Текст книги "Gate of the Sun"

Автор книги: Elias Khoury

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 27 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

Opposite the hill on which the village cemetery lay, Yunes stood alone, holding his rifle and hiding behind a tall palm tree that he would call from that moment on, “Sheikh Ibrahim’s palm.” There the men turned into ripples of water around the bier as they circled it to the sound of Sufi chanting, their voices reaching Yunes: “ Madad! Madad!Succor! Messenger of God, Beloved of God, People of the House, You whom we adore.” He seized his rifle, raised it in the air, and placed his finger on the trigger to bid the sheikh farewell with a salute. Instead, he lowered it and pointed its muzzle at the ground, bent over where he stood, and started to sing with the others as he had done when he was a child, when his father had taken him from Ain al-Zaitoun to Sha’ab. There, in the little mosque, the young Yunes would let himself be transported by the rhythm of the men as they spun around their blind sheikh, singing, shouting and dancing. And now, Yunes wanted to revolve with them and merge with their voices, but he stood still where he was and listened to the voice of the child he’d been.

The funeral rites came to an end, earth was thrown over the sheikh, everybody dispersed, and Yunes returned to his cave, where he stayed for a week, never leaving it. Then Nahilah came and took you to the house. You walked behind her like a sleepwalker, and when you arrived you were a little nervous and said you shouldn’t go in, so she dragged you inside. In the courtyard, the children were playing, but you didn’t go to them. You went in and sat down in the living room; your mother came and sat down beside you, took your hand, and said nothing.

You were sitting next to your mother when you heard Nahilah’s voice calling the seven children into the house. She’d call to each of them by name, then say, “Shoo!” as though she were herding chickens rather than children. They came in and saw you. None of them came over to you, and you didn’t open your arms the way a father who sees his children is supposed to do. They came in and you stayed where you were. They came in and drew back and stood in a single row, pressing against the wall as though they were afraid of you. Silently, you got up, approached them, knelt, and kissed them one after the other. Then you stood up and left. Noor, who was fourteen, cried “Dad!” as you went away.

That was your only meeting with your children, and when you recalled it, you spoke of it as a dream – “as though it never happened.” When you told me about your father’s funeral and how you’d taken part, you said that the barbed wire and the electric border fences hadn’t stopped you from bidding him farewell.

AND YESTERDAY, I stood in your room, under the avalanche of pictures – I saw them all. I saw your children and your grandchildren with their backs to the wall, waiting for you to get up and approach them on your knees and kiss them. I heard Noor’s voice and saw your mother’s death-inhabited eyes. You told me your mother died two months after your father and that you didn’t go to her funeral.

That day, after you’d kissed them, you returned to Lebanon. You came back once more on a short visit before disappearing for more than a year because of your preoccupations and the tense situation on the border. In the meantime, everything had changed. Salem had started work with his brother Mirwan in Mr. Haim’s garage in Haifa, and Noor was about to announce her engagement to Isa al-Kashif, who worked as a construction worker before becoming a contractor in the Arab villages, and Nahilah was exhausted.

“I’m worn out with poverty and the daily grind,” she said.

You were together in the olive grove next to your cave, sitting beneath the summer moon that shed its light on the green leaves, giving them a blue shimmer. You waited for her there because she’d told you, “Beneath the tree.” You tapped on the window and were about to leave when Nahilah appeared behind the glass and said, “Beneath the Roman tree.” You thought she meant the enormous old tree with the hollow trunk, the one that yields a small fruit with a special taste.

You love olives.

All of us love olives, especially those little green ones Nahilah used to cover with coarse salt in a cloth bag and recommend you place – the moment you reached your house – in a glass jar filled with water so the salt would melt and rise, white and raw, to the top, and into which you were to throw a few bay leaves, leaving the jar for a month before eating them.

