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ate of the Sun, by Elias Khoury
Raja Shehadeh, The Nation, Apr 19, 2006
This article was originally published in The Nation and is republished with the author's permission.
Elias Khoury's "Gate of the Sun"
Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews have fundamentally different attitudes toward the origins of the conflict that at once divides and binds them. The number of Israeli books about the early settlements and the 1948 war--histories, memoirs, novels--exceeds by far the number of those written by Palestinians. In the face of a work like Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial, which drew upon spurious demographic "data" to deny that Palestinians were ever the majority in their own land, a Palestinian is angered but not moved to action. Indeed, the rebuttal to Peters came not from a Palestinian but from Norman Finkelstein, an American Jew.
This may seem strange, but it is not. For the question of whether Palestinians did or did not exist in Palestine when the first Zionist settlers arrived is more of an American/Israeli issue than a Palestinian one, as is the question of whether Palestinians were driven from their homeland. Among Palestinians there is no debate about their roots in Palestine, or about the causes of their dispossession. They either had family living in 1948 Palestine or heard from those who had family about what life was like and the circumstances under which they were forced to flee. A Palestinian author writing in Arabic for an Arab audience is not weighed down by the burden of having to prove anything about the Nakba, "the catastrophe."
Not so for Palestinian authors writing in English for a Western audience. This may explain why much of the historical work on the Nakba by Palestinians such as Walid Khalidi and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod was written originally in English--and why the Israeli "new" historians who reached the same conclusions much, much later found it easier to persuade readers in the West that the 1948 refugees had not simply left of their own accord. As Edward Said frequently observed, part of being Palestinian is being denied the right to narrate one's own experience.
The same burden of proof under which Palestinian historians have labored applies with equal force to novelists and poets, whose evocation of the Nakba is almost always approached with suspicion--the suspicion being that the objective behind the work is propagandistic rather than artistic. As a result, imaginative writing by Palestinians is often assessed by Western critics according to narrowly political rather than aesthetic criteria, something few novelists would welcome, even if the reviews were favorable. It is no wonder that the number of literary works by Palestinians that have been published and become well-known in the United States is very small indeed.
This political rather than literary reception is likely to be the fate of Elias Khoury's epic novel Gate of the Sun (Bab al-Shams), first published in Arabic in 1998 and just released in English by Archipelago Books in an excellent translation by Humphrey Davies. Khoury is a Lebanese writer who has listened very carefully to the testimony of people who have been living in refugee camps in Lebanon since they were driven out of Palestine by Zionist forces in 1948. His novel is inspired by these accounts. When Gate of the Sun was published in Hebrew in 2002, the veracity of Khoury's chronicle of the Nakba stirred controversy (although the book was praised by some Israeli critics), and this could become an issue in the United States. That would be unfortunate, since Khoury's novel is a work of literature, not oral history.
When Gate of the Sun was first published, it received high praise in the Arab world, especially among Palestinians. (It was also adapted by Egyptian director Yousry Nasrallah into a four-hour film, shown at a few festivals in the States.) Palestine has produced some distinguished novelists, notably Emile Habiby and Ghassan Kanafani, both of whom explored the Palestinian condition of statelessness, exile and dispersion. Yet neither Habiby, with his absurdist vision of the experience of Palestinians who stayed behind in Israel (The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist), nor Kanafani, with his bitter tales of Palestinian laborers in the Gulf (Men in the Sun), wrote directly about the Nakba, preferring to examine its reverberations instead. Indeed, there are so few novels about the Nakba that many Palestinians were grateful to Khoury simply for giving voice to their memories of the most traumatic and defining moment in their history.
The Nakba has achieved such mythic dimensions in the Arab world that many Arabs are tempted to believe the events took place in one blow: One day there were Arabs in Palestine, and the next they were gone. In fact, for at least three months after the 1949 armistice the borders between the Jewish state and its Arab neighbors were open and Israel lacked the means to prevent infiltrators (the overwhelming majority of whom were simply seeking to return to their land, not to carry out guerrilla attacks). "Slipping across from Lebanon to Galilee," Khoury suggests, continued until the mid-1950s. He writes not only of the expulsion of the refugees but also of those who, once in Lebanon, smuggled themselves back into Palestine for short periods of time.
Arab governments did not encourage these efforts, as my father learned. After the Palestinian exodus from Jaffa, many of the townspeople, including our family, ended up in Jordanian-ruled Ramallah, as did many of those driven from Lydda and Ramle. Soon after, my father helped organize a meeting where a mass return of the refugees was proposed while the borders were still porous. The next morning, the Jordanian military arrested my father and warned that he would be kept behind bars if he ever floated this proposal again. The Arab regimes, for all their rhetorical bravado, agreed to the creation of Israel. They helped prevent the return of the refugees and the reversal of the 1948 Israeli military conquest.
