Текст книги "Gate of the Sun"

Автор книги: Elias Khoury

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Текущая страница: 25 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

“How should I know?” she asked.

My father was shown the door because of tips. Mr. Emile didn’t like it: “You can’t insist with a customer. If he gives you a quarter of a lira, how can you tell him it’s not enough? The customer’s free to give you what he wants.” It seems, though, that my father insulted one of the customers, so that was the end.

He hung around in the streets. Heading down toward the sea, he kept on until he reached the Bahri restaurant, and from there walked in the direction of al-Zaitouneh. In the Mina al-Hesn district he went into a gas station to ask if they needed help, and there he saw a small notice announcing positions for workers in the sheet-metal factory.

“I went into the workshop through the old arch at the entrance and saw a man wearing a fez and a long, open gown. I asked if they needed workers. He looked me up and down and asked where I was from. When I said Palestine, he took me inside and said, ‘Get started.’”

It was because of the workshop that my father went to prison.

The sheet-metal factory owned by the Jews Aslan Durziyyeh and Sa’id Lawi was small and employed about twenty young men, most of whom were Lebanese Christians. The two owners differed in every respect. Aslan Durziyyeh loved the workers and mixed with them. He even invited my father to his house in Wadi Abu Jmil once Yasin got to know his son Simon, and they’d started going to the movies together. Sa’id Lawi, who wore Western dress, was tough on the workers and would dock their wages if they were even a few minutes late.

I won’t tell you about the work because I don’t know what it was like. What I know is that my father told my mother he’d visit the Durziyyeh family at their home in Wadi Abu Jmil and that they used to feed him lamb-sausage sandwiches and that Simon had suggested he work with him in a dairy that Simon managed close to the fish market. But everything came to an end when the Lebanese police surrounded the factory and arrested all the young men who worked there.

That was 1953, the year when Rabbi Ya’qoub Elfiyyeh was stabbed to death in his home in Wadi Abu Jmil. It seems the police suspected that the gang responsible for the crime consisted of workers at the sheet-metal factory owned by Durziyyeh and Lawi, so they raided the place and took all the young men in for interrogation.

“Your father went straight from the prison to his wedding,” said my grandmother.

The story spread through the camp. At the beginning, the newspapers hinted that the presence of three Palestinians among those arrested pointed to it being a revenge killing. You know how they make a big thing out of any crime committed by a Palestinian in Lebanon, so you can imagine when the victim was a rabbi.

The investigation turned up some amazing facts. The rabbi’s wife gave everything away, confessing that her husband had been involved in abnormal relationships with seven young men and had fallen madly in love with the Greek, Dimitri Alefteriades, and had kept him overnight in his bed despite his wife’s objections.

So the investigation turned to Alefteriades, who confessed before the investigating magistrate, Lt. Colonel Tanyous al-Tawil, that he, along with seven of his comrades, had stabbed the rabbi to death. Dimitri said he’d wanted to get rid of the rabbi, who’d forced him to have sex with the young man, Salim Hneineh, in front of him and hadn’t paid him the money he’d promised. He said that he’d hated the rabbi but had had sex with him and had gone along with his wishes out of greed.

Dimitri wept in the courtroom and swore he was innocent and that he’d killed the rabbi unintentionally. The judge, however, accepted the view of the public prosecutor, who asserted that the crime was premeditated and that seven young men had taken part, led by Dimitri.

Naturally, my father was released a long while before the trial. But the details of the sodomy spread through the camp, and my grandmother felt she had to get her son married. She went to visit her daughter in Ain al-Hilweh the day before my father was let out of prison. There she met Najwah and her father, and the father broached the subject. She didn’t mention to him that the groom was in prison for a sex crime, and he didn’t ask what the groom did for a living. He just confirmed that he owned land in al-Ghabsiyyeh, for in those days people didn’t believe the land was lost.

So my father left prison and went straight to his wedding.

It goes without saying that he lost his job, since Aslan Durziyyeh closed his factory after the scandal and devoted himself to prayer, and my father went on visiting him at his house and eating lamb-sausage sandwiches with him. Aslan Durziyyeh even visited my father in the camp when my sister was born. After the events of ’58, however, he emigrated to Israel.

It was the rabbi’s wife who became the story!

