Free As Though She Were Sleeping by Elias Khoury Page A

told the story: how her husband had divorced her and snatched the child from her hands. The child had not died, then, but had been stolen away. Why did Hannah say his hair had gone as hard and dry as thorns? Had his father killed him?
    What does she mean, he divorced her? Milia asked her mother.
    Don’t say that word, we don’t have divorce. Divorce is haraam .
    Hannah disappeared and so did her story. Milia didn’t tell the story to anyone. Musa was the only one to whom she could tell things but he was too little. And by the time he was old enough the story had entered the realms of oblivion.
    After the death of her husband the mother contracted the chronic illness that obliged her to spend almost all of her time at the Convent of the Archangel Mikhail, in the company of prayers and icons and the nuns. As a grandmother she would become a saint or nearly so, eating nothing but bread and bringing cotton soaked in holy oil for members of the family who were ill. No one could ever claim they had not improved because of Saadeh’s sacred oil, because no one else would believe such a claim. Allmembers of the family, big and small, old and young, believed in Saadeh’s miraculous presence. After all, the corpulent nun with the thin nasal voice had bestowed a special grace on Saadeh through their relationship.
    The water and the morning briskness of Shtoura, creeping into Milia’s body, convinced her to return to the room. She went into the reception hall where the breakfast table was set. She saw the driver sitting alone at the table, stuffing himself with fried eggs, labneh, and cheese. When he saw her coming in from outside he rubbed his hands, gave her a sidelong look, and grinned. She saw the words hovering around his lips as if he wanted to talk but he went on chewing his food, exaggerating his lip movements in a show of mockery directed at her. Milia tiptoed up the stone stairs. She opened the door to the room where the drapes were still closed, immersing the place in darkness. She detected an odd smell, something like the smell of the lake in her dream, and felt sleepy. She took off her clothes, put on her nightgown, and got into bed next to Mansour, who was wrapped tightly in the sheets and curled into a half circle. Bringing her face almost to his closed eyes, she felt a rush of tenderness but along with it came an ache that swept from her shoulders to her tailbone.
    Milia would not call it love. Here in this bed, and there in the car, she felt something undefinable, something imprecise whose name she would not discover until Nazareth. The word love she used only once, returning home from the church, her belly swollen and the fragrance of the incense filling her clothes. Mansour was in the garden smoking a cigarette and sniffing the scent of the earth awakened by the rain. He turned to her and said, You know, Milia, you’ll be giving birth on Christmas, at the end of December.
    She was in her fifth month. The smell of the rain ushering in the month of September intoxicated her. She knew exactly when she would give birth to her baby, even to the hour. But when Mansour uttered the word Christmas she felt a shiver at her lower belly, as if the fetus were moving. She saw a white fog hovering around the eyes of her husband and remembered hisclosed eyes on that morning in the Hotel Massabki, and she said she loved him.
    So, if you love me, great, then why don’t you let me sleep with you?
    She put her finger on his lips to shush him. Why did he have to talk like that, using that phrase? She had told him a thousand times that she didn’t like to hear this sort of talk, and that sex was created for the sake of producing children, and now she was pregnant, and praise be to God.
    Mansour began to talk and silence gripped her, as though she had put on a veil that muted her. She would walk through the house on tiptoe, keep everything neat and in order, make food, and wait for her husband. She never asked him questions; he could