Текст книги "Gate of the Sun"

Автор книги: Elias Khoury

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

DR. AMJAD 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.”

“But history isn’t an illusion,” I answered. “And if it were, what would it be for?”

“What would what be for?”

“Why would we fight and die? Doesn’t Palestine deserve our deaths? You’re the one who taught me history, and now you tell me history is a ruse to evade death!”

That day, you laughed at me and told me that your father, the blind sheikh, used to talk that way, and “we ought to learn from our elders.” I don’t know if this discussion took place on a single occasion because we never had discussions; we’d just talk, and you wouldn’t finish your sentences but would jump from one word to another without paying attention to cause and effect. But you laughed. When you laughed, it was like you were exploding from within yourself. Your laughter used to surprise me because I was convinced that heroes didn’t laugh. I used to look at the photos of the martyrs hanging on the walls in the camp, and they weren’t laughing. Their faces were frowning and closed, as though they held death prisoner within themselves.

But not you.

You were a hero, and you laughed at heroes. And the little creases that extend from the corners of your eyes created a space for smiles and laughter. You were a laughing hero – but all the same I wasn’t convinced by your theories, or your father’s, about death and history.

You answered me by saying that what was worth dying for was what we wanted to live for.

“Palestine isn’t a cause. Well, all right, in some sense it is, but it isn’t really, because the land doesn’t move from its place. That land will remain, and the question isn’t who will hold it, because it’s an illusion to think that land can be held. No one can hold land when he’s going to end up buried in it. It’s the land that holds men and pulls them back toward it. I didn’t fight, my dear friend, for the land or for history. I fought for the sake of a woman I loved.”

I can’t recall your exact words now. They were simple, transparent, and fluid. You speak as though you aren’t speaking, and I speak as though I am. But I remember what you said about smells. We were sitting in front of the hospital drinking tea, it was the time of false spring. That year, spring arrived in February. The sun broke through the winter and tricked the earth, and yellow, white, and blue flowers emerged shyly from the rubble. That day you taught me how to smell nature. Putting your glass of tea aside, you stood up and filled your lungs with air and the aroma, holding it in your chest until your face started to turn red. When you sat down again and took a sip of tea and talked about the thyme and the jasmine and the columbine and the wildflowers, you said she was like the seasons. With each season she would come to your cave with a new smell. She would let down her long black hair, and the scents of flowers and herbs would fill the air. You said you were always enchanted by the new smells, as though she’d become a different woman.

“A woman, Son, is always new. Her smell reveals her. A woman is the aroma of the world, and when I was with her I learned to fill my lungs with the smell of the land.”

That was when I understood what you’d told me about her death: Nahilah hadn’t died, because her smell was still in you. But Umm Hassan has died. Don’t you want to come with me to her funeral? Everyone is gathering at her house, except for her son, Naji, who’s in America, as you know. I have to go. I want to carry Umm Hassan’s bier, and I will fear no one.

Please get up. We’ll go to Umm Hassan’s funeral, and then you can go back to your children and die with them. Go, die with them, as Umm Hassan suggested, and set me free.

Do you remember Umm Hassan?

Umm Hassan was my professor of medicine. I was in the hospital when a pregnant woman was brought in; I’d never seen a woman give birth before. In China they had taught me how to bandage wounds and do simple operations, what was called “field medicine.” But they didn’t teach me real medicine.

The woman was writhing in front of me, and I could do nothing. Then I remembered Umm Hassan, and I sent for her, and she came. She managed the delivery and taught me everything. As she helped the woman, she explained everything to me like a doctor training a student. From then on I knew what to do, and I became sure enough of myself to deliver babies. But she deserves all the credit. Umm Hassan was the only certified midwife in al-Kweikat; she had British documents to prove it.

I can see her now.