She came to the courtroom and spat in Dimitri’s face as he stood handcuffed in the dock, cursed her husband who had soiled the reputation of the Children of Israel, and said that Beirut would burn like Sodom. She said she didn’t know what would become of her: “I’m alone and have no children, and I can’t stay in my house, which is filled with the stench of sin.” She said she wasn’t asking for anything, but she was ruined: “I’m completely ruined, Your Honor. I don’t have the strength to stay here in Beirut or the courage to migrate to the Land of Israel. What am I supposed to tell them there? That I’m the widow of the rabbi who was murdered in the bed of adultery and sodomy?”

The judge ordered that she be removed from the courtroom because in those days it was forbidden to pronounce the name of the State of Israel, and there was this woman saying that Beirut was going to turn into the new Sodom and that she didn’t dare migrate to the land of her ancestors because she would be turned into a pillar of salt. “I am the pillar of salt, Your Honor, who announces the burning of your city,” said the woman before the policemen dragged her out of the courtroom.

The upshot was that my father married the girl from al-Tirah.

Najwah Hani Fayyad was fourteen years old when she married Yasin. Her father put her in my grandmother’s hands. He took the dowry and left, and the girl entered our house as the wife of Yasin, who’d found himself work in a sheet-metal factory called The Light Metals Company, in the Bir al-Abed district, owned by the Palestinian Badi’ Boulis.

I know nothing about my mother’s family. My grandmother said her mother had died and her father agreed to the marriage quickly because he’d found a job in Kuwait and didn’t want to take his daughter there with his second wife and her children.

“The wedding was like any other wedding – a party, a procession, youyous, and the usual fuss. But the girl remained a stranger among us, and your father changed after he got married. It was all the fault of the girl from al-Tirah. He would come home in the evening after work, close the door of his room, and read for hours. She’d sit with me in the house doing nothing – I swear she did nothing. I’d do all the cooking, wash the clothes, wash the dishes, everything. Even you, Son: I looked after you, and your father took no interest. He began staying away from home a lot and not coming back until the morning. It seems he left his job. I think Adnan Abu Odeh put ideas into his head. Then Najwah had her daughter, and Yasin died, and his daughter followed him.”

TELL ME about those days. My grandmother didn’t know much. Tell me about the beginning and how you formed the first groups of fedayeen, why my father died, why you disappeared, and why Adnan left the camp.

Tell me why Najwah disappeared.

In Jordan no one knew her address. It was as though she’d melted into thin air. My grandmother said she’d gone to her family in Amman, but she didn’t have family. Her father was in Kuwait. So where was she? The subject didn’t interest me much because when she disappeared, I was a child, and when I grew older, I held a grudge against her and didn’t pay much attention to her story. Then I met Samih and his wife, Samya. You didn’t meet Samih Barakeh; you hate intellectuals, especially the ones who come and visit the fighters, theorize and philosophize, and then go back to their comfortable homes.

I first met Samih in ’73 when clashes erupted between the army and the camps. He came to the camp with a group of workers from the Palestine Research Center. They toured the camp and then all went home. Except for him. Samih stayed for more than ten days, we were posted in the same positions and we became friends. I liked him a lot. There was great suffering in his face, which was broad and brown and etched with pain. He told me he was waiting for Samya to come from America so they could get married in Beirut. He said he’d fallen in love with her in Ramallah and then had gone to prison, and in the meantime, she had to leave with her family for Detroit, which has the world’s largest concentration of inhabitants of Ramallah. I asked why he didn’t go to her, complete his education in America, and marry her there. He told me he had his hands full here because he wanted to liberate Palestine. He spoke of his lengthy imprisonment in Hebron and of his dream of living with Samya in the stone house he’d inherited from his father in Ramallah. Samya did come and marry him, and now she lives in the stone house in Ramallah while Samih sleeps in his grave.

Samih said he was arrested for the first time in October of ’67.

