As Though She Were Sleeping Read Online Free PDF

these tremors coming over her like blows to her body?
    Milia decided to open her eyes because she sensed death. She knew that death comes only as a long dream with no ending. Death is a dream, she said to her brother Musa. Come on, look at your grandmama, see howshe’s always dreaming. The grandmother lay flat on her bed in a muddle of white sheets and the women sat all around. There was only a faint sound of weeping; no one dared wail out loud for Malakeh Shalhoub when she closed her eyes and passed on. Their grandmother had never liked crying over the dead. When the dead are finished dying, there’s no need for anyone to weep! This was what Malakeh screamed at the waiting women when her daughter died. That day after darkness fell, people heard the voice. It was her husband, Nakhleh, howling like an ox under slaughter. Later, rumors would go around the neighborhood that the man died – only two weeks after the death of his daughter – from the pain caused by having to suppress so many tears. His wife had forbidden him to weep over his daughter Salma.
    Milia did not tell her brother Musa she had seen her aunt Salma in her dream. Musa was only three then. He could not understand such things.
    The night before her aunt’s death Milia opened her eyes at the sound of her mother’s wailing. She decided to return to her dream where she might save her dying aunt, who was only twenty years old. But even there, Milia’s aunt would not emerge from her profound sleep; she would not open her eyes. The dream was a puzzling one. Milia understood its meaning only years later when she began to menstruate and dreamed that she was flying.
    When Milia related the dream to her grandmother everything was already over. The elderly woman held back her tears and requested the little girl to tell the others what had happened in her dream. That day Milia learned to speak about the cryptic, perplexing images she saw at night. As she spoke her cheeks would darken to red and her tongue would show in the gap made by her absent front baby teeth. She could not say a single letter without lisping. She told them how she had seen her aunt Salma falling into the pond in the garden and thrashing about amidst a multitude of tiny red fish as she called out frantically for help. In the dream, Milia tossed a ropeto her aunt and Salma grabbed it. She tried to get out of the water but the rope slipped from Milia’s hands.
    Her aunt lies on thick tufts of grass. Milia walks over and tries to awaken her but just then she hears her grandmother’s voice: Don’t wake her up, my dear, leave her to dream! That was the moment when Milia woke up, shaking with fear. As soon as she went back to sleep, it seemed, she heard her mother’s screams, leapt up from her bed in alarm, and understood that her aunt Salma had died.
    Actually, Milia was not telling the truth. She lied to everyone, but it was only because she was afraid to tell them the rest of her dream. She was afraid to reveal to them that she had entered her aunt’s sleep space. She had dreamed her aunt’s dream. Who would believe that anyone could enter the sleep-visions of another human being? Milia herself had not taken in fully what had happened; she would not understand what it meant to enter someone else’s sleep space until the moment of her own death. Only then did she see what no one ever sees; and she divulged it only to the infant who entered the world from her body.
    Milia lies down next to her aunt on the grass. A filmy white mantle coats Salma’s closed eyes. Milia can see herself entering that filmy cloud and then she sees her aunt flying over what looks like a remote and bottomless valley. She hears the heartbeat of the woman who sails across the sky and she sees fear in her eyes. Salma wears a wedding dress; a long white veil ripples and flutters behind her. Suddenly the veil plummets into the round basin below in the garden and rain comes down in sheets. Milia tries to catch up with Aunt