Текст книги "Gate of the Sun"

Автор книги: Elias Khoury

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

He spoke slowly and calmly, that’s all.

After a few days, however, he began to lose his head. He would have unexpected outbursts and speak to people as though he were talking to the Israeli jailers, jabbering in Hebrew. Then, a bit later, he lost the use of language completely; he’d bellow and run into the streets naked.

You returned from your last visit to him in the Burj al-Barajneh camp defeated, in despair. You asked me for sleeping pills and decided to stop going to see him. His son, Jamil, wanted to send him to the mental hospital. You objected and even wept. Everyone saw you weep. You told them, “Impossible! Adnan is a hero, and heroes aren’t locked up in a lunatic asylum.” It’s said you pulled out your gun and tried to shoot him. People intervened to stop you, saying it was a sin. “The real sin is that he won’t die. The sin is that he should live like this, you bastards.”

Why didn’t you tell me you pulled out your gun? And why didn’t you kill him? Why did you let them take him away to the Dar al-Ajazah Institution? Did you believe that place was the same as a hospital? I swear it wouldn’t even be suitable for a beast. The patients there are crammed together like animals, they live a thousand deaths each day.

This time, allow me to give another version of the facts.

With your permission, I won’t let Adnan end this way. I’ll tell you what happened in a different way.

Yunes, Abu Salem al-Asadi, went to visit his friend Adnan Abu Odeh in the Burj al-Barajneh camp. This wasn’t his first visit since his release from the Israeli prison where Adnan had spent eighteen years. Yunes was at the head of the group that welcomed him home. He danced, fired his rifle into the air, and slaughtered sheep in his honor. He’d embraced Adnan and told everyone, “Hug him, smell the aroma of Palestine!”

Everybody sat in the Abu Odeh clan’s guest hall eating lamb and rice and drinking coffee, and Adnan said nothing except for a few words that were lost among the ecstatic youyousof the women – and even the men, that day. The camp was flooded with a sea of colors – the women wore their multicolor peasant dresses and poured out onto the dusty streets of the camp as though they were back on the streets of their own villages.

When the party was over and everyone had departed, Adnan went back home with his family and sat down among his children and grandchildren. He embraced them all and kept repeating, “Praise be to God!”

Everyone laughed when Yunes related the events of the trial.

“Stand up, Adnan, and tell us the story!” said Yunes.

Adnan didn’t stand up, or tell them the story, or laugh, or clap; he didn’t repeat for them what he’d told the judge: “Do you really think your state is going to last another thirty years?”

Yunes told the story and everyone laughed, while Adnan remained immersed in his deep silence.

“You see, Adnan, twenty years have passed. There’s still plenty of time to go!”

At that moment Adnan began to manifest strange symptoms. He would raise his voice, then fall silent. He spoke an incomplete sentence and mixed in Hebrew words.

Yunes thought he was just tired. “Let the man rest,” he said. “He’s exhausted.”

He said goodbye to Adnan and promised to visit him in the next few days.

A week later, news began to arrive of Adnan’s madness, but Yunes refused to believe it. He went back to his friend’s house to see for himself – he saw and wept and returned distraught.

But things didn’t end there.

One morning, Adnan’s son, Jamil, came to Yunes to inform him of the family’s decision to move Adnan to the mental institution and asked him to get a report from a doctor at the Palestinian Red Crescent.

This is where Dr. Khalil – that would be me – comes in. He went to the Burj al-Barajneh camp, examined Adnan and said he was suffering from depression and in need of long-term neurological treatment, but there was no need to put him into a hospital. Adnan’s condition worsened, however, to the point where he would leave the house naked. The writing was on the wall, and Jamil came to me for help. I explained my diagnosis and the man exploded, shouting that he couldn’t take it any longer and that he’d made up his mind and it didn’t matter whether I wrote the report or not.

Yunes decided to intervene.

He went to Burj al-Barajneh and knocked on Adnan’s door. Jamil welcomed him, then started complaining and telling him stories. Yunes told him to be quiet.

Yunes went into the living room where Adnan was sitting in his pajamas listening to Umm Kalsoum’s “I’m Waiting for You” on the radio and swaying to the music. Yunes greeted his old friend. But Adnan remained absorbed in Umm Kalsoum, as though unaware of him.

