And you believed all of this about him?
That’s not so important. What does matter is that I’m convinced where it concerns you. At first, I thought this monk was one of your hallucinations. Perhaps not, but, dearest, you need not believe him. This fellow is a devil, not a saint as you’ve been thinking.
How do I know, one way or the other?
The woman doesn’t know what to tell her husband about her first sighting of the Lebanese monk. Did she dream about him before meeting him or was it the other way around? The world of dreams flings all of its gates wide open only in that terrifying hour when the world disappears and everything melts into everything else, just as her grandmother had cried, repeating the words of Solomon the Wise, Vanity of vanities! And then, added Grandmama, everything enters the light. We see what no eye has seen. We meet again the people we know, and we meet those we don’t know, too.
Was the glass that the man set down on the windowsill a dream or did it really happen? How had she recognized this man when she saw him on the street at the Virgin’s Spring? He had come up to her and told her to follow him. I am asking you one thing, Marta, he said. Come, follow me. And she did.
She told Mansour now that she wanted to go to sleep because things were confused in her memory. Mansour had changed and so had she. A single year had been enough for her to see life unrolling ahead of her; to sense inside herself an implacable aging that left her fatigued — tired of life and the upsets and reversals of time. For a thousand years in your sight, Lord, are but a yesterday now gone or like a mere watch of the night.
When she catches sight of the photographs of her mother-in-law or those of Asma, she is left feeling wearily sad. How has the house filled up with portraits like this? When they were married the photographer was there in the house and at the church, looming up in front of the bride and groom to snap pictures and asking Milia — tears clinging to her eyelashes — to smile. The camera’s aperture and that black cloth behind which the photographer hid stayed in Milia’s memory. She was apprehensive lest the photographer steal the color of her eyes from her, as had the photographer from Zahleh whom Musa had brought to the house, and so she kept them closed. The photographer begged her to open them, at first with gentle phrases and then in growing irritation, to create some light in the photo. When they passed through Beirut again on their way to Nazareth, Mansour refused to wait. The man had said, only two more days, no more, and the photographs would be ready. He asked Musa to send the photographs to Nazareth. But since the roads between Lebanon and Palestine had been closed, Milia had never seen her wedding photographs.
Actually, no one had seen those photographs. In a fit of anger the photographer tore them up. When Musa came to his little studio he told him he had ripped the pictures to shreds because they would not uphold his reputation. The bride did not open her eyes, he said, not even once! As though she were sleeping.
Saadeh was angry. Then she asked her son to write to his sister and to tell her to bring her wedding dress with her when she next visited Beirut with her husband. They can be photographed again, Saadeh said. What difference would it make? Everyone has to have a wedding photo.
Milia had no idea what had happened to her wedding photos. Mansour never asked about them. He put mirrors throughout the house, a big one in the sitting room and smaller ones in the dining room and bedroom. Milia did not object until he tried to put a mirror in the kitchen. She said no to that. It doesn’t make any sense! she fumed. Have you ever heard of anyone putting a mirror in the kitchen?
Mansour said he wanted the house to fill with a single image that he could see everywhere. I want to see you, my love, that’s all. He made an obsessive project out of convincing Milia to stand in front of the mirror, first thing in the morning, so that he could prove to her that nothing radiates a woman’s beauty like love.
See how beautiful you’ve gotten? That’s from love. You were asleep, and you were as warm as bread out of the oven — you were gorgeous this time! I turned you over on your back. . it was so-o-o sweet. The most beautiful it’s ever been.
Stop talking like that!
So, you don’t agree with me? That this was the best ever?
Mansour made up for pictures with mirrors. Otherwise he left the walls entirely bare. One time when his mother had upbraided him for not hanging a portrait of his late father in the sitting room — after all, that is what everyone does — he told her he hated photographs. Those pictures freeze people! he said. They look dead. I would rather keep the image of my father that I have in my head.
But your father is dead and gone, his mother said.
Dismissing her words with a brush of his hand, Mansour said, No, a person does not die — but we kill him when we hang his likeness on the wall. In his memory, his father lived on, he wanted her to understand. And he did not want to assassinate that papa who lived in his mind by hanging a photo on the wall.
Why did you kill her, Musa?
Suddenly the house was crowded with pictures. First, Mansour hung an enormous photograph of his brother swathed in black. Then he added one of his father, and then portraits of his brother’s children. Finally, he brought a picture of his mother and along with it a photo of the widow in her wedding dress, standing next to her husband. He even stuck photographs into the mirror frames that were now nearly everywhere in the house. Little photos, enlargements — Mansour even came back from Jaffa one day with a long-faded photograph. He said he would search for a portraitist who could reapply the oils because it was a rare picture of the late lamented with his mujahideen companions.
Why did you kill her, Musa?
Milia felt no jealousy at all. Me?? I don’t think I’ve ever been jealous, not even with Najib. No, I never felt any jealousy.
You’d be right to feel some. Tomorrow the photographer is coming to take a picture of you so we can put it in here.
I don’t want my picture taken!
I want a picture like the one in your family’s home.
Why did you kill her, Musa?
Little Milia stands alone amidst the mirrors, looking at herself in the descending early evening. She sees the lane outside in the large mirror in the dar, and then, in the mirror, she sees Musa striding into the house hoisting a large black-and-white photograph of a woman on a yellowing background. Seeing her brother, she hurries to hide under the sofa, waiting for him to come in search of her as he invariably does. But the swarthy young man in a white shirt does not turn toward his sister. He fishes in a small toolbox and takes out a hammer and a few nails, and begins pounding the picture onto the large mirror that his image has just passed across. Milia puts her hands over her ears so that she will not have to hear the mirror shatter beneath the heavy nails, which transform the light beaming from the mirror into splinters.