Текст книги "Gate of the Sun"

Автор книги: Elias Khoury

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Текущая страница: 30 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

The war broke out and Gaza was occupied. A period of curfews, of night, and of fear followed.

At the beginning of September 1967, as people in Gaza were searching for ways to initiate resistance, a bomb struck the house of Ahmad Salim.

Jamal said that as war became increasingly likely, his mother began to change. She didn’t share her children’s enthusiasm for Gamal Abdel Nasser but remained silent, her face flushed with a blackish redness, saying only, “May the Lord protect us, my children!” After the defeat and Gaza’s fall to occupation, her silence became heavy and alarming, and her face turned into a dark mask.

That evening, when the entire family was seated around the dinner table, and the mother’s silence had imposed a prickly muteness on everyone so that only the clattering of spoons and knives could be heard, the mother broke her silence in a dull wooden voice that seemed to come from far away. She said what she had to say with a strange rapidity, as though the words had been choking her, making her spill them all at once before resuming her silence.

The mother said, “Listen. I want to tell you a secret that your father and I thought would be better to hide from you because it would only create unnecessary problems for you. But things have changed, and you have to know.”

The father interrupted her, annoyed, saying there was no reason for such talk. He pushed his plate aside, put his head in his hands and bent over, listening.

“I’m not an Arab or a Muslim. I’m Jewish.”

Silence reigned.

Jamal said the food stuck in his gullet and he almost choked, but he didn’t dare cough or take a drink. Everything became constricted. Even the September air stopped moving.

Jamal looked at his brothers and sister and saw that they were all examining their plates as though they didn’t dare to raise their eyes.

After having dropped this bomb, the mother seemed relieved; the darkness left her face, she sat up straight, and her voice came back to her.

“Your father isn’t from Gaza but from Jerusalem, where he belonged to one of the city’s rich and notable families. There, in 1939, he met a German Jewess who’d recently migrated to Palestine with her family. Sarah Rimsky. In Jerusalem the girl experienced the difficulties that afflicted many German emigrants: She had a hard time acclimatizing to the laws of the Yeshuv, to its values and language. She was eighteen years old, studying German literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. That year she met a man by chance and fell in love with him. She had gone into a shop to buy clothes, and there was a young man, wearing a red fez, working in his father’s shop. The relationship was difficult, if not impossible, at first. She loved him but didn’t dare declare her love, and he behaved as though he were indifferent. He would sit in front of his shop and wait for her, and when she went by, on her way to the university, he’d say good morning to her in English. She’d reply in German, and they’d laugh. Then things developed. He invited her for Arab pastries at Zalatimo’s; she went with him and adored, she said, the smell of orange-blossom water and rose water. They went walking in the streets of the Old City, discovering it together. He said she taught him to see Jerusalem, that he was seeing the city through her eyes. That was his first declaration of love. After a year of a relationship that came into being around the scent of orange-blossom water and the alleyways of the city, they decided to get married – and this was unthinkable. A Palestinian marry an immigrant German Jewess? Impossible, said everyone. But there was no going back.

The girl told her friend she was prepared to get married in secret and run away with him. She suggested Beirut. The young man asked her to be patient and entered into negotiations with his father, which lasted two years.

The girl waited, and the story got out.

One day, the young man arrived with his father’s consent, on condition that they leave Jerusalem and go and live in Gaza, where the father had bought his son land and a house.

The crisis ended with their marriage and move to Gaza, where they lived and managed a stretch of orange orchards. What’s remarkable is that the young woman adapted quickly to her new situation. She started speaking Arabic with a Gaza accent, embraced Islam and lived in Gaza as a Muslim Arab woman. The name Sarah was not as widespread among Muslims in those days as it is today, though it was not considered unacceptable.

The mother said she’d told her children the truth so they’d know they had two uncles on her side of the family: the first, Elie, a colonel in the Israeli army, and the second, Benjamin, an engineer. Both lived in Tel Aviv.

The father removed his hands from his face and said his wife’s relatives had tried to kill her in 1944 – a group of armed Jews had attacked the house and sprayed it with machine-gun fire. The bullets had mostly hit the kitchen, where they believed Sarah would be. He said he’d removed the bullet holes from the kitchen walls but had left one “so we wouldn’t forget.” He proposed that the children get up so he could show it to them, but none of them moved.

The mother said she was Palestinian and that was her choice, “But you need to know; the Jews are occupying Gaza now, and they won’t be going anywhere.”