The secret history of Palestinian border infiltrations into Israel in the early years of the state is a central element of Khoury's story, and it gives Gate of the Sun much of its novelty and power. The protagonist, Yunes al-Asadi, a Palestinian refugee in Lebanon, makes a number of secret trips to Deir al-Asad, the village he was forced to leave in 1948. During these infiltrations he has to watch out for both the Lebanese and the Israeli armies. As the novel shows, for those who, like Yunes, were willing to risk the journey in order to attend to unfinished personal business, the Nakba did not immediately create an irreversible situation. By imagining the movement across the open border between Lebanon and the newly created state of Israel, Khoury brings out the complexity that is often suppressed in the official narratives of 1948.
On one of his first infiltrations, Yunes is reunited with his wife, Nahilah, who stayed behind. She tells him how the Israelis took the land and how their son's head was crushed by "a huge stone [that] had fallen on him" while he was playing with the children in the nearby settlement. She runs to the military governor's headquarters and asks for a permit to take her son to the hospital in Acre. There she is interrogated about her husband for three hours. Meanwhile, her son dies. After learning of Ibrahim's death, Yunes is eager for revenge, but he decides that individual reprisal is "worthless" and goes back to Lebanon to organize Palestinians into a guerrilla army. He chooses war over revenge and emerges as a legendary resistance leader. But Khoury is not uncritical of the Palestinian resistance, which he portrays as purely reactive. He takes us through the movement's different phases, from the days when its headquarters were in Jordan to the Lebanese Civil War, when Yunes serves in the Lebanon Regional Command of the Fatah Movement. Each phase leads "back to the beginning," as Yunes frequently laments, leaving him to pick up the pieces and start over again.
Yunes's story is recounted by Khalil Ayyoub, his caretaker at the Galilee Hospital in the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, where Yunes has been rushed following "an explosion in the brain causing permanent damage." Khalil is called a doctor but really isn't one. He is, in fact, a former PLO political commissar who studied field medicine in China. He has been talking to Yunes for the past three months, trying to rouse him from his coma. "Is he dead or alive?" Khalil wonders. "I don't know--am I helping or tormenting him?"
Frustrated by Yunes's silence, Khalil seeks the advice of Umm Hassan, the only midwife in Shatila, who despite her own childlessness is described as the "mother of all our mothers" from the Galilee. In the opening pages of the novel, we are told that Umm Hassan is a woman who "always told the truth." She knew, for example, that the 1967 war would only bring disaster, and she predicted that "Palestine would not come back until all of us had died." When Khalil complains that Yunes can't speak, she insists that he can: "It's up to you to hear his voice." Although Khalil still can't hear Yunes, who according to his real doctors is "clinically dead," he refuses to give up hope, promising to "hold conversations with you and tell you stories. I'll tell you everything. What do you say--I'll make tea, and we'll sit on the low chairs in front of your house and tell tales!"
Thus begins the novel's Scheherazade voyage, which stretches out over 539 pages. But whereas the tales in Thousand and One Nights are funny and bawdy, here the tales are recounted to a dying, if not already dead, man with great solemnity, as if the narrator speaking on his behalf were taking part in a religious ceremony. There is none of the black humor and irony that have inflected the Palestinian response to many generations of interminable suffering. And Khalil's second-person narration of the dying man's life often results in awkward constructions that can test one's patience, making it even harder for the reader to find his way in this labyrinth of overlapping stories. The silence of the man to whom the stories are told can also be infuriating. But then, Khoury may have intended to provoke such a reaction, for the comatose man--a leader of a national liberation movement, still in exile and unable to speak--is laden with symbolism.
As this scenario suggests, Gate of the Sun is a novel of prodigious ambition, seeking to evoke the full sweep of Palestinian history. Most Palestinian novelists have preferred to illuminate specific aspects of the Palestinian experience, and for good reason. That experience has been so eventful, so turbulent, so fragmented and so complicated--intertwined with the two World Wars, the Holocaust, the cold war, inter-Arab politics, the events of Black September in Jordan, the Lebanese Civil War and the 1991 Gulf War--that it seems to defy dramatization, even while inviting it. The story unfolds on an almost mythic plane, a plane much vaster than that of the novel. Khoury seems aware of this problem; his narrator observes at one point that the novelist Ghassan Kanafani didn't write about Yunes's experience of the Nakba "because he was looking for mythic stories, and yours was just the story of a man in love." Yet Gate of the Sun is not so much the intimate story of a man in love as the allegorical tale of an entire people.
