Gate of the Sun (70 page)

But how did your generation bear what happened to you? How did you manage to block up the holes in your lives?

I know what your response will be; you'll say it was temporary. You lived in the temporary; the temporary was your way of coming to an understanding with time.

You're temporary, and we're video. What do you think?

A
BU KAMAL
used to sell newspapers in Acre and made his life up as he went along. He was about fourteen when he started. He'd leave al-Kweikat on his bicycle each day and reach Acre some forty-five minutes later, pick up his bundle of
al-Sha'b,
^*
and sell them. In the afternoons, he carried a big
sign around the streets shouting, “Make it an evening at Cinema al-Burj!” inviting people to buy tickets for
The Thief of Baghdad
, and receiving half a lira for his efforts. Adding this to the lira he'd earned from selling papers, he'd return to his village.

Abu Kamal was known as Eggplant in his own village, too. It must be said, my son, that we brought with us both our nicknames and our real names. Eggplant proved he was wilier than all the rest of Kamal Sinounou's children, however. His three brothers worked with their father growing watermelons, but he found himself a job on his own. He went to Acre, saw a paper seller, and asked if he could work with him. The vendor took him to the Communist Party's Acre office, where he met a short man with whom he came to an agreement to sell the paper.

Abu Kamal wasn't a communist; he wanted to leave the village because he didn't like working in the fields. But it seems that his job selling
al-Sha'b
had its influence on how he spoke, since for the rest of his life he'd mumble certain phrases he'd picked up from the paper's headlines about workers' rights, Arab-Jewish brotherhood, and so on.

When things started to get complicated, he stopped going to Acre and joined the al-Kweikat militia as a bodyguard for Mohammed al-Nabulsi, the only man in the militia who owned a Bren gun. When the village fell and Mohammed al-Nabulsi died, Eggplant found himself part of the wave of people who moved out. They didn't go to Amqa because of the famous dispute between the two villages that followed the rape of a girl from the Ghadban family by an Amqa boy.

All the people of al-Kweikat went to Abu Sinan, and they all took up residence under the olive trees, where they set up their tents of blanket and canvas. They stayed in the fields of Abu Sinan for about a month. I won't go into what we know now about how people went back to their villages by night to steal provisions from their houses whose doors hung askew, and about how Qataf, an eighteen-year-old girl, died from an Israeli soldier's bullet as she was leaving her house carrying the demijohn of oil, her blood mixing with the oil, and about how, and how . . .

“There was nothing left for us to do but pillage our own houses,” said Umm Hassan. “Is it possible to steal from yourself? But what else could we do, my son?”

I didn't ask Umm Hassan why they didn't try to take their villages back the way you did in Sha'ab instead of creeping into their houses and stealing from themselves, because I knew her answer would be, “Go on! All that about Sha'ab, and it still fell. Enough nonsense!”

Anyway, Yunes, where were we?

Things have gotten strangely mixed up in my head. Even the names are mixed up. A name will fly away from its owner and settle on someone else. Even names have lost their meaning.

I wanted to say that Abu Kamal tried not to live in the temporary. After Qataf's death and the madness that seized the people of al-Kweikat, everyone left Abu Sinan for Jath, and from Jath in Palestine they went to Rimeish in Lebanon, and from Rimeish to Rashaf, and from Rashaf to Haddatha.

Abu Kamal lived in Haddatha for about two years, working on the construction of the Haddatha-Tibnin road, but he left after a quarrel with his sister-in-law. He then traveled to Beirut, where he worked in construction. He stayed in Beirut for about a month and then went back to Haddatha because of exhaustion and the swelling that had developed in his hip from carrying containers of concrete behind the master plasterer. He returned to discover that the Palestinians had been rounded up and put in the Burj al-Barajneh camp in Beirut. He went to Burj al-Barajneh, but he couldn't find a camp; all he found was a bit of empty land and people sleeping out in the open. A foreign official came, with a Lebanese at his side, and they started distributing tents. They distributed two or three and then stopped for one reason or another.

Those were the days of waiting.

Abu Kamal went back to Haddatha because working with concrete had tired him out, and he found that the Palestinians had been deported to the suburbs of Beirut. The trucks came, they ordered the Palestinians living in Lebanese villages to gather in their squares, and they were transported to Beirut and the north.

That was how they left Lebanese Galilee after their expulsion from Palestinian Galilee.

Abu Kamal didn't grasp the reality of what had happened. Like all of you, like my father, he was led by the feeling that everything was temporary. The temporary led him to work for the Jew, Aslan Durziyyeh, and then toward death.

You lived in the temporary and died in the temporary. You endured unbearable lives and hid yourselves in that never-to-be-forgotten oblivion.

What should I have asked Abu Kamal as he sat there, collapsed, his back against the wall?

Should I have asked him why he'd married three women? Or how his fortune turned after the death of his last wife, Intisar?

Would I have been able to explain to him why his first wife, Fathiyyeh, and his second, Ikram, refused to go back to him?

And how will Abu Kamal live now?

The children have emigrated. They send a little money to the two women, but he's alone, and no one sends him anything. Should I have told him he was paying the price for his behavior? Why should he have to pay? Was the camp destroyed just because he married a third time? His third wife, Intisar, died during the long siege that destroyed our world: Our world wasn't destroyed during the great massacre, when we were buried under corpses; our world was destroyed by what they call the War of the Camps, between 1985 and 1988, when we were besieged from every side. That was when everything was wrecked.

Later we read all that stuff they threw together in a hurry about how the
intifada
in Gaza and the West Bank was born to the beat of the War of the Camps. It may be true – I don't mean to judge history – but tell me, why does history only ever come in the shape of a ravening beast? Why do we only ever see it reflected in mirrors of blood?