He was distributing pamphlets against the Israeli occupation in the city. “In prison,” he said, “the Israeli officer taught me the most important lesson of my life. He interrogated me with a copy of the pamphlet in his hand and flung questions at me. At first I said I’d been reading the pamphlet and had nothing to do with distributing it, when in fact I was the one who’d written it, which called on schools to strike in protest against the occupation. He looked me in the eye and said I was a coward. He said that if he were in my place, and if his country were occupied, he wouldn’t go around distributing pamphlets – that would be shameful – he’d be distributing bombs instead. I confessed I was the one who’d written the pamphlet, and then he grew even more contemptuous and said I deserved to be beaten. I finished my one-year sentence in Ramallah, and when I came out, we started the real resistance. We began organizing a network for Fatah, but they arrested us before we could undertake any operations. They seized one of the members of the network who’d gone to Jordan and had come back in clandestinely, with explosives. And it was in the second prison that I learned my lesson.”

Samih said he’d been in the Hebron prison.

“It was February; it was bitter cold, and snowing. They took me to the interrogator, who ordered me to take off my clothes. Around the interrogator were four men with rippling muscles. I took off my shirt. ‘Go on,’ he said. I took off my vest. ‘Your trousers,’ he said. I hesitated, but a punch in the face that made my nose bleed persuaded me. I took off my trousers and my shoes and stood naked except for my underpants. With a wave of the hand, the interrogator ordered them to take me away, and we went through the door of the prison and walked to a high mound. It was icy. I was certain they were going to kill me and dump me on the ice as food for the birds. At the top of the mound, the beating started. They attacked my entire body. They used their hands and their feet and their leather belts. They threw me down on the ground and kicked me and stamped on my face, my blood turning into icy red spots. At first I screamed with pain, and I heard the interrogator say, ‘Coward.’ I remembered the first interrogator and the contempt in his eyes as he flung the political pamphlet in my face, and I went dumb. They beat me, and I swallowed blood and groans. I rolled naked in the ice, and my skin was torn from me. The beating stopped after a stretch that seemed interminable, and they took me back to the prison. At the door to the interrogator’s room, where they ordered me to go in and get my clothes, I understood everything.”

Samih said he understood.

The naked, bleeding man stood at the door. He heard the order to enter so he could be given his clothes. The naked man turned to the interrogator, took hold of the sleeve of his thick coat, and said to him, “Please, Sir, don’t go.”

The interrogator turned in disgust. He tried to pull his arm away, but Samih tightened his grip and said, “Please, Sir. I want to tell you something.”

“Quickly, quickly,” said the interrogator.

Samih swallowed his blood and saliva and little bits that he later realized were pieces of his teeth and said, “Listen, Sir. Listen to me well. I didn’t cry out. You beat me and stamped on me, and I didn’t cry out even once. Next time, when you fall into my hands, please don’t cry out. I can’t stand pity.”

Samih didn’t know what happened after he said that because he woke up in solitary confinement. When he returned to the common wing, he told the other prisoners only part of his story. He told of the beating on the mound but didn’t tell them what happened afterwards in the interrogator’s room. He said his words had to remain a secret between him and the interrogator.

“What do you think?” he asked me.

“Do you know the interrogator’s name?” I asked him.

“No.”

“So?”

“Any one of them will do.”

“And if he cries out?”

“I’ll kill him.”

Samih died in Tunis, and his wife returned to Ramallah. I learned that he died in his small house in Menzah VI. It’s said he died of shock at the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in ’82, but I’m not convinced that was the reason. I mean, after all those who were killed fighting and in massacres, along comes someone who dies of sentiment! It’s too much. But in her letter, Samya said that heart disease ran in Samih’s family and his two brothers died of angina before reaching the age of fifty.

Samih said that nothing – not the ice, not the solitary confinement – frightened him as much as the day the prisoners beat him. “In the cell I lost all sense of time. But when the prisoners beat me, I lost my soul.”

He said he opened his eyes to find himself in darkness.

The cell was very small, and the darkness extended into every corner. He tried to stand, and his head hit the ceiling. He sat and began to suffocate.

“There wasn’t enough air,” he said, and he almost went mad worrying about it. He struck the walls of the cell with his fists and discovered that he couldn’t find where the door was. The walls seemed to be covered in seamless iron in which the door was lost.

He said he was suffocating, that he opened his mouth wide to capture the air.

He said he felt a terrible thirst inside. This was true thirst: True thirst is having no air.

He said it took a while to get used to the lack of air. Then, once he’d regulated his breathing, he relaxed a little and tamed the darkness.