Yunes pulled out his gun, fired one shot at Adnan’s head and shouted, “I declare you a martyr.”

Then he bent over his blood-covered friend and embraced him, weeping and saying, “It wasn’t me that killed you, it was Israel.”

Adnan died a martyr. They printed his photo on big red posters, and he had a huge funeral the likes of which had never been seen before.

Don’t you think this ending’s much better than yours?

You should have killed him the way they do a wounded stallion instead of letting him be taken there.

Instead, you came to me asking for sleeping pills and left your friend to die a gruesome death in that place.

I saw him there, and I know he spent his final days screaming and then in a coma having shock treatments, but I never told you because you were busy and only wanted to hear what made you feel good.

As far as you were concerned, Adnan ended in the courtroom with his “This is the land of my father and my forefathers.” You’d clap your hands and laugh, saying, “Thirty years! God bless you, Adnan. There’s still plenty of time to go, Adnan. The years have passed, and we’re still in the camp.”

“It was time that pushed Adnan over the edge,” you told me. “Don’t count the years. We need to forget. The years pass, that doesn’t matter. Twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, a hundred years, what’s the difference?”

You let Adnan die like a dog in the hospital, and his son didn’t have the courage to announce his death. The Abu Odeh family didn’t take part in his funeral. They buried him secretly, as though there’d been a scandal. Even you, his lifelong friend, didn’t go to his funeral.

Now do you understand my confusion?

The temporary confuses me because it scares me.

“Everything’s temporary,” you told me when we met after the disaster in ’82. And during the long siege at Shatila in ’85, you said it was temporary. “Listen, we have no choice. However dire the circumstances are, we have to keep on living or we’ll simply disappear.”

I know your views, your eloquence, and your ability to make the impossible sound reasonable.

But what would happen if we were to remain in this temporary world forever?

Do you believe, for example, that your present condition is temporary?

Do you believe that I’ll stay here in your temporary world trying in vain to wake you, telling you stories I don’t know, traveling with you to a country that I’ve never seen?

What kind of a game is this? You’re dying right in front of me, so I’ll take you to an imaginary country!

“Don’t say imaginary!” I can hear you protesting. “It’s more real than reality.”

Very well, my friend. I’ll take you to a real country. Then what? I can’t stand any more illusions. I want something other than these stories stuffed with heroic deeds. I can’t live forever within the walls of fiction.

Should I tell you about myself?

There’s nothing to tell. I have nothing to say except that I’m a prisoner. I’m a prisoner of this hospital. Like all prisoners, I live on memories. Prison is a storytelling school: Here we can go wherever we want, twist our memory however we please. Right now, I’m playing with your memory and mine. I forget about the danger hanging over my life, I play with yours, and I try to wake you up. The fact is I no longer care whether or not you wake up; your return to life doesn’t matter anymore. But I don’t want you to die, because if you die, what will become of me? Would I go back to being a nurse or wait for death at home?

So, you’re right.

You were always right: The temporary is preferable to the permanent, or the temporary is the permanent. When the temporary comes to an end, so does everything else. I’m in your temporary world now: I visit your country, live your life and make imaginary journeys. I’m your temporary doctor who isn’t really a doctor. Do you believe I became a doctor? Do you believe three months’ study in China can make someone a doctor?

Would you like to hear about China?

I’ll give you a bath first, then order a dish of beans from Abu Jaber’s next door, then after dinner, I’ll tell you. I’m starving and the hospital food is foul. Believe me, you eat better than I do. You can’t taste anything now because you’re fed through your nose, but the taste of bananas with milk is delicious. Our food, on the other hand, is vile, and I’m forced to eat it. What else can I eat? Do you think I’m going to pay for a dish of beans every day? I had to fight a huge battle to get Dr. Amjad to take me back onto the hospital payroll as a mere nurse, at a miserable salary. He claims I’m not working and you don’t need a full-time nurse and all I do is take care of you.

That bastard of a doctor only agreed to pay me half a salary after Zainab intervened and told him his conduct was unjustified “because Dr. Khalil was a founder of this hospital, and he has a right to return to it.” She used the word doctorafter hesitating and eyeing me like an idiot, as though she had really gone above and beyond the call of duty.

Do you know how much I make?

