Gate of the Sun (3 page)

I didn't believe Amna because the story seems impossible. 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 only one to survive because you managed to grip a nippleless breast, and that your mother never failed to remind you of the pain she 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 mysterious disease, which was transferred to them from their mother's inflamed breasts.

I see you now, I see that child, and I see its big head – its face within a 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, I see your death, and I see the end.

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 me to stay with you because no one would dare to 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'm lost and I'm afraid and I'm in despair and I'm wavering and I'm fidgety 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 thing is, I read in a book whose title I no longer remember that people in comas can have their consciousness 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 have to listen. I know you're sick of my stories, so I'm going to tell you your own. I'll return to you what you've given me. I'll tell them, and I'll 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 keeping 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 after you were released from prison? Do you remember how you fired your gun into the air and insulted everyone and 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 and nothing more. 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. Bearded and filthy. That's what the police report from Sidon says; you were carrying your rifle 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, along with three other rifles from the guard post. With those rifles you began.

I don't want the beginning now. I want to tell you that fugitives never sleep. You told me how you used to sleep with one eye closed and the other one open for danger.

Where's your open eye so that you can see me?

I went over to you, opened your eyes and saw the whites. God, how white they were! I know you saw me searching for you because in those whites I could see all your shadows. Didn't you tell me about a man walking with his shadows on those distant roads? In your eyes I see the image of a man who neither lives nor dies.

Why don't you die?

No, please don't die! What will I do after you die? Remain hiding in the hospital? Leave the country?

Please, no! Death scares me.

Have you forgotten the olive grove, and that woman, and the three men?

You told me that the woman scared you. “All those wars, and I was never scared. But that woman, my God! She made my knees go weak and my face twitch. A woman sleeping beneath an olive tree. I went up to her. Her long hair covered her. I bent over, moved the hair aside and found that the woman was rigid with death, and her hair concealed a small child that slept curled up on top of her. That was the first time I saw death. I pulled back and lit a cigarette and sat in the sun, and there, behind a rock, I saw three other bodies.”

You were with them and had no way of escaping, because that day the Israeli machine guns were cutting down anyone who slipped over, which is what they must have done and what you were returning from doing. You told me that you lived on olives for a week. You'd break them with sticks, steep them in water and eat their bitterness. “Olives aren't really bitter – their bitterness coats your mouth and tongue and you have to drink water after each one.”

You couldn't dig a grave. You dug with your hands because you'd left your rifle buried in a cave three hours away from Deir al-Asad. You dug, but you couldn't make a grave that would hold the four of them. You dug a little grave for the child but then had second thoughts: Was it right to separate it from its mother? In the end you didn't bury any of them; you broke off olive branches, covered the bodies and decided to come back later with a pickaxe to dig them a grave. You covered them with olive branches and continued on your way to Lebanon. And all the many times you went back to Deir al-Asad, you never found a trace of them.

I'
M WITH YOU
now, and it's night. The electricity's off, the candle trembles with your shadows, and you don't open your eyes.

Open your eyes and tell me, have you forgotten my name? I'm Dr. Khalil. You told me I was just like your first son, Ibrahim, who died. Think of me as your son who didn't die. Why don't you open one eye and look at
me? You're sick, Father. I'm going to call you
father.
I'm not going to call you by your name anymore.

What is your name?

In the camp they call you Abu Salem, in Ain al-Zaitoun: Abu Ibrahim, on long-distance missions: Abu Saleh, in Bab al-Shams: Yunes, in Deir al-Asad:
the man
, and in the Western Sector: Izz al-Din. Your names are many, and I don't know what to call you.

The first time we met, you were called Abu Salem, though I'm not sure of this, because I don't remember the first time, and you don't either. “Remember,” you said to me, “you were alone in the boys' camp.” My mother had gone to Jordan and left me with my grandmother. I was nine years old. I remember that she'd left me a piece of white paper on which she'd scrawled things I couldn't read; my mother didn't know how to read or write. I remember her dimly now. I remember a frightened woman hugging me, looking suspiciously at everyone, saying that they were going to kill us like they killed my father. I was afraid of her eyes; they had something deep in them that I couldn't look at. Fear, Father, sleeps in the eyes, and in the eyes of the woman who was my mother I saw a cold fear that I couldn't shed until I looked into the eyes of Shams.