“Do you know what darkness means?” he asked. “No one knows the meaning of the darkness of the grave. Darkness can’t be described. A gluey emptiness creeps over your body and seals your eyes and your pores.”

He said he no longer knew who or where he was. Time was lost and with it the man. “To regain my sense of time, I started to count. Eureka! I thought. I opened my ten fingers and started counting. On the count of sixty, I reached a minute. I’d count sixty minutes and reach an hour. But I began to get confused. Had I reached two hours, or was it more? I’d go back to the beginning and count over again. I’d count and the numbers would get confused, and then I couldn’t go on any longer and passed into silence.”

He said he waited for daybreak, when they brought him water and food.

He said that the day didn’t come. “I didn’t have a watch, I had nothing. I was alone in the darkness, with the darkness.”

He said he hit his head on the walls. He said he bled and screamed until he was hoarse. He said he only wanted one thing from them, that they tell him what day and what time it was.

As Samih told his story, the fear would steal into his words, and he’d shudder and say, “That’s the worst torment, being deprived of time. Eternity is true agony.”

I asked him what he felt when they took him out of the dark. He was silent for a long time before saying that he felt the beauty of old age. “The prisoner doesn’t see himself in the mirror; there are no mirrors there. His only mirror is the eyes of other prisoners.” When he saw his own image in the eyes of the other prisoners, who were struck with terror at how he’d aged, he felt comforted.

“And the beating?” I asked.

“That was my mistake,” he said.

Do you know what Samih did when he left solitary confinement? He joined the prisoners’ Sufi circle. He said he started joining in their prayers and their ritual dhikr. In fact, he became close to their sheikh, Hamid al-Khalili, until they found out he wasn’t a Muslim.

“When Sheikh Hamid found out I was a Christian, I was terrified,” said Samih. “On the mound I wasn’t afraid. I thought I’d die on the ice, so I surrendered to the ice; it inhabited my eyes and took me into the whiteness of death. With the sheikh it was a different matter. I think an informer told the sheikh I was a Christian; he said he’d seen my mother with the other visitors, and she was wearing a cross around her neck.”

“Is it true?” asked the sheikh.

Samih didn’t know what to answer. All he could do was confess. They pounced on him, but the sheikh raised his hand and they stopped in their tracks. The sheikh approached him.

“I said yes. I couldn’t find words to justify my position. How could I, how could I tell him that after the darkness of solitary confinement, I felt the need to be among them?

“He asked me if I was mocking them.

“I said, ‘No, no, I swear.’

“In the midst of the devotees, as their fury took shape around me, a murmur spread. I wished I were dead.

“The sheikh questioned me and I tried to explain, but my words were the cause of my downfall.

“I said I was Christian, but also not, that I believed in God and loved Christ, but still I was. .

“‘A communist, maybe?’ said the sheikh.

“I told him I was a member of Fatah.

“‘So you’re an atheist,’ said the sheikh.”

This was where Samih made the mistake that almost cost him his life. He said he saw religion as a social phenomenon, an ethic. He said he loved Arabic literature and knew the Koran and pre-Islamic poetry by heart, and wanted to join in their experience.

“But that’s not what you told us at the beginning,” said the sheikh.

The sheikh held his hand up and said, “What do you think, brothers?” The brothers, however, rather than responding, attacked. The sheikh managed to extricate himself, but Samih fell beneath their blows and howls.

“On the ice,” said Samih, “when I saw death, I didn’t open my mouth. But there, I screamed and wept and was afraid. The circles revolved around me and by the time I opened my eyes, I was in solitary confinement. Then they took me to a new communal cell, where I found Sheikh Hamid, and we became friends.

“I explained to him and he explained to me. He wanted to convert me to Islam, and I wanted to convince him of the mixture of secularism, humanism, and Marxism that I believed in. We parted ways without him converting me or me convincing him, but he came to understand that I hadn’t been mocking them and that I loved religious ritual.”

Samih was an intellectual. He’d had two books published, plus a number of articles. He had his own particular theory on Israel, basically that it would collapse from within and that the moment of liberation was near. He’d mention dates. He was convinced that Israel would collapse at the end of the eighties as a result of its internal contradictions. It was difficult to discuss anything with him because he knew everything. He read Hebrew and English and kept an amazing amount of numbers in his head, which he would toss down in front of you so you could do nothing but agree. Naturally, his predictions didn’t come true. The only part that came true was that his remains were transported to Ramallah, where he was buried in his family’s grave. Samya was the one who arranged it.

