Текст книги "Gate of the Sun"

Автор книги: Elias Khoury

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

In fact, as was the fashion in those days, I made no secret of my lack of faith. If man could go to the moon, that meant there was no God. May God the Exalted forgive me for such thoughts, but when I voiced them I only meant the concept. Atheism was just an idea, and I didn’t express it because I believed in it but because it seemed logical, even though, along with the rest of the young men, I fasted during Ramadan and repeated Koranic verses to myself. How can you not repeat Koranic verses when confronted with death every day? What else can you say to death than, “Count not those who were slain in God’s way as dead”? ^*

Abu al-Fida got angry with me and ordered me to hand over my weapon and crawl on the ground in front of the platoon. And I crawled. I won’t lie to you and say I refused to carry out his order. I crawled, got filthy, and felt like an insect. I decided to hand in my resignation and join the fedayeen in the valley of al-Safi. Things heated up soon afterwards. The Israeli planes started shelling our positions, and we were too busy dealing with the slew of martyrs to remember Armstrong and his moon, my declarations and my atheism.

It was there that I discovered the incandescent flares. They lit up the sky, and I was able to see Palestine for the first time. The clustered bursts of light spread across the shimmering olive trees. That’s how I see them now, and I see you making your way alone, carrying your rifle through the hills and looking for a drop of water between the jagged rocks leading you toward Bab al-Shams, where Nahilah was waiting for you.

I see you making your way beneath the flares, feeling no fear.

How selective our memories are! Now I remember the light falling from flares, but then, after they had ignited the camp, after the flies had devoured me on the main street of Shatila, and after I had returned to this hospital with its pervasive stench of death, all I retained was the memory of fear.

That’s the difference.

You remind me of the light, even though you’re half-dead, while the corpses of the Shatila massacre make me think of death, however much they give the impression of living beings leaning against each other, petrified on the spot.

This is how I begin my journey toward sleep, watching the paths of the bright flares and the face of Abu al-Fida shining under the Doshka machine gun aimed at the sky. I run through the olive grove, take cover behind a rock, and fire. Then I find myself in al-Hama, taking part in general staff meetings and discussing military plans. Then I fall asleep. The memories come like swarms of ants invading my mind, and with their spiraling motion I sleep.

I lie on my bed and try to summon up the image of the ants, but it won’t come. I think of Shams, I see her mutilated body, and sleep won’t come. I think about love. Why didn’t I go to Denmark with Siham? I see her walking in the streets of Copenhagen and turning around as though she’s heard my footsteps. That was how our story, which isn’t even really a story, began. She came to the hospital complaining of stomach pains. When she lay down and uncovered her belly, I trembled all over. A shimmering little sun appeared, coated with olive oil. I prescribed a painkiller and explained that the pains were just symptoms of nervous tension. From that day on, whenever I saw her on what was left of the roads of this devastated camp, she’d turn around and smile, because she’d heard my footsteps and knew I was hurrying to catch up with her. Our relationship developed through walking, turning, and smiling. Then she went abroad. Should I go to her? Or stay? Indeed, why should I stay? But what work would I find in Denmark?

Siham doesn’t care because she doesn’t understand that I’m almost forty and that it’s difficult for someone of that age to begin again, starting from zero.

“But you’re at zero now,” she told me one day.

She’s right. I have to acknowledge this zero in order to begin my life. But what do I mean by “begin my life”? When I say “begin,” does it mean that everything I did before doesn’t count?

I think of Siham and try to sleep. I go with her to Denmark and become a prince like Hamlet. Hamlet lived in a rotten state, and I live in a rotten state. Hamlet’s father died, and my father died. True, my uncle didn’t kill my father and marry my mother, but what happened to my mother was perhaps more horrible. Hamlet went mad because he was incapable of taking revenge, and I’m on the verge of going mad because someone wants to take revenge on me. Hamlet was a prince watching the world rot around him, and I, too, am watching mine rot. Hamlet went mad, so will I.

When you told me about Ibrahim, your eldest son, with his curly hair, black eyes and long eyelashes, Hamlet came to mind. You say Ibrahim, and I see Hamlet.

The image of Hamlet started to form when you told me of your son’s death. At the time it amazed me that people could recall such painful things. Why wouldn’t they forget? And a terrible thought crossed my mind – that people are only the phantoms of their memories. Ibrahim’s story came up when you were telling me about the beneficial qualities of olive oil and how your mother never used any other remedy.

