Gate of the Sun (19 page)

Come with me then, Adam, to your hospital room. There's only one small window, which is covered with a metal grille like in a prison cell. The yellow – or sometime-yellow – door opens onto the corridor, from which comes the sharp smell of ammonia. Why the smell? Zainab says it's to kill germs, but I'm convinced there are germs nesting in every cranny here. That's why I bought us some cleaning supplies and clean your room every day. I wipe it down with soap and water, making sure that the smell of the soap gets into every corner. But no matter what I do, the smell of ammonia seeps back in and threatens to choke us. I thought of washing the corridor at night but gave up on the idea since it would be impossible to clean the hospital on my own, and everyone else seems to be used to the smell.

We're leaving your room now for the corridor, where you can see rooms just like yours on both sides. But you are the only patient with a private room. Why this special treatment? That's something I won't go into. You think you're here because they respect your history, and that's what I tell myself too so I can put up with the situation. The truth, however, is very different.

When they brought you here, Dr. Amjad threw up his hands and said, “There is no power and no strength but with God.” Everyone dealt with you as though you were dead so they didn't allocate you a room. Zainab understood you were to be left in the emergency room until you died – they left you lying there and went away. When I saw you in that state, with the flies hovering around you as though you were a corpse, I rushed to the doctors' room, put on a white gown and ordered Zainab to follow me. She didn't. Zainab, who throughout the war used to tremble at my orders, looked at me with contempt when I told her to prepare a room for you.

“No, Khalil. Dr. Amjad said to leave him.”

“I'm the doctor and I'm telling you . . .”

The bitch! She left my sentence hanging in the air and turned her back and went off. So I stayed with you on my own.

You were primed for death – lying on the ground on a yellow foam pad and shivering. And the flies. I started shooing the flies away and yelling. I left you and went in search of Zainab, ordered her to follow me, and went back to you. Even Amin, the young man in charge of the emergency room, had disappeared. I became obsessed with finding Amin. Where was Amin? I started yelling for him, and then a hand came from behind and covered my mouth.

“Shush, shush. Snap out of it, Khalil.”

Dr. Amjad covered my mouth with his hand and dragged me to his examining room on the first floor, where he explained to me that Amin had disappeared and started telling me a strange story about the killing of Kayed, the Fatah official in Beirut, and the Kurdish woman, and the car, going into an exhaustive analysis of the political assassinations that had taken place recently in Beirut.

You remember Kayed.

He was quiet and gentle and brave – you don't know that he's dead. No, you should know – Kayed died two weeks before your stroke. He was the last to be killed. Is it true he married a Kurdish woman before he died? And if he did marry her, why did he make a date to meet her at Talet al-Khayyat near the television building? Who makes an appointment with his own wife to meet on the road? And where did his new Japanese car vanish to?

“They buy luxury cars instead of spending money on equipping the hospitals,” said Dr. Amjad. “The Kurdish woman stole the car. She was a spy and inveigled him into meeting her and they assassinated him. And it seems Amin had something to do with the affair.”

Amjad was speaking, and I was trembling.

Amjad was telling his stories, and you're prostrate down below.

Amjad was analyzing Kayed's killing, and when I tried to get in a word his hand would come and cover my mouth.

When we're puzzled we always say, “
Cherchez la femme!
” and the problem is soon resolved. I'm convinced this Kurdish woman doesn't exist but is a figment of the young Iraqi who calls himself Kazem.

Do you know Kazem? He was Kayed's personal bodyguard. He came by twice to see you, claiming he wanted to see how you were doing. But he didn't know you. He came to clear his conscience; I'm sure he was involved in the assassination. But why would he come to visit me? I have nothing to do with all that. It's true, Kayed was my friend, but I wasn't his only friend, why choose me to tell the story of the Kurdish girl to? Did he want to get me involved? Or maybe he's part of the plot against my life. Does he know Shams' family? Did he come to check the place out? I don't want my imagination to gallop out of control because it has nothing to do with me, and Kazem has immigrated to Sweden. He said he was waiting to get refugee status but I didn't sympathize, and I made sure he understood that. Then he stopped coming to see me and we were finally free of him.

