Going into the kitchen, she did not put on the light because the night itself was bright. She put the little coffeepot on the flame and stood waiting but the water refused to heat up. Everything in the kitchen seemed out of the ordinary: the moonlight shooting through the window to encase the sink in its resplendent silver rays; the cicadas’ constant hass-hass-hass was almost deafening; the tracery of the tiles sparkling as if giving off their own light, and the yansun whose normal yellow had turned bluish. Milia was pressing her hands over her ears to block out the noise when she saw him, a sudden apparition that seemed to enter from nowhere. It was Mansour standing at the window turning his back to her.
I’m making a glass of yansun. Would you like one?
Suddenly she saw his baldness and her knees went weak.
And you’ve changed enormously too, said Mansour.
Milia screamed. In the name of the blessed cross! And saw that she was lying in bed wrapped up in the coverlet and there was no light anywhere.
Bells ringing. Where were the bells and why didn’t those people take the dead boy down from the bell rope?
Mitri picked her up and carried her inside his photograph as it hung on the wall. He was tall and dark-complexioned and muscular. That is how she had always imagined him. That was what he looked like in the dream of the bamboo cane and the labneh sandwich. But he was not like that at all.
Describing her son, to whom she had not given birth, Malakeh said he was thin and pale-skinned. His red tarbush tipped forward and he was never without his bamboo cane. But here he was large and dark, a brown abaya over his white robe, his right hand grasping the bamboo cane while his left hand encircled the young woman’s waist.
Put me down, leave me alone, please, please! Look, I’ll bring you arus el-labneh, I don’t want to go into the picture — one photograph is enough for me.
She screamed, NO! and opened her eyes. She recognized the hospital smell immediately and saw Mansour standing next to her, trying to keep hold of her hand.
You are sweating a lot, he said. Please, please, just calm down, everything is fine. He picked up a small towel and pressed it to her forehead and hands to soak up the beads of sweat.
Milia smiled, seeing him engrossed in his arak and his poetry. It was midsummer and very hot.
How can anyone drink arak in this heat!
Listen, he said. This is the absolutely finest line of the straying king.
You clove the heart in two so half of it is slain
and half is wrapped in chains
Not very beautiful, said Milia. Not very nice at all. I don’t like it when death is talked about this way, as if death is a word just like any other that you can toss around. That’s not what death is. It’s words — it’s talking that kills. We shouldn’t be so careless about it. And I’m not so fond anymore of these similes and metaphors. A poet imagines and then forgets. You recite the poetry with its proper rhythms and all, and then you go sleep like the dead.
But you’re forgetting something very important — before I go to sleep, I’m on fire for –
Isn’t there anything in your head except this business! I’m trying to talk about something serious. What I was starting to say is that when you go to sleep, you and these poets of yours forget whatever it is you’ve been saying and reciting. But I see these things in my dreams and they scare me. Just imagine if all of this poetry stuff became real. If people lived like they were in novels or poems, they would go mad, every one. See — no, it really is not beautiful, this poetry.
You’re the beautiful one, gorgeous!
He stood up and walked over to her, a handkerchief ready to wipe off the glistening beads of sweat running down from her bare underarm.
Do you remember? he asked her.
She said she remembered, to make him stop talking and to keep at bay the sea of memories from the days in Beirut when he fell in love and which she knew only through his words. She felt very odd and uncomfortable with these memories of love that Mansour was so insistent on establishing at the heart of their marriage. She told him she believed his memories.
It’s like — how should I put this? — like when my mother would tell stories about me as a two-year-old, and she would tell them over and over. What pleased her most was to tell the same story again. Every time, she told the same story but as if she were telling it for the very first time, until in the end she made us believe it was all completely true and we learned to take these as our stories. And now, my dear, you are going to make me believe everything that you remember. When I hear you I feel like it is me who is remembering, not me who is listening.
She was sitting in the shade of the enormous fig tree. The October sun crept through the green leaves to plant splashes of light across her bare forearms. Suddenly Mansour appeared. At the time, Milia was living through the period of apprehension that precedes marriage. When she had been with Najib she had decided that marriage would be the moment when she encountered the truth and the reality of life. She would exit the house of woe — the house her mother had made — and would take herself away from the nun’s shadow and her family to begin a new story that had no connection to the world of saints. But now she found herself with a man she knew nothing about, really, except that he said he loved her. Was it enough to feel the vibrations of another person’s love to fall in love oneself? She loved Mansour’s love and she convinced herself that he was her fate. And then came the dream that decided the issue for good. Mansour would be her great dream and she would live her story with him as she had lived all of her earlier stories.
Suddenly Mansour was there. He stood still, watching her. He did not say a word. He was looking at a drop of sweat that was forming slowly on her underarm, its weight about to pull away from her skin.
When did you come? she asked him.
He was silent.
What’s the matter with you? Aren’t you going to answer?
. .
She got up to go into the house and heard his voice begging her to stay there, exactly as she was, sitting on the little straw chair she had placed beneath the fig tree.
Allah yikhalliik, don’t get up. Please!
What is it? she asked.
Stay there, don’t move. I want to see where this water drop is going to land. He pointed to the pearl that was rolling slowly onto the underside of her arm.
She looked nervously at the sweat dripping from her underarm. She raised her other hand to wipe it away and heard his voice crying out, Don’t!
She stood up, wiped the sweat from her arm, and went toward the house. He followed her, telling her that she did not understand the meaning of love.
What is it, love? she asked.
Love is when I love everything about you, even these pearls.
Don’t say pearls — only tears are called that.
She doesn’t recall how the rest of that conversation went but now here he was, standing next to her and ready to snatch up the beads of sweat falling from her arm, puffy with pregnancy, repeating a story she has forgotten or perhaps it never happened.
He said, she had wanted to go inside then but he took hold of her forearm. She wriggled away from his hand but lost her balance and fell toward his arms and when he bent over to kiss her arm he could feel her trembling. You were like a little bird, he said.
Don’t say that, like a little bird! I told you, I don’t like similes, I don’t like comparing one thing with another because it’s never true. There’s nothing that is enough like something else for it to work. That’s why I don’t understand you.