I’ve told you about Samih so I can tell you about Samya. Samya was an ordinary woman, or at least that’s what she led us to believe in Beirut. She did nothing other than wait for her husband. In the space of two years, she bore two children and cooked a lot. When I visited them at home, I’d see her sitting on the edge of the sofa as though ready to get up at any moment. She sat with us but gave the impression of being elsewhere. I was told she changed a lot after Samih died. She arranged for herself and the children to return to Ramallah because she had American citizenship. She’d worked as a librarian and became the official in charge of the Ramallah organization during the intifada. It was as though Samih’s death had liberated her from waiting and had driven her to forge a new life.

My existence was jarred by Samya’s mysterious letter.

I was in Shatila, during the first siege, when a young man called Nadim al-Jamal joined us. He was a friend of the camp commandant, Ali Abu Toq.

Nadim al-Jamal said he had a letter for me from a woman called Samya Barakeh whom he’d met by chance in Amman, where she was returning from a conference in Stockholm. When she found out he was going to see me in Beirut, she asked him to delay until the next morning and brought him a letter for me.

I believed that Samya had never listened to me because although she’d sit with us at their place, she always gave the impression of not really being present. Her husband would ask questions and I’d respond, but she would never intervene. Samih would always talk about his dream of writing a book without a beginning or an end. “An epic,” he called it, an epic of the Palestinian people, which he’d start by recounting the details of the great expulsion of ’48. He said we didn’t know our own history, and we needed to gather the stories of every village so they’d remain alive in our memory. Samih would talk to me about his theories and dreams, and I had nothing to tell him. Well, I did tell him about our village, and my grandmother’s stories, and my father’s death and my mother’s disappearance. With him, or because of his questions, I became acquainted with the stories of my family, put events together and drew a picture of al-Ghabsiyyeh, which I hadn’t known. I put so much into getting the story ready that I came to know the village house by house. And during all that time, Samya sat there in silence.

I opened Samya’s letter and read it.

To start with, she wrote about her longing for Beirut. Then she informed me of Samih’s death and about the difficulties of life in Ramallah. I don’t have the letter any longer to read to you because we tore up all our papers when we were afraid the camp would fall. I wish I hadn’t torn it up, because it was my only evidence that my mother wasn’t a ghost or a story made up by my grandmother. My mother is a real woman, not a phantom belonging to the mysterious world of childhood. I followed orders and tore up the letter; Abu Toq called us together during the siege and ordered us to tear up everything. “I don’t want documents falling into their hands,” he said. I tore the letter up, but before doing so I wrote down the telephone number Samya had put at the end. I must have tried that number a dozen times, and every time I got a recorded message saying it was out of service. Did I copy it wrong? Or were the numbers on that little piece of paper I kept in the back pocket of my trousers erased or illegible?

Sanya wrote that she’d met my mother, Najwah, and that she had wept and wept when Samya told her she knew me and had kissed her and held her close, so she might breathe in the smell of me. Samya wrote that she’d met my mother in the hospital in Ramallah, that she wore a headscarf, and she was working as a nurse.

Samya was waiting for her son outside the operating room where he was having his appendix taken out when a dark-skinned nurse wearing a white headscarf came over to reassure her.

“Your mother’s beautiful, Dr. Khalil,” she wrote. I wish I had the letter, but it’s gone and I can’t get in touch with Samya because the number was either erased or written down wrong.

My mother’s there, a nurse like me! Samya wrote that she knew her because she was a nurse. “Nurses look alike, and she resembles you a lot.” I’m at a loss. What if I found my mother? I don’t want her now, and I don’t love her. But why? Why should her ghost come and inhabit this room with me? My grandmother didn’t describe her to me, and all I can remember is her brown arm. I used to put my lips on her arm and kiss it. All that’s left of that woman for me is the image of a face nuzzling her arm, two eyes fixed on it, a mouth caressing the vast, soft brownness.