Don't talk to me now about the mirrors of Jebel al-Sheikh. Wait a little, listen a little.

In front of me sits Abu Kamal, who I wish would die.

A man who has tried his hand at virtually everything, forging his path
through life. He worked in concrete – he left concrete with a hip problem, then at the Jaber Biscuit Factory, before deciding to sell ice cream. Then he opened a café, then a shop, which he named the Abu Kamal Minimarket and where he sold smuggled tobacco and a bit of everything. This man who tried to master life by every means possible, now, however, only inspires pity in me. I'm incapable of imagining a solution for his predicament. How could I possibly find work for him when I am myself, as you know, virtually unemployed? And then this man comes and tells me his two wives have shunned him and are keeping the money his children send from him?

“If I could just get in touch with Subhi,” said Abu Kamal. “Subhi's always been kind to his father, but I don't know his address. I went to Fathiyyeh and told her . . . I told her I didn't want anything. You don't know, Son, what it is to be treated like shit by a woman, a woman who was once . . .”

“Shame on you, Abu Kamal. Don't talk that way about the mother of your children.”

“But you don't know anything.”

He said that Fathiyyeh was humiliated twice. The first time was when he married Ikram, and the second, when Intisar forced him to repudiate his two other wives as a condition of marrying him.

“It was my fault, Son – it was my fault, but I just couldn't resist the Devil. He seduced me and made me accept the woman's conditions, but she died and took everything with her. Now I have nothing. The shop was burnt down, the house is half-destroyed. Can an old man like me live alone? I said I'd go back, I'd go back to my life the way it was before and to the two women who couldn't do enough to serve me. Do you know what Fathiyyeh did when I went to visit her? She stood at her door and began yelling and rousing the neighbors. As though I were a beggar. I didn't go to ask for anything, I went because God had opened my eyes. I said, ‘I'll get my wife back, and I'll be decently taken care of. I'll get my children back. God took Intisar and the shop to punish me.' I went to make amends, and all I got was humiliation and abuse. Now I don't have the price of a loaf of bread.”

I put my hand in my pocket, but all I found was ten thousand lira. I gave them to him saying it was all I had.

“No, Son, no. I don't beg.”

He put out his second cigarette, stood up, and left.

I know Fathiyyeh. That woman – I swear every time I think of Nahilah I see Fathiyyeh's image. A tall, dark woman who covers her head with a white scarf and stands as straight as the letter
alif
– no bending, no shaking, and no stumbling, as though life had passed beside her, not through her.

I don't understand how Fathiyyeh accepted his second marriage. At first, he hid it from her. He bought a house in Burj al-Barajneh, where Ikram lived, and divided his time. He'd spend the night in his first wife's house in the Shatila camp, and he'd spend a portion of the day with his second wife in Burj al-Barajneh. Word got out and Fathiyyeh discovered what was going on. When Abu Kamal returned to the house one day exhausted from work – as he claimed – she raised the subject. A look of uncertainty crossed the man's face, and he thought of denying everything because he was afraid of how she'd react, but instead he found himself telling the truth.

“Yes, I got married,” he said. “And that's my legal right.”

He waited for the storm.

But instead of getting angry and breaking dishes, as she usually did whenever she had a disagreement with her husband over the smallest of things, and instead of killing him, as he believed she might do, this woman, straight as an
alif
, collapsed and broke in two. She bent over, letting her face fall between her hands, and started shuddering with tears. Fathiyyeh broke apart all at once and never stood upright again until he divorced her.

That same day she made peace with Ikram, and the two women lived in one house with their ten children. As the family hemorrhaged children through the deaths of several boys and the emigration of others, and the marriage of their girls, the women found themselves alone, breathing in the scents of letters sent from far away and chewing over their memories together.

After her divorce, Fathiyyeh came back to life. The slump of her shoulders was erased and they became straight again; the long neck bore its white scarf, and the woman walked the roads of the destroyed camp as though she were flying over the rubble, as though the destruction were a sideshow
whose sole purpose was to focus the viewer on the beauty of her commanding height and the splendor of her huge eyes.

Fathiyyeh neither yelled nor roused the neighbors, as Abu Kamal claimed.

She stood at the door, blocking it with her broad shoulders, so Ikram couldn't interfere. She knew Ikram's heart would crumble for the man who'd made her believe that his every footstep shook the earth. She kept Ikram behind her and raised her right hand, straightening her scarf with her left one.

“Out!” she said. “Out!”

He tried to speak, but she put her hand over her mouth to keep her hatred and her shouts in, saying only those two words – “Out! Out!” The man left without daring to speak. He didn't even ask for the address of his son, Subhi, who worked in Denmark. He saw the barrier rise in front of him, and he leaned forward, before turning his back on the door Fathiyyeh had blocked with her body.

And now he comes up with the story that she yelled and humiliated him in front of the camp.

Why do people lie like that?

I'm convinced he believed it himself. I'm convinced that when he told me the story of how he tried to get his divorced wives back, he heard the yells that never emerged from Fathiyyeh's mouth.

Tell me – you know better than I do – do we all lie like that? Did you lie to me, too?

I told you your story with Nahilah as a beautiful story, and I didn't question your version of that last meeting beneath the Roman olive tree. You'll say it wasn't the last and will tell stories of your visits that continued up until 1974, but that meeting was the last as far as I'm concerned and as far as the story's concerned. For after Nahilah had said what she said, there was no more talk, and when there's no more talk, there's nothing.

When there's nothing new and fresh to say, when the words go rotten in your mouth and come out lifeless, old, and dead, everything dies.

Isn't that what you told me after the fall of Beirut in 1982? You said the old talk had died, and now we needed a new revolution. The old language was dead, and we were in danger of dying with it. If we weren't fighting, it wasn't because we didn't have weapons but because we didn't have words.