You kept those olives for celebrations. You’d celebrate with your olives in Shatila, taking a handful from the jar and steeping them in garlic, lemon, and oil, and drinking a glass of arak while listening to Saleh Abd al-Hayy singing, “My beloved, he tells me what to do,” taking your ritual to its pinnacle. You called those moments the ultimate prayer. You’d. . no, I won’t say the truth now so that I don’t spoil your memories, which you construct to please yourself. But when I listened to you talking about those Roman olive trees, planted before the time of Christ, saying they had an irradicable hidden bitterness, a bitterness that gave one an appetite for life, and then going on at length about those huge trees with the hollow trunks which they called Roman because they’re as old as the Romans, I’d imagine you with another woman. Please don’t get upset. You know I’m telling the truth, or what would the visits of those two women mean? The first I told you about. She came, and then disappeared. The second would come every Thursday at four in the afternoon. She still has a certain beauty, especially in her fine jaw and the two creases that crossed her cheeks. Her name is Claire; she introduced herself as Claire Midawwar. She came into your room and sat down. I was cleaning the mucus extractor. She didn’t pay the least bit of attention to me. She made me feel out of place, so I left the room, and when I came back an hour later, she was gone.

She continued to come at her regular time and I continued to leave her alone with you. Last week, however, she was late. Do you know why I haven’t spoken of her until today? Because she’d become a part of our life here in the hospital, a routine one pays no attention to until it stops. Last week I became aware of her because she was late, and I decided to wait for her to ask her who she was. I put on a clean white gown and thought to wear my glasses, which I usually forget in my pocket since I haven’t gotten used to the idea of putting on glasses. As soon as she entered the room, I went over to her to shake hands.

“I’m Dr. Khalil Ayyoub.”

“Pleased to meet you, Doctor,” she answered, sitting down again.

“I haven’t had the pleasure of making your acquaintance,” I said.

“I’m a friend,” she said. “An old friend.”

I got into a stop-and-go conversation with her about conditions in the city, but she didn’t seem to want to talk, as though I were stealing the time she’d set aside for you. Despite her irritation with my questions and her abrupt and evasive answers, I decided to be impertinent. I sat on the second chair and leaned forward a little as if to follow what she was saying. As soon as she saw me sit down, she put her hand on her hip as though she were about to stand up. Before the gesture could be transformed into the arch of the back that precedes the moment of rising, I got a question in. I asked her, point-blank, what her relationship to you was.

“When did your relationship with him start, Madame. .?”

I left my question hanging in the air, and the shock took the wind out of her sails. Looking at me with startled eyes, she said, “Claire. Claire Midawwar.”

“Have you known him for a long time?”

“A very long time,” she said and got up.

“Tell me about him,” I said.

She picked up her bag and said she was going. “Look after him, and may God make him well.”

Mme. Claire didn’t come that week, and it’s possible that she’ll never come back again. It’s my fault, but I couldn’t help but ask her. I saw her coming once a week and I imagined her with you, eating Roman olives dripping with lemon juice and oil.

Eating Nahilah’s olives with another woman!

I don’t understand anymore.

You’ll ask me about the French actress, I know. But no, I swear there’s nothing between us. I just felt a strange tenderness.

You’ll ask me about my visit to her at the Hotel Napoléon on Hamra Street.

I didn’t mean to visit her. I was feeling stifled here, so I went. I’m not going to tell you any more now. I’ll behave like Claire Midawwar, who went away without telling me a thing.

Tell me, is Claire the woman you sought shelter with during the Israeli invasion of ’82?You claimed that you’d fled to a priest’s house! Was she the priest? Got you! I’ve got you now, and it’s up to me to decipher what you said. Everything needs translating. Everything that’s said is a riddle or a euphemism that needs to be interpreted. Now I must reinterpret you from the beginning. I’ll take apart your disjointed phrases to see what’s inside them and will put you back together again to get at your truth.

Can I get at your truth?

What does your truth mean?

I don’t know, but I’ll discover things that had never crossed my mind.

“And you?” you’ll ask.

“Me?”

“Yes, you. What about you?”

“Nothing.”

“And the French actress?”

“Nothing.”

“And Shams? Where is she?”

Please don’t say anything about Shams. I promise, I’ll forget about Claire and the olives dripping with lemon juice and everything else, but please, not Shams.

So let’s close this chapter and return to the summer moon and Nahilah.

That night, the moon was bright in the skies of Galilee. Yunes tapped on the windowpane and left, but he heard her whisper. He turned and saw her standing at the window, the moonlight pouring down onto her long black hair. He went closer and she said, “The Roman tree. Go on ahead and meet me at the Roman tree.”

