Read As Though She Were Sleeping for Free Online Page B

been like tumbling into a deep, pitch-black valley.
    Milia had begun to dread sleep. She would lie down on her bed, eyes open, fighting her drowsiness. As sleep began to creep into the tips of her toes her body would jerk awake all at once, chasing it away. But sleep would wrap itself tightly around her and not let go. It came from behind and assaulted her, dragging her downward into its darknesses. Night – the nighttime that had been all hers – was an enemy now, witness to the shuddering and quaking of her body. Her thigh would jerk and go rigid as if receiving a blow. She would feel herself falling and her shoulder muscles would tighten, her body convulse. Trying to lie back and relax her muscles, she would search desperately for a story that could put her to sleep but whatever story she came up with would slide away as the darkness inched in to envelop her.
    Milia lost the cavern where she had concealed her dreams. She could not understand why – until the photograph exposed the secret of her eyes.
    Now Musa stood rigid with confusion before his sister. Why did she so dislike the beautiful image he had hung on the wall?
    Stand directly in front of it, he said to her. See, it’s as good as your mirror.
    Studying the photograph, Milia saw how the shadows of green had imprinted themselves inside the black ink. She turned her face away and left the sitting room. Standing in front of the picture, Musa sensed it speaking to him. Now, he thought, he could agree well and truly to the marriage of his sister. Milia would not really be going with this Mansour fellow to Nazareth but rather would stay here with them, hanging on the wall. He would not have to pine for her.
    Musa turned around. His sister was no longer there. He went out to the garden where she sat on the wooden swing that hung from a branch ofthe enormous fig tree. He saw his sister’s body tremble as she sobbed, but instead of going to her he turned around and returned to the sitting room. He sat down on the sofa facing the photograph.
    Milia did not tell Mansour that she had cried bitter tears, sitting on the garden swing. The taste of the tears on her lips did not match the words so often used to portray them. Tears are salty but we describe their tang as bitter. Drinking her salty tears, Milia tasted a bitter essence, but it came to her from a dream that was not hers. The color of bitterness is green, she thought, like the irises that had vanished from the screen where her dreams played.
    On a white metal bed set against the white wall where Musa hung his sister’s photograph, Milia was born at noon on Monday the second of July in the year 1923. The day was hot and humid. Beirut’s metallic sun pounded the streets with cords of fire. The midwife, Nadra Salloum, had hung yellow bedsheets over the sitting-room windows. They burned with the light that beamed through the window and turned the entire room into what seemed a mass of yellow flame. On the bed Saadeh lay moaning. Nadra – stocky and dark and plump faced, with a lit cigarette held eternally between her lips – chided and teased the woman whose torso stretched across the width of the bed, her face covered in heavy sweat and her white chemise spattered with a wetness tinted yellow by the imprint of the sun’s blaze.
    Shhh, sister, this isn’t your first tummyful and there’s no need to scream, said Nadra, arms crossed, chewing the butt of her lit cigarette as she waited for the baby to appear.
    It was Saadeh’s sixth childbirth. Of the previous five three boys remained: her firstborn, Salim; her fourth, Niqula; and the fifth one, Abdallah. Of the two who had died, the second child to be born to Saadeh had gone unnamed, his sobriquet becoming the Blue Boy because he had been born with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck and had choked on hisblueness. Number three, Nasib, had contracted jaundice a week after his birth, entering family lore as Yellow Nasib .
    Saadeh lay across the bed awaiting