“We’ll throw them out,” said Jamal.

“How I wish, my son!” said the mother.

“MON DIEU!” said Catherine. “Is it possible?”

“I didn’t invent the story,” I said, “which means it’s possible. Didn’t you just read about it in this book? Did the Israeli journalist make up the story of the nine Jewish women?”

“Of course not,” she said.

“There is something mysterious,” I said, “but that’s not what the story’s about.”

“They killed her?” asked Catherine.

“No.”

“Her brother, the colonel, came and dragged her to Israel?”

“No.”

“Like me, Jamal discovered that he was Jewish.”

“Like you?”

“No. I mean, I’m not Jewish, just my mother.”

“Your mother’s Jewish?”

“No, my mother’s Catholic, but her mother – her mother’s family were Jews. They converted to Christianity out of fear of persecution, then. .”

“Then what?” I asked.

“I learned the truth from my mother, so I decided to look for my roots and went to Israel.”

“And did you find your roots?”

“I don’t know. No, not exactly. I discovered that it’s not allowed, that we don’t have the right to persecute another people.”

“We don’t?”

“They don’t, the Jews don’t. That’s what I meant.”

I told her that Sarah Rimsky’s story didn’t end with her confession at that family dinner. In fact, that’s where it started.

Jamal the Libyan said his mother was changed after her confession. Her smile was gone, the dark spots on her face and neck multiplied, and the family entered the maelstrom of the prison world.

“But I went to see them,” said Jamal.

Jamal said he discovered that he wasn’t just Palestinian but could be Israeli or German if he so wished. “I went to their house in the Ramat Aviv district in the northern suburbs of Tel Aviv. I knocked on the door and a blond girl of about seventeen, who looked a lot like my mother, opened it. I told her my name was Jamal Salim, that I was the son of Sarah, her father’s sister. I spoke to her in English, but she answered me in Hebrew. When I said I didn’t know Hebrew, she switched to broken English.

“‘Come in,’ she said.

“I went into the living room, where she asked me to sit down and went off to tell her father.

“Colonel Elie entered, wearing a brown dressing gown. He stood in front of me and said something in Hebrew.

“‘I’m Jamal, Sarah’s son,’ I said in English as I stood up.

“‘You!’”

“‘Yes. Me.’”

“I didn’t expect him to embrace me, no,” said Jamal, “but I did expect that he’d be a little curious, that he might ask how his sister was. Instead, he asked what I wanted.

“‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I wanted to meet you.’

“‘It’s been a pleasure,’ he said and turned his back to me as though asking me to leave. I stood at a loss in the middle of the spartan living room – no other word fits when you compare their living room to the opulent one in our house. I said I wanted to talk with him a bit.

“‘You’re an Arab, right?’

“‘Palestinian,’ I said.

“‘What do we have to talk about?’

“‘Family matters,’ I said.

“‘What family?’

“‘Our family.’

“‘We’re not one family,’ said the colonel.

“‘But you’re my uncle.’

“‘We’re not one family, I tell you. You’re a terrorist. I’m sure terrorists sent you here.’

“I burst out laughing and said I’d come to propose a family meeting.

“‘Your mother sent you?’

“‘No. My mother doesn’t know.’

“‘So who sent you?’

“‘No one.’

“‘What’s your job?’

“‘I’m an engineer.’

“‘What kind of an engineer?’

“‘A civil engineer.’

“‘Where did you study?’

“‘In Cairo.’

“‘They know how to teach engineering there?’

“‘So so. It’s not bad,’ I said. ‘The people who built the Pyramids can build a house.’

“‘Your name’s Jamal?’ asked the girl.

“‘Yes, Jamal. And yours?’

“‘Leah Rimsky,’ she said.

“‘A beautiful name,’ I said.

“‘Do you know Tel Aviv?’ she asked.

“‘How could I?’

“‘Would you like to see it? I could show you around.’

“‘Go to your room and let me deal with him,’ said the colonel.