She’s putting the basin she was carrying on her head and bending over to pick up babies in the olive grove. In reality, she only picked up Naji, who became her son. I told you the story, remember? They were traveling inside Palestine because, having been driven out of al-Kweikat, they got lost in the fields and stopped on the edges of Deir al-Asad, and then they were driven from there, so they went to Tarshiha, which the Israeli planes came and burned, so they found themselves on the road to southern Lebanon, where Qana was their first stop. And on that road, a woman named Sara al-Khatib gave birth to a child with Umm Hassan at her side. Everyone was running, carrying their bundles on their heads, and Sara threw herself down under a tree writhing in pain. Umm Hassan washed the baby with hot water, wrapped him in old clothes and gave him to his mother.

Everyone walked on that “last journey,” as the people of the villages of Galilee referred to their collective exodus to Lebanon. But it wasn’t their last journey. In fact it was the start of wanderings in the wilderness whose end only God knows.

On that last journey, as Umm Hassan was walking with her basin on her head and her four children, her husband, her brothers, and their wives and children around her, she saw a bundle of old clothes discarded under an olive tree, and she realized they were the same clothes she’d used to wrap Sara’s baby in. She bent down, picked up the child, put him in the basin, and named him Naji – Rescued. She offered him her dry breasts, then fed him sesame paste mixed with water. At the village of Qana, where they stopped for the first time, the boy’s mother came, weeping and asking for her child back. Umm Hassan refused, but in the end, when she saw the milk bursting from the mother’s breasts and spotting her dress, she gave him to her.

Umm Hassan said she’d named him Naji and his mother didn’t have the right to change his name. Sara agreed, took the boy, offered him her breast, and went away.

“Naji’s my only surviving child,” said Umm Hassan. “He writes to me from America, God bless him. He’s become a professor at the best university, he sends me letters and money, and I send him olive oil.”

I see her walking and picking up babies and putting them in the basin on her head. It’s as though she had picked me up, as though I were Naji, as though the taste of the sesame mixed with water still lingered in my mouth, as though – I don’t know. I swear I don’t know. Umm Hassan died this morning, and we have to bury her before the noon prayer, and you are sleeping as if oblivious to what Umm Hassan’s death means for me, and for you, and for everyone in the camp.

Umm Hassan told me everything about Palestine. I asked her before she set off to visit her brother in al-Kweikat, or what’s left of it, to pass by al-Ghabsiyyeh and tie a strip of cloth to a branch of the lotus tree near the mosque for me. I told her that my father had made an oath to do this and that he’d died before he could carry it out, but he’d passed it on to my mother, and my mother had passed it on to me before going to her people in Amman. I haven’t been, and I didn’t dare to ask you to do it. I was afraid you’d make fun of me and of my father’s superstitions. I asked Umm Hassan to say a short prayer in the mosque and hang the piece of black cloth on the tree and light a candle for me.

When she returned, she gave me a branch heavy with oranges and told me she’d gone to the mosque to pray.

“Is a mosque defiled if they put animals in it?”

Umm Hassan didn’t ask herself that question. She went into the mosque at al-Ghabsiyyeh, which had been taken over by cows, drove them out, performed her ablutions, and prayed. Then she went out to the lotus tree, hung a black ribbon on it, and lit two candles.

She said the tree was covered with pieces of cloth.

“I don’t understand, Son. Your village is deserted. The roads have disappeared, and the houses aren’t demolished but are collapsing and almost in ruins. I don’t know why houses go like that when their people abandon them. An abandoned house is like an abandoned woman; it hunches over itself as though it were falling down. There’s no sign of life in your village, except for the strips of cloth tied around the branches of the lotus tree and the melted candles spread around all the way to the mosque.”

Umm Hassan said she’d been afraid of the tree when they told her about my uncle, Sheikh Aziz Yunes, and how he was found dead beneath it. But when she got close to it, she felt awe, and she knelt and wept and lit the candles.

She said she heard the rustling of the branches, full of the souls of the dead. “The souls of the dead live in trees,” she said. “We have to return and shake the trees so that the souls fall and find peace in their graves.”

I was about to cut an orange from the branch so that I could taste Palestine, but Umm Hassan yelled, “No! It’s not for eating, it’s Palestine.” I was ashamed of myself and hung the branch on the wall of the living room in my house, and when you came to visit me and saw the moldy branch, you yelled, “What’s that smell?” And I told you the story and watched you explode in anger.

