The little boy regained his height and returned to his manhood. He knitted his brows, looked full at his sister, and said, Yes.
As you wish, she said.
He did not ask her what her relationship was with this man. He did not say that Mansour had said, when he asked for her hand, that Milia had assented and had divulged her love. He felt betrayed but he did not use this word when he asked his sister how she felt about it.
Do you love him?
She gazed at him as if she did not understand what he meant. She smiled and said she had consented because Mansour reminded her of him.
You know, it’s as if he is you, she said.
Me! he answered, a hint of disapproval and reproach in his voice.
You’re better looking, but he looks enough like you to be your brother.
Musa frowned and muttered something about the wiles of women.
What are you saying? I didn’t hear you, Milia said.
Congratulations, sister.
That day Milia sensed she must discover life anew, as though she had been born that very moment, or as though (as she bent over her little brother’s eyelashes and then straightened up to stand facing the youth who had reached twenty and whose head already glinted with a few white strands) she had passed through her entire life thus far as though traversing a dream. She pressed her palms to her eyes briefly and then stretched her arms forward, trying to glean the sense of the words coming from her brother’s lips.
He told her she would go to Nazareth immediately after the wedding.
As you wish, Milia said, dropping her head slightly. Her steady gaze broke on the floor tiles, tracing their floral pattern on a background of black.
The photographer would come the next day, Musa said. I want you to still be here with us. So I’m going to hang your picture on the wall, just here.
The photograph that was fixed to the white wall in the sitting room would stay there for years. When Musa inherited the house from his mother he left the picture there, as though it had grown into the wall. Printed on a large white sheet of photographic paper and framed in black wood, the image was large enough to display Milia’s features clearly and in detaiclass="underline" her long hair and honey-brown almond-shaped eyes, her small nose and full lips, a long neck, hollow cheeks, and fine eyebrows. It was an upper-body shot. Sharif Fakhouri the photographer had stuck his head into a wooden box covered with black cloth. He had made Milia stand in front of the white wall for two entire hours as he tried to find the most attractive pose for her. In the photograph the pale woman with her features etched in black seemed to be coming out of the wall itself, and Milia’s eyes emitted a glow of light.
Musa was convinced there was something strange about this photograph. Everything was outlined in black contours except for the pupils of his sister’s eyes, which seemed to have been drawn in green.
Musa brought the photograph to the house three days before the wedding. He pounded a nail into the wall and hung it up, stepped back three paces and called out to his sister. Milia hurried into the room to find Musa in front of the picture, his eyes charged with astonishment.
Look, do you see it? he said to her.
Thank you, it’s very nice.
Look — the eyes, look at the color — as if there’s a green light at the center, coming out of the black. See it?
The girl looked at her photograph and the surprise of it struck her hard. She felt tears coming. The tears covered her eyes and the image broke up into fragments inside a vast watery field. She worried suddenly that her guardian angel had abandoned her. How could the photographer from Zahleh have snapped the secret of her green-tinted eyes? It was only in her dreams that her eyes shone green, only when Milia became the little girl with the brown skin and short curly black hair. How could the photographer have acquired the secret of her eyes? Had they betrayed her? Was this why she no longer saw dreams as she slept? Ever since the moment she had agreed to the marriage, going to sleep had been like tumbling into a deep, pitch-black valley.
Milia had begun to dread sleep. She would lie down on her bed, eyes open, fighting her drowsiness. As sleep began to creep into the tips of her toes her body would jerk awake all at once, chasing it away. But sleep would wrap itself tightly around her and not let go. It came from behind and assaulted her, dragging her downward into its darknesses. Night — the nighttime that had been all hers — was an enemy now, witness to the shuddering and quaking of her body. Her thigh would jerk and go rigid as if receiving a blow. She would feel herself falling and her shoulder muscles would tighten, her body convulse. Trying to lie back and relax her muscles, she would search desperately for a story that could put her to sleep but whatever story she came up with would slide away as the darkness inched in to envelop her.
Milia lost the cavern where she had concealed her dreams. She could not understand why — until the photograph exposed the secret of her eyes.
Now Musa stood rigid with confusion before his sister. Why did she so dislike the beautiful image he had hung on the wall?
Stand directly in front of it, he said to her. See, it’s as good as your mirror.
Studying the photograph, Milia saw how the shadows of green had imprinted themselves inside the black ink. She turned her face away and left the sitting room. Standing in front of the picture, Musa sensed it speaking to him. Now, he thought, he could agree well and truly to the marriage of his sister. Milia would not really be going with this Mansour fellow to Nazareth but rather would stay here with them, hanging on the wall. He would not have to pine for her.
Musa turned around. His sister was no longer there. He went out to the garden where she sat on the wooden swing that hung from a branch of the enormous fig tree. He saw his sister’s body tremble as she sobbed, but instead of going to her he turned around and returned to the sitting room. He sat down on the sofa facing the photograph.
Milia did not tell Mansour that she had cried bitter tears, sitting on the garden swing. The taste of the tears on her lips did not match the words so often used to portray them. Tears are salty but we describe their tang as bitter. Drinking her salty tears, Milia tasted a bitter essence, but it came to her from a dream that was not hers. The color of bitterness is green, she thought, like the irises that had vanished from the screen where her dreams played.
On a white metal bed set against the white wall where Musa hung his sister’s photograph, Milia was born at noon on Monday the second of July in the year 1923. The day was hot and humid. Beirut’s metallic sun pounded the streets with cords of fire. The midwife, Nadra Salloum, had hung yellow bedsheets over the sitting-room windows. They burned with the light that beamed through the window and turned the entire room into what seemed a mass of yellow flame. On the bed Saadeh lay moaning. Nadra — stocky and dark and plump faced, with a lit cigarette held eternally between her lips — chided and teased the woman whose torso stretched across the width of the bed, her face covered in heavy sweat and her white chemise spattered with a wetness tinted yellow by the imprint of the sun’s blaze.
Shhh, sister, this isn’t your first tummyful and there’s no need to scream, said Nadra, arms crossed, chewing the butt of her lit cigarette as she waited for the baby to appear.
It was Saadeh’s sixth childbirth. Of the previous five three boys remained: her firstborn, Salim; her fourth, Niqula; and the fifth one, Abdallah. Of the two who had died, the second child to be born to Saadeh had gone unnamed, his sobriquet becoming the Blue Boy because he had been born with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck and had choked on his blueness. Number three, Nasib, had contracted jaundice a week after his birth, entering family lore as Yellow Nasib.