“But Leah didn’t go to her room, and the interview with my uncle, the retired colonel, was short and brusque. He said he didn’t want to see his sister, had no interest in any family meeting, that it was up to us Palestinians to assimilate within the Arab countries (‘You’re Arabs like the rest of the Arabs’) and that he didn’t understand our insistence on living in the refugee camps, which had come to resemble Jewish ghettos: ‘Go and become Syrians and Lebanese and Jordanians and Egyptians, so that this blood-drenched conflict can come to an end.’ I thanked him for his advice and said, ‘Thank you, and you too. Why don’t you, my dear European German colonel, become assimilated in Europe? Go and assimilate yourself instead of giving me lessons in assimilation, and then the problem will be over. We’ll assimilate with the Arabs, you can assimilate with the Europeans, this land will be deserted, and we can turn it into a resort for tourists and religious fanatics from every nation. What do you say?’

“‘You understand nothing about Jewish history,’ he said.

“‘And do you understand anything about our history?’

“At this, Leah intervened and said she was ready to show me around Tel Aviv. We went out. The colonel said nothing and didn’t try to stop his daughter from going.

“With Leah I saw Tel Aviv, I discovered that strange society, which I can tell you is difficult to reduce to a few words. No, I didn’t go back and visit the colonel. I phoned Leah several times and went out with her, becoming reacquainted with my mother through her. Extraordinary! How is it possible? They’d never met but were so alike in everything – the same laugh, the same gestures, and they liked more or less the same foods. I suggested to Leah that she come with me to Gaza so I could introduce her to her twin, but she said she’d have to think about it.”

“And your mother? Have you told your mother?”

“I told my mother I’d visited them, and at first she asked about them eagerly; then the mask reappeared and covered her face.

“‘Please, stop visiting them. He’s a criminal and will kill you,’ said my mother.

“I told her about our discussion about assimilation and her face lit up for a moment, but then she furrowed her brow and said that history was a wild animal.

“After several more outings, Leah stopped answering the phone. Their number had been changed, and I had no other way of getting in touch with her. She’d warned me that her father wouldn’t allow her to meet me. Her father changed the number, and she didn’t call. Just between us, my uncle, the colonel, was right: After the bus operations, our meetings were no longer possible. Do you remember the bus operations, when the Popular Front planted explosives at bus stops in Tel Aviv?”

“Was that you?”

“I can’t claim that honor for myself, but I did take part through surveillance. My outings with Leah were a type of surveillance, and I reported on what I’d seen to the Popular Front cell. The cell was uncovered after a sweep of arrests in Gaza, and they took me to Damoun Prison, where I was sentenced to twenty years on charges of participating in terrorist activities and belonging to a saboteur organization.”

Jamal said that prison had brought him relief: “The battering torrent stopped roaring in my head. I was twenty-three years old then and I’m twenty-nine now, but all the same, when I remember those days before I was arrested and the feelings that raged inside me when I went out with Leah and took her to Jerusalem. .! I took her to Zalatimo’s, and when I saw her eating and singing and smelling the scent of orange-blossom water I told her about my mother and how my father had managed to seduce her with the help of Zalatimo’s pastries. When I remember that now, I feel a loss. Prison let me have a rest. Things are clear there – them and us. We’re behind bars, and they guard us. That way there’s no confusion. In prison I read all sorts of books, and I learned Hebrew. I thought to myself, When I leave prison, I’ll go and visit my uncle and speak to him in his new language.

“My mother came to visit me regularly. My father came with her sometimes, but she’d come every week, bringing cigarettes and food. She told me that my brother, Mirwan, had been arrested, too, that Samirah had been held for several days and then released, and that they were thinking about sending Hisham and Samirah to Cairo because they were afraid for them. I asked her why she didn’t get in touch with my uncle so he could help to get me out, and she asked me never to mention the subject again. I stayed in prison for five years before I was deported to Jordan.”

“And your mother? Where’s your mother?” I asked him.

“I haven’t gotten there yet. My mother stopped visiting me a year after I went to prison, and my father started coming on his own. He said my mother was sick, that she had arthritis. He brought me letters from her. Her letters were short and said only that I was to take care of myself after I came out of prison. You don’t know my mother. I swear no one could’ve guessed that she was Israeli or Jewish. She was more Palestinian than all the rest of us put together. My father still spoke with his Jerusalem accent, but she became Gazan – a true ghazzawiyya. She loved hot peppers, ate salad without olive oil, and all the rest. Then my father disappeared, too. Hisham and Samirah were in Cairo, Mirwan was in prison like me, and my father stopped visiting me.

“Later, a short letter from him reached me via the Red Cross. It said he’d taken my mother to Europe for treatment.

“When I got out of prison, I learned the truth. What a woman she was! And I don’t say that because she was my mother. All of us love our mothers and see them as saints, but if you only knew.”