He went to the tree, wondering why she didn’t want to go to the cave, guessing that she might be indisposed, because at that time of the month, she’d come to him at Bab al-Shams and ask him to go out with her into the fields, and he’d stubbornly refuse. The game would end with him kissing every crevice of her body while she screamed at him, “Stop it! Stop it! It’s a taboo!” and he’d give way before this taboo and be content with expending himself between her small breasts.

He went to the Roman tree, but instead of waiting for her beneath it, he got inside its huge, hollow trunk, which was wide enough to hold more than three people, and the idea rushed into his head that he could possess her there. He hid in the trunk, held his breath, and heard her circling the tree looking for him. She was like a small child lost in the fields. His love caught fire. He waited until she was close to the opening of the trunk, pulled her to him and brought her inside, while she trembled with fright and called on God for protection. He drew her to him.

“It’s me. Don’t be afraid.”

She yielded to his hands, and kisses, and his hot breath that enveloped her, while saying: “No, no.”

He pulled her closer, his back against the trunk, and tried to lift her dress. She pulled back, and her head struck the trunk. The pain made her groan. He tried to take a look, but she pushed him away with both hands and slipped outside. He followed her, reaching out like a blind man searching for something to grope.

“Listen,” she said and sat down.

“Sit there,” and she pointed.

He asked about her head.

“It’s nothing. Nothing.”

She spread the provisions she’d bought out in front of them. “I brought you some chicory and midardara.”

“No,” she said, escaping his grasp. “Today you have to listen.”

He listened as he ate, the femininity of the moon creeping inside him and chilling his body. She talked and was born through her own words. That day the seventh Nahilah was born.

The first Nahilah was his young wife that he didn’t know, because he was in the mountains with the fighters.

The second Nahilah was the beautiful woman who was born in the cave of Bab al-Shams as she trod the grapes and married her husband.

The third Nahilah was the mother of Ibrahim, the eldest who died.

The fourth Nahilah was the mother of Noor that Yunes clung to in the cave and called Umm Noor, Mother of Light, whenever she came to him with light shining from her eyes.

The fifth Nahilah was the heroine of the funeral who came out of prison to announce the death of her husband and lamented in front of everybody.

The sixth Nahilah was the mother of all those children who filled the square at Deir al-Asad.

And on that night, the seventh Nahilah was born.

Beneath the olive tree whose branches were drenched in the green moon of Galilee, the seventh Nahilah was born. She was approaching forty, wrinkles ran down her long neck, and sorrow extended from her eyes to her cheeks.

The seventh Nahilah had grown exhausted with all there was to exhaust her. A woman alone and poor.

“You know nothing at all,” she said. “Sit down and listen. I’m worn out, Yunes, you have no idea. You know nothing at all. Tell me, who are you?”

Did she ask him “who are you?” or was it enough to recount her torments? Did he see himself mirrored in her words?

Yunes sat down and discovered he knew nothing. He’d been concerned only with his Nahilahs, as though he’d married seven women who were different in every way but united by one thing: waiting.

All of a sudden, Yunes saw his life as scattered fragments – from Palestine to Lebanon, from Lebanon to Syria, from one prison to another.

He had lived for his long journeys to Galilee, when he had to get through the barbed wire, past the dangers and the Border Guard and the machine guns that mowed down border crossers.

He’d built up political and military cells composed of the tattered remnants of men who wanted to get back to their land. He’d joined various organizations. He’d started as an Arab nationalist with the Heroes of the Return and the Youths of Revenge and moved on to Fatah after meeting Abu Ali Iyad, and there, he became an official in the Western Sector.

“I was living in a no man’s land,” he told Nahilah, “as though I weren’t living, and you were here on your own, and I did nothing for you. Come with me to Lebanon.”

She said no. “The children have grown up, and it’s over. What do you want me to do in Lebanon? Live in the camp? Become a refugee? No. You come back here. I know you can’t because they’ll kill you or put you in prison here. You can’t come and I can’t either. You’re my husband, and I’m your wife. What kind of life is this, Abu Salem?”

The green moon cast its light over Yunes, and the story stole into his eyes and drowned them in a sort of drowsiness. It wasn’t tears; things rooted themselves in his eyes and spread out before him, and he became like a blind man who sees. He had been seeing without understanding. This was Yunes’ state in the presence of the seventh Nahilah – hearing and seeing and dissolving in the light of the moon that emanated, pure and green, from the woman’s eyes.