“You should have eaten the oranges,” you told me.

“But Umm Hassan stopped me and said they were from the homeland.”

“Umm Hassan’s senile,” you answered. “You should have eaten the oranges, because the homeland is something we have to consume, not let consume us. We have to devour the oranges of Palestine and we have to devour Palestine and Galilee.”

It came to me then that you were right, but the oranges were going bad. You went to the wall and pulled off the branch, and I took it from your hand and stood there confused, not knowing what to do with the decayed offering.

“What are you going to do with it?” you asked.

“Bury it.”

“Why bury it?”

“I’m not going to throw it away, because it’s from the homeland.”

You took the branch out of my hand and threw it in the trash.

“Outrageous!” you said. “What are these old women’s superstitions? Before hanging a scrap of the homeland up on the wall, it’d be better to knock the wall down and leave. We have to eat every last orange in the world and not be afraid, because the homeland isn’t oranges. The home-land is us.”

UMM HASSAN is waiting. Won’t you come with me? I’m in a hurry now, so I won’t tell you what she did in al-Kweikat.

Get up, my friend. God, you’re impossible. The woman’s dead, and everyone’s at her house. I can hear them weeping through the hospital walls, and you hear nothing.

You’re not coming? Okay, I’ll go on my own. But tell me, why do you look like that – like a little baby swathed in white? For the last three months I’ve been watching you shrink. My God, if you could see yourself before you die. It’s a shame you don’t know what’s going on, a shame you can’t see how a man doesn’t die but goes back to where he came from. I used to think the poets were lying when they said that a man returns to his mother’s womb. But now I swear they weren’t: A man becomes an infant again before he dies. Only infants die; all death is the death of infants – infants searching for their mothers’ wombs, curling up like fetuses. And here you are, turning back into an infant, curling up on yourself, blind. If only you could see yourself.

I can’t hear you properly. Why are you mumbling? Why are you moving your left hand? You want me to tell you about Nahilah? You already know the story, and no, I won’t tell it again. Do you think of yourself as the hero in a love story? Why have you forgotten your other heroic roles? Or maybe they weren’t so heroic. You told me, “Everyone thinks that the fighters are heroes, but that’s not true. People fight the way they breathe or eat or go to the john. War is nothing special. All you need to be a fighter is to fight. Being a hero is something else; heroism doesn’t exist, and even courage isn’t anything special. A brave man can turn into a coward, and a coward can turn into a brave man. The important thing is – ” You left it there.

I didn’t ask what the important thing was. I knew what your reply would be, and I didn’t want to hear it again. And now you want me to tell you some stories? No, I won’t tell stories, not today. Today I’m busy. Have pity on me; get up and release me, please release me. I’m tired.

I’m tired of everything. I’m tired of your sickness and of how sad you look, I’m tired of the baby’s round face suspended above your neck, I’m tired of praying for you.

Did you know that I pray?

My grandmother used to say that praying means laying down words like a carpet on the ground. I lay down my words so that you can walk on them.

Why don’t you get up?

ONCE UPON a time there was a baby.

No, you don’t like the story about Naji. You told me Naji was a dog because after everything Umm Hassan had done for him, he went off to America and left her poor and abandoned.

I see a frown on your face and black spots in your closed eyes. Okay, we won’t start the story with Umm Hassan or Naji or America. I’ll tell you another one.

Back to the beginning.

Do you remember when you used to say, “Back to the beginning!” and would stamp your foot? Do you remember what you did after Abdel Nasser resigned in ’67? People gathered in the alleyways of the camp and wept; it was night, and humid, and they were like ghosts weeping in the darkness. You stood in their midst, spat on the ground, and said, “Back to the beginning!”

And after 1970, when you’d returned safely to the camp from the slaughter in the forests of Jerash and Ajloun, ^*you said to the woman who came to ask about her son, “Back to the beginning!” and left.

