Read Online As Though She Were Sleeping by Elias Khoury - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Elias Khoury
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Turkish coffee. He took a final swallow, set the cup down on the table, looked into Milia’s honey-brown eyes, in which played all the colors of the world, and asked her what she had seen as she dreamed.
Go and dream your dream again, he said. I want to see you happy and relaxed today. Sleep a little before I come home tonight, and dream again, and then everything will go well tonight, too.
Mansour believed Milia to be afraid and anxious because of the troubles across Palestine, even though Nazareth was remote from the waves of strikes and clashes that had broken out throughout the country, accompanying ongoing protests against the British Mandate and growing Jewishimmigration. She never asked him about politics. And despite his political concerns – as modest as they might be – and his loud debates with friends at the café, and his fear of losing Palestine completely, Mansour did not speak to his wife about any of this more than occasionally and in passing. Worrying about the effect on her, he did not realize that the woman was not particularly taken up with such things, or even aware of their implications. She was living now inside her private experience of pregnancy and her personal bond with the city of Nazareth. The dream that had brought her here, convincing her to marry Mansour, recurred during her nights; the intimation that everything teetered in this city the Messiah had inhabited one thousand and nine hundred years before made her aware that everything in life is ephemeral. She preferred to give herself over to sleep, and so she lived inside a world walled in by the night.
She smiled at her husband when he asked her to dream her dream again, and she said she would do so. He told her that he was very fond of this dream of hers, even though she had not even told it to him, because she had been so sweet and gentle with him in the night. You were like sugar melting at the back of my mouth, he said. Milia remembered nothing, or so she claimed. Every night she dreamed, and redrew her image in the mirrors the darkness held up, that image of Milia as a child of seven: short black hair and wide greenish eyes and the impulse to believe that the night’s enticements spill into the daytime – so that, once awake, she would still be living inside her dream. She would intersperse the truth of daily events with the truth of her dreams. This sparked her husband’s worry. But the priest from Syria, Father Mikhail Muawwad, who shepherded the flock of the Church of Our Lady of the Tremblings right there in Nazareth, clarified that such things were among the indications of pregnancy and there was no need to work up his mind over it. Milia would emerge finally from this nocturnal existence after giving birth to her first child.
Milia came out of the hotel room into the bright sun of the petite garden.The snow sat in patches, looking like little white islets amidst the grayness that cloaked the trees. She felt a gust of cold air and saw the sun navigating the clouds scattered across the sky. She washed her dream in the light and the air and strolled in the garden sensing how the cavity inside her body had begun to take on a rounded shape. Every part was rounding out and growing warm. She sat on the edge of the tiny cavity at the center of the garden where the water pooled. She reached her right hand into the cold water and the heat in her fingers vanished. The shiver of the water spread all the way to her shoulders before falling to her breasts, where now she felt the pain of a new mother’s milk. She saw milk on those breasts, drops forming little pools and trickling across her skin, making circles, and tears escaped from her eyes, falling over the swollen breasts so that milk and tears mingled.
Milia was four when Hannah came to work as a servant in their home. But the girl did not remain with them for long. The story was that Sister Milana came to give Saadeh cotton immersed in holy oil, and stayed with her in the liwan
Go and dream your dream again, he said. I want to see you happy and relaxed today. Sleep a little before I come home tonight, and dream again, and then everything will go well tonight, too.
Mansour believed Milia to be afraid and anxious because of the troubles across Palestine, even though Nazareth was remote from the waves of strikes and clashes that had broken out throughout the country, accompanying ongoing protests against the British Mandate and growing Jewishimmigration. She never asked him about politics. And despite his political concerns – as modest as they might be – and his loud debates with friends at the café, and his fear of losing Palestine completely, Mansour did not speak to his wife about any of this more than occasionally and in passing. Worrying about the effect on her, he did not realize that the woman was not particularly taken up with such things, or even aware of their implications. She was living now inside her private experience of pregnancy and her personal bond with the city of Nazareth. The dream that had brought her here, convincing her to marry Mansour, recurred during her nights; the intimation that everything teetered in this city the Messiah had inhabited one thousand and nine hundred years before made her aware that everything in life is ephemeral. She preferred to give herself over to sleep, and so she lived inside a world walled in by the night.
She smiled at her husband when he asked her to dream her dream again, and she said she would do so. He told her that he was very fond of this dream of hers, even though she had not even told it to him, because she had been so sweet and gentle with him in the night. You were like sugar melting at the back of my mouth, he said. Milia remembered nothing, or so she claimed. Every night she dreamed, and redrew her image in the mirrors the darkness held up, that image of Milia as a child of seven: short black hair and wide greenish eyes and the impulse to believe that the night’s enticements spill into the daytime – so that, once awake, she would still be living inside her dream. She would intersperse the truth of daily events with the truth of her dreams. This sparked her husband’s worry. But the priest from Syria, Father Mikhail Muawwad, who shepherded the flock of the Church of Our Lady of the Tremblings right there in Nazareth, clarified that such things were among the indications of pregnancy and there was no need to work up his mind over it. Milia would emerge finally from this nocturnal existence after giving birth to her first child.
Milia came out of the hotel room into the bright sun of the petite garden.The snow sat in patches, looking like little white islets amidst the grayness that cloaked the trees. She felt a gust of cold air and saw the sun navigating the clouds scattered across the sky. She washed her dream in the light and the air and strolled in the garden sensing how the cavity inside her body had begun to take on a rounded shape. Every part was rounding out and growing warm. She sat on the edge of the tiny cavity at the center of the garden where the water pooled. She reached her right hand into the cold water and the heat in her fingers vanished. The shiver of the water spread all the way to her shoulders before falling to her breasts, where now she felt the pain of a new mother’s milk. She saw milk on those breasts, drops forming little pools and trickling across her skin, making circles, and tears escaped from her eyes, falling over the swollen breasts so that milk and tears mingled.
Milia was four when Hannah came to work as a servant in their home. But the girl did not remain with them for long. The story was that Sister Milana came to give Saadeh cotton immersed in holy oil, and stayed with her in the liwan
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