I make two hundred thousand Lebanese lira a month, or the equivalent of a mere one hundred and twenty U.S. dollars. A doctor for a hundred dollars, what a bargain! It’s not even enough to cover the cost of cigarettes, tea, and arak. And I only drink arak rarely because it’s gotten expensive.

What age are we living in?

“We were willing to take the shit, but the shit thought it was too good for us,” as they say. Between you and me, Amjad’s right. He found out I wasn’t a doctor, so he offered me a job as a nurse. I refused. And when I agreed, he made me half a nurse!

Do you believe I’m a doctor?

You encouraged me when I came back from China to work as a doctor, telling me revolutionary medicine was better than regular medicine.

But how sad it is when revolutions come to an end! The end of a revolution’s the ugliest thing there is. A revolution is like a person: It gets senile and rambles and wets itself.

What matters is that revolutionary medicine no longer exists. The revolution’s over, medicine’s gone back to being medicine, and I was only a temporary doctor.

And now I’m returning to my real self.

But what is my real self?

I have no idea. I know I became a doctor by accident, because I fractured my spine. I don’t remember how the accident happened – we were in the Burjawi district, whose main street forms a tongue descending from al-Ashrafiyyeh in East Beirut to Ras al-Nab’ in the west, a stretch we were able to occupy to announce that we were liberating Beirut.

It was Lebanon’s civil war.

When the war began, I remembered Amman and how we were thrown out without having lost; in September of ’70 we were defeated without a war and left for the forests of Jerash and Ajloun, and that was the end of it. Amman – today it seems like a dream; Black September was my dream. We called that September black to convey its significance, but Amman was white, and there I discovered the whiteness of death. Death is white, white as these sheets that you’re wrapped up in in your iron bed.

I was just a kid at the time. I fought in the district of al-Weibdeh near the Fatah office. To tell you the truth, I’d been enthusiastic about going to Amman so I could look for my mother, but that’s a long story I’ll tell you later.

The war in Beirut was different and went on for a long time. When it started, I thought it would be Amman all over again, and the fighting wouldn’t go on for more than a few weeks and then we’d withdraw somewhere. But I was wrong, Lebanon blew up in our faces. An entire country reduced to splinters, and we found ourselves running around among the shattered fragments of districts, cities, villages, sects.

I won’t provide an analysis of the Lebanese civil war right now, but it terrified me. It terrified me that the belly of a city could burst open and its guts spill out and its streets be transformed into borders for dismembered communities. Everything came apart during the years of the civil war; even I was split into innumerable personae. Our political discourse and alliances changed from one day to the next, from support for the Left to support for the Muslims, from the Muslims to the Christians, and from the Shatila massacre, carried out by Israelis and Phalangists in ’82, to the siege-massacre of ’85, carried out by the Amal movement with the support of Syria.

How can this war be believed?

I see it pass in front of me like a mysterious dream, like a cloud that envelops me from head to foot. I was able to swallow an amazing number of contradictory slogans: Words were cheap at the time, as was blood, which is why we didn’t notice the abyss we were sliding into. None of us noticed, not even you. I know you hated that war and said it wasn’t a war. With due respect, I disagree because I don’t think you can apply the concept of blame to history. History is neutral, I tell you – only to hear you answer, “No! Either we dish out blame where blame is due, or we become mere victims.” I don’t want to get caught up in that argument since, as you can see, nowadays I tend to agree with you, but you’ll have to explain one thing to me. Some day soon, when you wake from your long sleep, you must explain to me how clouds can so fill someone’s head that he goes to his own death without noticing.

In the war, the Khalil who’s sitting in front of you now was the hero of al-Burjawi. No, I’m lying. I wasn’t a hero. I was with the young fighters when we occupied that salient that climbs toward al-Ashrafiyyeh, and that’s where I fell: The world flipped upside-down, I couldn’t hear a sound, and I understood that death has no meaning, and we can die without realizing it.

Like all fedayeen, I expected to die and didn’t care. I thought that when I died, I’d die like a hero, meaning I’d look death in the eye before I closed mine. But when the world flipped upside down in al-Burjawi and I fell, I didn’t look at death. Death occupied me without my realizing. It was only in the hospital that I found out four of my comrades had been killed, and then I was stricken with the crazy fear that I’d die without knowing I was dead.