The novel opens, significantly, on November 20, 1995, two months after the Interim Agreement (Oslo II) was signed between the PLO and Israel, an agreement that addressed the condition of Palestinians in the occupied territories while leaving out the Palestinian refugees scattered throughout the Arab world. Oslo II was met with cries of betrayal in the camps, which have evolved into a permanent home to several generations of Palestinians, especially in Khoury's Lebanon, where as many as 350,000 Palestinian refugees wait to return home. In a sense, Yunes stands for all those refugees abandoned by the Palestinian negotiators at Oslo, with the stroke of a pen. (It is this same leadership that suffered a resounding defeat in the general elections on January 25 in the occupied territories.)
When Yunes is brought to the hospital at the opening of the novel, he is immediately pronounced dead, and hospital administrators don't want to assign a room to him. Khalil, however, rejects this judgment and, invoking a medical authority he does not actually possess, finds a room for him. By telling Yunes stories, the "doctor" hopes to resuscitate his patient. But can narrative and remembrance provide the sustenance of Palestinian survival and endurance? Khalil, exasperated, asks Yunes:
Do you believe we can construct our country out of these ambiguous stories? And why do we have to construct it? People inherit their countries as they inherit their languages. Why do we, of all the peoples of the world, have to invent our country every day so everything isn't lost and we find we've fallen into eternal sleep?
Khoury's answer seems to be that story-telling is a defeated nation's way of preserving its memories, keeping itself alive and reminding the world of its existence, its refusal to surrender. Despite the tragic history it recounts, Gate of the Sun is an affirmative book, insisting that despite the recent betrayals of its leaders, Palestine is not dead, that, in Khalil's words, Palestinians continue "seeking the aroma of life and are waiting." Yet Khoury seems to admit the limits of storytelling as an act of resistance, since it can draw one further away from the reality it is intended to recall. And for Yunes, reality seems to be slipping away. At one point, Khalil asks him whether he knows where he is now, and then answers:
Everything here isn't itself but a simulacrum of itself. We say house but we don't live in houses, we live in places that resemble houses. We say Beirut but we aren't really in Beirut, we're in a semblance of Beirut. I say doctor but I'm not a doctor, I'm just pretending to be one. Even the camp itself--we say we're in the Shatila camp, but after the War of the Camps and the destruction of eighty percent of Shatila's houses, it's no longer a camp, it's just a semblance of a camp.
It is hard to resist the temptation to read such passages allegorically. The hospital could represent Palestine (or the PLO) after Oslo II, a sick house run by a sham doctor, a semblance of a hospital where everything is breaking down and where the residents are nurtured by listening to stories that have no beginning or end--a "country of words," as the poet Mahmoud Darwish bitterly wrote.
At the risk of contradicting my own warning against reading novels about Palestine for their political rather than literary merits, I could not help bristling somewhat at Khoury's depiction of Palestine as an endless hall of mirrors with little or no relationship to reality. To be sure, this is the experience of Palestine for those refugees who have been stranded for more than half a century (and, perhaps, for those Palestinians who have remained in what is now Israel, and watched their country progressively disappear over time), and Khoury's intention to assert the reality of the refugees and keep their stories alive is admirable. But he overlooks those parts of Palestine that remain formally outside Israel and where the majority of Palestinians are still living under occupation. For Palestinians in places like Ramallah, where I live, Palestine is a physical reality, not simply an endless web of stories.
The proliferation of stories also presents a problem for Gate of the Sun as a work of literature, and it is as a novel, not as a political commentary or oral history, that Khoury's book must be assessed. Just before the end of Part One, Khalil stands up and declares: "For three months I've been telling you stories, some of which I know and some of which I don't. And you're incapable of correcting my errors, so I make mistakes once in a while.... My throat's dry from so much talking. I'm dried up, I've become desiccated." Khalil says he feels as if he is "a prisoner of the story. I'm drowning. Water surrounds me. I swallow water and swallow words and tell the story." These words could express the state of the reader, who feels just as lost in a maze of stories without the firm command of an author in control of his material. The idea for the book is brilliant, but the execution is uneven at best.
In the second part of Gate of the Sun, Khalil expresses his fear of "a history that has only one version. History has dozens of versions, and for it to ossify into one leads only to death." Perhaps it was to avoid this that Khoury ventured into territory rarely visited by Arab novelists: the Holocaust. Khoury describes his narrator imagining Umm Hassan "wandering in the fields among the thousands of others without homes." This waking nightmare continues, but the scene suddenly shifts from Palestine to Nazi-occupied Europe: "I see her, and I hear the whistle of the train...when the refugees were rounded up and distributed around the various suburbs, which then turned into camps. The whistle rings in my ears. I see the people being led toward the final train. I see the trains, and I shudder. Then I see myself loaded into a basin and carried on a woman's head. I confess I'm scared." He declares: "You and I and every human being on the face of the planet should have known and not stood by in silence, should have prevented that beast from destroying its victims in that barbaric, unprecedented manner. Not because the victims were Jews but because their death meant the death of humanity within us...we--you--were outside history, so you became its second victim."
