Did he dream about the bell they strangled him with? asked Milia.
No, about his mother, and Lord preserve us, he asked if I could smell his mother’s scent. He told me that his father did not even buy a new mattress when he married me. He pulled a fast one on me, that man. He told me he had bought a new bed but the truth is, he repainted the old one and did not even change the mattress. From that day on I couldn’t sleep. I started getting up in the night and walking through the house like a ghost. Nakhleh thought I couldn’t sleep from grief. A week after the boy died I screamed at my husband. You either get a new bed and change the mattress or I’m going back to my family!
Saadeh would not talk about her dead brother. All she said was that her mother, Malakeh, had borne a lot for his sake. She had stayed in mourning for four years and had decided to do as all bereaved mothers did, staying in black until the end of her life. But her husband ruled against that. It’s not your affair, he told her. He was not your son. He was his mother’s son. Nakhleh forced her to take off her black mourning clothes.
His mother’s son died of strangulation in the end. Samih Zurayq said that he came with his brothers to the churchyard to participate in ringing the bell, and that they had forgotten all about the fight after the apology that Nakhleh Shalhoub offered the Zurayq family on behalf of his son. But no sooner did Mitri see them — and he was already clinging on to the bell rope — than he began to soar upward. They did not understand how he could climb the rope like that, but he went up and up, while the bell pealed as no one had ever heard it ring before. Samih said they saw that boy fly and they did not take in what was happening until the sound of the bell began to deaden and grow faint. When they saw Mitri hanging by his neck and flopping around like a just-slaughtered bird, Samih said they grabbed on to the rope to rescue him but when they reached him it was too late because his neck had already stretched thinner than the rope, and the face at the end of it was bright blue. Nakhleh was not exactly convinced by what they said but there was nothing he could do about it. Starting a war with the sons of Zurayq would mean certain death for him, and revenge would not bring back the boy who had been sent back into his mother’s womb, just as they had predicted.
Do you mean that when people die they go back to their mother’s womb? Milia asked Grandmama Malakeh.
Girl, what are you talking about! Remember, like I told you, death is a dream. A person stays where he is and journeys at the same time, and comes back only after traveling to the light.
But why did they kill him, Grandmama?
No one killed him, dear. Don’t believe what your grandpapa says. He went senile from crying so much. It was his grief that invented this story about the sons of Zurayq hanging the boy on the bell rope. No, the poor boy died of fright. Nothing brings death more than being afraid of death. Your grandpapa is old and feeble. When I married him he was twenty years older than me, and now, look, he seems forty years older, maybe even more, God give me patience with him! I told him not to tell this story to the children but when a person gets old he returns to what he was like as a child and he doesn’t know how to talk to anyone but children. Forget the story, my girl. The real story isn’t Mitri’s, it’s mine. I was the stupid one. I don’t know how I ever agreed to marry a widow.
Malakeh’s marriage was a great surprise: a girl of twenty marrying a widower who had already passed his fortieth birthday. Was it his wealth? True, the story that had imprinted itself in Milia’s memory took place when Nakhleh and his only son were working as porters in Beirut harbor. But Nakhleh was not originally a porter and he would not die in poverty. That was the barren patch, as he called that period of time, when the silkworms went as ugly as common worms. Lebanon in the last years of the nineteenth century saw the beginnings of the famine that would devour it during World War I, laying ruin to a third of its population while emigration swallowed up the rest and only those who had no way to leave remained.
Nakhleh had no way to leave and found himself unable to make a living. Sometime around 1890 the man decided to shut his silk goods shop in Abd el-Malik Street, roll up the sleeves of his qumbaz, and get to work. That was how he and his son ended up at the port of Beirut. The truth is that it was Mitri who was the porter; his father simply organized and oversaw his son’s labor. But things improved. Nakhleh said it was Khawaja Efthymios who paid off his debts and thus he saw his way clear to reopening his little shop — but only after it was too late.
It was too late because Mitri died of hanging, and a lifetime was lost because the man did not dare to demand revenge for his slain son. From that moment — the instant of Mitri’s death and discovery — the household was turned completely upside down and Malakeh took over everything.
Why did Milia tell Mansour this story? Was she trying to convince him not to go to Jaffa or was she trying to find a relationship between her grandfather Salim and his Egyptian lover and the dream of her aunt that changed her life? Milia heard the name Efthymios one time only on the tongue of her grandmama. Malakeh was talking with her daughter Saadeh and said something about the moment of release when Efthymios paid Nakhleh. Saadeh asked, Efthymios the very same? Seems Mr. Sergios shows up wherever we are. That sentence stuck in the girl’s mind; and now here it was again intermingling with the sound of the bell.
She wanted to say, None of this has anything to do with me. She wanted to say that she was her own person: I am me; I am not my grandmama nor my great-great-grandmama, Lord, how different people become mixed up inside me. I don’t know who I am anymore.
He was like that, too, said Tanyous the monk. As he went to the cross he did not feel that he was himself. He felt everyone becoming a part of him. He tried to keep his memories apart but he saw everything together. He became mother and father, the Sitt and the Sayyid, Lady and Lord and lamb. Because he was everything, he could say nothing. If he could have talked, what would he have said? And if he did have things to say, who would have understood him? And if he found someone who did understand, who would believe?
Milia was walking on the road that led down to the Virgin’s Wellspring when she heard these words. She sensed the sky opening before her and she had an inkling that she was here to protect Mitri from death. She gave the boy the name Mitri in her mind. No, the truth was that the first name that came into her mind was Issa. She wanted to name the boy Issa, the Messiah’s name in Arabic. As a sign and a good omen, she wanted to be called Umm el-Nur, Mother of Light, as the Virgin had been called. But she did not dare announce that, even quietly to her husband. So she named him Mitri out of fear for him. She wanted to protect him from the bell and prevent the sons of Zurayq from slaying him. But her heart filled with fear because his father would take him to Jaffa, and there he would find only war and death waiting for him. She was not afraid of childbirth as her husband believed. She was certain she could lean against the trunk of a palm tree and give birth if need be; she would not even need Sister Milana there to raise the baby and imprint his image on the stark white hospital wall, as the nun had raised her high in the liwan of the old Beirut house.
Mansour said his name would be Amin. Suddenly the boy had a different name and Milia felt alone in the world. She was accustomed to talking with him, addressing him by one of his two names. There was the public one which, after a great deal of debate, had been settled on as Ilyas — for this would be auspicious, to name him after the Prophet Ilyas the Ever-Living whose secret Milia had come to know from her visit to him in Maarrat Sidnaya near Damascus where she slept in his grotto and felt the savor of eternity blending with the fragrance of the nectar of local wild figs that she had eaten. And there was his secret name, Mitri, for the sake of her only uncle, whom she had never met except in her dreams. The two names were felled in a single blow when Amin died in Jaffa. In her seventh month of pregnancy she had to get accustomed to a new name and a new child.