to say about this and everything will happen just as you want. But I am afraid for you — and for my son, too. I mean, we don’t have to put ourselves in the paths of death as your brother did.
Where had Mansour found this new language? He stood in the kitchen and spoke of the Persian poet Abd el-Rahiim Mahmoud, and quoted a verse of his:
I will cradle my soul in the palm of my hand
Yet I’ll hurtle it down ruin’s dank pit below:
I will lead my own life to give my friends joy
or I’ll die me a death to curdle my foe
That isn’t poetry, Milia said. I mean, would you ever claim that this can compare to the verse of Mutanabbi?
Should you hazard an honor for which you yearn,
aim not for any less than the stars!
Death’s essence can be but one flavor, one fate
whether faced for ideals or mere scars
No, no — this one’s even finer — listen!
Knowing death meets the foot soldier, you stood your ground
As though ruin’s eyelid held you bound as it slept
Heroes tread past you though in wounded defeat
and your face is alight, your mouth smiles: you accept!
But I love these two lines:
A sole departure left us apart:
now death is a true leave-taking
Has this night not seen your eyes through my vision:
wasting to nothing in abject forsaking?
Now isn’t the time for love poetry, said Mansour. Listen again!
Think not of glory as wineskin and songstress:
it is naught but the sword that kills at first slash,
to strike off kings’ necks, and glory is to see
the black swirls of dust as the fierce soldiers clash
Bring me poetry like this! Bring me a poet like Mutanabbi, and then I’ll go anywhere! Then the taste of war becomes the tang of poetry, and poetry’s flavor is the deliciousness of love. But this fellow who carries his soul in his palm, well. .