“Drugs never entered our house,” you told me. “My mother treated herself and us with olive oil. If she felt a pain in her belly, she’d dip a piece of cotton wool in the oil jar and swallow it, and if my father came back from the fields with his feet covered in cuts, she’d dab oil on them, and if her son was crying in pain, she’d run to the demijohn of oil, for the perfect cure.”

When Nahilah told you that three-year-old Ibrahim only liked to eat bread dipped in oil, you told her the boy was like his grandmother. He would dip his bread in oil and eat it with onions, only onions, never any thyme or labneh. ^*Only onions – but he liked honey, too.

You didn’t know your son.

His mother brought him to the cave several times, and you saw him swaddled in his diapers by candlelight, but you didn’t really see him. All that stuck in your memory was a white face and half-closed eyes. You loved him, of course – could any man not love his firstborn son? You would hold him in your arms and kiss him and then, when his mother came close, forget about him. When he got a little older, Nahilah no longer brought him to the cave.

She would describe him to her husband and imitate his walk, his movements, and his words, but she adamantly refused to bring him to the cave. She said he could understand now and talk, and that the child shouldn’t be exposed to danger. The village was full of informers. You’d agree with her, ask her to imitate the way he talked, and then forget the boy in your feverish efforts to hold onto time as it drained out of the cave. You’d bury your head in her hair and tell her you wanted to sleep with your head resting there, but you wouldn’t sleep.

One day, when Nahilah was telling him about her son, Yunes left the cave. He left his wife with her talk and went off. Nahilah knew he’d go to the house, but she didn’t go after him. Later she’ll tell him she’d been rooted to the spot with fear.

Yunes reached the house, pushed open the old wooden door, went into his wife’s room, turned on the electric light, and saw for himself. The boy was sleeping on his left side, his head resting on his hand, which was curled under the pillow, and his curly black hair covered his face.

Years after that visit, he would tell his wife that when he stood in front of the bed, he forgot where he was and was overwhelmed by beauty. He would tell her that beauty was curly hair flowing over a sleeping face on its pillow.

Yunes doesn’t recall how long he’d stood there before hearing his mother’s footsteps. The old woman had been awakened by the light; she climbed out of bed and went toward the bedroom, asking Nahilah if something had happened.

“When I heard her, I turned off the light,” he told his wife, “and tiptoed out of the house.”

Nahilah would tell him that his mother never stopped interrogating her. “Your mother hates me,” she said.

“You know she’s hated me since day one because she was convinced I was to blame for the mess-up that forced her to cut my finger and bloody the bed sheet, and for the rest of her life she would say she never felt such shame as on that night. But the night you visited, everything changed. I came back, and she was sitting in my room waiting for me. I saw something gentle in her eyes. I opened the door – it was four in the morning – and I heard her voice. She was walking up and down in the room talking to herself. I came in as the last shadows before dawn were slipping from the house.

“‘Was it him?’ she asked. ‘He was here, and you were with him?’

“I asked her to keep her voice down, afraid she’d wake Ibrahim. She lowered it, but it still seemed loud. She shook with excitement as she talked, her words tumbling over one another. She didn’t ask me anything, and I don’t remember what she said. Then she calmed down. She went to the kitchen and returned with two cups of tea and sat down on the floor. I was sleepy and felt my body slipping away. I drank the tea quickly so I could go to bed. Looking at me affectionately, she told me not to worry, she’d take care of Ibrahim when he woke up.

“‘Go and get some sleep,’ she said.

“I felt her eyes boring into my belly – from that night on, her gaze always fell on my belly first. I lay down on my bed. She came and sat on the edge of it and asked me to take her there with me. She didn’t ask me where I went, or how, or where ‘there’ was.

“‘Tell Yunes his mother wants to see him before she dies. I know he doesn’t have much time, Daughter, but tell him.’”

Nahilah told Yunes, but he warned her, “Don’t bring that woman here. I’ll go and see her.”

He didn’t go, though, except when his father died, and after he’d been, his mother said it was like she hadn’t seen him.

You didn’t go, you told me, because after Ibrahim’s accident you were no longer capable of going. “How could you expect me to enter that house after Ibrahim died?”

