Gate of the Sun (12 page)

This isn't what I wanted to say. I wanted to tell you that when I was caught up in that wave, I would dream of having a child and, at the same time, was terrified. I told Shams that the most horrible thing that could happen to a person was to lose a son or daughter. Even though I live amid this desolate people that has grown accustomed to losing its children, I can't imagine myself in that situation.

Shams laughed and told me about her daughter, Dalal, in Jordan, and about how missing her was like having her guts ripped open.

And when I asked Yunes about the death of his son, he told me about Nahilah.

The woman almost went mad. All the people of Deir al-Asad said the woman lost her mind. She would roam the outskirts of the village as though chasing her own death – going into areas the military governor had placed out of bounds (almost everywhere was out of bounds). She'd roam and
roam. Then she would return home exhausted and sleep. She'd never worry about her second son, Salem, whom his grandmother had smuggled out of the house.

It took Nahilah months and months to return to her senses after she gave birth to her daughter, Noor, “Light.” The girl's name wasn't originally Noor: Her grandmother named her Fatimah, but Yunes said her name was Noor because he'd seen Ibrahim in a dream reciting verses from the Surah of the Koran called “Noor.”

“Listen to what he was saying.” Nahilah looked and saw a halo of light around Yunes' head as he recited:

Yunes said he'd been able to bear his son's death because he hadn't believed it. “When you don't see, you don't believe. I used to tell Nahilah that Ibrahim would come back once he'd tired of playing with death. For me, I swear to you, Ibrahim is still alive, I'm waiting for him.”

I
CAME INTO
your room today laughing. Nurse Zainab had made me laugh by telling me how a woman had smacked Dr. Amjad. I'd thought that Amjad Hussein was a respectable man. I don't know where they dug him up to play the doctor here. Some say Mme. Wedad, the director of the Red Crescent, got him the job because he's a relative of hers. But he's not one of us, because he didn't fight with us and the Israelis didn't detain him at Ansar. So where does he come from? Don't ask me now why I didn't go to the Biqa' when
our battalion withdrew from al-Nabatiyyeh during the Israeli incursion – that's just the way it happened. I withdrew with the battalion and went to Ain al-Hilweh, and that's where I was arrested. A month later they released me and I found myself going to Beirut. I've no idea, however, where you disappeared to. You told me that when you learned the Israelis had gone into Beirut, you fled to the village of Batshay and hid there with the priest.

“The priest's an old friend of mine, he thinks I'm a Christian,” you told me.

Me, on the other hand, they tied up to a barred window that looked like a cage, blindfolded me, wound what felt like ropes around me, and took me to the Israeli prison before I was moved to Ansar.

I won't tell you right now what I told everyone about our life in the detention camp. In Ansar, I lost fifty pounds, I was frail and sick. Everyone was at the camp except Dr. Amjad. Even Abu Mohammed al-Rahhal, president of the Workers' Federation, left sick and died two months later. I haven't told you this dream he used to tell us every day. I don't know what happened to Abu Mohammed in the detention camp. There were thousands of us in the middle of a bare field surrounded by barbed wire, “treating our cares with our cares,” as we used to say – all of us except Abu Mohammed, who went from one tent to another, telling the same dream.

“Yesterday,” he'd say, “I had a dream,” and he'd repeat the same dream, until it became a joke.

“Yesterday I had a dream that I was, I don't know how, standing on the pavement with my manhood (he used this odd term for his member) sticking out, and it was – and I apologize for mentioning it – long, very long, longer than the street from side to side, and an Israeli tank came along and drove over it.”

“Did the tank cut it off, Abu Mohammed?”

“Did it hurt a lot?”

Abu Mohammed would say he was afraid he was going to die, because “when a man sees his manhood cut off in a dream, it means he's going to die.”

“Where did you get that from, Abu Mohammed?”

“I read it in Ibn Sirin's
Dreams
,” he answered.

“And who's this Ibn Sirin? An interpreter of dreams about reproductive organs?”

“God forbid! Ibn Sirin was a great Sufi and a great scholar, and his dream interpretations are never wrong.”

Anyway Ibn Sirin was right, because Abu Mohammed died. This Dr. Amjad, though, wasn't with us at Ansar, and no Israeli tank cut off his manhood. But he's here; a respectable man, obsessive about cleanliness. I've never seen such a clean man. He lives in the middle of this shit and streams of cologne flow from him. He washes his hands with soap, then dabbles them with cologne and turns his nose up at everything. I don't know what to make of him. You haven't seen him, so I'll have to describe him to you (even though I don't like descriptions): bald, short, thin, with an oval face, high cheekbones, small eyes. He wears glasses with gold frames that don't flatter his dark complexion, and his pipe never leaves his mouth. He has very narrow shoulders, and he speaks fast, looking off into the distance to make what he says seem important.

He wasn't with us in the war or the detention camp, and I don't understand why he's working in the hospital here. He says he's half-Palestinian because his mother's Syrian, from the region of Aleppo, and he doesn't speak Palestinian Arabic but a funny dialect that's a mixture of Classical and Lebanese.

Zainab told me today about a pious Muslim woman wearing a headscarf who struck him because he tried to make a pass at her.

“I heard the woman's scream, then the sound of slapping. The woman came out, threatening to return with her husband, and the doctor started pleading with her in an embarrassed voice. Later the woman emerged with her husband, who was carrying a bag of medicine, and the doctor thanked the husband, practically falling over himself he was bowing so low.”

Today I'm happy. Dr. Amjad was humiliated, and I want to savor the thought of him bowing in front of the husband, groveling like a dog. I want
to have a quiet cigarette and think about life. What more do you want from me today? I've bathed and fed you. We sucked out the mucus and everything else. Today I'm happy.

