Milia wants to come out from beneath the sofa to prevent this man from shattering the mirror any more. In a dream, she knows well, shattered mirrors signal disastrous luck. She crawls farther under the sofa to find herself in open air. She is in the dark; she senses danger. She does not know where she is but she does know that the wadi is directly in front of her and that she dares not budge, fearing that the darkness will swallow her up. The pounding knocks an unbearable ache into her head. She wants to scream — Musa! She hears herself scream — Mansour! She covers her mouth with both hands, afraid that her husband, asleep next to her curled into a ball, will awaken.
Where are you, brother?
The girl’s voice goes astray in the darkness and she decides to open her eyes. She will not allow this dream to continue; she will not see the shattered mirror in her home. O Lord, is the meaning of this that Mansour will follow his brother into death? We will be two widows in this house, with the old biddy, and what will I do here alone, and then the little boy — perhaps they will kill him, now that they have killed his papa. Isn’t that what they did to the Messiah? They killed his father Yusuf the Carpenter, or perhaps they just took him away — how would I know? And then they crucified him.
God save you, stop pounding those nails, brother!
She sees herself getting out of bed and walking barefoot into the dar. The gloom is barely touched by a pale nighttime glow that creeps into the house through the window. Little Milia walks across splinters of glass, and her blood makes butterfly shapes on the tiles.
But the mirror was there, hanging on the wall. She almost whispered thank God because the dream had not been able to break the mirror. But her heart fell sickeningly and she felt faint. She saw her portrait there, suspended inside of a swaying beam of light coming out of the mirror. The photograph Musa had hung on the wall of the liwan in the large house — precisely over the bed in which she had been born — was here. The white background blurred into the black. Only the open eyes escaped the black patches spreading across nose and lips and chin and brow. She did not see the long hair extending down this silhouette’s back like a river dyed in black and brown tints that curl round each other.
Where’s her hair? she asked, her voice low.
She looked around to find Musa sitting on the sofa beneath which the little girl had hidden herself. He had on his father’s tarbush and he held a black rosary.
Where did those beads come from, Papa?
That’s what she called him but she didn’t anticipate a response, for she knew well that this person sitting on the sofa gazing steadily at the picture in the mirror was not her father. It was her little brother, whose fear of the dark she had once dispelled with a touch of her fingers.
What brought you to Nazareth? she asked.
I’ve come to take the boy.
No, this is my son! No, you can’t do what your father did to you when you followed him to the Egyptian woman’s place and he threw a rock at you, trying to kill you.
Why, when she thinks of them, do people get confused with each other? This is not her father, she knows, because this man’s olive coloring is nothing like the pallor of Yusuf’s skin. But why did he come to take the boy who has not yet been born? Why does he pound nails into the mirror? She hears the pounding of that day at the cross. The Lebanese monk had told her that the greatest suffering the Messiah endured in his final moments was that of hearing the sounds of his own crucifixion. As they pounded the nails into his hands and feet the sounds grew louder and louder, unbearably loud, and his whole body seemed a pair of enormous ears transmitting the tiniest sound. Everything rang and pounded. Can you imagine what heartbeats sound like when they escape the rib cage? The crucifixion, my daughter, is the sound of this violent pounding which turns the body into nothing more than an echo. Stand above the wadi and shout and then listen. Imagine that your body is the valley and there are hundreds of pounding nails screaming into it.
Musa had become a little boy again. Milia had to stoop to wipe away his tears with her fingers; to raise him from childhood to manhood. But when she bent over and put her hand out to his eyes, he pushed her away roughly and stood stiffly silent before the photograph.
She looked where he was looking. She saw an image of Mansour reflected next to the image of Milia that was now fixed onto the mirror. Instead of calling her husband by his name she screamed. Why did you kill her, Musa?
On the day when she got up and walked out of the Italian Hospital, leaving her husband there with the Italian doctor and following whatever path her feet led her down, Milia searched through the streets and alleys for the Lebanese monk but she found no traces of him. She sat down on the stone edging at the Virgin’s Wellspring, closed her eyes, and saw.
Do not ask her — none of you, no one ask her — what she saw for she will not be able to tell you. This was the miracle she had awaited ever since the puzzling dream that had seemed more like a vision and that led her to her future fate in Nazareth. Did Tanyous not tell her that the Carpenter had lost his speech when he went in to his virgin wife and found her pregnant? He tried to ask her and his tongue turned to wood in his mouth. Rather than expressing anger or pain he went into a comalike state and that brought the angel. There he heard the beginning of the story which he would only fully understand beneath the olive tree, when the boy told it to him, years later.
Tanyous said that they used to call Yusuf the Carpenter the mute saint. True, he did utter words when his son told him the story but then he lived out the days of his life permitted to him on this earth in a more or less silent state, uttering the fewest possible words, as though he understood that whatever he had to say would be said only at the very end, when he would go in search of the boy before he was snatched away and taken above.
Was it true that Milia saw the sainted nun?
She sits, tired and faint, bent over her pain. She tries to speak but she cannot. The Italian doctor does not know what to do with this woman. And then he turns to the nurse and says something in Italian which the patient does not understand and she embarks on the voyage inside the secret world of childbirth.
Human voices faded and the nun appeared. She spoke in Tanyous’s voice and told this woman she must prevent Mansour from taking his son to Jaffa. Milia wanted to say, I beg of you, Haajja Milana, and she heard her mother’s voice edged with fear. What choice did the woman sitting on the brink of the Virgin’s Wellspring have other than to pursue her entreaties. I beseech you, Haajja Milana, I don’t want to become like my mother, she said in the same voice that she seemed to hear.
I beseech you, my sister, why is your voice like his? Where is our Father Tanyous? He said he wanted to tell me the secret and then he disappeared, and now you have come to me instead. I am afraid of you, ever since I was little I have been afraid of you, and I don’t want to live this whole story. I am not my mother. Mama was halfway to being a nun and that is not what I am. My fears are for the boy and all I want from God is to be left alone. I am going to Jaffa, fine, and I am so tired, but tell Tanyous that I want to see his face before I have the baby. I just want his blessing, that’s all, and then, khallaas, fine, whatever he wants can happen. Where is Tanyous?