“His mother,” you said. “His poor mother. I saw how Nahilah died and came to life again. I somehow knew he’d died; nobody told me, I swear. I heard his voice calling for help. I went and found that he was dead. After my only visit to the house, when I saw him sleeping, a special bond grew between us. You could say I started to love him, and I started to find a place in my pack for small presents. Nahilah didn’t understand at first why I insisted she dress him in the pajamas I’d stuffed into the pack. She said they were too big for him, so I asked her to shorten them, and when I explained why, she laughed. She said I was crazy, wanting my son and me to wear the same pajamas. Then she took things one step further. She started buying us the same outfits. I told her I wouldn’t wear Israeli clothes, and she said they weren’t, she sewed them herself. She said, ‘This shirt’s just like Ibrahim’s,’ and that when I wore it I looked amazingly like my son. She would make us matching clothes and say that when Ibrahim grew up we’d be like twins. I started wearing my clothes and imagining my son wearing his. She’d dress him, and then speak to him as if he were me. We became like one man divided in two, one half in the cave, the other at home.”

That was your favorite game.

Nahilah used to say that when she missed her husband, she’d dress Ibrahim in his pajamas, and that would take care of it. And Yunes would tell her that when he didn’t change his shirt for a while, it meant he was longing for her and her son. “See, the shirt’s torn and I haven’t changed it. That means I really am homesick. Plus it means you need to make us some new clothes.”

Clothes became the prime subject of the meetings of husband and wife in that cave suspended above the village of Deir al-Asad. The husband would bring cloth from Lebanon and the wife would sew it while protesting that she didn’t want to turn into a tailor, she had to take care of the unborn child growing in her belly.

“I started holding conversations with my son without realizing what I was doing. He became part of me. Even after Nahilah delivered our second son, Salem, and in spite of all the problems associated with the birth, we never forgot the clothes game.”

Yunes said he somehow knew.

“I was in Lebanon, hiding out at Nezar al-Saffouri’s house, God bless him, when I had that dream. I dreamt I saw Nahilah mourning my death. I saw myself lodged in the pit of al-Birwa, and Nahilah was standing at the edge of the pit trying to get me out, weeping. I was telling her to go back to the house, I don’t know how I was speaking because I was dead, or how I was able to see into the pit where I was, but I saw my pajamas.

“It was five in the morning and raining heavily. I got dressed and decided to go to Deir al-Asad. The dream had frightened me a lot because I had it more than once. I awoke in a panic, put on my clothes and set off. At Nezar’s house, I remembered I was seeing the dream for the third time, each time repeated detail for detail. The two times before, I’d seen it in prison and thought it was a hallucination caused by the torture, because in prison you become incapable of distinguishing between sleeping and waking. That morning I got up in a panic and heard the slosh of the rain, and I decided to go. I thought it was my father, that the old man had died and I had to go. I don’t know; when I thought of my father’s death, I felt relief, even though I’d grown to love the blind sheikh in his last days. But a father’s death comes quietly.

“Nezar al-Saffouri also awoke in a panic, tried to stop me from leaving, and said they’d kill me this time, that I’d never be able to stand the torture. I was worn out after three months in prison. I don’t know where they held me – I was in an underground vault, in darkness, damp and cold. I only saw the interrogator’s face once. The cold got into my body, and the pain, the pain of cold bones, crushed me from the inside. When cold gets into your bones, it turns you into solidified bits of agony. It was as though my skeleton had turned into shards of ice inside my body.

“You know, I used to hope I’d be beaten because it was my only way of getting a little warmth. I’d look forward to the beating huddle and rush to it. They must have noticed how I enjoyed the warmth while they were punching and kicking me, so they decided to do something different.

“I was laid out in the middle of the beating circle, with three men above me kicking every part of my body, while I rolled among their feet, unseeing. Just the boots, the boots above my cheeks and eyes. The interrogator came in, and the boots withdrew from my face. They stood me up – I couldn’t do it on my own – and one of them propped me up against the wall with his arm around my neck while the other started hitting me on my mouth with a chain wrapped around his fist, and the floodgates of pain opened. I remember the interrogator’s voice as he told me to swallow. I spat and gagged, and the man held my mouth shut with his hand to force me to swallow my shattered teeth.