She spoke of the world she’d divided into two halves, her life she put into little compartments, her children. She didn’t talk about the little compartment of fear, she didn’t talk about how the children – their children – wore her down with their questions and their fearful eyes. She didn’t say she’d waited for him to say, “Come with me,” and that she’d thought he hadn’t said it because of his parents, so she’d waited, and when they’d died, leaving was no longer possible. She said only that things weren’t as impossible anymore, that Salem and Mirwan had started working in Mr. Haim’s garage in Haifa, and that they were happy. Then a certain hesitancy began to punctuate her speech, stretches of silence began inserting themselves between words.

“You don’t know,” Nahilah said. “You don’t know anything. You think life is those distances you cross to come to me, carrying the smell of the forest. And you say you’re a lone wolf. But my dearest, it’s not a matter of the smell of the wolf or the smell of wild thyme or of the Roman olive tree, it’s a matter of people who’ve become strangers to each other. Do you know who we are at least? Do you know what happened to us when we found ourselves being led by a blind man? Your mother saved him from death, she yanked him out of their midst, and the Israeli soldier looked right through her. She said she asked God to blind them so they wouldn’t see her. Then they killed them all. You know what happened at Sha’ab. We found ourselves with bullets flying over our heads – no, before we fled, they led the men in front of the pond, the Israeli officer was shouting: ‘To Lebanon!’ Your mother took your father by the hand and tried to lead him to where the officer was pointing, but your father walked in the opposite direction. So we followed him. A blind man leading two women and a child toward the unknown. ‘Go with the others,’ your mother told me, but I didn’t go. I was afraid to leave them, afraid to meet you in Lebanon, afraid of you and of those crowds racing against one another and stomping over one another, and I said, ‘No, I’ll stay with you.’ So we walked. Night came, but the sheikh didn’t notice. It was the first time the sheikh failed to distinguish between night and day. Your mother said that was the day the sheikh went blind. You know your father better than me. The sheikh knew the times for prayer by the way the sunlight fell upon his closed eyes, but that night he lost the ability to distinguish. Two women walking behind a blind man, in the blackness of the night, in a devastated land. We walked for endless hours. Then the sheikh stopped and said, ‘We’ve reached Deir al-Asad. Take me to the mosque.’ The sheikh had decided that Deir al-Asad was his new village, and in the morning your mother went to the headman, who was related to your father; his name was Awwad. But the headman pretended he didn’t know them. In those days, no one knew anyone anymore; we’d all become strangers. The village sheikh intervened. He came to the mosque and told your mother there were plenty of abandoned houses, and that they should go to any house. We went to the first house we found, and it was beautiful, close to the caves that came to be known as Bab al-Shams, and surrounded by an olive grove. It was the house of Ahmad Karim al-Asadi, who had fled to Lebanon with his family at the time of the unforgettable incident in the village square when everybody lay down in the road to stop the Israeli bulldozers. Ahmad Karim al-Asadi didn’t join them in the square. Like many others, he fled. So we moved into the house; it became ours. And the village became our village.

“Yes Sir, we were strangers. Your father became a beggar. We went to live in this house not knowing what else to do and discovered, with the villagers, that the land had gone. The village wasn’t a village anymore – the peasants’ land wasn’t theirs anymore, so they were nothing, like you in Lebanon and Syria and I-don’t-know-where. No land, no rifles, and no horses – the men were no longer men. When a woman tried to pick her olives from her grove, they would detain her and make her throw them away – the land now belonged to the State. Nobody was left with work except for thieves. Yes, we stole from our own land and lived like thieves. I don’t know how many stayed behind. I stayed because I followed the blind man, and others fled because they ran like blind men.”

“There were more than a hundred thousand of you,” said Yunes.