And after the Israelis went into Beirut, after each new thing that happened, you’d spit as though you were wiping out the past, and you’d say, “Back to the beginning!”

So, you want the beginning.

In the beginning, they didn’t say “Once upon a time,” they said something else. In the beginning they said, “Once upon a time, there was – or there wasn’t.” Do you know why they said that? When I first read this expression in a book about ancient Arabic literature, it took me by surprise. Because, in the beginning, they didn’t lie. They didn’t know anything, but they didn’t lie. They left things vague, preferring to use that orwhich makes things that were as though they weren’t, and things that weren’t as though they were. That way the story is put on the same footing as life, because a story is a life that didn’t happen, and a life is a story that didn’t get told.

Do you like this story?

It isn’t real, you’ll say, but I don’t know any real stories, because my mother left me and went away before she could finish it. And the stories I know myself, you know, too.

Your eyes are alight with memories, and they’re asking for the story’s beginning.

The beginning of the story says that you were like a dead man, and there was no hope of reviving you. Dr. Amjad told me, “There’s no hope” – but I wasn’t convinced, and decided to try to treat you by talking to you.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was – or there wasn’t – a young man called Yunes.

No. I have to start from the place you don’t know, meaning from here, from the end, because the story can only start from its ending. I don’t want it to be for you the way it was for me: I never knew the ends of stories because I would fall asleep before my mother got to them. You, however, are going to know the story starting with the ending.

The ending says that it was nine in the evening. I was sitting on the balcony of my house in the heat and humidity of August drinking a glass of arak. There’s nothing like arak in the summer because it makes you burn hotter than the night. Each evening, I would nurse my sorrow and fear with arak. I was drinking on the balcony and eating a salted tomato and pistachios when I heard a violent banging on the door. Opening it, I found Amna, her face emerging from the shadows. All I could understand of what she said was that you were in the hospital. I thought you’d died, God forbid. Amna told me how you’d fainted and fallen to the ground like a piece of wood. I listened, waiting for her to say you’d died. I wasn’t sad. I felt a space emptying in my heart, but I wasn’t upset. I asked where you were. I tried to get through the door to go to you, but Amna wouldn’t let me by. She stood rooted to the spot and talked. I tried to get out, but she blocked the door with her hand.

She said it had started the previous night, when you’d lost the ability to speak. She’d gone to visit you, and found you wandering around the place, muttering. She’d asked you what was wrong and you’d answered, but your tongue couldn’t form the words.

“That’s when I realized,” Amna said. She ran to the hospital and told them, but nobody came. The nurse said she would send someone to look for Dr. Amjad, but Dr. Amjad didn’t come.

“I stayed with him the whole night. Do you know what that means? He was wandering around his house and wouldn’t settle down. He would raise his left hand and speak at the top of his lungs but you couldn’t understand a word. I tried to calm him down. I sat him down and gave him a glass of aniseed tea. I led him to his bedroom, but when he saw the bed he went into a frenzy, and I ran in circles after him. He opened the front door and tried to leave. Look at my shoulder, my body’s covered in bruises. No, he didn’t hit me, but he was as strong as a bull, and I was running around after him in tears.”

“Okay, okay, Amna,” I said, and I tried to get past her so I could go to the hospital, but she blocked the way with her hand.

She said she’d been alone with you and that you’d scared her. She’d knelt down in front of you and beat her chest with her fist. She said you calmed down when you saw her kneeling. You looked at her as though you didn’t understand, then fell to the ground.

At that point, I slipped between her hand and the door and went out.

Amna followed me, panting and talking, but I didn’t listen. And at the hospital door, she said that doctors were bastards and that I was a doctor too and had no pity in my heart and that she’d waited for them to come, alone with you, until evening.

I went into the hospital and ran to the nurses’ room so I could put on my white gown and go to you. Amna ran after me and said God would never forgive us. Then she disappeared.

You’re upset with Amna because she doesn’t come to visit you. Don’t be angry with her. She doesn’t know that you can hear and feel and are sad. She was convinced you’d died, so why should she come?

Who is Amna Abd al-Rahman really?

