It’s the nun’s fault, she put these ideas in your head.
Don’t bring the nun into it, she’s a saint! May God permit us to drink of her blessings.
Milia understood things differently. She saw the tiny airborne bodies and went silent. Najib had disappeared from her life and a black curtain had come down over his story. Everyone whispered the news, back and forth it went but quietly, quietly, in the belief that she didn’t know. But she knew everything. She saw the truth sketched on Najib’s eyeballs when the birds fell dead from the sky. It was not easy for her to recall the dream of the birds. To find it she had to plunge into the darkness and when she did, she was rendered incapable of saying anything about it. She had learned to classify her dreams. They were of three sorts.
The first sort of dream was the one that took place on the surface of things and arrived in the early morning. The shallow dream’s role was to motivate her to wake up. These were simple dreams crafted out of the details of daily life. They helped one’s eyes stay closed for a while longer but also to face the light of morning. This sort of dream did not concern Milia because the moment she got up it would have already vanished from her mind. Indeed, she could stop its march by opening her eyes and when it faded she would close them again to go to a place that was deeper, wanting to regain her real dream, which had hidden itself away somewhere beneath her eyelids.
The second kind of dream planted a cozy hedge around you. Milia took this sort of dream with her to sleep. Closing her eyes, she felt her head tingle and go numb, and she began to weave stories and images. Bedtime means a person plumps up a pillow on which to lay her head. Milia’s pillow was not made from cotton or wool or feathers but from stories. She would lay her head back on the long mound of pillow that also served as a backrest and ply her stories slowly. Images moved before her eyes and she selected those she wanted to use, arranging the elements according to her taste. Najib the lawyer became Wadiie the baker, and Wadiie became the priest at the Church of the Archangel Mikhail, and then the priest was passionately in love with the saintly nun, and so forth. .
There was another element she could not forget. Ever since her mother’s illness, cooking had begun to enter the warp and woof of her dreams. She would be mincing onions for laban immuh and suddenly Niqula and Abdallah would appear in front of her, Niqula in his jaunty tarbush and Abdallah wearing the sandals that he never took off, summer or winter. The two young men would be conversing about a visit they had made to the home of an Assyrian wizard called Dr. Shiha. He had come from Iraq and was calling people to a new religion that blended Islam with Christianity. Abdallah talked vividly about the new faith while Niqula made fun of it; the wings of onion turned into little birds; and Milia was fast asleep.
Milia knew that these two kinds of dreams were not particularly important. Even so, many a time she could not keep herself from taking them seriously. This led to her morning problem, which was a matter of persuading her body to acclimatize to moving through air rather than water. Dreams were akin to water; it was as though she swam the waters of her eyes. But she did not dare to tell this to anyone. Moreover, these two dream realms overlapped and ran into each other. An entry-dream that pervaded you with the first spreading numbness of sleep would come back to meet the end-dream that prefaced wakefulness, the door behind which one must shake off the waters of darkness and come out onto dry land. In her waking moment the two worlds fused into a single horizon clouded in fuzzy darkness. The prewaking dream picked up features from the entry-dream of the previous night such that Milia could no longer distinguish between the two. Getting out of bed, she would trace footsteps of the two dreams and behave in a way that those around her could not possibly comprehend.
What does one say to Najib? Should she have told him that she saw him in her dream embracing a plump woman under the lilac tree, while the woman caressed him and flirted with him and rubbed her fleshiness against his chest? Najib told her she was crazy and she believed his innocence. She would stop attaching her dreams to her life, she decided then and there. And then the dead birds came and laid everything bare.
The third sort was the deep dream. In these dreams she saw the dead creatures and knew everything about that woman whom Najib had married. In the first two classes of dreams Milia never saw herself. She would see others, but it was only in the deep dream that she saw her own image reflected in the mirror of the night. This was a dream that did not float to the surface: she had to dive into the depths of herself in search of it. There she would encounter the brown-skinned girl with the greenish eyes who scampered down the alleys of the night and concealed her dreams in a dark and cryptic hollow. Milia became accustomed to not telling this sort of dream to anyone because it was not really in her possession. It belonged to that girl whose form she inhabited, and with whom she flew, traversing the arcs of the night, before everything faded and broke up into fragments.
The birds occupied the deep dream. There, inside a forest of stone pine that rose to the skies, Milia saw herself. The small brown girl stood beneath a towering pine that threw its shade across the scene, though under the hot sun the taste of copper burned her lips and tongue. Without warning she saw him. Najib wore the uniform of a French soldier and darted through the trees as if he were fleeing from her. She waved both hands at him to make him stop. He was running like a blind man, colliding into the trunks of trees. She stood there not daring to move. It was fear that paralyzed her. Flocks of birds filled the vacant sky and eventually blocked out the sun. They looked like sparrows but they flew with a peculiar swiftness, bumping into each other and dropping, folding their wings and falling dead. The earth filled with death. Najib vanished and little Milia stood alone beneath a sun assailed by dark clouds, and the tiny feathered creatures were dying. The girl’s feet would not move; she saw herself spreading her arms and falling. She wanted to scream to Najib to come and save her but her voice choked in her throat and he was gone. The heart of the little bird who had folded his wings trembled but he did not plunge hard to the ground. The earth cracked open to make a series of valleys that moved apart, and the little bird was suspended in emptiness.
Milia opened her eyes. She was thirsty. She put out her hand for the glass of water next to her bed. It was empty. She took it to her lips and drank the thirst and the emptiness. She thought about getting up to fetch some water but she was afraid. Her feet were half paralyzed. She put her head down on the pillow and begged sleep to come. It came as waves of tingling and numbness and she saw the birds again. Najib was standing next to her holding her hand. Suddenly he let go of it and went into the tree. The trunk of an enormous sycamore tree split into two and swallowed him. The smell of graves and burials rose to spread across the scene. The little brown girl stood barefoot, pebbles digging painfully into the soles of her feet. The birds came. They spread their wings to fly and dropped, they were falling, and Milia grew smaller and smaller until she was no larger than a mote of dust.
She opened her eyes and heard herself panting with fear and understood that it was the end. Najib’s birds had died and it was over. When she heard the news from her mother she felt no surprise. Her almond eyes held a look of repose. It doesn’t matter, she said, and ran off to the kitchen to make the kibbeh nayye that the family ate every Sunday at midday.