Auntie, why are you crying? The dead don’t cry. They mustn’t cry.
Milia did not hear her aunt Salma’s answer; the woman had disappeared. The little girl saw herself lying on the wide pavement in front of the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth. Her belly was swollen and her hands were stretched out cruciform.
And then she saw the two of them, standing exactly opposite. She could not tell them apart. The saintlike nun held Tanyous’s hand as if they were a pair of elderly men, their faces attacked so vigorously by wrinkles that it was difficult to tell who they were. She heard a faraway voice instructing her to push. A hand gripped her hard and shook her by the shoulder. Open your eyes, girl, and push! Yallah, let’s finish up here, you have already gone a long distance and there isn’t much further to go.
Milia opened her eyes slowly and there was light. A dazzling sun had come out, now that the downpour had stopped, and the brilliance of it pierced every corner. Behind the light stood the aged Italian doctor, telling the woman lying on the birthing bed to help him bring her baby out. My girl, everything is fine and inshallah we are almost there but you have to help us out a little.
Milia gave him a little smile. She felt a towelly roughness as one of the nurses swabbed away the cold sweat falling into her eyes, and she asked for Mansour.
Mansour stood next to her. They were in the vast reception hall of the Hotel Massabki, where the photographs were lined up along the wall. He wanted her to stand beneath a photograph of Shaykh Bishara el-Khoury, president of the independent republic of Lebanon, with Jamil Mardam Bey, the prime minister of Syria. This wall of photographs, Mansour explained to her, was a summary of the history of Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine.
Strange, he said, it’s as though our history does not exist except on this one wall in a very small city on the Beirut-Damascus road, a wall that is here for the purpose of recording the tale of the Arabs’ defeats.
Please — I don’t like politics. From the moment we stepped inside this hotel, all you have talked about is King Faisal and the Battle of Maysalun and such things, and it’s giving me a headache.
She extricated herself from his grip and turned to another portion of the wall where two framed poems hung side by side.
Mansour went up to them and read out loud.
In Massabki we savored what our bodies craved,
and the soft strains of strings and ever a glass!
The place was beauteous, amiable, and so warm
as if hosted by the quaffer Abu Nuwas
This is by the Egyptians’ Prince of Poetry, he said. Ahmad Shawqi always stayed in this hotel. He came with Muhammad Abd el-Wahhab, the musician, carrying his lute. Abd el-Wahhab was forever putting verses of Shawqi’s together and setting them to music. Over here is a photograph of Khalil Mutran, who was called the poet of the two lands since he lived in Egypt but was from these parts. He came here, too.
But the Messiah, why bring him into this? And I don’t like this poem much.
Mansour went up to the second framed poem.
Maryam ran frightened, in search of her son
the young Yasua in that vast space
I called out, Maryam, do not fret and cry
Yasua’s at Massabki: calm be your face!
What is the Messiah doing here, in the middle of all of this? No, this isn’t real poetry, my dear.
It was on that day — the second day of their marriage — that Mansour realized he would never be able to grasp this woman who had now become his wife. He had told his mother that he had fallen in love with her for her womanliness: her tall and nicely filled-out figure, full hips, small waist — and her clear, soft pale skin, which reminded him of the beautiful pale-white figure, Daad, in The Orphan Pearl. The lines of her graceful body inhabited his imagination with the help of ten, twenty, one hundred poems singing the praises of love, in which Arab poets cataloged the innumerable desires and longings and inclinations attaching to the body of the beloved woman.
Where did those longings go? Why had this lethal sense of solitude come over Mansour? Since his brother’s death he had lived an unending maelstrom of anxiety, despair, and fear. He was not afraid of Jaffa or of war. He had decided to return to his city because it was what he had to do, and Asma, the young widow, had become his responsibility. He had even dreamed once that he had become husband to two women, Asma and Milia. And why not? He was overpoweringly hungry for it. Milia, in her eighth month of pregnancy, was astonishingly round. As she slept, her long hair flung across the pillow, he sat alone in the sitting room, sipping a cup of tea and smoking. He imagined himself between the two women and felt a quick pulsing through his veins. He was aware of how intensely bodily desire had come to possess him, as if a strong hand had seized his testicles and was squeezing them relentlessly.
Then suddenly he was undressing in the bedroom and was in bed next to Milia. He pressed his hands to her waist and the sleeping woman shifted position, turning her back to him. Her face disappeared beneath the tousled hair strewn across the pillow. He rolled over onto her body to take her. He cupped his hands over her breasts and his lips crept up her neck. And at the instant when he meant to come into her everything in him dwindled to nothing. His desire vanished as if a wave of icy water had choked the flame. Spirit abased, breath throttled, body suffocating, he moved away and lay on his back, humiliated to the core. He was certain that Milia was not asleep, that she had witnessed his collapse; she was watching it. Since the very beginning — ever since their first night at the Massabki — he had never been able to master this business of taking a sleeping woman. It left him uneasy. Yet it was a game he marveled at, as though it freed him and made him lord of the bed, as though Milia would give him what he wanted, when he wanted it, without ever calling him to account. He relished this sport that had charged his very marrow with unquenchable cravings. The woman’s restless slumber as he lay close to her had become his greatest pleasure, the source of the poetry he summoned to his lips. But now he was perplexed and his confusion left him in an agony of body and mind. How would he escape this ring of abject defeat into which he had slipped?
He got out of bed, threw on his undergarments and pajamas and heard her voice.
What’s wrong, habibi?
He didn’t answer. He went into the bathroom and closed the door. Milia got out of bed. She knocked on the bathroom door and asked him if he was ill, and she heard his hoarse voice. It’s nothing, my dear. He told her to go back to bed and wait for him.
Mama, where are you? cried the woman lying on her bed of pain in the Italian Hospital in Nazareth. Tanyous the monk stood facing her. He stretched his hands toward her as if they were ready to bring out the newborn.
I don’t want to go to Jaffa! I want to take the boy and go to Beirut. Please, Father Tanyous, tell my mother to come and get me. No, no — tell my brother Musa to come and find me so that we can make an escape from here.
The Master, peace be upon Him, Tanyous said, went to his death of his own will. Tanyous opened the book and began to read. Milia did not understand the Syriac words that the Lebanese monk’s mouth formed, yet she saw Him, walking through the streets of Jerusalem on the way to Golgotha carrying an enormous wooden cross, soldiers all around him, walking on and on as the whip tore into his back, gazing forward to see only the face of Maryam the Majdaliyya, now so perfectly like his own mother’s face. He bent double to shelter the pain through his body, wounded by the implacable whipping. He gazed into the distance and saw Ibrahim the Friend of God walking behind his son, as Ishaq bore on his back the wood his father had gathered for the sacrifice: the son, bent in obedience.