Since Israel depicted itself as the redemption after the European catastrophe, Khoury suggests, Palestinians were suddenly forced to see themselves through the prism of Jewish history. Here Khalil, until now a confused and broken man, suddenly overcomes his paralysis and improbably turns into a seer, a prophet, telling Yunes, "We mustn't see ourselves only in their [the Jews'] mirror, for they're prisoners of one story [the Holocaust], as though the story had abbreviated and ossified them. Please, Father--we mustn't become just one story. Even you, even Nahilah--please let me liberate you from your love story, for I see you as a man who betrays and repents and loves and fears and dies. Believe me, this is the only way if we're not to ossify and die. You haven't ossified into one story. You will die, but you'll be free. Free of everything, even free of your own story." Earlier, he says, "You saw your own image in their mirrors.... I do see a mirror broken into two halves, which can only be mended by joining the parts together. Dear God, this is the tragedy: to see two halves that come together only in war and ruination."
This image of Palestinians and Israelis as two halves of a broken mirror is striking, but the change in tone is jarring, the narrator's revelations unconvincing. Nor are the encounters with Jews who have left Lebanon to settle in Israel any more convincing. In one of Khalil's tales, Umm Hassan returns home to what has become the northern Israeli settlement of Beyt ha-Emek, where she meets Ella Dweik, a Lebanese Jew living in the house that once belonged to her. Dweik welcomes her, saying, "I've been waiting for you for a long time." When she discovers that Umm Hassan now lives in a camp in Beirut, her eyes fill with tears, and she says that she too is from Beirut. "They brought me from there when I was twelve," she recalls. "I left Beirut and came to this dreary, bleak land." When Umm Hassan asks her how this happened, she replies, "What do you mean, how did that happen? I've no idea. You're living in Beirut and you've come here to cry? I'm the one who should be crying. Get up, my friend, and go. Send me to Beirut and take this wretched land back." While Israeli Jews from Arab and Muslim countries are known to long for their ancestral homes, Ella Dweik's cry that she has "no idea" why she left Lebanon for Israel strikes a false note, as does her remark that she has been "waiting" for Umm Hassan, a woman who, after all, has the keys to the house Dweik now occupies. The point Khoury is making is an admirable one: that the destinies of these women, secret sharers of the intimate history of Palestine, are intertwined, and that the events of 1948 shattered the ties between Arabs and Jews native to the region. Yet the women are ciphers, embodiments of ideas rather than fully realized characters. As a result, the scene is contrived and sentimental rather than moving.
Reading Gate of the Sun, one has the impression that Khoury was so haunted by the anecdotes he was told that he could not bear to part with any of them--the story of the woman who left her home while the zucchini was still on the fire, the woman who lost her children while fleeing Palestine, the adventures of those who stayed behind and the hardships they faced, the journeys of those who acquired foreign passports in the West that enabled them to visit Israel. Palestinian refugees are all too familiar with these tales, but the urge to tell every one of them has produced a cluttered, crowded book. And the narrative conceit of having Khalil speak for the man in the coma and convey to us what he did and what he must have thought and felt, while repeatedly asking for his reactions and posing questions that never get answered, makes this long novel feel very long indeed.
The Nakba was the formative event for the Palestinians as a nation, particularly for the refugees in Lebanon who remain in camps and whose fate has been darker than that of any other Palestinian group. Khoury listened to their tales with compassion and commitment. He is among the few who have given literary expression to their memories. Palestinians tend to expect that every work about Palestine must encompass the whole of the Palestinian experience. It is unfortunate that Khoury, who is not Palestinian, was also motivated to achieve this impossible goal. Still, Gate of the Sun is important for trying to capture the Palestinian experience during and after 1948. Although it overreaches, the novel is unique and powerful, and Archipelago Books is to be commended for making it available to an American audience.
===
MM HASSAN IS DEAD. I saw everyone racing through the alleys of the camp and heard the sound of weeping. People were spilling out of their houses, bent over to catch their tears, running. Nabi-lah, Mahmoud al Qasimi's wife, our mother, was dead. We called her Mother because everyone born in Shatila camp fell from their mother's guts into her hands.
I, too, had fallen into her hands, and I too ran the day she died.
a woman Umm Hassan came from al-Kweikat, her village in Galilee, to become the only midwife in Shatila of uncertain age and without children. I only knew her when she was old, with bent shoulders, a face full of creases, large eyes shining in a white square face, and a white cloth covering her white hair.