I know, but I haven't told anyone. The girl that Kayed loved wasn't Kurdish, she was a Jordanian from Karak, a student at the American University in Beirut studying engineering. Kayed did love her. I met her with him a number of times. She was tall and fair and had mesmerizing eyes. They weren't large like the eyes we usually describe as beautiful, but they were mesmerizing. And her name was Afifa.

She smiled as she introduced herself to me: “An old name that isn't used much now.” She said her father, who'd been living in Beirut for twenty years, had named her Afifa after her mother, who was living alone in Ma'daba, and that she'd discovered that her uncle on her mother's side was a priest named Nasri who lived in Deir al-Seidnaya near Damascus and painted beautiful icons. Her eyes watered – no, they didn't water, but they had something of that watery blue in them. Kayed loved her and said she bossed him around: “People from Karak are always bossy.”

There was no Kurdish woman. Kayed was in love with a girl from Karak and all his friends knew about it, but that wasn't why he was killed. It's true that after falling for Afifa he abandoned many of the security precautions that Fatah officials in Beirut had to take in the wake of the decision to liquidate
the Palestinian political presence in the city, but his death had nothing to do with love. It was connected with something else, and I don't think the Israelis had anything to do with it.

But where did the car pass?

This Dr. Amjad rubbed me the wrong way. Where did he get all this information? Is it true the so-called Kurdish woman stole the car? She suggested they meet in front of the television building and, when he arrived, asked him to get out of the car so she could tell him something. He was killed getting out of the car. A man fired five bullets at him from a silenced revolver, and the Kurdish woman disappeared, with the car.

Was the whole thing just a car theft?

But why did he get out?

Didn't he know his life was in danger?

If we are to believe our Dr. Amjad's version, Kayed was supposed to drive just past the television building, and the Kurdish woman should have gotten into the car beside him.

How could that be? He stops his car, gets out and dies? Where was his Iraqi bodyguard, Kazem, and what did Amin have to do with it?

Kazem told me with a wink that he didn't make it to the rendezvous: “You know, meetings of that sort require privacy.”

Privacy! What privacy is there in the street at eleven in the morning? They're all lying, and Kazem has disappeared. He came to say goodbye because he was traveling and to “see how
Uncle Yunes
was doing”!

I never heard anyone else use this
Uncle
. You're
Brother
, Abu Salem, Yunes, or Izz al-Din – you're only
Uncle
to people who don't know you. The easiest trick in the book to get close to someone.
Uncle
and
Hajj
are titles we give to men over fifty when we don't know what we're supposed to call them. Out of laziness. Our language is a very lazy language. We don't dig deep for the names of things; we name them on the run, and it's up to the listener to figure things out, he is supposed to know what you mean so he can understand you; otherwise misunderstandings abound.

That's the word I was looking for. What happened between Dr. Amjad and me was a misunderstanding.

Dr. Amjad was talking about the disappearance of Amin after Kayed's killing and presented an exhaustive analysis to prove that Amin had a relationship with the Kurdish woman, as though I cared.

“She would come here to visit him and I think . . . I think the last time she came in the Japanese car, so Amin killed him and not Kazem. He killed him for the woman and the car. It's an expensive car as you know – Mazda,
full automatic
. I'm sure it was the car, but I don't know anymore.”

Dr. Amjad doesn't know but he wants me to know. I didn't say anything, gave no support to his hypotheses, and didn't tell him about the girl from Karak who's studying at the American University. I wish I could contact her; she's really fantastically beautiful, or not beautiful but striking (now look at the precision of the word
striking
, meaning more than pretty and implying presence and authority).