“We became strangers to one another. The villages were all mixed up together. The Bedouins moved into Sha’ab, we were in Deir al-Asad, and al-Ba’neh filled up with people from who-knows-where. We were no longer at home, and the villages weren’t villages any more. We no longer felt we were in our own country. You knew only the bullets that flew over your heads, of the blood that flowed, and of the young men reaped by death. We could no longer move from place to place. Going from one village to another required a military permit. We weren’t even allowed to visit al-Ba’neh, which was only a stone’s throw away. It was as though they’d built imaginary walls between the villages. And the people turned into thieves, or something like thieves, going into their fields at night and stealing their own crops. Strangers stealing from strangers. I would look around me and see nothing but emptiness, as though we had dug graves for ourselves in the air and had been buried in them. I hated everyone. I hated them all: the ones driven to take jobs working for their enemies, building settlements for the new immigrants with their own hands. We hated each other, idiotically, for no reason. Yes, we are an idiotic and naïve people. We buried our land with our own hands. Instead of digging the soil to make the plants grow and provide food for our livestock, we dug the foundations for houses to be built on the ruins of our own. We labored without daring to look each another in the eye, as though we were embarrassed to.

“What could we do? Nothing. We worked so we wouldn’t die.

“Then you came.

“You made your way through the blockade of hate that surrounded us, and knocked on my window. Did you think you were Qays looking for Layla among the ruins? You poor thing, I swear I hated you as much as I did myself. I was afraid you’d take me with you to Lebanon. I didn’t want to have anything to do with you because I didn’t know you, and you scared me. All I had in the world was the blind man, who used to go every day to the mosque and try and convince everyone that he was the sheikh of the Shadhliyya order. They would take pity on him and throw him a few piasters, which weren’t even enough to buy bread with. There was no trace of my mother. It was as though the earth had split and swallowed up my sisters. Do you know anything about my family? Are they in Lebanon? I never asked you about them and you never mentioned them, as though we had a tacit agreement to forget about them. At the beginning I used to see my mother in my dreams. I’d see her sinking into green water and when I woke up, choking, it felt is if my neck had been in a vise. Gradually their images started to disappear. I know they’re somewhere but I’ve forgotten them. I hated my mother. How could she have married me to a man who wasn’t even a man, and when I was only a child? How could they have abandoned me to roam from place to place and stopped taking care of me? All I had left was the blind beggar, who succeeded – by some miracle – in turning himself into a real sheikh and acquiring disciples.

“And you came.

“I was starting to get used to my new life when you returned to us bearing a promise. Why did you promise you’d all come back? Why did you make me believe you, even though you knew otherwise – don’t deny it. You knew it was history and that history’s a dog. You’d bring me books and go away. And I’d read. I read all the novels and the poetry, and I learned the stories by heart. Do you know what I used to do? I used to copy the books by hand. I wrote out Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sunlonghand innumerable times.

“And what else?

“Your father was fierce as a hawk. He said, ‘We’ll die before we let our women work for the Jews.’ And he didn’t let me. My belly would swell up and I’d swell up and my children filled the house. I swelled up so I wouldn’t die. I’d get pregnant and I’d feel the life beating in my belly. The plenitude.”

Nahilah talked and talked.

She talked of the death of Ibrahim and of her madness.

She talked of Salem, who was stolen by his grandmother so he wouldn’t die of hunger because of his mother’s dry breasts.

She talked of Noor and of the other children who are now adults.

She talked and talked, and Yunes put his head in his hands, sitting against the Roman olive tree on the ground that stretched to the horizon of the green summer moon.

She talked of a country that didn’t look like itself, and of people who refused to look in mirrors so they wouldn’t see their own faces, and of abandoned villages. . She said she no longer believed this world founded on destruction would last: “We lived in expectation of something that would come, as though we weren’t in a real place.

“That’s why I loved you,” she said.

“Do you remember the day you came to me and married me all over again? You spread your clothes on the ground, in that cold cave, and asked me to walk over the grapes. There I felt something real. There things were real. But not here. I fell in love with you in that place you called Bab al-Shams. I’d come to you as though I’d been sleeping on thorns, for in the house in Deir al-Asad, which had become our house, and among the furniture and the pots and pans left by its owners, I felt afraid, and strange, and insecure, drinking out of their cups and cooking in their saucepans. What do the Jews who live in our houses feel? I just couldn’t do it, even knowing that I’ll give everything back the moment they ask for it. I’ve lived all this time in the house of al-Asadi, who fled to Lebanon, but I was no longer myself.

“In truth, who am I? And who are you?

“Only Ibrahim made me feel I was alive, but he died. They killed him, or it was his destiny to die – I don’t know. I don’t cry for Ibrahim, I cry for myself.