Samya’s letter brought me this new picture of a woman, a woman who covered her hair and worked as a nurse in Ramallah. My mother emerged from the letter looking like any other woman, and when your mother comes to resemble any other woman, she’s not your mother anymore. What strange kind of a relationship is this that depends on an illusion? But everything’s like that. Isn’t Shams an illusion? My problem with Shams is that the illusion won’t die. When they killed her, they didn’t kill her image. I haven’t told you what I found out afterwards. When Shams was ambushed, she opened the door of her car and was about to get out. The upper half of her body hung outside the open door while the lower half remained inside the car. The number of bullets that poured into her was terrible. More than sixty machine guns firing at once. Her body was torn apart and scattered. Little bits flew through the air and pelted trees and houses. After they’d finished, the pieces were collected in two plastic bags and buried.

As far as I’m concerned Shams didn’t die, for when the body is torn apart there is no death. I wish she’d died, but she didn’t. And I’m incapable of loving another woman. No, I’m not saying that I won’t ever be unfaithful, because everyone is unfaithful, but I can’t. . The problem is not my betrayals but my permanent feeling of being unfaithful. I wish she’d died. No, it’s not possible to compare your situation with mine. You died when your wife died, but my wife wasn’t my wife, she was another man’s wife, and when she died her smell invaded and took hold of me. When her image comes to me, I’m overwhelmed by that feeling that my rib cage is burning. I get up from my bed and stand in the dark and drink it in. I drink in the dark and rub it into my chest, and the memories possess me.

I WAS TELLING you about my mother, and what has Shams to do with that?

I told you I lost my mother, then found her in Samya’s letter, then lost her again. All I know is that my father married Najwah after the incident with the Jew, then took a new job in the factory belonging to the Palestinian Badi’ Boulis, and then died.

My father married Najwah by chance. If he hadn’t worked in the factory belonging to the Jew in Mina al-Hesn, and if the rabbi hadn’t been murdered, and if my father hadn’t been arrested, and if Najwah’s father hadn’t been on a visit to Ain al-Hilweh, my father wouldn’t have married at such an early age. You know, I feel as though he were my older brother. He was eighteen years older than me. Now do you understand why I hated him, and hated my white hair and my face with its bulging cheekbones and long jaw? I don’t want people to look at me as if I were him. The truth is that that sort of look stopped existing after the Shatila massacre – as if everyone had died, as if that massacre, with its more than fifteen hundred victims, had wiped out the memory of faces, as if death had wiped out our eyes and our faces, and we’ve become featureless.

It was chance, as I told you. Chance was his story.

Explain to me how that young man could work for a Jew after all that had happened? Please don’t talk to me about tolerance; say something else.

Listen! I’ll tell you this story, and it’s up to you to believe it or not. Do you remember Alia Hammoud, the director of the camp kindergarten? Alia asked me to give a lecture to the teachers at the kindergarten on preventive health. So I went. When we were having tea after the lecture, one of the teachers started talking about her problems with a child named Khaled Shana’a. She said he was obnoxious and she couldn’t put up with his being in her class any longer. He was full of turbulence and anxiety, and she asked Alia’s permission to expel him from the class. Alia told her to be silent. The teacher continued complaining, at which point Alia said to her in a controlled voice that she couldn’t expel him and suggested that the teacher try being gentle and caring with him. When the teacher indicated her dissatisfaction with the director’s suggestion, Alia’s voice rose.

“Do you know who Khaled is? He’s the grandson of a great man.”

She was speaking of the ’48 occupation of her village, which was located in the district of Safad, and of how a group of young men had been taken and then crushed by a bulldozer; Khaled Shana’a, the child’s grandfather, was the only one to survive. She also mentioned how, after the villagers crossed the Lebanese border and took up residence in the village of Yaroun, Khaled was the only one to return to Teitaba. He stole into the village on his own, went to his house, opened the door, and everything exploded. The man opened his door and found himself thrown to the ground, blood gushing from him. He pulled himself together, returned to Yaroun, and spent the rest of his life blind.

“He’s a hero,” said Alia. “His grandfather is a hero, and I won’t expel his grandson.”

The teacher couldn’t understand where the heroism lay in the story, since she was one of the ones who’d escaped from the Tal al-Za’atar camp, where, during the siege of the camp, which had ended with the massacre of its inhabitants, she’d seen for herself how heroes die and their acts of heroism disappear.