I
DON'T KNOW
any stories. Where am I supposed to get stories when I'm a prisoner in this hospital? Okay, I'll tell you the story of the cotton swab. You're the one who told it to me, I'm certain of that. You know, when I heard the story, I was very aroused, even though I pretended to be disgusted and went into a long tirade defending women's rights, saying that such degradation of our women was the root of our failures, our paralysis, and our defeats. But when I fell asleep, I was possessed by the demon of sex. That's all I will say.

In those days, as the story goes, in a small village in Galilee called Ain al-Zaitoun, Sheikh Ibrahim Ibn Suleiman al-Asadi decided his only son should marry. The boy had reached adulthood, his beard sprouting at fourteen. The blind sheikh urged his wife to find a bride for her son quickly, for the sheikh had one foot in the grave, and he wanted to see his grandchildren before dying.

The wife was of the same mind. She, too, wanted her son to marry so that he'd settle down, find himself work, and put an end to his long absences and his life in the mountains with the sacred warriors.

The story is that the young man, who was called Yunes, had no objection to the idea, and when his mother told him she was going to ask for the hand of Nahilah, the daughter of Mohammed al-Shawwah, he agreed, even though he'd never met the girl. He said yes because he liked her name and in his mind drew himself a picture of a fair skinned girl with long black hair, wide eyes, broad cheeks, full hips, and round breasts. He fantasized about a woman sleeping next to him and letting him into her treasures.

But Yunes got a surprise. His wife wasn't a woman, she was a twelve-year-old girl. The girl wasn't fair skinned; her complexion was the color of wheat, her hair wasn't long but like tufts of black wool stuck to her head, and her hips weren't . . .

More than ten years later, when he was about to make love with her at Bab al-Shams, he discovered that he was mistaken. The girl was a woman, and fair-skinned, and her eyes were large, her hair long and black, and she was overflowing with secrets and treasures.

He said, on that occasion, that she'd changed.

And she laughed at him because he hadn't seen what was in front of him. “Now, after I've had children and have become fat and flabby, you come to me and say I'm beautiful? Now, after all the hard times, you see that . . . You men! Men are blind, even when they can see.”

But Yunes insisted, and embraced the roundness of her hips and saw the bright sky in her broad, high brow and ate Turkish delight from her long, slim, smooth fingers.

He told her he could smell Turkish delight on her neck. He would open his pack after making love to her and would pull out a tin of Turkish delight while she made tea. Then he'd sit hunched up inside the curve of her body as she lay on the rug, and she'd feed him, the fine white sugar falling onto his chest. He told her he loved eating Turkish delight from her fingers because they were as white as the sweet, which was the best thing the Turks had left behind when they left our country, and because her smell was musky, like the white cubes that melted in his mouth.

I
N THOSE DAYS
, as the story goes, the world was at war, and when there's war, things take on a different shape. The air was different, the smells were different, and the people were different. War became a ghost that seeped into people's clothes and walked among them.

Ain al-Zaitoun, in those days, was a small village sleeping on the pillow of war. Everything in it rippled. The people hurled themselves into the electrified air and tasted war. Nobody called anything by its real name, war itself didn't resemble its own name. Everyone thought it would be like the war tales of their ancestors, where mighty armies were defeated, locusts ate up the fields, and famine and pestilence spread through the land. They didn't know that this time the war without a name was them.

The blind sheikh told his wife that words had lost their meaning, so he had decided to be silent. From day to day, he withdrew deeper into his silence, which was broken only by his morning mutterings while he'd recite Koranic verses.

The blind sheikh told his wife that he could see, even though his eyes were closed, and he couldn't explain why he had come to fear the water.

Weeping, the woman told her son that the old man had gone senile. She said she was ashamed in front of the other people and begged her son to come back from the mountains with the fighters of the sacred jihad to look after his father.

The blind sheikh told his wife he couldn't bear to live any longer now that they'd appointed a new sheikh to be imam of the village mosque. He said an imam couldn't be deposed and that he'd never abandon his Sufi companions in the village of Sha'ab. And he said that Ain al-Zaitoun would be destroyed because it had rejected the blessings of its Lord.

He explained everything to his wife, but he couldn't explain to her why he'd come to fear the water. He said that water was dirty and that when he touched it he felt something sticky, as though his hand were plunging into dead putrefying bodies, and that ablutions could be performed with dust, and that dust . . .

He took to using dust to wash with.

The woman would look at him, her heart torn to pieces. The sheikh would go out into his garden carrying a container, squat as though he were preparing to pray, fill the container with dust and go into the bedroom. He would remove his clothes and bathe with the dust, which stuck to his body as he moved and sighed.

The sheikh said he was afraid of the color of water.

“Water doesn't have a color,” said his wife.

“You don't know, and nobody knows, but the water has its own color, like gluey blood that slides over the body and sticks to it.”

At the time, Ain al-Zaitoun was preoccupied with the story of its blind sheikh who bathed with dust. It had no idea that after a little while the dust
bath would move to the neighboring village, Deir al-Asad, and that the sheikh would die in his new village.

Ain al-Zaitoun was built on the shoulder of a hill. It didn't look much like a real village. Its rectangular square was long and sloping, and didn't look much like a real square. Its houses were built of mud and rose up above one another in piles above neighboring terraces. To the left lay the Honey Spring, Nab' al-Asal, which the village drank from and which the villagers said was sweeter than honey.

Ain al-Zaitoun was suspended between the land and the sky, and Sheikh Ibrahim, son of Salem, had been the imam of its mosque since he was nineteen years old.