Is she a cousin of yours, as you told me? Were you in love with her? Why didn’t you talk about her?

The fact is, my friend, you should tell me something about your women. You’re a man surrounded by women, and there’s something strange in your round pale face that inspires love; it’s the face of a man who is loved. You always described yourself as a lover, but I think you hid your lovers. You only spoke about one woman, and even that one you only would talk about a little. Piecing the glimpses together, I turned it into a story. But you mentioned love only in passing. You jumped over the essential story as though it were a pool in which you might drown. Once I plucked up my courage and asked you where you made love with Nahilah. I didn’t say her name, I just said “her,” and you smiled. You were in a good mood that day. Your eyes shone, you raised your right hand in a vague gesture and said, “There. Among the rocks,” and fell silent. It fell to me to collect your asides and mutterings and work them into a story to tell you.

Now you can’t shut me up. I can say whatever I want and tell you that it’s your story. My goal isn’t to make one up. I’m only half a doctor awaiting death at the vengeful hands of Shams’ family.

I promised I’d start with the ending, and the end will come when you’ve left this coffin of a bed. You’ll get up, tall and broad shouldered, walking stick in hand, and you’ll return to your country. You will go first to the cave of Bab al-Shams. You won’t go to Nahilah’s grave, as everyone expects. You’ll go to Bab al-Shams, enter your village of caves, and disappear.

This is the only dignified ending to your story, which you’ll never betray.

I know what you’ll say and how you’ll roll the word betrayaround in your mouth, before announcing that you had no choice. Your life was a series of betrayals. You’ll say that in order for us not to betray, we have to change – that is, to betray.

You’ll tell me how the adolescent you were during the sacred jihad alongside Abd al-Qadir, ^*God rest his soul, was related to the young man you became in the Arab Commando Brigades, and then in the Arab Nationalist Movement.

You’ll say that the man you became in the Lebanon Regional Command of the Fatah Movement was a continuation of that same young man, but different from him in every way. You’ll speak to me of the older man you became, the one dreaming of a new betrayal, because one has to begin somewhere.

Where were we?

Did you know that all this sitting in your room has made me incapable of concentrating? I jump from story to story, I lose the thread and forget where I began.

I was telling you about Amna. No, but Amna wasn’t the point. I was telling you how they brought you to the hospital half-dead. We carried you into your room and put you on the bed. Your eyes were closed, and you were shivering with fever. They slipped an IV into your right hand, tying it first to the edge of the bed so the needle wouldn’t rip the artery, you were shaking and twitching so much.

I stood there not knowing what to do. Alone in the room, I was listening to the nurses’ voices in the corridor, taking in the smell. That was the first time I had really taken in the smell of Galilee Hospital. Why don’t they clean the place? And why hadn’t I noticed the smell before that day? I came to the hospital every day – it’s true that I didn’t really work, refusing the demotion from doctor to nurse – but I’d never smelled that horrible smell before. Tomorrow, I’ll clean everything.

But the next day I didn’t clean everything, and another day passed, and after it another without my taking action. It seems I’ve gotten used to it. The smell is not a problem. Smells work their way into us, we absorb them, which is why they only exist at the beginning.

Let’s return to the beginning.

I left your room in search of Dr. Amjad and found him sitting in his clinic, smoking, sipping his coffee, and reading the newspaper.

He invited me to sit down, but I remained standing.

“Please sit down. What’s the matter with you?” he asked.

I asked him hesitantly about you.

“Blood clot on the brain.”

“Treatment?”

“‘No hope for a stroke,’” he recited.

“I can’t believe it.”

“It’s in God’s hands,” he said. “Leave it, Dr. Khalil. It’s over. I wouldn’t give him more than seventy-two hours.”

“What about a blood thinner? Didn’t you give him a blood thinner?”

“There’s no point. We did a scan on him and found that the hemorrhage has spread to more than half the brain, which means it’s over.”

“And the fever?”

I asked as though I didn’t know, even though I did. It’s amazing how one can become ignorant. Standing in front of Dr. Amjad, I forgot all my medical training and found myself behaving like an imbecile, as though I knew nothing.