“The Lebanese interrogator spoke to me in a fake Palestinian accent as though he were making fun of me, and he threatened me. Then he said they were going to let me go, and they knew everything and God help me if I tried to cross the Lebanon – Israel border again because they’d make me swallow all my teeth.

“I listened but didn’t answer. No, not because I was afraid of him, really. I just couldn’t talk without my front teeth.

“Nezar took me to a dentist, a friend of ours, who put in a temporary bridge and advised me to rest for a month before he put in a permanent one.

“Nezar didn’t ask me why I was wearing a torn shirt; his only concern was to stop me from going out. I told him I wouldn’t be long but that I had to go, and I set off. That day I was wearing the torn blue shirt I’d been wearing in the dream of the pit of al-Birwa. I found the shirt in the bottom of my pack – I’m the only man in the world who lives out of a bag: I put all that I possess in my bag, and it goes wherever I go.

“I won’t describe how I got there, because you’d never believe me. It’s true the distance between southern Lebanon and the village of Tarshiha in Galilee is short and you can do it, walking, in four or five hours, but in those days it took about twenty hours because we had to avoid the Israeli patrols. I don’t remember how, but I flew. Now, as I’m telling you the story, I see myself as though I weren’t walking – no, I swear I was moving over the ground as though I were skating, and I arrived at noon.

“I went to my cave at Bab al-Shams thinking I’d wait until evening and then go to the house, and I found her there, waiting for me.”

“You’re too late,” she said.

Yunes didn’t hear and didn’t see. Nahilah stood with her back to the entrance of the cave. The cave was dark, and the sunlight splintered against his eyes so he couldn’t see a thing. A wavering shadow appeared and what looked like bowed shoulders.

She said she’d spent the whole night waiting for him.

She said she wanted to die.

She said she had died.

And her words blended into her moans.

“She wasn’t weeping,” said Yunes. “I didn’t hear sobbing or screaming. I heard moaning like that of a wounded animal. I went to her. She shook me off and fell to the ground. Then I understood, and I started to rip up my shirt.

“She whispered, ‘Ibrahim.’ Silence and the madness of sorrow struck me, and I heard a low moaning coming from every pore of her body.

“I tried to question her but she wouldn’t reply. I sat down on the ground and reached out to her shaking body, but she moved away. She opened her mouth to say something, and a grating, gasping sound emerged, as though she were in her death throes.

“Poor Nahilah, she stayed that way for more than a year. For a year her eyes were swollen with unspilled tears. Her milk dried up, and Salem, our second son, almost died.

“To tell the truth, I couldn’t understand her behavior. Is it possible for a mother to lose her instincts, to refuse to let her second son live, as though she wanted him to join the first?

“Her milk dried up, but she went on feeding Salem as though nothing were wrong, and my mother didn’t notice. The child wept night and day. She would give him her breast, and he would fall silent for a while. Then he would start crying again. My mother finally discovered the truth when he wouldn’t stop crying even as he was nursing.

“Do you know what my mother did?

“She stole the child. She snatched him away and took him to Umm Sab‘, Nabil al-Khatib’s wife, and asked her to suckle him and keep him with her. My mother was afraid the old story would happen all over again, and my children would die just as hers had.

“Poor Nahilah. Mothers, my friend, are really something.”

I didn’t ask you then what you did, and how you bore the death of your son that you so resembled. “You look like him,” Nahilah used to say, when she found you sad in the cave because she hadn’t cooked you mihammaraand kibbeh nayyeh. She said it wasn’t just your features and clothes but also in the way you moved. This would make you laugh, and you’d accept the dish of leftover food she’d brought from home after hearing the tap of your hand on the kitchen window.

I didn’t ask you because this time you seemed like someone who was just telling the story. You told me how you’d spent two months in the wild out of fear for your wife. You tried to calm her down and told her that Salem had to stay with Umm Sab‘ so he could survive. She would speak disjointedly and say your mother was a liar, that her milk hadn’t dried up, that she was going to die. You spent two months wandering in the woods, going to see her three times a week, and taking her to Bab al-Shams.

