As Though She Were Sleeping by Elias Khoury

Fine. You are Mansour.
    But Musa did not disappear. One time he heard the name, or thought he heard it, when she was asleep. He was making his usual moves when he heard the name. He retreated and tried to go to sleep. But he couldn’t and so he went to her again and took her, deceiving himself into thinking he had heard the name wrongly. But he felt the utter strangeness of it all with a sense of alienation that he could not shake off. This woman was a stranger here. He no longer knew how to talk to her. Her low voice made him wary of voices in general, and her languid eyes seemed focused only on distant points. He had an uncomfortable sensation of never being able to reach them, wherever it was they went.
    That morning when she leaned toward him and brushed her fingers along his eyebrows and kissed them, Mansour felt like a child. He had as much as admitted seeing her by chance and following her, and standing behind the wall looking at her as she sat on a rock in front of the church steps.
    Now really, how did you see me?
    She said she had seen him with her back because she could see everything in her dreaming. She told him how a person sees in all four directions when dreaming. She asked him about his dreams. He never saw dreams in his sleep, he said.
    That can’t be, she said. You just don’t remember your dreams. She explained to him that a person has to train the memory. Dreams are an extension of a person’s life. We live as much by night as by day, she declared, and anyone who can’t remember his dreams is only living life by halves.
    She heard her grandmother’s husky voice explaining the importance of dreams in a person’s life.
    I’m not like that, said Mansour. I never dream, never ever.
    Everyone dreams, she said.
    For three months now Milia had been growing rounder, with pregnancy and sleepiness and thirst. Her breasts were swelling and her face had grown radiant. He asked her why she walked by herself every day. Why didn’t she come with him? They could stroll together in the evenings after he had returned home from work. He asked her if it made her sad to live so far away from her family.
    She regarded him without answering at first. Then she said she wanted to acquaint the little boy with the town.
    Which little boy? asked Mansour. For us, I hope so! But my heart tells me it’s a girl. My mother says that if a pregnant woman gets more beautiful as she gets more pregnant, that means it will be a girl. And you are getting more beautiful all the time.
    I said boy . He is a boy.
    On the day she covered her tiny breasts with her crossed arms, it dawned on Milia that she was on her way to a remote place from which she would never be able to return. In that rocky pool embedded in the sea her bare breasts exposed her. Her breasts betrayed her and it was on that very evening that the lamb appeared to her in a dream that would recur so frequently that Milia would no longer be able to tell it. Waking up, she would simply recall it as if it had happened in fact. In her sleep it came like an anticipated monthly visitor: a small white lamb skipping across an expanse of green grass. Milia sleeps beneath a spreading fig tree, her eyes shut tightly and her small brown body curled into a half circle. The little lamb comes up to her and stands over her. He puts his cheek to hers. The little girl turns over to lie on her back. He steps back, hesitates, and then scampers toward her, leaps atop her, and puts his front legs on her chest. He pokes his head downward as though to eat the grass. The little girl who sleeps sees nothing but therays of the sun, piercing the lamb’s coat as they pour into her open eyes. The lamb’s little mouth wanders near her eyes so she closes them. She’s afraid he might think her green eyes are of a piece with the grass in the garden and swallow them up. She closes her eyes, feels the tiny lamb’s tongue on her neck, and breathes in the smell of the sun. The sun lamb quivers and gives off