If you were alive, my dear friend, you’d laugh and tell me that no one knows he’s dying when he’s dying. But it’s not true, I’ve seen them dying and knowing. A doctor sees a lot, and I’ve seen them trembling, terrified of death, and then dying.

It’s not true that the dying don’t know; if they didn’t, death would lose its meaning and become like a dream. When death loses its meaning, life loses its meaning, and we enter a labyrinth from which there is no exit.

Tell me, when you were struck dumb and fell, did you know you were dying?

Of course not. I’m sure you didn’t. In medical terms, the moment you lost the power of speech, you became worried because Amna couldn’t understand what you were saying. You thought she’d gone deaf, so you raised your voice and tried to express yourself with gestures. Then, with the second stroke, you lost consciousness. Now look at you, lying here, not aware of a thing.

For me, too, when the world turned upside down, I didn’t regain consciousness for three days. The doctor at the American University Hospital in Beirut said I had to remain motionless for a week. My l6 vertebra was crushed to powder, and to escape semiparalysis, the only cure was to lie motionless.

If I told you the pain was unbearable, I’d be lying. The pain was appalling, as pain always is, but it could be withstood. It was like a hand of steel gripping my chest and neck. I was paralyzed, my chest was constricted, my breathing was shallow, and pain ran through every part of my body. But I knew I wasn’t going to die and that if I did, I’d die with my comrades who’d been killed by the heat from the B7s. The B7 was our secret weapon – a small rocket-propelled grenade carried on the shoulder capable of piercing tank armor because it gave off two thousand degrees of heat.

We were in our hiding place in an old house in al-Burjawi when the grenade fell on us and we ignited. They told us later that our bodies were completely charred, that I was black as charcoal. They thought I was dead and took me to the hospital morgue, but a nurse then noticed I was breathing so they moved me to the emergency room. They worked for hours to remove the black coating incrusted on my skin; you can still see a trace of it on my shoulder.

The doctor said my life wasn’t in danger; the only real fear was that I’d be paralyzed, but I’d probably “escape clean” – and he made a gesture with his fingers like popping an almond from its skin. I wasn’t afraid of paralysis. I was sure it wouldn’t happen to me. But the idea that I’d die without knowing struck terror into me. Everyone knowing and not me. Everyone weeping and not the dead man. A true masquerade, the masquerade of death.

I got better, of course. After a week I got out of bed completely healed; I even forgot the pain. Pain is the only thing we forget. We’re capable of revisiting many things, and may even be moved by certain sensations, but not pain. We either have pain or we don’t – there’s no halfway house. Pain is when it’s there, and when it’s not, it doesn’t exist. The only feeling it leaves is of lightness, the ability to fly.

Why am I telling you about my back?

Is it because the pain came back since Shams’ death?

Shams has nothing to do with it. God knows, when I was with her I didn’t notice my back. I was like a god. With her I experienced love in the way you described it: You said God had made a mistake with men; he’d created them with all the necessary parts except one, which there is no doing without and whose importance we only discover when we truly need it.

But why am I telling you about the missing part now? I started out telling you about China.

Could it be because that was where I became aware of how ponderous my body was and discovered I was unfit for war? Do you know what it means to be unfit for war during a war?

I won’t take up more of your time with this. I sense you’re tired of my stories and would prefer to have me take you back to Bab al-Shams, to that day when you wept for love and told Nahilah you felt impotent.

“Women possess it, this missing organ,” you told me. “I discovered there that women possess it; it’s their entire body, while I’m incomplete, incomplete and impotent.”

Nahilah looked at you in astonishment. She had a hard time believing in this sense of impotence that you were voicing, because you were insatiable. She thought you were talking about sexual impotence and burst out laughing. After such a journey of the body through the realms of ecstasy, you stop and tell her you’re lacking something! She felt she’d been purified inside and out, luminous, embodied, that her eyes were two mirrors reflecting the world!

You tried to explain, but she didn’t understand. You explained that you needed another part because the sexual organ was not an instrument of love. It was its doorway, but when the chasm opened you needed another part, for which you were searching in vain.