After staying with her for two months, you went back to Lebanon because the temporary bridge the dentist had given you was starting to crumble. You wanted to forget: More than a year went by before you returned to Galilee. You told me you were delayed by your various preoccupations and that you were getting things ready for the first groups of fedayeen, but I didn’t believe you. I believe you fled because you had no solution. A wife on the edge of madness, inconsolable, what could you do? You fled as men always do. Manliness, or what we call manliness, consists of flight, because inside all the bluster and bullying and big words, there’s a refusal to face up to life.

You went back to her after more than a year. You were embarrassed and timid, but you went back, knocked on the window and sprinted off to your cave.

She came.

She was like a new woman. Her hair was long and tied back; she smelled of a mixture of coffee beans and thyme, and her face was just like the face of Ibrahim, whose sleeping face you’d known only from photographs, with his curls spread across his pillow.

You said the woman had come to resemble her dead son and that when you smelled the coffee beans and the thyme rising from her hair, you fell into that feeling that never left you. You said that when you returned to Lebanon after that visit, you were like a lost man, talking without thinking, moving like a sleepwalker, unaware of your own existence except when you were on your way to Bab al-Shams.

“That’s real love, Abu Salem.”

You refused to acknowledge this blazing truth and said that something inside you, something that had come out into the open after being secret, made you incapable of putting up with other people, and that you were like a wolf that prefers to live in the open.

During that time, Yunes lived in the forest for sixteen continuous months. He didn’t tell Nahilah he was nearby. He would visit her twice a week, amazing her with his ability to traverse such distances and dangers. He didn’t tell her he had no distances to traverse, only time – the time that became his cross during the days and nights of waiting.

You told Dr. Mu‘een al-Tarshahani, who was in charge of the training camp you’d set up at Meisaloun near Damascus, that you were going on a long surveillance trip. “I’ll be away for a few months, maybe a year. Don’t look for me, and don’t issue any statements. I won’t die, I’ll come back.”

At the time, Dr. Mu‘een thought you’d been hit by “Return fever,” that disease that spread among the Palestinians at the beginning of the fifties and led hundreds of them to their deaths as they tried to cross the Lebanese border on the way back to their villages. He tried to dissuade you, saying that the Return would come after the liberation.

“But I’m not going back,” you told him. “I’m going to scout out the land, and I’ll come back so that we can return together.”

Dr. Mu‘een explained that those who succeeded in reaching their objective couldn’t live decent lives because they were treated as “resident absentees” and were permitted neither to work nor to move around.

“No communiqué. No death notice. I’m coming back.”

And you left.

There you were, pretending that you wanted to explore Galilee inch by inch, but you were lying. You didn’t explore Galilee. On the contrary, you just kept hovering around Deir al-Asad and making a circuit of Sha’ab, al-Kabri and al-Ghabsiyyeh. You lived among the ruins of villages and would go into the abandoned houses and rummage for food. You’d pounce on what people had left behind and savor the vintage olive oil. You said oil’s like wine, the longer it matures in its jars the smoother it gets. And then you gave me your views on bread. You made me taste the bread you ate when you were on your own during those long months, kneading the dough and cutting it and frying the little pieces in olive oil. You said you’d gotten used to that kind of bread, and you made it now in the camp whenever you felt nostalgic.

“But it’s bad for you and raises your cholesterol,” I said tasting its burning flavor.

“We don’t get high cholesterol. Peasants are cholesterol-proof.”

A YEAR OF living without shelter around Deir al-Asad.

A year of solitude and waiting.

You spoke to no one. No one lent you a sympathetic ear. People had other things to worry about, they danced with death every day.

Who remembers that woman?

You told me you prayed that God would bless you with forgetfulness and that you didn’t want to remember her, but she kept slipping into your thoughts, like a phantom.

She was alone – a woman alone wandering among the destroyed graves of al-Kabri. But they weren’t graves: The Israeli army didn’t leave one stone on top of another in al-Kabri after its occupation.

The woman was picking things up and putting them in a bag on her back. Yunes approached her. At first she looked like an animal walking on all fours. Her long hair covered her face, and she was muttering. Yunes moved toward her carefully, ready to fire his rifle. Then she turned and looked him in the eye.

“My hands were shaking and I nearly dropped the rifle,” he told his wife. “She seemed to have thought I was an Israeli soldier, and when I got close to her she slung her bag over her shoulder and started running. I stayed where I was and looked around but saw nothing on the ground. I found dried bones, which I thought belonged to dead animals. I thought to catch up with her to ask her what she was doing, but she bolted as fast as an animal. When Nahilah told me who she was, I went back to the place, gathered the remaining bones and buried them in a deep hole.”