God rest your soul, Kayed, but on the occasions when I met her I never saw her as being bossy. She had a certain indescribable delicacy. Her neck was long and smooth, and around it she'd wear a silver necklace with the Throne Surah, or so I thought until Kayed told me that it was a picture of the Virgin Mary. He said the girl from Karak loved the Virgin and would tell him not to be afraid because she had made a vow on his behalf to the Mother of Light. I didn't ask who this “Mother of Light” was, guessing it must be one of the countless names of the Holy Virgin.

I'd like to see her again, but not to clear things up, since they're beyond being cleared up at this point. No, I want to contemplate her beauty. Shameless, really. Instead of mourning my friend, Kayed, and bemoaning his horrible death, I desire his girlfriend. They left him on the pavement in Talet al-Khayyat for more than five hours before taking him to the hospital. A man lying in a pool of blood. The passersby looked on without wanting to see. For five hours under the Beirut sun, Kayed was in agony. Well, there you are. But I'm still not sure why I desire his girlfriend. My desire isn't sexual; I desire to see her. Men are traitors from the beginning, from the moment they discover their names. To know your name is to be a traitor. Wasn't that your blind father's theory about names?

Where were we? It seems I've become like Dr. Amjad. All doctors must be that way: I've left you lying here to amuse myself with the story of Kayed.

That day I swear I could have committed murder. But it was as if I were hypnotized, virtually paralyzed and mute. I was asking for Amin when a hand covered my mouth; then Dr. Amjad got deep into the analysis of Kayed's assassination and started mulling over the possible explanations and asserting the involvement of Israeli intelligence. But that wasn't enough. If he'd stopped there, this eruption would never have come, involuntarily, from deep inside me. Zainab told me that I roared, and that Dr. Amjad fled, terrified. It was when he launched into his contemptible tales about women that I let loose. You know how we men are. Amjad was talking about Kayed and the Kurdish woman when he suddenly switched to his sexual experiences with Kurdish women. How vulgar! He said a Kurdish woman used to call him every day on the phone, sigh into the receiver, and tell him the color of her panties.

That was when I exploded.

I didn't explode for your sake but for the sake of that woman he'd invented.

He said she would sigh into the telephone, but he didn't say what he was doing – how he would sigh and masturbate and leap like an ape from one line to another.

Plus, how dare he talk about Kurdish women that way? Even if we suppose that one Kurdish woman did that, is it thinkable to write them all off? I hate this stupid machismo. I think it's a cover up for men's deep-seated impotence.

I exploded, howling and bellowing like a wounded bull. Dr. Amjad fled, and Zainab came running. Zainab's stupid, and I could have done without further proof of it. She's not really a nurse, all she can do is take blood pressure and give injections. Not grasping that I was shouting because of you, she ran to get me a glass of water and started to calm me down. The idiot! I threw the glass on the ground, grabbed her hand, and dragged her over to you. She found a woolen blanket, and I covered you with it.

“What are we going to do with him?” she asked, looking at me like an imbecile.

“Quickly, quickly! Let's get him into a room.”

It was then that Zainab let out that Dr. Amjad had said you were to be left alone because there was no hope.

I told her to shut up and help me.

We tried to carry you, but it was impossible because the yellow foam mat on which they'd thrown you down wasn't rigid. I ordered Zainab to bring a stretcher and she ran off.

From the moment I yelled at her, Zainab changed completely. She started running blindly every time she heard an order from me. I'd give an order and she'd set off running like a fool. I could hear her clattering around everywhere – on the stairs, in the room, in the corridors. I could hear, but I couldn't see a thing. All she brought was a woolen blanket with a moldy smell. So I picked you up – I couldn't wait any longer. I committed an unforgivable medical sin. I picked you up and put you over my shoulder folded in half. You were heavy and shaking. God, how heavy people are when they're dying, or approaching death, as though, as Umm Hassan explained to me, the soul were a means of combating gravity and half your soul had left your body. I took you out of the emergency room and climbed up toward the first floor. Zainab was waiting on the landing to say there weren't any empty rooms. I climbed up to the second and last floor and took you into Room 208, which you now occupy. I put you into bed and ordered Zainab to take the second bed out of the room.