Sleep: An Exclusive Excerpt from the novel "Memories of Birth"

By Diana Abu-Jaber

When I was sixteen, my friend Selma and I used to travel to the souq and bring back special items for the women in our camp: cooking pots, threads, paper, seeds. We took a road that led up to the side of our river, the one my mother and I had once crossed to escape from the other side.

The water murmured to us as it ran. On those banks, I felt all my senses settle into me, everything failing in place among the fields, sunlight swaying in the tree limbs, sky running down to the river, turning the world round and blue, a single opal. I saw the blades of grass, stems, and wild herbs resolve themselves into curls of perfect Arabic. I saw those words repeating in the water, rocks, and earth. The red, wicking branches of the cedar and the fat-thorned briars hummed and moved, and in them I heard, I promise, I promise, the sky opening like the white pages of the Quraan, Fatiha, the opening, the arrival of angels.

One day, Selma and I were returning to camp, pockets bursting with fruit, string, nails, arms full of books, when we saw a woman huddled just in front of the camp territory. She sat in the dust with her arms around her knees, just rocking, head lowered, a person waiting for the world to pass on. I felt a dull weight sloughing through my limbs as if a spell had been cast over me. I looked at Selma and she too hung back as if suspended in the glassy air.

She lifted her head at our footsteps and smiled. Her family name was Basheer, she said. She was born in Lebanon and she described the gray-green screen of trees that had surrounded her there, in winter the air smoking from wood fires, the horizon fading to sky beige that she saw from the top of their hill. She looked around the desert traces outside our camp; she was still looking for the tree ridges. She had wild yellow hair and a way of seeing what was not there, of looking with eyes that seemed torn away and vacant. When the air lifted her hair we saw the cicatrices of old wounds or cuts that snaked up the sides of her jaw to somewhere above her hairline. She saw our stare and pulled her hair back over the scars.

"I was born into a family of ten girls," she said. "My parents were very poor and girl children are a luxury for the rich, a curse on the poor. When I was 14 years old, a man came into our village on horseback, pointed at me where I was picking up berries, and said, ‘I’ll take her. She’ll do.’ That was enough for my parents, even though I had several older sisters. I cried and my sisters said to me, have courage. Look, they said, he has such a fine horse, so lively, he must be able to feed it and shelter it. I was pulled, howling, on to the saddle behind him. He gave his horse a single slap and we were off. We went to his farm outside of Nablus."

She stopped a moment and appeared to be thinking, stroking the hair that covered her scars. Then she said, "He was my husband for 18 years."

I dared to say, "Then he was the one who gave you those scars!"

She turned her ice-green eyes on me and I repented having spoken. "How do you know I wasn’t born with these!" Then she looked down and said, voice muted, "No, he wasn’t the one."

The newcomer was beautiful and frightening as a golden-backed lion. Her hair sparked silver; it drew lightning from the sky. The old peasant women of the camp annoyed me, saying that she had the evil eye, that she was a witch who changed into a lion at night, roaming camp and looking for children to eat. They said she should be cast back into the sea or the desert where she came from, before she could resume her old form.

She stayed, then, with my mother and me. My mother could break a superstition into pieces with her laughter. I followed the new woman around like a firefly around a strip of moonlight. I looked deep into her eyes for magic or blood-thirst, but her eyes were ice crystals, her face white as if the snow had traced its white script over her features.

Her witching rumor continued, however. It flourished because we found she had a habit of strolling through the lengths of the camp, from moonrise to sunrise.

"I can’t sleep," she said one morning after she’d been with us a week. She was twisting and tugging at the long, gold and silver hair.

"But why?" I asked, clearing our breakfast. "Everyone has to sleep."

My mother gestured me away from my snooping, but my friend was already answering, "That’s when they come for me. When I sleep."

"But no one is after you in this place, my dear." My mother lowered her embroidery.

"No, they can get me anywhere I go," she said, and tapped one finger against her temple. "They are up here and sleep releases them into my blood."

"Who?’ I asked, a thread of excitement running up my spine.

She only shook her head and looked sorry then, perhaps that she had said so much.

After another week, our guest had settled into her work: the construction of beads and amulets against the evil eye, packets of incense and plant roots to bum by a sick child’s bed or to rub on an ailing belly. The women came around and bought her charms and remedies with a silent, offended air. Her pieces were of better quality and potency than those from the souq.

She heaped my mother and me with ropes of protective beads and she recited special prayers to ward off the envious gaze. When our neighbors saw how quickly their sick ones recovered, they began to invite her to weddings and funerals, and to call down benevolent spirits. She also became known as a fine storyteller. The women began to allow themselves to see her strange beauty and they asked her to preside over their dinners, to bless our gatherings. I confess here that I began to feel jealous of her attentions. My private joy and mystery was invited, at last, into the whole camp, and I wanted her back to myself. I don’t know if she guessed my feelings, but I turned away from her when she came to kiss me before I slept. I took off her beads and refused to rub her back when she asked.

One day, then, we were attending a wedding. The women sat in a circle around the woman that the whole camp was now calling, Our Sister. She was very pale, her beauty pristine as an icicle. The only flaw was beneath her eyes, the skin dyed a watery blue from lack of sleep. She had sometimes fallen asleep while talking to my mother or while setting out food, standing, chin nodding against her chest. She would not lie in the blankets my mother had spread for her beside my small cushion. Pointing to the bed, she said, "That is the doorway."