“You know.

“At one point, I decided to work, work at anything, work as a maid – but where? I went to Haifa. I’d never been to Haifa in my life. I got on a bus and went, and I walked the streets aimlessly. In Haifa, I got lost. No, not because of the language. I speak their language, I learned it with my children. I speak it as well as they do, or even better. I got lost because I felt like a stranger. On the way from here to there, I saw all the houses that have sprouted up; I felt like I was in a foreign country. And in Haifa, I saw the city. God, Haifa’s beautiful: a mountain that runs down into the sea, and a sea that embraces the mountain as though it were rising to meet it. But what good does beauty do? Is it true that Beirut looks like Haifa? You haven’t told me about Beirut, but Haifa is beautiful. I wish we could live there with the children. I went looking for work without saying anything to the sheikh or his wife. In any case, by that time the sheikh already wasn’t taking in what was said to him. He performed his ablutions with dust and lived in his own distant world. He’d talk to strange beings that only he could see. I went on my own to find a solution to our money problems, which became serious once the sheikh became confined to the house. But I couldn’t find work. And you didn’t care and didn’t know and didn’t come. And when you finally came, you’d give me the little bit of money you had on you. I didn’t tell you it wasn’t enough; I didn’t want to upset you. But the village isn’t a village anymore. It’s become part of a large city that sprawls from the heights of Galilee to Acre. A city of ghosts. The village has died and the city has died, and we are trying to. . And you knew nothing. I told the military interrogator, ‘I’m free to do as I please, and it’s no business of yours.’ I told him, ‘You’re stronger and richer, but you’re an impossibility that can’t last forever.’ I don’t know where I got those words, how I was able to say what I said about the Jews. I told him, ‘You were tormented, but your torment doesn’t give you the right to torment us.’ I told him, ‘We are suffering in our guts.’ He asked me about my swollen belly and my pregnancy and the children, so I told him, ‘Pain generates pain, Sir. You don’t know the meaning of pain that attacks the guts.’ He made fun of me for what I said. He said, ‘Go to Lebanon, where your husband is.’ And I said, ‘My husband isn’t in Lebanon; I don’t know where he is, and I’m not going anywhere. You, Sir, go to Poland where you came from, or stay here, but leave me alone. You come here and then ask me to leave? Why?’ I didn’t know how to argue with them. When the interrogator was with me, I pretended you were in front of me and thought, If Yunes were here, he’d know how to make them shut up. When you talk, you convince me of everything. Do you remember the first days in the cave – we’d make love, then you’d light your cigarette and start to talk. You’d talk about politics, and I didn’t understand politics; I was waiting for you to take me in your arms and cover me with your body, for you to pull out the thorns that had attached themselves to my soul. But all you’d talk about was politics and how you all were ready to liberate the land, and you’d tell me about Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was like Saladin. I believed you. I told the military interrogator about Saladin. He laughed, baring his large white teeth, and said, ‘You Arabs are living in a daydream.’ I didn’t understand what he meant by that, but I told him, ‘We’re not Arabs.’ Tell me, why here in Israel don’t they call the other Arabs Arabs? They call the Egyptians Egyptians, the Syrians Syrians, the Lebanese Lebanese, not Arabs. Are we the only Arabs? ‘We’re Palestinians, Sir,’ I told him, and he said, ‘Just a daydream.’ I agree we’re Arabs; if we aren’t, what are we? But I said we’re not Arabs to annoy him, because I didn’t understand what daydreammeant.

“Then later I understood.

“My whole life is a daydream.

“You imagine I was waiting for you because I was dazzled by your manliness? No, Yunes. I was waiting for you to talk, to escape the daydream that was swallowing my life. But you didn’t listen. You’d tell of your adventures, and of the magic nights that bewitched you, but you knew nothing.

“I didn’t tell you what the young men here in the village did. I was afraid you’d get upset. On the first of each month, they’d knock on my door and throw down a small cloth bundle. I’d open it and find money, and that was what we lived on. Do you think your blind father supported us – a family of ten mouths? Did you think we were waiting for your visits and the few pennies you brought to get by? No, Abu Salem. We were waiting for the little cloth bundle; I neither knew nor wished to know who threw it nor how they collected the money.