He cavorted among the lines, returning to the first one and then skidding all the way to the final line, skipping ahead, jumping back, rising above the water and plunging into it as if he were swimming. Poetry is water, he said, and a woman’s body is water. Love is water and God sits on a throne of water. And — Mansour would add — He made us from water, every living thing.
He would jump ahead to steal from the woman of the parted lips a kiss she was concealing or a word she was about to say. Suddenly he would find himself at the end of his forces. I am the bearer of passion, like in the poem, he would say. It’s exhausting to be a bearer of passion. At that point, Milia got up and went to the kitchen, where he followed her. This is arak, woman, real arak, ya Latif what arak does to a man! White upon white. Ten out of ten. That’s what arak is, ten out of ten.
Milia did not understand why her husband was so consumed by a single thought, leaving him oblivious to all else. Why could he not see how much of a stranger she felt herself to be here, and how alone she was? Sometimes, she felt truly afraid. . but no, Mansour was not like that, he was not like certain other men. But fathers do kill their sons, she had always believed. Well, no, not always: she had believed it because her father told her so. Well, no, actually, her father did not tell her anything of the sort, perhaps he did not tell her anything at all. But it was the family story, after all, and this story had not been buried along with her father at his death. For the image of Salim the Elder, the grandfather, lingered: indeed, it occupied center stage — even when their father grew to be so like his father. As Saadeh said to her children, though, the image of the victim never disappeared from Yusuf’s face, with its deep dark clefts and the half-closed eye.
Can the father really kill his son? she asked her grandmother.
No, my girl. He didn’t mean to kill him. He hit him with the rock because he didn’t recognize him.
How can that be? How can a father not know his son?
His father thought he was someone else. He thought it was a thief and so he threw a rock at him. It isn’t the fault of either the father or the son. It was the circumstances. Those days were tough ones, my dear, and most likely it was the woman’s fault. She created the problem and we inherited it after she died. Your grandfather Salim bought the house. That was the real problem — the house. Your papa tried first to sell it but he couldn’t. To sell it, he had to find someone to buy it, but in those days there was no money around. So Yusuf — and all of you with him — were stuck with the house. Your grandpapa didn’t intend to kill his son — that’s just chatter from that nun your mama follows around and repeats as if she’s a parrot. No, that sort of twaddle! Can’t possibly be right. Enough talk.
On the night when pregnancy filled her and she entered that sovereign realm of the dual, Milia decided to begin her life all over again. But then, all of a sudden, where had the specter of Najib come from, and why? Why had Mansour yanked it out of the cave of memory?
Mansour had married this young woman for love, and he tried to explain to her the meanings of love. He had believed she was as much a lover as he was but simply could not find the words to express her love. And so, he borrowed poetry and rolled it out like a lush carpet before her feet. He said that far back in the eighth century Bashshar b. Burd described love when he wrote his body into his lines of poetry.
Take my hand, lift my robe, and you will see:
spent is the body my wrappings enclose
What runs now from my eyes are not my tears
but a soul that melts and in melting, flows
He was wolfing down the plate of eggs in the hotel dining room when she came over to him. She lifted the plate away from his hands and passed it to one of the Wadiias, saying it was bad for his health.
I’m fine now, and that’s all over and done with, he said.
No, you aren’t fine yet, she said.
Fine, but didn’t you see what a tiger I was last night?
Last night!
I hope you’re just pretending you don’t understand.
What I do understand is that you must pay attention to your health. We must go back to Beirut — where’s the chauffeur?
He told her he had paid the fare and the driver had eaten his breakfast and left for Beirut.
And us?
We’re going to stay another two nights and then we’ll make our way down to Beirut and from there to Nazareth.
No, we have to go today, it’s very cold.
She sat down across from him, ate a little cheese, drank a glass of tea, and saw how the man devoured everything on the table in front of him. Milia was hungry but she knew that faced with her husband’s exhaustive appetite she would eat only sparingly, satisfying herself by observing him as he exclaimed over her stunning cooking. A day would come when he would call himself the first man in the world to prefer his wife’s cooking to his mother’s. Listening to him, she would wonder about her three brothers in the ancient house in Beirut who were having to get reaccustomed to their mother’s bland dishes. She would think of them, but the disturbances in Palestine had closed the roads and letters did not arrive. That is why she decided to talk with her brother Musa in her own special way. When Mansour left for work and the house was empty, she would call for Musa and he always came. She asked him questions and he always answered; she saw him there in front of her. She complained to him, too. She was so alone, she said, and so afraid, and she longed for the scent of the lilac trees in their family garden.
Milia spent three days with her husband in the empty hotel. The only people there were Khawaja Massabki and those two women of his. There was the tiny pond in the hotel garden, mounded with snow, and Mansour’s voice reciting poetry to her as he gripped her hand, pointing out certain photographs on the wall of the empty reception hall.
This one’s the king, and next to him is the prince of poets Ahmad Shawqi, said Mansour. The king fled when the French attacked Syria, and he set himself up as king over Iraq. What a joke — did you ever in your life hear of a king who betrayed his kingdom and got a second kingdom? But that’s us for you! Ahmad Shawqi stood weeping over Syria, which the French army had bombarded with heavy guns.
Greetings softer than Barada’s east wind
to you, my Damascus, with love I send
and tears and tears that never end
Milia lies between wakefulness and sleep. She feels fire in her bones. She goes out into the garden and thrusts her hand into the snow and brings it up to her mouth and swallows the soft white stuff. The snow melts against her burning lips and thirst stalks her. She sleeps next to Mansour in one bed. The man takes her with his powerful hands. She dozes in fire, and dreams. But little Milia will not return until three months have passed. Her place is taken by a woman of twenty-four stretched out over the fog of Dahr el-Baydar, going into a shadowy world, led to its gates by a blue woman whom she does not know.
The Second Night
AND THERE WAS DARKNESS.
Milia was in bed and in pain. The pain pincered her lower body and shot upward. She could not breathe. A fisted hand plunged into her lower parts and tugged. Her body seemed paralyzed and her head was heavy. She opened her eyes but saw nothing. The pain ebbed, as though diffusing and spreading along her belly before it melted away to leave behind an evanescent memory.
The nine months had passed. The time was come.
The pain returns. Her belly convulses and with that appears her grandmother Umm Yusuf. Why has this grandmother dropped from her memory? And why, today, does she return?