The woman’s story terrified the whole of Galilee.

In those days, Galilee quaked with fear – houses demolished, people lost, villages abandoned and everything in shambles.

In those days, the woman’s voice was like a wind whistling at the windows. People became afraid and called her the Madwoman of al-Kabri; she crept along the ground, leapt from field to field, her bag of bones on her back.

It was said that she gathered the bones of the dead and dug graves for them on the hilltops. When she died, the bones from her bag were scattered in the square at Deir al-Asad, and people came running and gathered them up and made a common grave for them. The Madwoman of al-Kabri was buried next to the bones she’d been carrying.

Who was that woman?

No one knows, but people learned her story from her bag.

Yunes said he met the madwoman of the bones and spoke to her, and that she wasn’t as mad as people said. “She gave me wild chicory to eat. She was looking for wild chicory, not bones. What happened was that she stayed behind in al-Kabri after the Jews demolished it to avenge the victims of Kherbet-Jeddin. The woman didn’t run away with the others because they’d left her behind.”

“In those days we forgot our own children,” said Umm Hassan when I asked her about the Madwoman of al-Kabri.

“In those days, Son, we left everything. We left the dead unburied and fled.”

IN THOSE DAYS the people lived with fear, military rule, and the death of border crossers. People no longer knew who they were or who their families were or where their villages were. And there was her voice. She would go around at night and wail, like a whistling wind colliding with the tottering houses.

All that the people saw in the square at Deir al-Asad was a dead woman. She was dead and spread-eagled, her arms outstretched like a cross, her black peasant dress torn over her corpse, her empty bag at her side, bones everywhere.

Ahmad al-Shatti, the sheikh of the mosque at Deir al-Asad, stood next to the corpse and ordered the women to leave. Then he wrapped it in a black cloth and asked the children to gather the bones; he placed them on top of the corpse. “The children of Deir al-Asad will never forget it,” Rabi’ told me at our military base in Kafar Shouba. Rabi’ was a strange young man who laughed all the time. Even when Abu Na’el al-Tirawi was killed by a bullet from his own machine gun, Rabi’ laughed instead of crying like the rest of us. Abu Na’el was the first dead person I’d ever seen. I’d only seen my dead father through my mother’s description. I saw Abu Na’el dying and the blood spurting from his stomach while we stood around him not knowing what to do. We carried him to the car, and on the way to the hospital he screamed that he didn’t want to die. He was dying and screaming that he didn’t want to. Then suddenly he went stiff, his body slumped, and his face disappeared behind the mask of death.

I don’t know how Rabi’ escaped from Israel, but I do remember his terror-stricken eyes as he said he hadn’t forgotten the bones. “Sheikh Ahmad al-Shatti was sure they were human bones but we children thought they were animal bones. That’s why we played with them until the sheikh made us put them on top of the corpse. There was a single human skull in the madwoman’s bag, and this the sheikh wouldn’t let us touch. He took it and put it in a bag of its own, and the rumor went around among the children that he’d taken the skull to his house to use in magic séances.”

Rabi’ left Kafar Shouba and joined one of the Hebrew-Arabic translation bureaus belonging to the resistance. He died during the Israeli bombardment of Beirut’s al-Fakahani district in 1981.

YUNES WAS sure that the madwoman collected people’s bones and put them in her bag. He believed that she’d been killed by mistake, that the Israelis had killed her during the sweeps ordered by Prime Minister David Ben Gurion in 1951.

In those days the villages of Galilee were haunted by border crossers at night, and there were clear orders to shoot anything that moved.

The madwoman used to move around at night, alone, like the ghost of the dead she carried in her bag. People were afraid of her. Nobody saw her and everybody saw her, wearing her long black dress and walking among the patches of darkness.

WHEN YOU told me the story of those long months spent among the abandoned houses, the night ghosts and the sound of the Israeli guns harvesting people, you told me everything except the word I was waiting to hear.

Are you scared of the word love?

I am, I swear; that’s why I can’t sleep: Frightened people can’t sleep. I lie on my bed, and I ask the memories to come like swarms of ants, and I follow their spiralling motion. I think of Shams, and I get scared.