“If you only knew,” Khalil said to Catherine.

“You could never guess what happened. Sarah didn’t go to Europe for treatment. Guess what she did.”

“She went to Tel Aviv and returned to her family,” said Catherine.

“That possibility has passed through Jamal’s mind, but it’s not what happened.”

“Her brother killed her?”

“Now you’re imagining an American film. We can’t behave as if we’re in American films, even if we like watching them.”

“What then?” asked Catherine.

Khalil said Sarah contracted colon cancer, but they discovered the disease too late, after the cancer had spread through her entire body.

“You know how women in our country suppress everything. They don’t complain, they refuse to say anything, and barricade themselves in with silence and secrets.”

Sarah treated herself at the beginning, and when the pain got bad she went to the doctor. She was admitted to hospital, had three operations, and was sent home after the cancer spread to her bones. She returned home to enter a long period of appalling pain.

One night, when Sarah couldn’t sleep because the pain was so bad even though she’d had a morphine injection, she went to her husband’s bed, woke him and told him she wanted to talk to him.

The man sat up in bed and listened to the strangest request.

Sarah asked her husband to take her to Berlin and bury her in the Jewish cemetery there.

Her husband told her he was prepared to go any place in the world with her for treatment and that he’d call the doctor in the morning to get the addresses of hospitals in Berlin.

“I don’t want treatment,” she said. “There is no treatment. I want to be buried there.”

Khalil told Catherine that Jamal, as he told the story, was more astonished than he was, as though he were listening, not recounting. He said his father told him later, when they met in Amman a few months before his death, that he’d leave this world in peace because he’d succeeded in making Sarah happy.

“She was like a little girl there,” the father said. “Every day we’d go out. I don’t know where she found the strength. She took me to the places of her childhood, of which not many remained – but she was happy. It was as though the pain had gone, or a miracle had occurred. After a week she was no longer able to get out of bed. I tried to take her to the hospital, but she refused. Three days later she died, and I buried her there.”

Khalil saw the sorrow engraved on Catherine’s face. The French actress who wouldn’t act in Jean Genet’s play was slumped in her chair almost as if she were unconscious.

“Why aren’t you drinking?” Khalil asked her.

She looked at her glass and said nothing. Khalil took Catherine’s glass and finished it off in one gulp.

Catherine said she was exhausted.

Khalil looked at his watch. “It’s three in the morning,” he said.

Catherine said she wanted to sleep.

“Now you want to sleep! The night’s just beginning. I would like some more wine.”

“No. You’ve had a lot to drink, Jamal,” she said.

“Not at all, and my name’s Khalil, my mother’s name is Najwah, and Jamal died during the Israeli invasion of Beirut.”

Catherine got up. Khalil got up.

“How are you going to get back to the camp?” she asked.

“I don’t know, but I’ll manage.”

“You can spend what’s left of the night here, in my room.”

“In your room. . No. .”

“I’m tired and want to sleep. Come up with me.”

They went up to her room. Catherine undressed quickly and climbed into bed almost nude. After a little hesitation, Khalil lay down next to her, fully clothed.

“Take your clothes off,” she said. “Don’t tell me you’re going to sleep in your clothes.”

He undressed, Catherine turned off the light, and there, in the darkness of the room, which would continue to cling to Khalil’s skin, they made love.

Khalil doesn’t remember things clearly, but he felt as though he were drowning and caught hold of the woman, who fell on top of him, and they drowned together.

The next morning, as he was opening his eyes, he saw Catherine emerging from the bathroom dressed and wearing a lot of lipstick. He dressed quickly, and they went down to the restaurant, where they ate breakfast like strangers.

She told him she was leaving that afternoon; she was going to the crafts shop near the hotel to buy some presents. He told her he was already late for work at the hospital and would have to get going. Neither one brought up any of the topics of the previous day – they didn’t even mention the play again. They finished breakfast and got up from the table. She planted a cold kiss on his cheek, and he left.

AND THAT was all that happened with the French actress.

I told her the story of Jamal, and we slept together. She thought she was sleeping with Jamal the Libyan, who could have been Palestinian or Jewish or German, and I glimpsed in her something of Sarah, who became Palestinian.

Now let’s suppose that Catherine had immigrated to Israel, married Jamal, and – after a long life – death had come for her. Where would she have asked to be buried? With her Jewish grandmother, her Catholic mother, or her Muslim children?