I stood there asking and asking, and he answered me tersely, impatient with my questions, as though I were keeping him from something important.

Dr. Amjad explained that you would die within three days and asked me to contact your relatives about arrangements for the funeral, but instead of trying to get hold of Amna I returned to your room and began my work.

You have brought me back to the medicine that I hated and had forgotten. Don’t be afraid of the fever. My opinion is that the clot occurred somewhere near the area of the fever in the brain, and the pressure is interfering with your body temperature, which means that the fever will disappear once the blood is drawn off.

Don’t be afraid.

I disagreed with Dr. Amjad when he said that the shivering was your death tremor. You were shivering with fever, and the fever would go. As you see, I was right. But do you remember what Nurse Zainab did? She started massaging your chest. When I asked what she was doing, she said that she was helping your soul escape from your body.

“Don’t you see how his soul is shaking?” she asked.

“That’s fever, you idiot,” I shouted, and chased her out of the room, locked the door and sat down, not knowing what to do.

During those first days I despaired. For three days I didn’t leave your room. I changed your IV and put antibiotics in it; Dr. Amjad made fun of me, telling me that the fever had nothing to do with any inflammation.

But I wanted you to live – not because I’m a nonbeliever, as Nurse Zainab had thought – but because I don’t want you to die in bed.

Do you remember what you told me when I visited to offer my condolences after Nahilah died? You received me calmly and offered me an unsweetened coffee. I asked you, as people offering condolences usually do, about the circumstances of her illness and her death, but you didn’t give me any details. You said she’d died in the hospital in Nazareth. Then you started murmuring some verses by al-Mutanabbi. ^*

You recited the poetry as though you’d composed it yourself, and you said you’d never die here. You’d go and die over there.

“And if I die here, try to bury me over there.”

“As you wish, Abu Salem,” I said.

But then you looked at me strangely and said it was impossible, because you knew that your end would be a grave in the camp that would become a soccer field a few years later. You were talking about the mass grave of the victims of the 1982 Shatila massacre, where children now play soccer and trash is scattered all over the place. Then you went back to al-Mutanabbi’s verses:

We make ready our swords and our spears

And the Fates destroy us without a fight.

We bury each other and the remains of those who came first

Are trampled on by those who came later.

That day – do you remember? – that day I suggested to you that you go to Deir al-Asad immediately and you said the time hadn’t come and that you’d return when you were good and ready.

For three days I did the impossible to save you in your room. You’d open your bloodshot eyes, and I’d close them for you, because leaving them open endangers the cornea. The eye is not a mirror, it’s a network of mirrors that must not be exposed to the air for too long or it’s ruined. I focused all my attention on your eyes so that you wouldn’t lose your sight. Because in those early days, I was certain that you would awaken from that sleep.

The strange thing is that, on the fourth day, when your temperature fell and you were lying quietly, I felt very afraid. I was certain the drop in your temperature would begin your return to consciousness. But stabilization led to lethargy. Now you never open your eyes. I’ve taken to opening them myself and passing my finger in front of them, but the pupils don’t respond. Glaucoma has begun. The redness has been replaced by a bluish whiteness.

“He’s entered a state of lethargy,” said Dr. Amjad.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“I don’t know, but he’ll stay like that until he dies.”

“And when will he die?”

“I can’t specify the hour, but he will die.”

Dr. Amjad decided to substitute a feeding tube for the IV. At first I objected, but then I realized that he was right, the tube will put life back into your guts.

And I started to prepare your food for you myself. I replaced the hospital’s ready-made yellow potion with bananas, milk, and honey that I mixed for you. For the last three months, you’ve been eating nothing else, like a baby.

Is it true that newborn infants are as happy as they look, or are they like you, opening their eyes in pain, refusing to take part in the life we’re forcing on them? You’ve changed my thinking about being an infant. All the same, and despite the pain, I dream of having one, because a baby gives you the feeling that you’ll live on through other people, that you won’t die.