Sitti. .
She told him about her grandmother Malakeh. My grandmama Malakeh came and sat down next to me on the bed, here. I was sleeping. The bed seemed endless, as though I slept on a bed of water, it was everywhere, the water, and Sitti sat with me. She was a young woman — Ya Latif she looked so much like my mother! At first I thought she was my mother, and I said, Mama, what are you doing here? She said, I’m not your mama, your mother is in Beirut and I came here to tell you a story. I said, Sitti, is this the time for stories? Don’t you see where I am? How I’m living on my own now, and no one is here with me? She said she had come here to awaken me but first I must accept a gift from her. She put her hand into her cloak and took out a tiny icon of the Virgin. It has to stay with you always, she said, to keep you safe. I took the icon from her but I did not know where I should put it. Set it on your belly, she instructed. I laid it on my belly and felt myself sinking. I called to her. Sitti, I’m sinking, I’m going to drown, what should I do? Hold my hand, she replied. I held out my hand but I couldn’t reach anything. I tried to scream but my voice wouldn’t come. I was drowning. I was underwater and I couldn’t breathe. Suddenly a woman in a blue veil was there. She held me. I saw myself on shore. I saw a lot of fish. The fish were poking their heads out of the water, opening their mouths to breathe, and diving under again. The blue woman was beside me. She was whispering to me but I didn’t understand a word of it. She talked and talked in a soft voice. I didn’t catch any of it except for one word: Tiberias. So then I knew I was at Lake Tiberias. The blue woman closed her eyes and I longed for sleep. If I went to sleep, though, nothing in the world could awaken me, I knew, and I was afraid. I remembered what my grandmama had said about sleep and death. Khallaas, I told myself. It’s all over for you, Milia. You are going to die in this water. But I was no longer fighting for breath. I was breathing underwater and seeing a rainbow of color. The blue woman was with me. She reached out and placed her hand on my stomach and I felt my belly start to swell and my body grow rounder. She took her hand away. I turned and saw my grandmama, here with me, but now she had no teeth. I used to be afraid of Sitti when she took out her teeth and put them in a glass of water. I didn’t understand why her set of teeth looked so strange. It wasn’t two sets of dentures, up and down, but four or five. The glass would become something frightful — water all around the dentures and the teeth looking as though they were trying to bite the glass. Why did you take out your teeth, Sitti? I asked. So I can talk with you better. No, no, Sitti, please, go back and put in your teeth so I can understand you. She said she could not, because in a dream one shouldn’t fiddle with one’s teeth. But you’re dead, Grandmama, I told her. It’s not important, I don’t matter, my dear — the important thing is you, she said. But you’ve been dead a long time, I protested. She laughed, that mouth of hers wide open, and she began saying things I didn’t understand. I caught only one word. She was talking in a very faint voice and I only understood a single word. Sabiyy. I said to her, What sabiyy? You’ll find out later on, she told me. But I’m afraid now, I told her, and I put my hand out to pull her dentures up and out of the glass. She slapped my hand and I started to cry. When my grandmama Malakeh died I cried a lot. Everyone thought I was crying so much because Sitti loved me so much. But that wasn’t true. Well, of course I cried because I loved her too, but the truth is that I cried especially because they didn’t put the teeth back inside of her mouth where they belonged. I asked my mother where they were and then I ran into the kitchen. She followed me and said, Don’t be upset, dear, take it easy. I didn’t answer. I just started searching like I’d gone mad. I went under the table, looking everywhere, opening the cupboards. My mother said to me, Stop. They aren’t here, we got rid of them.
Where? I asked. In the garbage. Why? Because, it’s haraam. False teeth mustn’t be buried with the dead. A dead person has to return to her Lord exactly as He created her.
In the garbage! I cried. And I went right to the garbage can and began to search. I didn’t find them, no. Not then. But yesterday, when I was drowning. . no, maybe this is another dream, Lord how I’ve come to confuse things! It has gotten so I don’t know the whys and whens and hows anymore. The important thing is that I took the set of dentures and went to my grandmama but she had vanished. I didn’t know where she went. I didn’t know what I would do with her teeth. Women were sitting all around me, crying and crying some more. And then I fell. I don’t know how. I was hanging on to the akadoniya tree with my feet braced against some heavy branches, and I was eating a hard green fruit I had picked from it, and I was aware of myself only when I began to fall. When I hit the ground I broke my teeth. I put my hand up to my mouth and it’s as if they were my grandmama’s teeth. I don’t know. There was a lot of water, there were eyes and tears. The women’s tears were pouring onto the ground and I saw my grandmama drowning and I started crying. I put my hands out to grab my grandmama’s hand but I couldn’t reach her. I felt like I was drowning too. And then I don’t know, everything was blue and I was asleep in bed, and the mattress was like a lake and Sitti sat next to me. She put her hand on my belly and gave me the icon. And I saw the blue woman: it was as though she had risen right out of the icon. I said, Grandmama, this is the woman, it’s her, the one who put her hand on my tummy and it started growing. A sabiyy, she said. And she told me we must name this boy Mikhail after Sister Milana’s convent, since the nun safeguards me, too, with her prayers. But I said to her, no, I’m going to name him Issa. His name is Issa, I’m naming him after the Messiah. Because that’s what the blue woman wants. I opened my eyes and got up and went into the bathroom. I washed my face, heated some water, and bathed. You were snoring away. Yesterday I tried to turn you over because the sound of it was so loud. But you were all curled up around yourself, like at the Hotel Massabki. God knows I was afraid for you there. No, not when you were in the bathroom and you weren’t answering me. That was easy enough to understand. At the time I felt. . no, not right then, but later, seeing you asleep in bed, curled up as if you were a little baby boy in his mama’s belly, I felt what you wanted was a mother. Now don’t misunderstand me, and please, don’t interrupt me. I don’t like hearing this kind of talk. No, I don’t know what all you do and I don’t want to know. Did I ever ask you, even once? If I didn’t ask you, then why answer me? No, I don’t want to understand, these are matters only for you. You told me you don’t want to go to Jaffa, and anyhow I don’t like it there. What was I saying? Oh yes, I could feel my belly getting big and round, all of me becoming round, and I understood then what the woman had been saying to me, that woman who draped her hair in a blue shawl. I understood that I was pregnant. Me, Mr. Mansour — pregnant since last night. That’s what I wanted to tell you. That’s all.
Mansour was utterly bewildered, his tongue tied. He tried to puzzle out the way she had of conveying things; to even understand what she had said. He sipped his Turkish coffee slowly, his head bent. But he was exasperated, too. Why didn’t she say things in a straightforward manner? Why did the woman wander among words, meandering amidst them as though she were speaking in a dream and not in wide-awake reality? He wanted to wake her up from this ongoing somnolence of hers, and from her insistent refusal to let him express his love. When she said she was pregnant, he tried to interrupt her, to say he had slept with her the night before and that it had been the most beautiful lovemaking ever, the very best they’d had. He said he had seen how it exalts a female when she receives her male and takes him into her. This is the kind of love that makes a woman pregnant, he said, a smile of triumph on his lips.