Our story has no end.

When Jamal told me his story, I couldn’t believe it. He told me because he knew he was going to die; now he’s resting in his grave in Beirut while his father’s in Gaza and his mother in Germany.

Will the dead be reunited?

Why did Sarah return to the country of her executioners?

“It’s the classic relationship between executioner and victim,” you’ll say.

I’m not so sure. I don’t have any strong convictions that would provide me with an answer about a world like the one that drew Sarah toward her German grave.

Jamal told me his father was able to see the joy that reconnecting with the German language gave Sarah. She adored speaking German and would gurgle in it the way a child does.

Are we slaves of our own language?

Is language our land, our mother, and our universe?

Catherine went back to her country. She didn’t take the part she was supposed to in the play about the massacre. She left the play to us so we could go on playing the role of the victim. The role has no end, starting from the fall of the man-bird from the heights of the minaret of al-Ghabsiyyeh and the men of Sha’ab who climbed the ropes of rain to their deaths.

The French actress left us to play our role and went back to her country with the story of Sarah and Jamal the Libyan. And, instead of uncovering the names, she lost them. I asked nothing of her; I found myself in bed with her and she spoke to me in French, which I don’t understand, and called me Jamal. And when she got up the next day, she put her mask back on and went back to her country.

She was right, but I didn’t understand right away.

In the morning, beneath her mask of lipstick, she became another woman. She put on her French mask and planted a glacial kiss on my cheek. She was right: If I’d had a French mask, I wouldn’t have taken it off and let myself enter this labyrinth called Palestine. I have no choice because I was born in this labyrinth, nor do you. Jamal the Libyan, his cousin, Sarah, the same goes for an incalculable number of others from here, from over there, or even from outside. We have no alternatives and no masks, and even war no longer provides enough of a mask to conceal the whirlpool in which we’re drowning. Them and us. As you see, they’ve become like us and we’ve become like them. We no longer possess any other memory.

All the war stories have evaporated, all that’s left are the massacres. Are we imitating our enemies, or are they imitating their executioners and pushing us to put on that same mask that camouflaged Dunya’s features? You remember Dunya? Dunya’s dead now. “It doesn’t matter,” you’ll say. I’ll agree – we’re all going to die. But Dunya died because she was no longer able to play the role of the victim. That phase is over. The international humanitarian agencies have lost interest in us. Now what they’re interested in is the West Bank and Gaza, and Dunya has lost her following. That’s why she died.

And you.

I know why you’re dying, Father.

You’re dying because the story has come to an end with Nahilah’s death.

Tell me, why don’t you open your eyes and speak as Sarah spoke? Why don’t you declare your wish to die over there?

Are you afraid of dying?

Or is it that you don’t want your story to end, that you want to leave it open-ended so you can force us to keep on playing the role of the victim for as long as God sees fit?

What do you say?

No, my story’s different, and I’ll tell it to you from beginning to end. Shams’ death is no reason for me to die. No, I won’t go out onto the street and ask them to kill me. No, what happened last week was an absolute fiasco. I heard shooting in the street near the hospital, which started shaking with the rattle of the Kalashnikovs. I came running to hide in your room. I was shaking with fear. Now I laugh at myself when I remember how scared I was – I was ready to hide under your bed.

In the morning, Zainab entered your room with a gloating smile.

“What are you doing here?” she asked me.

I said I’d been afraid for you because your breathing was irregular, so I spent the night here.

“Didn’t you hear the shooting?”

“No. What happened?”

That was my mistake. When you lie, you discover that you can’t correct anything: You’re naked. I was naked before Zainab’s smile.

“Everyone heard, and Dr. Amjad came from his house to make sure everything was alright and we looked for you. We didn’t find you in your room, and Dr. Amjad said you’d run away and told me to get everything ready to move Yunes to the home this morning.”

“We won’t be moving him,” I said.

“As you wish. Go and discuss it with Dr. Amjad. But why didn’t you come out of Yunes’ room last night?”

“I didn’t hear anything. I must have been fast asleep.”

“Whatever, Doctor. I can’t understand how you couldn’t have heard. Maybe you were in a coma. Fear can cause comas,” she said as she left.

I ran after her. “Zainab, come here.”

“What do you want?”

I asked her about the day before, fear creeping into my voice.