Nahilah thought you were saying all that as a preamble to making love again, and she had no objection; she was always ready, always ardent, always waiting. So she said, “Come here.” But you didn’t want to. You’d just been trying to tell her about your amazing discovery. But of course, you went to her; and there, amid the waves of her body, you discovered that women surpass men because the woman’s body itself is the part a man doesn’t have, because she’s a wave without end.

I won’t tell you now the details of that night at Bab al-Shams. First China. Let’s make a short journey to China, then we’ll go back to the cave.

In China I discovered I was unfit for war and metamorphosed from an officer into a doctor. I studied medicine in spite of myself, because I had no other option.

In Classical Arabic mixed with colloquial Egyptian, the woman told me I was unfit for war and should go back to my country or join the doctors’ course. I accepted even though the idea of studying medicine had never crossed my mind. Like the rest of my generation, I’d had no serious schooling. After elementary school we joined the cadet camps of the various military forces. We set off to change the world and found ourselves soldiers. We were like the soldiers in any ordinary army, the only difference being that we talked about politics, especially me. I started my active military life as an officer, a political commissar with the commandos of al-Assifa because I loved literature. I used to memorize long passages of what I read. I liked Jurji Zeidan and Naguib Mahfouz, but my favorite was Ghassan Kanafani. I learned Men in the Sunby heart, like a poem. Then I broadened my horizons and memorized whole sections of Russian novels, especially Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. How I felt for Prince Mishkin! How sweet he was, caught between his two lovers! How wonderful his naiveté, like that of the Christ! I’d read The Idiotand would never tire of it. How I wished I could be like him!

No. When I stood before the investigating committee, I didn’t feel like an idiot; I felt humiliated. Being an idiot is not the same as being humiliated. It’s a position one takes. But there I stood before them humiliated, and I lost my ability to defend myself.

Literature was my refuge. In the days of Kafar Shouba, when we were exposed to the aerial bombardment, sheltered only by the branches of the olive trees, those books were my refuge. To stay alive, I would imitate their heroes and would speak their language.

I became a political commissar because I loved literature, I became a soldier because I was like everyone else, and I became a doctor because I had no choice.

It happened because of my back: After a week I was completely recovered and rejoined my battalion, which had been transferred to fight at Sanin mountain. There among the snows of Lebanon I grew to hate the war and love that white mountain. I lived in the mire of blood-spattered snow.

Blood stained the snow on both sides of the front, which stretched to the horizon. I understood why my mother had fled the camp. There we don’t see, we remember. We remember things we never experienced because we take on the memories of others. We pile ourselves on top of one another and smell the olive groves and the orange orchards.

At Sanin I realized that those far horizons were an extension of man and that if God hadn’t made these curves, we’d die and our bodies would turn into coffins.

I was in Sanin when Colonel Yahya from the Mobilization and Organization Department came and informed me that I’d been chosen to join a training course for battalion commanders in China.

And I went.

From Sanin to China in one straight shot. “Seek knowledge, though it be from China,” the Prophet said. I descended from the highest mountain in Lebanon to the lowest point in the world and there my final destiny was decided. “No soul knows in what land it shall die.” ^*

It never occurred to me that I’d switch from military to medical school. Such are destiny and fate. My destiny was not to be a soldier, and my fate took me where it willed. I understood that that fall on the Burjawi steps had determined my future, and once I accepted my future as a doctor in the armed forces, things began to change. Now I’m no longer a doctor and it’s up to me to decide whether I remain a nurse. I prefer something else but I don’t know what it would be. You’ll say it was my fault, that I should have left with the others in ’82, you’ll blame me for having left the stadium and gone home.

When I recall my moments at the stadium, where the fedayeen gathered amidst rice and youyous, I don’t know what happened to me. I had no justification for staying in Beirut. I had no family, only Nuha, who I didn’t want.

“You should have gone with them,” Zainab said when she learned they’d decided I wasn’t a doctor and had to work as a trainee nurse.

Do you see the significance of the insult, Father? A trainee nurse! After all those years of being treated as a doctor, I’ve become a miserable servant in the hospital whose founding physician I once was. But let’s suppose I had gone with the fedayeen, where would I find myself today?

I’d probably be in Gaza, and my status would be ambiguous. Do you think they’d have accepted me as a doctor there? Our leaders, as I understand it, are setting up a legal authority, and this authority needs educated people, crooks, merchants, contractors, business men, and security services. Our role has come to an end; they won’t be needing fedayeen anymore. If I’d gone with them, I’d have to choose between working as a nurse or joining one of the intelligence groups. My destiny would be in limbo.

