Текст книги "Gate of the Sun"

Автор книги: Elias Khoury

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Elias Khoury
Gate of the Sun

~ ~ ~

He said, may Allah be pleased with him:

One day, Sheikh al-Junayd set out on a journey and while traveling was overtaken by thirst. He found a well that was too deep to draw water from, so he took off his sash, dangled it into the well until it reached the water, and set about raising and lowering it and squeezing it into his mouth. A villager appeared and asked him, “Why do it so? Tell the water to rise, and drink with your hands!” and the villager approached the edge of the well and said to the water, “Rise, with God’s permission,” and it rose, and the sheikh and the villager drank. Afterwards the sheikh turned to the villager and asked, “Who are you?” “One of God’s creatures,” he replied. “And who is your sheikh?” asked al-Junayd. “My sheikh is al-Junayd, though I have yet to set eyes on him,” replied the man. “Then how did you attain these powers?” asked the sheikh. “Through my faith in my sheikh,” replied the man.

Gate of the Sun

Part One: The Galilee Hospital

UMM HASSAN is dead.

I saw everyone racing through the alleys of the camp and heard the sound of weeping. Everyone was spilling out of their houses, bent over to catch their tears, running.

Nabilah, Mahmoud al-Qasemi’s wife, our mother, was dead. We called her motherbecause everyone born in the 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.

Umm Hassan came from al-Kweikat, her village in Galilee, to become the only midwife in Shatila – a woman of uncertain age and without children. I only knew her when she was old, with stooped shoulders, a face full of creases, large eyes shining in a white square, and a white cloth covering her white hair.

Our neighbor, Sana’, the wife of Karim al-Jashi the kunafa ^*seller, said Umm Hassan dropped in on her the night before last and told her 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 20th, 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 Palestine, but she wept. She told everyone she’d decided to wear 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.

Over the course of her long life, Umm Hassan had buried her four children one after the other. They would come to her borne 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 picked him up from beneath an olive tree on the Kabri-Tarshiha road and had fed him from her dry breasts, then returned him to his mother when they reached the village of Qana, in Lebanon.

Umm Hassan died today.

No one dared go into her house. About twenty women gathered 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.

I, 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 throb of life. For three months he’s been laid out on his bed in Galilee Hospital, where I work as a doctor, or where I pretend that 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’ll 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 is immersed in distant darknesses, afraid of the silence?

I swear I’ve no idea.

On her first visit Umm Hassan said that Yunes was in torment. 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, I beg of you, 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 don’t you?

It’s become our habit to look out 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?

^*A pastry.

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 but not weeping.

At the time I believed you. I believed that intuition had led you there to your house, 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 you.

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 Christian woman. You explained that she wasn’t a Christian but loved the Virgin and used to put her picture under her pillow. She’d made you love the Virgin, too, because she was the mistress of all the world’s women and because her picture 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 are drowning. The doctor said you had a blood clot in the brain, were clinically dead, and there was no hope. I refused to believe him.

I see you before 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, chewing on the butt hanging between your lips and sucking in the smoke.

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 tales. And you don’t answer.

Why don’t you talk to me?

The tea’s gone cold, and I’m tired. You’re immersed 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 pale 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 anchor 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 landmarks, my friend? How will 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 the Miyyeh wi-Miyyeh camp, where they killed her.

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 is full. 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 already told you about my mother, and I’ll tell you about her again. When you were telling me about Bab al-Shams, you used to say that stories are like wine: They mature in the telling. 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, your eyes shining with the same desire.

“She cast a spell on me, that woman,” you’d say.

But I know that the magician 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 to 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 would ask me to look at the surface 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 buried 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 saw her, you would 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 eat with her, and we’d look at the moon. That burning taste is still hot on my tongue and in my eyes now when I look at the moon; I drink my tea, I 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 its throne in the sky, the whole village would wake up, and the blind singer would sit in the square and play on his single-string fiddle, singing to the night as though he were weeping. And I am weeping with drowsiness, and the taste of 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 people 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 beaten death.

You never told 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, rushed out of the house and left me with her.

You came in and 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 to Shatila. 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 leavens 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 the debate would be closed.

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 and collapse when the children started to nurse, and they’d 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 in pain. So you were saved from death.

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 refugeemeant 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.”