The hotel manager, Khawaja Salhab, told me he had decided to ban the man from coming to the restaurant because every Sunday now he was getting drunk and picking arguments with customers. It isn’t a pleasant scene — a man of religion and always drunk, I don’t want this fellow around, said Khawaja Salhab. But now, tell me — between you and me, what do American girls taste like?
Musa said no one believed his version. They all insisted that they believed him but he could read the envy in their eyes, as if he had indeed slept with the girl. In the end, even he believed the story and in fact he would retell it to his own son Iskandar, who worked as a reporter and editor at the Ahrar newspaper in Beirut. When Musa turned seventy, the son asked his father what the truth was about the relationship between Marika and the bishop. And somehow Musa ended up telling him the story of his year at Lake Tiberias, when he was eighteen. He related how he had put his arms around the American girl, who didn’t say a word, and then suddenly all he wanted was to run away. It wasn’t that he made a decision to leave the place, but he just suddenly left. That was the last thing I expected, he confided to his son. I saw myself — without even quite understanding what was happening — inside her and I was terrified. All I remember is how frightened I was and how alone I felt as I listened to her calling for help.
So, that story was true? asked his son.
I don’t know. I do know for certain that the clergyman did not tell the truth. I hadn’t yet discovered the way things work. I always refused to go with other young men to Tel Aviv. They said, There you can find bars and women. I didn’t go, not once. Later, in Beirut, I learned the way with a girl from Aleppo — I don’t remember her name. But that’s how the world was in our time. A fellow couldn’t do anything outside of the whores’ souq. That’s where we all learned. But the American girl in Tiberias — that really was a love story, and she crossed it off. Maybe it had nothing to do with her. Her father was crazy-mad and he made up the rape and all of that. But the real problem was the nun. The nun announced that she smelled sin. My mother, God have mercy on her, started pressuring me to go to church and confess, and I didn’t have anything to confess to. What was I going to say? Anyway, the truly important thing is that the only one who stood with me, and told my mother to leave me alone, was my dear sister, Milia.
Musa looked up at the picture hanging on the wall and tears began to roll down his cheeks.
Why are you crying, Musa, habibi! called out Milia.
The woman lying on the birthing bed was moaning and crying. The two nurses stood by and the doctor was grumbling.
This is not going to go smoothly, the doctor said.
Nurse I said there was a problem. Nurse II said the woman’s face was turning blue.
The Italian doctor went over to the window, raised the sash, and gulped fresh air. The older nurse asked him what she should do, but instead of answering he turned to the second nurse and said in a low voice that he did not really understand what was happening. The young nurse bent toward him and asked him to repeat what he had said. Nothing, he replied.
The doctor was not Italian, as Mansour had thought. The name et-Talyani stuck to him because he had studied in Italy and had come back to Palestine bringing a very pretty Italian wife who stole the hearts of the Nazareth populace. Rita was considered the epitome of beauty in the small city bursting with monasteries, convents, churches, monks, and nuns. So Ghassan el-Hilw came to be called et-Talyani, after his eccentric wife, who carried a white parasol summer and winter, walking through the Nazareth alleys searching for the wondrous event, hoping to carry a baby. Four years went by without any sign of that longed-for pregnancy, and sometime in their fifth year living in Nazareth she traveled to her country of origin and never came back. But the doctor would not acknowledge the possibility that his wife would not return. He spoke of her as if she had gone on a short visit to her family and would be back in Nazareth next week. He went on expecting her and waiting for her, or so everyone thought. Months passed, and years, and the man went on repeating the same words he had always said whenever he was asked about his Italian wife — who, he said, was on a short visit to her mother, who was ill. The doctor began to walk through the city streets with his wife’s white parasol held firmly upright. He mixed Arabic with Italian and he went on practicing as the first gynecologist Nazareth had ever known.
The doctor bent over the young nurse whom Milia had named Wadiia II, his mouth giving off the smell of cigarettes. The nurse averted her face but turned back to the doctor and raised her fingers to her face to remind him that he must stop smoking. But hearing a moan, she bent over the pregnant woman, to hear her say something unclear about crying.
What’s the story, doctor? she asked.
Honestly I don’t know. It is very strange. Everything looks perfectly normal, but she reacts as though she’s afraid.
Yallah, my dear, the nurse said to the moaning woman. We’ve gotten through a lot of it already — there isn’t much more to do.
Milia’s eyelashes unraveled and a single tear came out from the corner of her left eye. She told Musa fiercely that he mustn’t cry.
Don’t cry, habibi. It’s a dream, that’s all. Just open your eyes and everything will go back to the way it was, and then you will see there’s nothing to be afraid of.
But Musa did not open his eyes. The little boy tossed and tossed in bed next to his sister, dreams fluttering and beating their wings around his eyes, never leaving him alone. She had seen him coming in the darkness. Little Musa dragged his bare feet across the tiles of the liwan and approached his sister’s bed. His green striped pajamas shivered and rippled beneath the silvery shadows of the moon creeping in from the window. He moved sluggishly toward his sister. Milia made a place for him next to her in bed, extending her arm so that he could drop his head onto it and fall asleep. But the boy simply climbed heavily into his sister’s bed, drew himself into a ball, and dropped immediately into a deep slumber. Milia pulled her arm back, turned onto her left side, closed her eyes, and saw herself stealing into her brother’s dream.
Musa sat in the garden exhaling his cigarette smoke and thinking about the story he did not know how to tell anyone. Since his return from Tiberias he no longer knew what he wanted out of this earthly life. His mother, Saadeh, was constantly in pain, or at least she moaned all the time, but after the marriage of her daughter and Milia’s move to Nazareth, their mother had had no choice but to take an interest in the house and to do the work necessary to keep a family. Salim had gone to Aleppo, taking Najib with him, staying there with the Aleppan carpenter who got rid of his two daughters in one fell swoop. Niqula and Abdallah had transformed the father’s shop into a small coffin-making factory. They had married the two Abu’l-Lamaa sisters and now were wont to act like a pair of fatuous emirs on the sole basis that they were in-laws of a family that had inherited the title of emir sometime in the bygone Ottoman era — even though that family lived in the genteel poverty of the eminent. Musa understood well that the invalid mother would be his lot since all of his brothers had left the house. Musa was convinced that the family had fallen apart because of Salim’s idiotic behavior and his mother’s underhanded ways. He did not understand that his mother was completely innocent when it came to Salim’s plot and its disastrous effect on his sister’s anticipated fortune in marriage, when he convinced Najib that their marriages to the two well-off Aleppan sisters was the solution to the problem of poverty that there seemed no escaping. When Niqula erupted and said he would kill his brother — that dog! — Musa looked at his mother as if he were accusing her. The mother protested that she had not known anything, but Musa was certain that she had blessed the step taken by her eldest son. In the end, after Musa wedded Adèle Niameh and they moved into the old house, their mother decided to move out, because Adèle could not endure the continuing charade of Saadeh’s illnesses, and because Saadeh knew she did not want to end as Hasiba had, breathing in an air of disgust and fear and loss of memory. Musa rented an apartment for his mother near the convent, where she lived alone but also in the company of the saint whose eyes the blue water of glaucoma had begun to consume so that eventually she was swimming in a world of blue incense that gave her to feel that the saints surrounded her on every side.