We’ve ended up in limbo, dear friend. Our lives have become a burden to us.

The decision to return to Shatila from the stadium wasn’t a mistake. It’s true it wasn’t a conscious decision, but, like all critical decisions, we take them, or they take us, and that’s the end of the matter.

In China I had no choice, I had to accept my role as a doctor because after two weeks of intensive nonstop military training, the doctor discovered I was unfit for war. She didn’t take me into the X-ray room or subject me to medical tests; she simply looked at me and understood everything.

I went to see her bare chested as my comrades had done. She looked at me attentively, walked around me, asked me to bend over, put her finger on the place where it hurt and pressed. I screamed in pain.

“When did your spinal chord get broken?” she asked.

“What?. . Two months ago.”

She asked me to bend over again, brought her face close to the place where it hurt, and I don’t know what she did, but I could feel her hot breath scorching my bones. Then she went back behind the desk and asked me to get dressed and wait.

After everyone had left, she came and sat down beside me. She was wearing khaki pants, a khaki shirt, and a khaki cap. All I could see of her was a small face and Mongol eyes. I couldn’t work out her age; I had guessed about thirty, but then someone mentioned she was in her fifties. I have no idea.

She sat down beside me and explained that my broken spine had knitted in such a way that to continue training, or any military work, was out of the question. The pain might erupt again at any moment. This meant that I had to get ready to go home.

I tried to explain that she was cutting off my future and that I had to continue military training at any cost.

She patted my hand to reassure me – the only time my hand touched a Chinese woman’s. She advised me to go back to Palestine to work with the peasants, saying that her most beautiful memories were of the time when she’d worked in the countryside.

“But I can’t go back.”

“Of course you can.”

“If I go back, I won’t work with the peasants because we’re not living in our own country and because there aren’t any peasants. .”

My response stunned her. I explained that we were a people of refugees, and she was even more stunned. I said we were orchestrating our revolution from the outside, surrounding our land because we were unable to enter it.

“You are surrounding the cities,” she said, looking relieved, “as we did on the Long March.”

“No,” I said. “We’re surrounding the countryside because we’re outside our country.”

Numerous questions flitted across her face, but she didn’t say anything more; she didn’t understand how you could surround the countryside or how there could be no peasants. She asked me to pack my bags, so I left the clinic and went back to the barracks as though nothing had happened.

The next morning, I went out to join the lineup as usual, but the trainer, who was accompanied by a social worker who spoke Classical Arabic, ordered me to leave. I went back to my room to wait to go home, but instead of sending me to Beirut, they took me to another camp, where I spent the training period in a field hospital belonging to the Chinese People’s Army. It seems that what I’d said had had some effect on the doctor. Medical training wasn’t very different from military training. We drank the same water, ate the same food, ran in morning lineups and practiced using medical instruments as though they were weapons. The only difference was the language.

In the military camp, we used Arabic, while in the field hospital, it was English. It’s true that I don’t know the language very well, but I could understand everything. The truth is I learned English in China! Imagine the paradox; imagine that I learned the importance of drinking water warm in English! In China they always drink their water tepid, almost hot. That’s why no one gets fat there. You open your eyes in the morning, and you’re desperate for a drink of cold water. But you get warm water, so you drink and you drink and you’re still thirsty. For the first few days, I was thirsty all the time. The more I drank, the thirstier I would get. Then I became accustomed to their water, discovered the secret and grew to like it. Warm water enters you as if through your pores: You drink as though you aren’t drinking, as if the water were already inside you. To this day I yearn for warm water, but I don’t drink it anymore the way I used to during the first days after I returned to Beirut. Perhaps the climate is the reason. The climate is what makes our men fat.

After the first days in China, we were overwhelmed by the feeling that we were outsiders. This happened when we visited the tunnels of Beijing – there were tunnels everywhere, tunnels full of rice and wheat depots, tunnels amazingly camouflaged. Once we went into a small shop to buy clothes. The salesman stood up and pushed aside piles of khaki garments, and we found ourselves descending into a tunnel more than thirty meters deep, equipped for people to live in for months.