On this day she was whiter than ever, her skin frost-touched. The sun veiled her.

My mother said, "Oh Beauty! Tell us something to make us laugh."

My friend tipped her head so she seemed almost to fade. Her drowsiness filled the room and held us. She began, her voice little more than the murmuring of air, blood running in our ears: ‘Let me tell you about the lioness who went out of the jungle. She was a fine, golden lioness with a coat like silk and large, powerful paws. She had no equal in her jungle."

"And do you know why she left? Because of the mystery of the new, because of the shadows and promises and loveliness of the new. A small black crow, shiny as a rose, hopped out of the tree above the lioness and darted out of the jungle, calling, ‘Mistress Lioness! Mistress Lioness!’ But the lion does not hear the crow. What is out there, our she-lion wonders. What could it be? I must go have a look-see. And the innocent lion makes for the heavy, golden dunes that glitter on the jungle’s outskirts."

She pauses here a moment and an expectant titter comes from the women, rippling through us. My friend moves her head again and I see through the sun that her eyes are fixed on me, steady points among the movement of light and laughter. I see that she is asking me something. Something that I am on the very brink of understanding, but then I stop myself from falling forward through her gaze, her thoughts. I hold back and say to myself, no, she will come to me! And I drop my eyes.

I hear her voice again, swirling in the cusp of my ear: "The lion, she did not use caution!" Her voice breaks. She is tugging at her hair, looking at me, falling forwardCas I had willed-through herself, as if in pieces. "When she reached the dunes, two soldiers seized her. The crow flew overhead, screaming, but there was nothing he could do. They took her to prison and they beat her with wooden bats. They accused her of collaborating with the resistance."

In a moment, with the changing of the story, our silences turns into something new; we spin at the story’s vortex as it becomes an open mouth, an angry eye. Memory whips the air as we look at her and see pieces of our own stories.

"My husband took me away. I didn’t want to go. What could I do? I bore his children in his lonely home. But he was old, he died and left us there. When the soldiers came they accused me of resistance work. They demanded the names of my cohorts. My mouth filled up with tears, my children cried. They kept me alone in a space that had no light, not enough room sit up. They fed me rice with maggots in it. They - they!" Her voice stretches to a single razor of pain. "I don’t remember. Their fingers. I don’t remember ... just water, water, a hose down my throat, up into my womb, water. Through my eyes, drowning me, their fingers ... I don’t remember. The flood. God help me ... so much water, water - help me, oh help me."

When my mother stands at last and breaks the spell, the women scatter as if they’d been in the presence of a devil. "The evil eye...." I could hear someone say.

Could they deny their own thoughts, their own memories? I saw it in the crescents of their down turned eyes, the white tongue of denial on their lips. My mother and I stood beside the woman. My mothers eyes alone were dark angels, steadying us.

After that, the visitor started to sleep. One of us would catch a glimpse of her curled on the blankets, always at odd hours, late morning after breakfast or right before dinner. But if we looked at her she would start awake, a person in mid-leap; she would swear she’d been awake.

She began to talk about leaving us, going to find her children, the baby that she had wrapped up in her skirts. I would sit on the floor by her feet and take hold of her ankles, saying, "No, not yet. You belong with us. This is your home!" But my mother said, "Hush, Alia, how would you feel if I had been separated from you?"

I sat stunned as if she’d struck me.

The other women no longer came by to consult with my friend. Their children said, "We hear you have a she-lion jinni living with you!’

I would smile, smug and diabolical, and say, "How would it be, I wonder, to be eaten alive?"

Then one night I had gone to bed while my friend prowled the length of the tent. I slept soundly until, at some point in the night, I thought the moon had strayed through my dream.

Everything was quiet, the sides of our canvas roof moving gently. I gradually became aware of a sound, small as breath, continuous, persistent. I began to sit up, my eyes opening wide, swallowing the tent, the moonlight. I heard it clearly, urgent as breath, blood pulsing through a body. I imagined the gold-limbed lioness had stood and was watching me, jaws gaping from the starvation of the desert.

I noticed a golden spot in the corner of the tent. I lit the lantern and saw that it was my friend, tucked into herself, brow against knees and hands against face, and her fingers were ribboned with blood; blood streamed along her wrists and knuckles. She tore at herself, opening the seams upon seams of scars, making a sound like a person breathing and crying.

"Yemah," I whispered for my mother. She woke, clutching her robe, her face set. She grabbed my friend’s hands, and, shaking her, I saw my mother wake her from a dream.

Our guest left us not long after that, after the new scratches had closed. I don’t know where she went; we never heard from her again. But shortly before she left, she gave me her favorite amulet. It was made of gold and silver, and had come, she said, from a place very far away and from very long ago. I wore it on a chain wound twice around my neck. A charm to help children sleep at night: a single open eye.

Diana Abu-Jabber’s is a writer-in-residence at Portland State University. Her first novel, Arabian Jazz, was published in 1993 by Harcourt Brace. "Sleep" is an excerpt from Memories of Birth, which won a NEA Fellowship, and will be published next year by W.W. Norton.

This article appeared in Vol. 3, No. 18 (June 1997).

Copyright © 1997 by Al Jadid