I know you'll laugh and say I didn't love Shams and ask me to call you Abu Salem, because Salem – He who was saved – was saved from death, and we're not allowed to die.

You used to call Nahilah Umm Salem – Mother of Salem – telling her, in the cave or beneath the olive tree, that she should use the name of her second son, who had become her first.

To tell you the truth, I don't know the truth anymore. You never actually told me your story – it came out like this, in snatches. I wanted you to tell me the whole thing, but I didn't dare ask you to. No, didn't dare isn't accurate. It would be better to say that I didn't feel capable of asking you, or couldn't find an opportunity, or didn't realize the importance of the story.

The moon is full, Father.

I call you my father, but you're not my father. You said your hope was that Salem would become a doctor, but the circumstances – military rule, the curfew, poverty – didn't allow him to complete his studies and he became a mechanic. Now he's got a garage in Deir al-Asad and he speaks Hebrew and English.

You said to me, “Doctor, you're like a son to me. I picked you out when you were nine and I loved you, and I asked them at the boys' camp if I could take care of you, and you became my son. You've lost your parents, and I've lost my children. Come and be a son to me.”

You took to referring to me as “my son, Dr. Khalil,” though I'm not a doctor, as you know. Three months of training in China doesn't make you a doctor. You appointed me doctor to the camp and asked me to change my name the way the fedayeen do. But I didn't change my name, and the fedayeen left on Greek ships, and the only ones left here were you and me. The war ended, and I was no longer a doctor. In fact Dr. Amjad, the director of the hospital, asked me to work as a nurse. How could anybody accept that, going from doctor to nurse? I said no, but you came to my house, rebuked me, and asked me to report to the hospital immediately.

When you spoke, you'd open your eyes as wide as eyes can go. The words would come out of your eyes, and your voice would rise and I'd say nothing. I'd steal glances at your eyes, opened to the furthest limits of the earth.

In the office at the boys' camp, you'd stand spinning and spinning the globe and then would order it to stop. When the little ball stopped turning, you'd extend a finger and say, “That's Acre. Here's Tyre. The plain runs to here, and these are the villages of the Acre District. Here's Ain al-Zaitoun, and Deir al-Asad, and al-Birwa, and there's al-Ghabsiyyeh, and al-Kabri, and here's Tarshiha, and there's Bab al-Shams. We, kids, are from Ain al-Zaitoun. Ain al-Zaitoun is a little place, and the mountain surrounds it and protects it. Ain al-Zaitoun is the most beautiful village, but they destroyed it in '48. They bulldozed it after blowing up the houses, so we left it for Deir al-Asad. But me, I founded a village in a place no one knows, a village in the rocks where the sun enters and sleeps.”

D
R
. A
MJAD
said he wasn't sure. The doctor said, and I say too, that you hear sounds but don't know what they are. Do the sounds enter your consciousness, or do they simply remain sounds?

The doctor said you don't see, and I didn't ask him what that means. Does it mean that you're in blackness, and is the blackness a color? Or do you exist in an absence of color? What does “absence of color” mean? Do you see that frightening blend of white and black that we call gray? If you don't see colors, that means you're not in blackness but in a place we don't know. Aren't you afraid of what you don't know?

You said you didn't fear death and that you knew fear only once, when you were living with the dead in the olive grove. You said that men die from fear, that fear is what is down below.

Are you “down below”? What do you see?

“It's a matter of arithmetic,” you told me. “We are afraid because we live in illusion, since life is a long dream. People fear death, but they really should be frightened of what goes on before being born. Before they were born, they were in eternal darkness. But it's an illusion. The illusion makes us think that the living inherit the lives of all others. That's why history was invented. I'm not an intellectual, but I know that history is a trick to make people believe that we've been alive since the beginning and that we're the heirs of the dead. An illusion. People aren't heirs, and they don't have a history or anything of the sort. Life is a passage between two deaths. I'm not afraid of the second death because I wasn't afraid of the first.”