Our neighbor, Sana', the wife of Karim al-Jashi the kunafa (pastry) seller, said Umm Hassan dropped in on her the night before last and told her that her death was coming.
"I heard its voice, daughter. Death whispers, and its voice is soft."
Speaking in her half-Bedouin accent, she told Sana about the messenger of death.
"The messenger came in the morning and told me to get ready."
And she told Sana how she wanted to be prepared for burial.
"She took me by the hand," said Sana, "led me to her house, opened her wooden trunk, and showed me the white silk shroud. She told me she would bathe before she went to sleep: I'll die pure, and I want only you to wash me."
Umm Hassan is dead.
Everyone knew that this Monday morning, November 20, 1995, was the time set for Nabilah, Fatimah's daughter, to meet death. Everyone awoke and waited, but no one was brave enough to go to her house to discover she was dead. Umm Hassan had told everyone, and everyone believed her.
Only I was taken by surprise.
I stayed with you until eleven at night, and then, exhausted, I went to my room and slept. It was night, the camp was asleep, and no one told me.
But everyone else knew.
No one would question Umm Hassan because she always told the truth. Hadn't she been the only one to weep on the morning of June 5, 1967? Everyone was
dancing in the streets, anticipating going home to Pal-estine, but she wept. She told everyone she'd decided to dress in mourning. Everyone laughed and said Umm Hassan had gone mad. Throughout the six long days of the war she never opened the windows of her house; on the seventh, out she came to wipe away everyone's tears. She said she knew Palestine would not come back until all of us had died.
In her long life, Umm Hassan had buried her four children one after another. They would come to her car-ried on planks, their clothes covered in blood. All she had left was a son called Naji, who lived in America. Though Naji wasn't her real son, he was: she had found him beneath an olive tree on the al-Kabri'-Tarshiha road and had fed him from her dry breasts, then returned him to his mother in the village of Qana, in Lebanon.
Umm Hassan died today.
No one dared go into her house. About twenty women gathered in front of the door to wait, then Sana came and knocked on the door, but no one opened it. She pushed it, it opened, she went in and ran to the bedroom. Umm Hassan was sleeping, her head covered with her white headscarf. Sana went over and took her by the shoulders, and the chill of death flowed into the hands of the kunafa-seller's wife, who screamed. The women entered, the weeping began, and everyone raced to the house.
1, too, would like to run with the others, go in with them, see Umm Hassan sleeping her eternal sleep and breathe in the smell of olives that clung to her small home.
But I didn't weep.
For three months, I've been incapable of reacting. Only this man floating above his bed makes me feel the thrill of things. For three months he's been laid out on his bed in Galilee Hospital, where I work as a doctor, or where I pretend I'm a doctor. I sit next to him, and I try. Is he dead or alive? I don't know am I helping or tormenting him? Should I tell him stories or listen to him?
For three months I've been in this room.
Today Umm Hassan died, and I want him to know, but he doesn't hear. I want him to come with me to her funeral, but he won't get up.
They said he fell into a coma.
An explosion in the brain causing permanent damage. A man lies in front of me, and I have no idea what to do. I just try not to let him rot while he's still alive, because I'm sure he's asleep, not dead.
But what difference does it make?
Is it true what Umm Hassan said about a sleeper being like a dead man-that the sleeper's soul leaves his body only to return when he wakes, but that the dead man's soul leaves and doesn't come back? Where is the soul of Yunes, son of Ibrahim, son of Suleiman al-Asadi? Has it left him for a distant place, or is it hovering above us in the hospital room, asking me not to go because the man lies in distant darknesses, afraid of the silence?
I swear I've no idea.
On her first visit, Umm Hassan said that Yunes was in tor-ment. She said he was in a different place from us.
"So what should I do?" I asked her.
"Do what he tells you," she answered.
"But he doesn't speak," I said.
"Oh yes, he does," she said, "and it's up to you to hear his voice."
And I don't hear it, I swear I don't, but I'm stuck to this chair, and I talk and talk. Tell me, man, what should I do? I sit by your side and listen to the sound of weeping coming through the window of your room. Can't you hear it? Everyone else is weeping, so why aren't you?
It's become our habit to wait for occasions to weep, for tears are dammed up behind our eyes. Umm Hassan has burst open our reservoir of tears. Why won't you get up and weep with us?
HEY, YOU!
How am I supposed to talk to you, or with you or about you? Should I tell you stories you already know, or be silent and let you go wherever it is you go? I come close to you, walking on tiptoe so as not to wake you, and then I laugh at myself because all I want is to wake you. I need one thing-one thing, dear God: that this man, drowning in his own eyes, should get up, open his eyes and say something.
