Wadiia I came over to him and asked after the bride. Seconds later the same question echoed from Wadiia II. Same voice, same gesture.
Where is Khawaja George? asked Mansour. He did not know why all of a sudden he should be seeking the aid of the hotel proprietor in concealing his unease about this doubled female image before him.
The Khawaja is asleep. Waiting for you so long yesterday exhausted him, said the first.
The Khawaja is not well, said the second.
Mother and daughter, mused Mansour. Khawaja George Massabki had been very fortunate with these two women, because he had not had to alter anything in his life. The eternal single, as he always called himself. He had found the perfect solution in a woman whose daughter replicated her. It had all worked out so well. The woman was a servitor, which meant no demands, just silence and submission. And she was a widow, meaning she had no independent means of support. And she had a youngish daughter who was just like her, meaning that after he had supported the girl’s upbringing, now the two women were like twin rings on his finger and he could live well served and well loved. Now there’s a man, Mansour felt like saying, and he attacked the plate of fried eggs. He heard the padding of Milia’s feet on the floor. Lifting his eyes he saw her standing between the pair of Wadiias. She seemed taller than before as she spoke in a low voice with the two women. She sat down across from him. She raised her eyebrows and he sensed he ought to stop eating his eggs.
In the bathroom he had felt ashamed and humiliated. He had closed the door and tried to summon his mother because he was certain he would die. Only death destroys bodily desire. When that desire vanishes, death is certainly not far behind.
Nothing makes you cling to life like that does, declared the old man. All Mansour remembered of him was his thick head of very white hair. The man had come to their modest foundry and had bought a heap of iron rods. He said they were for the mujahideen high in the rocky hills. He gazed at Mansour’s brother, Amin, and said, If only youth would return one day! He said he knew his hour was near, because that gizmo — and he pointed between his thighs — no longer wanted it. And when it has lost the desire for it, that means it is commanding you to follow it into death. All Mansour could remember of the story were these strands of words. He had arrived as the man was preparing to leave, and so nothing stuck in his mind except this sentence — and now here it was, coming back to him along with the vomiting as his legs turned into jelly and pain blasted his inner organs. Death, he said to himself. This is death, and he cried out for his mother. He saw his mother lying on the ground, her thighbone broken, wailing for her own mother, who was dead. As if life is but a closed circle of mothers and nothing remains but the relationship binding child to mother — that is, to the child’s own death. When you call out Mama! you are summoning the grave, even if that is not what you think you are doing. A person’s life unfolds between two graves: the mother’s womb and the soil. Both places shelter you in that stage of becoming, preparing for the enormous transformations that will see you through the tunnel to the next life.
Who told him the tale of the two graves?
Milia? But no — Milia was happy now, with her rounding belly. She slept soundly, drank glass after glass of water, and acted as if her life had only now begun. Sister Milana, then — but Mansour had met the saintly woman only once, when she came to the church for their wedding, and that day he had not seen or heard anything. Had he seen the nun in a dream? But he did not dream. Or he did not remember his dreams.
Mansour would have liked to tell his wife about his experiences with women before getting married. But she did not want to hear. And then, why tell them, anyway? After all, his grand story had begun when his eyes fell on this woman and he attached himself to her without really knowing how. He had not understood what was happening to him or why every time he shut his eyes the curves of her lower body began to chase him. Milia bewitched him with the undulating line that ran from her waist downward. He saw her whiteness erupt beneath a white dress that flowered with a pattern of red cherries. He wanted to go up to her and say something but he did not dare. It took three long months for him to speak to her, when he noticed the dimple in her right cheek and her wide and langorous eyes.
Like cream, her beautiful skin dons
a veil of skin to shield her skin
Her chest, two lovely mounds, I see
camphoras capped by ambergris
What’s that you’re saying?
I’m saying poetry.
Why — are you a poet?
No. I just love poetry.
And what else?
Echoes of Abla arc o’er me in my dream
kissing me thrice on my scarf-enwrapped lips
She bid me farewell and left me aflame
A fire in my bones concealed in my hips
Were I not alone in this empty place
damping with tears ardor’s white-hot coals
I would die of grief but I’d never complain
in my zealous watch — Full Moon that ne’er dips!
So, he would dream her?
Of course — how else to love her?
You mean, you fell in love with me in a dream?
I already told you I’m not a poet.
She noticed immediately how like her brother Musa he looked. It made her heart pound. She smiled, and that was the beginning that brought him eventually to stand up in the Church of the Archangel Mikhail and to walk shrouded in fog on the Shtoura Road. And there in the cold bathroom at the hotel he called out desperately to his mother for he sensed that death was on its way.
Well, no, that was not exactly the way it was. But this was how he told it to his wife three months into their marriage when he knew he wanted to open the file on that already buried story.
He did not say how intensely cold he had been in the bathroom, and yet he had not dared to return to the bedroom because he was afraid that to do so would only make things worse and harder to explain. As he sat on the toilet seat, the bathroom’s red tiles began to look and feel like blocks of ice burning his bare feet. Milia was knocking on the door and saying that she was going to call the doctor. No, Milia, no — I’m fine. Go to sleep, dear, it’s all fine, really.
He had no idea how his violently trembling lips actually produced the words but he heard her moving away from the door. His joints went completely limp and the shiver that his rib cage had kept imprisoned now leapt out and swept over him. Walking on tiptoe, he headed back to bed, his whole body shaking and his mind in despair. He stopped to warm himself in front of the stove before feeling his way into bed, where he would curl up around himself like a snail.
Milia was already asleep. He lay down, careful to leave a space between them. He pulled the covers over his body and head and heat began to penetrate his joints. He dozed off and then suddenly his eyelids flew open as though in fright, and he thought, I am a bridegroom on my wedding night and a just-married man must not go to sleep before taking the bride who lies next to him into his arms.
He told her he had not been able to sleep. His desire was so implacable. The image of her waist as she stood beneath the almond tree. . the curve of her abdomen and hips. . With each touch, every kiss, he began to regain the flavor of things. He began to collect the straying fragments of his spirit, scattered in the cold and the fear.