As Though She Were Sleeping Read Online Free PDF Page B

Salma but she cannot. Running toward her aunt, she trips and falls. Blood oozes from her right knee. She looks upward and sees Salma drawing farther away until she is no more than a white dot on the horizon. Milia hears her mother crying. She opens her eyes and sees Saadeh huddled in the corner of the room, sobbing. She knows that death has arrived. Sheunderstands that death is an unending dream, as her grandmother would say. At the age of seven it dawns on her that she can steal into the sleep-vision of death and savor the watery taste of it.
    Salma’s death did not come as a surprise. The young woman had contracted the yellow fever that prowled the streets of Beirut. Everyone knew that Salma would die. She had refused all offers of marriage as she waited for Ibrahim Hananiya, who had traveled to Brazil with a promise that he would return wealthy and marry her, and she was still waiting. Malakeh bought a white wedding gown so that her daughter could wear it into her coffin. Milia caught some fragments of the story from her mother, who contributed to the purchase of the gown. But matters became confused in the girl’s head. She heard her mother say that Salma’s wedding was near; and she saw the grandmother who came to visit them one morning weeping for her daughter’s lost youth. But she did not understand the meaning of any of it until she saw it in her dream. When her tongue formed the words to the story, which slipped through the gap made by the missing baby teeth, and she told her grandmother how she had seen what no one else had seen, she was afraid of her grandmother’s response. Don’t say such things, my dear, Grandmama warned. Only the dead see the sleep-visions of the dead. Her grandmother made the sign of the cross on her granddaughter’s brow and asked God’s protection for her. May the cross of the Greek Orthodox Church protect you, my girl.
    In her dream she saw him, too.
    Milia told her mother and her grandmother that she had seen Ibrahim Hananiya walking behind Salma’s coffin. She had seen a short, rather rolypoly man in a long green overcoat, his head drooping as if his short neck could not support it. He had been wearing brown and white shoes, she said, and he staggered and reeled as he walked, with no cane to support his body. Ibrahim was alone, Milia told them, and she had spoken to him. No, he wasthe one who spoke first. He came over to her and remarked that no one had recognized him. He had changed enormously in Brazil, he told her. Before, I wasn’t short like this, he said. But I put on weight and fat shortens a person. Maybe that’s why no one recognizes me. He smiled, showing his yellowish teeth, and asked her if she was Salma.
    Salma is dead. Why are you bringing me into it?
    I know, I know, he said. But you are Salma, aren’t you?
    When she tried to answer him her tongue stuck in the baby-tooth gap. She sensed herself powerless to form any words; what came out of her mouth seemed nothing more than a few unintelligible gurgles, and she began to cry.
    She wanted to ask him why he had not come back from Brazil before Salma’s death. She wanted to know if he had gotten rich like all Lebanese did when they immigrated to those faraway lands. She wanted to say that her aunt had died because of him. But she could not. She felt the words dissolve before they were even formed. She felt herself choking and she could not say a word.
    Ibrahim’s image remained imprinted in her memory as though he had been her man, indeed her very first man. She sensed a lingering love for him. From the tears welling in his eyes, she knew somehow that he had lost everything by returning to Beirut only to discover that the woman for whose sake he had gone away, and then had come back, was dead.
    That was what she would have told Mansour, had she told him anything. Mansour talked all the time. He left no spaces for the silent speech hidden in his wife’s pale features. And on those occasions when he did want to