But I'm lying. Did you know you've turned me into a liar? I say I want one thing, but I want thousands of things. I lie, God take pity on you, on me, and on your poor mother. Yes, we forgot your mother. You told me all your stories, and you never told me how your mother died. You told about the death of your blind father and how you slipped into Galilee and attended his funeral.
You stood on the hill above the village of Deir al-Asad, seeing but unseen, weeping and not weeping.
At the time I believed you. I believed that intuition had led you to your house there, hours before he died. But now I don't. At the time I was bewitched by your story. Now the spell is broken, and I no longer believe.
But your mother? Why didn't you say anything about her death? Is your mother dead? Do you remember the story of the icon of the Virgin Mary?
We were living through the civil war in Lebanon, and you were saying that war shouldn't be like that. You even advised me, when I came back from Beijing as a doctor, not to take part in the war, and asked me to go with you to Palestine.
"But Yunes, you don't go to fight. You go because of your wife."
You gave me a long lecture about the meaning of war and then said something about the picture of the Virgin Mary in your house, and that was when I asked you if your mother was Christian and how the sheikh of the village of Ain al-Zaitoun could have married a Chris-tian woman. You explained that she wasn't a Christian but loved the Virgin and used to put her picture under her pillow, and that she'd made you love the Virgin too because she was the mistress of all the world's women and because her image was beautiful-a woman bending her head over her son, born swaddled in his shroud.
"And what did the sheikh think?" I asked you.
It was then that you explained to me that your father the sheikh was blind, and that he never saw the picture at all.
When did Nahilah tell you of your mother's death? Why don't you tell me? Is it because your wife said your mother had asked to be buried with the picture and this caused a problem in the village?
Why do you sleep like that and not answer? You sleep like sleep itself. You sleep in sleep, and drown. The doctor said you had a blood clot in the brain, were clinically dead, and that there was no hope. I refused to believe him.
I see you in front of me and can do nothing. I hold conversations with you and tell you stories. I'll tell you everything. What do you say I'll make tea, and we'll sit on the low chairs in front of your house and tell tales! You used to laugh at me because I don't smoke. You used to smoke your cigarette right to the end, chew-ing on the butt hanging between your lips and sucking in the smoke.
Ellas Kh
Gate of
Now here I am. I close the door of your room. I sit next to you. I light a cigarette, draw the smoke deep into my lungs, and I tell you stories. And you don't answer. Why don't you talk to me? The tea's gone cold, and I'm tired. You are drowning in your breathing and don't care.
Please don't believe them.
Do you remember the day when you came to me and said that everyone was sick of you, and I couldn't dispel the sadness from your round white face? What was I supposed to say? Should I have said your day had passed, or hadn't yet come? You'd have been even more upset. I couldn't lie to you. So I'm sad too, and my sadness is a deep breach in my soul that I can't repair, but I swear
I don't want you to die. Why did you lie to me?
Why did you tell me after the mourners had left that Nahilah's death didn't matter, because a woman only dies if her man stops loving her, and Nahilah hadn't died because you still loved her?
"She's here," you said, and you pointed at your eyes, wide open to show their dark gray. I was never able to identify the color of your eyes when I asked you, you would say that Nahilah didn't know what color they were either, and that at Bab al-Shams she used to ask you about the colors of things.
You lied to me.
You convinced me that Nahilah hadn't died, and didn't finish the sentence. At the time, I didn't take in what you'd said; I thought they were the beautiful words an old lover uses to heal his love. But death was in the other half of the sentence, because a man dies when his
woman stops loving him, and you're dying because Nahilah stopped loving you when she died.
So here you are, drowsing.
Dear God, what drowsiness is this? And why do I feel a deathly drowsiness when I'm near you? I lie back in the chair and sleep. And when I get up in the middle of the night, I feel pain all over my body.
I come close to you, I see the air roiling around you, and I see that place I have not visited. I'd decided to go; everyone goes, so why not me? I'd go and have a look. I'd go and fasten the landmarks in my eyes. You used to tell me that you knew the sites because they were engraved on your eyes like indelible landmarks. Where are the land-marks, my friend? How shall I know the road, and who will guide me?
You told me about the caves dug out of the rocks. Is it true that you used to meet her there? Or were you lying to me? You said they were called Bab al-Shams "Gate of the Sun" and smiled and said you didn't mean the Shams I was in love with, or that terrible massacre at Camp Miyyeh wi-Miyyeh, where they killed her.
as Khoury of the Sun
You told me I didn't love Shams and should forget her: "If you loved her, you'd avenge her. It can't be love, son. You love a woman who doesn't love you, and that's an impossibility."
You don't understand. How can I avenge a woman who was killed because of another man?
"So she didn't love you," you said.
"She did, but in her own way," I answered.
"Love has a thousand doors. But one-sided love isn't a door, it's a delusion."