“It was nothing,” she said. “A robbery. A bunch of thieves tried to rob the hospital, and when Kamelya noticed them they fired in the air and ran away.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all. What did you think it was, an assassination attempt? Get a grip! No one’s after you. The woman’s dead and gone, and if they’d wanted to kill you they’d have killed you. Go back home and get some sleep. What kind of person sleeps next to a corpse when he can sleep at home?”

She called you a corpse! Stupid woman.

It’s as though she can’t see. No one sees you but me. I said to Amjad – this was the last time we talked about you – I said to him that I refused to move you to the home and asked him to come to your room to see for himself.

“It’s your responsibility,” he said. “You want him here, let him stay here. I suggested moving him for your sake.” Then he said he refused to examine you himself: “I’m not a forensic physician who examines corpses.”

I attempted in vain to explain it to him. He said that what I see as positive signs are really signs of death. Good God, can’t he see how like a little child you’ve become? You’ve grown younger, and the signs of aging have been erased from your brow and your neck, and your smell is that of a baby. Even your reflexes are like those of a newborn. The problem is your closed eyes, which I still put “tears” into. Your eyes are clear, the whites slightly blue, and your heart’s as strong and regular as a young man’s.

I told Amjad I could see your improvement in your eyes. I said I could hear your voice, as though you were waiting for something before coming out with the words.

“It’s all in your imagination,” he said.

“No, Doctor, I’m not imagining it. I speak to him and he understands. I put on Fairouz cassettes for him and see him swimming in his dreams, I play him Umm Kalsoum and see the desire gushing out around him, I play him Abd al-Wahhab and Abd al-Halim and see the mist of life curling above his head.”

He said he was sure you’d entered the final phase and he expected your heart to collapse – it could happen at any instant and carry you off – and that all my concern for you wouldn’t make the slightest difference. You hadn’t died already because your constitution was strong and your heart excellent – he’d never seen such a pure heart. He used the word pureto mean “regular” but the only true purity is the purity of love, and I’m jealous of you and of your love. I’m jealous of that meeting you had beneath the Roman olive tree when Nahilah took you to Bab al-Shams and poured her rain upon you. When I imagine that scene, I see her envelop you like a cloud and then pour her rain upon you. That is the water of heaven, and of life.

How can I convince them you’re not going to die? How can I convince myself?

Your childhood drives me crazy and crushes me; I never fathered a child and never knew the beauty that Yunes saw when his son Ibrahim’s hair covered the pillow.

Now I’ve started to understand how a man becomes a father.

Would you agree?

You don’t have to agree, Father, because you’re my son now. Let me call you “son,” please. Think of it as a game. Don’t parents play that way with their children, the father calling his son “daddy” and the son calling his father “son”? I’m the same. I carry the same name as your father: He was Ibrahim and I’m Khalil – the Companion. Ibrahim was the Companion of God, which is why we’ve named Ibrahim’s city Khalil, the City of the Companion. That’s why, too, the fiercest battles between the Palestinians and the Jews will take place in that city, and for it.

We won’t get into the complications of the relationships between fathers and sons. You know I don’t care for religious stories, and the name of the sacrifice that wasn’t sacrificed – be it Isaac, as the Jews say, or Ishmael, as we say – doesn’t concern me. Neither of them was sacrificed, because Ibrahim, peace be upon him, was able to produce a ram. The knife passed over both of their necks without a scratch, so what’s the difference?

I don’t want to discuss that now. I want you, Son, to see life with your new eyes. Start at the beginning, not at the end. Or start wherever you like. I’ve told you these stories so you can create a new story for yourself.

I can’t imagine the world that’s waiting for you. Make it yourself. Make it the way you want to. Make it new and beautiful. Tell the mountain to move, and it will. Didn’t Jesus, peace be upon him, say to the mountains, “Move!” Was he not the son who took on the outlines of his father’s image when he died on the cross?

Be the son, and let your bed be your cross.

What do you say?

Don’t you like the image of the son?

Isn’t it more beautiful than all the ones we’ve drawn during the six months we’ve spent together here? Come, let’s go back to the beginning.

You wanted the beginning, so let’s go there.

Listen, I don’t know any lullabies. Zainab does. Zainab lost her firstborn son in the Israeli air raid on al-Fakahani in ’82, and she still sings to him. I see her, when she’s all on her own, cradling her arms as though she were carrying a baby and I hear her singing:

Sleep now, sleep,

I’ll trap for you a dove.

Go, dove, fear not,