I didn't tell you then that your love for Nahilah may have been a delusion too, because you only met her on journeys that resembled dreams.
I DRAW CLOSE TO TELL YOU that the moon has filled the sky. In al-Ghabsiyyeh, we love the moon, and we fear it. When it's full we don't sleep.
Get up and look at the moon.
You didn't tell me about your mother, but I'll tell you about mine. The truth is, I don't know much about her-she disappeared. They said she'd gone to her people in Amman, and when I was in Jordan in 1970, I looked for her, but that's another tale I'll tell you later.
I told you about my mother, and I'm going to tell you again. When you were telling me about Bab al-Shams, you used to say that stories are like wine: they mature in the stelling. Does that mean that the telling of a story is like the jar it's kept in? You used to tell the stories of Nahilah over and over again, your eyes shining with the same desire.
"She cast a spell on me, that woman," you'd say.
But I know that the spellbinder was you-how else did you persuade Nahilah to put up with you, reeking with the stink of travel?
My mother used to wake me while it was still night in the camp and whisper to me, and I'd get up and see the moon in its fullness, and not go back to sleep.
The woman from al-Kweikat said we were mad: "Ghabsiyyeh people are crazy, they're afraid of the moon." But we weren't afraid though in fact, yes, we would stay awake all night. My mother wouldn't let me sleep. She'd tie a black scarf around her head and ask me to look at the skin of the moon so I could find my dead father's face.
"Do you see him?" she'd ask.
I'd say that I saw him, though I swear I didn't. But now, can you believe it, now, after years and years, when I look at the face of the moon, I see my father's face, stained with blood. My mother said they killed him, left him in a heap at the door and left. She said he fell in a heap as though he weren't a man but a sack. And when she went over to him, she didn't see him. They took him and bur-ied him in secret in the Martyrs' Cemetery. "Look at your father, and tell him what you want."
I used to look and not see, but I wouldn't say. Now I see, but what am I supposed to say?
Get up, and look at the face of the moon! Do you see your wife? Do you see my father? Certainly you will never see my mother, and even if you see her, you will never know her. Even I have forgotten her, forgotten her voice and her tears. The only thing I remember is the taste of the dough she used to make in the clay oven in front of our house. She would put chili pepper, oil, cumin, and onions on a piece of dough and bake it. Then she'd make tea and eat, and I'd join her, and we would look at the moon. That burning taste overwhelms my tongue and eyes, and I drink tea and look at the moon, and I see.
My mother told me that in my father's village they didn't sleep. When the moon grew round and sat on the dish of the sky, the whole village would wake up, and the blind singer would sit in the square and play on his one-stringed fiddle, singing to the night as though he were weeping. And I am weeping with drowsiness, and the taste of the hot pepper, and what seem to be dreams.
The moon is full, my swimmer in white sheets. Get up and take a look and drink tea with me. Or didn't you peo-ple in Ain al-Zaitoun get up when the moon was full?
But you're not from Ain al-Zaitoun. Well, you are from Ain al-Zaitoun, but your blind father moved to Deir al-Asad after the village was massacred in 1948. You were born in Ain al-Zaitoun, and they called you Yunes. You told me that your blind father named you Yunes-Jonah-because, like Jonah, you'd torn down the wall of death.
You didn't tell me about your mother; it was Amna who told me. She claimed to be your cousin on your father's side and had come to help you set the house straight. She was also beautiful. Why did you get angry with me that day? I swear I didn't mean anything by it. I smiled and you glowered, went out of the house and left me with her.
You came into your house, and you saw me sitting with Amna, who was giving me some water. She told me she knew everything about me because you had told her, and she asked me to watch out for you because she couldn't always come from Ain al-Hilweh camp to Sha-tila. I smiled at you and winked, and from that day on I never saw Amna at your house again. I swear I didn't mean anything. Well, I did mean something, but when all's said and done you're a man, so you shouldn't get angry. People are like that, they've been that way since Adam, God grant him peace, and people betray the ones they love; they betray them and they regret it; they betray them because they love them, so what's the problem?
It's a terrible thing. Why did you tell Amna to stop visiting you? Was it because she loved you? I know-when I see a woman in love, I know. She overflows with love and becomes soft and undulating. Not men. Men are to be pitied because they don't know that softness that floods and lightens the muscles.
Amna loved you, but you refused to marry her. She told me about it, just as she told me other things she made me swear I'd never mention in front of you. I'm released from my oath now because you can't hear, and even if you could, there'd be nothing you could do. All you would say is that Amna was a liar and end the conversation.
Amna told me your whole story. She told me about your father.
She said that Sheikh Ibrahim, son of Salem, son of Suleiman al-Asadi, was in his forties when he married, and that for twenty years his wife kept giving birth to children who would die a few days later because she was stricken with a nameless disease. Her nipples would get inflamed when the children started to nurse and they would die of hunger. Then you were born. You alone, Amna told me, were able to bite on a breast without a nipple. You would bite and suck, and your mother would scream with the pain. So you were saved from death.
I didn't believe Amna because the story seems impos-sible. Why didn't your mother get medicine for her breasts? And why did the children die? Why didn't your father take the children to the women of the village to nurse?
I didn't believe Amna, but you confirmed what she said, which made me doubt it even more. You said that you were the sole survivor because you managed to grip a nippleless breast, and that your mother never failed to remind you of the pain she had suffered. And when I
asked you why your father didn't marry another woman, you put up your hand as though you didn't want me to raise that question-because your people, you told me, "marry only one woman only once, and that's the way it's been from the beginning."
I imagined a savage child with a big head and eager lips gobbling the breasts of a woman in tears. Then you told me that the problem wasn't the absence of nipples. Your brothers and sisters died because they had a mys-terious disease, which was transferred to them from their mother's inflamed breasts.
I see you now, and I see that child, and I see its big head, its face within the flood of light. I see your mother writhing in pain and pleasure as she feels your lips grabbing at the milk. I can almost hear her sighs and see the pleasure fermenting in her drowsy, heavy eyes. I see you, and I see your death, and I see the end.
Still from Porte du Soleil (2004, с me to stay with you because Courtesy: Ognon Pictures
Don't tell me you're going to die, please don't. Not death. Umm Hassan told me not to be afraid, and I'm not. She asked no one would dare break into the hospital to find me-even Umm Hassan believed I've turned your death into a hiding place for myself. Even Umm Hassan didn't understand that it's your death I'm trying to prevent, not my own. I'm not afraid of them, and, anyway, what do I have to do with Shams' death? Plus, it's not right that that story should get in the way of yours, which is mythic.
I know you'll say, "Phooey to myths!" and I agree, but I beg you, don't die. For my sake, for your sake, so that they don't find me. I'm lost, I swear. I'm lost and I'm afraid and I'm in despair and I'm wavering and I'm fidg-ety and I've remembered and I've forgotten.
I spend most of my time in your room. I finish my work at the hospital, and I come back to you. I sit at your side, I bathe you, massage you, put scent on you, sprinkle powder on you, and rub your body with ointment. I cover you and make sure you're asleep, and I talk to you. People think I'm talking to myself, like a madman. With you I've discovered many selves within myself, selves with whom I can maintain an eternal dialogue.
The fact is, I read in a book whose title I no longer remember that people in comas can have their conscious-ness restored by being talked to. Dr. Amjad said this was impossible. I know that what I read isn't scientific, but I'm trying, I'm trying to rouse you with words, so why won't you answer me? Just one word would be enough.
You're either incapable of speaking, or you don't want to, or you don't know how. Which means you must listen. I know you're sick of my stories because they're your own stories that I'm telling you; I'm returning what I took from you. I tell them, and I see the shadow of a smile on your closed lips.
Do you hear my voice? Do you see my words as shadows?
I'm tired of talking, too. I stop, and then the words come. They come like sweat oozing from my pores, and rather than hearing my voice, I hear yours coming out of my throat. I sit next to you in silence. I listen to the rasp of your breathing, and I feel the tremor of tears, but I don't weep. I say, "That's it, I won't come back. What am I doing here? Nothing."
I sit with death and keep it company. It's difficult keep-ing death company, father. You yourself told me about the three corpses in the olive grove. Please don't forget you're a runaway, and a runaway doesn't forget. Do you remember what happened when you got to Ain al-Hilweh camp after you were released from prison? Do you remember how you fired your gun into the air and insulted every-one and how they arrested you? When they'd set up tents that the wind blew through from both sides, you said to them, "We're not refugees. We're fugitives. We fight and kill and are killed. But we're not refugees." You told the people that "refugee" meant something specific, and that the road to the villages of Galilee was open. You had a beard and were filthy-that's what the police report from Sidon says and you were carrying your rifle in your hand and muttering like a madman. The Lebanese officer wrote in his report that you were crazy and let you go. You listened in disbelief, but he bit his lip and winked before ordering you out of the police post. That day you screamed that you'd never leave jail without your rifle, so they forced you out. And you forced your way back in at night and got your rifle back, as well as three other rifles from the guard post. With those rifles you began. WIT
Translation from the Arabic By Humphrey Davies
HUMPHREY DAVIES's translations include Naguib Mahfouz's Thebes at War (2003) and Alaa al-Aswany's The Yacoubian Building (2004). Davies has lived throughout North Africa and the Middle East and currently is based in Cairo.
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